FATHER (as Socrates): And then there are so many of me to be bored and just one of you. I’ve sometimes wished I hadn’t been quite so enthusiastic about multiplying myself.
SON (wincing from a crick in the neck got from swiveling his head rapidly from portrait to portrait): Serves you right! Two hundred and thirty-seven self-portraits!
FATHER: Actually there are about 450, but the others are put away.
SON: Good Lord! Are they alive too?
FATHER: Well, yes, in an imprisoned drugged sort of way . . . (From various cabinets and drawers comes a low but tumultuous groaning and muttering.)
SON (rushing out of the studio into the living room in a sudden spasm of terror which he tries to conceal by speaking loudly and contemptuously): What colossal vanity! Four hundred and fifty self-portraits! What narcissism!
FATHER (from a full-length painting of King Lear over the fireplace): I don’t think it was vanity, son, not chiefly. All my life I was used to making up my face and getting into costume. Spending half an hour at it, or if there were something special like a beard (portrait touches its long white one with wrinkle-painted fingers) an hour or more. When I retired from the stage, I still had the make-up habit, the itch to work my face over. I took it out in doing self-portraits. It was as simple as that.
SON: I might have known you’d have an innocent fine-sounding explanation. You always did.
FATHER: In an average acting year I made myself up at least 250 times. So even 237 self-portraits are less than a year at the dressing-room table, and 450 less than two years.
SON: You’d never have been able to do so many portraits except you cheated. You worked from photographs and life-masks of yourself.
FATHER (self-painted as Leonardo da Vinci): Son, great artists have been cheating that way for five thousand years.
SON: All right, all right!
FATHER (being very fair about it): I’ll admit that in addition the self-portraits let me relive my triumphs and keep up the illusion I was still acting.
SON (cruelly): You never stopped! On the stage or off you were always acting.
FATHER (as Moses): That’s hardly just. I never talked a great deal. I was never domineering and (pointedly) I never ranted.
SON (stung): That’s right—offstage you preferred the quiet starring roles to the windy ones. Your favorite was a sickeningly noble, serene, infallible, pipe-smoking older hero—a modern Brutus, a worldly Christ, a less folksy Will Rogers. But no matter how restrained your offstage characterizations, you managed to stay stage center.
FATHER (shrugging pen-and-ink shoulders): Laymen always accuse actors of acting. Because we can portray genuine emotion, we’re supposed to be unable to feel it. It’s the oldest charge made against us.
SON: And it’s true!
FATHER (very kindly, from a jaunty portrait of Cyrano de Bergerac): My child, I do believe you’re jealous of me.
SON (pacing and waving his arms): Certainly I am! What son wouldn’t be?—surrounded, stifled, suffocated by a father disguised as all the great men who ever were or are or will be! All the great sages! All the great adventurers! All the great lovers!
FATHER (gently, from the gape-mouth of a gaunt plaster head of Lazarus lifting from a plaster grave-hole): But there’s no reason to be jealous of me any longer, son. I’m dead.
SON: You don’t act as if you were! You’re alive 237 times—450, if we count four reserve battalions. You’re all over the place!
FATHER (as Peer Gynt): Oh son, these are only poor phantoms, roused for a moment from the nightmarish waking-sleep of Hell. Only powerless ghosts ... (All the portraits cry out softly and confusedly and there comes again the muttering and groaning of the ones shut away in darkness.)
SON (overcome by another gust of terror and banging the door as he rushes out into the garden): They are not! They’re all facets of your perfection, damn you! Your miserable perfection, which you spent a lifetime polishing.
FATHER (from a gaunt-cheeked bas-relief of Don Quixote on the patio wall): Every human being believes he is perfect in his way, even the most miserable scoundrel or dreamer.
SON: Not to the degree you believed you were perfect. You practiced perfection in front of the mirror. You rehearsed it. You watched your least word and gesture and you never made a slip.
FATHER (incredulous): Did I actually seem like that to you?
SON: Seem? My God, if you knew how I prayed for you to make a mistake. Just one, just once. Make it and own up to it. But you never did.
FATHER (shaking a green-tarnished bronze head across a screen of leaves): I never suspected you felt that way. Naturally a parent pretends to his child to be a little more perfect than he actually is. To admit any of his real weaknesses would be too much like encouraging vice. He wants to be sure his child is law-abiding during the formative years—later he may be able to stand the truth. Children can’t distinguish between black and the palest shade of gray. It’s the parent’s duty to set as good an example as he can, even if he has to cover up some things and cheat a bit, until the child has mature judgment.
SON: And as a result the child is utterly crushed by this great white marble image of perfection!
FATHER: I suppose that conceivably could happen. Do you mean to tell me, son, that you didn’t know your father was as other men?—that he had every last one of their weaknesses?
SON (a hope dawning): You really mean that? You’re honestly saying . . . (Then, recovering himself.) Oh, oh, I smell another of your lily-white, high-sounding explanations coming.
FATHER (still from bronze head, which is that of Hamlet): No, son! I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I was very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I had thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. I itched to excel at everything. Because my life depended on being the best actor, I was bitterly jealous of everyone’s least accomplishments, even your own. I hid my scorn of all mankind under a mask of tolerant serenity—which I had trouble keeping in place, believe me. I lived for applause. During my last years I was bitterly resentful that ill-advised friends and greedy managers did not force me to come out of retirement and make farewell tours. I wronged your mother by lusting after other women, and myself by never having the nerve to yield to temptation—
SON: What, never?
FATHER: Well, hardly ever.
SON: Dad, that’s terrific!
FATHER (modestly): Well, inspired by the great characters I portray, I sometimes get carried away. A little of them rubs off on me.
SON (rather breathless): This puts a different complexion on everything. What a relief! Dad, I feel wonderful. (He laughs, a touch hysterically.)
FATHER: Wait, son, I did worse than that. I watched your mother’s personality fade, I watched her change into a mere adjunct of myself, and I let it happen, merely because life was a trifle easier for me that way. I watched you blunder along under a load of anxiety and guilt and I never tried to get close to you or tell you the truth about myself, which might have helped you, simply because it would have been difficult and uncomfortable for me to have done so and because I—