Karen Malpede
Julian Beck
The Living Theatre would open three new works, The Yellow Methuselah, based on Shaw’s play and Kandinsky, created by Hanon Reznikov who was Judith’s lover and had become the third partner in the upper echelon of the Living Theatre; a production of Ernst Toller’s brilliant Masse Mensch (The One and the Many) in Judith’s translation, an example from between the two world wars of German Expressionism, and The Archaeology of Sleep. Julian had trepidations about returning to New York, but he’d recently been cast by Francis Ford Coppola in a major gangster role, Sol Weinstein, in the Hollywood film “The Cotton Club.” Flush with LA cash, he was able to take the risk, with the Joyce Theater willing to coproduce. But hope for a repeat of ’69 was bitterly crushed when Julian and his final play, indeed all their work, was brutally denounced by the New York press. Julian was told he was passé, ridiculous, out of touch, a druggie, worse; that the Living had been fraudulent all its life. The critical attack was led by a young Frank Rich, then lead theater critic for the New York Times, later, a liberal political commentator. Julian had touched Rich, as he passed through the audience with the other actors, asking gently, “are you afraid if I touch you like this?” Frank Rich was.
“Though Mr. Beck and his partner, Judith Malina, are still turning their old tricks, their gimmicks look tacky now. In 1984, we can see the Living Theatre’s sexual assaults for what they are: pathetic and impotent attempts to camouflage the troupe’s far cruder assaults on our brains.”
In 1998, unrepentant, Rich added this note to his review: The Beck-Malina troupe had almost no resemblance to the company that electrified the theater with Frankenstein some fifteen years earlier. It now seemed instead like a demented cult that had lost its way after too many years abroad and too many drugs. This was, however, the only time that I was actually molested in the theater—an experience so weird I was more stunned than angry. https://www.enotes.com/topics/living-theatre/critical-essays/frank-rich-review-date-1984
Garrick Beck, who happened to be in the mezzanine, had a clear view of the scene. He watched while Julian put his hand gently on Frank Rich’s thigh. Competing narratives, no doubt, but it is difficult to imagine Julian intentionally assaulting a man seated on the aisle with a notebook on his lap, obviously a critic. Though one wonders what made Julian touch Rich at all—perhaps his attachment to Sacher-Masoch.
Julian Beck was not a playwright in any American sense. He was not interested in realistic character, conflict, or recognizable plot. He had spent his artistic life fighting against the so-called “real.” He was a Dadaist, a Surrealist, and abstract expressionist, an anarchist. He’d begun as an abstract expressionist painter of note and become a magnificent scenic designer, creating often huge sculptural sets out of wire, wood, pipe. He was a poetic writer in his diaries and his books on the theater, and he wrote poetry. He was most interested in altering the perception of the real and slowing down time in the theater. He wished to encourage and to manifest change. American theater critics had no sense of any of this, or any respect for it either. Kenneth Tynan, from England, had begun their ascent to fame when he stumbled upon The Connection. Harold Clurman, founder of the Group Theatre, writing for The Nation, followed Tynan downtown. The Living Theatre had fallen off the radar after they were exiled in 1963, and, once again, after their triumphant return in 1969, into a thriving counterculture and peace movement which embraced them. The Living had never been darlings of the American newspaper critics, who mainly serve Broadway producers with quotes for the ads they then place in the same newspapers, selling their shows and enhancing the critics’ recognition. Because the transaction with Living could not be financial, the establishment critics had usually denounced them—unless the groundswell was such that they had to acknowledge something was actually going on. It was only because the Living was not bound by commercial constraints and had their own theater space on 14th St., and did not pay many bills, that they were able to run both The Connection and The Brig, to slender audiences for weeks, long enough to achieve the notice and audience both deserved. In Europe, especially in Italy, the Living Theatre stands to this day as one of the most important twentieth-century avant-garde theaters of the world and, led by company members, it is still active. Far from bumming around Europe, doing drugs, though pot was a daily staple, the Living had for the previous six years been bringing theater to people and places where there was none. They toured Seven Mediations and The Money Tower. They created a play done in mental institutions, whose ending required the patients be freed (for a while) and in which each patient danced out the doors of the hospital, ecstatic, escorted by an attentive actor. Frank Rich knew none of this. Nor did he comprehend, nor wish to, Julian’s intention in Archaeology of Sleep, which was to slow down time, alter consciousness, and explore how dreams work, and might yet work upon us in the daily world. Julian was an artist-intellectual, a thinker, and this was a play in which ideas had been turned into images. It was not a story, but a sensual bath in which viewers immersed themselves—or not. Julian wrote in his program note that “our actual dreams are themselves the presentation of all ideas, materials, conflicts, thoughts, ideas, visions, in the form of a play of high artistic and poetic quality.” This is the alpha phase of sleep (the first act of his play); during beta phases, the repressed wish is expressed; in delta “both wish and the censorship take the form of ‘thoughts.’” As the dream stages continue, the wish is either fulfilled—“when a problem finds a solution, a wish comes true”—or is repressed, “due to overwhelming censorship … the experience we call nightmares.”
One might argue, the critic did not understand the play, or that the author’s stated intentions were badly realized, but to dismiss this ambitious and perplexing work entirely was an act of lazy and mean-spirited hubris on the part of the New York critics, who were also brutally dismissing, knowingly or not, the last large theater work of a dying man, a significant artist.
Julian was used to being treated with respect in Europe, as a great artist. He was friends with intellectuals like Michel Foucault and with Jean Genet. The Cultural Minister of France had commissioned, funded, and praised The Archaeology of Sleep. In his hometown of New York, he was treated as little more than a demented drug addict and a sexual predator who “assaulted” Frank Rich. George remembers Julian standing alone, forlorn and incoherent in the lobby of Theater for the New City. Julian could not understand the hate, and asked, in a tired voice, “what is wrong with New York?” He looked thin and beaten. None of us could explain, only that it was 1983, and Ronald Reagan was president. This was no longer the sixties. Things were different.
In no other country in the world would theater critics feel it their right, if not obligation, to seek to destroy with vicious words the entire history of a major and significant theater company (that was led by a man who was terminally ill, though perhaps they did not know that then, but given the theater gossip mill, it’s hard to believe they did not). In no other country in the world would the daily press think it its mission to destroy major artists in this way, as if a single critic’s single night’s “judgment” were enough to annihilate a life in the theater, as Julian had titled his book. The New York theater critics conferred outside the theater, according to Jack Gelber, The Connection’s author, who hovered close by, listening, and told me the critics reached unanimous agreement to damn the Living Theatre. This is how censorship works. The Living Theatre of Julian Beck and Judith Malina, begun in 1947, disbanded after the disappointing run at the Joyce. (Though Judith would later restart the theater in different form, with the plays of her husband and partner, Hanon Reznikov, and her own.) The season at the Joyce closed two weeks early, though 8000 tickets were sold or given as comps.
Julian was deep into chemotherapy, increasingly hospitalized. Surely the trauma caused by the hate-filled reviews and the closing of the plays did no good for his health. Yet he had no choice but to rise above, and after the initial shock, which was severe, we did not speak of those events again. He continued writing his last book, Theandric. “In this book we are watching the wrestling match between Death and the Poet,” Judith wrote in her afterword to the published volume. As Julian worked, weakened, and lived, and continued to act in film, television, and on stage, the community around him strengthened. We were the bulwark against the disease. We gathered around him at Mount Sinai Hospital and at 800 West End Ave., always in celebratory fashion. We’d been summoned by Judith at Julian’s request to form the loving community. He would share with us his life with cancer as he’d shared his life always. I kept a diary.
1984. The Seder:
All night. I am tongue-tied about the illness and (recent) operation. As we leave, Carrie Sophia goes to Julian. “Don’t you get sick ever again,” she commands, looking up as he towers above. Five years ago, when I saw them off to Europe at the boat, Julian bent down and kissed my just swollen belly. “A girl,” he chanted. “Let it be a girl.” Delighting in Isha so, he understood my wish for a daughter. And tonight they forge the bond between them. She speaks for me when I cannot.
“Don’t you get sick ever again,” she commands with all the authority of her four-year-old self, in her new holiday dress.
“I won’t,” he promises, smiling his radiant smile. “I won’t.”
May 14, 1984:
Yesterday, when Allen Ginsberg told Julian to “let go,” told him that when his father died Rinpoche said to just “let go of him” and that when he did so, he felt immensely better, Julian replied, “but you don’t understand, it’s me I would have to let go of and I’m not ready to do that.” Later, when I leave his hospital room, Julian whispers, “it’s going to be all right.”
June 25, 1984:
Changing every plan, in fear for Julian’s life and wanting to be with Judith, I rush home from Minneapolis, picking up child, seeing mother, aunt, grandmother briefly, arrive, drop my bags and run to the hospital uptown where Julian, sitting up with a prayer shawl around his shoulders, is surrounded by several handsome men. S. is there from Vermont and Andy Nadelson (a composer who would die of AIDS). S. is an acupuncturist and accupressurist. He has been working with pressure points on Julian, hoping to build him up to the point of acupuncture. Julian’s eyes are clear; his voice is strong. He looks much better. He is clearly happy to see me and says, “I enjoyed your letters. Your writing has improved.” I’m mortified.
July 1984:
Judith says, “Julian’s spirit is so present it’s hard to think about how sick he is.” Yes, the other day when he told me he was not going to die, I believed him. His spirit shines like an eternal flame. One almost believes in an afterlife. Where such spirits dance, forever, exalted. Except that Julian says, “If the body is not the soul, what is the soul.” He, himself, cannot imagine himself disembodied. So he clings to life.
We are Jews. We know no idea of an afterlife. We have no choice but to commit to life, to hold to life, love life, find our messiah in our ability to hallow this earth, for there is no paradise. Judith says, “where I cannot have coffee with my mother.”
July 1984:
He is completely the autocrat in his hospital bed. Julian sits, directing us to direct all of our energies toward him. He accepts whatever a mere healthy human offers, whether orchids or daisies, healing waters, or herbs, crystals, an ungraceful comment or good conversation. He cannot eat. Has eaten nothing for weeks, but he is voracious for the health we bring.
August 1984:
We have come slowly and carefully to the hospital roof, pushing the feeding machine to which Julian is attached. We sit cheerful now in the sun, looking down at Central Park, while Julian recites his lines from “The Cotton Club,” which will have to be dubbed in his hospital room. When Coppola let him keep his long hair pulled back in a bun under the fedora hat, he knew they agreed he would play the gangster Sol Weinstein as a mask so that we might learn to see violence as the mask, which has fallen down across the human form.
“Imagine wanting to die,” Julian said, aghast, when he learned of Barbara’s decision to stop cancer treatment and begin her “dance toward death.” He was dying, too, but his way was different, though each approached their deaths with eyes open, and with concerns not just for themselves but for all who loved them. Each evening the women would gather, drumming and singing, while Barbara, naked, and ever weaker, would dance in the middle of their circle. They played and sang music from the Civil Rights Movement. Aretha Franklin. The nightly ritual bringing Barbara ever closer to the inevitable. Dancing. On August 2, 1984, Barbara died in her sleep. Karl Bissinger called to tell me. Those of us who were not with her in Florida would receive a parting letter. Mine arrived after Barbara’s death, sent to me by her lover Jane Gapen in response to my condolence note:
To so many of you:
I have loved my life so very much and I have loved you so very much and felt so blessed at the love you have given me. I love the work so many of us have been trying to do together and had looked forward to continuing this work but I just feel no more strength in me now and I want to die. I won’t lose you when I die and I won’t leave you when I die. Some of you I have most especially loved and felt beloved by and I hope you know that even though I haven’t had the strength lately to reach out to you.
I love you. Hallowed by (may all be made whole). I want you to know, too, that I die happily.
Bobbie (Barbara) Deming
Now I sat next to Julian at Barbara’s memorial service, at the Quaker Meeting House where Judith had found me in 1972. In Quaker fashion people rose at will to speak to the wonders of Barbara’s life. I was hysterical with grief. I wept the whole service. Not just over Barbara’s death, though, yes, of course, for her, but also for the bad love affair I was involved in, and my abortion to come. The not-yet child that was to be unborn was still in my womb busy in the very first weeks with cells dividing. I felt terrible grief for the life I was going to deny, for myself, and my impending losses, the home I lived in with my child and a man with whom I merely existed, he with I, in a sort of domestic animosity. I wept and wept for life lost. Julian sat erect and silent next to me. I have no idea what Julian thought was the source of my extreme crying, in public, like this, unable to stop. Though I felt I was causing him sorrow he did not deserve by my weeping. He asked nothing. He did not comfort me. He allowed my grief, which surely, also, was his, and perhaps he took comfort from my public weeping. Perhaps, he sensed I was crying tears for him he could not weep.
“We are members of one another,” Barbara said often, quoting the Apostle Paul from the Bible, quoting other spiritual leaders who quoted the same six words. The I and thou of Martin Buber, which Judith and Julian quoted often. We belong to each other, we are members, as in sentient limbs, of the other, we feel with, and for one another. I feel as you. If I wound you, I wound myself, too. And the potential child whose life I would willfully stop was part of this too. Though I felt no lasting guilt about the abortion, and had others, too, I felt sorrow. We are like the mycelium under the earth, linking the trees in the forest, shooting them messages when danger advances. We are one. Bound. When it came time to die, when Barbara made the decision to end further treatment and prepare herself for death, she knew that although the decision was hers, she owed explanation, and invitation. She could not die alone as she, too, was a member of the community she had formed, and a member of the living, sentient world. Ritual, the dance toward death, and writing, the letter, were methods she had employed all her life to create understanding and which she used now, not so much to explain, but to gather in those who loved her. “I am not leaving you when I die,” she wrote. No, she was lodging herself in us, as a member of our imagination, our flesh, with her message, with her chosen approach to her death, her public acknowledgment. We would not forget her when we needed strength.
“For Karen Malpede, With a kind of translucent love, Julian” is the inscription he wrote with an ink pen in his elegant script on the thick brown paper, next to a black and white image of his face, in the small book of his poetry, Semi-Permeable Membranes: Twenty Songs of the Revolution, he gave me on the 25th of December, 1984—a Christmas gift. Likely, he inscribed a number of the slender books for his friends the last Christmas of his life. I am looking at the image now. Julian staring straight at me, intense and beautiful, at the same time there is a deeply private expression on his face, as if looking in. He was seldom as still, though he was becoming so. In health, he was more often flailing his arms, raising his voice but he became inward looking at the end, quieter. He attained a mystic’s bliss. “Translucent love” emanates from his face. A shimmering silken thread, nearly invisible to the eye, strong, which never knots, breaks, or binds. From that first evening we met in the kitchen until his death, this translucent love between us would remain secure whether he was far away in Europe on tour, or we were across the table at Schrafft’s, in New York eating pie, or in his Mount Sinai hospital room, or sitting together on the couch in Mabel Beck’s, now his, living room, my hand resting lightly on his naked foot.
Never lovers, though we once spent a naked night on a futon in his room in Pittsburgh feeling each other’s sexual parts, we referred to this as our “mutual fascination,” we were joined by translucent love from the start. Julian loved many people, none more that Judith, of course, and Ilion Troya, his lover of many years, who endured the young Italian flame who broke Julian’s heart, and who spent nights with him in his hospital bed at Mount Sinai, giving Reiki massage, or sexual pleasure, or holding Julian from behind while he wretched from the chemo-therapy treatments.
January 22, 1985:
Last night to St. Marks for Julian and Judith’s poetry reading. He is nearly translucent now, radiant in his weakness, in the glory of life departing which clings to him as pure spirit. He is beautiful in a pink and red sweater given him by Garrick, and strong, though his voice is weak. The reading takes place on Ronald Reagan’s inauguration night. Julian greets us, “We need these gatherings of poets to let in a little light in these dark times…I begin with a warning,” and he reads his poem, “The State Will Be Served Even by Poets,” a long list of male poets serving the needs of the state. Later he reads love poems and he says to one who was faithless, “The beauty, dear one, was never you, but in me, the lover.”
April 1985:
Julian sits in a yellow sweater, backed by his sensuous paintings, peering at me through a flowering branch, a bright white rug on the floor. “Found on the street,” he tells me proudly. Once, years ago, as we walked through the Village, he plucked a half-bristled broom out of the garbage. “People are so wasteful,” he said to me sternly. How good it is to see him glowing this spring. And we speak of theater all afternoon. When I go, he says, “that was good.” I’m pleased to have pleased him with talk that pleases me, too.
Last Seder, 1985:
The room is full as always, extended family of the Living Theatre, company members and friends. Julian and Judith sit together on the couch at the head of our improvised, long, winding circle. We sit on the floor. We eat on plates set on milk crates over which tablecloths have been draped. We read, as always, Allen Ginsberg’s long incantatory poem, Holy, then Julian then goes around the entire room, saying each person’s name: Holy Garrick, Holy Isha, Holy Amber, Holy Carrie Sophia. He smiles in their eyes. Holy each one of us in turn. It takes a long time; there must be fifty people or more. He does not forget a name.
August 1985:
Julian sits in the bath sucking on ice cream, the door ajar. In the adjoining room, Judith sits at the chair in front of her small desk, Hanon and I on the big bed. The talk turns to Martin Buber. Judith and Julian heard him speak in 1959. She reads from her diary, her voice vibrant, her words and Buber’s intertwine, filling the rooms, catching us up in their spell. It was to have been a holy place, Buber says of Israel, a place where the most holy went, it was to have been an experiment in living, and that necessarily meant community among Jews and Palestinians. But then the war happened and after the war the most wretched came to Israel, those who had been most badly hurt, those who had lost everything, who were weakened by cruelty, by hate. Judith’s voice breaks, and Buber’s. But she picks up again, about his sadness on that night, about the loss of hope violence always brings. Her words are beautiful, and her voice, though their content is only despair. When she is finished, Julian, naked and beaming, comes into the room.
“That was a zap,” he says, ruddy from the bath and aglow with delight in the moment. He settles himself cross-legged on the bed.
In the interview two weeks before his death, Julian speaks about touch and the importance of friendship:
“I’ve always been a lover. I love people. I love to embrace and to hug. I love the sensuality. After I found out I had cancer, I felt tremendously inhibited, suddenly, but now I am able to express more in the house, in the family and with friends. I sense a much greater openness than ever before. Many people don’t realize how important family and other means of support actually are to the person who is ill. I really hope the importance of home-based support can be proven in a scientific way.”
He would do one final serious theater work, a Beckett play, That Time, at LaMama. He performed on a ladder, he had taped Beckett’s words, his coughs edited out; he acted the emotions with his beautiful, ravished face. George Bartenieff, whom I did not yet know, Fred Neuman, and Thomas Walker were in the two short companion Beckett plays on the bill, Theater II, Theater III. I saw the production. For each of his acting roles in the final year of his life, whether on film, television or in the theater, Julian received high praise. His face and form ever more chiseled as he approached his death, he occupied a liminal space. As cancer eats the flesh, the frame appears, the shape of the self, there is no longer anywhere to hide. The eyes pop from the face. The bones protrude. Nothing extraneous remains. The skeletal form looks both as if it might break at any moment and pure, as if made of metal, like a Giacometti sculpture. Julian went on, through the great disappointment of the critical reception of his final play, which brought the end of his Living Theatre, using his failing body and voice to create memorable villains, since the market would pay, and Beckett’s contemplative man. Samuel Beckett seems to me, now, the playwright of buried trauma, inarticulate, trauma acted out as riddle, vaudeville turn, game, rambling tale, “that time, that time” is the repeated refrain in this play, but what happened “that time” is never voiced or understood; only the impact but not the event is seared into consciousness. War trauma, of course, but equally infant trauma of being unloved. Left all alone. Characters unaware of what has happened to them dominate Beckett plays. As if he, consummate poet, could not write a description of what happened to so many incinerated, tortured, bombed while he worked for the resistance and hid. Only the inarticulate impact remained (as it did for decades among the survivors.) How contrary to Julian Beckett was. Julian, himself, thought so. He lacked patience for Beckett’s inability to explain or exhort. Yet, they remain complementary artists. Both gravitate to the extreme, the unknown, the leap, or in Beckett’s case fall, or pratfall, the confusion that masks the forgotten essential event. Julian said to me that he did not share Beckett’s worldview, and yet, there is something in the poetic extremity of each, their purity and the position of the characters they create always on the edge, so it seems, of finally arriving at some great understanding, ever eluding them again. In their theaters, both manifested Artaud. George, who directed Waiting for Godot twice, with his students, argued that Didi and Gogo committed suicide, jumping from the Eiffel Tower before the play began. I argued back, impossible. But Beckett does seem always at the end, final words, last testimony, inchoate, and perhaps all of his characters are already dead, in which case George was correct, and Didi and Gogo had already leapt. And That Time is a man recollecting from the grave the turning points of his life. He remembers each moment well, that time, that time, that time, again, but he has no idea what happened to him, each time he was changed unutterably. Perhaps, he is trying to recount the moment of his dying.
Julian went, emaciated, unable to eat, he had refused anymore to be hooked twelve hours a day to an intravenous feeding machine, he, too, like Barbara, therefore, renounced essential treatment. He said he thought his appetite might return on this tour with George, Judith, Tom, Fred, and Ellen Stewart, to Munich. George took photos of Julian beaming his smile, beneath large dark glasses. No one could guess from the happy face in the photo how close he was to death, though the tour was cut short, the performances in Venice abandoned. Without sufficient nourishment, he grew weak, yet he refused to cart the feeding machine. He would die the next month. He went on, unable to stop. The life force burning into death, stronger as the flesh vanished, a continuous transformation. Julian lived in his final months what he was searching to convey in his last play about dreams. He seemed always exalted in those final days. Always on the verge of wish fulfillment. The insult and cruel dismissal his Sleep play had been left in the past. Julian was a man looking forward—peering into the unknown as he always had been. He was writing. Around him in his last year a community of the self-elect stood, determined to live with him as he died. We understood our privileged place. We have no choice but to continue to transform, until we are lifted from this world.
September 10, 1985:
Last night, Hanon reads Julian’s new poetry at Theater for the New City. Julian is in the hospital and cannot be there. I phone him today to compliment him on his writing. “That’s good to hear,” he says and we speak of a fall and winter spent writing. I am on my way out of town for a reading of my play A Monster Has Stolen the Sun, at Smith College. I tell him I cannot come to the hospital. “Oh,” he says, disappointed, but then, “you will only be gone a long weekend.”
Julian died Saturday, September 14, at 6 pm. I was in rehearsal in Northampton and had not the heart to call until we finished at 9:30, but I knew and my heart was heavy. “Don’t come home, Julian would have wanted the theater work to continue,” Judith said. “Julian was not about being brought down.”
When we spoke the day before I left, he had said, “I’m a little nauseous,” but when I praised his poetry, “Oh, that is good to hear.” We spoke of the cancellation of the Beckett tour. “Venice will still be there when I am ready to go,” he said.
“How did he die, mommy?” asked Carrie Sophia. “He went into a deep sleep, and god came and took him.” He had a cerebral hemorrhage.
When I return on Monday, going straight to the apartment on West End, the reality began to settle. Julian’s sprit seemed and seems still everywhere and we all of us half expect him to arrive. Burst through the door, smiling. “Holy” each one of us. But other people now sat in the corner of the living room on the couch where he sat so often and often I had sat next to him there and reached out and touched his soft feet. Never to touch those feet again. Never to hear that voice. Never. Never. Or as Judith says, “forever” the meaning of the word coming clear to her. People come in and out, Andrea Dworkin, Andre Gregory, Allen Ginsberg, company members from now and before, friends, hangers on.
I leave the shiva to walk with Carrie Sophia in Riverside Park. “Don’t cry, mommy,” the five-year-old says, whom Julian loved who loved him back, “We can still talk to Julian but Julian can only talk to god.”
Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the guitar playing Orthodox rabbi on whom Judith relies, led the packed service at Riverside Memorial Chapel.
But it is of the cemetery that I must write. For never in my life have I experienced a parting such as this. The day dawned soft and hazy, a warm fall day, with the death of the year in the air, the leaves heavy and already beginning to turn, and all of growth being pulled by the force of renewal down toward the earth. Julian, like the Tsaddik he was, died between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. (My father had died, then, too; his Catholic high mass held on the high holy day of the unobserved faith of his wife, with his unbaptized twins sitting next to her.) When I saw the plain wood coffin at the front of the chapel, then I wept for the glorious body bereft of spirit that lay in that box. The spirit hung in the air, Julian’s spirit, freed from the body, taken from us, but not lost to us, loose in the air as if looking for places to settle, in whose heart, in whose soul, in whose mind-body does this part fit, and there was felt among us a general opening up, an expansion of inwardness, a making room for the new spirit to enter, to dwell, the indwelling begun.
The light at the cemetery was clear, noonday light, with an autumnal haze. Almost immediately, the coffin was lowered into the ground, but then the workmen stepped back and Shlomo began todavenandspeak. He said that when Garrick recited the Kaddish, Julian’s soul would enter the body of his son. The sound of the Kaddish rose, the men in the circle speaking in their deep voices the Hebrew words I have just begin to learn. Garrick threw the first handful of earth down onto the coffin and the sound, the sound of soft earth hitting the wooden box which holds the body of our beloved friend, was as if some bell had rung, or that some gates had been opened.
We are being separated. He is being taken, but not taken, we are giving him over to a higher reality in which none of us believe. We each throw earth upon the coffin, sending Julian away from us, sending his body back to the earth and his spirit up into the ether so that he may return, an essence alive and living on in the world, so the flesh becomes spirit, that comes back into us, even as we send him away, casting him out, with our handfuls of dirt, casting him out of life. It was the hardest work any of us had ever done. Who dares throw dirt upon the beloved. Judith says later that when she picked up a handful of dirt all the Antigone performances she had ever done (100s of them) flashed through her mind in one continuous picture. Burial of the beloved. A necessary ritual.
I took handfuls of dirt and bent low over the grave. I wanted to see, to see the coffin. I bent low throwing the dirt slowly, hearing the sound, more final than any other, harsher than a bomb, softer than words of love, and I whispered “I love you” as the earth fell on my beloved.
Garrick picked up a shovel and began the even harder job of shoveling the earth into the grave. A handful of dust seemed like nothing, then, though it had been so difficult to throw it. Now the work began. I was startled and thought, the men will do this, but broken-hearted Serena took a shovel from one of them and then the women knew it was our task, too. I watched Erika with the shovel. Erika who had been with him at the last. Erika with her weak back and her large heart. I watched Mark, and Luke and Elaine and Joni and Renfrew. I shoveled dirt into the grave across from Allen Ginsberg, in rhythm, his shovelful, then mine. I could manage but three or four shovels, my heart gave out, and I handed my shovel over to Mark’s father. The earth kept rising. At first one could see the coffin and I felt we would see the coffin, that all of us would stop here with the coffin exposed and the few piles of dirt on its top. But the earth covered the coffin and then the earth began rise. And we were doing this. We covered the grave. No one spoke, except Elaine whispered to me that the workmen were delighted we were doing their work, four small workmen, gravediggers who stood to the side of the crowd.
It was the hardest thing I had ever done. Julian exacted a certain discipline always from me. He expected me to get better, my writing, my discernment in love. Schlomo began to daven—or perhaps he had been doing so all along. daven==Judith, wrenching herself from her grief, for she had wept and called “Julian, Julian” as the earth fell, Judith began the chord and our voices rose then for a long time. The chord, the Living Theatre signature piece, all of us, our voices rising and falling together as we tune in to each other. And if Julian had left anything unfinished it would be finished by his friends, Shlomo said at the service. When the chord quieted in our throats, Shlomo said, we do not turn our back on a grave, and we began to back up, a widening circle, away from the grave of our beloved, back into the world of the living whose work we resume as we can.
For I cannot explain how the dust stayed on my fingers and I felt the earth seep into my veins. I cannot explain the weight of that shovel, far heavier than anything I ever lifted yet light as a feather, the hardest work I have ever done, like giving birth, the concentration total. I cannot explain the sound of the earth in my ears.
Judith and I, arm in arm, walk on Broadway the next day. “Oh” she cries, “to pass by Cohen’s the local stationery store and not to be able to tell Julian what is on sale.”
I accompanied Judith to Shlomo Carlebach’s shul on Shavuot, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the giving of the Torah to the people. The place was divided, men on one side, women on the other, but on this year for the first time, the Torah was allowed to be carried by the men (god forbid women who menstruate should touch it) through the women’s section, so that it might be kissed by female lips. This was a very a big deal. Judith began to wail. She fell to floor in spasms of agony, shrieking her grief over Julian’s loss in loud, tortured cries. We knew none of the women around us, who witnessed and swayed, as Judith railed on the floor, crying out against the unfairness of death. “She’s going to have a good year,” someone said, “She is letting it all out.” Theirs was a ritual action, as was hers. They witnessed. Judith shrieked. She was not commanded to be silent, to calm; rather her grief further sanctified the moment. We stood silent around her in a circle, making with our bodies the container to hold the unbearable.
What held us all together in those days, an electric current running through our lives, was the idea of transformation, through art and in our own lives. Joseph Chaikin, and George Bartenieff, the two finest theater artists to work with the Living Theatre, were, like Julian Beck, transformational actors, each in his way. I mean instead of “putting it out” (current fashion) by getting “bigger,” “louder,” “jumping about” they opened themselves up and allowed us to witness their depth, vulnerability, and their wonder. George followed Joe into the Living, but they never knew each other well nor did they much like one another. Though invited, George did not join the Open Theater. He felt they did not have a commitment to language, nor to realizing an authored play. Instead, he remained with the Living to perform in The Brig, then went on to perform Beckett and Albee, and to do plays at Judson Poet’s Theater. Joe was another of my early mentors, and I wrote twice about his work. Joe suffered from a chronic heart condition, the result of having had scarlet fever as a young person. He admired my first play about cancer deaths and was instrumental in seeing it staged.
Joe and George followed the Living. Both their esthetics were based on the major tenet of the Living Theatre, the belief that the world Does Not have to be as it is. That We might Transform, Change, Become. Beneath the violence, the hurt, there is a beating heart. And a world of possibility inside of each one on earth. “One is as important as one million,” Judith used to say, speaking of reaching into the audience in a way that caused someone(s) to change. The idea, the certainty that people could change (after all, we all had) drove all of us in those years. Julian, Joe, George each believed fiercely in theater as the means for transformation. Each had a different embodied way of manifesting their belief through their acting. If Julian was the prophet come down from the mountain bearing the news, Joe was the individual epiphany, opening himself before us, revealing the fragile inner life. George was the man who became someone else. His was the humanity, the gift of entering and materializing the other. The Other become Self.
When the Living went into its first long exile in Europe, Joe Chaikin founded The Open Theater, an improvisatory actor’s theater he directed. In 1971, George co-founded Theater for the New City, a place for the staging of new poetic plays, many of them written by women because George, like Julian, believed that the time was right, and that the world needed to listen to and absorb the wisdom of the female voice. Both had women esthetic partners.
We had changed, coming from wherever we’d come to the downtown scene. Even if, raised on the Upper West Side, like Julian, he had renounced a Yale education, wiggled away from privilege, though it was there, a cushion under him, and the Living Theatre, too. Judith, however, and George, were raised in poverty in New York. They brought, through their parents, most especially her father Max Malina, a rabbi, and George’s mother, Irmgard Prym Bartenieff, choreographer and the creator of movement therapy in the US, an understanding of the European avant-garde from between the world wars, a radical intellectual tradition, present in the immigrant communities in New York. Both studied at German émigré Irwin Piscator’s Actor’s Workshop—a radical, like Brecht, and Piscator is also credited with creating the Epic Theater—he, too, had had to flee Germany early. George studied in the children’s program. Judith became the first woman to receive a certificate in directing, instead of in acting, and she had to fight for it. Both their parents like the European immigrant community that so shaped New York were educated, visionary people on the run from racist violence. The commitment ran deep for visionary change, societal and personal. The folly of the Vietnam War, and fury at the nuclear age, marked us all. We experienced internal transformations as we experimented with drugs, sex, radical lifestyles, political action, new forms of love, and as we put the poetry of language and action on the American stage.
Julian never lost his fascination with the radical potential of dreams. He continued to work on Theandric, a compilation of radical poetic exhortations. In Mount Sinai Hospital, July 11, 1984, two months before he died, he wrote the last full entry in his final book:
My Lens
The lens with which I observe, my opera glasses, binoc-
Ulars, telescope, microscope is no casual invention
And I didn’t buy it cheap in a flea market, I’ve been
Polishing it for years, developing my eyesight, sharp
Ening my equipment because I knew when I first began
Going to the theater and looking at the world that
Everything was covered with the fine dust of illusion,
And things were in a disastrous condition because
Nobody could see what was going on. Naturally at a
Certain point in organizing our theory of revolution-
ary process Judith and I declared that the first thing
that needed to be done was to change perception
so that need for change could be perceived. I want
to change everyone’s vision. Those with their eyes
bent to the ground or focused on TV or on public
statues, those in Nietzsche’s mud, are locked out of
their own paradise, tho any of us at any moment
is capable of seeing the face of god, experiencing
satori, flying straight up from rung I to rung X.
I give this lens to you now, what has been observed
Constitutes the substance of this book. The lens,
Like most lenses, had its origin in Holland.
The luminosity and courage of late-stage cancer patients, as the flesh pulls taut to the bone, the only word to describe this is awe—they exude awe for the tortured life they are still fiercely living, and we, awe for them. Certainly Barbara, Julian, and in years later, George. They are all so alive in their dying. Of life so fully. Even as the cancer grinds on, relentless, now. Only their nearest ones witness the physical agony that exists grueling alongside the luminosity they exude.
Ilion Troya, Julian’s lover, recalls vividly after all these years: “I was there to sleep beside him and to hold his back when he was having convulsive bouts of vomiting. Chemotherapy was exhausting, and so was the IV (feeding machine), the hiccups, and yet Julian continued recording Beckett and going to Europe with Nam June Paik to the 1984 Locarno International Film Festival, then the tour with George in Gerald Thomas’s Beckett production to Frankfurt.” When too weak to tour, he finished his book.
I read my diary excerpts at Julian’s memorial service held at the Joyce Theater, November 25, 1985. Among others on the program along with Judith and Garrick Beck were his friends and colleagues, John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Eric Bentley, John Cage, and Ellen Stewart. Allen Ginsberg would speak at the memorial at City Lights Books in San Francisco.
I wrote a published tribute in the local newsletter of the War Resisters League:
“Our beloved Julian Beck, co-founder with Judith Malina of the Living Theatre, died after a long struggle against cancer on Saturday, September 14, in Mount Sinai Hospital. He was sixty years old. Founded in 1947, the Living Theatre is recognized worldwide as a major artistic and pacifist force.
The last year of his life, knowing he was terribly ill, he worked as hard as he had always worked. He wrote 51 poems and the day he entered the hospital, finished his book, Theandric. It tells of how the theatre reveals the divine in humankind. Also in that year, through acting jobs in Hollywood and television, he supported plans to relocate the Living Theatre back in New York, after many years of residence in Europe.
Two weeks after his death, he was seen in “Miami Vice,” playing a (corrupt) New York banker. He gave a speech about money in which the actor’s longing to be free of capitalist restraints upon the human spirit shone through the banal words he spoke. He simply could not help turning everything he touched to art.
His work as a theatre actor, designer, writer, and director inspired several generations. His literary work will inspire many more. He showed us that theatre is a sacral place where through daring acts of the imagination, through brave image and delight we might first realize our dreams of human justice, human love. He knew that creativity is the only antidote to violence.
He was proud. I’ve never met a man more proud. And gentle. With Judith Malina and members of the Living Theatre he was on many picket lines and protests and many times in jail for acts of civil disobedience. He faced death with the same defiant nobility with which he faced all cruel situations in this world. He held death in disdain. It was not a topic upon which he wished to waste one moment of precious life. The theatre he leaves to Judith and to others, after all, is called The Living. And since life was of such inestimable value to him, he had a gift for enormously enriching the lives of others, making us care that much more dearly for ourselves and one another. In this way, as in all others, he was preeminently as man of peace.”
The Nonviolent Activist, Nov/Dec 1985
