Remembering William Alfred
Stephen Bates
(1999)
Shuffling through Cambridge in thrift-store suits and shirts bearing someone else's monogram, a fedora over his knobby head, William Alfred always seemed as delighted to chat with street people as with his fellow Harvard medievalists. In the days before his death in May, he attended a former student's lecture on Thomas Merton and the funeral of a homeless woman. When his doorbell rang, he routinely checked his pockets for dollar bills. His callers often needed a bit of help.
So did his playwriting students. When I took his seminar 20 years ago, he would, in tiny, spidery handwriting, pronounce our first drafts brilliant--then, a few weeks later, would declare that the second drafts solved the myriad problems that had plagued the originals. Had he stressed those flaws the first time around, we might have given up. Instead we persisted. We mapped out the biography and perspective of even the most minor characters, because, he explained, a jibe from a stranger can wreck your day as surely as a faithless friend. He urged on us Santayana's three-part view of reality: "Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence." And he cautioned that grumbling about one's artistic pain-- a favorite lament of melodramatic young dramatists--is a vast waste of creative energy.
He relished the comic moments of everyday life. Through lilting laughter, he once told of a gritty play staged in a Harvard common room, where, beneath the portrait of a Yankee dowager, two student actors had simulated fellatio (fuh-lotch-ee-oh, in his rendering), an impious juxtaposition that delighted him. Another time, he told me that his stern housekeeper had called him an Irish drunkard. He protested that he drank only a single Martini a day. "Yes," she replied, "but you enjoy it."
Professor Alfred's blank-verse play Hogan's Goat is one of the great political dramas of our age, a parable about, as he once put it, the "human tendency to think that you can get away with anything." In 1890s Brooklyn, Matt Stanton yearns to become mayor in order to improve the lives of his fellow Irish immigrants. Without power, he says, "there can be no decency, no virtue, and no grace." The incumbent, Edward Quinn, scoffs at the newcomer's naivete. When Stanton's wife chirps about the need for trust in politics, Quinn responds icily:
That kind of talk is like a penny cream puff,
All wind and whey, and deadly when it sours.
Trust no one. No one. Let no man too close.
They are as quick to fury as to love.
Once give them purchase, they will pull you down.
Stanton seeks to win by publicizing Quinn's misappropriations of city funds. Quinn in turn lays his hands on letters (the stained dress of the story) showing Stanton to be a bigamist. In the politics of personal destruction that follows, Stanton loses the election, his reputation, and his wife. And Quinn apologizes, sort of:
I never meant to do this to you, Matt.
I didn't know. I never meant to do it.
I only meant to look out for my good.
I'm nobody. I'm no one, if I'm not the mayor.
Of that last line, the critic Wilfrid Sheed wrote: "No more desolate cry was ever uttered."
Starring a Boston University undergraduate named Fay (later Faye) Dunaway, Hogan's Goat became an Off Broadway hit in 1965. Professor Alfred's next big play, a blank-verse comedy called The Curse of an Aching Heart, opened on Broadway in 1982 and closed a few days later. He told me about the opening-night party. The early reviews arrived and circulated like samizdat, but, deep in conversation, he didn't see them. The room grew quiet, people began inching toward the door, he realized something was afoot. Then--his favorite moment--a waiter snatched his place card, crumpled it, and marched away.
No doubt Professor Alfred would have written more, and more successful, Broadway plays if not for the throng of mendicants at his doorstep. The homeless merely took his money, someone remarked at his wake. Students, with lackluster scripts and hunger for praise, deprived him of something far more valuable, his time.
Curse of an Aching Heart was, for him, a cheeky title. After a heart attack as a young man, he was told that he probably wouldn't reach middle age, but he survived another half-dozen attacks and lived to 76. He loved to tell of the heart attack that had struck him while a student was reading aloud during a tutorial. When he regained consciousness, the student was still reciting, not knowing what else to do. During a health scare in the early 1980s, Professor Alfred prepared for death while awaiting the results of more definitive tests. The experience, he told me after the prognosis was lifted, wasn't especially somber or mind-concentrating. Mostly it was a dreadful bore: the cleaning, the paperwork, the thousand loose ends needing to be tied up for an orderly departure.
In Time's famous "Is God Dead?" issue in 1966, he was quoted as taking the negative. "People who tell me there is no God," he said, "are like a six-year-old boy saying that there is no such thing as passionate love--they just haven't experienced it." At Mass each morning in St. Paul's Church in Harvard Square, he invariably sat near the fourth column back on the left side. He was in his usual pew when the blizzard of '78 rendered the streets impassable. When the priest asked how he had made it, he answered: "The snow wasn't so high that one couldn't get out the window."
He paid his last visit to St. Paul's on the Friday before Memorial Day, at a funeral Mass attended by hundreds of colleagues, friends, and students. Faye Dunaway and her ex-husband, the musician Peter Wolf, served as lectors. I sat in the back of the church, alongside a knot of homeless men and women. When the priest extolled Professor Alfred's selflessness, one of them gave a thumbs-up and said, "That was Bill."
"We write," William Alfred told us in playwriting class, "so our sense of life will outlast us." His sense of life will endure, on bookshelves, on stages, and in the aching hearts of those who knew him.