The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [108]
“To you?” My mother laughed. “Please. This was why I couldn’t have a life with him. Couldn’t put up with it. What sort of life is it, if the person is going to turn out not to be who you thought he was an hour before? You can’t live like that. Life isn’t about trying to make surprise and wonder. Life is hard enough when you’re trying to cobble together a biding sense of reality from one minute to the next. Life is impossible and unsteady enough. Look what it thinks up! Car crashes and cancer. Pregnancy and heartache. Then on top of that? To be married to someone who might be one person one day and another the next? Who shouts, ‘Surprise! All of life so far was just a wonder I worked up in the basement’?”
“But you said you’d made a mistake not staying with him. You said Sil was a bore. You said—”
“Oh, no. Dear, please. Arthur. Really. You seriously think I can give you words to live by? Oh, Lord, you do. Well, I’d best start watching what I say. Is that what you want? Simple thoughts, consistent? How dull we’ll be. Tell me again how you think he did it.”
If my father forged everything, this whole story is much simpler. Sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, when he is showing Girl with Lily in Minneapolis art galleries to no acclaim and starting to win his first commissions “duplicating” paintings for insurance purposes, he thinks it through: What would be the single most profitable forgery he could produce and how long would it take to pay out? What might be possible if he had infinite patience, if he was willing to wait even fifty years for the payoff? He realizes that the biggest prize—a fountain of copyrights—requires an entirely new Shakespeare play, no chance of a second copy ever appearing. That rules out the plays we know are lost—Cardenio, Love’s Labour’s Won, the ur-Hamlet—because they might still turn up. He writes the text. Somehow. Really? He sits around, stressed for unstressed syllables, in private, in prison? Having written the play, he fakes the 1904 edition, tests it, uses it to trick out expert criticism, weed out mistakes in vocabulary. Then, when he’s certain of the text, he forges the 1597 quarto. Selecting a real printer of the period, knowing which one would have no heirs, no estate, no possible line of textual ownership to this day (which has taken a full U.K. law office several months to prove), he produces a 1597 document with ink and paper that can pass modern forensic tests and academic readers. Tests that didn’t exist when he set to work in prison or before 1986, when he locked it in a safe-deposit box. Writing a play the disappearance of which can be well explained by Shakespearean studies that were developed only in the 1990s.
My mother interrupted me at this point. “Hmm. Arthur, you know the old line? Sometimes liars tell the truth. Listen to yourself. There were barely libraries in those prisons. Somehow he’s concocting sixteenth-century ink?”
“Maybe he had a partner. Why not Glassow?”
“Because Chuck Glassow’s a grocer and a thief, not a genius. And he’s been out of the country for twenty years. But, really, by now, who cares? Why are you getting so exercised about this? You have other things to worry about.”
“He’s willing to wait fifty years to see a profit, so he can leave it to his family and feel sentimental and like he made it all up to us. Nauseating.”
And more. He gets to know he’s pulled it off, his last thought as he dies, a smile on his face, alone in a furnished rental, paid for by his pigeon son. It’s the pathetic part of forgery, the snickering little mischief-maker. Still and always the wonder-worker, which role, no matter what he said, always contains an element of laughing at the suckers, the farmers, the fake-Rembrandt buyers. And the ego! He adds to the world’s pleasure and mystery. Just a big fairy ring. It’s pitiful. He gets to feel like he’s Shakespeare. As good as Shakespeare. Not as good as 1600 Shakespeare, not as good as Hamlet, but as good as 1593 Shakespeare. As good as the first batch of history plays. He fooled everyone: academics, scientists,