On the eve of Hallowe’en, 1980, Dick Cavett’s television guests included Stephen King, George Romero, and Peter Straub. Watching it now, King is the most voluble, playing the open-shirted raconteur, stage right, closer to the audience than the others in several senses. He is alert to the chance to promote Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, released in May, and to tag team with Romero to tease their forthcoming horror movie anthology Creepshow (1982). Straub, in something like an accountant’s uniform, looks like the straight man, but he is also quick and generous. These masters of their genre were born during, or in King’s case, shortly after World War II. They have Atomic Age anxieties, but an ease with television.
Yet, there is a fourth guest, one that Cavett has to draw out. It is as if he has shrugged himself from the spotlights, is somewhat camera-shy. Perhaps it is because he is not a horror writer in anything like the sense that the others are. This interloper is Ira Levin, born in 1927, twenty years before the youngest, Stephen King. And of the four, it is Levin who claims to have had the most orthodox, the least neurotic and least uncanny childhood. But is this so?
By 1980, the modest, introverted Levin had written four iconic novels: A Kiss Before Dying (1953), Rosemary’s Baby (1967), The Stepford Wives (1972), and The Boys from Brazil (1976), all of which had been adapted for cinema. Levin’s third novel, the dystopian science fiction novel This Perfect Day (1970), caught somewhere between Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s Logan’s Run (1967), was the only misfire of his career as a novelist to that point. Levin had also established himself as a playwright and writer for television in the 1950s—something to which he later would allude in Sliver (1991)—and his 1978 play Deathtrap would have the longest run of any ironic thriller on Broadway.
It is Levin, among Cavett’s guests, and among writers of thrillers in general to whom I am drawn. I cannot claim a prose influence from Levin; his staccato style is quite distant from mine. Indeed, I do not admire Ira levin without a flicker of cognitive dissonance yet admire him I do. This must be because we share some undercurrent of sensibility, a Freudian gothic, belied by the transparency of his style.
Levin quietly announces that his formative horror influence was Dracula. Straub interjects, “You mean the movie.” No, Levin means Bram Stoker’s novel which he read as a child. It is from Stoker, of course, that Levin adapted the name of the building in Rosemary’s Baby, the Bramford. It is also the case, easily forgotten, that Dracula is premised upon a real estate transaction with Jonathan Harker as the substitute broker. Levin’s protagonists from the eponymous Rosemary Woodhouse, and Joanna Eberhardt of The Stepford Wives, to Sliver’s Kay Norris, discover the uncanny, repressed material that haunts their desirable new homes. Each is afflicted in her own way by what Freud, in his paper “The Uncanny” (1919) traced to the unheimlich, the emergence of the ‘unhomely,’ and to misrecognitions, failures to identify their nemeses, and the animism or animation epitomized by the Stepford wives.
Roman Polanski’s 1968 film of Rosemary’s Baby is so faithful to Levin’s novel as to suggest what Harold Bloom called transumption, or the uncanny sense that the later work precedes the original, as if Levin’s book is a novelization of Polanski’s film. Films of Levin’s works tend to flinch, but Polanski’s does not. The book was published in March 1967; Polanski wrote the screenplay and completed filming in December of the same year. The film was released in the summer of 1968.
A little over a year later, in August 1969, the central issues of the novel collided. Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate was stabbed to death by Tex Watson and Susan Atkins, members of Charles Manson’s apocalyptic cult. As he entered the house, Watson is reported to have announced, “I am the Devil, and I’m here to do the Devil’s business.” Polanski and Tate’s child died in her mutilated body. Watson and his accomplices also killed Tate’s former partner, hairstylist Jay Sebring, Polanski’s friend Wojciech Frykowski and his girlfriend Abigail Folger (of the Folger coffee dynasty) that night at 10050 Cielo Drive, in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles. In Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary gets a Vidal Sassoon haircut. In 1965, Sharon Tate had modeled a short mod hairstyle for Vidal Sassoon. Such is the unconscious of a novel. Such are moments of the uncanny. Joan Didion picks up others in “The White Album.”
Interviewed in 1992 at the American Jewish Committee Oral History Library, Levin describes his Russian immigrant grandparents, his American-born parents, a mostly secular and secure upbringing, and his family’s move from the Bronx to Manhattan when he was in his early teens. He claims not to have experienced anti-Semitism in his youth, with the notable exception of an experience in applying to Cornell where he was told that being Jewish would count against him.
His family’s move from the Bronx to Manhattan—more aspirational real estate—was immediately preceded by his bar mitzvah during which the rabbi subsituted Levin’s prepared speech with a more orthodox of his own. “I resented that very much,” Levin says, “and I was unhappy.” Levin’s fiction displaces his experience and his non-experience of Jewishness. In Chapter Three of This Perfect Day, Snowflake and Chip express doubt and dismay over the historical notion that baby boys were ever circumcised.
There are significant gaps between novels for Levin: fourteen years between A Kiss Before Dying and Rosemary’s Baby, and fourteen more between The Boys from Brazil and Sliver, and thirty years between Rosemary’s Baby and its dubious sequel Son of Rosemary (1997), Levin’s final novel. Yet, his preoccupations retain a certain consistency, and not merely in the form of puzzles, code, anagrams, falls from vertiginous heights, and his characters’ trips to Tiffany’s.
The Boys from Brazil represents the evolution in Levin’s oeuvre from the birth of mythic, Satanic evil in Rosemary’s Baby, to alternate historical evil with Josef Mengele’s attempts to clone a literal Hitler youth. Levin’s work is haunted by eugenics, by nightmarish engineering of life. The real Josef Mengele, Levin notes in his interview for American Jewish Committee Oral History Library, supposedly had a copy of the novel in the house where he died in 1979. “I’d like to think that he read it and that he was perhaps furious that some Jew writer in New York was using him as the villain of a pop novel.” The Stepford Wives and This Perfect Day are similarly concerned with the manipulation of, or uncanny replacement of biology. Even the initial drama of A Kiss Before Dying is a pregnancy, the killer’s need to effect an abortion, before the family romance is given several more turns of the screw.
Levin’s final novels, Sliver and Son of Rosemary are Oedipal dramas. In Sliver, the voyeur Pete Henderson’s attraction to Kay Norris is explicitly because she resembles so precisely the actress Thea Marshall, his dead mother. The novel is determinedly Freudian, with the protagonists referring on several occasions to the Oedipus Complex sustaining their relationship, before Levin takes the Oedipal strain and returns it to Sophocles’ original. And the denouement is strained indeed, a camp recapitulation of The Boys from Brazil. None of this survived into Philip Noyce’s dreadful 1993 film. Perhaps it should have.
In Son of Rosemary, Rosemary’s satanic baby grows up to be a messianic figure with mother and son always at the edge of an incestuous, Oedipal encounter which neither struggles against with any decisive strength. One thinks of the proximity of Levin’s Deathtrap to The Mouse-trap, and Freud’s sense of the Oedipal in Hamlet. It is true that Son of Rosemary, which Levin dedicated to Mia Farrow, is a mediocre book. Levin’s screenplay-like shorthand loses its original edge and becomes irritating where once it felt energetic and vital. There is something of self-parody in the last novel. The double-ending cannot quite save it.
Yet, in Ira Levin’s willingness to wrap perversity in Tiffany gift paper, and at his best, one finds in his novels ingenious constructions and scenes that are genuinely shocking. Behind the terse style, there is a poetry to the ironies of Levin’s plots, and there is a brutality that emerges from his intricate imagination. For me, behind his self-effacing manner, Ira Levin often reveled himself in his fiction as unflinching, uncompromising, and audacious. And he made it look easy.
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