Timebends (49 page)

“Tripping? I didn't see anybody tripping.”

“Well, they have slightly, and it makes them uncertain.”

“Talk to the director if they're uncertain, uncertainty is his job.”

“But what is the point of it, Max—a rise like that in the middle of the stage?”

“You have written a graveyard play,” he said as categorically as if he were reading each word in lights behind my eyes, “and not some factual report. The play is taking place in a cemetery where their son is buried, and he is also their buried conscience reaching up to them out of the earth. Even if it inconveniences them it will keep reminding them what the hell all this acting is really
about.
The bump stays!” In fact, I gradually had to admit that in some indefinable way the mound did seem to unify the performances around a single subliminal preoccupation that had a certain power. And if one of them tripped on it occasionally, perhaps it did serve to remind them that the play was indeed about a bad conscience. But whether it worked or was meaningless, Max terrorized Kazan and me and everyone else into believing that it did, the alternative being to confront him, a suicidal act.

Kazan, Clurman, Gorelik, Arthur Kennedy, Karl Maiden—these were all men connected to the now deceased Group, whose influence on theatre, however distorted and convoluted, continued for decades to come and extended far beyond the United States. Inevitably, I took their idealism more seriously than they did, but I was not an actor and could afford to be saddened by opportunism; they had to make a living, and when the money wagon came, many of them jumped on before it passed them by. In rehearsals they were like a football team, helping one another, advising, and criticizing, for the Group's idea had emphasized the coherence of the whole over the stardom of any individual, something they regarded as a symptom of artistic cynicism.

The play's first performance, in New Haven, in addition to gripping the audience, reawakened the dimmed idealism of the war years, and the prospect of so serious a work actually becoming a popular success pushed the cast into a feverish search for the least detail that might not contribute to the whole effect. By the time it opened in Boston and then New York, the production was like a bullet on a straight, clean trajectory that rammed the audience back into its seats.

It can take a long time to accept that celebrity is merely a different form of loneliness. Especially in that era when play writing was considered as much a craft as an art, a play that was serious and could still win a Broadway audience was an achievement to envy, the more so when every such attempt normally failed. No longer purely the observer but the observed, I denied at first that any
thing could change in my life, and that was when, a month or two after
All My Sons
opened on Broadway, I took that job at the Long Island City factory, as though to insure my continuity with the past. I spent the better part of a week working around a circular counter alongside six or eight men and women standing as silent as prisoners doing time, assembling the dividers in wooden beer boxes. My play was bringing in some two thousand dollars a week, and my wage here was the minimum, forty cents an hour. After a few days the irreality of my flight from and toward myself simply spent my energy and I quit. I can only surmise that without at the time rationalizing my feeling, I was attempting to be part of a community instead of formally accepting my isolation, which was what fame seemed to hold. But there really was no community; those workers had never been inside a theatre in their lives, and probably never would be. If on some sublime level I thought I was speaking for them, it was purely my illusion, which they would hardly have understood.

But I was also reacting to my having excelled, and the contradictions of the old fraternal competition flamed up, for they could neither be openly acknowledged nor set aside. I wanted and did not want to excel over my brother, or more precisely, the little boy in me did not want to, even as I knew perfectly well what pride Kermit took in my success. But the first church is in the skull, and there the gods face in two directions. In any case, having laid a week's ill-paid and mind-numbing work at the foot of the idol, I went home and returned to my life of writing. I had paid some other dues as well with
All My Sons,
which in fact was my only tightly made play among seven or eight of a far looser and more vagrantly poetic form; now I hoped to open up the side of my vision that was, so I imagined, a path into my own chaos.

The box factory was not the first time that I had tried to turn my back on the isolate life of the writer. My wartime year in the Navy Yard, completely voluntary as it had been, was in part an expression of the same wish for community, since arguably my radio work for various government agencies aided the war effort more than anything I contributed to repairing ships. I left the Yard early in 1943 when Herman Shumlin recommended me to Lester Cowan, a Hollywood producer looking for a young writer to make a screenplay of
Here Is Your War,
a collection of columns by America's best-loved war reporter, Ernie Pyle of the United Press. I was still
almost two years away from the production of
The Man Who Had All the Luck,
and totally unknown, but Shumlin's prestige as a producer-director convinced Cowan to offer me seven hundred and fifty dollars a week to invent a movie based on Pyle's book. Far, far down the road this project would finally emerge as
The Story of GIJoe,
but only after some four or five other writers had hauled and pushed and recarved my original screenplay about an infantry company moving through the war.

With my prejudice against screenwriting as an art—it was produced by the will, not the soul—I found it difficult to feel more than a cool technical involvement, but I would learn more than I bargained for in the next months as I went from Fort Benning to Camp Campbell to half a dozen other training camps trying to understand soldiers and a war that only a handful of cadremen, returned from combat to train others, had as yet experienced. In the European theatre of operations our only serious engagement had been in North Africa, the Battle of Kasserine Pass, where the Germans had mauled us badly.

In contrast to the quite different wars that were to come in Korea and Vietnam, I recall no sign that the tankmen, glider troops, paratroopers, and foot soldiers in the stateside camps ever questioned our ultimate victory, which was merely a matter of time. And for many the army was a distinct step upward from the Depression life, which a majority were fairly sure would return when the fighting was over. I kept searching for some ideological conception animating them, but the war was “about” little more than what a game of football is “about”—something that had to be won for pride's sake. Nevertheless, I wrote a work of reportage,
Situation Normal,
my first published book, in which I tried to see a higher purpose operating among these men. In truth, the minority who did grope for some meaning in the war beyond America's responding to the Japanese attack ended up figuring that somebody else must know what it was, but even so, this was a world away from the nihilism of Vietnam or even the Korean War. Though unable to define it in words, they shared a conviction that somehow decency was at stake in this grandest slaughter in history, literally a war on every continent of the planet and in the air overhead and under the seas.

My screenplay reflected my instinctual democratic suspicion of stardom; I tried to make every man in the company the center of the war, equal in importance. After working for five or six weeks at home alone, piling up not less than a hundred and fifty pages of
manuscript, I was summoned to Hollywood by Cowan. But first I had to accompany him to Washington to meet the chiefs of the Army Ground Forces and explain our film, which would require much army cooperation and equipment, not to mention a few submarines and a small naval battle squadron. Why the latter I had no idea, having written no naval scenes whatsoever, but Cowan moved in mysterious ways. He was a small former basketball coach from Ohio with a flattened nose and a grin like a canteloupe slice.

In Washington, my naivete impregnable as ever, I spent three nights and days being introduced to generals and colonels who were apparently convinced that they were personally to be made world-famous by this movie. That there was no character of their rank in the script was a fact I knew enough not to mention. With war raging everywhere, Cowan could pick up a phone and cause coveys of the highest army officers to assemble in order to hear me unwind about this movie, whose main virtue, he endlessly repeated, was that it would put the “ordinary GI in the front row of the war and show that he is what it's all
about,
” to which startling new conception there could only be patriotic agreement. I was gritting my teeth, trying not to quit with every dawning day.

But Washington had its pathos, too. Joe Liss, a friend and radio writer then working for the Library of Congress Folklore Division, took me to dinner with his wife and a young woman friend of theirs whose husband had been reported missing on the Murmansk run a few months earlier; his destroyer had been either damaged or sunk escorting merchant ships going to Russia with Lend-Lease supplies. As I looked into her distracted face, the war suddenly became real to me. She was keeping up almost daily inquiries at some naval office as though there was still hope for her young husband. I danced with her. She told me she was sleeping with young sailors now. I found this admission astonishing, and very moving, since it persuaded me that through them she was reaching into the sea where her beloved lay dead. I wanted to sleep with her myself, stimulated almost as much by the poetry of the idea as by her body, for she was not really my notion of a beauty. But the brush of death had made her sensually attached to life, to sex, had given her a taste for the catastrophic. My own vulnerability, which normally I kept carefully shielded, responded to hers, and I knew that I was no longer as safely high-minded as I had tried to imagine.

So absorbed with myself was I that on the long train ride to Hollywood I blithely told Mary of my attraction to this woman, saying that had I not been married I would have liked to sleep with her. It seemed not at all an explosive announcement and in another
culture might have been passed off as one more male inanity or simply a report on human nature, but it was received with such a power of disgust and revulsion—as though I had longed to use a toothbrush found in a railroad washroom—that her confidence in me, as well as my mindless reliance on her, was badly damaged. If her reaction was silly and overblown, she had nevertheless sensed a truth; I had announced the existence of the part of my nature nearly absent from our marriage. Like most such announcements, it had scorched my face, and our arrival in Hollywood was strained and sad.

Still, my congenital optimism soon swept even this cloud away, believer that I was in the permanence of marriage—here I was, past twenty-five, and none of my friends had been divorced. The American trivialization of marriage had not yet become a fact of life, and it weighed on me that I had shaken my own, especially so stupidly and unnecessarily.

Meanwhile, I worked, or tried to, in an office in the General Service Studios, a rambling one-story building whose windows looked out on a wide lawn and beyond it to the immense sound stages where two or three films were then being shot. Copies of my script were being shown to various directors, one of whom had participated in the perilous British commando raid on Dieppe; he arrived each day, conferred with Lester privately, and finally, after some weeks, took me aside and asked if I was being paid, since he was not. He was the earliest of several whose minds would be sucked for ideas before they were allowed to simply wander away, drained. At the same time Lester was having the army send along one hapless foot soldier after another to sit and tell me his battle experiences, none of which I could possibly fit into the script. I became ashamed to look at these boys, so excited by the hope of being in the movie, sitting out in the waiting room all day until they too drifted off.

At last, one evening, appeared Laurence Stallings himself, among the most famous of screenwriters, co-author of
What Price Glory?
with Maxwell Anderson, and author of other war films including my boyhood favorite,
The Big Parade.
Stallings had lost a leg in World War I and walked with a severe limp that enhanced his martial authority for me. As the chauffeur solemnly drove us through the Hollywood dusk, I felt myself privileged to have won my way into this life and this work, through which I could put my talent to use for the antifascist war.

Stallings spoke in a soft, rather kindly voice. “Your script is surprisingly good, considering you've never been in battle. The de
vice of not featuring any one man above the others could be moving and would gradually impose the idea of a company, maybe of an army. It's a very unusual approach. I've never seen it done before.”

Swimming in my happiness, I explained that I had wanted to symbolize, through a nearly equal emphasis on the whole group, the democratic ideals of the war. I went even further and pointed out the then incredible turnabout on the eastern front, where the Russians were beginning to look like they might well roll, back the Germans, until now widely believed to be the inevitable winners due to their technological superiority and warmaking ability. “It's the Russians' belief in their ideology that's helped make the difference,” I said.

“That's not exactly the way it is,” Stallings replied, giving me a faint elder man's grin. “They're using their Guards Divisions. A Guards Division man is not thinking about socialism, he's in there with his mustache and his special uniform and is not going to retreat, ever, because he is a Guards trooper. This is one thing you've got to watch in your script—don't try to make it mean too much. Battle is never about beliefs or ideas, it's about your buddy and you and not coming off a shitass or a coward. War is the whole world turned into a drunken barroom. And there's one other thing.”