Wallace Shawn fascinates me. He played Vanya in Vanya on 42nd Street --
but I first saw him as Vizzini (Mr. "Inconceivable") in The
Princess Bride. There is a lot to say about Wallace Shawn, darling of radical
theatre by day/Hollywood actor by night -- but a description of his childhood
in Fintan O'Tool's essay about Shawn, The
Masked Avenger, (from The New York Review of Books ) resonates with
me. (A description of exactly why will have to wait until another day.)
Wallace Shawn, his father, and his grandfather could be the subject of a
trilogy of novels, telling the story of America from the thrusting energy
of the self-made man in the first generation to the absorption into the East
Coast establishment in the next and finally to the rage, disgust, and disillusionment
of the third. His grandfather, Benjamin Chon, known as Jackknife Ben, was
an embodiment of the immigrant drive for material success. The child of Eastern
European Jewish immigrants, he set up as a street peddler, sold knives and
later jewelry in the Chicago stockyards, and made a small fortune. His children
grew up in a house with servants and a billiard room, and were triumphantly
assimilated into the American upper middle class. His son William, his surname
safely Anglicized, became, as the revered, long-serving, and famously fastidious
editor of The New Yorker, one of the presiding figures of the postwar
liberal literary establishment. And then along comes his son Wallace,
haunted by the conviction that to be born into American abundance is to have
a soul marked with original sin. Guilt, not gratitude, is the keynote of Wallace
Shawn's reflections on the luxury of his childhood. In his opening monologue
in Louis Malle's film My Dinner with André, in which he plays himself
in a long conversation with the director André Gregory, Shawn recalls his
privileged childhood in Manhattan, where he was born in 1943:I grew up on the Upper East Side, and when I was ten years old, I was rich,
I was an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and
all I thought about was art and music.In his theatrical monologue The Fever (first performed by the author
in a New York apartment in 1990) there is an indication that this recognition
of privilege was accompanied by the uncomfortable awareness that he belonged
to an elite. Shawn carefully avoids any indication of the age, sex, or nationality
of the speaker in the play, and it would be crude to conclude from the fact
that he performed it himself in the apartments of his friends that it is straightforwardly
autobiographical. There are, nevertheless, clear parallels with his own life,
and it is hard to mistake the crippling consciousness of having been both
blessed and cursed by gratuitous advantage:I was born into the mind. Lamplight. The warm living room. My father, in
an armchair, reading about China. My mother with the newspaper on a long
sofa. Orange juice on a table in a glass pitcher….And my friends and I were the delicate, precious, breakable children, and
we always knew it. We knew it because of the way we were wrapped-because
of the soft underwear laid out on our beds, soft socks to protect our feet.And I remember that my darling mother, my beautiful mother, my innocent
mother, would say to me and my friends, when we were nine or ten, "Now be
very careful, don't go near First Avenue. That's a bad neighborhood. There
are tough kids there."