and swept left and right, forward and back. He tipped his head back and called out for everyone to mark out a playing space and begin to go through the motions and whisper the lines of whatever scene marked their entrance into The American. After they’d done so for a few minutes, over the gentle, strange murmuring punctuated by the creak and clap of the boards, he told them to speak up and to slow down.
From the balcony Sir Edwin shouted. “NOTICE HOW THE NATURE—”
And Charles took it up, almost as if he were echoing Sir Edwin: “Notice how the nature of what you are doing changes along with the speed, your apprehension and judgment of what you are doing.”
A few more minutes passed and he climbed up on the stage, moving around an imaginary painting on an easel, speaking Christopher Newman’s first lines of the play—“That’s just what I wanted to see!”—while the young woman who was the imaginary painting’s painter, Noémie, fell in with him.
“Now half again as slow and notice—”
“NOTICE HOW YOUR THOUGHTS STILL LAG BEHIND YOUR ACTIONS, EVEN WHEN YOU HAVE COME NEARLY TO A STANDSTILL!”
“Move as slowly as you can move and still maintain a sense of one single continuous movement and notice how your thoughts still lag behind your actions, which indeed are reactions themselves to something we cannot see, name, understand.”
“ASK YOURSELF WHY YOU DO NOT FEEL WHOLE WHEN YOU ARE A CHARACTER!” shouted Sir Edwin, who then began again to sob, loudly—and, it had to be said, histrionically.
“Pick a new scene,” said Charles. “Move normally, speak softly.”
Vera—Claire de Cintré—joined him for their first scene together. Charles spoke his lines with her for a while—“It’s as if there had been a conspiracy to baffle me tonight: we have been kept asunder from the moment I arrived”—then said, “Indeed, as Sir Edwin suggests, you know who you are at the expense of being happy. Ask yourself why that is. Know that you will never be happy until there is no division between you and the other characters. Know that you are sinning when you are isolated and alone on the stage. Know that sin means only that you have missed the point and that repentance means only to change your perspective. You in your isolation have created the other characters and now you are afraid of them, of what they will do, of how you will act in consequence. You created them but you are afraid of being dragged into their lives. Do not be afraid, my actors. You are living in a constant state of anxiety and anticipation. Change your sinning way: everything is waiting for you, here on the stage, in the character of the other.”
Again he gave them just a few minutes, two or three, then asked them to slowly and gently cease to speak and move. He asked them to savor the silence and stillness and yet remember where they were and what they were doing. When they were ready, calm and alert, they were to return to the scenes they had just been acting but include the other characters in the scene, two or three others, reform, as it were, and choose a property that was important to the scene, a chair or an easel.
“You will never be convincing on a stage, my friends, if you cannot treat your props properly. You must see and use them—and allow them to use you—in exactly the same way you see and use and are used by the other human beings onstage with you. A chair is every bit as miraculous as a human being is. Look at the chair, feel it. It is floating there in space just as you are. Just as the planet does. Its constituent parts are your constituent parts. You may wish to think of yourself as related to your property interdependently. This in truth is how we live. Distinctions between consciousness and self-consciousness, between organic and inorganic are only superficially true and useful. Consider the story the chair will tell: as we are flesh, it is wood, fashioned by a maker in a shop, who got the wood from a timber merchant, who got the wood, with subtle but overwhelming violence, from a tree in the forest. Of course you tell yourself you know where the tree came from: it grew from a seed. Break open the seed: Is it empty or merely invisible? Without water, and soil, and sunlight, what will come of it? What is water? The wave recognizes itself only when it is washed upon a shore. Instantly it vanishes, is withdrawn from the shore into the singularity of the ocean. What is soil? Light? Where does light come from and where does it go to? Does it come from darkness and go to darkness? Does it need darkness in order to claim its singularity? Does darkness need light to claim its singularity? Does darkness come from light and go to light? ‘Brief as the lightning in the collied night that, in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth, and ere a man hath power to say, behold, the jaws of darkness do devour it up. So quick bright things come to confusion.’ All this coming and going implies time and space, a clock and a grid. Who built this clock? Who drew and laid down the grid? Who declared five senses and no more? What is a senseless man? What is a dreaming man? What is man dreamlessly sleeping? What is prior to logic, to reason? Is character, your own and your character’s character, a matter of outward performance and social polish, as La Rochefoucauld would have it, or of inward essence? Where is the Christ who promised to show us what could not be seen? Why was this gnosis banned from our Bible? Where is the Christ of the Upanishads? Why must we hear only Jeremiah when our cities are destroyed? ‘Behold, that which I have built up, will I break down. That which I have planted will I pluck up.’ The worker is hidden in his shop. The work has drawn a veil over the worker. Only on the stage of simultaneous being and not being can we see the work and the worker together.”
Charles ceases to speak. Slowly the ensemble follows him into silence—and it is only then that they realize the cellist of the continuo group Charles has engaged has slipped in sometime during the weaving and fallen immediately under the spell, providing a single unceasing ground note, moving imperceptibly up to the sharp, then back down to natural, further still to the flat, then up again. No one moves, everyone listens. There are more persons in the theater than he had thought. Children, mostly. Children of the crew, he supposes.
Vera tries to catch Charles’s eye, but he refuses—or is intent on something else. She wants to see how seriously he has taken himself—taken himself as opposed to what he has spoken of with such bafflingly strange eloquence. She wants him to remember that it is a game. Rather: she wants that belief confirmed in herself. He has either over-rehearsed or, how shall she put it . . . lost his balance. He is, she thinks, using one of his pet phrases, “out of joint,” and she wants to know which of these metaphors he prefers. She sees how liable he is to become an icy clown or an ironic lout if he is not understood and applauded. That a spell was woven she cannot deny, but now wants out.
A little boy, no more than five, who has been standing very near them, only half-there, like a sprite, or a cupid, he is so chubby and pretty, like a cupid carved in the corner of a great ceiling now mysteriously between herself and Charles, says—no, sings, chants—very clearly and sweetly in the silence, “When I put a chair in my head, it’s so I can sit in my head. I take my body apart and put the pieces in my head. And then I sit in my head.”
He is the plumber’s son. Again and again and again, he is the plumber’s son.
Cheerful laughter chitters and laps around them.
Charles claps his hands. She sees he is not laughing, but, to her great relief, would like to.
“And what’s yer name, young feller?” Charles asks him.
Suddenly shy, he looks down, then, spinning, runs stage left and disappears in the shadows of the wing, shouting for his father, who is standing and chuckling in the middle aisle of the steeply raked orchestra seats, under the chandelier, where Vera had been sitting in her winding sheet. Laughing loudly, father calls out to son.
Allowing himself to smile, Charles addresses his actors. “I know you don’t all have all of your lines yet, but find a script and, quick as you can, let’s run through the whole play, shouting your lines as fast as you can say them and running around the theater until you run out of breath! That includes the balcony, the wings, the stairways! Run until your heart is pounding! Noémie! Lord Deepmere! Start us off, please!”
Thus was the story told of the wealthy Californian who goes to Europe in search of art, of beauty, who falls in love with the widow of an impoverished aristocrat, and who encounters simultaneously a deep disdain for his lack of family