Richard Byrne’s recent play Hotel Mayflower supposes a 1939 meeting at a Manhattan hotel between a young William Burroughs, his German Jewish wife, Ilse, and her employer, the German Jewish exile and antifascist writer/activist Ernst Toller.
Toller’s 1927 play Hoppla, We’re Alive! about a communist revolutionary who takes his own life after spending almost a decade in an asylum only to find his comrades in new unexpected stations in their lives, was likely one of the books burned by Nazis in 1933 as his citizenship was revoked by the government that same year.
Toller took his own life on May 22, 1939, in that hotel where Byrne’s play is set. Some newspaper accounts indicated Ilse was the one who had found his body only a few months after she arrived in the U.S. His death sent shockwaves through German communities as well as the literary, theatrical, and intellectual anti-fascist worlds.
As Byrne was researching Toller’s life and death for the play, he discovered some discrepancies in reportage, books, and personal accounts, inspiring him to explore these contradictions and uncover any truths he might find. This investigation into Toller’s final days is the subject of his fascinating new book Beauty Doesn’t Reach Me (We Heard You Like Books, 2026).
Five hundred people showed up at Toller’s memorial service on Saturday, May 27, 1939, but only three hung around for Toller’s cremation the following day. Who were they? Who was responsible for the arrangements? Wasn’t Toller married? Who was his wife and where was she through all of this?
Rather than a biography of Toller, Byrne instead raises questions inspired by the writer’s death from the get-go and doesn’t stop for a tight 120 pages. Some answers are head-scratchers, prompting new questions, while others take him down unexpected paths, but Byrne remains undeterred. I’m reminded of the Bob Dylan lyric: “A question in your nerves is lit / Yet you know there is no answer fit / To satisfy, insure you not to quit.”
In other words, this book is a champion for curiosity.
The image on the book’s cover is a death mask made of Toller’s face. More questions arise. Who made it? How did they pull it off? Since death masks went out of fashion in the late 19th century with the rise of photography, why make one? Does it still exist?
Byrne uses the mask as a kind of Rosetta Stone, constructing a narrative through procedural means, taking side quests (though never straying too far from his path), and connecting the sub-journeys back to Toller and his “final image.” This centering of a totem reminded me of Warren Ellis’ Nina Simone’s Gum (Faber & Faber, 2021) where the author takes a seemingly innocuous object and uses it to expound on art, memory, creativity, and the meanings we humans project onto inanimate things.
In exploring the tangential connections to Toller and the mask, Byrne is able to touch upon larger themes of immigration, mid-20th century psychiatry and psychology, human behavior, art, literature, activism, and even anti-comic book crusades. Husbands, wives, co-workers each have their own stories which juxtaposed with each other, tell a larger story. The greater the context, the richer the narrative. As a bonus, we get nuggets of trivia such as discovering that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.H. Auden was a translator for some English-language productions of Toller’s plays, and Rudolph Valentino’s memorial service was held at the same New York location as Toller’s.
I don’t want to give away too much more because, for me, the unfolding of the investigation is more the point of the whole enterprise rather than the compelling story itself–the finding rather than the having found. Byrne walks the walk of his research, traveling to archives in different cities, scouring boxes and files, searching for pieces of information to scratch one itch only to irritate a new one, bringing us down the rabbit hole right with him so that we can engage and ask questions, too. In fact, he includes his references at the end of each chapter rather than a single comprehensive bibliography at the end of the book as if to encourage us to double-check him or to go on our own Choose Your Own Adventure and see if there are other threads to pull, something he may have missed.
And Byrne writes it with such a taut approach, not indulging in flowery prose and complicated sentences, so much so that it reads like one of those great pocket-sized crime novels. I love it when a tight declarative sentence can answer one question while raising another.
Case in point, this simple sentence from the seventh chapter:
“No one from the funeral committee had turned up for Toller’s cremation in 1939.”
You may ask yourself, “Wow, there was a funeral committee for the guy?” Yes, he was that significant in his circles, and the committee’s existence is brought up much earlier in the book. But even still, within this sentence, there is an answer: Byrne discovers no one from said committee attended Toller’s cremation (despite a large attendance at his service), which raises the questions: So, attended? Wait, who was on the committee again? Why didn’t they show?
It connects to the opening graph of the sixth chapter:
“The meager attendance at the cremation foretold how quickly Toller would be forgotten. Yet for those more closely involved in the drama, ill feelings rippled on for months.”
The first sentence highlights why it’s notable few showed up for his cremation, the second sets up a path of drama to explore.
The opening sentence in the seventh chapter tells us:
“All the new information I had gathered about Ernst Toller’s final days eventually led me back to the death mask.”
Once again, we’re chasing an object at the center of the narrative like an Alfred Hitchcock “MacGuffin,” but instead of Hitch’s use of an object as an excuse for action and plot, Byrne uses it as a reason for wonder.
These examples may seem somewhat slight on the surface, but there is tension and drama inherent in the interrogative back-and-forth, even if the interrogation is with old newspaper articles, yourself, a mask, or ghosts. It’s kind of like using pencil shading (debossing) to uncover hidden invisible writings on a blank piece of paper.
In a culture of online know-it-alls, gurus, self-designated experts, and self-righteous blowhards, everyone seems to have the answers and almost no one asks any questions, much less sits with them for any amount of time. (Exercise: Post a rhetorical question on social media and see how long it takes before someone answers it literally or sarcastically.) Immediate means may create an expectation and addiction to needing immediate answers, but when we stop asking and pondering questions, we stunt development and expansion. We stagnate, rot, and die. The antidote is to be curious again, or at the very least, for God’s sake, not willfully incurious.
Byrne wants answers, too, but he’s going to take a 360-degree look at a finding first before taking notes and inevitably being motivated toward the next examination. I’m reminded of three other works: Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey by Mack McCormick (Smithsonian Books, 2023), All the Devils are Here by David Seabrook (Granta, 2018), and Bill Morrison’s documentary film Dawson City: Frozen Time (Kino Lorber, 2016).
In each of these, the author studies their subject with obsessive exactitude and careful reporting. The world actually knew very little of bluesman Robert Johnson in 1969 and McCormick made it his mission to find out what he could, teaching us that perhaps you learn more about a subject by going around it, that the tangential story is often as interesting and telling as if you were able to conduct a straightforward one-on-one interview with your subject. Seabrook digs up a series of dark stories beneath the facades of a few idyllic coastal towns of South East England, collected and arranged in a way to give heft to the “Satan masquerading as an angel of light” idea with the angel here being oceanfront locales. And filmmaker Morrison took silent film reels discovered in 1978–literally excavated under rubble from an old hockey rink–and used them to tell a story about Hollywood, silent film, the Gold Rush, and the history of a Canadian city, where the macro story, its micro narratives, and the story behind the opportunity to tell them are all of equal importance.
Beauty Doesn’t Reach Me made me want to be a fellow excavator, alongside Byrne and these other investigators and storytellers, uncovering narratives about… well… anything! Everything starts with a question. Who built that interesting building in your town? Who sculpted that statue? What all connects to it? Why is a known personality buried in a local rural cemetery? Why was there controversy surrounding something? How does it fit into a larger topic? What does it say about its time period? What might it say about human beings? If beauty didn’t reach one person in the book, did it reach me? Will there be renewed interest in Ernst Toller? What should we read of his first? Will death masks return? What else has Richard Byrne written? Will he write something else like this? What’s next?
wow, great review! excited to read this book
I'm envisioning that Toller death mask, very carefully set on rollers, and being gently pushed toward some overwhelming question...
Great review!!! -- looking forward to reading it! :)