Volume 29, Number 1 · February 4, 1982
Golden Boy
By Robert Brustein
Clifford Odets: American Playwright The Years from 1906 to 1940
by Margaret Brenman-Gibson
Atheneum, 748 pp., $30.00
Years before he died in 1963 at the age of fifty-seven, Clifford Odets had assumed a symbolic importance greater than his position as a writer. Calling himself 'the foremost playwright manqué of all time,' he allowed, perhaps even encouraged, a myth to evolve which identified him as an artist of great promise who had made a corrupt Faustian contract with the film industry. A television interview conducted in the year of his death shows him, his eyes bulging, his hands working nervously to build a mountain of cigarette butts, as he tries to persuade the interviewer to regard him as a 'technician' who turns out movie and TV work for money, and finds his fitful moral purpose, his rare creative satisfactions, in the theater. Odets's career would seem to confirm his inglorious place in the moral melodrama of our cultural history. It tells a now familiar tale of early auguries and failed achievement, of high expectations dashed by personal ambitions. He considered the Group Theatre, out of which he was born and in whose bosom he was nourished, one of the last embers of a fading American idealism; and like many of his Group colleagues, he helped extinguish those embers by abandoning the company for Hollywood.
Review, 3199 words
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