The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [61]
So go, yes, go, write. I don’t say you shouldn’t. You will, I hope, put all of the pieces together in some new pattern. Maybe you’ll pull off the trick of singularity. Maybe. It’s a heroic struggle. But it’s not the point. And you definitely won’t succeed if you start by denying everything you’ve ever been until this very moment in Italy. You know what you are now? Dad’s son, but in Italy.
I must have snarled at Dana, because her next letter reads:
Your anger at me is totally misplaced. I didn’t and don’t mean to discourage you. Far from it. I am just trying to spare you some time-wasting delusions. As for Margaret, I don’t think you are in any position to criticize or to get a vote. She should have killed herself for you? Please. Besides, I like her private mole, cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops in the bottom of a cowslip.
I took my sister to mean that my goals were futile and that I was already beaten. She didn’t have faith in me, I read, and so the confidence seeped out of me. I was just a pretentious idiot who’d quit his job and was trying to be someone I wasn’t. And so, when I ran into a little trouble—not liking one of my stories once I came down from a manic, first-draft high, or stumped for what to write about in perfect Venice, where everything was supposed to come easily—I gave up. I surrendered: an exertion of free will, free of Will. It was obviously childish, cowardly, petulant, self-fulfilling: if I could quit, then I was destined to fail anyhow.
So, to prove to myself that it wasn’t cowardly, I prodded myself into a few years of ostentatious bravery: boxing badly, running with Spanish bulls, doing construction work in Eastern Europe, drinking and fighting with Oktoberfesters, dancing mock flamenco in Budapest bars, trying to sleep with rich married women and usually just getting in trouble with their husbands. And to prove to myself it wasn’t childish, I composed a dozen semischolarly (not-at-all-about-Dad) essays attacking Shakespeare, each of which I submitted to little literary magazines back in the States. I fled from my father, my mother, my twin, my work, an entire life, which I at twenty-eight dismissed as unoriginal and a failure. Just like my father, I did not come home for years.
19
MEMOIRISTS ARE SELF-SELECTED: they want to tell their stories, nice or nasty. I am something else. A gun to my head—as you will see—I spill my forced confession, revealing me as an indifferent person, a poor friend, a variable brother and son, jealous, hurtful, able to delude myself. I say this not from any pride. It’s going to get worse.
Still, I acknowledge that I am growing addicted to the pleasures of self-revelation I once scorned. A memoir requires a courage that we can fairly assert Shakespeare lacked. (“What?” squeals the wild-eyed Bard lover. “Did he never use material from his own life? Did he not reveal himself in his works?” A million words over twenty-five years: yes, it’s very likely that he did secrete dollops of oily autobiography into his crisp fictions. But the existence of such revelations does not mean—especially four hundred years later—that you can sift them from the fantasies, fears, and imagined selves, not to mention his masked revelations about other people you don’t know: his friends, family, and enemies.)
But now I must explain some more years in order to explain the play. So, enter Chorus: Imagine, then, within this paper V we’ve crammed the spires and shadows of Prague, the Czech Republic. I settled there and married a Czech girl, because I honestly thought I was in love, and she was beautiful (a model, I was glad to let my friends discover without having to tell them), and she was as far from my old life and self as she could be, since, under the superficial beauty, she was a country girl from a land of which I knew