[In the excerpt below, Rabkin examines Odets' incorporation of elements of agitprop into his writings of the 1930s.]

Clifford Odets scrawled his name across the page marked 1935 in American dramatic history. In the course of that year he had five plays produced, four of them on Broadway: "Waiting for Lefty," "Till the Day I Die," Awake and Sing!, and Paradise Lost. His short monologue, "I Can't Sleep," was produced at a union benefit, and the aforementioned "Lefty" began a theatrical career that was to carry it, not only from one end of the United States to the other, but all over the world. The name of Odets became the number one topic of literary conversation, and the hitherto unknown and struggling young actor became one of the foremost celebrities of the day. The Literary Digest [6 April 1935] described his emergence:

In less than ninety days, toiling with the unrest of his times as a central theme, a young actor in the New York theatre … has become the most exciting spokesman the world of workers yet has produced, and he has become perhaps the most articulate dramatist available in the theatre.

For once the Broadway and Marxist critics were unanimous in their praise. Richard Watts wrote in the Herald Tribune [31 March 1935], "It is pretty clear by now that Mr. Odets' talent for dramatic writing is the most exciting thing to appear in the American drama since the flaming emergence of O'Neill. …" And the Marxist critics, despite specific reservations, found much to cheer about in the fact that the new young dramatist had emerged from their own ranks, for Odets' initial discovery was indeed the result of his radical affiliations. "Lefty" had been written in response to a contest by the left-wing New Theatre League which was looking for one-act plays on a revolutionary theme which might be easily produced. The play was written at fever heat in three days and nights, won the contest, and was produced at one of the New Theatre League's Sunday night benefit performances by members of the Group Theatre (to which Odets belonged). The performance on January 5, 1935, was one of the electrifying moments in American theatre. Harold Clurman [in The Fervent Years, 1945] relates its initial impact:

The first scene of "Lefty" had not played two minutes when a shock of delighted recognition struck the audience like a tidal wave. Deep laughter, hot assent, a kind of joyous fervor seemed to sweep the audience toward the stage. The actors no longer performed; they were being carried along as if by an exultancy of communication such as I had never witnessed in the theatre before. Audience and actors had become one. … When the audience at the end of the play responded to the militant question from the stage: "Well, what's the answer?" with a spontaneous roar of "Strike! Strike!" it was something more than a tribute to the play's effectiveness, more even than a testimony of the audience's hunger for constructive social action. It was the birth cry of the '30s. Our youth had found its voice.

Odets had succeeded where other revolutionary dramatists before him had failed. He had written a militant "agit-prop" drama which succeeded in appealing to unaffiliated liberals as well as to convinced Marxists, and he had done so by humanizing a form of drama whose avowed purpose, as we have observed, was to present political doctrine directly to the audience by means of broadly theatrical playlets. The following titles indicate the thematic simplicity of the agitprop: Work or Wages, Unemployment, The Miners are Striking, Vote Communist. To achieve overtly didactic ends, a variety of dramaturgical devices were employed, many of them stemming from the theatrical experimentation of the twenties: choral recitation, episodic structure, satiric caricature, theatrical stylization. …

It is apparent that "Waiting for Lefty" is essentially in the agit-prop tradition. Its purpose is overtly didactic in its affirmation of communist doctrine; it is episodic in structure, cartoon-like in its character delineation, directly presentational in technique, and replete with slogans and political comment. Yet while its conclusion is strikingly similar to that of [Art Smith and Elia Kazan's] Dimitroff in its merging of actor and audience, in its militant cry to action, we may observe that Odets' plea to strike is essentially a device. The answer and response of actor and audience is not designed to achieve an immediate goal as in the case of Kazan and Smith's play, but is rather a symbolic call to arms, a demonstration of unity and achieved class consciousness. "Lefty's" success lay in the fact that it appealed to the unconverted as well as to the committed; it swept all of a liberal persuasion into militant participation, at least in the theatre, by virtue of the precision with which Odets enunciated the Depression malaise. Odets' achievement lay in his ability to humanize the agit-prop without forgoing its theatricality and didacticism. He succeeded not only in presenting the conversion to militancy of a series of taxi-cab workers, but in forcing the audience to see in the plight of these characters a reflection of their own social predicament. Several Marxist critics, among them John Howard Lawson, objected to the designation of "Lefty" as a proletarian play because "the militant strike committee [is] made up largely of declassed members of the middle class. One cannot reasonably call these people 'stormbirds of the working class.'" But "Lefty's" strength as a conversion drama lay precisely in the fact that Odets' appeal was directed essentially to the class to which he belonged. Of the principal characters only two, Joe and Sid, are proletarians; the others represent various members of the declassed bourgeoisie: a lab assistant who refuses to become an informer, an actor who can't find work on the Broadway market, an interne who is fired because of the anti-Semitism of his superiors. All are forced into activism by social circumstances. "Don't call me red," shouts Joe. "You know what we are? The black and blue boys! We been kicked around so long we're black and blue from head to toes!" But Joe had not always been as adamant as he is now. He had been goaded to militancy by his wife's threat to leave him unless he organized and fought for his rights: "Get those hack boys together! … Stand up like men and fight for the crying kids and wives. Goddamnit! I'm tired of slavery and sleepless nights."

Joe's social awakening is but one in the series of conversions that constitute "Waiting for Lefty." Each episode presents the road to commitment of each of the several characters against the backdrop of various capitalist evils: labor spying, informing, anti-Semitism, economic aggression, etc. One by one the dramas of conversion are enacted: the interne finds that Jewish and Gentile capitalists are cut from the same cloth; the lab assistant recognizes that the logic of capitalism demands war; the workers, Sid and Joe, realize that the cards are stacked against the proletariat; and the young actor, turned down by a producer who cares more for his pet dog than for human beings, is taken in hand by a radical stenographer who undertakes his ideo-logical enlightenment:

One dollar buys ten loaves of bread, Mister. Or one dollar buys nine loaves of bread and one copy of the Communist Manifesto. Learn while you eat. … Read while you run. … From Genesis to Revelation … the meek shall not inherit the earth! The MILITANT! Come out in the light, Comrade!

All roads lead to Agate's final peroration, his cry for alliance with the proletariat: "It's war! Working class, unite and fight! Tear down the slaughter house of our old lives!" The basic metaphor of the play is, of course, the futility of waiting for something that will never come, the hope that somehow conditions may be alleviated by other than direct action. Fatt, the personification of the capitalist system, had counseled the workers to put their faith in "the man in the White House" in his attempt to dissuade them from striking; but half-way measures are doomed to failure. Salvation must be earned; Lefty never comes be-cause he has been murdered—the ritual martyrdom of proletarian literature—and the act of waiting must be replaced by militancy.

Hello America! Hello! We're Stormbirds of the Working Class. Workers of the world … our bones and blood! And when we die they'll know what we did to make a new world! Christ, cut us up to little pieces. We'll die for what is right! Put fruit trees where our ashes are!

The impact of "Waiting for Lefty" is irrevocably dependent upon its contemporaneity. In the thirties the play was a formidable weapon. Within weeks after its initial production it became the public property of the left, and groups were organized all over the country to perform it. Odets later doubted if he had earned a thousand dollars out of the play: "People just did it. … It has been done all over the world … and I have not received five cents of royalties. … It was at one time a kind of light machine gun that you wheeled in to use whenever there was any kind of strike trouble." A storm of censorship accompanied its production in many different cities. In Boston, the actors were arrested for language that was "extremely blasphemous"; in Philadelphia, the theatre in which the play was to be produced was suddenly called "unsafe," and the performance was canceled. Will Geer produced the play in Hollywood despite threats and was severely beaten by hoodlums; and in general, the stridency of conservative criticism revealed that Odets' "machine gun" was not far off target.

The instantaneous success of "Lefty" at the New Theatre League Sunday performances caused the Group Theatre to present the play as one of its scheduled productions. In moving to Broadway, however, a new companion piece was needed to fill out the bill, since Dimitroff would hardly have succeeded uptown, and Odets wrote a play based upon contemporary life in Nazi Germany called "Till the Day I Die." Based upon a letter in the New Masses, the plot concerns Ernst Taussig, a German communist captured by the Nazis in a raid and subjected by them to torture in an effort to force him to inform upon his associates. Although he is never completely broken, Taussig is made to appear a traitor to his comrades. Blacklisted by his former friends, fearful of compromising the revolutionary cause, Ernst commits suicide.

Lawson objected that "the sustained conflict, the conscious will of man pitted against terrible odds is omitted. We see [Taussig] … only before and after. The crucial stage, in which his will is tested and broken, occurs between scenes five and seven." The significant fact is that the audience is never really sure whether or not Taussig was broken by the Nazis or whether or not he retained his integrity to the end. At the beginning of the play he is a convinced revolutionary fervently viewing the classless future. Has he indeed changed when he is released from his initial Nazi captivity? It does not seem so. To Tilly's query as to whether or not he was afraid Ernst answered, "A man who knows that the world contains millions of brothers and sisters can't be afraid. … In the cell there—I know I stayed alive because I knew my comrades were with me in the same pain and chaos."

All the evidence of the play supports Ernst's contention that he kept the revolutionary faith, that he had been forced to accompany storm troopers on their round-ups of radicals, that he was forcibly brought into court at political trials, that, in short, it was planned to make him appear to be an informer. Nowhere is it implied that Taussig was actually broken. The important fact is that the issue of his innocence or guilt is not the crucial dramatic question which the play posits. It is rather involved with the problem of political loyalty; the play affirms the revolutionary contention that the individual is less important than the cause to which he is dedicated. In the best scene in the play—best because it smacks of the authentic logic of political debate—the local cell excommunicates Taussig because his comrades cannot afford to take the chance that he may be guilty; he cannot be trusted, whether he is innocent or not. Love and fraternal affection must bow before the iron exigencies of the revolutionary situation, since in a warring world "it is brother against brother." Just as the labor spy in "Waiting for Lefty" is exposed by his brother, Ernst Taussig is disavowed by his brother Carl:

Many a comrade has found with deep realization that he has no home, no brother—even no mothers or fathers! What must we do here? … We must expose this one brother wherever he is met. Whosoever looks in his face is to point the finger. Children will jeer at him in the darkest streets of his life! Yes, the brother, the erstwhile comade cast out! There is no brother, no family, no deeper mother than the working class.

Ernst recognizes that there is but one action left him, and he asks his brother to administer the coup de grâce. He knows that he must be cast away, that the individual is unimportant in the greater struggle, that his realization will come through the work of his comrades: "the day is coming, and I'll be in the final result." Unlike the traditional martyrs of Marxist literature, whose deaths serve as the catalysts for the awakening of others, Ernst believes that he is the phoenix that will arise from the ashes of his necessary death. Thus the play ends, not with the conversion of the previously uncommitted, but with the affirmation by the committed that their existence is contained in the collective of which they are a part.

When he was writing "Waiting for Lefty" and "Till the Day I Die," Odets expressed himself in typically Marxist tones, maintaining that the function of art was primarily propagandistic. "It may be said that anything which one writes on 'the side' of the large majority of people is propaganda. But today the truth followed to its logical conclusion is inevitably revolutionary." It is not surprising, then, that the author of such a statement should be, in fact, a member of the Communist party, having been recruited by the small core of communists within the Group Theatre. Years later, in the familiar purgative drama of the fifties, Odets related to the House Un-American Activities Committee the circumstances of his enrollment:

In a time of great social unrest many people found themselves reaching out for new ideas, new ways of solving depressions or making a better living, fighting for one's rights. … These were … horrendous days … there was a great deal of talk about amelioration of conditions, about how should one live. … One read literature; there were a lot of … pamphlets … I read them along with a lot of other people, and finally joined the Communist party in the belief, in the honest and real belief, that this was some way out of the dilemma in which we found ourselves.

Odets testified that he remained in the party "from toward the end of 1934 to the middle of '35, covering maybe anywhere from six to eight months." It is not our purpose here to scrutinize the motivations which resulted in Odets' disavowal. We are concerned primarily with the dramatist, not the individual; we may observe, however, that Odets' act of disaffiliation in 1935 is in no way clearly obvious from either his public statements or his dramatic work. As the counsel for the Un-American Activities Committee embarrassingly pointed out, Odets continued to affiliate with leftwing groups throughout the Depression and war years. Perhaps the answer lies in the intellectual climate of the mid-thirties, the era of the Popular Front. Unless one was, as an intellectual, directly involved with the vagaries and variations of social doctrine (e.g., Edmund Wilson, Sidney Hook), it was quite possible to drift away from overt commitment without the painful process of making a clean break.

Thus Odets' Marxist commitment was very different from that of John Howard Lawson. The latter came to his political beliefs, as we have seen, after a long period of conflict and indecision; once he made his commitment, Lawson became a political man, his role as artist receding behind the ideological facade. Odets, however, did not arrive at his radicalism after a long period of intellectual debate. He was, in a sense, born to it; radicalism was in the air his generation breathed. Since his commitment was never primarily intellectual, he never formally rejected it in the manner of the intellectuals who, having made themselves political men, one day awake with horror to a sense of betrayal and find it necessary to destroy their radical roots.

We cannot, therefore, discover any crucial moment of commitment or disaffiliation in the life and work of Clifford Odets. For whatever reasons he left the party, there can be no denying the pervasive influence of Marxism upon the great bulk of his work. Surely Odets' temperament, particularly after his sudden access to fame and his defection to Hollywood, was unsuited to political obligation. He was too concerned with his own problems ever to assent fully to the role of party member. But since his commitment to Marxism was essentially more emotional than intellectual, he retained, throughout the Depression, an umbilical connection with the radical movement. It is interesting that despite Odets' statement to the Un-American Activities Committee that he left the Party in 1935 because "it came to the point of where I thought … I can't respect these people on a so-called cultural basis" Odets was still talking in terms of the social "usefulness" of art in the preface to his Six Plays (1939). He stated his esthetic aim as follows: "Much of my concern during the past years has been with fashioning a play immediately and dynamically useful and yet as psychologically profound as my present years and experience will permit." This is the artist's great problem "since we are living in a time when new art works should shoot bullets. … "

Odets' aggressive Marxism of the mid-decade is reflected in a short monologue, "I Can't Sleep," written for performance at a benefit for the Marine Workers Industrial Union in 1935. It, too, is a party play in that it overtly considers the greatest of revolutionary sins, heresy. It is reminiscent of the Grand Inquisitor sequence in [Fyodor Dostoevsky's] The Brothers Karamazov, in which the silence of Christ forces the Inquisitor into self-revelation. Odets' hero—played originally by Morris Carnovsky—rejects a beggar's appeal for charity, and finds himself imprisoned in a cell of guilt constructed by the disavowed radicalism of his youth. He initially answers the beggar's unpitying stare with belligerence—"Listen, don't be so smart. When a man offers you money, take it!"—but soon he turns from aggressive self-justification to personal revelation. He tells of his inability to communicate with his wife, of the gulf of misunderstanding which separates him from his children, of all the bitter frustrations which afflict him, symbolized by the ever-present fact of his insomnia. Consumed by loneliness, he yearns to cry "Brother" to his fellow man but is constrained by the fear of appearing a fool.

And slowly the last layer of artifice is pulled away and the true cause of the man's depression is revealed: "I spoke last week to a red in the shop. Why should I mix in with politics? With all my other troubles I need yet a broken head? I can't make up my mind—what should I do? … Join up, join up. But for what? For trouble?" This question reaches the heart of the man's dilemma, and in a torrent of words he reveals the source of his guilt, the renunciation of his working-class roots, his acceptance, against his better nature, of the capitalist ethic. …

The source of much of Odets' strength as a "proletarian" playwright lay precisely in the fact that he did not force himself to write about the proletariat. Unlike other middle-class writers of Marxist persuasion, he had the esthetic sense to write about areas of his direct experience. In his early days in the Group he started several plays, one in particular on the subject of his much-beloved Beethoven. A diary entry of the time reveals his dissatisfaction with these early attempts: "Now I see again in myself flight, always flight. Here I am writing the Beethoven play, which when it is finished may not be about Beethoven. Why not write something about the Greenberg family, something I know better, something that is closer to me?"

The resultant play, initially entitled I Got the Blues, was started in a cold-water flat on West 57th Street, New York City, and finished at Warrensburg, New York, during the rehearsals of Men in White. It was finally produced by the Group, after the success of the subsequently written "Lefty," under the title of Awake and Sing! In it the Greenberg family emerged as the Berger family of the Bronx, and Odets revealed himself not only as a young writer of intense revolutionary fervor, but as a skillful recorder of the pungent detail of Jewish lower middle-class life.

The basic image of Awake and Sing! is resurrection, the emergence of life from death. For the life of the Berger family in Depression-age America is spiritual death, dehumanized by a thousand irritants, frustrated by the exigencies of economic breakdown. Yet precisely because the sources of the Bergers' difficulties are primarily social, Awake and Sing! is an essentially optimistic play; dangers are without, not within, and they may be combatted. The fundamental activity of the Bergers—"a struggle for life amidst petty conditions"—is a noble one; nor is it meaningless. Significantly Odets changed the title of the play from I Got the Blues—a statement of the Depression malaise—to Awake and Sing!—and the imperative commanded by the exclamation point is no accident. "Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust," he is crying, the American blues can be eliminated. But the play is not a direct call to militancy; its strength rests in the depiction of the social dislocation of the middle class and the skill with which this dislocation is personalized in the several characters. …

Awake and Sing! is not merely a catalogue of frustration. In the portrayal of old Jacob, the radical of the family, Odets provides the play with its explicit social commen tary without violating the demands of character. Throughout the early action Jacob serves as a kind of chorus, drawing the Marxist moral from the statements and activities of the other characters. When his somber social analyses are laughed at by his family, particularly by his business-man son, Morty, he responds: "Laugh, laugh … tomorrow not." It is in the hope of achieving this tomorrow in the person of Ralph, the young son of the Berger household, that Jacob commits the sacrifice of leaping to his death so that Ralph might have his insurance money as a means to escape the strangle hold of the family and society. When Ralph learns of the old man's sacrifice he vows that it will not have been in vain. Jacob's legacy is not money, which Ralph in fact rejects, but social awareness. To his mother's justification of life in America, he retorts, "It don't make sense. If life made you this way, then it's wrong." Bessie answers, "So go out and change the world if you don't like it," and Ralph affirms, "I will! And why? 'Cause life's different in my head. Gimme the earth in two hands. I'm strong." Jacob's books, his ideas, are Ralph's real inheritance, and he has become infused with the old man's revolutionary fervor:

Get teams together all over. Spit on your hands and get to work. And with enough teams together maybe we'll get steam in the warehouse so our fingers don't freeze off. Maybe we'll fix it so life won't be printed on dollar bills.

And the play ends on the note of resurrection. "The night he died," states Ralph about Jacob, "I saw it like a thunder-bolt! I saw he was dead and I was born! I swear to God, I'm one week old! I want the whole city to hear it—fresh blood, arms. We got'em. We're glad we're living."

Thus, despite the effectiveness of realistic detail, it is apparent that Awake and Sing! still retains strong agit-prop roots. But instead of appealing directly for revolutionary action, it attempts to demonstrate the thesis of revolutionary awareness in the relationship between Jacob and Ralph against the family background of middle-class decay. Its success is dependent upon this conjunction of thesis and detail. Odets never was a genre painter; his strokes are broad, his dialogue heightened. What he succeeded in delineating were the specific images of social dislocation. The importance of the Marxist premise from a dramatic point of view does not lie in its specific truth or falsity; it serves radier as a dramatic metaphor which orders the disparate elements of the play, which relates the images of frustration and dislocation to a guiding thematic concept. The spine of the play is the conviction that the world of the Bergers must be changed if human potentiality is to be realized. For Odets at that time this faith was affirmed by Marxism; far from marring the play, the Marxist metaphor gathers the various dramatic strands and relates them to the basic theme of social resurrection.

Odets, then, was never primarily a realist. Awake and Sing! and his next play, Paradise Lost, are essentially allegories of middle-class decay. It was the inability to recognize this fact which was primarily responsible for the critical furor which attended the production of the latter play. The Broadway critics, who had greeted Awake and Sing! in uniformly commendatory tones ("a triumph for the Group and … Mr. Odets," "Something of an event, not to say a miracle," "a stirring play") now turned their guns upon Odets' new play, most finding it marred by "frowzy characterization, random form and … inchoate material." Nor did Odets receive any consolation from the radical press. For the most part, Marxist critics rejected the play on the grounds of unsound social analysis. Stanley Burnshaw, for example, questioned the validity of Odets' portrait of the American middle class. He maintained that the American bourgeoisie "is not a homogenous group withering into oblivion. … Overwhelming numbers of middle-class people … are part and parcel of the advancing social group. … Can their life be truthfully conveyed by such symbols as sexual impotence, heart disease … barrenness and arson, larcency, racketeering, cuckoldry, feeblemindedness and sex neuroses?"

The Marxist attacks were predicted on a literal interpretation of the dissolution of the Gordon family as a result of economic pressures. Under such an interpretation it is obvious that physical disease cannot fairly be credited to capitalism. But as Clurman, the play's director, noted, neither in direction, acting nor set design was Paradise Lost naturalistic: "The 'reading' I have given the script gives the play a definite line or what certain reviewers would call a propagandistic slant." And, despite the fact that the play displeased the left, the "line" was clearly Marxist: "The middle-class carries out the orders of the ruling class with the illusion of complete freedom."

At the beginning of Act III of Paradise Lost, Clara Gordon relates to her dying son, Julie, the parable of the golden idol:

Well, Moses stayed in the mountain forty days and forty nights. They got frightened at the bottom. … What did those fools do? They put all the gold pieces together, all the jewelry, and melted them, and made a baby cow of gold. … Moses ran down the hill so fast. … He took the cow and broke it into a thousand pieces. Some people agreed, but the ones who didn't? Finished. God blotted them out of the book. Here today, gone tomorrow!

Paradise Lost is itself Odets' parable of the decadence of contemporary capitalism, and his idolators are as surely condemned as those who worshipped the golden calf. The characters in the play are all condemned—some by disease, some by economics—but they are all presented as denizens of a world made unreal by false hope and futile illusion. The image is starker than that of Awake and Sing! because the seeds of redemption, although present in the play, are not allowed to flower. Ralph, Moe, Hennie escape to attempt to create a better world; despite his realization that he must do the same, Leo's final affirmation has come too late. He, too, is condemned. Thus, redemption must come from without, in the creation of a world unmarred by the abortiveness and sickness which dominate the world of Paradise Lost.

Such a vision is unquestionably grim, and Paradise Lost is a grim play, relieved but briefly by the humor that characterized much of Awake and Sing! The several characters, despite particularization, are more overtly allegorical; all represent to a greater or lesser degree the smothering of the individual by capitalist society. …

The image which pervades Paradise Lost is the "sweet smell of decay." The world of the Gordons is a microcosm of the "profound dislocation" of the middle class in capitalist society. Leo Gordon, a man of fundamentally noble instincts, comes finally to recognize that he is the representative of a dying class. Throughout the play he is appalled by the misery which he sees around him and is determined not to build his happiness on the exploitation of others. But his fortune and his family are crushed by personal tragedy and his refusal to recoup the loss of his business by approving an arranged insurance fire. "So in the end," he laments, "nothing is real. Nothing is left but our memory of life." But, despite his condemnation, he is allowed one glimpse of the new future that will replace the false paradise:

No! There is more to life than this! … There is a future. Now we know, we dare to understand. … I tell you the whole world is for men to possess. Heart-break and terror are not the heritage of mankind! No fruit tree wears a lock and key. … The world is in its morning … and no man fights alone!

Despite dramaturgic preparation, there can be no denying that this peroration is inconsistent with the basic metaphor of Paradise Lost. Perhaps Odets feared that if he did not explicitly state what was generally implied in the play, it might have been open to the criticism of "negativism." And yet, even without the obviousness of Leo's final awareness, it is apparent that the very frustration which dominates the play implies a social protest. As John Gassner has pointed out, "Airing one's discontents is a patent form of rebellion, dramatization of frustration is already a form of acting out, exposing a situation is criticism and often a challenge to action."

The unreality which critics of the play objected to is a reflection of the dream world constructed by the middle class in its futile attempt to escape the economic realities of capitalism. The Marxist metaphor lies at the heart of Paradise Lost; it is basic to its very conception. The very title implies that there is a paradise to be regained. The play also represents the end of Odets' period of overt political commitment, the last expression of the bitter years of anonymity which preceded his emergence. Downcast by the bad critical reaction to the play, which long remained his favorite, he wrote a short biographical piece in which he lamented the vagaries of sudden success:

The young writer comes out of obscurity with a play or two. Suppose he won't accept the generous movie offers. Why, that means he's holding out for more. Suppose he accepts—he's an ingrate, rat, renegade. …

If he's written two plays about the same kind of people everyone knows that's all he can write about. … If the reviewers praise him Tuesday, it's only because they're gentle, quixotic fellows. But watch them tear him apart on Wednesday! … The young writer is now ready for a world cruise!

And as Clurman pointed out, "for a New York playwright this means almost inevitably Hollywood."

The problem of artistic integrity is necessarily difficult to define; it invariably mires the critic in the quicksands of the intentional fallacy. But biographical concerns are not necessarily extrinsic to an evaluation of literature. In the case of Odets, for example, it is crucial to an understanding of much of his later work—in particular Golden Boy and The Big Knife—to recognize the ambivalent attitudes which he displayed toward the symbol of American success, Hollywood. Indeed, we are faced here with a not unfamiliar problem: if the roots of an artist lie in the fact of his knowledge of an environment which is economically deprived, how is he to prevent the withering of these roots by the fact of his newfound success? Is the artist, by virtue of his status as celebrity, now cut off by this very status from the sources of his previous vitality? These questions have relevance not only to Odets but to many others of his generation. Hollywood's siren song dashed the talents of many young radical writers on the rocks of hack screen writing.

In the case of Odets, Hollywood meant not only separation from the roots of New York radicalism, but separation as well from his theatre, the Group. Odets' debt to the Group was manifest: it produced all of the plays that he wrote in the thirties. Odets is one of the few playwrights of our time to have a theatre which enabled him to speak in a consistent voice. In the direction of Clurman and the acting talent of the Adlers, Carnovsky, Bromberg, Garfield, Cobb, et al., he was fortunate in having a well-trained ensemble which offered the perfect medium for the expression of his dramatic vision.

Perhaps for several reasons—the failure of Paradise Lost, the lure of the fantastic salary ($2,500 a week), the desire to explore that most powerful of mass media—Odets, to the dismay of the Group, went to Hollywood in 1936 to "look around"; as he himself stated to Clurman, he had a need "to sin." Thus began a tortured love affair between Odets and the film capital which lasted until his death there in 1963. Ironically enough, his last work of any significance was his screenplay for the cynical The Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Alternately praising and reviling Hollywood, Odets was never able either fully to accept or reject its values. He viewed the cinema alternately as a medium particularly suited to the dramatist because of its directness, fluidity, and universality, and as a medium which, because of its subjugation to commercial exigencies, vitiates and destroys artistic integrity.

On the one hand, Odets offered the justification that Hollywood, by virtue of its fantastic salaries, might serve as the new patron which would free the writer for his more creative work; while, on the other, he continually recognized that isolation from the source of his material was the artist's real danger. Ironically, less than a year before he went to Hollywood for the first time, Odets wrote: "Shortly I'm getting to the coal fields and the textile centers. Let New York see the rest of the country. Hollywood too. Play material enough to keep six dozen writers going… " [New York World Telegram, 19 March 1935].

Odets' major, and only, dramatic effort for the year 1936 consisted of the film, The General Died at Dawn; it was eagerly awaited by radical circles in the hope that the fairhaired boy of leftist drama had succeeded in striking a few blows for the revolutionary cause. Sidney Kaufman reported upon the film's progress in the New Masses: "This melodramatic yarn rings like a coin from the nickelodeon mint," he admitted, "but, godalmighty, what a different face it wears." This different face was, for Kaufman, reflected in several speeches of implied social consciousness. An examination of the script, however, reveals them as hardly inflammatory. Judy (played by Madeleine Car-roll) has decoyed O'Hara (Gary Cooper) into a train compartment.

Judy: Why do they make these attempts on your life?

O'Hara: Politics. A certain honorable tootsie roll named Yang thinks he has a right to control the lives o: tens of thousands of poor Chinese.

Judy: How?

O'Hara: Military dictatorship! Taxes! You put, he takes! You protest, he shoots! A head-breaker, a heart-breaker, a strike-breaker! Altogether a four-star rat!

The General Died at Dawn found few champions in either the radical or nonradical camps, and the artist in Odets soon recognized that the media of the film and the stage were not equally hospitable to seriousness, that the powers that controlled the film industry were not interested in fully utilizing the talent in their employ. The stage, and the Group, beckoned, and Odets returned to New York with Golden Boy. But while he was anxious to be free of the encumbrances of the film colony, Odets was excited by the possibility of applying film technique and subject matter to the medium of the stage. The cinema was indeed "the authentic folk theatre of America," but producers were not interested in presenting their material significantly; on the contrary, "their chief problem is the one of keeping the level of human experience in their pictures as low as possible." But the film has opened up the possibility of a true portrayal of American life by virtue of the range and color of its subject matter and technique. Inasmuch as Hollywood will not permit the serious use of this authentic material, it remains the task of the playwright to do so within the freer confines of the stage: "It is about time that the talented American playwright began to take the gallery of American types, the assortment of fine vital themes away from the movies."

This is precisely what Odets attempted to achieve in Golden Boy. "Where is there a more interesting theme in this country than a little Italian boy who wants to be rich? Provided, of course, you place him in his true social back-ground and … present the genuine pain, meaning and dignity of life within your characters." In short, Odets took as his self-appointed task the infusion of a typical Hollywood theme with a sense of reality, "to tell the truth where the film told a lie. … " The difficulty with such an approach is that the triteness of the traditional subject matter may negate the seriousness of theme. Golden Boy treads the uncertain line between cliché and seriousness. But, on the whole, one must, in the case of this play, acknowledge Odets' success in achieving his avowed purpose. Although the story of Joe Bonaparte's rise and fall is indeed sheer Hollywood—it is the stuff of a hundred fight films—Odets has succeeded in covering the bones of melodrama with sterner stuff. He has done so by reverting to his role of allegorist.

Golden Boy is not primarily concerned with the decay of a class, it is concerned with the decadence of an ideal, success. The very nature of Odets' personal situation in Hollywood offered him his theme; for Joe Bonaparte in gaining the world loses his soul, and he loses it because he relinquishes his artistic integrity for immediate success in the world of the quick buck. It is not my intention to draw any invidious biographical parallels, but it is apparent that Joe's dilemma to a great extent parallels Odets'. The worlds of the prize ring and the motion-picture studios betray uncomfortable similarities. Both exploit talent for specifically commercial ends; both deal in forms of mass entertainment. But in the case of Joe Bonaparte the choice is not ambiguous; the pugilistic talent which he must employ to achieve success is clearly demarcated from his ability to play the violin. The Hollywood screenwriter could bask in the illusion that he was pursuing the dramatic craft.

Whether or not the world of the prize ring is intended to represent the world of Hollywood, it is apparent that the values of both are those which Odets had previously attacked in his early plays. The theme of Golden Boy is made meaningful in terms of a specific condemnation of the values of a society in which false values are able to pervert man's better instincts.

Joe Bonaparte's decision to fight, to show the world, is given credence by a society in which "five hundred fiddlers stand on Broadway and 48th Street, on the corner, every day, rain or shine, hot or cold." In such a world the artistic gesture appears futile, and if success must be gained at the expense of art, then art must be sacrificed. But Joe's success, based upon false values, is doomed to prove insubstantial. Slowly he is turned into that which runs against his better nature, a killer; ultimately no longer faced with an alternative, he must fight because that is the only thing he can do. Joe has become a killer in spirit: "When a bullet sings through the air it has no past—only a future—like me! Nobody, nothing stands in my way!" It is not long before he becomes a killer in fact, the fit companion for the homosexual racketeer, Fuseli; in the course of a fight he knocks out his opponent and finds that the blow has killed him. Remorse has come too late; Joe recognizes that in the act of violence he has killed as well the man he might have become. Too late he realizes that it is not the kings and dictators who conquer the world, but "the boy who might have said, 'I have myself; I am what I want to be!'"

Joe's death in an auto crash is not gratuitous; it is the fitting conclusion to a life which he chose to lead according to the laws of the jungle. The final verdict is delivered by Joe's union-organizer brother, Frank: "What waste!" The creative energy which might have produced beautiful music has been destroyed in a false crusade. Joe's killer instinct had been bred in a world in which such talent is highly prized. If Joe was destroyed by his false image of success he was not entirely culpable; this image was created by a society in which man's basest instincts are glorified.

Such are the implications of Odets' parable. It is apparent that beneath the surface melodrama lies the familiar Marxist metaphor, albeit somewhat diluted by personal considerations. Odets' involvement in the problem of success, however, reveals more than merely personal concerns; it reflects his awareness of its mythic role in our society. It is significant that Joe was presented with an alternative. Although he rejected it because of the pressure of false values, the alternative nonetheless exists: to refuse to acquiesce in these values, to build a society in which art has a place. This conclusion is not directly affirmed, but it is strongly implied, particularly in the person of Frank, who serves as a foil to Joe's destructive energy. It is noteworthy that Odets should turn Hollywood subject matter and technique (the short, cinematic scenes, the use of fade-outs) against itself, in order to combat the mythic Hollywood success story (and Hollywood, in retaliation, reversed Odets' logic by putting a "happy ending" upon the screen version of Golden Boy). The moral of Odets' allegory might not be overtly revolutionary, but it is nonetheless rooted in severe social criticism.

Odets was not, however, through with Hollywood. Over the course of the next decade he was alternately to make his peace with the film colony and then reject it anew. (A 1944 interview [New York Times, 27 August] was entitled "Going Their Way Now? Clifford Odets Has Given Up Tilting at the Hollywood Windmill, or So He Says.") In 1948, for example, he returned to Broadway after a seven-year absence, and castigated the movie colony in the harshest terms possible. He deeply resented the accusations of "sell out" which had plagued him ever since he initially left for Hollywood, and offered several explanations for his long defection: he wanted to recoup the "small fortune" he had invested in the Group in its dying years, to forget "the distress of several misplaced personal allegiances"; he was looking for a period of "creative repose: money, rest, and simple clarity." But Hollywood, he averred, offered few consolations beyond the monetary; since his talents were still ignored, he came to detest the lethargy into which he had fallen; he consoled himself with the plays he was going to write, "took my filthy salary every week and rolled an inner eye around an inner landscape." Apparently Odets never quite escaped the sense of guilt born of accepting Hollywood gold, and was performing an act of purgation in returning to the New York theatre, "where personal affiliation with one's writing (the first premise of truth) does not constitute lese majesty."

Odets' specific act of contrition was represented by his play The Big Knife (1949), in which he attempted to expose the mendacity of Hollywood and the corrosive effect of its guiding ethic. "The big knife," he stated, "is that force in modern life which is against people and their aspirations, which seeks to cut people off in their best flower," but, we must ask, in what precisely does this force reside? For the difficulty with the play is that we are never exactly sure what the playwright is railing against. In Golden Boy, Odets used some of the conventions of melodrama in order to construct an allegory which depicted the pernicious effect of a destructive ethic; in The Big Knife he attempts much the same thing, but fails to demonstrate the play's thesis through dramatic action. Joe Bonaparte is destroyed because society has made him a killer; why does Charlie Castle destroy himself? Hank, the New York writer who symbolizes the man of integrity, presents Charlie's eulogy: "He killed himself … because that was the only way he could live." Charlie's suicide was "a final act of faith." Faith, however, in what? Castle's predicament, as revealed in the play, seems magnified beyond all dramatic credibility precisely because it is forcibly wedded to melodramatic circumstance instead of arising inexorably from a genuine moral dilemma. The real issue involved is simple: should the artist, luxuriating in material splendor at the expense of his artistic integrity, chuck it all to return to a meaningful existence? Stated in these terms, the issue seems hardly one to induce suicide. But Odets obviously felt that the problem was not dramatically sufficient, and therefore felt constrained to project this dilemma in terms of a plot which deals with intrigue and suggested murder. The difficulty with this scheme from a dramatic viewpoint is that the real issue—the acceptance or rejection of Hollywood values—is in no way related to the machinery of the plot. If Charlie Castle is blackmailed into signing his contract, what happens to the element of choice which is crucial to the larger, more serious, dramatic issue?

Thus the prevalent tone of The Big Knife is hysteria. Odets attacks many evils of the Hollywood scene—the malicious gossip-monger, the amoral aide-de-camp, the hypocritical, vicious producer—but he fails to achieve what he succeeded in accomplishing in Golden Boy, to relate these specific evils, and the drama's basic structure, to a guiding metaphor which clarifies the main lines of the intended allegory. The boxing world becomes, in Golden Boy, a microcosm of the larger society of which it is a part; Hollywood, in The Big Knife, fails not only as a microcosm, but as a realistic portrayal of the film capital. God knows there are sufficient grounds for criticism without implying that producers and agents are would-be murderers.

The crucial fact is that Golden Boy presents a social alternative; The Big Knife does not. "Does the man in your book get out of here?" cries Charlie to Hank. "Where does he go? What, pray tell, does he do? (bitterly) Become a union organizer?" This alternative, objectified in the person of Frank in Golden Boy, has become unthinkable. Charlie's anguish springs from the recognition that he is a part of the world which he wants to reject. The problem with the play resides in this very ambivalence. Odets—in the character of Castle—alternately vilifies and accepts Hollywood captivity. Charlie wants to reject the malicious world of which he is a part, but feels unable to substitute another. Although he recognizes that "everyone needs a cause to touch greatness," he has lost his capacity to believe in causes. He has, as hank points out, sold out, and is consequently tormented by guilt: "Look at me! Could you ever know that all my life I yearned for a world and people to call out the best in me?" In short, although Odets has a theme, he is unwilling to face its direct implications. For the real question, left unanswered in The Big Knife, is in what or in whom does the responsibility lie for the destruction of Charlie Castle? In society? In his own weakness? Perhaps Odets was too personally involved in Charlie's dilemma to objectify it truthfully. As Clurman noted, the play "is neither the true story of Odets nor the clear account of a freely conceived Charlie Castle. Its subjectivity is muddled by its pretense of objectivity; its objectivity is compromised by the author's inability to distinguish between his creature and himself."

The importance of Odets' political commitment from a dramatic point of view resided in its affording him an intellectual substructure upon which to construct his several dramas. Since Odets' virtues were never primarily intellectual, his social orientation enabled him to relate his characters and themes to a coherent world-view. Either explicit or implicit in all his dramas of the thirties lies the metaphor born of his Marxist commitment. At first overtly stated, it later becomes the philosophical undercurrent which relates his several portraits of frustration to a gesture of protest. The Marxist eschatology provided the dramatist with a structural referent, for implicit in the dialectical struggle is an essential drama, the vanquishing of the old class by the new. It is this dialectic which informs Odets' Depression dramas; either explicitly in "Waiting for Lefty" or implicitly in Rocket to the Moon, they all offer the hope of the future against the frustration of the present. The structural failure of The Big Knife lies in Odets' inability, after the loss of political commitment, to substitute a suitable unifying dramatic metaphor. With the absence of the substructure of social protest, the drama flounders in a sea of hysteria. I am not implying the necessity of a social metaphor in drama, but merely pointing out the crucial role it played in Odets' career as dramatist. Odets has lost his status as major dramatist because, unlike Tennessee Williams, for example, he failed to suggest in his later dramas that he was presenting us with a vision of reality which transcended his several plays.

The consequences of the loss of metaphor may be observed in a comparison of two domestic dramas written in the thirties and the fifties respectively. Rocket to the Moon (1938) is not an overtly political play. In fact, the Marxist critics complained that "Odets has stopped listening to the people he knows so well." It is concerned with the frustrations of a middle-class dentist and his futile love affair with his young secretary. But despite Odets' essentially personal concerns, despite his emphasis upon psychological rather than social factors, there can be no denying that beneath the play resides the basic social metaphor.

The very positing of the metaphor of the rocket to the moon—the illusion of escape—has meaning because it is an illusion, because there is an alternative. Cleo, the young secretary, rejects both Stark and Prince, the denizens of a dying world, to seek fulfillment elsewhere:

Don't you think there's a world of joyful men and women? Must all men live afraid to laugh and sing? Can't we sing at work and love our work? It's getting too late to play at life; I want to live it.

Thus Rocket to the Moon, despite its psychological emphasis, is still structured by the redemption motif which characterizes Odets' earlier plays. And the redemption resides both in an affirmation and a rejection, since the one predicates the other. The play succeeds, therefore, in relating the confusion and frustration of its major characters to the larger world of which they are a part; Stark, Prince, Belle, and Cleo speak in the authentic voice of the Depression generation, reaching, grasping for a way out. But personal problems are grounded in a larger social context; Ben Stark cannot really love because his bourgeois world is rooted in futility and illusion. Odets draws the social moral—the moral Clurman chose as the "spine" of his production of the play:

Who's got time and place for "love and the grace to use it?" [asks Stark] Is it something apart, love? … An entertainment? Christ, no! It's a synthesis of good and bad, economics, work, play, all contacts. … Love is no solution of life! … The opposite. You have to bring a whole balanced normal life to love if you want it to go!

It is revealing to compare Rocket to the Moon with Odets' later domestic drama, The Country Girl (1951). Although in the latter play Odets again treats the themes of frustration and redemption, he does so this time within a self-contained personal world removed from social causation. Odets formally acknowledged his restriction of emphasis in an interview in the New York Times [5 November 1950]. In omitting "social significance," he admitted that he may have taken "a step backward" as a playwright. However, by insulating his characters from the raging complexities of the world beyond their own private heartbreak, he believed that he was able to write more proficiently than ever before. He deliberately undertook to limit himself to but one aspect of life, the search for personal values. He acknowledged the self-imposed limitation, but mused, "It may be that limitation is the beginning of wisdom."

The Country Girl is endowed with virtues hitherto unassociated with Odets; it is neat, well-ordered, and theatrically sound—a pièce bien faite. "I wanted to take simple elements and make something sharp and theatrical about them. I stated a fact, the story of these two people, rather than speculated about the fact." But in restricting his scope, Odets robbed the play of his salient virtue, the necessary connection between the characters on the stage and the world of which they are a part. Frank Elgin's redemption is portrayed but it is never related to any specific cause. The key questions, left unanswered, are why did he go to pieces and why was he saved? The esthetic difficulties in The Big Knife resulted from Odets' inability to realize Charlie Castle's real anguish in effective dramatic terms; the esthetic difficulty with The Country Girl is that one is never fully convinced of Elgin's anguish. Since he remains the skeleton of a character rather than its flesh and bones, his redemption by his faithful wife seems, in the context of the play, almost gratuitous. He might well have gone on another bender and failed to achieve his theatrical triumph. At the end of the play Georgie, the country girl of the title, herself admits that "neither of us has really changed," but none the less discerns some "new element of hope," although she is not sure what. Neither are we as audience or reader convinced of this new possibility of hope because we are never presented with any dramatic alternative except that of the conventional backstage drama: will Frank Elgin succeed in making a comeback or not?

Insofar as there is a theme, it involves the fact of human responsibility, the necessity of looking forward not back. Georgie attempts to make Frank look life in the eye, to emerge from behind the myriad of evasions with which he has buttressed his life. But this theme is itself evaded because the roots of Frank's irresponsibility—symbolized in his alcoholism—are never explained. Responsibility implies a correlative: responsibility to what, and evasion of what? Frank's theatrical triumph does not arise out of the fact of his coming to terms with himself; it is merely presented. The last scene of the play might well have demonstrated his inability to cope with the responsibilities of opening on Broadway without marring the essential logic of the play.

In Rocket to the Moon the outside world continually intrudes, but in The Country Girl the social metaphor has been eschewed, exposing the bare bones of theatrical contrivance. It is as if Odets were saying to Broadway: "You want me to meet you on your terms? Very well, I'll show you that I'm able to do so." But in accepting Broadway's terms—an acceptance rewarded by commercial success—he surrendered the very real virtue which distinguished his earlier work, the adamant refusal to be confined by the structure of the conventional Broadway play, the fervent desire to change the theatre, and ultimately the world outside it.

Odets, in losing his political commitment, enacted the drama of his generation. It is not inappropriate that disenchantment with Marxist principles should have specific esthetic results, for Marxism had indeed attempted to create a specific esthetic. We have observed that although Odets never adhered rigidly to the strict logic of the doctrine of proletarian literature, none the less his Depression dramas are rooted in the metaphor of the Marxist dialectic. Thus the theme of redemption or resurrection is wedded to the concept of the necessary vanquishing of the old class by the new. Odets' problem as a dramatist, although never explicitly viewed as such, was to find a substitute metaphor to order the various elements of his artistic experience. Once the Marxist metaphor had lost its validity, once the substructure of the Marxist dialectic no longer sufficed, Odets was deprived of the structural framework upon which he had consciously or unconsciously built.

The consequences of the absence of this framework may be observed in an examination of Odets' last play with the Group, Night Music (1940). Although certain persistent Odetsian themes appear in the play, in particular the redemption of the young by the old, they are no longer related to a guiding, thematic concept; instead Odets attempts to substitute an esthetic metaphor, musical structure, for thematic structure, and the resultant play is characterized by a general diffuseness and uncertainty which robs its social implications of any vitality. In attempting to portray contemporary homelessness and uncertainty, Odets committed the esthetic mistake of being himself uncertain and erratic.

Odets possessed an aural rather than a visual imagination; his plays have always been characterized by the specific quality of their dialogue, the authentic sound of colloquial, urban speech. In commenting on New York City, he once noted that "I don't see it visually—though it's beautiful enough—so much as I hear it and feel it." And in the story of Steve Takis' erratic weekend on the town, Odets attempts, in Night Music, to record the sounds and music of twentieth-century New York and, by extension, America. But the myriad variations of the play serve to muddy rather than to clarify the theme. Hearing the sound of crickets, Fay, the young heroine, remarks, "Night Music … if they can sing, I can sing. … We can sing through any night!" This faith in the ability of the human being to transcend his difficulties is, at best, most generally stated. True, the play raises some specific social issues. Steve's predicament, for example, is given an economic base, since his aggression is motivated by the fact of his deprivation. The "big international question" for him is still "when do we eat?" But a sense of man's inability to confront reality and change the world vitiates the social implications of Night Music. If there is one essential theme it is that of homelessness, the individual's inability to find someone or something to belong to. Although Steve Takis is indeed a proletarian, despite occasional outbursts of indignation, he displays no real sense of class. He is a boy without credentials, the "All-American bum," striking back at friend and foe alike with a defensive hospitality, which is merely a mask for his sense of homelessness. The theme of Night Music is, thus, not the determination of the economically deprived to gain their deserved rights, but rather a despairing acknowledgment of the futility of gestures of protest. Not merely Steve and Fay, but all the characters in the play, regardless of class, are characterized by this similar sense of dislocation. Where previously dislocation had served Odets as a class image, it now informs all strata of society.

Odets seems to acquiesce in the mood of futility which pervades the play. His attempt to dispel it, in the person of the Guardian Angel, the detective Rosenberger, is so generalized in its optimism as to be fundamentally unconvincing. For Odets' answer seems to be nothing so much as to affirm a blind faith in man's possibilities. Rosen-berger's role in the play serves merely to demonstrate the gratuitousness of his solutions; whenever the young couple finds itself in difficult straits, he appears to set the situation right, and to present them with his optimistic gospel: "Where there is life there is hope, in my humble opinion. Only the living can cry out against life."

It is precisely this sense of false solution—of conquering life by merely living it—which provides the play with the Saroyanesque note that many of the critics noted ("Now that Odets writes like Saroyan," wrote Atkinson, "doomsday is near"). Rosenberger's relationship to Steve is not unlike that of Jacob to Ralph, but whereas the latter's redemption was predicated on the acceptance of a specific road out of the frustrations of the present, Steve's redemption is based upon his acceptance of the vaguest kind of social philosophy: "In the time of your life, live." Although Saroyan's particular talent was able to inform this false optimism with a kind of wistfulness and nostalgia which made it work theatrically, Odets' talent did not lend itself to such manipulation. Ultimately, despite his attempt at wistfulness, his world is a real one, and demands real solutions. Night Music is one of those works which catches a specific moment in history; the spirit of the thirties had disappeared, employment was up, and the European war hovered ominously on the horizon. The major social issue was soon to become the simple act of survival. In such a world, in which catastrophe appeared imminent, it is not strange that the playwright should turn to themes of uncertainty, despair, and a desperate optimism. But Odets' dramatic dilemma was to find a means of structuring these various themes. He failed, despite the musical metaphor, because the implications of the various elements in the play continually led him in different directions. Thus the play is alternately wistful, nostalgic, bitter, farcical, optimistic, and despairing. The theme of redemption seems gratuitous because it does not seem warranted; if there is any moral in Steve's redemption, it lies in the cliché, love conquers all. Yet the seriousness of much of the play makes us unwilling to accept the conventional romantic ending. Rosenberger advises Steve to "make a Party-To-Marry-My-Girl." Even as a comic statement, it is significant that Odets' specific political solution to Steve's problems should be marriage.

In Clash By Night (1941) the vision of uncertainty and homelessness which found whimsical reflection in Night Music had turned stark and grim. The war clouds which had appeared on the horizon in the earlier play now seemed poised to drench the American landscape, and, in fact, less than one month after the play was produced in November, 1941, the Depression era found its violent interment in the cataclysm of world war.

The mood of the play may be gathered from Odets' diary notes pertaining to its genesis:

July 27: The climate of the … play will be exactly that of the weather here. Muggy, foreboding, the never bursting open sky Why? I feel it must be that way. It is weather in which anything can happen. All courses of conduct are possible, men and women may suddenly weep, reverse their entire lives under this leaden sky; relaxed amiabilities, hatreds, exquisite tenderness … sudden murderous wrath, all may happen. … Out of a long chain of seeming dull trivia is born a shattering explosion that is the line of the new play.

August 8: The theme is taking shape in my mind, intensely personal but generally significant feeling behind it. The theme … has to do with the need of a new morality, with a return to voluntarily imposed morals, to voluntarily assumed forms in a world … where there are no forms but plenty of appetite and irresponsibility.

October 21: Part of the theme of this play is about how men irresponsibly wait for the voice and strong arm of Authority to bring them to life. … Nothing stands for Authority and we wait for its voice!… The children are looking for the father to arrange their lives for them!

Clash By Night represents Odets' final testament to the themes which informed his earlier dramas. The vision which had celebrated human possibility has turned sour, and the image of redemption is overshadowed by that of death. Like Odets' early characters, the people whose struggles are recorded in Clash By Night are frustrated by circumstance. Mae, like Hennie, is trapped in a loveless marriage; Earl's bluster, like that of Moe and Steve, masks a basic insecurity; the good-hearted Jerry wants nothing so much as to feel that he is needed. The dream of love, the desire to escape a life which is devoid of joy—"a life lived on the installment plan"—these pathetic gropings set the stage for the enactment of the love triangle which constitutes the plot of the play. But whereas Hennie, Moe, and Ralph were able to escape, Jerry, Mae, and Earl are condemned. There is no escape afforded them; Jerry, goaded by the fascistic Kress, is overwhelmed by jealousy and kills Earl rather than lose his wife.

Odets attempts to use the redemption theme by posing, in opposition to the tragedy of his major characters, the healthy relationship of a young couple, Joe and Peggy.

Unlike Earl or Jerry, Joe "knows his address," he is not torn away from the roots of life. He states what, we may assume, Odets intended as the moral of the play:

We're all afraid! Earl, Jerry, Mae, millions like them, clinging to a goofy dream—expecting life to be a picnic. Who taught them that? Radio, Songs, the Movies … paradise is just around the corner. … But… we know the facts, the anti-picnic facts. We know that Paradise begins in responsibility. … Yes, it's a time to learn, a time to begin—it's time to love and face the future!

We must ask in what manner this theme is realized in Clash By Night. Despite this statement, and Mae's final advice to the young couple—"You're young and strong, you got a future"—it is apparent that Odets is merely going through the motions. He had become so acclimated to the structural support of the Marxist-redemption metaphor that he used it in this play as a dramatic device even though it is never validated. The drama of Earl, Jerry, and Mae is in no way logically connected to the drama of Joe and Peggy. Indeed, the latter might well have been eliminated without impairing the play one iota. Nowhere in the play is it implied that the dilemma of the principal characters is motivated by the false ideals which they have learned from society. Nowhere is the corrosive influence of radio, songs, and the movies manifest. Mae, Jerry and Earl are trapped by circumstances, by the inexorable fact that in a love triangle someone's fingers must be burned. Is the desire to escape from the frustration of the present necessarily a false ideal? Nowhere does Odets imply this. The metaphor of social redemption which served as a dramatic aid as long as Odets accepted the implications of Marxism, serves, in the case of Clash By Night, to falsify the play; for all elements of the play enforce the conviction that there is no escape. The world is seen, in Arnold's image as "a darkling plain … where ignorant armies clash by night." All the characters in the play confirm this pessimistic view, even the untormented Peggy, who states, "It's a nervous world, a shocking world. I don't understand it, I just don't understand it."

The ritual of violence which Odets enacted in Clash By Night was soon enacted in the world at large, and the world war which inaugurated the forties fittingly ended both the decade and the Great Depression itself. We have already traced much of Odets' subsequent career. Like many of his generation he was unable to replace the faith which had made him one of the most representative dramatists of the Depression era; and what is more significant for his art, he was unable to find a new dramatic metaphor to replace the one born of his political commitment. The failure of The Big Knife brought forth the compromise of The Country Girl, in which the rebel in Odets deferred to the Broadway craftsman. And yet his dissatisfaction with the compromise is attested by his last play, The Flowering Peach (1954), in which we find the playwright groping towards a new metaphor he never succeeded in finding.

Once again, Odets is concerned with an allegory of redemption; but redemption in this case is not born of a specific act of faith, but rather the attempt to replace the loss of faith. For in The Flowering Peach Odets attempts to define the dilemma both of his generation and of his own art. It represents that moment in an artist's career when reassessment seems to be demanded, when the artist must stop and take stock of his personal and esthetic resources. "I'm not a kid anymore," Odet acknowledged to a Times interviewer [26 December] 1954, "I'm 47. And at this age I began to ask myself, what happened? Do you want to begin all over again? Who are you and where are you?"

The significance of the play lies in the fact that Odets finally attempted to come to terms with the esthetic consequences of the loss of his political commitment. It was an acknowledgment long overdue, for, as we have observed, the attempt to exploit the structural advantages of the Marxist metaphor after rejecting its meaning vitiated Odets' post-Depression plays. The essence of The Flowering Peach is the acceptance of the loss of political faith. If there is one key line in the play it is perhaps Rachel's cry to the idealistic Japheth: "There is idealism now in just survival." Odets affirmed this conviction in the Times:

When you start out you have to champion something. Every artist begins as if he were the first one painting, every composer as if there were no Beethoven. But if you still feel that way after ten or fifteen years, you're nuts. … I couldn't have written The Flowering Peach twenty years ago. As you grow older, you mature. The danger is that in broadening, as you mature, you dilute your art. A growing writer always walks that tight rope.

Odets' utilization of the Noah myth is not subject to a one-to-one allegorical interpretation. There can be no doubt, however, that the play represents an intensely personal statement. Odets is basically concerned with man's reaction to cosmic injustice, his attempt to construct a means whereby he can accept this injustice. It is this concept of acceptance which dominates The Flowering Peach. Despite everything, Noah accepts the will of God, the fact of human destruction. The rebel, Japheth, prefers to remain off the ark rather than accept the divine edict, but Noah knocks him unconscious and carries him aboard; thus man, Odets, implies, must accept the inequities of life; the gesture of protest must not be carried to extremes. And yet the rebellious gesture is not futile. It is Japheth's insistence that the ship have a rudder, his skill in fixing leaks, which saves the ship from foundering. Man must not merely accept, he must act. He cannot assume that God will necessarily prevent catastrophe; he must have faith in himself, for he can never be sure what God wants. Noah, however, does know what God wants. He wants to prevent the extinction of life, to provide the basis for the construction of a new world. The necessity of this preservation—and the acceptance of the capriciousness of divine law—transcends the meaning of Japheth's gesture of protest. Ultimately, he too must accept the way of the world. The rebel may attempt to guide his destiny, but he cannot change it. Significantly, the world which is renewed at the end of the play, it is implied, will not be very different from the world which was destroyed. Shem, who symbolizes man's acquisitive nature, has not been changed by the catastrophe. At the beginning of the play he was loath to accept Noah's demand to aid in the construction of the Ark because it meant the sacrifice of his worldly possessions; during the voyage he had planned for the future by saving the manure of the animals in anticipation of the time when fuel would be needed and he could sell dried manure briquettes. But Noah, who had previously berated Shem's avariciousness, finally, and significantly, comes to live with it. Previously Noah had attacked Shem's desire to live again by the principle of exploitation, but after his initial anger at his son's attempt to "begin a new world … with manure," at the risk of endangering the safety of the ark, Noah finally comes to accept his wife's logic: "Shem made a useful thing from nothing. … Why kill the man with brains? No, make him use it for the family!" Ultimately it is not the rebel, Japheth, that Noah goes to live with in the new world; it is Shem. "Why? It's more comfortable."

Thus, the rebel in Odets came to accept the futility of the radical gesture; there is sufficient idealism in the fact of survival. "You say to the eagle, fly!" cries Noah to God at the moment of his designation, "Even to a little bitty of an eagle like me, fly, fly, higher and higher! You have shrinked away his wings and he couldn't do it! Why did You pick me?" But every man is chosen, and every man must face the contradiction between his aspirations and his achievements. The fire of youth is gone, the desire to change the world is gone; but the world endures. And what has Noah learned from his journey through catastrophe? "To walk in humility, I learned. And listen, even to myself … and to speak softly, with the voices of consolation."

Thus redemption is ultimately born of acceptance, not protest; Agate Keller had cried in "Waiting For Lefty" that "when we die they'll know what we did to make a new world! Christ, cut us up to little pieces … put fruit trees where our ashes are!" But Noah accepts a small branch of the flowering peach as a "precious gift… from the new earth." Regeneration indeed, but this time without the ashes of man's effort.