The Life and Opinions of Marcus Aurelius Wherefore
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I am halfway across the living room when Ardis barks, "Are you so drunk you can't even find your way to the bedroom!" Forging on: "Who the hell says I'm drunk? And who the hell says I'm going to the bedroom? I'm going to my study to make a few notes while some . . . some choice ideas are still fresh in my mind." "Oh really! The natural-born writer! Lurching off to work still soaked in booze after his party-party. And I suppose the hero of this magnificent opus is an old lech." I attempt to keep a firm pace ahead, resolved on silence. I will not be drawn in, even though much worse is coming, as I am aware from long experience. Shudders run through me. Certain words sharper than the serpent’s tooth are in Ardis's keeping, and she always knows just when to whip them out and strike. "Wherefore, art thou Romeo?" she screeches, ending with a cackle that would have made a McBeth witch feel good about herself. Do I wheel and slug her? Or do I slink away? I slink away. I make for the door of my study, my fragile refuge. The grand question tailing me as I go is an all-too-familiar one: how can a man avenge a cruel mocking of his surname, short of strangling the mocker, when that name happens to be what Ardis has just belted out? Wherefore. Yes, I said Wherefore. Now my sole consolation--on this and many another such occasion--is in thinking that the person I ought to throttle, if I could lay my hands on the old coot, is my great-grandfather--whatever the hell his original name was in the cranny of Europe he crept out of to join the huddled masses sent off in great hope to America. Wherever it was he hailed from, Ur-Grossvater picked up enough English there to dabble in Shakespeare: figuring, I suppose, to learn the language he meant to adopt from the top down. Led on by such clownish judgment, he could not--I understate--speak English very well. In the helter-skelter of Ellis Island, the words of an official who must have been asking the old fart's name--correction, young fart at the time--sounded to him like an order to get out of the way. Stubborn by nature and doubtless eager to show off his learning, Ur-Grossvater comes out with what he thinks is the proper term for 'why': "Wherefore?" chirps he--gloating, you can bet, over the purity of his English compared to that of a mere native functionary. So that's what got written down as his surname: Wherefore, misspelled by the immigration agent, to be sure, but later corrected by my worthy ancestor. Because when he found out that he was to be an American with a Shakespearean name, he'd have hanged rather than change it. And thus it was that my worthy Wherefore progenitor landed on these bountiful shores. So then did his son, my grandfather--or his son's son, my father--or your humble servant--ever work up the nerve to get rid of that name, irksome as the fool thing has turned out to be? We did not! Not a one of us, I suppose from some taint of superstition that bearing a curse is less likely to displease the gods than running from it. In any event, so the matter stands to this day, cowardice and superstition mingled and passed on even unto the fourth generation: in spite of the many indignities which have stalked me under the auspices of that name--not the least of which is that for the whole of my academic career, out of self-preservation, resorting to whatever artifice or sacrifice I could, I managed to avoid teaching Romeo and Juliet--. Nor is this Wherefore business the end of my onomastic tribulations. My grandfather, they say, loved Marcus Aurelius this side idolatry, though from what I've heard, no one could have been less stoic than he. All the same, my doting parents, to curry favor with the old knucklehead--with an eye on his will, I make no doubt--unloaded the name Marcus Aurelius on my helpless infant self. By Marcus Aurelius Wherefore--therefore--I stand or fall. Guess which most often? So there you have it: the unfolding to this point in history of the Whereforian American Dream. The first of my clan arrived with a preposterous faith in his comical English. The second took pride in basking in pointless adoration of a philosophical emperor. The third--my father.... But better not to dwell on him. Suffice to say that outside of accumulating and passing on a set of pretentious names, none of my forebears ever amounted to a horse turd. As for myself--well, if you paddled ashore out of a gene pool like mine, how could you expect to scale the heights of achievement?
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About the Book
Just retired from Confusion University, Marcus Aurelius Wherefore is determined to embark on a novel he has long anticipated writing about the twisted politics of his former department. He nurses in vivid mental form the stuff out of which he must actualize his dream, but the power to translate it into the written word seems always to evade him. None of this proposed creation is lost, however, for the reader of The Life and Opinions of Marcus Aurelius Wherefore, in which the scenes Mark was to fabricate emerge directly from recollection to the page in all their brilliant hues, more vivid than they might have been if he had fashioned them into words of his own. As he gropes ahead, Mark soon realizes, too, that he cannot continue his search to create without looking into other past and present spheres of existence beyond the university, into his own and those of the world at large. What evolves, as set down in this novel through a dynamic interweaving of memory and the present moment, is a comic journey through the world that Mark has always called his own but never quite understood--leading even to a visitation by novelists dead and gone and a translation into the afterlife. With widening and deepening vision, Mark’s quest for greater understanding and higher achievement lies through a web of stories in which he mentally recreates life as it passes and life gone by, a broad spectrum of tales ranging from realism to fantasy: glowing accounts of the lost past; complex episodes of married life; Biblical stories retold; a tale of friendship and tragic loss; a mythical sojourn of a black cowboy among a fierce tribe of Indians; a look at the remnants of Marxism, and at minority and gender excesses out to the lunatic fringe. Interspersed with all these come interludes of political shenanigans in the Confusion University English department, the whole narrative climaxing in the politics of the Great Impeachment Farce. The novel is bound together in a powerful and fascinating form by the versatility of the protagonist-taleteller, whose sweeping narrative vision extends from simple tales through gripping adventure into hard-ball satire raking politics and intellectual life and social extremes over the coals. At the same time, a biting satire develops on contemporary literary criticism, particularly on theories of narratology, closing with the protagonist’s vision of his own future in narrative: living and creating with his muse off yonder in a pastoral cyberland.
About the Author
The Life and Opinions of Marcus Aurelius Wherefore is a new departure in the art of fiction for L. D. Clark. Among his eleven other published works are four novels and a book of short stories, set largely in rural North Texas where he grew up--a region called the Cross Timbers--and reminiscent of life in the first half of the twentieth century: The Dove Tree (Doubleday, 1961): "The story evokes both a real outer, small town life, and many echoes of profound human dilemmas. Best--it gives the reader that rarest gift of fiction--the sense of having entered wholly into another human’s life and mind." Virginia Kirkus Bulletin. Is This Naomi? And Other Stories (Confluence Press, 1979). "This is a lovely, moving collection of stories commemorating rural life. All the stories are good, but the best ones depict lives in harmony with the land that sustains them, and, in turn, with the universe." Books of the Southwest. The Fifth Wind (Confluence Press, 1980). "Only a very few books each year allow readers to fully experience the lives of characters as this one generously does." Portland Review. A Charge of Angels (Confluence Press, 1987). "Clark’s writing is filled with ghosts, visions and scripture, punishment and forgiveness, and the voice he has chosen to carry the story is powerful in its naivete." Texas Books. A Bright Tragic Thing (Cinco Puntos Press, 1992) is a fictional recreation of a Civil War mass lynching known to history as the Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas: "a tale of the emotions inherent in any timeless story in which love, hatred, and the forces of vengeance conflict. It is, as well, the story of the effect of inherited tragedy upon one of the Southwest’s finest contemporary writers." RE Arts and Letters. Clark has also edited a volume of memoirs concerned with the Great Hanging: Civil War Recollections of James Lemuel Clark (Texas A&M University Press, 1984), much of which serves as a factual basis for the novel A Bright Tragic Thing. In addition, he has engaged for a number of years in D. H. Lawrence studies, out of which he wrote Dark Night of the Body (University of Texas Press, 1964), about Lawrence in Mexico and the American Southwest, and The Minoan Distance (University of Arizona Press, 1980), a study of travel symbolism in Lawrence’s work. He edited Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent for Cambridge University Press and for Penguin Books. A combat veteran of World War II, now a professor emeritus of English from the University of Arizona, Clark lives with his wife, LaVerne Harrell Clark, also a writer, in Smithville, Texas.