I'll Drown My Book
Foreword — This short story is based on the radio episode ‘Conscientious Objector’ in the Radio Three series ‘Our Fathers’ War’ written and performed by Michael Goldfarb about his professor Meredith Dallas. The scene which makes up most of this story and information about his professor all come from that episode and I borrow a few phrases from it as well. So if you enjoy this, give it a listen!
My professor, Morgan Dawson, was not only the man who taught me how to act but the man who taught me how to be a man, though he never mentioned a word to that effect. One memory of him stands out, still clear if not slightly distorted from all the times I plucked it out and polished it to imperfection.
The Kent State Massacre had shut down our production of The Tempest. America was in a crisis of identity. It seemed like the stories of our fathers that had formed the basis for our world had been torn asunder and we were left suspended, desperately trying to decide how to stay in the air before the inevitable fall. Instead of the production, we all crowded into Dawson’s apartment, to read aloud The Tempest.
It came around to Act V. We’d been going for some time and though I was enjoying it, I partly wished for it to be over. The magic was lost without the stage and costumes, us packed in the dingy living room. Then came time for Prospero to renounce his magic. Dawson, who had so far only been watching, acquiesced to demands to join in. He stood up and someone passed him the script. Dawson was tall, well-built despite the disforming effect of age. To see him stand with such authority, it was perhaps surprising he wasn’t a veteran. With his greying beard, uncombed mat of hair and intense eyes, he fit the role of Prospero well.
He had once been on the precipice of a promising acting career until he lost his words during Hamlet, right at the moment when Claudis laments his words flying up as his thoughts remain below. With that, Dawson also lost his heart for acting. He never performed professionally again. To enthusiastic, if not a bit conceited—though to be an actor, one must be at least a little conceited—drama students, this downfall was incomprehensible. Only now do I wonder if his time in prison had a hand in his decision. He’d been a conscientious objector to WWII and been locked up for eighteen months for it, many of those spent in solitary confinement.
I had visited him earlier that week, ostensibly to ask how I might best embody the role of Ariel, but really I was fishing for praise. He’d said during rehearsal that I’d been doing an ‘excellent job,’ which may not seem unusual for a drama teacher, but for him it was. He was not quick to give praise and wasn’t particularly forthcoming with it in that meeting, though we did have a good discussion on The Tempest’s place within Shakespeare’s oeuvre.
Pushing my luck, I asked him if he had any advice on making a career of acting. He smiled slightly, a worn, cynical smile.
He didn’t have any advice on that.
“I’ll tell you something though,” he said. “A person wakes up one day and realises they could have done something with their life. If only they had seized it. They could have been something. Life could have been a wondrous thing. Every day could have been glorious. If only, if only, that person will say to themselves. And that moment will happen to everyone, either rich and famous or just a man off the streets. But once you accept this moment…” He grasped his fist and let go, but I couldn’t tell if this was to emphasise or illustrate his point.
His words disturbed me. Though that night, a little drunk and merry, I dismissed his fatalism as the melancholy of an old man whose moment had passed. I respected him, yes, but not more than I respected myself.
When he stood up to read, there was tangible excitement in the room. He paused for a moment, the dim light and press of the students’ reverence casting an almost mystical atmosphere about him. Dawson started without announcement. The words spoken with such verisimilitude that they melted into the truth.
“I have bedimmed the noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, and ’twixt the green sea.”
He glanced only once at the script, then did not look at it again.
“The pine and cedar; graves at my command have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth by my so potent art. But this rough magic I here abjure.”
He seemed to be looking into a world beyond the world. Before us, without stage, actors or paying audience, was Prospero, splendid in magic robes. There was the true, rare art of acting. It was a flash of brilliance which leaves you hollow in its wake. I knew I could never compare. The thing I’d staked my worth upon, the ultimate end upon which the meaning of my life depended, was revealed to be futile. I was good at acting, perhaps, but not good enough. I’d been mistaken to think that greatness was promised to me, because there was nothing within me capable of developing into greatness. And that, in the end, was a mercy. Even greatness is just a mask for emptiness; at least the gap between mediocrity and emptiness is easier to bear. Perhaps I should have hated Dawson for making me realise that, but in that moment, I loved him.
“I’ll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound, I’ll drown my book.”
The resonance of that harsh ending consonant has haunted me since, its rich tone undiminished by the passing of the decades. At Dawson’s funeral, that final sound repeated with each thunder of raindrops on my umbrella as I watched his coffin being lowered into the ground.