Yesterday I considered the near-incest situations of Philip Roth and Woody Allen. In Roth's My Life as a Man, Roth's shadow Nathan Zuckerman marries Lydia Kettering and when she commits suicide he takes up with Monica, who is Lydia's sixteen-year-old daughter by a previous marriage. When Lydia turns twenty-one, Zucerkman proposes marriage but she, wiser than her step-father, declines. I do not know whether Zuckerman's borderline incest had a precedent in Roth's real life. I do know that Roth's doppelganger Woody Allen eventually married Soon-yi Farrow Previn and that he has adopted two children with her. (The woodman now has five offspring in his complex family, including two adopted and one created in the downright way with Mia Farrow. Child-averse Roth seems to have avoided paternity.)
While reading My Life as a Man I've also been watching movies by Nicholas Ray. Last night I saw In a Lonely Place (1950) with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. I recommend it to all who love film. It's tough and intelligent, filled with great dialog, brilliant lighting, excellent music and stylish direction. Trust me, It will hold your interest and give you something to admire. Gloria Grahame steals the show; she's just as good and much more subtle than Humph.
I didn't know anything about Grahame's career and life, so I looked her up on the standard databases. Her life was so unusual that I might even try to track down a biography.
With the Roth/Allen/incest theme on my mind, I discovered these facts about Gloria Grahame. In 1948, Grahame married director Nicholas Ray and gave birth to a son who was named Timothy. She and Ray were divorced; in 1960, Gloria married Anthony Ray, Nicholas Ray's son, and subsequently gave birth to two more boys, Anthony Jr. and James. She had biological children by both father and son and has therefore left incest-flirters Roth and Allen in her dust. What an achievement!
Query: Tim, Anthony Jr, and James are half-brothers -- but are they also uncle and nephew? Half-cousins? Cousins? I never fully grasped the theory of relativity.
Though I would not go so far as to say, even for merely rhetorical emphasis, that Roth and Allen are Doppelgänger, the correspondences and similarities are, indeed, many and striking.
What about other Jewish writers of their generation? Malamud, for example? Another member of this incestuous family?
Posted by: Paul | January 01, 2008 at 03:22 AM