The hasty publication of this journal, with foregoing textual matter by William Piper, has led to disgraceful rumors within and without the publishing field that said journal is spurious, is not the work of George Stone, and was prepared by the staff of William Piper solely to relieve himself of present dangers. Having the courage of my format, I will come to grips with this mendacity forthrightly by acknowledging its existence and by saying that it is scurrilous. How could this journal possibly be spurious? It was found above Stone’s own toilet seat. Besides, it exhibits, in every fashion, the well-known and peculiar style of this actor; its idiosyncrasies are his, its convolutions are the creation of no other man. Its authenticity has been certified to by no less than Wanda Miller who, as we all know, lived with the actor during those last terrible years, and was privy to his innermost thought. If she says it is the work of Stone, how can we possibly deny?
I therefore present, with no further comment, the journal of George Stone. Present difficulties notwithstanding, and with all sympathy for the embattled Administration, I must point out that this should bring, once and for all, an end to this business. How could I possibly have had anything to do with Stone’s performance? I was merely the focus, the camera, the static Eye. The vision, the hatred, the pointlessness of all of it was Stone’s own, as in the creation of all madmen. “Re-enact and purge national guilt by becoming the form of the martyred President and being killed again!” Yes, indeed! Is such nonsense the product of a sane mind?
And now let it speak for itself.
STONE: Yes, here it is: I have it right here. I wrote it down somewhere and I knew it was in this room. Well, I found the little son of a gun. Right under the newspapers on the floor. I must remember to be more organized. Wanda won’t like it if I don’t get organized. She’s warned me — rightly — many times about this. Live and learn, I say; live and learn. I WILL NOT SCATTER MY SHEETS.
Anyway, I’ve got it. The whole memory, just as I transcribed it yesterday. Or the day before. July 11, 1959. It is July 11, 1959, in Denver and Stone is acting Lear again.
He — that is, I — am acting him half on history and half on intention, trapped in all the spaces of time, the partitions of hell. Space is fluid around me, shifting as it does defined only by rows, by heads, by dim walls, by my own tears and tread. Sight darts crosswise. I act Lear as only I, George Stone, the flower of his. generation, can, while the cast stands respectfully in the wings like relatives at a baptism, while lights twitch and hands wink.
For I, George Stone, am Lear. It is the Gloucester scene and old Earl, my familiar and my destiny, stands behind, playing mutely while I rant. He is fat, he is bald, he is in fact old Alan Jacobs himself, familiar as God, as empty as death … but no matter; I am alone. I extract the words carefully, reaching inside to make sure that what they mean is still there; the burning, the burning.
“ … I know thee well; thy name is Gloucester; I shall preach to thee, so listen …”
And the burning leaps,the burning leaps.
“… When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools … this a good block;
It were a madness to shoe a troop of horse
With felt; so when I steal upon these sons-in-law,
Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!”
Do you hear me, Jacobs?
“Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!”
I wheel upon the bastard; I take old Earl by the shoulders, and I move to vault him on the sea. He trembles in my grasp, and I feel his false surfaces shake; he gasps and groans but no matter for I am beyond his objection: I drag him to the sheer, clear cliff and topple him over, send him shrieking ten stories searching for the ground until he hits with a thud and in an explosion of sawdust, his brains spill free and then, cotton as they are, turn green in the fading light. So much for Lear.
Sa, sa, sa, sa. For I can kill, I can kill and now, against that wooden sky I scream murder so that they can hear; so that all of them can hear. No more of this magic, I say; no more of these imprecations against the nailed skull: in Lear, no one kills; no one ever kills, but let us have no more magicians.
Attendants come.
They have detected something in the wings, something they were not supposed to see. Ah, here they are: eight of them in a row, carrying a jacket of mail for my:. arms, my legs. They are coming for the old King; greet the world. I flee.
From stage center to left I go, nimble as light, stuffed like a porpoise. The spot cannot pin me; oh, boy, I transcend vision itself. Sa, sa, sa, sa.
Stone is acting Lear again. In Denver, in the vault of the unborn, in all the Denvers of the skull, in the sun of the city itself while the Keeper walks straight through those who love him. Perpetual Lear; perpetual Stone.
He had such plans, he did, that no one knew what they were. But they would be the terror of the earth.
On the other hand, does this make much sense? All of this is fine for me, fine for Wanda: we know what’s going on here, and that Jacobs business in Denver was just terrible (did I kill him?) prefiguring, as it did, so much which followed. But I am no impressionist; not me, not George Stone. Got to get the material in shape circumspectly; from one thing to the next, all in its place and at last to end with something meaningful. So let me structure the materials as I structured a role; let me resist that impulse which is simply to implode my own skull; sprinkle this stinking cellar with thoughts and curses. Where is Piper? He promised to be here three days ago. The profligate louse; you can trust him for nothing but this time I have the goods and he’ll be here. My reputation. That alone makes it worth it. STONE RETURNS TO PUBLIC LIFE ENACTING HIS OWN CREATION BEFORE YOUR EYES. Yes, that should do it. He loves that. But why isn’t he here yet? Oh, Wanda, Wanda; I’ll grasp a proper grasp to show you what I think of you!
We need an organized journal. Part one, part two, but first, by all means a prospectus. Begin with the beginning:
THE BEGINNING
So. It began like this: it was, for me, as if the worst of us had risen to confront and destroy the best; that the blood ran free in heaven because the worst said they wouldn’t take it any more; don’t need none of this crap. It was a shattering, because no body politic can exist forever in two parts. Oh, I had it figured out so elegantly. I had it made.
For me it was like this: it was benefit Friday for the Queens chapter of one league or another; the curtain was scheduled to rise at two, and at one I was comfortably settled in full costume, fully prepared with nothing to do for an hour but sit and get in some serious time on the gin which I had thoughtfully stocked at the beginning of the run. I sat there for a while, drinking like that, and listening to the radio, and after a while the Announcement came through. I shut off the radio and went down the hall, looking for the stage manager.
Oh yes, he had heard it too; he had a television set in his office, and now they had broken into all kinds of programs with the Word. Yes, he believed that it was true; someone like the Keeper was bound to get it one of these days, and besides, every man elected in the even number years ending with 0 since 1860 had died in office. He had known the Keeper wouldn’t make it from the start. And it looked how he was right, not that it gave him any pleasure and not, thank God, that he had any idea what was really going on. I left the stage manager.
Back in my own room, whisk close the door,
listen some more and came the Second Announcement. The Keeper was dead.
I corked the gin and put it away, put my feet up and began to think the thoughts I have mentioned above, the best and worst and coming together and all of that. They certainly made me feel better, because my legs got numb right away, and I was convinced that if anyone was part of the best, I was. Didn’t the notices say so? Everybody knows Stone.
After a while, the stage manager came into my room, and said that he had decided to call off the performance. Would I make the announcement? “After all it’s your play,” he said. “Nobody else should do it. They’ll
feel better if they hear it from you.”
“Why not just pipe it in and let them go home? Much easier.”
“Can’t do that. Equity rules, you know. Anytime there’s a major change in a performance, a member of the cast has to announce it, from the stage.”
“This isn’t a change, it’s a cancellation.”
“Fight it out with Equity. There’s no precedent. You do it.”
“Can’t say I want to.”
“Who does?”
So I did it.
Can one explain the barbarity of that occasion?’ The theatre was virtually filled, then, and the news. did not seem to have come to die audience; they, were all sitting there in a spray of contentment, waiting for the curtain to rise on the eminent George Stone in MISERY LOVES COMPANY (doesn’t it?), and there I came as the house lights darkened, to stand before the curtain with the servile tilt’ of the jester. They quieted, and a spot came on me.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the jester said, “I have an announcement. I am most entirely sorry to say, that this performance will be canceled.”
That seemed to sit fairly well: a few stirrings but nothing drastic. The jester, pleased with his success, decided, however, that they deserved in the bargain to understand the cancellation (not being caused by the jester’s health), and so he hastened to serve them:
“As you might know,” he said, “our Keeper has been shot in the Southlands, and it appears that he was killed instantly. While we await official notification, it seems certain in the interim that he is no longer with us. Our new Keeper is already at the helm, of course, and will serve us well.”
There was a faint murmur, and the lights began to tremble upward again; the jester looked out into the full eye of the house and noted that they were confronting him.
They were confronting him.
“A most terrible tragedy,” he said helpfully, “and I am sure that all of you could be induced to join in a moment of prayer for the departed Keeper.”
Not a good ploy. There were no bent heads, no shared mutterings during which the jester could make graceful exit. Instead, they continued to look at him. And look.
And the jester had an insight then, in that moment when all of the barriers were down and that ancient and most terrible relation between actor and audience had been established, killers and prey … the jester realized that they were staring at him as if he were the assassin. If he wasn’t, why had he interrupted their revels with such news? What had he done? How long had it taken him and how, then, had he been able to return to this stage so quickly?
Well, he had given the news, hadn’t he? He, the perpetrator, had made it known. So, then —
It was a difficult period for the jester, and it lasted several seconds until, by sheer heroic will, he compelled himself to take his handsome, if slightly gnarled, frame off the stage and into the wings. He hardly wanted to do so, of course; what he wanted to do — that is, what I wanted to do, what I wanted to say — was to confront them in return and have it out, lay it on the line. Excuse me, I wanted to say: excuse me, ladies and gents, but I cannot be held responsible for drastic acts committed by lunatics in a distant place. I am, after all, only an actor, an occupation never noted for its ability to perpetrate with originality.
That is what I might have said … but, to be sure, I said nothing at all. The moment passed, the confrontation went under the surface to muddle with other things. They rose, and as I watched them — having decided that it would, after all, be a mistake to leave the stage — they left.
And, oh god, I hated them, then. I hated their greedy need for a perpetrator as I hated my own tormented and quivering mind; I despised them and shuddered at how close these had come to evicting some final ghosts. But they were right.
They were right, you see; it was as simple as that, and as deadly. Oh, it took me a long, long time to apprehend that knowledge which they had so easily and effortlessly assimilated. I was the killer. The killer of their Keeper.
You can imagine the effect that it had upon me; it was simply catastrophic. I was appalled. It was appalling. It shocked· me to the core of my innocent actor’s being.
What happens? I asked myself in the empty theatre, uncapping my bottle of gin; what is going on, here? We must define some limits and stay within. Easier methods by far to dispose of a Keeper; quiet strangulation or death by pater; poison in the tonic and leeches in the bed. This was going too far, I said. I sat before the media and wept for the whole three days, and shortly thereafter I left MISERY LOVES COMPANY.
I left the play, found myself a proper slut to bed and plan with; and a fortnight after that I came to my present quarters, this reeking, stinking abandoned theatre, once a whorehouse, before that a slaughtering mart. A rich, a muddled history: this building is descending into the very earth of the lower East Side of Manhattan; in two hundred years it will peep shyly through a crown of mud.
But that has nothing to do with me. I lie here content with my notes, with my intentions, and with Wanda; always Wanda. Together, then, we work out my condition, my final plan and the plan becomes fruitions through the corpus and instrumentation of William Piper. Ah, Wanda, Wanda; I’ll make my skull a packing case for your scents, for my waters. I’ll toss you a touch to make the alter jump.
My condition. All of it, my condition. For the Keeper’s death, too, was an abstraction, and it did what nothing else could have done; sped me gaily to the edge of purpose; found me a proper slut and a proper tune. And now, to be sure, a proper destiny.
For the secret shorn bare is this: it made everything come together. Without it I was nothing, a child trapped in dim child’s games; but with it, ah — with it, I moved to new plateaus, new insights on the instant. No one ever killed a King but belped the Fool. Focused so, with edge and purpose at last, I feel within me wandering, the droning forebears of a massive fate.
So endeth THE BEGINNING. We move forward jauntily now, a fixed smile on our anxious face; the old, worn features turned blissful and unknowing, toward the sun.
So, before the act be done; before Piper and his technicians come to unroll the final implements of purpose, chronologize a little; we explain, ourselves. Writing, this late at night as I must, I can make little order; the entries flickering in time and space would be the ravings of a madman were I not so sane. Barriers must be smashed in any event; fact and fantasy must be melded together; As the Keeper knew. Wow, did he know!
But one last terror remains in these rooms, then, and that must be this: that when it is all over and when police come for my belongings, find this and turn it upon a fulfilled, grateful world, these notes may be taken as clinical offering; may, indeed, be found by Piper and his troops themselves and disseminated as “culture.” Oh, I know your tricks, Piper; I, know the corridors of your cravening soul and you will try, you will, to reduce these to pure casenotes, more symptomology. But if this be so, be forewarned, Piper: I will not be a document, I will not be a footnote. Not me, George Stone; I Will purge the national guilt by being the Keeper and plunging, at last, the knife into myself; take that, you bastard, and I’ll free you all.
So, chronologize a little.
My name is George Stone. I am an actor. I am ,the greatest actor of my time. Read the notices. Look at my Equity card. It checks out.
I know more than that. Thirteen seasons ago, when I was young and full of promise, I acted in repertory theatre on the black and arid coast of Maine … a cluster of barely reconverted buildings on some poisoned farmland, a parking lot filled with smashed birds and the scent of oil; those dismal seawinds coming uninvited into an the spaces of the theatre. From this; I learned everything I know about the human condition.
How could I not? Life, you see, is a repertory theatre; each of us playing different roles on different nights, but behind the costume, always the same bland, puzzled face. Oh, we wear our masks of so many hues night after night that the face is never seen: tonight a clown and last night a tragic hero and tomorrow perhaps the
amiable businessman of a heavy comedy of manners, and next week … off to another barn. But underneath the same sadness, the unalterability: the same, the same, the same.
And so I know: I know what you wore Thursday and what the stage manager plans for you Monday night; I know while you pace the stage this Saturday, all activity, pipe clenched firmly in your masculine jaws, that crumpled in your dressing room lies the faggot’s horror. I know you. The power of metaphor is the power to kill. You deceive me not for I know ‘all of your possibilities.
Enough, enough. As always, I move from perception to abstraction, from the hard moment to the soft hour. Oh, I must stick to the subject, I must stay in the temple, the temple of the Keeper.
Last night, I became 38.
It was a poor enough birthday for the old monarch. Wanda brought me a cake, Wanda cut a slice and I ate it, Wanda blew out the candles, Wanda gave me congratulations. She too ate some, let me give her a pat and then, reaching, we tumbled to the slats and made our complex version of love; the bloat-king’s fingers tangling through her hair. It was not a bad birthday, but it was hardly a good one.
Here it is: I got it down just the way it happened. Word by word. Wanda and I had a talk, after my party, and several matters were discussed freely and frankly:
STONE: Wanda? Seriously, now. What do you think of me?
WANDA: How’s that?
STONE: Do you think this idea of mine is crazed, Wanda? A little mad? This matters to me, you being my world and all, you know. Is this a sane conceptualization; my re-enactment?
WANDA: I don’t get it.
STONE: You go out of doors, Wanda; these days I never do. You have perspective. You know things. The national guilt is really bad, isn’t it? They really need a purge, right? You haven’t mislead me into —
The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 13