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People in a Diary
was the last work that Behrman wrote; he completed it in
1972, a year before his death. Like most of his other
non-fiction prose works, much of it was first published
serially in The New Yorker magazine. It later
appeared in book form in an edition brought out by Little
Brown.
Although Behrman
continued to write plays late in his life—Lord Pengo, The
Cold Wind and the Warm and But for Whom Charlie
were written and staged in the Fifties and early Sixties,
and Fanny, his one musical, written collaboratively
with Joshua Logan, also appeared at that time—he began in
the late Forties to devote less of his energy to the theater
and more to non-fiction prose. He had always written
for The New Yorker, starting in 1929, but from the
late Forties till the end of his life it was this magazine
that became the main outlet for his work and raised the
status of his second career as a writer of non-fiction
prose.
This shift was due in
part to the fact that the style of "high comedy" that
Behrman had developed in the Twenties and Thirties had begun
to fall out of fashion by the early Fifties and that the
theater world's attention was now focused on the work of
other, mostly younger playwrights. But it was due also to
the delight he experienced in working collaboratively with
two brilliant New Yorker editors, William Shawn and
Katharine White. He felt a deep affection for and gratitude
to both of them. He believed that they had an ability to
help him shape his writings into a form that was as good as
it could possibly be. And he was very happy when, once the
writings were ready, they would appear serially, during
successive weeks, in the pages of this fine and unique
magazine.
That experience at
The New Yorker must have been a great relief for Behrman
after years of working in the theater. The theater was a
crazy place, a cauldron where talented artists confronted
business people who were sometimes mediocre, where decisions
were made in a hurry, in a panic sometimes, under the threat
of a play closing when tickets didn't sell or bad reviews
came in, where there were power struggles between different
factions, where egotistical producers and stars rewrote
scripts, where the direction and mood of plays were changed
at the last moment.
The main components
of four major Behrman works were published during these
years by The New Yorker: The Worcester Account,
Duveen, Portrait of Max and People in a Diary.
The best-known of these, Duveen, has become a classic
of art history and has been translated and published in many
foreign languages. Edmond Wilson referred to it this way:
"It is the best profile The New Yorker has ever
printed—incredibly entertaining and at the same time a
filling in of a chapter of American cultural history that
hadn't been written before."
People in a Diary
refers to the habit Behrman developed as a young man of
ending each day with a handwritten entry in his personal
journal. By the end of his life the journal had accumulated
to 43 volumes filled with intricate handwriting. (These
volumes now reside in the depths of the basement in the New
York Public Library, a part of The S. N. Behrman papers.)
In the 23 chapters of
People in a Diary, Behrman discusses the various
friendships that he formed and the environments he
encountered during his early and middle years. These became
ingredients contributing to the six kinds of writing that he
did, including 1) plays for the New York and London
theaters, 2) screenplays for Hollywood films, among them
two, Anna Karenina and Queen Christina, he
wrote for Garbo, 3) non-fiction prose, mostly for The New
Yorker, 4) personal letters, very many of them, some
quite long, addressed to many people, 5) daily entries in
his personal journals, covering the period from 1915 to
1972, and 6) his single novel, The Burning Glass. |
