The Magic Lantern

...modestly, Kirk Douglas contents himself with 500...

...Well, he managed the amazing feat of keeping both wife and mistress happy—not to mention himself...

...A few directors and producers, the odd critic, and one dead writerStrindberg—helped and sustained Ingmar...

...No friendly god will turn us into a tree to shade the farm...

...This structure serves a distinct purpose: to make the past and the present coexist, to convey the oneness of life through and beyond individual phases, even as life and work also form a single, coherent whole...

...An incredibly obliging taxi driver spread his newspapers THE MAGIC LANTERN: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Ingmar Bergman/Viking/$19.95 John Simon 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 out on the back seat and conveyed this semiconscious stinking couple to their hotel, where for the next twenty-four hours, crawling from the bed across the floor, we alternately and jointly embraced the lavatory bowl...

...From a somebody I will become a nobody...

...Loves and marriages come and go, as Here again Bergman understates consummately...

...Bergman went to the Royal Dramatic for the first time at age twelve...

...But note that "necessarily...

...It resembles Bergman's film Wild Strawberries in its nonchronological progression, only it is much more daring...

...The striking bacilli are clearly but subtly contrasted with the workers' strike, as is the latter's being in the "public cleansing department" with the lovers' private, intensely sullied state...

...the incident is told with devastating honesty and is painful even to read, much less to live...

...For "this great auditorium lying in silence and semidarkness was—after great hesitation, I think of writing 'the beginning and the end and almost everything in between.' It looks silly and exaggerated in print, but I can't find a better way of putting it—the beginning and the end and almost everything in between...

...As I am neither able nor willing to imagine another life, some kind of life beyond the frontier, the perspective is appalling...

...In nine lines, Bergman can encapsulate what went wrong with his marriage to the pianist Kabi Laretei (of whom, bizarrely, we get only a rear view among the inadequate selection of illustrations), but the true writer reveals himself even in the briefest of snatches: "I was sitting in my workroom in Faro and it was raining, that soft quiet summer rain, as if it were going to rain all day, the kind that doesn't exist any more...

...How nicely that is worded...

...He also pointed out that he had no chance of committing suicide because he could not move his hands...

...a sickly infant, he is not expected to live...

...but there was lurking incomprehension all around, and the series of setbacks that made a young man who could take everything save humiliation suffer horribly...

...That nobody will not even have the memory of an affinity...

...At one blow, all discretion was swept away...

...there was no contact, no affinity...

...Past, present, future are abolished, and there is only a stretch of synchronicity over which the memory roams freely in search of connection and comprehension...

...Nothing is said...

...Only one's own insight inexorably and relentlessly moves inwards toward the truth...

...To him, they were still parents, mysterious creatures, capricious, incomprehensible and larger than life...

...We were both afflicted with terrible internal spasms and rushed for the lifts, where large notices stated that they were closed for two hours in sympathy with the protracted strike of the workers in the public cleansing department...

...Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...

...Later that night he woke up Dag and gave him all his hundred tin soldiers for the cinematograph...

...Bergman believes in ghosts, and there are several arresting ghost (or otherwise fantastic) stories...

...Then he recalls Ovid's tale of Philemon and Baucis (which he getsslightly wrong) and goes on, infinitely movingly: My wife and I live near each other...

...It's fun to cling to the northwest wall of Mount Everest...

...have nothing to say to each other, he is indifferent to the old man, and he might scare him to death with an unexpected visit...

...There are detailed accounts of the income tax scandal Bergman was unjustly enmeshed in and of his ensuing nervous breakdown...

...In sundry interviews, Bergman has 1 said that film was his demanding mistress, but theater his cozy, loyal wife...

...Then back to childhood, and forward again to 1965, each subchapter about two pages long, as Mother phones Ingmar to come to see Father at the hospital, where he faces a serious operation he may not survive...

...Everything is said...

...Escape into art was not easy...

...The ending of Wild Strawberries suggests the hero's reconciliation with his parents, his past, his life...

...the other, to the reader's imagination...

...But, then, Bergman is precisely the master of the hint, the suggestion—of what is said without being spoken...

...From a tormented and exultant child, Bergman develops into a neurotic and difficult young man whom success doesn't lastingly appease or tame...

...Thus Bergman's life, which provided countless incidents for his scenarios (transmuted, of course), profits from the scenarist's art when that life, in turn, becomes the subject...

...Success, in both theater and films, came in sudden spurts...

...And there are splendid details such as embracing the bowl "alternately and jointly...

...So Arthur Miller weighs in at 600 tall pages and Elia Kazan at 800 (including, to be sure, the illustrations...

...The same sense of architectonics for building up a paragraph to a shattering climax or a sobering anticlimax...

...Things come full circle...

...But not only is this translation full of sometimes arcane Britishisms, it is also devoid of knowledge of film, theater, even grammar...

...Not just by myself...

...From his pastor father, Bergman learns (in an incident he incorporated at the end of Winter Light) that "irrespective of everything [specifically: physical illness], you will hold your communion...

...Johnny," the key word, is missing from the title of Marlene Dietrich's famous song, Claudel's The Tidings They Brought to Mary (as it is known in English) becomes The Annunciation to Mary, and so on...

...Again the uncertainty, disguised as playfulness.] If there is no other god than your hope as such, it is important to that god too...

...And what of the movies...

...When he and Ingrid left Sweden over the income tax mess—just as Strindberg had left under a different sort of cloud—they tried Hollywood for a while...

...It also means that he does not feel compelled to tell everything he ever did, saw, thought, but leaves a few empty spaces to be filled in by the reader...

...Since the American edition does not use the British pages, we must assume that copy editing is equally dead on both sides of the Atlantic...

...And the narrative goes on from there, with the same incisive terseness, with the same artful alteration of small, concrete things and big, transcendently awesome ones...

...It would take much more than that, however, to dim the pleasure of this book...

...The two salient features of this autobiography are its unusually skillful construction and the simple beauty of the writing...

...It is important to the churchgoer, but even more important to you...

...Next she comes to Dramaten (the Royal Dramatic Theater) to extract from her son a promise that he'll go see Father...

...My brother wanted to die, but was at the same time afraid of dying...

...You've a feeling for rhythm, the musicality, pitch...

...Your mood must be even and forceful, but, on the other hand, indefinable creative desires must not be encouraged...

...he slams the receiver...

...Our physical misery undoubtedly brought us closer to each other...

...Would that Joan Tate, the translator, had done likewise...

...One problem is insoluble...

...When Bergman became director of Dramaten, he had to fire Molander though, along with Sjoberg, Molander had been one of his heroes...

...We made our way along overgrown paths and stared at each other in astonishment, two elderly gentlemen, now at an insuperable distance from each other...

...Until then, shyness in our love had prevented us from using the bathroom convenience, and when in need we had pattered off to the considerably less luxurious arrangement in the corridor...

...the suggestive leaps by which the story proceeds—through reminiscences, echoes, flashforwards—somehow manage to turn discursiveness and disjointedness into the compelling self-portrait of a restlessly stalking mind...

...Subsequently, as its director, he would sometimes go sit in the same seat in the dark, empty house and "give in to nostalgia...

...A god does not necessarily dwell among our increasingly capricious atoms...

...You have to rely on careful preparation and hope for better things...

...We made our way down the winding staircase with no possible chance of preventing a catastrophe...

...The next time he comes to see her, a few days later, she is dead by the time he gets there...

...Here, for instance, is Bergman with Ellen, his second wife, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 43 do triumphs and failures...

...Near the end of The Magic Lantern, he talks about his private screening room on Farb and the films the Swedish Cinematheque lends him: "Sixty years have gone by but the excitement is still the same...

...When you die, you are extinguished...

...He finds he cannot write about her...

...But Bergman wouldn't be Bergman if the opposite were not also true...

...son and mother have a nice time drinking tea and chatting...

...But he is also an atheist, albeit with relapses into some sort of half-belief...

...She has a small Band-Aid on her left forefinger...

...Miss 'Tate gives us "two-acters" for two-reelers, "Goethe's Margareta" for Gretchen or Marguerite, such barbarisms as "virtuosi Bavarians," "and nor," "when I asked him . . . he had at once accepted," "a mutual existence," "period of time," "intriguing objects," "hellish stimulating," and many more...

...Bergman, as mentioned, is terrific also with thumbnail descriptions and characterizations...

...The struggle with God leaves him "with a calming message...

...But in an autobiographer concision is a double virtue: it bespeaks skill in the writer and unpretentiousness in the man...

...I plug in my intuition and my imagination and appropriate emotions pour in, colouring and deepening...

...The Band-Aid is still on her finger...

...First, the construction...

...I love that last sentence, pitched exactly midway between matter-of-factness and irony...

...There were also the women, often his actresses or other co-workers, who became lovers or wives and helped or impeded artistic evolution...

...Other collocations of subchapters may not have so obvious a thread, but they do connect, even as they often contrast in rhythm or emotional intensity...

...In the very next subchapter, Dag is 69, paralyzed, and barely able to speak...

...Mother and son fight: Ingmar will not fall for the blackmail of "for my sake," and Mother cries...

...There are entrancing episodes of work experiences, ludicrous or inspiring or both at once...

...One morning "Barbra Streisand telephoned and asked us whether we would like to bring our bathing gear with us for a little party by the pool...

...In Paris with Gun, after a fancy lunch of kidneys flambe and a visit to the theater, comes the ascent of the Eiffel Tower: Now as we stood at the very top of the Eiffel Tower, gazing over that famous panorama, countless colon bacilli struck...

...I want to be a pest, a troublemaker, and hard to pigeonhole...

...So the inner life is cinema, too...

...As he projected his first little film loop, his excitement was indescribable...

...econd, the quality of the writing Li itself, full of apercus and ironies, evocations of people or places or situations with utmost economy and understated elegance...

...I thanked her, put down the receiver, turned to Ingrid and said: `Let's go back to Faro at once...

...And he goes on: "Failure can have a fresh and astringent taste, adversity stirs up aggression and shakes life into creativity which might otherwise remain dormant...

...Thus ". . Serge Lifar, the aging monster in L'4prs-midi d'un faun [sic, but blame this on translator and publishers], a fat whore with moist open lips, shamelessly radiating all the vices of the 1920's...

...Take this passage, perhaps the most moving in the book, where he tries to talk about his current and doubtless last wife, Ingrid, the only fully mature woman he was ever involved with...

...It is a dereliction of duty to let private afflictions obtrude at work...

...As children, they had fought with fratricidal rage, Dag knocking out Ingmar's two front teeth, Ingmar setting Dag's bed (with Dag in it) on fire...

...The Magic Lantern is similarly shot through with reconciliations, although it is also a facing up to certain errors, certain insufficiencies, that will never cease to ache...

...How wonderful that Ingmar Bergman in The Magic Lantern can bring his seven decades of life in at 290 smaller, looser pages...

...He has been consul to Greece, and he and his Greek wife have come to Faro (Sheep Island) to visit Ingmar and his wife: He remembered much more than I did...

...It is a charming, old-fashioned politesse, like leaving one last mouthful on one's plate: the one is a tribute to the host's generosity...

...In one way, of course, "all the vices of the 1920's" is absurd: what vices are limited to a specific decade...

...Bergman's is an arduous life, the slow divestment of the terrible constraints imposed by a troubled Lutheran minister's household in puritanical Sweden...

...It begins with the birth of Ernst Ingmar during the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918...

...And he never denies the life of the spirit...

...It was what he had wanted most, and the injustice of it crushed him...

...to whom he lied constantly: "For brief moments between battles, we felt a profound fellowship, the sympathy and forgiveness of the body...

...I have a talent for imagining most of life's situations...

...That three-part build-up from physical description, through psychological impression, to metaphysical nostalgia—there you have the true writer at work...

...Yet it is also true: the decadence of that period seems somehow gaudier, more purple, than that of any other in recent memory...

...remarkable vignettes of other people's and his own experiences working in theater and film;evocative sketches of meetings or collaborations with Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, the conductor Issey Dobrowen, the aging actor Lars Hanson (who is not named), Laurence Olivier (they did not hit it off), and great Swedish directors such as Alf Sjoberg and Olof Molander...

...This strikes me as enormously powerful in its understatement...

...That happens every day...

...But there 1 is also Bergman dejected, fighting the weakness of age and sympathizing more and more with Master-Builder Solness climbing the church tower despite his vertigo in "the urge toward the impossible...

...rr hat is Bergman hopeful...

...And what about the following, on the work of the director—in this case a fever-ridden young Bergman: "But I showed nothing...

...He spoke of his hatred for Father and his strong ties to Mother...

...These juxtapositions, though sudden and jolting, have a common theme: Mother...

...Soon the boy is four and wildly jealous of his new-born sister...

...We shall have to see if it is important to God...

...Before I am silenced for biological reasons, I very much want to be contradicted and questioned...

...There is a wonderful love of nature and childhood informing this book, which may come as a surprise to those having only a cursory knowledge of Bergman's work...

...The ordering is both musical and cinematic, and thus especially appropriate to Bergman, towhom Herbert von Karajan said, "You direct as if you were a musician...

...I have no means of describing our affinity...

...This writing can hold its own against anybody's...

...Neurotic as Bergman was all his life (though less so as he grew older), hounded as he was by chronically upset stomachs, insomnia, and a host of intermittent ailments, he nevertheless always came through for himself, for his art, for the world...

...But the twin passions that thread their way through the autobiography are the theater and the cinema...

...But Bergman can be just as effective with a comic episode...

...Near the end of the book, her ghost appears to him, and they have a long but unsatisfying conversation...

...but there were always dread relapses into failure...

...Ingmar refuses: he and Father John Simon, author of Ingmar Bergman Directs, is movie critic for National Review and drama critic for New York...

...there was penury for a long time...

...You were born without purpose, you live without meaning, living is its own meaning...

...One of us thinks and the other answers, or the other way round...

...A memory of Bergman's third wife (out of four or five, depending on whether you count the quasi-marriage to Liv Ullmann), Gun, who was in some sense raped by her ex-husband, elicits the following comment: "There are moving pictures withsound and light which never leave the projector of the soul but run in loops throughout life with unchanging sharpness, unchanging objective clarity...

...When Ingmar was even smaller, nine or ten, a very rich aunt gave a cinematograph—a toy film projector—which he thought he was getting from her on Christmas, to his brother instead...

...Nevertheless I lack the means of imagining the moment of separation...

...Next, he is a grown man scanning pictures of his childhood for the changing face of his mother, clearly for the documentary he made about her face that he mentions near the end of the book...

...In any medium, Bergman is the kind of artist that hardly exists any more...

...Here, for example, is a bit from Ingmar's final reunion with his older brother, Dag...

...a raging will to live keeping his lungs and heart going...

...There follow recollections of childhood scenes involving Mother, then a flashforward to "today," with Mother in the hospital with a tube up her nose and talking to Ingmar about their lives...

...Here again the attitude toward life and, by implication, death is, if not cheerful, at least stoical...

...One day the blow will fall and separate us...

...If you add to this the eventfulness of Bergman's life, the hard-earned wisdom with which he can now contemplate it, and the candor with which he relates both the good and the bad about himself—without false modesty or vain self-justification—you have before you the stuff of great autobiography...

...It is not as if he had had a less eventful life or were a lesser artist—on the contrary...

...Our mutual antipathy had gone, but had left space for emptiness...