Broadway Baby (21 page)

I want to thank several dear friends and family for help with this book over the many years that it evolved: Pam Durban, Daniel Wallace, Tom Sleigh, and my beautiful and brilliant wife, Callie Warner. I need to single out two friends in particular, Jill McCorkle and Allan Gurganus, without whose insight and encouragement this book would never have gotten to where it is. I also want to thank my agent, Janet Silver, for her wise counsel, on and off the page, and my editor at Algonquin, Chuck Adams, for his faith in the book and his indispensable guidance.

Broadway Baby

Life vs. Art: A Note from the Author

Questions for Discussion

LIFE VS. ART

A Note from the Author

In both my poetry and my prose, my personal life has been a source of subject matter. But in saying that, I feel it’s important to point out that personal experience is not art, and art is not personal experience. For one thing, personal experience does not happen in sentences and paragraphs, or lines and stanzas. For another thing, even in a story that follows closely something that may have happened in life, the writing of that story always requires a selection and arrangement of detail, and thus is always as much invented as recalled. While autobiographical detail often finds its way onto the page, my loyalty in writing poetry and fiction (nonfiction is another matter) is to the story itself as it evolves, and not to the actual events that may stand in back of this or that scene or stanza. In
Broadway Baby,
for instance, I have drawn on certain facts of my personal life. Like Ethan, my brother David was a Broadway actor, a song and dance man, and like Miriam’s parents, my mother’s parents were divorced in the 1920s. My family lived at the same time and in the same place as the Gold family in the novel. And like Hank Gold, my father spent most of his working life running his father’s slaughterhouse. But while some external facts are similar in some ways, the internal lives of the people in this book are completely imagined. What they think and feel and often what they do issue from the dramatic necessities and pressures of the story as it unfolds.
Th
e story itself determines how the characters develop. I took my cues from what was happening on the page, not from anything that has happened in the world. And even where there is some correspondence between real and imagined life, that reality is transformed into art, into linguistic forms and patterns that I hope illuminate experiences that otherwise, in the world itself, are muddled and confused.

Why do essentially good though complicated people behave in ways that can have damaging effects on both them and those they love? How do people survive devastating losses? In times of trouble, how do the things we desire become as much a refuge as a passion? In what ways are the dreams we dream as much a burden as a blessing? How do we see past our fantasies about other people to develop a real appreciation of who they are?
Th
ese are the questions I aim to explore in all my work. My need to ask such questions may derive from the particular circumstances of my life, but the exploration itself is governed by imagination and the necessities of art.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. In the Broadway show that Miriam sees,
Showboat
, the character Miss Julie is a kind of outcast after she is exposed as being born of mixed blood, an anathema in the period in which the musical play was set, right after the Civil War. Why do you think the ten-year-old Miriam identifies so closely with the character of Miss Julie in particular, and to the lure of the stage in general? What is it about her family life and her parents’ divorce that predisposes her to love the theater, to dream about a life on stage?

2. By means of musicals and Miriam’s lifelong love of them, what does this novel say or imply about the role not just of entertainment but of art in general, high art as well as popular art, in how we live our lives?

3. How does Miriam’s relationship with her mother, Tula, influence the kind of mother she herself becomes?

4. Despite her dreams of stardom, Miriam is in many ways a conventional middle-class Jewish housewife. How do those conventional values shape her relationship to her children, to her daughter Julie’s involvement with African Americans, to Sam’s eccentricities and his later passion for poetry, and to her friendship with Stuart Foster?

5. While Miriam is anything but a religious Jew, how does her Jewishness inform her understanding of the world? Why do you think she is made so uncomfortable by the presence in her neighborhood of Holocaust survivor Sigrid Rosenberg?

6. Why is intimacy, physical as well as emotional, so difficult for Miriam? What in her makeup or in her cultural and historical background hinde
rs her from connecting with her children and her husband? Does she ever realize what it is about herself that estranges her from others?

7. In their last conversation, Stuart Foster tells Miriam that she’s been living in a dream world. In what ways is this statement true? In what ways do Miriam’s dreams, hopes, and expectations cut her off from those she loves?

8. Faced with a distressingly dysfunctional home life, Sam retreats into a world of his own creation, using biting humor rather than overt rage as a coping mechanism. Discuss the very narrow lines that separate comedy from tragedy and humor from anger. Given his upbringing, do you envision a happy adult life for Sam? Why or why not?

9. Miriam loses her daughter Julie to the culture wars of the 1960s and her son Ethan to cancer. She cares for her mother, Tula, when she falls ill; she cares for Curly during his long physical and mental decline. In what ways do these catastrophic losses change her? In what way do they humanize her?

10. At the end of the novel, there is a moment of redemption for Miriam, a moment of seeming uncharacteristic humanity and love.
Th
e moment involves the character Catherine Olsen—what is it about this woman that draws Miriam to her? How does Catherine help Miriam overcome her inhibitions, her squeamishness about the human body?

11. Do you feel that Miriam was a “good” person? Which of her traits and characteristics do you relate to, and which do you find most unattractive?

12.
Th
e lack of emotional interaction between members of Miriam’s family is a constant theme in the novel and leads to frequent conflict, yet in the telling, the story is full of humor. Do you find this kind of “black comedy” an effective way to convey the reality of human emotions, or do you think the story would have been more effective if played “straight”?

PHOTO CREDIT: CALLIE WARNER

Alan Shapiro is the author of ten volumes of poetry and two memoirs, one of which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received a
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize, a Lila Wallac
e
–
Reader’s Digest
Writer’s Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, among other honors.

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