Mathias B. Freese

Several months back I saw Fritz Lang’s M  in which Peter Lorre introduced himself to cinema. In the film he is a child molester and murderer;  for the greater part of the movie we see Lorre at angles, in shadows and then we catch that face with eyes as big as “soft-boiled eggs” Kirk douglas labeled them in a much later Disney movie. Lorre’s head was round and often he gave the appearance of a goiterous frog. At the end of the movie he has about three to four minutes in which he pleads and cajoles his criminal captors to grasp his compulsions as molester. (Lorre had attended the lectures of Freud as a young man which goes a long way to explain how he worked at his roles; he was actor as intellectual.) It is an astounding performance; Daniel Day-Lewis would enjoy this as did so many actors for decades to come. Lorre does not act; he inhabits his role, he turns himself inside out and reveals what there is to behold. Absolutely remarkable! Yet this role was to haunt him to the end of his life — imitated, mimicked, stereotyped and mired in Hollywood typecasting so that he rarely escaped. Lorre’s first and greatest performance (perhaps) crippled him.

What is important here is some context. He was Hungarian, his real name Lowenstein. He was a close friend to Berthold Brecht and performed in his plays during the Weimar period in Germany (his apprenticeship as a performer, entertainer and actor was profound). By the time he fled the Nazis he was quite the professional. He starred in two Hitchcock movies, Secret Agent  and The Man Who Knew Too Much, and terrific in both; he was a character actor of the first order and in the heyday of character actors in the 30s and 40s, he was marvelous — I give you Joe Cairo in The Maltese Falcon, the gardenia wearing closet homosexual and in Casablanca as Ugarte, the chain-smoking conniver who is nabbed by the Nazis in the early scenes at Rick’s. Bogart loved him dearly as a friend.

Bogie had very good taste. In fact there is a charming and very tender picture of Lorre resting his head on Bogie’s chest in comradeship, affection and love in the book I am reading, The Lost One by Stephen D. Youngckin, more on that in a moment. Hitchcock, Langs, Houston all knew very well that Lorre was masterful, and a remarkable scene stealer as well, but also very generous with other actors all through his short life (he died at 59 from a cerebral hemorrage). Lorre would coach an actor about his lines or ease him into a performance by kibitzing or playing. In fact, Lorre was an imp and elf and often had actors chase him about a set because he pinched their fannies or told them the truth. I admire him for telling Robert Morley that he was a pompous ass, which he was. Yet within a moment he could become serious and give a good performance. He had the ability to move from one stance to another, the consummate professional. He wanted to make people happy but it came from his acting needs rather than some sorry emptiness within.

Although he was the “monster” on radio, then TV, he could rarely if ever escape the parameters set for him. He spent his later years with Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone in a series of Corman movies based very loosely on the stories of Edgar Allen Poe. (Ironically, during the war Lorre would narrate from memory Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart and by all accounts audiences were enthralled by his skills.) They knew they were acting in trash, but Lorre and the other pros kidded themselves and tried to make the most of it; they had to eat. Professional to the end, Lorre was always quick to ad-lib a line or show through gesture (his genius) what pages of dialogue tried to communicate. Karloff was a kindly man, Price was quite literate, graduating from Yale or Princeton and had written books on art. As a young boy I saw Karloff in 1957 with Julie Harris in The Lark. Even then I vaguely recall the fuss kicked up by having Karloff in a serious role. It is the classic story of how this country run by entrepreneurs and its plutocracy of puppets assimilates creative artists and grinds them into a kind of soylent green cracker. All through his short life Lorre joined the resistance, fled from it, toyed with it, criticized it until he dropped dead. He could stand apart and wisecrack about what was being done to him. What is admirable about him is his scrappiness, his unwillingness to be shut down and he paid the price of his persona being turned into cartoons, Robin Williams as the genii in Aladdin and one sordid person who tried to change his name to Lorre’s and to pose as his son.

Lorre returned to German in the very early 50s to direct and write a screenplay with strong undercurrents about Germany’s role in the past war. In the rubble that was Germany this introspective film was not received well, for the Germans had, perhaps still do, a short memory and Lorre was very disappointed with the reception. The film is the title of the book,  Der Verlorene (The Lost One) made in 1951. For much different reasons Charles Laughton never directed another movie after The Night of the Hunter  and Lorre never did direct again, but ended his life going back to the old stuff the audience knew and expected from him.

At the end of the book a eulogy is reprinted given by Vincent Price. Remarkable in its insight, in its love and respect for Lorre, one actor to another actor, with full admiration for his special genius, I was very, very moved. I suggest if you get the book read the eulogy first and then go back to the specifics of a life, almost well lived, almost respected. His fans cherished him; he had the remarkable capacity to extend his warmth to you over the airwaves, in his comedic stances. I believe that Price’s words reflect so well on him and the special gift Lorre had for making friends.  I give you Peter Lorre: Any man who is mistakenly thought not Jewish in a hotel and faces anti-Semitism, purposely spills ink on the register and then forwards a three month subscription of the Jewish Forward to the hotel manager is my kind of man — my kind of Jew.

I admire that short sentence although I do not admire Luther who was an anti-Semite. Some of his essays about Jews are vitriolic. Unwilling to convert to Protestantism, Luther tagged them as “this insufferable devilish burden.” Read his “The Jews and Their Lies” (1543) and  his “suggestions” of how to deal with the Jews. This blog is not about Luther but more about  “Here I stand.” As I age I fully realize that the social and psychological cues of my early years are a razed environment; that what ethical values I have are not extant or in very serious decline. However, I hold fast with the self-known, willing to flex here and there, but who I am has been chiseled out decades ago and I live out this template. Is it good or bad, all those value-laden concepts? What I do know is that it is what is. I need to give some samples here to concretize what I am feeling and what I mean. I believe in a reasonable amount of shame, no, not the shame Gregor Samsa feels in “Metamorphoses.” That is inordinate and beyond the pale. I believe in a reasonable amount of regret for a mistake made, a moment or twinge in which we feel less respect for ourselves because we have disgraced or dishonored another human being. The Clintons know no shame, Cheyney knows no shame, Fox News knows no shame, Karl Rove knows no shame. We are a culture that is unreflective and corrupt, well, all societies are essentially corrupt. And if one has values that are repelled by shamelessness, one has to stand firm in all the molasses: thus, here I stand.

It has gotten so progressively worse that I derive  secondary gain being ornery about my own sense of values that does not abide current cultural norms. I observe and reflect upon the dreck that consumes this culture with a pessimsitic point of view about it all. And what I have resolved to do throughout the years is to get about my own creative business while acquaintances, former friends and neighbors behave abysmally toward me, riven with their own self-hatreds, warped personal projections and distortions. I still have disintegrated atoms of naivete within me that bring about a stunned response when individuals act or behave so poorly with me. As a wise mentor told me, don’t expect too much from people and you won’t be too disappointed by them. How far can I go down that road without questioning this philosophy? Bambi I am not.You know the feeling; someone does something unthinkable to you and you cannot imagine ever doing that to them. It is beyond the pale and one is in disarray. One is wounded.

Recently in litigation I was a witness for myself. I was asked quite directly by the plaintiff if I had made insurance money from my wife’s death in 1999. The question was in the shape of an attack, framed more as a statement without a question mark behind it. It was followed by a similar and much more cruel question in that I was asked if I have profited from insurance money from my daughter’s death by her own hand in 1998. Two questions that reflected upon the inner repository of a shameless plainiff who knew no limits, few human margins of behavior, whose sole attempt was to inflict pain. And what motivates this person besides significant psychopathy was a vicious attempt to cause pain at whatever cost, no matter the ruins that might be made — or the consequences. Oh, if you think there is justice to all this let me disabuse you of that. For plaintiff seethes with this all day and all night and there are individuals about who feel the plaintiff is a kind and spiritual person, just like Luther. I will not bend to all this and I have not done so. I was made by a different value system and the plaintiff does not understand that, thus the rapid quick daggers into my side, hoping that I will fall. The plaintiff tilts at windmills with me. I am made of sterner stuff and this is what puzzles, annoys, very much vexes this entitiy that thinks it is human. The delusions we own about ourselves are mind-numbing.

I am inner-directed; plaintiff is outer-directed. Although plaintiff’s personalty is a by-product of a long-standing psychopathy, I know as a retired therapist that many of the mentally ill turn inward on themselves and fall into guilt and depression. They have the painful decency to suffer without inflicting pain on others. To repeat a theme from above, this plaintiff does not have the shame necessary to reflect upon the damage wreaked by vengeance and  personal venom. It is a psychopathy that attacks others. I can report to you that I won the case. And after I testified I turned to the judge and said, “Here I stand.” It is in the transcript of the trial. It is on the record, forever more, to gather dust and mold in the hall of records, unseen, unread. And that is perfectly fine with me.  It was not a Kodak moment, to use that cliche. But I understood full well what I meant and knowing that was satisfying  to me alone as I stood stoically alone.

One last anecdote.  The plaintiff assailed me and my book. Gunther, a vicious Nazi, guard does many horrific things in The i Tetralogy.  In ignorance, with spite, with a lack of intellection, plaintiff accused me of being Gunther in essence. In a conflation of literature and real life the author was now his character and I was being castigated, berated and damned for being such a foul character.  If you have your wits about you, you must be reaching some conclusions about plaintiff. It is one of those stellar moments when the simple and obvious has to be explained to the dumb, dismal and deviant in ways that are simple and obvious. Plaintiff’s “logic” had it that Camus in The Stranger, Mark Twain in Huck Finn, Melville in Moby Dick were not apart from their inventions. In short, I was a Nazi. I felt that this was Orwellian — and it was. In any case, citing the examples above, I made the case for differentiating the author from his creation.

Additonally plaintiff was going to use some sappy psychotherapist to testify without ever having interviewed me as to how I must be the Nazi in the book! Said sappy therapist must have reflected, if that is the word, and withdrew — caved in. It was to be a long-distance analysis of me by someone ill-equipped to do so, professionally aberrant. Amazing, what we can dig up to self-serve our own self-destructive tendencies.

If all this smacks of paranoia, you are on the yellow brick road. The case is now won; the consequences long-lasting for both sides.

I give you humanity.

Jane and I have just finished laughing about the title of this blog. I was thinking of starting a column for a local newspaper with this as my working title. After all, what questions do you ask a golem? Before I go on I must say that I just finished a short story about 20 pages long tentatively called, “The Dis-Enchanted Golem,” the hyphen having importance. It is a part of a working collection of new short stories called, again tentatively, “Tales of the Holocaust and other Fun Stories.” In any case a golem is a kind of dolt made up out of clay, mud, earth. During the medieval period he was invoked by Cabalists (pre-Madonna kind) during moments of great jeopardy for Jewish communities which essentially is the last 2,000 years. The golem’s task was to slay those Christians who had killed Jews or were about to do so. To those of you who know more than I do about this creature, hold your horses. In any case I wanted to write a story about a golem. Inaccurate. I began to takes notes and the story just began and over three days it was finished. I will leave it to cool down and come back to it later. However, the questions I raised in the story are still with me. What is a golem except a mudpie without a neshamah, a soul? What does this jewish robot feel about killing? What happens to the Jew who brings him forth? Is he a Dr. Frankenstein? And what happens psychologically, emotionally, to the golem? Mary Shelley’s story has the influence of the Jewish golem tradition within its fabric, I give you as an aside. So, my story deals with ethical questions, explores the “feelings” of the golem as avenger? Jews invoke monsters periodically because as Jews in medieval times they could not have arms in the ghettoes of Europe. They were defenseless except in the one place goyim could not get at — their powers of conceptualization. I see the golem as a product of the Diaspora, a product of Jewry of the Middle Ages.

So reader what questions might you ask a golem. Dick Cheyney is a goyish golem. What might you ask him? A neshamah  he does not have, I say with a pronounced Yiddish inflection. The golem in my story is the monster asking or beginning to ask questions of his creator — on the way to awareness, a recurrent theme in my writing, on the yellow brick road to owning a soul. I have another story which deals with a golem and I am beginning to consider that the golem has meaning for me beyond that of a story feature. Metaphorically we might argue that we are all born as golems and that our task is to acquire intention and soul, otherwise we remain sodden and sullen, clay dolts throughout our years. I am an educated golem, for that is what I have done with my life. As to wisdom? As to compassion? As to ethics and values? Issues for me, not you, to explore. However, would it not be interesting to have a golem columnist, coming to ideas and questions from his readers with the perspective of a golem?

“Dear Golem: Should I marry a man who is of the Christian  faith?”  Golem: “Go ahead. Who knows but one day I may be called forth to kill the son-of-a bitch.”

Dear Golem: Should I convert to my husband’s faith. He is Jewish. Golem: “Why would you choose to take on such a burden?”

I am open to other Golem repartee — just email this site.

In “The Dis-Enchanted Golem” our golem is invoked by a tsaddik which is a good and pious man who knows the Cabala. The story really is an examination by me of what it is to be a creature destined to avenge and subject to his creator’s needs. It is, I suppose, a story about will and the awakening of intelligence. I have written several stories of late about Holocaust victims and Holocaust experiences,  trying to dwell deeper into that horror show of the Twentieth Century. The golem is a fanciful tradition that reveals the Jewish mind’s attempt to cope with the horrors they came upon. Why not create a monster to seek out and kill one’s pursuers? Yet, from what I have read, there were rules and regulations, the rational side of the Jewish mystical tradition. The golem is raised, Frankenstein is made. Historian Jay Gonen  in his Psychohistory of Zionism suggested that like the Golem, “Israel was created to protect the physical safety of Jews through the use of physical power. In this allegorical fashion, Golem still lives.”

ASK THE GOLEM: Dear Golem: “What do you think of the ‘The Terminator’ in the movies? Golem: “As a robot he talks too much, thinks too little, acts too much; he is misdirected, flamboyant and purpose driven only. Personally, es zol dir farshporn fun fornt un fun hintn — you should be blocked up from in front and from behind.

If you go to breenibooks.com a review of Stricken  by me is available for 10 December. I have decided not to do reviewing as it takes away from my own writing, my own life, if it be said. Time is very precious to me. However, if something really good is proffered and it is no more than 250 pages I will review it. In any case the aforesaid review gives you a sample of how I go about reviewing. (Contact me if you have a book of interest.) The book was about loss in all its varieties and if anything, by the time we all come to die, we have become quasi-experts on death and dying. 1960, 1999 are indelible milestones in my own experience with loss of the most grotesque kind, one by cancer, the other through a horrific car crash. Of course, closure is for those Americans who suck on the nipple of MYSpace, YouTube, and Twitter. Closure, my ass. Loss is an open-ended ache until you die yourself.

For the past year I have been involved in costly litigation, trying to sell a house in this moribund market, unintended construction costs to repair an electrical problem of some magnitude in the house, the usual harassing shit of living life, the grotesqueries of neighbors who are trailer trash and all the rest while I try to use this mind of mine to find a clear, well-lighted place to attain some respite, some space to respire freely so that I can manage all this looming, impending and nagging crud!  I work hard on falling back on those values and memories that fortify me for adversity and often it works but it is draining and often tiresome to be so defended in order to walk ahead. I compare my worries and anxieties, often really difficult ones, to the image of Rochelle lying dead on a gurney. It is this flashback remembrance that holds me steady as I face human dreck, folly and the inanimate world.

Within this passive-aggressive personality is embedded a high-strung, anxious person who uses control to defend against the pressures of everyday life. Control doesn’t work, for it is a temporary measure, like a dam against Katrina. (Re: Ordinary People. . . “Control is a bitch.”) Inevitability destroys control. The secondary defense, I imagine-think-believe, is to fight back, more in self-defense than out opf character-driven intention. The inner, quaking fear which I have never experienced, but a fear nevertheless, is that I may shatter, but shatter I do not during impossible moments of stress, such as losing one’s mother, losing one’s wife. I do not will this resiliency; it simply exudes, like a rich sweat after a workout. I am stronger than I think, and I am weaker than I think, might say it all.

Like lint in a dryer’s filter, we gather debris as we course through life. Divorces, deaths, major mistakes and minor catastrophes, so by the time we are my age or nearing our journey’s end, we can turn back and see this human comet trail of absolute junk. And then it is over. As I ponder this aimless wool-gathering, I wonder if i can see what it is as opposed to find meaning in it. I’d rather see than understand. When I have seen I have grown or deconditioned myself. At times meaning is a slugfest while seeing is to spin a Venetian glass. Adieu.

Each one of us is a repository. Like flypaper, time and its detritus clings to us, often unknown except at a subliminal level. Allow me to troll the lake of my mind and give evidence of that gone except in mind. I recall adults telling us “Hey, kids get off my fender.” We no longer have cars with bulbous fenders, the ones we’d sit upon and talk to one another. Recently I went to Costco to buy 35mm film and the clerk had to redirect us to a nether shelf with a few boxes. Digital has been so completely successful that now I must seek out film like a hunter. Words have left the language — stoopball; potsy; “Chinese” boxball; boxball itself; Spaldeen; punchball; Fleer’s bubble gum; Studebaker; Hudson; Nash Metropolitan; Henry K; Kaiser-Frazer; Packard; dungarees, et al.

The movies of my children, late 40s through the 50s, are now either classics or forgotten nitrates resurrected, thank god, by DVDs. I grew up on Lamarr, Mature, Michael Rennie, George Sanders, Elizabeth Taylor, Hopalong Cassidy, Sidney Toler as Mr. Chan, Welles, Tyrone Power and Jack Hawkins, Sabu, Conrad Veidt, Mantan Moreland, Abbott and Costello, Bette Davis, Alan Ladd, Martin & Lewis, Donald O’Connor, Esther Williams, James Baskett (Song of the South), Novak, Pleshette, Stewart, Natalie Wood, Eva Marie Saint, Brando, Jean Simmons, Stewart Granger, not to mention all the films I caught on TV — Flash Gordon serials with Buster Crabbe; Hopalong Cassidy movies with William Boyd and the B oaters that starred Ken and Kermit Maynard, Tex Ritter, Autry and Rogers, Bob Steele, Tim Tyler, Buck Jones, McCoy, and early Wayne westerns. Movie candies were of the time, Jujy Fruits, Non-Pareils, Bon Bons, Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy, JuJubes and Dots.

I walk around with all this sweet and cloying if not sentimental stuff in me. It is all context, that’s about it. We each grow different kinds of feathers at different times in our lives. Early readings stay with us and we can recall where and when we read a particularly eventful book. We smile inwardly at our childhood  environments and we are often touched. When I was a cab driver back in 1969 -1972 in New York, I eventually mastered the ins and outs of Central Park and the oddly S shaped Broadway as well as the cross streets. Similarly as a child I learned the neighborhood like the proverbial back of my hand. I could go back now and within a few minutes know my way about although new homes have filled in the “lots” we used to play in and roast “mickies,” potatoes, in the cold of February. I was connected, like a farmer, to the “soil” of this urban world. I knew when it was the season to play two-hand touch football, marbles, to fly kites, to make orange crate box scooters; to pluck berries from trees to use as ammo in our slingshots made from wire hangars and the back of mom’s nylons. We plundered the neighborhood of riches, like migrant workers cherrypicking the best of the fruit. We were earnest scavengers too busy and intent on doing this than to ever really cause mischief. We had  purpose and there was meaning in play. We were always outside and hated to come in which apparently is the opposite of today in which the computer glues kids to the monitor.

Like all generations, it was the best and worst of times, and what we grew up with we are favorable to and give meaning to in our memories and our nostalgia. As I grow older I often return to those days of radio listening — Tom Mix. The Lone Ranger, Superman, Inner Sanctum –of parents moving about in memory, of school and the street. Quite normal to return to connection and relationship. I felt then that I was a nut within a snug shell, comforting and secure. Out of this nexus all my writing flows. I really believe what other writers have said is that we tell one story and we repeat that story in many variations throughout our lives. I will try to pause here and see the unfathomable which is what song I needed sung. I believe that I was not registered by my parents. I was not “felt” by them so that I grew up thinking that this is the way in this home and probably in other homes. Centuries later in terms of psychic time a close friend and brilliant therapist told me that I needed to be “felt.” Yes, I needed to be felt. The sadness in my life is the knowledge that if encouraged, if nourished I would have placed my palms upon the heavens. Since that was not forthcoming all of my life has been my self-parenting myself — but that is what is. I have made my “peace” with that but that is a self-lie I tell myself to get on with life. When I die all my lies and all my myths die with me. The realities go equally dead as well, for what person or persons can read the sorrows of another.