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Part Three: PLAYS
The Marowitz Hamlet (1968)

“I despise Hamlet. He is a slob, a talker, an analyser, a rationalizer. Like the parlour liberal or the paralysed intellectual, he can describe every facet of a problem, yet never pull his finger out.” Considering the play imprisoned by centuries of critical appreciation and grand acting, Marowitz has taken it bodily, broken it into pieces and reassembled it in a collage which, he hoped, makes its meaning real again. This is the original full-length version with the original 1968 introduction restored. Along with the play Sherlock’s Last Case (1984), and his book Recycling Shakespeare (1991), this is Marowitz’s most popular work and it is the prime example of his collage adaptations of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Buchner, Ibsen, and Strindberg. The Marowitz Hamlet is also indicative of the turbulent era in which it was created much like Shakespeare’s version.

Tea with Lady Bracknell (1981)

Tea with Lady Bracknell, is a previously unpublished one woman show that Marowitz wrote for actress Hermione Baddeley. Hermione Baddeley (1906-1986), was effortlessly funny and authoritative and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Room at the Top (1959) and she portrayed Ellen the maid in the 1964 Walt Disney film Mary Poppins. In this play Lady Augusta Bracknell’s wisdom lies not only in her pessimistic yet advanced philosophy of life and marriage, but also in her mastery of language. Her words are loaded with sharp arrows that aim at her ultimate purpose, which is to test the suitability of those in her orbit. The play is reminiscent of the Stanislavski exercise whereby an actor is interviewed in-character and caries on a conversation and goes about their business. The iconic mandarin Lady Bracknell shares her hilarious subjective view of the world of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Epilogue
Remembering Charles Marowitz, by Thelma Holt CBE (2014)

This is Thelma Holt’s personal account of her twelve-year collaboration with Marowitz and their lifelong friendship and association thereafter. In this piece she describes how they first met and their fervent years together running the Open Space in London. It provides among other things fascinating anecdotal information regarding the various personalities involved and describes how the trajectory of their lives and careers were greatly influenced by one another. Holt was among other things the leading lady at the Open Space and when Marowitz left England she retired from acting and stated that she would never act for any other director. This piece gives the reader the kind of personal insight that can only come from a first-hand account.

Appendix

In the included 1972 article, Artaud at Rodez, Marowitz draws in part on the interview material provided from friends and confidantes based upon the true incidents of Antonin Artaud’s life and his incarceration in the asylum at Rodez. Also, included in this section are Marowitz’s interviews with Artaud's psychiatrist, Dr Gaston Ferdiere, and leading avant-garde figures of the time such as Roger Blin, (1907-1984) one of Artaud’s earliest protégés, and one of France’s leading directors. Blin’s productions included the world premieres of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Happy Days. He also directed the first productions of Jean Genet’s The Blacks, and The Screens. In addition, Arthur Adamov (1908-1970) was, with Beckett and Ionesco, considered for a time as one of the leading Absurdist writers of the 50s and one who strongly revealed signs of Artaud’s tutelage.

Acknowledgements

The editor would like to thank and acknowledge Jane Windsor-Marowitz for her generous supply of documents and permissions, Valerie Lange at Ibidem Press, Holly O’Neill at Cambridge University Press, Professor Maria Shevtsova at Goldsmiths College, London and Editor of New Theatre Quarterly, and Rainbow Underhill for her generous graphic design assistance. ‘Notes on the Theatre of Cruelty’ was first printed in the Tulane Drama Review, Volume 11, No. 2, Winter 1966, pp 152-172, reprinted courtesy of TDR: The Drama Review and The MIT Press. ‘Picasso’s Four Little Girls’ by Charles Marowitz, was first printed in TDR, Volume 16, No. 2, June 1972, pp 32-47, reprinted courtesy of TDR: The Drama Review and The MIT Press. ‘The Marowitz Hamlet’ with Introduction was first printed by Allen Lane/The Penguin Press in 1968. Penguin was contacted regarding permissions and responded that we should contact the rights holder (Jane Windsor-Marowitz). Marion Boyars which reprinted ‘The Marowitz Hamlet’ in 1978 and 1990 with a different Introduction was also contacted several months in advance of this publication but never responded. ‘Marowitz Remembered’ by Thelma Holt was first printed in the New Theatre Quarterly, 30(3), 2014, pp 206-207, reprinted courtesy of Cambridge University Press. ‘Artaud at Rodez’ by Charles Marowitz was first printed in Theatre Quarterly, Volume II, No. 6, April-June 1972.

Notes

Aronson, Arnold. American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History, London & New York: Routledge, 2000.

Shellard, Dominic. British Theatre Since the War, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999.

Rebellato, Dan. 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama, London & New York: Routledge, 1999.

Marowitz, Charles. Burnt Bridges: A Souvenir of the Swinging Sixties & Beyond, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990.

—The Encore Reader: A Chronicle of the New Drama, (edited with Tom Milne & Owen Hale) London: Eyre Methuen, 1965.

—Open Space Plays, (editor) London: Penguin Books, 1974.

—Off-Broadway Plays, Volumes 1 & 2 (editor) London: Penguin Books, 1970 & 1972.

—The Marowitz Shakespeare: Adaptations & Collages of Hamlet, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and the Merchant of Venice, New York & London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 1978.

—New American Drama, (Contributor) London: Penguin Books, 1973.

Chambers, Colin. The Story of Unity Theatre, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989.

—Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company, London: Routledge, 2004.

Miles, Barry. London Calling: A Countercultural History of London Since 1945, London: Atlantic Books, 2010.

Hewison, Robert. Too Much: Art & Society in the Sixties (1960-1975), London: Methuen, 1986.

Crespy, David. Off-Off Broadway Explosion: How Provocative Playwrights of the 1960s Ignited a New American Theater, New York: Back Stage Books, 2003.

Kershaw, Baz. The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention, London & New York: Routledge, 1992.

Chinoy, Helen Krich, and Toby Cole (eds.) Actors on Acting, New York: Crown Publishing, Inc., 1970.

Artaud, Antonin. Artaud: Selected Writings, (edited by Susan Sontag) Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988.

Burns, Elizabeth. Theatricality: A Study of Convention in Theatre and in Social Life, New York and London: Harper and Row, 1972.

Davies, Andrew. Other Theatres: The Development of Alternative and Experimental Theatre in Britain, Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1987.

Schiele, Jinnie. Off-Centre Stages: Fringe Theatre at the Open Space and the Round House 1968—1983, University of Hertfordshire Press & Society for Theatre Research, 2005.

McMillan, Joyce. The Traverse Theatre Story 1963 -1988, London: Methuen Drama, 1988.

Moffat, Alistair. The Edinburgh Fringe, London & Edinburgh: Cassell Ltd, 1978.

Marowitz Interview 2011

Bottoms, Stephen. Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960’s off-off-Broadway Movement, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2004.

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd, London: Pelican Books, 1968.

Kirby, Michael. Happenings, New York: Dutton, 1965.

Haynes, Jim. Thanks for Coming, London: Faber & Faber, 1984.

Part One

OUT OF THE MELTING POT
(Four Excerpts)
PLEASE NOTE

An early memoir written by Charles Marowitz was entitled BURNT BRIDGES (A Souvenir of the Swinging Sixties & Beyond) published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1990. The material in OUT OF THE MELTING POT predates that period dealing with events from boyhood in the Lower East Side of New York right the way up to events and friendships from the start of the new millennium.

The proper sequence of chapters does not yet exist; it is still being assembled. The enclosed material is not intended to be chronological nor has the sequence of the material been conclusively decided. The nature of the Memoir is to describe salient points in the author’s private and public life as they are recalled. There is, of course, a logical undercurrent that guides events but no attempt to present them in the order in which they occurred. Among the persons depicted in the Memoir, besides intimate friends, the reader will find mementos of PETER BROOK, GLENDA JACKSON, SIR LAUENCE OLIVIER, PAUL SCOFIELD, FRANK LANGELLA. LENNY BRUCE, SAM SHEPARD, SAMUEL BECKETT, THELMA HOLT, JOE ORTON, PETER BARNES, SAM WANAMAKER, and other luminaries with whom the author has come into contact.

Preface to: OUT OF THE MELTING POT

Autobiography is an attempt to outwit death. If a book can live on after its author has expired, the author, despite moldering in his grave is, in some verifiable way, still amongst us and available to future generations; a gratifying form of perpetuation although, of course, not particularly gratifying to the dead author who, being dead, is beyond the lure of all gratifications.

It’s also an exercise in thrift. If a life is not memorialized in print, your own or someone else’s, it might just as well have never been. A good biographer endows it with infinitude. But if not, what a waste of fourscore years and ten, and who but the wastrel will ever know what hopes, fears, joys, vanities and lunacies collided with each other during his or her brief span on earth?

For many years I’ve kept a diary and, for just as many years, I have tried to rationalize why I did so. Was that too an attempt to outwit death? A way of saying, ‘Hey, I was here, and this is how it was, so don’t erase me entirely from the rolls.’ Or was it, as I sometimes rationalized it, a therapeutic way of dealing with blows and buffets that, without the anodyne of inscribed reflection, would have been even more difficult to bear? Or was it only the irrepressible ego proclaiming its durability in the midst of waste and ruin, a grandstand play to a future generation I would never know in order to affirm a significance I never had? Or, might it have been simply a kind of post-dated letter to loved ones—a wife and a child—preserving feelings never fully expressed in person; a kind of Last Will and Testament that divvied up one’s soul to those two or three people most entitled to some share in it.

I ask these questions but, as I try to define what my life has been, I have no answers. No doubt, if this tome has any future readers, they will draw their own conclusions no matter how tendentiously I veer them towards my own. For the great thing about being dead is that one need no longer ‘take a position’ on the thorny issues of life. ‘Not having to vote’ is one of the great blessings of being posthumous.

And then, of course, there is the preposterousness of the task—viz. trying to locate and inscribe the happenings of one’s life. No one has ever written a comprehensive autobiography for to do so one would need the lifetime that one no longer has. Those who have attempted it have often produced an egocentric valentine to their own self-esteem. Autobiographies bear a strong resemblance to archeological digs; most of the time is spent shoveling rubble and only a very small amount polishing up a handful of precious objects. One of the promises I made to myself at the outset was that I would not clog up the sinuses of my readers with mountains of dirt and dust doggedly gathered from the quotidian. I would only fasten on to those things that burned with a clear, memorial light. If all autobiographies followed that rule, none would be longer than a hundred pages. But most writers-of-memoirs fall into the songwriter’s litany of: “...and then I wrote”, accumulating in print the cloying minutiae that clogged their calendar-days with both author and reader getting swamped in redundancy. A mirror-image of their spent (often misspent) lives.

I write these things mainly as an admonition to myself; to lay down guidelines for what I am about to compose. Like all writing, I am thinking out loud and I don’t give a damn if you heed me or not. I am resolved not to add to the glut of typography in which we all drown daily. Books, more books, websites, twitters and no Hercules will ever have shovels enough to clean out the proliferation of these Augean stables—although I know full well that in writing anything I am simply adding to the compost heap. Yet another of those mental roadblocks that one crashes through to avoid being entirely mewed up by contradiction.

Everyone, if they are honest, has only a handful of vivid memories which are truly memorable. A person here and there, an encounter, a glitch, a voyage, a surprise, a triumph, a defeat, the memory of a night, a day, an hour; if one is lucky, a fleeting epiphany. A few dozen happenings which, once assembled and articulated, make up the essence of one’s life. All the rest is dross; circumambulating routine and a lot of waiting around for letters and phone calls. We aggrandize the mundane because we are ashamed to admit it was so mundane, but the real highpoints of our lives are etched so finitely in the mental archives that we constantly anecdotalize them to strangers and reiterate them to oneself. If these ineradicable memories could be gathered together and defined, we would have the essence of our lives in miniature, and I don’t know that we would need very much more as a memento of having lived. The problem is not marshalling them but explaining them to oneself and to others. The reproduction of life’s quintessential moments are nothing if their meaning is not understood and their significance interpreted. But if one can pull that off, one might possibly achieve that elusive Socratic ideal: if the ‘unexamined life is not worth living’, the life that reveals every dram of its significance and every relevance to the world that encapsulates it, adds something unspeakably precious to human existence.

Writing is not a ‘voyage of discovery’; at least autobiographical writing is not. It is a coming to terms with events which we have never seen entirely in perspective because we are endowed with true perspective only towards the end of our lives. It is leaving a noisy and jostling party in order to sort out the jumble of sensations one was too involved to perceive at the time. Is this a valuable thing to do? It is for the autobiographer. Whether it has any relevance for the reader depends on a number of variables—e.g. the ability to empathize another’s experience, the degree of clarity and honesty available to an author in positing his own, the number of illusions he is able to dispel, the number of deceptions he is able to unmask, the width of his frame of reference, the richness or poverty of his character.

Although life is sequential, the recollection of life is fragmented and hap-hazard. What I have retrieved from my past are high and low points that defy standard chronology. Life is not orderly and past events battle with current ones as they move from the past to the present. Therefore I have not even attempted a chronological order but permitted my imagination to wander and halt, leap forward and back, zoom in and out of incidents that in some cases, insist on being recalled, and in others, slurred and even erased.

As we are gently released from the strictures of Time, there is an overwhelming desire to be remembered by those who remain—not simply as one who was once in attendance, but for the imperishable meaning of one’s now-absent presence. To achieve this, the retiree is obliged, using the finest perceptions of which he or she is capable, to tell it how it was.

Here’s how it was. **CM**

Dumped in the Melting Pot

My mother was a Galitzyaner—i.e. a native of Galicia; my father, a Litvak; born and bred in Lithuania. The twain was never meant to meet. Traditionally, Galitzyaner’s loathed Litvaks and vice versa. They both arrived in America around the turn of the 20th century; met in the lower East Side of New York and married. I’ve always attributed the schizoid part of my personality to the fact that I was the offspring of two antagonistic cultures. Life was always a shuttling between stratospheric ‘uppers’ and infernal ‘downers’.

In the late 30s and early 40s, the Lower East Side of New York was a Dickensian wasteland inhabited by greenhorns (disparagingly called ‘mockeys’) drawn from every part of Europe. Although much has been written about the sense of community that existed—a kind of lovingly recreated shtetl life—the grimmer truth was that it was a ruthless society generated by agonizing poverty and the kind of double-dealing that breeds especially among the poor. The émigrés were led to believe the streets were paved with gold. In fact, they were strewn with a kind of deadly quicklime that created casualties far more than it did millionaires; goniffs, shysters, con-men and whores all desperately scraping for a living and very early learning the national truth that in America, the prevailing credo was more often dog-eat-dog than love-thy-neighbor.

The Lower East Side was, to all intents and purposes, a self-imposed ghetto. The denizens never wandered beyond its parameters, Delancey Street on the east and 14th Street on the west. Everything they needed could be found between those twenty-some blocks. It was a place where Yiddish was spoken and memories of ‘the old country’ were constantly invoked. ‘Uptown” was as distant as Antarctica. It could be reached by a ten-minute subway-ride, but never was. It was populated by foreigners—i.e. ‘Americans’, and was a cold, unfriendly place where immigrants were disparaged and mistrusted. The ghetto-consciousness was strong in all of us. We went shopping on Orchard Street; to synagogue on Eldridge Street; ate ‘deli’ on Delancey Street and, when we could afford it, bought tickets for the Yiddish Theatre in the three or four playhouses that dotted Second Avenue. 14th Street was ‘Uptown’; the last bastion before the sprawling City took over and disorientated everyone that lived below its borderline.

As a child, I had begun to romanticize Broadway; the Great White Way; the glittering marquees; the High Life. At about ten or eleven, anxious to experience the glitter with my own eyes, I ventured on my own, and despite warnings not to do so, beyond 4th and 5th Avenue over to Broadway. It was a non-descript street populated with warehouses, lofts and candy stores—just like the Lower East Side. Of course, it was Lower Broadway, and, like a befuddled Columbus, I had mistakenly believed I had reached the ‘New World’, the incandescence of Times Square and the Rialto. The street sign clearly proclaimed ‘Broadway’ but the reality cruelly contradicted the myth. It would be several more years before I actually experienced Uptown; the uptown that was so swingingly celebrated by Anita O’Day in the pop song Let Me Off Uptown, or the Busby Berkeley number Lullaby Of Broadway. Once it was glimpsed, the Lower East Side was cast into a squalid perspective from which it would never escape.

My father was in ‘the rag trade’. He worked long hours in sweatshops sewing zippers into men’s trousers until the influx of Puerto Rican workers rendered him, and thousands like him, redundant. After that, he sat around the house reading the Cabala, and the works of Rabbi Moses ben Maimonides while my mother complained bitterly that he was shiftless and lazy and ought to get out and find a job. She never quite grasped the reality of the social situation—that there were no jobs and those that existed were scooped up by hispanics for half the wages they would have had to pay my father.

After dinner, there were long walks down 2nd Avenue—from 4th Street to 14th Street and then back again—during which he philosophized to his young son about life and love, marriage and tradition. “Never marry a shiksa!“ he commanded in Yiddish for he had never mastered English “as that is the worst sin a Jew can commit.” In 1976, had he lived that long, it would have broken his heart to discover that I had married a long-limbed, golden-haired model who was the personification of the ‘Shiksa Goddess”, the very creature his constant abjurations had warned me against. Most “nice Yiddisheh boys” tended to lust after the forbidden but voluptuous golden-haired gentiles, bypassing the yenta-like Jewish girls ‘from good families’ whose noses were invariably over-extended and who never shaved under their armpits. We all shared the same fantasies and they were all grossly shiksafied: Jean Harlow, Betty Grable, Veronica Lake, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, Grace Kelly. When she came along, we all abhorred Barbara Streisand. She was the personification of the ‘nice Yiddisheh girl” we were supposed to bed but wouldn’t be caught dead with. No amount of hype about her Grecian features and svelte form ever persuaded us that she was anything other than ‘a dog’.

On one of those walks along 2nd Avenue, my father asked me how it was that the moon, which had appeared on our right when we began our walk, was on the left side when we returned. Being an enlightened American pupil enrolled in P.S. 25, I should have had the answer to such a question, but I hadn’t a clue. Even to this day, I can’t explain it. Much of the time he would put questions of that sort to me and, though I could never provide answers, it inspired in me an appreciation of the unfathomable Mystery of the Universe. In my mind, his simple questions segued into far greater questions. What is a ‘moon’ anyway? And how did it get there? Why does it wax and wane? And how can something that far away exert a pull on the tides?—No doubt there were concise scientific answers to all those questions, but they concerned me as little then as they do now. What I realized was that there was an inexplicable universe beyond the rooftops of the Lower East Side and it looked down upon us with as much perplexity as we looked up at it, and no matter what intelligence the scientists would gather, nothing would ever penetrate the mystery. It never has.

Yiddish was the only language my mother and father knew, although they both gamely struggled to express themselves in an English that was more mutilated than ‘broken’. When I was drafted into the US Army and shipped overseas, my mother wanted desperately to remain in contact. English being beyond her, she wrote letters in phonetic Yiddish, carefully using the little English she knew to recreate the sounds of the only language that was available to her. On receiving them, I carefully decoded them by pronouncing the Yiddish words she had meticulously inscribed in her shaky English hand, often before the bewildered looks of my barracks-buddies who assumed I was ‘decoding’ some arcane enemy communiqué. My replies were always in basic, childishly simple English phrases which my mother persuaded more Americanized Yiddish neighbors to ‘translate’ for her. In this way, contact-of-sorts was maintained over a period of some two years.

The atmosphere in our tenement apartment, first on 4th Street then on 3rd, was usually hilarious; this, despite the grinding poverty and the minuscule portions of food which were served up at mealtimes. My father (they Christened him Harry, but his Yiddish name was Yudel and he answered only to that) was something of a Zen zany. He often donned my mother’s tattered Persian lamb coat and plunked her flowered hat onto his head to regale my brother, my sister and myself. If that joke began to wear thin, he would jut the dentures half out of his mouth and blink like a chimpanzee. That was good for a long and protracted uproar from everyone, my mother more helpless than everyone else but still hectoring Yudel to desist and restore some dignity to the proceedings.

When relatives came—viz. Uncle Lena, her brother Gus and other stocky, obstreperous in-laws—the apartment reverberated with raucous argument. Bring together three or four Jews with opposing views and the sound they make will peel the plaster from the walls and splinter the windowpanes. My father was the most excitable of all and the blast of his rhetoric tended to beat down all counterarguments.

The subjects were usually the unions (i.e. The Workman’s Circle), assimilation and Judaism but, just as often they involved condemnations of the ‘trumbanik’ shenanigans of other relations who had married out of the faith or cut off their children or committed some other dastardly crime which had to do with money or religion. When a particularly heinous malefaction had been committed by a relative, we all ‘sat Shiva’ on him or her; intoning the prayer for the Dead over them which, in theory, rendered them lifeless. From then on, even if they were smack in our midst, they were treated as the ‘un-dear departed’, neither acknowledged nor addressed. The English have a way of ‘cutting’ people they dislike, an imperturbable ‘looking-past’, offhand glance which is immensely effective in nullifying people that delude themselves into believing they actually exist. The Jews just took it a stage further. If one ‘sat Shiva’ for someone, they were obviously dead and being so, there was no way they could be corporeally extant and therefore need never be socially acknowledged.

We all loathed the squalor of our apartment, my sister Bess most of all. When we moved from what we disdainfully called the ‘chaser-stahl’ (pig-sty) of East 4th Street to the infinitesimally superior apartment on 3rd Street, I remember her cursing the abandoned slum and aggressively kicking the furniture and pulling the peeling plaster of the walls. It was as if those meager and jerry-rigged tangibles were what proclaimed our impoverished state. Bess would eventually marry a tollkeeper who was flagrantly unfaithful to her. Although she knew it was a shaky union, it was a passage to marriage and domesticity, and she was at a dangerous age where spinsterhood definitely threatened. The marriage was heartbreaking with the errant husband leaving her alone night after night to go to dances where he would pick up transient girlfriends. He had a gigantic store of pills of every kind and color in large jars in the bathroom. Eventually, they induced an early death by heart failure. After that, his cruel infidelities and insufferable selfishness became diffused with the passage of time and he was remembered affectionately, even by the mortified widow.

Although marriage had been miserable, widowhood was even more so. Bess bonded strongly with my mother and the two of them lived for each other; endlessly bargain-hunting, gossiping, carousing, nostalgizing. My mother, Tillie, was ravenous for society, but there was little of it available for her in the Lower East Side project where she lived in a one-room ‘studio-apartment’ and what friends she made—gossiping busy-bodies and self-serving widowed geriatrics—involved agonizing compromises. Bess was the only real soulmate and when she died in her early 50s, Tillie was bereft. Yudel had already passed on and Bess had been the perpetual link with the world they both knew. Despite her aloofness and lack of sympathy, my mother tried to adopt my brother’s wife as a replacement, but she had always alienated Tillie and Bess had despised her but, so hungry was she for some kind of human companionship, my mother butched down her enmity and made the effort. She believed, in the circumstances, given her loss and the sparseness of any immediate family, a reconciliation of some sort with the glacial daughter-in-law might be affected. She encountered only an impassive stone-wall and was forced deeper and deeper into her shell. David, the elder son, dutifully visited every Thursday but because Tillie felt it was only out of a sense of duty, it brought no joy into her life. With Bess, she could share laughs and mock all the ‘mishagoyim’ that constituted the outer world. With David, there was only silence and manufactured small talk.

I was living in London and had been for some fifteen years. I would make occasional visits to her tiny apartment in one of the downtown Projects that housed aging senior citizens like herself, but those visits were always short-lived. I knew I was in a sense abandoning her, but my life had become rooted in Europe and I rationalized my guilt by telling myself that at least she had David and some small circle of friends.

The fact is after Bess’s death, the ‘circle’ had contracted into a noose. There were no friends and nothing that constituted a tolerable society. A state-employed female companion came to her two or three times a week, a colored lady with whom she had nothing in common. Each morning the Superintendent of the Project building would knock on her door and wait for some screeched verbal response. “They knock like that,” she told me once “to make sure I’m still alive. Funny, no?” During one of those visits, she broke down and all the pent-up despair and isolation of her life spilled out. “I’m like a dog in a box,” she rasped not with self-pity but with anger at being old and abandoned. The years after Bess’s death were a long dark tunnel filled with desperate but vain attempts to conjure a friend out of the embittered crones that made up her neighbors. Even when she managed to create a spark with one or another of them, they would either die or become aggrieved over some trifle and turn away. Her overeager quest for ‘a friend’ in her old age was desperate and heartbreaking.