Night vision

CHAPTER 33

Professor Gerald Prince thrust his chin forward, and in his best upper-crust Rex Harrison voice intoned: "The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls, in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another." I hobbled to my customary spot in the back row and wondered if I'd get in trouble for not doing the homework. On the stage a young woman read Eliza Doolittle's lines as they worked their way through the final act.

When Prince told the community-college Eliza that he'd grown accustomed to her face, I believed him. He was a damn fine actor.

They wrapped up the final scene and the class applauded politely. "What is Shaw telling us in the play?" Prince asked.

"It's about abolishing the difference between the classes," said an earnest young man up front.

"Perhaps that is the result, but the mechanics of the change?"

"Language, clarity of thought and speech," said the woman next to me.

The class mumbled its agreement. They had learned something since my last visit.

"Quite so," Prince said. "The play is unapologetically didactic. Shaw sincerely cared about the language. He-"

"I don't get something," interrupted a student near me. "In the movie the professor gets the girl. Here…"

"Here, she leaves to marry Freddy Eynsford Hill," Prince said. "And why? Because Higgins is a confirmed bachelor more attached to his work than to a pretty face, even one to which he has become accustomed."

"And his mother thing," the young woman said. "Higgins was a momma's boy."

"A mother thing, indeed," Prince said. "In his notes Shaw discusses the mother as rival. As intelligent and articulate as he was, Higgins was not fully developed emotionally."

Prince looked toward the clock on the wall, nodded his head, and the students obediently closed their notebooks. I gingerly worked my way to the front. Prince was stuffing some papers into an old briefcase.

He saw me and bowed formally. "Did you fancy my reading of Higgins?"

"First rate. Much lighter fare than Edmund Tyrone. Not all that in-love-with-death stuff."

He beamed. Like trial lawyers, actors never hear too many compliments. The professor wore a checked shirt under a blue blazer with a rakish yellow ascot. His eyes were clear. "You were worried about me, weren't you? I am moved by that, Biff. Have no fear. I am sane, stable, and as happy as can be expected. As for Edmund's speech, in drama, if one looks hard enough, there is the antidote to every expressed emotion:

"' No life that breathes with human breath

Has ever truly longed for death. '"

"Good to see you so chipper. And I like the line. Shakespeare?"

"No, Alfred Tennyson."

Him again.

Prince smiled slyly. "Your policeman friend was here yesterday. He apologized for unfairly accusing me. Then he showed me printouts of someone calling himself Passion Prince chatting with Miss Rosedahl and Mrs. Fox. Some very good poetry, if you like that sort of thing, taken badly out of context. I thought I'd get a rise out of you with the reference to Tennyson."

"You did."

"The policeman said you always believed in my innocence. That means a lot to me, Biff. If there's anything I can do for you…"

Of course, there was.

I ordered an iced tea and Prince said make it two. I gave him a look.

"There's a repertory company auditioning in Lauderdale," he explained. " Inherit the Wind. The collision of blind faith with the inquisitive search for truth. It wouldn't hurt me to show up sober."

"Henry Drummond?"

"But of course. Would you care to hear his cross-examination of the self-appointed prophet, Matthew Brady?"

"Maybe later."

He looked great. The silvery hair was swept back and combed. The blazer was either new or freshly pressed, not a gravy stain in sight. Best of all, he was cold sober. He had acknowledged his problem. So few do. A doctor asks a patient how much he drinks and how often he has sex. To get the truth, multiply the former by two and divide the latter by three.

The waiter brought our broiled snapper and fried plantains. We were in a bayfront restaurant two weeks old that tried hard to achieve the dilapidated sea-shanty look. Unpainted, knotholed boards were bolted to walls of sturdy concrete block. Lobster traps and colorful buoys hung from the ceiling, and an old dinghy sat wedged on the roof, as if a hurricane deposited it there. None of that bothered me. I could even tolerate the plastic pelican on a Styrofoam piling. But the snapper had that too-late-frozen, too-early-thawed, four-day-old fishy taste.

A sad truth: it is hard to find good, fresh local fish in a city that sits on the sea. I used to visit the docks in Bayfront Park when the fishing boats came in. The fishermen would fillet yellowtail, grouper, or dolphin that had been caught an hour earlier, and an hour later, you could be home marinating the catch in pineapple juice and soy sauce while the charcoal turned white. Then the city fathers evicted the fishing boats and built a trendy plaza of shops and restaurants, where we now sat, eating last week's fish.

"What did Rodriguez want?" I asked.

"The poetry. What it might mean. I told him what it meant to Tennyson was quite different than what some warped soul might read into it."

"What did the poet mean when he wrote, 'Woman is the lesser man'?"

He smiled at me and finished the stanza:

"' And all thy passions, matched with mine,

Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.'"

What do you think it means, Biff?"

"I don't know. It contradicts most people's beliefs. Most would say that women's passions run deeper than men's, though my recent experiences would belie that."

Prince didn't seem interested in my personal life. Instead, he began the lecture. "The poem was written shortly after Tennyson's unhappy love affair with Rosa Baring. Her marriage to another man may have prompted the bittersweet imagery."

"So jealousy is the emotion."

"The poem is more complex," he continued, "and frankly, a bit whiny for my tastes. If you're looking for a theme, Tennyson's important later poetry was naturalistic and Utopian. He saw mankind's struggle as an ascent to a nobler life. His poetry hinted of evolution even before Darwin's Origin of the Species."

"Henry Drummond would approve."

"Yes, and he also wrote of evolving to a new happiness. Man was still unfinished, still evolving. Tennyson was optimistic to the end. In his last poem, 'The Dreamer,' an old man speaks to a despairing Earth, which is wailing of its destiny, 'darkened with doubts of a faith that saves, and crimson with battles, and hollow with graves.' But the poet tells the Earth that 'less will be lost than won. Whirl, and follow the sun.'"

I wanted to know more. I showed Prince the printouts from Pam's conversation of the night before.

Prince frowned. "Someone's still using my handle. Perhaps I should sue. Know any honest lawyers, or is that an oxymoron?"

I ignored the insult. "What about the poetry?"

He read part of it aloud:

"' Till back I fell and from mine arms she rose,

Glowing all over noble shame; and all

Her falser self slipt from her like a robe. '"

He considered it a moment, then said, "It's from The Princess. It was written about ten years after the lesser-man diatribe of Locksley Hall. It's Tennyson's view of feminism, women's aspirations juxtaposed against the requirements of marriage. The poem raises numerous questions about sexual identity but the answers are left somewhat open."

"Sexual identity?"

"In the beginning, the gender of the prince and princess are confused, each taking on characteristics of the opposite sex, perhaps even hermaphroditical, at least figuratively. The prince has blue eyes and hair 'of yellow ringlet, like a girl.' The princess is a dark and masculine woman. She wants to live apart from men. Her identity needs to be adjusted. At the end-"

"'Her falser self slipt from her like a robe.'"

"Right. She became womanly, he manly, but only in an androgynous way idealized by the Victorians."

I read aloud from the printout:

" ' Yet in the long years liker must they grow;

The man be more of woman, she of man.'"

"That's it," Prince said, "man into woman, woman into man."

"Would Professor Higgins agree?"

"Perhaps to the extent he believed in a relationship with a woman at all. When Eliza threatened to leave, he told her to come back for his good fellowship."

"Not very romantic," I said.

"No, not like his progenitor."

"Shaw?"

"Pygmalion."

It took me a second. "But Pygmalion wasn't real," I protested. "He was a figure from myth."

"And what was Higgins or the princess or the old man speaking to the Earth, or even Biff? Mythical characters who represent universal thoughts, common experiences. Do you remember the Metamorphoses? "

"Something from high-school biology?"

Prince grimaced. "Ovid's Latin poems, written at the time of Christ. Surely you read of Echo's ill-fated love of the selfish Narcissus, Apollo's pursuit of Daphne, and of the sculptor Pygmalion."

"I missed it in Latin," I said, thinking of Charlie Riggs, "but caught it in Classic Comics. Pygmalion carved a woman from ivory and fell in love with her."

"Galatea by name. He prayed to Aphrodite to bring her to life, and she complied. He created his beauty and willed her to live."

Now there's a sexual-identity issue for you, Tennyson. Statue into woman. Hang some rhymin' on that, Al, baby.