The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  And then, only then, did I arrive in Venice. I had been too busy looking at the Teutonic beauty with the wind-burned cheeks on the vaporetto ride, at her shadowed hips on our last walk, and I had been too busy squinting for a crowd-screened girl in the days after. Now, having accepted that I was not worth her time, that I had been brought here by her but not for her, that I had been chosen by her to be released from my old life, I set off into Venice at last.

  I still occasionally saw a flash of blond two bridges away that I allowed to blur into Heidi for a hot, frozen minute, but I was no longer looking for her. I was floating free of everything in this place, as she had obviously meant for me to do, as I needed to do, waiting for something to happen, shedding past selves in the April and May breezes, melting myself down in the June and July heat in the hostel where my budget had necessarily moved me.

  I fell in love. I loved Venice first for its surface beauty, just like all the other suckers. But soon enough I loved its ability to hide from prying, to withdraw its essence behind those thousands of cleverly identical façades and squares, to vanish despite a billion grazing eyes, as though the tourists were all walleyed or willfully blind. At first it seemed that no one lived there to man these shops, cafés, and churches. I tried to follow them—merchants, barmaids, prelates—into the spirals of the city. They led me down the alleys, past the street signs that urchins moved or removed from one day to the next, the bridges that shifted their colors from one hour to the next, the buildings whose flags and banners were so easily swapped, the congenially conspiratorial Adriatic, which would as needed bubble up to distract or divert, the throppity-thropping cyclones of pigeons that would, as a last resort, block my view, until, upon this shifting swamp town, the naïve newcomer and the moneyed tourist alike were repeatedly funneled back, tricked back, drained back into the same small area of commerce and snapshots, the impulses Venice allowed you to indulge.

  But if you waited and followed, patiently, day after day, finally you saw real stories, real lives. I spent my days now reading secondhand books in dusty yards, eyed up by squat old women in loose housecoats and their feline familiars, guarded and malevolent. I was twenty-eight. I was writing stories about the people I saw, the tourists and priests, about the conversations I overheard. When I wasn’t writing, I imagined Dana and my father reading my stories in print. I told myself I was doing something Shakespeare never did. I was the plein air Impressionist rebel and he the stuffy Salon. I told myself that everything about me and my bizarre leap into Venice would produce something entirely new, free of all that came before, free of my life, free of old musty fiction. Something new would pour out of these sun-dried courtyards and pigeon-splattered squares.

  Heidi was my muse, I came to understand in a flash of self-love. I have since wondered if I didn’t imagine her. I don’t remember when I lost my last souvenir of our twenty-four hours—her novel—but with its disappearance and the intervening decades I can almost believe I created her, so perfectly did she make my new life, shove me on to the next thing. It was about then, having cast her as muse, that I realized I would never return to the States but would wander the world wherever adventure and literature led me, learning and loving and writing about the lives of those around me … there may have been a Nobel Prize at the other end of this plan.

  I don’t have access to any more of my letters to Dana, but I can guess their tone, and my manic-Romantic idea of myself based on her replies:

  Darling Runaway,

  Well, well. Venice, is it? O.K. I can see the appeal.

  Things have settled down here at court since your flight, but it is only thanks to me. And now you have had your epiphany, and we are all very excited for you. Though I saw it coming, if I may say so. You had to go somewhere and start over.

  Miss Margaret Wheeler. I can’t say you handled that with gentlemanly finesse. She started sniffing around here for you after ten days or so. She had already hunted you at your office, where she learned of your resignation before your own sister, resigned to be the last to know anything of importance about you.

  She is sweet, though, your ex-Margaret, and I have attempted to bring her a measure of comfort. [Note: I recall thinking this was a lie, because Margaret had always spoken like a committed homophobe. “Your sister’s a dyke? Seriously?” Older and wiser than when I was in high school, I didn’t hit her. Because she was pretty. So instead I slept with her, and was always ashamed of that willingness to trade away one of my few principles for sex.] Her ideas of you were very limited. It seems you presented to her a very controlled and managed version of yourself: competent, ambitious, and businesslike, rather dull. Is this what you think of yourself? Well, she and I have spent many happy evenings now in a sort of Arthur reeducation course, in which I tell her stories of how you really are and always have been. I am giving her a more detailed picture of your life abroad than you have given me. I improve upon what little you have written. She is taken with this, but also, I think, sees the twin before her as the painter of the portrait and perhaps the portrait itself. I think this also comforts her.

  The stories of our childhood have tickled her, and she is very ticklish. One’s past, you know, is relevant and cannot be so easily erased as you would seem to think right now, judging by your shrieking Venetian rebirth. Dad’s son.

  The good part is your decision to take writing seriously. Finally. I am really glad about this. I think you’re right: your flight from your job and New York and all of us back here was necessary so you could begin something over there. That’s great. Don’t let the rest of what I have to say take anything away from that. You are a writer. Write. Come home when you know you can.

  But. Really. You are kidding yourself if you think you will blossom out of the damp Venetian soil as some new flower, never before seen, with nothing in you of us, of Minnesota, of Dad and Mom and Sil, and those Family Rooms and Lake Minnetonka and all the rest. You will somehow rise from the ashes without influence or history, entirely original in every way? It is a myth and drives its worshippers to madness or bad writing or both.

  Seriously. Your new life is (A) already tainted by the past, and (B) already unoriginal. It comes at the cost of that German fool spending at least a night, if not more, in a London jail, where you left him so you could have his woman. Like King David. Or Uter Pendragon. Unoriginal. And the woman? I agree you have no choice but to cast her as your muse, the free spirit who had no life of her own but only existed to pull you out of your dreary corporate drudgery (which I always thought you liked and were good at), and launched you with a welcoming lay into your spectacular new career before flying off immediately to leave you to your glory and not drear it down with her own needs, family, aging, stomach flu. But that’s because you can’t afford to imagine her as I do: raped, murdered, and sunk tongueless into a canal when she was wandering, lost, looking for the sweet American who’d gone with her on an adventure. Your story is built on many other stories, some of which you know, most of which you will blithely ignore, understandably. It is not built on the imagined lives of old women in Venetian courtyards, though I’m sure those will be good to read. You can’t make “you” without us. And what if we are unoriginal?

  Because, really, we are. It’s all been done before, and you claim that you are free of influences? Anxious brother, he shares your birthday. Why do you have to deny him for that? You will somehow reduce him, beat him, ignore him, prove he doesn’t own you? Even if those weren’t contradictory, you miss that he has invented you already. The boy intent on being free of his family? The dreamy artist who roams Italy for inspiration? The Jew in Venice? You learned all this from him, or from people who learned it from him then mushed it into sitcoms and weepy movies for you. We are all his ideas. To be fair, he learned it from someone else, too, but he at least didn’t kid himself, claiming to be unique. He was worried that he was unoriginal, too, you know, just like you:

  If there be nothing new, but that which is

  Hath been before, h
ow are our brains beguiled,

  Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss

  The second burden of a former child.

  But he got over it. He hung around with other ones: Marlowe, Peele, Greene, Lodge, Nashe, Watson. And he plundered like a madman from everyone. As a result, he was pretty original. Like a multiple winner of the Oscar for best-adapted screenplay. That makes him sound less threatening, doesn’t it?

  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 nothing. She’d lived through various political turmoils I had to learn about from books. She was entwined in centuries of cultural, religious, and social networks that proved, when she loved me back, that I must be free of my own past. Heidi separated me from the United States, and now a desire not to be separate, to rediscover with a wife the feeling of my youth with Dana, carried me through compromises and misjudgments. Some part of me thought I had to roam to a land as foreign as possible and find the most unlikely mate to solve this problem. You can wish to be indifferent. Oh, Christ, the unconscious, the psychologizing, the myth, the instinct: I can write and theorize and still not fully explain: I loved Jana. I did.

  How long does the geographic solution work? How long can you strive for difference and indifference? Eleven years. Time whips us through each accelerating year, January, Janua, Jan, J, as through a centrifuge, shooting out particles of regret, shreds of memory, a distillate of recalled loss, squandered potential, wasted opportunities, scrambled priorities. Those eleven years—the onset of adulthood at last—brought some of the happiest times of my life: wedding, birth of children, professional success.

  “Bohemia!” my father wrote me back in ’94, congratulating me on my wedding, sending his well-justified regrets for the ceremony, where Dana served as my best woman and Sil and Mom were graciously entertained by Jana’s mother, an unwilling tour guide guiding unwilling tourists. “A magical place with a wild sea,” Dad rhapsodized. He preferred, no shock, the imaginary oceanic country of The Winter’s Tale to the landlocked but no less beautiful reality of Kafka, Havel, Kundera, Skvorecky, Stoppard, me. That was okay by then. I could laugh at my father by then. “And Arthur, his wandering and resistance complete, has taken a wife and accepted his crown! It reminds me of a story, and this time it may end well.”

  In 1995, genetics, uninspired in its patterns, coughed up twins again, two boys who developed, to my obtuse surprise, into little Czechs who for a while thought their foreign father was okay, but then grew increasingly embarrassed by his accent and general air of not belonging and his stupid answers to their czildhood predicaments. This period has mostly passed, and we understand one another better now. I harbor hopes for their twenties.

  I intend to keep my kids out of this except to make three relevant points:

  1) As twins, they were fascinating to watch. They were independent of me and Jana in a way monos would not have been. They had that same sense of completion and confidence—visible almost as soon as consciousness flickered on behind their oversized brown Slavic irises, my own blue eyes receding back into the gene pool. Their version of twindom involved more fisticuffs and flaring conflict than Dana’s and mine, but Jana and I learned early that our well-meaning intrusions in their intra-twin broils only made them go on longer and with more fragile conclusions, whereas left to their own violent devices, they would pummel each other only so far and so long as was necessary to institute some closer, still more conspiratorial partnership.

  2) They loved their Aunt Dana instantly and with a laughing, un-Czech joviality that began when they were about three. She visited, as she did twice a year for seven years, until her conflicts with Jana made visiting untenable, and the twins would keep her to themselves—in their room, in the garden, in the woods, later in the streets of Prague.

  3) They are fifteen now, and though as tightly bound to each other as ever, they will face struggles ahead that I would like to prepare them for, and perhaps a candid explanation of why I no longer live with them will help more than it embarrasses. And so I have written such an explanation for them, but elsewhere. This is not the place.

  Except to say that I did not find my lost half in Bohemia after all, try as I did to fit myself against the unique edges of a lovely, kind woman, wounding her in the process with my own incompatible, jagged shards.

  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 supers
tition, 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.