Con Artists and Artists
MERKIN, DAPHNE
Writers & Writing CON ARTISTS AND ARTISTS BY DAPHNE MERKIN As THE recent events in Guyana have demonstrated, our cherished freedom to choose from an exhaustive array of "lifestyles" is not...
...Then Brook decided to forego all traditional props for the "void" of the Sahara and the unpredictable responses of primitive audiences: "It would bean improvisation in the dark...
...They married in 1953, three weeks after his 18th birthday...
...In the interests of spontaneity Brook has avoided drawing up an itinerary...
...The group is a motley one, including many nationalities (Greek, French, Japanese, English, African, Russian, American) and backgrounds (dishwashing, Zen training, Haight Ashbury, the Royal Shakespeare Company...
...He was making lots of money but apparently it did not occur to him to contribute any of it toward Pat or his children's support...
...Yet I can neither describe nor explain it...
...his mother, Dorothy, was Episcopalian...
...he and June boarded a flight to Indianapolis, leaving an elaborate trail of false clues so that their families would not be able to locate them...
...Various members of the troupe come down with malaria...
...am"have netted est hundreds of thousands of followers, not to mention dollars...
...He played around and his marriage appeared to be in danger of falling apart...
...Writers & Writing CON ARTISTS AND ARTISTS BY DAPHNE MERKIN As THE recent events in Guyana have demonstrated, our cherished freedom to choose from an exhaustive array of "lifestyles" is not necessarily liberating...
...His father, Joe, was a Jew who converted to fundamentalist Christianity when Werner was three...
...Nothing serious happened, though, until Werner met June Bryde, a tall blonde who worked for a real-estate agency...
...The reader progresses with Heilpern from cynicism to awe...
...A n Interior Dialogue Begins...
...They are, however, met with polite silence or bewildered jeers from the villagers...
...is a reverential "biography," endorsed in a Uriah Heep-like Forward by Erhard himself, and written by one W. W. Bartley III, a professor of philosophy with an imposing array of academic credentials...
...He now applied his charm and expertise to the marketing of preschool materials for Parents' magazine and quickly rose to the top of the corporation...
...He taught us the Zen art of bookselling," muses one worshipful employee from those days...
...Both parents worked in the restaurant business in various sections of Philadelphia...
...Werner Erhard was born Jack Rosenberg in the year 1935...
...He married June, renamed Ellen, and they had three children...
...he worked for a time under the pseudonym of "Jack Frost" because, as he ingenuously explains it, "I wanted to give customers a name that was easy to remember while they were out shopping for a car...
...The crew rapidlyand, Heilpern implies, understandably—becomes fed up with the shenanigans of the artists...
...In America such "leaders" are especially likely to gain ascendancy if they offer the prospect of redemptive self-transformation...
...You had only to see a child fight for the scraps of food we threw away to have such an illusion shattered...
...Erhard did not communicate with his parents or family for the next 12 years...
...Aided by a $l-million grant from the Ford Foundation, Brook, whom Glenda Jackson here refers to as "the Buddah," established a three-year program known as the International Centre of Theater Research and went to work behind closed doors in Paris...
...Such picturesque settings...
...The child was bright and very close to his mother: "Dorothy was wonderful to m e . . . . In the space she gave me I truly expanded...
...He showed something of a literary bent and Bartley thoughtfully provides us with examples of Werner's high-school poetry: "Summer sunrise is a honey-haired girl/Wriggling her toes./Crouched on the moss-soft blue of a hill . . . . " The honey-haired girl was not merely a convenient simile...
...Under certain conditions it may prove fatal...
...The first year of experimentation culminated in the "controversial" performance of Orghast, written in a new sound-language by the poet Ted Hughes and set against the background of Persian ruins...
...Making use of his scholarly training, Bartley punches up the early, deeply conventional part of his subject's story with fancily interpretive titles and subtitles: "Donning the Mask...
...instead the actors are to stop as the collective spirit moves them, lay out their carpet, and begin to enact a nonverbal dramatics rooted in emotion rather than conception...
...And that God passed before our eyes...
...The Conference of the Birds, the Persian masterpiece from which the book takes its title, still awaits performance in its final version...
...It is not who I am...
...Finally, in the sacred forest of Oshogbo, the group watches a secret cult of two young drummers and several gray-haired dancers: "The old women danced and were young . . . The whole of life was held in their movements and gestures, rhythms of gods, changing and mesmerizing...
...this book would be funny, were it not also frightening in what it indicates about the abuse of individual power and the manipulation of mass intellect...
...Werner Erhard (Potter, $10.00, 267 pp...
...What unites themand, as Heilpern shows with gently mockery, frequently divides themis Brook's vision of a universal theater of sound and action, "outside cultural reference...
...That they remain just that—intimations rather than actualities—can be viewed as disheartening or challenging evidence...
...Within the next five or six years Werner became a successful car salesman...
...The rest, as they say, is history...
...This may sound simple, even self-evident, but variations on this theme"Experience is simply evidence that I am here...
...Bad notices"Brook's actors can't sing, they can't dance, and it doesn't seem they can act," comments one indignant spectatorare taken in stride...
...The unrelenting task-master has his people up at dawn, imitating bird-calls and doing their Oriental-inspired exercises, all aimed at a final effect of what Brook calls "the most stunning simplicity...
...His big chance was yet to come, and the emerging "human potential movement" would provide it...
...Having raised many objections to Brook's enterprise along the way, the primary one being that "theater can't rely on the abstract alone," Heilpern is in the end convinced of its majestic possibilities...
...His skeptical father has undergone the est training, and his wife trills: " I never doubted that he could stop the rain from falling and move mountains...
...What Bartley rather shrewdly has done is drape Erhard's strikingly irresponsible life in the trappings of a "universal story of the search for true identity," featuring " a rogue genius...
...The author accompanied a troupe of actors, led by the innovative director, Peter Brook, on an 8,500-mile journey over the Sahara Desert and into remote corners of Africa...
...Pastoral idylls...
...Erhard generously shares the unsavory details of his past with est followers, for he would like others to learn from his mistakes: "The moment when you really experience that you have created yourself being whatever way you are, at the same moment you will never have to be that way again...
...they are driven by the need to fool most of the people most of the time—a complex need, to be sure, but one that does not easily fit into a structure of human give-and-take...
...That in a room I received a vision of sheer existence...
...her name was Pat and she was Werner's sweetheart, whom he got pregnant...
...For all our good intentions," writes Heilpern, "we came like wealthy prospectors into the villages...
...In the meantime, Heilpern's rendition of a strange and risky journey has "lulled" us "into the deeper aspects" of the creative process...
...rarely do they succeed in communicating at the profound level the director had hoped for...
...Then again, the psychological sources are perhaps beside the point...
...Never had I seen a dream like this...
...But failure doesn't exist in Brook's vocabulary: "The moment you arrive anywhere, you limit the distance you might have travelled...
...If her husband sounds remarkably modest about it all"I don't want any statues...
...The expedition is chauffeured over vast, barren distances in a convoy of Land Rovers, manned by a professional crew whose leader is fond of crying, "Lives are at stake...
...Con artists, especially brilliant ones, are not comprehensible in terms of ordinary parlance...
...The West Coast, in particular, teems with such guru-type figures, and it was California in the early '70s that welcomed the Pied Piper of est and his new philosophy of Self:" Rocks are hard, water's wet, and Mother's Mother...
...Upon hearing Elizabeth Swados, who is part of the entourage, wailing at the moon, one of them mutters, "She ought to be locked up...
...Werner as Oedipus...
...The author's account is singularly unencumbered by irony or understatement...
...And while some of Bartley's conjectures about Werner's family life and the nature of his responses to precocious feelings of alienation are plausible enough, they do not come close to tapping the psychological sources of the man who was to say that through est, he had been "privileged to be profoundly intimate with more people than anyone in history...
...The name of Werner Erhard was devised en route, inspired by an Esquire article on eminent West Germans...
...Today, of course, Erhard is amicably reconciled with all his families...
...Quiet Desperation," etc...
...The most potentially dangerous of these conditions involves our often peculiarly undiscerning receptiveness to charismatic personalities...
...I don't want any ordinary monuments"small wonder why: Saint Werner, I suspect, is too busy laughing all the way to the bank...
...They consult with tribal oracles and succumb to grim doubts about the value of their undertaking...
...Were we just tourists of a special kind, urban romantics and intellectuals in search of'the simple life...
...On May 25, 1960 Jack Rosenberg abandoned his wife and four children...
...they have endless, argumentative conferences that focus upon "that great raw nerve of the privileged classes, second only in its explosive velocity to the chore of washing dishes and the state of the international monetary market: boring food...
...Conference of the Birds (Bobbs-Merrill, 297 pp., $10.95) is a fascinating account of a legitimate contemporary quest, written with elan by John Heilpern, a British journalist...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 1
