Hamlet's Dresser

Hamlet's Dresser

I don't normally read books like this. Hamlet's Dresser is Bob Smith's memoir of growing up, his involvement with the Stratford, Connecticut Shakespeare Festival in the 1950s and early 1960s, and in his 50s, teaching Shakespeare in senior citizen centers in New York City.

It's an absolutely heart-breaking book--one of those, "I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man with no feet" accounts of growing up with a severely retarded younger sister, Carolyn, and the struggles that they as a family endured trying to care for her at home--before they eventually bowed to the inevitable, and put her into a state hospital.

It's also heart-breaking because it is a story of a man for whom as close as there seems to be to spirituality is getting lost in Shakespeare. Smith grew up in an Irish Catholic family that seems to have immunized him against Christianity--one of those families where a culture of ritual and tradition mattered, but Jesus Christ was someone on a crucifix, and nothing else.

Something of the weirdness of his parents' faith can be gathered from his description of coming home early one evening in the 1950s when his parents were having an "adults party" and finding that they were all playing strip poker--and yet his mother was angry that his father disappeared on Tuesdays, apparently for another woman. There are days that I get the impression that the 1950s was more subtle about its sexual immorality (and there's something to be said for at not encouraging immorality by pretending it is okay), but not objectively all that much better.

Smith is a powerful writer, with painfully evocative accounts of small town Connecticut, with its small town cruelties. He was pegged as homosexual by his classmates in high school--and ended up largely friendless because of it. If Smith ever married, it seems not to have made it into this memoir--and I get the impression from subtle remarks that he drops here and there that perhaps his classmates were right about his orientation, for the wrong reasons. Still, Smith doesn't dwell on sexual orientation as the source of suffering; his younger sister's problems seem to be the clearer explanation.

I am not sure that I particularly like the way in which Smith moves rapidly between past to present. In a few places, I found myself having to go back and re-read to make sure that I knew whether he was talking about 2000, or 1955, or 1961.

I'm writing a book right now that is a mixture of memoir and popular history of deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. The power of Smith's writing is encouraging me to throw in as many of the details of the time and place as I can.

Hamlet's Dresser is one of those reminders of how even a year or two of personal experience changes what the reader brings to the table. Smith describes how in high school on Saturdays he would take the 8:03 train from Connecticut into New York City so that he could visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, contemplate the great art there, and read Shakespeare's plays, which even though were a dominant focus of his life.

Smith describes eating in the cafeteria in the center of the museum, with what he calls a Hollywood view of the classical world. If I had read Hamlet's Dresser last year, it would have been far less personal. Back in April, my wife accompanied me to New York City for the Armed America book tour, and we spent part of a Saturday at the Metropolitan. Obviously, fifty years has elapsed between Smith's Saturday visits there and ours--but eating lunch in one of the restaurants around that "Hollywood" classical world probably hasn't changed much--and I can recall being just as transfixed by some of the paintings that Smith describes.