Where art thou?
AUTHOR GLENN DIXON CHRONICLES HIS TIME ANSWERING LETTERS TO THE BARD’S JULIET
Late in the summer of 2014, Glenn Dixon arrived in Verona for the first time to volunteer at the Club di Giulietta. Dixon previously discovered the organization, founded to answer letters to Shakespeare’s Juliet by former baker Giulio Tamassia, in a text Dixon used with his high school English class in Calgary.
“The core group of secretaries — three or four of them — have been doing this for twenty years or more,” Dixon says, reached at home. “There are others who come and go, and occasionally they have people like me come along, but the core group have answered thousands and thousands of letters.
“And they have a kind of wisdom about love,” he continues. “They’ve read it all. They’ve given answers to all of this stuff. And they’re very thoughtful people.”
Dixon, author of t he W. O. Mitchell Book Prize- nominated Tripping the World Fantastic: A Journey Through the Music of Our Planet (2013), had been working on a book “about love around the world,” and planned to write a chapter on Verona. Showing a sample to his agent, though, redirected his efforts. “She said, ‘ No. This is a whole book here. This is a whole book’s worth of story.’ Then I really had to take a step back and that’s where it started to change.”
After recounting extensive travels in past books, Dixon, 59, who’s since retired from teaching, never imagined his own dating record as fodder for the project. The result, Juliet’s Answer, his third volume of non- fiction, follows his experiences in Verona amidst romantic unrest. “My love life has been disastrous, basically,” he says, laughing. “I’m sure there was a part of me that wanted to find out why, but it never entered my mind that that would actually become a part of the book.”
Braided with the central plot are classroom scenes featuring composites of his pupils as they ponder Romeo and Juliet, and a thread that hints at the historical roots of the star- crossed lovers. Dixon relished “all these little pieces of evidence that maybe it really was a true story about the Capulets and the Montagues, who in real life were the Cappelli family and the Montecchi family.
“It was just a thrill for me to find out that, for example, Dante wrote about this 300 years before Shakespeare,” he says. “And that Dante was probably in the city when this story actually took place.”
Research for Juliet’s Answer included a visit to the British Library to view a manuscript of Romeo and Juliet from 1599 (“we don’t know for sure, but likely it was printed right from Shakespeare’s notes”) and reading widely on neuroscience. Love, from a chemical standpoint, “is an addiction just like any other,” Dixon remarks. “To have that taken away from you is really as powerful as a heroin junkie trying to get off the junk.”
During his stays in Verona, Dixon answered hundreds of letters. “The vast majority are kind of the same,” he says. “They’re from teenage girls looking for their Romeos. Those are pretty easy. But one or two in every ten would be really something different.” The letters, which began appearing in 1937 at the Monastery of San Francesco — rumoured site of Juliet’s vault — were initially answered by the groundskeeper.
Dixon’s conversations with the secretaries at the Club di Giulietta revealed to the author that “we all feel the same when it comes to love” regardless of age or orientation, gender or culture. As he observes in Juliet’s Answer, “Everyone everywhere experiences love. No one had to invent it. In a recent study across fifteen thousand people in forty- eight countries, romantic love appeared in every culture. It’s now believed to be among two hundred universally human traits — like the ability to use language to communicate, or to create and enjoy music, or the presence of laughter. Scientists actually keep track of this sort of thing. The ability to love, it seems, is central to being human.”
While he admits that the events of the book turned his whole life around, Dixon remains dubious of “that Hollywood thing where there’s the one perfect person for you out there in the world. A good relationship — you have to work on, and I think everybody kind of knows that.”
Pragmatism, too, anchors the narrative’s examination of romance. Acknowledging more would require a spoiler alert. “Everybody’s got to go through that learning process themselves,” Dixon says. “I still don’t know if there are any easy answers. I was lucky enough to get my answer, but it’s tough.”
WE ALL FEEL THE SAME WHEN IT COMES TO LOVE.