MADNESS AND MOURNING

...some tried to have almost no character at all...

...Kaddish also seems like an exorcism, or a spell to put madness at rest...

...Hands peel potatoes on the screen, a knife slices cabbages, while she muses: "And when we die we become an onion, a cabbage, a carrot, a squash, a vegetable...

...They're doing this to me because I slept with Maxwell Bodenheim...

...She hated the drugs injected into her, hated growing fat from insulin...

...Naomi Levi came from Russia as a child in 1905...

...She was infuriating, almost intolerable, and her life embodied the horrors of repetition...

...Nora Sayre is New York correspondent for The New Statesman...

...As in any family that tries to cope with such sickness, Naomi's husband and sons struggle to accept the abnormal as the norm...

...Listen at keyholes for Hitlerian invisible gas...

...There is certainly an interest in fiction and plays which are intensely personal...

...Sometimes, it is the split screen of Naomi's consciousness, or the desperate images from her mind...

...Now, autobiography itself is welcome...

...when she insists that it's poison, he cries out in agony and hurls the bowl across the room...

...Part of the play is about one person loving another—and we don't see that very often, perhaps because the subject is so un-cool...

...There were infinite shock treatments, and finally a lobotomy...

...The racked family can never know what to expect: "Would she hide in her room and come out cheerful for breakfast...

...She saw Hitler's moustache in the sink...

...Naomi Ginsberg died in 1956...

...Ginsberg has made a play from his 1959 poem, titled and shaped from the Jewish prayer of mourning...

...Naomi shrieks that she is not insane, howls from behind the boy's hand held over her mouth...

...Meanwhile, theater audiences are responding to intimate emotions which might have been rejected or satirized a few years ago—when passionate yet impersonal abstraction was the style, and some of off-Broadway's best directors were scornful of characterization and motives...

...Or lock her door and stare through the window for side street spies...

...At times, there is supplementary film behind the stage—Naomi being wrestled off in her straitjacket, or gagging naked on all fours before the toilet bowl, or weeping and waving from the window of the ambulance to Bellevue...

...So symbolically she was correct . . ." When Ginsberg was a student at Columbia in the Forties, he was called crazy for reporting his visions of God and William Blake...

...By the time Ginsberg was twelve, she believed that President Franklin Roosevelt was spying on her, that wires in the ceiling were attached to her head, that capitalists and fascists and William Randolph Hearst and Franco and The New York Daily News and her relatives were conspiring against her...

...On one of her returns from the hospital, her husband greets her with chicken soup...

...But, in America, most mothers are not popular with sons...

...But, although they know she can't help her behavior, they can't help being hurt and angry at certain moments...

...Recently Ginsberg, in an interview, paid respect to her paranoia and its roots in the society around her...

...In Kaddish, there is a lighter scene when Naomi talks about meeting God and making supper for him: "He's a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup...

...Madness has been made so romantic in the last ten years that the honest ugliness and misery of Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish, which details the mental illness of his dead mother, is almost a relief...

...Yet one of the astonishments of Kaddish is the affection that is shown throughout, It is also unusual to see a son's feelings for his mother so simply expressed—in a form that doesn't set the Freudian popcorn sputtering...

...In the name of politics or acid, many Aquarians tried hard to suppress their selfhood...

...Yet Ginsberg's sympathy doesn't waver: ". . . as I walk toward the Lower East Side—where you walked fifty years ago, little girl —from Russia, eating the first poisonous tomatoes of America—frightened on the dock—then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?—toward Newark—toward candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hard-churned ice cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards—toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching school, and learning to be mad . . ." One of her many violent crack-ups was in a drugstore: "Naomi, Naomi—sweating, bulge-eyed, fat, the dress unbuttoned at one side—hair over brow, her stockings hanging evilly on her legs—screaming for a blood transfusion—one righteous hand upraised—a shoe in it—barefoot in the Pharmacy...

...she gulps iodine, vomits, and her young son cleans the floor...

...MADNESS AND MOURNING NORA SAYRE If collectivism is curdling—if the recoil from mass movements and participation that we are now seeing has spurred a sudden revival of individualism—then the arts may be starting to reflect it...

...At others, the actors are televised from the flesh: their own huge distressed faces loom up behind them...

...This is surely a reaction against the conviction of the late Sixties that ego is awful: from SDS to Timothy Leary, you heard that the sense of self must be dumped...

...not long ago, he described them on television for a cordial network...

...Hence the new and acute introspection among many who were once so doctrinaire...

...And at that time somebody in Germany was sticking a needle with poison germs into some Jew's arm...

...The last time Ginsberg saw her, in a hospital, she didn't know him...

...But two days after her death, he received her final letter: "The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window—I have the key—Get married Allen don't take drugs—the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window...

...She thought that poison germs were awaiting her...

...her voice wheezed like an old radiator...

...Nothing romantic here...

...Most of the New York critics, delighted with Kaddish, have remarked with surprise that it is extremely moving—and some agree that emotion in the theater has been scarce for quite awhile...

...And that reminds me of Ginsberg's presence in the Chicago parks of 1968, where I heard him sounding like a death-rattle, his voice broken by days of gas and chanting, as he tried to calm the frightened crowds...

...Kaddish has had a fine production from the Chelsea Theater Company, and it includes the most exciting use of video-tape that I have yet seen...

...Love, your mother...

...she became a teacher, wrote children's stories, married a school principal, lived in New Jersey, was the secretary of her local Communist Party, played the mandolin...

...These double visions heighten the emotions and distill the pain which the characters can't escape...

...Perhaps Ginsberg is freer than some because he has been so open about his homosexuality for so long...

...Last year, at a Yippie workshop which was expected to be totally political, I was astounded when the theme became "cultivating personal relationships" (none I questioned had heard of Bloomsbury...