For Better and for Worse

By R. Z. Sheppard

A PLACE FOR NOAH by Josh Greenfeld Holt, Rinehart& Winston; 310 pages; $10

Lesson one for writers: write about what you know. Lesson two: don't be surprised if you would rather not have known what you wrote about. In 1966 Josh Greenfeld, novelist, playwright and screenwriter (Harry and Tonto), and his Japanese-born wife Foumi had their second child. They named the infant Noah. At the time, Greenfeld was attracting attention as a resolutely independent journalist, and a critic with a nose for new talent and a style that cut effortlessly through literary baloney. Foumi was cultivating her own career as a painter, and together the Greenfelds looked forward to lives rich in individual achievements and family pleasures.

Then, at 2 1/2, Noah stopped talking. He seemed to have slipped his worldly moorings and drifted into an uncharted inland sea. No one could follow him. Physicians concluded that the boy suffered from autism, a variety of schizophrenia that literally means self-involved.

The diagnosis explained everything and nothing. Meanwhile, the Greenfelds forgot what it was like to have an uninterrupted night's sleep. Their mops and washing machine were going constantly, cleaning up after a child who resisted toilet training.

Josh and Foumi made the medical rounds, only to have hopes replaced by cold facts: Noah was incurably brain damaged; more experts were interested in scientific and career concerns than in the child's plight; state institutions were poorly run dumping grounds. Ultimately, the Greenfelds acknowledged the problem that was basically theirs alone. "Have a crazy kid," wrote Josh, "and get to understand the gut meaning of a society."

That conclusion appeared in A Child Called Noah (1972), Greenfeld's hypnotic day-by-day account of how a family survives and continues to love under the pressures of caring for a brain-damaged child. In 200 pages of brief takes, Greenfeld created a whole familial world. A Place for Noah is a sequel to that earlier diary, and together the two books are a contemporary classic that directly transmits the experience, emotions, conflicts, practical difficulties and even the humor that can attend such a domestic tragedy. Entry for March 5, 1973: "Last night we had Chinese food. Noah's fortune cookie: 'A little conversation can remove great hindrances. Try it.' "

He couldn't. Noah still behaves like a two-year-old. Outwardly he is a sturdy, beautiful child. Internally he seems to be operating on a simple on-off switch. Mostly it is off. July 3, 1975: "Last night was a lie-around-the-den night. And Noah took part in it. He just loves it when the rest of us are also not doing anything. After all, not doing anything is his 'thing.' " Sometimes he chirps and croons to himself. As his brother Karl, 13, wrote in a poem a few years ago:

Noah Noah everywhere

he goes around just like air.

And when you hear his sacred tune

you know he'll come around the room.

And when he comes to stay

he will stay his way.

But the question that the Greenfelds ask themselves constantly is just how long Noah can stay. The answer is put off day by day. Entry for Jan. 2, 1976: "If Foumi or I became ill, for example, he would have to go. But right now we do enjoy Noah, as a love object, as a living presence, ... I think everyone has a Noah, something dear and treasured that will be foreclosed too soon. Only ours is of our blood and tissue."

This private truth has made Greenfeld more sensitive to our common human feelings than most American men would choose to be. In spite of this his diary is never sentimental, self-pitying or gratuitously bitter. His anger at medical and educational bureaucracies, even at a fate that has dealt him what he calls "the joker in the bourgeois deck," is always tempered by stoic irony. "Instead of being a driven writer," he notes, "I have become a driving writer." Entry for Sept. 22, 1976, two days after Greenfeld's play I Have a Dream opened to rave reviews on Broadway: "It's a good thing I did not go into New York. This morning Foumi complained of a severe toothache. So after driving Noah to school I had to take her to our dentist in Venice. He referred her to a dental surgeon in Brentwood. We drove there and had the tooth extracted. Then in the afternoon the taxi company neglected to pick up our Day Care children. So I had to ferry them to our site in Santa Monica. When I returned home I found Karl waiting for me to take him to the Palisades shopping section so he could buy a jockstrap for gym and sign up for drum lessons. After that, it was back to Santa Monica to pick up Noah. Being a Broadway playwright is not all it's cracked up to be."

It is almost impossible to imagine readers of this book who would not make a special place for Noah and more room for their own children.

-- R.Z. Sheppard

The house at the end of the street in Pacific Palisades is an unpretentious single-level ranch with requisite car port. The torrents of rain that recently fell on Southern California have turned the lawn AstroTurf green. Strawberries, one of Noah's occasional words, are ripening along the walk that leads to the front door.

"We take off our shoes before entering," says Foumi Greenfeld in a pronounced Japanese accent. She weighs only 95 Ibs., but she is not frail. Her hair is touched with gray, yet youthful energy and intelligence snap from her eyes. One is reminded of an enduring, middle-aged heroine in a Kurosawa film.

Seated at the kitchen table reading the sports page and drinking beer, Josh, 50, forms a timeless tableau of the New York apartment dweller. Noah watches with a distant curiosity from the living room couch. The next moment he has vanished, but one can hear him crooning excitedly. "He is having prepublication jitters," says Greenfeld.

It is the kind of spontaneous, left-field humor he is known for. An active coast-to-coast telephone caller, Greenfeld scatters his one-liners like electronic appleseeds. Why do Californians get up with the sun? "They don't know how to hang drapes." He is credited with an inspired description of New Jersey ("It looks like the back of an old radio") and with putting Hollywood's pretentions into perspective with the observation that "cinema is a form of Danish." His wit can contain practical advice. To someone seeking top dollar for the sale of his Malibu house, he suggested that they display gold records on the wall. Realtors in Los Angeles like their properties to have a credit. The Greenfelds once rented a place that had been leased to Carroll O'Connor before he became Archie Bunker. "Which," says Josh, "shows where we fit in." Writer John Gregory Dunne sees him as the Samuel Pepys of A T & T, "a telephone plugged permanently into his ear, bringing news of the venal and the absurd, for both of which he has perfect pitch, from all the far-flung outposts and hill stations of the writer's world."

For someone kept close to home by a brain-damaged child, Greenfeld has contacts throughout the literary community. He not only has known Norman Mailer and Philip Roth for many years, he has also met their mothers. He knew Richard Wright in Paris, met Norman Podhoretz in the latrine at Fort Dix and even has a tenuous connection to J.D. Salinger. Greenfeld and the hermitic writer used to cash their checks at the same Greenwich Village liquor store.

Born in Maiden, Mass., raised in Brooklyn, and educated at the University of Michigan, Greenfeld set his course for a playwright's career. "I had a play produced off-Broadway before there was an off-Broadway," he notes. It was about an Italian boxer who kills his brother. "It had cosmic overtones, a mixture of Antigone, Golden Boy and the last Arthur Miller play I had seen." In 1959 Greenfeld's Clandestine on the Morning Line was produced by the Ford Foundation. "Brooks Atkinson," he recalls, "said it was funny but lacked substance."

Foumi's painting career has been deflected by Noah's care, though she has blossomed as a writer. She has published a book in Japan that compares the educational systems of East and West, and she recently completed a novel about a Japanese woman living in Southern California.

For Greenfeld, 1978 is "the year of the sequel." In addition to the second Noah book, he is writing the script for another George Burns Oh, God! film (the screenplay for Part 1 was written by Larry Gelbart). Says Greenfeld: "The studio told me, 'The concept of God is assigned material,' and I would have to make up the rest." As a film writer, Greenfeld had an early success when he was an Academy Award nominee for the script of Harry and Tonto. "I modeled the plot on King Lear," he says, "and put the cat in so the old man would have somebody to talk to. I was going to use a dog, but a dog would have stolen the picture."

Greenfeld writes in a small, phoneless office over a bank on the main street in Pacific Palisades. "It's a full-service bank. I use their Xerox machine, and in an emergency the branch manager takes messages." The writing day can often be interrupted by the need to pick up Noah at his special school or drive him to the day care center that Foumi organized and directs as a volunteer. For a writer it is sometimes an untenable position. "But then," says Greenfeld, "life itself is an untenable position."

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