New Wave Fabulists Read online

  By nine the sun has stopped making the effects that Harriet likes; she’s made four exposures. She’s more weary than she expected to be, getting in and out of the car, dealing with the camera’s three legs, and her own four. The tripod lies on the backseat, her two steel crutches (enameled maroon) on top of it.

  Coming back into town, Harriet’s car pulls up next to mine at a stoplight. She calls over to me:

  “Did you hear the news?”

  “What news?”

  “Somebody killed the pope. I just heard on the radio.”

  “Yes. I heard that. But he’s not dead. He’s just hurt.”

  “Oh.” She glances at the red light and scoots over in the seat to see me a little better. “I’ve been thinking about your question,” she says. “I have.”

  “And?”

  “And I have,” she calls. “I have.”

  The month before, heart-turning June, I asked Harriet to marry me. She hasn’t answered. The light changes, and we turn in different directions.

  Those of us chosen for the Indiana Shakespeare Festival at Avon (it included almost all of those who applied that year, being a summer option unthinkable to most people in that state then or now) received a letter that showed a bust of plump Shakespeare pen in hand—an etching of the monument over his grave in Stratford, I can see now—and instructions on what we were to bring that sounded like any summer camp’s: raincoat and sweater, blanket and sneakers and writing materials for letters home. I watched my mother sew tapes with my name on them into every pair of shorts and socks.

  We came from around the state by car or bus, pulling into town on the appointed day uncertain where anything was or how to get to the theater or the place we were to go, only to find that the town was so small that it was evident where everyone was gathered, on the little green by the riverside, where a Union soldier stood on a small granite plinth, the names of the town’s dead carved on it.

  She’s almost the only one I can now remember seeing when we arrived, though I know she wasn’t the one I looked at most, or took the greatest interest in. No. Harriet had her own way of dressing and looking, and it didn’t fit with my received images of what I wanted to look at. The tough girls from northern Indiana, “the Region,” favored beehive haircuts, mascara like kohl around their eyes, and pale lipstick; the country girls had blonde flips and wore bobby socks over the stockings they’d put on for the trip. Harriet wore loose peasant blouses, and wide skirts in many colors, and flat shoes or sandals without backs; her haystack hair kept her busy pushing it from her face, and she drew strange orangey eyebrows over her own, above the cat’s-eye pink glasses. Her cheeks were flushed; I didn’t know if that was makeup or not. She moved with overprecise grace, the studied manner of a dancer, though I didn’t recognize that either. She was herself. She was a free spirit.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Where’ve you come from?”

  “Williamsport.”

  “Uh … ?”

  “Near—”

  “Oh right. Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  Why would she greet me? I didn’t think of myself as particularly visible to others then, or possessing anything that would attract their attention; I don’t remember my own clothes, but I’m sure they weren’t designed to impress, as I wouldn’t have known how to do that. I suppose shy is the obvious word, though like many shy people I only needed the right signs of acceptance and welcome—however I understood them—to offer myself more completely than the glad-handers.

  By afternoon we were all gathered in the center of town, with our clumsy bags and suitcases—backpacks weren’t common then; I remember Harriet had a couple of cases with poodles appliquéd on them, one of them round, like a pillbox. The festival director was to put in an appearance, and Robin, who would be directing the plays and managing the apprentices, was to welcome us and give instructions, but no one had seen either of them. Parents who’d brought their kids stood with them by their station wagons, the kids eager to slip away. We were about twenty in all, some of us full-grown, some still children. I don’t remember perceiving that but it must be so.

  Then—making an entrance, at which he was skilled—Robin was among us, going from one to another with a look on his face as though he had just discovered astonishing and unsuspected treasure. Oh brave new world, that has such people in it! He was particularly attentive to the parents. Sandy, his wife, was with him, doing as he did but at the same time watching his performance appreciatively. They were the most beautiful people I’d ever stood near. Sandy with the collar of her soft white shirt up, her hands in the pockets of her capris, looked to me like Kim Novak: the same gray hooded eyes, the same softness; like Novak she would wear, sometimes, no bra. Robin was lean and hawklike with piercing eyes and deeply incised cheeks. They were both remarkably small—not small at all, really, but remarkably so for the persons they were, for the size of the persons they projected.

  We apprentices were housed in a nearby summer camp that hadn’t been used for a year, the cabins dusty and the mattresses musty; I can still smell them sometimes. An assistant stage manager and his wife were our counselors or chaperones. There was an old bus that each morning drove the twenty of us the five miles to the Swan—that’s what they called their theater, their barn-becoming-a-theater—and back again at day’s end to the camp, where we were fed huge dinners of children’s food, tuna casseroles and spaghetti and Spam. The kitchen help made leftovers into sandwiches and gave them to us in boxes for lunch.

  All day we worked in the Swan, cleaning and painting and building seating. That’s what we were there for, free labor, but we didn’t mind that, there was nothing we wouldn’t do, and anyone who complained or refused immediately had his place taken by a volunteer. I’d never played sports unless dragooned into them, as at school; had never made the team or been to camp or done any group task at all—none except the pageants and plays I organized my siblings into—and I had a near-mystical experience being included in this gang. All the same I would often find ways to escape them, sneak out of the horseplay, hide. It wasn’t hard. The funny fat little bus that carried us to and fro went through the town center as well, to pick up the actors and others who were staying in tourist homes or with proud citizens, and I would take it into town and sit on the Methodist Church steps, or go into the cool book-odorous little library, or just stand in the street feeling this nameless, wondrous feeling that inhabited me, that was freedom, or something even better. Somehow without my even asking I had been passed through the membrane of common reality into another space, where things were not as they were where I came from; where Shakespeare was important, and everything else less so, and what I knew about mattered, and what I didn’t know about was inconsequential, and it was midsummer.

  I’ve always had difficulty associating with actors, and these actors (most of them wanted to be actors) were just embarking on their careers of self-display; there were sullen James Dean and Brando imitators smoking in silence and reading Rimbaud and Kerouac; there were extravagant hearts-on-their-sleeves personalities who had found out that by defining themselves as actors they could pretend to be only pretending to be the people they actually were, and get away with it; there were the narcissists-in-training, both the secret and the patent kind, jealous of their self-assigned centrality. The dramas they improvised all summer were amazing and repellent to me; I saw more tears, male and female, than anywhere else in the whole of that decade. I’m given to nervous laughter, not the best response.

  Harriet was different; she seemed at once avid for the blowups and collisions the others created and gently mocking of them—with me, whom she chose to take part in her study of them. I didn’t know why.

  Harriet was different. Harriet would seek me out at the campfires, take cigarettes from my pack (that was how I was becoming an adult), and let me light them, and then almost immediately discard them into the fire. Harriet called me dear boy because an aged, absurdly courtly actor in the
company called every male that. Harriet would get up late each morning, sail out past the surly woman handing out the box lunches, skip onto the bus with a smile back at me. Sometimes I caught her looking at me in the rearview mirror of the bus, too. I didn’t know why. I don’t know why. But I looked frankly back at her in that mirror, and not away; and maybe that was enough.

  At the end of a workday soon after we got there, Robin called us together from our jobs and herded us out to the field—it had once been farmyard and was to be the parking lot when the heavy equipment arrived, if it ever did—to the enormous oak that grew all alone there: an oak just like Stratford’s, we’d all been told, and warned to carve no initials in it.

  By the oak, Robin was hunkered down next to someone we’d never seen before, who sat hands on his knees in a chair that had been brought out for him from the dormitory building where the festival’s offices were, or would be. The man wore a seersucker suit and a pale bow tie, the only tie in evidence there, the only jacket too. Beside his chair an old belted leather briefcase sat drooping like a weary dog.

  When all of us had gathered (a few late arrivals wandering from faraway parts of the grounds), Robin stood, dusted his hands on the back of his pants, and looked us over. We apprentices were immediately silent. The actors, some at least, immune to his authority or his portrayal of authority, went on talking until Robin at last hushed them with raised hands. Then he paused before he spoke.

  “I’ve asked you to come out and meet a man who has been very important to the progress of this festival theater,” he said, “someone without whose help there would very likely be no season this year.” He looked down at the man in the chair, who was smiling at once eagerly and apologetically. “It’s a great honor to have him here today, he’s come a very long way to be here, to see the progress we’ve made, and he’s asked for a little time today to talk to you about something very important, something you may not have thought about.”

  Then he held out his hand to the man, and said his name, which I have never been able to remember; nor do I recognize it now among the names of those who were of his party, or shared his beliefs, though surely it is there amid all their privately printed publications and pamphlets and books. We applauded politely, and he held up a hand to us but didn’t rise. He was an academic-looking man, long-necked and pale, with ginger hair so long and fine it floated in the faint breezes that came and went as he spoke.

  “Oh now thank you, Robin,” he said, in the warmest and kindest sort of voice, one of those voices so unassuming and good that you almost have to smile in response to it, even before it says anything of consequence. “I won’t take up very much of your time at all, I promise, I know how little you have in order to be ready, and I don’t want Robin angry at me. But I thought I might bring up something for you to think about in the weeks ahead as you work and study here.”

  I suppose it was his not standing that made us, or me, study him a little more closely. He wore wing-tip brown shoes that seemed as though they had never been walked in, and around the middle of each, like a stirrup, a band of metal went, and up beneath the cuffs of his wrinkled pants. And in the grass behind his chair a pair of canes. I’ve thought of those canes, since then, and those braces. I’ve wished I could ask about them. There are things in your past, preserved in memory almost by chance, that only later on, because of the course your own life takes, come to seem proleptic, or significant, when other things don’t.

  “All of you,” he began, “boys and girls, men and women, are so wonderfully fortunate to be here, in this beautiful place, immersed all day long in the works of the greatest author who ever wrote in English. I envy you very much. I wonder though how many of you have ever given thought to just who the man was who wrote these wise and witty and passionate works. Who was he? Well, we can look at that picture that accompanied the First Folio, the first complete printing of a number of plays ascribed to this fellow, and try to learn something of him, but we can’t learn much, and in fact that picture doesn’t actually seem to be a picture of anyone, does it? There’s something wholly unreal about it, I think, that gets more unreal the longer you look. In the book a little poem is printed opposite the picture that says it’s him to the life, exactly as he lived, but the picture’s so odd that you wonder if the poem is a joke, an ‘in’ joke maybe. And in the end the poem tells us to ‘look not on his picture, but his book.’ Which takes us back where we started.

  “Well, then, we might consult the histories, and look for the contemporary accounts of his life, how he lived, how he struck his friends and admirers, what he said. And of course there is next to nothing. Of the man credited with having written this vast body of deathless writing, we know very, very little. There is not a single letter from him in existence. We know that a man of his name was listed as an actor in the company that produced the plays; we have a few shaky signatures on a few legal documents; we know that the actor retired to Stratford, where he came from, and sued a few people and signed a will and died. That’s about it. In his will there is no mention of plays or manuscripts, indeed no mention of books at all; perhaps he had none. He certainly was unconcerned with his own writings.”

  He pulled a large handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. From where I stood beneath the oak, I could see Harriet sitting on the ground near the speaker, elbows on her knees and her cheeks on her fists like a gargoyle, fascinated or seeming to be.

  “Very well then,” he said. “Suppose we confess that we know just about nothing that we would like to know about the author of these poems and plays, not a thing at all about the mind or opinions of the actor whose name was the same or similar to the author’s—I say ‘similar’ because on none of the documents we have is his name spelled as it’s spelled on the First Folio.

  “We have to turn around, then, I think, and see if within the works themselves we can learn something of the man who wrote them. Most of them, of course, are plays, and not personal opinions or lyric self-expression, but not all; there’s a large body of personal, very personal, writing, the Sonnets, and even in the plays the mind of the man comes through in the allusions he makes, the things he seems to know about and uses for poetic comparison and so on. And what appears when we study the work with this in mind?

  “Well, I’ve made a list,” he said, and grinned somewhat self-deprecatingly. “I’m not the first to have made one, and I think that many of you may have a mental list of your own, a list of what you think the man was like.” He flapped open the briefcase and after a brief search pulled out some typewritten sheets.

  “First of all, he was apparently a man.” He looked up, and we laughed dutifully.

  “He seems to have had a classical education.” He consulted his paper, though it was evident he had no need to. “All his writing is full of allusions to the Greek and Latin classics. He seems to have been very familiar with Italy, with certain other European places, such as Navarre in France. He also read Italian: some of the plays are based on Italian stories that had not been translated when he wrote. What else? Well, the Sonnets picture a man who was at one time poor, in disgrace, in exile. I say exile because Sonnets which complain of his separation from his beloved make it sound so enforced. ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,’ he says, ‘I all alone beweep my outcast state.’”

  He looked up at us. “He says, not once but several times in the Sonnets, that he’s lame,” he said. “Interesting. ‘I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite.’ Could that be a metaphorical lameness? Well, maybe; but he says it more than once. ‘Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt,’ meaning stumble.

  “So.

  “A few more things. His knowledge of the law is so extensive, and his use of legal terms in all sorts of situations so constant, that it’s hard to believe he wasn’t trained for the law. And another thing we can guess at, that some critics are more certain of than others. The Sonnets suggest that at least some time in his life he was what the learned of the time described as
paiderastes, or in our modern language, a sexual invert.”

  He folded up his paper then and put it away with care, as though to give us time to ponder all this, which we did, I did anyway. I was beginning to feel very odd, as though a trick or a trap were being constructed for me, a gin Will would say, and that the man’s self-effacement and reasonableness and sweetness were part of it.

  “So.” He removed his jacket, still without standing, and there were dark sweat-circles under his arms. “What if you were to suppose that you didn’t know the name of the man who wrote these plays. Suppose you knew when they were written, and knew a lot about the people living in England then, and any one of them could have been the author, and not just the one actor fellow with the similar name. Who would you suspect? How would you narrow the search? Where, if you were a detective or a private eye, would you turn your magnifying glass, or your flashlight?

  “Well you probably already know, or many of you do, certainly Robin here knows, that this search has in fact been going on for a very long time, ever since people began to suspect that the man Shakespear, or Shaxper, or Shagsberd, made a very poor match with the writings.

  “If the author was someone else, he kept his identity secret. That’s all we know to start with. He kept his identity secret, and must have had a reason. Well. I can tell you some of the people who have been suspected at one time or another, who various detectives have guessed might fit the particulars we worked out, and other ones, too.

  “There are educated poets, like Christopher Marlowe and Edward Dyer. Now Marlowe was certainly a pederast. Of course Marlowe was murdered before the Shakespeare plays began to appear, but, well, maybe he wasn’t really. There’s the Earl of Oxford, who loved plays and players but maybe wouldn’t have wanted to associate himself with the common theater. Unfortunately he died before several of the greatest plays were written. One candidate isn’t even a man: someone’s claimed that Queen Elizabeth herself was the author.”