PARTISAN REVIEW
39
When I left Stockholm at the beginning of February 1970, I stop–
ped off in Paris, hoping that I could persuade Laurent Terzieff (an actor
I'd admired for years hut had never met) to accept the role of Carl. I
discovered he was not in Paris but was on tour for the whole month.
The phone call which finally reached him was to the backstage of a
theater
in
a small city whose name I've forgotten, an hour before cur–
tain time. Apologetic, and forced to shout (the connection being up
to the usual Paris-to-provinces standard ) in my far from perfect French,
I
tried to explain who I was, that I wanted him to :be in a film, and
that I hoped to come to see him that week, wherever he would be. To
my astonishment and pleasure, he replied that my trip wouldn't be
necessary, since he could tell me right away that he would like to
work with me. Two minutes after the start of our conversation, without
giving me time even to tell him the theme of the film or what his
role would be, and undeterred by my warning that he (like everyone
working on the film) would be paid next to nothing, I had his
promise to put aside three months to come to Sweden.
If
perhaps un–
consciously I had become prepared by Lindgren to receive unexpected
gifts of trust, Terzieff's two-minute consent, blind, over the telephone
(we did not meet
u:n1lil
two months later ), had nothing of the stately
tone of Lindgren's one minute in the corridor the previous March.
No one could be more un-Swedish than ascetic, exacting, ardent,
generous Laurent - who was to be, quite simply, perfect in his under–
standing of Carl. More confident i,n the script now that I knew Terneff
would play Carl, I went back to New York and rewrote it once more.
It
was Laurent Terzieff who first observed - when I sent him
the script a month later - that in the tormented history of Martin and
Carl I was evo\cing ,the legendary relatJionship between Diaghilev and
Nijinsky, I told him he was right, and I know it helped Terzieff to
believe that in the weeks he spent preparing for the role before he
arrived in Stockholm in July. But, in point of fact, it's not true. My
distant real-life models were quite another, more contemporary director
(theater, not ballet) an.d his holy fool. But even they were only the
vaguest of starting points for
Brother Carl.
The characters that became
Martin and Carl are, as I now know, people who have lived for decades
inside my head - emblems of the dramaturgy of silence (or voluntary
mutism) that has been an obsessive theme in my life and in my novels
as
well as my films. Silence haunts
The Benefactor,
not only as a
recurrent option in the plot- but, more important, in the off-centered
loquacity of the narrator (and the oppressive weight of all that he
does
not
tell ) . Voluntary mutism is what tempts Diddy throughout the
mg
meditation on dying which is the argument of
Death Kit;
and in
