Max Lerner

...My stop," she said...

...Backward/forward moves the story, so that we learn for example, that before mistakenly coming to Casablanca "for the waters," Rick Blaine was a Jewish hoodlum...

...The technique, that is, used by Francis Ford Coppola in his overrated sequel to The Godfather...

...To judge from his dust jacket photo, the blow-dried author ofAs Time Goes By acquired his interest in Rick and Ilsa by osmosis, at one of those with-it Harvard gatherings in the 6o's, where the likes of Todd Gitlin and Al Gore bonded at the Brattle Theatre each year to celebrate Bogart Week...

...He argued that the victories of the Red Army were due to the "moral strength" of Communism...

...When the "New Left" emerged he was sharply critical of it, while in their eyes he was a "Cold War liberal...

...No, but I'm willing to learn...

...She said that he went so far as to ask her to hide her pregnancy from one of his paramours, apparently for fear that it would provoke r MOVING...

...At Peretz's suggestion, Brandeis University organized a memorial symposium, and political scientist Sanford Lakoff, an admiring former student of Lerner's, has now expanded his contribution into a full-length biography...

...said Rick, mystified, not for the first time, by the female mind...

...The unwieldy length was the result not only of the book's ambitious scope but also of big cotton-candy tufts of pointless prose and of litanies of citation and allusion that at times seem to serve only as demonstrations of erudition...

...So summary a conquest of the world's imagination [was] never before achieved without arms and colonization...

...Marxism as a historical system drew me powerfully," he explained...

...Drink...

...He deployed his literary talents in defense of his behavior, sometimes through disarming humor —"never resist an adequate temptation," he quipped—and sometimes with ponderous nonsense about Eros and the "life force...

...He was apparently an impressive teacher, and some of those he influenced became influential in their turn...

...You want to shtup my daughter...

...Ever use a gun...

...Like Linda Ronstadt's rendering of Cole Porter, the words and music may be there, but absent the spirit...you know what I mean...

...1. Please write your new address in the space provided...

...This was (Rick's/Yitzik's) weekly mitzvah, going downtown to buy his mother a knish...

...Two pages later we come to the scene of Rick's first meeting with Lois's father Solly, the Beer Baron of the Bronx, who proceeds to pepper him with questions...

...But at the risk of seeming churlish, I am reluctant to embrace the figure who emerges from Lakoff's unflinching although admiring portrait, even if his intellectual journey brought him finally into my camp...

...Perhaps this would have made more of an impression had the book not sprawled over 1,000-plus pages...

...The American Spectator • February 1999 73 W hat is alarming is not so much the early years of political folly, but the lifelong devotion to philandering and the light it casts upon Lerner's character...

...No real feel for the material...

...He eventually turned against the war in Vietnam but much later than many others had done...

...For the record, I am not spritzing this up...

...TASAddress Changes Made Easy...

...This oblique confession mixed with profession of devotion was calculated to be touching, but it was a lie...

...Slow as he was to awaken, Lerner made a clean breast of it...

...As much as the next guy...

...The brilliant, erratic British historian, A.J.P...

...He also became a member of the free-love Sandstone Retreat...

...He often stayed at the west coast mansion while teaching at United States International University in California...

...Taylor, complained: "The book is too long and too large...

...If you prefer that your name not be rented, please check here...

...We missed it...

...Not a screenplay but a novel, on the order of the romantic potboiler a few years back that told Margaret Mitchell fans what happened to Scarlett O'Hara after Rhett said he didn't give a damn...

...The man was indeed erudite, but this kind of writing also displayed a lack of self-discipline February 1999 • The American Spectator and of modesty...

...She smiled...

...Being myself a neoconservative and a disciple of Kirkpatrick's, this would seem to be, from my vantage, a happy ending to the Lerner story...

...You married...

...The great reason why the Russian people are fighting as they are," he explained, "is that they are fighting in behalf of something they believe they themselves had a hand in building...

...Throughout the 5o's and 6o's Lerner was a mainstream liberal, devoted to labor and civil rights causes...

...He acknowledged that he had notbeen "clear in my thinking about Russia and Communism...

...My solution has been to present the lives of the characters before and after the action of the movie, placing Rick Blaine, Ilsa Lund, Victor Laszlo, and the others in a larger historical context...

...she said with agitation...

...It's the best...

...This work bears the strengths and weaknesses that one might expect from someone whose métier is scholarship, not biography...

...Woody Allen as Humphrey Bogart...But wait: It all leads up to the story of how the world-weary future owner of Rick's Cafe met the first love of his life—not Ilsa in Paris, but Lois Rabinowitz on the Lower East side...

...In the 198o's, with his syndication plummeting and the Post turning sharply right after being bought by Rupert Murdoch, Lerner also took a turn to the right, embracing Ronald Reagan and neoconservatism...

...Although she had an affair with him, Mary Ellen turned out to have more sense than most of the women in Lerner's life, rebuffing his proposal...

...He indulged in brief liaisons and longer affairs both among the guests to be found at Hefner's estate and among his students and graduate assistants...

...I cannot even hold it with comfort...

...While it lacks a story-teller's verve, it traces Lerner's evolving political views, and aspects of his personal life, with admirable frankness and balance...

...If anyone is to get the chance to fail at a Casablanca sequel, why not someone who lived through the era and VICTOR GOLD is The American Spectator's national correspondent...

...On the lam, it seems, from the New York gang wars of the early 1930's: He was riding the Second Avenue El down from his mother's apartment on East ii6th Street, having walked over to visit her from his dump in Washington Heights...

...But given encouragement, there are always those players who can't resist a chance to do the best one better...

...Therein lies both the challenge and the danger of writing a novel of Casablanca...

...When he died at age 89 in 1992, New Republic editor Martin Peretz said in a eulogy that Lerner had been more of a father to him than his natural father...

...Not that Michael Walsh went into this project without fair notice: "Everybody knows Casablanca," he writes in an explanatory epilogue...

...He was indeed assassinated, in May 1942, by Czech patriots working with British Intelligence, a fact duly It's 'Play It Again, Sam,' Not `Play It Again, Michael' The American Spectator - February 1999 75...

...asked Rick...

...Occasional blameworthy acts by Moscow were attributable to "the men around Stalin" who "have learned his sense of power, but...have little of his saving humor and flexibility...

...Why not me...

...Perhaps Lerner's literary heritage should be considered apart from the tale of his personal foibles...

...The contrast of surface and core invites reflection upon Lerner's legacy...

...The gefilte fish," she said...

...Odd, I thought, that a writer whose literary oeuvre included such heart-thumpers as The First One-Hundred Years of Carnegie Hall should get the call to embellish one of my generation's most cherished classics...

...Near the end, he commented modestly that he would leave behind "some words...

...How then can I read it...

...In the 1930's, when Sidney Hook and numerous other liberal and left intellectuals saw through the Soviet charade, Lerner took up the cudgels against them in defense of the socialist motherland...

...He spoke out against the fashions of "multiculturalism," and when asked whom he would favor as a presidential successor to Reagan, he named Jeane Kirkpatrick...

...At Ruby's...

...just be sure to allow six weeks for your change to take effect...

...3. Return this form to us at the address listed below...

...Against this, Peretz's debt to him speaks to his credit and so does Edna's comment that he was a "wonderful father...

...They all, wouldn't you know, wound up in the same unlikely place: Prague, with Ilsa as Mata Hari and Rick, Captain Renault and Victor Laszlo as hit men in the plot to assassinate the villainous Major Strasser's SS boss, Reinhard Heydrich...

...Missed what...

...In his waning years he wrote of Edna as "the life center to whom I have kept returning, and to whom I have been faithful—in my fashion...

...The moral, I believe, was that sometimes it's best to leave well enough alone...

...But for all the fine prose, it is hard to think of the ideas by which we might remember Lerner...

...By the end of the 1940's, after the Czech coup and the other humorless acts by which Stalin subjugated eastern Europe, Lerner recognized the evil nature of Communism...

...2. Attach the mailing label from your most recent issue...

...In his senior years he struck up a friendship with Hugh Hefner and became an occasional contributor to Playboy and a regular guest at the Playboy mansions...

...Social evenings at his home "routinely ended...with the singing of labor union and radical songs," and his young second wife spent the summer before her senior year of college visiting the USSR, no doubt so that she might see the future with her own eyes...

...He proposed that they have an "open marriage," but she declined, and so they had a half-open one: He chased whom he willed and she endured...

...self-absorption that triumphed so relentlessly and remorselessly over spousal obligations is what rendered his oeuvre devoid of more than passing interest...

...He didn't mind visiting his mother from time to time, even if that meant having to listen to her kvell about his good looks and yiddische kopf and kvetch about his lack of a job...

...His first marriage lasted nyears during which he had many affairs, which he apparently did not bother to conceal from his wife, Anita...

...America as a Civilization, published first in 1957, was a deeply pro-American book, although it abjured direct political argument...

...During the war, most Americans felt a sense of solidarity with our Soviet ally, but Lerner went further...

...Gevalt...

...Other than Henry IV, Part Two and Second Corinthians, I'm hard put to find one that's worked...

...We missed it...

...Morris, IL 61054-8084 1-800-524-3469 IMPORTANT: Allow six weeks for address change...

...Real name, Yitzik Baline...

...From this point on, it's pure Mel Brooks, as we move to the story of what happened to the surviving characters in Casablanca after their memorable fade-out on the airport tarmac that foggy night in Morocco...

...Even his enemies and rivals pay him the homage of imitation...

...He made the cogent point that "the principal imperialism the American exercises is the imperialism of attraction...

...Name: (Please Print) Address: City: State: Zip: Date of change: VCAFRM L J 74 in her the pangs of conscience to which he was immune...

...One of the book's too few photos shows Lerner at the Playboy mansion in a chef's hat, demonstrating to the similarly adorned Hefner the technique of making the classical Jewish dish, latkes (potato pancakes...

...Envy, yes...

...Everybody loves Casablanca...

...Just a couple of years earlier he had told Mary Ellen, the 27-year-old graduate student who was his latest passion, that he would divorce Edna if she would marry him...

...He began in 1935 as political editor of the Nation, later became the political columnist of PM, the innovative left-leaning New York tabloid of the 194o's, and then settled at the New York Post, where, for the roughly 30 years that it served as the voice of New York liberalism, Lerner was its most prominent commentator...

...But how wonderful can a father be who inflicts the pain he did on his children's mothers...

...Sex, Stalin, and Second Thoughts Max Lerner: Pilgrim in the Promised Land Sanford Lakoff University of Chicago Press 323 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Joshua Muravchik For some four decades Max Lerner was one of America's most prominent public intellectuals...

...He published numerous books, of which the most important was America as a Civilization, and he held teaching positions at Brandeis, Sarah Lawrence, Williams College, Harvard, Notre Dame, and United States International University...

...Subscriber Service P.O...

...For the first 15years or so of his career, Lerner was what, in the JOSHUA MURAVCHIK is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...He divorced Anita soon after their third daughter was born to marry Edna, one of the grove's blossoms...

...That's all there is to it...

...Many of these are still in print, in collections and reissues...

...If Max wanted to have one last chance at love, I thought itshould be with the woman he'd been married to all those years," she said...

...knows the characters and their story firsthand...

...But one wonders whether the same profound As Time Goes By: A Novel of Casablanca Michael Walsh Warner Books /420 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Victor Gold M y father, a part-time casino gambler, once told the story of a blackjack player holding two tens and an ace who asked for another card...

...He was, Lakoff allows, an "unblushing narcissist...

...What is...

...She captivated him as Anita never had, but he was no more faithful to her...

...He described himself as a kind of pioneer, dividing his life between New York, where he enjoyed "the rooted and secure bonding with my wife and children" (he and Edna had three sons), and the carnal playgrounds he had discovered in "that curious, exhilarating subculture of California, which no one has yet grasped in its full meaning...

...Case in point, sequels to classics...

...His magnum opus, America as a Civilization, argued that America should be considered one of history's great civilizations—like Greece or Rome —and not merely an offshoot of Europe...

...Lerner never submitted himself to the discipline of party membership, but the Kremlin was the Polestar from which he took his ideological bearings...

...Box 655, Mt...

...It was for my father...

...But reading Lerner's own mumbo-jumbo explanations of Fascism, with their pathetic blather about the "proletariat," "lumpenproletariat," "bourgeoisie," "upper bourgeoisie," only redoubles the wonder...

...A little real-life back-story here, for the benefit of those Generation-X readers whose familiarity with World War II is limited to Tom Hanks's saving of Private Ryan: Reinhard Heydrich was at that time the brutish Reichsprotekter of Czechoslovakia, known to his non-Aryan subjects as "The Hangman," and to Hitler himself as "the man with an iron heart...

...O Renew my subscription for one year (twelve issues—$34.95) O Payment enclosed O Bill me later O At various times TAS rents its subscriber lists to other organizations...

...But this anodyne confession scarcely helps us to understand how a man of his intellectual gifts and wide learning could have been guilty of such grievous intellectual and moral error...

...According to Michael Walsh, he was doing lunch at a trendy restaurant in midtown Manhattan with a publisher one day when, out of the blue, she asked if he'd be interested in writing a sequel to Casablanca...

...He liked to think of himself asa tough guy, and here he was, riding the El to buy an old lady a knish...

...milieu of my youth, we called a Stalinoid...

...He was at this time a young instructor at the all-female Sarah Lawrence College, which he called a "budding grove" of potential conquests...

...Mary Ellen grasped that there was ever only one great love in Lerner's life—and that was Lerner...

...Perhaps Lerner found the shot charming, but there is damning symbolism in his deployment of one of the superficial symbols of his cultural heritage in a setting devoted to the traduction of its moral substance...

...Forget Woody Allen...