Low-Jinks
The Last Analysis. A play by Saul Bellow. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson : paperback, 12s. 6d.; hard cover, 21s.)
IN an excellent piece on Isaac Bashevis Singer, published in February's Encounter, Irving Howe wrote, 'Second-rate writers imitate others, first- rate writers themselves, and it is not always clear which is the more dangerous.' Saul Bellow's latest offering, a play called The Last Analysis, struck me—I'm afraid—as self-parody Bellow; a minor lapse into self-indulgence. The work is sporadi- cally amusing, there are some incidental pleasures, but these are far outweighed by an underlying coarseness, a distressing run of familiar theatrical tricks and vulgarities.
Take this, for instance. When our comedian- hero, Bummidge, is receiving his mistress, who should ring the bell but his wife? Where does mistress hide? On the fire escape. What hap- pens next? Thunderstorm. The truth is, I suspect, that the real trouble with The Last Analysis is that it is 'a work for the theatre.' Bellow, the novelist, would never be so lazy as to describe a young man as `MAx: Bummidge's son is in his mid-thirties. Impeccably tailored, manicured, barbered, he is nevertheless the Angry Young Man.' It is even sadder to find him reduced to the traditional, exposition-laden first lines, which is to say the play begins with 'Enter Winkleman.'
WINKLEMAN : Imogen, where's my cousin? Oh, there, Now Bummy-
ImoGEN: Please, Lawyer Winkleman. I just got him to rest. . . .
Bummidge, a comedian who once made mil- lions—for himself, for the parasites who sur- round him—is now suffering from 'Humanitis.' He can't live without hope, like everyone else. He is driven by a need to explain to his peers, America's leading analysts, his new discovery: Existenz-Action-Self-analysis. As the play opens, Bummidge is preparing to broadcast, at enor- mous expense, to a waiting audience, specialists from the American Psychiatric Association, on closed-circuit TV. The swindlers who surround Bummidge—his sister, his lawyer cousin, his son, his wife and mistress—are determined to stop the broadcast until they find a way to turn it to possible profit. It is arranged for Fiddleman, the agent, to watch the closed-circuit broadcast elsewhere, with a group of sponsors and. pro- ducers. The first act is taken up with prepara- tions for the broadcast and the second deals mostly with the broadcast itself.
Some of the dialogue is brilliant, very funny, but it is vitiated by the theatrical low-jinks. We are asked, for example, to suffer psychiatrists with funny foreign names (Doctor Gumplovitch, Doctor Ratzenhofer) and even a girl, Imogen, formerly a Playboy Club Bunny, who (after a pass has been made at her) says things•like, 'It makes me so unhappy. I try to communicate with people, but they only pay attention to my body.' At one point, Mott, making another pass at her, manages to loosen Imogen's garter belt, and, following that, the Whitehall-farce-type stage instructions read : 'Imogen's stockings are falling. Her dress has been pulled off the shoulders.' There is also a caustic grandmother figure, who works as a midwife, Tante Velma. She smokes cigars on stage.
MORDECAI RICHLER
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