Voices from the Past Part 130

My last will...my last walk...my last play. I never thought of a last play. Henry VIII was to have another and yet another...creeping on but creeping to be sure...other sonnets...other songs...to sleep, to die, to sleep...

O s.h.i.+t on death.

Home

February 10, '16

I used to wake with antic.i.p.ation. I wake these mornings and know that I may not wake in another twenty days. When I lie down to sleep I think I may fall asleep and from that sleep never wake. I consider the worried faces about me and realize they will not have to endure me for long.

Jonson visits me and I think this is his last visit.

Cheat, your door, as it swings open, opens onto a cave; no shepherd's note signals to watery star...cuckold...b.a.s.t.a.r.d...my tale will end and my small cubicle will be filled. Have I put down man's spirit with enough spirit? Beauteous youth, have I recorded you? I never wanted to write love's epitaph... Antony was my tongue in praise.

I am certain that love is the best, love that is closest to beauty and the kindest of affections.

Sensation surpa.s.ses thought. Imagination is well enough but it is not love. Between earth and heaven, imagination compares with no warm arms and legs.

Feb. 11, '16

Stunned by poverty-how hard it was to write during those early years. Belly gnawing, I kept at it: I lay down, I got up, sat at the big table. Storms hunkered over the roof tops, the sun licked at the roofs, snow bundled them, and I was cold, cold. Smoke puffed from chimneys, bent in the icy mornings like hea.r.s.e plumes.

Chimneys-I never wanted to count them; broken, dying chimneys, strewed the city below me. One brick stack leaned far over, yet belched smoke.

Pimps lived on one side of me, prost.i.tutes on the other; I could not move without paying my rent. My place was never warm: my hands cracked because of the cold. I kept my legs wound in rags, coughing.

Because of pleurisy I had to sell all of my books: Mary sold them for me, one by one, maybe two or three at a time. How old was Mary? Twenty? I was about twenty-five.

It would take another twenty-five years to dim her memory: the stalk of her body, her restless, weightless feet. She bent a little to the left, as if injured, the arms also restless, the eyes inward. Did she ever laugh?

Her smile always seemed something pushed into being, only a little jolt got it there.

She sold my books and bought my food and fed me, the h.e.l.l of pleurisy riding me: tears in my eyes I attempted to eat: tears of many kinds crushed me. The roofs, the cold, the sorrow, how they come back to me! The anguish in my side went on for weeks but Mary never failed or complained: she f.u.c.ked men at night and succored me during the day: sometimes she slept on the floor beside my bed or lay across the foot of the bed, a blanket around her. Her black hair might unpin itself and lie about her.

"Let's keep a bird, when it's Spring," I suggested.

"How can you feed it, w-w-w-without money?" she asked.

"My father is sending money."

"When? Soon?"

"Has someone written to him? You must see to it, Mary.

Make someone write."

"I think s-s-s-so. I'll try again, ton-n-n-night."

I managed to eat more when the money came and Mary ate well: I ate for those who were poor, I ate for my father, for the starving waifs, for the sick, those in prison, fighting in wars. I ate because it would soon be Spring.

I ate because I must write.

Wrens built a nest above my window. Day after day, they fluttered in and out; day after day it got warmer; I was able to take care of myself; Mary and I were planning to picnic beside the river; she never came; I waited and waited; I asked those who knew her; no one had seen her.

I asked for her many times. There was absolutely no trace of her. She simply disappeared. Some criminal? Some man? Death? I never knew.

Ave Maria!

Home

Over the years I have read Ellen's letters, hearing them almost. Those lines of hers, when I was dismal and lonely, shook off the curse of disillusionment. Even now, after these years, lines come to me:

Surely the greatness of a play lies in its mystery: we are taken inside a private world that is tragic or amusing or sentimental; things that are a part of this world must be judiciously hinted at.

Your plays take life apart because your poetry is so profound. It's the finest poetry I know. Knowing you gives your work added profundity...

The theatre gives man breadth: it's his second life. A country without a theatre is a poor, barren country.

Spring is the best part of the year...we decided: our lochs take on a greenness that must originate in deep, moss-covered rock. I think that water has a definite temperament, a personality, if you like... I like to walk when the sting of spray mingles with fog and underfoot, like a blanket, are the tiny flowers... I want you...

My brother is fond of you. He laughs and asks what is it that makes me take to that man? You must come back to Scotland, Will.

Write me seriously about a possible visit...

Love finds a way...

I wish you could be here, the castle is so beautiful, springtime is so evident, so unlike Scotland, full of gay things, white lilies and pansies along the paths, tulips and agnus-castus, roses around our statues and ramblers on the arbors. Only the biggest roses are in full flower: you should see the yellow ones. You know, I think yellow is my favorite color, and it's because the sun is yellow, for what would this earth of ours be without the sun? We wouldn't even have love, would we? And I wouldn't even be able to dream of your kisses and your arms about me.

And that's what the sun is for, for dreaming, springtime dreaming...and I wish for you, to walk with me, and love me. I will pick a pansy and wear it for you. I will pick a rose and put it in my room, for you. Will, when can we see each other? Can't you come here?...

Her letters were like that...

Stratford

February 1616

Queen Elizabeth came on our stage at the Palace as I played the role of king, the afternoon staingla.s.s bangling her jewels. I was shocked at seeing her galled face and yet had the guts to continue my lines, adding improvisations as well, to force her to wait. While she waited, she dropped her glove (playing her part), and as I arranged my robe, talking as I stood there, I picked up her glove and slowly faced the audience and said:

"Yet we stoop to pick up our Cousin's glove."

How that amused her. "Such propriety!" she said.

"Such folly," I wanted to say.

This is high cla.s.s prost.i.tution commonly called "purse penury," our coldest-oldest art. The art is especially susceptible to jewels and the brazenness of crowns. Men have been hung for their inability to kowtow, with poverty in the wings, snivelling or prancing jubilantly.