Odets, Where Is Thy Sting?

MARLON BRANDO once said of his good friend Clifford Odets, "To me, he was the '30s." Author of plays like "Waiting for Lefty" and "Awake and Sing," and champion of the innovative "Group Theater", Odets was virtually unrivaled as the great voice of Great Depression liberalism. By age 29, he had three plays running simultaneously on Broadway. At 32 he was on the cover of Time magazine for an article entitled "White Hope."

But if Brando's remark testifies to Odets's incredible success in capturing the Zeitgeist of the 1930s, it also gives a hint of tragic flaws buried beneath the success. Although Odets would live and write well into the early 1960s, he strived, unsuccessfully, to break out of the role of spokesman for a decade that was over before he had turned 35.

Odets's inability to escape this 1930s pigeonhole is reflected in the intensely ideological, even didactic, nature of his plays. The public received Odets less as the artist than as an unavowed literary politician, swept into the office of playwright laureate on the strength of the politics spouted in his characters' soliloquies, but just as resoundingly voted out when the political climate had changed.

"Waiting for Lefty," the play that made him famous, is a perfect example of the class-oriented drama fashionable at the time. Like Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine or Arthur Miller's All My Sons, Lefty was everywhere acknowledged to be as much a political statement as an artistic one. It was quickly hailed in the left-wing press; the drama critic of the Daily Worker called it "frankly revolutionary propaganda...the most exciting theater this reporter has seen in many months."

A one-act play set in a union hall, "Lefty" dramatizes the taxicab strike that plagued New York in the spring of 1934. Lefty is the union leader, for whom the drivers are waiting before they take a vote on whether to strike. In a series of flashbacks, several of the men detail their reasons for voting to strike. One of the heavy-handed scenes has a young wife telling her cabbie husband that she will accept the advances of an old admirer unless he starts bringing home more money. The flashbacks continue until it is announced that Lefty has been beaten to death.

After the announcement, the audience is asked to vote. At the play's premiere, the audience broke into impassioned shouts of "Strike! Strike!" In behavior more congruous to a political rally than a Broadway opening, the uproarious crowd stormed the stage, demanding to meet the play's author.

LESS INTERESTED in examining the political facet of Odets's writing than in searching for deeper psychological meaning, however, Brenman-Bibson a practicing psychoanalyst, believes that the political nature of Odets's art is merely symptomatic of childhood insecurities.

Born in 1906 to a Jewish working-class family in Philadelphia, Odets spent his early years in a home in which he, his mother, and his two younger sisters were--Brenman-Bibson would have it--tyrannized by a bullying, selfish intent only on upward financial and social movement.

Preoccupied with making money, living in the "right" apartment building, joining the "right" synagogue, and even making his family look "right" to the neighbors (he would constantly and publicly taunt his lame daughter by claiming she could walk normally if she wanted to), L. J. Odets was an oppressive force on his sensitive young son.

In this impassioned father/son relationship, Brenman-Bibson finds the unresolved conflict that would haunt his future life and work. Off the stage, he would look for sympathetic father-figures among his male companions, and treat women with the attitude he learned from his father: fear of commitment led to a long string of unstaisfying love affairs. On the stage, Brenman-Bibson sees the onmipresent L. J. Odets lurking in the the employers, the Nazis, and all of the other tyrannical forces at the center of Odets's plays.

But if the psychoanalytical approach yields such occasional epiphanies, it all too often thrusts the analyst herself into the biography and we see the actual process of analysis. In the course of a treatment of Odets's private diaries, for instance, we are told that one entry "stops the biographer in her tracks with its bite and prescience, until she deduces it was written long after the fact."

More damaging, though is the staggering detail in the book and the author's attempt to find deep psychological meaning in every slight object or detail. She wants to find eternity in every grain of sand but ends up looking at an ocean of sand.

At times, this attention to detail borders on the ludicrous. In the course of an analysis of Odets's family, for instance, one learns that his mother was a delicate child, "spoiled by her gaunt mother, who would secretly give her the giblets on the rare occasions when there was a chicken." Further on, the poultry perspective continues, as one finds Odets's mother "still confiding to Ida Mae her longing for her dead mother (who had saved bits of chicken for her)."

The essence of biography is selectiveness; even the most uneventful lives contain enough to fill a library. In this case, the tendancy toward inclusiveness results in a 750-page tome which, we are assured on the dust jacket, is merely the first volume.

THE TRADEOFF is unmistakable. Although this is clearly a heavily documented scholarly tool, it is unfortunate that Brenman-Bibson did not write a slightly more approachable biography to immortalize her obvious admiration for Odets.

The author picked a good time to stop this volume, leaving Odets before he enters into his tragic decline. He will never again match his early dramatic successes. He will move on to Hollywood as a screenwriter, at the time a well-known repository for manque artists. He will go on to become a friendly witness for the House Un-American Activities Committee. And, perhaps most sad, even his early plays would lose favor.

At the end of the volume, we stand at Act III, scene II of a tragedy of Shakesperean proportions. There are hints of fatal flaws and impending doom, but no visible resolution Bibliophiles can only eagerly await the next 700 page installment.