Timebends (40 page)

No work of any interest has a single source, any more than a person psychologically exists in only one place at any one time. Nevertheless, as Tolstoy thought, in an artist's work we want to read his soul, and for that, the artist must commit himself and stand still for his self-portrait. I was trying to make of spirit a fact, to make a circumstance of what I took to be a common longing for meaning.
I wanted to write a play that would stand on the stage like a boulder that had fallen from the sky, undeniable, a fact. I had come a particular road to the point of making such a demand not only of myself but of the drama.

On the day my name was called out before the assembled contestants and their guests as a Hopwood winner, in the spring of 1936, I felt pleasure, of course, but also something close to embarrassment, praying that everybody would soon forget my poor play in favor of my next one, which would surely be better.

I immediately called my mother, who screamed and left the phone and rushed outside to arouse relatives and neighbors to the new day dawning while my new wealth trickled away into the phone company's vault. On Third Street I was now famous and no longer in danger of watching my life shrivel up in touch football games on the streets all day, and there is no fame more gratifying. In particular the prize let me relish a certain vengeance upon a woman, my aunt Betty, widow of my mother's brother Harry, self-appointed seer, card reader, and mystic, whom my mother had had do my cards on the eve of my departure for Michigan two years before. Betty had been a very buxom and good-looking woman, at one time a burlesque dancer. When she had realized, twenty years ago, that her baby son was mongoloid, she turned to religion and expectantly watched for spooks out of the corners of her eyes as she wiped poor Carl's chin, by turns flying at him in a rage, mocking his fluffy speech to his face, and dressing him up in expensive suits and ties to proudly walk with him, teaching him how to take her arm and act like a real gentleman.

On the last night before my trip west, Betty had sat me down at the dining room table and dealt the cards. My mother kept a certain distance from us lest her own vibrations of anxiety confuse those emanating from me. My father was in the living room playfully baiting Carl. “So you like Mae West, Carl?” “Oh, yeah, I love him.” “What do you love about him?” “He beautiful.” My sister, Joan, now entering her teens, was probably upstairs trying on Mother's clothes with her best friend, Rita, whom I suspected, rightly as it turned out, of pilfering our loose change, and who was graduating into Mother's costume jewelry, heading no doubt for the few valuable diamond trinkets that were still left. Kermit, I suppose, was either off on a date or in the bedroom writing me one of his heartfelt hortatory notes, his style a continuation of poor
Uncle Moe's Victorian World War I letters from the front. In short, I was leaving them all behind, the Joseph packing up to cross the desert to bamboozle Pharaoh one day. I knew that this last evening at home was a cresting of my life's small wave.

An expectant silence as Betty carefully snapped down the last card in the row and proceeded to match arcane correspondences in the series of cards, which she now placed one on top of the other. Pause. More shifting of cards in a thickening silence. Obsessively neat Aunt Esther walked in to say goodbye and wish me luck but before she could speak was
shhhed
by my mother and stood awed, brushing specks of dandruff off her nearly nonexistent bosom as she watched Betty's operation.

Now Betty shook her head mournfully from side to side. “He's not going to do very well there. He's going to flunk out in a few months.” Electric horror flashed into my mother's eyes. Betty now looked directly at me, reaching over with a commiserating touch of her hand. “Save your money. Stay home. There's no use going there.”

Naive though I was at the time, it occurred to me as I looked into her round, sensual face that there might be less a question of spectral visitation here than jealousy. But I quickly shook off the accusatory thought—after all, she was family and must wish me well. The truth was that she had touched the naked nerve of superstition in me, depressing me by saying exactly what I feared myself. Valiantly recovering, my mother immediately whipped out coffee and one of her deep yeast cakes and turned the occasion into a party, to which news of the cake's appearance drew a houseful of well-wishers before the night was out. Next morning Kermit and my father were at the bus to see me off as though the nether parts of Asia were my destination, and at the very last moment Kermit suddenly took off his hat—he always looked handsome in hats, and I ridiculous—and stuck it on my head as a parting gift. It was a hat I would only lose four years later on my last hitchhike home, in a wheat field near Oneonta, New York, on a day filled with sunshine and spring gusts, when a sudden wind lifted it off my head and away into the distance like a child's balloon as I hurried to a car that had stopped for me on a very lonesome road.

By the spring of ‘36 and the Hopwood Award I no longer feared academic failure, but I wanted Betty to acknowledge this distinction, in order, I suppose, that I might also believe it, since she had done no more than express my own doubts that evening. Only fitfully was my victory a promise of things to come; hardly had I
cashed the Hopwood check when I started the habit, which I have never lost, of worrying whether I had anything left to write. I had exhausted all I knew about the family in this first play, and I knew very little about anything else. More, its central drive had been an attack on a father by his eldest son for his antisocial attitude in fighting a strike in his plant. But having laid my fictional father low, I had the satisfaction of winning the approbation of my real one, no longer needing to pretend to him that I was studying journalism—a real profession with a boss and salary. As for Kermit, toward whom I felt some guilt for having left him to prop up the family while I, the inferior student, went off to college, the prize might help him to feel his sacrifice had not been wasted, even as he must have privately wondered why he was not a recipient too. But he was in service to the idealized father just as I was enlisted in that ideal's destruction.

The prize had all sorts of benefits. It earned me the pained pleasure of listening to Professor Erich Walter give an unprecedented reading of my play to his essay class as an example, he said, of the condensation of language. This absentminded, lovable man—whose tie as often as not came out from under the side of his shirt collar, and who habitually forgot that he was slipping out of his overcoat on entering the classroom and simply walked away from it to his desk, from where, half an hour later, he would notice it lying on the floor and stare down at it through thick rimless glasses, wondering how it had climbed off the hook—Erich Walter insisted on reading my New York dialogue in his Midwestern twang, which tore my ears, especially when he pronounced “Oh, yeah” as “Oh, yay.” But his horrible rendition was so loving that when a line got a laugh from the class he would look up with apple cheeks shining to beam proudly down the long table at me. A while earlier in the term he had surprised me by inviting me to walk with him after class. So awed was I by professors that this individual notice raised my sophomore self-regard by several yards even before he spoke. What he wished to tell me was that my essays indicated a bent for criticism and that I might become a critic if I studied, let's say, for ten years. Ten years! I would be thirty before I could begin being a critic! I could only nod gravely as though I would consider it, but I was secretly thinking I would break through as a playwright in a year, or at most two—certainly not nine, as it turned out. Walter sent me to Kenneth Rowe, who taught play writing and welcomed me to his class. Rowe soon became for me a combination of critical judge and confidant. Aside
from his friendship, which meant much to me, his chief contribution to my development was his interest in the dynamics of play construction, something not normally the subject of college courses. His scholarship and support were greatly important, and when he became a consultant to the Theatre Guild, reading new plays for them, this professional recognition added weight to his encouragement.

It was the same Erich Walter who in the early fifties took me into his office in the new administration mini-skyscraper to help me with my
Holiday
article. Dean of the university now, he wore a smartly tailored business suit and a sedate tie that no longer came out from under the side of his collar but obediently from the front, and he had a couple of secretaries in the outer office, but he still lisped and had pink cheeks and listened intently, always ready to be delighted. He was hoping, he said, that McCarthyism would be part of my article, for its paranoid spirit was paralyzing communication between students and faculty and, combined with the current corporate competition for college graduates, was inculcating a smooth and featureless psyche in the young. The students' highest goal, he felt, was now to fit into corporate America rather than to develop some skill in separating truth from falsehood. “They become experts at grade-getting, but there's less hanging round the lamppost now, no more just chewing the fat,” or speculating about the wrongs of the world and ideal solutions, something no employer was interested in and might even suspect. It was Walter who sent me over to the orientation professor, who in all innocence, with no idea of the sinister implications, revealed as a matter of course that the FBI was actually enlisting students to report any radical remarks by their professors and at the same time asking professors to inform on students who expressed dangerous thoughts. The shadow of the faceless informer had not quite darkened the entire university of the fifties, but the dean was beginning to seriously dread the future.

With the 1936 Hopwood Award, my psychic sun on the rise, I had no difficulty pitting myself in imagination against the reigning writers of the Broadway theatre—Clifford Odets, first of all, and Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, Sidney Kingsley, and Philip Barry, and a dozen others whose names have disappeared with their seasons. However, there were no Americans who seemed to be working a vein related to what I had come to sense
was mine, except for Odets and for a few weeks Anderson, who I thought was attempting to break out of the dusty Broadway naturalistic habit. But there was something artificially antiqued in his work that soon wore thin for me.

As for Eugene O'Neill, his work seemed archaic in the mid-thirties with its mawkish twenties slang and, along with a deadly repetitiveness that sometimes lulled me to sleep as I tried to read his plays, a suspicion of self-willed grandeur. One approaches writers from one's own historical moment, and from where I stood O'Neill seemed the playwright of the mystical rich, of high society and the Theatre Guild and escapist “culture.” It would take many years before an entirely opposite side of him emerged, when his disgust appeared more absolute and beyond earthly solace than any strain in Odets, who alone had seemed pure, revolutionary, and the bearer of the light. This, of course, by virtue of his commitments to socialism and the Soviet idealization that was so widespread in the West, as much as for his plays' lyricism of hopeful despair. O'Neill had begun his decade of silence just as Odets's rocketlike career was taking off, and this seemed to prove the withering up of his fossilized individualism, his dirgelike longing for private salvation redolent of the alcoholic twenties, in contrast to Odets's comradely outcry against the intolerable present. As always, we were trapped into estimating writers by what they apparently stood for rather than by what they were actually doing, by the critical propaganda surrounding them rather than by their literary deeds.

It would await the end of the forties, a quite different decade, for me to realize that I had been had; despite the extremely weak original production of
The Iceman Cometh
in 1946, the same season
All My Sons
opened, I was nevertheless struck by O'Neill's radical hostility to bourgeois civilization, far greater than anything Odets had expressed. Odets's characters were alienated because—when you came down to it—they couldn't get into the system, O'Neill's because they so desperately needed to get out of it, to junk it with all its boastful self-congratulation, its pious pretension to spiritual values when in fact it produced emptied and visionless men choking with unnameable despair. If content had been the gauge of radicalism rather than certain automatic journalistic tags like “Catholic,” “Jewish,” “tragic,” and “class-conscious,” it would have been O'Neill who was branded the anticapitalist writer first and foremost. Odets, after all, would have reformed capitalism with a dose of socialism; O'Neill saw no hope in it whatsoever, but unlike
Odets he was not part of any political movement, at least not since his socialist youth. It was O'Neill who wrote about working-class men, about whores and the social discards and even the black man in a white world, but since there was no longer a connection with Marxism in the man himself, his plays were never seen as the critiques of capitalism that objectively they were.

The real Odets was also not quite as advertised at the time. He might wave a red flag and for a while be happy to take to the air as a “stormbird of the working class,” but this was gesturing toward a hoped-for certainty that he did not really possess, as it turned out. He was an American romantic, as much a Broadway guy as a proletarian leader, probably more so. To call him contradictory is merely to say he was very much alive and a sufferer. Harold Clurman, his director and closest friend, visiting him in Hollywood, once read him a sentence he had written about him—“For Odets Hollywood is Sin”—and laughed as he quoted himself. “What are you laughing about? It is,” Odets rebuked him, like a man who had lost his moral bearings.

One could easily blame him for squandering himself in screenplays, most of them never produced, but to what theatre was he supposed to remain faithful? The Broadway commercial theatre is an organism that rejects its hearts; Odets felt mocked and discarded in his last years, quite like Williams and O'Neill. I came to taste their species of bitterness myself, but not as devastatingly, perhaps because my illusion of having been truly accepted in the first place was always thin—I was not raised to be surprised when a marriage between commerce and art collapsed. The story of American playwrights is awfully repetitious—the celebratory embraces soon followed by rejection or contempt, and this without exception for any playwright who takes risks and does not comfortably repeat himself.