B. H. Friedman

Cool, elegant, pure, and yet surprisingly eccentric, the thirteen stories in Between the Flags explore contradictions of American experience since World War II. This retrospective of B. H. Friedman’s work begins with “As I Am I Will Be,” as its central character, Little Boy, faces civilian life after the war. It ends with the title story, in which a nameless man fights for his life against the sea and afterward realizes how little of his identity he carries away. Between these two periods — the forties and the eighties, youth and old age — are life stories filled with regret, humor, and subtle complications. They complement the stories collected in Coming Close (1982), also published by Fiction Collective.

Friedman’s characters struggle with the ways in which their lives are bounded. The desire to recover the sexual energy of youth propels one character into a confrontation with priapism. An art critic and the painter she made famous nourish and then finally consume each other’s talents. In “Whisper,” a man cherishes the anonymity that allows him to move freely in his pursuit of “zeros” (money). “Whisper,” a prescient parable for the eighties, was expanded into a novel and recommended for a National Book Award by William Gass. Except for “Reunion in Spain,” which is published here for the first time, all of these stories appeared previously in distinguished literary magazines.

Coming Close is what the author calls “alternative autobiographies” — four stories, each dealing freely with different, though sometimes overlapping, material through which we understand the complexity of a man’s life.

In the previously unpublished novella “Watching Father Die,” a son sees his father die — both as physical man and psychological symbol. At the same time, the son watches himself die, and cool rage balances warm compassion.

“Drinking Smoke” and “Moving in Place” have both been published in prestigious literary magazines — New American Review and The Hudson Review. Like the novella, each is concerned with an obsession. “Moving in Place” received a Fels Award of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines as one of the five best stories of the year. Finally, “Choosing a Name” focuses on how a man who is nameless, though precisely identified in the first three stories, comes close to being B. H. Friedman. Altogether, the four stories reinforce one another to become a coherent, multi-faceted self-portrait.

This novel is both a love story and the history of the Skane family’s Museum of Living Art, as it changes from a small private museum into a large public institution, what Emerson called “the lengthened shadow of one man.” That man, that shadow, the museum’s founder, permeates the novel. Though long dead, his ideas, his wishes, his dreams struggle to stay alive in the consciousness of his son who sits on the museum’s board. The son’s relationship to his sister and other trustees is deeply experienced within the context of seemingly cold, businesslike board meetings and, outside the boardroom, in equally intense relationships with two women, a painter and an art historian, as he, on his own behalf as well as his father’s, resists the institutionalization of dreams.