“Lucky Bruce” Meets “The Subversive”
What a Bruce Jay Friedman story from sixty years ago tells us about contemporary America and our own selves
by Gary Lippman
What’s going on with Bruce Jay Friedman? I wondered recently when I saw the author’s name mentioned online. He hadn’t published anything in a while; did he have a new book or play or movie coming out soon?
Since the mid-20th century, Friedman had been an underappreciated player of “the Quality Lit Game,” as his friend Terry Southern called it, with Friedman’s madcap work sharing distinctive energies along with those of Southern, Erica Jong, Joseph Heller, Gael Greene, and Kurt Vonnegut. Given how generally awful the past year was to me and to the rest of humankind, I realized upon thinking of Friedman how much I craved a new shot of the man’s exhilarating cynicism. Unfortunately, my annus horribilis quickly got worse: After a few fingertip-swipes across my phone screen, I found this New York Times report from June 3rd of 2020:
“Bruce Jay Friedman, whose early novels, short stories, and plays were pioneering examples of modern American black humor, making dark but giggle-inducing insecurities of his white, male, middle-class and often Jewish protagonists, died on Wednesday at his home in Brooklyn. He was ninety.”
What a loss, I thought. No more Friedman — which meant no more Friedman novels to shelve alongside his great A Mother’s Kisses, no more story collections like Let’s Hear It For A Beautiful Guy, no more dramas like Scuba Duba, no more screenplays like Splash, no more sui generis character studies like About Harry Towns (my favorite of Friedman’s books), and no more memoirs like his provocatively entitled Lucky Bruce. (I say “provocatively” because the one other person I’ve met who nicknamed himself “Lucky” eventually got busted for doing something naughty and is now doing serious prison time. The gods take note of how we label ourselves and promptly get busy mocking us for it.)
My next reaction after reading the Times obit concerned Friedman’s birth year of 1930. As far as I was concerned, this timing put him in an excellent crowd, because also born that year were my beloved uncle Bill Fern and my dear friends Jack Garfein (the stage and film director) and David Amram (the jazz and classical composer). Alas, Garfein died last September, but my uncle and Amram both turned ninety recently, and both laughed when I paraphrased to them this bit of dialogue from the TV show Billions: “Dying in your sixties is ‘too soon.’ Your seventies — ‘a good run.’ Eighties — ‘a life well lived.’ And nineties? ‘That’s a fucking hell of a ride.’ ”
For Friedman, this “hell of a ride” ping-ponged him between Broadway, Hollywood, and the Upper East Side literary clubhouse of Elaine’s Restaurant, not far from which he’d once survived a most unusual yet archetypal world-of-letters experience. While attending one of Norman Mailer’s wild sixties house parties, Friedman got into an argument with the host, who gave him a vicious head-butt, and even though Friedman survived that affront and went on to win the ensuing fight, “Lucky Bruce” subsequently needed to get a tetanus shot because Mailer, before losing, had bitten him in the neck.
My most important reaction to the news of Friedman’s death had to do with a particular debt I owe to the author. Simply by writing a certain compelling short story, he had fundamentally changed the way I view my fellow citizens. Our recent election and its aftermath, I might add, have only confirmed the lesson that Friedman’s story taught me.
“My friend Ed Stamm was the most all-American person I’ve ever met.”
So begins “The Subversive”, Friedman’s mid-twentieth century saga. When Stamm, a tall, handsome, athletic, well-mannered, and genial Midwesterner who “looked like a white, foaming symbol of Free World cleanliness,” meets our narrator, a Jew from the Bronx, they’re Air Force cadets together. The contrast between these two young men is evident from the get-go. According to the narrator, who is clearly a stand-in for Friedman, the comprehensively blessed Ed is “waiting to get into jet fighter training while I was waiting to get into something small and inconspicuous where my lack of military know-how would do the least amount of damage.”
Over the course of several pages, an “Odd Couple” camaraderie between the men develops, as does the narrator’s awe at just how wholesome and decent Stamm keeps proving to be. The story’s climax arrives during a weekend in which Ed invites the narrator back to his hometown in Iowa. Sure enough, that setting turns out to be as white-bread as its native son. Ed’s father is an “all-American” older version of his progeny. Ed’s “kid sister” has charming freckles. And Ed’s “Girl Back Home” is “the bank president’s daughter, cheerleader at the college, voted ‘Prettiest’ in her senior class.”
Sounds too good to be true, right? And it does end up being too good to be true once the narrator discovers that his buddy is the “subversive” of the story’s title. During a happy home-cooked dinner at the Stamm dining room table, “a shriveled woman in a bathrobe” with a shawl covering “either withered legs or none at all” suddenly enters the scene. From her wheelchair she says a sweet hello to Ed. Although this woman seems to be Ed’s heretofore-absent mother, Friedman doesn’t say so explicitly. What is clear to us is the intensity of the title character’s sudden reaction:
“Ed stood up at the table, his eyes shut and his fists clenched, screaming in a monotone, ‘SON OF A BITCH, SON OF A BITCH, GET IT OUT OF HERE, DIRTY, DIRTY, SON OF A BITCH, OH, DIRTY, DIRTY BITCH.”
Both the woman in the wheelchair and Ed’s father seem saddened but mostly unruffled by this outburst from their golden boy. Probably accustomed to it, they just mutter, “Now, Ed, now, Ed,” as the father hastens to push the woman in her wheelchair out of the room, out of Ed’s sight. And afterward, Ed and his father continue the meal as if nothing strange has happened while assuming that the narrator will follow suit. Which, uncomfortably, he does.
Friedman concludes his story by repeating to us that he thinks of Ed Stamm as “the most all-American person I ever knew…Or at least I would think of him that way if I could forget that one subversive thing he pulled at dinner that night. It proved to me that you probably can’t trust a goddamned soul in this country.”
I first read “The Subversive” in the autumn of 1981 when I was eighteen, a college freshman, standing in a used-bookstore near my campus. Having unearthed Far From the City of Class, Friedman’s first story collection, in the shop’s bargain bin, I’d never heard of the author, but once I began reading “The Subversive”, I couldn’t stop. My mother had died of cancer at age forty-nine a few weeks earlier, leaving me with very little family, yet I’d retained a positive faith in humanity in general and my homeland in particular. Youthfully naïve and relatively privileged as I was then, I still believed that “American” meant “basically good” (or at least better than “Russian” or “Chinese” or even “French” or “British”). I still believed, too, that the people around me were mostly how they appeared, and that their natures were essentially one thing or another, with not much nuance, not much gray.
Or at least I deceived myself into believing those things. To do otherwise — to admit that a profound darkness surrounded me and everyone else — was simply too frightening a prospect. Watching my mother die slowly and painfully had been frightening enough for me. For eighteen years, my self-deception had held. Yet by the time I finished reading “The Subversive”, something clicked, and I felt shaken. Sometimes it takes someone else’s narrative, fabricated or otherwise, to awaken you to your own tale. “The Subversive” rang so true that I sensed I wouldn’t, couldn’t, lie to myself anymore. Farewell, innocence — here was a foretaste of grown-up reality. The reality in which paragons of goodness like Ed Stamm can, and on occasion do, conceal monstrous natures. “Man is wolf to man,” as the expression goes, and some of the worst wolves show up disguised as lambs. Thanks to a story in a book in a store’s bargain bin, I had to acknowledge that life was gray, dark gray. And, with this being the case, how safe and well-oriented could I, a motherless new adult, ever hope to feel in America? Or anywhere else?
After mulling over Friedman’s story some more, I had a second revelation connected to it, and this insight felt even more disturbing than the earlier one. Like the poor woman whom Ed Stamm had screamed at, calling her “dirty bitch,” my own mother had suffered from a serious disability, but it had not been physical. For many years — for as long as I could recall — she had been emotionally disturbed, and my living alone with her (I had no siblings, and no father at home) left me feeling destabilized, worried, and enraged. Much of the time she was loving and nurturing and fiercely protective of our household and quite functional in our everyday suburban world, but she had regular bad intervals, and these intervals seemed to engulf and obscure all the happy times.
Not surprisingly for a child, I’d found my mother’s emotional problems to be deeply embarrassing, so I kept them secret from my closest friends. In a sense, by assuring myself that “She’s not that bad,” I’d even kept her troubles a secret from myself.
But she was “that bad” — sometimes, at least — and whenever she provoked me, directing her lunacy and violence in my direction, I usually lashed back at her as violently and crazily as Ed Stamm had behaved with his mother. Or worse. And so, whereas I had initially identified with the narrator of Friedman’s story, shaking my head at Ed and passing judgment on him for his savagery, I realized now that I was more like Ed than I was like anyone else. My new “grown-up reality” now included some heavy guilt. I too had been a “subversive” (in the negative sense Friedman meant) and I had pretended to myself that I wasn’t one. Never mind my perhaps-understandable reasons for it: I’d been a wolf to my mother as much as I’d been a lamb. So those “goddamned souls” in this country whom I could trust no longer — they even included, especially included, myself.
One last thing I kept pondering about Friedman’s short work of fiction: just how fictional was it? Had Friedman actually known a prototype of “Ed Stamm,” either in the Air Force or elsewhere? If so, had this Ed’s freakish hidden nature really in some way shattered Friedman’s own sense of social innocence?
I’ll probably never find out, I told myself.
As it happened, though, I did find out. Twenty-three years after reading “The Subversive”, during the summer of 2004, I attended a writer’s conference in the Hamptons where Bruce Jay Friedman taught a week-long seminar, and it was there that I got to meet the author. He ended up being as funny and friendly and helpful a teacher as I’d hoped. One afternoon after class, I approached him to inquire something about that day’s classwork. When our conversation went past ten minutes, he said, “Walk with me out to my car,” and I did, and then we stood kibitzing in the conference parking lot for another half an hour.
I wish I could recall more of what we spoke about that day. I know that Friedman recounted some funny stories about Paris Review parties at the home of George Plimpton. I know, too, that he reminisced fondly about Terry Southern. Needless to say, I avoided asking Friedman what it had been like to be bitten in the neck by Norman Mailer, or by anyone. But I did fly my fan-boy colors toward the end of our parking-lot chat when I mentioned how memorable I’d found “The Subversive”.
“That was one of my very earliest stories,” Friedman said.
I asked him a few questions about his writing it. He answered each question thoughtfully. Then, screwing up my courage (because when would I ever get this chance again?), I mentioned that I’d been wondering for more than two decades whether that story’s characters and events had been based in reality.
For a moment in the Hamptons summer sunshine, Friedman stared at me with no expression. Which was worrying. Had I offended him by indirectly questioning his ability to invent fictive material? Would he grow so angry that he would get all Norman Mailer on me?
Happily, no. After another moment, Friedman broke into a smile and said, “It all happened pretty much the way I wrote it.”
“You know,” I said, smiling even more than he was, “I thought so.”
I didn’t tell him about the emotional and moral doors that his story had knocked down inside me. I didn’t mention my mother. I simply listened as, for the remainder of our talk, Friedman told me more about his relationship with the man he’d called “Ed Stamm” in “The Subversive”. As he indicates in “The Subversive”, the two friends began to drift apart soon after that eventful dinner at the “Stamm” home, and Friedman said he hadn’t kept in much contact with “Ed” since then.
“So you don’t know whatever happened to him?” I asked.
“Oh, I did hear some stuff about that guy through the grapevine, through mutual friends,” said Friedman. “He became a fighter pilot, a highly respected one, and stayed in the Air Force, attaining a high rank. He married a woman who seemed as all-American as he did, and they raised some apparently all-American kids, and very early one morning he went over to his base, which was located in the desert out west. The military brass would let the top guns borrow planes whenever the top guns wanted to have some flight practice, so my old friend signed out a souped-up new model. He did an hour or two of solo flying, bringing that aircraft way up high. Then he pointed it nose-down and gunned it right into the desert floor.”
“Whoa,” I said. “You’re serious?”
“That’s the story I heard.”
I squinted at Friedman, shaking my head. “Could it have been an accident?”
“From what I’ve heard, not a chance.”
“Well,” I said, “I guess that the darkness he kept bottled up inside finally came spilling out, and he turned it against himself.”
Friedman didn’t reply to this speculation. He simply shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, You claim you want to be a writer, kid—draw your own conclusions.
I did draw my own conclusions. And I vowed that, however like Ed Stamm I had once been, I would not end my life as he had. And after I said goodbye to Friedman that day, I considered myself fortunate. Not only had my longtime question about “The Subversive” been answered (yes, that story’s events had happened), but, as a bonus, I’d gotten to hear from the author’s own lips a coda to the story, a real-world “What Happened Next.”
I never got to meet or speak with Friedman after his writing seminar ended. According to his memoir, he did have, pace that quip from Billions, “one hell of a ride.” Ninety years’ worth. He considered himself “Lucky Bruce” and the gods let him get away with that. I wish my mother had been half that lucky. I wish she could have found peace for herself and could have lived into old age. Ninety years’ worth. And I wish that I’d told Friedman about her, and about how like Ed Stamm I’d once been, and about how unlike Ed Stamm I’ve since kept trying to be.
Finally—since I’m on a wishing binge here—I wish that Friedman could have lived long enough to see Donald Trump defeated on this past Election Day. I don’t know what Friedman’s politics were, but I suspect that he would have enjoyed witnessing that defeat. Then again, far too many “goddamned souls in this country” willingly voted for a plainly corrupt and cruel madman. This did not surprise me, because, like Friedman, I had learned as a young person what the American heart—what the human heart—all-too-often contains. And no election victory, or any other kind of victory, can dispel the darkness there for very long.
Born and raised in New Jersey, Gary Lippman received a law degree from Northwestern University and has worked with New York's Innocence Project. Lippman's play Paradox Lust ran off-Broadway in 2001 and his journalism has been published in the New York Times, The Paris Review, VICE, Fodors, and other fine spots. His novel Set the Controls for the Heart of Sharon Tate was published by Rare Bird Books in 2019, and his story collection is slated to appear next year. You can read his work at garylippmanofficial.com.
