by Jean Hegland
After his failed address to the International Shakespeare Society, the damage could not be undone, his chance to nudge his profession in a better direction wasted, the final years of his career lamed, his marriage to Freya marred beyond repair, even their European vacation so soured he winces to recall.
He’d never believed that one lecture could single-handedly change the course of criticism, but he’d hoped it would help. He’d known that by arguing for a revival of humanism, he risked being dismissed as soft-hearted and outdated. But after years of seeing William Shakespeare reduced to a function, his plots dismissed as propaganda, and his poetry dissected by tone-deaf semioticians, he had resolved to hazard all for his chance to set things right.
He’d even decided to share some of his own story, in hopes that by describing how a kid who’d grown up in a community where Reader’s Digest was considered literature had found himself so astounded by Shakespeare’s plays that he’d devoted his life to studying them, he might be able to remind his colleagues about the potential of their profession to affect—and perhaps even transform—people’s lives.
It could have worked, he thinks now—and yet again—his remarks might have had a real impact. If only he had slept the night before, if only he’d had the manuscript of his speech on the lectern in front of him, if only he had been able to focus on his message instead of worrying about his wayward daughter. After all, he’d quipped as he adjusted his microphone and looked out across an audience comprised of renowned scholars and their impressionable apprentices, he was speaking to a critical mass.
“Critical mass,” he’d repeated in hopes of buying a few more seconds in which to gather his splintered thoughts and recall the contents of the speech that was still sitting on the night stand back in his hotel. But instead of the amusement he’d hoped to provoke, the expressions on the faces of his audience appeared to harden ever so slightly.
Ignoring the extra work it already appeared he’d have to win them back, he’d said that, actually, criticism was his subject, the topic on which he wished to speak. It had long been his conviction, he went on, as he focused some corner of his brain on trying to appear relaxed and in control while the rest of his mind surged ahead, straining to recall what he’d planned on saying next, that the primary purpose of criticism was simply to help readers understand—and thus more fully appreciate—a text.
Though it was also true, he’d added, casting a glance toward Freya, who he suddenly realized was sitting beside that hotshot Harvard guy, that understanding some aspect of a text could often help a reader better understand some aspect of the world. He himself had been excited to see how brilliantly the new critical theorists, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and their ilk—their like, he hastily amended—enabled those extraliterary understandings. He had no doubt that the current focus on theory was in many ways making their field more vigorous, more rigorous, and more relevant. But lately he had become aware of some of the limitations he believed those new critical approaches posed, and it was those limitations he wished to address in his remarks.
While his audience sighed and shifted in their seats, he’d gone on to say there were a number of aspects of current thinking that he found worrying. Apologizing because he did not have the exact words in front of him, he reminded them how nearly two centuries earlier William Hazlatt had written that, if we want to see the full force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare, while if we want to see the true failure of human thought, we should study his commentators.
Despite his colleagues’ lack of appreciative chuckles, he’d plunged on, offering as a prime example of Hazlitt’s words an article he’d recently come across that claimed the very process of failing to comprehend the work of certain important theorists was a significant part of what their work had to offer. Articles like that were nothing but jargon-clotted pseudoscience and sleight of hand, he’d announced, gripping the lectern with both fists as if his conviction alone might convince his audience. Articles like that did justice to neither Shakespeare’s readers nor his work. In fact, it was articles like that, John added elegiacally, that were exposing their entire discipline to derision, inviting their own marginalization, driving their most passionate and intelligent students into other fields.
He could offer many more examples of similar absurdities, he’d said, wishing desperately for the manuscript wherein he had listed those absurdities so carefully. He could offer a great number of other reasons for concern, too, though perhaps his concerns were actually linked by a single—and, in his mind, singularly significant—motif, since it was their rejection of humanism that troubled him most deeply.
Humanism, he repeated, groping for the razor-keen phrasing he’d worked for weeks to hone, perhaps the most significant concept to come out of the very Renaissance that had enabled Shakespeare’s blooming. Humanism—he’d tried again—that philosophical system that assumes, as William Shakespeare himself must surely have assumed, that all human beings share an essential nature, that, despite such powerful influences as biology, psychology, history, and culture, we still have an ability to exercise free will. Humanism, he continued, leaning toward his colleagues with the zeal of his conviction even as he stumbled over his words, that holds as its core value the belief that human beings can learn and grow and change, and that art—and literature—can fuel that evolution.
But he was so wracked with worry and lack of sleep, his mind so splintered and distract, his tongue so weary and unwieldy that even if he’d had the text of his speech in hand, he would still have been hard-pressed to deliver a stirring address. And the longer he spoke, trying desperately to fill the hour that had previously seemed so short, the more he found himself groping for words or losing himself inside sentences, so that even to his own ears his remarks sounded less like a rigorous and well-considered challenge to the status quo, and more like the sour-grape complaints of a man nearing his retirement—if not his dotage. When he noticed that Freya was not even making an effort to stifle her yawns, he’d had some intimation of the magnitude of his failure.
And thus he botched his best chance. After that speech, he never had another opportunity so golden. The dent that disaster made in his career was anguish enough, but what pains him even more—what still hurts almost past enduring—is the way he failed his whole profession, the way he let William Shakespeare down.
“John,” a woman says, barging into his despair like Feste or Touchstone or some other artificial fool, “Has your daughter left already?”
“Daughter?” he echoes, scowling at the raw consternation that word stirs in him.
“That’s right,” the woman answers. When he shifts around in his seat to look at her, he sees she is carrying a stack of folded bedclothes, which she plops down on the dresser.
“Your daughter,” she asks as she peels back the covers on the bed, “has she left?”
“Daughter,” John muses, “left.” He senses that the woman’s question links with the failures he has been pondering, and he offers that verb—left—to his fraying mind, waits to see what his mind will give him in return. Snippets of lines float and cluster in his head. O churl, Juliet complains when she wakes in the tomb to find Romeo’s cup of poison empty, drunk all, and left no friendly drop To help me after, while Beatrice confesses to Benedict, I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest, and Lear’s fey fool observes, thou hast par’d thy wit o’ both sides, and left nothing i’ th’ middle.
You were the one who left, he hears some other character saying. Remember? Sixteen years ago, when I was ten, you left. He feels the same hot instant anger that comes when he accidentally bangs his head or stubs his toe.
“Did you guys have a good visit?” the woman asks, setting a wad of used sheets on the empty chair beside his own.
“Guys,” he says, and suddenly the entire visit comes spilling back—Guy Fawkes and coffee and chocolates, an angular, unpurpled daughter. Or at least some changeling claiming to be his daughter, an imputed daughter,
though a much different version than any daughter he’s ever seen before.
“That’s right,” the woman nods. “Did you guys have a nice time?” The badge pinned to her bekittened bosom announces MATTY.
“Nice?” he puzzles, turning to frown at her wide rump as she balloons a fresh sheet across the narrow bed. Of all the synonyms he can recall for nice—coy, careful, petty, foolish, precise, or even pleasant—none of them seem to fit either that daughter or that visit, since instead of the reunion he has long yearned for and imagined, a scene of reconciliation to rival the ending of The Winter’s Tale, it seems their meeting had been a failure, such a disappointment he doubts she could be his true daughter, after all.
Besides, he ruminates as the woman spreads a blanket over the sheets, it was she who left, not he. It was she who left the hotel, she who stayed away all night, she who left him to pass all those hours in panic and confusion. Back home in California, it was she who cursed him and told him to stay away, she who even snubbed his wedding announcement.
His mother left, too.
His mother left one shining morning the spring he turned sixteen, riding away with his father in their black Packard. That was the way those things were done back then, so soon after the Depression and the war. It was a harder simpler time, when a trip to San Francisco was an undertaking, cancer a word people lowered their voices to say, and the death of a parent an unfortunate but not uncommon fact of life.
Of course he’d known his mother was ill, but the illusion his family shared was that she would take another trip to San Francisco and come home cured. “We’ll be back before you know it,” his dad had said, reaching out to clap John’s shoulder with his hammy palm as they made ready to go.
His mother was dressed for traveling that last morning, wearing her good wool suit, her best hat and gloves. She wanted to give John a hug good-bye, but he had grown since they’d last embraced, so their hug was an awkward one, she clinging to his shoulders like a dancing partner, while he accidentally bumped her chest so that she’d gasped and winced.
“You’re a good boy,” she whispered, closing her eyes as if to preserve the moment or to avoid it. “You help your aunt, you hear? I don’t want you causing any trouble.” Then, her face set in a concrete smile, she’d turned away. Moving stiffly, clutching his father’s arm for more than balance, she’d shuffled out to the car and eased herself inside, and when she thought that Johnny wasn’t watching, her smile became a cramp of anguish.
He never saw her again. Or rather, he’d seen some poor approximation of her at the funeral, such a meager remnant of his mother in that satin-lined box that at first he’d thought there’d been a mistake or even that someone was playing an awful joke. When, at his father’s behest, he’d bent over her coffin to say good-bye, he’d been unprepared for the emotions that battered him. Seeing her lying there in her good suit, her waxen face set in an expression she’d never worn in life, he’d been appalled to feel not sorrow nor tenderness but anger at her helplessness, irritation at the stupid way she’d let her hair be combed, devastation to be confronting such an inhuman thing in the guise of his mother, and terror to think he loved her, even so.
“Suppertime,” a woman announces, sweeping into his shadows as pertly as a maid in a restoration comedy. “Are you hungry, John?”
“I don’t have time to eat,” he answers brusquely. “I have work to do. I need to leave. Presently,” he adds for emphasis, and then, recalling what century it is, he amends, “Immediately.”
“It’s pizza night tonight.” Deftly the woman takes his arm and helps him to his feet. “Pepperoni,” she coaxes as she waits for him to find his balance. “Mushrooms, olives, sausage—what do you like on your pizza, John?”
“Nothing,” he replies, shaking off her hand. “I have to go. I’ve been waiting … all day.”
“Eat first, why don’t you?” she suggests. “Then you won’t be hungry.”
In the dining room, he scowls at his fellow diners, cuts a careful sliver from the slice of pizza on his plate. But when he places the tidbit in his mouth, it seems more like some gelatinous cud than anything he can recognize as food. Because he can think of no other acceptable way to empty his mouth, he swallows, reaches for his glass of milk, and takes a tiny sip. The taste of cold milk catches at the back of his throat like sadness. In sooth, I know not why
Those were the first words of William Shakespeare’s that ever he read: In sooth, I know not why I am so sad. It’s yet another narrative he knows by heart, part of the story he had crafted so carefully for his ruined speech, and now he welcomes it gladly, happy to leave that sorry dining scene behind and return to a more familiar time instead—some benign, former now in which the plot and themes and conflicts make more sense—an oven-hot afternoon when John trudges into his eighth grade English classroom to discover an unfamiliar teacher sitting behind old Mr. Brown’s wide desk, a young woman with fragile wrists and pale hair, perched stiffly beneath the dusty flag with its forty-eight stars.
“Mr. Brown is ill,” the substitute announces once the students are all seated at their desks. Her cheeks flushing with heat or perhaps self-consciousness, she asks the class to diagram the sentences she has written on the board, adding that there will be extra credit for anyone who can also diagram the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address correctly.
Diligently, John gets to work, chopping the sentences into phrases and then dividing up the phrases, parceling the words onto their branching lines until he has finished even the final appositive of Abe Lincoln’s famous sentence. Setting down his pen, he gazes out the window, watches a buzzard wobble lazy circles in the infinite sky.
“You, in the third row—you need to quit daydreaming and finish your assignment.” The other students glance up from their papers, eager for distraction, but when John pulls his gaze from the bird to identify the culprit, he finds the substitute’s eyes are fixed on him.
“I have,” he answers.
“You’ve finished? Already?” She holds out her slender hand. “Let me see.”
His classmates return to their own thickets of subjects, predicates, and clauses as John navigates his way between desks to pass his paper to the substitute. Red pen circling, she moves down the page. When the pen reaches the end of the assignment without touching down, she gives a careful nod.
“That’s good,” she announces. “You earned the extra credit, too.”
“What should I do now?” he asks.
“Oh,” she answers with a little gasp. Snatching up a book nearly at random from the row on Mr. Brown’s desk, she presses it into John’s hand. “Read this.”
As he returns to his desk, he feels a fleeting resentment that he should be given more work for having finished all his sentences correctly. But he generally enjoys reading, and the substitute hasn’t said he has to do anything but read. Discarding his discontent, he turns his attention to the book.
It is a small volume sturdily bound with faded red fabric. Lifting the cover releases the heady scent of aged paper, a smell that reminds him of the trunks in his grandmother’s attic and the odd old treasures they contain.
The book contains a play, he sees when he flips past the title page. He pauses to peruse a list of unfamiliar names under the strange heading Dramatis Personae, but it all makes so little sense that, rather than trying to understand, he turns the page to read the first line of dialogue, which is spoken by a character called Ant. In sooth, I know not why I am so sad
And before John can stop to wonder why an ant might speak those words, something is flaring inside him like the fireworks he and his friends set off on the river bank outside of town on midsummer nights. In sooth, I know not why I am so sad He has no idea what sooth is—or maybe where it is—since it seems to be a thing that one can be in, like San Francisco or a bathtub. But he recognizes what it means, to be sad and know not why. He’s felt that more and more of late, sadness saturating him like the morning haze that fills the river bottom in all but
the driest weather, sadness lingering like the acrid scent of sulfur long after all the fireworks have been reduced to burned-out, blackened tubes. Sadness squeezing his chest and flooding his throat and heart, even as it rouses him from the doze of daily life. Sadness, with its pang and sting, inviting him to savor more of his existence than he ever had before, back when he was merely a careless kid.
Forgetting the blackboard with its rows of sentences to be flayed, forgetting his brash, dull, or callous classmates, forgetting even the pretty substitute who is sitting now with her hand cradling her neck and her head tucked to one side, he reads the next few lines:
It wearies me, you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn
It is both comforting and disconcerting to think of sadness as something he might catch or find, like a head cold or a coin. Like Ant, John, too, longs to learn what stuff his sadness is made of, whereof it is born. He keeps reading, the words opening inside him like blossoms, or bombs.
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me
That I have much ado to know myself.
A want-wit—that’s what he is, smart enough to diagram the Gettysburg Address, but sometimes so stunned by sadness that he, too, has much ado to know himself. He wonders exactly what that means—much ado. And he wonders why it is so hard for a person to know himself.
Recently, in a rare attempt at intimacy, he’d confided to his brother how hard it was to know what he should do or even be. He’d said he could see how he might try to please their dad by trying out for football or joining the baseball team, but it didn’t seem like it would be the real John who was doing those things. He’d added that he wondered how he could still be himself if he were to change like that, and he wondered if that other, football-playing John wouldn’t also find himself confused about who he was.