And what of myself? If I was unsure of my own posture, why was I risking attack by chairing this session, something that I indeed sensed would do more to interfere with my freedom in the coming years than anything I had done until then?
I had tried two years before to define once and for all my philosophical position vis-á-vis Marxism. All My Sons had received some very good but also some lukewarm notices, and its fate was doubtful; at this point the Daily Worker had nothing but praise for it, noting that its truthfulness would doom it to commercial failure. But once Brooks Atkinson turned it into a popular success with a couple of articles in the Times, the Worker re-reviewed it and found it a specious apology for capitalism—after all, Chris Keller, the son of the boss who has shipped faulty parts to the army, causing fighter planes to crash, accepts to inherit the business rather than turning into a revolutionary himself. Among other things it now occurred to me that for the left the best proof of artistic purity was failure.
To clarify my own thoughts on the subject, I wrote an essay arguing that if Marxism was indeed a science of society, a Marxist writer could not warp social probability and his own honest observations to prove an a priori point of political propaganda. In short, Chris Keller would not become a revolutionary in real life, and in any case that was not what the play was about. The preconceived conclusion, after all, is detestable to science. I then read my essay to a large meeting of writers in the midtown theatre area and found that it caused massive confusion. For what I seemed to be saying was that art, at least good art, stands in contradiction to propaganda in the sense that a writer cannot make truth but only discover it. Thus, a writer has first to respect what exists or else abandon the idea of unearthing the hidden operating principles of his age. Marxism is in principle neither better nor worse than Catholicism, Buddhism, or any creed as an aid to artistic truth-telling. All one could say was that a philosophy could help an artist if it challenged him to the sublime and turned him from trivializing his talent.
In fact, I pointed out to this audience of writers of various shades of leftist opinion, most of whom no doubt admired All My Sons, that the play would not have been written at all had I chosen to abide by the Party line at the time, for during the war the Communists pounced on anything that would disturb national unity; strikes were out of the question, and the whole social process was to be set in amber for the duration. Like everybody else, of course, I knew that this was nonsense and that profiteering on a vast scale, for one thing, was rampant and that the high moral aims of the antifascist alliance, if they were to be given any reality at all, had to be contrasted to what was actually going on in society. The truth was that as I worked on All My Sons for better than two years, I expected that if it was ever produced the war would more than likely still be going on. The play would then explode, most especially in the face of the business community with its self-advertised but profitable patriotism—and of the Communists!
As it was, within a few weeks of the play’s opening, a letter to the Times from an engineer flatly stated that the plot was technically incredible, since all airplane engine elements were routinely X-rayed to detect just such defects as Joe Keller manages to slip past army inspectors. The letter went on to accuse the play of being Communist propaganda, pure and simple. And in August 1947, hardly seven months after All My Sons opened, its presentation to U.S. troops in Germany was canceled after blistering protests by the Catholic War Veterans, whose commander, a Max Sorensen, admitting he had never seen the play as he was “too busy to go to the theatre,” nevertheless condemned it as a “Party line propaganda vehicle” and demanded the identity of “who in the War Department was responsible for this outrageous arrangement.” (Joe McCarthy was still some five years in the future, but his entrance music was wafting through the air.) Sorensen was quickly joined by the socialist New Leader, whose fiery anti-Stalinism led it into amnesia about the simplest American realities of the time such as the play presented.
But I was spared having to reply to such accusations when a Senate committee exposed the Wright Aeronautical Corporation of Ohio, which had exchanged the “Condemned” tags on defective engines for “Passed” and in cahoots with bribed army inspectors had shipped many hundreds of these failed machines to the armed forces. As Brooks Atkinson pointed out in one of several defending articles, the Wright Corporation had “succeeded in getting the Government to accept defective motor materials by falsification of tests, forging reports and failing to destroy defective materials.” Atkinson could smell the future; my attackers, he wrote, were “working in the direction of censorship and restriction. They would feel happier if all art were innocuous and never touched on a real idea.“A number of officials went to jail in the Wright case, while in my play poor guilt-ridden Joe Keller blew his brains out. Even worse for the Wright Corporation, it would hardly have collapsed had it withdrawn its defective engines, while Keller’s small company would have been knocked out of business for manufacturing defective parts, let alone for shipping them.
If my little essay touched a nerve, it started no debate on the left, but the exercise did clear up some questions in my mind anyway.
Meantime, as chairman of the arts panel at this “pro-Soviet” conference, I was being pegged by the anti-Communist left as quite simply a Stalinist. But it is the memory of Shostakovich that still haunts my mind when I think of that day—what a masquerade it all was! As the recent target of a campaign by Stalin attacking “formalism,” “cosmopolitanism,” and other crimes against the official line, he had abjectly promised to reform; were his rote statement here and his silence additional payments of dues to avoid worse punishment? It would be thirty years before the full details emerged of the physical threats and spiritual torture he had had to endure under the very regime he purported to represent at the Waldorf. God knows what he was thinking in that room, what splits ran across his spirit, what urge to cry out and what self-control to suppress his outcry lest he lend comfort to America and her new belligerence toward his country, the very one that was making his life a hell.
In any case, whatever my misgivings about doctrinaire Marxism, it was beyond me at the time to join the anti-Soviet crusade, especially when it seemed to entail disowning and falsifying the American radical past, at least as I had known and felt it. The sum of it all was that with no answer at hand I grew more stubbornly determined to resist the wind; so here I was waiting for Odets to begin, surer than ever that my part in this storm was to hang in there and wait it out.
The stillness in the room as Odets made ready to speak spread even to the anti-Communist contingent, which sat clustered in a group separated by empty chairs from the others. Now, in a voice very close to being inaudible, Odets asked, “Why is there this threat of war?”
Silence deepened and he lengthened the pause. Slight apprehension danced across my mind that he might overtheatricalize. But so far the audience was unquestionably held.
“Why,” he went on in his near whisper, “are we so desperately reaching out, artist to artist, philosopher to philosopher, why have our politicians failed to insist that there cannot and must not be war between our countries? What is the cause? Why is this threat of war?”
The question hung in silence, and the audience pressed forward, straining to hear his voice. Now, slowly, his hand rose above his head and his fist closed, and at the raging top of his voice he yelled, “MONEEY!”
Astonishment. A few grins breaking out. But on the whole his inner urgency was having an effect.
There was another pause, and again a series of questions demanding the source of our danger, and once more the scream: “MONEEEY!”
Four or five repetitions had the audience tittering, and even worse was Odets’s apparent unawareness that he was stepping over the edge into the ridiculous. I sat there thinking unjust thoughts: what had he been doing in Hollywood but wasting his talent making money? Had this cri de coeur come from a man who had stuck with the stage and his art rather than hiring himself out under
the delusion that Hollywood would ever allow him an honest word, he would have swept the audience. Why were there so few Americans so far beyond corruption that their voices were undeniable by any honest person? The question transcended Odets, obviously. Was it simply that we consumed everything including our truth-tellers at such a rate that none of them ever seemed to mature? Still, this outlandish gesture of defiance had taken some courage, what with most of the powerful columnists in Hollywood sniffing up the left for blood.
In 1958, preparing to shoot Some Like It Hot, Marilyn met Odets and gave him a script of The Misfits; he suggested they have dinner to talk about it and—more important—about a project of his own in which she could star. I was then splitting my time between Connecticut and California, trying to get on with a play between attempts to be of what help I could to her. On the afternoon of their date Odets called our bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel to confirm the time and place, and I had to tell him that she did not feel up to dinner that evening. It was her day off, and she was at the moment attempting to fall asleep, having slept poorly the night before. The agonies she suffered in the making of every film of hers during our nearly five years together were even now moving toward a climax. She liked Odets and felt bad about standing him up, so she asked me to see him alone. Naturally he was disappointed, but I looked forward to a quiet talk with this man who had meant so many contradictory things to me and the theatre of our time.
Outside the hotel I got into his dusty old Lincoln. He seemed to have aged little in the decade since the Waldorf Conference; there was still something movingly boyish about his manner, despite a touch of disingenuousness at having wound up with only me for dinner. Nine years his junior, I found myself feeling older or at least not as desperately uncertain, and indeed he turned to me in the car and asked, “Where do you like to eat?”
Since it was he who had been living here for the last two decades, I said that any place he liked would be all right with me, but he persisted—“I don’t know the town that well.” This feigned un-familiarity, so childishly transparent rather than crafty and expert, made him vulnerable to the point of fragility, and I wondered if he was even trying to make it a bit more believable to himself that he had not squandered himself over so many years in this industry he claimed to despise. Earlier, while waiting for him to arrive, I had resolved to tell him how much his work meant to me as a student in the thirties, but it was impossible to praise his past now that I found him so painfully defensive.
After more hesitation he managed to think of a restaurant but even then made a couple of mistaken approaches to it, peering up at the names of the main avenues as though he had never seen them before. Our dinner died before it could be born since, as I had suspected, he had little interest in The Misfits; only when Marilyn came into the conversation could he let his natural warmth flow, his defensiveness forgotten, as he asked his fan’s questions with wide-eyed wonder. “She reads, doesn’t she?” he asked, as though she were a prize gazelle or a genius chimp. I said she did, and let it go at that. With the possible exception of Colette’s Chéri and a few short stories, however, I had not known her to read anything all the way through. There was no need to: she thought she could get the idea of a book—and often did—in a few pages, and most of those she opened she found unnecessary or untrue to her experience. With no cultural pretensions to maintain, she felt no need to bother with anything that did not sweep her away. She could not suspend her disbelief toward fiction, wanting only the literal truth, as though from a document. A story by Bernard Malamud upset her because it seemed to regard rape as something less than a catastrophically tragic and contemptible event. “That author doesn’t know what a rape is, and he shouldn’t pretend he does.” I suggested that he might be understating in order to lead the reader to feel it more deeply, but her outrage could not accept literary irony about a humiliation she had experienced. And in many another situation, her sense of humor would collapse whenever painful images were evoked. Beneath all her insouciance and wit, death was her companion everywhere and at all times, and it may be that its unacknowledged presence was what lent her poignancy, dancing at the edge of oblivion as she was.
She was a born Freudian in this: there were no accidents of speech, no innocent slips; every word or gesture signaled an inner intention, whether conscious or not, and the most innocuous-seeming remark could conceal some sinister threat. I had always erred in the other direction, canceling out hostilities around me for the sake of getting on with life, a habit that had already created some serious misunderstandings between us. This golden girl, who was like champagne on the screen and whose very ability to read at all was a surprise even to so sensitive a man as Odets, was of another sort, but for Odets as for many shrewder observers before and after him, it was the happiness she emanated that was her whole nature. As we sat having our dessert and coffee in the rather ordinary, New York-like Italian restaurant, Odets seemed to me to share something of Marilyn’s special kind of perceptive naivete; like her, he was a self-destroying babe in the woods absentmindedly combing back his hair with a loaded pistol.
By this time, in 1958, it was some six years since Odets had “cooperated” with the House Un-American Activities Committee, and two years since I had refused to and been sentenced to jail for contempt. But his performance in Washington had always seemed more a pathetic coda to me than a climax. The overwhelmingly significant truth, I thought, as I still do, was the artist-hating brutality of the Committee and its envy of its victims’ power to attract public attention and to make big money at it besides. To his generation Odets was more than an individual: he typified what it meant to survive as an artist in America, especially in the so-called big time. There was something so utterly American in what had betrayed him—he had wanted everything. His longtime friend, set designer Boris Aronson, mused once, “Odets has one trouble; he has to be the greatest everything. The biggest lover, the best family man; best friend to Billy Rose and then go downtown to sit with the Communist big shots; the biggest experimental artist in the theatre and at the same time the highest-paid movie writer. Who can be everything without exploding? The only thing he never liked was to hurt other people. And that’s unusual for such a fellow.”
Similarly, testifying before the Committee, he would roundly castigate them at one moment and without at all changing his indignant tone proceed to corroborate for them the names of people he had known in the Party. His tentative grip on the real was with him even on his deathbed. His body wasted by cancer, he suddenly raised a fist, tried to sit up, and gasped to a friend at his bedside, “Odets is coming back! Odets is only beginning!” America was promises, and Odets bought them all, with everything he had.
Harold Clurman, who was more clear-eyed but occasionally climbed up to sit with Odets on his cloud, kept exhorting him to leave Hollywood and “return,” as though to some religion in whose bosom he would revive his spirit. Of course there was nothing to return to, no theatre or theatre culture, only show business and some theatrical real estate, and even that doomed to vanish soon as garish new hotels tumbled one grand old house after another into piles of bricks. In American theatre the moral is always so boringly the same: the quickest route to failure is success, and if you can’t get there yourself, there are plenty around who’ll be happy to give you a lift.
A play, even the angry and critical kind, is always on one level a love letter to the world, from which a loving acknowledgment is eagerly awaited. The trick, of course, is how to face the turndown and go back and write another letter—and to the same lover, no less. This is an enterprise for a very young man, obviously, and a man with both feet solidly planted in his garden of Narcissus. Within two years after leaving Michigan I had written six plays, one of them a tragedy in grand style about Montezuma and Cortez, all of them rejected by the only producers there were in those days, the ones on Broadway. My Montezuma play, sent to the Group, did not even merit a reply.
Nearing thirty, having added two or three more u
nproduced plays to the pile, I began All My Sons as my final shot at play writing. I knew playwrights nearing forty who were still awaiting their debut, but life was too interesting to waste it hanging around producers’ doors. I laid myself a wager: I would hold back this play until I was as sure as I could be that every page was integral to the whole and would work; then, if my judgment of it proved wrong, I would leave the theatre behind and write in other forms. When, in 1947, after two years of work, I sent All My Sons to my agent, Leland Hayward, I was an American playwright, which is to say, a Darwinian who had learned to expect no mercy (although he might still secretly hope for a little).
It was a pridefully tough profession in the forties. Time magazine referred to playwrights who wrote hits as “crack,” implying something like target shooting, brisk and very technical, with big money prizes for hitting the bull’s-eye, no sissy literary nonsense in cranking a play together, but a job for cigar-chewing mechanics serving—according to the going myth of the time—the whole American people.
It was an audience impatient with long speeches, ignorant of any literary allusions whatever, as merciless to losers as the prizefight crowd and as craven to winners, an audience that heard the word culture and reached for its hat. Of course there were people of great sensibility among them, but a play had to be fundamental enough to grab anybody, regardless. One healthy consequence of this audience’s makeup, both actual and fancied, was a shift toward full-blown plays with characters and story that asserted as little as possible verbally and dramatized as much as possible by action. This tended to keep speeches short and the stage active rather than reflective. Different as we were as writers, Tennessee Williams and I both thrived on these stringent demands. The time was far, far off when a character could be permitted to sit in one place indulging in pages of monologue while surrounding actors stood absolutely still and mute awaiting the end of his aria. (When O’Neill so indulged, his storytelling never stopped, and if it did he failed.) Even further off was the time when a certain span of sheer boredom was thought to be a signal that a culturally rare event was taking place on a stage. The revolutionary newness of The Glass Menagerie, for example, was in its poetic lift, but an underlying hard dramatic structure was what earned the play its right to sing poetically. Poetry in the theatre is not, or at least ought not be, a cause but a consequence, and that structure of storytelling and character made this very private play available to anyone capable of feeling at all.
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