by Alena Deerwater
Unless you feel it, you will never achieve it.
If it doesn’t flow from your soul
with natural easy power
your listeners will not believe it.
You can sit down and paste phrases together by the hour.
Cook up a little stew from others’ feasts;
you can blow up miserable flames
from your heap of ashes
that will amaze children and monkeys –
if such little triumphs please your tastes –
but you’ll never move others, heart to heart,
unless your speech comes from your own
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
These words found me when I was an adolescent. Hauntingly familiar even then.
Perhaps my maggid, my beloved spirit-guide, whispered them in my ear before I gasped my way into this world of buzzing electricity and towering flat cement. On the way home from the hospital, after my mother recovered from her twilight sleep, trees sang me a welcome along with the clouds and sun, with the rotating green-growing earth out the car window. Oh, this is home. Now I feel it.
Perhaps I remember the words from the first time I saw Faust . . .
Fourth row center.
Royal Shakespeare Company
Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
Summer of 1968.
I am nine years old.
Young, I know. But I am the baby of the Weil clan, and we are on our one and only family trip to Europe. Before the show, we eat at the famed pub and restaurant double named The Black Swan and the Dirty Duck. The actors eat here too, according to my dad and the guide books. I am entranced by the sign with a different name on each side; one of dark grace, the other raunchy humor. I order prawns. My legs swing in gleeful anticipation.
I sit next to my mom in the plush red seats of the theater, holding her hand throughout the play I barely understand. Mesmerized. Something about soul and the devil. He’s right there in front of me on stage, the devil, coming to collect the soul of this man. The man wanted something, and he sold his soul to get it. Now he doesn’t want to give it up.
“Mommy, I don’t feel good.”
“Shhhh, honey. It’s almost over. You’ve been such a good girl. Shhhh.”
“Mommy. . . .”
“It’s the final soliloquy. When that man stops talking, people will clap and we can go. Now hush.”
I look up at the man standing in the light. We seem to be overhearing an impassioned yet private moment of revelation.
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
She turns to look at me.
“Now?”
I nod. Afraid to open my mouth.
My mother bravely crawls us over the knees and toes, past faces within spitting range of the monologing actor. All I remember after that is the sound of my saddle shoes hitting the hard floor and bouncing off the cathedral-like walls and arched ceiling as we run through the grand entrance hall in search of the nearest loo. And, later, the crisp air calming me through the open car window. And, later still, my older sisters’ merciless teasing whenever we encounter prawns on a menu.
* * *
1975.
Goethe’s words return.
Sixteen, and I am in love – with acting
Scene: Hathaway Brown School for young ladies, Shaker Heights, Ohio.
We are reading Goethe’s Faust in History of Theater class. My cohorts and I lug the two hardbound volumes of Norton’s collection of every-important-play-ever-written from lockers to classroom and back, again and again. We should get a P.E. credit for this labor.
Our teacher, Sandy Barker, is the mistress of my enchantment. She actually lived in England. Studied Shakespeare at Oxford. Was getting a PhD. But her mother got sick, and Sandy as Dutiful Daughter returned to the States. So for this brief interlude in her blossoming career, she is teaching us. Wow. From her I take English Literature, and Theater, and Acting, and she directs me in the school plays. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was the first: “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.”
One winter afternoon, near the end of the first volume of Norton, we encounter Faust. As usual, Sandy has us take turns reading the play aloud. Many of my classmates obligingly drone rather than step into the characters. The radiators in these old, second story rooms quietly hiss and moan as they struggle to overheat the stifling air. Mine is not the only head occasionally nodding among the voices chanting like monks. Suddenly, a stanza erupts into a deep, bold, three-dimensional print floating before my eyes. The rest of the page slides out of focus, like a dream.
Unless you feel it, you will never achieve it.
I am startled by my own unnamed beliefs about acting speaking to me.
If it doesn’t flow from your soul
with natural easy power
your listeners will not believe it.
These lines feel like my own words that I haven’t yet formed.
You can sit down and paste phrases together by the hour.
Cook up a little stew from others’ feasts;
Or am I remembering them.
you can blow up miserable flames
from your heap of ashes
that will amaze children and monkeys –
if such little triumphs please your tastes –
No. Such little triumphs don’t please me.
but you’ll never move others, heart to heart,
unless your speech comes from your own heart.
It does. It does. I swear it all comes from my heart.
Later that same school year, I hand write Goethe’s words meticulously with pen and ink on the final page of my personal poetry anthology.
Julie Nunlist insists on calling this class Enjoyment of Poetry; her matriarchal predecessors had bored poetic drills of standardized verse into young girls’ minds and named it Appreciation of Poetry. Julie Nunlist, with her uncoiffed long gray hair is anything but boring and standardized. She wears pants at a time in the 70s when every other female teacher wears skirts. We are all stunned and amazed the single time she zips into a skirt, wears stockings and rolls her free-flowing locks into a simple severe bun. This costume is donned for one weekend to play the part of the principal who undoes the dangerous heroine in The Prime of Jean Brodie.
Ms. Nunlist doesn’t even seem to be teaching us. She simply brings in her favorite poems, reads them aloud, and invites us to go on a treasure hunt for our own favorites.
Shyness sits among the desks with attached chairs. We don’t know how to behave in an open classroom: there’s nothing to mimic or rebel against.
Julie continues to read aloud. No droning here. True, rare, enjoyment.
By spring, poems skip into the classroom: from children’s books, plays, magazines, anthologies, record album covers. Every stanza is equally respected and honored no matter the source. We read aloud. We listen. We talk about whatever comes up. We are given space to fall in love with poetry. We are given permission to trust our own taste. A precursor, I assume to “finding one’s voice” that is such the rage among adult women decades later.
Just the semester before, my entire English class got D’s and F’s on Sandy Barker’s final exam about dissecting verse. I don’t remember if that was before or after she threw a dictionary across the circle of desks at my best friend for talking back.
It is time to begin my take home final for Julie Nunlist.
My hand-drawn, hand-printed, personally-selected poetry anthology.
I sit away from the hustle of the rest of the house in my mom’s art room.
It takes weeks.
And I do enjoy it.
Julie aptly named the class.
She secretly has each of our anthologies spiral bound. A new technology back then.
Mine still sits on my shelf.
A home for Goethe’s words, and others who have whispered in my ear.
Senior year.
From Julie Nunlist I take Music Composition. That final spring, she has the music we wrote in private little rooms of our own, alone with only a piano and pencil and paper, performed by students from the Cleveland Institute of Music. An Oboe and clarinet sing in a dialoguing duet I created in my imagination and it is manifest.
That same spring, the now married Sandy Barker Sokol circles up her devotees. She returned to England only once, to take us to see eight plays in six days and show her proteges off to her old friends in a pub. The PhD is abandoned. For her final performance before sending us out into the world, Sandy plays fortune teller.
“You, Elaine, are extremely talented.”
I glow under her sharp praise.
“But you don’t have what it takes to make it…”
“You are too soft for the Theater,” she continues. “Too nice. You’d never survive the cattle calls.” And she’s off telling the engrossing tale of her experiences auditioning in New York.
* * *
You don’t have what it takes to make it.
You don’t have what it takes to make it.
You don’t have what it takes to make it.
How many times have those words echoed through my head, through my life?
And I chose to listen.
Sitting here, at fifty-one, in Mendocino.
Writing this.
I am stumped.
I’ve been writing freely, with enjoyment when I hit this memory, these words of anti-affirmation, and I can’t write forward for days. I can loop back and rewrite till the piece is in shreds but I cannot go forward.
Call on Julie.
Julie Nunlist.
The teacher I didn’t follow blindly but who gave me space.
Julie, who is the reason I have Goethe’s words in front of me now as I page through the worn, stained, loved anthology.
For so many years Sandy’s closing words of doom dominated.
Now I remind myself to listen to Julie and my own music, my own voice.
* * *
I have heard the echos of rumors.
Julie is finally retired and living out her dreams in a renovated barn in New Hampshire.
Sandy is divorced and married again; a principal of a private school on the east coast.
* * *
I just got it.
Sandy’s prophecy.
Not making it in THEATER.
Not life.
Goethe’s words, as I open my anthology today, speak to me again
– not of acting,
but writing.
My life.
My writing.
From my own heart.
Yes.