I have such hopes for The Intellectual Lover and other Stories, a collection of short stories written by David Freedman, a Romanian Jew who emigrated to the U.S. as a toddler, proved a prodigy at chess, and, after graduating from City College, became one of the most successful writers of jokes, sketches, and other material for comedians such as Eddie Cantor. Herman Wouk was one of many young Jewish writers in New York who spent time in Freedman’s laugh factory.
His family and friends considered that Freedman had frittered away his talent on the lucrative but not particularly respected business of churning out comic material, which the combined demands of radio and vaudeville were consuming in record quantities. And so, after Freedman died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of just 38, they collected a few of the short stories he’d written over the years and got them published by Harper and Row in 1940 with an introduction by Freedman’s friend, the writer and fellow Romanian emigre, Konrad Bercovici.
Bercovici’s introduction is by far the best part of the book. He describes the unique intimacy that existed between Freedman and his father, both lovers of chess, music, and literature, and shows how Freedman became something of a victim of his own success. Once he proved capable of coming up with apt material on demand, demand simply grew and grew until he worked himself into an early grave.
The stories, however, are another thing. They read like the work of someone who spent too many hours shut up in a library with one too many copies of Walter Pater, John Ruskin, or William Morris. In the title story, for example, the “Intellectual Lover” becomes incapable of not transforming the real women he sees into his Platonic ideal:
I began to notice for the first time, in women who I had known for years, certain features which I was confident belonged to that other girl. It became a habitual pastime with me to reconstruct her out of this one’s waist-line, that one’s eyes, the third one’s next, the fourth one’s arms, and the fifth one’s mouth.
She became a standard by which I analyzed, classified, and measured girls. I looked at women not to see them, but to see how they compared with her, with the standard. And as I observed new and more striking female traits in various women, I added them to this standard until it became an embodiment of all the attractive features and characteristics of all the women I knew.
It doesn’t take much of this to make me run to open a window and let some fresh air in. I will spare you the pain of an extract from the relentless Italian-American dialect of another story, “I Am He.” Let’s just-a say-a a beeg “Mamma Mia!” and leave it at that.
My apologies to those friends and family who still cherish Mr. Freedman’s memory, but I have to rate this the most justly neglected book I’ve come across in a long time. Sorry, but thats-a my opinion. If you’re desperate to prove me wrong, you can read the book in e-book formats for free at the Open Library (link).