Inger Christensen | Azorno / 2009

pictures resembling creatures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Inger Christensen Azorno, translated from the Danish by Denise Newman (New York: New Directions, 2009)

 

As are most of her writings, Inger Christensen's 1967 fiction Azorno, is a highly structured work. In this case, seven characters—Randi, Katarina, Louise, Xenia, Bathsheba (Bet), Sampel and Azorno—each of the women pregnant, are in the process of writing fictions. Each of their narratives—although one who be hard placed to describe any of them as having a plot—contains similar actions, phrases, and events.

      Various of these figures write on pages topped by the address Rome, Via Napoli 3 and the telephone number 484.409-471.565. Several of the characters travel through Alpine passes: Oberalppass 2044, Passo S. Gottardo 21009, Disentis / Mustér 1133, Passo del Lucomagno 1917, and Biasca 2931 before approaching via Lugano 334 "in the hot, crisp, spicy landscape around the border at Chiasso and Como 201," singing with the car window open. Other figures wake each morning to watch the person across the way dress before going to a small cafe where, to free the locals from seeming to be observed, they stare at a rag, a sandstone sculpture, and a little greenish manikin. Or they go out at other times, sitting in the Piazza della Repubblica, without a hat or gloves, observing the man (or woman) across the way. They return to write on the papers headed with their name and address kept, while they are traveling, in at the bottom of a suitcase full of "a multicolored heap of extra bras, girdles, panties, stockings, sandals, scarves, gloves, creams, cosmetics, and a white hat, all rolled up in a glossy transparent plastic tube with a handle made of twisted gold thread. 

    Lists dominate the structures Christensen employs to help this work to cohere. At several points characters visit a beautiful lake home, approachable only by boat, where Sampel has created a rose garden with special breeds of roses: "Rosa rugosa, Rosa rubignosa, Rosa pimpinellifolia, cream-colored Rosa "Nevada," yellow Rosa hugonis, and deep scarlet Rosa moyesii."

   Several of the women of this fiction write one another, perceived by other figures as liars or exaggerators of the truth. Bet Sampel, Sampel's wife, at one point invites all the other women to join her in the lake house, whereupon they discover that each of them is pregnant and, together, upon the arrival of Sampel, proceed to claw him to death. The dog in that house is called Goethe. A small fountain that does not imitate the sound of rain sits on a terrace.

     At other times, several figures gain comfort from staring at a picture which they call "the composer," who seems to be staring at a small cigarette burn or a black dot. Some of the women go to Tivoli in Copenhagen or other parks where they order two Dubonnets, and/or two martinis, quickly drinking them and paying, after pulling the table close to them. Most of these figures speak of two ways of destroying life: with poison or freedom:

 

                        Both equally gently. Every confinement can be terminated from

                        within: e.g., by giving the tree poison and quickly paralyzing the

                        tissues in their multiple functions. When everything stands still

                        this way, a mute block, all movement begins to go downward:

                        flowers disintegrate, leaves curl up, rustle, are carried away, twigs

                        on branches dry up, break, and the trunk cracks, caves in.

                        Slowly consumed by everything. Or the confinement can end

                        from without: e.g., by giving the tree freedom, an excess of space,

                        light, air, water, nourishment, by which it's made to unfold in a

                        series of ecstatic flowerings, abruptly followed by exhaustion,

                        withering. At last the tree dries up, a mute block that is slowly con-

                        sumed by itself. By everything.

 

     In many respects one might say that the two methods of death described above are at the center of this "story." In several instances the women seem trapped, metaphorically poisoned by the relationships or lack of relationships they must suffer; one sits in a dark room where outside it perpetually rains. Another is locked away in an institution. Another is trapped in Sampel's bedroom at the beautiful lake house. Others move, like Beckettian figures, "in" and "out" in seeming freedom, but with nowhere to go, wander the streets, sit at tables to drink, or cross the various Alpine passes by car.

     We soon realize that these figures are all, in some way, creations of the artist Azorno, who, when he sits at Via Napoli 3 to write, admits of using the pseudonym Sampel. In their imagination, in the possibilities of telling the various sets of possible scenarios, each is indeed made pregnant by the author, and each rearranges these series of events, like the ever-recurring image of a bouquet of various-colored tulips that is described in many scenes.

     Christensen asks again, but in a highly original manner, what is reality, who of us is real? Several of her figures often have the feeling that somewhere there is a person who exactly at the present makes the same notes to be woven into a novel about him or herself.

     It is only in the final section of this lyrical work that we sense we may have broken through to a seeming "reality." In that section, Azorno and Bathsheba are in Paris (not Rome) where he is writing and she, accompanying him, shops and walks the streets. Here too are many of the elements we have seen at work throughout the book: he loves listing the roses from his garden as if even saying it were a charm. The suitcase is packed with the several tablets and toiletries as described elsewhere. Just as another character cuts through a withered plant to reach its thorns, Azorno destroys such a plant in the Luxembourg Gardens. Yet here Goethe, the dog, has been transformed into a small porcelain figure set atop the wardrobe in their room. And while Azorno attempts to write his story, Bathsheba (no longer called Bet) ponders, since she has been told she will be his novel, whether she should consider herself as "simply a human being" or "as a human-made being." As elsewhere in the book, she carries an umbrella, meets a man (Azorno), and joins him at a table she draws close to herself as she orders two Dubonnets.

     Yet this time, she has challenged her husband, who claims to have a vision of her, to tell her what she is wearing. As at another scene in the fiction, he responds that she wearing a white coat, white hat, and white gloves, and when the wind blows the coat open, underneath is a large-flowered dress. In fact, when she opens her coat she is wearing "an orange sleeveless dress made of a thin fabric that hung loosely on her and moved with every little puff of wind," something outside of the repeated elements of the work. In short, we now understand that she is an image to him, not a reality. She, as all people are in a world in which we create realities for them, is "a human-made being."

     Christensen does not leave the story there, but finally takes it into a possible reality, as Bathsheba announces she is going to have a baby. The couple put their arms around each other and kiss, yet, as the author describes the event, it is still a symbolic act: "It was a question of gentleness."

     At that same moment, however, Azorno seems to suddenly come alive, realizing for the first time that the woman "With the dark orange dress against her dark skin against the dark evening" is something separate from himself, that the mass of people around him are not the same as his creations, that he is living not a life, but his life, his only life. He realizes that he is "A person. Maybe more. Who just now thought exactly this." The revelation changes everything as the author, mimetically, becomes one of us, living human flesh:

 

                             When the gardens were about to close and the water jets

                        sank down so that the water's surface became calm, there was

                        a moment of soundlessness, everything was silent, though certainly

                        never completely silent, since there was the sound of many

                        people's movements quickly increasing, as the sound of all that

                        I have written was quickly increasing and limiting my freedom to

                        experience, but it was in this moment of soundlessness that we got

                        up, and the whole time I heard Bathsheba breathing, and I kissed

                        her, it was in that moment that we kissed each other, that for the

                        first time in our lives we experienced the mild even air. And sang.

 

And with that song the "pictures resembling creatures," of which Søren Kierkegaard writes in Christensen's epilogue, are transformed into the creatures themselves.

     The death of Inger Christensen in January of this year has left us without one of our greatest celebrants of living and life.

 

Los Angeles, September 27, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (September 2009) and PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) (October 2009).

Russell Banks | Dreaming Up America / 2008

anyone or everyone

by Douglas Messerli

 

Russell Banks Dreaming Up America (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008)

 

In his first book of non-fiction prose, acclaimed American novelist Russell Banks takes on the daunting task of defining what it is to be an American—how our country came into being, how we perceive ourselves and how we define our dreams and aspirations, all directed to a French audience in the form of a film by Jean-Michel Meurice and, now, published as a transcription of his comments in Banks's own country.

      Although I have attempted to tackle some of these same issues in a few of the essays of My Year, Banks is a far braver man than I; I am certain that had I been asked to do the same, I would have demurred. For how does one speak as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant for a nation which Banks himself describes as a "Creole" culture from its earliest days, with its vast displacement of Native Americans and its endless waves of immigrant populations beginning with the Africans, who Banks, correctly I think, refuses to describe simply as descendants of slaves. And then, of course, there are those generations upon generations of German, French, Dutch, Scandinavian, Irish, Spanish, Italian, Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and vast ethnic populations Banks does not even mention such as the Russians, Armenians, and Persians (who are represented by large populations in my home city of Los Angeles)—all of whom are portrayed in popular thinking as having merged and embedded their cultural identities within the larger whole. Even in these cultural heritages Banks mistakenly combines religious groupings (describing Jews as a single cultural entity—tell that to Jewish citizens from Germany, Poland, Iran, and Ethiopia) and heaping all immigrants from Arabic-speaking countries into a single whole he describes as Arabs (let us just mention not only the differences between Arab-speaking people of different countries, but the radical separations between Sunis and Sufis). One might as easily declare that to be an American is be anyone from nowhere—or everyone from everywhere, depending upon your point of view.

     But to be fair, this is not an historian's essay, let alone a coherent political commentary, but rather an intelligent artist's perspective of what it means to be from the USA. And from this perspective Banks presents a fairly credible and often fascinating discussion of our inherent successes and failures as a culture.

     Note that I do not use the word "country." Banks argues, rather convincingly, that when our nationalist tendencies show their ugly heads, they are often directly in opposition to our founding members' philosophical viewpoint.

     Banks argues that three major strands of American ambitions are evident in the first European settlers of the continent: in New England the English settlers' religious dreams of the "City on the Hill," the Dutch and French desires for commercial and trading success, the Spanish wishes for wealth mythologized in Cortez's and Pissaro's "City of Gold," and the dreams of Ponce de Leon for a "Fountain of Youth," ambitions that gradually were interwoven to express the current American Dream, a hope for religious purity and freedom of expression, our attempts to attain wealth, and our belief in the possibility of making a new life, of starting over again. Yet these three strands of the American Dream also pull us in different directions and often play out our destinies in opposition to one another such as our Civil War, which pitted our striving for wealth against the moral and spiritual opposition to slavery.

     Banks also points to the basic hypocrisy of our values; while seeking a "City on the Hill," a moral ground that permitted freedom of expression, we simultaneously failed to recognize any rights for those that were here before us and had tended the new world which the immigrants now felt was rightfully theirs to settle and develop, to move ever forward with soldiers and fortresses followed by the settlers themselves who took over Indian lands, dividing them up into farms and ranches. Accordingly, Banks insists, racism was at the very heart of the developing nation from its inception—an issue with which (and even despite our joyful embracement of our first Black president) we have still not completely come to terms.

     What set this new nation apart from other countries, however, was the radical embracement of democracy and, in particular, its Enlightenment leaders (Washington, Paine, Franklin, Jefferson, and others) who in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution spoke in a loftiness of ideas that embraced not just its voting citizens (Blacks and women, we are reminded, not among them) but all of mankind. These "sacred documents," as Black novelist Ralph Ellison has described them, gave rights even to those who did not yet have them, and had important consequences that even the founding fathers might never have imagine.

     As Banks writes of the Constitution:

 

          It's fascinating to contrast the United States Constitution with the constitutions

          of our individual fifty states. Each state has its own constitution, usually a

          litany of laws. It's the same with most national constitutions—the new constitution

          of Iraq, or the French Constitution, for example. They're deliberately oriented

          to a specific people, place, and time. But the American Declaration of

          Independence has a poetic loftiness that universalizes its ambitions. It speaks of

          mankind as much as Americans. And the institutions laid out in the American

          Constitution are so decorously balanced that it manages to universalize our

          country's political structure, too. Both of our founding documents really are

          extraordinary acts of creative genius.

 

    Yet those pulls that Banks spoke of earlier often contorted and twisted those sacred texts, particularly given the enormous powers of the American presidents, that could work for the good of the American populace (Banks predictably mentions Franklin D. Roosevelt) or could push the country in the direction of a self-deluded people who regularly commit genocide in the name of "Civilization, Christianity and Capitalism." As he quotes D. H. Lawrence: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer."

    The author of Dreaming Up America is particularly critical of how through some of our technological advances such as television we have turned our economic interests—that search for "The City of Gold"—upon our own citizens, inviting the salesman, who we once kept at the door, not only into our living rooms, but into our children's bedrooms:

 

          We've colonized our own children. Having run out of people on the planet

          to colonize, run out of people who can't distinguish between beads and

          trinkets and something of value, having found ourselves no longer able to

          swap some beads and axes for Manhattan Island, we've ended up colonizing

          our own children. ...The old sow is eating its own farrow.

 

     I wonder, however, just how gullible our own children truly are. I recall that when I was a grade schooler, presenting a school-play with another young boy satirizing the endless advertisements we had heard over and over again on both radio and television in its earliest days. Perhaps our children, having encountered thousands and thousands of such ads, may not be quite as naive regarding the market as we imagine. Rather, I would argue that the greater danger lay in the programming itself, in the empty narratives of television productions and news reporting. When that emptiness is presented as reality, it contorts the minds not just of our children but of adults as well.

      Nonetheless, we can well understand Banks's fears. And with the author we wonder where this homicidal sickness caused by the "conflict of our material goals and our spiritual justifications..." will lead us. That, Banks appears to argue, depends of what we make of ourselves, on how we comprehend that despite our commitment to this particular nation, we have, as individuals, not truly been melted down in some metaphorical pot, but are still each different from one other while sharing similar ambitions and goals. We are not anyone, but everyone from everywhere, a truly universal force; and in that fact lies our strength and our ability to renew ourselves and our country.      

      

New York City, January 17, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2009).

Saša Stanišić | How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone / 2008

when you can’t cut fog

by Douglas Messerli

 

Saša Stanišić How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (New York: Grove Press, 2008)

 

Saša Stanišić’s remarkable premier novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, begins in a kind of mythologized Bosian world, a place of magical-like tales—many of them emanating from the young hero’s recently dead grandfather Slavko—mixed with a humorous presentation of the collapse of Tito’s Communist rule of Yugoslavia. Indeed a good part of this fiction enchants the reader through the young boy Aleksandr’s imaginative retelling of various stories from the small village of Višegrad on the river Drina (made famous by Ivo Andrić’s novel Bridge on the Drina), including those of his family members—Uncle Bora, Uncle Miki, Auntie Typhoon, the deaf Nena Fatima, his grandparents, great grandparents, and his own Muslim-born mother and Serbian father—and their colorful neighbors, the referee of the Yugoslavian league, Milenko Pavlovic (better known as Walrus), his son Zoran, the arguing friends Čika Sead and Čika Hasan, and Alexsandr’s school friend Edin.

      Throughout this first section, as in many such childhood accounts, the mix of what remains of peasant culture with the popular culture of Western Europe and the United States (Carl Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and Madonna are invoked as commonly as Lenin, Das Kapital and Marx), creates a humorous and often disquieting satire that cannot help but enchant.

      At the time of these early events, the years from 1990-1992, Višegrad was nearly 64% Muslim and 32% Serb; today the town is almost entirely Serbian. Anyone picking up Stanišić’s book, accordingly, should have been prepared for the inevitable shift from comedy to something darkly tragic. Yet, in part because of presenting this information through his young narrator’s point of view, we witness the arriving soldiers less as the deadly murderers of ethnic cleansing than as often ineffectual brutes of war. Aleksandr with his family, hiding in their midst a young Muslin girl, Asija, camp out with neighbors in their basement as soldiers of both sides come and go, tearing apart the magical world they had all once known. Ultimately, Aleksandr, his parents and others of his family members escape to Germany, where they face new prejudices but, at least, potentially more stable lives.

     Unfortunately, as Aleksandr thrives in his new home, growing outwardly into a young man speaking fluent German whose parents eventually emigrate to Florida, his internal behavior as a slightly coy, cocky maker of lists and Comrade in Chief of the unfinished only slightly shifts. What we found appealing at the beginning of the book, accordingly, seems slightly embarrassing and, at times, shockingly immature late in this novel, particularly when the young adult returns for a visit to his former hometown.

      It is hard to know, particularly since the narrator is so obviously close to the author’s own persona, whether Stanišić is suggesting that such horrific war-time experiences have psychologically damaged Aleksandr, have turned him into a kind of soccer-loving boy-man, or whether he is oblivious to his character’s no-longer-charming immaturity. It may represent a kind of catharsis to call random telephone numbers in Sarjevo, leaving a series of cryptic queries and messages about the young girl he seeks, Asija, but it also suggests that the character—still a major list maker and self-enchanted wizard—may need some medical help.

      In a sense, of course, there is no way that the author or his narrator can truly reflect the horrific events that Bosnia and Herzegovina have undergone. Aleksandar knows that the dead were so numerous that at times it blocked up the river Drina, but he has not experienced it himself, and the world to which he returns is both bleak and modestly spiffed-up. Although there is still strong evidence of the destruction of nearly every building of his town, the village has attempted to  become part of Westernized Europe. Zoran, the son of the Walrus, for example, has taken over an entire floor of a building, decorating it with modern appliances. The older remaining population, like Alexsandr’s former teacher, suffer from Alzheimer’s disease or, as in the case of his own grandmother, the forgetfulness of old age. Indeed, through different methods, nearly all those who remain have had to forget. And, like the fog which so deeply settles upon the Bosnian countryside that all traffic is brought to a standstill, Alexsandr’s attempt to return to this world through his memories and imagination is doomed, ending in a confusing cul-de-sac. For all his lists, all of his childlike memories, he is no longer part of that world. As Zoran moodily describes the situation:

 

                      Aleks! Just look around you! Do you know anyone here? You don’t even

                      know me! You’re a stranger, Aleksandr! Zoran stares at me at close

                      quarters. You’d better be glad of it.

 

Reencountering his Uncle Miki, Aleksandr is confronted by a man, we suddenly recall, who has remained as a Serbian soldier—clearly one of that town’s ethnic cleansers. Even Aleksandr must finally admit that his lists are of no worth, that remembering cannot save anyone from the past.

      Perhaps Aleksandr’s manically absurd humor is the only way to deal with that dreadful and repeating history. The long description of a soccer game played by opposing forces in the brief cease-fire is certainly one of the most rewarding stories of this book of stories-within-stories. Long time friends, now dreadful enemies, Kiko (for the Bosnians) and Milan Jevrić, better known as Mickey Mouse (for the Serbians) battle to win the game and, as the cease-fire comes to  an end, fight for their very lives. While outwardly they seem only to be “playing” their favorite sport, the game itself becomes a mirror of their fears and hates. As the ball goes into the woods, strong soldiers such as Meho—forced to retrieve it among the hundreds of landmines buried about—shit their pants, break into tears, and ultimately go crazy before they are shot to death. It does not fit our easy notions of war—our feelings of absolute moral outrage—to speak of a battle between life and death in terms of a pitiful sporting event. Yet it is hard to doubt that such an event might have or even actually happened in a world so completely and absurdly split apart.

     In the end, we must recognize that both the author-narrator—despite our justifiable discomfort with his often coy and too clever childlike actions—weighed down with the two million dying voices of his homeland also must break, must metaphorically come apart:

 

                  The echo comes back, I have to sit down, I’ve eaten and drunk in-

                  credible amounts, twice, I can’t take any more, I let myself drop, I

                  lie there among the sweet humming of a rain of voices. Where? Howl

                  two million voices at once. I feel sick. I can’t cope anymore, above me

                  the clouds, five or perhaps six feet above me. The rain fills my mouth,

                  voices like flies in my hear.

                       Yes, I say, I’m here now. 

 

With the completion of this fiction it is clear Alexsandr and his creator have grown into men, the latter an individual so gifted that we can only look forward to his future creations.

 

Los Angeles, August 9, 2008

Reprinted from The Brooklyn Rail (October 2008).

Arnold Weinstein | Red Eye of Love / 1962 / 1997 || Jack Gelber | Square in the Eye / 1964

eye to eye

Arnold Weinstein Red Eye of Love (New York: Grove Press, 1962); revised ed. reprinted by (Los 

     Angeles: Sun Moon Press, 1997)

Jack Gelber Square in the Eye (New York: Grove Press, 1964)

 

It’s interesting to note that two of the most energetic and manic comedic plays of the early 1960s shared a titular connection with eyes. Gelber’s play, Square in the Eye, was first performed in 1965 off-Broadway at the Theater de Lys; but it first occurred in print in 1962, and was copyrighted by its publisher, Grove Press’s Evergreen books in 1964. Arnold Weinstein’s more gently satiric Red Eye of Love was performed in 1961 at The Living Theater, and was published, again by Grove Press, in 1962. Obviously, in the climate of the early 1960s these so-called “avant-garde” playwrights both saw love as something that—to borrow a phrase from the 1952 popular song “That’s Amore”—“hits your eye like a big pizza pie.” 

 

     Gelber’s play, the more emphatically absurd of the two, focuses on a would-be artist, Ed Stone, who is forced because of lack of artistic success to teach art in the New York schools. As he announces in the stand-up comedian-like prologue, he actually wanted to be a doctor, but instead has “the rare privilege of teaching art to delinquents in the New York public school system.” Accordingly, he suffers—“How I suffer,” and spends much of the play feeling sorry for himself while loathing his hilariously nasty children, Sarah and Bill, Jr.—the latter a son from his wife’s first marriage—and coveting his wife’s best friend Jane Jaffe, recently divorced from his successful artist friend, Al. Al has, evidently with far less talent than Ed, honed in on the art craze of the moment, and has filled his pockets with money, even though he has lost his wife. Ed’s nearly insane in-laws, meanwhile, are furious with him for pretending that he is Jewish, and see his admission of his lie as a betrayal of their faith. In a sense Ed’s resultant anger is aimed in too many directions to be effective; his verbal attacks—and Gelber’s play as well—are scatter-shot over too wide an area to hit any one target.

      After what appears to be a typical night in the Stone home, a gathering of the players whose loathing of one another is barely hidden by witty social dialogue, Ed stomps out, whereupon his wife suddenly becomes ill and is hospitalized. By the time he is able to find her in the hospital, gathered with his grumbling in-laws in a waiting room, the doctor reports she has died of a brain hemorrhage. With lightning quickness Gelber has transformed his comedy of anger into a comedy of regret as Ed tries to sort things out and discover, despite the doctor’s utter confusion and refusals to explain, how his now beloved ex-wife could have so suddenly expired.

     Inevitably, each survivor blames the others for the death and their lack of sympathy and love—for they have all been hit “square in the eye,” with the reality of their squalid lives full of petty bickering.

    Yet even here, Gelber refuses to allow his characters much humanity, as they scurry to quickly perform the funeral in time for Ed’s remarriage, this time to a beautiful girl with “a lot of money.” Meanwhile, Ed’s student Luis, an innocent boy who has been forced to witness the horrors of Ed’s former family life, has run off with Jane Jaffe. So everything seems to have ended for the best.

     Gelber’s dissection of love, fame, and fortune, however, is not yet over, as he returns us to Sandy’s hospital bed, just before her death, where she discusses her life with her sympathetic friend Jane—the doctors presuming the two are lesbians—and then is gradually put on trial, in retrospect, by her own children, mother, father, and husband. Sandy, accordingly, is forced to justify her life, even after death. But this time—despite her and her husband’s failures—the love the two had for one another is slowly revealed and somehow redeems their lives. That it ultimately means nothing given the fact that Ed will go on through life more successfully perhaps without her does not rob her of her dignity; indeed Sandy ultimately breaks through Gelber’s study of New York caricatures—figures described by Time magazine in 1965 as “talkocrats, the people who talk of writing novels and painting pictures, who interminably discuss the problems of home and headline,” and the various medical quacks, religious bigots, over-sexed and impotent beings Gelber’s play presents—to represent someone close to a real human being, a woman who, despite being trapped in an unfulfilling marriage, did her best to live, love, and survive.

      Weinstein’s “red eye” is less violent than Gelber’s direct hit, and his masterful play is tinged with a kind of nostalgia that might be an anathema to the former, but the satiric focus of these two works is quite similar. Although the central couple of this work, Wilmer and Selma, seem to be a perfect match and declare their love for one another several times throughout the play, they too are torn apart by fame, fortune and finances. Wilmer, a born dreamer seeking throughout his life to find “the key”—both a key to success and to spiritual fulfillment—attempts various occupations: accounting, doll-manufacturing, soldiering, and working as a butcher—all of which end in failure. One can’t blame Wilmer for not trying hard enough; indeed he takes up each profession with such zeal that he forgets his wife Selma—who like Gelber’s Sandy must endure an obnoxious son (Bez) from her previous marriage. She has no choice but to divorce Wilmer and marry the wealthy meat merchant, O. O. Martinas.

      Like Gelber, Weinstein directs his satire against various professions and institutions: police (two policemen join forces, becoming life-time “partners”), the military (during numerous wars that occur throughout the play, enemy soldiers find more in common with each other than they do with men of their own units), business tycoons (from shoeshine boy to successful tycoon, O. O. Martinas gradually builds up an empire symbolized by a high-rise department store devoted to various meats, and wanders about the play declaring his pride in being illiterate while composing outrageously bad poetry), as well as the sort of lovers featured in Broadway musicals and operettas (Selma and Wilber again and again meet one another anew, describing themselves as “your former casual acquaintance and husband”), along with scattergun attacks on society, propriety, and even Santa Claus. 

      As Selma vacillates between her love and her desire for money, both Wilber and O. O. Martinas end up with the red eyes of love, and ultimately find it easier to satisfy Selma’s needs by moving in together, creating a kind of ridiculous ménage à trois, the horrible Bez becoming an Astro-butcher who is “lost in orbit.” Weinstein’s sympathies with the artist-dreamer Wilber, however, are apparent, as the three conclude the play with the determination of all to go and live with the Navahos, “a fine folk in the field of the rug and the pot.” 

      In both these plays we see the writers grappling with one of the major issues of the day, the failure of the so-called American Dream to link human desires such as love and spiritual fulfillment with the necessary finances to survive. Love, spirit, and money are represented in both these works as what a necessary for happiness—but in everyday life they seldom can be combined. The Masonic-like search for the holy trinity of (brotherly) love, relief, and truth, seems a nearly impossible achievement in the worlds so brilliantly satirized by these two gifted playwrights.

 

Los Angeles, April 15, 2003