Lehman & poetic justice

There was a time when American readers kept pace with new plays, even if they didn’t live in New York or couldn’t afford tickets. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, published by Viking Press, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection; Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  made good money in hardcover and paperback for Atheneum.

When theatres went dark in March, good plays were left dangling early in their runs. Some will never re-emerge. One was the Italian writer Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy, a broad-backed epic about the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers.

Mr Massini began writing this book in 2008, shortly after the firm precipitously crumbled, like a cigar ash, amid the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. When I initially saw photographs of the New York production, showing dark-suited men gesturing in a gleaming office cube, I assumed the play was a boiler-room account of that collapse.

That’s not it at all. Mr Massini’s play pans across 160 years of the firm’s history, beginning when Hayum (soon to be known as Henry) Lehman moved from Bavaria to Alabama and entered the cotton business. The play’s Italian version ran five hours. Sam Mendes, who directed the London and New York productions, whittled it down to three and a half.

Mr Massini’s original text, a novel in verse, has now been issued in English for the first time, in a translation by Richard Dixon. It’s a monster, a 700-page landslide of language with no obvious speaking parts. But it’s apparent right from the start that Mr Massini is the real thing. His writing is smart, electric, light on its feet.

The Lehman Trilogy: A Novel

Author: Stefano Massini 

Publisher: HarperVia

Price: $35 

Pages: 708

 

At the same time, his book ominously circles the big questions: Were the original three Lehman brothers and their descendants heroes or villains? Did they inject spirit and muscle into the American experiment, or were they simply cowbirds, laying eggs in other birds’ nests? The answers are complicated.

Less complicated is the criticism, articulated most exactly by Sarah Churchwell in a New York Review of Books essay, that Mr Massini’s play glosses over the Lehmans’ participation in the slave trade in Alabama.

Henry emigrates to America. Having arrived, he: “can smell the stench of New York/all over him:/a nauseating mix of fodder, smoke and every kind of mold,/such that, to the nostrils at least,/this New York so much dreamed about/seems worse than his father’s cattle shed,/over there in Germany, in Rimpar, Bavaria.”

He moves south, to Alabama, for the sunshine. One wonders what Henry expected. He arrives, as do his two brothers shortly thereafter. They are in constant motion, making sure their materials are the finest and their prices the lowest. They perfect, if not invent, the all-American idea of the middleman. They become brokers, buying cotton and selling it elsewhere. 

Their business expands to coffee, oil and coal, and eventually to electricity, railroads, planes, comic books, Hollywood and computing. They enter banking, and the idea of what they do becomes increasingly abstract.

Early on we read: “First: when we were in business/people gave us money/and we gave something in exchange./Now that we’re a bank/people give us money just the same/but we give nothing in exchange./At least not for the moment. Then we’ll see.”

By the end of the book, the debt swapping and complicated mathematics lead a character to ask, “Have you at least asked whether a rodeo like this is entirely legal?”

The Lehman Trilogy lives on the page because of its human moments: the wooing of spouses; the scandals and feuds; the perilous attempts to climb the class ladder.

The best running set piece is one in which the Lehmans seek a better row in their Manhattan temple, competing with families like the Goldmans and the Sachses, with whom they have much in common.

The family has a lot of worms to drop, via well-buffed fingernails, into the beaks of their young. They learn to launder reputations through philanthropy. A long-anaesthetised sense of morality emerges among some of the young members of the clan.

Lehman Brothers grows more predatory. Mr Massini pauses to examine the language of finance. Where once wo­rds like “succeed” and “competitor” were used, now the terms are “impose” and “enemy.” The Lehmans wield their power through discipline, control and punish­ment. Upon their conquered enemies, they impose Carthaginian terms. Business isn’t business, business is war.

Mr Massini writes language that’s excited about itself, and that nearly always casts a spell. If at a few moments I wished I were reading a short nonfiction history of the firm instead, well, those moments were few.

The Lehman brothers were good at what they did. They were also blessed with luck. They were a bit like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in the Tom Stoppard play, who toss “heads” on a gold coin 157 times in a row.

The firm throws and throws until, in Mr Massini’s words: “they achieve a result/they then regret”.

©2020 The New York Times News Service