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Dangers of Happiness. The development described in Bergman's work seems to have been realized in his life. Since the completion of The Virgin Spring, friends have noticed a new mellowness in the man. An intimate who has peeked at his diaries reports that they used to be filled "with a very funny kind of logic in which he could wear many different masks and be a new man for every person he met. They reminded me of Kafka." But recently the note of logical unreality has disappeared, and the diaries are now filled mostly with clearheaded, matter-of-fact notes about people to be seen and work to be done.
Bergman and his pianist-wife, Kaebi (pronounced Cabby), live with two servants in a big old frame house in a Stockholm suburb. Bergman is up at 7:30. At 9:15 a studio chauffeur delivers him to SF, at 5 takes him home. After supper he sets up the next day's work, goes early to bed. The Bergmans rarely entertain—too much trouble. He coolly observes: "We have to administer our gifts." Bergman likes his wife to wear light makeup. "I don't want her to look like a movie actress," he says.
To some of Bergman's friends, the suburban idyl looks too good to last. One of them skeptically recalls a line from a Bergman script: "Happiness is a thick, paralyzing pastry settling down on one's everyday life." But so far happiness has not stifled Bergman's creative inspiration. Last week most of his next film, a comedy called The Devil's Eye, was in the can, and he was hard at work on the script of another picture. And it will take him a dozen years, he expects, to make all the other movies he has in mind. He will probably make most of them in Sweden. "I have spent 15 years forging my instrument," he says, "and now I have become a part of it. All the legs of the millepede are working at last. Why should I leave?"
The Existentialist. Hollywood is trying hard to persuade him. Harry Belafonte recently offered him the chance to make a movie with Belafonte in the role of Aleksander Pushkin, the octoroon who was Russia's greatest poet. Bergman declined with thanks (said he: "Pushkin was a genius. Belafonte is not"). And a Hollywood producer has reportedly offered him twelve times the modest annual income (about $22,000) he realizes from all four of his careers if he will make a picture with a big Hollywood star. Bergman has "indicated interest" in making a screen version of The Fall, by Albert Camus.
In whatever he does, Ingmar Bergman will continue with all the force of his extraordinary talent "to express the current dilemma," which he sees as a religious dilemma. God's in his heaven, says Bergman, all's wrong with the world. Man needs a God much closer to home, a God within himself. "If God is not there, life is an outrageous terror" ruled by fate, which has "no answers, merely appointments." Nevertheless, "nobody can live with Death before his eyes, and the knowledge of the nothingness of all things." Life must have a meaning. But the search for meaning ends in empty words and an empty heart.