Readers and writers blog

My wife and I are getting together with some of our friends July 4th to read and discuss Henry IV, a Shakespeare play that is more often talked about than read, mostly because everyone’s heard of two of its characters — the lively young Prince Hal and his ne’er-do-well sidekick John Falstaff.

I’ll be the beard.

Well, I may be corrupting an expression that I associate only with New York, although it dates back to Chaucer: ‘To beard’ or ‘to be a beard’ is to act as a romantic cover for someone else, as in the movie ‘Broadway Danny Rose’ when Woody Allen takes Mia Farrow to a nightclub so that the nightclub crooner can pick her up later without his wife finding out. (”I’m only the beahd,” Woody says in his Brooklyn accent to a couple of gangsters who have taken him for Mia’s boyfriend.)

In my case, I’ll be just covering for my own romantic interest — my wife, Bonnie — who hasn’t read the play, hasn’t been feeling well and has been so busy with work and with family matters (not the least of which was our recent trip to Indiana) that she won’t have time to read it and wondered one recent day if I had.

“That way, you can sit there and talk about it, and I can just sit there,” she said.

“Hell, I do that even if I haven’t read the book,” I said.

Bonnie, ever the honest but considerate one, just smiled back, not wanting to agree that I would be such a pompous ass to do such a thing but not wanting to lie and say, “No, that’s not true.”

Over the years, I’ve read a number of Shakespeare’s plays, but I couldn’t remember whether Henry IV was among them. When I looked it up, I quickly realized it wasn’t. It’s a two-part play, and I would have remembered that.

Now before you get the wrong idea about my literary background, it’s a basic 1950s plumber’s model that included Julius Caesar and Macbeth in high school, King Lear in college and a handful of other Shakespeares when I was in the Army and didn’t have either the finances or the energy to be a young Falstaff myself.

And don’t get the wrong idea about our reading friends. Although I have referred to them as the Woodstock Reading Group, a lofty appellation entirely of my own invention, it’s just a loose-knit group started by a couple of friends who run a publishing company in nearby Woodstock.

People show up as they will, whether or not they’ve read the book that we all agreed would be the subject of the gathering. And we may or may not get around to the subject. Basically, the book is just an excuse to get together to eat a little food, drink a little wine and talk about stuff — maybe the book, maybe the world, maybe just ourselves.

The books aren’t all hoary classics, either. Selections have included Zadie Smith’s 2005 novel On Beauty, Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled detective novel from 1939, The Big Sleep, and Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk from his 1956-57 Cairo Trilogy.

Among the selections have been two of my recommendations — The Redheaded Outfield, a less-read Zane Grey book about minor league baseball, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America — and the group basically hated them. (I have to admit the Zane Grey book was a favorite from my adolescence, which is how those who read it saw the book. I recommended de Tocqueville because everybody talks about his book but nobody ever reads it. For good reason. Much of this huge work from the 1830s reads like an annual report of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But some parts — the young French aristocrat’s prescience about what would happen in the young America in the decades and centuries to come — I just loved.)

And now, if the group members read this blog, they’ll know about my beard on the bard. Ah well.

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter Nine of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess uses paint and canvas to put new life into a dying orchard outside the apartment where she has taken refuge in a small Maine town, and she finds new life growing in herself toward her neighbor Brian.

• Chapter 21: Foghorn Fish-and-Chips of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. One of Gerard and Ginny’s occasional roommates, a one-eyed hippie named Thulin, marries a high school girl named Wanda but later abandons her and their unborn son. Wanda gets the last word: She names the boy Popeye.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*The photo at top is from the Royal Shakespeare Company showing Ian Holm as Prince Hal and Hugh Griffin as Falstaff.