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S.N. (Samuel Nathaniel) Behrman wrote
more than two dozen comedies during his 40-year
career, as well as many short stories, two
biographies, and a number of screenplays. He is
best remembered for popular Broadway plays that
commented on contemporary moral issues. Behrman
wrote about the wealthy, intellectual sector of
society, endowing his characters with eloquence
and intelligence. It is considered proper to say
of S.N. Behrman that he is America’s chief
practitioner of high comedy; that he is, as
Brooks Atkinson says in his review of The
Cold Wind and the Warm, “the Congreve of
American letters.”
Actually, nothing that Behrman wrote resembles
Congreve and, with the possible exception of Jane (which
Peccadillo revived in 2003),
no Behrman play since his first two (The
Second Man and Serena
Blandish), can be called high comedy. In
high comedy, if it is a definable genre, manners
and morals are examined, lightly or bitingly,
with witty conversation as the chief tool.
Behrman was not as concerned with manners and
morals as with ideas, political and social, and
with the interplay of man’s intellect and
emotions. If he is to be compared to any English
playwright, it should be to Bernard Shaw in
genre.
As a young man, Behrman contributed to
newspapers and magazines, including New
Republic and The
New Yorker, and studied playwriting at
Harvard with George Pierce Baker. An early play, The
Second Man (1927), was a huge success.
Behrman tells of the play’s creation in his
autobiography:
I owe this play to the most tenuous and
untraceable of accidents, to the chance reading
of a sentence . . . from a letter of Lord
Leighton’s. The sentence reads:
“…for, together with, and as it were behind,
so much pleasurable emotion, there is always
that other strange second man in me, calm,
critical, observant, unmoved, blasé, odious.”
The Second Man has
for its central idea pluralism in personality.
There is a word in German that conveys this
notion of duality — Doppelgänger. This “double”
functions as a kind of observer that can stand
aside and judge the actions of the other, public
self. It is objective, truthful, ironic; it
suffers from no illusions. Clark Storey in The
Second Man is
its epitome: Though he longs to be a good
writer, he admits to having a second-rate
talent; though he is fond of Kendall, he
acknowledges that her wealth weighs more heavily
with him than her charm. When he is tempted
briefly by Monica because of her beauty, her
youth, and her flattering opinion of him as a
man and an artist, even then the “second man”
mocks him for aspiring to be more than he is.
Austin Lowe, another character in the play,
while far less complicated, also discovers a
“second man” within himself. As a scientist, he
has always believed in logic, common sense, and
self-control; now, made helpless by his first
experience with love, he finds himself
uncharacteristically humble, jealous, and
maddened enough to attempt murder. When the fit
passes, he is appalled by this stranger whose
presence he had never before suspected.
Like those of his closest rival in the field of
high comedy, Philip Barry, Behrman's writings
were marked by a distinctive dichotomy. But
whereas Barry's best work drew strength from his
interweaving of wit and despair, Behrman's
sometimes profited and sometimes was hurt by his
unique mixture of brilliant, high social comedy
and increasingly strong political colorings.
Behrman’s comedy, for all its acknowledged
out-and-out laughter, largely induces a
continuing smile of the mind. [In a comparison
to Behrman’s peer, Philip Barry, legendary
director Harold Clurman notes: "One doesn’t have
to make a choice, but I think Behrman is
superior to Barry. With all deference to Barry,
his plays are more agreeable to the audience,
more superficial. With Behrman there is always a
note – even as early as The
Second Man –
a note of psychological ambiguity and complexity
which Barry never had. You have to be somewhat
astute for a Behrman play. The
Philadelphia Story, Holiday, Paris
Bound –
anyone can understand them – they’re the real
bedlevel of the prosperous middle-class. It was
easier for Barry to plot better because his
material was so simple. But the minute you get
into real complexity of character and thought,
you have difficulty with plotting.]
Brooks Atkinson wrote of Behrman, "[His] ethical
and political principles have never been
appreciated. It is an ancient rule that prizes
are not given to comic plays about serious
subjects. The court jester invariably ranks with
dilettantes and flaneurs." In Atkinson's view,
this "short, rounded, merry,
owlish-looking...marvelously erudite and
civilized" man was far more than merely a writer
of Broadway entertainments. |