Somebody let me know if I'm doing wrong by this microphone.
They usually go wrong for me because I do wrong.
I've been talking with and to and about writers
and writing since I got here.
I thought in a way I would direct my reading
to them and to anybody else who may be interested in directly
in problems of writing.
And what I would do this evening is read one little passage
from Death of the Fox and then a couple
of short passages from a more recent book, just
came out last fall, called The Magic Striptease,
which is quite different.
And they were both in kind of stages of composition
at the same time and represent reactions
in a way to each other.
That is in Death of the Fox which
was written over a long period of time, I was having to--
I could have a number of voices.
I was having to try to work as an American
in our time writing about 17th century people, 16th century
people.
Seemed as I went along increasingly strange
alien and very, very interesting.
But the job was to create a kind of language which
I hadn't ordinarily used and probably would not use again
in exactly the same way.
Well, one of the things I talked to one class
about, somebody asked me in the first class I met I guess,
something about research for this book.
I told him one story which I won't burden you with,
I can give the shortened version of it,
of finding a thing by accident.
Has to do with Queen Elizabeth who
has all the biographers noted regularly in her old age
covered up the mirrors in her palaces
and has had them turned to the wall.
And this has been taken by people to mean various things.
This was in the last decade of her life.
I also found in an obscure book about Venetian trade
with England, something that the biographers hadn't noted
and nobody else had since being confirmed.
I was just guessing that the things arrived there,
that it precisely the same period of time she
ordered from Venice.
And they were so shipped.
An elaborate set of mirrors which were enormous,
the largest that had ever been made in Venice,
for her bathroom.
And the contradiction there didn't make a lot of sense
but seemed to be one I had to deal with.
The only thing I can tell you is that it turned out
to be true last year.
Finally got a letter from some Englishman
who heard they were portable things because she moved
from one palace to another.
They hadn't known what these very complicated stands
were for.
And they do know now that she got the mirrors
so this is one little thing that turned out to be true.
The reason I picked the passage out is as an example.
It's fairly short of the kind of prose
that was necessary for this other book
and kind of the level of seriousness
to compare and contrast the other things with.
One other thing.
I finally had to decide who since the characters
all the way through.
Who would say anything about this and in what context?
And it sort of developed and came along that Raleigh.
It's not really my opinion of what it all
means but his in a letter which I
imagined he wrote to his surviving
son who was very young then.
And then to be true to history I had him burn it
later on in the book so nobody will
find this imaginary letter.
But he gets on the subject of mirrors and brings this up.
The only other things you might have to know about it
is that this son was born to him.
He was quite far along in age while he
was in the tower for the first time.
And ordinarily for the most part,
his great days apparently had been over.
He refers to a wound that he received and so forth.
The son knew him as a gray haired man with a limp
from a wound and other things.
And this is his only surviving son.
He had another son on whom he lavished
a great deal of getting older.
Care and attention on that son had been killed.
He's therefore uses mirrors to talk
about how things look now and then
and from the sun's point of view in the midst of the letter
saying, think on this when I look into a mirror glass,
I see what my eyes see of myself but I can never
see what you see.
I can think of you and what you are,
remembering that you have never known me
without gray in my hair and beard, and have always known me
as a man with one stiff leg.
You have no reason to imagine that I was not
born with the wounds and scars I've received.
To me, the gray and the deepening lines of my face
are late intrusions on my property.
Impositions enforced against me.
I see them but I cannot credit them wholly and each wound is
from a date and a time.
Before I felt pain and fire and the cracking of my bone,
I could run and dance as well as most men
and sometimes my stiffened leg can seem still
to remember its former liberty.
The truth of mirrors then is more than meets the eye.
Thinking of mirrors, I remember the late queen.
She as a young and beautiful woman whom I knew not
began our age and she lived to end it.
At the last there was melancholy in her heart in common
I know now with all who live to see
the strange ends so many bright and fair things come to.
There were hard times in this kingdom,
reflecting as it were her inward sorrows,
and she was required to be not herself but much like a player,
like any boy actor with a high voice.
For she must wear a wig and cover her wrinkles
with thick powders, flesh her cheeks with rouge,
righten her lips with paint, not smile
for fear of showing her last few blackened teeth.
Must perfume away this stinks of aging
and where many jewels and stiff padded frothing gale dresses
to divert the eyes from frail flesh and bones.
I tell you this so that you can know
things you will never understand until you
live to be old yourself.
Body decays and fails and flesh disgusts,
and yet there is no man so deformed
or so ugly that he believes himself to be
beyond love or admiration.
Easy enough to regret what once one
has been, to curse the young with shine on their flesh,
and green sap in their limbs, and to wish them a long life
too, and the same bitter fruits at the end of it.
Still in all, I think no man is so loathsome that even in his
self-disgust, he cannot cleave to the belief that in some way
magical, as in some myth or child's tale of transformation,
toad and depressed, sub zero and the silk persons alike,
that in some way he is far more beautiful than he seems
or knows.
I venture there is a hidden truth veiled
behind this illusion.
We are said to be in the image of God
and to be in the image of God is therefore to be beautiful.
And therefore the naked truth of us
veiled though it is, is beautiful
and would be most beautiful if we could behold it.
This illusion then, though it is denied by every wrinkle
and deformity of flesh, may be the one true apprehension
of our true condition.
It is a sad wish that is more than a wish,
because what it asks for has already been granted.
Yet without thinking of these mysteries beyond understanding,
we can see how those whom we love
are transformed and being loved by another.
We find that we ourselves have been somehow
remade and restored.
Indeed through the power of love,
we feel the certainty of this in the lover's eyes.
Who is to say that the fantasy of human love
is not true for as long as love lasts?
If human love is a weak reflection or wavering
image of the light of infinite and eternal love,
then it may be that in the transformation of lovers,
each one to the other, we are given a sign of hidden truth.
No, more than that.
We are seeing true and clear for the first time.
In love not deluded but the scales of our eyes fallen away.
Return to the queen.
Consider a woman with more than a woman's will
and all of a woman's vanity, consider
that she had a woman's harsh and ruthless eye
for the truth of herself.
In the myth, Narcissus is depicted as a man
and rightly so.
For only a man could fall in love with his own appearance,
for it is a stranger to him.
The woman had her looking glass sees what she sees and knows
it.
And therefore I think women do justly
demand the slight subterfuge of flattery from us.
The queen ordered the mirrors in her palaces
removed and covered up in her last years.
And this has been taken by some as a sign of her vanity
and self deceit.
They do not know or do not remember
that her in-most bathing chambers where she was alone
with herself, as naked as God made her,
we're all made of mirrors, walls, floor and ceiling.
To see herself not in delusion or vanity or self-love
but from all sides as no one sees himself
so that she would know and never forget the truth of herself.
She knew her appearance as well as
any who make a life study of themselves.
And yet she took that aging body, that withering face,
and she painted, and dubbed, and costumed, and disguised it
until at a proper distance, she was
the very picture of a queen.
Not out of the wish to deceive but
out of the compelling necessity to be
what she must be to rule and never
to permit the expectations and the pride of her subjects
or of this kingdom to be diminished.
She was willing then to sacrifice even
her own integrity of person in the name of her office
and for the good of the kingdom.
And I think it was too much to ask
her to look upon herself in the disguises of public mirrors
and then beam approval and signify thereby
a total self-delusion.
We deprived her of her youth, for better
from the natural life and joys of a woman, and in the end
we denied her even the privilege of being old.
That she loved us in this kingdom
I find remarkable yet she did love us even at the last
when so very few loved her.
And it is that love, my son, all these years afterward
which has the power to transform our memory
of her and of the age and therefore of ourselves
so that we view those times gone with and through
the transforming power of love.
And none of us who were witnesses in the flesh
will ever again have the power to give true testimony.
We are all false witnesses and yet the sum of our witnessing
may be true.