Timebends (42 page)

The audience for the panel I was chairing—my duty turned out to be simply to announce the name of the next speaker and to recognize people who wished to speak from the floor—was surprisingly sparse, testimony to the fear in the air. Not more than twenty or thirty people showed up, of whom some eight or ten were angrily hostile to the whole occasion. Mary McCarthy was there, along with the composer Nicholas Nabokov, who in later years would become a good friend, and a number of others from the intellectual anti-Communist and Trotskyite camps. Never having attended such a meeting, I did not know exactly what to expect. A couple of speakers read statements pleading for the world not to allow the American-Soviet wartime alliance to disintegrate. Dmitri Shostakovich, small, frail, and myopic, stood as stiffly erect as a doll and without once raising his eyes from a bound treatise in his hand read a
pro forma
statement affirming the peaceful intentions of the Soviets. When he finished he sat down, his gaze directed over the heads of the audience, an unapproachable automaton. The man accompanying him made no attempt to even introduce him to the rest of us on the panel. I can no longer recall what the anti-Soviet contingent actually said, only that I recognized three or four of them who stood up and, mainly addressing Shostakovich, raised the issues of Soviet persecution of artists and the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe. The great composer, who unbeknown to me was at that very moment in a deadly duel with Stalin, kept his silence, and no real debate occurred at the conference, which ended in futility except for its setting a new and higher level of hostility in the Cold War. That a meeting of writers and artists could generate such widespread public suspicion and anger was something brand-new in the postwar world.

Even now something dark and frightening shadows the memory
of that meeting nearly forty years ago, where people sat as in a Saul Steinberg drawing, each of them with a balloon overhead containing absolutely indecipherable scribbles. There we were, a roomful of talented people and a few real geniuses, and in retrospect neither side was wholly right, neither the apologists for the Soviets nor the outraged Red-haters; to put it simply, politics is choices, and not infrequently there really aren't any to make; the chessboard allows no space for a move.

Odets now took his turn. By this time he had spent practically the whole decade in Hollywood, although he still spoke of writing more plays and indeed would in a few years write his last,
The Flowering Peach.
Until this very moment I had not gotten more than a cool nod from Odets, because of his competitive resentment toward me, I assumed.
The Crucible,
still four years in the future, would be the only Broadway play to take on the anti-Communist hysteria; Odets denigrated it to Kazan as “just a story about a bad marriage.” There was a slightly more generous acknowledgment by Lillian Hellman, who, after a twenty-minute all but silent walk with me following a performance of the play in its pre-Broadway week in Wilmington, Delaware, let drop, “It's a good play.” If we on the left were engaged in a conspiracy, as was almost daily reported, it certainly did not overflow into mutual generosity and support among the participants. It is no great credit to me to say that I felt no such hostility toward either of them, probably because I was sure that if there was a competition among us I had won it. But I was never more conscious of resentment from my fellow writers than from those on the left, no doubt the consequence of my own arrogance as much as theirs.

The audience was quieting down to hear Odets. I had absolutely no idea what he would say, no idea what his present orientation toward the Soviet Union actually was, any more than I knew my own beyond a belief in resisting the burgeoning new anti-Soviet crusade.

He seemed distracted as he rose to his feet, tieless, with his shirt collar open and his sports jacket hanging unbuttoned. I recalled how, years before, I had assumed him to be a determined militant, but he seemed so thin-skinned and childishly sensitive. The roles we play! Striving to achieve an authoritative stance, he now began an amazingly theatrical speech that I have never forgotten, and one that makes me despair of history as more than a circumstantial fiction.

The point is that we were now in 1949, some fifteen years past
Odets's springtide of theatrical rebellion against the failed America of the Depression. Yet not only was he still generally identified with that period, but despite his ten years of Hollywood luxury, he himself evidently felt as he faced this audience that he should sound as though it were still 1935; helpless before his own past, he felt bound to reidentify himself as “Odets.”

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.