The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel Read Free Page B

egocentric, short-tempered, principled but chronically impulsive bastard. He is a flawed hero, at best, who succeeds then fails as a result of his unique personality. Unable to find a solid self upon which to rely, he ricochets from crisis to crisis, never quiteseeing how he has caused the crisis until it is too late, and then flying so far to the opposite extreme in a doomed effort to repair his mistakes that he inevitably makes things still worse. This description also fits my father, Arthur Edward Harold Phillips.
    In American literature and movies, the reigning Jew is still the meek scholar or the mild family man, although I’ve lately noticed a growing cinematic population of tough Jews, surprising hero soldiers, rebels, kickers of Nazi ass, the occasional gangster. But the Anglophilic, artsy, bohemian Jew is a rarer bird, assimilating into the Gentile world not from any desire to blend in but because he is too florid to prune himself to fit available Jewish types. This, somewhat, was my father: not bookish, as Jews in his day were meant to be, but flamboyantly literary. Not self-hating, but self-creating. Not interested in himself as a Jew at all, but by no means interested in anonymity.
    His imprisonments before the final one seemed even—sometimes—to amuse him, or at least he was so intent on playing out his created character that he would not let on to any disappointment at being convicted of a crime. He refused, at least in front of me, to take any of it seriously, as if it somehow had nothing to do with him. It was only much later that he ever indulged an urge to blame someone else, to resent or regret his life. A psychiatrist would (and did) perceive in this a diagnosable medical disorder. In older, more romantic days, though, it would have been a heroic attitude or the sign of a profoundly philosophical character. He was able to keep it up until that last sentence, when they snatched most of his life away.
    To this day, I do not know the extent of my father’s crimes or even most of his employers (clients, in his parlance). I know everything he was convicted of, some of which he admitted to, some of which he stubbornly denied in private even when he had pleaded guilty. He tended to downplay the seriousness of his offenses. “It’s really a question of misvaluation, an uneven distribution of knowledge between buyer and seller, just a market inefficiency, and so I’m going to jail,” he told me. This was in the case of a collector at auction paying more for a drawing than it might otherwise have been worth because my father had added a signature and a long, very supportive, typed andaged provenance, transubstantiating the small picture, temporarily, from anonymity to Rembrandtivity.
    When pompously asked if he had anything to say for himself before sentencing, my father, putting on a good show, reminded the court that he hadn’t drawn it, only signed it. “That hardly speaks in your favor,” lectured the judge, whom I, at thirteen, instinctively disliked, a puckered school-principal type, later to appear in various guises in my novels. “At least drawing it would mean you’d made something of value.”
    “No,” my father rebuked the judge. “Your Honor, I have to object to that. The drawing was, and now again is, without much value. While it supported belief, thanks to me, its value swelled a thousand-fold, and people loved it a thousand times more. Punish me for doing it badly: all right. For getting caught: fine. For failing the world: guilty. But don’t say I didn’t make something!” I applauded, expecting others would join me. If it had been a movie, the courtroom would have shaken with cheers that swallowed the limp gavel’s tapping, and some new evidence or technicality would have bubbled up to the attention of counsel.
    “Without parole,” concluded the judge. That was 1977.
    Truly criminal people, in my father’s view, were men like the Rembrandt Research Project, a squad of Dutch