John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

Why did Clark begin by attacking Mark Twain? An assignment to read Life on the Mississippi, in Clark’s high school years, had caused “an almost lethal injury to my imagination”—or so Clark complained. Twain’s autobiography had nearly ended Clark’s aspirations to become a writer. And according to Clark, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should have been one novel—“a short one,” Clark railed.

The audience, Juan Diego could tell, didn’t understand the point of this rant — no mention had been made of the other writer onstage (namely, Juan Diego). And Juan Diego, unlike the audience, knew what was coming; he knew that the connection between Twain and Shakespeare had not yet been made.

Mark Twain was one of the culprits who believed that Shakespeare couldn’t have written the plays attributed to him. Twain had stated that his own books were “simply autobiographies”; as Mr. Shapiro wrote, Twain believed “great fiction, including his own, was necessarily autobiographical.”

But Clark hadn’t connected this to the who-wrote-Shakespeare debate, which Juan Diego knew was Clark’s point. Instead, Clark was going on and on about Twain’s lack of imagination. “Writers who have no imagination — writers who can only write about their own life experiences — simply can’t imagine that other writers can imagine anything !” Clark cried. Juan Diego wished he could disappear.

“But who wrote Shakespeare, Clark?” Juan Diego asked his former student, trying to steer him to the point.

“ Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare!” Clark sputtered.

“Well, that settles it,” Juan Diego said. There was a small sound from the audience, a titter or two. Clark seemed surprised by the tittering, faint though it was — as if he’d forgotten there was an audience.

Before Clark could continue — venting about the other culprits in the camp of unimaginative scoundrels who subscribed to the heresy that Shakespeare’s plays had been written by someone else — Juan Diego tried to say a little about James Shapiro’s excellent book: how, as Shapiro put it, “Shakespeare did not live, as we do, in an age of memoir”; how, as Mr. Shapiro further said, “in his own day, and for more than a century and a half after his death, nobody treated Shakespeare’s works as autobiographical.”

“Lucky Shakespeare!” Clark French shouted.

A slender arm waved from the stupefied audience — a woman who was almost too small to be seen from the stage, except that her prettiness stood out (even seated, as she was, between Miriam and Dorothy). And (even from afar) the bracelets on her skinny arm were of the expensive-looking and attention-getting kind that a woman with a rich ex-husband would wear.

“Do you think Mr. Shapiro’s book defames Henry James?” Leslie timidly asked from the audience. (This was, without a doubt, poor Leslie.)

“Henry James!” Clark cried, as if James had caused Clark’s imagination another unspeakable wound in those vulnerable high school years. Poor Leslie, small as she was, seemed to grow smaller in her seat. And was it only Juan Diego who noticed, or did Clark also see, that Leslie and Dorothy were holding hands? (So much for Leslie’s saying she wanted nothing to do with D.!)

“Pinning down Henry James’s skepticism about Shakespeare’s authorship isn’t easy,” Shapiro writes. “Unlike Twain, James wasn’t willing to confront the issue publicly or directly.” (Not exactly defamatory, Juan Diego was thinking — though he’d agreed with Shapiro’s description of “James’s maddeningly elliptical and evasive style.”)

“And do you think Shapiro defames Freud?” Clark asked his adoring writing student, but poor Leslie was now afraid of him; she looked too small to speak.

Juan Diego would have sworn that was Miriam’s long arm wrapped around poor Leslie’s shaking shoulders.

“Self-analysis had enabled Freud, by extension, to analyze Shakespeare,” Shapiro had written.

No one but Freud could imagine Freud’s lust for his mother, or Freud’s jealousy of his father, Clark was saying — and how, from self-analysis, Freud had concluded this was (as Freud put it) “a universal event in early childhood.”

Oh, those universal events in early childhood! Juan Diego was thinking; he’d hoped Clark French would leave Freud out of the discussion. Juan Diego didn’t want to hear what Clark French thought of the Freudian theory of penis envy.

“Just don’t, Clark,” said a stronger-sounding female voice in the audience — not Leslie’s timid voice this time. It was Clark’s wife, Dr. Josefa Quintana, a most impressive woman. She stopped Clark from telling the audience his impressions of Freud — the saga of the untold damage done to literature and to young Clark’s vulnerable imagination at a formative age.

With a beginning of this oppressive kind, how could the onstage interview hope to achieve a spontaneous liftoff? It was a wonder that the audience didn’t leave — except for Leslie, whose early exit was very visible. It was a mild success that the interview got a little better. There was some mention of Juan Diego’s novels, and it registered as a small triumph that the issue of Juan Diego’s being, or his not being, a Mexican-American writer was discussed without further reference to Freud, James, or Twain.

But poor Leslie hadn’t left alone, not entirely. If not everyone’s idea of a mother and her daughter, those two women with Leslie were certainly competent-looking, and the way they’d escorted Leslie up the aisle and out of the theater suggested they were used to taking charge. In fact, how Miriam and Dorothy had taken hold of the small, pretty woman might have caused some concern among the more observant members of the audience — if anyone even noticed, or had been paying attention. The unshakable grip Miriam and Dorothy had on poor Leslie could have meant they were comforting her or abducting her. It was hard to tell.

And where had Miriam and Dorothy gone? Juan Diego kept wondering. Why should he care? Hadn’t he wished they would just disappear? Yet what did it mean when your angels of death departed — when your personal phantasms stopped haunting you?

THE DINNER AFTER THE onstage event was in the labyrinth of the Ayala Center. To an out-of-towner, the dinner guests were not discernible from one another. Juan Diego knew who his readers were — they announced themselves by their familiarity with the details of his novels — but the dinner guests Clark identified as “patrons of the arts” were aloof; their sympathies toward Juan Diego were unreadable.

You shouldn’t generalize about those people who are patrons of the arts. Some of them have read nothing; they’re often the ones who appear to have read everything. The other ones have an out-of-it expression; they seem disinclined to speak or, if they talk at all, it’s only to make an offhand remark about the salad or the seating plan — and they’re usually the ones who’ve read everything you’ve written, and everyone else you’ve ever read.

“You have to be careful around patron-des-arts types,” Clark whispered in Juan Diego’s ear. “They are not what they seem.”

Clark was wearing thin on Juan Diego — Clark could grate on anyone. There were those known things Clark and Juan Diego disagreed about, but it was when Juan Diego most agreed with Clark that Clark grated on him more.

To be fair: Clark had prepared him to expect “a journalist or two” at the dinner party; Clark had also said he would warn Juan Diego about “the ones to watch out for.” But Clark didn’t know all the journalists.