by
Elia Kazan
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At his classes in the technique of acting, Lee laid down the rules, supervised the first exercises. These were largely concerned with the actor’s arousing his inner temperament. The essential and rather simple technique, which has since then been complicated by teachers of acting who seek to make the Method more recondite for their commercial advantage, consists of recalling the circumstances, physical and personal, surrounding an intensely emotional experience in the actor’s past. It is the same as when we accidentally hear a tune we may have heard at a stormy or an ecstatic moment in our lives, and find, to our surprise, that we are reexperiencing the emotion we felt then, feeling ecstasy again or rage and the impulse to kill. The actor becomes aware that he has emotional resources; that he can awaken, by this self-stimulation, a great number of very intense feelings; and that these emotions are the materials of his art.
I sat at the feet of Lee and Harold, literally; wrote down everything they said. Harold opened my eyes to the importance of theatre in a society, that it had an obligation, particularly in our time of national emergency, which was to voice the concerns of the people in the audience. Theatre, he said, was not just a pastime between supper and bed. In the twentieth century, it must serve a purpose close to what it had in the pre-Christian Greek world, as a “pop” religion. It had to be an awakening and a reassurance for the masses when they saw their own dilemmas acted out.
YOU MUST be wondering about my strange way of telling a story, constantly shifting around, twisting back and forth in time even though my life has been lived as yours is being lived, in a progression of days. What I’m doing is unraveling a great tangle of twine, found in an old basket at the bottom of a dark closet. There are many strings, balled together. I pull on one; it yields, then binds. I pull harder; it gives a little more, bringing up with it another string, of another size, color, and texture. So the strands of my life intermingle; they cannot be separated into a succession of “and then I dids.” I can only offer you various lengths extracted from various times in the jumble of my days, none completely free of all others, none unattached. Recounting bare events explains little; meanings come from connections—and from endings. Associations, turning up like the dummy card in stud poker, bring triumph, regret, and understanding. The links of meaning are always more relevant than those of time. For this reason, events that took place fifty years ago stand out vividly in my memory, whereas I can’t remember what I did last week. I do not hope to untangle the whole ball; it is snarled and knotted and mildewed by time. To know it all … Whoever has? Who can?
I’ve often thought: Oh, if I could only have looked ahead and seen the consequences of what I was about to do. But the evidence of the cost of each step into the unknown—what might be gained, what lost—was all there, just below the surface. I didn’t look long enough or hard enough, or I didn’t dare look at all.
I’m such a man. I’ve always felt in danger. I’ve never felt totally secure, even when I was most successful and every author wanted me to direct his new play. I’ve thought affluence uncertain and praise temporary. I am obsessively aware that money in the bank leaks, that it shrinks. I don’t trust the state—whichever state. Do you? Really? I fear authority. I don’t believe that those who exercise it will continue to be friendly. I trust authority—to be unfriendly. I feel I will be apprehended as much for my thoughts as for past deeds and omissions. I’ve done nothing for which I might be arrested, but that doesn’t seem to make any difference.
Even today, when I’m modestly affluent and recognized as a man of some achievement, I will be driving along or walking the streets or sitting at dinner, and suddenly I’ll find myself in the grip of a fantasy in which I am defending myself—actually speaking the words, trying to wash myself of guilt. The police have me! I protest my innocence. I contest their accusations. The actors I’m working with are questioning my directions. I slam into them, challenging them with my reasons. My wife, the present one, who loves me entirely, or the one before her, who loved me less, is accusing me of some marital misdemeanor. True or false? Either way, I fight off the accusation. It seems I am constantly defending myself against an accusation of one kind or another. And I’ve been doing it all my life.
ahhh a lifelong persecution complex
I consider myself rigorously moral—moral enough, in fact, to admit this: There is one thing I’ve lied about consistently, and that is my relationships to women out of wedlock. I have again and again lied to my wives about this. I don’t know how else to handle this problem, and I don’t think you or anyone else does.
People have often accused me of being selfish and self-centered. They’re quite right. All artists are. They protect like all hell what’s most precious for them—the privilege to exploit the full range of their curiosity. On the other hand, in my case, brought up as I was, I also wanted a steady home, a good, strong roof over my head. I’ve tried all my life long to hold on to both ways of life, despite the fact that I know they are finally incompatible.
Or are they? Because of my cleverness and something slippery in my soul, I found that they need not be mutually exclusive. Later in life, I maintained a succession of girlfriends while, at the same time, “worshipping” in a middle-class home. Flaubert has said that an artist must be, au fond, a bourgeois. That is only half right, but it is half right.
We’d take turns cooking. On my day, I’d prepare my specialty, a great pot of bulgar flavored with tomatoes, onions, and lamb-kidney bits, in the Anatolian manner. Lee preferred boiled chicken; Paula boiled chickens. Cliff, also broke, was writing a play in a large kitchen closet, aptly called I Got the Blues. The atmosphere of the apartment was saturated with disappointment. People wouldn’t greet one another when they entered. Bedroom doors remained closed all day, shutting everyone apart. We might as well have been living alone. Lee stayed in his room and read; when he came out he was silent, an owl by daylight. I got into a fight with another actor, kept slamming his head on the floor until I was pulled off. I’ve forgotten what the fight was about; it didn’t matter. It had been a disappointing season and there was no new play for the coming season.
<3
THAT SPRING was when it began. I’ve found a notebook from that time, and it’s full of a new passion. There are jottings about steelworkers walking off a job, tools held high (I’d read about that), about a job in a cement factory in the dead of winter and its hardships (I’d not suffered this cold), about construction workers on payday shooting craps in a half-finished building (I’d seen this but from a students distance), about “hobo jungles” (I’d never seen one), and there’s a long, ardent defense of the Bonus Army: “Those men came to Washington because they had nowhere else to go and were as willing to starve on the road as in the streets of the cities they call home.” (I’d never been hungry.) Then: “You’re breaking my heart, fellow, go starve somewhere else!”—dialogue to be attributed to the villains of the Hoover government or someone on General MacArthur’s staff.
[...]
But that spring it was all romance. By the time I went to Green Mansions in June, I was ready for the Communist Party.
I wrote in my diary: “I know the source of his sickness. The capitalist system. The fascism which keeps the gambler gambling long after he wants to or has the money—or blood—to pay with. [Certainly a lurid description of my father’s modest trading.] The revolution I want is a society where everybody works to produce enough for everybody but not for profit.” And then: “My father’s neck is marked by the weasel teeth of Morgan and Mitchell. [Mitchell was president of the National City Bank, whose stock had given Father a big ride up, then plunged to the bottom.] He worked all his life for these men. Now he rattles in the wind, sick and miserable, walking up and down in his store, hoping something he cannot imagine will come to the rescue and save him.”
Then this, which still astonishes me: “From now on I will be kind to him and—[I underlined the phrases italicized here] I will revenge him. Now is the time, as my strength is building. I will make the revolution. That is all I want.”
Who the hell did I think I was?
That fall, after Men in White opened, I became a member of the Communist Party of America.
So we went forth from the Group Theatre like the apostles of Jesus, teaching, instead of brotherly love and the Ten Commandments, the art of Stanislavski as filtered through Strasberg. South of Fourteenth Street was our Corinth and Antioch and Caesarea. We assumed it as our duty to enlighten the unenlightened. After my personal lessons in the morning and early afternoon, I would rush downtown to teach a course in directing at the New Theatre League, a Communist-front organization, preparing my notes for each talk on the twenty-minute subway ride. At the age of twenty-five, I carried on about the art of direction without the least doubt. Now I’d hesitate a long time before engaging to teach such a course and take months to prepare it. The more you know, the less you believe you know.