If he was going to the Our Lady of Guadalupe church with Clark French in the morning, Juan Diego was thinking, maybe skipping a dose of his Lopressor prescription tonight wasn’t a bad idea. Given who Juan Diego Guerrero was, and where he came from — well, if you were Juan Diego, and you were going to Guadalupe Viejo with Clark French, wouldn’t you want as much adrenaline as you could get?
And there was the ordeal onstage, and the dinner afterward — there was tonight and tomorrow to get through, Juan Diego considered. To take, or not to take, the beta-blockers — that is the question, he was thinking.
The text message from Clark French was short but would suffice. “On second thought,” Clark had written, “let’s begin with my asking you who wrote Shakespeare — we know we agree about that. This will put the issue of personal experience as the only valid basis for fiction writing behind us — we know we agree about this, too. As for the types who believe Shakespeare was someone else: they underestimate the imagination, or they overesteem personal experience — their rationale for autobiographical fiction, don’t you think?” Clark French wrote to his former writing teacher. Poor Clark — still theoretical, forever juvenile, always picking fights.
Give me the adrenaline, all I can get, Juan Diego thought — once more not taking his beta-blockers.
32. Not Manila Bay
From Juan Diego’s point of view, the good thing about being interviewed by Clark French was that Clark did most of the talking. The difficult part was listening to Clark; he was such a pontificator. And if Clark was on your side, he could be more embarrassing.
Juan Diego and Clark had recently read James Shapiro’s Contested Wilclass="underline" Who Wrote Shakespeare? Both Clark and Juan Diego had admired the book; they’d been persuaded by Mr. Shapiro’s arguments — they believed that Shakespeare of Stratford was the one and only Shakespeare; they agreed that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were not written collaboratively, or by someone else.
Yet why, Juan Diego wondered, didn’t Clark French begin by quoting Mr. Shapiro’s most compelling statement — the one made in the book’s epilogue? (Shapiro writes, “What I find most disheartening about the claim that Shakespeare of Stratford lacked the life experience to have written the plays is that it diminishes the very thing that makes him so exceptionaclass="underline" his imagination.”)
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.