The thirties & Clifford Who?

...The more earthbound truth is that the inseminating moment of the thirties had passed...

...and so, hilariously or suffocatingly, on...

...and so flakily on...

...Or thirties history in the sentimental, romantic, authorized versions of the Left...

...and when the biographer is a psychoanalyst (and the "subject," or analysand, was a walking case history whose life reads like one), not a cultural historian or literary critic but a psychoanalyst first and last, then the resultant biography is likely to be that curious fusion -far more often than not, even in Freud's hands, that misalliance -of the shilling life and psychoanalytic procedures called psychobiography, widely practiced in this nation of born psychologists and kin to a related discipline called psychohistory, in which name great crimes have been committed -and at times some flickering illuminations cast...

...The language had to have been provided by their interviewer, our author, and framed in such a way as to attain from the unhappy ladies the precise formulation desired by Brenman-Gibson the better to press her thesis...

...No, I do not...

...For one thing, other contenders flock to mind...

...for another and in the first place, what can such a statement mean...

...No one below a certain age is likely even to know the name, much less its significance, unless driven by a strong interest in the cultural history of the thirties and its postlude, or in the history of American theater, drama, film...

...And if this is an instance of chasing phantoms through the mists, what are we to make of the following instance of contrived word-play underlying a connection that is no connection at all, based on a disorder that isn't one, though it might have been, and is when it appears in others, the lot of it hanging on a word that is both misleading and readily replaceable by another more commonly used which, in addition to being the ordinary descriptive word for the condition, changes utterly the implied psychic weight and pressure...

...Commenting on the curtain scene in Lefty, and its final chorus of "STRIKE, STRIKE, STRIKE...

...This sort of bogus "insight" is not only mischievous...

...Without that, all is psychobabble...

...The Odets estate made available all the papers, the written detritus of a writer's life, the entire documentary record, public and private, all at the mercy and discretion of the designated biographer: diaries, journals, notebooks, letters, laundry lists, everything...

...I mean merely that the analyst, while never offending against our common sense, against the allowable range of metaphor, against the analogical imagination, its heights and depths but also its strictures and limits, had better provide overwhelming support,and there's not a shred of it here...

...In Awake and Sing, Hennie, matter-of-factly described as the "feminine identity element in Odets," as if that were self-evident, is made pregnant by a man not her husband...

...and the master's marvelous gift for deep, circuitous analysis, metaphor, analogy, imaginative leap and sudden connection reduced to babble and banality...

...A biographer's dream of heaven...

...And so with Freud, if not more so in every department save (perhaps) actual bloodletting: the tragic poet and dark prophet drowned in the Atlantic crossing only to be resurrected as an American optimist, soothsayer, faith-healer, cafe dandy...

...So with the truths of The Interpretation of Dreams and Civilization and Its Discontents: without them the century soon ending is unrecognizable, its habits of mind and modes of sensibility reduced to a gibberish...

...At the time I was a beardless boy...

...very well, then, passion for -the art of music is accorded by that slippery equation the precious psychological weight accorded addiction in the pathological sense . . . with one escape hatch provided by the uneasy writer's dear friend, "possible," by which all things are made possible, even the highly improbable, and possibly the impossible itself, if there is such a thing in the psychic universe of infinite possibility...

...Strike...

...They were fed that line, and they swallowed...

...and we are able to "test'' their truth in the cauldrons of the real world, where they prove true in such a way that intellectual and imaginative life is radically altered or altogether nullified if they are not...

...Of this moment in history Odets was the golden boy, the Group's principal playwright and its incendiary, lyric voice...

...A footnote in this connection even raises a delicate question of professional ethics on the biographer's part when she notes that "several of Odets's ladies spontaneously expressed the view that 'Clifford wanted to be husbanded more than wived.' " Now I'll wager my hope of heaven against a 1982 dime that Clifford's ladies, whose name was legion, neither spontaneously nor deliberately said any such thing, for the simple, single, conclusive reason that no one talks that way, not, in any event, since the reign of Elizabeth the First...

...Margaret Brenman-Gibson's immense biography of Odets is merely the first of a projected two, and leaves off in 1940 when her subject (as well as longtime friend), reading the handwriting on the wall and following the breakup of the camp as it drifted one by one to Hollywood, went West himself and, just as myth requires, perished as an authentic, original writer...

...Do I then mean that none of this is possible in the phantasmagoric world of the unconscious...

...If his creative emptiness had not been sufficient in itself to expunge his name from history -a brilliant evanescent flame now extinguished -his moral collapse would have done nicely...

...In our time, the art of biography not only invites psychological inquiry and insight of the biographer, it requires it...

...not to wait passively for his personal success and salvation, but to join with his Group brothers and deliver an uppercut to 'the enemy' responsible for all of their problems, ranging from betrayals by women to material deprivation, to his failure to get parts in plays...

...rings of fire elsewhere, among other acts unleashing upon the world Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, not to mention Stella and Luther Adler, Lee Cobb and Edward Bromberg, Art Smith and Phoebe Brand, John Garfield and Morris Carnovsky, Franchot Tone and Frances Farmer, and others: the company of players, styles of acting, staging and direction, an idea of a theater that was to have permanent influence -a conscious, if eccentric, attempt to import and adapt Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theater...

...and Odets's fragile talent had exhausted itself, though he would write other plays (and of course screenplays) during and after the war...

...In Waiting for Lefty, that celebrated debut which Clurman rightly called a "significant moment in history," less a conventional drama than a sequence of agit-prop scenes based on a strike (the obligatory ritual occasion in the "proletarian" literature of the period), in this instance of cab-drivers (that being a time when an audience could still be depended upon to respond with immediate, instinctive sympathy for exploited workers everywhere, including brutally exploited cabbies -yes, even cabbies) the villain exposed for the rat he is by his brother, a member of the strike committee, is the perfidious informer in their midst...

...At the same time, there is some serious sense in which such statements strike one not only as true but as self-evident and in no need of apology or defense: a writer, by no means necessarily a major writer, catches a rhythm, a pulse-beat, something in the air, as no other does...

...in the analyst's allegorical world where nothing is what it seems to be, however, the "baby" is "equivalent to Odets's brain-children, his plays, which appear to be, in his view, equally illicit and born of 'forbidden' passions, his unconscious wish to be "husbanded' by his father...

...Why, then, is psychobiography as a species of biography, and this "clinical" biography, so dismayingly unsatisfactory...

...Brenman-Gibson is no cheapjack sensationalist or coffeehouse wit ablaze and dangerous from a first intoxicating reading of Freud's early landmark writings -she is a distinguished practitioner in her field...

...In a future article I want to look further at some of the problems posed by what Leon Edel calls "literary psychology" and assess his recent collection of essays, Stuff of Sleep and Dreq/ns: Essays in Literary Psychology, in its light...

...If the promised second volume is as thick as the first (and one can readily imagine an even larger one), we may yet have a 2000-page exhaustive, authorized biography of an erratically gifted minor writer who left a fading legend, a slender body of time-bound work no longer read much less produced, whose name may soon vanish entirely (the publisher apparently felt the need to identify him in the sub-title as an' 'American playwright...

...it amounts to mutilation of the portrait and what comes to a kind of malpractice, certainly of the biographer's art, and, I venture to say, of the analyst's as well, It also runs the risk of plain damn foolishness, which a reader may find so offputting as to dismiss what is welcome and valuable in the book, especially some of the cultural and political history of the period, and of course the history of the Group Theatre, though here the standard work must remain Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years, which can perhaps be augmented but never replaced...

...No mystery, after all...

...if one feels compelled to ponder Odets's heightened sensitivity to critics and criticism, however, one would be better advised to seek it in his own uncertainty about the depths and magnitude of his gifts...

...BUT what does it mean and in what sense if any is it true to assert that Odets's lifelong psychic battering at the hands of an ogrish, overbearing, hectoring, cloddish, coarse-grained father led to the playwright's terror in the teeth of the "infinite life-and-death power of the critic," as if there's anything surprising about that widespread if not universal fear considering that critics, especially but not only of the theater, do in fact possess the power to maim and kill or let live...

...and goes on to say: "His indictment of a patently unjust social system is genuine...

...A shilling life," Auden said, "will give you all the facts...

...and by 1947 had run bone dry...

...As with Marx so with Freud: the master is not required to answer to history for sins committed in his name...

...Convolution within convolution, and not a little slithery and devious, grounded in a play on words in which the unfortunate man's fondness for -all right, love of...

...We speak, as everyone knows, of a "love" for music -I'd say Odets was "mad" for music if I dared...

...Waiting for Lefty was the first professional production I'd ever seen in the "legitimate" theater...

...And this from an analyst married to a playwright...

...The Group Theatre set fire to the American theater and touched off...

...the personal steam, however, is supplied by his relationship to his parents and by his current yearning not only to overcome his loneliness, but also to deliver an 'uppercut' to his surrogate fathers, the Group directors...

...In Odets's case the searcher doesn't have far to seek -the mystery is not that he was shattered by his father but that the boy didn't do as Oedipus did and slaughter the old reprobate soon and suddenly the day he was old enough to wield a halberd...

...IF WAITING FOR LEFTY caught the historical moment, the most consequential of the later plays (Awake and Sing, Paradise Lost, Golden Boy) caught a tone of voice, a manner or speaking (lyrical, intense, filled with a confused, passionate yearning for something unspecified, unformulated, forever elusive and all the more compelling for that): the most vital plays are both Jewish and "Jewish" and released into the distinctive "voice" of American letters a language and music and range whose echoes are to this day inescapable, deeply implanted in the soil of American-Jewish writing...

...Odets makes an ideal subject -he overflowed with symptoms, exuded and leaked them...

...There is something especially repellent about the sight and smell of moral surrender in one who not only "knows better," not only feels just as deeply as you and I do about such matters, but whose work, the play which launched him into public consciousness, made his name and established him as a writer and symbolic figure at one with the loathing we feel, whatever our politics, for the informer...

...It had better be...

...Any more than one can on the second, but one must be strong...

...Strike...

...Yet however tenuous the metaphors of the imagination and arguable the proposed connections among disparate objects might seem at first sight, we know them, once they have sunk into our consciousness, as constituent elements of our inner life, as if we were remembering with great surprise what we had long forgotten or didn't know we knew: they seem ancient and inevitable and possess first explanatory and then predictive power...

...Yet the instant such a statement is made, it rings hollow, seems flashy...

...We demand it, rightly...

...Finally they seem not strange but familiar, the stuff of our common sense...

...The consent we give to Freud in his noblest work, no matter how great and bold the leap from ledge to ledge, is akin to if not of the same substance as the belief we accord the leaps of poetry, the connections forged in the imagination, acts abidingly true though unverifiable and immeasurable...

...and so will shilling history...

...that is the "state of the art" at this late date, and there is no going back...

...A writer -unless we are speaking of the consummate writers without whom an age is not an age at all -individual writers do not a decade make, especially decades so various, so teeming with gifted writers, as those two emblematic, shaping decades...

...But though such questions lie at the heart of psychoanalysis as mythology, theory and therapy, what relation can they be said to bear to psychobiography -what Brenman-Gibson calls "clinical biography" -in its particular application not to any patient but to the writer whose work and life are under minute, continuous, unrelenting -not to say chivvying, nagging, implacable, tormenting -scrutiny...

...though one would have imagined in one's innocence that no comment was necessary, Brenman-Gibson remarks: "Underneath the fiery political message, Odets is counseling himself...

...What did Yeats "mean" when he asserted that "all the ladders start in the foul rag bone shop of the heart...

...Is the statement "true...

...Ask any playwright, any novelist, including those who have been most tenderly nurtured by infinitely loving Datls (and let's not forget Mums...

...and even more, the emergent portrait and the means by which it was forged must have the palpable sound and feel of truth...

...To place Odets as a figure in history doesn't begin to convey the American myths, which confer far more nearly the actual sense of things as they resonate in time...

...To psychologize about this misses the point...

...A very American career: an electrifying early phase followed by a quick withering when the moment passes and with it the lyric impulse, the sort of death we like to lay on Hollywood, that vast mortuary of the arts, though it is far more likely that Hollywood is the name we assign to the afterlife of the artist who has died in bed at home back East, long since...

...Two further instances will have to suffice, both examples of the application of what passes for psychoanalytic procedure to a literary work in its relation to the life itself...

...I am not a Marxist," Marx said in pique or horror at what was already being said and done in his name during his own lifetime -what he might say now is best not thought about (though in thinking about it I've sometimes thought his self-designated disciples might well drive him into the arms of the enemy...

...We know them to be true...

...This massive work written by a psychoanalyst of no small reputation might seem somewhat excessive...

...On this sort of thing, one cannot bear to comment...

...and I knew pure joy as I leapt to my feet to urge the cabbies, those stormbirds of the international working class, to raise the barricades -our vanguard, our brothers, our comrades, harbingers of the great day a 'dawning, and as we left the theater, my friends and I, none of us had the smallest doubt, I least of all, that even if it took its own sweet time getting here, got temporarily derailed in the barnyards of History, I would see a socialist America on or before the day my bar mitzvah was to befall me, both events being foreordained, in the very nature of things...

...There, Odets wrote indifferent scripts, dreamed of composing a great film based on the life of his revered Beethoven, sent an occasional play into the world at distant intervals to remind his old admirers that he was still alive and was not to be written off...

...Looking back upon it from the distance of a lifetime as a playgoer, I can say there would never again be anything like that wild excitement of audience fusing with players at the famous climax in shouting "Strike...

...here is Brenman-Gibson's word-shift and what she makes of it: "It is possible that his addiction [italics added] to music, like that of George Ber-, nard Shaw, served as a protection against an addiction to alcohol or drugs" and goes on to say that though Odets drank "heavily" at times, drink was never a "problem," and "drugs" certainly weren't...

...As it turned out, neither event was to take place...

...But the great event which lay ahead of him (presumably to be dealt with at definitive length in the second volume) was in the first place political and moral -his appearance as a "cooperative" witness before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities during its assault on Hollywood...

...SAUL MALOFF IF SCOTT FITZGERALD came to symbolize the twenties in American literary history and myth, so was that once said of Clifford Odets and the thirties...