The Woman Who Wrote "King Lear," and Other Stories
Copyright page
The Woman Who Wrote "King Lear," and Other Stories
By Louis Phillips
ISBN 978-1-929355-39-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007937936
Design by Susan Ramundo
Cover by Laura Tolkow
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ERRATA
SUDDENLY I DO NOT EQUATE THE LIGHT WITH ANYTHING BUT MADNESS
WRITING
THE GORILLA AND MY WIFE
JAZZ CITY
JOHN LOCKE AND HIS BICYCLE
ON THE STREET OF THE MAD MUSICIANS
NOTES FROM THE COMMITTEE OF GRIEF
A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF TERMITES FOUND IN AFRICA (1871)
THE DESTRUCTION OF IOWA
THE WOMAN WHO WROTE KING LEAR
THE CAT THAT SWALLOWED THOMAS HARDY'S HEART
THE GORILLA AND MY WIFE
INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS
IN AMERICA YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOUR LIFE UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND THE MOVIES
LEE HARVEY OSWALD'S CAN OPENER
ERRATA
In last month's issue, we were privileged to publish a new short-story by Louis Phillips. The story, as you may remember, was titled "Errata," and it has elicited thousands of letters expressing admiration for its grace, style, and felicity of expression.
Unfortunately, as the author and numerous irate readers have pointed out, the story contained a small number of printer's errors. The printers' and editors' strike of last months has finally been settled, and so we hope to resume our unusually high standards of careful proof-reading, but we feel that we should bring to your attention the errors that occurred in last month's story:
ERRATA
TITLE PAGE: The author was Louis Phillips and not Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Page ONE: The main character was Mr. Malone, not Ms. Malone.
Page TWO: Pages two and three got reversed in the editing process. Page Three should be Page Two. Page Two should be Page Three. All other pages, however, are correctly numbered.
PAGE TWO (old Page Three): The sentence that reads, "Mr. Malone was ravished by Mr. Phillipott in a hanging garden where a dead moose was rotting," should read, "Ms. Malone was not ravished by Mr. Phillipott in a hanging garden where a dead mouse was rooting."
PAGE FOUR: The paragraph that reads, "So saying the fair and hospitable dame took our hero by the hand; and the touch was light, and the force was gentleness, and though Robin read in her eyes what he did not hear in her words, yet the slender-waisted woman in the scarlet petticoat proved stronger than the athletic country youth. She had drawn his half-willing footsteps nearly to the threshold, when the opening of a door in the neighborhood startled the Major's housekeeper, and leaving the Major's kinsman, she vanished speedily into her own domicile." - actually comes from Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux." How this unfortunate interpolation came about is difficult to explain, though it has been pointed out that the same firm that typesets our stories was also in the process of setting type for an anthology of short fiction by American authors.
In your edition of "The Woman Who Wrote King Lear & Other Lurid Tales for Readers Drawn to Sex and Violence on an Operatic Scale," please delete Mr. Hawthorne's paragraph and substitute the following: "Major Phillipott, father of Amos and beloved husband of Robin, a fair and hospitable dame, was indeed haunted by a terrible sin. The Fall of Mankind was no abstract theological concept to the Major's tortured soul; the Fall occupied the very center of his Ground of Being. One could trace to the Fall, that most important moment in the history of the world, the Major's major obsession: he hated mistakes. He despised slovenliness. He attacked minor errors with the same loud enthusiasm used to dispatch the Arabs at Khartoum (General George Gordon, the Egyptian governor general of the Sudan, had been Phillipott's childhood heroes). [CLARIFY THIS - PLURAL? THEN WHO?] His mornings were frequently spent dictating heated letters to the London Times or to the Manchester Guardian.
Once when he found a nightshirt left over the arm of a chair, the Major flew into a rage. Since the nightshirt belonged to the hapless Amos, then only ten years of age and far away from his tragic episode with Ms. Malone and the dead mouse, the Major ordered his son's entire wardrobe burned. The servants, blushing under a flurry of grotesque orders, gathered together every shirt, pair of trousers, socks, shoes, underwear, suspenders, ties, vests, corsets, and piled the clothing in the front lawn.
In front of the weeping Amos, Major Phillipott doused the freshly starched materials with a container of kerosene and he lit the match himself.
Unfortunately, the conflagration got entirely out of hand. A surge of wind took the lawn by surprise. Trees, grass, hedges, two servants, and eventually the manor house itself were badly singed. Major Phillipott, too proud to admit that he himself had committed an error of judgment, refused to place a call to the fire department; but as the fire was spreading to the upstairs bedrooms, the Major's wife, bravely fighting off hysteria, attempted to call for help. Alas, Amos, in great anger because of the unjust humiliation heaped upon his now naked shoulders, had severed the telephone cords with a pair of hedge-cutters stolen from the gardener's shed. The shed, in fact, was the only out-building left standing. In a frantic last-ditch effort that bordered upon desperation, Mrs. Phillipott, nee Sedgewick, retired to her bedroom and dictated a letter to her secretary, a certain Ms. Malone (who shall play a much larger role later in our tale), a slender-waisted (wasted?) [IS THIS SUPPOSED TO BE HERE?] young woman, who created something of a scandal in the major's household by her frequent sportings in a scarlet petticoat (the very same petticoat found in the field near the dead mouse). The letter was addressed to the Suffolk County Department of Pyrotechnics and Fire-tending:
To Whom It May Concern (the epistle began),
My husband, the Honourable Major Horace M. Phillipott, has accidentally set a fire that now threatens our estate and manor house and all the valuables they contain, including the Major's collection of rare postal errors (inverts, overprintings, and incorrect colors). I therefore humbly beg your department to send out your fire-wagons as soon as this epistle falls into your hands.
Warmly yours,
Robin H. Phillipott (Mrs.)
PAGE SIX:The two pages of stock market listings are not part of the story proper. They were inserted by mistake.
PAGE SIX A:The sentence that reads, "Amos Phillipott joined a nudist colony, and he refused to wear clothes for the rest of his life, while his mother moved to London to work as an assistant to a producer of stage plays," should have read "cautere sur une jambe de bois."
PAGE EIGHT: There is no page eight. As far as we can tell.
PAGE NINE-A: The name of the main character was misspelled. The correct spelling is Amos Phillipott. Please correct throughout.
PAGE TEN: The bird identified as a Ruby-Crowned Kinglet was incorrectly identified. The bird that Amos saw, while frolicking in the field with the secretary, was, in all probability, a fulvous tree duck.
PAGE ELEVEN: The sentence should read, "Ruddy ducks have been known to cock their tails." We wish to apologize to all readers who were offended by the obscenity that resulted from an irate editor's transcription.
PAGE XII: The recipe calling for twelve pounds of raisins should be replaced by the following sentences that were inadvertently dropped from the main body of the text: "It was not until nearly two decades after the death of Major Phillipott (he died from inhaling kerosene in the back seat of his Rolls while the automobile was on fires) that the now-Lady Phillipott finally met her son in one of the high-priced nudist camps that dot the shore of Southern France. Cautere sur une jambe de bois, she thought but did not speak because she was thinking in a language she could not pronounce. She did not at all feel embarrassed walking naked, hand in hand with her son. But she finally realized how wrong-headed her husband had been in burning her son's clothes. There are some experiences a family can live without.
PAGE 16 and 3/4: The final page of the story somehow blended into the beginning of Linda Bucknell's article, "Ten Things To Do with Your Son or Daughter on a Hot Summer Day." The final sentence of the story should read, "When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on the shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters." Delete: "Give into the ecstasy of endless love." Delete: "Build a stove from scratch."
ADDENDUM
Ordinarily we would be pleased to reprint the story in its correct form, but we feel that in this unusual case that there were so very few errors involved, and all of the minor variety, and that the story itself was somehow enhanced by the additions made - well, we have printed the errata sheet. We allow each reader to judge for himself/herself.
SUDDENLY I DO NOT EQUATE THE LIGHT WITH ANYTHING BUT MADNESS: THE BEST SHORT STORY OF 2010
If you look through THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 2010, you will find my story there. It won first prize that year, beating out some pretty good company. Joyce Carol Oates was there with a story about beating up Norman Mailer, and Norman Mailer was there with a story about beating up Joyce Carol Oates, and John Updike was there with a piece about Rabbit beating up himself and going to Heaven and meeting both Joyce Carol Oates and Norman Mailer. I'm telling you that the writing game is a pretty rough business and very political. What the poor say is true: It's not what you know, but who. Whom?
How I found out that my story had been printed, however, is a story unto itself. But we all have stories and the longer I live, the more I think that all of our stories are pretty much alike. It is as if you woke up one morning and carried with you all the voices of the world. Such voices stick to you, and no matter how hard you try you cannot shake the voices off. "Alles ist innig."
"Didn't the editors tell you that they were going to print your story?" my father asks. John is having quite a difficult time reading the pieces because the sun is in his eyes, bouncing off the page, and he is too proud or too lazy to go inside to get sunglasses. Or maybe he does have sunglasses and the sun is in my eyes so I cannot make out the title of my own story. I know I had sent the story to somebody, but somebody didn't like it. The story kept coming back. Then one day it didn't come back anymore. I had gone to the Police Station to swear out a Missing Documents Report, but the police, up to their ears in Neo-Platonism, held out no hope for its return. So many stories disappear every year, the sergeant said. He was a kind man, in his early sixties and on the edge of retirement. He had seen stories of all shapes and sizes walk off the face of the earth. Three years ago they had uncovered an unpublished fragment by Holderlin in a warehouse in New Jersey. The fragment had been left in storage by Warner Brothers.
Of course, by the age of 36, Holderlin had gone insane. No wonder. "Alles ist innig. Just because it happened to Joyce or to McCullers or any of those other guys, it doesn't mean it's going to happen to you," the sergeant said.
He didn't mean to be unkind. He was merely telling the truth. Just because it happens to someone else it doesn't mean it's going to happen to you. Actually he reminded me of my father. I left Precinct 23 with about twenty posters. (The missing document artist had reconstructed my story to the best of his abilities, but in truth my powers of description were woefully inadequate. There were so many touching passages missing. No one could hope to identify the story from the outline on the poster). The only part that made any sense at all was the making of my child.
In addition, the posters from the police station were printed upon white paper. It is difficult to take seriously a story printed upon white paper, even if the story does concern a father and a son digging up the corpse of the boy's mother so that the body can be moved to another cemetery. Such a story does not make much of an impact nowadays. We are interested in something else. And we all know what the philosopher G. E. Moore says about the assertion that Blue exists: "If we are told that the assertion 'Blue exists' is meaningless unless we mean by it that 'the sensation of blue exists,' we are told what is certainly false and self-contradictory. . . . We can and must conceive the existence of blue as something quite distinct from the existence of the sensation. We can and must conceive that blue might exist and yet the sensation of blue not exist. For my own part I not only conceive this, but I conceive it to be true." For my part all I do is look up at the sky and see that it is sometimes blue; though, of course, I realize that even sky blue is an illusion. An illusion like so many stories, so much memory. My mind is mostly blue movies.
I look across my mother's grave and see that my father is wearing a blue work shirt and blue jeans. He's in his late seventies and he can still put in a good day's work without complaining. He used to be a carpenter, but now he builds odds and ends for friends and neighbors. Don't whine, just do it, he would tell me when I was a child. I believed him then. I believe him now.
"Didn't the editor even tell you they were printing your story?" John asks me again. I have wandered off into my own thoughts. I have been doing that a lot lately, much to the distress of my friends. I am burning out, but I can't stop. Too many papers to grade. Too many part time jobs. The honor of being recognized for a story that is not even mine has come too late, much too late to do me any good at all. It is about as much use as a toothache, though to tell the truth I have had a toothache all week, and I am beginning to enjoy it. Its pain is weaning me into real life, luring me away from complacency. I go over the Catechism of Stone in my head. The Catechism of Stone is a series of ideas about the relationship that exists between a stone and the hand that throws it, a catechism my father and I have frequently recited to each other, though often when my father gets the drunk the catechism eludes him, and "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" ends up in its place. How often do we start off with one story and end up with another? You only have to read The Best Short Stories from 2010 from cover to cover to know the answer.
"Therefore," says Simonides, "I shall never spend my allotted span of life vainly in infeasible hope, seeking that which cannot come to pass - a fully blameless man. None of us who win our bread from the wide earth...." People are talking to me all the time, and I never know what to say in reply. Orchids. I suppose one could say "orchids" in reply. One could open one's mouth and pull out flowers.
"_______________," says my father, tossing down his shovel and reaching for a bucket. Ironic that he almost kicks the bucket in a literal sense. It's his idea that my mother's body should be dug up and moved to Syracuse for reinterment. She should be near her parents, my father insists. When you die you should go back to your family. He's old, and so that's the way he thinks about things, not the way G. E. Moore thinks about things, say, the color blue, or Holderlin, or Simonides. We think things; we say things; we forget them. I am forty-four and angry all the time. How does the commercial go about G. E. Moore? G. E. brings good things to life?
Three feet into the tender earth, my mother, my father, and I have encountered an underground spring, and the water flows into the grave so rapidly that we must bail like crazy.
"Sonavabitchingflyingfuckingwater." My father swears a blue streak. Up one side of the grave to the other, with both of us standing in the muck and mire, mud slopping into my one pair of shoes. The spring gurgles like a demented child crazy with happiness that it has done something to thwart the best-laid plans of mice and men. "Bail, bail, bail," my father mutters to himself, and then glares at me as if the water pouring over the remains of his dead wife is somehow my fault because he knows that I am superstitious and do not want the body moved.
"Sonavabitchingflyingfuckingwater." The hidden spring flows in at such a slow rate that my father and I, working in tandem, each of us bailing as if we were in a leaky boat - where we have been more than once in our lives, - can undo it, work beyond it and bring my mother or what remains of her to the surface.
"You can slow down now," John says. "We got it licked."
Overdoing it! That's what I want to do. I want to come on with everything and crazy and break the skull of the world wide open. I'm a madman all right and I don't care who knows it. Alas, Yorick.
I pick up my shield and run my hand over its convex front. It is the kind of shield called a Goolmary. Long. Heavy. The back of the shield is nearly flat. In spite of the July heat, I know I must dress in full armor. To tell the truth I need a new shield. A man should not go into new battles with the same old weapons. A trip across town is in order. There the washer woman waits. She too up to her arms in water. "No," I said. "I think the editors wanted it to be a surprise."
"Is it?"
"Of course," I say. "But to tell the truth I am embarrassed."
"I would be too. It's not well thought out. Something essential is missing. I wanted to cry and there is nothing to cry over, and what's all that stuff about going crosstown on the bus with the passengers babbling about loneliness. Loneliness is not everything."
"It's not even mine."
"What do you mean?"
"Something's wrong. They have printed someone else's story under my name."
"Are you sure?"
I think about that. It is a worthwhile question. One I dig my rotten tooth into. "That's what bothers me. Maybe I wrote something and I have forgotten all about it. The world is filled to overflowing with stories. Some of them might belong to me."
I know I shall have to walk across town and confront the publishers. Perhaps the bald- headed editor has confused my story with one told by someone with a similar name. A tale told by an Id. Waiting for mother to dry, I call my brother to ask what he thinks. My brother delivers baked goods to restaurants and delis. "I took Saturday off," he tells me over the phone, "and now I have to pay for it. The dispatcher is giving me a bomb of a schedule." He volunteers to make a new shield for me, but I would have to arrive late in the afternoon. His bomb of a schedule does not permit him to return home before sundown. My father says he'll come along later to help.
"Hand me my axe," I say.
"Huh?"
"The Hortuk."
John hands me my Hortuk. The axe feels good in my hands. One of my brothers, there are six of us, had brought it back for me from Malay. I adjust my helmet and pick up my spear. One takes one's gifts where one can.
"You really have to go across town?" my father asks.
"I have no choice. I've been humiliated. Publicly humiliated."
"The public doesn't care. It's not a movie."
"But I do."
I place a few stones in the pocket of my skirt.
I take the book with the story attributed to me from John and start across town. The bronze of my armor glitters in the sun. There is a good chance I shall lose ten or twenty pounds on this one trip alone. Not that I mind. I can afford to lose the weight. I have been running to fat. Too many palindromes: A I rot sack Castoria. What a mind! If it were only mine. We are born with so many minds.
I walk a few blocks and then decide to conserve my energies by taking the bus, although I knew that many passengers would be miffed by the presence of my shield, spear, and axe. Weapons meant for slaughter always take up more room than anybody thinks. Standing on the crowded bus I reviewed what my father and I had learned from the Reverend P. H. Francis. In his book on Mechanical Biology, the Reverend Francis had written:
1. The stone by itself is an incomplete weapon: the complete weapon is formed by the hand and stone together.
2. The contrivance formed by the hand and stone has many features of the fist.
3. The contrivance consists of two main parts: a human part formed by the hand, and a mechanical part formed by the stone.
4. The form of the hand and stone are complementary. The contrivance is wielded in much the same way as the fist.
5. The hand is released by the stone from the need for directly delivering the blow.
6. The type of weapon formed by the hand and stone depends on the way the contrivance is used and on parts which come into contact with the opponent.
7. The fastenings which hold the hand and stone together are formed partly by the hand and partly by the stone.
8. The human and mechanical parts of the fastenings holding the hand and stone together are complementary.
9. The contrivance is held to the arm by fastenings formed by the fingers and their connections to the arm.
10. All actions and movements of the body are affected by the partial replacement of the fist by a stone.
11. Advantages gained by partly replacing the fist are accompanied by disadvantages.
In W. H. Auden's poem "The Shield of Achilles," he creates an image of a boy throwing a stone at a bird. Did such a boy think of all the ramifications of his thoughtless and mean-spirited act? Was he aware that the human and the mechanical parts of the world are complementary?
On the bus two passengers, women in their early eighties or their hundred-and-twenties, were discussing an article about testing loneliness on the Differential Loneliness Scale.
"How did you do, Milly?" the woman in the moon mask asked.
"I flunked the course," said Milly. "I always do. It was the question about keeping all the lights at night burning that got me. Who can afford to keep lights burning all night long?"
"Who can afford lights?"
"You can say that again,"
"But to measure loneliness," Milly said after a while. "I never thought that they could do it."
I get off the bus three blocks from my brother's garage. My armor glitters in the sun. A world of bronze amid a world of steel. A world of greed. Oh, mother, why didn't you make me immortal?
I am surprised to find my brother hard at work. My father is at the door to greet me. No matter where I go, he is always waiting for me. I don't know how he got across town ahead of me. "I told the boss what he could do with his bomb of a schedule," my brother says, bent to his welding. The garage houses many curious items, among them a complete hand-carved carousel. The floor of the carousel is covered with grease. My father slips and slides, and I hold out my hands to pull him up. He is getting old and it takes everything in my power to keep him going. Asking him to help my brother Edwin to build me a shield might keep his mind off decay, how his own body is failing him. I wonder what he thinks about being a father, but I don't ask him. Instead I ask him about the water in the grave. "When I reached your mother's body," he says, turning the bellows toward the fire, "she had turned to stone. All except her head. The head has disappeared."
"Her head?" I ask. I use my arms to wipe the sweat from my face. "We'll have to go back and look for it."
"Later."
My brother doesn't say anything. Like me he is upset about moving my mother's body to Syracuse. But now her body is like stone and sinking further and further away from us.
"When I first buried her," my father continues as he and Edwin lift my new shield from the forge, "she couldn't have weighed more than 150 pounds, but in her present state I wager she weighs at least twice that."
Life's funny. One minute you're nothing but a son. Then the next moment a being emerges from the darkness into the light and you are both father and son, a member of a generation caught in the middle. One generation was being pushed off the edge of the horizon. Another embarking on the cruise.
"If you're going to do battle with the publishers," my brother says, "you're going to need stones."
"I've got them," I say, "in the pocket of my shirt."
"They don't fight fair."
"I know."
"They don't have to."
"I know."
"How can they publish somebody else's story under your name?" he asks, as he brings his hammer down upon a huge rim of bronze. My mother's face shines. It is as if she is speaking. The artist has made a miracle.
"Must happen all the time," I say.
"Remember, if you throw stones, that the human and mechanical parts of the fastenings holding the stone and hand together are complementary."
I nodded. "Number 8," I said.
"What should I put on this shield?" he asks. Edwin is in his late thirties, and his eyes are brown like mine. His back is straight. He works without stopping, the sweat pouring from his tanned face, and his hair glowing red hot in the foreground of the forge.
"Start with the creation of the universe," I told him, "and work your way down."
"You always were the ambitious one in the family."
"I know."
"On the other hand...." My brother's voice trails off.
"I know," I tell him. And my father, staring at my mother's face upon the shield, bursts with a cry of grief, such a lament that every goddess gathers about him: the Nereides of the wine-dark sea; Glauce, Thaleia, Nesaea, Speio, Thoe, and ox-eyed Cymodoce; Doris, Panope, and Galatea of the spiriting song; Nemertes beating her breasts; Doto, Pherusa, Limnoreia, laneira, Ianassa, Maera. Each pulls John from the grease-stained floor; each fills the grotto with grief and prayer. My mother's body has turned to stone. She weighs more in death than she ever weighed in life.
On the shield my brother has depicted a wedding dance. And there are my parents, seated in chairs, being carried around and around in a circle. And then there is my father's heart besieged by two armies. The first army has sat outside his feelings for ten years or more. There on the imperishable bronze, amid the dancing and the feasting, is a lone singer. Bent to his guitar, he sings a song not of his own making. His heart rises into his mouth. Soon all the dancers stop in their mad whirlings and they listen. The singer sings:
Well-met, well-met, my own true love,
Well met, well-met, says he,
I've just returned from the saltwater sea,
And it's all for love of thee!
I might have married a king's daughter fair.
In vain she'd have married me,
But I refused a crown of gold,
And it's all for love of thee.
If you could have married a king's daughter fair,
I think you are much to blame,
For I have married a house-carpenter,
And I think he's a nice young man.
The song is published under his name but is not his, and the singer turns red with fury. He lifts his guitar and smashes it to the floor. The music breaks into many pieces. The wedding guests are embarrassed.
Edwin turns back to the forge. Nothing he can say or will say can assuage my father's grief. And there on the five-layered shield, tears are falling. What can fathers tell their sons? What can sons tell their fathers? We live under the fear of loss. One losing the other.
The great Orion. I place my arm through the strap at the back of the shield. Edwin knows what he has made; I do not know what I have made. That is the great difference between us. Two sons from the loins of one man, and yet we have so little in common.
"Kill them," Edwin says. "Kill them all. I hate all those bastards."
"I will," I say. I find a spear on the greasy floor and, using a discarded rag, wipe the shaft clean. I dip the point into poison.
"Wait!" John says. "Before you go. I have to tell you something about your mother. A story you haven't heard." I reach down and pull him up.
"When the telephone company installed the first pay phones in Manhattan, your mother walked into Howard's drugstore to try to call home. The operator told her that it would cost her a $1.05 to talk to her home in Syracuse. And so you know what your mother did?" John can hardly contain himself. He starts to laugh long before he gets to the good part. I glance over my right shoulder towards Edwin. He and I have both heard the story before. Most of my father's stories about my mother are pretty much alike, except for the most recent, the one about her body turning to stone and her head disappearing. What was the best way to define what any family was? By the stories that were repeated from one generation to another.
John stops laughing long enough to continue. He requisitions number 76432243876554 from Chestnuts Unlimited, his ears turning red. "And so the operator keeps telling your mother to deposit the money into the slot and your mother keeps insisting that she has put the money into the phone and after a few minutes of wrangling back and forth, Mother gets it into her head that the phone company is trying to cheat her and so she goes out to get a policeman to press charges against the phone company. And when she dragged the policeman back, she showed him where she had placed a nickel in the nickel slot and a dollar bill in the dollar slot, and as soon as the policeman sees that he nearly doubled over with laughter."