Being Alone (on Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin)

Monnickendam, Netherlands

Gerbrand Bakker The Twin, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer (Brooklyn, New York: Archipelago Books, 2009)

In Dutch novelist's Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin, a farmer, Helmer van Wonderen undergoes what one might describe as a kind of mid-life crisis. One day in what apparently is 2005 (he was 18 in his first year of college in 1967, and we are told he is 57 during the events of this work), Helmer wakes up and moves his elderly father—who can no longer walk—from the downstairs bedroom to the upstairs room where Helmer has slept most of his life.

At the same time he throws out a number of pieces of furniture and a rug, and reorganizes the downstairs. It is, as if, suddenly at the age of 57, Helmer—who at the time of his identical twin brother Henk's death in 1967, has been forced to leave the university and take his brother's place on their farm—has recognized that this is now his farm, and that he has earned the right to make decisions about his life.

Henk, although a few minutes younger than Helmer, had always taken the lead in acting and was clearly their father's favorite, a son who looked forward to continuing in father's footsteps. Helmer, more introverted and intellectual, was determined to attend the university, and had recently begun courses there. Now, years later, his bitterness toward his father is apparent, and his treatment of the old man might, at times, appear almost to fall in the category of elder abuse. But as this slow-moving, simply expressed fiction develops, we slowly begin to understand the farmer's anger and frustration with his empty life.

Bit by bit, we discern what Helmer himself seems never to be able to comprehend, that the relationship with his brother was more than sibling love, and that his inability since the fatal day of his brother's death to find anyone to care for has not only to do with his isolation in terms of both his temperament and the place, near Monnickendam in Northern Netherlands, where he lives, but is intertwined with his attitudes toward sex.

Before his death, Henk had determined to marry Riet, a young blonde woman who has come to live with the family. Riet, having just learned how to drive, takes her fiancé on a ride which ends in an accident and the tragedy which changed Helmer's life. The father sends Riet away, while all these years Helmer has suffered on, milking cows, watching the sheep, mucking out the yearling's stall, and caring for the only animals he himself has added to farm, two donkeys, perhaps emblematizing his own stubborn aloofness from life.

Helmer's world, in short, until the special day in 2005, has been frozen in time, as if with Henk's death this twin simply shut down.

Now, he suddenly sells two of his sheep, purchasing a map of Denmark to place on his bedroom wall. He takes down photographs, repaints floors and walls.

As Helmer proceeds with these gradual alterations to his home, we learn more and more through his awakening memories of his father's psychological abuse of both Helmer and his dead mother, and we gradually perceive other moments that help us to understand Helmer's sexual conundrum. One of his favorite moments of his youth, for example, concerns a hired hand who taught him to skate. What Helmer most remembers, however, is not the lesson itself, but the worker's hand against his "bum" and ultimately, the placement of his body against the boy's back.

The friendship between the two, boy and the hired worker, Jaap expands as Helmer visits the small hut where the worker lives. There is no sex involved, only a kiss, and the two talk of everything but sexual matters, but it becomes clear that Jaap is gay, and that Helmer's interest in him is centered in that fact.

The father, sensing something strange in the situation, fires the worker. In short, anyone who might have possibly demonstrated any love for Helmer or shown him any affection has died or been sent off!

Coincidentally, Riet herself writes, asking if, after all these years, she might come to see Helmer. She now has two grown daughters and a teenage son from the husband she has married after Henk's death.

Somewhat reluctantly, Henk agrees to a visit, after which she pleads for him to take on her son as a worker, perceiving of the boy's unhappiness in her home. Helmer vaguely acquiesces, and the boy, also named Henk, is suddenly sharing his quiet abode, where there is not even a television set.

Much like Helmer, Henk is also dissatisfied with his life, in part because of his boredom at home, and the transition he is himself undergoing—he is 18, probably the same age Helmer was when his twin died—and is unsure of his direction in life.

Helmer puts him to work, but the boy does not always accomplish his tasks, often sleeping in for the whole day. Yet the two do somehow get on, Helmer purchasing a television set, buying him wine, and basically permitting the youth to come to terms with the world in which he is involved. Ultimately, Helmer, imitating the bad habits of his young guest, takes up smoking. Henk even saves Helmer's life when the farmer is trapped under a sheep in a small stream.

It appears that Henk is also questioning his sexuality, as at one point he attempts to join the farmer in his shower, and for several nights crawls into Helmer's bed, refusing to return to his upstairs room which once belonged to the now-dead Henk.

Helmer, although a bit confused by the boy's action, refuses to return any affection, and Henk grows daily more angry about the relationship and his place on this farm. Is he a replacement of the other Henk, he assertively asks.

Although Helmer, unlike his father, refuses to abuse the boy, either verbally or sexually, the relationship between the two resembles Helmer's and his father's. Like Helmer, the young Henk is clearly unable to explore love in this environment.

As the situation begins to become more and more tense, Helmer writes Riet, telling her that he intends to send the boy home. Henk, however, rips open the letter before it is mailed, and burns it. Yet in that act, he realizes he now has no choice but to go away.

This time Helmer himself has sent a source of love packing. As the boy bicycles off, moreover, Helmer's father dies (he has refused to eat for weeks). Suddenly Helmer is left in utter silence with no purpose to his life but the routine of chores.

Into this vacuum, Jaap returns for a visit.

Neighbors check in with the famer and a funeral of sorts (despite the father's insistence that he should be buried without one) is held, attended by more people than the son might have imagined.

Finally, Helmer begins to perceive a logic in all the recent changes he has made. Selling his cows and yearling, and arranging with the neighbors to care for his donkeys and sheep, Helmer goes off with Jaap on the first vacation of his life—to Denmark, where the two swim nude, share a double bed, and play cards in the evenings. There is no mention at all, once more, of sex. But it is clear that Helmer may have found a companion with whom to share his newfound pleasures, and the "vacation" seems to be open-ended.

Bakker does not end the book, however, with that kind of revelation. As Jaap invites him to join him in cards, Helmer takes another short voyage, walking to the sand dunes where the summer sun is in its slow set. Undressing, he takes a short swim, then sits on a dune to ponder the beauty of the world around him. Behind him he feels a presence, a warm breath; it is a sheep come to keep him company. Helmer knows he must get up and return, but the novels ends in his remaining there, peacefully sitting: "I am alone."

Although the twin has led an empty life, it was never been his own, having been determined by all those around him until this very last moment of Bakker's quietly meaningful work. After all these years, the twin is now free to define his own future.

Los Angeles, November 7, 2009

The Fire Behind Myself (on Robin Blaser's The Fire: Collected Essays)

Robin Blaser The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)

The death on May 7, 2009 of American-Canadian poet Robin Blaser sent me to my office shelf where I keep books waiting to be read. For three years Blaser's collected essays had burned its presence into my eyes, but only now, six months after his death, have I actually found the time to read this important book.

Beginning with his famous manifesto-like essay, "The Fire," Blaser argues that the business of poetry and poetics is creating a cosmology. He means that, as he explained in 2009 interview with Paul Nelson, not so much in a "religious" sense—although he himself admits to the influence of his Catholic childhood—but in a larger system of a world view. When asked for the specific components of the cosmology that he and his friends Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer attempted to create, Blaser answers in that 2009 interview (published in Golden Handcuffs Review):

The main components are, first, that there isn't one. That was what you felt
and this was what the 20th century tried to do to us. It took us away and
Marxism didn't help at all unfortunately with that problem. Marxism is quite
a different thing, but that's when we're already social and know how to move
and then Marxism can speak to you. Otherwise, you're fucked. You've not got
a cosmos with which: Where's God? Well you're sure not going to...even an old
Catholic like me isn't going to turn into THAT. And Spicer, I mean, Spicer's
view of the Catholic Church [laughing heartily] IS ONE KICK IN THE ASS
AFTER ANOTHER! HA! and I just loved it. And Duncan, ooooh Duncan. He
was an occultist in some part and the occult tradition was a fascinating one. We
all came to know of it. But the occult was a counter Christian, counter religious
tradition that was also a religious tradition, whatever a religion means, essentially
to be tied to a world at large. So all of us were busy working around it,
sometimes at quite a loss. ....It was simply a matter of finding language as the
way with which you could walk on a piece of earth....

In short, as Nelson suggests, for Blaser the search for a cosmology, an entire system of being, was a process rather than an end. As opposed to a lyric self-expression, Blaser approached poetry as a serial-like search—what in other essays he describes a revelation of the "real"—that in its intensity metaphorically "burns up" the poet, leaving a fire behind him.

This "process," he argues, moreover, can only occur in a community, and most particularly in a community of poets. Attacks against "coterie" ignore the reality that poets band together because

Such communities tend to build a structure for men who wish to keep, hold
and record the passionate relation with the outside that the world, the
nation, need. This is the only place where such talk goes on.

Discourse, accordingly, is at the center of Blaser's poetics, even in this early essay, and most of the works in this volume resound with voices, often contrary voices that express a kind of explosion of ideas surrounding the subject at hand.

This kind of dialectical commentary can often seem an onerous task for the uninitiated reader; Blaser's essays are filled with references not only to his poet friends, Duncan, Spicer, Olson and others but to philosophers and contemporary thinkers, from Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Alfred North Whitehead, Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Merleau-Ponty to all of Greek and Roman mythology along with writers such as Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, and Dante. Fortunately, Blaser's commentary is accompanied by an Introduction and highly informative Afterword by Miriam Nichols who expertly takes the reader by the hand through the dense thickets of Blaser's poetics.

If nothing else, what any reader comes to realize early on in Blaser's work is that his writing, both the poetry itself and the criticism, is not a historical recounting of the "other," but an immersion in both the thinking process and in the lives of the writers on whom he focuses, all creating a kind of Memory Theater, "a box with tiers, where the initiate would take the place of the stage and look out on the tiers, which in an ordinary theater would hold the audience—here there are images upon images, so that a man could hold the whole world in view."

Such an impossible undertaking, made even more difficult by the impact of differing demands upon the poet's attention, particularly the call for social and political involvement that claim little role in the poetic imagination, itself might truly "burn up" the poet. One by one, Blaser takes up some of those issues, in "The Particles" the role of the political, for example, in which he dismisses various views of what political poetry might be before going on to argue that it is the passionate particularity of poetry, its never-ending search for truth or "reality" and the commitment of the poet to this search that demonstrates most clearly poetry's relationship with the polis as opposed to statements about political positions which merely reiterate frozen thoughts, dead images of the society at large.

Blaser cites the wonderful example of the Spanish writer, Miguel de Unamuno, Rector of the University of Salamanca. After a rabid speech by General Millan Astray, "thin, emaciated, one eye and one arm," in which he called for the extermination of all who stood against Franco, Unamuno rose and gave a speech beginning:

"All of you are hanging on my words. You all know me, and are aware
that I am unable to remain silent. I have not learnt to do so in seventy-
three years of my life. and I do not wish to learn it any more. At times,
to be silent is to lie. For silence can be interpreted as acquiescence. I
could not survive a divorce between my conscience and my world, always
well-mated partners."

Describing the General as a "symbol of death," Unamuno closes: "Unfortunately there are all too many cripples in Spain now. And soon, there will be even more of them, if God does not come to our aid. It pains me to think that General Millan Astray should dictate the patter of mass-pyschology. ...You will win, but you will not convince. You will win, because you possess more than enough brute force, but you will not convince, because to convince means to persuade. And in order to persuade you need what you lack—reason and right in the struggle."

The crowd might have killed the Rector right there had not a Professor of Law taken Unamuno by one arm and Madame Franco by the other and quietly left the dais. Unamuno remained a prisoner in his house, Blaser tells us, until his death at the end of that year.

For Blaser it is the persuasion, through particularities, the "particles" of reality, that matter and are at the heart of any truthful political act.

That argument continues in "The Stadium of the Mirror," in which Blaser explores the relationship of poetry to the public in terms of aesthetics and psychology rather than the political. Here Blaser argues against the imaginary stage of poetry which the child mistakes as an "image of psychic wholeness," and argues instead for another version of the Memory Theater in which the mirrored stadium incorporates "as much of otherness as the poet can see and hear," internalizing, in short, a great part of the world inside of the poet's self.

Blaser's vision of the poet and his roles, accordingly, demand enormous undertakings, a knowledge of history, literature, language, politics, and much else that transforms the poet's role into a near Herculean act. It is, obviously, something that might indeed burn the poet up, actually destroy the living man. And in his beautiful testament to his beloved poet-friend Jack Spicer, we see precisely this self-immolation. Although the story has been told many times, it is worth repeating.

One of two Spicer essays in this book, "The Practice of Outside," describes some of Spicer's methods, the creation of the serial poem beginning with not having any idea where one is going. Spicer, as Blaser claims, used a simple language that resembled his own way of speaking so to be able to live in that language and, as he wrote in his book, Language, to "have the ground cut from under us." Blaser argues:

Just here, poetry may become a necessary function of the real, not
something added to it.

This living through poetry came, however, at a "remarkable cost." As Spicer once declared: "Neither baseball nor poetry are for amusement." Spicer's life, filled with contrariness and complexity, along with a deep dependence on alcohol, demanded a price.

At the end of this long essay, Blaser returns to a scene in which he had previously left us, at Spicer's beside in the San Francisco General Hospital, where he is soon to die.

I have already said his speech was a garble. He could manage a name
once in a while. Otherwise there were long-runs of nonsense sounds. No
words, no sentences. That afternoon, there was something like a dozen
friends around his bed, when it became clear that he wished to say
something to me. By some magic I can't explain, everyone left to let
it be between us. It was odd because I didn't ask them to leave and
Jack couldn't be understood. Their affection simply accounted for
something inexplicable. Jack struggled to tie his speech to words. I
leaned over and asked him to repeat a word at a time. I would, I said
discover the pattern. Suddenly, he wrenched his body up from the
pillow and said,

My vocabulary did this to me. Your love will let you go on.

The strain was so great that he shat into the plastic bag they'd wrapped
him in. He blushed and I saw the shock on his face. That funny apology
he always made for his body.

Along with Blaser's observations in short and long essays on Olson, Louis Dudek, George Bowering, Mary Butts, the artist Jess and others, The Fire encapsulates the immense demands he puts upon the role of poet, a figure, like Joan of Arc, destined to be burned up in the glory of his or her faith.

Los Angeles, November 1, 2009

Tosca's Kisses (on Puccini's opera Tosca)

Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Ciacosa (libretto), based on a play by Victorien Sardou, Giacomo Puccini (music) Tosca / premiere at Teatro Costanzi, Rome, January 14, 1900 / the production I saw was from The Metropolitan Opera's HD production of October 10, 2009 (the encore production I witnessed was on October 29, 2009)

By coincidence, soon after seeing a filmed version of Puccini's La Bohème (see below), Howard and I attended the High Definition film production of The Metropolitan Opera's October 10, 2009 performance of Puccini's Tosca.

Both Howard and I had watched Tosca on film and, together, witnessed the Berlin Opera's production at the Kennedy Center in 1975-1976. Howard saw the same production in Berlin the next year.

Accordingly, we felt we knew the opera quite well, and perhaps I do not need to repeat the entire plot for most readers, although it is easily summarized.

The painter, Mario Cavaradossi (brilliantly sung by Marcelo Álvarez) is at work on a painting of the Madonna in the Church of Sant'Andrea della Valle in Rome when he discovers a friend, Cesare Angelotti (former Consul of the Roman Republic) hiding in a family crypt nearby. Angelotti has just escaped from prison, and Cavardossi offers him a hiding place in his nearby villa.

Enter the noted opera singer Floria Tosca (Karita Matilla), Cavaradossi's lover, who immediately becomes suspicious that her beloved is seeing another woman, having overheard Cavaradossi whispering to someone. He assures her that he is in love with only her, but when she notices the painting on which he has been working, she recognizes the face of the Marchesa Attavanti (Angelotti's sister), who Cavaradossi has observed praying at the church. Her jealousy returns, as she demands Cavaradossi change the blue eyes of the painting to her own darkly-colored eyes.

A cannon is shot from the prison; they have detected the escape of Angelotti, and Cavaradossi promises his help to his friend. Enter the Chief of Police, the evil Baron Scarpia (George Gagnidze), who, upon discovering the Marchessa's fan in the crypt, successfully stirs up Tosca's jealousy once again. He himself would like to become Tosca's lover, and, as he sings of his evil machinations, the priests, chorus boys, and attending parishioners march forward in the Te Deum, which, in total hypocrisy, he finally joins.

Later that night, Scarpia awaits Tosca in his home in the Farnese Palace. His henchman have discovered and arrested Cavaradossi in his home, suspecting him having hidden Angelotti. As Tosca arrives, Scarpia orders Cavaradossi to be tortured in the next room. He demands Tosca tell him what she knows about Angelotti, but she claims to have no knowledge and refuses his demands. As the torture continues, however, she wavers, and finally unable to bear her lover's cries, confesses that Angelotti is hiding in a well near Cavaradossi's hut. The artist is released, taken off to prison to be hung.

Tosca now pleads with Scarpia to save Cavaradossi, but he is unwilling to do anything unless she give herself over to his sexual desires. In what is perhaps the most dramatic scene of the opera, Tosca hatefully gives herself up, but only if Cavaradossi's life is spared and they, together, are given a letter of free passage out of the country. Scarpia orders his henchmen to perform a mock-shooting of the artist and writes out the letter. As he moves to Tosca for his reward, she stabs him in the stomach, proclaiming the knife to be "Tosca's kiss."

The final act is a short one, as Cavaradossi awaits to be killed. Tosca arrives, quietly telling him the news that she has killed Scarpia and the artist's life has been spared. All he has to do is dramatically fall as the soldiers pretend to shoot, and when they leave she will tell when it is permissible to "return to life." Liberty is at hand!

But even in death Scarpia has extended his control over them. The guns are filled with real ammunition and Cavaradossi is murdered. The dark irony of their love is dramatized by Tosca's continued warnings to the artist to wait just a little longer, just a little longer, as the soldiers march away; finally, she commands him to stand, but as she rushes over to help him, she discovers the reality that he is dead. As the policemen arrive, having discovered Scarpia's corpse, she rushes to the parapets of the fortress, screaming "O Scarpia, we shall meet before God!" before jumping to her death.

There have been numerous books and hundreds of essays written about this popular opera, and I have little of great originality that I could add. I would just reiterate the fact that, although this opera seems, in Puccinni's hands, to be centered upon emotional issues of love and passion, jealousy and hate, it is just as significantly motivated by the politics of the moment. Both drama and opera are set on a single day, June 17, 1800, a day in which, after having crossed the alps with his army, Napoleon Bonaparte met in the Battle of Marengo with the Austrians, led by General Mélas. The events of the play follow the historical reality. Early in the play we hear that Napoleon amazingly has been defeated by the Austrians, and Tosca's evening performance is given, in part, in celebration for that event. Later in the day, however, the truth is revealed: new troops joining Napoleon's army helped reverse the situation, and by evening, just as Tosca was performing in celebration for the French defeat, Napoleon's army crushed the Austrian forces. When the news reaches Scarpia's rooms, we observe Cavaradossi celebrating the fact before he is taken away to be tortured.

A little back history may explain the situation. Just two years earlier, in February 1798, French troops, headed by Napolean's general Louis Alexandre Berthier Louis Alexandre Berthier, occupied the Vatican State, proclaiming the establishment of the Roman Republic. The Pope, Pius VI, was forced to flee to Tuscany, and, ultimately, to France where he died. Cavaradossi's friend, Angelotti, was one of the Republican leaders, a consul.

The Bourbon king Ferdinando IV, King of Naples, attempted to rescue the Pope and restore the Vatican but was defeated. For a brief time in 1799, the Roman Republic was incorporated into the Napolean-supported Parthenopean Republic which included Naples, but by April of that year General Suvorov, heading the Austrian-Russian army crossed into northern Italy and defeated the French Republics. Soon after the Bourbon's were returned to power, which, under the orders of Maria Carolina of Austria, wife of Ferdinando IV, began a "cleansing" of former Republicans, liberals, artists, scientists and others who had supported or been sympathetic to French rule. Both Angelotti and Cavaradossi, accordingly, were in danger, Angelotti imprisoned for his political position and Cavaradossi under suspicion for his artistic avocation. Thousands of men and women were killed under the eye of the newly appointed Baron Sciarpa (upon whom Scarpia is said to based).

In reverse of Napolean's battle, what seems to have saved the day in Cavardossi's and Angelotti's lives ends in death.

Tosca's political position in this time of general turmoil is quite vague. She comes from the northern Italy, which clearly is attempting to defend themselves from Napoleon's advance, and her intense religiosity seems to suggest, as does her participation in the celebration of Napoleon's supposed defeat, that she has aligned herself, despite her lover's sympathies, with the Bourbons.*

In any event, we can observe in the very political context of these momentous times that all the characters of this opera are, as one observer has suggested, not what they seem to be. The artist is also a revolutionary, the diva and sexually attractive lover is also religiously devout, the outward devout chief of police is a lustful lecher and liar. Even Angelotti is ready to don a woman's dress to escape. If for no other reason, the shifting realities of these figures might justify director Luc Bondy's decision to remove the brilliant colors of Franco Zeffirelli's previous Metropolitan production, leaving the viewer with vast abstract spaces murkily lit. It may be a justification, but, in my estimation—and apparently in those of many other opera goers, who loudly booed the opening night production—it was not successful. At times it was simply difficult to "see" these brilliant singers, and one missed the elaborately artificial trappings in which they might have further hidden their identities.

My point in all this historicity (other than my feeling that, in part, it is the very basis of the My Year volumes, in which I am attempting to remember what is so easily forgotten), is that, politically speaking, the characters are at "war" with one another even before the curtain has been raised.

Floria Tosca is not only emotionally at war with both Cavaradossi and Scarpia because of her love and jealousies, but is spiritually at war with them, more pious than Cavaradossi's all too human depiction of the Madonna and Scarpia's hypocritical worship of the symbols of the church. She is, as Cavardossi's warns early in the opera, a natural confessor, telling her own confessor "everything." It is strange, accordingly, that he allows her to discover the circumstances surrounding Angelotti, for, inevitably, even if it is presumably to save Cavardossi's life, she betrays the cause.

Tosca's kisses, accordingly, are all inevitably lethal, not only to Scarpia, whom she kisses metaphorically with the knife, but to Cavardossi, whom she kisses passionately, only to condemn him, unintentionally, to death. In such a world, in short, no one is to be trusted, for it is a world in utter chaos, official rule changing nearly instant by instant. The Battle of Marengo allowed Napoleon easier access to Italy, and Rome would soon fall to his forces, his son given by birth the title, "His Majesty the King of Rome."

Los Angeles, October 30, 2009

*In Shirley Hazzard's 2008 book, Ancient Shore (see my essay in Rain Taxi), she describes a 20th century dinner conversation with friends, a couple fiercely debating still about the Bourbon reign of Italy. Apparently, Italians are still divided on the issues.

Review of the Dardenne Brother's Lorna's Silence

The Brothers Dardenne

For my review of the Dardenne brother's new film, Lorna's Silence, you may want to visit the great web site, Nth Position: http://www.nthposition.com/lornasilence.php

More Than Zero? (on Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine)

Elmer Rice The Adding Machine, Garrick Theatre, New York, 1923
Elmer Rice The Adding Machine (New York: Samuel French, 1929)
Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt (libretto), based on the play by Elmer Rice, Joshua Schmidt
(music) The Adding Machine, Minetta Lane Theatre, New York, opened November 14, 2007 / the performance I attended was the matinee of May 11, 2008

My determination expressed in my 2002 essay on Billy Wilder’s The Apartment that I would revisit Elmer Rice’s play The Adding Machine has stayed with me over the five years since, and when I saw that a musical version of the 1923 expressionist play had opened in New York in 2007, I seized the opportunity to attend that play on my May visit to the city.

I was surprised, I must admit, by the dramatic and musical intensity of this chamber-like piece. Indeed, I found it a much more fascinating work than the blockbuster musical revivals, South Pacific and Gypsy, I revisited during the same trip. Certainly this work outshines the more predictable good-feel and block-party celebration that won the Tony for the best musical of 2008, In the Heights, but the legendary Minetta Lane Theatre is not on Broadway!

As I had remembered the play, it is certainly a devastating portrait of the work place; but unlike Wilder’s film, Rice’s play is not centered in the office, but focuses on the entire life of its anti-hero, Mr. Zero, who is abused and dismissed not as much by his boss—who after all does nothing more than fire him on a day Mr. Zero thought he might get a raise—but by his wife and friends, by the community outside his workplace.

The play and musical begin in the bedroom, the musical version raising the bed to an upright position so that Mr. and Mrs. Zero are parallel to the audience itself. The uncomfortable positioning of the bed only reiterates the discomfort of its inhabitants, and particularly Mr. Zero as his wife complains loudly not only about his behavior and lack of drive (“I was a fool for marryin’ you. If I’d ‘a’ had any sense, I’d ‘a’ known what you were from the start”) but of the quality of the movies she has been attending in the afternoons. Joshua Schmidt’s music, influenced clearly by Kurt Weill and Marc Blitzstein, reiterates her sermons with sharp, staccato chords and jarring rhythms that perfectly point up the kind of assembly-line atmosphere of Zero’s entire existence.

Indeed, we discover in the next scene at the office that Zero himself is the adding machine, a man who adds figures in his head, demanding that his assistant, Daisy, speed up her call of the numbers of each and every sale. When, after 25 years at the job, his boss asks to speak with him, Zero cannot imagine anything but that his employer has had “his eye on him,” and intends to reward his dedication.

In fact, the boss intends to replace Zero with a mechanical adding machine. Unable to even fathom what he is being told, Zero is enveloped, in the original play, with loud noises, a swelling of music, the sound of wind, waves, the galloping of horses, a locomotive whistle, sleigh bells, an automobile siren, the crash of a glass, a peal of thunder.

The third scene of the play, wherein all the other “numbers,” friends of Zero and his wife, have gathered at his home for a party, is one of the best of the play. With the men on one side of the room and the woman on the other, Rice treats us to a delicious parody of the prejudicial attitudes of the working class, and underlines the near impossibility of any individual act. The scene ends with arrest, as Zero admits the murder of his employer and meekly allows the police to take him away.

In a sense, this is the only possible way that Zero could escape his humdrum existence. In the original play, this fact is almost immediately revealed, directly after a powerful courtroom scene, in a frightening and comic graveyard. But under David Cromer's excellent direction, Zero encounters a fellow murderer—a young man who, in carving up a turkey on Sunday afternoon, applies the knife to the throat of his beloved mother instead—in his prison cell; as the two are literally forced to carry their cells with them as they move about, we recognize that even murder has allowed him little respite.

The gods of the universe Rice presents seem at first more forgiving than human folk. Instead of a scene of fire and brimstone that the young murderer Shrdlu has prepared for, both he and Zero find themselves in the pleasant landscape of the Elysian fields, where they are permitted to experience all the pleasures previously disallowed. Daisy, the young woman with whom Zero had worked, is also there, having committed suicide upon her colleague’s arrest. Together they discover their unspoken love for each other. But like Shrdlu, Zero is unprepared for the pleasures now facing him. From his completely bourgeois perspective, he can only imagine that a world which awards crimes such as his own is not one in which he can partake; he will not live a society of “drunkards, thieves, vagabonds, blasphemers, adulterers,” a world filled with “a lot of rummies an’ loafers an’ bums.”

Damned to mediocrity, Zero “lives out” the rest of his afterlife adding figures on a new adding machine given him by the gods.

These “gods,” moreover, are evidently no more forgiving than the earthbound society he has left, as it is ultimately revealed that all souls are used over and over again, and that he is to be sent back to the world which he has thought he escaped. For century after century he has been returned to the living, becoming worse and worse as a vital human being each time around.
The play closes accordingly, with the reincarnated hero, a “poor, spineless, brainless boob,” once again facing his brave new world. One can only pray that this time he may become more than a zero—even if he rises only to become a simple number in the human race.

Both Wilder’s film and Rice’s play, accordingly, end with the possibility of transcendence, but while we surely believe that Baxter and Kubelik have escaped the world that formerly imprisoned them, we are fearful that Zero will embrace the prison of his blind ignorance once again.

Los Angeles, June 27, 2008

Flight and Return: The Apu Trilogy (on Satyajit Ray's "Apu" series of films)

Satyajit Ray

Bibhitibbushan Bandyopadhyay and Satayajit Ray (writers), Satyajit Ray (director) Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) / 1955

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and Satyajit Ray (writers), Satyajit Ray (director) Aparjito (The Unvanquished) / 1957

Bibhuitbhusan Bandopadhaya and Satyajit Ray (writers), Satyajit Ray (director) Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) / 1959

In 2000 or even earlier poet and typographer Guy Bennett gave me, as a present, tapes of three Satyajit Ray films, Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Jalsaghar. I had long wanted to see these films about which I had read. But, for some reason, I delayed three years in viewing the first of them, and three more years before seeing the two other films of the Apu trilogy.

Pather Panchali (originally released in 1955) begins with Durga—daughter of Sarbojaya and Harihar—stealing a guava from the orchard that once belonged to the family but has now been sold to a neighbor. Hari, the father, is a poet and dreamer who cannot support his family properly. Accordingly, Sarbojaya is left—as is the apparent fate of poorer Bengali women—to care for the daughter, cook the food, and look after the old aunt, Indir, while pregnant with a child. The task is an onerous one, resulting in her frustration and anger which she vents upon both the aunt and daughter.

The film begins slowly, with overly long focuses on the orchard between the house and the neighbors. But it quickly takes shape with the birth of Apu, a male child, and our first view of Hari, a man of such gentleness and kindness that one simultaneously recognizes these qualities as both the sources of his failure as a bread-winner and his strengths as a father and lover. Our first view of Apu is one large eye peeking through a blanket, and his eyes become the center of focus as the surrounding events of the small Bengali village unfold. Critic Robin Wood has observed that the viewer does not see the film from the child’s view but rather from a point of view that makes one party to the child’s perceptions and reactions to what they witness together.

What we are shown may at first seem ordinary and incidental; as Ray himself noted, the novel on which the movie was based determined that it would have a rambling effect. “Life in a Bengali village does ramble.” The noted French film director François Truffaut walked out of the film after the first two reels, declaring the film “insipid” and observing he was not interested in Indian peasants. Indeed, at times too much attention is given to children simply coming and going down the wooded path. But, as the film progresses, we are drawn into the minor events: the appearance of a candy seller, a performance of a traveling theatrical company, the eternal bickering between neighbors, and the slow fading of dreams for mother, daughter and aunt. The women of Pather Panchali, clearly, are the unfortunates. While the entire family dotes (along with the audience, I might add) on the male child, Apu, his sister Durga is expected to help the mother in her housekeeping chores; a girlfriend of her own age is soon to be married. The aunt, so wizened she can barely walk, is sent packing to another relative. Only Hari and Apu seem to remain apart from the misery of everyday life. Apu is being taught to read and write, while Durga, the petty thief of the orchard, is now accused of having stolen her friend’s necklace and is punished by being locked outside the gates of the house.

It is quite justifiable that, when Apu steals tinsel from his sister’s toy box in order to make himself over as a King he has seen in the local theatrical, she is outraged and strikes him. The girl escapes the house in anger, with the beloved Apu following, and thus Ray introduces a scene that is one of the most beautiful in film history. Wandering the fields about, the children stand in stark contrast to the rows of power lines that criss-cross the countryside, and the surrounding patches of white, fluffy kaash flowers are the antithesis of the dark, fast-moving train that awes and overwhelms the two. The filmmaking here is stunning as Ray pulls the camera across the tracks so that the train blacks out landscape and children; we see them only in the small space of light between the carriage and tracks. The train and all its associations of travel, speed, commodity, and culture immediately portray everything the children’s world is not, and suddenly the separation between brother and sister vanishes. They turn toward home, only to discover their aunt a short distance from their doorstep, dead.

Ultimately, Hari must leave the small town to find employment elsewhere. But as time passes without his return, Sarbojaya is left ever more impoverished. She must sell the family’s plates. The village returns to everyday life: Druga’s girlfriend is married with much pomp and circumstance and, in surely one of the most abstract scenes in narrative film, spring returns in all its natural beauty. Dragonflies dart across the pond, reeds reflect into the water like a Hans Hartung painting. Once again, however, the beauty of the natural world prefaces the destruction of the surrounding figures.

In a ceremonial-like prayer, Druga dreams of a future husband; but in dawdling she is caught with Apu in a rainstorm. Throughout the film she has been described as feverish, and now she truly catches fever which, throughout the night of howling wind and rain, her mother attempts to cool. But the fever she has caught is also a symbolic one: the fever of a young girl in love with living. There is no hope for such a being; in the poverty-stricken world wherein she is trapped, she can only be destroyed—just has her mother has spiritually died.

Upon Druga’s death, Sarbojaya is so grief-stricken that, like Brecht’s Mother Courage, she cannot express her pain. It is only upon the long overdue return of Hari, who upon his arrival begins by describing the petty gifts he has brought the family, that her tears commence. And the awfulness of events is fully understood by family and audience alike.

The family determines to move to Benares, and as they pack their few possessions, Apu reaches for two unused bowls on a high shelf, where he discovers the missing necklace. Ray brilliantly demonstrates the wisdom the child has learned by having him secretly throw the evidence into a nearby stand of water. The last frame reminds those of us imbued with Christian imagery of the flight of Mary, Joseph, and child into Egypt. A new world awaits.

Los Angeles, May 20, 2003


The second of Ray’s Apu trilogy immediately establishes for the viewer the new world which has, so to speak “swallowed up” Harihar Ray and his family. The first image we encounter is centered upon sound, as a flock of pigeons suddenly take to the sky. The camera then focuses on the center of Benares life, the Ganges river and the various purposes it serves: it is a place for bathing, washing clothes, drinking, and religious activities.

Soon after the camera travels into the narrow street passages of the city, following the games of Apu and his friends dashing throughout the confines of its poor residents, running wild—as Sarbojaya puts it—like monkeys. Here there is no schooling, no organized activities; the only alternative to his childhood games is helping his mother as she cooks in the most primitive of conditions. The Rays’s abject poverty is made clear when she runs out of matches and asks Apu to fetch one or two from a man living in a room above. Caught by the young boy in the process of unwrapping a bottle of liquor, the friendly neighbor, somewhat conspiratorially and with what might be perceived as a slightly predatory friendliness, offers up a whole book of matches.

Throughout the Benares episodes of this film, however, we recognize that in his graceful runs throughout the city, Apu will slip away from all danger; like a monkey, he limberly speeds through the landscape, stopping just long enough to observe the kaleidoscope of sites and activities going on about the city, including his father’s readings of religious texts.

In this early section of Aparjito Ray’s camera is almost constantly on the move, as the human “monkey”—as well as actual monkeys who invade Sarbojaya’s kitchen—runs wild, and in this context there is something so dizzying about these early scenes that we almost share Hari’s first complaints of dizziness.

Despite his fever, Hari goes out again to oversee religious rituals connected with the holiday, collapsing as he attempts to return home. Brought into the house by others, he falls into a deeper fever much like that suffered by his daughter Druga in Pather Panchali, the significance of which is not lost on his wife. Apu is ordered to bring some water from the holy Ganges and races off, returning to find his father near death. Again the birds fly up—which, like other repeated images of motion such as trains and flying insects, signifies adventure, escape, and the release of the soul. Hari is dead.

Apu’s last act in Benares is to feed the wild monkeys who have overtaken an ancient shrine—the images of which suggest polar opposites of his future: subservience to ritual as against the imaginative meanderings of a young man.

Invited by her uncle to join his household, Surbojaya and Apu travel by train, in the opposite direction of their previous flight, to the small town of Dewanpur. Life in this remote village, however, is even quieter than the village they previously “escaped,” and, although the uncle appears to be kind and helpful to Apu and his mother, there are subtle restrictions attached to their being taken in, the most important of which is that Apu must now learn and practice the religious rituals to which his learnéd father had commited his life. Apu is an eager and apt pupil, but it is clear through Ray’s evocative images of children playing the kinds of games Apu previously enjoyed in Benares before being forced to abandon the innocent joys of childhood. Momentarily escaping from his religious observations, Apu runs toward the children only to witness their disappearance into the nearby school. The scene is a devastating one for both character and viewer, for we both recognize that this precocious child of Harihar will be doomed in this small town to what I will call the life of “the fever,” a life of almost total subservience to greater economic and social forces, ending in early death.

He pleads with his mother to allow him to attend school, to which she agrees if he can also continue each morning his religious activities. Through a series of short scenes, including the visit of a local school authority and several images of the young boy imitating the various cultures about which he is reading—Apu’s costuming himself as an African “native,” may be a wry statement of India’s still colonial-based values—Ray quickly reveals the intelligence and potential of his young hero. At sixteen Apu places second in a regional test, and is awarded a small scholarship to the university in Calcutta.

The hurdle of his mother’s opposition remains, but with his awarded globe in hand, he argues for accepting the stipend with such a fervor—with the burning desire of any young person to discover the world—that despite her severe reservations and fear for her own survival in the uncle’s household, she agrees, even offering Apu money she has set aside for their survival.

Like Benares, Calcutta is presented as a seething center of energy. Given a small room in a printing shop in return for his working nights at its presses, Apu, nonetheless, is serious engaged—despite falling asleep during an English lesson—by his university studies. A quick trip home for the holidays is spent primarily in bed sleeping, even as his mother attempts to convey her own loneliness and, more importantly, her fears that she has contracted fever and is soon to die. She can only look forward to the day when he will call for her to join him and make enough money for her to see for a doctor; but when the boy falls asleep while she speaks, the audience knows that that day will never come. When she slaps his face for his glib reactions to her genuine suffering, we know, if Apu cannot yet quite grasp the significance, that it is her only weapon to awaken this sleeping dreamer to the grim realities of their life, despite recognizing that those dreams may represent the only way he might escape.

In one of the most touching of this film’s scenes, Apu determines he must return to school over his mother’s pleas that he remain just a few more days. The young boy—played as an overly gaunt teenager by Smaran Ghosai (replacing Pinaki Sengupta earlier in this film and Subir Bannerjee in Pather Panchali—insists he must hurry back to the city, escaping as quickly as he can to the train station. For the last time in his life, the power of family love wins out over the seductive attractions proffered by the machine in motion, as he purposely misses the train and returns for one more day to his mother.

Back in Calcutta, however, as he prepares for his final exams, he clearly attempts to block out the few ties remaining to his mother and uncle. Sarbojaya has pleaded with him to return home during the vacation, but Apu insists he must study and cannot do so in the “sleepy” atmosphere of Dewampur. His mother prays for his return and, now overtaken by the fever, imagines she hears his returning call. As she goes outside to look for him, like her daughter Druga and Harihar before her, she becomes dizzy. Fireflies twinkling in the night sky become blurred, shining in what appears to her as a path to her prodigal son, but is perceived by the viewer as the release of her soul; the screen goes black. She is dead.

When her son finally arrives, having learned of her illness, there is no longer anyone there to greet him. Apu’s remorse is one of the most painful moments of this film, pain alleviated perhaps only with the uncle’s simple observation: “What’s done cannot be undone.” If Apu has awakened to the truth, he now recognizes all the more the need to reject it and the inevitable fever accompanying it. He ignores his uncle’s demands that he observe the rituals for her death, taking flight once again on the train that represents a society in complete opposition to the one in which he has been born.

Despite winning the Golden Lion award of the Venice Film Festival, Aparjito is not Ray’s most appealing movie; it moves forward in a slow pace that at times can seem almost maddeningly static. The characters, moreover, often seem appallingly ignorant in their lack of self-recognition. The several travels back and forth between the two societies at war in this film also bring to the film a repetition of images and themes that will frustrate impatient viewers. I would suggest, however, that Ray reveals through these flaws (intentionally or not) just the kinds of patterns that continually arise when such cultural differences meet. Despite the recognition of those suffering in subservient isolation and under conservative restrictions that there must be a world better than the one they inhabit, they often resist change in order to preserve the simple dignity with which they have lived life as opposed to joining a society that might transform them into unrecognizable beings. At film’s end, Apu’s return to the city may be his salvation, but he is no longer the wide-eyed child in wonderment that he was in Pather Panchali and the Benares section of this film. And we sadly recognize that Apu will now be an outsider for the rest of his life.

Los Angeles, June 11, 2006


The third film in Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, The World of Apu, is perhaps the most memorable—not particularly because of its cinematic originality as for the strange twists of its story and the memorable acting of Soumitra Chatterjee as Apu, Sharmila Tagore as his wife, Aparna, and their small son, Kajal, performed by S. Aloke Chakravarty.

If Aparjito showed a world which had swallowed up Apu, cutting him off from the traditions and simple joys of his childhood, the Calcutta of this third film has, so to speak, spit him out with little hope for his future. Unable to finish his university education, Apu is able to eke out the barest of wages through writing, odd-jobs, and tutoring. Much like the central character of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, the would-be writer, Apu, has little to eat and is daily threatened by his landlord of being cast into the streets. A chance encounter with his school friend Palu at least provides him with an opportunity to eat while boasting of his potential possibilities (we have already seen him rejected for the most menial of jobs) and his hopes of finishing his “great” novel. As Palu argues, however, despite the self-depravation of Apu’s life, he lives in a mental fog, a kind of creative stupor that disallows him to experience the daily realities of life of which he might write. Just to help his friend escape the city for a short while, Palu invites him to travel for a few days with him to East Bengal where he is attending a relative’s wedding.

If life in the city, despite the squalor, grinds on without notable change, life in the country is filled with exceptional characters and happenings. Even as he is introduced to the family, the mother of the bride-to-be senses something special about Apu, and repeatedly wonders whether or not they haven’t previously met. As the bride, Aparna, prepares for the wedding, the bridegroom and his party arrive (while under a nearby tree Ray presents us with the dreamer, the pan-like Apu, asleep with his flute); but when the retinue stops, the bridegroom refuses to leave his conveyance, evidently panicked by the marriage, recognizably if temporarily gone mad. The family also panics (it is useful to understand the root of that word as a derivation of Pan’s effects), and in fear that Aparna will be cursed if she is not married to someone that day, Palu is sent to ask Apu if he will wed the girl. Apu’s reaction is understandable, wondering if the whole family has not gone mad. How can they ask him such a thing in modern times? East Bengal is, quite obviously, still steeped in curses, blessings, and magical events. And, ultimately, Apu—more on a whim one supposes than from any rational act—decides to replace the mad bridegroom and marry Palu’s relative.

The beautiful scene after the wedding in which Aparna sits placidly and obediently upon the wedding bed, while Apu circles in despair on account of his actions, represents Ray’s slow, methodical directorial techniques at their best. How can he explain to Aparna the horrible thing he has done? She has grown up in a large and wealthy home in the country, while he, now a child of the city, has no income with which to support her, to sustain the pattern of life to which she has been accustomed. Her insistence that she will remain with him, despite the poverty they face, far better represents a modern wedding compact than any romantic presentation. As they travel to the city and together sneak up the stairs to his near-hovel of a room, the audience despairs as much as the bride for her future. Her tears are ours. The symbol of escape and adventure of the first two films, the train (which now runs by Apu’s very doorstep), is transformed in The World of Apu into a howling machine of torture for the young girl, belching out, like the factories it passes, a constant cloud of toxic smoke.

Despite their and our fears, however, Apu and Aparna are nearly a perfect couple, both romantic innocents who seem destined for one another; she, like Echo (in some myths Pan and Echo were married before she was destroyed) ready to learn his language (in this case, English) and repeat it. Becoming pregnant, she is encouraged by relatives and Apu to return home, he to follow.

The beautiful scenes in which Ray represents their deep love for one another—scenes which present Apu’s attempts to read a letter sent to him from Aparna during a day of working and traveling through the streets, ending in the middle of the train tracks—comes suddenly to a tragic end with the appearance of a relative reporting that the child has come too soon. Pan’s beautiful Echo has been torn apart. Apu’s reaction—he strikes the bearer of the news—presages his later inability to separate truth from circumstance: he will hold his own child responsible for his wife’s death.

In despair, Apu leaves the city, traveling first into the woods (Pan’s native home) and gradually into the center of the country where he finds a job deep within the bowels of the earth, a mine. Now that he has finally had an experience, he realizes the meaninglessness of his fiction, as he drops the pages into the natural landscape, returning the paper and ink into the world from which it emanated.

Returning to India after a trip abroad, Apu’s old friend Palu visits the East Bengal home of Aparna, where the child, Kajal, remains. The uncle reports that Apu has abandoned the boy without even seeing him. Palu searches out Apu, insisting that he return with him, that he rescue the increasingly troubled offspring. But this time, it appears, Apu will not accept the invitation. He refuses the responsibility, attempting to explain to Palu how the boy is inextricably linked in his mind with his beloved Aparna’s death. But as Palu leaves, we recognize that Apu must return; as a child who has lost his own family, Apu necessarily recognizes the fear and loneliness facing his own son.

His reunion with Kajal, however, is not at all what he might expect; filled with anger, the boy will not accept him as his own father, and refuses to have anything to do with him. With understandable rage, the boy rejects over and over Apu’s conciliatory acts. Witnessing one of these rejections, the uncle is about to strike the child with his cane in punishment, when Apu—just as Kajal had previously predicted to a neighbor—rushes forward to stop the brutal act.

As Apu leaves, the boy follows like a shadow, stopping when Apu stops, turning to look back just as the father turns to look back at the boy. Having heard that Apu is returning to Calcutta, he asks if he will take him to his father. Apu readily agrees. Suddenly the child is torn between obedience to his uncle or escaping with the stranger. Kajal’s eventual choice to escape parallels Apu’s own childhood choice; and as Apu hoists him to his shoulders, he clearly accepts the responsibility of raising his son, accepts all the responsibilities of life. He has finally completed his flight, unafraid of facing his return, wherever that my lead him.

Los Angeles, November 25, 2006

City of the Living (on Mary Beard's The Fires of Vesuvius)

Mary Beard The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008)

What I described as a dead city, Mary Beard, in her transformative study of Pompeii, The Fires of Vesuvius, reveals as a living—one might almost raucous—city of anywhere from 30,000 to 64,000 people. Beginning with the day of the eruption, August 25 79 CE, Beard takes us back to its earliest known roots, which may have been Etruscan, through various sieges and political developments which ultimately brought it into the Roman Empire.

Early in the book Beard warns us of easy assumptions, forcing us to question even what visitors appear to witness on their pilgrimages to the city, reminding us that although the city was destroyed in 79 CE, there had long been warnings and smaller eruptions of the impending volcano, most of the citizens consequently escaping, often with possessions in hand, long before August 25th. To date only around 1,100 bodies have been unearthed, and speculation is that, at most, 2000 people died in the August eruption. So what we see at Pompeii is not precisely a city with everything remaining frozen in time and space. In 62 CE, moreover, the city had been badly damaged in an earthquake, and as late as the Vesuvius eruption a great deal of repair work was still underway.

Although the world did not discover the wonders of Pompeii until the late 1700s, locals had known of the ruins for hundreds of years, over which time numerous digging looters had raided and destroyed several buildings. The original archeologists, moreover, were in some cases untrained and careless in their handling of artifacts. Even since its slow uncovering, the city has crumbled and faded in the Italian weather and sunlight. Bombings during World War II also damaged the city extensively. Five larger regions of the city remain unexcavated even today. In a sense, accordingly, what one witnesses in the vast array of buildings in Pompeii is a city often very different in appearance and quality from the Pompeii of 79 CE.

Step by step Beard takes us through the city through a series of lenses: general living, street life, house and home, painting and decoration, making a living, government, pleasure of the body, fun and games, and religion, all in a brilliant recreation of what it meant to be a Pompeiian citizen. The route, however, is not a easy one. Hundreds of standard assumptions are questioned, pet critical theories of scholars are challenged, and conflicting interpretations vetted. If there is one theme that the reader comes away with at the end of reading The Fires of Vesuvius it is that we know less about these subjects than we might presume.

Fascinating issues such as the filth of the streets (mixes of urine and dung [human and animal], garbage, and water)—which help explain several large stepping stones rising from the pavement— combined with night time dangers of near complete darkness, make for a clear sense of danger for the average citizen. The small size of rooms for the average houseowner, combined with cohabitation of slaves and extended family, further add to a modern reader's sense of discomfort. The noise, night and day, would seem to have been nearly unbearable, not to mention the proliferation of smells. Some of the most beautiful houses had to endure neighbors serving as fulleries (with its smells of hide and urine) or garum (fish oil) manufacturers. Homes and public buildings, inside and out, were apparently marked with graffiti.

Further, the myths we have of Roman dining, three to a couch while consuming a vast quantity of fish, fruit, and meats seems to have had little reality in Pompeii. While some houses, such as The House of the Golden Bracelet, show evidence of elegant dining (in this case, surrounding a small pool within a garden) Beard argues that most individuals were forced to eat out and even in wealthier homes eating shared more in common with fast food dining in contemporary American households, food consumed in various places throughout the house.

It was also a society very much controlled by a few wealthy men. Women had little power (an exception may have been the wealthy benefactor and priestess Eumachia) and wives spent most of their life raising the children and weaving. Men ruled the city, through aediles and duoviri, the latter of which were expected to pay for entertainments (public pantomimes or gladiator bouts) in return for their clout. The wealthy Pompeiian males found sexual pleasure in the bosom of his slaves (both male and female), while the poor sought sexual release in bars, some baths, or in the one likely brothel unearthed. Bathing, Beard explains, was a necessary social activity, but the pollution of the water was recognized to be a dangerous thing that could sometimes lead to infection, gangrene, even death.

Besides this more sordid information, the author also takes the reader on spellbinding trips through many of the homes, public buildings, and temples, pointing out their beautiful paintings and tiles, the arrangement of rooms, views, and other information, much of which is no longer visible. Beard explains to the lay reader the centrality, yet cultural mix of Roman religion. We begin to comprehend Pompeii's relationship to Rome itself. In short, by the time Beard completes these intellectual spins through the bustling, active city, we feel rather electrified by the exhausting trip. When the author returns us to the cities of the dead, the cemeteries just outside city gates, we realize that Pompeii is something we might never before have imagined. Too bad I had not been able to read Beard's remarkable book before my own stumble through the ruins of that city in 2007.

Los Angeles, October 22, 2009

City for Failed Acrobats (on Vitezslav Nezval and Milos Sovak)

Nezval


Some spires of Prague

Jerry and Diane Rothernberg and the Sovaks in their Paris apartment

Vítězslav Nezval Antilyrik, translated from the Czech by Jerome Rothenberg and Milos Sovak (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2001)

After a couple of years in pre-production, my Green Integer press finally published this July Jerome Rothernberg's and Milos Sovak's excellent translation, Antilyrik, a selection of poems by the forgotten (almost unknown, at least in the US) Czech experimentalist, Vítězslav Nezval.

Nezval, born in the village of Šamikovice in Southern Moravia, studied philosophy in Charles University in Prague at the very time when Czechoslovakia was as the "first real and socially oriented democracy in central Europe" (Rothenberg and Sovak), and like most Czech intellectuals of the time aligned himself with the Communist Party. The artistic counterpart of the political revolutionary spirit of the day was, for Nezval, an alliance with what was called the "Nine Powers" (Devetsil), a poet and artist collective that included some of the major figures of Czech experimentalism, including Jindrich Styrsky, Jaroslav Seifert, Karel Teige, Frantisek Halas, and Toyen (Marie Germinova). One of his first publications with this group was his long poem The Remarkable Magician, published at the age of 21.

From 1923 on Nezval presented his own program of poetics described as "Poetism," which set itself against "literary poetry" and proposed "a new art which will cease to be art." This movement would later ally itself with the Surrealists of Paris, particularly after Nezval's meeting with André Breton in 1932. Over the next 35 years Nezval would continue to publish, despite periods in which his art was banned and described as "degenerate," dozens of audacious works of poetry and fiction, as well as works of drama and art.

Our collection was only the third selection of his work to appear in English, and included several remarkable poems, including "City of Towers," where Nezval mesmerizingly repeats the word "fingers" to celebrate the creative tool that allows his poem itself to bring his Prague into life:

o hundred-towered Prague
city with fingers of all the saints
with fingers made for swearing falsely
with fingers from the fire & hail
with a musician's fingers
with shining fingers of a woman lying on her back
..........................
with fingers of asparagus
with fingers with fevers of 105 degrees
with fingers of frozen forest & with fingers without gloves
with fingers on which a bee has landed
with fingers of blue spruces
.............................
with fingers disfigured by arthritis
with fingers of strawberries
with spring water fingers & with fingers of bamboo

"The Dark City" presents a dream-like ghoulish world a city like a carousel, houses like accordions, streets composed of beds from which the citizens come out like "giant worms" or "A pack of dogs that leaped out of a mirror." As the narrator escapes this nightmare world, the city crumbles into ruins and is left as only a pile of earth and ash.

A similar nightmare world is experienced in "The Seventh Chant" from The Remarkable Magician, in which the sights and sounds of the city are linked to European history:

I heard the secrets in a kiss
the words around it circling like a line of colored butterflies
saw thousands of bacteria
in a sick man's body
& every one of them looked like a spiky chestnut
like a cosmos making war
with a skin of scaly armor

I saw a human break free from his dying comrades
in the pit of history that has no bottom

"Fireworks 1924" consists of 82 directions which Nezval defines as a "cinemagenic poem."

"Diabolo: A Poem for Night" is a longer more narrative work that recounts the movements of a sexually attractive but also a vampire-like woman as she removes her clothing and ultimately "her breasts & rests them on the nightstand / then slips out thru the monastery crypt to take confession." Like the poem that follows, the woman's courtier is represented at times as being an "acrobat," a man caught upon the wire "between his wife's bed / & another woman's." The "nite vaudeville" Nezval describes becomes a story of equilibration, a "marriage halfway station for failed acrobats," presumbably fallen beings from the wires connecting the city's many spires (Prague is commonly known as the city of a hundred spires).

In his 1927 poem "Akrobat," Prague becomes a meeting place of all Europe as the acrobat, both a marvelous shape-shifter and a fallen fool, reveals all the pleasures and tortures of modern life. Like a fairy tale, the poem, Nezval argues, "redeems our happiness," to which, by the end of the poem, Nezval bids "farewell": "I leave you now so I can keep returning."

Jerry Rothenberg, is a long time friend of whom I have written elsewhere. Milos Sovak, who was formerly a physician and now heads up a medical research company in San Diego, also has homes in Paris and Prague, where he grew up. I visited his Paris home on Rue Jacob in 1997, having a beautiful luncheon with him, his wife, and the Rothenbergs. When I told him where I was staying, the Hotel Notre Dame, he claimed he had always stayed there before buying his Paris apartment. On this occasion Sovak also displayed several of the beautiful books of poetry by friends such as Cees Nooteboom and Manuel Ulacia he had published, each accompanied by original art works by noted painters.

In 1999 I visited Milos in Prague.

Milos, who comes from a illustrious Prague family, spent a couple of days touring me through the city, the first night taking me to the Švejk restaurant whose walls carry the drawings by Joseph Lada and George Grosz for famed Czech novelist Jaroslav 's Hašek The Good Soldier Švejk.

The next day Milos was kind enough to take me on a long walking tour of the old town and other parts of the city. At one point he showed me a large building where, during the final days of Nazi control, his father had worked as head doctor. As the German tanks were leaving the city in the early days of May 1945, one gun tank was conspicuously pointed at the hospital; it was clear that the Germans were determined to destroy the hospital (the only one that would accept Jewish patients) as they left. Those at work in the building, including Milos' father, were horrified by their imminent destruction. Meanwhile, as Milos describes it, an elderly woman who worked as the head secretary, sitting at her window and witnessing the scene, carefully took out her pistol from the drawer of her desk, and aimed it at the operator of the tank, shooting him directly in the head. The tank careened around the square for several minutes before finally coming to rest.

That afternoon, Milos and I visited Argo publishers, where I met the publisher and his assistant, who some days later joined me in Frankfurt (in attendance at the Frankfurt Bookfair) for a Japanese dinner.

Back in Prague Milos took me out to a splendid dinner at a lovely restaurant. I believe I ordered boar. On our way back home we walked across the Vltava river, stopping in a small park along the way where he pointed across to the home (more like a lit-up mansion, it appeared to me) in which he had grown up. "What a beautiful city," I sighed.

Prague was in near-complete renovation when I visited, nearly all of the buildings which had not previously been repainted, were enjoying new coats of the bright colors that now identify the Prague sky-line. Milos scoffed, somewhat jokingly I presume, at all the renovation. "I somehow got used to and now prefer the old gray city Prague was for so many years under Soviet rule. Everything now seems so artificially bright!"

A few years later, Milos introduced me in Los Angeles to beloved Mexican poet Manual Ulacia, with whom Horácio Costa had lived for several years before I met him on my first trip to Brazil. Ulacia drowned while swimming in the ocean this year. A good swimmer, he was swept out to sea by undercurrents and was unable to return to shore.

Los Angeles, August 19, 2001


In 2002 Milos and Jerry won the PEN Center USA award for their translation of Nezval's Antilyrik.
On January 26, 2009 Sovak died in San Diego, after a prolonged illness, at the age of 67.


Los Angeles, October 18, 2009

Secret Lives (on the short fiction of Joseph Roth)

Joseph Roth Collected Shorter Fiction of Joseph Roth, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (London: Granta Publications, 2001)

Most of the wonderful stories and novellas collected in this volume represent worlds in which the characters act in ways that seemed destined, the figures themselves moving forward in life without seemingly knowing what motivates them and how they might have in any way transformed their own worlds.

This is particularly true of the earliest stories of Roth's as in "The Honors Student," a perfectly terrible portrait of the bourgeoisie mentality epitomized by Anton Wanzl, the overachieving but completely unimaginative son of the local Postmaster. Anton is the perfect student, aping his masters and winning their favor so successfully that honors are heaped upon him:

His glowing reports, ceremonially folded, were kept in a large
brick-red envelope next to the album of specially beautiful
stamps....

Yet Anton, moving quietly though his life, is not a happy child, but one "consumed by a burning ambition," we are told, by "An iron desire to shine, to outdo all his comrades...." Beloved by his proud parents, Anton returns no emotion. As Roth tells us "He lacked heart," and his first relationship with a young woman, Mizzzi Schinagl, is run more like a campaign to win her mother and father's respect than to romance the girl herself. As he moves into the Gymnasium, he easily forgets her and moves on to a relationship with the daughter of a more successful individual, Court Councilor Sabbaeus Kreitmeyr, eventually winning her hand in marriage over the more romantic entreaties of the artist Hans Pauli.

Anton goes on to become a teacher, ultimately requesting to be transferred back to the small town in which born and raised. There, instead of seeking for a higher position, he feels fulfilled, eventually becoming the Director of the school where he was educated before his frail sensibility, hitherto subject to his intense ambitions, wins. He dies of pneumonia, highly respected by the locals but without having done anything meaningful in his life.

In a similar way, a mother, "Barbara," sacrifices her life and love of her lodger Peter Wendelin to make certain that her son is given every opportunity. The child achieves a kind of success, ultimately becoming a student of divinity. But the thick-skinned boy has no ability at feelings, and, as his mother lies dying, he spends his time with her in abstract talk "about the hereafter, and the reward that awaited the faithful in Heaven." rather than expressing his love. As he "stifles a yawn" and goes out for a breathe of air, Barbara lies dying, alone as ever, "stumbling towards Eternity."

In one of the very best tales of this collection, "April," Roth's narrator is a stranger to a small town wherein he notes the comings and goings of the town's figures. He soon is involved with a lusty barkeeper, Anna, and is amused by several other figures, including the local and beloved Postmaster. One man alone he cannot abide, the assistant railwayman.

I hated the assistant railwayman. He was freckled and unbelievably tall
and erect. Every time I saw him, I thought of writing to the Railway
Minister. I wanted to suggest he use the ugly assistant railwayman as a
telegraph pole somewhere between two little stations....
I couldn't explain my hatred for this official. He was exceptionally
tall, but I don't have principled hatred for anything exceptional. It seemed
to me that the assistant railwayman had shot up so much on purpose, and
riled me. It seemed to me that he had done nothing else since his youth
but acquire freckles and grow. On top of everything else, he had red hair.

One day he discovers, while dining in a nearby restaurant, a beautiful woman in the Postmaster's home who completely captures his attention. Another day he nods to her, and everyday thereafter they greet one another from a distance, the storyteller imagining that she comprehends what is on his mind. The narrator is told that she is the Postmaster's daughter, who is ill. Soon the narrator discovers himself in love with this beautiful woman, but, unable to communicate with her, he determines that he need leave this small town.

It was so ridiculous, I thought, for me to hang around night after night
in front of the windows of a girl who's about to die, and whom I won't
ever be able to kiss. I'm not that young any more, I thought. Every day
is a task, and each one of my hours was a sin against life.

As he enters the train to leave, he sees the abhorrent assistant railwayman, the beautiful girl in the window trailing after.

"Stay, won't you!" I heard the railway employee say to her. "I'm almost
finished!"
But the girl didn't listen to him. She looked at me. We looked at each
other. she stood upright, and she was wearing a white dress, and she was
healthy, and not at all lame, and not at all tubercular. Obviously, she was
the assistant railwayman's fiancée or his wife.

The irony of the situation sends the story's narrator on a long voyage to New York.

The idyll "Strawberries," told primarily through the voice of Naphtali Kroy, describes the adventures of various figures living in a small Eastern European town where each member of the community, poor or rich, play nearly equal parts, the poor being fed by the local Count, and the Count depending for his significance of the local folk. Each of these lives, sometimes comically and at other times tragically are interwoven. But gradually we see the small town changing. The new hotel is constructed, even though there is hardly anyone to inhabit it. To the town square is added a new sculpture dedicated to a local poet, Raphael Stoklos. Finally, an Englishman comes to the city and builds a large new structure without any windows, "a big store, a department store."

The following story, "This Morning, A Letter Arrived..." obviously a follow-up tale in what was presumably to have been a longer fiction, shows the Diaspora of that former community, as Naphtali is described in Buenos Aires and, later, Vienna.

The ordinary Stationmaster, Adam Fallmerayer, married to an even more ordinary woman, one day falls madly in love with a Countess he encounters in a train accident some distance from his station. Drafted into War, the Stationmaster teaches himself Russian and, one day, finds himself stationed not far from the Countess's home in the Kiev region. Visiting her, he arranges another meeting and before they know it the two have fallen in love. Fallmerayer's wife writes to say she is leaving him. As the Russian revolutionary forces move toward them, they flee to Monte Carlo, where the Countess becomes pregnant.

By coincidence the Count, who has also been fighting in the war, arrives in Monte Carlo, where he is greeted by the Countess and her lover. But the man Fallmerayer discovers is not at all one with whom he might battle for his love.

Fallmerayer looked at the Count's long, yellow, bony face, with
its sharp nose and bright eyes and the thin lips under the drooping
black moustache. The Count was wheeled along the platform like
one of his many pieces of luggage. His wife followed the wheel chair.

As the wife plumps up one of her husband's pillows, Fallmerayer says good night, never to be seen again. For his life, if he were to stay with the Countess, would now mean his own attentive devotion to the old man.

The secret life of Dr. Skovronnek, who in "The Triumph of Beauty" specializes in caring for women at a local spa, is revealed through his incredible story of a friend, a young "upper class" diplomat and a beautiful, but rather stupid English woman, whom the young galant marries. While the story portends to be an objective description of how the young man is tricked by a course woman (she loves Wagner, he plays Mozart with the Doctor), we soon recognize the tale as misanthropic fable about women in general who trick and destroy their innocent husbands. What is clear is that the Doctor himself is enamored of the young man and angry at the wife for coming between them. The final flurry of hatred towards women expresses the Doctor's condition quite clearly:

Many, many women passed me in the street, and some of them smiled
at me.
Go on, I thought, smile, smile, turn, look over your shoulders, swing your
hips, buy yourselves new hats, new stockings, new bits and bobs! Old age
will catch up with you! Give it another little year or two! No surgeon will
be able to do anything about it, no wigmaker. You will be disfigured, em-
bittered, disappointed, you will sink into your graves and then further, into
Hell. But go on, smile, smile!...

The last tale of this marvelous collection, "Leviathan," also is a story of a secret life. In the town of Progrody lives Nissen Piczenik, a renowned coral merchant, a successful Jewish businessman. Secretly, however, corals are not just the source of Piczenik's income, but represent an obsession, a kind of madness that includes all things connected with the ocean. When a local boy who has joined the navy returns for a visit home, Piczenik takes up with him, questioning him about everything to do with ocean waters, for Nizzen has never himself been to sea. So compelled is the coral merchant with the subject that, when the young man must return to his ship, he accompanies him to Odessa, claiming he is the boy's uncle and joining him for a tour of the vessel and staying on in the city for three days.

With his return to Progrody, Piczenik discovers his business is dwindling and, soon after, another coral merchant opens a shop in a nearby town, selling only synthetic corals at great discount. Against all his principles and his love of the objects he sells (which the merchant perceives as living beings) he begins to mix the synthetic with the real. Sales drop even further, and since he cannot sell only the real ones, determines to emigrate. On his way to Canada, the boat sinks, Piczenik leaping overboard to join his real corals.

Interestingly enough, in Roth's early stories absolutely exceptional-seeming individuals were revealed as absolutely ordinary and boring figures. But in the best of these tales the ordinary men and women he portrays, when their surfaces are slightly scratched, are represented as extraordinarily complex individuals, flawed yes, but amazing for their secret passions of life.

Los Angeles, September 24, 2001

It Comes with the Job (Three films about workers and unions: The Pajama Game, On the Waterfront, and Norma Rae)

Charley and Terry in deep discussion

George Abbott and Richard Bissell (book, based in Bissell's novel 7 1/2¢), Richard Adler and Jerry Ross (music and lyrics) The Pajama Game / New York, St James Theatre, May 13, 1954

Budd Schulberg (writer) (based, in part, by articles by Malcolm Johnson), Eliza Kazan (director) On the Waterfront / 1954

George Abbott and Richard Bissell (based on Bissell's novel 7 1/2¢) (writers), Richard Alder and Jerry Ross (music and lyrics), George Abbott and Stanley Donen (directors) The Pajama Game / 1957

Harriet Frank, Jr. and Irving Ravetch (writers), Martin Ritt (director) Norma Rae / 1979

Considering that Benedetti's novel, like his short story "The Budget" (which I published in translation in 1001 Great Stories, Volume 1) both take place primarily in the workplace, I thought it might be interesting to explore a few films that focus on workers and, in particular, the employee relationship with employers, which also involves the issue of labor unions. The three works on which I've decided to focus center on the unions, linking the labor organizations with better pay, better working conditions, and, in the second example, representing them as a corrupt force demanding the employees' blind faith. I might have chosen numerous other films about the workplace, The Apartment (a film on which I've already written in My Year 2003), How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying and Nine to Five immediately come to mind. But I chose these particular three films because their focus is on the relationship of workers and union more than on extracurricular situations involving affairs of the heart.

The Pajama Game, based on Iowa writer Richard Bissell's 1952 novel 7 1/2 ¢, however, is a none too serious example of a workplace drama, and were there not a real battle between labor and management presented in this work, it might have floated off into a love comedy. The head of the Union Grievance Committee, Babe Williams (Doris Day)—despite her denials ("I'm Not At All in Love")—is clearly attracted to the new superintendent of the Sleep-Tite Pajama Factory, Sid Sorokin (John Raitt). But, as she later explains to him, she is a "Union girl," and resists his attentions precisely because she is afraid of what will come between them. Although it is a comic resistance—one that we immediately know will ultimately be overcome—there remains throughout the play a serious breach between management and labor that ends, temporarily, in their separation.

A more comic series of characters buoy up these more serious issues facing the feuding lovers by mocking all love quarrels: Vernon Hines (Eddie Foy, Jr.), the factory timekeeper, is perpetually jealous of the woman he loves, Gladys Hotchkiss, (the great comic dancer Carol Haney) secretary to the head of the factory "Old Man" Hasler. That jealousy, combined with Hines' drinking and "skill" at throwing knives, a skit he is determined to perform at the annual employee picnic, creates its own fireworks, underlying the more serious battles between the superintendent and union representative. One of the best comic moments in the work, indeed, is played out by Sid's secretary, Mabel (the delectable Rita Shaw), and Hines, as she tries to cure him of his jealous behavior ("I'll Never Be Jealous Again"); that "cure," however, is short-lived, and ultimately, hinting at an even darker fears in the war between factory employees, culminates in the possibility of murder and death!

As Sid and Babe fall deeper and deeper in love (helped along by songs such as "Small Talk" and "There Once Was a Man"), the war between the union and management threatens. Workers demand a raise most other such employees have received throughout the state of 7 1/2 cents, and as Hasler continues to resist, a slow-down is ordered. Outraged by their actions, Sid orders an "honest day's work," and as the slackers again speed up production, Babe jams the machinery. Sid has no choice but to fire his lover. His lonely fate is beautifully spelled out twice in the musical as he sings to himself into a Dictaphone ("Hey There").

Meeting at Babe's house, several rebellious workers plan strategies to embarrass the company, mismatching sizes of pajamas, flimsily sewing on fly-buttons, etc. In order to correct the threatened mayhem, Sorokin becomes determined to see the financial records which the company head keeps carefully locked away from sight. Pretending to court Hasler's secretary Gladys (who has dismissed her dangerous lover Hines) he meets her at the popular city night club, Hernando's Hideaway, with the attention of wheedling the key to the company records she keeps on a chain around her neck.

In fact, that key reveals another kind of "chain" around all the worker's necks. Sid discovers that Hasler has already raised the cost of his products to account for the 7 1/2 ¢ months before, refusing to grant the raise simply out of greed.

The union rally is in progress where union leaders explain just what that raise of 7 1/2¢ will mean to the underpaid workers over a lifetime. But before the strike is declared, Sorokin arrives with Hasler in hand, having threatened to reveal Hasler's actions to the workers. The old man has no choice but to give in to Union demands. Sid is restored to a hero in Babe's mind. And everyone is suddenly off to celebrate at Hernando's where "All you see are silhouettes. / And all you hear are castanets. / And no one cares how late it gets," clearly a kind of laborer's heaven.

The same year that The Pajama Game opened on Broadway, Eliza Kazan's On the Waterfront premiered in movie houses; the two could not be more different in how they deal with the subject workers and unions. Whereas in The Pajama Game the local union, completely controlled by the local workers, successfully serves their concerns, writer Budd Schulberg's International Longshoreman's Association, run by the mob (in New York the infamous Genovese family) robs union funds while demanding complete fealty and further financial extortion from the workers.

The film, based on newspapers stories written by Malcolm Johnson in the New York Sun, begins with a somewhat dim-witted but gentle tough, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), playing lackey to the gangster union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) who orders him to lure a young dockworker, Joey Doyle, to his apartment rooftop. Doyle has evidently informed on union workers to a new Crime Commission committee, and Johnny wants him killed. The unsuspecting Molloy (who presumes Friendly's henchmen will only rough him up) does what he's told, inviting Doyle, himself a bird lover, to inspect his rooftop pigeons. In shock Terry witnesses Doyle's murder as he is hurled to the street below.

From that moment on, Elia Kazan's film takes its subject by the teeth and refuses to let go. No matter what one thinks about Kazan—most of my older Hollywood friends have refused to speak to or even of him since 1952 when he served as a friendly witness before the House on un-American Activities—there is no question that On the Waterfront is a powerful and mesmerizing film, with brilliant performances by Brando, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger, and Eva Marie Saint and an original score by Leonard Bernstein. The film won eight Academy Awards, including the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, and is listed on the American Film Institute's list of most memorable movies.

It is useful to realize, however, that no matter how factual Schulberg and Kazan's film was (and there is every reason to believe that they correctly portrayed the brutality of the New York shipping docks) Kazan's intention was to create a kind of allegory for his own position before McCarthy and others. The original screenplay, "The Hook," was by Arthur Miller (who refused to name names before the HUAC committee), but he was replaced by Schulberg (who, like Kazan, testified as a friendly witness before the committee). Pressure from the HUAC committee wanted the mob villains to also be Communists, but fortunately Schulberg did not defer to their wishes. Nonetheless, Kazan's film, with its emphasis on those who refuse to speak up against the mob, his obvious disdain for those who remain "Deaf and Dumb (D & D)," was clearly a statement against the criticism he had received for speaking out at HUAC. (It's interesting that Miller went on to write two works that told a different story of behavior regarding public testimony: A View from the Bridge, about the family loyalty of Italian immigrants, and The Crucible, about the Salem witchcraft trials and the related testimony of young girls and others against the so-called witches.)

Most of On the Waterfront, accordingly is devoted to the long struggle by Father Barry (Karl Malden) and Joey Doyle's sister, Edie (Eva Marie Saint), with whom Terry gradually falls in love, to convince Terry to come clean and report what he has seen to the Crime Commission. When the mob begins to suspect that Terry might squeal, they order him killed, unless Terry's older brother Charley (part of the Union mob) can convince him to remain silent. Through conversations with Edie and Father Barry, Terry gradually begins to understand the difference between survival and hope, as he develops a new set of moral values which reach back into his own past.

In what is one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the film, Charley literally takes his brother "on a ride," trying to force Terry to understand the danger of his potential acts. As they discuss Terry's past career as a boxer, Terry admits that is has very little offer in his current life. But whereas Charley blames his brother's manager ("That skunk we got you for a manager, he brought you along too fast"), Terry suddenly blurts out the truth:

It wasn't him, Charley! It was you. You remember that night in the Garden,
you came down to my dressing room and said: 'Kid, this ain't your
night. We're going for the price on Wilson.' You remember that? 'This
ain't your night!' My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens?
He gets the title shot outdoors in the ball park—and whadda I get? A
one-way ticket to Palookaville.

Their final interchange represents Terry's transformation from dim-witted lackey to a man of growing wisdom and moral integrity:

Terry: You was my brother, Charley. You shoulda looked out of me
a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me—just a little—so I wouldn't
have to take them dives for the short-end money.
Charley: I had some bets down for you. You saw some money.
Terry (yelling and heartbroken): You don't understand! I coulda had
class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead
of a bum, which is what I am. Let's face it [pause]....It was you, Charley.

With such an intense scene between brothers, Kazan needs to say little about the union Charley represents. The relationship between the workers and the union is played out in On the Waterfront in terms of sibling rivalry, saving the director from having to focus on the deeper issues concerning the relationship between the two forces.

Obviously, Terry must die! And in Schulberg's original script that was to have been his fate. But Kazan would then have been without a hero to give evidence to his righteous act of testifying. In the final film Terry battles Friendly directly through a kind of end-all fighting bout; he is nearly killed by the union henchmen, but, once Terry, his supporters in pietà-like formation, is helped to stand, he refuses to give in, weaving and lunging forward, a working man's Christ, into the maw of the ship, Friendly shouting after like some angry schoolyard bully who has temporarily lost his powers. The myth Kazan has created is perhaps more powerful than Schulberg's original political commentary.

Martin Ritt's 1979 film Norma Rae is clearly, of the three union films I discuss, the most realistically conceived as well as the most focused of these films on the actual issue of unions. Located in a small Southern US town, a region (as I mention in my discussion of There Goes My Everything in My Year 2006) where union leaders and even members were often thought to be Communists, and joining unions, accordingly, was perceived as an Un-American act, the film presents the often brave and always strong-willed activities of Norma Rae Webster (Sally Fields, who won an Oscar for her role) and a Union organizer from New York, Reuben Warshowsky (Ron Liebman). Based on a real-life figure, Crystal Lee Sutton, who, while earning $2.65 an hour folding towels at the Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, J. P Stevens plant, tried to organize her co-workers, the film proceeds in a fairly true-to-life, unspectacular manner to depict the gradual awakening of the workers to their needs and, most importantly, their rights.

Norma Rae's own difficulties with men, her latent attraction to Rueben, and their discomforts with opposing cultures and religions is all gently laid to rest early in the film so that Ritt can focus on the growing union activities and the inevitable repercussions upon her life. The mill itself, more than its unsympathetic owners and managers, is represented as a monstrous Dickensian machine, the air filled with wool dust and the pounding sound of the looms that voids almost any possibility of verbal communication and assures the eventual loss of hearing for employees. The moment in the film where Norma Rae discovers that her mother has become hard of hearing is one of the most memorable in a series of scenes played out in the infernal factory, where employees are carefully watched for even the smallest of infractions.

Refused permission to put up a union sign or even post company policies, arrested, and fired, Norma Rae gradually grows through Rueben's mentoring from a fairly ignorant country girl into a wiser woman who is transformed from just another worker to someone, as Crystal Lee Sutton is purported to have asked to be remembered, "who deeply care(s) for the working poor...." Upon being arrested and humiliated, Norma Rae breaking into tears, is given little sympathy by Rueben, who reports "It comes with the job."

Her growing sense of determination and righteousness is at the center of Ritt's film, and its trajectory is what makes his film a fulfilling work. By the time that Norma Rae, like Sutton before her, closes down her machine and, standing on her work table while holding a cardboard sign upon which has scrawled UNION, brings the entire factory to a silent halt, we know that no matter what the outcome, the workers have won and their relationship to the monstrous mechanic in which they toil, has been changed forever.

In reality it took a year before the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union won the right to represent the seven plants located in Roanoke Rapids. The court ordered that Sutton be paid back wages and returned to work. She returned for two days, quitting to work as a union organizer. On September 11 of this year, Sutton died of brain cancer at the age of 68.

Los Angeles, October 14-17, 2009

Lies in a World of Lies (on Isak Dinesen's Ehrengard)

Isak Dinesen Ehrengard (New York: Vintage Books, 1975)

The noted Danish storyteller, Isak Dinesen's novella Ehrengard is a tale of lies. Eager to marry off their son, the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess of Babenhausen arrange, through the artist Geheimrat Wolfgang Cazotte, to have Prince Lothar meet with Princess Ludmilla of the house of Leuchtenstein. As in any such fable—and Dinesen's story has a great deal in common with a fairy-tale like romance—the couple immediately fall in love, and are speedily wed.

Unfortunately, the Princess suddenly discovers herself pregnant, due with child before the proper time has elapsed after their betrothal. What to do without causing a scandal?

Upon discovering the predicament, the Grand Duchess arranges for the two to retreat to the country estate, Schloss Rosenbad, where, accompanied by only a few stalwart loyalists, Cazotte among them, the couple will remain until a sufficient time passes after the birth that they can announce the new heir.

Among those joining the Rosenbad (dubbed by the participants as Venusburg) party is the beautiful Ehrengard von Schreckenstein, with whom Cazotte soon falls in love.

A child Prince is born, and the court is overjoyed with the boy's perfection. Indeed the whole fabrication seems to be working wonderfully. Even Cazotte, a wily and seasoned figure, is overjoyed by the beauty of the royal family and the countryside. One night, however, while taking in the rapturously beautiful sunset he accidentally comes across Ehrengard and her maid swimming nude in a nearby brook, and, overwhelmed by her beauty, is determined to seduce her, not through the usual manly wiles, but by painting her so precisely that when she witnesses the artwork a blush will rise to her face with the recognition of what has occurred, making her, he imagines, his love alone.

So begins Cazotte's dangerous voyeurism, seemingly encouraged by Ehrengard's continued trips to the stream. At one point she even seems to taunting the painter to accomplish his abstract rape:

My maid tells me," she said, "that you want to paint a
picture. Out by the east of the house. I wish to tell you that
I will be there every morning, at six o'clock.

Fear and trembling ensue.

Meanwhile, enemies of the court, particularly Duke Marbod and other intriguers suspect something is unusual about the gathering of the couple at this castle. Lispbeth, a woman hired to suckle the new Prince, has a husband, Mattias, whom she has left behind, jealous for her being taken from him, particularly since she has, at home, a suckling child of her own, and she has told him there is no child at the court. Inspecting the castle grounds, Matthias encounters his wife. She, in turn, is so fearful of scandal that she reveals that there is a child, and she will show it to him the next day.

Marbod and the others are delighted to hear from Matthias the new information, and with him they plot the abduction of his wife and the baby, determined to meet up at the Blue Boar, a nearby inn. When the absence of the child is discovered, both Cazotte and Ehrengard race toward the inn, discovering the nurse, Matthias, and others are within. Even more surprisingly Ehrengard encounters there her fiancee, Kurt von Blittersdorff, who is startled by her looks:

"Ehrengard!" Kurt von Blittersdorff cried out in the highest amazement.
The girls' cheeks as she tossed back her hair were all aflame
and her eyes shining. She opened her lips as if to cry his own
name back, then stiffened, like a child caught red-handed.

Racing to the room to where the child and nurse are imprisoned, Ehrengard ignores Kurt's inquiries. He follows, and upon seeing a child demands to know "What child is it?"

At that very moment Cazotte also arrives, just in time to have two more impossible lies cast into the comic foray. Ehrengard claims it is her child, and when all demand to know who was the father, she answers: "Herr Cazotte is the father of my child."

In a stroke of brilliant irony, Dinesen has suddenly reversed the character roles, as Ehrengard accomplishes what Cazotte had hoped to impose upon her:

At these words Herr Cazotte's blood was drawn upwards, as
from the profoundest wells of his being, till it colored him
lover like a transparent crimson veil. His brow and cheeks, all on
their own, radiated a divine fire, a celestial, deep rose flame, as
if they were giving away a long kept secret.

The story of deceit has come to an end, with the first glimmer of truth finally revealed: It is Ehrengard who has seduced the great "Casanova" Cazotte.

It hardly matters that in an epilogue we discover that everything is later straightened out, that Ehrengard is married to Kurt with "the light blue ribbon of the Order of St. Stephan" (an award given to noble ladies for service to the house of Fugger-Babenhausen) pinned upon her white satin frock. For the royal houses of Dinesen's tale have lied only in order to be saved again by her lies. And unable to face the truth of his love, Cazotte escapes to Rome to paint a portrait of the Pope.

New York, September 18, 2001

The Creepy Stuff I Did (Letterman, Allen, and Polanski)

David Letterman and his wife, Regina Lasko


Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate

Roman Polanski today

David Letterman Late Show with David Letterman, October 1, 2009, CBS
Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman (writers), Woody Allen (director) Manhattan / 1979
Joe Bini, P. G. Morgan, and Marina Zenovich (writers), Marina Zenovich (director) Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired / 2008, the showing I witnessed was at the Melnitz Theatre, UCLA, on October 1, 2009

While recently listening to David Letterman's "confession" of his sexual encounters on late night television, I was bemused and more than a little frightened, once again, by my fellow citizens' sexual prudery and by the underlying attitudes we Americans seem to have about sex in general.

Letterman, as most Americans now know, was being blackmailed by CBS producer Robert "Joe" Halderman for having had—are you sitting down?—"sex with woman who work with me on this show." Allegedly these sexual relationships all occurred before his marriage to Regina Lasko and the birth of their son, although there are now suggestions that he took one of the women, Stephanie Birkett, on a Caribbean vacation with his wife and son.

However, unless Letterman threatened these women with dismissals ffrom their jobs if they did not have sex with him, it amazes me that anyone might have thought that he could get away with blackmail or that viewers might even imagine this to be of interest except to Letterman, his wife, and the women with whom he had sex. Certainly, it can (and evidently has) lead to matrimonial difficulties and may some day end up as an issue in divorce court, but in my estimation those issues have no place at all in the minds of prurient American television viewers, who every day, it seems, are shocked and absolutely amazed that our celebrities and leaders lead lives as sexual beings!

The media, of course, mightily fuels this ridiculous outrage. In France or even Italy, the public and press might hail Letterman as an ordinary man. But here he is forced to describe his noncriminal behavior as "creepy," as if he were some strange deviant, hiding his actions from an innocent American mass. Although the American divorce rate, as some sources show, has decreased in the last few years by 30%, it is still, according to The Marriage Index, 2-6 times higher than in Canada and European countries. Obviously, divorce may occur for numerous reasons, yet infidelity is obviously high among its causes. Accordingly, Letterman may be a very ordinary man. Why are we so fascinated by the topic?

On the other hand, if one of these women had been an underage intern, it would be a different matter. And that is what we must consider in the recent arrest of Roman Polanski, to whose side numerous Hollywood figures have recently come in support of his being freed from the Swiss prison and possible U.S. extradition.

At some point in the pages of these volumes I would like to discuss American and current international attitudes (largely in response to American pressure) about sexuality and children. As a society, the rising hysteria about child abuse—and I will assert that it has reached that level of behavior, is something that cannot be rationally discussed—is dismaying to the say the least. Our viewpoint is based on a Victorian notion of childhood isolation, a blessèd time of innocence in which children are to be protected from the world at large, and there is a certain wisdom, I am sure, in this vision, even if the reality seems to be pointing to the opposite, that today's children are increasingly behaving, earlier and earlier in their childhood, as adults (with results both good and bad). Those facts, also fueled by the media, in turn, fans the flames of further fears which Americans play out.

Nearly everyone save sexual predators themselves, recognizing the power adults have over children's minds and bodies, want to protect juveniles from the sexual advances of men and women who may psychologically hurt them, physically abuse them, or even kill them; most civilized societies understand those dangers and seek to protect their young. But at what age to draw the line? We have somewhat arbitrarily named the age of 18, even though one can enlist, without parental consent, to go to war at age 17. Evidently, children have permission to die, as long as do it as virgins.

No matter what age is chosen to be appropriate, on the other hand, there will always appear to be exceptions, children more advanced, physically and sexually, than their peers. And one cannot expect the judge or jury to make such determinations, to pick and choose among the victims. On the other hand, in severe cases of murder and mayhem there seems to be an increasing decision among prosecutors to try some juveniles as adults. Not being a lawyer, I don't know what kind of criteria goes into these determinations, but it does seem somewhat hypocritical when we can pick and choose how we can apply life imprisonment or even the death sentence to underage children, while making no allowance for their sexuality.

In his 1979 film Manhattan, Woody Allen flirts with this very issue. Recently revisiting this film, I was a little abashed to remember that the girl Allen has taken up with after his second wife (Meryl Streep) has run away with another woman, is a 17 year-old high school girl (Mariel Hemingway). Although the Allen character is clearly someone uncomfortable with the idea throughout the film—joking at one point, "I'm older than her father, can you believe that? I'm dating a girl, wherein, I can beat up her father."—no else seems appalled by the fact. Indeed all of Allen's friends in the movie seem to be involved, like Letterman, in extramarital affairs (particularly the character Yale, played by Michael Murphy) or, in the case of Diane Keaton's character, easily shifting from bed to bed. Only Tracy, Allen's 17 year-old lover, seems to know what she wants, an older lover to "fool around" with. Not until Allen has sent her packing does he realize how much he misses her; but she's now 18 and on her way to a new experience in life, a six-month stay in England, which, incidentally, he had previously recommended to her.

That film received nearly unanimous praise, and no reviewer I've read seemed at all appalled that it was, in some senses, a film about child abuse. Maybe because it was fiction it was saved from public outcry, although one must remember that just two decades earlier Lolita, another fiction about this subject, was banned in the USA.

Allen, one should recall, has had his own sexual scandale, involving himself in an affair with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Allen's lover of the time, Mia Farrow, a romance she discovered by finding nude pictures of her daughter taken by Allen. Frankly, I might describe Allen's actions as far more "creepy" than anything Letterman has done. Ultimately, Allen married Soon-Yi, and they remain married today. It comes as no surprise, accordingly, that Allen is one of the signatories of the petition demanding Polanski's release from jail.

If in the film-fiction Manhattan Tracy is apparently more mature than all the adults of that film, the girl with whom Polanski had sex in 1977, Samantha Geimer, although a mature looking girl, was not even close to legal age; she was only 13 at the time. Geimer, moreover, clearly did not want a sexual relationship with her photographer and reported his sexual advances as rape to the police. Whether Polanski had set out to rape her or whether his sex with her seemingly arose from a too-intimate setting, a sauna at Jack Nicholson's house, is not really the issue. Polanski fed her both Champagne and part of a Qualude before engaging in sex. And even imagining that, as a sexual swinger of the international set, he was unaware of how serious Americans took such infractions, he surely couldn't have been so stupid to think his actions would have no consequence.

Although one might find it psychologically fascinating that he committed these infractions just a few years after the brutal slaying by Charles Manson and his dreadful followers of Polanski's beloved wife, Sharon Tate, events all further interwoven, surely, with his childhood memories of the murder of his parents in the death chambers of World War II concentration camps, it can have no direct bearing on his criminal behavior, particularly since he was twice found to be free of serious pyschological problems. It may be fascinating to consider those issues when discussing his films, but cannot be seen, as some have attempted, to be an excuse for his actions.

Finally, it seems ridiculous to argue, as some in Hollywood have, that he should be excused from this sexual "slip up" because of his immense talent. When will we learn that great artists, writers, and other geniuses often support evil actions and those behind them? I love the writing of Knut Hamsun, but to do so one must also accept the fact that we was a supporter of the Nazi cause and actually met with Hitler. My own thinking about poetry has been very influenced by Ezra Pound, but I cannot condone his support of the Fascists and his anti-Semitic writings. Great artists can also be bad human beings.

Yet Polanski's acts are even more muddied by the actions of the press, lawyers, and judge overseeing his criminal case. As Marina Zenovich's 2008 film, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (screened at UCLA soon after Polanski's Swiss arrest) reveals, from the moment of Polanski's act he was hounded by the news media, who cast him as the perfect target for Americans who hated the intelligentsia, were xenophobic, and who feared the sexuality he exuded.

The appointed judge for the case, Lawrence J. Rittenband, was noted for his relationships with celebrities, and sought out the case, purposely generating news coverage of the hearings. The opposing lawyers, Douglas Dalton (Polanski's lawyer) and Roger Gunson (for the accuser) were intelligent and dedicated lawyers forced to play charades by the judge's shifting impositions of law. Even when the parties agreed to drop all charges except rape and that Polanski would undergo psychological observation, Rittenband further played to the grandstand, demanding a series of new tests in Chino State Prison. Once again all parties agreed to his demands, yet Rittenband audaciously made them perform his decision out in court, each lawyer playing out the case that had been already previously decided.

Even after serving his time in the Chino prison, Polanski and his lawyer were further threatened by the judge, and after flying to Europe, where the filmmaker was captured in pictures at the Munich Ocktoberfest surrounded by young women (an event Polanski had not even wanted to attend, but was encouraged to by a German friend), Rittenband threatened to sentence Polanski to more time in Chino and demanded, illegally, that Polanski give up his rights for deportation. Dalton and Polanski refused. Even the blue-eyed upstanding Mormon prosecutor Gunson admits, had he been asked to do what Rittenband had demanded, he too might have left the country. In 1978, after almost a year of such public torture, Polanski illegally fled the US.

That the California enforcers are still vigilantly attempting to return Polanski to the US for sentencing—a sentencing which clearly threatens, as the New York Times recently pointed out (Sunday, October 11, 2009), to be a less forgiving prison time for his acts—seems unfair at best.

Although there is little question that Polanski "got off," the first time around, with a very short time in jail, in the end one must ask what is justice, what is imprisonment about? Certainly, justice did not win out in 1978, either for the accuser or accused. Why do we imprison people? Obviously, in part, we incarcerate the guilty as punishment for their crimes. But we seem to have forgotten that we also jail individuals with the hope of reformation, with the desire of somehow redeeming their lives. Today, it appears, particularly when it comes to sex crimes, that we no longer believe in that possibility. And we all know that some sexual abusers, particularly when it comes to children, have committed crimes over and over again. I do think, however, that we should not presume by such recidivism that all such criminals are unable to be reformed.

Clearly, Polanski has led, in the 31 years since his escape from America, a productive and seemingly governed life. What can be the use of trotting a 76 year old man off to prison for a crime he committed at age 44? It seems to me that Polanski has been more than punished for his acts, unless, as I suspect, we are a terrifyingly vengeful society when it comes to sex.

Los Angeles, October 12-13, 2009

Holding In, Holding On (on Mario Benedetti's The Truce)

Mario Benedetti The Truce: The Diary of Martin Santomé, translated from the Spanish by Harry Morales (read in manuscript)

I have just finished reading Mario Benedetti's 1960 novel The Truce for the third time. I first read Benjamin Graham's translation, published by Harper & Row, sometime in the 1970s. In 1996 translator Harry Morales sent me a new version (which he revised again in 1998), restoring what he described were missing passages in the Graham translation, and retranslating the entire text. I read this new version with great pleasure, and offered to publish the book on Sun & Moon Press. We offered a $1,000 advance to Benedetti through his agent at the time, Thomas Colchie, but Benedetti inexplicably rejected the offer, Colchie responding that he could not dissuade the author from that decision. Both Morales and I feel it may have had something to do with Benedetti's anti-American sentiments. So ended my brief "relationship" with the great Uruguayan author.

Upon hearing of Benedetti's death on May 16 of this year, I momentarily thought of checking my files and contacting Harry Morales again to see if he had ever found a publisher for his version of the book. A few weeks later, Morales called me, soon after providing me with yet another revised version of his translation, which I finally completed reading this week.

Accordingly, I feel I now know this fiction well enough that, whether I end up publishing it or not, I should write something about the book in memory of its renowned creator.

Few major characters are as unassuming, unpretentious, and outright boring as Martin Santomé. When one first meets him in the pages of his private diary, the reader might almost give up a yawn to this bookkeeper's calculations about his retirement and his unimaginative speculations of what he might do when he stops working:

Do I really need leisure so much? I tell myself no, that it's not
leisure that I need, but the right to work at what I love. For example?
The garden, perhaps. It's good as a restful activity on Sundays, for
counteracting sedentary life, and also as a secret defense against my
future and guaranteed arthritis. But I'm afraid I couldn't bear it every
day. The guitar, perhaps. I think I would like it. But it must be lonely
to start studying music at forty-nine. Write? Perhaps I wouldn't be too
bad at it, at least people usually enjoy my letters. And so what? I can
imagine a short bibliographical note about "the worthy values of this
new author who is nearing fifty" and the mere possibility of it is
repulsive.

From the first words penned to his journal, we already know Santomé is a man of no special talents, no great imagination, and so equivocal about every aspect of his life that he can make no significant decisions.

Nonetheless, before long we are drawn into his diary as he describes his children, his dead wife, and his office companions, none of whom does he know very well and with whom he has no deep relationships. Like almost all office workers, Santomé complains of the boredom of his job and his treatment from his superiors, yet, as the head of his department he is a good worker, and, accordingly, it is hard to imagine what else he might accomplish.

His relationships between his sons Jaime and Esteban are fractious, Esteban seemingly destined to be an office worker with even less imagination than his father. Jaime, as the story develops, is discovered to be gay, and is attacked by Santomé as being depraved. This son leaves home, never to be seen again. Only Santomé's daughter seems to have serious communication with

him, but she has just fallen in love and has little time to devote to her father.

For all of the insignificance of Santomé's life, however, we begin to understand his series of indecisions as being related to his moral character. He is a caring and careful man, but in his equivocation is simply unable to express those feelings to anyone. Yet given the perversities of his acquaintances, particularly his friend Vignale, who begins an affair his sister-in-law living in his house, Santomé is nearly a saint, albeit a saint with few temptations put in his way.
In short, Santomé has given away his life, never challenging himself to live up to his dreams, perhaps never having significant enough dreams in the first place. He can hardly even remember the face of Isobel, his dead wife.

It is wondrous, accordingly, that he gradually falls in love with a new employee, Laura Avellaneda. But even here his relationship begins with temerity. At first she does not appear as a beautiful woman, but slowly he begins to enjoy her company, seeing her as a whole being, suddenly slipping into a friendship which promises something beyond his own expectations. When it dawns upon him that he is truly in love, he is amazed by the possibility.

Here again, however, the two, working together, must meet covertly, must spend much time in cautious hand-holding rather than a sexual relationship. The difference in their ages, Avellaneda being a young woman just beginning her life, forces him to suggest an open relationship, in his reasoning a way to make it possible for her to leave him as he ages. When a friend suggests his lack of commitment to marriage is simply a way to protect himself from possibly being hurt, Santomé recognizes the truth, but having purchased a small apartment for their meetings, it has become too late for him to change, he feels, the nature of their relationship.

In fact, one might argue that everything upon which Santomé acts is too late. The love between the two actually blossoms into a kind of happiness which the narrator has never known before, but the moment he realizes this new-found joy, the moment he becomes determined to act out of impulse, determined to ask Avellaneda to marry him, she becomes sick and dies. His temporarily reborn sense of self withers before his eyes.

Throughout Benedetti's slow accumulation of the details of Santomé and the figures on whom he writes, we grow almost fond of this over cautious Bartelby, who has suddenly found a way to say "yes" to life. For men like Santomé, however, there is perhaps no possible way out. Their very equivocation of life means that they will not experience life itself.

Benedetti's Montevideo, indeed, seems filled with just such people. One of the saddest episodes in the entire work is when, weeks after his lover's death, Santomé visits her father, a tailor, and her mother, neither of whom have ever met him. Both reveal, privately, their own failures at having been unable to express themselves to their living daughter, the father admitting that he had always intended to tell Laura of his love, but continuing to put it off until now he has lost his chance of expressing it. The mother, who senses who the stranger is, tells an even more tragic story, a story she has told no one before: she once had a lover, but told him to go away. The daughter of that man, Avellaneda, was all she had to remember that lost love, the only possibility of joy in her life:

"Laura was all I had remaining of him. Again, that's why I feel
that the heart is an enormous entity which starts in the stomach and
ends in the throat. That's why I know what you're going through."
....She was looking upwards and crying, without passing her hand
across her face; she was crying proudly.

Those tears are the closest Benedetti's figures come to outrightly expressing the horror of their emptiness. The fiction ends where it has begun. No change has been possible in such a world of "holding in while holding on," a truce they have made with life. "Starting tomorrow and to the day I die," Santomé writes, "time will be at my disposal. After so much waiting, this is retirement. What will I do with it?"

Los Angeles, October 10, 2009

Another Job, or The Uncertainty Principle (on Coen brothers' A Serious Man)

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen (writers and directors) A Serious Man / 2009

A Yiddish peasant's cart beaks down when, suddenly, out of nowhere a man in a horsecart appears to help him. Miraculously, he is an acquaintance, so the peasant invites him to dinner. Upon telling his wife the story, she becomes horrified, for the good Samaritan, she has heard, died years before. He must be a dybbuk, a body possessed by a dead spirit. When the "dybbuk" appears at the door, she announces her feelings, which he politely denies: here he stands before them, not dead in the least, but a helpful passerby. Without hesitation she stabs him with a kitchen knife. For a moment he looks utterly surprised, but quickly regains his composure. No, he will not stay for dinner, not remain in a house where he is not wanted. Yet as he leaves we can see a blood stain slowly growing over his chest where she has stabbed him. Is he a dybbuk surviving the wound or a man about to die? The couple are cursed forever for their possible mistake.

The uncertainty of the situation, the curse of the dead, and the ludicrousness of the system of beliefs underlying this tale sets the tone for the Coen brothers' new film, A Serious Man, set in St. Paul, Minnesota in the late 1960s, where the brothers grew up.

Larry Gopnik (wonderfully performed by Michael Stuhlbarg) is a physics teacher at a local university who is about to be reviewed for tenure, blessed with a wife, two children, and a nice suburban home. True, he is tormented by a brother living with them, who spends most of his time in their bathroom draining a cyst. But otherwise his life, if uneventful, is what he might describe as ordinary and pleasant.

His children, we soon discover, have little interest in their education or, for that matter, anything of value. The boy, Danny, about to be bar mitzvahed, is forced to go to Hebrew classes, during which he secretly listens to music on his headphones. Outside of the classroom his greatest activity is smoking pot. Sarah, the daughter, consistently steals money from her father's billfold and spends most of her time, as Larry later puts it, "washing her hair."

Larry's wife Judith suddenly announces that she wants a divorce; she has fallen in love with another man, Sy Ableman, an oily pragmatist with whom one finds it hard to imagine any could fall in love. Not only does she suggest her husband move to a living room cot (Larry's brother inhabits the couch), but she insists upon a Get, a Jewish decree that will allow her to remarry.

At school, a Asian graduate student whom Larry has failed, tries to bribe him by leaving behind an envelope filled with hundred dollar bills, and when the professor attempts to return the incriminating evidence, threatens to sue him for defamation. A fellow professor reports, moreover, that the tenure committee has been receiving anonymous letters attacking Larry's moral character.

What more could go wrong? In the Coens world this is only a warmup for a series of painful events as Larry is forced to move with his brother into the Jolly Roger Motel, discovers through the police that his brother has been gambling, is sexually tortured by the nude sunbathing of the woman next door, is involved in a car accident, and—when his wife's lover Sy is killed in an coincidental accident—is forced to pay for his enemy's funeral! Wait! More is coming. The Coen's great joke in this well-crafted and alternately sad and silly tale is that the sufferings of a schlep like Larry can be worse even than those of the Old Testament's Job.

The subject, the utter unpredictability of life, is a rich one, especially when the hero, like Job, is a believer, a good man. In his search for answers, Larry seeks out three rabbis (like Job's three friends) who, predictably, can offer him nothing accept simple prescriptions ("you have to see things from a different perspective") or meaningless stories (the second rabbi's tale of a dentist who discovers a secret message in the teeth of one of his patients is a gem). The third rabbi (played by an acquaintance of mine, Alan Mandell) can't be bothered to see him. The attorney only complicates Larry's life further by charging him large sums of money.

What happens to faith, to one's sense of being, to an understanding of the universe—a subject at the heart of Larry's love of physics—when faced with such a series of dilemmas and betrayals? Would that the Coens might really care about these issues and at least seek out some possible suggestions to the problem, even if we know there can be no real explanation.

Too often in their films, the Coen brothers present characters that are more like cartoons than actual living folk, and in this film we quickly discover ourselves unable to sympathize with anyone, including the confused Larry; he's so passive and unassertive that, at times, we almost feel he deserves what he got. And the Coens, in their adolescent abuse of their character types, purposely manipulate us to laugh and cry at situations that often are so bizarre that we feel the directors are simply thumbing their nose at us.

For a few moments in this film, a fog seems to lift: stoned out of his mind, Danny nonetheless gets through his reading of the Torah splendidly: the family is proud, Larry's wife almost seeming to suggest that there might be a way to return to normalcy. Larry even gets tenure.

But the Coens are determined to turn even that possible resurrection of his life into a joke. The doctor calls, reporting that there was something in Larry's recent X-rays that they need to discuss. A tornado is pounding down upon Danny's school and the principal cannot seem to open the basement door. The End. Thumbing their nose in complete disrespect of any genuine audience emotion, the Coens throw their work to the dogs. All right, so there is no predictable order in the world! But even Job finally got a break, was ultimately restored to God, with a new family and wealth, living on for 140 years.

As my companion Howard observed: the Coens are perpetual whiners angry with the universe for its failure to provide answers, pouting smart alecks afraid to admit that compassion might possibly exist.

Los Angeles, October 9, 2009

Stage and Street (on the theater writings and poetry of Stefan Brecht)

Bertolt Brecht and son Stefan


Stefan Brecht and his wife Rena Gill

Theater historian and poet Stefan Brecht died, at the age of 84, on April 13th of this year. The son of German playwright Bertolt Brecht and actress Helene Wiegel, Stefan was born in Berlin, but came to the United States at the age of 17, when his family escaped Nazi Germany by moving to Santa Monica, California where they joined the growing German émigré community. When his family returned to Germany after Brecht was forced to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Stefan remained in California, attending UCLA and, later, Harvard, where he received his PhD in Philosophy.

In 1966 he moved to New York City with his wife, Mary McDonough Brecht and his two children, quickly becoming involved in the burgeoning experimental theater groups in Lower Manhattan. Brecht performed with the theatrical performance artist Robert Wilson and Charles Ludlam in his Ridiculous Theatrical Company.

In 1972 Brecht published a book detailing several of Wilson's performances titled The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson, printed in English by the German publishing house of Suhrkamp Verlag, thus beginning what was to have been a nine-volume series of presentations of what he described as "original" theater: The Original Theatre of the City of New York: From the mid-60s to the mid-70s. The mind boggles just thinking about Brecht's grand project, outlined as follows:

Book 1. The theatre of visions: Robert Wilson
Book 2. Queer theatre.
Book 3. Richard Foreman's diary theatre. Theatre as personal phenomenology of mind.
Book 4. Morality plays. Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet theatre.
Book 5. Theatre as psycho-therapy for performers.
A. Joe Chaikin's Open Theatre. The Becks' Living Theatre.
B. Richard Schechner's Performance Group. Andre Gregory's
Manhattan Repertory Company. With notes on Grotowski and Andre Serban.
Book 6. The 1970s hermetic theatre of the performing director. Jared Bark. Stuart
Sherman, John Zorn, Melvin Andringa. With appendices on Ann Wilson,
Robert Whitman and Wilford Leach.
Book 7. Theatre as collective improvisation. The Mabou Mines.
Book 8. Black theatre and music. With notes on the Duo Theatre and M. van Peebles.
Book 9. Dance. Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, Douglas Dunn.
With a note on Ping Chong.

One can only imagine, had he accomplished this project, how much richer would be the history of our cultural heritage. As it happened, Brecht was able only to complete three of these volumes, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson, Queer Theater, and Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre. At the time of his death his was working on the Richard Foreman study.

To call these books "studies," however, would be inappropriate. Each of the volumes differ from the others, but all combine painstaking detail with an often irritating style that frequently overwhelms the works he is attempting to describe.

The Robert Wilson book, for example, consists of minute-by-minute descriptions of the performances, along with charts and maps, and Wilson's own notes that takes us through each production. These detailed descriptions, moreover, share each page with long footnotes describing events in even greater detail and explaining variations in the text.

Brecht's description of Wilson's renowned Einstein on the Beach, for example begins:

K 151
18.31
On the horizontal grey rectangle of the drop, (ft 52: American premiere of Robert Wilson's and Phil Glass' Einstein on the Beach: November 21, 1976, at the New York Metropolitan Opera. I am here describing the second performance, in the same place, the following Sunday, Nov. 28th, but include data re the first), doubly framed in black, enormous, at the lower right a smaller, fatter, almost square rectangle, pasted to it, projector light that seems to spill over, a white rug, on the floor beneath the two women seated in front of its, a Caucasian 9the dancer Lucinda Childs) and a Negro (Sheryl Sutton, a Wilsonian performer),the latter immobile, hands in lap, the former, within the maintained pose, shifting: contrast of self-contained quietude in concentration to tension imperfectly imposed on nervous agitation. (ft 53: Wilson has maintained them in this contrast, analogous, relative to light, to that of back to white, through the play except for the concluding >knee< (tho' act IV is such as to preclude its being in evidence). Self-contained black is to Wilson not negative. It is his own color.) A sustained organ note, the space-filling sound of a present awareness, accompanies it (in the pit, by pale-green lights, the console awareness of an electric organ is visible).

All that in the very first moment of the work! After 59 pages of that kind of writing, on some of which there is only one line of text, the rest given over to footnotes, one feels utterly exhausted, although perhaps one can conjure up the "vision" at the heart of Wilson's pieces. Yet Brecht's conclusion to all his attentive description is a simple thumbs down dismissal of the work:

Wilson failed to find images for what was on his mind. The themes he
hit on do not relate to the content. He changed his style to divorce
the spectacle from its content. Watching it, we see the meaningless
alteration of meaningless themes, and perhaps the theme of failure.

Arguably, it may be beneficial to have such a thorough-going historian treat his work with a kind of love-hate relationship. For all of his obvious devotion to the experimental theater on which he writes, Brecht never makes easy assumptions.

In Queer Theater, he maintains that as the gay theater got better, as it more artfully organized its childish yet energized low comedy and burlesque into formal artifice, the works became more popular but less interesting, that, in some senses, although they were better structured, the plays "fell apart."

After a description of the work of Jack Smith, notes on the earliest productions of the Theatre of the Ridiculous, an analysis of "the gesture of hatred" works of John Vaccaro, and the "gesture of compassion" works of Charles Ludlam, and a brief summary of Ronald Tavel's career, Brecht ends this fascinating work with three pieces on The Hot Peaches, a discussion of Larry Ree's Original Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet Company and Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, and a piece on John Waters.

In this volume Brecht has replaced his detailed scenarios with broader, but even more baroque, personal evaluations of the works he has seen:

Still in the flush of his first imperfection broadcasting untellable riches,
Charles [Ludlam] immediately without hesitation entered his Classic period,
putting on Whores of Babylon (by Bill Vehr) and then Turds in Hell (based
on an idea of Bill's), grandiose Christian moralities, personal pictures of
homosexual misery in the grand format of existential maps. The party-going
camouflage of naive fun shed, no longer in a living-out on stage, their opulent
disorder, aristocratic crudity, unostentatious shamelessness was the adequate
form of a content in ideal beauty, which is why i use the word >classic<>

He then goes on to more specifically describe the play at hand.

If the overlaying metaphors of the paragraph above seem to present a kind of thicket of words through which one must make his or her way to get to the heart of Brecht's observations, there are other times in his writing that one feels Brecht's academic training crowding out any heady gush of lively expression:

Sentimentality is a predisposition to uncircumspect, though conventionally
prescribed, feelings of tenderness of a mind and approving, through
possibly compassionate sort, more indulged in for their own sake, i.e. with
a hypocrisy, because they feel agreeable and reflect credit on oneself, than stimulus
to generous action.

More often, however, some of these impacted sentences quite brilliantly reveal the theater to which he is attending:

Remarkably, this sentimental appeal of Ludlam's clean and pure sentimental
poses, —not camped up, neither exaggerated nor twisted, nor played in
quotational style, —was not destroyed either by their being recognisable
derivatives from films shown at night on TV, and from old films at that,
that is, in a style of expression gone out of style in art and in life, given up
together with the ideal of woman as fulfilled by her sacrifice of herself to man
and procreation, nor by their isolation in an ornate setting of stridently
ambiguous poses of enviously competitive, ridiculing adoration of woman
as powerful sex-object.

Similarly, a comment on playwright Ronald Tavel tells the reader a great deal about most of this the author's works, including some of his early Andy Warhol movie scripts:

The dialogue [of Shower] was an exercise in the pseudo-wit of smutty puns,
the author's attempt to elevate the speech of the boroughs into art, an art
that would provide a kind of entertainment. this art, though like Oscar
Wilde's an art of speech, is literary rather that theatrical in that, a play on
language, it focusses the audience on language rather than character, and
not create tension or advance action. The puns hinge on meaning, a not
too clever double entendre, but Tavel is stuck on sound, addicted to
alliteration.

Accordingly, Brecht sums up Tavel as a writer of "cleverness," focusing on, in place of a ridiculous theatre (a term first coined by Tavel) on a "disgusting use of language."

In short, although one is seldom given an easy go of it, Brecht takes us through the various stages of experimental New York theater in a way no one previously has been able to accomplish. And what a joyful, if some sometimes carping, trip that is!

One might add that what this artist attempted to do for the theater taking place mostly in lower Manhattan, in his two collections of poetry, Poems of 1975 and 1978 and 8th Avenue Poems, he attempted to capture for that same area's streets. These are not carefully sculpted poems but often raw expressions, not without their own sentimentality, of city life.

a hum in the air envelops the wheeling flocks of pigeons above the gliding cars,
as a newspaper page in the lesser format of the tabloids
with agility slips off the sidewalk.

From another poem:

dream, befittingly disquieting,
the morning's sea throwing the dream's transtemporal fluidity into city
street's straight line, eerily dissolves
the night's phantom solidity of matter
into aspect of time....

In a sense, through his very personal encounters, both everyday and cultural, with the American scene, and despite his European upbringing, Brecht was the most American of Americans. In a poem title "Addendum" he writes:

I walk here and I don't have to
and I wasn't meant to, the houses about me always
perfectly clear. No thread ties me to them, eyes only
that see and they sink into me
and the traffic too and the people
and never become mine
and don't touch me.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Yet I feel perfectly at home here.
So you see I am not even afraid
nor merely discontent,
but simply unnourished, myself not stirring ever
and old man virginal.

This is the truth.

At the performance at Mabou Mines I describe in the essay above, I introduced myself to Stefan Brecht and his current wife, Rena Gill, who were attending the play. Suffering from the progressive brain disease, Lewy body dementia, Brecht looked frail, his head and arms heavily shaking. Upon hearing of his death last month, I again mused what a great loss to the theatre world that Brecht had not been spared to complete his books.

New York, May 10, 2009

20 Days in the City of Angels: The 19th Day (Interviewing the Inteviewer)

Army Archerd with Marilyn Monroe

The condominium in which I live lies directly across the street from a high rise building in which are currently located the offices of Variety, an entertainment daily magazine to which I do not subscribe, but which, as a child—on those rare occasions when I came across a copy in Marion, Iowa—utterly fascinated me since it was an entire newspaper devoted to theater, film, and other of my favorite cultural activities. Even today, I can't imagine who in my small city might have been subscribing to it and how I might have encountered copies, but—as any regular reader of the My Year volumes knows—stranger things have happened to me.

Recently I read of the death of one of Variety's most noted columnists, Armand "Army" Archerd, on September 8th of this year, and that, in turn reminded me of the February 7th, 2008 press opening of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's new Broad Museum, when I had lunch with him. It was not a true interview, of either him or me, but an accidental seating arrangement of which I took advantage to introduce myself and to question him on his long career.

I had known a little about him, simply through celebrations in print of his life. Archerd replaced columnist Sheilah Graham (the noted girlfriend of F. Scott Fitzgerald) in 1953, and worked at Variety for the rest of his life, most notably covering Hollywood news and gossip in his "Just for Variety" column. Close acquaintances describe him as a handsome, always nattily dressed man; he was both on that the day I encountered him as well, although when I met him he had just recently reached the grand age of 86.

Unlike some gossip columnists, who cattily and often nastily seemed to spy on Hollywood performers, Archerd interviewed them, often reporting their own corrections to tabloid gossip and sharing information the stars themselves wanted to be made public. Accordingly, he was beloved by many in the Hollywood community, and was highly celebrated in a 40th anniversary event thrown for him by his own paper at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in 1993.

Among his hundreds of famous pithy observations was Hitchcock's comments in 1966:

He [Hitchcock] also regrets too many film writers today believe plot
is out of fashion. "Plot in a short story and a movie is the most
important thing. The motion picture is like a short story—it's the only
medium you expect to see in continuity without a break. You have to
consider the endurance of the human bladder."

or the wonderful quip from Cary Grant in his 1975 column:

Cary Grant has his attorneys investigating suits vs. People mag and Associated
Press, the former for printing he has false teeth. "I want to get into court
and open my mouth," said Grant. And the AP suit involves their quotes
from a Redbook yarn (which Grant claims doesn't exist), saying he never
loved any of his wives.

and his 1960 news item:

The "mystery malady" which laid low Marilyn Monroe is an allergy to
medication, she says. "At one time I was out cold," she admits. "Now
the only thing I'll take is aspirin." MM mystified guests at her cocktail
party launching "Let's Make Love," Friday, by showing up on time.

I asked him what he was presently working on, and he replied without an instant of thought: "A memoir."

"Wonderful," I responded. "It will have to include everyone! I'll read it."

"Except Greta Garbo. I never got to interview her," he admitted.

I briefly explained my work on my own "cultural" memoir, in which he seemed interested. I wish I'd been able to send him a volume or two.

I asked which piece of his reporting he felt had been his most important.

"Oh definitely, my piece on Rock Hudson announcing that he was sick with AIDS."
That 1985 item began:

The whispering campaign on Rock Hudson can—and should stop. He has
flown to Paris for further help. The Institute Pasteur has been very active
in research on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Hudson's
dramatic weight loss was made evident to the national press last week
when he winged to Carmel to help longtime friend Doris Day launch
her new pet series. His illness was no secret to close Hollywood friends, but
its true nature was divulged to very, very few. He left for France and
possible aid from scientists there over the weekend. Doctors warn that
the dread disease (AIDS) is going to reach catastrophic proportions in all
communities if a cure is not soon found....

"Of course many Hollywood columnists had long hinted about Hudson's gay sexuality," I added. "I recall reading one such column in 1950s in which the writer warned that if a well known actor showed up once again on Santa Monica Boulevard, trying to pick-up a trick, there would be no way she could any longer hide his identity.

"I never did that kind of writing," he protested.

"I know. But Hudson was pretty obvious," I admitted. "I once saw him with Rod McKuen on an interview show with Dinah Shore. I guess they were doing some kind of record together. It was quite embarrassing, each of them almost swooning over the other, hardly able to keep their hands to themselves."

"Today, I think there would be way to cover up such behavior. But we—others and I—kept some respect for the stars' privacy. It was the only I knew how to write about the men and women on whom I depended for my career."

We ceased chatting and dug into Chef Joachim Splichal's delicious rib tips.

Los Angeles, September 30, 2009