The Place of Shakespeare in a House of Pain
a memoir of childhood and youth
If my Uncle Howard, resplendent in Panama hat and poplin suit, had sworn under his breath over some 'goddamn fool' trifle, or even if he had indulged an explosive and unfettered sneeze, Grandmother might at once exclaim: What lusty trumpet thus doth summon us? She'd look hard at him and my uncle wouldn't know what to reply. Was she mocking him, or applauding him? But Aunt Dee, despite her habitual hangover, could fire back just as fast with: Come not between the dragon and his wrath! Or, drawling the words out lazily, intone: His tongue is now a stringless instrument; and then, with an enigmatic squint at my grandmother (and in perfect iambs), crescendo up to: 'Our ears are cudgellèd, and that's no joke!' At this juncture my mother, whom such exchanges made instantly apprehensive, scrambled for some dampening comment - anything but Shakespeare! - that would avert the impending duel between her sister and he mother; she might begin a long hazy soliloquy about the state of the gardenia bush in the back yard and how it needed tending without delay. And wasn't it 'Dee's gardenia'?
Ours was a semaphoric family. Our words fluttered like pennants over our heads and we were often encoded, sometimes indecipherable. The messages were transmitted thus, by means of oblique verbal gestures rather than plain words, were intended as much to rebuff as to allure. Language itself had turned sharp-edged on us; to negotiate a conversation successfully - a conversation that to an outsider might have sounded innocuous - was like picking our way barefoot through a field of broken glass.
I grew up in the 1950s in Coral Gables, near Miami, in my grandmother's house where, with her heavy furniture, her drapes that obstructed the fierce light of the sun, her antimacassars and bone china, she had created a late Victorian oasis in a subtropical climate. Shut against the sun, the heat, the house luxuriated in a faint but insinuating mildew. Inside that time-warped place, our little gods were worn but venerable. From dust-lidden eyes or though the sun-bleared glass of he china cabinet, they followed us with their gaze, benign but remote.
There was, for instance, the alabaster Cupid whose wings had been misplaced and who bore on his back, in their place, two oblong gouges like the incision of a chisel. Wounded Cupid stooped over the Psyche to bestow a chaste kiss, but the Psyche's lips wee covered with a fine sheen of grime which gave her a rakish and mustachio'd smile. And there were the improbable amulets Great-Uncle Albert had brought home from his restless peregrinations for General Electric: potbellied figures of ivory reminiscent of the Buddha, already yellowing like the nicotine-tinted fingers of my aunt, or llamas carved out of coral, vivuñas of jade, each poised on its own indented pedestal of teak. A massive, one-volume edition of Shakespeare's works, whose foxed pages and double columns of text interrupted only by the spidery antiquated illustrations intrigued me before I could even read them, dominated the oak bookcase in the living room. The sadness of these objects weighed on me. I felt a shy solicitude for them. But of those tutelary presences, Shakespeare loomed largest, perhaps just because he was not represented by any figural embodiment, a bust or an engraving or a sampler calligraphed in fidgety needlepoint.
My grandmother had been reared on Shakespeare, first in London and later in Rugby, Tennessee; to that curious Victorian utopia, founded by Thomas Hughes (of Tom Brown fame), my great-grandfather had transplanted his entire family in 1881. There, in the middle of the woods, on the Cumberland Plateau, Hughes had built a replica of an English village complete with Anglican chapel and belfry and well-stocked library. And there - 'in that howling wilderness', as my grandmother later claimed - she and her several sisters had been raised on Shakespeare, not merely to become literate or cultured or well-read, but principally in order to learn how to live. From Shakespeare they learned thrift as well as eloquence; what they knew of love they gleaned from his pages and what they already knew of hatred they found confirmed and given indelible utterance in his verses. Shakespeare taught them to be circumspect, honourable and dignified; he tutored them in the protocols of mourning as of courtship; he was their master in all the niceties of the melodious speech. Later, out of her (by then almost entirely oral) knowledge of Shakespeare my grandmother had stitched together a patchwork of maxims, some of which stifled while others warmed. To me, confusedly, it seemed at times as though Shakespeare had pre-imagined our travail and had, rather officiously, provided the very wisdom by which we were expected to surmount them. I think there was almost no occasion on which my grandmother, abetted by her elder daughter, my aunt, and my mother, could not furnish some pungent apothegm excised from 'the Bard'. Sometimes these dicta, with their aura of unassailable authority, stuck in my throat; at other times, they managed to illumine our darkness, as if his word had split open the obdurate husk of dim reality in order to direct one slight but piercing beam onto some overlooked but bracing truth.
Our Shakespeare was not confined to that monumental tome of his works; he dwelt in our mouths; he nested in our gesticulating hands; he lay in the cowslip curls of our ears. When I was seven, Grandmother began paying me to memorize Shakespeare. By declaiming soliloquies I barely understood - 'Is this a dagger that I see before me?' I would thunder while brandishing a butter knife - I earned my weekly pocket money, for 'the quality of mercy…' speech (it was one I particularly disliked, because Grandmother, though often notably lacking in mercy, doted on it so) I earned a quarter. A sonnet, on the other hand, brought me only fifteen cents. For any of Polonius's remarks, I discovered, I could reap a bonus and 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be' (one of Grandmother's all-time favourites) netted me half a dollar. I had to sing for my supper; with scrubbed face and combed hair, wearing a fresh shirt, my shoes properly knotted, I stood upright before Grandmother who liked to ensconce herself in the great wingback chair in the living room and when she nodded solemnly I would begin. On special afternoons, when there were visitors, I would be obliged, like Dickens's 'infant phenomenon', to offer a recitation while the ladies sipped their tea and smiled approvingly. Avid as I was then for quarters (for one quarter I could by a ticket to the Saturday kiddy show at the movie theatre), I tended to regard these performances more as opportunities for easy lucre than as character-shaping occasions. I prospered and my store of memorized lyrics and soliloquies grew by leaps and bounds.
If ours was a semaphoric household, it was still with words that we signalled. Not, be it noted, in order to 'communicate'. Communication would have horrified us. To have 'communicated what we really felt' would have resulted in something like spontaneous combustion, in which I could all too readily picture my grandmother, my mother, my brother and myself, along with my aunt and uncle, blown sky-high through the roof. 'Communication' would have been the struck match in the arsenal's powder magazine, whenever we did 'communicate' our 'true feelings', the result was a terrifying brawl, invariably in the 'dead waste and middle of the night', at which no vestige of dignity or pity or affection was left untattered. To have abandoned Shakespeare in favour of outspokenness would have been our ruin.
Once, it is true, my grandmother enlisted the services of a psychiatrist and even induced him to pay a house call, this was for the purpose of interviewing my aunt whose alcoholism and resultant malnourishment had suddenly intensified but who refused to seek medical aid, even from 'old Doc Preston', a drinking buddy of my uncle's. When the unsuspecting psychiatrist tiptoed into her darkened bedroom, my aunt rose, an avenging angel in a dirty dressing gown, whipped a pistol out of the dresser drawer and chased him out of the house. This pleased Aunt Dee immeasurably and she celebrated her rout of medical science with a monumental week-long bender, punctuated by hoots of triumph and snarls of retribution. 'I have scotched that snake', she would chant, or 'I have drunk and seen the spider, goddamn right I have!'
I think that we relished words as much for the darkness in which they were swaddled as for any communicatory light they might have thrown. And Shakespeare, I sensed early, was a virtuoso of the darkness in words. From him I learned that there were leaden words, words blunt-edged and numbing, which could be wielded like clubs; or sly stiletto words, so satisfying to insert between the ribs of a raging relative. Words were more useful for camouflage, for diversionary action, for misleading others, than for any doomed and deluded effort at 'communication'. I suspected - and perhaps it was another effect of that 'first disobedience' I had recently learned about from Milton - that language, or at least our language, had an innate propensity for falsehood; that, left to its own devices, as it were, a word preferred to deceive, or perhaps better, misdirect, rather than enlighten. (I had experienced the perfidy of words more than once: As my grandmother lost her sight, I was more and more often asked to read aloud to her; to my discomfort she had an unappeasable fondness for Wordsworth's poem 'The Solitary Reaper', a poem I was always afraid to read out loud to her because I knew that at the fateful moment I would say 'Raper' instead of 'Reaper' - I wasn't sure what either version meant but I knew one was 'bad' - and, of course, no matter how I schooled myself, that is just what infallibly occurred.) Perhaps I was even then, as a child, in my experience of words an instinctive dualist, a riven devotee of the Zen, a pipsqueak Parsee, for whom Truth and Falsehood, like Light and Dark, were locked in full throated and unceasing combat until the end of time and not always possible to separate.
If as a child I had been discovered in some more than usual act of turpitude, my grandmother had only to intone 'How'in that orotund manner she had perfected, for me to be instantly abashed. For 'How'was not only the expulsion of disgusted breath from her lings, like the air that escaped from the tires of my Schwinn, but a semaphore freighted with the terrible weight of King Lear and his embittered tirade:
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
to have a thankless child…!
If she managed to reach the queer word 'thankless' - which to me smacked of tangible deficiencies: a thankless child was like an 'armless', 'hairless' or 'shoeless' one - I was really in for it. I flinched as if the switch had already lashed my bottom. Of course, she was quite capable of dropping the word 'thankless' with seeming nonchalance into some casual conversation and almost at once I would begin to feel the twinges of guilt.
My Aunt Dee ('Dee' for Dorothy) was thin and brown; you might have mistaken her, in the gloom of the dining room, where she frequently installed herself, for a female version of Mahatma Gandhi. Her skinny legs and bare feet protruded beneath her nightgown (she often wore nothing but a nightgown day and night) and reminded me of pictures I had seen of fakirs in India. Except Aunt Dee's shins and calves and thighs were mottled with running sores, as were her forearms, her shoulders and her throat. At nightfall, as precisely as if by a struck signal, great swollen welts broke out all over her body. 'I've got my hives again,' she would wail. All night, try as she might, she would not be able to resist scratching the hives and her fingernails by morning were often stained with her own blood. Her nightgown was permanently spattered with brownish-red flecks. Often, I am sure, she got drunk to deaden the itch,
Her face was small and delicately heart-shaped, and she had the most exquisite brown eyes. Her mouth was beautiful too but she developed a habit of thrusting her lower lip out when she smoked, and this gesture created the impression that she was imitating an ape (her favourite animal). Her hair was dark brown and wavy and she kept it bobbed, somewhat reminiscent, to me at least, of a 1920s style. (When I later saw pictures of Norma Shearer I realized who my aunt had modeled herself upon.) I and my brother lan were often told, by her as well as by others, that Aunt Dee had been 'a great beauty' when young. As if in attestation of that long-vanished glory, her portrait stood in a gold frame on the mahogany table on the landing of the stairs, and every morning I passed it on my way to breakfast and every night, on my way to bed, I said good night to it.
In the portrait she wore a long fluted evening gown, of some ivory or cream shade. With her long graceful arms bare to the shoulders, she leaned back, propping herself demurely and yet somehow provocatively against a satin drape. Her head was tilted upward as if to convey some inexpressible joie de vivre.The photographer had cunningly stationed his subject so that the tiny crystalline highlights played on the sculpted waves of her hair, on her eyes alive with a mischievous merriment, and on the glamorous, too glamorous, smile of her lovely mouth.
My mother's portrait stood nearby but it displayed a far softer person than my aunt, though my mother was garbed in as magnificent an evening gown. My mother had always been told that 'Dee' was the 'beauty' and she appeared resigned to this even in her formal photograph, this portrait too I greeted morning and at night but I was often afraid to study it closely, since I knew that I had fallen hopelessly in love with that shimmering double of my mother. My mother, a blonde, seemed good whereas my aunt, a brunette, seemed bad - another instance of the primitive dualism that possessed me - but this did not mean that I loved my aunt any the less for her imagined baldness; on the contrary, the aura of serious sin that emanated from her attracted and piqued me far more than my mother's gentler beauty. (This impression was given a considerable boost when I discovered while rummaging in my aunts vanity table that her favourite perfume was My Sin.)
My aunt was no longer a beauty and this was a source for her of both endless sorrow and sarcastic self-deprecation. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night to the pounding of the upright piano where Aunt Dee, blind drunk, was delivering her rendition - 'famous throughout Atlanta, you hear?' - of 'The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi'. Or she would recite nursery rhymes that I suppose had been addressed to her in her resplendent young girlhood:
Little Tucky-Too
Your eyes are china blue
But you're a señorita through and though…
Not quite Shakespeare; though he never was far behind. After singing my aunt would launch into declamation that she had imbibed at the knee of her maternal grandfather, a noted reciter of English verse (and a bit of a windbag). Her favoured verses in these late-night sessions began with
Who steals my purse steals trash…!
to which Aunt Dee would emphatically append the comment: 'You got that right! My goddamned purse is trash, not even one stinking nickel in it…!' while from her darkened bedroom my grandmother would roar back
but he that filches from me my good name
robs me of that which not enriches him
and makes me poor indeed.
'Goddamn my good name, and yours too!' my aunt would bellow, and I knew from the provisional safety of my upstairs bed that we were in for a much longer session of the shouted Shakespeare and belligerent commentary, for Aunt Dee positively basked in her rage. Anger radiated from her the way the peacock's tail shakes out from its hindquarters. Her diction cleared, her memory came back, her repartee was sabre sharp, she stamped and pawed the floor in a fury. Out, out, vile jelly! she would shout or, rather incongruously at this juncture, My kingdom for a horse…! This in turn would lead to a long bitter rambling soliloquy on just why she didn't have a horse and why should she not have a horse? Hadn't all Atlanta turned its head when she passed? Weren't the suitors thicker than ticks on a con-dog after her debut? And those lovely beaux - or bõz,as she dragged it out on her drunken tongue - weren't they the handsomest young men anyone had ever seen…? How should it be that so-and-so - 'Who was she anyway?' - should have had a chestnut gelding to ride while she, prettier by far than Dolores Del Rio, hadn't got 'a pot to piss in, quoth the Bard'!
Listening to this from the darkness of my upstairs bedroom frightened me; she could go on for what seemed like hours. What was frightening was not her anger but the awful feeling of pity that swept over me. Her hurt was so palpable as to be unignorable. Beneath the imprecations, the tirades, the jeremiads she hurled against her mother or her husband or the neighbours (especially, that 'sneaky little son-of-a-bitch next door!'), or against Life and Time and Fate, there was an inconsolable sorrow that touched me instantly whenever she began. It was only later, much later, that I was to learn the actual source of that sorrow.
For my grandmother, Aunt Dee, together with her husband Howard ('the living image of shiftlessness', in Grandma's estimation) were pitiful exemplars of ruinous failure and she held them up before my brother Alan and myself as cautionary models not to imitate. Her penchant for moralizing was ungovernable, and she routinely drew morals and maxims from their wastrel shenanigans. Predictably enough, this had the opposite effect on me; because I loved them, I came to see failure as preferable to success and to believe that only through failure could I demonstrate my solidarity with them.
Uncle Howard was the prime example of a man who to my grandmother was 'no-account'. He had been born short of stature. Since Grandmother had a pronounced dislike for short people - 'little short dogs', she called them and routinely barred undersized children from playing with me - Howard already had one strike against him. Uncle Howard had never held a paying job in his life. This didn't prevent him from being continually 'busy'. He arose each morning at dawn and undertook a careful toilette. He bathed and then he shaved, using freshly stropped razor and gobs of shaving cream which he whipped up expertly in a little china dish. He took time to dress, choosing a crisply ironed shirt, well creased trousers, an understated tie in impeccable taste and a freshly dry-cleaned jacket, often of cord or poplin, the front pocket of which he sprigged with a jaunty but elegant pochette. He had his hair cut every week and his shoes shined daily. Thus attired, he would head for the kitchen. There he brewed a pot of coffee and made a piece of toast, always being sure to percolate enough for my grandmother. 'I made enough for Miz Haire,' he would invariably say in the deferential voice of a trusted retainer. He read the morning newspaper while he sipped black coffee and smoked his first cigar of the day. After this he began pacing from the kitchen to the front door, all the while jingling the change in his pockets in a restless anxious rhythm, - a sound I cannot hear now without being reminded of him.
By 7 a.m., when we were getting ready for school, Uncle Howard's day had already passed its apogee. Occasionally one of his pals - they all had names like Wiley and Little Joe - telephoned and Uncle Howard tore out of the house with a vast relief for a 'business meeting'. He claimed to be engaged in numerous sure-fire ventures that would one day astound us all; one project, for example, involved a malodorous spring deep in the Everglades which was reputed to have powerful medicinal properties. But usually, seven days a week, he observed this strict early morning ritual only to spend morning and afternoon pacing and rattling his change.
My grandmother liked Howard even though she considered him a 'ne'er-do-well' and a monument to a sloth. 'Look at that man,' she said pointing him out to me with an expository gesture. 'He is the picture of idleness. He never lifts a finger to any useful occupation. He toils not, neither does he spin.' She would quote from the King James Bible, but often (as I realized much later) misapplied the Gospel sentence in accordance with her own idiosyncratic interpretations.
She liked her son-in-law, even though she held him responsible for turning her favourite daughter into an alcoholic; liked him because he came from 'one of the best families in Atlanta'. She hinted that she had in fact personally selected him for Dee. As idle in his youth as he was in middle and old age, Howard had been considered a good catch principally because of the family connections. It never failed to impress Grandmother when Howard received his weekly cheque from Atlanta, from the family that in effect paid him to stay away. The very idea that anyone would pay a person for not working filled her with wonderment, for she had always been hard-working and frugal to a fault. I think that to her English mind this smacked of remittance men and aristocratic manners, such as she had read about in Thackeray, and because she was an awful snob, she could not help but be impressed by such grand gestures of gratuitous largesse.
Uncle Howard was a man of few words. I cannot ever remember him quoting Shakespeare, though he was known to sweat and toil under the infliction of opprobrious verses directed at himself.The expense of spirit in a waste of shame, which Grandmother seemed to think was about sloth, always made him twitch with guilt. Or, when he got his cheque, she might speak with an almost indiscernible irony of Uncle Howard's 'golden uncontrolled enfranchisement', and he would not know if she were mocking or complimenting him.
Uncle Howard was a sporadic alcoholic. Sober for months, he would go without warning into a violent binge. I recall one such rampage when I tried uselessly to calm him down. We were standing by the living-room windows and for a moment I turned my head away. When I looked back he had disappeared. It turned out that he had to toppled backwards out of the living-room window and landed on his back on the lawn where he lay in a daze, still cursing and gesticulating, until we hoisted him back up again, with Aunt Dee drunkenly chanting,'What light through yonder window breaks? Damn if it ain't Howard breaking through, haw haw!'
Where was Shakespeare in those moments? What actual power did magical language possess? If Grandmother muttered direly during one of these binges, 'They are both "red-hot with drinking",' and Aunt Dee fired back in sarcastic self-abasement with, 'And I, thy Caliban, for aye thy foot-licker!', what did that avail us? To hear those words, even a single line, elated me; and yet, for all their manifest power, the words had none to protect us. I confided these talismans to the snug fist of my memory and muttered them over to myself. I might have chanted to myself, 'this is as strange a maze as e'er men trod', or 'O, tremble: for you hear the lion roar'. But more than an apotropaic object, a talisman is a token of hope. So that even now, thanks to my grandmother, I need only to read a page of Shakespeare (or Milton or Wordsworth, slightly lesser favourites), or dredge up a memorized citation, to feel improbably reassured.
Still, my grandmother's use of Shakespeare often irked me, though I paid lip-service to the honour accorded him. Her quotes had a way of coming between me and my own musings and I resented this.If we were driving home from Miami Beach and there was a particularly splendid full moon in sight, Grandmother would weigh in with:
Sit Jessica. Look how the floor oh heaven
is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold…
It irked me to hear this because it pricked my interest and distracted me from whatever solipsistic reverie I was in the middle of. Who on earth was Jessica? A dumb name, like 'Juliet', my grandmother's given name; the sort of name that foreigners, and especially the English, gave their kids. Still, that unusual word 'patens' caught my ear. I liked it though I had no idea what it meant. I thought of it then as denoting ingots or bars of gold; the light of the moon did fall through the clouds in long bars and lambent slabs. The description was right, I couldn't deny, but it had the effect of sliding words between me and the world outside. Undisciplined as any child that age, I did not want to see my mercurial sentiments marshaled into language. But beyond that, I disliked and mistrusted the way grandmother reduced everything she saw to some sort of poetic form; disliked and mistrusted it, even while I myself possessed and nourished the same instincts as she.
If there was one thing my grandmother could not reduce to form, poetic or otherwise, it was her elder daughter, the great sorrow of her long life. When my aunt was absent at the dinner table I began to have premonitions of disaster. The absence almost always meant she was asleep and that several hours later, refreshed, she would wake up and begin again one of her nocturnal prowls, just as we were going to sleep. I had always been afraid of the dark. Try as I might I could not walk past the portraits of my aunt and mother on the staircase into the dark upper reaches of the stairs without a terrific pounding of my heart and a prickling fear that almost paralysed me. Step by step I ascended into that murk. Once there, my senses, sharpened by my panic, grew acute. In my nerves I understood the lines, Good things of day begin and drowse, Whiles night's black agents to their preys do rouse. The house was full of uncommon noises that by day could not be heard. Under the red tile roof there were rats and I could hear them scuttling back and forth all night long; sometimes, they climbed out on the telephone lines and, tightrope walkers, inched along to and from the roof while I peered at their dark teetering silhouettes. Worse still were the cockroaches. Big tropical varieties, they came awake in the dark and flew about the room. Terrified I hunched in bed and listened as they batted back and forth from one wall to the other. Even worse, however, was their silence. Silence meant that they had landed, but where? I imagined them crawling up the covers towards my face, and sometimes they did.
But the dark held worse terrors than rats or roaches. Often I fell asleep only to be woken up by the blaze of the ceiling light and my aunt's drunken caresses. Fear and pity woke with me. I was terrified of her kisses, her slobbered endearments - 'You're my sugar, my only sweetheart …' - and I was scared as well of the pity that I could not help suffering for her. When she left she would sob something maudlin and ridiculous ('Goodnight, sweet prince, may flights of angels something something something - whatever it is those goddamn angels do…!)
Sometimes Aunt Dee went on too long or too loudly and then my grandmother and mother would wake up and join the fray. These were the worst encounters, worst because the family system of semaphores broke down or was abandoned, words in all their nakedness burst forth. No more subterfuge, no more obliquity, no more veiled allusions and hidden hints, but in their place a clamour of fiercely contending emotions, in which it was no longer possible to say what was love and what was hate, what was despair and what triumph, what was grief and what a hideous jubilation. Grandmother denounced her eldest daughter and disinherited her; she was worse than the Prodigal Son who at least changed his ways in the end. She was Goneril, she was Regan, she was Iago, she was Caliban. For Aunt Dee, however, her mother was no mother but a kind of Lady Macbeth, a hardhearted torturer and skinflint, a woman without understating, a destroyer of lives. At the sidelines my mother fretted and wrung her hands or tried with appalling lack of timing to make little jokes in order to turn fury into laughter.
From such scenes I learned the paradox that it was night that laid bare what day and merciful hypocrisy covered over. The awareness of this would not leave me on the mornings following such outbursts. At daybreak Grandmother liked to recite the lines of Romeo:
and jocund day
stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintops.
Baffled by the nighttime uproar and even more by the reticence that now surrounded it, I felt anything but jocund. By reciting this line Grandmother wanted to draw the curtain over the previous night. I understood that if night brought despair and bafflement, day prompted hope, and the fact that hope is routinely disappointed did not serve to render it invalid; as fragile as daylight itself, hope roused itself irresistibly with the beginning day. It roused my uncle and impelled him to his elaborate toilette, even though Grandmother might look at him and sarcastically quote Milton's 'They also serve who only stand and wait'. It moved my aunt to promise to amend her ways, to give up drink forever, to start down a fresh path. It made my mother think that maybe life in that painful place might after all be borne. And it moved Grandmother to unspool further maxims, more pertinent quotations, to ransack Red Letter Poems anew for edifying snippets of verse. But to me, and perhaps to my brother as well, hope was as baffling as it was irresistible.
But the night could bring other things to light, things I had hardly suspected. So it was that one evening Grandmother took me with her to see a performance of Hamlet at the Ring Theater of the University of Miami. This evening, perhaps the most magical of my childhood, has stayed alive in my memory for fifty years. For the first time I witnessed with my own eyes and heard with my own ears the full and august witchery of language.
As its name implies, the Ring Theater was a theatre in the round. We sat in the first row, slightly off to one side. Inches from my toes the scuffed wooden platform off the stage gleamed with fresh paint. But nothing prepared me for the revelation that was to come. To hear strangers, unknown men and women, speaking those lines which even to me had seemed to constitute almost a private, secret family language dumbfounded me. And there was more. The magical words danced or hung in the air, surrounded by little clouds of spittle that caught the lights, and poured thus into the porches of my ears, those words made my skin crawl and the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. I could not take my eyes off the actors. Everything about them fascinated, their gestures at once so courtly and yet so satisfying, their gait and posture, with knuckles perched defiantly on hips or with tosses of the head, the way they moved so that the verb strode, so beloved of my grandmother, became immediately comprehensible to me, their costumes all of velvet and satin, with ballooning sleeves and exaggerated buckles, with boots and feathered hats and gauntlets of reddish leather, their leotards which let their muscles show through as they strode, the loud but melodious voices unexpectedly modulated to convey every shading of the words. What on the page had seemed one way to me now showed itself differently; what I had taken as straightforward revealed itself as sardonic or comical or sly. I thus began to have an inkling that (contrary to my grandmother's settled view) Polonius was not in fact the hero of the play and when Hamlet pierced him through the arras - another word of fascinating opacity to me then - and Grandma perceptibly flinched, as though she had herself been run though, I saw clearly that this was not the denouement of the play, but merely a passing incident, and I felt disappointed.
The asides, especially those of Hamlet himself, intrigued me. When he delivered his soliloquies the actor came to the edge of the ring and stood directly before us, inches away. He wore mustard-coloured tights and a black doublet with slashed sleeved. It astonished me to see how profusely he sweated; his curly blond hair was damply matted and sweat streamed down his cheeks as he spoke. Coming as I did from a house dominated by women I had a frank fascination with men, a curiosity about them, the way they spoke and carried themselves; even their musculature as revealed by their costumes struck me as strange and wonderful. It exhilarated too to discover that Hamlet himself was seething with secret thoughts to which he gave the noblest utterance. I wanted more than anything that evening to be Hamlet, to dress that way, to stride and speak as he did, to have command of both inner and outer speech. I saw that the words hidden in his head could be made audible; it was like hearing somebody else think, a telepathic eavesdropping. Even then, I think, I realized that Hamlet was not lying but that there was a profound chasm between our innermost words and those we articulate for others.
Beyond the language of the play, the huge clashes of personalities felt familiar to me. My grandmother and my aunt, locked together in their titanic midnight rages, struck me as quintessentially Shakespearean. Especially so because the poet confirmed what I had sensed, without ever admitting it to myself: at the close of the play, everyone dies; for certain conflicts there are no happy endings. Like all children I was intuitively persuaded by the tragic. I had too little experience of life to be able to imagine any other outcome but one that was irreconcilable.
After the performance, I applauded until my palms hurt. Then Grandmother took me backstage and I met the real Hamlet. He was sprawled in a chair in front of a dressing table with a mirror framed with little light bulbs. There was an odour of powder and dust and smoke. Sweat-drenched and worn out as he was, my Hamlet appeared to me as a wizard on a coffee break - fabulous but endearingly disengaged. His name was Keith. That name, so exotic to me then, came to embody all the manly virtues that I imagined him possessed of; ever after, the Keiths I met would seem incarnations of nobility and a kind of tacit splendor. Keith even signed my playbill with a dramatic flourish of his hand, all the while conversing with me about the play I had just seen and questioning me as to what I had understood. I answered with confusion. I was dazzled by his presence. To me he was still Hamlet underneath his everyday Keith-mask.
A boy without a father is supremely vulnerable. Small as he may still be, he has inexhaustible resources of love and loyalty and devotion. And he aches to bestow these on some man who shows him what he might, if he is lucky, become. The heart of such a boy hangs on the smallest of tokens and is to be had for the slightest expression of regard; is to be had, I mean, passionately, irrevocably and for life. And for what? For a glance of interest, a question, an autograph on a program. I was just such a child and in the presence of certain men I could feel my whole being brim towards them as though I were holding out to them a cup so full that the least jostle would make it spill. For me a fascination, such as I might feel for some previously unknown but dazzling beetle or sea-creature, took hold of me and with the least encouragement would turn into desperate love. That is how I looked at Keith the actor in his dressing room. His physical presence, his masculine vitality, had given the words that came out of his mouth on stage such immediacy that I regarded him as awesomely emblazoned, and in memory her remains so.
My inspiration did not abate. On the very next day I began to write a five-act verse drama loosely modeled on Hamlet. I can still remember how pleasing the lines looked, parceled out on the page according to character, and so different from the compositions I was forced to do in school. But I can't remember the title of the play (Eric, Prince of Florida?) or a single scrap of my clumsy black verse though I had memorized it all. I know that I made much of such lines as 'O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!' and that there were many daring uses of 'whoreson dog' and 'arrant knave!' That evening, in the dim and overstuffed living room, with the blinds drawn, I acted out my drama, taking all the parts and concluding, of course, with a bloody finale in which I expired from a treacherous sword-thrust, all to the started clapping of my grandmother, my mother, my aunt and my brother. This was the first time I was to experience the unparalleled exhilaration attendant upon the deployment of words and their perceptible effect on others, and it shaped my entire later life.
Still, the claustrophobia of Hamlet bore down on me, the sense of a family as a cramping cage from which no escape is possible either for Hamlet or myself; but this desperate confinement was also strangely reassuring. I think I have never escaped it and it continues to define my possibilities, and that only through the incantatory manipulation of words is, not escape but the illusion, the promise, of escape, possible. You could say in a way that Shakespeare had become our jailor though this has a double sense: he confined us within aching limits but he alone held the key to the outside.
For my grandmother, my aunt and my uncle, the only way out was through death. In the fall of 1958, Grandmother, nearing ninety, slipped on the terrazzo floor of the front porch, and broke her hip. I did not know that this was a virtual death sentence in those days. In the hospital she contracted pleurisy and six weeks later she was gone. She died with her 'eagle-wind pride of sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts' intact and valorous to the end. A few days later, Aunt Dee followed, dying also from the effects of a fall in the house; her malnourished bones were so brittle he all but shattered when she fell. Uncle Howard did not live to ninety but became witless and enfeebled; when my brother went to visit him, he didn't recognize Alan even though he had been the closest thing to a father my brother ever had. There should have been some Shakespearean flourishes for them all, there should have been doleful but majestic epitaphs, there should have been funeral music of august and inconsolable chords. Only our mother lived on, and lived on happily until in her early eighties she died of a hole in her heart, a congenital impairment she had never known she had. What Shakespeare would have made of that!
Sometime before she died, our mother told us the tragedy of Aunt Dee's life. She had eloped to marry an Atlanta man she 'worshipped', but of whom her mother disapproved. When Grandmother found out and tracked them down, she had Dee forcibly brought home and the marriage annulled. Though named Juliet, Grandmother displayed no sympathy for clandestine romance. Was Aunt Dee's alcoholism, which ended up by killing her, a lifelong drinking of the potion another Juliet procured? Now it seems so to me. Now when I remember how Aunt Dee assailed Grandmother for her green-eyed 'envy', for her jealousy, of all things, I understand that to her, her mother had intervened not because she disapproved but because she wanted to deprive her daughter of a possible happiness she herself had never known. Now when I think back on those midnight tirades, they take on the dimensions of an agony, monuments to baffled hatred and love, to anger and shame and mortal injury, indissolubly joined. Like the kings and queens, the tortured bastards and the buffoons, of Shakespeare's plays these flesh-and-blood kin of mine were at once transparent in their passions but opaque in their self-disclosures, withholding inside themselves, it now seems to me, an infinitude of shadows.
The small gods who watched over our sufferings and our secrets have been routed and dispersed. Now perhaps they oversee other struggled, other lives. And the house itself, sold and renovated, admits light from every angle. Gone are the Venetian blinds, the drapes, the stolid furniture, all that sheltered the house from the sun. (Fear no more the heat of the sun…' I hear Grandmother reciting.) The walls of the rooms have been repainted white and are too bright to the eye. Are there still some tiny echoes of our lives captured between these walls, some delicate reverberation of a word in a wainscoting or a windowsill, fragile as the spider webs that collect there hung with dusty wings? A word perhaps onto which in some terrible moment we poured all our fear and love and hate; not even a word of our own, the words of another? Whatever remains now, it is clear, remains only as an indistinct gesture half deciphered, a dim pulse in the memory.
Sometimes, in recent years, when watching a Shakespeare play, I have caught a glimpse of my mother or my aunt, my grandmother or my uncle, in the personages before me on the stage, especially in amateur productions where a sudden clumsiness or a stumble in diction betrays the breathing person behind the actor's mask. I have felt then as if the play - whether Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet or Measure for Measure (a particular favourite because of its very ambiguity about language and life) - was in some secret way about conflicts I knew intimately from the time I was old enough to remember. This doesn't inspire any complacency in me, however, since the characters continue to elude me, for all their apparent kinship. At those times, the stage itself echoes with the voices I have not heard for years but which I recognize at once. Despite the high-flown diction and studied accents of the actors, the voices come through to me with all the intonation of home.