The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [52]
Dana replied, “When you talk crap like that, riding your hobbyhorse all over the room, do you even know it’s about Dad? Do you even know you’re mad at him, that you won’t forgive him because you have a small heart? You’ve so conflated him with his favorite writer that you want to punish one by taking shots at the other. Do you know that?”
“I do know you did that, and you think I’m not original enough to have my own ideas. But that doesn’t mean I have to roll over and agree with you. I could even be mad at your father—”
“My father?”
“—and still be right about this. You’re part of a vast, unconscious conspiracy of enablers, all of whom operate without central control but to the same end: to make a man who died four centuries ago into a god. I honestly don’t know what you get out of it, but there it is.”
“How is that not about Dad?”
Samuel Pepys, the noted seventeenth-century diarist (rather like being noted for writing a lot of shopping lists), judged Romeo and Juliet “the worst [play] that ever I heard in my life.” He was not alone in that view, but claim such a thing today and you’ll be dismissed as a philistine. As Herman Melville already noted back in 1850, before the Shakespeare-industrial complex had crushed our spirit, “This absolute and unconditional adoration of Shakespeare has grown to be part of our Anglo-Saxon superstitions … Intolerance has come to exist in this matter. You must believe in Shakespeare’s unapproachability, or quit the country. But what sort of a belief is this for an American?” I liked Moby-Dick until I read that quote. Now I love Moby-Dick.
If it didn’t have his name on it, half his work would be booed off the stage, dismissed by critics as stumbling, run out of print. Instead we say it’s Shakespeare; he must be doing something profound that we don’t appreciate. Compare: a blogger on The Egyptologist: “Phillips, clumsy as a newborn calf, totters through the opening scenes, farting exposition as the urge touches him.”
Shakespeare and I, admittedly, have a necessarily strained relationship by now, and as I (and others) judge my own writing harshly, I can’t help but point out that he is let off easy all the time. You really can’t say that this or that bit of dialogue is overdone or undercooked, forced exposition here, unnecessary repetition there, implausibility, inconsistency, haste or languor: no, any apparent crime is excused by some fork-tongued Shakespearologist, another volunteer public defender who leaps up to paper over the fault with some new reading or explanation, for the master can do no wrong, by definition. Any faults we perceive are in us, his faulty readers. (He saw that one coming, too: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.) Everything was intentional, perfect, deep, multilayered, or you can “quit the country.” Or “That’s really you talking about Dad.” And all of us become his fools.
17
BUT DANA WAS RIGHT. I look at my “spontaneous” and “original” actions from this distance and they course with motivation and years of previous history. Here, in this letter of April 23, 1992, written at the end of an agency trip to London, we see the abandoned child running further and further from his resentments and wounds:
D,
We had a day off after we landed and the hotel wouldn’t let us check in early, so I joined a side trip to wander in your woods, yours and Dad’s. I visited lovely Stratford-upon-Avon. I’ve seen your man’s house now (a museum with a plastic ham on a replica dining table). I’ve walked in his magic forest (the sliver of it that remains between two expressways). I’ve watched actors in drag prance and spittle his words. I’ve gone looking for his ghost in the streets that remain, the furrowed fields that remain, the churchyard he walked,