The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [125]
TO: Jennifer Hershey
SUBJECT: The end.
Dear Jennifer, my editor and friend, I hope,
I have had a rotten couple of weeks. You keep sending me the good news, and I just don’t believe it, and I can’t bring myself to start writing some Introduction I know is a lie and I don’t want to make money on a lie and I keep staring at this very bullying letter from RH’s legal office, which I have to say pisses me off.
My “failure” to deliver “The Tragedy of Arthur” by William Shakespeare is predicated (to talk like a lawyer) on the fact that no such item exists. I signed a contract with you in my good-faith belief that it did. I was wrong. It doesn’t. Something else exists, which, published over my name and your colophon, will make us both look like fools or worse. I am sorry for any damage this does to you. I really do sympathize. I know you put a lot of career capital into this. As for real capital, I’ll pay back the advance, and then you and I will both say goodbye to our mutual dreams of avarice and fame dreamt in other days. Hershey, “I charge thee, fling away ambition: By that sin fell the angels.” For my part, I’ll burn this atrocity of an old criminal’s fevered, feculent ambitions.
I put off telling Dana. Characteristically, I suppose, even predictably, it appears. Friday, I resolved to do it. Kinsmen was off that night, and I left her a voicemail asking her to meet me for dinner. And I waited. And practiced what I would say. I think I would have done it. I was ready.
Petra called instead. She was sobbing, just sounds, until a few words emerged, incoherent. “Do you want to come and do this with me?” I asked. She just cried and cried. “Pet?” I told her to calm down or some other pointless inanity. At last she said, “I told her. I’m so sorry. Tonight I told her. You never did. And she told me to leave and I did. Please, I’m so sorry. I’m here. Now. She took something. I don’t know. Arthur, she’s hurt herself. She’s … oh, God …” My sister was dead.
46
MY FATHER SPENT HIS LIFE pretending to be other people, the creator of other people’s work, creating pretend things, things everyone knew were impossible, whether they realized it right away or only later. He gave himself over to his unoriginality. At the end, he had stripped away everything but the unkillable urge to convince me (and the world) that Shakespeare wrote Arthur, when obviously Arthur wrote Shakespeare. As he lay dying alone, all that mattered was an act of self-immolation.
To strive to break loose, to skin oneself down to the unique germ under all the layers of other people’s effects, and to try to rebuild on that one unique element, to avoid at all cost any hint of pastiche, imitation, anxiogenic influence, and then to burst out and display colors never before seen in combinations never before imagined: this is the chimera I have been scrambling after in response to what I thought of my father back when I was an ordinary, common disappointed child. But we all seem to pray at this cult of our own originality. This accounts for our flood of dull memoirs, which tend to be, ironically, quite similar: everyone feels they are unique and the story of themselves will be unique, too.
But, on a planet of seven billion, it is unlikely that very many of us (if any) are literally unique. That blow to the beloved identity can feel fatal, and so the forger settles for second best: he finds the acknowledged and accredited unique figure (Shakespeare) and says to himself either (A) “Well, if I can be him, then he’s not so unique, so I don’t have to feel bad for being a bundle of low-grade copies myself,” or (B) “Well, if I can be him, then I’m unique, too, just like him, unlike these seven billion walking duplicates.”
But Dana. Beautiful Dana. Her job was to pretend to be other people, to speak words written by someone else, while other such people pretended to love or hate her, to make a darkened room full of strangers admire her in her artificial imitations and recitations.
I sat between Petra and my mother on the opening night of The Two Noble Kinsmen. Dana made her