Djuna Barnes |At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays / 1995

djuna barnes’ roots

by Douglas Messerli

 

Djuna Barnes At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995)

 

The plays of Djuna Barnes are unquestionably some of the most curious works of American drama. Combining the realist settings and Irish speech patterns of the plays of J. M. Synge, an Oscar Wildeian sense of wit, and an often sentimental portrait of down-and-out New Yorkers, Barnes’s earliest plays are, at best, odd amalgams of styles at war with one another. One must remember that at the time of the earliest plays—The Death of Life, At the Roots of the Stars and Maggie of the Saints—Barnes was 25 years old, and she was clearly seeking models. She had read Synge; she published an article on his drama in the New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine in the weeks between the publication of her first three plays. Family members, on the other hand, purportedly had known Wilde; the family lore was that her great-grandmother had held regular salons which Wilde attended. Mentions of Wilde’s Salomé, in particular, show up in Barnes’s stories and journalistic writings several times. Accordingly, most of Barnes’s early writing for theater, composed at the same time as the fiction she herself described as juvenilia, must be understood as experimentations in which she was working out in dramatic terms the theatrical influences of the day.

     Re-readings of her plays, however, reveal far more interesting achievements than this summary allows. Already in A Passion Play, published in the magazine Others in 1918, but certainly by the time of Three from the Earth (first performed by the Provincetown Players in 1919), Barnes had begun to use a less realistic and more stylized language and action that would lead her in a direction theatrically much closer to her later work. Three from the Earth, for example, uses an almost tableau-like setting in which the three Carson brothers, “peasants of the most obvious type,” crowded together upon a couch, serve primarily as provocateurs for the world of Kate Morley as she recounts her affair with their father. Until the final moment of the play, indeed, there is no action: it is all a dialogue of possession, a war of words between the true inheritors of the father’s love and the woman who has stolen and squandered that love (she is now engaged to a Supreme Court judge). When the youngest son—possibly the offspring of Kate and his father’s union—steals a photograph and a kiss, the subject of the play is actualized, and the kiss simultaneously becomes a visual emblem of Barnes’s theme.

     Similarly, in The Dove, one of Barnes’s most successful plays of this early period, we witness a world not unlike Hedda Gabbler’s of two intelligent sisters’ intense sexual and imaginative frustration. Like Hedda, these women keep weapons, knives and pistols, around them as emblems of danger and excitement, but their primary weapons are their tongues as they wittily spar with one another and the passive girl living with them, whom they have nicknamed “The Dove.” Through the very fact of her youth, however, “The Dove" has the only true potential for danger and excitement and, for that reason, is the central object of their linguistic abuse and desire. Her retaliation—which in Ibsen would have become the subject of tragedy—is treated comically and wholly symbolically by Barnes, as the young boarder puts a bullet-hole through their “scandalous” painting of Venetian courtesans. Once again, Barnes’s action, which in this case occurs offstage, brings the battle of wits into a concretized and static image that completes the play.

     The same pattern of linguistic sparring that results in a visual denouement occurs time and again in these early works: in Kurzy of the Sea the hero’s love for the “unnatural” is transformed into a wholesome sexual drive, as a mermaid, thrown back into the sea, metamorphosizes (again offstage) into a barmaid; the sexual freedom exposed by the castaway couple in Five Thousand Miles is contradicted by the discovery on their uninhabited island of an “eggbeater,” which belies their isolation from civilization and symbolizes the result of any proposed union between them; Gheid Storm’s attempt to sexually storm the walls of Helena Hucksteppe’s self-sufficient disinterest in him and other men is visually presented in To the Dogs by his vaulting through her windowsill, and his failure is realized by his doorway exit. In short, what we see in these early plays are the roots of the tableaux and emblematic structures of the great Nightwood and The Antiphon.

     In several of these plays, Barnes wipes away all action, and explores instead the dialogue of wit. In works such as An Irish Triangle, Little Drops of Rain, Two Ladies Take Tea, Water-Ice, and She Tells Her Daughter, Barnes returns to the Socratic dialogues, one of the roots of theater, in order to push away from a naturalist drama toward a theater in which language, as opposed to setting, character, or thematic structure, dominates. There is no true response possible to Shiela O’Hare’s recounting of the sexual arrangement between her husband and the lady (and/or possibly the lady’s husband) of the manor house; Kathleen’s bourgeois shock is simply a tool to keep the language and her story moving. Mitzi’s outrage against Lady Lookover’s dismissal of her and her generation in Little Drops of Rain simply spurs the witty maxims and homilies of the elder. The daughter’s innocence in She Tells Her Daughter is merely a fact around which Madame Deerfont weaves the tale of her own murderous past. In these plays Barnes has stripped away action and setting in a manner that would be easily at home on the stage of Beckett, Albee, or Pinter. As Barnes biographer Andrew Field has suggested of Barnes’s comedy of 1918, Madame Collects Herself, the play has less to do with influences of the time, particularly those of her fellow playwrights of the Provincetown group—Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Edna St. Vincent Millay—than it does with Eugene Ionesco.

     Unsurprisingly, few critics of the day could make much sense of the plays of Djuna Barnes. While they all seemed to recognize something interesting was happening on stage (or, as Barnes bounded up and down the aisle, offstage), most reviewers were puzzled by the theatrical experience. Alexander Wolcott quipped of Three from the Earth, “[The play] is enormously interesting, and the greatest indoor sport this week is guessing what it means.” Burns Mantle wrote of the same play: “It is probably the incalculable depth of the playlet that puts it beyond us. It is something that should be plumbed. But others must do it. We are a rotten plumber.” Only S. J. Kaufman recognized Barnes’ talent: “Miss Barnes’ play is so near to being great that we hope that we shall be able to see it again. And we hope it’s printed. ...Even now as we write the power, the simplicity and withal the incalculable depth of it has us enthralled.”

     Kaufman did get his wish. Three from the Earth was reprinted in A Little Review and, subsequently, in both Barnes’s A Book and in its republication as A Night Among the Horses in 1929. However, none of these plays has been reprinted since until my edition of At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays of 1995.

 

Los Angeles, 1995

Reprinted from Djuna Barnes, At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995)

Knut Hamsun | The Women at the Pump / 1978

testing his creations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Knut Hamsun The Women at the Pump, translated from the Norwegian by Oliver and Gunnvor Stallybrass (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978) / reprinted Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1996)

 

Reading this new translation of The Women at the Pump I was reminded of those delightful hours when I first discovered the works of the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun; and I was once again struck by the fact that despite Hamsun’s remarkable writings and his influence upon modern masters as diverse as Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller and Isaac Bashevis Singer, his major works remained out of print for more than four decades.

     Fortunately, in the late 1960s, Farrar, Straus & Giroux began a series of new Hamsun translations, and previous to this book have published five of his masterpieces: Pan, Hunger, Victoria, and Mysteries—my own favorite. For these new editions—as for other series of translations—the publishers can only be praised. That a major publishing house should devote so much of its energies towards the publication of one author’s oeuvre is a small miracle in these days.

     The publication of Oliver and Gunnvor Stallybrass’s superb translation of The Women at the Pump, however, is an event that might be seen as somewhat controversial, and at the very least problematic. In the first place, this novel has never been a favorite among Hamsun’s critics. His depiction of small-town provincials in this novel is so sardonic as to be cruel. “Even Strindberg has a little pity for the sins and foibles of those he so passionately despised,” wrote the reviewer for London’s The Times Literary Supplement when the book was first translated in 1928.

    Later critics, moreover, would see in this contempt for small-town life—and in Hamsun’s adoration of landliv (farm life) in this novel and in Growth of the Soil—the roots of his later attraction to fascism. (During the Nazi invasion of Norway, Hamsun published and broadcast speeches denouncing then premier Johann Nygaadsvold; and in 1947, at the age of 86, Hamsun was tried and found guilty of collaboration with the Nazis.) Clearly, these critics have a valid point. Hamsun’s extreme disdain for intellectualism, his biting attacks on small-town and city pretensions, and his recurrent exaltation of the sea and soil all found expression in the Nazi propagandist advocacy of a “new soil-loving Nordic race.” Indeed, in The Women at the Pump there is often a horrifying vacuousness as Hamsun, through stylistic maneuvers and didactic statements, brings into question the human worth of his townsfolk. Thus, while superficially The Women at the Pump may remind one of Sherwood Anderson’s kaleidoscopic presentation of small-town life in Winesburg, Ohio—which appeared one year earlier—at heart this is a very different work. In Hamsun’s novel there is seemingly no center, no hero, no human figure strong enough to unite the varying patterns it presents.

      Yet, for all of this, there is a strange tension at work in the novel. While Hamsun’s characters are often no more than mouthpieces for a series of dialectics, Hamsun as narrator is brilliantly vital. And despite the fact that the novel contains no hero, the townspeople do speak as a positive force through Hamsun’s incredible narrative techniques. Like the women gossiping at the pump, the narrator moves fluidly from formal to colloquial language, from omniscient to limited points of view, from complex dialogue to ellipsis. And it is this protean energy as manifested in the townspeople which, in the end, is what the novel is about. If, on one hand, Hamsun empties his characters of human qualities, on the other, through the mere fact of their ability to withstand Hamsun’s satirical assaults, he wrings from them a sort of instinctual dynamism. Hamsun’s Oliver Anderson, for example, is created as a sexless cripple, an obese “abomination,” an “empty husk” cuckolded many times over by his wife. But he is also, as Hamsun eventually admits, a survivor. “A child of misfortune, if you like, chewed and spat out by life, left high and dry, but possessed of an undying instinct for survival.”

     Thus, ultimately, it is not Hamsun’s idealization of soil and sea that wins out, and it is this fact which makes The Women at the Pump less romantic than Hamsun’s other works. It is almost as if he needed to test his literary creations in this novel against the romantic values he inherited, and which would eventually lead him naively—as it did others—towards fascism.

     In The Women at the Pump, however, Hamsun goes one step further. At the novel’s end Oliver Anderson is not only a survivor, but a proud father of the town’s new schoolmaster and its blacksmith. The fact that this character not only survives but, as Faulkner would later put it, endures, is a testament not only to Hamsun’s honesty, but to his underlying faith in the human race, a faith expressed so beautifully in his last work, On Overgrown Paths, written in a psychiatric clinic in Oslo as he awaited trial for his war crimes. It is for this honesty, and for his ability to portray such enduring characters, that I so value the works of Knut Hamsun. And for this reason—and the enjoyment derived from reading any Hamsun fiction—it is wonderful to have The Women at the Pump back in print.

 

College Park, Maryland, 1978

Reprinted from The Washington Post Book World, September 1978 / International Herald Tribune, September 1978.

Tom Sancton | The Bettencourt Affair: The World’s Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris / 2017

pandora’s box

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Sancton The Bettencourt Affair: The World’s Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris (New York: Dutton, 2017)

 

Tom Sancton’s new book, The Bettencourt Affair, covers a long and protracted scandal and trial that may not be well known to US audiences, but shook the country of France from about 2007 to its final court-room decisions just this past year. Elements of the court fights have still to be settled.

       Sancton carefully takes us through the long, sometimes silly and ultimately sad tale from the moment when Liliane Schueller Bettencourt—as the heir of more than 32 billion dollars, the world’s wealthiest woman—met François-Marie Banier, then a young handsome photographer, writer, painter, playwright, and sometimes actor.

    Banier began his career by publishing his first fiction, Les Résidences Secondaires in 1969 and performed in several important films beginning in the 1980s, including Robert Bresson’s L’Argent (an interesting coincidence since money would become the central factor of his life), three films by Éric Rohmer, and a film by Olivier Assayas as late as 2008. Gay, impulsive, erudite, and somewhat of a clown, Banier clearly brought out something in the L’Oreal heiress that her previously ordered life had never before permitted, and, as Sancton puts it, she literally fell in love with him—if not in the sexual sense, clearly in a spiritual one.

      Together the pair dined in famous Parisian restaurants, attended art galleries, shopped, and, as she later insisted, met far more interesting people that her usual social set had ever permitted. Some of her friends suggested, to describe their relationship, the fact that despite her money and Art Deco mansion, Liliane had never done anything creative in her life; Banier was a workaholic artist, if a bit of a dilettante, charming her and everyone around her. One need only to think back to Gregory La Cava’s 1936 film My Man Godfrey to comprehend that for Liliane, Banier represented a protégé similar to what the wealthy women of that film both sought.

      Banier, who had close relationships with other celebrities such as Salvador Dalí, Vladimir Horowitz, Samuel Beckett, Isabelle Adjani, and Johnny Depp, gave her time, laughter, long letters, and access to a large community of interesting notables, even accompanying her with Liliane’s husband André, at times, to their other houses and her island. He visited her and/or they dined together nearly every day.

      In return, she began by giving him the apartment across from his own, valuable artworks by Picasso, Monet, and others; she gave him large insurance policies worth millions, even offering him her island, and, cash outlays, and not only to him but to his current lover, Martin Le Barrois d’Orgeval, nephew of his former lover, Pascal Greggory. In all, some estimates suggest that Liliane, over the years, paid nearly 1 billion euros to Banier and his associates.

     Things might have gone along quite swimmingly, with Banier providing the intellectual entertainment for the elderly heiress, and she paying what for her, quite obviously, as a small remuneration for his efforts, had it not been that in 2006 she had a light coma and severe dehydration, after which she became over-medicated, and mentally confused, on some days not even knowing where she was in her own home. At moments she would return to complete lucidity, but both staff members and some of the L’Oreal officers quickly became concerned about her mental health.

      It appears that only the accountant at L’Oreal, Claire Thibout, knew the exact amounts that Liliane was paying Banier and others, and she was worried and angry about what she knew,  presuming, as would many others soon after, that the handsome protégé was taking advantage of the heiress and her increasing confusion, demanding payments for all sorts of things that went beyond Liliane’s eagerness to support his photographic exhibitions and catalogues. One day, quite by accident, she met up with Liliane’s daughter, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, and the two went for coffee, Thibout pouring out the entire story and her long-time worries.

    Françoise, who had a cold relationship with her mother, had long hated Banier and, perhaps in her mind, saw him as a purposeful displacement of her in her mother’s heart. What Sancton does make clear is that Liliane did not enjoy the company of her daughter, her husband, and one of their sons. Clearly, they had none the joie de vivre and wit that Banier possessed. And it was for that reason and others, despite her own wealth, that Françoise determined to cut her mother off from Banier and get back some of the money she had given him.

     What she couldn’t know is that in filing her suit against François-Marie Banier she would open up a real-life Pandora’s Box that would reveal that Liliane’s father, the founder and genius behind L’Oreal, was a Nazi collaborator; that André, Liliane’s husband, had been a member of La Cagoule, a violent French fascist-leaning and anti-communist group, and had written several articles for a Nazi propaganda organ; that her parents had secret Swiss Bank accounts, and had failed to report taxes concerning the purchase of their island; and that her suit against Banier would sweep up governmental figures from then French-President Nicolas Sarkozy (the affair virtually ended his political career), his Budget and Labor Minister, Eric Woerth, Liliane’s former financier, Patrice de Maistre, André’s loyal valet, and Pascal Bonnefoy, who had secretly taped many conversations between Liliane and others; and would bring about the testimony of many of Bettencourt maids, creating a kind of upstairs-downstairs stir of gossip. Two people involved in the scandal and trials, including Françoise’s attorney, Olivier Metzner and Commissaire Noël Robin, who supervised some of the Bettencourt investigations, committed suicide before the trials were over. Alain Thurin, Liliane’s trusted nurse, one of the defendants, attempted to hang himself in a forest near Brétigny-sur-Orge; he lay in coma for days, but eventually recovered. One of the early judges was also brought to trial for possibly collaborating with the Sarkozy administration. And by the end, Françoise, herself would be under investigation for bribing Claire Thibout.

      Accusations about a plot to have Lilianne adopt Banier and the discovery that she had left her entire estate to him upon her death added spice to the already stew of speculations. The public couldn’t get enough.

     In the end, Banier was found guilty, but suspended from serving any time in prison, while being fined 375,000 euros. The state took away one of his apartments and his 140-million-euro insurance policy, but wiped out the 158 million euro in civil damages. D’Orgeval’s prison sentence was also suspended and was fined 150,000 euros.

     Both sides proclaimed to have won, but neither actually did, with Banier, despite retaining most of his wealth, shunned by friends as a gigolo, a guru, and worse names.  Françoise, who now controls her mother’s wealth and her visitors, was surely now seen as a petty mean-spirited daughter. The case against her is still to be decided.

     And Liliane, now well into full Alzheimer’s does not even have her once pleasant memories of her time with Banier, having forgotten the names of nearly everyone she ever knew. When asked by the judge Jean-Michel Gentil, did she recall Banier, her answer was: “I don’t walk to talk about him.” When Gentil asked did he abuse her, she responded: “Surely a bit, but I don’t care. I’m not going to get sick over it. I don’t have time to lose over that. I don’t deny his faults, but I was a victim of my own enthusiasms. He took money from me, I don’t give a damn. I accept the consequences of my mistakes. I’m not going to cry about it.”

      Liliane is now what daughter describes as “serene,” having lost touch today with nearly everyone, her family included as well as her memories. She is kept under close scrutiny, a situation she dreaded during most of her life, by her unloved daughter.

     Although Sancton pulls no punches when it comes to Banier’s inability to say no to Liliane’s lavish gifts—he is described by many of his friends as a 5-year-old in a grown man’s body—it is clear that the figure he most admires in this sad family tragedy is François-Marie, now at age 70, sitting in his palatial retreat, Le Patron, in the south of France, with memories of his continued admiration for his real-life patron, maybe, in fact, her very last lover.

 

Los Angeles, August 31, 2017

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Winter 2017)

James Agee | A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text (ed. by Michael A. Lofaro) / 2007

invention serves remembrance

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Agee A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text, edited by Michael A. Lofaro (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2007)

 

In a year (2008) in which I had determined, after writing about my father's death in 2002, to read James Agee's A Death in the Family, it seemed that I was fated to read the newly released "restored" edition of that book. I admit that I was not completely enthused by the idea, particularly after having read, in March, the review of the "restoration" in the Los Angeles Times Book Review which argued that David McDowell's editing of the original publication of the Agee work in 1957 was "superior" to the Lofaro text:

 

“Lofaro conjectures that McDowell ‘changed the novel to suit the popular tastes of the 1950s and increase the book’s marketability’; he does not consider that McDowell might have made his decisions for a simpler reason: to create the best possible book. The new chapters, while interesting, don’t add much to our understanding of Jay or Mary or young Rufus. In fact, everything that needs to be established – the tenderness and conflict within the marriage, Jay’s drinking and tendency to drive too fast, Rufus’ deep sensitivity and his near-worshipful relationship with his father – is handled perfectly, and more economically, in the original version.”

 

     The critic goes on to argue that Lofaro's "most egregious" decision was to remove the "Knoxville: Summer 1915" section, replacing it with a nightmare sequence, which, "with its graphic violence and religious symbolism, is heavy-handed and not nearly as effective."

     In short, he concludes, "Lofaro has made a mess of it."

     My own intuition, moreover, was that what Lofaro argued was Agee's intention of a straight-forward, chronologically-ordered narrative seemed far less interesting than the flashbacks and other modernist narrative devices introduced by McDowell. The sheer size and heft of the "restored" edition, along with these reservations, led me to put off reading the Lofaro edition until late in the year.

      Fortunately, the time in early December in which I came to the fiction also allowed me to slow down the pace of the reading and to more carefully consider Lofaro's voluminous series of notes and annotations—nearly as long as the work itself.

      I have now come to feel that the restored version, contrary to the reviewer's insistence, is far superior: clearer, more emotionally engaging, and, most importantly, in concert with the author's desires.

      Agee, it is apparent, never intended his beautiful set piece, "Knoxville: Summer, 1915," first published in Partisan Review in 1938, to be included in A Death in the Family. And the situation he describes in that prose poem, although it may remind one of the poetic tone and certain incidents in the fiction, makes it seem as if the young boy's uncle and aunt, "living at home," were residing within his own house. Emma, his sister, appears nowhere in that short piece. And the poem ends with a dilemma of self-identity that is not at all an issue in A Death in the Family.

     Lofaro admits that there is no way of definitively knowing that Agee intended to begin his work with the horrifying dream sequence about a John the Baptist-like being, killed by the mobs of the city; but it is also clear that there is no other place for it in the work, despite it being contained in the original manuscripts.

      The dream episode seems quite obviously that of an older man, still haunted by the death of his father; and Agee's own analysis at the end of that dream that the corpse was the father and his recognition that "He [the narrator]

 

      should go back into those years. As far as he could remember; and

      everything he could remember; nothing he had learned or done since;

      nothing except (so well as he could remember) what his father had been

      as far as he had known him, and what he had been as he had known

      himself, and what he had seen with his own eyes, and supposed with

      his own mind....

 

all seem to point to the very beginning of the imaginative voyage upon which the rest of the work will take the reader. As Agee wrote in 1948 to his dead father:

 

      Let me explain what I am trying to do here [in this work].

      I have lived, now, a year longer than you were given to live. I feel

      very heavy in the sense of life and death, and very heavy in my

      sense of uncertainty and of failure in my life so far.... My way of

      trying to handle these things is to try to recall and understand

      my life, as well as I can, and to try to write it down as clearly and

      as well as I can.

 

As Agee wrote his mother:

 

     I am trying to write a short book, a novel, beginning with the first things

     I can remember, and ending with my father's burial. The whole closing

     section is to be as clear an account as I can make of everything I can

     remember, from the morning I woke up and learned that he had died

     the night before, through to the end of the afternoon of the funeral.

 

He notes elsewhere that he is trying to write a narrative that is as chronologically correct and clear as he can make it. "In most novels, properly enough, remembrance serves invention. In this volume," Agee proclaims, "invention has served remembrance."

    More importantly, Lofaro shows us that Agee saw this work less as "a novel"—even though he himself, as I have noted above, refers to the work as "a novel"—than as an autobiography, a work, had he lived longer, that might have been embedded within other writings about his ancestors, his mother and father's relationship, and his own later education and writing experiences.

     The Lofaro edition adds ten chapters and restores versions of three other chapters, as well as bringing parts of the text together which were previously divided. The newly-found chapters that Lofaro includes slow down the work and draw the reader into the detail of Agee's world. Indeed, it is this series of details wherein this work has its deepest meaning. As I have written elsewhere, A Death in the Family virtually has no plot. We know from the outset what the major event of the work entails: the father's death. And anyone who has experienced the death of a family member can imagine the effects on a family. What is remarkable about his writing is how Agee makes his family members (Lofaro restores the actual family names, Agee and Tyler, to his text) so immediate and real: the way they cook, shop, worry for and about each other, and share and disagree with each other regarding viewpoints on various issues such as sexuality and religion. The familial details of life are at the heart of Agee's work, and Lofaro's version not only enhances these, but allows the reader to better understand the relationship of husband and wife, father and son, mother and son, and brother and sister.

      Had the original editor, McDowell, more transparently admitted his radical editorial changes, I think no one might blame him for his decisions; I agree with Lofaro's analysis that "he changed the novel to suit the popular tastes of the 1950s and increase the book's marketability." The decision to produce a shorter work, the various flashbacks in time and space are quite understandable in a decade in which readers were assimilating Faulkner's great experiments and reading new works by Nabokov, Salinger, Bellow and others. Within this context, Agee's work, as he intended it, does seem somewhat "old-fashioned."

     But McDowell felt it necessary to disavow any major changes, insisting in his "A Note on This Book":

 

            There has been no re-writing, and nothing has been eliminated except

            for a few cases of first-draft material which he later re-worked at

            greater length, and one section of seven-odd pages which the editors

            were unable satisfactorily to fit into the body of the novel [apparently

            the prologue of Lofaro's edition].

 

      If nothing else, however, Lofaro definitively shows just how extensive McDowell's changes were, revealing in many respects how different this book is from the original publication and, just as importantly I would argue, how different is a novel from an autobiography.

     Admittedly, there are a few problems with this "restoration." Agee did not title any of his sections or chapters; Lofaro has chosen to title sections, some with words from the text that seem, within the context of Agee's poetical writing, rather awkward, such as "This little boy you live in," "Perceptions c. 1911-1912" and "Enter the Ford: Travel, 1913-1916." Lofaro also occasionally explains some of Agee's dialect word choices, placing them in brackets within the text, while I feel this might have been better handled through a discrete asterisk with a same-page note. But these are minor quibbles in what has clearly been a long labor of love. 

      Rather than "making a mess of it," I would argue, Lofaro has utterly clarified Agee's intentions and revealed an astounding contribution to American autobiographical writing.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2008

Reprinted from Rain Taxi, XIV (Spring 2009).

Arthur Laurents | Home of the Brave / 1946

the coward’s hand

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Laurents Home of the Brave (New York: Random House, 1946)

 

Arthur Laurent’s first play, Home of the Brave,* is the story of a young soldier, Peter Coen, part of an engineering division of the US Army during World War II in the South Pacific.

    By the time the curtain rises, Coen, called by his Army companions Coney, has already endured a mission in which he and four others penetrated an island held by the Japanese, secretly surveying and mapping the landscape to prepare for an invasion and the building of a small airport. Just as they finish their jobs and prepare to evacuate, Japanese soldiers discover their position and shoot, hitting Mingo and, later, wounding Coney’s best friend, Finch, who has temporarily forgotten where he put the maps. By the time Coney retrieves the maps, Finch is too hurt to move ahead with him and the others, and they are forced to leave him behind, with the hopes that we can eventually make his way to them before they leave the island that night.

     Events do not go well, and Finch, found and tortured by the Japanese at a distance close enough to where the others are hiding so that they can hear his cries and suffer his torture, horrify the soldiers. As they move off to dig up their canoes, Coney is left alone to protect the gear as Finch crawls into the small clearing, dying in Coney’s arms.

     Coney attempts to bury him so that the Japanese cannot dismember the corpse, but by the time his friends return, he finds himself unable to walk, suffering an inexplicable paralysis. He is carried away by a fellow soldier, waking to find himself in a military hospital under the care of Captain Harold Bitterger, a sympathetic psychiatrist.

     In December 1945, the date this play appeared at the Belasco Theatre in New York, the events of World War II was still so fresh that the audiences who attended the performances would have felt the circumstances of the play had occurred only yesterday. The play’s events are described as just a year earlier, and only five months before the play's opening the US had bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

     If today much of the psychological jargon and the treatments used to help Coney seem obsolete and naïve, one must remember that although Freud had perhaps been assimilated by the intelligentsia, even a couple of years earlier a major character in Guys and Dolls had been told by his girlfriend, “Nathan, you got psychology, everybody’s got it!” The ideas of post-war syndrome and psychological hysteria were startlingly new concepts for the general public; treatment by "narcosynthesis" must have seemed almost futuristic.

     Any sensitive reader today, in our cure-all culture, might be able to discern that the problem with Coney was a terrible feeling of guilt for not having protected his close friend Finch, the only one of the group for whom his being Jewish seemed to have no significance. The discovery later that Finch, in a moment of duress, turned on his friend, parroting the statements of the other men: “you lousy yellow…” stopping before he finished the word "Jew," and transforming it into the word “jerk,” helps us to further understand Coney's guilt. The hurt Coney momentarily endures in that statement results, a few minutes later, in a momentary flash of pleasure when Finch gets shot. And we realize that his regret for that momentary sensation is entangled with the hundreds of racial and religious epithets Coen has had to endure not only throughout his life but, more particularly, while he has put his own life on the line for his prejudiced companions.

     Laurents has created a painful and revelatory play about how racial slurs and prejudices effect all Americans who must suffer them, whether in civilian or military life. But the situation upon which Laurents focuses, where Americans such as Coen were helping to battle just such hatred in Europe and elsewhere, makes such disgusting behavior even more insufferable.

     Only two years later, in 1947, the film Gentleman’s Agreement, would even more interestingly reveal the ugliness and prevalence of American anti-Semitism and its effects on good families and human inter-relationships, including Gregory Peck’s love with the liberal WASP Kathy Lacey (played by Dorothy McGuire) and, even more evidently, the job aspirations of the Dave Goldman (John Garfield). In that sense both of these works, Home of the Brave and Gentleman’s Agreement should be understood as works that helped, if all too slowly, alter standard American prejudices with regards to being Jewish, prejudices which my own father, fighting in World War II, thought he was challenging as well through his actions as an Air Force bombardier flying over Germany.

     Yet I cannot help but feel there is something “more” going on in Laurent’s play that is not at all an issue in Gentleman’s Agreement, another matter that renders the central subject of Home of the Brave somewhat diffuse and incomprehensible. The good psychiatrist perceives the “central” issue, so it seems, and “cures” his patient by helping Coen to realize that every soldier, of necessity, feels, for an instant when another soldier is hit, a momentary sense of relief, expressed, as another of Coney’s group, Mingo, puts it “Thank God, it’s not me!” Coen is made to understand that he is like everyone else, no matter how men like the intolerant T. J. describe him. That, in turn, frees Coen to forgive himself, to comprehend his flash of anger and hatred towards his dying friend as an instant of justifiable self-protection.

 

    Even the psychiatrist, however, laments that he cannot go further, in the short period he has to work with his patient, into Coen’s past in the comprehension of his mental issues. By play’s end, now with Mingo’s help, we can only believe that—unlike T. J.’s suspicions that one day Coney will go “off” again—he will survive in the civilian world as a productive human being. Yet Laurents, we feel, or at least I do, has left something out. Why has Coen gone “off” in the first place? It is hard to believe that a Jewish man living in what was an anti-Semitic society in the 1930s and 1940s, fighting in a War that, at least in the European scene, occurred in part because of the German hatred for and determination to destroy all European Jews, would still be so utterly sensitive to what appears, at least in the context of the play, as a few racial slurs. Yes, they would be painful, angering, particularly, when uttered—or almost uttered—by a dear friend. But then, a moment before, Coen has referred to Finch as a “dumb Arizona bastard,” perhaps to Finch just as painful an epithet. Of course, there is a radical difference, one is a statement dismissing one’s home state and the conditions of life there; the other is a complete dismissal of belief and cultural identity, not only one’s own identity, but the identities of one’s father and mother and all the generations before that. Yet both demean and belittle the individuals to whom these slurs are thrown.

     Throughout one of the earlier scenes, moreover, Coen calls Finch a “jerk” numerous times. A few minutes later he describes Finch to Mingo as “the Arizona tumbleweed.” So Coen himself is not above handing out a few epithets that suggest his friend’s backwardness, lack of education, and cultural isolation. What exactly does Coen’s over-sensitivity to slurs he must have heard much of his life suggest? I am reminded of an important scene in Gentleman’s Agreement, when Phil Green (Gregory Peck) revels to his Jewish friend, Dave Goldman, that he is pretending to be Jewish in order to write a story about anti-Semitism: 

        

Phil Green: I've been saying I'm Jewish, and it works.
Dave Goldman: Why, you crazy fool! It's working?
Phil: It works too well. I've been having my nose rubbed in it, and I don't like the smell.
Dave: You're not insulated yet, Phil. The impact must be quite a business on you.
Phil: You mean you get indifferent to it in time?
Dave: No, but you're concentrating a lifetime into a few weeks. You're not changing the facts, you're just making them hurt more.

 

So too does Peter Coen seem to be concentrating all his hurt into a single incident having to do with a young Arizona boy named Finch.

    Of course, it helps to know that he and Finch are not just friends, but are planning, when they are discharged, to open a bar together in…Finch’s “whistlestop home” in rural Arizona. A Pittsburgh Jewish boy in Arizona? Something is wrong with this picture. Or, I should perhaps say, something is quite right—if you comprehend the situation. The two men are clearly in love, whether or not they know it or the author is willing to express it. The very fact that Peter Coen, who keeps Kosher and is religiously observant, would be willing to abandon city life and move to a small town in the Southwest in the 1940s—long before that area’s startling growth—in order to open a bar where “married men” will feel comfortable, speaks volumes. The two men are suggesting a long term relationship completely off the beaten path, which was a way of saying, in those days, they were committing themselves to one another.

     Of course, Laurents cannot speak of this, and why should he? His central issue was painful enough. To have illuminated it as a story of their love would have completely overwhelmed any other concerns he might have wanted to express. Or, to put it another way, if Laurents had centered the work on gay sexuality in 1945, the play would never have been produced. While it was the time to discuss, finally, the issue of anti-Semitism, gays would have to wait through the blistering attacks on homosexual writers, composers, and other figures of the early 1960s until later in that decade to even bring up the issue. Laurents would be one of the earliest to suggest these issues in his 1948 screenplay Rope, where he and Hitchcock created a situation where two gay men simply lived together, without making anything of it in the story; but then they were murderers, based on the real life figures Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.

     I know there are a few readers, who have read several of my essays, who will say that I find these issues in too many plays, films, fictions, etc.—and they are right. My response is that for much of the 20th century writers who wanted to consider these difficulties had no choice but to bury them in other narratives that opened for those who understood and were sympathetic to the situations and were closed or oblique to those who were not.

    Moreover, I want to make it clear that I am not diminishing the obvious concern of Laurents’ play.  It’s simply that the love between these two soldiers, sexual or not, intensifies and clarifies everything!

    Laurents, moreover, takes this issue even further when, once Coen has regained his sense of self and purpose, he goes off with another man—this time Mingo—perhaps the kind of married man for whom Finch and Coen had planned their bar. Mingo suggests he is willing to partner, at least the bar, with Peter. A man whose wife has abandoned him, Mingo even likes poetry (perceived by many in this decade as a woman’s avocation), which he claims throughout the play his wife writes, but which we suspect, given the appropriateness of the lines he quotes, he himself might have written:

 

                                  Frightened,

                                  you are my only friend.

                                  And frightened, we are everyone.

                                  Someone must take a stand.

                                  Coward, take my coward’s hand.

 

    The ending is a bit like Rick and Louie’s last lines in Casablanca:

 

                                  Coney: Hey, coward.

                                  Mingo [turning]: What?

                                  Coney: [coming to him]. Take my coward’s hand.

                                      [He lifts the bag up on Mingo’s back.]

                                  Mingo: Pete, my boy, you’ve got a charming memory.

                                      [A slight pause.]

                                  Coney [softly]. Delightful!.....

 

And it is…charming, delightful, as the one-armed survivor and the formally paralyzed man walk off into the sunset.

 

*Over the years, I have made note of the countless times coincidence has played an important role in my life. I read this play while I was visiting New York, having found it in the library located in Sherry Bernstein’s apartment where I was staying. The books in the room in which I slept belonged to Charles Bernstein’s brother and were stored on an entire wall of the room. I often chose to borrow a book on my visits there, and on the evening of May 4th had chosen quite at random to read Laurent’s play before I fell to sleep after midnight. The next morning in a taxi on my way to a Broadway matinee, the radio news reported that Arthur Laurents had died.

 

New York, May 8, 2011

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2011).