Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_r_00690

1537-9477

William Davies King,

Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research

BOOK REVIEWED: Wallace Shawn, Sleeping among Sheep under a Starry Sky: Essays 1985–2021. London: Europa Editions. 2022.I think it’s acceptable for me to reveal that years ago I was contacted by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to offer my opinion whether I thought Wallace Shawn deserved to be awarded a “so-called genius grant,” as they are often so called. I had written a book about his plays, so they probably expected me to support the idea, as I fervently did. Shawn is undoubtedly ingenious—an innovator, hard to categorize, who has found peculiar and often profound ways of knowing the world. When I look back at my letter, I am convinced again. Maybe I should have used boldface.Shawn did not then or ever (so far) get that award, though he has received others. But the MacArthur is so munificent a gift, such a kiss of cash, that it would have been instructive to see how he would handle it. Wealth is an issue (?), a motif (?), a target (?), definitely a puzzle for him. Would he find a way to give half a million dollars away, and if so, to whom? Would he absorb it into the antic rationale of being a radical thinker/silly figure/unleashed dramatist, or let it accumulate interest, as it inevitably would, while he would stew? How would a (well-called) genius who knows he has had such conspicuous advantages in life absorb yet more advantage?The insistent theme of Shawn’s whole writing career derives from his knowing how blessed he has been since birth. He reverts again and again to the gift of his childhood and education (“I am virtually an experiment in receiving the most encouraging upbringing possible”), and the realization by the age of five that every creative and self-expressive opportunity was available to him in an environment that was “glowing with beautiful expectations.” He lived in a world established by The New Yorker, which his father edited and his mother in every way espoused. Wispy-haired gentlemen uttered the unutterable genius of Beethoven in his parents’ living room while Shawn and his composer brother Allen prepared puppet plays in the bedroom, on the way to Putney, Harvard, Oxford, and the school of whatnot. Paradise Lost was the apt subject of one of those bedroom puppet plays, because the greatest gift he received from that Edenic childhood was a freedom to step out of the garden with his creativity intact. What other space, what other art, might be a living room for him?Shawn would retain, from that blessed beginning, ample wit and a measure of wisdom, also an awareness that he had the rare opportunity—and privilege—to rip a new asshole in complacent art appreciation and liberal reformist politics. He wrote uncomfortable plays that would kick at the pricks, plays like Marie and Bruce (1979) and Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985), and eventually, in essay form, he would inscribe intensely reasoned assaults on the self-righteousness and complacency of the empowered. Always a portion of his harsh critique has been aimed at the mirror where he sees evidence of his complicity with the powers that oppress. To this day, he decries the ingrained self-satisfaction he observes in intellectuals and artists of his kind, even as he proves through his strenuous, self-hating sallies (in plays, speeches, and essays) that he is anything but.“Anything But” might work as a subtitle to Sleeping among Sheep under a Starry Sky, the most recent collection of his writings as an advocate and activist. The author of this book is anything but somnolent and far more awake than “woke.” He’s like that snarling alarm clock that tells you it is time to get ready for work, again and again, echoing itself even as it bores into your dozing brain, insisting this is the moment of “Or else!” The book consists of fourteen pieces, eleven of which were previously published in Essays (2009), and a long one was published as a booklet called Night Thoughts (2017). One essay, “Why I Call Myself a Socialist,” which began as a talk at a 2016 conference, has not been previously published, and the other new item, “Breakfast Table with Jewish Newsletters,” was published in 2021 in the online edition of The Nation, drawing some of its material from a few other writings in Essays. Thus, for the dedicated Shawn enthusiast, there is little that is new in this book beyond its typically eloquent Introduction, though a note points out that he has taken this opportunity to “fix things that seemed repetitious, illogical, mistaken, garbled, whatever.” Over his whole career, Shawn is insistent on logic, relentless on garble, resistant to whatever palls, and ever anxious about mistakes, but repetition is his bugaboo.How can you not be Wally Shawn, if that is the guilt you happen to grind and the grist you professionally mill? The figure he sees in his mirror is another wonderfully inconvenient gift: his distinctive body and voice, which have led, by my count, to four hundred and sixty-six listings as actor on IMDb, maybe more by now. He has matched credit and credibility several times, notably in My Dinner with Andre (1981), Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), and A Master Builder (2013), but mostly he is the available joke about not being … some Hollywood man or about the ineffectual fact of being brainy or educated or … able to put two words together. He gets to seem a joke—the “homunculus” from Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1978), the hapless high school teacher in Clueless (1995), Vizzini in The Princess Bride (1987)—even as he warns us readers to get serious, or else. Character actors get used to pushing the same button again and again, and in essay form Shawn has developed a similar niche. In prose and on screen, he knows his brand, which is this odd paradox of Jeremiah and a toy dinosaur. He also knows he is stuck in a repetition of this conundrum, and, like Marcel Marceau, he palpates the imaginary box, which we have collectively imagined for his use, because if he got “out,” he’d be invisible, and broke, and consumed with remorse.His screen credits will undoubtedly fade, but what about his plays and essays, which bear the stamp of his integrity? Books like this one will arrive by locomotive and postal carrier or through digital devices that will fast grow obsolete. They form a presence, a gift of sorts, which the world will contain, perhaps changed in some way, perhaps not. Shawn speaks, unfortunately, mainly to people like you, who read this journal (or at least some of it, and hey, I’m one), and who prepare our own puppet plays in the bedroom. In that mirror, we awaken (by alarm) and recall Shawn and his mirror and appreciate the irony. “Irony” is a word on the skids, because what, if anything, of what is written and read is not already appropriated and alienated and memed and horse-plopped? Irony is like the little number that used to show up in the pockets of garments that were made who knew where by who knew whom—a relic of the day when someone was actually checking the seams for us.There are blind alleys in this anthology. When Shawn talks to Noam Chomsky, we wonder why we are not just reading Chomsky? When he interviews Mark Strand for The Paris Review, we recall that Strand previously interviewed Shawn for The Paris Review and go off to reread that instead. When Shawn prefaces some reissue of a weird old play or four, you get it that he is trying to retrace his pathway to an old sincerity. As a mouthpiece, saying what needs to be said, he resembles many (Miller, Hare, Havel), but I think he is most like Bernard Shaw, whose prefaces sometimes out-worded his plays and whose public utterances occasionally made his plays seem like afterthoughts.Shawn, like Shaw, struggles to rise above the distracting effect of his impish tendencies, which evade the doctrinaire in rhetorical ways that cannot be easily parsed, yet seem to strike gold. Shawn handles the stage well in the guise of someone who does not handle the stage well. He likes the way an anecdote will wallop a creed, more than the reverse. His prefaces, like Shaw’s, are the hairshirt (a costume any ninety-nine seat theatre can run up in a minute) that stages the penance well (choirs of assent, mugshots of dissent—these take time, training, rehearsal), while thrusting the cultural cold sore into print. What does not come off well gets noticed in Shawn’s viewfinder, and in the periphery he scopes the alternatives. Nowhere, nohow can Shawn’s plays be contorted into the contrarian jocularity of Shaw’s, nor can they prop the agitation of Brecht’s. But the prefaces themselves fall back always on the puzzle of being born of William and Cecille Shawn, those perfectly nice, not so amicable, perfectly open-minded though blinkered, perfectly established but discontent, perfectly American yet diasporan parents. As a genius, what do you do with that gift?