Word: kazan
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...their chairs, a corollary to an old adage will probably have occurred: if it is still true that the only life worth living is the examined one, it may be that in 20th century America the only life worth examining is the headlong one. Incaution on the scale that Kazan has practiced it is now a rarity, not only in the arts but everywhere else in our public life. So is the range of Kazan's achievements, both authentic and dubious...
...sense of worthlessness, Kazan says, is what drove him. It stemmed from his foreignness (he immigrated to the U.S. with his Greek parents when he was four); his lack of social status at Williams College, which he worked his way through as a fraternity-house waiter; and his lack of visible talent at the Yale Drama School. He acquired his nickname, Gadget (latterly Gadg), because the Group Theater people found him such a handy little guy to have around, "doing whatever I had to do to gain the tolerance, the friendship, and the protection of the authority figures...
Harold Clurman, a director of the Group Theater, informed Kazan that his only gift was excessive energy. But that, of course, is a quality too often underestimated by intellectuals. Combined with his survivor's shrewdness in observing the behavior that betrays motives, it is what gave his productions both realism and driving power. Above all, it is what enabled him to survive the contempt heaped on him after his HUAC testimony. This is how he remembers his interior monologue at the time, addressed to his critics: "You can't hurt me; you haven't penetrated my guard; I can beat...
...conventional marriage -- for that matter, no conventional relationship of any kind -- could contain a natural force as powerful as Kazan's. If there is, indeed, something "ugly" in his book, it is his account of his 30 years with his first wife, Molly. She was a Yankee of the old-fashioned kind, high- principled and strong-minded. Her acceptance of him was, Kazan admits, the first sign that he might amount to something; her support and the stable home she provided were vital to his success. Yet he betrayed her constantly, in an obsessive love affair with Actress Constance Dowling...
...That is Kazan's truest tone -- flat and harsh, undercutting his own attempts at rationalization with the bitterly truthful ring he cannot keep out of his voice. It is the voice of a man with no patience for poetry (he confesses that when he staged Archibald MacLeish's J.B. he simply moved the actors whenever he was bored, which was approximately every three lines) and no patience for ideological impositions, intellectual cant or institutional stability. It is perhaps a peasant's voice, valuing survival above all. But surely it is an actor's voice, one that knows it is impossible...