I shall perhaps slowly accustom myself to my wife’s probably lengthy stay in a nearby rehabilitation facility, but after sixty-two years of common life the separation seems weird and unsettling. Geriatric problems are often by their very nature disturbing, disorienting. Our external social lives have largely consisted of attendance of musical events and the cinema or theater, both highly “social” in character. I was able to continue it this weekend, after a fashion. Bill and Anne Charrier have been in town. Bill is a former student from much earlier days (Class of 1969), retired after a long and successful business career, and a prominent booster of undergraduate theater at Princeton. The Charriers became personal friends of ours over the years, mainly through a shared devotion to Dante, and last weekend they invited me for dinner and a night at our student playhouse, Theatre Intime. Joan was of course in hospital. We went to see a rather wild comedy, Ken Ludwig’s The Game’s Afoot, in a student production. It has a subtitle: Holmes for the Holiday. I take the following summary from an on-line source: It is Christmas Eve, 1936. William Gillette, an actor famous for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, has invited his fellow cast-members to his Connecticut castle for a weekend of revelry. But when one of the guests is stabbed to death, the festivities in this isolated house of tricks and mirrors quickly turn dangerous. Then it’s up to Gillette himself, as he assumes the persona of his beloved Holmes, to track down the killer before the next victim appears. This glittering whodunit has murder, infidelity, wit, and surprises—something for everyone. I found it somehow significant that the play was set in 1936, the year of my birth. Go figure.
I suppose I would characterize this play as a farce, but a rather “meta” one. I use this term in its popular literary sense, pointing to a recurrent and possibly significant allusiveness, in this instance directed to works in the standard English literary canon. I deduce that its author, Ken Ludwig, was an English major. The dialogue is laced with allusions, at least some of them significant, to canonical English literature. These allusions are often joking. The primary source is Shakespeare, and little Shakespeare jokelettes appeared now and then.
The word-fun starts with the title, the phrase “the game’s afoot”. Hard-core readers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may recall that Sherlock Holmes does indeed say that “the game’s afoot”, but in Ludwig’s play there are several games afoot and many feet agaming. Sherlock found the phrase in Shakespeare, and in no less famous a passage than the “patriotic oration” in Henry V (“Once more unto the breach, dear friends…”) First of all, the play is historical, or semi-historical. The main character, William Gillette, was prominent on the American theater scene between the Wars. He was a slightly odd duck, who did indeed build himself a castle on the Connecticut River. I myself have a very slight history with Gillette, as he featured in a graduate seminar I took with Alan Downer, a man who seemed to know everything about the history of the American theater. Of course I cannot for the life of me remember what Downer said about Gillette.
The student actors were of course amateurs and a couple of the more important ones amateurish, if you grasp my distinction. So the play’s intrinsic sparkle was rather intermittent, as though there were a couple of malfunctioning bulbs in a chain of Christmas lights. But it was still full of energy, surprises, and good laugh lines. The “mystery” aspect of it was less gripping than the stage high-jinks, but all was received generously by a happy audience. I was very glad to have been included in the evening.
On the domestic front I now need to manage the protocols of nearly solitary living for a spell. After a blitzkrieg of efficient organization and planning Katy has had to go back to the reality of her important job as head of the Getty Foundation and her responsibilities in Los Angeles. But Luke, who will be returning from Sri Lanka in less than two weeks now, will be able to spend some time here in August, while Richard, who has invested many hours here in the last couple of weeks, pursues a project in South Africa. How lucky we have been in our offspring. As the psalmist says, “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows in the hands of the mighty, so are children of youth.” Or of middle age, so far as that goes. The daily aches and pains of old age, as also its more severe blows such as those that Joan and I now have both experienced, are part and parcel of the slings and arrows of outrages fortune, otherwise known as the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. These thousand natural shocks are part of the universal inheritance of the human species. One can embrace them or rail against them. But avoid them one cannot. Yet the gift of children who are “as arrows in the hands of the mighty” is a blessing that can never be fully earned. So I end by acknowledging our three wonderful children, Richard Arthur Fleming, Katherine Elizabeth Fleming, and Luke Owles Fleming.
