Entry from Journal
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.
These posts are too interesting. For pity’s sake, let me sleep.
Beethoven bores me. I know that’s classical-music heresy, but I need more harmonic complexity than he provides. Still, even to me Beethoven’s passion is apparent. But I find Odets’s description of Beethoven more exhilarating than the music itself.
Also, “That is Beethoven’s final lesson, if an artist may teach a lesson.” Quite an aside from a serious artist.
Also, I’m struck by how much his vision of art and the artist resembles Ayn Rand’s. The visions aren’t identical, but they’re kindred.
I suspect Odets and Rand would’ve hated each other.
I’m not sure. Talk to me more about Ayn Rand.
Odets was a very complex individual. He was a Communist. But his writings on Communism are … I mean, I wince to read them now – they are so naive … but they were well-thought-out and impassioned. However – the dude was completely Machiavellian – and he also LOVED the finer things of life. His journal is filled with champagne toasts and nights at the Stork Club and hanging out with stars – he was a star-fucker.
Not very Communistic there.
And then – when his career was threatened by the HUAC – he abandoned all of his lofty principles, named names to the committee – and could not live with his inner betrayal. He died soon after, of alcoholism. It’s almost like he died of old age, even though he was a young man.
I think all of this inner turmoil is why I love his plays so much. The man is a great writer of plays. A great creator of characters.
And that ambivalence about capitalism – and material wealth – colors all of his plots. And yet – his characters WANT things, they YEARN for acceptance, they try to climb up the ladder…
I don’t know. I think he and Rand might have understood each other. Not sure.
Rand was a lot of good things, but understanding wasn’t among them. Like Sauron, she did not share power. She wanted to be the star around which all other intellects revolved. She hated Communism and Communists from her childhood in Russia, and I doubt Odets’s testimony before HUAC would’ve redeemed him in her eyes. Rand had some kind of salon-type circle in the 1940s and 50s, but I’d bet that she’d have detested him as a fool and a weakling (forgiveness wasn’t one of her strengths either). If Odets had his own outsize ego, he’d likely have loathed her right back.
There are a lot of Rand fanatics on the Web (I’m no worshipper, though she’s been invaluable to me) — maybe one of them knows. Googling the two names brings up no connection.