Three Balconies (7 page)

“You
look
great. What's wrong?”

“Not a thing,” said Dugan. “Actually, I'm fit as a fiddle. But as we both know, it's just a matter of time. So I thought I might as well check in and get an early start.”

ALBERT P. WIENER.
The mention of his name hadn't always made Baum sick with envy. Weiner was a few years his senior, but the two had started out neck and neck in the literary world. Wiener had published a
bildungsroman
which was praised for its intellectual reach, although several critics found it “bloated.” Baum agreed, but felt that Wiener's skills were undeniable. Baum himself had written a book of stories – fables, really – that were admired by reviewers for their inventiveness and concision. Both Wiener and Baum were cited by the Frederick Buchner Foundation as two of the most promising artists of the Post-World War Two era.

Baum met Wiener for the first time at a literary cocktail party in Cologne. The tall and hawk-nosed Wiener told Baum: “You are on the cusp of something.”

“As you are, too,” said the shorter and more compactly built Baum, somewhat awkwardly.

For the next decade, both artists followed a similar path – publishing books and stories and essays that, for the most part, were warmly received. Wiener was shortlisted for the distinguished Gechwisterlein Award. Baum actually won the only slightly less esteemed Frankel/Sagner Prize for yet another volume of his finely crafted fables.

At this point, their careers – or literary lives – took divergent paths. Weiner, known to be a ladies man, moved from Cologne to Paris where he dated film stars who were slightly below the top tier. He wrote a racy account of his affair with one of them. She fired back with a scandalous version of her own that focused on Wiener's sexual inadequacies. Both accounts sold well.

Baum moved his family – his wife and two daughters – to Rome. No sooner had they arrived than Elmira Krantz Baum fell in love with a distributor of spaghetti westerns. She asked for and was granted a divorce. Though one of his daughters remained loyal to him, Baum was shattered by the breakup and turned to drugs and alcohol. Somehow he gathered his resources to write what many considered his best work – an unmistakably autobiographical novel about the breakup of his marriage. Following this small triumph, Baum, in a literary sense, began to tread water. He fell into an easy life as a translator of American film scripts for the Italian audience. His career took a surprising turn when he showed some skill as a director of screwball comedies, also designed for the Italian market. The money – always cash – was substantial – and the work was far from strenuous. His furnished apartment was luxurious. He enticed women with fast cars and cocaine. A few of his lovers may have found him appealing. He would never know. Apart from his dark and unsettled spirits at dawn, he led a comfortable, somewhat pampered life, one he felt he deserved after a harrowing and bitter marriage. It was his plan to return, at some distant point, to more “serious” pursuits. And he kept Wiener in his sights. His competitor – and that's how Baum thought of him – had written two huge essayistic novels, both of which grappled with eternal questions – who are we? – why are we here? Both works met with respect in small literary journals – though some felt that the books were little more than homages to Thomas Mann. Still, Baum admired Wiener for sticking to his last, while he, Baum, worked below his capabilities. Or so he thought. Nonetheless, Baum felt confident that he could “overtake” the man he thought of as his rival – or at least draw even with him in terms of literary achievement. All he had to do was close the door on his sybaritic life and step on the gas.

The two men had a single exchange by mail. Baum's letter was innocuous. He congratulated Wiener on one of his ponderous novels, which he had only skimmed. Wiener's response was to chastise Baum for falling into a trap of easy money.

“Why do you waste your time on movies? All that counts is the novel. Nothing else.
Nada
,
Nada
,
Nada
.”

Baum's reaction was dismissive. He told a colleague: “One
Nada
would have been sufficient.”

The two men met once again, by chance, on the Piazza della Republica. Wiener was in Rome to attend a literary seminar. Baum, who hadn't been invited, was walking off a night of strenuous carousing. He wore dark glasses and a Stetson to cover the evidence of his dissolute behavior.

The sharp-eyed Wiener saw through the disguise. Full of good cheer, he called out: “Baum! Why are you hiding?”

Wiener then reached out and tipped Baum's hat backward. Baum was offended and clenched his fists as if to strike a blow. But he had no strength. The debauched night had stolen his energy. He clamped the hat back on his head, waved a disgusted arm and slouched away. Wiener, who missed nothing, had sensed Baum's weakness and jumped on the chance to assert his superiority, to treat the other man with contempt. Baum took note of the offensive gesture and vowed never to be caught again in a depleted and whorish state. He quickly forgot the vow.

In the years that followed, both men stayed below the literary waves, while young lions fought to take their place. Wiener traveled far afield with two books on modern architecture. Neither was a threat to Baum who felt, along with at least one distinguished critic, that Wiener had gotten in over his head.

Along with his lowly cinematic function, Baum became an unofficial “greeter” in Rome, taking visiting luminaries on a tour of the city's fleshpots. He kept a toe in the literary waters, although just barely, with an amusing tourist guidebook to the Eternal City. One visitor to Rome was a distinguished film director from Sweden. He told Baum that he had worked with Wiener on a screenplay.

“It was in Stockholm. We were together in a hotel for four long months. We almost drove each other crazy, but we couldn't pull it off.”

“That's hard to believe,” said Baum. “Wiener ridiculed such work and swore he'd have nothing to do with it.

“Still,” said Baum, on reflection. “I always
knew
he'd attempt a screenplay, if only in stealth.”

 

Shortly before his sixtieth birthday Baum said goodbye to the film colony and left Rome. He moved back to Cologne, determined finally to address his “serious” work. In truth, he was no longer quite clear as to what it was. He thought he'd begin with God and the Universe and take it from there. No sooner had he arrived than he met a young and pretty sociologist. Within a year, they were married and Magda had given birth to twin girls. Baum was delighted with this development. For the moment he thought little of the added financial strain.

He tried, unsuccessfully, to get up some traction on a novel, but he'd taken too long a vacation from literature and had no feel for it. He'd heard that Tennessee Williams, in his late years, had scribbled notes in Gaelic to bartenders, saying “I have lost my way.”

If the great playwright could lose his way, why not Baum?

In search of safe ground, Baum tried a few plays of his own. Theatre owners seduced him, then turned away without explanation. What began as an innocent dalliance with the stage cost him the better part of a decade.

Baum was approaching seventy now. All he had to show for his recent efforts was an article on hormones in a Swedish health magazine. He consoled himself with the knowledge that great men such as Goethe and Cervantes had produced important work in their late years. He began to regret the wastrel time in Rome, but not entirely. Though he was beginning to drown in debt, his excellent wife, Magda, was supportive. “Those years you spent in Rome – they weren't wasted – they all went into the soup.”

“Maybe so,” said Baum, “but where's the soup?”

Mercifully, Wiener hadn't been heard from for some time. It was as if he was unwilling to take advantage of the plodding and
unproductive Baum. Then, treacherously, Wiener exploded on the literary world with a l000-page Holocaust novel. It was told from the point of view of a wily Jewish tailor who had survived for five years in the center of wartime Berlin, all the while making slacks for the Nazis. Before this publication, Wiener and Baum, as if by tacit agreement, had avoided the Ultimate Subject. Both Jews, though not practicing, they had fallen in with Eli Weisel's view that the magnitude of the Holocaust demanded literary silence. Baum felt, and assumed Wiener agreed, that the genocide existed in another dimension. The very mention of it, like God's name, was a crime. To approach it with cheap art – or even decent art – was to spit on it. In violation of this silent compact, Wiener had plunged ahead all the same and produced his thunderbolt. The effect was to electrify the literary world . . . Suddenly, there wasn't a newspaper or magazine, popular or otherwise, that didn't feature a Weiner interview, a lengthy critique not only of his current work but of his entire oeuvre. The man was in Baum's face from dawn to dusk. His books sold by the truckload. Television might as well have been called
All Wiener All the Time
. No sooner had the Wiener craze died down than a revisionist attack took hold. Its substance was that Wiener had been overrated. Heavy-handedly, a tabloid cried out:
Wiener's Back, But Where's the Schnitzel?
The attacks gave solace to Baum, but only temporarily. They kept the flame alive. New and passionate defenders of Wiener found their voices. Baum had acknowledged for some time that Wiener had outdistanced him by a considerable margin. But at least Baum could make out his silhouette on the horizon. Now, he no longer saw his nemesis, only a disappearing puff of greatness.

The effect of the Wiener phenomenon on Baum was literary paralysis. Obviously, Wiener's triumph was not directed at Baum specifically, but it might as well have been. Now and then, a critic would mention Baum's name in connection with the Sixties. Inevitably – and sickeningly – the writer would point out that at one time, Baum had been mentioned “in the same breath” as Albert Wiener.

Baum tried to go back to his early fables, but there was no passion in his efforts. I.B. Singer, the Nobelist, had written: “Just because a man has written ten good novels, it doesn't mean the next one won't be trash.”

Baum found strength in this observation. But where were his ten good ones?

In an hour-length television interview, Wiener was seen in a spare and gloomy apartment with a rowing machine. For the most part, he lived alone and continued to date fading actresses. What kind of life was that? Baum told himself that at least he experienced the joys of family. But in truth, Magda Baum had become fat and indolent. One daughter was a survivalist in the state of Washington. Another drew listless watercolors in Trondheim. The twins lived at home in a state of romantic confusion, dating half the young men of Cologne.

Was it possible that Wiener was better off with his fading actresses and his rowing machine?

Despairingly, Baum abandoned his literary efforts and found a job at a community college as a teacher of creative writing.

“If I can reach only one or two young minds,” he heard himself say, self-importantly, in the faculty lunch room.... “If I can only pass on what I know. . . .”

But what did he know? Envy of another writer? One that he had underestimated? Is this what he wanted to pass on to young minds?

One morning, Baum opened a newspaper and read that Wiener had suffered (“been felled by”) a stroke. To his everlasting shame and humiliation, Baum took heart in the news. Still, he felt it only right to extend his sympathies. After all, this was a fellow craftsman. He called an agent in Vienna who had once represented Wiener – and Baum as well.

“I heard about Wiener,” he said. “Tragic.”

“It's not so tragic,” the agent said. “If you or I had a stroke, God forbid, it would be one thing. But he has entire medical teams,
the finest in Europe, attending to him. Round-the-clock nurses are at his disposal. He'll survive beautifully.... And by the way, what have you been doing?.”

“I keep busy,” said Baum, vaguely.

“You were as good as Wiener. Yet look what he's achieved. And you. . . .”

Here he sighed hopelessly.

Baum longed to fire back. Where are the Wiener movies? The short fiction? And where is his family? Where is his life?

But the questions lacked force. He choked back his words.

 

After three months of recuperative silence, Wiener returned to the literary wars, as if the stroke had given him added strength.... In the months and years that followed he was more productive than ever. First came a slyly crafted novella about adultery. (When did he have time to write it? Had he tossed it off in intensive care?) This was followed by an announcement that a new play by Wiener on Life, Death and the Universe (Baum's themes?) was to be produced as part of the Theatretreffen Berlin Festival. The play was thrown immediately into production. Baum waited tensely for the reviews, which were tepid. “The Great Man Stumbles . . .” said one. No sooner had Baum taken a grateful breath then it was announced that Albert Wiener's play would be mounted in a grand production in Petersburg.

“Here we will do it properly,” said the Russian impresario.

En route to attend rehearsals, Wiener announced to the press that he had signed a contract with the Pflaume/Kunstler Presse to do the first revisionist biography of Benjamin Disraeli. This was yet another venture that Baum had thought wistfully of tackling. Wiener had already completed four hundred pages. The rest was in meticulously organized notes.

Each mention of Wiener's name or one of his projects was like a spear lodged in Baum's side. Only on those rare days when his rival was absent from the news was Baum able to draw a clean breath. In mid-semester, he gave up his teaching job. “I'm not
worthy of it,” he told the headmaster, and tossed his classroom keys on the man's desk.