by
Elia Kazan
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WHEN Father had first come to America, he must have felt that he was still in a hostile and threatening environment—after all, he could not speak the language—so he continued to behave in New York as he had among the Turks, guarding himself to be circumspect, always beyond criticism on the streets and in the marketplace, always ready with his smile of compliance. He’d learned to get by on his cleverness and never say anything that might be misinterpreted. He learned to survive by cunning, by guile, and by restraining his real reactions. He couldn’t afford to behave truly on the streets or in his store. He had to please and flatter his customers. A salesman has to sell himself before he can sell his goods. He preserved his life by pretending respect for what he feared and even despised. In Turkey, he’d learned what Anatolian Greeks learn: how it was necessary to be in order to survive.
I spent afternoons after school in the stacks of the New Rochelle Public Library, reading books that might explain the intimate problems of my life. Or in the movie houses. Movies became my passion. They were dreams, like my dreams. I didn’t have money, so I found a way to sneak into Loews New Rochelle. When the exit doors were opened and everyone was crowding out of the theatre, I would slip in against the current of the crowd. I was quick and I was slippery.
What did I want of life? Nothing noble. But, passionately, to be an American, to have what American kids had, a daily life like theirs, to be accepted by them, to enjoy what they were enjoying—each other’s company, cars, bell-bottom trousers, summer places, a pocketful of pocket money, a varsity letter on my sweater, to dance with a girl, to dance well, to neck with her later—nothing very noble, you see. Just the most ordinary, the most common, and the most precious things.
I generalized from this disaster that the most precious things in life were forbidden by authority (my father) and that everything I wanted most I would have to obtain secretly. I learned to conceal my longings and to work to fulfill them surreptitiously. I stopped feeling guilty about the beautiful brown eyes conspiracy. It was necessary. From that philosophical conclusion it was only a short step to this one: What I wanted most I’d have to take—quietly and quickly—from others. Not a logical step, but I made it at a leap. I learned to mask my desires, hide my truest feelings; I trained myself to live in deprivation, in silence, never complaining, never begging, in isolation, without expecting kindness or favors or even good luck. To do without good luck! What a fate! To never expect an improvement! To consider rejection inevitable!
But I learned to keep coming back, to persist. I hardened.
And since what I wanted most I didn’t get, not nearly, I learned to live as an artist lives, empathically, observing, imagining, dreaming, all behind the mask.
Remember that for years, when I was a very young man, every time I entered a bed where a girl was waiting for me I’d be entering a courtroom where I’d lost many decisions. Doesn’t every culprit wish to turn the tables on his judge, deflate his eminence, show him up, kill him? Wasn’t it natural, since women had once held so much power over me, that when the tables were turned and it was I who had the heft, I’d want to gouge the situation for all it was worth?
Well, I did. I specialized in taking women away from men, particularly those handsome young fellows who played leading roles in films, tall and well muscled, every way confident or seeming so—war heroes, horseback riders, fast-car drivers, publicity gods. I wanted to prove that Vin Draddy wasn’t able to please a woman or hold her, not when I wanted her.
I found many women were working off the same kind of thing I was. They were getting back at squadrons of men, and would go to extraordinary lengths to play out their grudges. Sometimes I thought they actually preferred breaking the marriage laws in their own beds. And if an infant, the fruit of the union, slept peacefully through it all in a gaily painted cot at one side, or even in bed with us, I got a special charge out of it. It proved what I needed to have proved twice over.
Don’t get mad at me. I’m not really worse than most of you. Admit it. Besides, I’m penitent now. And faithful.
There was a long stretch of my life, unhappily, when I was not able to be faithful to anyone, not to a single woman, not to the best woman I’d known, my first wife, Molly. I used to assert—this was my rationale—that I was faithful to her in every way except sexually (actually I was), and I used to say that those “other ways” were the important ones. Did I believe that? I did.
His apartment was dark, and it did indeed look as if a life had just ended there. Over two great slugs of Scotch, I asked and he told me what had happened to the “big” athletes of our day, men I’d admired who’d had jobs on Wall Street waiting for them after they graduated. But their scores “downtown” had not been winning ones. Then he told me about himself. He’d had a job waiting for him when he left college, and over the years had risen to just below the top. But vice-presidents in the world of finance are listed by the dozen. Now he seemed terribly alone and wanted me to stay on when I said I’d better leave. I saw that he could not be envied and that there was nothing to “tear down.” What I felt for him was sympathy and a kind of brotherhood.
I can recall nights that spring when at two or three in the morning, dead drunk, I’d be leaning across the sill of my open window and crying in great, coarse-throat jags. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Despite my new interest in the backstage crafts, I was living a life without satisfaction and was given to black silences or murderous rages. I’d go to a party, behave sullenly, then leave to be alone in my misery. I was a vagabond in the city, wandering its streets at night without purpose or direction. Lovers passing left me sick. One night I dreamed I was born again, good-looking. My scalp itched constantly; I was convinced I would soon be bald. I passed out at a party from a bellyful of bathtub gin and woke at dawn lying on a garbage dump, five miles south of town. I was nearing the end of a road; you might have thought me beyond saving. I needed luck. Soon.
Molly had made up her mind in the first days of our acquaintance that I was gifted and bedeviled—and the man for her. She made it her duty on earth to encourage, protect, support, and—in the end—tolerate me in whatever I did. It nearly killed her, but she did not waver from her self-imposed duty, not once, not ever. From the day we became lovers until the day she died, in 1963, I was—and our four children became—Molly’s whole life. I was never again to know a love so unwavering. I was luckier than I knew. Did I deserve it? I don’t ask that question.
reminds me of iris murdoch, oddly
Now don’t believe what follows. Don’t believe that the month of May, which had already passed, and which is my favorite month because it is the burst of spring and the time of hope and promise, was three months long that summer, that it was May all summer that summer. The air of the place that May was sparkling and bright, as effervescent as soda. The camp twinkled with the games and the mischief of eager young artists. Don’t believe that all the sounds that long, long May were mellow and intimate, that there were no voices raised in rancor or rage, that everyone liked everyone else, that the directors, when they spoke, never spoke that eloquently again, or that the buzz of the actors eating supper together was never again as congenial. Don’t believe, if you are determined to be realistic, that there was an aura over all the people as they arrived, one that enlarged their talents and filled me with longing to become one of them. All that is how I remember my first summer with the Group and why I quickly made up my mind that no matter what it took in work and devotion, I’d hold on until I’d proved myself and become one of them. I had a passion at last.