Paradise Lost and The Dream of the Four Miltons

Several years ago I wrote an interpretation of a dream I had in 1990 that I titled "The Dream of the Four Miltons."  The dream takes place at a hotel: a place where people are "always dropping in, always good food."

I have become ever more convinced that an important latent theme of the dream is the Clifford Odets play Paradise Lost (whose name is drawn from John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost) and my associations of that play to my childhood experiences in Atlantic City and other personal and psychological associations.

1.  Paradise Lost concerns the Gordon family; the parents Leo and Clara have three children: Jules ("Julie"), Ben, and Pearl.

Storyline: The extended family of a middle-class American businessman succumbs in stages to the crushing pressures of the Great Depression beginning in 1932 when, while America is voting for Roosevelt and against Hoover, the breadwinner's resources are stretched to the limit and continuing in a grinding spiral through to the 1935 day when the family is to be evicted from their home with no place to go, nothing to do and no way even to buy food. Through it all, however, the head of the household hangs on to a set of moral values.

2. Odets was a lover of classical music and throughout his career as a playwright he considered writing a play about his beloved Beethoven.  Coincidentally, Beethoven died in his 57th year and Odets saw meaning in the fact that he was stricken with cancer and ultimately died at age 57.  I am now 57 years old.  Odets' stage directions for Paradise Lost indicate that Pearl Gordon plays Beethoven in the play.

The final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony features a tenor and chorus singing the following text that refers to a runner running his race.  The text also refers to "Elysium," or paradise. Sometimes Elysium is imagined as a place where heroes have continued their interests from their lives. Others suppose it is a location filled with feasting, sport, song; Joy is the "daughter of Elysium" in Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy."

Joy, beautiful spark of divinity,
Daughter from Elysium,
We enter, drunk with fire,
Into your sanctuary, heavenly (daughter)!
Your magic reunites 
What custom strictly divided.
All men become brothers,

Where your gentle wing rests.

Whoever has had the great fortune 

To be a friend's friend,

Whoever has won a devoted wife,

Join in our jubilation!

Indeed, whoever can call even one soul,

His own on this earth!

And whoever was never able to, must creep

Tearfully away from this band!

(Odets' biographer, Margaret Brenman-Gibson, has written: "He [Odets] began a file marked 'Beethoven,' noting the similarities between himself and the great composer and analyzing the sources and forms of his genius.  Both, he felt, were shy, suspicious, essentially homeless, poor, and parentless -- negative elements that Beethoven had changed into a positive but embattled idealism, a reaching out for 'Bruderschaft' [Brotherhood].)

Odets' choice of the title Paradise Lost is an overt reference to Milton's poem of the same name and, arguably, a veiled reference to the term "Elysium" (or paradise) in Friedrich Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy," which Beethoven set in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony.

In the play Paradise Lost the character Ben Gordon is an Olympic runner. In the year 1990, when I had the dream I titled "The Dream of the Four Miltons" I used to run every morning.  Perhaps there is some relationship in my mind between Jesse Raben, my coworker in 1990, and the African American runner, Jesse Owens.  Significantly, the identity elements of competition and humiliation present in the manifest dream ("I am the great Stanley Palombo, a professor of medicine, and one of the greatest psychiatrists in the world. And room service is sending you a birthday cake? Who are you? You're nobody!") recur in the relationship between Jesse Owens and Adolf Hitler, who was humiliated by Owens' victories at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.  (In the context of the 1936 Olympics the word "race" is a play on words denoting both ethnicity and athletic competition.)

The "events of the previous day" of "The Dream of the Four Miltons" featured my watching an episode of the TV series "Baywatch" -- an episode that featured a waterskiing race.

Baywatch
Season 1, Episode 19: "The Big Race"
Original Air Date—16 March 1990

(According to the psychologist Drew Weston, Ph.D. "competitiveness" is a feature of the personality of the high-functioning individual with anorexia nervosa.  See paragraph 3, below).

SOLO (Tenor)
Froh
froh wie seine Sonnen fliegen
froh wie seine Sonnen fliegen
durch des Himmels prächt’gen Plan.
Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn,
Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn
freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen,
wie ein Held zum Siegen
Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn
wie ein Held zum Siegen
freudig freudig wie ein Held zum Siegen.

CHOR (Tenor I/II, Bass)
Laufet Brüder eure Bahn
freudig wie ein Held zum Siegen,
wie ein Held zum Siegen,
freudig freudig wie ein Held zum Siegen.

English Translation

Glad, as his suns fly
Through the Heavens’ glorious plan,
Run, brothers, your race,
Joyful, as a hero to victory.




3. Apparently Wagner's opera Parsifal was a favorite of Odets. The "transformation music" from Act 1 of Parsifal accompanies a scene change in which a symbolic father initiates a son figure into his world.

There is a parallel passage in "The Dream of the Blue Oxford."  "The Dream of the Blue Oxford" has its origins in my friendship with Craig W. Dye.  A passage from my dream interpretation discusses a man initiating another man into his private world:

A few days later we established contact. By that time the Jewish ghetto as it existed in 1942 until July 1942 did not exist anymore. Out of approximately four hundred thousand Jews, some three hundred thousand were already deported from the ghetto. So within the outside walls, practically there were some four units. The most important was the so-called central ghetto. They were separated by some areas inhabited by Aryans and already some areas not inhabited by anybody. There was a building. This building was constructed in such a way that the wall which separated the ghetto from the outside world was a part of the back of the building, so the front was facing the Aryan area. There was a tunnel. We went through this tunnel without any kind of difficulty. What struck me was that now he was a completely different man--the Bund leader, the Polish nobleman. I go with him. He is broken down, like a Jew from the ghetto, as if he had lived there all the time. Apparently, this was his nature. This was his world. So we walked the streets. He was on my left. We didn't talk very much. He led me.   Well, so what? So now comes the description of it, yes? Well . . . naked bodies on the street. I ask him: "Why are they here?"

(According to the psychiatrist Michael Friedman, M.D. there is a relationship between "survivor guilt"-- a phenomenon first observed in Holocaust survivors -- and families preoccupied with food and eating.  See Survivor Guilt in the Pathogenesis of Anorexia Nervosa.  See paragraph 10, below.)

4. Odets wrote: "Would you believe that Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann are as alive to me as almost anyone I know? It has been true for many years, and there I am talking about men I do not know in life no less! "  I include this quote in my book Significant Moments.

5. One of the characters in the play is named Schnabel, perhaps based on the classical pianist Artur Schnabel who was a great Beethoven interpreter.  The pianist, coincidentally, had two sisters named Clara (like the character in Paradise Lost) and Frieda (Frieda, ha!).  Arthur Schnabel had been a pupil of the internationally celebrated piano pedagogue Theodor Leschetizky.  In the play Paradise Lost Pearl Gordon, a classical pianist, studied under a pupil of Leschetizky.  Pearl's boyfriend, Felix, was named for the composer Felix Mendelssohn, or so he tells Pearl.

6. Throughout my childhood we visited Atlantic City every July.  We stayed with a family who lived in a large three-storey house at Vermont and Oriental Avenue in the Inlet, the Lischins: Sylvia and Sam.  (Sam Katz was the name of Leo Gordon's business partner in Paradise Lost.)  Sylvia's mother, the mater familias, as it were, was Ethel Blum.  Ethel Blum had a brother who lived at the house who occupied the same shady world as the character Kewpie in Paradise Lost.

The Lischins had four sons.  On the first floor of the Lischin house was a grocery store; a sign outside the store was emblazoned "Blum Delicatessen."  So the Blum Delicatessen in Atlantic City paralleled the Cameo Shop in Paradise Lost, a women's handbag business owned and operated by the characters Leo Gordon and Sam Katz.  The Lischin household was populated by a "gallery of characters."

7.  In Paradise Lost the son Ben Gordon was an Olympic athlete; Odets' stage directions for the play indicate that there is to be a statue of Ben in a running pose in the Gordon home.  One of the Lischin boys (Eddie Lischin) was very athletic.  His athletic trophies lined the living room mantlepiece.  (I was always so envious of those trophies!) Eddie Lischin was a year older than my sister.  My father used to say about Eddie Lischin: "He's very wiry."  Eddie Lischin still reminisces about Growing Up Athletic in Atlantic City.  I think he has a Jesse Raben complex!

8.  In the Lischin living room there was a piano.  I don't know who played piano.  The instrument was kept covered in cloth as if it were in mourning.  The Lischin piano always seemed mysterious to me.  Sylvia Lischin's niece, Susan Blum, was an accomplished classical pianist and for a time majored in music at Glassboro College, in New Jersey.  I remember her father, Eddie Blum, saying in the summer of 1968: "Susan is working on Claire de Lune.  That's a difficult piece."  I was 14 years old at that time.

9.  In Paradise Lost the Cameo Shop was plagued with labor/management problems.  In the first act of the play a delegation of workers visits the Gordon home demanding better pay and working conditions.  My father was active in his union: something I write about in "The Dream of the Four Miltons."

10.  The character Ben Gordon in Paradise Lost derived his name from Odets' cousin, Benny Rossman.  Odets was born in the same year as my father: 1906. In the 1930s my father had been a close friend of Odets' cousin, who lived in Philadelphia. Odets' biographer (the late Margaret Brenman-Gibson) describes the Rossman home in North Philadelphia as "a freewheeling, lively place filled with Yiddish talk and Yiddish newspapers. . . . [A family member] recalled 'lots of people always dropping in, some living with us for a few months if they had no work . . . always good food.'" My father was one of those "people always dropping in" for food and talk.   My father's relationship with the Blums and Lischins in Atlantic City was similar to his relationship with the Rossmans.  Food played an important role in the Blum family.  Sylvia Blum Lischin's brother, Eddie Blum, owned a restaurant.  Sylvia Lishin operated a grocery store.  The Blum Delicatessen had its origins in Ethel Blum cooking knishes and selling them on the beach in Atlantic City.

11. Democratic Party Politics is a theme in Paradise Lost as it is in "The Dream of the Four Miltons."  The pushy Democratic ward heeler, Phil Foley, appears in Act 1 of Paradise Lost.  Foley's associate is named Milton.  Act 1 of Paradise Lost takes place on Friday November 11, 1932 -- Armistice Day.  Franklin Roosevelt had been elected President a few days earlier, on November 8.

12.  A theme in "The Dream of the Four Miltons" is my father's heart disease.  In Paradise Lost Ben Gordon's career as a runner is brought to an end by the diagnosis of heart disease.