Edwin Booth — What Makes Us Truly Important?

The Fight about Importance

In "Mind and Importance" Eli Siegel explains the thing in us that is against being truly important. I believe this explains a fight which, unknown to him, came to a head in Booth just at the time of his greatest success:

We have to meet this thing which says, any time you say something is good or important which is not you, you are taking away from your unconscious bank account.

Booth loved acting and also had a deep care for his wife. Yet I think he began to feel this care for what was not him took away from his "unconscious bank account." Also he likely missed something from Mary Devlin who both revered him and had a tendency to patronize him, referring to Edwin as a "genius" with an "untaught mind." Eleanor Ruggles writes that Booth's thoughts "turned inward," he began to drink and even act under the influence. "No one can imagine the call of that desire,' he said. "When it engulfs me I could sell my soul...for just one glass."

In 1863 Mary Devlin, who had given birth to their daughter Edwina, became ill with consumption and went to their home in Massachusetts to rest. Booth, acting in New York, seemed not to be aware of his wife's condition, which became grave. He was drinking so heavily that when three telegrams accumulated on his dressing room table about Mary, each increasingly urgent, he didn't see them. Finally realizing what was happening, Booth rushed to Massachusetts, but it was too late—Mary died just hours before he got there.

His regret was searing. He wrote to a friend "My grief eats me!":

"My conduct hastened her death, when she heard that I...was lost to all sense of decency and respect." "I feel now how mean, how thoroughly nothing I am."

The shock of his wife's death and the intensity of his guilt did, in time, make for a large change in Edwin Booth. He never drank that way again. From what I read it seems Booth used his regret about her death to be less selfish and more fair to the world. He said he didn't value Mary while she was alive, the good effect she had on his work. And he became determined to honor this now.

One year later Edwin Booth acted Hamlet with a beauty, an utterness that electrified audiences. Eleanor Ruggles writes:

From his first entrance upstage left every eye was riveted on that forward-drifting...elegant...figure in...black with the dark hair hanging to the shoulders. [In the "to be or not to be" soliloquy]...The audience sat rapt...while the six words on which the actor had lavished as many weeks of labor seemed not to be spoken to, but within each separate consciousness...He was fire and elegance as he fenced with Laertes...[Then, dying]...in Horatio's arms, [he] breathed his last words in tones...invested with sublime pathos... There was no...applause until the orchestra [began to play]...and snapped the charm.

This was Booth's most stunning success. Said one critic, "He did not act Hamlet—he lived it."

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