The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  Hamlet, or There Is Something Wrong With Everyone

  HAMLET CAME from an old upper-class family. He was the only son of a king. He was very intelligent, though somewhat of an intellectual, and he was quite handsome too, except for a tendency to get fat in the face and thicken. The Prime Minister Polonius itched with an eagerness to get Hamlet to marry his beautiful, charming and sweet-tempered daughter Ophelia. Not only that, but more important by far, Ophelia was very much in love with Hamlet, and when Hamlet went to Germany to study metaphysics and lager beer, she thought about him all the time. “That’s what love or infatuation seems to me,” said Ophelia, “it’s when you think of someone all the time, wondering what the loved one is thinking, what he is doing, and if he will ever love you the way you love him,” which is not very likely, most things tending to be one-sided affairs.

  Hamlet’s father, the king, died suddenly, and right after the funeral, Hamlet’s mother remarried, her new husband being Claudius, the king’s brother who now became king himself. The marriage took place very soon after the funeral and Hamlet was enraged and it was then that Hamlet began to behave in a most peculiar manner much to everyone’s surprise and perplexity. He had always been very careful about his appearance, even somewhat of a dandy: now he looked like someone who has slept for three nights in a railroad coach, and slept very poorly at that. He had always been consistently sensible, polite and full of tact. Now he made all kinds of remarks which no one could understand, and he went about looking very glum, but it was better when he was glum because when he opened his mouth, he said something which seemed, at best, mysterious, and often enough, maniacal. For example, when his mother said that he ought not to be so sad about his father’s death, because the show must go on, life is full of inevitable losses, everyone is bound to die, sooner or later, what did Hamlet say in answer? He requested his mother to sing for him as she had when he was a child, the old songs “My Old Kentucky Womb,” and “Carry Me Back To Old Virginity.” Naturally she did not know what to make of this.

  Some people thought that he was behaving like that because he was very much in love with Ophelia. But that’s ridiculous. Ophelia would have married him without hesitation. And even those who thought that he was just a lovesick young man were not sure of this explanation and went about eavesdropping and looking through transoms each time Hamlet and Ophelia were alone with each other.

  Other people, particularly Claudius his uncle the new king thought that Hamlet was very angry because he wanted to be king himself. Claudius thought that everyone was just like he was, for he had wanted to be king very much.

  The truth is that Hamlet did not care about being king because he was very depressed about everything. He just felt rotten, no matter what he did. And when he talked to his best friend Horatio, or visited with his old friend the local undertaker, what he talked about in the main was how depressed he was, how meaningless life seemed to him, and how he would like to commit suicide.

  “There’s an eternity that mocks our hopes,” he said one day to Horatio, “no matter what we try.” This was supposed to explain why he did not commit suicide, even though he felt like it. Horatio was polite, so he did not tell Hamlet that he did not understand a word of what he was saying.

  Some people supposed that his mother’s second marriage, and right after the funeral of his father, was what upset Hamlet so much. It is certainly true that Hamlet did behave in an extraordinary and offensive way with his mother, telling her that she had married too soon, that her new husband and his uncle was far from being as fine a man as his father had been, and that she ought not to let her new husband make love to her, among other ridiculous suggestions. According to this view of his conduct, he was jealous of his uncle and in love with his mother, who was still a very attractive woman.

  There may be a great deal of truth in this view of Hamlet’s behavior, for all we know, but then again how about his father? He never behaved like that when his father was alive, nor did he carry on in a sullen and disgruntled manner, not even as an infant. Still and all, this may be a superficial difficulty in observing Hamlet’s true state of mind, for he was certainly horrified by the very idea of his uncle just touching his mother.

  He said to her in fury one night in her bedroom,—to live,

  In the rank sweat of an enseaméd bed,

  Stewed in corruption, honeying, and making love

  Over the nasty sty.

  And many more remarks of the same kind, just as adolescent and irritating, indicating that he had a distinct aversion, to say the least, to the idea of people making love. Love seems to have been something dirty to him, in fact, a four letter word: L-O-V-E.

  But something more than this incestuous jealousy was wrong with Hamlet, as you can see when you know that he told the sweet and likable Ophelia to become a nun. It’s one thing to turn a girl down, but to make these proposals about her future, a future with which you refused to have anything to do, is quite insulting and shows how disgusted Hamlet was with the idea of anyone making love to anyone else. Probably he wanted Ophelia to become a nun so that no one would ever make love to her. And Horatio, who was a kind and well-meaning fellow, as well as a good friend, said to Hamlet that he had been very cruel to Ophelia and that he ought not to mistreat a girl just because she was very much in love with him.

  “A pretty girl is like a canteloupe,” replied Hamlet, “once opened, begins to get rotten.” What kind of remark was that for a well-bred young man to make?

  Horatio just sighed when he heard such things, for he realized that his friend was under a severe emotional strain.

  “You never step twice into the same girl, as Heraclitus should have said,” Hamlet continued, now that he was on the subject of girls. “I would like something more permanent.”

  “You did not always feel like this,” Horatio remarked, “perhaps this is just a passing phase?”

  Hamlet shrugged his shoulders and expressed contempt for his uncle the king on the ground that he drank too much.

  “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make successful,” said Hamlet, apropos of nothing at all and at the same time everything, including his uncle’s success and alcoholism for he had become more and more given to statements of a quasi-philosophical and invariably cynical character.

  “You better watch those human relationships,” said Horatio, thinking again of how cruel Hamlet had been to Ophelia.

  “That’s what upset me so much,” Hamlet fatuously replied, “I’ve been watching those human relationships, and I do not like them very much.”

  You can see how sick a young man he was also when you remember how beautiful, lovable, and delightful a creature Ophelia was. She would have done anything to make Hamlet happy. The fact that she was in love with him made absolutely no impact on him, except perhaps to irritate him because it was a distraction from what really preoccupied him.

  “I had not thought life has undone so many,” said Hamlet to Horatio and to Ophelia, in passing.

  Some people also thought that Hamlet suspected his uncle of killing his father in order to get his throne and his wife, and consequently the reason that he felt badly and behaved strangely was that he felt that he ought to avenge his father’s murder but suffered from a lack of will-power. But he did not suffer from lack of will-power, nor was he a coward, as some have supposed. This should be obvious because when he was sent to England by his uncle, ostensibly for a change of scene to improve his health and emotions, and when he found out that this trip was really a plot to get him killed in England, he acted swiftly, bravely, and with resolution, stealing the secret papers which contained orders to have him killed and fixing it so that his accompanists, who were in the pay of his uncle, would be wiped out instead of him: hardly the behavior of a coward with no will-power!

  It’s true that he was disturbed by his father’s death and detested his uncle but this hardly explains his state of mind, and he killed a man suddenly because he was eavesdroppi
ng behind the curtain when he was talking to his mother. He thought the spy was his uncle, but it was Ophelia’s father, poor Polonius. Ophelia went insane quite reasonably because the man she loved had killed her father and she was in an inexorable emotional trap, from which she fled by means of drowning herself, an event which brought her brother back from his studies in France to challenge Hamlet to a duel. But as a result of tricky and despicable Claudius’ machinations, this duel resulted in a virtual holocaust: everyone was stabbed or poisoned to death, except Horatio.

  People have been arguing for hundreds of years about what was really wrong with Hamlet. Some say that he must have been a woman, some say that he was homosexual, in love with his uncle or with Horatio, and unable to bear the fact that his uncle slept with a woman, and there is one fascinating view which maintains that all the mystery is utterly clarified if we suppose that everyone is roaring drunk from the beginning to the end of the play. This view is very fine except that I don’t see how it clarifies anything, for drunk or sober, not everyone behaves the same, and the real question is why Hamlet behaved as he did: certainly just hitting the bottle does not account for all his emotions and opinions, and in vino veritas, anyway.

  Needless to say, I have a theory too; in fact, several. But I don’t know if it is correct or not? For if after all these years no one has explained why Hamlet felt as he did, it does not seem very likely that I can. However, for what it is worth, and to use clinical terms, I will say in brief that I think Hamlet suffered from a well-known pathological disorder. He was manic; and he was depressive. No one knows what the real causes of the manic-depressive disorder are, whether physical or mental or both, and that is why no one understands Hamlet.

  Now that is my point, the fact that you can have this gift or that disease, and no one understands why, no one is responsible, and no one can really alter matters, and yet no one can stop thinking that someone is to blame. To be manic-depressive is just like being small or tall, strong, blond, fat,—there is no clear reason for it, it is quite arbitrary, no one seems to have had any choice in the matter, and it is very important, certainly it is very important. This is the reason that the story of Hamlet is very sad, bad and immoral. It has all these traits because Hamlet’s diseased emotions caused the deaths of the beautiful Ophelia, her pompous but well-meaning father, her hotheaded brother Laertes, and his own talented self. In this way we must recognize the fact that there is something wrong with everyone and everything.

  Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems, 1950

  Chandler Brossard

  (1922–1993)

  New Directions published Chandler Brossard’s Who Walk in Darkness in 1952, billing it as “the first time the new generation of American bohemians are presented in fiction.” Brossard did not identify with the hipsters he portrayed—“they measure their cool by the length of time they refuse to say anything to each other,” he told a friend—but as an editor and writer, he knew them well. This chapter depicts a well-heeled ad exec who goes in search of the authentic underground in a Village bar: the archetypal encounter of hip and square that is fodder for Mad Men today.

  from Who Walk in Darkness

  WE STOPPED in at the Sporting Club Bar to see what was going on there. Harry Lees was standing at the bar with a girl named Julia and a man I had never seen before. The man was expensively dressed in sport clothes and he had a crew haircut. The place was jumping. It was jammed. You could barely move it was so crowded.

  “Come on over here,” Lees shouted across the bar.

  “I’m going to case the place first,” Max said. “I’ll be over later.”

  He walked through the crowd examining everybody.

  Porter and I went over to the bar. We said hello to Harry and Julia. Porter called her Slim.

  “I want you to meet Russell Goodwin,” Julia said. “He is an account executive and he makes four hundred dollars a week.”

  “That’s quite an introduction,” Goodwin said, smiling. “I’m very glad to meet you. Won’t you have a drink with us?”

  We said all right. I said it was nice of him to do this.

  “Don’t mention it,” he said. “It gives me a great deal of pleasure.”

  “It does too,” Julia said.

  “Four hundred dollars a week,” said Harry.

  Goodwin laughed. “Don’t keep saying that. You’ll make me feel self-conscious.”

  “Not a bad way to be self-conscious,” I said.

  The bartender put our drinks on the bar and Goodwin paid for them from a long pigskin wallet he kept inside his jacket, and handed the drinks to us.

  “Here’s mud,” he said. We drank. “Harry,” he said, “I think you and Julia need yours freshened up a bit.”

  He called for two more Scotch and sodas. He looked at the crowd around us. “I’m crazy about this place,” he said. “I just stumbled on it tonight.”

  Porter and I looked at each other, and Porter made a questioning gesture with his eyebrows. Then he slapped Harry on the shoulder. “Hey, old sport. What have you been up to?”

  Goodwin was watching and listening and smiling. I could not help noticing again how well-dressed and set up he was.

  “That is an ambiguous question, old sport,” Harry said to Porter.

  I felt Harry was doing this just for fun, not for any other reason. Goodwin had handed Harry his new drink and was watching him and Porter.

  “I don’t know exactly how to answer you,” said Harry. “When you say what am I up to do you mean what am I capable of doing? Or do you mean to what point have I risen? The assumption being I am low and going up. You see, old sport, it’s very ambiguous.”

  Goodwin laughed. “That’s very clever, Harry. I had never thought of it that way.”

  “Take it any way you like,” Porter said.

  “All right. To be honest, Porter, I haven’t been up to anything. I’ve been pretty low.”

  “Won’t you have another drink?” Goodwin asked me, looking at Porter too.

  “No thanks,” Porter said.

  “Are you sure? Come on. Have another.”

  “Don’t be dull,” Julia said. “Have another drink, Porter.”

  “I’m not a drinking man,” Porter said. “It makes me dizzy and confused.”

  “Are you afraid somebody is going to put something over on you when you are tight?” Harry asked him.

  “No. I just don’t like feeling confused.”

  “I’m not afraid of feeling confused,” said Harry.

  “But you will have one, won’t you, Blake,” Goodwin said to me.

  “Sure. Blake will have one. He’s not afraid of getting dizzy.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “That’s the boy, Blake. Stay with us,” Julia said. “Don’t let us down.”

  “Or bring us down.”

  “Oh. I get it,” Goodwin said. “I get that one. It’s a jive expression. Right?”

  “You’re in,” Porter said.

  “He’s a very solid citizen,” Harry said. “He makes four hundred a week.”

  “What do you do?” Goodwin asked Porter.

  “I write fiction.”

  “Really? I used to write fiction, when I was in college.”

  “And?”

  “It was pretty good. I gave up writing because nobody bought my stories. But it was good. Now I wish I had kept at it.”

  “You’re doing all right,” Julia said.

  “Oh yes. I do all right. Harry, when do you expect to finish your book?”

  “Are you writing a book, Harry?” I asked.

  Goodwin answered me. “Didn’t he tell you? He told me he’s doing a book on the end of the Renaissance. Aren’t you, Harry?”

  “I’m not only doing it, I’m living it. Which reminds me. What happened to that underground man you came in with?”

  “He’s casing the joint,” Porter said. “He’ll be back.”

  “What do you mean by the underground man?” Goodwin asked.

 
; “The man who will do anything. He’s a spiritual desperado.”

  “He means Max Glazer,” Porter said. “He’s a very smart guy. Really very hip.”

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t. He is a desperado, though. Do you know what his ideal is? His ideal is to look like a street corner hoodlum and be the finest lyric poet in America at the same time.”

  “He sounds remarkable,” Goodwin said. “I would enjoy meeting him.”

  “Don’t say it that way,” Julia said. “You’ll meet him.”

  “There’s a booth. Let’s get it.”

  We pushed through the crowd on our left and got to the empty booth just ahead of some other people. “Very sorry,” Goodwin said to them, smiling nicely. They did not say anything and went away.

  “Tell me some more about the underground man, Harry,” Goodwin said.

  “I’m writing a book about him too.”

  “It seems that you are writing these books with your mouth, Harry,” said Porter.

  “It is a new literary form,’” Harry said. “Anyway, about the underground man. Max. His favorite reading is Andrew Marvell and the Daily Mirror comics. You might say he is the Neanderthal man of the new world.”

  “Here he is,” Julia said.

  Goodwin stood up. We all looked at him as he did this. He held out his hand to Max. “You’re Max Glazer, aren’t you? My name is Goodwin, Russell Goodwin. We’ve been talking about you.”

  Max did not return Goodwin’s greeting, though he did shake his hand gently. He made a surprised expression and smiled at us.

  “Sit down, Max,” Goodwin said, and gave Max his seat in the booth.

  “I’ll get a chair from the dining room.” He shouldered through the crowd and went back to the dining room.