On the desk were papers, folders, a few books, all very neatly arranged. Squeezed between the desk and the wall was a spartan cot; a brown leather jacket and a brown knitted cap were lying on it. The visitor’s chair in which I sat was placed at an angle to the door, which proximity, each time that I was there, led to much bumping and scraping and smiling exchanges in Esperanto. On the wall were three photographs of Charlie Chaplin and one of Victor Sjöström.
Eventually, he came in, bareheaded, wearing a sweater, a tall man, economically, intimidatingly lean. He must have been the gawkiest of adolescents, his arms and legs still seeming to be very loosely anchored; something in his good-natured, self-possessed directness suggests that he would also have been among the most belligerently opinionated: by no means an easy man to deal with, in any sense, any relationship whatever, there being about him the evangelical distance of someone possessed by a vision. This extremely dangerous quality—authority—has never failed to incite the hostility of the many. And I got the impression that Bergman was in the habit of saying what he felt because he knew that scarcely anyone was listening.
He suggested tea, partly, I think, to give both of us time to become easier with each other, but also because he really needed a cup of tea before going back to work. We walked out of the office and down the road to the canteen.
I had arrived in Stockholm with what turned out to be the “flu” and I kept coughing and sneezing and wiping my eyes. After a while Bergman began to look at me worriedly and said that I sounded very ill.
I hadn’t come there to talk about my health and I tried to change the subject. But I was shortly to learn that any subject changing to be done around Bergman is done by Bergman. He was not to be sidetracked.
“Can I do anything for you?” he persisted; and when I did not answer, being both touched and irritated by his question, he smiled and said, “You haven’t to be shy. I know what it is like to be ill and alone in a strange city.”
It was a hideously, an inevitably self-conscious gesture and yet it touched and disarmed me. I know that his concern, at bottom, had very little to do with me. It had to do with his memories of himself and it expressed his determination never to be guilty of the world’s indifference.
He turned and looked out of the canteen window, at the brilliant October trees and the glaring sky, for a few seconds and then turned back to me.
“Well,” he asked me, with a small laugh, “are you for me or against me?”
I did not know how to answer this question right away and he continued, “I don’t care if you are or not. Well, that’s not true. Naturally, I prefer—I would be happier—if you were for me. But I have to know.”
I told him I was for him, which might, indeed, turn out to be my principal difficulty in writing about him. I had seen many of his movies—but did not intend to try to see them all—and I felt identified, in some way, with what I felt he was trying to do. What he saw when he looked at the world did not seem very different from what I saw. Some of his films seemed rather cold to me, somewhat too deliberate. For example, I had possibly heard too much about The Seventh Seal before seeing it, but it had impressed me less than some of the others.
“I cannot discuss that film,” he said abruptly, and again turned to look out of the window. “I had to do it. I had to be free of that argument, those questions.” He looked at me. “It’s the same for you when you write a book? You just do it because you must and then, when you have done it, you are relieved, no?”
He laughed and poured some tea. He had made it sound as though we were two urchins playing a deadly and delightful game which must be kept a secret from our elders.
“Those questions?”
“Oh. God and the Devil. Life and Death. Good and Evil.” He smiled. “Those questions.”
I wanted to suggest that his being a pastor’s son contributed not a little to his dark preoccupations. But I did not quite know how to go about digging into his private life. I hoped that we would be able to do it by way of the movies.
I began with: “The question of love seems to occupy you a great deal, too.”
I don’t doubt that it occupies you, too, was what he seemed to be thinking, but he only said, mildly, “Yes.” Then, before I could put it another way, “You may find it a bit hard to talk to me. I really do not see much point in talking about my past work. And I cannot talk about work I haven’t done yet.”
I mentioned his great preoccupation with egotism, so many of his people being centered on themselves, necessarily, and disastrously: Vogler in The Magician, Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries, the ballerina in Summer Interlude.
“I am very fond of Summer Interlude,” he said. “It is my favorite movie.
“I don’t mean,” he added, “that it’s my best. I don’t know which movie is my best.”
Summer Interlude was made in 1950. It is probably not Bergman’s best movie—I would give that place to the movie which has been shown in the States as The Naked Night—but it is certainly among the most moving. Its strength lies in its portrait of the ballerina, uncannily precise and truthful, and in its perception of the nature of first love, which first seems to open the universe to us and then seems to lock us out of it. It is one of the group of films—including The Waiting Women, Smiles of a Summer Night, and Brink of Life—which have a woman, or women, at their center and in which the men, generally, are rather shadowy. But all the Bergman themes are in it: his preoccupation with time and the inevitability of death, the comedy of human entanglements, the nature of illusion, the nature of egotism, the price of art. These themes also run through the movies which have at their center a man: The Naked Night (which should really be called The Clown’s Evening), Wild Strawberries, The Face, The Seventh Seal. In only one of these movies—The Face—is the male-female relation affirmed from the male point of view; as being, that is, a source of strength for the man. In the movies concerned with women, the male-female relation succeeds only through the passion, wit, or patience of the woman and depends on how astutely she is able to manipulate the male conceit. The Naked Night is the most blackly ambivalent of Bergman’s films—and surely one of the most brutally erotic movies ever made—but it is essentially a study of the masculine helplessness before the female force. Wild Strawberries is inferior to it, I think, being afflicted with a verbal and visual rhetoric which is Bergman’s most annoying characteristic. But the terrible assessments that the old Professor is forced to make in it prove that he is not merely the victim of his women: he is responsible for what his women have become.
We soon switched from Bergman’s movies to the subject of Stockholm.
“It is not a city at all,” he said, with intensity. “It is ridiculous of it to think of itself as a city. It is simply a rather larger village, set in the middle of some forests and some lakes. You wonder what it thinks it is doing there, looking so important.”
I was to encounter in many other people this curious resistance to the idea that Stockholm could possibly become a city. It certainly seemed to be trying to become a city as fast as it knew how, which is, indeed, the natural and inevitable fate of any nation’s principal commercial and cultural clearing house. But for Bergman, who is forty-one, and for people who are considerably younger, Stockholm seems always to have had the aspect of a village. They do not look forward to seeing it change. Here, as in other European towns and cities, people can be heard bitterly complaining about the “Americanization” which is taking place.
This “Americanization,” so far as I could learn, refers largely to the fact that more and more people are leaving the countryside and moving into Stockholm. Stockholm is not prepared to receive these people, and the inevitable social tensions result, from housing problems to juvenile delinquency. Of course, there are juke boxes grinding out the inevitable rock-and-roll tunes, and there are, too, a few jazz joints which fail, quite, to remind one of anything in the States. And the ghost—one is tempted to call it the effigy—of the late James Dean, complete with un
iform, masochistic girl friend, motorcycle, or (hideously painted) car, has made its appearance on the streets of Stockholm. These do not frighten me nearly as much as do the originals in New York, since they have yet to achieve the authentic American bewilderment or the inimitable American snarl. I ought to add, perhaps, that the American Negro remains, for them, a kind of monstre sacré, which proves, if anything does, how little they know of the phenomena which they feel compelled to imitate. They are unlike their American models in many ways: for example, they are not suffering from a lack of order but from an excess of it. Sexually, they are not drowning in taboos; they are anxious, on the contrary, to establish one or two.
But the people in Stockholm are right to be frightened. It is not Stockholm’s becoming a city which frightens them. What frightens them is that the pressures under which everyone in this century lives are destroying the old simplicities. This is almost always what people really mean when they speak of Americanization. It is an epithet which is used to mask the fact that the entire social and moral structure that they have built is proving to be absolutely inadequate to the demands now being placed on it. The old cannot imagine a new one, or create it. The young have no confidence in the old; lacking which, they cannot find any standards in themselves by which to live. The most serious result of such a chaos, though it may not seem to be, is the death of love. I do not mean merely the bankruptcy of the concept of romantic love—it is entirely possible that this concept has had its day—but the breakdown of communication between the sexes.
Bergman talked a little about the early stages of his career. He came to the Filmstaden in 1944, when he wrote the script for Torment. This was a very promising beginning. But promising beginnings do not mean much, especially in the movies. Promise, anyway, was never what Bergman lacked. He lacked flexibility. Neither he nor anyone else I talked to suggested that he has since acquired much of this quality; and since he was young and profoundly ambitious and thoroughly untried, he lacked confidence. This lack he disguised by tantrums so violent that they are still talked about at the Filmstaden today. His exasperating allergies extended to such things as refusing to work with a carpenter, say, to whom he had never spoken but whose face he disliked. He has been known, upon finding guests at his home, to hide himself in the bathroom until they left. Many of these people never returned and it is hard, of course, to blame them. Nor was he, at this time in his life, particularly respectful of the feelings of his friends.
“He’s improved,” said a woman who has been working with him for the last several years, “but he was impossible. He could say the most terrible things, he could make you wish you were dead. Especially if you were a woman.”
She reflected. “Then, later, he would come and apologize. One just had to accept it, that’s all.”
He was referred to in those days, without affection as “the young one” or “the kid” or “the demon director.” An American property whose movies, in spite of all this temperament, made no money at the box office, would have suffered, at best, the fate of Orson Welles. But Bergman went on working, as screen writer and director in films and as a director on the stage.
“I was an actor for a while,” he says, “a terribly bad actor. But it taught me much.”
It probably taught him a great deal about how to handle actors, which is one of his great gifts.
He directed plays for the municipal theaters of Hälsingborg, Göteborg, and Malmö, and is now working—or will be as soon as he completes his present film schedule—for the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm.
Some of the people I met told me that his work on stage is even more exciting than his work in films. They were the same people, usually, who were most concerned for Bergman’s future when his present vogue ends. It was as though they were giving him an ace in the hole.
I did not interrogate Bergman on this point, but his record suggests that he is more attracted to films than to the theater. It would seem, too, that the theater very often operates for him as a kind of prolonged rehearsal or preparation for a film already embryonic in his consciousness. This is almost certainly the case with at least two of his theatrical productions. In 1954, he directed, for the municipal theater of Malmö, Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow. The next year he wrote and directed the elaborate period comedy, Smiles of a Summer Night, which beautifully utilizes—for Bergman’s rather savage purposes—the atmosphere of romantic light opera. In 1956, he published his play A Medieval Fresco. This play was not produced, but it forms the basis for The Seventh Seal, which he wrote and directed the same year. It is safe, I think, to assume that the play will now never be produced, at least not by Bergman.
He has had many offers, of course, to work in other countries. I asked him if he had considered taking any of them.
He looked out of the window again. “I am home here,” he said. “It took me a long time, but now I have all my instruments—everything—where I want them. I know my crew, my crew knows me, I know my actors.”
I watched him. Something in me, inevitably, envied him for being able to love his home so directly and for being able to stay at home and work. And, in another way, rather to my surprise, I envied him not at all. Everything in a life depends on how that life accepts its limits: it would have been like envying him his language.
“If I were a violinist,” he said after a while, “and I were invited to play in Paris—well, if the condition was that I could not bring my own violin but would have to play a French one—well, then, I could not go.” He made a quick gesture toward the window. “This is my violin.”
It was getting late. I had the feeling that I should be leaving, though he had not made any such suggestion. We got around to talking about The Magician.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with hypnotism, does it?” I asked him.
“No. No, of course not.”
“Then it’s a joke. A long, elaborate metaphor for the condition of the artist—I mean, any time, anywhere, all the time—”
He laughed in much the same conspiratorial way he had laughed when talking about his reasons for doing The Seventh Seal. “Well, yes. He is always on the very edge of disaster, he is always on the very edge of great things. Always. Isn’t it so? It is his element, like water is the element for the fish.”
People had been interrupting us from the moment we sat down, and now someone arrived who clearly intended to take Bergman away with him. We made a date to meet early in the coming week. Bergman stood with me until my cab came and told the driver where I lived. I watched him, tall, bare-headed, and fearfully determined, as he walked away. I thought how there was something in the weird, mad, Northern Protestantism which reminded me of the visions of the black preachers of my childhood.
One of the movies which has made the most profound impression on Bergman is Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage. It is based on a novel by Selma Lagerlöf which I have not read—and which, as a novel, I cannot imagine. But it makes great sense as a Northern fable; it has the atmosphere of a tale which has been handed down, for generations, from father to son. The premise of the movie is that whoever dies, in his sins, on New Year’s Eve must drive Death’s chariot throughout the coming year. The story that the movie tells is how a sinner—beautifully played by Sjöström himself—outwits Death. He outwits Death by virtue, virtue in the biblical, or, rather, in the New Testament sense: he outwits Death by opposing to this anonymous force his weak and ineradicable humanity.
Now this is, of course, precisely the story that Bergman is telling in The Seventh Seal. He has managed to utilize the old framework, the old saga, to speak of our condition in the world today and the way in which this loveless and ominous condition can be transcended. This ancient saga is part of his personal past and one of the keys to the people who produced him.
Since I had been so struck by what seemed to be our similarities, I amused myself, on the ride back into town, by projecting a movie, which, if I were a moviemaker, would occupy, among my own productions, t
he place The Seventh Seal holds among Bergman’s. I did not have, to hold my films together, the Northern sagas; but I had the Southern music. From the African tomtoms, to Congo Square, to New Orleans, to Harlem—and, finally, all the way to Stockholm, and the European sectors of African towns. My film would begin with slaves, boarding the good ship Jesus: a white ship, on a dark sea, with masters as white as the sails of their ships, and slaves as black as the ocean. There would be one intransigent slave, an eternal figure, destined to appear, and to be put to death in every generation. In the hold of the slave ship, he would be a witch-doctor or a chief or a prince or a singer; and he would die, be hurled into the ocean, for protecting a black woman. Who would bear his child, however, and this child would lead a slave insurrection; and be hanged. During the Reconstruction, he would be murdered upon leaving Congress. He would be a returning soldier during the first World War, and be buried alive; and then, during the Depression, he would become a jazz musician, and go mad. Which would bring him up to our own day—what would his fate be now? What would I entitle this grim and vengeful fantasy? What would be happening, during all this time, to the descendants of the masters? It did not seem likely, after all, that I would ever be able to make of my past, on film, what Bergman had been able to make of his. In some ways, his past is easier to deal with: it was, at once, more remote and more present. Perhaps what divided the black Protestant from the white one was the nature of my still unwieldy, unaccepted bitterness. My hero, now, my tragic hero, would probably be a junkie—which, certainly, in one way, suggested the distance covered by America’s dark generations. But it was in only one way, it was not the whole story; and it then occurred to me that my bitterness might be turned to good account if I should dare to envision the tragic hero for whom I was searching—as myself. All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up. All of it, the literal and the fanciful. Bergman’s authority seemed, then, to come from the fact that he was reconciled to this arduous, delicate, and disciplined self-exposure.