The Books: The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre And The Thirties, by Harold Clurman

Daily Book Excerpt: Theatre

Next book on the acting/theatre shelf is The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre And The Thirties, by Harold Clurman

The Group Theatre, summer of 1931, summer workshop

Harold Clurman was one of the founders of The Group Theatre in the 1930s. A wonderful writer (he spent many years following as a theatre critic), he has penned many books, two of which are considered classics, one being his book On Directing (my thoughts here), and this book, The Fervent Years, a memoir of his life during the 1930s and the formation and eventual folding of the influential Group Theatre.

The Fervent Years is an emotional, well-written, and beautifully articulated behind-the-scenes memoir of those tumultuous, productive years. The people involved in the Group Theatre all leap from the pages, as very real and passionate personalities – these names that have been burned into my brain forever. Phoebe Brand, Morris Carnovsky, Ruth Nelson, Stella and Luther Adler, Elia Kazan, Julie (John) Garfield, Franchot Tone, Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg, and all the rest. These people are idols to me. Of course many of them went on to great movie success (John Garfield, Franchot Tone) – and then all of them suffered under the blacklist (which helped kill John Garfield), due in part to the belief that the Group Theatre was somehow a Communist organization. The Group Theatre members were fighting about what the Group Theatre was until the end of their days. There’s a great anecdote of Harold Clurman, his ex-wife Stella Adler, and someone else driving in a car on a long ride. It was night. Harold was driving, the other passenger was in the passenger seat, and Stella was supposedly asleep in the back seat. Harold was talking on and on (he did go on) about the Group Theatre, and why it folded. He went into the economics of the time, the financial realities, the pull of Hollywood, the failure of Odets’ Big Night. He described their struggles to keep things going, to keep it pure, the problems of running an ensemble. Harold Clurman was never at a loss for words. Finally, after an hour of Clurman talking, he paused. Silence reigned for a bit. Then came a voice from the back seat. “The Group Theatre died because I killed it.” So everyone has their version of events, everyone thinks their version is right, and all of these people were articulate defenders of their craft, so in their books they all gave their versions of what happened.

This is Harold Clurman’s version.

He was a born writer. Although he did direct productions, his real gift was in the written word, in putting down on paper the theories and impulses that led to this coalition of like-minded people in the 30s.

Anyone who cares about American history (not just American theatrical history) should read this book. It is a detailed account of the crazy decade of the 1930s, from the view of one of its participants. A social-minded liberal guy, who wanted to make a difference, as well as create work for himself that was meaningful and filled his soul. He didn’t want to just go from job to job in the theatre. There was no continuity then, no sense of community. He wanted the theatre to be a home.

And if there was one guiding principle of all of the Group Theatre members, at least at the beginning, it was that. The Group might have lasted longer if they had formed in the 1880s, when Hollywood and its money was not yet a factor. But there really was no other decade the Group COULD have been formed. As the Depression raged at its height, they struggled to find new works of theatre that could express to the Broadway audiences what it’s like out there. They didn’t do Shakespeare, or Shaw. They didn’t disrespect the great playwrights of old, but they thought that in such troubled times, America needed its own voices. Contemporary voices. They changed the world, even though they only lasted for 10 years. They were the inspiration for the next generation of playwrights, certainly. Both Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller watched The Group very very closely, and even submitted plays for consideration. Tennessee Williams, actually, as a young man entered one of his early plays into a Group Theatre playwriting contest, and his entry won him $100 (quite a fee at that time), as well as the attention of an agent (who would become his long-time representative). The Group was a big deal. They operated on the ensemble model. There were no “stars”, just ensemble members. Many of them lived together. It was a communal existence. Money was always tight. Some of their plays flopped, but many of them were startling successes.

The development of the playwright Clifford Odets is one of the great legacies left by the Group Theatre. In many ways, he IS the voice of the 1930s. His plays don’t travel well outside that decade. It would be almost impossible to place Awake and Sing or Paradise Lost in any decade other than the 30s (and Waiting for Lefty, a piece of propaganda, really – one of the most exciting pieces of theatrical propaganda ever written – is a ripped-from-the-headlines evocation of the year in which it was written) – but the language: the LANGUAGE. It has earned the right to be called “Odetsian”. His language cannot be compared to anything else. I would recognize an Odets line if I met it in a dark alley.

Those Odets plays hit like a bomb going off in the culture. Odets, a young man, found himself a celebrity. He was “the voice”. He was the zeitgeist. The story of the opening night of Waiting for Lefty when the entire audience leapt to its feet shouting “STRIKE STRIKE STRIKE” before rushing the stage is the stuff of legends. But it really happened.

He tapped into something. Something powerful, pained, beautiful, and right. He wasn’t just a propagandist for pet causes. He was a hell of a writer.

So in flipping through Harold Clurman’s exquisite book this morning, a book that means so much to me and many others, I came across one of his many sections on his friendship with Clifford Odets. I thought I would excerpt that today.

This book is a must-read. Not just for actors, or playwrights, or people interested in theatre. It’s a must-read for anyone.

Excerpt from The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre And The Thirties, by Harold Clurman

After these excursions into dubious places of amusement Odets and I penetrated the mysterious night that separates Times Square from Greenwich Village. There was a very popular meeting place in that year of the hunger and bonus marches: Stewart’s Cafeteria on Sheridan Square, where the Greenwich Village Theater, in which I had made my stage debut, had once stood. At midnight it had the festive air of Madison Square Garden on the occasion of a big fight. Here the poor and jolly have-beens, ne’er-do-wells, names-to-be, the intellectual, the bohemian, the lazy, neurotic, confused and unfortunate, the radicals, mystics, thugs, drabs, and sweet young people without a base, collected noisily to make a very stirring music of their discord and hope.

Though this cafeteria must have represented a high degree of affluence to the really hungry, it struck me as a sort of singing Hooverville. For, strangely enough, this incubator of the depression, with many marks of waste and decay upon it, was in point of fact a place rank with promise. Some of the old Village (1915-25) was going to pot here, but also something new, not wholly aware of itself, and to this day still immature, was in an early state of gestation.

At one table we met a phenomenal young man who, under the influence of a duly proportional diet of spirits, could speak superb Gertrude Stein by the hour, making insidious sense in a curiously fascinating way that held Odets spellbound, while it discomfited me. At other tables youngsters who had left homes in other towns only to find New York more hybrid but no less stricken were carrying on conversations that mingled despair, yearning, and eagerness in a compound that is nearly always tonic and of good augury. Most of these kids did not lead good lives, but much that was useful and healthy was eventually to come from them. The evil that they witnessed, and of which they were often products and victims, was in full bloom; the good that they sought and would do was still embryonic and would perhaps remain so for years. Yet only the dull or the priggish could fail to notice the seeds of some future growth.

Odets knew many of the people here. In some respects he was like them. Before the formation of the Group and during its first winter he had lived in a dismal hotel west of Columbus Circle, and here he had cultivated a little horror and more love for the atmosphere of dejection and defeat. It was as if he wanted to be one with the semi-derelicts who were moldering in this pesthouse. Now that he was moving from the Fifty-seventh Street Group apartment down to the Village, he came upon an environment that corresponded in poverty with that which he had already know, but the difference was that in the first instance there was a feeling of permanent breakdown, while here, despite much looseness, there was a seeking for the future and some hope for it. Odets seemed to share a peculiar sense of gloomy fatality, one might almost say an appetite for the broken and rundown, together with a bursting love for the beauty immanent in people, a burning belief in the day when this beauty would actually shape the external world. These two apparently contradictory impulses kept him in perpetual boil that to the indifferent eye might look like either a stiff passivity or a hectic fever.

Odets introduced me to many of these people at Stewart’s where, despite myself, my first reaction was a middle-class shrinking. (My home had always been enlightened, liberal, and inalterably proper.) One girl especially – tiny, blonde, miserably poor, and equivocally attractive – stands out in my mind because she was typical. Some years later, influenced by the Group Theater and the Odets literary manner, she was to write a play produced experimentally by the Federal Theatre Project, in which the young girl’s life of this period was dramatized. (It was the kind of young person’s play that was both imitative and authentic; it described seediness and youthful corruption with a mixture of indulgence and honesty that made it a lyric document of more value than might be supposed, for which our straitlaced theatre has absolutely no place.)

This girl, without sufficient funds to fix her teeth, too pretty and pushing to remain in her proletarian home somewhere in the hinterland, too unprotected to receive proper guidance for her incipient talent, too ignorant to amount to much without such guidance, too alive and clean-souled to make any convenient adjustment, and finally too unconcentrated because of all this to cut through to a sane consummation of herself, was living somehow, nohow, like a fresh plant in the center of chaos. She met a handsome boy in flight from an important Oklahoma family. What must have seemed to him at first an adventuresome life and background attracted him to her; and he must have seemed to her a Western Galahad, strong, educated, and thoroughly at home in the big American scene. They were married. In the middle thirties she was “radicalized” along with others of her age and experience, hung on the fringes of the Group, acted in the Federal Theatre, where, as noted, her play was given a trial performance – and drifted. Her husband began to get parts on Broadway, disapproved of her friends (his uncle was a notorious reactionary in Congress), grew successful, divorced her. With time he developed into a Hollywood picture star till he received a commission in the army. Today she lives in Hollywood, married to a labor lawyer who is also in the army.

Odets, I repeat, was very sympathetic to such characters, as he was to many failures – those failures in whom he could discern former power, and those whose potentiality he felt threatened by unfavorable circumstances. Later he would say that he had written his first plays because he had seen his schoolmates, whom he had always thought cheerful good fellows, turn into either tasteless messes of nameless beef, or become thin, wan, sick ciphers. He wanted to explain what had happened to them, and, through them, to express his love, his fears, his hope for the world. In this way, instead of wallowing in his unhappiness, he would make it a positive force.

Here at the Stewart’s Cafeteria, Odets began to tell me a little about the play he was writing; he sought my opinion of such new projects as the Theatre Collective and the Theatre Union, and proved the content of my mind and the secrets of my soul. Neither of these was very secret. And apropos of one of my problems he ventured the opinion that “no Adler could ever be made a Group person”! He knew that I was disconsolate, frustrated, stewing in creative juices. This and funny habits I had, idiosyncrasies and gestures of helplessness or naivete, seemed to endear me to him.

One absurdity we developed together: the poorer we both got, the more solace we seemed to take in smoking cigars. Together with a sandwich, coffee, and pie at the cafeteria, we rarely failed to order two small Coronas. I like chewing the thick weed, and the cigar’s red band under the electric light in the tobacco rack seemed to beckon me with an undercover hint of well-being. I puffed like a kid, not a capitalist, and it made Odets laugh. He was younger than I, but he treated me as he were an affectionate older brother. I liked him too perhaps because he listened to me so understandingly and responded warmly to my moods, but if I had been asked about him, I believe I should have confessed that I liked him for being so physical a person. He reacted to everything, not with words or articulate knowledge, but with his body. His senses were extraordinarily alive, though he was not professionally “sensitive”. To be near him was like being near a stove on which a whole range of savory foods was standing ready to be served.

The strength I drew from this period of apparently aimless ambling through the dark of depressed areas in place and spirit was crystallized for me one day when I was struck as if by the miracle of conversion with the feeling that no matter how bitter things became for me, personally, professionally, economically, I would never allow myself to be destroyed from within; it would never get me down; I would sustain all kinds of disappointment and distress without ceasing to believe, to hope, to love. I would never yield to the temptation of pessimism, to the ease of despair or withdrawal. It was as if I took an inner vow

never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowing of the spirit.

I believed, as some ancient had said: “It is not within thy power to finish the task, nor is it thy liberty to abandon it.” From this inexorable maxim I drew an abiding joy. In this sense I swore fealty to myself.

Thus that historically cruel winter of 1932-3, which chilled so many of us like a world’s end, became for me a time of renewed faith, because I appeared to be withstanding a sort of test. In our exchange Clifford Odets and I contributed much to each other, but we both received most of our nurture at this time from the world around us, even as it was reflected in such humble, none too glamorous haunts as I have described.