John Banville - Eclipse

It was for Dora, offstage, that I gave my first real performances, filled my first authentic roles. How I posed and preened in the mirror of her sceptical regard. Onstage, too, I saw my talent reflected in her. One night I turned in the midst of my curtain speech—“ And which of us, brother, will Ballybog remember? ”—and caught the flash of her specs in the wings from where she was watching me narrowly, and under the heat of her sullen envy something opened in me like a hand and I stepped at last into the part as if it were my own skin. Never looked back, after that.

The curtain goes down, the interval bar is invaded, and in the space of the huge silence that settles on the briefly emptied auditorium, thirty years fleet past. It is another first night and, for me, a last. I am at what the critics would call, reaching down again into their capacious bag of clichés, the height of my powers. I have had triumphs from here to Adelaide and back. I have held a thousand audiences in the palm of my hand, ditto a bevy of leading ladies. The headlines I have made!—my favourite is the one they wrote after my first American tour: Alexander Finds New World to Conquer. Inside his suit of armour, however, all was not well with our flawed hero. When the collapse came, I was the only one who was not surprised. For months I had been beset by bouts of crippling self-consciousness. I would involuntarily fix on a bit of myself, a finger, a foot, and gape at it in a kind of horror, paralysed, unable to understand how it made its movements, what force was guiding it. In the street I would catch sight of my reflection in a shop window, skulking along with head down and shoulders up and my elbows pressed into my sides, like a felon bearing a body away, and I would falter, and almost fall, breathless as if from a blow, overwhelmed by the inescapable predicament of being what I was. It was this at last that took me by the throat onstage that night and throttled the words as I was speaking them, this hideous awareness, this insupportable excess of self. Next day there was a great fuss, of course, and much amused speculation as to what it was that had befallen me. Everyone assumed that drink was the cause of my lapse. The incident achieved a brief notoriety. One of the newspapers—in a front-page story, no less—quoted a disgruntled member of the audience as saying that it had been like witnessing a giant statue toppling off its pedestal and smashing into rubble on the stage. I could not decide whether to feel offended or flattered by the comparison. I should have preferred to be likened to Agamemnon, say, or Coriolanus, some such high doomed hero staggering under the weight of his own magnificence.

I see the scene in scaled-down form, everything tiny and maniacally detailed, as in one of those maquettes that stage designers love to play with. There I am stuck, in my Theban general’s costume, mouth open, mute as a fish, with the cast at a standstill around me, appalled and staring, like onlookers at the scene of a gruesome accident. From curtain-up everything had been going steadily awry. The theatre was hot, and in my breastplate and robe I felt as if I were bound in swaddling clothes. Sweat dimmed my sight and I seemed to be delivering my lines through a wetted gag. “ Who if not I, then, is Amphitryon?” I cried—it is now for me the most poignant line in all drama—and suddenly everything shifted on to another plane and I was at once there and not there. It was like the state that survivors of heart attacks describe, I seemed to be onstage and at the same time looking down on myself from somewhere up in the flies. Nothing in the theatre is as horribly thrilling as the moment when an actor dries. My mind was whirling and flailing like the broken belt of a runaway engine. I had not forgotten my lines—in fact, I could see them clearly before me, as if written on a prompt card—only I could not speak them. While I gagged and sweated, the young fellow playing Mercury, who in the guise of Amphitryon’s servant Sosia was supposed to be cruelly taunting me on the loss of my identity, stood transfixed behind plywood crenellations, looking down at me with terrified eyes in which I am convinced I could see myself doubly reflected, two tiny, bulbous Amphitryons, both struck speechless. Before me, in the wings, my stage-wife Alcmene was trying to prompt me, reading from the text and frantically mouthing my lines. She was a pretty girl, preposterously young; since the beginning of rehearsals we had been engaged behind the scenes in an unconvinced dalliance, and now as she writhed there in the looming half-darkness, her mouth working mutely like the valve of an undersea creature, I felt embarrassed less for myself than for her, this child who that very afternoon had lain in my arms weeping sham tears of ecstasy, and I wanted to cross the stage quickly and put a restraining finger tenderly to her lips and tell her that it was all right, that it was all all right. At last, seeing in my face, I suppose, something of what I was thinking, she let the text fall to her side and stood and looked at me with a mixture of unconcealable pity, impatience and contempt. The moment was so grotesquely apt to the point we had arrived at in our so-called love affair—both silent, lost for words, confronting each other in dumb hopelessness—that despite my distress I almost laughed. Instead, with an effort, and with more fondness than I had managed to show to her even in the intensest toils of passion, I nodded, the barest nod, in apology and rueful gratitude, and looked away. Meanwhile, behind me in the auditorium the atmosphere was pinging like a violin string screwed to snapping point. There was much coughing. Someone tittered. I glimpsed Lydia’s stricken white face looking up at me from the stalls, and I remember thinking, Thank God Cass is not here. I turned about and with funereal tread, seeming to wade into the very boards of the stage, made a grave, unsteady exit, comically creaking and clanking in my armour. Already the curtain was coming down, I could feel it descending above my head, ponderous and solid as a stone portcullis. From the audience there were jeers now, and a scattering of half-heartedly sympathetic applause. In the dimness backstage I had a sense of figures running to and fro. One of the actors behind me spoke my name in a furious stage whisper. With a yard or two still to go I lost my nerve entirely and made a sort of run for it and practically fell into the wings, while the gods’ vast dark laughter shook the scenery around me.

I should have had another Dora, to mock me out of my malady of selfness. She would have grasped my neck in a wrestler’s hold—she could be rough, could Dora—and rubbed her rubbery breasts against my back and laughed, showing teeth and gums and epiglottis with its quivering pink polyp, and I would have been cured. As it was, I had to flee, of course. How could I show my face in public, to my public, after the mask had so spectacularly slipped? So I ran away, not far, and hid my head here in shame.

Before I fled I did seek help in discovering what might be the exact nature of my malady, though more out of curiosity, I think, than any hope of a cure. In a drinking club late one gin-soaked night I met a fellow thesp who some years previously had suffered a collapse similar to mine. He was far gone in drink by now, and I had to spend a grisly hour listening to him pour out his tale of woe, with many slurs and wearisome repetitions. Then all at once he sobered up, in that disconcerting way that unhappy drunks sometimes manage to do, and said that I must see his man—that was how he put it, in a ringing, cut-glass voice that silenced the surrounding tables, “ Cleave, you must see my man!” —and wrote down on the back of a cardboard beer mat the address of a therapist who, he assured me, tapping a finger to the side of his nose, was the very soul of discretion. I forgot all about it, until a week or two later I found the beer mat in my pocket, and looked up the telephone number, and found myself one glassy April evening at the unmarked door of a nondescript red-brick house in a leafy suburb, feeling inexplicably nervous, my heart racing and palms wet, as if I were about to go onstage in the most difficult part I had ever played, which was the case, I suppose, since the part I must play was myself, and I had no lines learned.