Was there ever a successful Marxist author whose parents weren’t affluent? From Bertolt Brecht to Frantz Fanon to Che Guevara, there’s a pattern: privileged youth, largely unmerited prominence, then increasing indifference from readers and audiences after death. As the falseness of the writing becomes clear, the shining light of fame moves on. But one figure is at once a strange proof and a wholesale rejoinder to the rule: Clifford Odets (1906-1963). The exception is striking.
This is not to say that Odets was born into the hardscrabble world he depicted in his plays. In fact, his father owned a thriving advertising agency. Moreover, as Odets himself said, “I have never been near a strike in my life.” What distinguishes Clifford Odets from the Erich Fromms and Amiri Barakas of the world is not that he understood the life of the proletariat. The difference is that his work is not fading from view.
There have been four Broadway productions of his plays in the last decade. That’s almost half the number Shakespeare has had, and more than Eugene O’Neill or Arthur Miller. It’s as many as George Bernard Shaw and Anton Chekhov combined. And these productions featured name actors such as Morgan Freeman and Mark Ruffalo, and their glowing notices were followed by 19 Tony nominations. Indeed, according to the New Yorker, the shows placed Odets “finally and forever in the Pantheon, where he belongs.” Yet another full-length biography is about to be published.
Along with this renewal of interest in Odets comes an accepted narrative: Clifford Odets was among America’s most gifted playwrights, but his genius was destroyed by the false money and wasted years he spent in Hollywood.
This tale is one which the playwright himself subscribed to: Looking back on his life, Odets remarked humbly, “I do not believe that a dozen playwrights in history had my natural endowment.”
But there is a problem with this account: While Odets had a very real talent for creating vivid characters and distinctive, lively dialogue, his plots are of two types: idiotic and preposterous, and outrageous and objectionable.
By most accounts, his three most important plays are Awake and Sing! (1935), Golden Boy (1937), and The Big Knife (1949). Consider their stories. The Big Knife concerns a Hollywood movie star named Charlie Castle. When a depraved studio head and his flunky arrange for the murder of a key witness to an accidental vehicular homicide Castle was responsible for, Castle is forced to sign a huge new contract. Yet, learning of their machinations against his adulterous wife, Castle kills himself in shame.
Golden Boy is about a young Italian American, Joe Bonaparte, who has to choose between a bright future as a classical violinist and his status as a middleweight contender. Joe is conflicted by the knowledge that boxing will ruin his delicate fingers and make his father’s dream of his playing Paganini impossible; but for too long, Joe is putty in the hands of manipulative beauty Lorna Moon and his crooked fight managers. Yet when Joe knocks a highly ranked opponent dead in the ring, he is filled with remorse and drives away wildly, ending his own life and Lorna’s in a desperate and purposeful car accident.
Do such people actually exist? Would George Clooney or Jennifer Lopez decide to end their lives because they had no choice, for years to come, but to star in big movies for high salaries? Was there ever a homicidal/suicidal violin prodigy equally known for his right hook and left jab?
Awake and Sing!, regarded by many as Odets’s best play, is also contrived. But its plot is plausible. The story centers on a working-class Bronx clan who must take in a boarder to make ends meet. The family’s grandfather, Jake, is a committed Marxist and jobless barber. But while Jake is a voice of wisdom, his arrogant and thieving children ignore his preaching and plot against his grandchildren, Ralph and Hennie.
In the play’s bald presentation, the only hope for a better, nobler world stands with these two young people—and the Soviet Union. Indeed, at the end of Awake and Sing!, Ralph reads his grandfather’s Marxist tomes and his eyes are opened to the wonders of communism and, by implication, Joseph Stalin. The play is set in 1934, which means that the hero is learning about the Soviet Union just a year after five million Ukrainians were forcibly starved to death and as the Moscow purges are taking place.
But that’s not all that is offensive or absurd about the conclusion of Awake and Sing! Equally incredible is the transformation of the boarder, a one-legged gangster, from misogynist and sexist brute to tender-hearted romantic. We are asked to believe that, as he is transformed by love, he will be an ideal lover and husband—and he and Hennie will live happily together in (pre-Castro) Cuba once she has sensibly abandoned her 1-year-old child. Odets’s presentation of his characters proves as willfully naïve and sentimental as his politics.
Ironically, Odets’s work as a hired Hollywood scriptwriter has stood up well. This is especially true of Sweet Smell of Success (1958), a classic about the seedy world of publicists and gossip columnists in New York City. Here, Odets merely adapted someone else’s true-to-life screenplay draft. The story, by Ernest Lehman, was based on his experiences with columnist Walter Winchell; since Odets’s skill at writing dialogue and crafting characters was considerable, the results were sterling.
The defects of Odets’s plays, however, are plain: He had limited imagination, and his only ideas were either pulp fiction or political dogma he picked up from leftist friends. Given this, would it be too much for theatrical producers to give theatergoers a merciful break?
Jonathan Leaf is a playwright who lives in New York.
