Edwin Booth — What Makes Us Truly Important?

Two Ways of Being Important, Early

Every person, Aesthetic Realism explains, has an attitude to the world, and this begins with how we see the first representatives of the world we meet: our parents.

Edwin Booth was born November 13, 1833, in his family's log cabin in rural Maryland, the seventh child of Mary Ann and Junius Brutus Booth. A large drama of Edwin Booth's early life was his relationship with his father. Junius Booth was the preeminent American actor of his day, best known for his King Lear and Richard II. He had a true care for the drama and literature, and his manner was outwardly rough and bold.

But the life of an actor traveling across America in the mid-1800s was tough, and it took its toll on Junius Booth. He began to drink heavily, and had bouts of rage. Then three of his children died in a short span of time, and from then on Junius Booth was, at times, on the brink of insanity.

Young Edwin was "grave, thoughtful...and especially reticent," writes the critic William Winter. At thirteen he was sent to keep his father company on the road and to stop him from drinking. In her biography, Prince of Players, Eleanor Ruggles writes:

It steadied [the elder Booth] to re-enter his dressing room after a performance and find Edwin there, wan, rather taciturn, but instantly and silently solicitous of his father's comfort...it was this son's voice, a quiet voice, that could recall the father when Booth was wound about in melancholy or lost in frenzy.

Edwin Booth went on the road with his father for years. He saw his father's life as important, worthy of his steady care. Yet I believe he felt something else, too. In The Right Of #137 Eli Siegel writes about Hamlet and his father; as he does I think he describes what Edwin Booth felt:

A father is a most dignified being...but as a person, he can have frailties a knowing or perceptive child may see...Hamlet, like many children, is between seeing his father with respect and as confused, non-admirable.

I think Edwin Booth felt superior to his father's jaggedness and troubles, and made an unconscious choice early that he would take care of himself by a refined, reserved approach to the world. This was really a choice to have contempt—to feel important being aloof from what he saw as the rough edges of a messy world.

My life growing up in suburban Miami in the 1960's was very different from Edwin Booth's. Yet I too made early choices to have contempt. I saw that my mother and father were disappointed with each other, but I didn't try to know what they felt, to be kind—I didn't feel that would make me important. Instead, I used what I saw to be superior to these two grown ups and people as such.

I used my family to be a snob. When my father's company gave him a Cadillac, I liked knowing the neighbors saw that car in our driveway. From then on I pushed him to buy fancy cars even though he didn't want them. This was so mean; my father worried a lot about money and supporting a family of five. I am so grateful Aesthetic Realism criticized my contempt; I was able to be a kind son to my parents for the first time in my life.

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