I passed the years of my youth practising for the stage. I would prowl the back roads of the town, always alone, playing out solitary dramas of struggle and triumph in which I spoke all the parts, even of the vanquished and the slain. I would be anyone but myself. Thus it continued year on year, the intense, unending rehearsal. But what was it I was rehearsing for? When I searched inside myself I found nothing finished, only a permanent potential, a waiting to go on. At the site of what was supposed to be my self was only a vacancy, an ecstatic hollow. And things rushed into this vacuum where the self should be. Women, for instance. They fell into me, thinking to fill me with all they had to give. It was not simply that I was an actor and therefore supposedly lacking an essential part of personality; I was a challenge to them, to their urge to create, to make life. I am afraid they did not succeed, with me.
Lydia had seemed the one capable of concentrating sufficient attention on me to make me shine out into the world with a flickering intensity such that even I might believe I was real. When I first encountered her she lived in a hotel. I mean, her family home was a hotel. That summer, more than half my lifetime ago now, I would see her almost every day as she came and went through the revolving glass doors of the Halcyon, got up in outlandish confections of cheesecloth and velvet and beads. She wore her black hair very straight, in the soulful style of the day, the bold silver streak in it less pronounced than it would be in later years but still striking. She became an object of keen speculation for me. I had a room in a rotting tenement in one of those cobbled canyons off the river, where at dawn the drays let loose from the brewery gates woke me with the thunder of apocalyptic hoofs, and the nights were permeated with the sickly sweet smell of roasting malt. Loitering along the embankment I watched for Lydia by the hour, in the gritty airlessness of the summer city. She was an exotic, a daughter of the desert. She walked with a sort of sulky swing, rolling her shoulders a little, always with her head down, as if she were meticulously retracing her steps to somewhere or something momentous. When she pushed through the hotel door the revolving glass panels threw off a splintered multiple image of her before she disappeared into the peopled dimness of the lobby. I made up lives for her. She was foreign, of course, the runaway daughter of an aristocratic family of fabulous pedigree; she was a rich man’s former mistress, in hiding from his agents here in this backwater; certainly, she must have something in her past, I was convinced of it, some loss, some secret burden, some crime, even. When by chance I was introduced to her at an opening night—she was a great one for the theatre, in those days, and seemed to go to every production that was put on, with undiscriminating enthusiasm—I experienced an inevitable jolt of disappointment, as of something subsiding with a crunch under my diaphragm. Just another girl, after all.
“I’ve seen you,” she said, “hanging about on the quays.” She was always disconcertingly direct.
But that Levantine tinge to her looks, the hothouse pallor and stark black brows and faintly shadowed upper lip, remained a powerful attraction. The Hotel Halcyon took on for me the air of an oasis; before I entered there I imagined behind that revolving door a secret world of greenery and plashing water and sultry murmurings; I could almost taste the sherbet, smell the sandalwood. Lydia had a magnificence about her that was all the more enticing for her seeming unawareness of it. I admired her fullness, the sense she gave of filling whatever she wore, no matter how ample or flowing. Even her name bespoke for me a physical opulence. She was my big sleek slightly helpless princess. I loved to watch her as she walked to meet me, with that heavy-hipped slouch and that distracted, always vaguely dissatisfied smile. I basked in her; she seemed the very source and origin of the word uxorious; I decided at once, without having to think about it, that I would marry her.
I should say in fact that my tender-eyed wife’s real, or given, name is Leah; in the hubbub of the crush bar that night when I was introduced to her I misheard it as Lydia, and when I repeated it later she liked it, and we kept it between us as a love-name, and eventually it became established, even among the more easygoing members of her family. It occurs to me to wonder now if this surrender and substitution of names worked a deeper change in her than one of mere nomenclature. She had relinquished a part of herself, so surely she took something on, as well. From Leah to Lydia is no small journey. When I was starting out in the theatre I toyed with the possibility of taking a stage name, but there was already so little of me that was real, I felt I could not afford to sacrifice the imperial label my mother—I am sure my father had no say in the matter—pinned on me so that I might be at least a noise in the world, though at once everyone, including my mother, went to work shortening my name to Alex. In my first parts I billed myself as Alexander, but it did not stick. I wonder what it takes to be proof against abbreviation.
I looked up the name Leah in a dictionary, which told me that in Hebrew it means cow. Dear me. No wonder she was willing to relinquish it.
Over all my recollections of that period of my life there lingers a faint warm bloom of embarrassment. I was not entirely what I pretended to be. It is an actor’s failing. I did not tell lies about myself, exactly, but I did permit certain prominences to show through the deliberate fuzziness of my origins that were, frankly, larger than life. The fact is, I would happily have exchanged everything I had made myself into for a modicum of inherited grace, something not of my own invention, and which I had done nothing to deserve—class, breeding, money, even a run-down riverside hotel and a drop of the blood of Abraham in my veins. I was an unknown, as we say of fledgelings in our trade: in my case, truly an unknown, even to myself.
I think I took to the stage to give myself a cast of characters to inhabit who would be bigger, grander, of more weight and moment than I could ever hope to be. I studied—oh, how I studied for the part, I mean the role of being others, while at the same time striving to achieve my authentic self. I devoted hours to my exercises, far beyond the demands of even the most demanding among my coaches. The stage is a great academy; I mastered all manner of useless accomplishments: I can dance, I can fence, I can, should circumstance demand it, swing down from the rafters on a rope with a cutlass in my teeth. When I was younger I used to do a frightening fall, straight over, crash! like a pole-axed ox. For a year I took elocution lessons, at five bob a time, from a genteel old thing in black velvet and musty lace—“By a negg, Mr. Cleave, do you perhaps mean an egg?”—who at intervals in our weekly half-hours together would excuse herself and turn aside demurely to steal a swig from a naggin-bottle she kept hidden in her reticule. I did a course in ballet, stuck at it throughout a whole winter, sweating away doggedly at the barre, stared at by lumpen schoolgirls and doe-eyed ephebes of doubtful intent. I devoured improving texts. I read Stanislavski, and Bradley on tragedy and Kleist on the puppet theatre, and even double-barrelled old buffers like Granville-Barker and Beerbohm Tree on the art of acting. I sought out the most obscure treatises. I still have somewhere on my shelves Perrucci’s Dell’arte rappresentativa, premeditata ed all’improvviso—I used to roll that title around my tongue like a line from Petrarch—on seventeenth-century Venetian comedy, which I would carry about with studied aplomb, and some pages of which I even read, laboriously, with the aid of a primer. I was after nothing less than a total transformation, a making-over of all I was into a miraculous, bright new being. But it was impossible. What I desired only a god could manage—a god, or a marionette. I learned to act, that was all, which really means I learned to act convincingly the part of an actor seeming not to act. It brought me no nearer to that exalted metamorphosis I had so hoped to achieve. The self-made man has no solid ground to stand on. He who pulls himself up by his bootstraps is in a permanent state of somersault, and in his ear always is the world’s laughter as, look! there he goes again, arse over tip. I had come from nowhere, and now at last, through Lydia, I had arrived at the centre of what seemed to be somewhere. I was compelled to invent, of course, to elaborate on myself, for how could I expect to be accepted for what I merely was in the exotic new accommodation she was offering me?