Bosco felt that he was more Heathcliffe than any of them, but he did not have the temerity to suggest it to this influential person who walked beside him now and who had disclosed her very essence, her most secret of secret desires, to him in their torrid passion. Although a Catholic, he didn't believe in original sin what he believed in was original guiltlessness. What was all that last night was it some of it perversion? He thought now of their actions, at what point do these actions transgress the boundaries.
He would discuss this with the Pissaro woman.
"Interesting, I think at the heart of perversion is a kind of mystery. What one conceives as norms is coercively and sometimes violently subdued. When we climax, and reflect that there was something potentially murderous in our frenzied behaviour then we come back to a virtuous reckoning of ourselves. Weighed against the good that behaviour was bad. What you deem as perversion cannot rid itself of moral taint, especially if like you, you happen to be a lapsed catholic. So the word 'perversion' is used as a term of reproach. There's a uote here somewhere...she looked out at the leafy garden with its pond and fronds, then a man appeared. A gardener. For no reason Bosco thought of Lawrence.
"Here it is..." she had pulled a book down from the book lined wall.
remark of Freud’s: ‘No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is in itself enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word perversion as a term of reproach.' "How much Freud have you read?"
"Very little."
"Take this..."
"Thanks very much...when do you want it back?"
"Oh when, you feel you have absorbed it. He did have his problems
Freud but he was a wonderful writer. So you didn't suggest to her
that you play Heathcliffe?"
"No, I didn't" he attested guiltily.
"But why not?"
Because there are proprieties to observe, you know English reserve and some things you just don't say to a well brought up girl in England, like what about you suggesting me to your father as Heathcliffe.
"Is it because she is uite a celebrity."
"No, no...I don't know. What do you think of celebrities?"
"Hmm...I have actually seen her on that television series, it's uite good isn't it?"
"It's ok. So what is your take on celebrity?" he persisted impatiently.
"Are you with her because she is a celebrity? I mean even if you did, it admit it, is not as if you are flaunting a shameful secret."
"No, I don't think with her for those reasons... I mean, falsely or not, I think of myself as a bit of a celebrity."
"Well, I think the courage you displayed in your past 'profession' is worthy of celebrity. A lot of people feel a deep shame to be drawn to celebrity and by doing so they are engaging in bottomless, demeaning humiliation...especially if they are a religious bent, far from honouring him who made us, we honour him whom we have made. And being a celebrity might be difficult for her,
Among other things, public celebrity, if you have worked hard to get it, might be an elaborate diversion from the complex, often punitive audience inside the mind. One variety of narcissism could be a diversion from another.
"Not sure I understand that."
"Well, her parents were celebrities, so you tell me."
"Yes, they were."
"...maybe this compelled her to become a celebrity herself. One variety of narcissism - being a celebrity, could be a diversion from another - of being a nobody. Some people's feeling of being a 'nobody' engenders a kind of pathology and the drive to become a celebrity could be termed a kind of pathology.
She looked at her watch. Bosco was used to the signal.
"Well look, thank you very much for the book."
"I am sure you will enjoy it."
He walked out into the South West London sunshine. He felt good, liberated. Was he paying to talk to a friend? Well, he wasn't paying her hardly anything, a pittance, a nominal £5. It had always been like tha teven when she was practising in Harley Street. In many way he was her act of creation, her project - a wayward son she had never had. As she opened the French doors to talk to the gardener
she reflected with a uiet pride of how she had brought him out of that awful drug ridden, alcohol sodden mass. Years lost, a tragedy,
but that is the essence of tragedy, it is waste, she reflected.
"Good morning. Beautiful day."
"Indeed Madam, indeed.
I think he will be fine, he has a good brain, and she bent down to smell the petunias.
All the way home he was full of what he would say to her.
But I am more Heathcliffe than any of them. I mean I may have been reformed by the Pissaro woman but I am still, au fond a rake, I still simmer with violence which is this side of gratuitous when goaded. There is sizable element of cruelty lurking in me. At times I can be curt and rude, I like swearing, the Norse plosives, like bullets of the tongue, give me great satisfaction. And you have witnessed that I can be explosive at times.
As to Heathcliffe's murderous type revenge, well, I am not a deranged epistemologist, ie I don't assess the knowledge that I have actually been hurt or humiliated and then stealthily enact revenge. Still I am aware that the revenger, the person who is determined to get his own back, has to be a skilled (and a deranged) epistemologist; for he/she deals in evidence and prediction.
But I do understand how Revenge sic...yes, I intend the scary, spooky, weird cap', Revenge is essentially aesthetic because it has to be composed, staged and performed. .For the plot to ‘work’, it has to be thought out, and so it entails both deferring gratification and a certain conscientiousness. And I can bring that into the playing of Heathcliffe.
You see I full understand how Heathcliffe is a disturbing commentary on – or parody of – many of our most cherished values. I understand that psychology in Heathcliffe, and in my playing of him I am not going to confuse him with a Hamlet type revenge, Prompted as he is to revenge by heaven and hell.
Look Letetia, I know at the moment I am like some whore unpacking my heart with words but I was born to play Heathcliffe
You didn't see it but didn't I play Iago at RADA and did so with admirable intensity...that was the professors' at RADA's view. Iago's lust for revenge is embedded in me.
Remember, remember when you gave me the book Wuthering Heights in that pub in Whitehaven when we were on tour. Do you remember we sat there listening to Kate Bush singing Wuthering Heights again and again. Yes we were in the 70s, that condemned era, condemned to look back on the 60s, it was the anodyne Paul McCartney and Wings instead of the exotica of the Marashishi, Ravi Shankar and sitars All you said to me was 'take it, read it, it is fine' that's what my Dad thinks too,
that's the word he used 'fine'.
Well, it is not fine, every relationship in the Brontes oeuvre
is sado masochistic. I could help your Dad. Those Bronte girls were provincials who did not want realist solutions to problems.in their fiction. So they reached back to fairy tale and Gothic romance. You know if you can't unpick a problem there is always magical devices."
"You are sounding like a one man world literature department again."
"OK, OK, but Take Jane Eyre, If you can’t get Jane back to Rochester in a convincing way, you can always have her hear his plaintive cry on the wind. Yes, throw in a bit of telepathy. And if mad Bertha stands in the way of their union, you can topple her from the burning rooftop in an agreeably sadistic Gothic cameo. Think of the rage that makes a character take a poker to a child a la Heathcliffe. Think of Jane Eyre where Bertha is permitted to maim, blind and disfigure Rochester. It's sado masochism to its fingertips. I really could...help your Dad with the interpretation. I really could.
You probably think me as some kind of upstart, well I am not, nor am I an arriviste, or a parvenu, but I am like Heathcliffe, nouveau riche.
Look Letetia, why don't you just have word with your Dad about me playing Heathcliffe. It could be a novel piece of casting someone totally new to the 'business'
is cast as ...yes...that famous ex athlete will bring his pugnacious attributes to...
Why don't you have a word with him, explain to him, after all I was born to a very working class family in fairly abject poverty in Dublin, I am not as was Heathcliffe one of the 'gens de voyage' tribes but because of my impoverished upbringing it would be very easy to assimilate someone from an early age who was that deprived and was hounded from 'home' to home in their brightly painted Caravan.
Indeed my mothers 'lost' me one day in O Connel Street in Dublin when I was very young child, and forever since the thought has pinged my brain, like some flight recorder, what if? what if ? she had never found me. I too could have been a Heathcliffe too, an unwashed, ragamuffin orphan.
There was a message on the answer machine when he got back to Barnes. It was her, asking her to ring when he got in and by the way Dad cast Ken Richards as Heathcliffe....what do you think?
What do I think? What do I think...no, that the way that Vince behaved. Keep you fucking dignity in the face of another sco ....well thank you for that. Interesting. Look, we will let you know. Thanks for coming along." Just more of the bottomless fucking humiliation that is acting. It makes you suicidal.
If only I had said those things to her...oh fuck it...
I should have said all that to her but I didn't. Meek, mild, spineless, gutless bastard.
He flopped hopelessly into a chair.
"Well, there is always that audition coming up for Uncle Vanya
Now where is that revolver, I put it somewhere."
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