Timebends (43 page)

Outside the hotel I got into his dusty old Lincoln. He seemed to have aged little in the decade since the Waldorf Conference; there was still something movingly boyish about his manner, despite a touch of disingenuousness at having wound up with only me for dinner. Nine years his junior, I found myself feeling older or at least not as desperately uncertain, and indeed he turned to me in the car and asked, “Where do you like to eat?”

Since it was he who had been living here for the last two decades, I said that any place he liked would be all right with me, but he persisted—“I don't know the town that well.” This feigned un-familiarity, so childishly transparent rather than crafty and expert, made him vulnerable to the point of fragility, and I wondered if he was even trying to make it a bit more believable to himself that he had not squandered himself over so many years in this industry he claimed to despise. Earlier, while waiting for him to arrive, I had resolved to tell him how much his work meant to me as a student in the thirties, but it was impossible to praise his past now that I found him so painfully defensive.

After more hesitation he managed to think of a restaurant but even then made a couple of mistaken approaches to it, peering up at the names of the main avenues as though he had never seen them before. Our dinner died before it could be born since, as I had suspected, he had little interest in
The Misfits;
only when Marilyn came into the conversation could he let his natural warmth flow, his defensiveness forgotten, as he asked his fan's questions with wide-eyed wonder. “She
reads,
doesn't she?” he asked, as though she were a prize gazelle or a genius chimp. I said she did, and let it go at that. With the possible exception of Colette's
Chéri
and a few short stories, however, I had not known her to read anything all the way through. There was no need to: she thought she could get the
idea
of a book—and often did—in a few pages, and most of those she opened she found unnecessary or untrue to her experience. With no cultural pretensions to maintain, she felt no need to bother with anything that did not sweep her away. She could not suspend her disbelief toward fiction, wanting only the literal truth, as though from a document. A story by Bernard Malamud upset her because it seemed to regard rape as something less than a catastrophically tragic and contemptible event. “That author
doesn't know what a rape is, and he shouldn't pretend he does.” I suggested that he might be understating in order to lead the reader to feel it more deeply, but her outrage could not accept literary irony about a humiliation she had experienced. And in many another situation, her sense of humor would collapse whenever painful images were evoked. Beneath all her insouciance and wit, death was her companion everywhere and at all times, and it may be that its unacknowledged presence was what lent her poignancy, dancing at the edge of oblivion as she was.

She was a born Freudian in this: there were no accidents of speech, no innocent slips; every word or gesture signaled an inner intention, whether conscious or not, and the most innocuous-seeming remark could conceal some sinister threat. I had always erred in the other direction, canceling out hostilities around me for the sake of getting on with life, a habit that had already created some serious misunderstandings between us. This golden girl, who was like champagne on the screen and whose very ability to read at all was a surprise even to so sensitive a man as Odets, was of another sort, but for Odets as for many shrewder observers before and after him, it was the happiness she emanated that was her whole nature. As we sat having our dessert and coffee in the rather ordinary, New York-like Italian restaurant, Odets seemed to me to share something of Marilyn's special kind of perceptive naivete; like her, he was a self-destroying babe in the woods absentmindedly combing back his hair with a loaded pistol.

By this time, in 1958, it was some six years since Odets had “cooperated” with the House Un-American Activities Committee, and two years since I had refused to and been sentenced to jail for contempt. But his performance in Washington had always seemed more a pathetic coda to me than a climax. The overwhelmingly significant truth, I thought, as I still do, was the artist-hating brutality of the Committee and its envy of its victims' power to attract public attention and to make big money at it besides. To his generation Odets was more than an individual: he typified what it meant to survive as an artist in America, especially in the so-called big time. There was something so utterly American in what had betrayed him—he had wanted everything. His longtime friend, set designer Boris Aronson, mused once, “Odets has one trouble; he has to be the greatest everything. The biggest lover, the best family man; best friend to Billy Rose and then go downtown to sit with the Communist big shots; the biggest experimental artist in the theatre and at the same time the highest-paid movie writer. Who
can be everything without exploding? The only thing he never liked was to hurt other people. And that's unusual for such a fellow.”

Similarly, testifying before the Committee, he would roundly castigate them at one moment and without at all changing his indignant tone proceed to corroborate for them the names of people he had known in the Party. His tentative grip on the real was with him even on his deathbed. His body wasted by cancer, he suddenly raised a fist, tried to sit up, and gasped to a friend at his bedside, “Odets is coming back! Odets is only beginning!” America was promises, and Odets bought them all, with everything he had.

Harold Clurman, who was more clear-eyed but occasionally climbed up to sit with Odets on his cloud, kept exhorting him to leave Hollywood and “return,” as though to some religion in whose bosom he would revive his spirit. Of course there was nothing to return to, no theatre or theatre culture, only show business and some theatrical real estate, and even that doomed to vanish soon as garish new hotels tumbled one grand old house after another into piles of bricks. In American theatre the moral is always so boringly the same: the quickest route to failure is success, and if you can't get there yourself, there are plenty around who'll be happy to give you a lift.

A play, even the angry and critical kind, is always on one level a love letter to the world, from which a loving acknowledgment is eagerly awaited. The trick, of course, is how to face the turndown and go back and write another letter—and to the same lover, no less. This is an enterprise for a very young man, obviously, and a man with both feet solidly planted in his garden of Narcissus. Within two years after leaving Michigan I had written six plays, one of them a tragedy in grand style about Montezuma and Cortez, all of them rejected by the only producers there were in those days, the ones on Broadway. My Montezuma play, sent to the Group, did not even merit a reply.

Nearing thirty, having added two or three more unproduced plays to the pile, I began
All My Sons
as my final shot at play writing. I knew playwrights nearing forty who were still awaiting their debut, but life was too interesting to waste it hanging around producers' doors. I laid myself a wager: I would hold back this play until I was as sure as I could be that every page was integral to the whole and would work; then, if my judgment of it proved wrong,
I would leave the theatre behind and write in other forms. When, in 1947, after two years of work, I sent
All My Sons
to my agent, Leland Hayward, I was an American playwright, which is to say, a Darwinian who had learned to expect no mercy (although he might still secretly hope for a little).

It was a pridefully tough profession in the forties.
Time
magazine referred to playwrights who wrote hits as “crack,” implying something like target shooting, brisk and very technical, with big money prizes for hitting the bull's-eye, no sissy literary nonsense in cranking a play together, but a job for cigar-chewing mechanics serving—according to the going myth of the time—the whole American people.

It was an audience impatient with long speeches, ignorant of any literary allusions whatever, as merciless to losers as the prizefight crowd and as craven to winners, an audience that heard the word
culture
and reached for its hat. Of course there were people of great sensibility among them, but a play had to be fundamental enough to grab anybody, regardless. One healthy consequence of this audience's makeup, both actual and fancied, was a shift toward full-blown plays with characters and story that asserted as little as possible verbally and dramatized as much as possible by action. This tended to keep speeches short and the stage active rather than reflective. Different as we were as writers, Tennessee Williams and I both thrived on these stringent demands. The time was far, far off when a character could be permitted to sit in one place indulging in pages of monologue while surrounding actors stood absolutely still and mute awaiting the end of his aria. (When O'Neill so indulged, his storytelling never stopped, and if it did he failed.) Even further off was the time when a certain span of sheer boredom was thought to be a signal that a culturally rare event was taking place on a stage. The revolutionary newness of
The Glass Menagerie,
for example, was in its poetic lift, but an underlying hard dramatic structure was what earned the play its right to sing poetically. Poetry in the theatre is not, or at least ought not be, a cause but a consequence, and that structure of storytelling and character made this very private play available to anyone capable of feeling at all.

The time would come when storytelling seemed old-fashioned; the Bomb had blown away credibility in all such continuities. The world would end with neither bang nor whimper but two people
on a slag heap each trying unsuccessfully to make out what the other was implying. If it was hard to disagree, I could still not walk for long in New York streets without running into people whom I hadn't seen in decades and who had left their tracks mixed into mine or my father's or brother's; the city still seemed to be built of time, time in the process of decay and transformation, just as it had always been.

When I pass Forty-seventh and Sixth Avenue now, it is as grimy as it was in 1938. But in those days there was an old tobacconist's shop with dusty pipes, untouched for years, behind an unwashed window on the ground floor of a four-story walk-up. From the second-floor landing as I climbed the dark stairs Mr. Franks was already leaning waving down to me with his kindly and distracted greeting. I had just graduated from the university, and my mission here was theoretically going to get me into the WPA Theatre Project.

“Well, say!” he chuckled, offering his hand and leading the way into the small apartment. “Sidney isn't here yet, but he shouldn't be more than a couple of minutes. Just went downtown to pick up his uniform.” He had always called him Sidney when the rest of us were Bernie or Danny or Artie or Sam, and he was still a formal man with his starched collars and silk ties. With his outdated gentility and the eager appetite for company of a man alone all day, he gestured me to sit on the worn, once elegant wing-back chair that I remembered from childhood when Sid and I played in their apartment on 110th Street, the park, magical and mysterious, spreading out below us as we leaned out the sixth-floor windows at dusk to free our captured fireflies.

Mr. Franks, so long as he was not talking, looked healthy with his round, untroubled face and his gently polite smile, the neatly arranged dark blue tie flowing out of his stiff collar, and his gold cufflinks glittering even in the gray light that came through the grimy back windows. The place was a furniture dump filled with eleven rooms' worth of stuff from their old apartment, including the carpets, rolled up and standing like pillars against a high pile of chests and trunks that touched the ceiling.

I asked if the inspector had come.

“No, nobody. Maybe today.”

“You don't mind me waiting?”

“Oh, no, glad to have you. Like some tea?” It was the only cooking he knew how to do seven years after moving in here, in
1931.

I had forgotten, even since yesterday when we had sat waiting here like this, how doll-like he had become in those years. He sat there, implicitly subservient, content to wait for me to move the conversation another step forward or to sit in silence. I had also forgotten how frequently he repeated, “Well, say,” and what variations he had invented for it.

“They're predicting a very hot summer.”

“Well-say.” (That's to be expected.)

“Although no water shortage.”

“Well, say!” (Mild surprise.)

“Business seems to be picking up.”

“Well … say.” (Chuckling disbelief.)

In later years he would seem the perfection of the Crash experience. Until 1930, he was a wealthy banker surrounded by an active, intelligent family. Then, in a few short months, his bank's assets evaporated, his wife died, and his daughter committed suicide. That he sat here smiling like this was something I found myself wishing to flee from, like a dark prophecy, all the worse because he was so placidly cheerful with me.

I had been coming here every day from my home in Brooklyn in order to demonstrate to the Welfare Department inspector that I lived in this place. To join the WPA Theatre Project it was necessary to get on the welfare rolls first, in effect to be homeless and all but penniless. And to get the bureaucratic process started I had brought my father to the Welfare Department's requisitioned old warehouse near the Hudson River, where we put on a fine scene of parental indignation against filial rebellion. The welfare worker looked on as we demonstrated why I would never be allowed to sleep in my family home, and simply sighed and judged the performance adequate, without necessarily believing anything more than our economic desperation. The final step was to be an unannounced visit by an inspector to see whether I actually lived at this address with people who were unrelated. My alleged cot, on which I had never slept, stood under a window here, and my winter overcoat hung on a hanger hooked over a gas fixture on the wall. A nice touch was the pair of sneakers placed under the cot, for by this time I was down to one pair of leather shoes.