The Humbling

by Philip Roth

  “What do you do with the days?” Jerry asked.

  “Walk. Sleep. Stare into space. Try to read. Try to forget myself for at least one minute of each hour. I watch the news. I’m up to date on the news.”

  “Who do you see?”

  “You.”

  “This is no way for someone of your accomplishment to live.”

  “You were kind to come all the way out here, Jerry, but I can’t do the play at the Guthrie. I’m finished with all that.”

  “You’re not. You’re scared of failing. But that’s behind you. You don’t realize how one-sided and monomaniacal your perspective has become.”

  “Did I write the reviews? Did this monomaniac write those reviews? Did I write what they wrote about my Macbeth? I was ludicrous and they said as much. I would just think, ‘I got through that line, thank God I got through that line.’ I would try to think, ‘That wasn’t as bad as last night,’ when in fact it was worse. Everything I did was false, raucous. I heard this horrible tone in my voice and yet nothing could stop me from fucking up. Hideous. Hideous. I never gave a good performance, not one.”

  “So you couldn’t do Macbeth to your satisfaction. Well, you’re not the first. He’s a horrible person for an actor to live with. I defy anyone to play him and not be warped by the effort. He’s a murderer, he’s a killer. Everything is magnified in that play. Frankly, I never understood all that evil. Forget Macbeth. Forget those reviews,” Jerry said. “It’s time to move on. You should come down to New York and begin to work in his studio with Vincent Daniels. You won’t be the first whose confidence he’s restored. Look, you’ve done all that tough stuff, Shakespeare, the classics—there’s no way this can happen to you with your biography. It’s a momentary loss of confidence.”

  “It isn’t a matter of confidence,” replied Axler. “I always had a sneaking suspicion that I have no talent whatsoever.”

  “Well, that’s nonsense. That’s the depression talking. You hear actors saying it a lot when they’re down the way you are. ‘I don’t have any real talent.

  I can memorize the lines. That’s about it.’ I’ve heard it a thousand times.”

  “No, listen to me. When I was fully honest with myself I’d think, ‘Okay, all right, I have a modicum of talent or I can at least imitate a talented person.’ But it was all a fluke, Jerry, a fluke that a talent was given to me, a fluke that it was taken away. This life’s a fluke from start to finish.”

  “Oh, stop this, Simon. You can still hold attention the way a big star actor does on the stage. You are a titan, for God’s sake.”

  “No, it’s a matter of falseness, sheer falseness so pervasive that all I can do is stand on the stage and tell the audience, ‘I am a liar. And I can’t even lie well. I am a fraud.’”

  “And that is more nonsense. Think for a moment of all the bad actors—there are lots of them and they somehow get by. So to tell me that Simon Axler,” Jerry said, “with his talent, can’t get by is absurd. I’ve seen you in the past, times when you were not so happy, times when you were in psychic torment in every other way, but put a script in front of you, allow you to access this thing that you do so wonderfully, allow you to become another person, and always it’s been liberating for you. Well, that’s happened before and it can happen again. The love of what you do well—it can return and it will return. Look, Vincent Daniels is an ace at dealing with problems like yours, a tough, canny, intuitive teacher, highly intelligent, and a scrapper himself.”

  “I know his name,” he told Jerry. “But I’ve never met him. I never had to meet him.”

  “He’s a maverick, he’s a scrapper, and he’ll get you back to contending. He’ll put the fight back in you. He’ll start from scratch if he has to. He’ll get you to give up everything you’ve done before if he must. It’ll be a struggle, but in the end he’ll get you back to where you should be. I’ve been to his studio and watched Vincent work. He says, ‘Do one moment. We’re only dealing with the single moment. Play the moment, play whatever plays for you in that moment, and then go on to the next moment. It doesn’t matter where you’re going. Don’t worry about that. Just take it moment, moment, moment, moment. The job is to be in that moment, with no concern about the rest and no idea where you’re going next. Because if you can make one moment work, you can go anywhere.’ Now it sounds, I know, like the simplest notion, and that’s why it’s hard—it’s so simple that it’s the thing that everybody misses. I believe that Vincent Daniels is the perfect man for you right now. I have complete faith in him for you in your predicament. Here’s his card. I came up here to give you this.”

  Jerry handed him the business card, and so he took it at the same time that he said, “Can’t do it.”

  “What will you do instead? What will you do about all the roles you’re ripe to play? It breaks my heart when I think of all those parts you were made for. If you accepted the role of James Tyrone, then you could work with Vincent and find your way through it with him. This is the work he does with actors every day. I can’t count the number of times at the Tonys or the Oscars that I heard the winning actor say, ‘I want to thank Vincent Daniels.’ He is the best.”

  In response Axler simply shook his head.

  “Look,” Jerry said, “everyone knows the feeling ‘I can’t do it,’ everyone knows the feeling that they will be revealed to be false—it’s every actor’s terror. ‘They’ve found me out. I’ve been found out.’ Let’s face it, there’s a panic that comes with age. I’m that much older than you, and I’ve been dealing with it for years. One, you get slower. In everything. Even in reading you get slower. If I go fast in reading now, too much of it goes away. My speech is slower, my memory is slower. All these things start to happen. In the process, you start to distrust yourself. You’re not as quick as you used to be. And especially if you are an actor. You were a young actor and you memorized scripts one after the other after the other, and you never even thought about it. It was just easy to do. And then all of a sudden it’s not as easy, and things don’t happen so fast anymore. Memorizing becomes a big anxiety for stage actors going into their sixties and seventies. Once you could memorize a script in a day—now you’re lucky to memorize a page in a day. So you start to feel afraid, to feel soft, to feel that you don’t have that raw live power anymore. It scares you. With the result, as you say, that you’re not free anymore. There’s nothing happening—and that’s terrifying.”

  “Jerry, I can’t go on with this conversation. We could talk all day, and to no avail. You’re good to come and see me and bring me lunch and flowers and to try to help me and encourage me and comfort me and make me feel better. It was tremendously thoughtful. I’m pleased to see you looking well. But the momentum of a life is the momentum of a life. I am now incapable of acting. Something fundamental has vanished. Maybe it had to. Things go. Don’t think that my career’s been cut short. Think of how long I lasted. When I started out in college I was just fooling around, you know. Acting was a chance to meet girls. Then I took my first theatrical breath. Suddenly I was alive on the stage and breathing like an actor. I started young. I was twenty-two and came to New York for an audition. And I got the part. I began to take classes. Sense-memory exercises. Practice making things real. Before your performance create a reality for yourself to step into. I remember that when I began taking class we’d have a pretend teacup and pretend to drink from it. How hot is it, how full is it, is there a saucer, is there a spoon, are you going to put sugar in it, how many lumps. And then you sip it, and others were transported by this stuff, but I never found any of it helpful. What’s more, I couldn’t do it. I was no good at the exercises, no good at all. I’d try to do this stuff and it never would work. Everything I did well was coming out of instinct, and doing those exercises and knowing those things were making me look like an actor. I would look ridiculous as I held my pretend teacup and pretended to drink from it. There was always a sly voice inside me saying, ‘There is no teacup.’ Well, that sly voice has now ta
ken over. No matter how I prepare and what I attempt to do, once I am on the stage there is that sly voice all the time—’There is no teacup.’ Jerry, it’s over: I can no longer make a play real for people. I can no longer make a role real for myself.”

  After Jerry had left, Axler went into his study and found his copy of Long Day’s Journey into Night. He tried to read it but the effort was unbearable. He didn’t get beyond page 4—he put Vincent Daniels’s card there as a bookmark. At the Kennedy Center it was as though he’d never acted before and now it was as though he’d never read a play before —as though he’d never read this play before. The sentences unfolded without meaning. He could not keep straight who was speaking the lines. Sitting there amid his books, he tried to remember plays in which there is a character who commits suicide. Hedda in Hedda Gabler, Julie in Miss Julie, Phaedra in Hippolytus, Jocasta in Oedipus the King, almost everyone in Antigone, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Joe Keller in All My Sons, Don Parritt in The Iceman Cometh, Simon Stimson in Our Town, Ophelia in Hamlet, Othello in Othello, Cassius and Brutus in Julius Caesar, Goneril in King Lear, Antony, Cleopatra, Enobarbus, and Charmian in Antony and Cleopatra, the grandfather in Awake and Sing!, Ivanov in Ivanov, Konstantin in The Seagull. And this astonishing list was only of plays in which he had at one time performed. There were more, many more. What was remarkable was the frequency with which suicide enters into drama, as though it were a formula fundamental to the drama, not necessarily supported by the action as dictated by the workings of the genre itself. Deirdre in Deirdre of the Sorrows, Hedvig in The Wild Duck, Rebecca West in Rosmersholm, Christine and Orin in Mourning Becomes Electra, both Romeo and Juliet, Sophocles’ Ajax. Suicide is a subject dramatists have been contemplating with awe since the fifth century b.c., beguiled by the human beings who are capable of generating emotions that can inspire this most extraordinary act. He should set himself the task of rereading these plays. Yes, everything gruesome must be squarely faced. Nobody should be able to say that he did not think it through.

  *

  JERRY HAD BROUGHT a manila envelope containing a handful of mail addressed to him in care of the Oppenheim Agency. There was a time when a dozen letters from fans would come to him that way every couple of weeks. Now these few were all that had arrived at Jerry’s during the past half year. He sat in the living room idly tearing the envelopes open, reading each letter’s first few lines and then balling the page up and throwing it onto the floor. They were all requests for autographed photos—all but one, which took him by surprise and which he read in its entirety.

  “I don’t know if you’ll remember me,” the letter began. “I was a patient at Hammerton. I had dinner with you several times. We were in art therapy together. Maybe you won’t remember me. I have just finished watching a late-night movie on TV and to my amazement you were in it. You were playing a hardened criminal. It was so startling to see you on the screen, especially in such a menacing role. How different from the man I met! I remember telling you my story. I remember how you listened to me meal after meal. I couldn’t stop talking. I was in agony. I thought my life was over. I wanted it to be over. You may not know it but your listening to my story the way you did contributed to my getting through back then. Not that it’s been easy. Not that it is now. Not that it ever will be. The monster I was married to has done ineradicable damage to my family. The disaster was worse than I knew when I was hospitalized. Terrible things had been going on for a long time without my knowing anything about them. Tragic things involving my little girl. I remember asking you if you would kill him for me. I told you I would pay. I thought because you were so big you could do it. Mercifully you didn’t tell me that I was crazy when I said that but sat there listening to my madness as though I were sane. I thank you for that. But a part of me will never be sane again. It can’t be. It couldn’t be. It shouldn’t be. Stupidly I sentenced the wrong person to death.”

  The letter went on, a single handwritten paragraph stretching loosely over three more big sheets of paper, and it was signed “Sybil Van Buren.” He remembered listening to her story—summoning up his concentration and listening like that to someone other than himself was as close as he had come to acting in a long time and may even have helped him to recover. Yes, he remembered her and her story and her asking him to kill her husband, as though he were a gangster in a movie rather than another patient in a psychiatric hospital who, big as he was, was as incapable as she of violently ending his own suffering with a gun. People go around killing people in movies all the time, but the reason they make all those movies is that for 99.9 percent of the audience it’s impossible to do. And if it’s that hard to kill someone else, someone you have every reason to want to destroy, imagine how hard it is to succeed in killing yourself.

  2

  The Transformation

  HE’D KNOWN PEGEEN’S parents as good friends before Pegeen was born and had seen her first in the hospital as a tiny infant nursing at her mother’s breast. They’d met when Axler and the newly married Staplefords—he from Michigan, she from Kansas—appeared together in a Greenwich Village church basement production of Playboy of the Western World. Axler had played the wonderfully wild lead role of Christy Mahon, the would-be parricide, while the female lead, Pegeen Mike Flaherty, the strong-minded barmaid in her father’s pub on the west coast of County Mayo, had been played by Carol Stapleford, then two months pregnant with a first child; Asa Stapleford had played Shawn Keogh, Pegeen’s betrothed. When the play’s run ended, Axler had been at the closing-night party to cast his vote for Christy as the name for a son and Pegeen Mike as the name for a daughter when the Staple-fords’ baby arrived.

  It was not likely—particularly as Pegeen Mike Stapleford had lived as a lesbian since she was twenty-three—that when she was forty years old and Axler was sixty-five they would become lovers who would speak on the phone every morning upon awakening and would eagerly spend their free time together at his house, where, to his delight, she appropriated two rooms for her own, one of the three bedrooms on the second floor for her things and the downstairs study off the living room for her laptop. There were fireplaces in all the downstairs rooms, even one in the kitchen, and when Pegeen was working in the study, she had a fire going all the time. She lived a little over an hour away, journeying along winding hilly roads that carried her across farm country to his fifty acres of open fields and the large old black-shuttered white farmhouse enclosed by ancient maples and big ashes and long, uneven stone walls. There was nobody but the two of them anywhere nearby. During the first few months they rarely got out of bed before noon. They couldn’t leave each other alone.

  Yet before her arrival he’d been sure he was finished: finished with acting, with women, with people, finished forever with happiness. He had been in serious physical distress for over a year, barely able to walk any distance or to stand or sit for very long because of the spinal pain that he’d put up with all his adult life but whose debilitating progress had accelerated with age—and so he was sure he was finished with everything. One of his legs would intermittently go dead so that he couldn’t raise it properly while walking, and he would miss a step or a curb and fall, opening cuts on his hands and even landing on his face, bloodying his lip or his nose. Only a few months earlier his best and only local friend, an eighty-year-old judge who’d retired some years back, had died of cancer; as a result, though Axler had been based two hours from the city, amid the trees and fields, for thirty years —living there when he wasn’t out somewhere in the world performing—he didn’t have anyone with whom to talk or to eat a meal, let alone share a bed. And he was thinking again about killing himself as often as he had been before being hospitalized a year earlier. Every morning when he awoke to his emptiness, he determined he couldn’t go another day shorn of his skills, alone, workless, and in persistent pain. Once again, the focus was down to suicide; at the center of the dispossession there was only that.

  On a frigid gray morning after a week of heavy snowst
orms, Axler left the house for the carport to drive the four miles into town and stock up on groceries. Pathways around the house had been kept clear every day by a farmer who did his snowplowing for him, but he walked carefully nonetheless, wearing snow boots with thick treads and carrying a cane and taking tiny steps to prevent himself from slipping and falling. Under his layers of clothes his midsection was enveloped, for safety’s sake, in a stiff back brace. As he started out of the house and headed for the carport he spotted a small long-tailed whitish animal standing in the snow between the carport and the barn. It looked at first like a very large rat, and then he realized, from the shape and color of the furless tail and from the snout, that it was a possum about ten inches long. Possums are ordinarily nocturnal, but this one, whose coat looked discolored and scruffy, was down on the snow-covered ground in broad daylight. As Axler approached, the possum waddled feebly off in the direction of the barn and then disappeared into a mound of snow up against the barn’s stone foundation. He followed the animal—which was probably sick and nearing its end—and when he got to the mound of snow saw that there was an entry hole cleared at the front. Supporting himself with both hands on his cane, he kneeled down in the snow to peer inside. The possum had retreated too far back into the hole to be seen, but strewn about the front of the cave-like interior was a collection of sticks. He counted them. Six sticks. So that’s how it’s done, Axler thought. I’ve got too much. All you need are six.

  The following morning while he was making his coffee, he saw the possum through the kitchen window. The animal was standing on its hind legs by the barn, eating snow from a drift, pushing gobs of it into its mouth with its front paws. Hurriedly he put on his boots and his coat, picked up his cane, went out the front door, and came around to the cleared path by the side of the house facing the barn. From some twenty feet away, he called across to the possum in full voice, “How would you like to play James Tyrone? At the Guthrie.” The possum just kept eating snow. “You’d be a wonderful James Tyrone!”