Thomas Berger, ‘Little Big Man’ Author, Is Dead at 89
New York Times
By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and William McDonald
July 21, 2014
Thomas Berger, the reclusive and bitingly satirical
novelist who explored the myths of the American West in “Little Big Man” and
the mores of 20th-century middle-class society in a shelf of other
well-received books, died on July 13 in Nyack, N.Y. He was 89.
His agent, Cristina Concepcion, said she learned of his
death, at Nyack Hospital, on Monday. Mr. Berger lived in Grand View, a village
in Rockland County, N.Y., where he had remained fiercely protective of his
privacy.
Mr. Berger fell into that category of novelists whose
work is admired by critics, devoured by devoted readers and even assigned in
modern American literature classes but who owe much of their popularity to
Hollywood. “Little Big Man,” published in 1964, is widely known for Arthur
Penn’s film adaptation, released in 1970, starring Dustin Hoffman as the
protagonist, Jack Crabb.
The novel, told in Crabb’s voice at the age of 111,
recounts his life on the Great Plains as an adopted Cheyenne and makes the
claim that he was the only white survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
But Mr. Berger’s body of work was far broader than that, and it earned him a
reputation as an American original, if an underrecognized one. The author and
scholar Thomas R. Edwards, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1980,
called him “one of our most intelligent, witty and independent-minded writers.”
“Our failure to read and discuss him,” Mr. Edwards added, “is a national
disgrace.”
To many critics, “Little Big Man” was Mr. Berger’s best
novel and a worthy addition to the American canon. (The Dial Press plans a
50th-anniversary trade paperback edition this year.) “Few creative works of
post-Civil War America have had as much fiber and blood of the national
experience in them,” the historian and novelist Frederick Turner wrote in The
Nation in 1977.
Brooks Landon, Mr. Berger’s biographer, placed “Little
Big Man” in a tradition of American frontier literature begun by James Fenimore
Cooper. Henry Miller heard echoes of Mark Twain in it.
Historical fiction was just one genre that the restless
Mr. Berger embraced. He took on the horror novel in “Killing Time” (1967) and
the pulp detective story in “Who Is Teddy Villanova?” (1977). He ventured into
science fiction (and Middle American sexual fantasy) with “Adventures of the
Artificial Woman” (2004); utopian fiction with “Regiment of Women” (1973), in
which men have surrendered their grip on the world; and the survival saga in
“Robert Crews” (1994), an updating of “Robinson Crusoe.” He revisited the
western, and his best-known character, in “The Return of Little Big Man”
(1999).
The classics were also fodder. He dipped into the Camelot
myth in “Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel” (1978) and Greek tragedy in “Orrie’s
Story” (1990), a replay of the Oresteian trilogy. At other times, he reworked
popular fantasies: “Being Invisible” (1987), in which the protagonist has the
power to disappear from sight at will, and “Changing the Past” (1989), in which
a man gets to go back in time to the forks in his road and take the other path.
If Mr. Berger had a literary mission, it was to mine the
anarchic paranoia that he found underlying American middle-class life. “Sneaky
People,” from 1975, chronicles three hectic days in the life of a used-car
salesman, a “family man” who keeps a mistress and hires a car washer to kill
his phlegmatic wife. “Neighbors” (1980) records a nightmarish day in suburbia
that parodies the rituals of neighborliness, among them competitiveness,
bonhomie (false and otherwise) and a striving for civility in the face of a
creeping conviction that the people across the street are barbarians.
(“Neighbors” was made into a 1981 movie starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd,
one of four film adaptations of Berger books.)
In these and other novels — “The Houseguest” (1988),
“Meeting Evil” (1992), “Suspects” (1996) and “Best Friends” (2003) — everyday
social encounters quickly disintegrate into Kafkaesque comic horrors.
“It was Kafka who taught me that at any moment banality
might turn sinister, for existence was not meant to be unfailingly genial,” Mr.
Berger told the critic Richard Schickel in a rare interview in 1980, published
in The New York Times. He gave expression to that view in “The Feud” (1983),
which he set in the American Midwest in the 1930s. In this tale, a
misunderstanding over the fire hazard posed by an unlit cigar devolves into a
slapstick battle between two communities that somehow manages to convey a
convincing portrait of the mean Depression years.
“The Feud” was the top recommendation of the fiction jury
for the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, but it was passed over by the Pulitzer board in
favor of William Kennedy’s Depression-era novel “Ironweed,” which had also been
cited by the jury.
Before then, Mr. Berger’s focus had mainly been on
contemporary American life, in all its sprawling disorder, in a series of books
that trace the growth of a woebegone character (and perhaps alter ego) named
Carl, né Carlo, Reinhart. The books — “Crazy in Berlin” (1958), “Reinhart in
Love” (1962), “Vital Parts” (1970) and “Reinhart’s Women” (1981) — follow
Reinhart from his bewildered youth as a soldier in Berlin to his mellower
middle age as a serious cook.
Reinhart is “representative of the unrepresented,” the
cultural critic Benjamin DeMott wrote in The Times in 1981. “We’re talking
screw-ups, frankly,” he continued. “Chaps who, while seldom dropped from the
lineup, continually whiff, in all senses, in the game of life.”
But Reinhart’s existence is not without meaning.
“Possibly the simple secret of Reinhart’s value is just this: The fellow has
hunkered down here in the U.S. of A.,” Mr. DeMott went on. “He’s stuck it. He
is a man of no standing growing up stunted, naturally, blowing it in a thousand
helpless ways, dreaming on into late middle age of the coup that will turn him
overnight into Somebody, knowing it’s not in the cards, knowing (in totally
unsystematic fashion) that They, the Managers, have more or less stolen his
humanity, yet working hard to avoid being needlessly cruel to anyone.”
Of all Mr. Berger’s characters, none is as indelible as
the Indian scout and adopted Cheyenne Jack Crabb. His homespun but shrewd
colloquial voice drives the narrative of “Little Big Man.”
In his early years, Crabb is indoctrinated into the ways
of Indians, including their diet.
“The antelope chunks weren’t too well done,” he says.
“Indians don’t have a prejudice against grease, on the one hand; and on the
other, they weren’t given in those days to using salt. Along with the meat was
some chokecherries all cooked to a mush, and a root or two that didn’t have a
taste until you swallowed it and it fell all the way to your belly and gave off
the aftereffect of choking on sand.”
But he befriends his captors. “In later years I grew
greatly fond of Old Lodge Skins,” he says of one. “He had more bad luck than
any human being I have ever known, red or white, and you can’t beat that for
making a man likable.”
Thomas Louis Berger was born in Cincinnati on July 20,
1924, the son of Thomas Charles Berger, the business manager of a public school
system near Cincinnati, and the former Mildred Bubbe. Both parents loved to
read, and Thomas’s mother encouraged him to adopt the habit.
After graduating from Lockland High School in Cincinnati
in 1942, he enrolled at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and found he did not
like it. So he enlisted in the Army, which put him in the Medical Corps and
sent him to England and Germany as World War II raged.
After the war, he enrolled at the University of
Cincinnati, earned his baccalaureate degree there with honors in 1948 and
pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University until 1951, when he
abandoned work on his thesis, on George Orwell. In the meantime he married. His
wife, Jeanne Redpath Berger, a painter, is his only immediate survivor.
After Columbia, he held jobs as a librarian at the
Tamiment Institute and Library (formerly the Rand School for Social Science) in
New York and as a summary writer for The New York Times Index.
In the early 1950s, Mr. Berger moved from New York City
to Rockland County, where he scraped by as a freelance copy editor and worked
on his first novel, “Crazy in Berlin.” Writing the book took four years, in
part because he had discarded the original manuscript after two and a half
years and begun again.
For a time, Mr. Berger thrived on literary sociability.
Writers, editors and publishers frequently gathered around the dinner table at
his home. But he became reclusive, Mr. Schickel wrote in his 1980 article in
The Times, to an extent that not even his publisher or his literary agent knew
how to get in touch with him.
Mr. Schickel sustained his friendship with Mr. Berger by
mail and was sworn to secrecy about his whereabouts. In his interview with Mr.
Schickel, Mr. Berger unburdened himself of his disdain for the New York
literary scene and his weariness of everyday living, saying, “Real life is
unbearable to me unless I can escape from it into fiction.”
He was more sanguine about his craft:
“Why does one write? Because it isn’t there! Unlike
Everest and other celebrated eminences. Beginners sometime ask me how a novel
is written, the answer to which is: Any way at all. One knows only when it is
finished, and then if one is at all serious, he will never do it the same way
again.”
He concluded: “I should like the reader to be aware that
a book of mine is written in the English language, which I love with all my
heart and write to the best of my ability and with the most honorable of
intentions — which is to say, I am peddling no quackery, masking no intent to tyrannize,
and asking nobody’s pity. (I suspect that I am trying to save my own soul, but
that’s nobody else’s business.)”
BERGER, Thomas (Thomas Luis Berger)
Born: 7/20/1924, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A.
Died: 7/13/2014, Nyack, New York, U.S.A.
Thomas Berger’s western – author:
Little Big Man - 1970
Dick Smith, who transformed the art of creating special
makeup effects, has died aged 92.
