by
Elia Kazan
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With that, Joe Bromberg came forward; he played Agate Keller, a man who’d lost one eye in an industrial accident. Clifford gave Agate a rousing summation. “Working class, unite and fight! Tear down the slaughterhouse of our lives. Let freedom really ring.” Then on to attack the union’s leadership: “These slick slobs stand here telling us about bogeymen, the Reds is bogeymen. But the man who got me food in 1932, he calls me COMRADE! The man who picked me up where I bled, he called me COMRADE too! What are we waiting for? Don’t wait for LEFTY! He might never come—” Whereupon he’s interrupted by a man—me—rushing down the theatre aisle and up on stage to announce: “They found Lefty—behind the car barns with a bullet in his head.”
To my astonishment when I read this play recently, I responded as I had when I first read it. I was thrilled to the verge of tears. In the passing of that half century of time, I’d turned violently anti-Communist. But the yearning for meaning, for dignity, for security in life, stirred me now as it had then. The Communists got their influence and their power by speaking up for these universal human desires. It seemed that I hadn’t changed; they had. How did they get their hold on the need for militancy? By being militant before the rest of our society knew it should. Something still alive in me reenlisted.
And the actors? We couldn’t sleep that night. We straggled north through the silent streets—Harold Clurman among us—found a Child’s that was open all night, and lingered over our suppers, not talking too much, stunned by what had occurred. None of us was ever to be the same again, and I suppose we all knew it. But we had no idea how far and how fast this change would go. Cliff was to become a god. The next morning, I’d arrived. The review that would appear in the New Masses called me the “Proletariat Thunderbolt.” (Who was ever less working class, more middle class, than I? But it never occurred to me to privately challenge this description. I was proud of it.) The company as a whole became a model for what a left theatre should and must be.
For a time he maintained his show of indifference; as far as he was concerned, the season was over. But the actors were no longer the docile, worshipful “children” he’d been training for more than five years. Lefty had changed them. One of their number had written it; they’d mounted it despite Lee’s indifference and Harold’s lassitude. Now, in a charged atmosphere, the actors were not to be denied.
So, in every way, Clifford’s life was made simultaneously easier and more complicated. His pleasures were multiplied, while he had less and less time for himself. The flattery never stopped and he couldn’t help eating it up, while at the same time he believed what was said about him less and less and finally not at all.
Here’s the tragic heart of the problem—as I understood it. When the irritations, the problems, and the conflicts that existed before the big success are eased and removed, when the struggle is (apparently) over and one lives behind a permanent Don’t Disturb sign, it soon becomes evident that these troubles, now put behind, were the source and the genesis of the talent that brought on the success. Fame and money were insulating Clifford from the discomforts and challenges of his earlier years but, at the same time, “saving” him from those abrasions that were the source of his “genius.”
There’s a price for everything.
Now came the classic questions: “Suddenly I can do anything I want, so what do I do? I can go any which way; which way will I choose? What do I ask of life? What do I want to do with my years and energy? If I do have the talent they say I have, to what shall I turn it? Now that I have what appear to be unlimited choices, which choices shall I make?”
In other words, I continued to think like a Communist. The theatre is a weapon. A play must teach a lesson. The third-act climax must send the audience home with hope and courage born of a sweeping revolutionary insight. Only I and those like me had the answers. I continued to regard the society around me as hostile and repressive, yes, corrupt beyond redemption by peaceful change. Why? Because it was run by moneymen. Change is necessary; in fact, inevitable. What kind of change? Complete. Final. A shift of power. Trust the working class. Only. Defend the U.S.S.R. With all its faults. (This did change.) My duty as a theatre artist was to teach others the right way and lead them down the right path.
All of us who came out of the “movement” and all those who remained in the “movement” were marked with this intellectual arrogance. We were sure of our “positions,” and it was too damned bad for anyone who didn’t agree with us. We were sure we were right. After I resigned, I did not think any differently than I did when I was a member. In fact, I still believe a good part of what I believed then.
I made a point of catching the commercial. Orson offered the nation his assurance of the product’s worth with a voice as resonant as ever—a beautiful instrument indeed—and his presence was, in some grotesque way, still imposing. I couldn’t help wondering—as I do with any sponsoring of a product where an artist is paid to say what he’s paid to say—did Orson, himself, believe what he professed? Of course, he must be broke, so he has to earn his living this way. What a tragedy, to put such a talent to this use.
I contrasted this puffy huckster with the dauntless, spirited fellow I’d worked with in the thirties. I remarked how he dressed now, entirely in black, a formless, unbound costume, the kind of garment old women choose to conceal the infirmities of an aging body. I thought of what he was wearing as a great tent inside which he was hiding. I also thought of him—remembering his glory years—as a great beached whale, driven onshore by a storm or, more likely, by some mysterious turbulence in its essence. Why this slow suicide among whales? No one has ever found out. Was there some compulsion of shame or spiritual defect here that made Orson “let himself go,” then degrade his huge gifts by making commercials? Did he have an impulse, like the one that beached the whales, to rush to the end?
When I think of large talents that were beached by a crisis in their lives, I think first of Clifford Odets. There is one sorrow that must pain men so stranded most: that they were unable to live up to the image of themselves that once gave them their pride. Clifford was what Orson was not, a celebrated member of the Communist Party. In 1935, after his first two plays hit New York, he was the artist-revolutionary of the day, honored and respected by all good men. In 1952, he did what I’d done, named the Party members in the Group to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and whereas that act, unhappy as it was, gave me an identity I could carry, naming his old comrades deprived Odets of the heroic identity he needed most. I don’t believe he was ever again the same man.
There are others whom the waves of thought and art in the forties, when they retreated, left stranded. Brando, like Welles neurotically overweight, and by some mysterious choice out of things, respecting no one and least of all his own profession and his incomparable gifts, hides on a dirt hill over the film colony or in Tahiti. There are others too, many of whom make fat livings by boosting commercial enterprises—you’ve seen them on TV. These men in their private moments still present themselves as rebels—like old actors coming back again and again to play a favorite role, the one in which they scored their great successes. But in their hearts, I believe, they know the unhappy truth, that they are now deep in the system they once loathed and attacked. Many of them are affluent, with a Mercedes or the assurance of a stretch limo and an obedient chauffeur at their command. They are all good men, men of the “movement,” as it was called, not the Communist movement but the surge of hope and confidence and determination that took over from the Great Depression, the anti-monopoly-capital movement, the common-man movement, the anti-colonialist movement of the thirties and forties. These were and are worthy causes, causes with which I am in sympathy, and, as much as the others, I hold on to the postures of those days and the dreams we once all had. But now, in the cold light of a cold morning, those dreams are troubled when they exist at all, and on the beach lie the remains of that other time.
My own opinion is that they do because the actors—whether by technique or by accident—gave you pieces of their lives, which is certainly the ultimate generosity of the artist, and they did it unabashed. You were the witness to a final intimacy. These artists spoke to your secret self, the one you hide. They offered you more than cleverness or technique: they gave you the genuine thing, the thing that hurt you as it thrilled you.
What made these distilled experiences awesome and unforgettable is that in these cases, a kind of fear is aroused—not in them but in you as you watch—a fear that may be the ultimate respect you, the viewer, can give in return. You find yourself unsure of what is going to happen next—or in the end. Will they last it out, will they come through? As in life, there are likely to be surprises that discomfort you. All leading men and women should have something unpredictable and dangerous about them. You should be anxious about what they might do; it could get out of hand. Didn’t Bogart have this? And Bette Davis? Will the leading man make love to his leading lady or will he strike her—Cagney. Who can plumb the mystery of Greta Garbo? She doesn’t yield, she doesn’t make friends; she’s not after your approval, not ever. Yes, there should be a persisting menace, even in heroes. They should be the opposite of housebroken, only partly tamed, not quite civilized. Immoderate.
READ this photograph with me. Here is a gathering of old friends who’ve been through a lot together and earned a rest. We’d just arrived at the Pinebrook Country Club, reassembled for another summer of work. Look closer: It’s probably hindsight, but I’d say that the passion that had once made us so open to Harold’s exhortations about what our theatre might be if we willed it and worked for it, that fever had cooled. We weren’t “hungry” anymore. For the most part, we seem calmer, maybe nicer, certainly more relaxed, ready to talk and laugh together, listen to music, play tennis, and party, even work reasonably well without quarreling. But is that what’s required to hold a group like this together? Isn’t an edge of fanaticism needed? Does that level of desperation and desire accrue to none but the young? It would seem so. Only men of genius, once past a certain age, look as if they’d kill for their work. As for the rest of mankind, what more to ask of life than to gather on a sunny June day and enjoy the company of good friends?