The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  The Englishman, Peter Bryce, had a white beard, a white ponytail, seemed in every way a retired 1970s rock bassist, the one Jethro Tull fired just before they made it big. He had an attitude of someone having wonderful good fun. “You sure you want to watch today?” he teased. “These tests can get a bit ugly for the owners.” Before a single instrument appeared or the quarto was revealed, all was explained to me: the truth would out; twenty-first-century science simply could not be fooled, and the atmospheric assumption in the lab was that I was trying to fool them. “The hardest fact any forger has to overcome is a simple truth: every object contains the history of its own making. That history can be read. All papers age. Gelatin size degrades. Fibers weaken. These things cannot be hurried along to suit a forger’s timetable.”

  “Okay. Let’s do it.” I began to open the case.

  Bryce wasn’t done talking, however. I suspected that his best party trick was to win with a lecture, without using a single tool, to crack a forger’s brittle confidence with a well-aimed smack from his hammer of knowledge. (“D’ye recall that case where Bryce flew to Minneapolis and terrified the bloke into confessing before he’d even looked at it!”) He was plainly waiting for me to gulp when he reached the trick I hadn’t thought of, to scramble to pack up my quarto and run for it. “Fake paper? The raw materials are not the same as they were. Linen rags are not the same. Flax grows differently now and is processed differently. No pesticides in the 1590s. Did you know that about flax?”

  “I did not. How little I know about flax would startle you.”

  “Well, even if someone found a stock of blank period French or Genoese laid paper, the paper would not take ink properly because of how it had aged. Not to mention that the ink would now be over any foxing rather than the foxing over the ink. Only four people on earth can fabricate a replica of sixteenth-century paper, and I know them all. They won’t do it. So, if you bleached old writing off printed stock, to print on it again, or found old linen to make new replica paper, modern detergents contain optical brightening agents. The paper would bear traces of the OBAs, which fluoresce a very particular light bluish-purple under UV. Did you know that? All I need for that test is this.” And he withdrew a UV light from his bag, watching me for reaction, then firing it up like a reluctant martial artist forced, despite his profound pacifism, into crushing my windpipe.

  He asked me to open the case and lay the quarto on the table. I’m a little color-blind, so I wouldn’t have known if the resulting glow fluoresced correctly or not, but he waved it over every page and finally said, “Well. Hmm.” He was utterly likable and obviously very happy to taste a challenge. “Next we’re going to study every detail of the binding. Stitching styles, threads, glues. Then we shall wallow in the text block, the paper, the orientation of the sheets, the wire profiles, the form of the signatures. We have the polarizing light microscope and the FTIR after that, should we still require. Then our friend Viktor here, from Chicago, will bathe in the ink. It doesn’t matter how many details appear right. If one or two are wrong, then the beast is mythical.”

  “Carry on, carry on.”

  “Okay. Let’s have fun.” Some answers would be instantaneous; others would require a week or two for a final report.

  For six hours, microscopes, lasers, and various doodads of our century were wheeled in and out. Magnified slides of individual letters were projected next to control samples from other quartos printed by William White. Surfaces were tweezed, photos taken, flakes of ink peeled and dissolved in vials, tips of threads were snipped off the edges of pages and mounted behind glass. Individual sheets (“Look away, Mr. Phillips, this might hurt a bit”) were sliced open from the side, butterflied.

  “It’s very smooth. Hardly a stain. It’s been pressed all this time, hasn’t it? Bound? No exposure to light. Stored vertically is my guess, which means there should be a divergence in thicknesses between the top and bottom.” There was.

  Hands were shaken, results were promised, and I put my treasure back in its case. A frustrating but gleeful send-off from the Englishman: “Mr. Phillips, one curiosity of my work is that it is much harder to prove something is genuine than to prove something is a fake.” I went home.

  My father, Arthur Edward Harold Phillips, lay still in his bed. He had probably been dead for several hours, since before I’d left that morning, or even when I’d been on the phone giving my sister romantic advice.

  37

  “I WILL NOT TRY TO EXCUSE my father’s acts. His acts were his own. His mistakes, crimes, defeats: these were his own. As Shakespeare wrote, I would not have it any other wise, and that is surely how my father felt. But I will say this of his life: he believed that the world could be transformed completely, if only occasionally, if only for one person at a time, but that was something, and that was worth it. There are times when I consider some of his greatest creations, his most selfless creations, and I feel cowardly in comparison when I think of what he hoped to achieve in his work.

  “A novelist tries to capture a person in a phrase (a walk-on character), or a paragraph (a minor character), or a page (a major character), or a whole book (for the protagonist), but how to describe an entire life of a real person? Not in snatches of action or frame-frozen descriptions, but over a whole life? My father eludes my abilities. I can write a paragraph about him for you, but it seems to miss everything, even though it’s all true:

  “Arthur Edward Harold Phillips was a dandy and a great artist and a great mind who could quote poetry in three languages to charm you. A self-made character, he was an original. He lived for art and wonder. He loved a woman, and he lost her, gave her up in self-sacrifice. He loved his two children and wanted to give them, more than anything, a love of literature and art and the world’s limitless capability to delight, and he succeeded. But he was also a man whose best principles eroded far too early, who was made bitter by the world’s indifference to his creativity, who needed money more than he ever would have guessed, who discovered his greatest genius was in his ability to bring back to life the spirit of long-ago geniuses, but who then wasted himself in the least exalted, least wondrous escapades one could imagine, far less wonderful than if he had simply done what he always claimed to fear the most and become an office hack or an advertising illustrator, and come home every day at five o’clock to a loving wife and admiring children in the suburbs. This, too, is a sort of wonder-working, after all.

  “As far as an accurate portrait of my father, I don’t know if that paragraph is him or not. This writerly method fictionalizes him, cuts off so much of him—so many contradictions, extenuations, annexes, chapters—that what remains is only a shadow of him, a shadow of his hopes, and a shadow of his griefs. It seems impossible to descend through all the layers of him at even a single moment or at a single decision. I consider even one of his pedestrian crimes, and I ask myself, What motivated him? His worst moments can be explained by: his wonder-lust philosophy, bitterness, pride in his craftsmanship, mere habit, inevitability, simple greed and thoughtlessness, genetic selfishness bordering on criminality, love. I can hardly pull the burrs away to find the man underneath …”

  I include this extract of egocentric eulogy (I went on for quite a while, in love with the sound of my words—frame-frozen!) because of certain contractual requirements I am coming to, and because it is the best testimony I have to illustrate precisely my state of mind before the events of the next week.

  “And yet, for all of that, there is my father reading to me and my sister, the voices and the lessons, the laughter and the wisdom, so that his twins couldn’t wait to spend a weekend with him in his world of wonders. For all of that, there remains his generosity, his willingness to sacrifice for his children, to sacrifice for the only woman he ever loved, giving her an extraordinary gift because he knew he could not give her an ordinary one.”

  I put my arm around my mother’s shoulder, and she patted my hand. She was hardly shattered with grief; she had long ago decided to deny my fa
ther any access to her heart, and she had done just fine. Petra stood with Dana, held her gloved hand. The four of us embraced and drove together, silently, out to the Temple Israel cemetery on Forty-second Street.

  I was—from synagogue to graveyard—at my most piously devoted to my three articles of faith: (1) My father—despite it all—had loved me, wished things could have been different between us; (2) Petra—despite it all—loved me and would accept my love, and somehow Dana would be spared any real pain, and my boys would love her and me, and we would all rearrange somehow for the best and happiest ending to these early dramas; and (3) The Tragedy of Arthur was by William Shakespeare. These three apparently separate trees were one and the same, connected under the soil, sharing invisible groundwater and spliced, inseparable roots.

  “I want you to take over this project,” I told Dana. “Or do it jointly with me. I want you to keep the play, write some of the essays. We have to share this. I don’t think I can back out completely and give it all to you—I would if I could, I swear to God, but I’m too late with the publisher on that. I should have done that in the first place, and I’m very sorry, really, truly sorry. But come in with me now. Please.”

  A superstitious gesture, whistling in a graveyard, but heartfelt. I suppose I thought it might make Dana feel better, when she learned about me and Petra. I suppose it can be viewed as a somewhat crass offer, as if I were buying Petra off Dana in exchange for a share of a lottery ticket. I didn’t mean it like that, but I was afraid that’s how Dana took it, as if she knew how thickly delusion had caked over my brain.

  “No,” she said. “Thank you, but he wanted you to do this. And you’re doing it for all of us anyhow. So don’t feel like you’re taking something from me, okay?”

  38

  IT HAD BEEN MORE THAN A WEEK since I had found him and sat on the bed next to his body for an hour. It was easy enough now to throw away the few clothes and toiletries. All sentimental value lurked in the box of letters.

  I read through the whole lot sitting at the table in the living room, where all those Shakespeare pros had read of another ambiguous Arthur. I read letters from his kids, his wife then ex-wife, his lawyers, the prison records like report cards. I found souvenirs of his art career, but I had hoped for a comprehensive catalogue of his forgeries, the basis perhaps—I felt the seductive whisper in the back of my mind—for my next novel. He’d kept nothing so rich, unfortunately, no roster of clients, no onymous mention of a country house in England. But there was this index card:

  It is in faded pencil. It is undated but obviously old, softened by the caress of years. There is a number 14 in the upper left. The card has a vaguely Australiaform stain on it, which, when I found it, was also crusty and still adhesive enough to have stuck the card to the back of a mimeographed catalogue of a 1967 group show in an art gallery in Dinkytown, which included two pictures by AEH Philips (sic): Girl with Lily and Tired Mother. The back of that booklet’s last page has a twin (although inverted) stain to the one on the card.

  There are four lines of writing. Under a doodled comet or approaching cannonball, two stylized arrows mark ideas or a to-do list. The first line reads, “explain Arthur in York.” The second arrow points to “Cumbria backs away.” Below these is a line of verse, lightly seasoned with scansion marks: “When Ríghteous mén would stánd alóof.”

  The line is almost the last line of Act III—When righteous men in conscience stand apart—from a soliloquy in which the Earl of Cumbria backs away from his plan to assassinate Arthur (who never explains what he was doing in York).

  My father was working out Cumbria’s words. This index card represents an early draft of the play, the only survivor of a deck of at least fourteen, still here only because something spilled on it, and it stowed away to the twenty-first century on the back of something he thought he could safely keep, a catalogue of his failure as an artist working under his own name (appropriately misspelled).

  The shock when a con reveals itself is physically sickening, and I felt a shudder of pity for all those from whom my father had stolen over the years. He had escaped in the nick of time, dead and buried, praised by me despite years of better judgment.

  Revelation, in my case, felt like a draining, like—to be a little unpleasant—a storm warning of intestinal panic, as if something were being flushed out of me, sluiced away from heart and brain, a voiding that was hotter, more acidic, more thorough and more scouring than the worst movement in my system’s muscular memory.

  It ages you, this instantaneous purging of belief. Your skin hangs lower off the bones under the eyes, some fat and sinew are lost in the evacuation, and shadows start to fall across the face.

  They don’t ever stop, those shadows. After they darken the half-moons under the eyes, they darken the room, the world, and then they set off to darken the past. All those warm moments at his end and at our start: the nervous request for help, the emails, the Tab, the apartment, and back, back, further and further back, shadows blackening all the way back. The death of Arthur meant the death of Arthur’s love all the way back, the nights on his floor, the crop circle, the little people of Saturn as I dozed in his arms, all flushing out with the other filth, all withering as the light went out and the cold wind picked up.

  Too much? Too melodramatic? (By my assent he fashioneth complotment!) Maybe. But such aesthetic quibbling does not apply at the moment of revelation.

  The only payoff in exchange for this loss is the sudden and permanent clarity of vision, the X-ray eyesight, and the charitable evangelist’s belief that this clarity can be taught to others before they have to feel the pain themselves. Sometimes this is true: clarity can be suddenly contagious when a group labors together under a forgery’s illusions.

  What makes something rapidly and obviously a forgery after it was, sometimes for decades, so obviously genuine? Go Google the van Meegeren Vermeers. A child could tell you that those Navajos and Down’s syndrome maids aren’t by the same man who painted Girl with a Pearl Earring. Read James Frey’s memoir now: an elderly Amish lady could find a hundred impossibilities. Sometimes better science opens our eyes, but often it feels more as if a spell has worn off. We blink and look around, rubbing the fairy dust from our eyes, wonder whether we might have dreamt it all. Once you know it isn’t Shakespeare, none of it sounds like Shakespeare. How could it? If I didn’t write this, it wouldn’t sound like something I wrote.

  First things first: I was not going to allow the publication, obviously. I would end this farce. Equally obviously, you are reading this, and I have failed. All I can hope now is that the critics do the job for me. The wise ones will quote me right now and say, as they should, or if only out of fear of appearing like suckers, “It’s a parody, a pastiche, obviously false, an act of inexcusable chutzpah, temerity, pretension.” Or will we hear instead, out of their fear of appearing like philistines, that it’s “a remarkable find, a treasure, certain to keep scholars and playgoers and Bardologists busy for years to come, a ripping yarn, quite possibly from the genius who gave us Macbeth”?

  One day, someone will find something within the play to match what I found without: the wrong something. Maybe not even that, maybe there will be no flash of anachronism, no smoking verb fifty years out of place. Instead, someone trustworthy, far from our family dramas, will feel, as Coleridge felt of Henry VI, Part One, “the impossibility of this speech having been written by Shakespeare,” and everyone will wake up, and no one will even need to prove it, and this book will creep quietly out of print, and the 2011 edition will join the 1904 edition of this curiouser and curiouser family heirloom.

  “He did it to me again,” I whined.

  “To you?” My mother laughed. “Please. This was why I couldn’t have a life with him. Couldn’t put up with it. What sort of life is it, if the person is going to turn out not to be who you thought he was an hour before? You can’t live like that. Life isn’t about trying to make surprise and wonder. Life is hard enough when you’re trying to
cobble together a biding sense of reality from one minute to the next. Life is impossible and unsteady enough. Look what it thinks up! Car crashes and cancer. Pregnancy and heartache. Then on top of that? To be married to someone who might be one person one day and another the next? Who shouts, ‘Surprise! All of life so far was just a wonder I worked up in the basement’?”

  “But you said you’d made a mistake not staying with him. You said Sil was a bore. You said—”

  “Oh, no. Dear, please. Arthur. Really. You seriously think I can give you words to live by? Oh, Lord, you do. Well, I’d best start watching what I say. Is that what you want? Simple thoughts, consistent? How dull we’ll be. Tell me again how you think he did it.”

  If my father forged everything, this whole story is much simpler. Sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, when he is showing Girl with Lily in Minneapolis art galleries to no acclaim and starting to win his first commissions “duplicating” paintings for insurance purposes, he thinks it through: What would be the single most profitable forgery he could produce and how long would it take to pay out? What might be possible if he had infinite patience, if he was willing to wait even fifty years for the payoff? He realizes that the biggest prize—a fountain of copyrights—requires an entirely new Shakespeare play, no chance of a second copy ever appearing. That rules out the plays we know are lost—Cardenio, Love’s Labour’s Won, the ur-Hamlet—because they might still turn up. He writes the text. Somehow. Really? He sits around, stressed for unstressed syllables, in private, in prison? Having written the play, he fakes the 1904 edition, tests it, uses it to trick out expert criticism, weed out mistakes in vocabulary. Then, when he’s certain of the text, he forges the 1597 quarto. Selecting a real printer of the period, knowing which one would have no heirs, no estate, no possible line of textual ownership to this day (which has taken a full U.K. law office several months to prove), he produces a 1597 document with ink and paper that can pass modern forensic tests and academic readers. Tests that didn’t exist when he set to work in prison or before 1986, when he locked it in a safe-deposit box. Writing a play the disappearance of which can be well explained by Shakespearean studies that were developed only in the 1990s.