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PARTISAN REVIEW
explicit Ranking of the Greats . And he examines the artist's fallow
period honestly: he suggests Albee's twenty-year bout of heavy drinking,
including ten years of debilitating drinking (from 1967 to 1977), sapped
him of creative power and left him an arrogant, mean drunk.
"What he had lost (or never had) in his childhood," Gussow writes,
"he has been seeking as an adult, and as an artist." The same could be
said of any author, but childhood is of paramount concern
to
an Albee
biographer. Albee's unhappy adoption by nouveau riche parents left him
with a nagging sense of transience. (They gave him "all the things
money could buy.") As an artist, he was confused about where his tal–
ent came from. Albee's family members appear in his plays: the
grotesques in
The Sandbox
and
The American Dream,
the declaiming
WASPs in
A Delicate Balance,
and of course the elderly mother- the
anti-muse-at the center of
Three Tall Women.
In
fact, Albee's adoption
and family drama are central obsessions in his work. "They bought
me," the playwright laments, and he seems unable
to
shake that
thought.
Albee has never kept a journal and has rarely corresponded . Thus,
Gussow relies on the playwright's memories, his plays, published inter–
views, and the comments of friends and colleagues, who attest to Albee's
influence on a generation of playwrights.
It
may be difficult now to fully
appreciate the affect Albee had on New York theater in the early
196os-how he freed the stage in terms of language, form, and content
for Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, David Mamet, and others. As John
Guare, reflecting on
The
Zoo
Story,
notes, "Albee spawned an entire
generation of park bench plays." Unfortunately, what emerges most
memorably from this biography, despite Gussow's best efforts, is not
Albee's early influence or his late success, but the fact that Albee suf–
fered a decades-long slump in between. He long fancied himself a
prophet rejected by his own people: his biological parents, the Larch–
mont couple who adopted him, the theater-going public. But in fact, the
latter two rejections were the result of his own maneuverings: he chose
to rebel against everything, including his success and the role God chose
for him as the Messiah of Broadway.
Myles Weber
