John Irving - In One Person

“It’s a speech about impressions, Kittredge,” Elaine managed to say. “It’s not a speech about sex.”

Enter Ariel, invisible —that was the stage direction to my upcoming scene (act 3, scene 2). But I was already truly invisible; I had somehow succeeded in giving them all the impression that Elaine Hadley was my love interest. For Elaine’s part, she seemed to be going along with it—maybe for self-protective reasons of her own. But Kittredge was smiling at us—in that sneering, superior way he had. I do not think the impressions word ever meant very much to Kittredge. I believe that everything was always about sex—about actual sex—to him. And if the present company was convinced that Elaine and I were interested in each other in a sexual way, possibly Kittredge alone remained unconvinced—at least this was the impression that his sneer gave Elaine and me.

Maybe this was why Elaine suddenly turned from him and kissed me. She barely brushed her lips against mine, but there was actual (if fleeting) contact; I suppose I even appeared to kiss her back, albeit briefly. That was all. It wasn’t much of a kiss; it didn’t even fog up her glasses.

I doubt that Elaine had an iota of sexual interest in me, and I believe she knew from the beginning that I was only pretending to be interested in her in that way. We were the most amateur actors—her innocent Miranda and my largely invisible Ariel—but we were acting, and there was an unspoken complicity in our deception.

After all, we both had something to hide.

To this day, I don’t know what to make of the wretched Caliban—the monster whose attempted rape of Miranda earns Prospero’s unforgiving condemnation. Prospero seems to take minimal responsibility for Caliban—“this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine.”

For someone as self-centered as Kittredge, of course, The Tempest was all about Ferdinand; it’s a love story, in which Ferdinand woos and wins Miranda. But Richard Abbott called the play a “tragicomedy,” and for those two (almost three) months in the fall of ’59 when Elaine Hadley and I were in rehearsals for the play, we felt that our close-enough-to-touch proximity to Kittredge was our tragicomedy—notwithstanding that The Tempest has a happy ending for Miranda and Ariel.

My mother, who always maintained she was just the prompter, had the curiously mathematical habit of timing each actor; she used a cheap stove timer, and (in the margins of her copy of the play) she noted the approximate percent of the characters’ actual time onstage. The value of my mom’s calculations seemed questionable to me, though both Elaine and I enjoyed the fact that Ferdinand was onstage for only 17 percent of the play.

“What about Miranda?” Elaine made a point of asking my mom, within Kittredge’s keenly competitive hearing.

“Twenty-seven percent,” my mother replied.

“What about me?” I asked my mom.

“Ariel is onstage thirty-one percent of the time,” she told me.

Kittredge scoffed at this degrading news. “And Prospero, our peerless director—he of the much- ballyhooed magical powers?” Kittredge inquired sarcastically.

“Much- ballyhooed !” Elaine Hadley thunderously echoed.

“Prospero is onstage approximately fifty-two percent of the time,” my mother told Kittredge.

“Approximately,” Kittredge repeated, sneering.

Richard had told us that The Tempest was Shakespeare’s “farewell play,” that the bard was knowingly saying good-bye to the theater, but I didn’t understand the necessity for act 5—especially the tacked-on epilogue, spoken by Prospero.

Perhaps it was a small measure of my becoming a writer (though never for the stage) that I believed The Tempest should have ended with Prospero’s speech to Ferdinand and Miranda—the “Our revels now are ended” speech in act 4, scene 1. And surely Prospero should have ended that speech (and the play) with the wonderful “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” Why does Prospero need to say more? (Maybe he does feel responsible for Caliban.)

But when I expressed these thoughts to Richard, he said, “Well, Bill—if you’re rewriting Shakespeare at seventeen, I expect great things of you!” Richard wasn’t given to satire at my expense, and I was hurt by it; Kittredge was quick to pick up on someone else’s pain.

“Hey, Rewriter !” Kittredge called to me, across the quadrangle of dorms. Alas, that nickname didn’t stick; Kittredge never said it again, preferring Nymph. I would have preferred Rewriter; at least it was true to the kind of writer I would one day become.

But I’ve strayed from the Caliban character; I have digressed, which is also the kind of writer I would become. Caliban is onstage 25 percent of the time. (My mother’s approximations never took into account the lines spoken, only the onstage time of the characters.) This was my very first experience with The Tempest, but as many times as I’ve seen the play performed, I always find Caliban a deeply disturbing character; as a writer, I would call him an “unresolved” character. By how harshly Prospero treats him, we know how unforgivingly Prospero thinks of Caliban, but I wonder what Shakespeare wanted us to feel about the monster. Sympathy, maybe—some guilt, perhaps.

That fall of ’59, I wasn’t at all sure what Richard Abbott made of Caliban; that Richard had cast Grandpa Harry as the monster sent a mixed message. Harry had never been onstage as a male anything; that Caliban was less than human was further “unresolved” by Grandpa Harry’s steadfastly female impersonation. Caliban may indeed have lusted after Miranda—we know the monster has tried to rape her!—but Harry Marshall, even when he was cast as a villain, was almost never unsympathetic onstage, nor was he ever entirely male .

Perhaps Richard had acknowledged that Caliban was a confusing monster, and Richard knew that Grandpa Harry would find a way to add to the confusion. “Your grandfather is weird,” was how Kittredge unambiguously put it to me. (“Queen Lear,” Kittredge called him.)

Even I believe that Harry out-weirded himself in Caliban’s case; Grandpa Harry gave a sexually ambiguous performance—he played Caliban as an androgynous hag.

The wig (Grandpa Harry was bald) would have worked for either sex. The costume was something an eccentric urban bag lady might have worn—floppy sweatpants with an oversize sweatshirt, both as workout-gray as the wig. To complete the gender-unknown image, Harry had whorishly painted the toenails of his bare feet. There was a mannishly chunky rhinestone earring attached to the lobe of one ear—more appealing to a pirate, or a professional wrestler, than a hooker—and a fake-pearl necklace (the cheapest costume jewelry) over the sweatshirt.

“What is Caliban, exactly?” Kittredge would ask Richard Abbott.

“Earth and water, Kittredge—brute force and guile,” Richard had repeated.

“But what sex is the guile supposed to be?” Kittredge asked. “Is Caliban a lesbian monster? Is it a she or a he who tried to rape Miranda?”

“Sex, sex, sex!” Elaine Hadley screamed. “All you think about is sex!”

“Don’t forget those earplugs, Nymph,” Kittredge said, smiling at me.

Elaine and I couldn’t look at him without seeing his mother, with her legs so perfectly crossed on those uncomfortable bleacher seats at Kittredge’s wrestling match; Mrs. Kittredge had seemed to watch her son’s systematic mauling of his overmatched opponent as if it were a pornographic film, but with the detached confidence of an experienced woman who knew she could do it better. “Your mother is a man with breasts,” I wanted to say to Kittredge, but of course I didn’t dare.