Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love And Theater Part 6

I had believed in books. And I believed in fairies. I'd hoped that, one day, he would emerge off the ground, like Jean Marais, in cap and cape, leaving the beast behind. Trespa.s.sers will be prosecuted. But now, there is no one left to do the prosecuting. The imagination, be it the Hundred Acre Wood or Wonderland or the Beast's castle, never, in the end, truly prosecutes its trespa.s.sers. Everyone gets a second chance. And so have we. I have not been admitted to his secret places, but I think I'd rather find us welcomed there than in the countless cla.s.srooms of our back-to-school nights, looking out of windows onto playgrounds, or across gla.s.s part.i.tions of probation. Du verre, ce n'est pas du verre.

After sixteen months away, our son is back with us now. Like Shakespeare's Puritan successors, we have shuttered up the playhouse of his pa.s.sion. My wife and I moved out of the old house, boxed his lab away, and put his childhood books back on the shelves. Our tempest cooled, he sleeps not as a monster but a man. My wife cooks simple meals, and we sit down together, dinners shorn of drama. And Prospero, entering in act 4, turns to the son he never had, and asks forgiveness: If I have too austerely punished you, Your compensation makes amends, for I Have given you here a third of mine own life.

EPILOGUE.

The Soldier's Tale In the spring of 2011, I was approached with an idea. A cellist in the Music Department thought that it would be great fun to put on Igor Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale and have me play a part. It would, he promised, fill the hall. After all, he said, how many times does someone get to see a dean onstage?

In preparation, I spent weeks listening to the piece on YouTube. The Soldier's Tale recounts the story of an infantryman who makes a deal with the devil, trading his treasured violin for a book that, it turns out, lists future values in the stock market. In the course of the performance, he dies and returns to his hometown, only to discover that no one can see him. Eventually, he tricks the devil into playing him at cards, wins back his violin, and beats the devil into dancing. The props call for a fiddle and a book of spells, but there are no directions about stage sets or costumes. There is no singing; the actors read their lines in set pieces, interlarded with musical vignettes played by a chamber orchestra.

Originally, the cellist had thought of casting me as the devil, but he changed his mind when a retired faculty member-a performance artist, now nearly eighty, who had shared in some of the original Happenings of the 1960s and had lost none of her girlish narcissism-all but insisted on performing. The chance to cast her as the devil was too tempting for him, and so I was rea.s.signed the soldier's part.

We spent days trying to rehea.r.s.e. The artist could barely come in on cue and spent most of our rehearsal time trying out dance moves that her body now could only hint at. The narrator was played by a British art historian, chosen for his plummy accent and his height, though he found it too difficult to speak in rhythm with the music and, eventually, stopped coming to rehearsals all together. But I was there for all of them: on time, on point, on book.

The day before the scheduled performance, I went out on my own to buy some props and costumes for the show. I drove into Oceanside to find the largest Army Navy Surplus store in Southern California. Nestled between the marine base and the water, Oceanside was as busy with military as it had been thirty years before, when I accompanied my father-in-law to get some hardware for a home repair project. Just like that day, I walked the streets in a b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt and loafers, threading through the crowds of overly tall twenty-year-old boys and their even younger wives, the only man with a beard in a sea of shaved heads. I found the Army Navy store and walked along its aisles, pulling down a camouflage s.h.i.+rt and a matching cap, grabbing a bullet belt, and picking up out of a bin marked "Five Bucks Your Pick" a discarded gas mask. I went up to the counter, spreading my haul before the cas.h.i.+er like Viking booty, when a young man threw the front door open so hard that it banged against the wall. He must have been six-six, blocking the California sunlight with his shoulders, booming.

"I just got back from a year in Afghanistan. Some son of a b.i.t.c.h stole my bedroll. I need another one."

And as if I had vanished from the counter, the cas.h.i.+er left me, strode down one of the aisles and picked up a new bedroll for the returning soldier. Ringing it up without even noticing me, she called the soldier "hon" and told him she'd knock off half the price, just for him. He stood there, all bald head and bicep, and looked down at my camo s.h.i.+rt and cap and belt and gas mask and said, more in confusion than in sneer, "You going to war, buddy?"

No, I said. I'm in a play.

The next night, we went on. The hall, in fact, was full, and even though we had had only one complete rehearsal, everyone felt confident that it would be a great success. I stood at the back of the theater in the shadows, wearing my camouflage cap and s.h.i.+rt and carrying a backpack with the soldier's fiddle in it. I hung the gas mask around my neck and waited for the music. It started, and the British art historian-who had shown up five minutes before the performance, in a tuxedo-read his lines impeccably, and I trudged through the audience as heads turned and a few people clapped. I walked up on the stage and opened my mouth to speak, and with the first word out there was a loud tw.a.n.g. We all turned to find that a string had broken on the ba.s.s fiddle. The conductor stopped the performance right there, and the ba.s.sist went offstage to change the string. We would begin again.

I stood there, my mouth still half open, not sure if I should remain in character, wearing my camo cap and thinking, no one will ever take me seriously after this.

After what seemed two phases of the moon, the ba.s.sist returned and we began again.

I read my lines, the artist came on, mincing in leotards with a b.u.t.terfly net, turning an allegory of World War I into a hippie happening. Nothing went wrong after that point; we hit our cues. The lines we read, in the version of Michael Flanders, sounded more like Dr. Seuss than Stravinsky, but as we came to the end and the musicians played the closing chorale, I read to the audience's silence: No one can have it all, That is forbidden.

You must learn to choose between.

One happy thing is every happy thing: Two, as if they had never been.

We each successively walked offstage, the narrator, the artist, and me, and as the last notes ended the audience stood up, applauding loudly our audacity, and we came back onstage and took our bows, and then, backstage, I greeted everyone-students and colleagues, old couples who had no other place to go, people half-expecting me to be in makeup, and a woman who broke through the crowd carrying a copy of a book I had written, saying she had only that day heard that I would be in the performance and, please, would I autograph it. She gave me the book, and I told her how touched I was that she had come. I took off the camouflage cap and took up her pen, and resting the book against her back, I signed my name.

I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear, But a silver nutmeg, and a golden pear.

I kept two items from Dad's closet: the nut-brown leather jacket and a silver tie. Two weeks after he died, I put them on, and my wife and I went into San Francisco to the Castro Theater. Mildred Pierce was showing, and it was one of those nights when moviegoers at the Castro were expected to dress up in period costume. The line tailed down the block-women with hair in snoods, lipstick as red as Christmas, and the men in soft fedoras, wide lapels, and two-tone shoes. We stood in line, the late-November chill frosting our breaths, and someone looked at me, looked right through to the jacket and the tie, knew them as he had known his own palm, opened his lips and closed them, silently, only the white air coming from his mouth.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

This book began in autobiographical essays originally published in the Southwest Review and the Yale Review. I am indebted to Willard Spiegelman, editor of the Southwest Review, who supported my first efforts, graciously offering advice and encouragement. Sections from chapter 4 appeared as "My Mother, the Ingenue" in Southwest Review 91 (2006): 34958. A much earlier version of chapter 9 appeared in Southwest Review 93 (2008): 53142. I am grateful to J. D. McClatchy and the staff of the Yale Review for their commitment to my earliest essays on children's literature and for their expert editing of my writing. A few sentences in chapter 10 are adapted from "Children's Literature and the Art of Forgetting," Yale Review 92 (July 2004): 3349. An earlier version of the prologue appeared in Yale Review 98 (October 2010): 3948.

In addition to revising these earlier materials, I have adapted a few sentences in chapter 6 from my Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), and a few sentences in chapter 9 from my Children's Literature: A Reader's History, from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). The quotation from the novel in chapter 10 comes from Anna North, America Pacifica (New York: Reagan Arthur Books, 2011). All quotations from The Tempest are from the edition of Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

As this book evolved, I took guidance from many friends and colleagues. Jennifer Crewe and John Kulka brought their editorial experience to early drafts. Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum taught me about narrative pacing. Anna North helped me find the dramatic arc to my story. Joseph Dane knew what to keep and what to cut out. Kathryn Temple shared with me her own experience of writing personal, creative nonfiction. Denise Gigante has been an ardent supporter. Deanne Williams thoughtfully read many drafts and has worked rewardingly with me on reading, teaching, and writing about Shakespeare.

This book would not have seen its publication without the inspiring support of Randy Petilos of the University of Chicago Press. The editor for my Children's Literature, he welcomed the idea of this book from the start, and he has been a true partner in this project. Alan Thomas of the Press expertly shepherded my ma.n.u.script through the review process, and I am grateful to him and to the two anonymous referees who approached this unusual submission with attentiveness, care, and critical ac.u.men that helped immeasurably in my revisions.

In his book The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell quotes Wright Morris as saying, "Anything processed by memory is fiction." I have not willfully manipulated fact here. But this is how I remember things.

end.