The New York Times, December 30, 1934
IN BEHALF OF A CRITIC
Mr.
Behrman Tells of His Sources for 'Rain From Heaven'
By S. N.
BEHRMAN
On Aug. 27, 1933, there appeared in these columns an article
called "The Sentimental Journey of an Exile" by Alfred Kerr.
An editorial note preceding the article informed the reader
that Mr. Kerr had been for many years the dramatic critic of
the Berliner Tageblatt and that he was "one of the many Jews
who are no longer free to practice their profession in
Germany." The article, written with a lightness of touch and
an extraordinary urbanity certainly non-Teutonic, told of
the author's wanderings from Berlin to Prague and from
Prague to Vienna and Zurich and from Zurich to Paris. It
ended with the quotation from the German poet and dramatist,
Friedrich Hebbel, who wrote in his journal on leaving Paris:
"May this city flourish longer than any other city in the
world."
When I read this article I hadn't the faintest idea that I
was to put its author into a play. Could I have fallen a
victim to the insidious delusion that gayety and charm are
the meringue of superficiality? When a man writes of his
delight at watching girls deliciously snub-nosed while
sitting at a café table in Prague or of being ravished by
the voices of the ladies in Vienna, can he feel so keenly
the deprivation of his position and métier at home? I read
the essay, felt the ingratiation of its charm and then
forgot all about it, having never until that Moment heard of
the author at all.
* * *
Some months after this, during the Winter, I went to call on
Dr. Rudolf Kommer, the sage of Czernowitz, and was pottering
shamelessly about among his books and magazines while the
(to use Mr. Woollcott's phrase) mysterious Rudolfo was
engaged in arranging a luncheon party over the telephone. I
came upon a German magazine published in Amsterdam which
displayed on its front cover the names of Klaus Mann and
Thomas Mann and Alfred Kerr and Aldous Huxley. When the
luncheon was finally arranged I asked Dr. Kommer about this
magazine and he told me that it had been sponsored by a
group of German literary exiles, voluntary and involuntary,
with the collaboration of foreign writers like Huxley and
Wells.
Dr. Kommer mentioned Alfred Kerr, and I remembered the
amiable flâneur of Prague and Vienna. I had, after all, not
forgotten him. There he was, docketed in a special
brain-cell-Kerr, dramatic critic, exile, likes snub-noses,
feminine Viennese voices, little sausages called "talianys"
served with wild horseradish. It appeared that Alfred Kerr
was not merely an unrealizable and remote dramatic critic
traveling on pleasant trains to escape an unrealizable
ukase; it appeared that he was a real person whom Kommer
knew quite well, that he was in addition quite the most
distinguished dramatic critic in Germany, that people sat up
nights to read his notices, that you might get a very good
press from everybody and be profoundly unhappy if Mr. Kerr
did not like you. This was close to home. In Dr. Kommer's
study on Seventy-ninth Street Alfred Kerr gained in nearness
and intensity.
* * *
Moreover, he was not a dramatic critic alone—he was a
distinguished writer. Dr. Kommer fumbled among the serried
piles on his writing desk and volumes emerged signed by Mr.
Kerr: books of travel, books of dramatic criticism, a book
of verse. A poem called "Tolstoy—1916"—singular
prophecy—berates the great man for deprecating the Russian
revolutionary movement. Another poem written during the war
presents a remarkable fusion of skepticism and intense
patriotism. There are exquisite ironic verses on chamber
music parties and an extraordinarily evocative lyric to a
literary man whom Kerr had met for a few minutes at a party,
toward whom he had felt a flash of sympathy which contained
the potentiality of a real friendship and of whose death he
had just heard.
After this personally conducted tour through Kerr's poetry,
Dr. Kommer told me of Kerr's long friendship and devotion to
Gerhart Hauptmann, how he had propagandized and written with
all the eloquence he could summon, in season and out of
season, year after year, in praise of his hero and how
during the political crisis marked by the election of
Hitler, the Grand Old Man turned his back on Kerr, as he did
on all his friends and associates who did not measure up to
the new standardization. When I walked home from Dr.
Kommer's I saw that scene of Kerr's repudiation by his
friend and hero. I saw Mr. Kerr coming in to Hauptmann
expecting the familiar and mellow greeting. (I could
visualize Hauptmann from his pictures—he looked like Goethe.
Kerr, in this twilight day-dream walking home through the
New York December dusk, I visualized as young, ardent, dark,
romantic. Actually, I am told, he is a man of 64 with an
Assyrian beard and two children.)
* * *
I saw this scene, which probably never occurred until it did
to me, but which when it did emerge meant that I was
condemned to write the play which I started a few days later
and which was to move far away from this locale and this
original impetus as most writing does from its original
starting point. The meeting between Kerr and Hauptmann
became only a narrated incident in the finished play, but it
seemed to me then, and still does, an essential conflict.
There they were, these two men, two artists, two civilized
men, two essences of what the race might hope to be—the
author of "The Weavers" and the author of an exquisite poem
in which a man mourns the untimely passing of another artist
who might have become a friend. Here, in the great man's
quiet study one might hope for the emergence of a spirit and
an understanding transcending the clamors and ferocities of
the marching, lustful mobs. Here, in a clear vapor, might
rise an emanation so distilled and powerful that
miraculously it might delethalize those other and headier
exhalations from the test-tubes of the poison gas chemists
and from the heated breaths of the demagogues. Because if
not from this room, from where else? That it did not
come—this for me—was essential tragedy.
* * *
For the mob is the same in nearly all countries whether it
engages in a pogrom in Russia, an Armenian massacre in
Turkey, a book-fire in Germany, a lynching-bee in America.
One does not expect anything from it but massacre or
senseless vilification on the "stinking breath" which
nauseated Shakespeare. Isolated fragments of the mob are
equally predictable in their conduct and, therefore, for the
playwright quite uninteresting. There is no surprise in
them: they may be reduced to the generalizations of the
crowd-psychologist. When one drunken moron (whether in
dinner clothes or overalls) murders another in a brawl over
a woman it is only a sanguinary bore. There is not here any
of the dignity of tragedy. But should George Bernard Shaw,
for example, have walked across Adeiphi Terrace one day and
killed J. M. Barrie in a quarrel over Mrs. Patrick Campbell
that, for the dramatist, would have been news. For it would
have involved a struggle beyond the physical contest between
Mr. Barrie and Mr. Shaw. The tragedy would inhere not in the
death of Mr. Barrie, regrettable as that might be, but in
the sudden destruction of Mr. Shaw's acquired
characteristics by his inherited ones.
* * *
Such a destruction is visible in this poignant confrontation
of Alfred Kerr and Gerhart Hauptmann. We are so used to
slaughter that the doleful mass-necrologues of history no
longer give us pause. Mr. Lloyd George tells us of several
hundred thousand men needlessly murdered at Passchendaele by
Sir Douglas Haig. Well, we think that was careless of Sir
Douglas Haig. We read of a government-engineered famine in
Russia in which 3,000,000 people die and it may occur to us
that such a government is willful but actually it is not
possible to visualize malnutrition on such a scale. The
truth is that these vast lapses from civilization are so
continuous, so wearisomely repetitious that they become
literally unimaginable and boring. If they were at all
imaginable would they recur so devastatingly? I knew a
charming boy who told me he would go to war in a minute
though he didn't believe in it because he couldn't withstand
the excitement. I gave him Laurence Stallings's "The First
World War." He said: "It's awful, but just the same I'd go
to war if war were declared because I couldn't resist the
excitement."
* * *
But the battle which might have taken place in Gerhart
Hauptmann's study reveals the impasse in which the human
race is suffocating with a vividness, as far as the
playwright's problem is concerned, beyond battlefields and
holocausts and carnage. For one thing you can't get a
battlefield on the stage—you can get a man on the stage, a
superb specimen-man with a facade conveying nobility and
when you get him there—and his opponent—you have history and
the past and the present and future—as a scientist may have
a disease or its antidote in a drop of water—all these
innumerable deaths and the arresting savior. |