Copyright budapesttimes
Allen is an unabashed New York Jewish intellectual and his career has been pretty much built on that, so it’s hardly any surprise that his novel doesn’t exactly make allowances for those readers who aren’t New York Jewish intellectuals. Dumbing down he ain’t. Yiddish-Hebrew, American, cultural, philosophical and religious references abound with nary an explanation. Still, it keeps readers on their toes and if puzzled they should take the trouble to look up the meanings. There are things for the inquisitive to learn, rather than just scratch their heads and read on. Best not to overdo it though, and Allen does come close over the course of a slimish 186 pages. It could be called a novelette. Of course, there are winning one-liners too. If anyone is in doubt as to whether protagonist Asher Baum is partly Allen, try this: after a woman interviewer is going to accuse Baum of ”coming on” to her and touching her breast. his friend Amnon Weinstock warns: ”In today’s society an accusal is as good as a conviction.” Or, to emphasise the point: ”So you sue, get into a dogfight, pay extortionate fees to lawyers, make headlines in the yellow press; be reviled, parodied on social media. You could be right and still lose your case. And of course, there’s the court of public opinion.” Those are surely clear references to the Allen controversy of 1992, and they don’t stop there. Perhaps we are reading too much into it all, but that’s The Budapest Times’ opinion. Still, it definitely wasn’t wise to dedicate the novel ”To my amazing wife Soon-Yi. Where did you learn that?”. Read into that what you will but to us it is a brazen, and rather naughty, taunt to his accusers. So, as is plain, the front cover of ”What’s With Baum?”is a riff on Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s painting ”Skrik” (”The Scream”) from the 1890s. The borrowing of the agonised face and its new setting against skyscrapers tells us to expect some sort of urban angst. What is with Baum? What’s troubling him? Here, then, is the Allen schtick with which we are so familiar via the films (even when other actors – Branagh, Cusack – assumed the mantle). Baun, 51, fears loneliness, black holes, time burglars, tumours, failure, lifts and much more. The cosmos is awful and life is pointless but the truth is he does want to live. He is a failing Jewish author, neurotic and hypochondriac. His latest book was ”Despair”. His marriage to his third wife, Connie, 46, is hitting the rocks. He hates living out in the country in her Connecticut mansion and prefers her Manhattan pied-à-terre. We may be wrong but doesn’t Allen’s ex-, she of hell hath no fury, have a domicile in Connecticut? Deepening the angst, Baum wonders if Connie is unfaithful with a neighbour and if she slept once with his brother Joshua. Also, he can’t stand Connie’s son Thane, 24, an “insufferably handsome and smug youngster on the fast track to literary stardom”. Thane’s very first book is a big success. This wouldn’t veil a real-life “New York investigative reporter”, would it? There was a time when Asher and Connie could speak, share feelings, argue, laugh. But that was then and this was now, and all the nows never seemed to be as nice as all the thens. As for the countryside – ”Baum had always hated the country, everything about it: the ticks and spiders; the raccoons, cute but with rabies; the poison ivy; the sound of crickets and cicadas. He hated the isolation and the ghostly silence and dead black of the night… but when the oohing and ahhing was over, it was back to civilization. Bookstores, record shops, cinemas. He enjoyed them even as they were almost all gone. But who wants to live where you need a flashlight to take a walk after dinner?” Shades of ”A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy”? Here is Baum/Allen again – ”… comets and shooting stars that scared the hell out of him and feared not the mysterious black hole that gobbled up a million suns a day, a statistic that could paralyze Baum should he pause to visualize it”. Or, ”I have a dim view of my fellow man and I have six million bodies to prove it.” With this we read ”… comparing Bruno Bettelheim’s take on concentration camp life with Primo Levi’s”. They were survivors. Man’s humanity to man and God’s reaction/non-reaction are deep in Baum/Allen: ”Also, the plot he was toying with based on the enforced starvation of five million Russians by Stalin and God’s silence seemed less than a theater party favorite.” For Allen, the Almighty and the Bible are never far away – ”He talked it over with an analyst who sought the answer in Baum’s dreams but what worked so well for Joseph and the Pharaoh didn’t seem to click on that couch in the little room on East Sixty-Eighth.” Baul calls himself “Agnostic. Not atheist,” but as Josh points out, for Baum the whole universe is a cosmic booby hatch. ”You don’t believe in any of that stuff. No religion, no afterlife. To you it’s all bullshit.” Baum dislikes Josh: ”For Christ’s sake he’d screw a snake if you held its head.” Here’s a nice bit of imagination from Allen: “Josh lived in a new, lovely apartment at Battery Park. Much glass all around. Glass, the building material of modern man. If ancient man had glass, the pyramids would have been see-through and you could feast your eyes on mummies in their beautifully painted sarcophagi if that was your thing. Baum always thought the worst job in the world was to be a servant of the Pharaoh because when your master died you got buried along with him even if you were in perfect health. To serve the master in the afterlife was their duty and everybody was happy in this delusion, though Baum wondered if the servants talked in private about handing in their notice.” Another familiar Allen theme is his dislike for Los Angeles, and he can’t resist a dig – ”… she said goodbye to the movie business and sold French chateaux, Mexican adobes, and Italian villas all side by side right off Sunset Boulevard.” Name-checks come left, right and centre: George Gershwin, Hannah Arendt, Buster Keaton, Cole Porter, Ingmar Bergman, Tadeusz Borowski, the Midwich Cuckoo, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Dostoevsky, Jocasta, Grandma Moses, René Magritte, the king of Thebes, Kafka, Kant… And a whole lot of Yiddish-Hebrew to tackle, such as kvetching, bupkis, megillah, meshugganah, schlemiel, putz, schmatte, schneken, nudnick, shvach, nachas and more. ”Ichor”, that’s Greek, ”weltschmerz” is German, aperçu is French. Allen gives us the whole shebang. Throw in some advanced vocabulary – systolic, cockalorum, for example – and if you didn’t look it up you would never know that callipygian means having shapely buttocks. Getting back to that ”court of public opinion” for a moment, the following is the sort of muddled logic that Allen is up against, from Kate Winslet who appeared in his ”Wonder Wheel” in 2017. She said the 1992 allegation had given her pause and now she regretted having worked with Allen. And yet: ”I didn’t know Woody and I don’t know anything about that family. As the actor in the film, you just have to step away and say, I don’t know anything, really, and whether any of it is true or false.” Um, yes, imprecisely. ”What’s With Baum?” is absolutely entertaining and the undertones are as intriguing as all the references and strange words. While we would have liked a 52nd film, here is acceptable compensation. Allen says he has never made a great film but we consider ”Crimes and Misdemeanours” from 1989 as perhaps his very deepest, melding tragedy and humour. It’s got more layers than an Esterházy szelet. Happy 90th, Woody Allen, this November 30.
