What’s With Baum? A Novel by Woody Allen. Post Hill Press, pp. 186, $28.00
A time there was when a person could admire the way Montgomery Clift kissed Elizabeth Taylor in extreme close-up. A celebrity might drive whilst intoxicated, run over pedestrians, or get caught shoplifting, and their names were kept out of the newspapers.
No longer, as in our neo-puritanical epoch, any admiration for female beauty, let alone sex, is quite off the menu. As for drinking—two glasses of wine and it’s an alcoholism diagnosis. When we read, as we do in Woody Allen’s new novel What’s With Baum?, “What is it with these white cotton summer dresses? Are they laundered in pheromones?” we laugh because these days nobody is permitted such transgressive idle day-dreaming thoughts.
Nostalgia for old-school manners, customs and (frankly) bad habits underpins this immensely enjoyable novel. Now in his 90th year, the indefatigable Woody has produced a mighty salvo against priggishness and cultural hypocrisy. Everything he says in this book has long needed saying.
Asher Baum is a typical Woody hero. Like Alvy in Annie Hall, Isaac in Manhattan, Sandy in Stardust Memories, and heaps of other classics, Baum is prone to “hypochondrial panic attacks,” and his fear of death keeps wrecking his life, damaging happiness, clouding “mankind’s every sunrise.” The tiny space we take up in the universe, he frets, “the universe would one day want back.” We are, as human beings, “a meaningless agglomeration of cells killing time between one abyss and the next.”
From a metaphysical angle, all too true. But when Baum writes novels and plays on the subject (unlike the real Woody, who has made comic films on the subject), he is met with poor sales and a critical lambasting. Baum is one of those over-earnest sorts who “equate enjoyment with triviality,” and probably would have been happier as a beetle-browed academic, concealed in an ivory tower.
Indeed, the only bit of the novel not ringing entirely true was the way Baum, who is meant to be a failure, lives in nice houses and big Manhattan apartments, dines frequently in fancy restaurants, has instant access to medical professionals, and is no stranger to foreign travel. Believe me, authors haven’t enjoyed salubrious lifestyles like this since the death of Somerset Maugham.
Nonetheless, down the years, for all his professional and personal disgruntlement, Baum has not been short of female companionship. He is attracted to difficult, neurotic women, who in turn are drawn to his avowed ambition to be an American Dostoevsky or Kafka—and who soon enough get fed up with his cynicism and didacticism. “Remember,” he tells the reader, “it’s physics. Whatever pleasure you get from a relationship, there’s an equal and opposite amount of pain when you’re dumped.” There’s another theme Woody has explored in film after film.
Baum fell in love with twins, but in error went off with the wrong one. (Which actually happened to George Sanders, incidentally. Intending to marry Eva Gabor he married Magda Gabor instead, having already once been married to Zsa Zsa Gabor.) Another wife left Baum abruptly to be a shepherdess in New Zealand.
The latest Mrs. Baum is Connie, “a nasty babe but hot.” Things are not going well. In fact, “everything’s unravelling.” Connie is angry that her faith in her husband’s artistic genius was misplaced. He’s clearly never going to amount to anything. “Connie and Baum had started to fall off two years ago, and like any falling thing, it accelerated on the way down.” More physics. Newton, I think.
Exacerbating matters is Connie’s son, Baum’s stepson, the horrible Thane, “a spoiled, supercilious cockalorum,” “a spoiled little narcissist,” “a pampered little arrogant prince,” who, aged only 24, has published a much-feted novel. It has helped his career no end that he is photogenic and sought after for magazine profiles. “Thane had posed on the grass, white shirt unbuttoned to the navel, tanned chest, tight blue jeans…wild flowers framing the tableau.”
Connie is besotted with him to the point of creepiness, and (says Baum) “the kid hated me right off, because he was worried I’d come between him and his mother.” Talk about Oedipal wrecks. The way Thane is emotionally intertwined with Connie keeps the New York Freudian psychiatrists and psychotherapists in lucrative business.
It turns out, towards the finish, that Thane lifted his plot, characters, and descriptive passages from a long out-of-print novel by a dead author none can recall. It is sheer “fraudulent merchandise,” yet Baum is the one pilloried for blowing the whistle. He has attempted to destroy a charismatic young man’s career. He has spoiled the general public’s enjoyment of a best-seller. He has humiliated the critics by exposing their ignorance of literary history. He has embarrassed the publishers and editors, who have been hoodwinked. Baum feels like the squealer in a prison movie, the one who comes out of it badly.
As for Connie, she simply flips. She chases Baum through the woods with a loaded gun, “firing a few times, missing her target but getting closer.” Baum has to run out onto a freeway, waving down the traffic.
What’s With Baum? is a fable about honesty and integrity. If the concepts don’t much matter today, it’s because people—young people, for the most part, people under ninety—don’t know what the words really mean. They instead get much more agitated and seek the moral high ground, not when a blatant act of literary theft is uncovered, but if lightly touched or embraced.
There’s a subplot here about Baum and a female interviewer. He’s gracious with her and brushes her forearm when saying goodbye, “gave her an antiseptic showbusiness peck on the cheek.” The next thing Baum knows, he is on the receiving end of a harassment suit, the interviewer claiming he is a misogynist and a predator. Baum is instantly dropped by his agent and publisher (“people run scared”), because “in today’s culture an accusation is as good as a conviction.”
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Innocent gestures are misconstrued. Everyone is paranoid, suspicious, wanting to believe the worst, because ill at ease in their own skin. One can’t help wondering: How much of the novel is inspired by Woody’s own persecution by Mia Farrow? Is Thane to some extent Ronan Farrow?
There are certainly biographical elements. Baum, like Woody, doesn’t like hot weather, as “ultraviolet rays were carcinogenic.” He prefers soft grey light and rain. Secondly, Baum, like Woody, loathes the countryside, with its rabid animals, ticks, spiders, and prickly plants. How much more civilized and preferable, lox and bagels at a decent city deli.
Most of all, Baum and Woody can never be carefree, as they never stop being anxious about the actualities of loneliness, black holes, burglars, tumors, and claustrophobic elevators. And how can anyone have the leisure to eat meals slowly, “sitting back while their time on earth was going through a sieve”? Baum, to put it simply, thinks too much. Does Woody? Possibly. The difference being, he turns tragedy into hilarity. I salute his resilience.
