The History of Torture, the Torture of History

By Alexi Zentner

I considered it a personal victory that I did not throw up inside of Shakespeare’s house. This was in 1995, when I was in my third year of undergraduate study and spending the semester in London as part of Grinnell College’s study-abroad program. I was pining for a girl who had broken my heart and who was, tortuously, in the London as part of the same program. My dad was at home, in Canada, slowly dying of lung cancer, and the professor who was teaching me Shakespeare that semester was going blind, trying to memorize the entirety of Shakespeare’s work before blindness overtook him. He smelled of pipe smoke and had a great beard and thick glasses — the professor, not my father; my father smelt of cigarettes and aftershave — and read from the plays we were studying with such passion that it was hard not to share in it.

At the time, I was not particularly well suited to travelling alone, nor was I suited to living in a flat with other students. The proximity of the girl who broke my heart, the distance of my dying father, a general failure at being a decent human being, and the fact that I fancied myself to be a bit of a poet, meant that I coped — or rather, didn’t cope — in a way that is boring and familiar: I drank a lot, took up smoking, and tried, rather unsuccessfully, to sleep around. I’d been writing poetry — badly, and you can trust me on this, because I still have all of those old notebooks, notebooks that I don’t revisit for fear of infecting my current writing — at least partially because that girl who broke my heart had given me a dozen pages of typed out poems (not her own, but of poets who were almost all new to me) the spring before. But living in London — and I lived in Bloomsbury — and pretending to be a writer while being surrounded by the ghosts of people who actually were writers, was a slow torture.

The smoking lasted only a week, ending on that morning that I avoided vomiting inside of Shakespeare’s birthplace during a field trip to Straford-upon-Avon. I’d spent the night before drinking and dancing with a waitress and two other women I’d met at the pub across the street from my flat, waltzing into bed at five in the morning and catching an hour of sleep before boarding the bus with the other students. Most of that day was a blur even at the time, let alone a decade-and-a-half later, but I remember waking up on a bench outside of Shakespeare’s birthplace, most of the booze finally burnt off, but the smell of cigarettes so strong that I still wanted to vomit.

What I remember most clearly from that day, however, was sitting through a matinee performance, and even as terrible as I felt, the words and the story written four hundred years earlier cut through me, cut through what was left of the beer. I’d like to think that I’m a better person now, removed from that day by more than fifteen years, 3,500 miles, a marriage, two children, a couple of different careers, and an understanding that there is a difference between wanting to be a writer and actually being a writer. But even if I’m not a better person, I’m a better writer, and I try to keep a little bit of that day with me whenever I am at my desk: I try to write so that I cut through the beer and the cigarettes of my younger self, cut though the broken heart and the dying father a continent away. 

Alexi Zentner's debut novel Touch is out this month from Chatto & Windus