If you could not afford a ticket, space would be made for you anyway. He did not want to work it out systematically, philosophically. He wanted to make it. He wanted to make it appear on a stage, like a magic trick that suddenly made everything around it the illusion. There was your salvation, wretched of the earth: the only life is in Jesus Christ, and you have to be destroyed to know it. Watch the brightly colored mannequins on the stage and you will see The Way.
“Christopher Newman is the name of the character you are playing in The American.” Sir Edwin spoke calmly but firmly to Charles, who had suddenly realized what an abyss lay between rehearsal and performance, and who was consequently experiencing the last condition he thought he would ever feel, that of “stage fright.” He had somehow convinced or duped himself, via his own obscure speeches to the company, into thinking something was at stake that had never been at stake before, and was going to pieces. “You are like him in many ways, perhaps too many ways: Newman could have been your grandfather—”
“The chronology isn’t quite right — more like a much older brother of Father’s, or a half-brother from an earlier marriage.”
“And while your diligence in constructing a biography of Newman that would have pleased Stanislavsky in the early years of the Moscow Art Theater is remarkable and laudable, it would not have much impressed the Stanislavsky of today, now that the idea that it can all be worked out in advance of the actor appearing on the stage and moving about has been repudiated as being of little avail when the actor does in fact appear on the stage and move about — repudiated as being an actual and frustratingly burdensome hindrance. The tone and volume of your voice, the manner of your accommodation of the other actors onstage with him, the nature and timing of your gestures and the effect the properties you handle has on you — this is as you have tirelessly and perhaps tiresomely noted is what matters, and is the means by which Christopher Newman might be located and animated. You are to spend no more time on thought, but quickly and quietly enter into what is to be done, whether you are James’s Newman, Shakespeare’s Romeo, or Strindberg’s Arkenholz. If you insist in your panic on illustrating your speeches to make sure everyone understands, you will, I assure you, vanish from the stage. It is a magic trick, from which anti-magic will spring. You are a big, tough Christian.” Sir Edwin was now, inexplicably, speaking with a Russian accent. Charles supposed it was because they had been talking about Stanislavsky. “You are at home in world.”
“Do you mean me or Newman?”
Sir Edwin waved his hands in disgust. “I dun’t care which one. You must be at home in world or we will bore audience to greatest disgust they can endure without throwing rotten vegetables at you. You must be, can only be, who you are. What does Polonius say to you, whoever you are, you ridiculous boy. ‘To thine own self be true. And it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false.’” He had reverted to stage English for this quotation and waved off Charles’s certain question as to why he was talking about Hamlet all of a sudden.
“I understand that,” Charles said, “but I can only play such a man as a cartoon.”
“You can only be self as if you are cartoon.”
“Yes.”
Sir Edwin produced a notebook and asked Charles to read out a marked passage.
“‘He was not given, as a general thing, to anticipating danger, or forecasting disaster, and he had no social tremors. He was not timid and he was not impudent. He felt too kindly toward himself to be the one, and too good-naturedly toward the rest of the world to be the other. But his native shrewdness sometimes placed his ease of temper at its mercy; with every disposition to take things simply, it was obliged to perceive that some things were not so simple as others. He felt as one does in missing a step, in an ascent, where one expected to find it.’”
Sir Edwin clapped his hands and stood up from his favorite seat in the balcony. He suggested loudly that if Charles moved about the stage as if both timid and impudent, such behavior would be tiresome for an audience and finally unendurable. It would be his own fault because he could not or would not get over himself and simply be himself.
“You are actor,” said Sir Edwin. “Act.”
“I do not have this character within me. I would be perpetrating a ridiculous fraud upon our audience if I pretended I did. And whether or not they find my honesty tiresome, as you say, I do not care.”
“Stop whining and fretting and complenning and do what you must do.”
“I am not whining and fretting and—”
Sir Edwin shot an arm out from beneath his cloak and silenced Charles: If he was this certain kind of very particular fraud, why then not simply admit it? Why not accept himself for what he was and have the courage of his convictions? If he was a fraud then why could he not say so to the people who mattered, the ones who were paying good money to hear what he had to say? If he was a fraud he should stand there and defraud them all, not whimper to his fellow infants.
“I am not whimpering.”
“You are whimpering coward, Charles!”
“Do not call me a coward.”
“Why! Iz not truth?”
“Is not hull truth,” Charles mimicked faintly.
“You are coward. You say it many times yourself!”
“When I say that I mean something else entirely.”
Sir Edwin swirled his cloak around himself as if he were waltzing with it. He made a grand gesture suggesting tragedy, then asked Charles if he did not know, could not tell, the difference between someone standing before him and earnestly trying to pass himself off as something he clearly was not, and an actor doing the very same thing.
“If you cannot, you are hupliss.”