Jens Bjørneboe | The Bird Lovers / 1994 || Semmelweis / 1998

cataloging evil

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jens Bjørneboe The Bird Lovers, translated from the Norwegian by Frederick Wasser (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994)

Jens Bjørneboe Semmelweis, translated from the Norwegian by Joe Martin (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1998)

 

 In the 1990s I published two plays by the noted Norwegian writer Jens Bjørneboe, The Bird Lovers in 1994, and four years later, Semmelweis. Both works are "didactic" in the sense that the writer is determined to convey to his audience large, banner-like themes. In the early 1960s Bjørneboe stayed for a time with the Berliner Ensemble, working through a kind of apprenticeship with many of the major figures of Brechtian theater, and these plays, both of which contain songs that point up dramatic events, show the influences of the German playwright.

 

    Yet as Joe Martin points out in his introduction to Semmelweis, Bjørneboe's theatrical "alienation," similar as his views are to Brecht's, takes his plays in very different directions from the master. Indeed, both of these plays work nicely with Bjørneboe's more complex late trilogy, The History of Bestiality (1966-1973), of which I wrote (through the example of Kruttårnet [Powderhouse]) in my 2007 essay. In these fictions, as well as in the two plays, Bjørneboe is primarily interested in cataloging evil rather than assigning it or even creating solutions which might prevent it.

     In The Bird Lovers, a small group of working Italians who served together in the war and were imprisoned by the Germans, gather regularly at a bar to talk and to eat; they are particularly fond of serving up the small game birds in the region. Enter Mrs. Director Stahlmann, a bird lover who is determined to stop the practice of killing birds in the village and, with the support of the National Society for Animal's Rights, plans to bring new tourists to the region by establishing it as a bird sanctuary. The various verbal volleys between the two groups are predictable and mostly comic, with the locals clearly getting the better of the situation.

     To this town also comes Huldreich von und zu Greifenklau—a German judge determined to enjoy the local songbirds for their music—and his servile friend, Johannes Schulze, both of who are immediately recognized by the cafe regulars as men who tortured them and killed their friend in prison. Despite the protests of one of the men's wife, the group is bent on kidnapping the two from the local hotel and putting them on trial for murder.

     The mock trial reveals the horrible evils of Grifenklau's past, and the group is ready to hang both him and Schulze until the defendant's assigned lawyer, Father Piccolino points out that the evil these men have perpetuated came as much from their superiors. Like the Nazis after World War II, Piccolino argues (despite his belief they are guilty) that they were merely doing their duty. But Piccolino also argues from another point of view, that of the executioners, pointing out to them that if they proceed with the hanging, they too will be guilty, just as Americans who strung Blacks up in trees, as Turks who drove the Armenians into the desert, as the English who shot and hung the Irish, and the French who electrocuted the Algerians. The theme, highly reminiscent of Bjørneboe's listings and descriptions of punishment in Powderhouse, turns the tables, so to speak. Gradually, one by one, the men see the folly of their acts, and "sell out" by accepting the Germans' promises to financially help them when the city becomes a tourist spot. This is no Judgment at Nuremberg.

     In short, as translator Frederick Wasser points out, Bjørneboe does not attempt to answer what to do about evil, but merely wants to recognize it in all of us. It is as if Bjørneboe, despite his hatred for all the tortures of individuals by human beings and institutions, does not comprehend a way to end it—except through comedy and, of course, death. We are a race unforgivably cursed by our past.

     So too is the great Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis mocked by all those around him for his theories about handwashing before operations. The doctors and students he calls "murderers" are just that, men who because they refuse to see the truth do not take the proper precautions and kill every year hundreds of their patients—particularly women during childbirth. One of comic frustrations of this drama is the outlandish statements of the scientific belief of the day, that child-bed fever is not contagious but is brought on by the sexual enjoyment of women of the lower class. These and other such notions would be merely comical except for the fact that they cover up any truth, and they use these beliefs, moreover, as tools to ruin Semmelweis.

     But as in The Bird Lovers, Bjørneboe's "heroes," the foes of this work, Semmelweis and Kolletschka, are also fools. Semmelweis is a kind of mad innocent, a man so devoted to his beliefs that he has no notion of how to properly achieve it or to make any compromise that might cause his theories to be practiced. Despite his seeming purity of purpose, Semmelweis drowns his sorrows in sentimentality, wine, and whores, ultimately dying of a kind of slow suicide. Kolletschka dies, ironically, of the very disease which he once proclaimed was not contagious.

     Bjørneboe's play centers less on individuals that on the institutions, the universities, the hospitals and other organizations which, while supposedly searching for truth, fight any possibility of discovering it. The reality of these organizations is that the teachers, students, and doctors were to admit to being wrong, they would be crushed by the very thing they believe they are promoting. Accordingly, truth is the last thing that such institutions can permit. The playwright makes this even more ironic, but encasing his play in a student protest which ends with a male student insisting that such protests have been the "forerunners of fundamental change" while the students within the play are often the most resistant to Semmelweis' dictums.  

     Once again Bjørneboe makes it clear that evil is so prevalent that everyone can share in its curse. The students of 1968 may have been admirable for their refusal "to allow [themselves] to be used for oppression and genocide," but we know that the students of just a few years later would become the powers behind new atrocities.

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2010

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2010).

Jaime Bernstein | Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein / 2018

a family circus

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jamie Bernstein Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein (New York: HarperCollins, 2018)

 

If there was ever any question that Charlie Harmon’s memoir about his brief employer and mentor Leonard Bernstein might have been an overstatement, a kind of hyper-inflated vision of the kind of near mental-breakdown he suffered while working with the Maestro, you need only read Bernstein’s elder daughter’s memoir, published the same year, to perceive how extreme it all was.     

 

    If the genius creator of American music, the wonderfully erudite teacher of younger and older American audiences of how music worked, the brilliant conductor who charmed an entire generation of US and international audiences with his ability to convey the musical nuances of so many great composers throughout the centuries, he was also a truly psychological mess of desperate needs, stalking down young and older men for sexual pleasure, sloppily kissing everyone, including his daughters, with tongue-in-mouth frontal assaults, drugged-out with uppers and lowers constantly as he marched through a musical assault that charmed and, sometimes, shocked the entire cultural world.

     If may admirers such as Jackie Kennedy might breathlessly bow to his larger-than-life persona, others, as even Jamie Bernstein admits, played with him wildly as children in a kind of adult sand-pile, including his sister Shirley, his brother Burton (called affectionately BB throughout the book), and a pageant of famous figures that would be impossible to list—unless you wanted an index of figures longer than the index to this book—which include Adolph Green, Betty Comden, Mike Nichols, Lauren (Betty) Bacall, Lillian Hellman (who later broke with her father after her failed contributions to Candide), Richard Avedon, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Aaron Copland, Stephen Schwartz, Seiji Ozawa, Michael Tilson Thomas, and endless other celebrities and hangers-on—whom this young girl, her brother Alexander, and her younger sister Nina had to endure, while still enjoying the circus into which they had been born.

 

     And then there was their beautiful Chilean-born mother, actress, painter, talented wife-of-the-Maestro, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, who kept, during her life, everything at even keel, overseeing their overstuffed and dramatically absurd household with her nanny, and long-time friend, Julia, who kept the family together even after Felicia’s early death. If Bernstein described himself to Harmon as Mississippi Mud, we now perceive his as a kind of strange Mississippi Merman, who sang sangfroid’s that might have been right of Wagner to absolutely everyone he might have ever met, complicating the lives of his family and, despite his deep love and need for his children, smothering them with an impossible-to-bear love-hate relationship that draws tears to one eyes even to read about it.

      Jamie Bernstein, the author of this long, often painful admission of what it was like to “grow up Bernstein” and her siblings, being forced to play your entire life in a world of anagrams, constant lectural sufferings from their so-highly educated father, and, later—in their adolescence, having to come to terms with their increasing gossip of their father’s homosexual activities—fortunately all survived; and Jaime tells her story in almost a comical jaunty style that balances what one might have presumed would have destroyed most children of “famous father families,” with a great deal of joy, love, and appreciation of the world in which she grew up.

 

     Surely, as to expected, there are lots of drugs, particularly for Jaimie and Alexander, to have to be ingested, lots of meaningless sexual encounters, travels back and forth across the country, educational (all three were forced to attend Harvard, from which their father had graduated) resentments, career vagaries—for a long Bernstein’s daughter attempted to create her popular music, without success—as well as the deep pain the entire family felt with the death of their mother of complications from breast cancer when she was just 51.

      Yet, in the end, the marvel of Jamie Bernstein’s story is that she is a quite brilliant and resilient writer who could finally make her own family, as all three of the children gradually turned to, like their father, educating the public about music, in this case about the works of their own powerful father.

      While Charlie Harmon might have later become one of Bernstein’s stalwart musicologists, strangely enough he speaks very little about the composer’s own works, while Jaime proves a quite insightful commentator not only about her father’s compositions, revealing important perceptions about Trouble in Tahiti and the later operatic sequel, but often speaks quite intelligently about them.

      Of Bernstein’s late Arias and Baracrolles, for example, she writes:

 

             At the time, I couldn’t relate much to Arias and Baracrolles. Now, all these decades later,  

             it strikes me as one of my father’s most mature and nuanced pieces: wry and touching and  

             full of delight surprises—'Tit…come’ and Ebonics notwithstanding. [elements to which

             she originally found “cringeworthy’]

     

      During many a concert she, her brother, and her sister are moved to tears by the beauty of the music.

     But then there are all those absolutely wonderfully gossipy moments, sometimes from a child’s point of view, regarding all the figures who surrounded her difficult father. She wanted to be—what young woman of the time might not have wanted to be?—the witty and clever Betty Comden. She might have longed to be a kind of Betty Bacall, to aspire to the acting talents of her own mother (Bernstein’s son Alexander and young daughter Nina both studied acting). But she also desired to be her father’s girl, the daughter of a near-impossibly complex figure that no one, let alone his young daughter, could ever become.

      Famous parents are difficult people to grow up with, let alone helpful to leave a self with a sense of true personal legacy. As Jamie beautifully discovers through this loving memoir is that she needed to realize herself by both embracing and releasing the remarkable past in which she had participated. Truly, I’m rather amazed that she could so gracefully do so in the sometimes stumbling, occasionally obscene, puerile, but ultimately loving woman, who raised her own two children and guided them to safe harbor.

      Her family, Leonard Bernstein at the helm, was perhaps much too very close, bumping into themselves, aunts, uncles, impossibly talented friends, and famous admirers. Most of us might have collapsed simply with the weight of all these endlessly gifted folks running through the halls of the Dakota apartments and the Fairfield, Connecticut house; yet Jamie Bernstein, along with her brother and sister, apparently, walked away, burdened surely, but all the stronger for it. If their childhoods were crazy, they also had love; if their father looked broadly afield for attention and love, he still brought it home for them. And they survived quite nicely, so it appears.

 

Los Angeles, September 12, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2018).

Gennady Aygi | Child-and-Rose / 2003

word faces

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gennady Aygi, Child-and-Rose, trans. from the Russian by Peter France, with a preface by Bei Dao (New York: New Directions, 2003)

 

On the book cover of this collection by the noted Russian poet, the book is touted by Jacques Roubaud, Roman Jakobsen, Fanny Howe, Paul Barker (writing in the London Times), and Michael Palmer—all writers I highly respect. The preface by the renowned Chinese poet Bei Dao proclaims what a wonderful human being Aygi is, and suggests that, along with Pasternak (a friend of Aygi's) and Mandel'shtam, Aygi is one of the greatest of Russian poets. Just as  importantly—to my way of thinking—is Bei Dao's insistence that Aygi is an engaging drinking companion: "illuminating" in his conversations, "sociable, sensitive, and full of insight." Peter France, in his excellent Introduction to the book speaks of Aygi in the context of his Chuvashia, the small republic in the Russian Federation where the poet is hailed as a national treasure, and France expertly explains how Aygi's writing, although composed in Russian, is highly influenced by the Chuvash chants, riddles, festivals, and Khorovod or choral dance. His work is difficult, but not indecipherable insists France. Aygi has been nominated for the Nobel Prize several times.

     If all that weren't enough, the book begins with a short foreword by Aygi himself in which he describes most of the book we are about to read as being a joyful celebration of the birth of his daughter. With five sons, he had long looked forward to the birth of a daughter, particularly having grown up in a culture where most of the men had died in World War II, and women were the bond between families, creating a kind of "sacred" femininity." I had recently finished a review of Charles Bernstein, praising him for employing the language of his children and that of others in his poetry, and here was a writer arguing not only for a poetry expressing the childhood experience, but a "respect for children" and childhood, a love for the child in all of us.

     It would seem that one would have to be particularly ornery—perhaps even malicious—not to love the poetry of such a man!

     I'm as sentimental as anyone. I almost always cry at the swell of the orchestra and the rise of movie credits, even if the movie has been completely empty-headed. Perhaps that's why I recognize sentimentality so well; and this book suffers from it. A substantial number of the poems here represented seem particularly trivial, focused as they are on his beloved baby. It is not that they are uninteresting—I love children and enjoy their parents' observations about them—but Child-and-Rose is a bit like being subjected to too many baby pictures. Aygi's daughter's "gurgles" "show forth / the clarity of the treasure 'my quiet god.'" The father feels a "heaviness" as the child falls to sleep. The baby's "a-a-of-lullaby" again "shows forth" "with clear-simple-shining / …(in firstguessing / like firstcreation)." The poet's world, we are told, contains, "you know-[only] you," the child. And a part of one poem is made up, presumably, of the baby's attempt at language:

 

Bwol bzilda grad

ei tselestine

bzilda and grad

obei verty

 

I actually find that more interesting than some of the other conceits.

      However, it is not just the focus on child and father that creates, at times, frustration, but the many pauses, dashes, colons, word combinations and other visual devices that accompany such concentrated subject matter. Normally, these devices would delight simply because of the complexity of the text. And at first reading there appears to be a kind of Celan-like quality to Aygi's "father-wandering," "First-circle," "fresh-and-new-bound," "common-shining." The "mother-come-again," "birchcherry," "falsely-adult-clearsighted" images create a kind of "Word-face," that brings an easy resonance to otherwise quite transparent passages. But in the end, I fear, it is a kind of "face," with none of the dark "breathturns" of Celan's painfully wrought compositions. Dare I suggest that Aygi's writing—at least in this book—is a bit like e.e. cummings's poems: superficially experimental, but actually quite straight-forward, even mawkish?

     Having said all that, there is no doubt that this likeable poet is, at times, also quite brilliant. Particularly in poems where his focus is broader, the pauses and shiftings of thought create a linguistic sensuality and narrative wonderment, as in "Song from the Days of Your Forefather (Variation on the Theme of a Chuvash Folk-song)," "Little Tatar Song," "Story of the Level-crossing Gate and the Crossing Keeper's Cabin," "Story of Harlequin Grown Old," "Chuvash Song for a Girl Your Age," "Little Song for You—About Your Father," "Now There Are Always Snows," "Again: Appearance of a Bluetit," "My Daughter's Autumn Walk," and "Drawing Long Ago." Even from the titles of these poems, one can perceive that, at least to my way of thinking, Aygi is on the most solid ground when he immerses himself in the landscape and culture of his homeland. And in conveying that world, Aygi is a true master. Can there be any poem that more clearly portrays a world that, although infused with human spirituality, is equally at the whim of nature as in "Now There Are Always Snows"?

 

 

Like snow the Lord that is

and is what is the snows

when the soul is what is

the snows the soul the light

and all is only this

that those like death that is

that like them too it is

 

confess that it is so

among light darkness is

when once again the snows

Oh-God-Again-the-Snows

how can it be it is

 

 

and is not to be checked

as corpses are and not

oh Deathmask-Land that is

no question that it is

then when the People verb

which signifies is not

 

…………..

 

it is as is an not

and only by this is

but is what only is

 

miracle sudden swirl

there is no Deadness-Land

oh God again the snows

the souls the snows the light

 

Oh God again the snows

 

but be there there are none

the snows my friend the snows

the soul the light the snow

 

oh God again the snows

 

and snow that is there is

 

—Los Angeles, 2003

Reprinted from The New Review of Literature I, no. 2 (April 2003)

Djuna Barnes | Ryder / 1928 / 1979

ABANDONMENT, INVOLVEMENT, AND SURRENDER

by Douglas Messerli

 

Djuna Barnes Ryder (New York: Horace Liverwright, 1928); reprinted by (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979)

 

In the last few pages of Djuna Barnes’s Ryder, one of the title character’s multitudinous offspring describes another of the fiction’s minor figures (Dr. O’Connor, the renowned monologist central to Barnes’s Nightwood) as sounding as if his wisdom “were ill gotten”; “and when it has become mature,” the boy prophesies, “I would be the first to fly from it, for it will be overheady and burst from its sides.” A few pages later, upon completing the fiction, the reader may well wonder whether such a statement might not be applied to Barnes herself. For there definitely is something about the message of Ryder that strikes one as “ill gotten,” as emanating from an author who, more than precocious, is painfully clairvoyant.

     When this work was first published in 1928, with its jumble of picaresque, anatomy, and epistolary genres, it appeared as a startlingly archaic hybrid, as a fantastic blend of the best of James Branch Cabell, the worst of Joyce. The fact parts of it were censored helped to put it for a few weeks on the list of best sellers; but reviewers and critics of the day clearly did not know how to respond to such eclecticism. “In brief, a piece of rubbish,” scoffed The American Mercury. Today, in the context of such works as Russell Bank’s Family Life, Barbara Guest’s Seeking Air, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, and John Barth’s Letters, Ryder—now reprinted by St. Martin’s Press—in its linguistic and generic mix is at once familiar and fresh.

     Contemporary readers no longer expect—even desire—“pure” fiction, that seamless weave of voice, time, place, character, and plot by which authors such as Barnes, Lewis, Stein, and ultimately even Joyce (in Finnegans Wake) were tested, judged negligent, and exorcised from academic reading lists.

     The irony is that Barnes, perceived by Moderns as an avant-gardist “gone too far,” is actually a moral classicist. She never really adapted much to the modern way of thinking and writing of life. Barnes’s is a Medieval vision of a universe inhabited by creatures from a Restoration play. Accordingly, in Ryder, as in all her works, everything and everyone is ajingle, in continual battle between the body and the intellect, between spirit and animal lust.

     No figure is more aware of such perpetual alternation than is Jonathan Buxton Ryder, a character based on Barnes’s father. Having been raised in an atmosphere of high wit and sexual freedom (Barnes’s grandmother—Sophia Grieve Ryder in the fiction—held a salon which included such notables as Elizabeth Stanton and Oscar Wilde), Ryder attempts to bring the twain together in polygamy. And much of the fiction’s plot—such as it is—is focused on his fruitless schemes to reconcile the wife and mistress he sleeps between, in himself. But life, Barnes demonstrates, is not about to permit humankind its birthright, its full range. Entrapped in poverty and a two-room cabin, the religious Amelia and lusty Kate—bearing children at prodigious rates—fight tooth and claw for the soul of Ryder. If Ryder survives these hostilities with humor and grace, he cannot withstand the social dictums of the village bourgeoisie nearby. While he saves his growing offspring from a “public” education, he cannot save himself.

     Delegations of outraged citizens are visited upon him; and, in the end, he must send his legal wife packing in order to protect his helpless mistress and his progeny, whom he has come to call “the Ryder race.” In short, Ryder must give up the spirit to continue to produce his own and, by metaphor, the human species. At novel’s end, having had to sever his love of the spiritual from his love of life, Ryder recognizes that he can no longer achieve the ideal. In a world where everyone is broken, damned by circumstance, one can only “disappoint.”

     Humankind is doomed to failure, Barnes seems to argue, from the start; her theme, so it appears, is one of despair. Such conclusions, however, are highly Romantic, and help to explain, perhaps, why Moderns had such difficulty with her writing, why they “flew” from her visionary truths. For in Ryder, as in its successor, Nightwood, Barnes is less a tragedian than a comic, a comic in the way Dante was. If man’s desire is to be whole, his condition, to Barnes’s way of thinking, finds him caught—where the Great Chain of Being put him—“halfway between the angels and the beasts.” The fact that Ryder can only “disappoint” is not meant to bring the reader to despair, but to knowledge, to the awareness of what it means to be the human beast.

     Just before the young Ryder bastard tells Dr. O’Connor what he thinks of him, O’Connor recites the “Three Great Moments of History”: the moment when Cleopatra, reaching for a fig, saw beneath it an asp, and placing it to her left dug, “drew her breath backward through her teeth,” saying “oooooooOOOO Jesus!”; the moment when Stonewall Jackson went riding by, and Barbara Frietchie, “putting her head out the window, shrieked, ‘UUUUh, HHHu, Stonewall!’”; and the moment when General Lee, “knowing he had to surrender, polished-up his medals, reswung his epaulets, tightened his girdle, and burnishing up the old blade, walked into the courthouse,” and “drawing himself up to full height,” presented it, hilt first, to Grant, saying, ‘You know what you can do with this, don’t you?’” (pp. 304-306). In a fiction riddled with parables, fables, and tales, O’Connor’s is especially significant. For these three moments represent, I suggest, the three basic attitudes with which humankind, faced with that chasm between desire and destiny, has dealt with life: abandonment, involvement, and surrender. In a world where there are no solutions, each position has its grandeur. And which posture this fiction’s hero takes, the reader is never told. In Ryder’s cry of “And whom shall I disappoint?” however, one senses his need for an object to disappoint, and one suspects that his lament is the impetus of another search. Like all picaros, Ryder retains the potential to begin the voyage again.

 

College Park, Maryland, 1979

Reprinted from The American Book Review, 1979

Charlie Harmon | On the Road & Off the Record with Leonard Bernstein: My Years with the Exasperating Genius / 2018

a very noisy place

by Douglas Messserli

 

Charlie Harmon On the Road & Off the Record with Leonard Bernstein: My Years with the Exasperating Genius (Watertown, Massachusetts: An Imagine Book/Charlesbridge, 2018)

 

 

The author of On the Road & Off the Record with Leonard Bernstein is Charlie Harmon, who worked as Bernstein’s personal assistant for 4 years late in Bernstein’s life, establishing a very close if also, as the subtitle indicates, exasperating, relationship. As Harmon begins this personal memoir: “Before I entered his life, Leonard Bernstein’s assistants came and went like the change of seasons in New York.” Some just disappeared out of his life, while others resigned after fairly short periods; one attempted to steal Bernstein’s limousine. Others were simply not up to the demands of the job, which included everything from packing and unpacking the 12 suitcases with which Bernstein traveled around the world, making sure that the Maestro made all of his rehearsals, luncheons, and dinners on time, on occasion even chauffeuring Bernstein to events, but also helping him to dress, carrying his music about with him, and hundreds of other duties large and small that helped ease the conductor and composer through his more than stressful life. 

                       “The stereo speakers quit last night.” Or, “Get me tickets of Idomeneo at

                       the Met this Thursday,” or, “See if Jackie Onassis can come for dinner

                       tonight.”

 

     Not only was Harmon highly organized, but when Bernstein realized that Harmon had studied music, could play the piano, and knew how to score musical compositions, the Maestro might call him down in the middle of the night (Bernstein traveled at all times with a piano in his room) to play Don Carlo or a duet. Since Bernstein was working on his opera A Quiet Place during the first year of his work as Bernstein’s assistant, Harmon was asked to score all the instrumentals and distribute them to orchestra members.

     Much of his time was simply attending events with the Maestro, meeting and making small talk with major musicians and celebrities, even dancing and singing with Betty Comden and Adolph Green. And surely it didn’t hurt that Harmon could also speak German and Italian and was a quick learner even of Hebrew.

       Yet if you think that Harmon’s book might be simply a loving paean of his time with the master, you’d be highly disappointed. The Bernstein of Harmon’s book is not the well-dressed “Lenny” of the Kennedy’s whirlwind life, but the LB (as Harmon and others of his entourage refer to him) who can be rude, petulant, dismissive, haughty, unwashed, and, occasionally, downright sleazy (his own nickname for himself was “Mississippi Mud”).

       From the very first after LB’s manager, the terrifying Harry Kraut, hired Harmon, Bernstein’s private chef, Ann Deadman immediately looked over the new hire, responding “He’s too cute; he’ll have to shave that moustache.” Even the sometimes naïve Harmon wonders “Cuteness a liability? Had prior assistants been up for grabs in some kind of sexual free-for-all?”

       I had known, of course that Bernstein, besides having been married (Bernstein’s wife had died before Harmon came to work for him) and producing three children, was openly gay; but I didn’t quite know just how open he was or how he notedly sought out handsome younger men for his beds. Years later, when Harmon was introduced to Bernstein’s new chauffeur for a stay in Italy, he himself was tempted to repeat Deadman’s phrase. Indeed, the handsome driver was found in Bernstein’s bed soon after.

      At first, in fact, I was a bit irritated by Harmon’s book; why need he air all of LB’s dirty laundry (which, in fact, was another of his literal jobs)? But as the book progressed, I began to realize that if you truly loved this talented genius, you had also to take in a fuller portrait. How else, for example, could LB not be a speed addict given how the Maestro bounced back and forth from his apartment in the Dakota in New York, to Italy’s La Scala, Vienna, Israel, England, Tanglewood, Los Angeles, and his home in Connecticut—all in a single year? Without it, as Harmon was, one could hardly be expected to survive; and by book’s end the author has nearly had a nervous breakdown from his endless tasks. There is even a kind of #MeToo moment, when, in a hotel room, the great Bernstein attempts to grab Harmon’s crotch. The too cute gay boy pulled away, simply explaining that that was not part of his job.

 

      Besides, it is clear that the two men, although sometimes furious with one another, had become close friends, LB even seeing his assistant as being in a kind of “marriage” with him. And how else could Bernstein have gotten through his last years? Harmon shares long descriptions of what he describes as the perks of this job, meeting and becoming close friends with so many of Bernstein’s celebrity acquaintances. If some might have treated the assistant—Harry Kraut among them—as if he were only Lenny’s servant, many others recognized his importance to the Maestro, opening their homes and their personal lives to him.

       Moreover, there are all those wonderful times with not only LB, but with his maid, Julia Vega, the chef, Deadman, and Bernstein’s long-time personal secretary, his original piano teacher Helen Coates. Not only were there hundreds of stars—Beverly Sills, Lauren Bacall, John Travolta, James Levine (who unexpectedly took over Harmon’s roll so that the younger man might have one day of much needed rest), but Queens and other royalty. And then, despite his dislikable attributes, LB was brilliantly witty and funny, a long-time player of anagrams, and a kind of bawdy poet who wrote dozens of messages for his assistant, even, for one Christmas buying him a cabbage patch doll to which one of LB’s daughters attached some strands of hair to make it look like Charlie, a gift which they all dubbed as Carlito. Bernstein’s own loveable mother once took him aside to ask what he was really planning “to do” with his life, as if provoking him to think about what gifts other than endless sacrifice to her son that he might wish to give to the world.

      This book, furthermore, does not represent a rush to press for the sake of dishing out the good and the bad. Harmon waited 28 years after LB’s death to write this memoir, obviously obtaining permissions from the estate and others who still live to describe these often very personal events.

       Finally, even when he left Bernstein’s employ in utter exhaustion, he still kept close ties with LB, working with Coates, who had kept in an apartment once used by LB, a wide library of clippings, personal objects, scores, photographs, and other archival objects which Harmon had evaluated by rare book appraiser George Minkoff (a man who attempted to help me sell my own Sun & Moon Press archive).

     When he was told that Bernstein was ill and near death, Harmon paid him a visit at the Dakota, where the two briefly and humorously spoke of their long friendship (my summary).

 

                             Harmon to LB: “You’re only the second person I’ve ever known

                                  that I could fight with.”

                             Harmon to LB: (soon after) “Arguing isn’t the same as confrontation.

                                  When both sides agree to a compromise, a fight deepens a friend-

                                  ship, instead of destroying it.”

                             LB: (in a raspy growl) “Fighting—it’s as good as fucking.”

 

Soon after, he takes Charlie’s hand and says: “Please look after my music.” Repeating the sentence again.

      Harmon did. After Bernstein’s death, he edited full scores of West Side Story and Candide before tackling vocal scores for Candide, On the Town, and Wonderful Town. He might have gone on to also edit performance scores for others of Bernstein’s works, but Kraut, unable to see the importance of those projects, pulled the plug on further edits he proposed. Yet today people still come to him asking his advice about many questions of the scores and productions. Charlie finally discovered his own life, while without abandoning the life of his great mentor and, as he describes LB, rebbe.

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2018

Reprinted from Reading with My Lips (March 2024).