From Anger to Numbness
MERKIN, DAPHNE
Writers &V\fating FROM ANGER TO NUMBNESS by daphne merkin V JL. unny men often begin as sad or angry little boys and go on to become??behind the armor of their jokes??unhappy grownups. John...
...Here's a boy that wants to do something...
...William Orton was a gardener for the city...
...Robert could not understand this, because Dan and Penelope did not communicate even well enough for her to ask him to fix her boots...
...Prick Up Your Ears can be read as a study in the creative uses of anger...
...He was accepted, on scholarship...
...One can discern in her work traces of the repressed poignancy of J. D. Salinger, to whom she has been compared...
...They listen to Bob Dylan or Keith Jarrett, display vaguely artistic interests and get stoned a lot...
...He's not got much talent, but I was out to help him...
...John Lahr, as the son of the dolorous comedian, Bert Lahr, has first-hand knowledge of the psychological underpinnings of humor...
...the flowers," Lahr wryly notes, "could not talk back...
...There was no culture, no education...
...Joe, handsome and well-groomed, was his mother's favorite...
...Shane...
...She is a veritable wizard at devising resonant last lines that cast retrospective significance over an entire story: "Going out of the bedroom before him, 1 grope for the hall light...
...Monteith understood just how hermetic their life together was when he gave them a party in May, 1957: "I realized that they had no friends whatsoever...
...Most of these stories feature couples in various stages of mutual unrelatedness: "Nick chattered to me as nervously as he had when he had started to tell me how he loved the woman he lived with, but ended up, instead of telling me anything about his life with Anita, talking about how some noises that cars make can indicate serious trouble...
...But her emotional minimalism, the drastically reduced expectations that comprise her social outlook, could serve as a credo for the book: "If you have something to say about the weather, you will always be able to make conversation with people, and communicating is very important...
...The predominant mood, dire enervation, is oddly contagious...
...It was as if he were playing God...
...Orton had not been particularly successful at teenage romance...
...They both gave up acting...
...for Halliwell it was the most public humiliation in a lifetime of real and imagined rebuffs...
...I'm fed up with girls" was a frequent entry in his adolescent diaries...
...Nevertheless, the misogyny that would inform his plays was still latent, or at least unconfirmed...
...But soon after he arrived at rada and met Kenneth Halli-well, an erudite, worldly, balding fellow-student seven years his senior, Orton's homosexual pattern was set, with few backward glances...
...Colorado") In one piece ("A Reasonable Man"), a woman going quietly crazy continues to prepare gourmet dinners for the man she is living with...
...You eat like a bloody mouse"??so we are hardly surprised to learn that they were incompatible...
...A future social scientist who stumbled across these stories and wondered at their cultural implications could conclude that ours was a dazed, lost time...
...all of them share dis-quietingly sophomoric tastes and desires...
...Clever-Kids Story") Whatever sexual charge may have once existed between Beattie's men and women has fizzled out long ago: "Penelope was living with a man named Dan...
...T JL...
...He took John over," recalls one of the other boarders...
...As were the protagonists of her first collection, Distortions, they are generally in their mid-'30s...
...he people in Ann Beattie's second book of stories, Secrets and Surprises (Random House, 307 pp., $8.95) have gone beyond anger into numbness...
...When the two men became lovers, Halliwell, who had been left money by his father, lavished clothes and entertainment on the younger man...
...He had remarkably little impact on his brood: "William never played with his children or bought them presents or even ate dinner with the family...
...Orton enjoyed the role of enfant terrible and worked at enhancing the impression of untutored genius created by his first success, Entertaining Mr...
...While there he made little impression on his teachers??no one, in fact, save he and Elsie sensed his promise...
...I've raised four kids on one lung...
...Halliwell harbored literary ambitions and Orton collaborated with him on several projects that were rejected by publishers but inspired enough interest to get their authors taken out to dinner...
...In 1962 they were arrested for defacing library books and sentenced to two months in separate prisons...
...Although he acknowledged his lover's influence in private, this was not enough to sustain Halliwell's wilting identity or to assuage his obvious resentment...
...On August 9, 1967 Halliwell murdered him with nine hammer blows to the head and then swallowed 22 Nembutals, killing himself...
...I never saw Mum and Dad kiss??not once, not in all my life," Joe's sister, Marilyn, recounts...
...When he failed the eleven-plus examination that would have enabled him to go on to grammar school, Elsie pawned her wedding-ring and enrolled him in Clark's College, a private school...
...There's no such thing as a joke" was one of his few convictions...
...Tuesday Night") The surprise is "The Lawn Party," a delicate, Cheeveresque story that evokes the drenched, lyric atmosphere Beattie is usually careful to avoid...
...I felt sorry for him...
...The mother, Elsie, who worked first as a knitware machinist and then, after her eyesight failed, as a charwoman, was the dominating figure: "'I'm mother and father to this family!' she would scream...
...Besides being a classmate, Orton was initially one of three paying boarders in his West Hampstead apartment...
...And his speculations might converge on the following hypothetical problem: If one of Beattie's characters were to murder another with a hammer, would anyone care...
...They were quite fun," according to Charles Monteith, of the publishing house of Faber & Faber...
...While seldom grubby, her characters are fixed by a similar eye for homely detail, and the deliberate flatness of her prose imparts an almost tactile quality to the narrative...
...His childhood was dismal...
...They did make the point that they hadn't eaten in a restaurant for years...
...An eye on the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (rada) moved the 17-year old to take elocution lessons with "Madame" Rothary to eradicate his lower-class accent...
...The author does have a few secrets up her sleeve, and at least one surprise...
...He transcended the rage in his art but not in his life, where he remained bound to the menacing partner of his blighted past...
...She had lost the other one in a bout with tuberculosis...
...His family lived in a housing development in the industrial city of Leicester...
...Entitled??with a punning abrasiveness Orton would have relished??Prick Up Your Ears (Knopf, 302 pp., $15.00), the book tells an unlikely and grisly story, marked by the same lethally-antic tone that characterizes Orton's work...
...In four short years, however, between 1963-67, Joe Orton would become a major new force in British theater, courted by the rich and famous from Sir Terence Rattigan to the Beatles...
...Yet there was an actual father and husband, three-quarters crushed beneath Elsie's vociferous disappointment and wrath...
...some of them are parents...
...Orton took it with his usual detachment...
...Theysatonthesofathewholeeven-ing and didn't speak to anybody...
...You look like a mouse...
...he left home with a crush on one Joyce Holmes, to whom he wrote: "What do you think of 'free love,' I think it's cute...
...But his new status was not without its price...
...Physically slight, weighing 112 pounds, he was the butt of his wife's mockery...
...Their situation is a bit more extreme than the average one in this collection, if only because we are given hints that the woman's disturbance is recognized by others and is therefore not merely a heightened form of lethargy...
...I remember Henry saying to me, as a way of leading up to talking about divorce, that going to work one morning he had driven over a hill and had been astonished when at the top he saw a huge yellow tree, and realized for the first time that it was autumn...
...Halliwell and Orton were hopeless socially...
...Halliwell disguised his "deadly insecurity" with "a sinister superiority" of dress and manner...
...Having inherited her fascination with the stage, he joined several amateur dramatic societies...
...And he puts this to good use in his biography of the English comic playwright Joe Orton...
...He would undoubtedly remark upon the consistent displacement of emotional affect on to nonpeople: cats, dogs, songs, cars...
...He showed John what to wear, what to read, where to go...
...Despite Halliwell's suicide threats, they continued to live together, and the last 10 months of Joe Orton's life were among his most buoyant and prolific...
...On his 18th birthday Orton went to London to audition for rada: "1 did a piece from Peter Pan between Captain Hook and Smee, he later told an interviewer, "both at the same time, a kind of schizophrenic act...
...Beattie has been polishing her style of mannered naturalism for some time now, and it is beginning to show signs ot wear...
...But Beattie's method??her painstakingly accurate rendition of the commonplace, her reliance upon the artifacts of popular culture (Perry Mason, Newsweek, Notorious)??reminds me not so much of other writers as of the sculptor Duane Hanson, who uses wax to capture grubby likenesses??waitresses, construction workers and museum guards...
...She was not particularly taken with Orton either: "He was just an ordinary, unsophisticated boy...
...They are by and large unlikable, albeit not uninteresting, and even, on occasion, touching...
...They have "a civilized discussion" about her cooking techniques, notwithstanding the fact that "he does not know exactly what she is talking about...
...The outrageousness and amorality of his comic vision scandalized many, yet were recognized by astute observers as evidence of an innovative and lacerating talent...
...In the shadow of Orton's ability to elicit laughter lay a sense of pain and horror...
...Born on January 1,1933, John Orton (he subsequently changed his name to Joe, to prevent being confused with playwright John Osborne) was the eldest of four...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 2
