Georgeann Murphy

How do you, Dear Reader, respond to the seashore?  Matthew Arnold heard there “the eternal note of sadness”—like my mother and paternal grandfather as I recall.  For Arnold, “the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery” evoked a thought all too resonant for our present time:

               . . . we are here as on a darkling plain,

               Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

               Where ignorant armies clash by night.

But for me, the seaside has long been a comfort, the paradox of those recurrent waves, eternally the same and yet with each breaking swell unique, linking past to present, not sounding sadness, but rather establishing one’s place in time and space.  Today’s post title is Mary Tyrone’s line from Long Day’s Journey Into Night, O’Neill’s great play pulled from the lives of his own tormented family, and a role I acted (at age 21, how absurd!) as an undergraduate senior.  I had seen Laurence Olivier play James Tyrone to Constance Cummings’s Mary in London’s National Theatre production during the fall of 1972—three times, in fact, so taken was I with the play and those performances.   After the third time, I felt compelled to wait at the stage door—as no one else did—to tell the cast that production had, I believed, changed my life.

At first a backstage manager thought I just wanted an autograph, collected my program, and brought it back signed, expecting me to leave then.  But I felt compelled to thank the cast and lingered.  I suspect this fellow must have alerted the actors that some star-struck American might ambush them as they left the theatre, as I don’t recall seeing them depart through that door.  But then, a long black limousine drew up to the curb, and I knew this must be for Lord Olivier.  It was now or never.  So, when he appeared, I rushed up to him to blather my thanks for the autograph and his performance, which I had returned and returned to see again and again.

In response, Lord Olivier took my right hand in his, and patting it with his other hand, thanked me for waiting so long in the cold to tell him that, asked what brought me to London, was I studying the theatre, and hoped I was enjoying London.  After what felt like five minutes, he apologized that he really must go, thanked me again, let go my hand, and disappeared into the back of the limo.  I, gobsmacked, regarded my right hand with awe, and hyperventilated my way back across Waterloo bridge to share my story with my roommates in our Bloomsbury student quarters. 

Returning to campus in the new semester, I for the first time added theatre classes to my English major, was cast in LDJ, and many years later earned my doctorate by specializing in Renaissance literature, Shakespeare, and drama as a genre.  That landed me a tenure-track position split between the English and drama programs at Centre College of Kentucky, tenure, and a year’s appointment as director of Centre’s new London program.  Back to London, where my life had first diverged from what I thought it would be, back to London, where I met my future husband, another professor, and again took the road less traveled by.  And that has made all the difference.

This morning in a just-before-waking dream of an extended conversation with a very sympathetic Lord Olivier, we sat side by side on a couch.  When I rose for a moment to study something across the room and left my purse behind, he gallantly tucked it behind a cushion so no one would snatch it.  My first thought on being fully awake:  “The past is the present.  It’s the future, too.”