The Sheila Variations

Happy birthday, Clifford Odets!

Clifford Odets (playwright in the 30s and 40s - inspiration to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, a generation of playwrights - and he inspires still although some of his plays have dated badly) kept a journal throughout his tumultuous life.

One year of that journal has been published - 1940 - and the title of the book is "The Time is Ripe". It's a classic. Practically required reading for those of us in the theatre, but chock-full of stuff that would be interesting and illuminating to anyone. Marvelous first-person document.

A couple biographical notes:

Clifford Odets was catapulted into fame in the early 30s with his play Waiting for Lefty. He became a resident playwright with the influential Group Theatre - and they put on many of his plays - which are now considered classics: Awake and Sing, Paradise Lost, Golden Boy - just to name a few. His work is very much of a time and place - although the writing is good enough for ALL times. But his plays all have "the Great Depression" as an extra character. Without understanding that context, his plays may seem ... trite, or small, or naive. His theme is how the individual man can maintain his dignity, his human worth, in the middle of a capitalist society. He has written lines like, "Is life written on dollar bills?" WORTH has nothing to do with money ... but when you have no money, it sure as shit is difficult to remember that. His plays in the 30s insist upon human dignity, but also (like in Golden Boy) insist on the fact that there is compromise, and tragedy. This is where he can seem, to modern eyes, a bit naive - but it is essential to place him in his context.

But what remains (for me anyway) is not so much the thematic elements, the snapshot of urban life in the 30s - but the language. Odets' language!! It's raw, it's poetic, and it's not realistic. It's street poetry.

We got the blues, Babe -- the 1935 blues. I'm talkin' this way 'cause I love you. If I didn't, I wouldn't care ...

Or

You won't forget me to your dyin' day -- I was the first guy. Part of your insides. You won't forget. I wrote my name on you -- indelible ink!

Or this, from the same scene = I love this line:

So I made a mistake. For Chris' sake, don't act like the Queen of Romania!

Or

Yes, yes, the whole thing funnels up in me like a fever. My head'll bust a vein!

Or

A sleeping clam at the bottom of the ocean, but I'll wake you up. I'm through with the little wars: no more hacking, making a pound in a good day. Like old man Pike says, every man for himself nowadays, and when you're in a jungle you look out for the wild life. I put on my Chinese good luck ring and I'm out to get mine. You're the first stop!

And then this famous exchange from Golden Boy, immortalized in millions of acting classes across the country:

JOE. What did he ever do for you?

LORNA. [with sudden verve] Would you like to know? He loved me in a world of enemies, of stags and bulls! ... And I loved him for that. He picked me up in Friskin's hotel on 39th Street. I was nine weeks behind in rent. I hadn't hit the gutter yet, but I was near. He washed my face and combed my hair. He stiffened the space between my shoulder blades. Misery reached out to misery --

JOE. And now you're dead.

LORNA. [lashing out] I don't know what the hell you're talking about!

JOE. Yes, you do ...

Harold Clurman wrote about Odets:

Odets wrote some of the finest love scenes to be found in American drama. An all-enveloping warmth, love in its broadest sense, is a constant in all Odets' writing, the very root of his talent. IT is there in tumultuous harangues, in his denunciations and his murmurs. It is by turns hot and tender. Sometimes it sounds in whimpers. It is present as much in the scenes between grandfather and granson in Awake as in those of Joe and Lorna in Golden Boy. It is touchingly wry in Rocket. This explains why these scenes are chosen by so many actors for auditions and classwork.

The Group Theatre lasted almost a decade - from 1931 to 1940.

The Time is Ripe describes the year of the Group's demise. Night Music, Odets' latest play (which I ADORE - it is very difficult to find, and never produced anymore - my dad found it for me in the library and Xeroxed me a copy - Great play.) - was a huge flop. This was devastating for Odets - the critics were very cruel. They had built Odets up - and man, they loved tearing him down.

The play was a huge flop, and the theatre ensemble folded.

All members scattered to the 4 winds - John Garfield, Franchot Tone, Frances Farmer, Morris Carnovsky, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan - and yet they were forever linked, they forever had a relationship with one another - because of their experiences in the 1930s.

In honor of his birthday, I've posted a bunch of excerpts from his journal below. (Oh - and welcome House Next Door readers! Thanks for the link, Keith - and LOVE the Awake and Sing poster you found!) Some are funny, some are thought-provoking, some are lyrical - he is at the height of his powers here. He is about to go into his long decline - which is sad, because he has such fire and energy here. In 1944, he made his directorial debut with None but the Lonely Heart - starring Cary Grant. This was the second part Grant was nominated for an Oscar for - mainly because of the big crying scene at the end. (The fact that Grant would not be nominated - then or now - for his performance in His Girl Friday - is just indicative of how silly those awards can be!!) He and Grant were friends until the very end - and Odets had a particularly sad end. The guy had a long way to fall, and boy, did he fall. Grant would lend him money, or go and sit with him and talk and laugh and try to help his friend. None but the Lonely Heart is obviously Odets-ian - the themes, the compromises (it's always about choosing money or love, choosing money or humanity) - but what's really interesting about it is how great it LOOKS. The MOOD of the movie is really the reason to see it. It has an almost Fritz Lang-ish feel to it, eerie, melancholy, big empty urban streets, the alienation of urban life made manifest in the dark cobblestones - it's a great looking movie.

But now, in honor of his birthday, some excerpts from his journal from 1940. Obviously Clifford was all about Beethoven. Beethoven, and thoughts on FORM. Great stuff.

January 21, 1940

I am growing uneasy -- a new play is coming on. For me, this creative uneasiness excuses everything. Otherwise my inability to follow up assumed personal responsibilities would be another strong item to make my life unhappier than it is. Everything-for-the work is practically the only way I can feel and think -- notice that I put the word feel before think. Right now, these days and weeks, I am very clear in my relationships with the theatre, friends and intimates, almost the world. And that clarity of relationship is the prime necessity for doing good work.

Loneliness -- the business of living alone -- seems to have one of two results for a man. Either it makes him excessively romantic; or it makes him sour and bitter. Sometimes, however, there is a curious blending of both, a tart personality emerging, a sort of eccentric. In fact, all three results add up to an eccentric.

January 23, 1940

The period of courtship, in any matter, gets to be a shorter and shorter affair with me. This is because I am getting shorter and shorter on self-delusion. Let us get to the heart of the matter, I feel, and let us get there quickly and put things on a working basis. I am anxious for results and impatient, unfortunately, with the steps which lead up to the results. This is growth from one point of view; from another it is sheer backsliding.

January 21, 1940

John Barbirolli conducting the Schubert Seventh this afternoon, on the radio. An English musician or conductor! -- the very words are contradictory! Although there are some good words to say for [Sir Thomas] Beecham, who seems to have lifted himself into the top ranks of conductors by sheer will. He plays everything with great muscularity, forcing the music. Particularly true is this of his Mozart. He has discovered the "demon" in Mozart and will have the demon out even if he breaks the orchestra apart! But he really has his points, Beecham.

But Barbirolli? We went over on the same ship when we went to London with Golden Boy...He scowled and strode darkly through the passageways of the ship, romantic and glamorous, or trying to be. It's easy to hear, in his conducting, that he is quite a mild fellow, so mild that I keep looking to see what is holding up the music from behind. The symphony board here, in the case of Toscanini -- since they claimed that people came to see and hear only T. -- erred on the side of distinction. Then they got Barbirolli, whose personality would not overshadow the aggregate personality of the orchestra ... and they erred on the side of extinction!

March 24, 1940

Form, form. I go crazy when I hear some of these goofs say I have no form! Debussy had no form? Certainly not -- he had none of Beethoven's form! And some of Beethoven's last piano sonatas had no form. Yes, none of Mozart's form. These idiots do not realize that there is no such thing as abstract form! Form is, like style, an intensely personal thing. The trust is that my plays have much more form and shape and pattern than thousands of well-made American plays which are simply a scaffolding holding up nothing. I am a talented individual, seeing and handling material in an individual and creative way. And these so-called critics do not understand that when they ask for a ready-made form from me they are simultaneously asking for the death of my talent.

Well, everything is your own fault -- you read what those stupid men write!

April 8, 1940

In the music of Berlioz you will find something petulant, like a man with a toothache. I write this because I am thinking of the "Roman Carnival" overture which I played this afternoon. There is something historical about this piece, some strange and new outburst -- the "peeve" has come into art, the sense of personal rejection, the man unwanted and unheeded. What a strange sad man Berlioz must have been. Aaron Copland says the music of Berlioz is strange too, in the sense that one never knows where it is going or what the artist's intention is (if I am reporting correctly) but I don't understand what Aaron means: the music is followable enough to me. One might almost say that the nerves and hysteria of the modern man have come into the art with Berlioz, too.

April 25, 1940

Every [movie] studio has its own style in writing. A Warner Brothers picture always has an interesting linear quality about it, but is always dead in parts. The picture I saw last night, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, In some ways it is such an ordinary picture that one is apt to overlook the remarkable assembly and compression of the machinery, for it is a piece of machinery, dead all over, inhuman, but machinelike in its precision and use of parts. Characters never have any doubts which pull them two ways -- they are one thing, one color, good or bad, moving only in one direction, on one dimension. In a word, they are not dialectic -- they are without those contradictions which are in themselves the source of the deepest human drama.

But I most not forget the superb old German actor, [Albert] Basserman, who played Koch, the great German scientist, in this picture. He had only several small scenes in the picture, but he immediately made every American or English actor in the cast look like a boy. How he did this I am unable to say, perhaps with great repose, a WHOLE grasp of the character, really talking to the other characters instead of acting talking. He was well aware of the meaning of every situation in which he found himself and it was to that meaning he gave himself, never to something abstract, never to, for instance, nobility in general. In a word, he acted, he was active, he understood, he dealt with!

April 17, 1940

In the early evening went to Lee Strasberg's house for dinner. Paula's mother was there [Ed: Paula was Lee Strasberg's wife - an INFAMOUS individual - Marilyn Monroe's controlling acting coach - the bane of John Huston's life - there's a whole story in there], preparing the dinner, and I understood a great deal about Paula from seeing her mother's weak face. For the first time in ten years the tensions are down between Lee and myself -- so we were both able to relax.

He spoke of what he called "the blight of Ibsen", saying that Ibsen had taught most writers after him how to think undramatically. He illustrated this by an example. A man has been used to living in luxury finds he is broke and unable to face life -- he goes home and puts a bullet in his head. That, Lee said, any fair theatre person can lay out into a play. But it is not essentially a dramatic view of life. Chekhov is dramatic, he said, for this is how he treats related material: a man earns a million rubles and goes home and lies down on them and puts a bullet in his head.

I LOVE that!!

April 12, 1940

Perhaps the main activity of the romantic, often idealist, is that of giving, that of offering himself up, of throwing himself at the world. The trouble beings when the world coldly refuses him. Nothing daunted, again the leap, again the throwing of the self. Again repulsed, again and again! Finally, you have a tired, embittered, and frustrated man, or one of resignation, or one who has learned to modulate his behavior and values to those of the world.

In Beethoven we have the glorious exception to all the rules.

He never stopped the fierce activity of throwing himself at the world, of demanding attention for his values above all others, of insisting on the validity of what he was above all current social values.

This persistence created, finally, one of the greatest bodies of art the world has ever seen, but it cost the man dearly -- it cost him his life, his home, his friends, all ordinary comforts and amenities. It crippled him almost beyond recognition. But even on his deathbed he suddenly started up and threw himself at the world with a clenched fist.

April 9, 1940

Mozart, in his best work, has the profound sadness of a man trying to break out of a form not his own personally: which is to say a man trying to break out of prison. Child and man of his age, he was above it by being underground in it. On the other hand, the personal tragedy of Beethoven, the man, is that HE DID BREAK THROUGH THE FORM! (In Mozart's case it is like the Negro who walks around, personal life in him, contained in a social form which he did not make and from which he can never escape!)

In certain periods where the forms of art are breaking down (because of social breakdowns and changes) it is a bondage, a sign of servility, to work within those forms when one's content is in advance of the times. It was between these two worlds that Mozart was beginning to be caught by the time he had reached the age of independent manhood. Against him was ranged the entire world of common usage of the artist, represented by his employers and his very own father, a perfect servant and minor diplomat. The overlords did not want to know or hear what he was feeling and sensing; they wanted only the shell of his genius, never the substance. Here, in the simple and natural protection of his genius, is where Mozart began a subtle change in his life.

He pretended a servility (as Haydn did not have to pretend) by retaining the old decaying forms. And this is how he went underground -- he moved around in these forms freely, saying exactly what he wanted to say, loading them with a rare precise vehemence (which Beethoven was later to bring up into daylight!), often expressing all sorts of censorable materials behind opera masks.

He is a man of great elegance in his art, not all of it natural to his nature. His technical equipment is excellent and enviable. His playing contains a contained feeling of which he is somewhat afraid; and he possesses, when you think of it, little quality of the spirit. His name is Heifetz, and you know all of this when you hear him fiddle Mozart.

March 29, 1940

The man of genius walks, talks, sleeps, eats, loves, and works with a load of dynamite in him. If he carries this load carefully -- balance -- its power for good work and use is enormous -- it can landscape a whole mountainside. Abuse -- out of balance -- is suicide and a bitter grave.

It is in this sense that the artist, if he makes a proper amalgam, is beyond good and evil, for everything in him is for creation and life.

For example, let us say that Dostoevsky had impulses of rape in his heart.... See how a great artist held this part of himself within his recognition and acceptance of what he was. Its creative uses were enormous. It gave him work, tone, feeling, anguish, a wealth of feeling. Finally, it was just such "weaknesses" which gave Dostoevsky's novels their religious ecstatic fervor.

In other words ... inner contradictions are not solved by throwing out half of the personality, but by keeping both sides tearing and pulling, often torturing the self, until an AMALGAM ON A HIGH LEVEL OF LIFE AND EXPERIENCE IS ACHIEVED! For the artist there is not "bad". He must throw out nothing, exclude nothing, but always hold in balance. When he has made this balance he has made and found his form.

March 25, 1940

Life was mysterious and impressive to Beethoven, and like a true artist, he was gratified when it showed his face to him. The caprice of fortune he understood very well, the uncertainties of life were always with him. This is clearly in all of his music. What is the romantic temperament? It is amazed, impressed, delighted and enraged by the caprice of life. It is impulsive, swaggering, remonstrating, scolding, pleading, straining, sulking, appealing, denouncing the unfairness of life. It is the romantic who cries out that he is out of harmony with life -- by which he means that life is not in harmony with his vision of the way he saw it as a youth with moral and idealistic hunger to m ix his hands in it and live it fully and deeply. The classic art is to accept life, the romantic to reject it as it is and attempt to make it over as he wants it to be. The classic accepts the forms and conventions of life around it, the romantic breaks them down, rejects, and rebels against them -- they do not fit him -- they were made for the dead and let the dead clutch them in the graves! Yes, with the romantic it is all self-discovery and self-exploration. The injustice and coldness of life is constantly throwing him back on himself, and it is from this center of the expanding demanding growing ego that the romantic functions. The romantic's nature inwardly is one of chaos; this is because there are no accepted or standard values for him -- he will not and does not accept a code made by others. Everything must be tested and measured by his own experience -- anything else is rejected.

It is typical that Beethoven scorned the teachings of Haydn and only when much older was able to return to those lesson books and say that he should have paid attention in his youth to the lessons. But to have paid attention would have implied not a Beethoven but a Haydn! The roar of pain which comes from the romantic is real pain, albeit often a pain self-made.

Beethoven roars, Chopin complains, Brahms is resigned and sad. But in each case their pain comes from this real meeting: their ideal vision of life met the reality of life, and they are left with this utterance, "What, is that all it is? Is this all? Nothing else? Down with it!"

True, there is something vastly self-destructive in the essential nature of the romantic, but when he is a good artist he builds a form to gird him in, to prevent the scattering of his life -- his art teches him a way of life and he lives it! Simply that he insisted till the moment he died that his ideal vision of life, of the conduct of men and their interrelationships, was the correct and most valid way to live -- his world was better, and he was willing to fight and die for this belief: he did!

The romantic of the Stendahl type is rare. He understands what has happened to him and his aspirations -- HE DOES NOT ASPIRE IN HIS WORK -- and this detached sense of what has happened later forms the basis of his work, writing, in this case. But this is possible only when the man waits for a good ripe age before setting to work. Stendahl, if we chose, we could call a "romantic iconoclast", the romantic turned ironist, psychologist who looks underneath to reveal with contempt the pitifully paltry forms of life and convention around him.

March 24, 1940

You cannot live in old forms, or work in them, when your life has brought you ahead to a new point. Try better to keep a child in last year's coat. It is simply an intolerable contradiction which must be resolved consciously in order to bring the life and/or work up for a higher level of creativity. Otherwise the spirit dies a death and sterility is the only outcome.

Beethoven is the only man or artist I can think of at the moment who never once faltered in this difficult task: he was a fanatic! He hacked and chopped, twisted and tortured, but he did not EXCLUDE a drop of his experience from his work; in each phase of his life he found the right form for an increasingly higher and deeper experience. That is Beethoven's final lesson, if an artist may teach a lesson. Life is a series of rebirths, year after year more difficult, never to be refused, but always to be worked with, coped with, understood, used and used by, never going back, but always moving ahead and higher. Which is what Beethoven did. Easy words to write, these!

Why is Brahms an inferior artist, all other things equal? Because his last period is given over to "resignation" and acceptance. he did not have that same passion of the HEART which was Beethoven's. That is why any last Brahm's work is child's play compared to any last Beethoven work.

Beethoven's work, it must be said, represents the deepest expression of man's faith in life which has ever been written by a man. No artist before or since has expressed so deeply the will to live and accept every fact of life, to be both figuratively and literally crucified for his belief that the way to conquer life is to live without ever once relenting or letting up in that living.

It was Beethoven who understood the passion of Christ, not Bach, for he lived it and experienced it while Bach heard about it in a sort of secondhand way. What some writer once said is true: Bach sacrificed the Church, Beethoven sacrificed himself. His last quartets, a record of his sacrifice (or crucifixion), are more moving to the modern man than any page in the Bible.

March 17, 1940

The bad reviews of Night Music threw me back on myself, but that was good, that is very good, that is as it should always be! But the self independent, resolute! Let there be light, an inner light, a personal light, a light which touches unconscious negative plates of the plays to come with exactly the correct intensity. Keep away from those sensitive negative plates all light from the outside, but all! Later there will always be time to respond to the outside beams.

In this entry he describes the out-of-town tryout of his new play "Night Music" - It would be the last play the Group Theatre did as a company. The failure of "Night Music" was the death knell for the ensemble - despite the fact that it is a LOVELY play. But Odets - radical revolutionary playwright of the early 1930s - wasn't supposed to write lovely comedic romances. The audience wouldn't forgive him for it. It was seen as a BETRAYAL, not just a play they didn't like.

February 22, 1940

The performance of the play was tip-top -- the cast had never been better. The play suffered from what had always been wrong with it because of a certain lack in the direction -- a lack of clear outlining of situations, a lack of building up scenes, a certain missing in places of dramatic intensity. But none of these things was enough to do vital harm to a beautiful show, smooth, powerful and yet tender, fresh, moving, and touching, with real quality in all the parts. But I could see during the first act that the audience was taking it more seriously than it deserved; and I knew that the old thing was here again -- the critics had come expecting a King Lear, not a small delicate play. It all made me very tired, but at the end I thought to myself that it didn't matter, for the show was more or less what I intended; it was lovely and fresh, no matter what the critics said. And I knew, too, that if another and unknown writer's name had been on the script, there would have been critical raves that day.

People surged backstage after the curtain -- they all seemed to have had a good time. There were the usual foolish remarks from many of them -- "Enjoyable, but I don't know why," etc., etc. Also a good deal of insincere gushing from a lot of people who would like nothing better than to stick a knife in your ribs, God knows why!

I invited some people down to the house for a drink. Along came the Eislers, Kozlenkos, Bette, Julie [John] Garfield, Boris Aronson, Harry Carey and his wife, Morris [Carnovsky] and Phoebe [Brand] later, Harold [Clurman], Aaron Copland and Victor [Kraft], Bobby Lewis and his Mecican woman, etc., etc. We drank champagne, Scotch when the wine ran out, talked, smoked, filthied up the house, listened to some music. Then they went and I dropped into bed, dog-tired, unhappy, drunk, knowing what the reviews would be like in the morning. In and out I slept, in and out of a fever -- all of modern twentieth-century life in one day and a night.

February 22, 1940

Stella Adler was there with a party, smoke-eyed and neurotic -- usually when you are dying she is more dramatic about the event than you are!

February 1, 1940

In the Moussorgsky songs, if you do not have the emotion you do not have the song, not even the shadow of the song. Chekhov could hope to find and did find actors to play his plays; where can the talent of Moussorgsky find singers to sing his songs? For the point of each of M's songs is not in the notes, not in the words, but between them, a sort of suggested emotional line without which the song simply does not exist. Here is where the conventional songsinger is shown up for what he is, a tracer on glass, a sharper or duller instrument at his use, but not more. The trouble with the damn singers, unless they are fat and fifty, is that they do not give themselves a chance. They don't listen to the songs, they are not open to the music and what it emotionally suggests. Leaving aside the emotional significance, they can't even play with humor, with charm, deftness, alertness. Their backsides should be kicked off till they ache!

January 27, 1940

Perhaps this constant uncovering of the self is one of the prime impulses in the creative mechanism, it and the constant effort to relate the self to persons, things -- a woman -- outside of the self. All of the characters in my plays have the common activity of "a search for reality". Well, it's my activity before it's theirs. And before it was mine it was the activity of almost any serious artist who ever lived, from the breakdown of feudalism till today. When you say an artist died still looking for his form, as, for instance, Beethovern and Cezanne did, you mean he died still looking for his reality.

A man named Turner wrote a book on Beethoven and was very smart -- he called the book "Beethoven -- the search for reality." Woe to the artist who is able someday to look at his life and say, "Yes, this is it. Here I rest."

January 23, 1940

But one must make sure to write from a firm core even though, in my opinion, an attempt to reach as broad an audience as possible should always be taken into consideration. I thought once that it would be enough to play in a small cellar, but I soon saw that those who would come to the cellar were not the ones in need of what I could say.

January 17, 1940

Much of love for me is in giving. Unfortunately, I am not one of the receivers in life. I receive badly, restlessly, shamefully.

That last one kills me. I am the same.

Happy birthday, Clifford. And thank you thank you for your plays.

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