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The
Burning Glass
S. N. Behrman
Boston:
Little, Brown, 1968
First edition in dust jacket |
| The severity of
Behrman’s disappointment with the production and reception
of But For Whom Charlie precluded his continuing on
yet one more piece of dramaturgy. Inevitably he put aside
his notes for a new work, tentatively entitled "At Rise,"
which offered the French philosopher Montaigne as the
central character. Instead, Behrman turned his attention
back to "Let Me Hear the Melody," ostensibly to fashion his
failed play into a novel. However, he developed The
Burning Glass, a novel he had talked of writing back in
the 1930s. The third person, "Stanley Grant," is Behrman in
a semi-fictionalized account of a playwright/screenwriter
socially conscious of the rising menace of Nazism. The
resultant book dissatisfied him, and he reviewed his life in
further memoirs, People in a Diary. At last his
health faltered, his eyesight failed him, and he spent the
last of his days in a state of near blindness. He died when
he was eighty. |
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