Most American playwrights are fitted out with identification labels early in their careers. A conventional tag makes easy the reaction of the reviewers and the public to any play that a man writes. Whether it is to be praised or damned, it is convenient to be able to say that it is or is not typical Anderson, Hellman, Odets, Williams. It is considered proper to say of S. N. Behrman that he is America’s chief practitioner of high comedy; that he is, as Brooks Atkinson says incredibly in his review of The Cold Wind and the Warm, “the Congreve of American letters.”
Nothing that Behrman has written remotely resembles Congreve and, with the possible exception of Jane (1952), an adaptation of a Somerset Maugham story, no Behrman play since his first two (The Second Man and Serena Blandish), since 1929 in fact, can be called high comedy. In high comedy, if it is a definable genre, manners and morals are examined, lightly or bitingly, with conversation—witty, the playwright hopes—as the chief tool; the tradition in modern drama is mainly English, passing, with increasing vapidity, from Wilde to Maugham to Noel Coward. Behrman has been concerned not so much with manners and morals as with ideas, political and social, and with the interplay of man’s intellect and emotions. If he is to be compared to any English playwright, it should be to Bernard Shaw in genre, if not in quality.
Yet Behrman has never been seriously considered as a comedian of ideas. One reason may be that he sets his plays in drawing rooms. His drama moves in that international half-world in which art and intellect meet money, in which celebrity, notoriety, or wealth is a necessary entree. Invariably, the dramatic situation against which the conflict of ideas is played is one that involves the discovery or dissolution of love, and there is always a central female character, who could be and often was played by Ina Claire. When an elegantly dressed play, with articulate and often amusing lines, is centered on a character who is played by an extremely sophisticated actress, it is not surprising that substance is ignored for surface.
There is another, and probably more important, reason why the ideas in Behrman’s plays have been passed over. The bulk of his plays were written in the 30’s and his objectivity, if taken seriously, would have been completely unacceptable in that decade. Basically conservative, Behrman stood on middle ground, trying to hold on to the area, once staked out by humanists, in which tolerance of ideas and of human weakness could flourish. His plays show a fascination and a distaste for the man who becomes completely absorbed in himself or his beliefs—the complete egoist or the convinced idealist. There are indications, such as the Author’s Note to Wine of Choice (1938), that Behrman shared the general longing for a world in which a man might awake and sing, but he has never been convinced that the new world is coming, and he has always been suspicious of those who know precisely how to achieve it. From Richard Kurt in Biography (1932) to Chris, identified as a Communist, in Wine of Choice, Behrman has sprinkled his plays with radicals whom he distrusts because of “that extraordinary, humorless intensity characteristic of saints and fanatics” that he identifies with Emma Goldman in his New Yorker series, The Worcester Account. He dissects with equal lucidity the dreamers of the right, from Raphael Lord in Meteor (1925) to Clay Rainier in Dunnigan’s Daughter (1945). Behrman was, however, forced by outside events in the 30’s to admit that the tolerant man must finally face commitment; in the note to Wine of Choice, he wrote: “If there is any crusade possible for the rest of us, it is a defensive one of no quarter to those who will, if they can, force their totalitarian creeds down our throats.” In Rain from Heaven (1934), for all the English country house setting, Behrman wrote an anti-Nazi play, while leftist playwrights were still preoccupied with domestic problems and pacifism; Odets’s Till the Day I Die, one of the early anti-Nazi plays from the left, did not come until the next year.
By insisting on the general character of Behrman’s plays, I do not want to imply that he is a major playwright. Too often his characters do not seem to have ideas; the ideas have characters. The connection between the personal insecurity and the fascist politics of Hobart Eldridge in Rain from Heaven exists more obviously in the mind of the playwright than it does on the stage. At his worst, in plays like Meteor or Wine of Choice, Behrman can be distressingly hortatory, building his ideational conflict on the sands of artificiality. At his best, in plays like Biography and The Second, Man, the ideas manage a real relevance to the dramatic situation and the characters. If Behrman has failed to make the comedy of ideas, that very European plant, grow luxuriously in American soil, he has at least produced a body of work in which the ideas remain alive and interesting, when so much of the drama of the 30’s has become merely naive. The explanation for this, perhaps, is that Behrman is preoccupied with understanding life in terms of ideas, and at the same time he is pragmatic, matter of fact, very much a part of the commercial theater. The Broadway playwright tempered the intellectual, but the intellectual regularly insisted—drawing room or not—that the plays deal with serious matters. This may be why he has never written a really fine play; it may also be the reason so many of his plays still seem to be good ones.
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If the stereotype, “a Behrman play,” made it difficult to consider Behrman as a playwright of ideas, how much more unlikely it would have been to consider him as a Jewish writer. A Jew, yes, and a writer, certainly; but until the first of the memory pieces that eventually became The Worcester Account appeared in the New Yorker in 1946, it was highly unlikely that anyone would have connected the two identifications. It was as though Behrman, born into an Orthodox Jewish home, broke completely with his past when he left Providence Street in Worcester for Harvard and New York City. Actually, The Worcester Account is full of evidence that, in some ways, Behrman remained the Providence Street boy in the years of his Broadway success. But artistically there was a break. The world of Behrman’s plays was as removed as possible from the one that he grew up in. There are personal reasons for this, of course. The Worcester Account testifies to how strange his father’s world, bounded by the Talmud and the Jewish tradition of suffering, was to a boy growing up in an American town, discovering the delights of skepticism and the American materialistic dream that he found in Horatio Alger’s books.
The only identifiable Jew in the early Behrman plays is Sigmund Traub, the diamond merchant, in Serena Blandish (1929). The play is an adaptation of a grotesque novel by Enid Bagnold in which the innocent, compliant Serena illustrates “The Difficulty of Getting Married” (the subtitle of both play and novel) in a society in which elegant viciousness is the prevailing quality. In Miss Bagnold’s novel, the diamond merchant is just an incident in the chronicle of Serena’s inability to achieve “success” in the way that Countess Flor di Folio and her circle understand the word. Behrman turns the jeweler into an important character, gives him a name, and endows him with a Viennese-opera sentimentality and a contrasting practicality (“the impulse to bargain is deeper than the impulse of generosity”), twin stereotypes that might seem appropriate in that early expatriate from Jewishness, Arthur Wing Pinero. Behrman also provides the Countess with casual anti-Semitism: “I wager he capitalizes her in some way. Those Jews make money out of everything.” Yet, in the long run, although Traub is gentler to Serena than the rest of the Countess’s circle, even asks her to marry him, he is ranged with them, a gallery of bizarre figures, against whom Serena’s honest innocence and girlish romanticism seem a healthy and condemning contrast.
Serena Blandish, perhaps because it is an adaptation, is in many ways an atypical Behrman play. After it, Behrman concentrated on the international intelligentsia and the clash of ideas. Achievement or, more often in Behrman’s plays, the reputation for achievement was the card of admission to the society of his plays; being a Jew or not seemed irrelevant. By 1934, the irrelevant had become distressingly relevant. In a Prefatory Note to Rain from Heaven, Behrman explains that the play grew out of an incident that had been described to him by a friend—Gerhart Hauptmann’s rejection of the drama critic, Alfred Kerr (who, by 1934, was a refugee in this country), one of the playwright’s most devoted supporters, because Kerr “did not measure up to the new standardization.” By the time the play was written, the incident had become no more than an echo in the action.
The play itself is the story of Hugo Willens, a German with a Jewish grandmother, a Jew only by Nazi definition, and his recognition that there are times when the most tolerant of men must draw the line of acceptance. One of Behrman’s uncommitted humanists, Willens, had been sent to a concentration camp for writing a satirical pamphlet called “The Last Jew.” In the play Willens, now free and in England, slips into his natural complacency, until an anti-Semitic outburst from an old American friend forces him to his decision. “I see now that goodness is not enough, that kindness is not enough, that liberalism is not enough. I’m sick of evasions. They’ve done us in. Civilization, charity, progress, tolerance—all the catchwords. I’m sick of them. We’ll have to redefine our terms.” After his speech, Hugo leaves, presumably to work in the anti-Nazi underground.
Hugo’s final declaration can be accepted simply as a commitment against Nazism, one that might have been made by a Gentile; his father, after all, was a Protestant clergyman. The play, however, makes clear that his final act is the acceptance of Jewishness, a fighting for as well as a fighting against. This is made apparent in the contrasting figure of Sascha Barashaev, an American piano player, who feels it necessary to hide the fact that he is Jewish. It is made more apparent in the immediate cause of Hugo’s decision. Rand Eldridge, an Antarctic explorer and a clean-living, pink-cheeked Boy Scout type, an old skiing friend of Hugo’s from happier days, driven by jealousy, pulls out of himself a buried epithet: “You dirty Jew!” Hugo is in many ways a standard portrait of the good man forced into action, the anti-Nazi hero, professorial ordinarily, who was to turn up with increasing frequency on the American stage and screen. In his understanding of Rand, Behrman shows most clearly the heritage of Worcester; it is inconceivable that a Jewish boy growing up there could have avoided a variation on Rand.
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As though, having made his declaration, he felt the need to stand away from it, Behrman turned back to a consideration of those terms that Hugo had been forced by events to redefine—the great generalizations—goodness, kindness, liberalism, civilization, charity, tolerance. In End of Summer (1936) he embodied them in Leonie Frothingham, who is so ineffectual that she is easily devoured by the strong and the self-sufficient. In Wine of Choice his hero takes a stand for these qualities, even when they are weak to foolishness, against the Communist who would sacrifice them for his special vision. Wine of Choice contains the only two identifiable Jewish characters to appear in a Behrman play between Rain from Heaven and his adaptation of Franz Werfel’s Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1944).
Although the main point of Wine of Choice is clear enough—the rededication to a world in which one can taste the wine of choice, even if the after-effects are unhappy—the play itself and the use of the Jewish characters is somewhat confused. The least important of the two, Leo Traub, the movie director, is another of Behrman’s spoiled artists, one of a gallery of expendables in the eyes of the play’s Communist. The other Jew, Binkie Niebuhr, is an acid androgyne, modeled to some extent on Alexander Woollcott, who played the role. He is a fussy, interfering man who tries to arrange everyone’s life to fit some vague pattern; “the Shadchen de Luxe,” Traub calls him. His Jewishness is apparent only in occasional lines, such as that of Traub’s, which Behrman cautiously translates in the next line, and in a story about a pogrom long ago in Niebuhr’s Lithuanian village. The anecdote is used to illustrate that Binkie has moved not only years from the poverty of his Lithuanian and his Jewish youth, but also years from humanity, and that he, in his officious busyness, is a complement to the Communist—a man divorcing himself from human compassion—although in this case the divorce is for trivial, personal reasons, without even the benefit of Chris’s revolutionary dream. If this evaluation is correct, then Binkie is, by inversion, reaffirming Hugo’s self-definition. There is, however, a certain ambiguity in the presentation of Binkie; he is on the side of the hero. If this last fact is any more than the accident of personal need, then Binkie, as a Jew, is a mystery.
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In Behrman’s version of Jacobowsky and the Colonel, the Jewish refugee becomes the embodiment of all the civilized virtues which Hugo, to defend, would discard. Jacobowsky’s only defense is patience and wry humor: “There are two things a man shouldn’t be angry at—what he can help and what he can’t help.” His wild, sometimes slapstick escape with the anti-Semitic Polish aristocrat becomes, as the Pole finally succumbs to the Jew (“Jacobowsky child, I adopt you!”), not only the triumph of one gentle man over one violent man, but the triumph of all that Jacobowsky represents over all that the Colonel implies. At the end of the play, the British officer makes room for Jacobowsky on the submarine: “I’m not convinced by your arguments, Colonel, but by his tenacity for life.” In Behrman’s hands, Werfel’s play becomes a fable in which the Jew, as outcast and refugee, sustained by a tradition of suffering (“I wept when I was born and every day shows me why”), is joined in Jacobowsky by the liberal humanist to form a single comic archetype. Comic because he triumphs, or triumphant because he is comic. Behrman says in the Forward to the play, of Werfel, not of Jacobowsky, “Perhaps humor is the salt of survival. . . .”
Werfel’s Jacobowsky, judging by Gustave O. Arlt’s translation of the play,1 is not the endlessly gentle, eternally lovable little man whom Behrman depicts. He is not a persistent sea of tolerance in which the Colonel at last drowns. He is an active antagonist, as much a hater as the Colonel is. In Behrman’s play, Jacobowsky reluctantly parts with the Colonel’s party because his papers have been taken away and, then, discovering that the Colonel has left behind the documents he is to take to England, he sets out to find them, knowing that he risks his chance of escape. In Werfel’s version, Jacobowsky parts with the Colonel because he cannot stand being with him any longer, will not shake his hand when they separate, and only meets him again by accident. The Colonel’s anti-Semitism is obvious, but implicit in Behrman; in Werfel, it is explicit. Jacobowsky’s speech about every man’s guilt in the Nazi crimes against the Jews, which is an important part of the argument with the Colonel in Werfel’s second act, is given, in Behrman, to the anonymous French gentleman, a kind of personified conscience. Werfel’s picture of the relationship between Jacobowsky and the Colonel is probably more realistic than Behrman’s; the anger of his Jacobowsky is somehow more fitting than the tolerance of Behrman’s. Yet Behrman’s changes do not simply meet the politic requirements of Broadway production. His conception of Jacobowsky, which transforms Werfel’s bitter comedy into a humanistic fairy tale, is obviously the product of a mind that wants to identify the Jew with all the virtues and values that that playwright has so often celebrated in his earlier plays.2
Two years after Jacobowsky, the war over, the first of the Worcester reminiscences appeared in the New Yorker. I doubt if Behrman could say why he turned back to his childhood and adolescence. Any number of guesses are likely and all of them are probably correct. For one thing, the literary fashion in the postwar years put a premium on memory pieces; the New Yorker, which had begun innocently with H. L. Mencken’s Baltimore reminiscences before the war, suddenly became nostalgia rampant as every novelist, poet, and humorist in sight turned his imagination and his typewriter to his childhood. For another thing, Behrman was past fifty, and ready to review his origins. For still another, the postwar years saw an increasing interest, among Jews and non-Jews alike, in the American Jew as a distinctive yet integral part of American culture (witness: COMMENTARY). I prefer to think that the plays I have cited show evidence of Behrman’s growing recognition that a man’s identity as a Jew is as important as his identity as a music critic or as an American; under the pressure of that recognition, he turned his attention to Worcester, hoping to find there the line that led from his tenement home to Broadway eminence.
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The Worcester Account is quite unlike the bulk of reminiscence writing. Part essay and part story, each of the pieces in The Worcester Account examines an incident or a complex of incidents and extracts from it some general perception, perhaps dimly seen in childhood, by which Behrman has come to understand some universal emotion—loneliness, desire, fear, longing for the infinite, social insecurity. These are not nostalgic evocations, the lyric re-animation of the past, such as we get in Alfred Kazin’s The Walker in the City; nor are they the pointless anecdotage of so many remembering writers: the day I got my first watch. These are intellectual constructions, the prowling examinations of a man who is not so intent on getting back to his roots as he is on realizing that he has grown from them.
In The Cold Wind and the Warm Behrman has tried to use the material of The Worcester Account on stage. He has failed to make a play of the book, which was, after all, primarily contemplative. On stage many of the people who appear in the reminiscences—even the fabulous Aunt Ida—have become stereotypes. So much that was expository in the book, descriptions and complicated, intuitive examinations of states of mind, now comes incredibly from the mouths of characters who could not have spoken such lines. The youthful Tobey may have had the youthful Behrman’s fantasy about holding on to the bedposts to save himself from the Angel of Death, but it is unlikely that he would have blurted it so widely around the neighborhood.
The play’s chief difficulty is that it does not know whether or not it wants to be a frankly nostalgic play about the growing up of Tobey; whether it wants to explore the strange mind of Willie Lavin, the mystery in The Worcester Account that has to be explained limpingly in the play; or whether it is to be an unlikely triangle play involving Willie and his two girls, the attainable and the unattainable. The Cold Wind and the Warm is interesting as an attempt to render The Worcester Account in another form, but the book, really, was the end of Behrman’s return to Worcester.
S. N. Behrman came home, but not to escape the world, as many writers of reminiscence seem to want to do. He brought with him all that he had learned as a student, a playwright, a man in the large world, and found, when he turned his experience loose on his childhood, that he had carried away with him, when he left Worcester, the embryo of much of what was to grow into knowledge. As a boy he used to contemplate the wonder of streets connecting to streets, of Providence Street meeting another street and another and another until, if he followed them, he would be led from Worcester to the ends of the world. He was. But in The Worcester Account he came to know that “There is only one street, indivisible as the sea, which touches every shore. The horizon widens, the horizon contracts. It remains the same.”
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1 Published by Viking in 1944, the year in which Behrman's version was acted and published by Random House.
2 The recent movie version of Jacobowsky, for which Behrman, as one of the script writers, must accept part of the blame, is a vulgarization of his play. The general conception of Jacobowsky is retained, but the farcical action—and there is much more of it—seems extraneous where once it seemed integral.