The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [119]
It is difficult to think of my father as empathetic in the usual sense of the word. Though, semantically, the prison psych report in his box of papers concurs: “Mr. Phillips is capable of remarkable leaps in empathic reasoning, able to rapidly assess the emotional state and needs of others. However, this capability is significantly narcissistic in its orientation.” He could see into other people very well, but only so he could manipulate them.
The revealed forgery demands of us, “What sort of person bothers?” Well: “The act is paradoxically arrogant and self-effacing. In extreme cases, it can be read as a form of psychic suicide. It is a plea for attention and an ashamed desire to be invisible (as unimportant compared to the esteemed original). It is simultaneously a desire to fool the whole world and, by fooling it, to be assured of one’s own unrecognized greatness. Those who accept the forged work as authentic participate in building a monument to the ego of the criminal.” That’s the psychiatric casebook speaking, and this classical description generally fits. Take van Meegeren (“That pathetic little man,” as my artist friend described him). He forged a whole period of Vermeers. “He couldn’t really paint like Vermeer, of course, so he invented the idea of Vermeer’s poor early efforts. Clever idea, dismal paintings,” my friend remarked.
“Remember, the experts couldn’t tell; they swore these for Vermeers until van Meegeren painted one right in front of them. People couldn’t see it because the sense of knowing the subject, of knowing Vermeer, was so strong in van Meegeren that he could feel like Vermeer, even if he couldn’t paint like him. He could still make us feel like we were in Vermeer’s presence, seeing the world as Vermeer did.”
Is that my father, then? But my father didn’t forge juvenilia; he aimed for the 1590s, when Shakespeare was beginning to break from the pack. Certainly the monument to his ego sounds right: as the professors write in with their tentative or gushing authentications (“It’s not unconvincing,” said the one from East Anglia, “not unconvincing at all”), they each polish my father’s monument.
How large the monument is! The editorial team at Random House excitedly hung up a giant map, and as each university professor weighed in, assistants pushed in a little labeled pin—red for yes, blue for no. Oxford, England, and Oxford, Mississippi. Two Cambridges. Hampshire and New Hampshire, York and New York, Jersey and New Jersey, Wales and New South Wales, and on and on. The red tide seeped across the map, the swath of a flying epidemic of credulity flu.
Was that my father? A man so gifted with empathy—specifically, empathy for a glover’s son born four centuries earlier—that Shakespeare experts read his fake and scratch their heads? If my father wrote The Tragedy of Arthur, then we have an unpalatable portrait of the artist with a capability for extraordinary love and understanding who was unable to direct any of it toward me. “Can you see how I would find this embarrassing?” I asked him, age fifteen, when Career Day required an essay by me about a parent’s job.
“I don’t,” he snapped. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you. I’m me and you’re you.”
A biographer asks, “What would my subject likely have done, even if I have no record of it?” The forger asks a slightly trickier question: “What would my subject have done that he definitively did not do?” And in turn, the forger makes all of us ask ourselves the potentially terrible question, “What actions or thoughts out there are like mine—are me—even though I’ve never done or thought them?” This leads to that paranoid and extreme Shakespeare-philic/Shakespeare-phobic idea that there is nothing we can do or think that some actor from