In the mid-thirties, with what Clurman would call his “poster play,” Waiting for Lefty, followed by Awake and Sing!, Odets had sprung forth, a new phenomenon, a leftist challenge to the system, but even more, the poet suddenly leaping onto the stage and disposing of middle-class gentility, screaming and yelling and cursing like somebody off the Manhattan streets. For the very first time in America, language itself had marked a playwright as unique, for the context of his advent was a nonpolitical and nonlyric theatre, with the hits of the hour plays like Dinner at Eight, Stage Door, The Children’s Hour, The Petrified Forest, and The Philadelphia Story. Our Town was the nearest to a reaching for lyricism, but its language in comparison to Odets’s was timorous. And because he was so rough a diamond, Odets’s image was instantly loaded with a moral and social responsibility that he would wrestle with through a lifetime. It was not his radicalism, actual and alleged, but his art that was the real cross he bore in a popular culture demanding instant and painless entertainment. The apolitical F. Scott Fitzgerald would founder within much the same conflict, in Odets’s case symbolized by Joe Bonaparte of Golden Boy, who, according to Clurman, is Odets himself, a man torn between the quick buck and notoriety of boxing-Hollywood-Broadway and his violin, an art expressive of his private soul.
Returning to New York on vacations, I had my brain branded by the beauty of the Group Theatre’s productions. With my untamed tendency to idealize whatever challenged the system—including the conventions of the Broadway theatre—I was inspired by the sheer physical spectacle of those shows, their sets and lighting by Boris Aronson and Mordecai Gorelik, and the special kind of hush that surrounded the actors, who seemed both natural and surreal at the same time. To this day I can replay in memory certain big scenes acted by Luther and Stella Adler (children of Jacob, my father’s hero), Elia Kazan, Bobby Lewis, Sanford Meisner, and the others, and I can place each actor exactly where he was on the stage fifty years ago. This is less a feat of memory than a tribute to the capacity of these actors to concentrate, to be on the stage. When I recall them, time is stopped. They seem never to have been tempted to make an insignificant gesture. The closest to these productions that I ever saw was the Abbey Theatre’s Juno and the Paycock with Sara Allgood and Barry Fitzgerald, who humbled the heart as though before the unalterable truth. There is also color in my recollection; Gorelik and Aronson used color interpretively, like painters, for its subjective effects and not merely its realistic accuracy. I would later learn of the feuds within the Group, the nervous breakdowns and the selfishness and arrogant ambitiousness of various members, but from my fifty-five-cent balcony seat it was all a dream of utter integrity of aims and artistic means, as indeed it often really was. It was not the first time that the art was nobler than the artist.
Lillian Hellman’s work didn’t seem to me and other younger writers I knew to belong with these impassioned, challenging plays. Despite her dissection of its moral pretensions, the middle class in her plays seemed as unshakable as it was unworthy, enough so to make it a surprise to learn that personally she was on the left.
There was also a certain elegance in her dialogue that set her apart from the theatre of protest, which was so brash and exciting then. No doubt unjustly, she seemed to some of us preeminently Broadway rather than an outsider, with plots that never faltered and a certain deliberateness that we were probably too young and careless as writers to appreciate. Not slow revelation but the renewing blaze of righteous anger was what we were looking for. Moreover, the heart of decadence was Hollywood, and she seemed too welcome there to be trusted with one’s hopes. Which may simply be another way of saying that as rebels we did not know how to idealize successful people, but it did seem unlikely that a genuine light-bearer could be spending so much of her life working for Sam Goldwyn and the other merchants.
My purity was still breathtakingly unmarred through the thirties, so much so that at a certain point in 1939, only months out of college and conniving to get myself a twenty-three-dollar-a-week job on the Federal Theatre Project, which was already coming to its end, I had no qualms about turning down a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week offer by a Colonel Joy, representing Twentieth Century Fox, to come to work for them—along with dozens of other young writers who, as the saying went, were being shipped to California in cattle cars at the time. There was a going-away party for a few of them one afternoon, all left-wingers, some of them contributors to New Masses magazine’s literary page. Two in particular had written unproduced plays that I thought showed talent, and when I asked them why they were leaving the theatre, one of them replied, “Do you realize the number of people who see a movie? We want to reach the people.” But with what were they being reached? Everyone knew how closely controlled films were. Since there was obviously no contradiction between this man’s social convictions and his newfound eagerness to hire himself out, I asked, “But would any of you be talking like this if Fox were paying thirty-five dollars a week?” It was still beyond my understanding, this rush to unfreedom. The very idea of someone editing a play of mine or so much as changing a word was enough to make my skin crawl, and to actually submit pages to a producer who became the owner of what one wrote the moment one wrote it—this was unconscionable. Indeed, the very process itself of exchanging art for money was repulsive. Even as far along as the late forties I was shocked and incredulous to hear an actor referring to his accountant-business adviser. An artist having an accountant !And a business adviser!
Naturally, I was not above dreaming of success and the power that went with it, a power expressed in wealth and fame, its inevitable accompaniments in the theatre, but success was only legitimate if won without sacrificing independence, a word one particularly connected to the theatre. Odets, one heard, had moved into One Fifth Avenue, one of the most elegant apartment houses in New York, and owned hundreds of records. I could never roam the streets of the Village without glancing up at that elegant apartment house overlooking Washington Square and thinking of him with shelf upon shelf of classical music at his fingertips, and probably beautiful actresses stretched out on one of his numerous couches, and him with his shock of wavy hair staring moodily down at the city that waited upon the clacking of his typewriter for scenes that would mesmerize and save. An Odets play was awaited like news hot off the press, as though through him we would know what to think of ourselves and our prospects. But in those years of the “high” thirties when the prestige of the Communists was cresting, there were rumors that even Wall Street analysts were consulting with Communist Party intellectuals for clues as to the system’s next crisis. In Marxism was magic, and Odets had the wand, and of course it was an impossible act of levitation to sustain for very long.
For four or five years there was no writer who so concentrated in himself the symbolic uniqueness of his era. O’Neill came out of Jeremiah, Odets out of Isaiah; prophetic spirits both, they were playwrights of political consequence, not merely theatrical talents.
Of course my impressions were filtered by the vast distance from the top of One Fifth Avenue to the street, and the even vaster one from New York to Ann Arbor, where, in addition to schoolwork and jobs, I was writing a full-length play a semester. Confronting dramatic problems myself now, I read differently than I had before, in every period of Western drama, pretending that the works of Chekhov or Euripides or Ernst Toller were brand-new or not yet finished, still open to revision and improvement, trying out choices different from those their authors had made. I imagined them no longer marble masterworks but improvisations that their authors had simply given up trying to perfect. Regarding them as provisional, I could not find as common an identity among various Greek plays as Aristotle described, Ajax, for example, being of an entirely different nature than Oedipus at Colonus, and so it all devolved into the practical and familiar business of storytelling and the sustaining of tension by hewing to inner theme or paradox. My mind was taken over by the basic Greek structural concept of a past stretching so far back that its origin
s were lost in myth, surfacing in the present and donating a dilemma to the persons on the stage, who were astounded and awestruck by the wonderful train of seeming accidents that unveiled their connections to that past. (To possess the past is to achieve importance!) But the discovery of connection was also the revealing of their characters; it was each person’s uniqueness that paradoxically revealed his union with the fate of all.
And of course the purpose of the whole event was to prove the power of the invisible world, expressed in the long arm of vengeance upon violators of the moral law; and what was the moral law but man’s sacred ongoing social survival? And that retribution was beautiful because it proved that something out there cared. The Erinyes, howling furies of the gods’ police force, were put in the world to sustain the symmetry of Nature’s endless self-correcting urge, her aversion to man-destroying waste.
I could find no such air of process in Odets, only individual explosive scenes with no strong momentum driving the whole, excepting always Rocket to the Moon, his one real success as a writer, and one with a central symbol that emits an integral power, not merely a rhetorical one, and does it naturally. I find it interesting that like O’Neill, he was working within and against an orthodoxy, but O’Neill had wrestled loose of his Catholicism, while Odets’s Marxism still—in the thirties—pressed him into deforming gestures.
I encountered Odets the first time in 1940, when I glanced up from a rack of secondhand books in Dauber and Pine’s shop on Fifth Avenue and Twelfth Street and recognized him from his photographs, though he looked more wraithlike than I expected. He was just leaving with two thick tomes lovingly clasped to his chest, and since I had only come in to browse, my income from the radio plays being nearly nil at the moment, I followed him outside, something I had never done before. His hair grew thin and soft, like feathery ferns, and his gaunt face had a rather startled look. I was so supremely naive as to mention that I was a playwright too, news that to my surprise seemed to slam a door between us then and there. I had no way of knowing how boringly often this approach must have been made to him, but I did manage to ask what he was writing now, and hefting the books he was carrying, he said, “I’m doing a play about Woodrow Wilson.”
Eighteen years later he met Marilyn Monroe in a Hollywood studio and made a date to meet us both for dinner, but first our paths would cross again in 1949, at the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where we both found ourselves on the arts panel at what would turn out to be a hairpin curve in the road of history.
It was dangerous to participate in that fateful attempt to rescue the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union in the face of the mounting pressures of the Cold War, and one knew it at the time. For me, however, the conference was an effort to continue a good tradition that was presently menaced. To be sure, the four years of our military alliance against the Axis powers were only a reprieve from a long-term hostility that had begun in 1917 with the Revolution itself and merely resumed when Hitler’s armies were destroyed. But there was simply no question that without Soviet resistance Nazism would have conquered all of Europe as well as Britain, with the possibility of the United States being forced into a hands-off isolationism at best, or at worst an initially awkward but finally comfortable deal with fascism—or so I thought. Thus, the sharp postwar turn against the Soviets and in favor of a Germany un-purged of Nazis not only seemed ignoble but threatened another war that might indeed destroy Russia but bring down our own democracy as well. The air was growing hot with belligerence. I thought one must either speak out against it or forfeit something of honor and the right to complain in the future.
Paradoxically, however, I might not have agreed to chair one of the panels had Salesman not continued to be such a universally acclaimed success. I simply felt better with one foot outside the standard show business world, and once invited, I could not refuse.
There was no denying the probability of retribution against the conference participants as its opening day drew near. If some were obviously only concerned liberals like Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, composer Aaron Copland, and painter Philip Evergood, or literary stars like Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, Mark Van Doren, Louis Untermeyer, Norman Cousins, and a score of others, the radical Odets would be speaking, as well as some real live Soviets, including the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the writer A. A. Fadeyev.
The House Committee on Un-American Activities by this time had become a permanent kind of thought police in Hollywood but made forays into New York for a crack or two at a few prominent stage actors, and with all the famous names at the conference the Committee would doubtless be most interested. In addition, on the eve of the conference Life magazine published two facing pages of passport-sized photos of the several dozen Americans listed as supporters or participants, a veritable gallery of rogues. And indeed, as the months passed, “Supporter of Waldorf Conference” or “Participant” would become an important key to the subject’s disloyalty. On top of this, it was big news in the press that every entrance of the Waldorf-Astoria would be blocked by a line of nuns praying for the souls of the participants, who had been deranged by Satanic seduction. And on the morning of the conference I actually had to step between two gentle sisters kneeling on the sidewalk as I made for the Waldorf door. Even then it was a bewildering thing to contemplate, this world of symbolic gestures and utterances.
The audience for the panel I was chairing—my duty turned out to be simply to announce the name of the next speaker and to recognize people who wished to speak from the floor—was surprisingly sparse, testimony to the fear in the air. Not more than twenty or thirty people showed up, of whom some eight or ten were angrily hostile to the whole occasion. Mary McCarthy was there, along with the composer Nicholas Nabokov, who in later years would become a good friend, and a number of others from the intellectual anti-Communist and Trotskyite camps. Never having attended such a meeting, I did not know exactly what to expect. A couple of speakers read statements pleading for the world not to allow the American-Soviet wartime alliance to disintegrate. Dmitri Shostakovich, small, frail, and myopic, stood as stiffly erect as a doll and without once raising his eyes from a bound treatise in his hand read a pro forma statement affirming the peaceful intentions of the Soviets. When he finished he sat down, his gaze directed over the heads of the audience, an unapproachable automaton. The man accompanying him made no attempt to even introduce him to the rest of us on the panel. I can no longer recall what the anti-Soviet contingent actually said, only that I recognized three or four of them who stood up and, mainly addressing Shostakovich, raised the issues of Soviet persecution of artists and the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe. The great composer, who unbeknown to me was at that very moment in a deadly duel with Stalin, kept his silence, and no real debate occurred at the conference, which ended in futility except for its setting a new and higher level of hostility in the Cold War. That a meeting of writers and artists could generate such widespread public suspicion and anger was something brand-new in the postwar world.
Even now something dark and frightening shadows the memory of that meeting nearly forty years ago, where people sat as in a Saul Steinberg drawing, each of them with a balloon overhead containing absolutely indecipherable scribbles. There we were, a roomful of talented people and a few real geniuses, and in retrospect neither side was wholly right, neither the apologists for the Soviets nor the outraged Red-haters; to put it simply, politics is choices, and not infrequently there really aren’t any to make; the chessboard allows no space for a move.
Odets now took his turn. By this time he had spent practically the whole decade in Hollywood, although he still spoke of writing more plays and indeed would in a few years write his last, The Flowering Peach. Until this very moment I had not gotten more than a cool nod from Odets, because of his competitive resentment toward me, I assumed. The Crucible, still four years in the future, would be the only Broadway play to take on the anti-Communist hysteria; Odet
s denigrated it to Kazan as “just a story about a bad marriage.” There was a slightly more generous acknowledgment by Lillian Hellman, who, after a twenty-minute all but silent walk with me following a performance of the play in its pre-Broadway week in Wilmington, Delaware, let drop, “It’s a good play.” If we on the left were engaged in a conspiracy, as was almost daily reported, it certainly did not overflow into mutual generosity and support among the participants. It is no great credit to me to say that I felt no such hostility toward either of them, probably because I was sure that if there was a competition among us I had won it. But I was never more conscious of resentment from my fellow writers than from those on the left, no doubt the consequence of my own arrogance as much as theirs.
The audience was quieting down to hear Odets. I had absolutely no idea what he would say, no idea what his present orientation toward the Soviet Union actually was, any more than I knew my own beyond a belief in resisting the burgeoning new anti-Soviet crusade.
He seemed distracted as he rose to his feet, tieless, with his shirt collar open and his sports jacket hanging unbuttoned. I recalled how, years before, I had assumed him to be a determined militant, but he seemed so thin-skinned and childishly sensitive. The roles we play! Striving to achieve an authoritative stance, he now began an amazingly theatrical speech that I have never forgotten, and one that makes me despair of history as more than a circumstantial fiction.
The point is that we were now in 1949, some fifteen years past Odets’s springtide of theatrical rebellion against the failed America of the Depression. Yet not only was he still generally identified with that period, but despite his ten years of Hollywood luxury, he himself evidently felt as he faced this audience that he should sound as though it were still 1935; helpless before his own past, he felt bound to reidentify himself as “Odets.”
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