The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [63]
But I did write in Prague, and with some success, publishing four novels from 2002 to 2009. Each time I wound myself into ridiculous states of affectation and superstition, convinced that I could not finish a novel without sacrificing something: attendance at the twins’ birthday party, kindness to my wife, a visit to a sickly parent, honesty to one of my rare Czech friends. I returned to the States on book tours and for family visits, though the tours became shorter and rarer as the book business shrank and publishers looked to more and more eye-popping product to halt the collapse. (Which, I have to admit, would include a new Shakespeare play, so we may save each other yet.)
I did not achieve true indifference to my father, and Jana would testify to that, having spent so long trying to nurse me through my anger and recurrent fears and sorrows, scolding me only when I would declare myself “over him,” since she knew she would bear the brunt of my renewed grief and furies the next time he let me down. She, in her Central European wisdom, knew that the goal itself was inane, and she would mock Dana’s forgiveness of Dad as American sentimentality, weak and self-deluding. You don’t get over things, Jana taught me. You suffer infinitely. It’s hard not to love the Czechs.
And how right she was. I sent him a personalized copy of my first novel, named after my new hometown, waited vainly for a response, then visited him about a month later. To my father, who taught me so much about creativity. With all my love … I sat across from him at yet another of those Formica-topped tables in yet another windowless room with carpeting the color of vomited-up oatmeal. In those surroundings, my feelings of having arrived (I was a novelist; I was a father; I was thirty-eight years old) merged with all the emotions of childhood visits to other Family Rooms. They were all present at once, and I realized how much of my life had been about him, and how much I wanted to hear him tell me that I was a great writer, as important to him as he was to me. This moment waited and trembled, and I did not know how to speak.
After ten minutes, at the most, asking after his daily routine and complimenting him on his retained youthfulness (he did look pretty good for seventy-two, not much older than my last visit, three or four years earlier), I couldn’t help myself any longer. I very uncoolly asked him if he’d had the time (!) to take a look at my novel yet.
He nodded eagerly, was very kind, effusive, really, in his praise of it, the imagery, the story, everything. It’s difficult to describe the relief and love, the pride and love, the happiness and love, the sense of having forgiven and having been forgiven, both at the same instant. I should have been satisfied. I should have kissed him and flown back quickly to the Czech Republic to work on my next book and my indifference and my adulthood and my marriage.
Instead, I blundered on, blubbered forward. “There was something of you in the character of Imre, you know.”
“Was there? I—I didn’t … sense myself in him.”
He met my eye, and I knew, and I didn’t even call him on it, just felt disappointment as a sudden outrushing of all my air, almost of muscular control. I slumped against the table, trying to catch an in breath.
“I think he traded it for cigarettes,” I told Dana back in New York on the way home, futilely garbing pain in a joke for her.
“First edition? Warmly inscribed? Must have gotten a carton at least.”
“I would hope.” I melted into her couch.
“Well, come on, what did you expect, really? It was already written out centuries ago. The half-made man, self-loathing, comes to his wizardly father for approval, for his freedom to become fully human. Sound familiar, Caliban?”
“No. That sounds forced and irrelevant and annoying.”
Dana was reading a book by Harold Bloom, a Yale professor who traveled all the way to the maximalist and insane thesis that Shakespeare invented how people now live, communicate, think. Before Shakespeare, we were different, and since the plays have sunk into