Joe’s father had been part of a famous vaudeville team of the twenties, Weber and Fields. The brother of lyricist Dorothy Fields, he had written many successful musical comedies and seemed the last man in the world to be attracted to what in Broadway terms was an arcane work. But while his Doughgirls, a big, brassy farce, was raking in a fortune, Fields himself was spending much time in art galleries or reading his favorite French writers, especially Charles Péguy, one of whose books was always in his jacket pocket. He believed in my play and enlisted the backing of Herbert H. Harris, founder of Charbert, the perfume company that supplied the money for the production.
Trying to explain their uneasiness, one after another of the critics latched onto what they considered the absdurdity of a baseball pitcher as great at throwing a ball as Amos Beeves being turned down by a big league scout merely because of his ineptitude at pitching with men on base. Surely he could have been taught this skill! On the other hand, the critic Burton Rascoe, a former sports reporter, wrote a long piece in the World-Telegram assuring his colleagues that he had known many athletes who had been destroyed by a single defect, and going on to predict great things for me. Even so, it was slightly embarrassing to win my first professional encouragement on the grounds that I did indeed know something about baseball.
A more important if mystifying boost came from a source I would have thought unlikely. John Anderson, the critic for the Journal-American, a reactionary and sensational Hearst paper, invited me for a drink at the New York Athletic Club to talk about my play. I had never laid eyes on a critic before. He was in his early forties, handsome and well tailored and very earnest. There was an un-clarity in the play, he felt, “but I sensed some strange shadow world behind the characters, a fascinating gathering of darkness that made me wonder if you have thought of writing tragedy. A doom hangs over this play, something that promises tragedy.”
I said that I didn’t think I would write another play. “This is now my fifth or sixth, and I seem to have gotten nowhere.”
Anderson looked down at the floor. As I remember him he had wavy brown hair and a searching, deeply serious look. “You’ve written a tragedy, you know, but in a folk comedy style. You ought to try to understand what you’ve done.”
This was the first of perhaps three or four conversations I have ever had with critics, and though I did not return to play writing until three years had passed—during which I published my only novel, Focus —I nevertheless held his words dear. Only three months after our talk, Anderson was suddenly dead of meningitis.
One other question of Anderson’s nagged at me, and still does. “Are you religious?” he had asked. Blind not only to myself but to what my work was trying to tell me, I thought the surprising question absurd. If anything, The Man Who Had All the Luck seemed an antireligious play about a young man who had renounced his own power to the heavens and could only be saved by recognizing himself in his work. But drama, if allowed to follow its premises, may betray even its author’s prejudices or blindness; the truth was that the play’s action did seem to demand David’s tragic death, but that was intolerable to my rationalist viewpoint. In the early forties such an ending would have seemed to me obscurantist. A play’s action, much like an individual’s acts, is more revealing than its speeches, and this play embodied a desperate quest on David’s part for an authentication of his identity, a longing for a break in the cosmic silence that alone would bestow a faith in life itself. To put it another way, David has succeeded in piling up treasures that rust, from which his spirit has already fled; it was a paradox that would weave through every play that followed.
Standing at the back of the house during the single performance I could bear to watch, I could blame nobody. All I knew was that the whole thing was a well-meant botch, like music played on the wrong instruments in a false scale. I would never write another play, that was sure. After the final performance and the goodbyes to the actors, it almost seemed a relief to get on the subway to Brooklyn Heights and read about the tremendous pounding of Nazi-held Europe by Allied air power. Something somewhere was real.
I suppose it is inevitable that the thought of religion should call up memories winding back to the first mention of Marxism I ever heard. On a clear fall day in 1932 I for some reason found myself rather hesitantly venturing into the Avenue M temple, looking, if the truth be known, for God. A few years before, I had made a terrific hit with my bar mitzvah speech, which had drawn highest praise from my father—“Ya sure put it over!”—and possibly because I was in the throes of a sexual explosion with no permissible outlet, my mind had made a connection between the synagogue and that sparkling day when I had successfully asserted myself, even if only with a speech. In any case, what I found inside the building, scene of my triumph, was three old men in an office smoking Turkish cigarettes, kibitzers who looked at me in mystification through watery eyes as I tried to explain that I would like to ask somebody a few questions about religion, a subject obviously far from their minds when they were no doubt swamped by building deficits and a falling off of attendance and other vital matters.
Since I was probably the only adolescent ever to ask such a question, especially in the middle of the week, they were dumbfounded. Recovering, they glanced at one another as though for inspiration until one of them came up with the suggestion that I return on Saturday and join the sabbath service. But I knew all about that rote exercise, which was really for people already certain about themselves, I thought. What I needed was something that would reach into my chaos and calm it and make me like everybody else.
So I wandered the two blocks to our house, my inner thirst as unslaked as it was undefined. The house meant much to me. Some rainy afternoons with nothing to do I enjoyed vacuuming the carpets, gluing a loose chair rung, or in spring planting tulips in the backyard—and digging up tin cans and old boots, for it was all filled-in land under a layer of cosmetic topsoil. At such times I had to work close to the ten-foot fence surrounding the kennel of Roy, the wolf kept by the Lindheimers next door. Roy would snarl and fling himself against the fence, his eyes red and his jaws lathering. He really was a wolf. Mr. Eagan, Lindheimer’s father-in-law, who, in top hat and boots, drove a hansom cab stationed in front of the Plaza Hotel, would take Roy for his walks holding him by a heavy chain in one hand, a riding crop in the other. At Roy’s slightest attempt to deviate left or right, the crop would hit him square across the eyes.
I was digging among my tulips one day when I noticed the quiet. Roy was not behind the fence. Straightening up to rest my back, I caught out of the corner of my eye the sight of Roy standing in our yard behind me, unchained, unaccompanied, empty space all around him, and he was looking up at me. I froze. We looked at each other a long, long time. I knew that if I so much as moved a finger to change my grip on the shovel he’d be at my throat. I doubt if I even blinked. After several months he turned, perfectly relaxed but looking rather baffled, and walked around their garage and back into his kennel area. Step by careful step, I managed to get into our house and phoned next door, and powerful Mrs. Lindheimer, a high school swimming teacher, came out and locked Roy’s gate. A broad-shouldered woman, Mrs. Lindheimer always seemed unhappy. Mr. Lindheimer was a wholesale butcher, and they both seemed full of meat. They had recently bought a new Packard, a beautiful car and expensive, but it turned out to be hardly three or four inches narrower than the driveway. She had already gotten it stuck trying to back it out and had become nearly hysterical, caught inside with no possibility of opening the door for rescue or escape. She finally inched it into the street, but not without cracking our stucco and gouging a streak along one shiny fender. She seemed to blame us for having our house so close to theirs, and I could never pass her on the street without feeling I ought to apologize for something. But I lacked the retaliatory spirit and never dreamed of her drowning.
Our furnace also meant a lot to me. It was mysterious. We were never sure of precisely how to bank it to keep it from going out overnight, so
I deeply loved the fire when blue flames played evenly over the whole bed of black coal rather than licking at one corner and leaving whole areas of it dead and ashy, a condition you knew was going to spread and spread until the fire went out and you were left with all that perfectly good coal, which had to be rescued from the ashes piece by piece.
I loved to see the coal truck backing up to the house and the driver setting the chute through the cellar window and then tilting the truck body so that the coal slid into the bin with a satisfying and even warming and tasty whoosh. With a full bin we could keep warm for a long time.
It was thrilling to go down to the cellar at about four in the morning and, opening the furnace door, find that it had not gone dead in there, that this time I had mastered the mystery of banking the fire for the night. Then, walking the block and a half to my job at the bakery with my woolen skating socks pulled up over my mackinaw sleeves, I would feel that the family was secure and safe.
The baker was a friendly but worried overweight man who breathed hard. From a list scrawled with a stubby pencil whose point he was always having to sharpen because he leaned on it too hard, he inscribed addresses on each brown paper bag he had packed with rolls, bagels, and rye breads in various combinations to suit each customer. I curled the bags shut and carefully stowed them in the immense wire basket hanging over the front wheel from the heavy delivery bike’s handlebars. In spring or fall it was glorious riding down the silent empty streets past the sleeping houses; you could almost hear the people breathing in their beds. Despite my newly explosive sexuality, I did not yet imagine them making love. I simply did not think of it. Stopping, I would carefully lean the bike against a lamppost, with a flashlight find the right bag for that house, and gently lay it on the back porch near the kitchen door. When it rained I would find some sheltered place for the bags; a few of my customers set out lidded wooden boxes.
On winter mornings the temperature was sometimes around zero at that early hour, and cats would follow me in troops, desperate for the heat of my body, rubbing urgently against my trouser legs and howling imperatively up at me, sending chills up my back with their accusations.
There were mornings when Ocean Parkway, six lanes wide, was entirely covered with ice as unblemished as a frozen country pond, and occasionally there would be a taxi playing on the otherwise deserted road, jamming on the brakes to make the car spin happily over the glaze. At about half past four one such morning, I saw two cabs waltzing around like this trying to come as close to each other as they could without crashing. Sometimes it was nearly impossible to keep my balance on the ice, and I would have to walk the bike for the entire route. One time it toppled over and all the bags spilled out of the basket and opened, shooting naked bagels skidding like hockey pucks over immense distances into the darkness, rolls and rye breads fanning out over the sidewalk and into the road. I had to find them with my flashlight and then try somehow to match the bags’ swellings with the right number of bagels, rolls, and breads. By the time I got back to the bakery the phone was already ringing, with people demanding to know what they were supposed to do with four rolls and two bagels when they always got three of each. The outrage in their voices leaped out of the receiver and I feared for my job, but the baker forgave me.
As it had been in childhood, my bike was my solace, my feminine, my steed of escape carrying me forever toward some corner around which would suddenly appear the magic of myself at last, mere ectoplasm no more. One day I found myself straddling the bike and watching a big round-robin handball game against the wall of Mr. Dozick’s drugstore. Four boys were playing doubles, and a dozen others were standing around cheering or offering screams of advice or quietly conspiring to lay somebody’s sister or trying to figure out how to steal penny candy from Mr. Rubin’s store or, failing that, how to go on a militarily disciplined Boy Scout camping trip up to Newburgh. I sat on the bike’s saddle, absorbed in the game and all the conversations at the same time, while beneath this level of murmuring excitement ran the ever present anxiety about my and my family’s future.
By the fall of 1932 it was no longer possible in our house to disguise our fears. Producing even the fifty-dollar-a-month mortgage payment was becoming a strain, and my brother had had to drop out of NYU to assist my father in another of his soon-to-fail coat businesses. There was an aching absence in the house of any ruling idea or leadership, my father by now having fallen into the habit of endlessly napping in his time at home or occasionally looking at me and asking, “What do you think you’re going to do?” With my life, that is. What I would dearly have loved to do was to sing on the radio and become a star like Crosby and make millions. In fact, by the time I graduated from high school, I already had an agent of sorts, a squat, cigar-smoking neighborhood character named Harry Rosenthal, who peddled songs to publishers and sometimes got singers jobs in clubs.
I had a high, steady tenor voice, “slightly Irish” in Rosenthal’s judgment and not bad for ballads, especially Irving Berlin’s stuff. But these were songs I thought made me sound like Eddie Cantor, who sang part-time, in my opinion. In the months to come Rosenthal would take me into Manhattan on the subway, to the Brill Building on Broadway near Fiftieth Street, the heart of Tin Pan Alley, to get me auditioned for singing jobs. On each floor there were tiny cubicles with upright pianos where a songwriter could play his new song for a publisher, and the sounds intermixed through the skimpy partitions so that in any one cubicle you heard everything going on everywhere on the floor. In the midst of this pandemonium I tried to sing some tender ballad by my favorite, Lorenz Hart, before a harried, droopy-eyed man to whom I was not even introduced, so lowly was my position in this world. I could hardly hear my own voice, and I was scared and sang badly and in the middle of the number wondered what I was doing there. No, this did not feel like me, but Rosenthal nevertheless managed to arrange a fifteen-minute radio show of my own on a Brooklyn station—without pay, of course. A blind pianist was provided, an aging man whose strangling emphysema was probably being broadcast along with my singing, and whose arthritic fingers could strike chords but few individual notes, so cemented were his joints. Covered with cigar ashes, his half-dozen hairs wetted down for the occasion and combed laterally across the top of his head, he seemed moved by my singing, and after our second program—which turned out to be our last—he advised me to bill myself as “The Young Al Jolson,” which I thought might be reaching a bit, though not outrageously so.
But I was already at the end of my singing career. At sixteen, for the first time in my life, I found my brain translating the song lyrics into reality, and they embarrassed me when I realized with some amazement that almost every one of them implied the attempt of a man to make love to a woman. Here I had been innocently throwing my heart into these sung poems without the remotest idea of their having any meaning at all—they were simply sweet sounds to carry my voice and might as well have been in another language—when I was really singing to a girl, no less, and saying, “If I had a motion picture of you-oo …” It was simply intolerable and closed my throat forever, at least as an aspiring professional, and by the time I could make use of the ideas behind those lyrics I had all but lost my voice.
Like most abrupt turnings in the path of life, my introduction to Marx that day outside Dozick’s drugstore came out of an absurdly unexpected moment, and it has frozen in my memory to the stillness of a painting. The brick wall of the store was being pounded by the ball, the bane of that mild, unoffending man’s existence, for not only was his large store window occasionally hit, but he also had to give out free glasses of ice water from his fountain. Dozick was tiny, with thick eyeglasses and a piping voice, and was too kind to refuse thirsty boys. Finally, in desperation, he had his soda fountain removed altogether, and when that failed he put up a big six-by-ten-foot metal sign advertising bottled Moxie, the popular soft drink. The sign stuck out of the wall several inches and if struck would deflect the ball, ruining a shot, but we quickly learned to play around
it quite expertly as though it weren’t there at all. Of course when a ball did hit it, the sign resonated, bringing Dozick out of his door on the run to plead with us to stop, simply stop hitting the sign for God’s sake, and we always apologized and tried to play more accurately. On top of all that he had to sew up our wounds, complaining right through some fairly intricate emergency operation that he shouldn’t be doing it. “I am not qualified!” he would cry out when some bloodied boy staggered in from the street, as my brother once did after chasing a ball and putting his head through the side window of a passing Ford, nearly severing his left ear. Almost twenty years later Dozick would write me a note of appreciation for Death of a Salesman, doubting that I would remember his name, as though it were not engraved an inch deep in my brain, especially after watching him sew up Kermit’s ear as he lay flat on Dozick’s desk in the back of the store. (Right next door was another tiny Jewish man, Mr. Fuchs, who ran a minuscule tailor shop. For a dollar he would let out your trouser bottoms and insert a gore that made the cuffs as wide as your shoes; a lot of sewing went on in that block.)
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