Poison Spray
LENNY BRUCE, found dead in Hollywood three weeks ago, from a suspected overdose of heroin, probably made more appearances in court than on stage. During the past five years this public scold (how did the misnomer 'comedian' ever get applied?) was arrested repeatedly, hither and thither, for obscenity or narcotics possession. Much of this book is allocated to verbatim reports of the author's wranglings with the law: the case of Bruce v. Everybody. It is impossible not to be impressed by his teeth-gritted deter- mination to continue talking dirty to the last. It is impossible not to find odious officialdom's flat- footed hounding of a trapped victim.
Yet I line up shoulder to shoulder with the late Mr Bruce wincingly. My acquaintance with him previously was limited to his London per- formance, at which I failed to recognise his fans' description of Lenny the truth-teller and light- bringer, cleansing with iconoclasm our grubby little guilts. Instead of candour, there was malevolence; instead of the voice of sanity, the snigger of cruelty. Prowling the stage, black and busy, he seemed more housefly than gadfly. I wish I could now declare that his autobiographi- cal exercise causes me to repent of that judgment, but on this more detailed self-parade Mr Bruce appears even more gangrenously unappetising.
Little here of the usual when-we-were-six routine. Bits about his poor-Jewish childhood on Long Island; about finagling a naval dis- charge for transvestism; about hustling Florida as a con-clergyman; about his marriage to a stripper named Honey Harlowe, a composite `Virgin Mary and 500 dollar a night whore.' These, however, a -e asides in endless cabaret- style fantasy flights---longueurs of half-baked psychiatry and philosophy occasionally shot through with brilliant flashes of free-form dialogue, but always devalued by his obsessional need to shock. His first paragraph packs in lightning sketches of male and female genitals, just to give the reader his bearings, I suppose.
Kenneth Tynan's introduction presents Mr Bruce as a brave crusader (Indelibly hip'), yet surely his meek compliance not to say f— on television was a half-heartedness Mr Tynan must deplore : Len and Ken ought to have hammered out a strategic alliance on this. Off television- Mr Bruce's tirades were directed against war, hypocrisy, pitritanism, jingoism---who could fault that? Sadly, his brash, illiterate nihilism, con-
fused with a coyness that became more excited as it became bluer, isn't easy to distinguish from the fascist opposite extreme. Does it liberate emotions to get a giggle out of a small girl being sexually fingered? Bomb is the nastiest four-letter word of all, but the antidotes of love and life-affirmation don't noticeably cascade through Mr Bruce's poison spray about tumours, VD, child murder and mutilation. He never missed a trick where human dignity and vul- nerability could be kicked in the crotch.
Here is one of the few places where he exudes warmth: 'Living from one crazy disaster to another, Honey and I were always laughing, kidding, teasing, loving each other.' If he wrote in those terms about something that mattered to him, how much was his insight worth on any- thing else to anyone else?
KENNETH ALLSOP
Previous page
