Sinossi
Anne Frank's Diary has been acclaimed throughout the world as an indelible portrait of a gifted girl and as a remarkable document of the Holocaust. For Meyer Levin, the respected writer who helped bring the Diary to an American audience, the Jewish girl's moving story became a thirty-year obsession that altered his life and brought him heartbreaking sorrow.
Lawrence Graver's fascinating account of Meyer Levin's ordeal is a story within a story. What began as a warm collaboration between Levin and Anne's father, Otto Frank, turned into a notorious dispute that lasted several decades and included litigation and public scandal. Behind this story is another: one man's struggle with himself—as a Jew and as a writer—in postwar America. Looming over both stories is the shadow of the Holocaust and its persistent, complex presence in our lives.
Graver's book is based on hundreds of unpublished documents and on interviews with some of the Levin-Frank controversy's major participants. It illuminates important areas of American culture: publishing, law, religion, politics, and the popular media. The "Red Scare," anti-McCarthyism, and the commercial imperatives of Broadway are all players in this book, along with the assimilationist mood among many Jews and the simplistic pieties of American society in the 1950s.
Graver also examines the different and often conflicting ways that people the world over, Jewish and Gentile, wanted Anne Frank and her much-loved book to be represented. That her afterlife has in extraordinary ways taken on the shape and implications of myth makes Graver's story—and Meyer Levin's—even more compelling.
Lawrence Graver's fascinating account of Meyer Levin's ordeal is a story within a story. What began as a warm collaboration between Levin and Anne's father, Otto Frank, turned into a notorious dispute that lasted several decades and included litigation and public scandal. Behind this story is another: one man's struggle with himself—as a Jew and as a writer—in postwar America. Looming over both stories is the shadow of the Holocaust and its persistent, complex presence in our lives.
Graver's book is based on hundreds of unpublished documents and on interviews with some of the Levin-Frank controversy's major participants. It illuminates important areas of American culture: publishing, law, religion, politics, and the popular media. The "Red Scare," anti-McCarthyism, and the commercial imperatives of Broadway are all players in this book, along with the assimilationist mood among many Jews and the simplistic pieties of American society in the 1950s.
Graver also examines the different and often conflicting ways that people the world over, Jewish and Gentile, wanted Anne Frank and her much-loved book to be represented. That her afterlife has in extraordinary ways taken on the shape and implications of myth makes Graver's story—and Meyer Levin's—even more compelling.
Le informazioni nella sezione "Riassunto" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo.
Informazioni sull?autore
Lawrence Graver is Professor of English at Williams College. He is the author of Conrad's Short Fiction (1969), Carson McCullers (1969), Beckett: The Critical Heritage (1979), and Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot (1989).
Dalla quarta di copertina
"Lawrence Graver's book is a precise and generous account of dreadful obsession, in which deep issues are reduced by paranoia into misery all around—and work for many lawyers. It's sad, true to my knowledge of Meyer Levin and others enmeshed in the history—infinitely sad."—Herbert Gold, author of Fathers
"Beautifully and poignantly told, this story holds a mirror up to American Jewry's own coming to terms with the Holocaust. It is by turns captivating and heartbreaking, the story of both Levin's obsession and his search for Jewish and American identity after the Holocaust. In this literary history, Lawrence Graver also reanimates the diary itself, returning it to the time and place from which it was torn fifty years ago."—James Young, author of Writing and Re-writing the Holocaust and TheTexture of Memory
"A gripping account, easy to read in one or two sittings, hard to put down. The balance between sympathy for Levin and criticism of his mounting obsession is exquisitely established and beautifully maintained, culminating in remarkable insight."—Morris Dickstein, author of Gates of Eden
"Beyond Anne Frank is so beautiful and thoughtfully written that I really couldn't put it down. Diane Wolf's voice is human and humanistic, without glossing over any painful realities. She probes the subject from an impressive array of angles, considering a wide variety of types of experiences. This book is extraordinarily fine and I enthusiastically recommend it."—Lynn Davidman, author of Motherloss
"Beautifully and poignantly told, this story holds a mirror up to American Jewry's own coming to terms with the Holocaust. It is by turns captivating and heartbreaking, the story of both Levin's obsession and his search for Jewish and American identity after the Holocaust. In this literary history, Lawrence Graver also reanimates the diary itself, returning it to the time and place from which it was torn fifty years ago."—James Young, author of Writing and Re-writing the Holocaust and TheTexture of Memory
"A gripping account, easy to read in one or two sittings, hard to put down. The balance between sympathy for Levin and criticism of his mounting obsession is exquisitely established and beautifully maintained, culminating in remarkable insight."—Morris Dickstein, author of Gates of Eden
"Beyond Anne Frank is so beautiful and thoughtfully written that I really couldn't put it down. Diane Wolf's voice is human and humanistic, without glossing over any painful realities. She probes the subject from an impressive array of angles, considering a wide variety of types of experiences. This book is extraordinarily fine and I enthusiastically recommend it."—Lynn Davidman, author of Motherloss
Dal risvolto di copertina interno
"Lawrence Graver's book is a precise and generous account of dreadful obsession, in which deep issues are reduced by paranoia into misery all aroundand work for many lawyers. It's sad, true to my knowledge of Meyer Levin and others enmeshed in the historyinfinitely sad."Herbert Gold, author of Fathers
"Beautifully and poignantly told, this story holds a mirror up to American Jewry's own coming to terms with the Holocaust. It is by turns captivating and heartbreaking, the story of both Levin's obsession and his search for Jewish and American identity after the Holocaust. In this literary history, Lawrence Graver also reanimates the diary itself, returning it to the time and place from which it was torn fifty years ago."James Young, author ofWriting and Re-writing the Holocaust and TheTexture of Memory
"A gripping account, easy to read in one or two sittings, hard to put down. The balance between sympathy for Levin and criticism of his mounting obsession is exquisitely established and beautifully maintained, culminating in remarkable insight."Morris Dickstein, author of Gates of Eden
"Beyond Anne Frank is so beautiful and thoughtfully written that I really couldn't put it down. Diane Wolf's voice is human and humanistic, without glossing over any painful realities. She probes the subject from an impressive array of angles, considering a wide variety of types of experiences. This book is extraordinarily fine and I enthusiastically recommend it."Lynn Davidman, author ofMotherloss
"Beautifully and poignantly told, this story holds a mirror up to American Jewry's own coming to terms with the Holocaust. It is by turns captivating and heartbreaking, the story of both Levin's obsession and his search for Jewish and American identity after the Holocaust. In this literary history, Lawrence Graver also reanimates the diary itself, returning it to the time and place from which it was torn fifty years ago."James Young, author ofWriting and Re-writing the Holocaust and TheTexture of Memory
"A gripping account, easy to read in one or two sittings, hard to put down. The balance between sympathy for Levin and criticism of his mounting obsession is exquisitely established and beautifully maintained, culminating in remarkable insight."Morris Dickstein, author of Gates of Eden
"Beyond Anne Frank is so beautiful and thoughtfully written that I really couldn't put it down. Diane Wolf's voice is human and humanistic, without glossing over any painful realities. She probes the subject from an impressive array of angles, considering a wide variety of types of experiences. This book is extraordinarily fine and I enthusiastically recommend it."Lynn Davidman, author ofMotherloss
Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.
An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary
By Lawrence GraverUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1997 Lawrence GraverAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0520201248
1
"Some day A Teller Would Arise"
The American writer Meyer Levin first read Le Journal de Anne Frank in August of 1950, when he was living with his second wife, Tereska Torres, and two children in the upstairs of a bus driver's cottage on the Côte d'Azur near Antibes. Torres, herself a writer, had heard about the stir the translation from the Dutch had made when it was published in Paris that spring, and she bought a copy for her husband at a local bookstore. Years later she recalled what she said as she handed it to him:"Tiens, c'est un cadeau. Il paraît que c'est un livre extraordinaire. Le journal, tenu pendant la guerre, d'une petite fille morte à Bergen-Belsen, à quinze ans "—an offering that would haunt both of them in different ways for the rest of their lives.1 Reading Anne Frank's diary astonished and provoked Levin. Not only was the spirited young girl telling an engrossing story about herself and her family at a convulsive moment in recent European history, but her account and her fate unex-
Les maisons hantées de Meyer Levin , 42.
pectedly touched Levin's deepest feelings about his own identity as a Jew, an American, and a writer.
Levin was forty-four, and although he was reasonably well known as a novelist and newspaper correspondent, his position in the postwar literary world was far from secure. He was not, by his own admission, "much of a literary master. My gifts are basically in the urge towards honest expression and in empathy."2 "My readership," he told a friend at this time, is "faithful but not too numerous," and he spoke often of a constant "scrambling for income," of doing "a bit of everything" to earn a living: magazine articles, opinion columns, radio scripts, film and television work, translating, and ghostwriting. Two decades earlier, Levin had done a great deal of journalism (mainly for the Chicago Daily News and Esquire ) and published six novels in swift succession, each a distinctive and promising accomplishment in its own right but none a financial success. Reporter (1929) refashioned the brassy documentary techniques of Dos Passos to depict and expose the speed-driven world of modern newspapers. Frankie and Johnny (1930) was a spare, affecting story of ill-fated teenage romance in an urban setting. Yehuda (1931), based on Levin's own early visits to Palestine, was the first novel in English to dramatize the clash between individual and group concerns on a modern kibbutz. Two years later, The New Bridge offered a stark picture of the lives of an unemployed construction worker and his family evicted from a tenement at the beginning of the Depression. In 1937, Levin published what many readers thought (and still think) was his best book, The Old Bunch , a densely textured chronicle of the inter-
Introduction to unpublished first draft of The Fanatic (BU).
twined lives of two dozen young Chicago-born Jews (children of immigrant West Siders), which James T. Farrell called "one of the most serious and ambitious novels yet produced by the current generation of American novelists" (Saturday Review of Literature , 13 March 1937). And Citizens (1940) was a vigorous fictional response to the 1937 strike and subsequent Memorial Day police shooting of workers at the Republic Steel Company plant outside Chicago.
Although these works had received mixed reviews and did not sell especially well, as a group they established Levin's reputation as one of the most able and enterprising young novelists of the 1930s, and The Old Bunch became a favorite book for many readers. The early interest in his fiction was a response in part to the energy and range of his social realism, but also to the fact that almost alone among the writers of the period, he seemed to be on the verge of shaping "a career" as an American novelist writing frequently and convincingly about the tensions of Jewish life. In the 1920s and 1930s, the commercial market for literature with any ethnic subject matter was both limited and extremely sensitive, and very few Jewish writers were able to make a living or to sustain a body of work. Elmer Rice and Clifford Odets in the New York theater might be considered exceptions, but the situation for novelists was less promising. Ludwig Lewisohn and Anzia Yezierska both gained followings in the 1920s, but either the quality or the volume of their work dropped off after that. Michael Gold's Jews Without Money (1930) was widely noticed, but he remained primarily an essayist. Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934), now prized as one of the splendid novels of the period, sold about four thousand copies in the thirties, and Roth did not publish another novel until 1994. The three books that make up
the fresh, wryly disenchanted Williamsburg trilogy of Daniel Fuchs sold four hundred, four hundred, and twelve hundred copies between 1934 and 1938, and he abandoned fiction for screenwriting until the 1970s.3
At the beginning of his career, Levin himself was hesitant about using his own experiences as a Jew in his fiction. After writing some ethnic sketches and stories ("Roosevelt Road" and "A Seder") for the Menorah Journal and other magazines, he also worried about being labeled parochial and limiting the potential audience for his work, and he deliberately concealed the Jewish origins of the characters in his first two books. But after basing his third novel, Yehuda , on his formative visits to Palestine, he began writing with increasing frequency and openness about the problems of acculturation and self-definition for Jews in Chicago and elsewhere. Once he did, however, he too suffered from the timidity and the often biased, narrow, or nervous tastes of publishers and readers. One editor called on him to diversify the eth-
Daniel Fuchs, "Author's Preface," Three Novels , p. vii. Forty years after Levin published his first fiction, he provided a vivid description of what the marketplace had been like when he first began to write: "The magazines were cold to [Jewish] material, and book publishers avoided it with the same avidity with which they were to pursue it three decades later. It was felt that non-Jewish readers would not care to identify with Jewish fictional characters and that even Jewish readers preferred to identify with 'real Americans' in fiction. As a result, some talented writers who had begun quite naturally by writing about people with backgrounds with which they were familiar soon abandoned Jewish material or falsified it. They gave Jewish characters in their imaginative vision new, characterless names like Dick Benson or Jane Meredith, and homey Dr. Shapiro could always be endowed with a country twang and changed into Dr. Carmichael." Introduction to The Rise of American Jewish Literature , edited by Levin and Charles Angoff, 10-11.
nic identity of his characters in The Old Bunch , arguing that the book would be more typically American if it consisted of a melange of nationalities ("a few Irish, an Italian or two, and maybe a Greek") rather than a homogeneous group of Jews. The publisher of Citizens tried to get him to change the doctor protagonist from a Jew into a gentile to make the book more salable. Jewish readers themselves often complained of Levin's blunt treatment of the personal problems of Chicago Jews; Jews, they felt, should not be quite so obtrusive in fiction, and writers not so candid. Levin's newspaper and magazine work was also affected. In 1939, while he was writing film criticism for Esquire , the magazine received complaints that it was publishing too many articles by leftists and Jews. One of the awkward, if playful, editorial responses was to run Levin's film criticism under the byline of Paterson Murphy, a decision that led his friend Ernest Hemingway to quip: "The hand is the hand of Meyer but the foreskin is the foreskin of Paterson Murphy" (undated letter, circa 1939, at Bu). But Levin persisted, and he was gradually able, after works as exotic as Yehuda and The Golden Mountain (a path-breaking collection of translated Hasidic tales) and as robust and absorbing as The Old Bunch , to create a modest audience for stories from a discerning American point of view about the way Jews lived then and in the recent past.
Just at the point when Levin seemed ready for what might be a breakthrough book, the progress of his career as a fiction writer was interrupted by America's entrance into the war against Germany and Japan. A strong-minded non-Communist progressive, Levin had always been responsive to calls for social action. As a newspaperman, he had reported firsthand on the civil war in Spain and on the mounting hostilities between
Arabs and Jews in Palestine; as a novelist, he was often praised for his sensitivity to proletarian distress in The New Bridge and Citizens . After Pearl Harbor, Levin felt a compelling need to play an active role. Getting an assignment at thirty-six was not going to be easy, but, as he liked to say, the fight against fascism could be fought without a gun, and he believed that for his writing to have currency and usefulness afterward, he would have to experience the war in an immediate way.
Levin also had strong personal reasons for wanting to get closer to the actions and passions of his time. In 1935, following a string of unsatisfactory romances and affairs, he had hastily married a twenty-year-old widow, Mable Schamp Foy, whose first husband had died of typhoid a few weeks after their wedding. She was a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Chicago; Levin had been a prize student there and was making his reputation in the city as a newspaperman and novelist. At first they seemed well matched: both very smart, good-looking, high-spirited, ambitious; but it soon became clear that each had come to the other on the rebound, and each was trying to exorcise someone else (in his case a fervently idealized teenage love who had rejected him). Although they were active in radical politics and went to Spain together to support the Loyalists in the civil war, their relationship steadily dissolved into conflict and mutual infidelity. Although they had a child in 1938, by the early forties they were estranged and soon divorced.4
For Levin, then, the commotion of the public sphere in
Mable Foy remarried after her divorce from Levin, and she committed suicide in 1951. For information about her, I am indebted to her son, Eli Levin. Meyer Levin married Tereska Torres on 25 March 1948.
1941-42 was a distraction and an escape, as well as a challenge. He went first to Washington and found work as a writer and director with a group of documentary filmmakers at the Office of War Information. Crisscrossing the country making movies in factories and housing sites to show activity on the home front, he was exhilarated by the strength of civilian commitment—and also relieved at not having to deal in imaginative work with the more difficult problems of conflicted Jewish identity in America, which had been emerging as the dominant subject matter of his fiction before the war. In 1943 Levin was assigned to London to write propaganda pamphlets for the Psychological Warfare Division, and he then worked for the Overseas News Agency and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency as a battle correspondent in France. It was in this role as reporter that Levin found the subject that was destined to shape the rest of his writing life. As he was to put it in his memoir, In Search (1950), "There was one story, in Europe, which I was peculiarly fitted to tell. It was the story of the fate of the Jews. Now at last as the continent was opened we would be able to discover the facts behind the gruesome rumors of mass slaughter and slavery that had been coming out of Europe" (169-70).
Assigned mainly to the Ninth Air Force and the Fourth Armored Division between September 1944 and June I945, Levin took every opportunity to report on what the Germans had done to the Jews as more and more specific details about their already widely reported genocidal campaign were confirmed. When a concentration camp or killing center was liberated, he tried to go there, and he was among the first Americans to see the piles of dead and the devastated living at Ohrdruf, Nordhausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Bergen-
Belsen. Encountering the camps touched the deepest sources of horror, anguish, and fear in his personality, and changed him for good. As he was later to say, "Human beings had had it in them to do this, and we were of the same species."
His first response to the shock was to establish himself as a legman, a reporter who gathers information by being present at the event. He faithfully sent home spare dispatches: the who, what, when, where of what he described in a report from Buchenwald on 2 May 1945 as "the greatest systematic mass murder in the history of mankind." At the same time, he moved around recording the names of the dead, the deported, the survivors. Approaching emaciated inmates or refugees, he would ask them to write down their names, where they came from, and the address of one person they most urgently wanted to contact. So persistent was Levin in attempting to account for the living and dead Jews that survivors would crowd around his jeep and try to write their names on the hood, on the fenders, until the vehicle was covered with scrawls in Hebrew and Roman characters.
But despite his steady efforts to send dispatches back to America and to serve also as a kind of self-appointed, one-man social agency, tallying the names and numbers of survivors across France and Germany, Levin knew only too well that the events he was trying to register and respond to had a horror and a breadth of malignant implication that he would not be able to render. "From the beginning," he later confessed,
I realized I would never be able to write the story of the Jews of Europe. This tragic epic cannot be written by a stranger to the experience, for the survivors have an augmented view
which we cannot attain; they lived so long so close with death that on a moral plane they are like people who have acquired the hearing of a whole range of tones outside normal human hearing. . . . As I groped in the first weeks, beginning to apprehend the monstrous shape of the story I would have to tell, I knew already that I would never penetrate its heart of bile, for the magnitude of this horror seemed beyond human register. My comprehension seemed to me like an electrical instrument whose needle has only a limited range, while the charge goes far beyond. Occasionally I could tell a story that gave a tangential glimpse into the hearts of the survivors. Some day a teller would arise from amongst themselves. (In Search , 173-74)
The belief that "some day a teller would arise from amongst themselves" became something of an idée fixe for Levin during his last weeks in Europe and in the months following his return to the United States. By this time, he had committed himself to the task of writing to help Americans realize the nature of the catastrophe inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews of Europe and to get people to reflect on its meaning for the postwar world. He also dedicated a good deal of time to assisting survivors who wanted to get to Palestine, a journey that under the British mandate was then illegal. In 1946, as a correspondent in Tel Aviv, Levin reported on the strife and terror accompanying Jewish resistance to British rule. And then in 1947-48, at considerable physical risk and financial sacrifice, he made two courageous films: My Father's House , the story of a child who goes to Palestine after the war, hoping to find the father from whom he had been separated in a concentration camp in Poland; and, with Tereska Torres, The Illegals , a documentary account of the actual clandestine voyage of a ship transporting
Jewish survivors to the Holy Land. He also translated a group diary that had been kept by inmates at Buchenwald, and he rewrote the screenplay of My Father's House and published it as a novel.
Throughout this period, Levin encountered some of the same difficulty getting his work to audiences that he had met in the early part of his career. The managers of the Overseas News Agency told him he could not report from the emerging state of Israel because they felt a non-Jewish byline would be more credible in America; financial backing for the two film projects was enormously difficult to obtain, and Levin worked at virtually no pay on both projects; and when the editing of Illegals was finished, he found it almost impossible (because of red tape, disputes, and indifference) to get the film widely distributed and shown in Europe or elsewhere. Yet despite the hazards and obstacles, Levin's determination to respond in as many ways as possible to the consequences of the German attempt to exterminate the Jews became a shaping emotional and intellectual fact of his life.
It also became something of a major personal predicament. Although he called the making of The Illegals his richest and most rewarding experience, he felt, too, that after having returned to ancestral Poland and having confronted Buchenwald and other camps, he had come to "the end of a stage in my journey toward self-realization. . . . I had told all I could find to tell, shown all there was to show. Now, like every Jew, I needed to come to a new understanding of myself in relation to Israel" (476). Yet after a brief return visit to Tel Aviv and to the kibbutz on which he had twice spent several months in the
late 1920s, Levin was convinced that his destiny was to remain an American writer writing about Jews, not a citizen of the emerging new Jewish state. His commitment was to the larger Jewish community, Jews past and present, not to Jews in a specific physical place, however revered. He saw himself more and more as a bicultural writer, not so much divided as enriched by the imaginative possibilities of traditional Jewish life and of contemporary experience in America.
Levin's most valuable expression of this dilemma (and of the potential inherent in it) is his imposing work of self-inquiry, confession, and explanation In Search , written in 1948-49. Divided into three sections—"America: The Self-Accused," "Europe: The Witnesses," and "Israel: The Released"—the book is nothing less than Levin's attempt to come to terms with his identity and the condition of being a Jew in the mid twentieth century. In Part One, he explores the consequences of his shame and his fear of Jewishness as a boy and young writer in Chicago. In Part Two, he depicts his life during the war and tries to measure the impact of the Holocaust on his sense of himself and his future. In Part Three, he describes his major efforts (in My Father's House and The Illegals ) to call attention to the struggles of surviving European Jews to refashion their lives in mandate Palestine and the new state of Israel.
Levin wrote In Search as if his life depended on it, and in important ways it did. Not only was the memoir meant to be therapeutic—an attempt to discover an emotional and intellectual equilibrium that had always eluded him—but it was also designed to be his "big book," the magnum opus that The Old Bunch and Citizens seemed to promise but that the war had
apparently delayed. From the moment he submitted In Search for publication, however, Levin's worst suspicions about his place in the literary scene in America were confirmed and intensified. Although editors found the manuscript forthright and often moving, they were put off by what they saw as Levin's relentless preoccupation with Jewish victimization and self-hatred, notably his indignation at his own difficulties getting fiction published and films distributed.
In early 1949, In Search was rejected by several important New York publishers. Random House found it "overburdened with resentment and a conviction of having been wronged." Viking called it verbose and self-indulgent, marred by "too much complaining about bad luck and persecution for being Jewish." Farrar, Straus turned it down for similar reasons. When Levin pressed Random House, Saxe Commins (who praised the memoir's urgency) explained that too much time was spent rehashing tedious quarrels with publishers and producers. "The reading public has little interest in the rows and grudges incidental to the production of a movie, a book, or almost anything else that they want to purchase for amusement, improvement or instruction." The manuscript, he told Levin, "leaves the impression that a particular person, yourself, had a hell of a time with everybody" (letter, 1 April 1949, BU).
Late in the year, Crown and Company accepted the book, but when Levin refused to make changes and cuts, the publishers withdrew the acceptance, fearing lawsuits and a bulky work that might not sell. At this point, frustrated and furious, Levin decided to have the manuscript printed in Paris at his own expense, "so it won't lose timeliness and die of old
age" (28 January 95o, BU). Shortly after the book was printed in Paris, it was finally accepted by Horizon Press, a little-known house in New York, and it appeared in early summer 1950.
The rejections of In Search and the cheerless history of its publication turned out to have unfortunate, lasting consequences for Levin's writing career. Although he had earlier met with resistance from people in publishing, he usually explained his bad luck and small financial success as the result of the Depression and the inexperience or mismanagement of the people who produced and marketed his work. Now, after the disapproval of what he believed to be his most intimate, venturesome, and important book (a book about his quest for authentic identity as a Jew), he became convinced that there was something far more personal involved: an antagonism to who he was, to his view of the world and his way of expressing it. "At bottom," he concluded, "it was the same old Jewish question," and he saw himself locked in a struggle with people whose prejudices kept them from recognizing his talent and potential and prevented him from communicating with the public.5 The editors and publishers, some of them Jewish, came to a very different conclusion, frequently describing Levin as suspicious, hypersensitive to criticism, obstinate—an increasingly difficult author with whom to work. Even friends noted his increasing outbursts of bitterness, one of them remembering "the atmosphere of palpable suffering binding you like a
In an early unpublished draft of The Obsession , then called The Manipulators (BU).
shroud." "I hope," this friend wrote in a letter to Levin, "you solve the problems, financial and emotional, which may obstruct your creative fiction."6
Yet despite these strains and the deteriorating situation, Levin felt entirely dedicated to his role as bicultural writer, and he turned with renewed vigor to develop two new film projects about Israel for the English and American market: the first, The Hidden Word , a script about the siege of Jerusalem and the opening of the emergency road to Tel Aviv, which he hoped to combine with a plot about the finding of a set of ancient scrolls like those from the Dead Sea; and the second, Song of Israel a film based on Yehuda (his novel about a violin player on a kibbutz) that would star Yehudi Menuhin. For neither of these ventures was Levin finally able to get sufficient financial support, and his run of bad luck continued. The only book he could sell at the time was his translation of Tereska Torres's Women's Barracks . The Russian Boris Morros, who was supposed to have produced Song of Israel , turned out to be (unknown to Levin and Menuhin) a double agent for the United States and Soviet Union, who was using the film as a cover for spying on Soviet spies and had no intention of providing any money.
It was just when this string of failures and disappointments occurred and the early sales of In Search in Paris and New York were meager that Levin first read Le Journal de Anne Frank . Here, he immediately felt, was the teller he had predicted would materialize—a voice from among the dead he himself had seen at Bergen-Belsen. "As I read," he recalled, "I must
Undated letter from Alan Marcus (BU).
have gazed down on the body of this young girl. . . . The voice reached me from the pit."7 As he was later to explain in a deposition for the Supreme Court of the State of New York, "It seemed to me that the girl's diary contained the elements by which the world could finally and clearly absorb the enormity of the mass murders perpetrated by the Nazis. It had a passion similar to mine in setting down truly the lives of these people and it reflected in particular the tragedy of the times as they affected the development of the young."8 As far as Levin knew, the Dutch text had appeared in translation only in French. If he could help make the diary available to English and American readers, he might obtain some financial advantage while furthering his mission of conveying the meaning of the Nazi atrocities to people who had previously been insulated from them.
On 8 September 1950, Levin wrote of his admiration to Calmann-Lèvy, the French publisher of Le Journal de Anne Frank , inquired about English and American rights, and asked for the address of the book's agent. Oddly, Tereska Torres, without mentioning it, had also written to praise the book. The publisher sent both letters to Otto Frank, the girl's father, who wrote back to explain the current situation regarding publication in various countries. In letters and later conversations with the Levins, Frank, who was in the process of moving to Switzerland (where his mother and other members of his family lived), recounted the early history of his dead daughter's book.
Introduction to unpublished first draft of The Fanatic (BU).
Deposition given by Meyer Levin, 21 February I956, in Levin v. Frank (SCSNY).
On 4 August 1944, when the German and Dutch security police had broken into the apartment behind his business on the Prinsengracht to arrest the eight Jews who had hidden there for more than two years, they emptied a briefcase in a search for valuables, and the child's diary, exercise books and assorted papers were strewn on the floor. Later that day, after the prisoners had been taken for questioning, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, the Christian women who (with Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, and Jan Gies) had kept the Jews alive in hiding, went back upstairs into the apartment and gathered the loose books and papers in the event that anyone should ever want them. In the summer of 1945, following his liberation from Auschwitz, Otto Frank (the only member of the fugitive group to survive the death camps) returned to the house and was eventually told of the existence of his daughter's diary. At first, he could hardly bear to read it, but when he did he was so stirred that he began copying out sections he thought would interest relatives and friends. Since parts of the diary existed in several versions, Frank served as an editor as well as a transcriber. In addition to choosing between different renderings, he omitted passages that fell generally into four categories: those that might offend living people, those that reflected negatively on his dead wife, those that were extremely intimate, and those that he thought trivial and of little import. What he copied he also translated into German to send to his mother in Basel, who did not know Dutch.
When relatives and friends read the selections from the diary, they were at once convinced of its exceptional value as both a document of the war and an absorbing story of a lively young girl's maturation, and they urged Frank to try to publish
it. At first, he thought the manuscript would attract little attention outside the immediate family, but he was persuaded to allow friends to make inquiries. In the winter of 1945-46, several Dutch publishers turned the book down. But in early April 1946, the Amsterdam paper Her Parool printed on its front page an eloquent article by the eminent historian Jan Romein, praising the unpublished diary as a strikingly graphic account of daily life in wartime and a revelation of the "real hideousness of Fascism," which had destroyed the life of a richly endowed, effervescent young girl. Publishers responded quickly, and Otto Frank signed with Uitgeverji Contact to issue Her Achterhuis [The House Behind ] in a small edition the following June.
The Dutch reviews were uniformly enthusiastic, and in less than three years Het Achterhuis was reprinted five times, selling more than twenty-five thousand copies. Posthumously, Anne Frank had become the best-known child in Holland, and her sixty-year-old father had surprisingly found himself the busy, dedicated guardian of her expanding fame. As an experienced businessman, Otto Frank appreciated the sales potential of his daughter's remarkable book, and as a decent, compassionate man, mourning the loss of his family and friends, he hoped that her dark story but bright character might have some positive moral meaning for postwar readers. On the strength of the diary's popularity in Holland, he was able to arrange for a French edition to appear in the spring of 1950 and for a German imprint to be scheduled around Christmas, but as Frank explained to Levin in September, British and American houses had as yet shown no interest. In England, the book had been rejected by Gollanz, Heinemann, Allen and Unwin, Macmillan, and Secker and Warburg; in the United States, it had been
turned down by Scribners, Viking, Vanguard, Simon and Schuster, Appleton Century, Schocken, Knopf, Harper, and Harcourt. There was no market for special-interest war books, Frank had been told, and besides, few readers in England or America could be expected to buy the prosaic diary of a teenage Dutch girl whose life ended so unhappily.
Despite these rejections, Frank explained, he had not lost confidence in the book's value and usefulness, and his Paris agent was still trying to arrange for publication in England and America. Thus he could not at this time give Levin an option on rights. Besides, Random House in New York had recently indicated that they might consider joining in a mutual arrangement with a British firm for publication in both countries, and Frank wanted to pursue this new possibility. Levin replied that his concern with the diary was not commercial but rather emotional and sympathetic, and he offered to translate it to help call attention to the book in New York. Such an opportunity, he said, would be a mitzvah, a good deed. He also told Otto Frank that he believed there was material for "a very touching play or film in the Diary," and he asked for permission to suggest this to his contacts in the field when he returned to New York in mid-October. Finally, he sent along a copy of In Search to give Frank some sense of his personal history and his understanding of, and commitment to, the postwar predicament of the European Jews.
Frank confessed that he did not perceive any theatrical or cinematic possibilities in his daughter's diary. For him, the appeal of the book lay in the uncommonly intimate, honest manner in which the young girl expressed her thoughts and feelings, and he worried that a filmmaker would feel compelled
to emphasize the excitement and thrills of a story about people in hiding in order to entertain an audience. If Levin saw it differently, however, he should feel free to make inquiries once he was back in the States.
In New York in October, Levin did begin contacting people in theater and film, and over the next months he wrote scores of letters to agents, producers, and directors, among them Darryl Zanuck, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis de Rochemont, Stanley Kramer, Dore Schary, and Fred Zinnemann, but he could not obtain any definite commitment. In mid-November, he continued his campaign to publicize the diary itself by writing an essay called "The Restricted Market" for Congress Weekly (the journal of the American Jewish Congress). Here he recounted the discovery and European publication of Anne Frank's book in the context of a discussion of the attitudes among American publishers toward works prominently about Jews. He observed that the recent appearance of John Hersey's The Wall had led some people to believe that the resistance to books with a Jewish subject was diminishing, but he then went on to describe the success of the Anne Frank diary in Holland and France and its surprising rejection by a large number of eminent publishers in America. Following an account of his own frustrations with the many rejections of In Search , and of the way the memoir had been ignored by some reviewers even after its publication, he ended with a call for a continued fight for attention.
Although the primary aims of Levin's piece were to register a complaint about the treatment of his own memoir and to urge people to continue to press for the publication of Jewish books, "The Restricted Market" did have the valuable effect of calling attention to the existence of the Anne Frank diary, even men-
tioning the likelihood that a British and an American publisher would soon share translation and typesetting costs to bring the book out in both countries (a plan that was shortly to fall through). By coincidence, Levin's piece appeared on the same day (11 November 1950) as Janet Flanner's New Yorker "Letter from Paris," which described Le Journal de Anne Frank as one of the most widely and seriously read books in France. Given the different size of the readerships of the New Yorker and Congress Weekly , Flanner's article was likely to call more attention to Anne Frank in America than Levin's, but nonetheless his essay played a useful role in making readers aware of the worth of the book and its importance as a historical document of the Nazi assault on the Jews.
Aside from Levin's efforts, there had been several other positive developments. In September, the London firm of Vallentine, Mitchell wrote to Frank's Paris agent asking for information about English rights, and Levin helped follow this up by talking with the firm when he was in London. In November, a Dutch refugee writer, Dola de Jong, sent the editors at Little, Brown in Boston copies of the Janet Flanner New Yorker piece and the Levin article from Congress Weekly . Frank encouraged both the London and the Boston publishers, and for some weeks it looked as if a joint effort might be possible. On 22 November, Ned Bradford of Little, Brown wired Frank:
This is definite offer to publish Anne Frank diary in US. Excellent chance simultaneous British publication. $500 advance against royalties on signing contract, additional $500 when MS delivered by translator. $1,000 trans fee charged against future royalties. Royalty rate 10% on $3 selling price, first 5,000 copies. Royalty rate 12 1/2 on next 5,000, 15% over
10,000. Prefer Dola de Jong translate. Would think eventual sale of 25,000 not exaggerated expectation. Much enthusiasm for book here. (BU)
Frank accepted both offers by the end of the month, but disagreements arose almost immediately about various aspects of the proposed copublication scheme. Vallentine, Mitchell and Frank did not like the Dola de Jong translation, and disputes emerged over other issues of production and promotion, such as which printing plates should be used and which firm should get the rights to the Canadian market. But the most troublesome sticking point for Otto Frank had to do with dramatic and film rights. Little, Brown insisted on both; Vallentine, Mitchell cared about neither; and Frank, influenced by Levin's urgings about the dramatic potential of the story, finally decided to go ahead separately with the London firm (which he did in January 1951) and, after protracted negotiations, to cancel the contract with Little, Brown in late March. Vallentine, Mitchell did publish the British edition of the Diary in May of the following year.
While all this was going on, another American firm had come forward in the bidding for U.S. rights. In January 1950, Francis Price, the head of Doubleday's Paris office, was shown an advance copy of Le Journal de Anne Frank by the writer Manes Sperber, who advised Calmann-Lévy. At first, Price thought the volume of little importance—a kids' book by a kid—and told his assistant, Judith Bailey, to send it back. Instead, she read it with mounting enthusiasm and urged Price to take another look. He did and eventually advised the editors in New York to consider making an offer. The Doubleday peo-
ple came actively back into the picture just when negotiations were breaking down between Vallentine, Mitchell; Little, Brown; and Otto Frank. Even though Levin had advised Frank to stay with Little, Brown because it had the higher literary reputation, Frank decided to accept a similar offer from Doubleday and signed with that firm in late April 1951; the book was published just over a year later, in June 1952.
The details and the precise chronology here are especially important because in the subsequent dispute between Levin and Frank that led to two notorious law suits, Levin gave a different account of the events and the matters on which he and Frank had agreed. He later maintained that he was instrumental in getting the Anne Frank diary accepted for publication in the United States; and in a 1956 court deposition he claimed that in or about the summer of 1950, he and Frank had "entered into an agreement" that had four major points: (1) Levin would represent Frank's interest in the United States in regard to the Diary . (2) He would negotiate, as Frank's exclusive agent, with theatrical producers for a play and film to be made from the book. (3) He would attempt to obtain a producer "of prominence and capability." (4) And in sole consideration therefore, he also would have the right to write a play based on the Diary .9
Frank was subsequently to challenge the accuracy of several of the claims in Levin's account. He contended that their early arrangement was a good deal more general and vague: more like a willingness on his part to allow Levin to make inquiries about the theatrical potentiality of the material than like a
Ibid.
binding agreement about agency and the right to produce a dramatic adaptation of the Diary . Levin could counter with the point that Frank did sign a letter dated 31 March 1952 authorizing him to negotiate for motion picture, television, radio, and dramatic adaptation for a period of one year, but in that letter there was no mention of the right to adapt the Diary . Some of the acrimony that was to develop between the two men can be traced to their contentions about what was actually agreed upon in 1950 and 1951. Now, more than forty years after the events, in the absence of written contracts, it is impossible to determine precisely what in fact was agreed upon and when. But from existing letters, accounts, and interviews, it seems likely that many of Levin's later assertions were based more on what he had wished for than on what Otto Frank had granted or understood to be the case. Levin, for instance, was not directly responsible for getting the Diary published in America. Although he had written letters and made inquiries, and certainly had drawn people's attention to the book, the Doubleday contract evolved from the high praise of Judith Bailey, Francis Price, Donald Elder, Barbara Zimmerman, and others. Levin himself was not involved in those early negotiations. In fact, he wrote to Frank, in a letter dated 14 March 1952: "Should you want an agent to handle the matter at this time, I can refer you to a good one. Otherwise, I will try to do the things an agent would normally do, but without obligating you in any way—that is, I will submit the book to the various producers, story editors, etc." (BU). This letter clearly casts doubt on Levin's later claim that a formal agreement about agency and adaptation existed in 1950-51, and it supports Frank's contention that Levin confused the chance to write
with the right to write. The complex implications of Levin's and Frank's different understanding of Levin's role, and the consequences of their perceptions, are explored at a later stage of this history.
In the months that followed Doubleday's acceptance of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl , Levin continued his unsuccessful attempts to draw the attention of producers to a possible stage adaptation, and he spread the word about the book's distinction at every opportunity, writing essays about it for Congress Weekly and the National Jewish Post . He also arranged for first serial rights to go to Commentary , where excerpts from the Diary started appearing a month before the book was published. Although several of the people at Doubleday (notably Frank Price, Barbara Zimmerman, Jason Epstein, and Karen Rye) formed what came playfully to be called the Informal Society of Advocates of Anne Frank, the prevailing assessment at the firm was that the sales potential was small. The first edition was set at five thousand copies, and there was no prepublication advertising. Even an edition of five thousand was felt by some in the company to be "something of a gamble and assuredly large enough to meet what was expected to be the demand for such a chronicle." Reports to the sales force played down the grim aspects of the story and emphasized the "beauty, humor and insight" of this "document of sensitive adolescence."10 Doubleday editors also managed to persuade Eleanor Roosevelt to provide an introduction (actually written by Barbara Zimmerman and signed by Mrs. Roosevelt), but otherwise undertook no unusual efforts—aside from word-of-
June 1952 (JM).
mouth endorsement and personal letters—to promote the book in advance. It was at this point, however, that Levin made his most important contribution to the success of the Diary in America.
In February I952, without declaring his interest, he had asked for and had been granted the assignment of reviewing the volume for the influential New York Times Book Review . At first he was told that he had about three hundred words, but when he conveyed his excitement about the Diary , Francis Brown, the editor, requested that he write at greater length. Levin's authoritative, dazzling review appeared on the first page of the Times Book Review on 15 June 1952, the day before the book went on sale. Entitled "The Girl Behind the Secret Door," this piece offered the fullest and most compelling account of the interest and distinction of the Diary that had yet appeared in America. Other laudatory reviews (notably those in Time, Newsweek , and the Herald Tribune over the same weekend and in the daily papers on Monday and Tuesday) also helped promote the book, but afterward nearly everyone agreed that Levin's tribute in the Times was what launched Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl on its spectacular career in America.
Levin's strategy in the review is brilliant. He opens with the bold, eye-catching claim that "Anne Frank's diary is too tenderly intimate a book to be frozen with the label 'classic,' and yet no other designation serves"—a startling assertion about a work that most Sunday-morning review readers would never have heard of. Then, after reassuring his audience that this is "no lugubrious ghetto tale," no chilling "compilation of horrors," he goes on to explain why the child's journal is for now
and forever. The quicksilver diarist is a born writer; her style is zestful, her observations various and unfailingly keen. Her amazing story has suspense, heartbreak, tart comedy, romance, discovery, terror, and anguish. As a fearful tale of fugitives in hiding that reveals the stirring psychological drama of a girl's sexual and moral growth, the diary has the shape and tension of a superbly constructed novel. But the historical implications of the narrative, Levin argued, give it the force of an epic, the story of a people. "Anne Frank's voice," he asserts in a sentence that was to be repeated (for better and worse) countless times, "becomes the voice of six million vanished Jewish souls." And surely, he ends, "she will be widely loved, for this wise and wonderful young girl brings back a poignant delight in the infinite human spirit."
On Monday morning 16 June booksellers across the country reported a very heavy demand for Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl , and by early afternoon the entire first edition had sold out. Everyone at Doubleday was amazed and jubilant; a second edition of 15,000 was swiftly ordered, and a few days later a third printing of 25,000 brought the total number of copies to 45,000. A full-scale promotional campaign was ordered, with advertisements taken in major newspapers in cities across America. In the next few days, a dozen papers bought syndication rights; the Book Find Club picked the Diary for its August selection; and Omnibook chose to offer a condensation in a forthcoming issue.
People in the book trade observed that this surprising success was due almost entirely to the applause of the reviewers; one leading New York publisher told Pyke Johnson of Doubleday's publicity department, "If there were a prize for the best review
of the year," Meyer Levin's piece on Anne Frank "would almost certainly win it."11
On the same morning that booksellers were receiving a rush of requests for the Diary , theatrical agents, producers, and people in television and film began telephoning Doubleday to inquire about dramatic rights. Although everyone at the publishing house was giddy with excitement and felt that Levin and Doubleday shared the same objectives, it quickly became clear that Levin could not be expected to handle such intricate commercial negotiations by himself. Ken McCormick, editor-in-chief at Doubleday, suggested that a cable be sent to Otto Frank in Basel, asking him to assign the task of negotiating to the firm's own subsidiary rights department, whose large and experienced staff would work closely with Levin. Levin agreed, and a cable to Otto Frank went out that same day, signed jointly by Barbara Zimmerman, the young editor assigned to the book from the beginning, and Meyer Levin: "Due to wonderful critical response Anne's Diary there is much interest from theatrical and film producers. May Doubleday have authority to handle these rights for you at usual agent's fee of 10% of proceeds. We feel strongly we could handle these rights in a way suitable to book" (16 June 1952, BU).
Although on its face the proposal made good sense, it concealed tensions between the various parties that had been developing and were about to erupt into conflict. By Monday afternoon, the people at Doubleday were aware that they had a very hot property on their hands, and they had already begun to have doubts on several counts about Levin. First, they thought
Doubleday in-house memo, 17 June 1952 (JM).
of him as overzealous and vague about the business of selling rights. He made odd arrangements on his own (authorizing Howard Phillips of NBC to negotiate film rights as his representative), appeared to be susceptible to the proposals of people with dubious credentials, and did not keep the publisher's representatives fully informed of his many consultations. Second, they perceived that Levin's own desire to write the adaptation might be an obstacle to a producer who wanted another playwright. Levin had come into the picture as Frank's informal agent; now he was forcefully putting himself forward as the preferred adapter. The ambiguity of his role was potentially troublesome. Barbara Zimmerman bluntly expressed some of the Doubleday skepticism in a letter to Frank Price: "Although Levin himself was not after selling the rights for base financial reasons, he seemed to be screwing the whole deal up and I think, as Ken does very strongly, that it would be best if we handled the rights and worked closely with Levin" (17 June 1952, JM).
Levin had his own misgivings about the people at Doubleday. Within hours of the time the joint cable was sent to Otto Frank in Basel, he became increasingly worried that his interests and the company's were potentially at odds. Although he had written several plays, few had been produced and none on Broadway; he was known as a novelist and journalist, not as a playwright. Now that the Diary was headed toward enormous success, Doubleday might want to persuade Otto Frank to aim for a glamorous sale to a powerful producer who could sign a big-name playwright, and then Levin, who wished above all to adapt the Diary , would be out in the cold. That night,
unknown to Doubleday, Levin sent a second cable urging Frank to "Please await my letter before answering Doubleday's request for agency power." In the letter he gave a detailed account of why he had joined in the original cable and then privately sent another of his own. "As you know," he wrote to Frank, "I have from the beginning, even before there was an American publisher, had my heart in making a play and a film from this material. If I had the money, I would have offered to buy the rights from you." And then he went on to ask Frank to stipulate to Doubleday that it had the agency rights and the rights to ten percent of the value of any sale, but that "no sale shall be made unless the conditions of the agreement are approved by me, and by yourself. It would then be possible for either one of us to stipulate that I should be the writer, or at least one of the writers, in any play or film treatment. Of course, should the situation arise where a production by a famous playwright is possible only if I step aside, I would step aside. However, I should be heartbroken if the material were sold to some producer who would simply appoint any friend of his to write the play or film" (16 June 1952, BU). In his concluding paragraph, Levin proposed some wording for a cable that Frank could send to New York.
The cable that Frank did send to Doubleday on 18 June borrowed several phrases from Levin's letter and read: "Consent to give you authority to handle film and play rights with usual agent fee providing conditions of any sale of such rights be approved by Meyer Levin and myself as desire Levin as writer or collaborator in any treatment to guarantee idea of book" (BU). Although at this point, the editors at Doubleday and
notably Joseph Marks, the vice-president who was handling the negotiations for dramatic rights, did not know that Levin was communicating separately with Otto Frank, they recognized that the situation was tangled and ambiguous at best. They were aware that earlier, on 31 March, Frank had authorized Levin "to negotiate for motion picture, television, radio and dramatic adaptation of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl , for a period of one year from this date, with the stipulation that I, as the sole owner of these rights, shall require to approve any such agreements, and any adaptations of the material in this book, before public presentation" (BU). Obviously this earlier assignment (the wording of which had been proposed by Levin himself) and the cable of 18 June conflicted at enough points to require clarification.
Proposals were coming in rapidly. Cheryl Crawford mentioned Lillian Hellman, said she might consider Levin, but mentioned other writers and directors as well; Kermit Bloom-garden, proposing Arthur Miller, promised to weigh the possibility of Levin; Norman Rose and Peter Cappell suggested Morton Wishengrad or Thornton Wilder, saying they would consider Levin as collaborator but would accept him as the sole adapter only as a last resort; Maxwell Anderson was an active bidder for the Playwrights' Company but did not wish to work with a collaborator—no reflection on Levin, he said, just a condition he felt it necessary to impose. Walter Fried suggested that Levin and Harold Clurman discuss the play, and if there was a meeting of minds, he might produce, Levin write, and Clurman direct. Among the others who came forward were Joshua Logan (who wanted to adapt and direct himself), Shep-
ard Traube, Lemuel Ayers, Max Gordon, Robert Whitehead, the Theatre Guild, CBS-TV, and Milton Krents for the Eternal Light radio program. Although no two proposals were precisely the same, each producer reserved the right to judge whether a script (by Levin or anyone else) was acceptable. If not, he or she would have to be free to employ a collaborator or another playwright.
Given the number of people involved in the flurry of discussions and the fact that the wishes and rights of Frank, Levin, and Doubleday were still not clearly spelled out, rumors and misrepresentations spread, and distrust mounted quickly on all sides. Levin often met alone with interested parties, and his version of the prospective arrangements sometimes differed from Doubleday's. On one crucial matter whether he would step aside for a famous playwright—he kept changing his mind, gradually becoming more resistant to the possibility. Producers and agents often gave diverging accounts of what they were offering, depending on whether they were talking with Levin or with a representative of Doubleday. If a producer thought Levin had veto power, he might encourage him and thus reinforce the impression that Doubleday was not telling the whole truth. Similarly, some bidders talking to the publisher would belittle Levin's talent in an effort to get the rights for a playwright of their own. Other producers told Levin and/or Doubleday that the division of responsibility in negotiating dramatic rights was ill-advised, but this was now the fixed condition that had evolved and had been approved by Otto Frank.
On the fourth day of the negotiations, Levin told Frank that
he had been in another lengthy discussion with several of the Doubleday people, and they had decided on some general guidelines:
—if definite offers were received from theatrical producers, naming dramatists of the first rank for the task, it would be suggested that Levin collaborate on the adaptation;
—preference would be given to whichever dramatist accepted Levin as collaborator;
—if no first rank "name" dramatist offered to adapt the play, Levin should have preference over other writers;
—if only one producer wanted to do the show and would accept only a dramatist who refused to have a collaborator, someone other than Levin himself should decide whether Levin should step aside.
But even these revised guidelines were Levin's formulations and hardly firm. Although he and the Doubleday representatives were entirely devoted to securing a deal that would respect the integrity of the Diary and satisfy Otto Frank, there continued to be too many differences in other aims and assessments, and too many pitfalls inherent in the decentralized negotiations, for them to work satisfactorily together. On 23 June, only a week after the discussions had begun, Joseph Marks and others concluded that the situation had become untenable and that further efforts would have to be made to get Otto Frank to clarify what rights and responsibilities each party had. Frank in Basel was still loyal to both sides and believed that a collaboration based on mutual understanding was still possible. He felt
that Levin had worked immensely hard for the book and could write a sympathetic and tasteful adaptation; he also believed that the employees at Doubleday were doing everything they could to promote the Diary and to effect an advantageous sale of the dramatic rights. But he understood too that if a producer bought the rights he might not want to be constrained by conditions in the choice of an adapter.
Without consulting Levin, Doubleday asked Frank if he could come to the United States to participate in the knotty discussions. When Levin learned about the invitation, he felt further confirmed in his belief that Doubleday now wanted to sign an eminent playwright and to force him out. On 2 July, he wrote a sharp letter of protest to Ken McCormick, charging Joseph Marks with actively campaigning to get rid of him as a possible adapter of the Diary . He had, he said, earlier suspicions, which were now corroborated by conversations with Max Gordon, Cheryl Crawford, and Norman Rose, producers who he believed were willing to work with him on the play. Marks, he claimed, gave them the impression that they would fare better in the bidding if they backed the choice of a more eminent writer, and then Marks gave him a distorted account of where he stood in each producer's favor. Expressing astonishment that Otto Frank had been called to the United States to "settle this problem," Levin indignantly concluded that "there was no problem and is no problem. . . . We have a choice of many excellent producers and could get to work at once. . . . Moreover, it seems clear to me that the only motive for having him come here to deal with 'this problem' can be the motive of talking him out of having me as adaptor, since that seems to
be the problem in Mr. Marks's mind" (BU). Levin also maintained that Marks's actions had damaged his professional reputation and impeded his career.
When Joseph Marks was shown Levin's letter, he told Ken McCormick that the accusations had no basis in fact, and he declared that in all the conferences no information had been withheld from Levin, nor had he been told anything that was not absolutely true. Given the range of his charges and the intensity of his feelings, however, the negotiating situation had clearly deteriorated to the point of collapse. After consulting with their lawyers, the Doubleday representatives concluded that it was no longer advisable for the firm to continue as a party in the negotiations. Levin, they felt, had changed his mind so many times, and was now so incensed and hostile, that he had become impossible to work with; earlier he had been in love with the book, but now he seemed more eager to protect what Frank Price called "his own private gold mine."12 Then, too, the editors remained wary of the nebulous negotiating terms and saw the threat of a lawsuit in Levin's specific claim that he was being forced out as adapter and in his general charges about professional injury. As Marks wrote to Price: "Levin, by his own statement, is a pretty fast guy with a lawsuit and from what I can learn, has not endeared himself to any of the people with whom he had worked" (9 July 1952, JM). On 7 July, the decision was made to inform Frank that Doubleday had withdrawn as co-agent in the negotiations, and a cable to that effect was sent to Basel. On the following day, in a more
Mentioned by Barbara Zimmerman in letter to Frank Price, 22 July 1952 (JM).
detailed letter, Marks was polite but firm. "We were acting under your instructions as partners with Mr. Levin. As you can surely understand, in a partnership there must be complete trust on both sides. Perhaps because of incompatibility of personalities, Mr. Levin and I could no longer see eye to eye on many problems which confronted us. I think it is best for the negotiations . . . for one person to handle it. We had to come to the conclusion that we must withdraw and we have given Mr. Levin detailed information of our negotiations with various people" (JM).
Otto Frank was disappointed by the news but still spoke of coming to New York to try to bring about an amicable collaboration. Despite the wording of some of his messages and his admiration for Levin, he had never intended to force him on anyone as the writer of the play, and he insisted that Doubleday still get a financial share of the proceeds for the sale of the dramatic rights. ("This is a commercial matter which has to be treated in a decent manner, so kindly do not refuse!" he wrote to Marks on 9 July.) But Doubleday remained firm in its decision to withdraw and persuaded Frank to postpone his trip and concentrate on working with Levin alone to find a suitable producer for a play based on the Diary .
Fortunately for Frank, Cheryl Crawford had for the past two weeks been emerging as perhaps the most promising of the bidders. She had first inquired the day after the Diary was published, and the editors at Doubleday knew of her reputation as an experienced and highly respected figure in the contemporary theater. In the 1930s she had been cofounder with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg of the progressive Group Theatre and in the following decade had worked with Eva Le Gallienne
and Margaret Webster to create the American Repertory Theatre and with Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis to establish the Actors Studio. Recently she had produced several successful musicals (One Touch of Venus, Brigadoon , and Paint Your Wagon ), had staged Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo , and was planning to put on his Camino Real .
Although Crawford had spoken with Levin about the Diary before it was published, when she contacted Doubleday on 17 June she thought he was only the agent for the book and was not aware of his desire to do the adaptation. Her first suggestions for possible playwrights were Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets, both of whom she knew and had worked with. By 25 June, when she met with Joseph Marks to explore the situation further, she understood Frank's preference for Levin and was willing to give him a chance to write a draft on speculation. She had, she explained, a high regard for Levin's talent but was aware of his inexperience as a playwright and would have to be free to use another writer if Levin's script was unacceptable. She would be willing to give him two months to present a version for her to approve or disapprove but wished first to talk with him to hear how he planned to approach the book. If his script was promising but needed work, she might select another playwright to collaborate with Levin, providing him with partial credit and a certain share of income. At this time, she also mentioned having spoken with Ella Kazan about the possibility of his directing, but although he promised to read the Diary , he told her that he might soon be making commitments for the fall season. For this and other reasons, she urged Doubleday to make a quick decision.
In the days following this conversation, Joseph Marks heard
reports that Levin believed Doubleday was angling for a big-name playwright and was trying to force him out. Marks talked with Levin, denied the rumor-based suspicions, explained the terms under which Crawford would permit him to write a draft version, and also mentioned other producers who were willing to consider him as the adapter. The relieved Levin swiftly provided his version of the current status of the negotiations in a letter to Otto Frank, warmly praising Crawford ("One can't go wrong with her") and explaining: "Her idea is to have me make a dramatization, while working closely with her and the director, and if the dramatization is not right, another writer would be called in for extra work. This is often done and seems reasonable to me" (11 July 1952, BU).
When Crawford phoned Doubleday on 1 July to find out how negotiations were progressing, she was told that the agents were seeing and talking with all parties, that Otto Frank had been asked to come to New York, and that no final decision would be made until he arrived. It was precisely this situation, however—the invitation to Otto Frank and the continued discussions with a dozen eager producers and playwrights—that seemed to confirm Levin's suspicion about Doubleday wanting another adapter and prompted him to write the decisive accusatory letter to Ken McCormick. The Doubleday representatives insisted that by welcoming all comers they were following Otto Frank's instructions and acting in his best interests, until they could confer with him in New York. But, not surprisingly, Levin's reading of their motives and behavior (based as it was on the conflicting testimony of many of the aspirants) was more distrustful.
After Doubleday withdrew on 7 July, Marks, Price, Zim-
merman, and Levin all urged Otto Frank to choose Cheryl Crawford as the most sensitive, best-qualified producer for a stage version of the Diary ; at the same time, Crawford herself wrote Frank spelling out her views on the prospect of Levin's doing the adaptation:
I have read Meyer's plays and think he has talent. I know that he wants very much to dramatize the Diary. I told him I would be willing to give him eight weeks to make a draft. If it turns out well, I would produce it. If, on the other hand, it does not seem satisfactory, I would engage another playwright and would compensate Meyer for his work. It would be splendid if Meyer could write a good dramatization as I know how close he feels to the book, but he is willing to take the chance I have suggested above. (9 July 1952, PWRW&G)
In addition to this explanation, Crawford gave Frank her general ideas about other playwrights and about possible directors, ending, "If Meyer had the first opportunity to write it, I would decide on one of these experienced directors so that Meyer might have the benefit of their experience while he was writing as well as mine."
As with so many of the other formulations of conditions in the early negotiations for dramatic rights, Crawford's statement did not have the exactitude or the status of a formal contract and allowed for various interpretations. Otto Frank understood it to mean that Crawford had to decide if she liked Levin's draft or wanted another playwright. He thought her offer a fair one and told Barbara Zimmerman: "If a producer invests money, risks his name, he has to know what he is doing and Miss Crawford will certainly not accept a draft she does not like. Per-
sonally I think I should not interfere and leave it to her judgment" (18 July 1952, PWRW&G). Similarly, Frank Price told Joseph Marks that Levin was being permitted, at his own risk, to proceed with an adaptation of the play to be accepted or rejected. If Crawford felt it necessary later to bring in either a collaborator or a new writer, she would be left free to make such a choice. Price added that he advised Frank to settle this point clearly with Levin because a large part of the recent disagreement had "arisen from a duality of control and that the point must be arrived at where some one person could say 'Aye, Yea, or Nay' flatly. It seems to me, on the basis of all the various proposals, that Crawford was the best to be entrusted with this" (16 July 1952, JM).
Levin, however, seems not to have understood the agreement in the same way. He began working on the adaptation of the Diary in mid-July, confidently assuming that it would be stageworthy but not coming to a detailed understanding with Crawford or Frank about what would occur if she did not find it acceptable. Her letter states that she might go to another writer or consider calling in a collaborator. Levin appears to have thought only about a possible collaborator, not an outright rejection; this became a severe point of contention later in the year.
In late July and early August, however, Levin continued working on his script on Fire Island, while Frank in Basel and Crawford in New York exchanged letters about the forthcoming project. Frank acknowledged how much he liked and trusted Levin and how convinced he was of his sympathetic feeling for the book, but he also confessed that he had no way of judging if Levin was the right dramatist for the job. Apart
from sentiment, he said, a play is a commercial matter, and a good deal of money was invested. He reassured Crawford that he did not want to interfere and was sure that he would never need to use his veto as owner of the rights. She in her turn mentioned that Levin was working on the play even though they had no contract (a delay caused by the vacation of Levin's lawyer), and she summarized her understanding of what Levin took to be the arrangement between them: if he could not write a satisfactory draft, she would have the liberty to give it to another writer or call in a collaborator. In the meantime, she told Frank, she had asked "one of our top playwrights to study the Diary with the idea of a collaboration with Meyer or taking over completely" (30 July 1952, PWRW&G).
In late August, Levin mailed Frank a draft of a proposed contract on rights and royalties. According to him, the usual procedure recommended by the Dramatists Guild was for the adapter to make a contract with the owner of the rights and then in turn make a contract with the producer of the play, who does not customarily make a contract directly with the owner of the rights. When Otto Frank received the draft from Levin in early September, he read it with surprise and some concern, for it was not in accordance with the informal terms he had worked out with Cheryl Crawford. In all their discussions, she was supposed to be the judge of the adaptation; thus he could not now sign a separate agreement with Levin. Since he had questions about other points as well, he suggested Levin wait until he came to New York at the end of the month so they could discuss contractual matters at that time. Frank also wrote to Crawford to explain his reservations about the proposed contract, and there the matter stood.
Although Levin's work on the adaptation was interrupted by a commission from the American Jewish Committee to do a short radio play drawn from the Diary , scheduled to be broadcast on CBS during the Jewish New Year, he did finish a draft of Anne Frank on 15 September and sent a copy to Crawford the following week. She had not seen any advance work on the play but had told Frank that she liked the way Levin in conversation described what he was planning to do. They had conferred several times during the summer, usually by phone, and had talked generally about his work and contractual arrangements. Years later, Levin claimed that at a lunch at the Algonquin, Crawford had offered him a $1,500 advance, promising $500 on submission of the first draft of a manuscript, $500 on completion, and $500 on production. He also said she spoke of Elia Kazan as a possible director and of Lillian Hellman as a possible collaborator (the "top playwright" she had referred to in an earlier letter). But there seems to be no record of any such conversation from the period itself.
By the end of September, Levin's confidence was high. The half-hour radio broadcast had received very favorable reviews in Billboard and Variety ; Crawford had phoned to say that the first draft was "promising, good enough to proceed," and Otto Frank had arrived in New York to begin consultations about contracts and a production. But then on z October, at a meeting with Levin at her office, Crawford said that she had just reread the play and had lost touch with the characters: they no longer moved her; they seemed stated rather than explored. The scenic construction worked against both progressive development and dramatic tension. She now thought the script did not have enough theatrical potential for Levin to continue
working on it, nor did she think there would be any use engaging a collaborator. She wanted to start afresh with a new writer.
Given her earlier encouragement and the depth of his own commitment, Levin was stunned by so sudden and negative a reaction. He reminded her of previous praise and of Otto Frank's observation that the characters were truly represented. But Crawford, while admitting that her response was a subjective one, said she had given the play a painstaking reading and had to trust her own judgment about what would or would not move an audience in the theater. (Later evidence suggests that she had also been influenced by the responses of Lillian Hell-man and other friends with whom she had discussed Levin's draft.) Stricken at the unexpected prospect that he would lose what he believed to be the creative and financial opportunity of his life, Levin asked for more time to make revisions and for someone else to read the script. Crawford said she would think about these requests.
The following day, however, Crawford wrote to Otto Frank at his Manhattan hotel, reporting on the meeting with Levin and explaining the reasons for her unfavorable assessment. Although she again admitted that her response was entirely subjective, her tone and emphasis in the letter suggest that her decision was very close to being final. Levin, she told Frank, was a man of integrity who had to write what he felt, and although he would try to respond to her criticisms, the job would not be easy; and she gave no indication that she thought he could succeed in revising the script to her satisfaction. On 7 October, she told Levin, "I can't say yes as much as I would like to," but she did agree to let someone else read the play and proposed Kermit Bloomgarden, with whom Levin had already
been in contact. Bloomgarden, like Crawford, had produced a number of major plays on Broadway (notably several of Hell-man's and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman ), and had also inquired in July (although later than others) about getting dramatic rights to the Diary . At that time, Levin opposed his selection on the grounds that Bloomgarden's left-wing political sympathies made him a risky choice, since the House Un-American Activities Committee was likely soon to investigate Communist influence on Broadway. Now, however, Levin accepted the suggestion and sent a copy of the draft to Bloom-garden, who read it and had an extremely negative response, telling Crawford and Frank that no reputable producer would consider putting on a play of so little theatrical promise. (Later, Bloomgarden was quoted as having said "a producer would have to be crazy" to stage Levin's work [Obsession , 83].)
In the meantime, the dismayed Levin was talking with theater people who knew something about his adaptation, and he asked several of them to read the draft, hoping for positive reactions and support. The well-known director and critic Harold Clurman and the producer Herman Shumlin found the early version promising (as did the younger Norman Rose and Peter Cappell), and the agent Miriam Howell agreed to represent Levin in his efforts to get the play accepted. They all lent support to Levin's contention that to reject the script at this time as unstageworthy was premature. This encouragement led Levin to think he might be able to convince Crawford to allow him to continue working on the draft alone or with a collaborator, or to persuade Frank to cancel the arrangement with her and to stage the play with another backer. But Crawford had been further confirmed in her decision by Bloomgarden's unqualified
rejection, and she now offered to compensate Levin for the writing he had already done, if he would quit the project. Levin refused, on the grounds that he had never agreed to withdraw completely and that Crawford was bound by the earlier agreement to engage a collaborator to work with him.
Frank, extraordinarily distressed by the turn of events, found himself torn by conflicting loyalties and obligations. Although he was genuinely grateful to Levin for his invaluable work on behalf of the Diary , he also felt morally and even legally committed to Crawford. Some weeks earlier, he had been persuaded by Joseph Marks and others to get a lawyer to handle the upcoming contract negotiations for the play, and after consulting with his boyhood friend Nathan Straus, Frank approached John F. Wharton of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison. When it became clear that the disagreement between Levin and Crawford was unlikely to be resolved, Frank decided to turn the matter over to Myer Mermin, a respected attorney at Paul, Weiss with considerable experience in handling theatrical cases. Mermin first learned the details of the dispute on 23 October and in the next few days conferred with all parties to determine if there was any likelihood of resolution or compromise. Frank maintained (as he had from the start) that he was unable to assess the dramatic value of a script based on his own anguished history and had to rely on the expert judgment of experienced theater people, in this instance Cheryl Crawford. He was, however, troubled by the negative reactions of producers as prominent as Crawford and Bloom-garden.
Crawford continued to argue that Levin's script was unacceptable, but she agreed to talk with Harold Clurman about
the possibility of allowing Levin time for further revision. Levin repeated his belief that the original understanding between himself, Crawford, and Frank called for the engagement of a collaborator if his script was not wholly satisfactory. He also insisted that there were other producers (Norman Rose, Peter Cappell, Herman Shumlin, and Walter Fried) who had expressed genuine interest in the prospect of putting it on, and thus he would not submit the fate of his play and his reputation to Crawford's "unsteady opinion." As the controversy continued, Levin's doubts multiplied: he now maintained that Craw-ford had never intended to produce his play but had agreed to let him draft a script only in order to secure the dramatic rights from Frank in the first place. On 28 October, Levin wrote to Crawford restating his case for having his play produced and asked her to release Frank from his obligation to her. The next day Mermin wrote to Levin asserting that Crawford and Frank's interpretation of the original agreement was correct and that Levin—since he had no legal right—should withdraw his play. Crawford rejected Levin's request and Levin rejected Mermin's, and the discussions appeared again to be deadlocked.
Mermin perceived the major difficulty in resolving the conflict to be the absence of a contract; although he believed the informal agreement—woven through letters and conversations—supported Crawford and Frank, it nonetheless remained open to interpretation and perhaps even legal challenge. He also recognized the mix of emotions involved: despite their convictions about being in the right, both Frank and Crawford were in different ways indebted to Levin and were troubled by the possibility of being unjust to him. In this strained atmosphere, Miriam Howell, Levin's agent, and Mermin, Frank's
lawyer, eventually came up with a new proposal. Would the three parties accept an arrangement in which Levin could submit his script to a limited group of producers within a set time period to see if any of them was willing to produce the play? If a commitment was made within the time allowed, Crawford would step aside and the play would be staged by a new producer; if not, Levin would renounce his claim as the preferred adapter, and Crawford and Frank could proceed uncontested to negotiate with another writer. Although Crawford, who believed the original agreement was clear and unconditional, considered this new proposal inadvisable, she agreed to go along with it out of personal deference to Otto Frank's feelings of obligation to Levin, and because there may have been some injustice done to Levin at an earlier stage. No one underestimated the problems inherent in the proposition: drawing up a list agreeable to both sides and settling on a reasonable number of names, a satisfactory time frame, conditions of production, and so on. Frank and Crawford would want a limited list of notable producers who they believed could deliver a successful play, a list that might exclude some people acceptable to Levin. Levin and Howell would want a longer list with the names of some people already favorably inclined toward Levin; this list would no doubt include producers unacceptable to Frank. Mermin, doubtful of Levin's claims and playwriting abilities, seemed to want most of all to get a clear-cut contractual agreement that would clarify the rights of all parties and allow his client to proceed with a successful adaptation of his daughter's diary.
At the start, Mermin pressed Miriam Howell to submit the initial list of names to be considered, for he knew if he made
the selection, Levin would object to its being stacked against him. Howell and Levin submitted twenty-eight names; Mer-min and Frank argued that this list was too long and included producers with whom for various reasons they refused to deal. They proposed the number fourteen. After protracted, contentious negotiations in which each side continued to raise objections to names offered by the other, Mermin and Howell agreed on the following list of producers: Richard Aldrich and Richard Myers, Alfred de Liagre, Maurice Evans, José Ferrer, Walter Fried, Oscar Hammerstein, Leland Hayward, Theresa Helburn (the Theatre Guild), Gertrude Macy, Guthrie McClintic, Gilbert Miller, the Playwrights' Company, Irene Selznick, and Robert Whitehead. In the last stage of the talks, Levin asked for the opportunity to make additional suggestions and also for the right to have his play performed in Hebrew in Israel if it should be refused for New York. Mermin objected to the first request as contrary to the original ground rules of the negotiations, but he agreed to add the point about Israeli rights. Then Levin, angry at the final restriction of his options and at an earlier elimination of Herman Shumlin (who he had reason to think would consider producing his script), said the agreement was unfair and he would sign only "under protest," which he did on 21 November.
The contract stipulated that Levin had one month to get a signed production agreement from one of the fourteen producers on the approved list. If one of the group agreed to stage his version within a year, in accordance with the specified terms covering royalties, advances, subsidiary rights, and other matters, the play would be accepted, and Crawford would give up her claim. If, however, such a commitment was not obtained
by 21 December, Levin would withdraw his work and would agree not to use it in the future "in any manner whatsoever." Frank would then have the right, free of objections by Levin, to engage any other dramatist to adapt the Diary and any other producer to produce it. Levin would also renounce any claims for infringement of his play unless another writer willfully made use of a new character, plot, or situation created by him and not found in the book. A supplement dated 25 November added two points: (1) if Levin's script was ultimately to be withdrawn, Crawford would pay him a sum of $500 for work already done; and (2) Levin would have the opportunity to make arrangements for the production of a Hebrew version of his Anne Frank in Israel subsequent to the New York opening of another play based on the book.
The concerns and tactics of each party were obviously complex. Mermin believed that the history of the dispute and the rejections of Levin's script by Crawford and Bloomgarden were so well known in the theater world that no producer would likely come forward to stage the play, and Otto Frank would then have an incontrovertible legal document denying Levin his rights to the Anne Frank story. Admittedly, some producer might sign on, but this was a small risk worth taking. Levin believed the opportunity of having his play submitted to a large number of producers was more "normal" than having it judged only by Crawford; and since she had already said no, at least he now had a set of live options. His risks were the bad publicity of the controversy, the very short trial period, and the fact that the list reflected many more of Mermin's choices than his own. Indeed, one reason he signed "under protest" was his belief that Mermin deliberately barred all those producers who
had previously shown an interest and might have done his play (most notably Herman Shumlin).
Although Levin submitted copies to all the named producers and received a few favorable comments about his work, he was unable within the month to get any written pledge to produce it. Some readers found the material unsuitable for drama or doubted its commercial potential; others praised the script but said they were already committed; others just did not care for the play. Whatever the assessment, the result was clear: on 21 December Levin lost whatever rights (however contested) he previously had.
Yet even before the outcome was known, Levin had begun a campaign to demonstrate the inequity of the agreement and to try to reinstate what he claimed to be his rights. To publicize his case, on 9 December he wrote a letter to Brooks Atkinson, drama critic of the New York Times , maintaining that he was fighting for the life of his play against adversaries who, through threats, pressure, and deceit, had gotten him to sign an agreement that deprived him of his rights. Atkinson replied that the quarrel between Levin, Crawford, and Frank was private and not a matter to be aired in the columns of the Times ; he suggested that a more fitting platform might be the trade journal Variety . Following Atkinson's suggestion, Levin in February did send a similar letter to Hobe Morrison, Variety's editor, which subsequently provoked an irate denial from Cheryl Crawford and was not printed.
In December, however, Levin wrote of the approaching deadline to Elia Kazan, asking for an account of the director's conversation with Crawford and asking too if Kazan might read his script. Kazan replied that he did tell Crawford he liked the
Diary and would welcome a chance to read a play based on it, but because of heavy commitments could not consider directing it or even looking at Levin's version now. All this, he remarked, had been said in casual conversation and meant nothing more definite than that he would like someday to see a play based on the book and would be happy to look at Levin's version next spring.
Then, the day after the deadline for selling the play, his claim lost, Levin harshly attacked Crawford and Mermin in a letter to Otto Frank, who had returned to Basel in mid-November. Both the producer and the lawyer, he charged, had deceived him through a series of bluffs and dishonest statements: Crawford had never intended to stage his play but had used him and Kazan to insinuate her way into Frank's favor; Mermin had gone far beyond a lawyer's prerogative, making autocratic aesthetic judgments about who was fit to handle a production of Levin's play and then rigging the "acceptable producers" list against him. Infuriated by his forfeiture, Levin further accused Crawford of trying to castrate him, of being "the kind of homosexual" who felt a deep compulsion to destroy people not like himself. Not content merely to take his play away from him, she needed to destroy his confidence in himself as a writer, "for she objected not to anything specific but to the deepest part of a man's creative ability, the emotional sense of the work itself" (22 December 1952, BU).
Levin acknowledged the extravagance of his passion and, in the last part of the letter, he tried to separate his hostility toward Crawford and Mermin from his feelings for Frank:
You will feel this is an angry letter. My anger is not against you. It is against people who use deception and manipulation.
It is against lawyers who pretend they know more about art than artists, who take the incredible responsibility of destroying creative work. It is against the sort of people who have all my life stood between myself and my audience, and who have proven wrong every time. . . . You may feel that I stood in the way of your plan. I can only regret that you did not have more faith in what I wrote.
I do not associate you, as a personality, with all that is written above. We all feel that you were absolutely straight and generous with us, and that there were simply professional things in the background which you could not understand. We hope for every happiness for you in your new life. (BU)
But before this letter reached Frank in Basel, Levin learned of still another development in the dramatic rights negotiations that aroused him even more. He read a newspaper report that Carson McCullers, who had recently turned her novel Member of the Wedding into a prize-winning play, was being considered as the new adapter of the Diary . A month earlier in Paris, Frank Price, at Crawford's suggestion, had met with McCullers to explore the possibility of her adapting the Diary if Levin's version was to be withdrawn. McCullers found the idea appealing, read the book, and soon afterward sent a rapturous letter to Otto Frank:
I don't know how to write you, during the three days I have been reading Anne's Diary I have been crying, and now I need to write to you—and I don't know what to say. I think I have never felt such love and wonder and grief. There is no consolation to know that a Mozart, a Keats, a Chekhov is murdered in their years of childhood. But dear, dear Mr. Frank, Anne, who has that dual gift of genius and humanity has through her roots of unspeakable misery, given the world
an enduring and incomparable flower. Mr. Frank, I know there is no consolation but I want you to know that I grieve with you—as millions of others now and in the future grieve. Over and over in these days I have played a gramophone record of one of the posthumous sonatas of Schubert. To me it has become Anne's music. (28 November 1952, PWRW&G)
McCullers's astonishing outpouring led quickly to a meeting with Frank, who found her frail, walking with a cane, "unlucky to look at," but "a sensitive and lovable creature . . . very, very sympathetic." The prospect of adapting the Diary excited her, conversations continued, and her possible involvement was public knowledge in New York by the third week of December. Again Levin vented his feelings in a letter to Frank:
I am disgusted and enraged at the thought that a non-Jew has been selected to write the play. I should think Miss Crawford would have had more tact. You may say it does not matter and all the rest of it, but after the way my work was treated to bring in a Gentile writer over the dozens of excellent Jewish writers that are here, to have it produced by a Gentile when important Jewish producers who were eager to do it were ruled off the list, is scandalous beyond measure. I will not stand for this. I will write about it wherever I can. It is adding insult to injury. I will tell the whole story of Cheryl Craw-ford's double-dealing, in the press, and I will protest the way in which Mr. Mermin saw to it that my play would be killed. (25 December 1952, BU)
Continues...
Excerpted from An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diaryby Lawrence Graver Copyright © 1997 by Lawrence Graver. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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