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5 Commitment 80 By the early 1930s, John Howard Lawson was a bicoastal pioneer, a frequent traveler on trains shuttling between midtown Manhattan and downtown Los Angeles. He was compensated amply and had attained a critical acclaim, being viewed by some as the “hope” of the stage and an important voice of the screen. Yet he was torn with conflict and inner doubt, though like one of his well-made plays, his life was driving inescapably to a resolution . Those who perhaps should have been shouting support for him from the rooftops were among his most caustic critics, thereby contributing to his self-doubt. Harold Clurman “watched with shock and anger” as Lawson was upbraided by Communists and leftists at a meeting of the radical John Reed Club.1 Lawson’s labor—pecking on a keyboard as he conjured up tales from his fertile imagination—was isolating, and that was hardly assuaged by collaboration with producers, directors, actors, stagehands, and others. With the advantage of hindsight, he later admitted that Clurman’s critical evaluations of him were “not altogether wrong.” “In my enthusiasm I oversimpli fied complexities and creative problems,” though he was correct in “feeling that the Group could not establish a Broadway theater that would be genuinely creative.” Many “days and evenings” were spent “when the whole company of the Group gathered to discuss what kind of theater should be built.” The Adlers, Strasberg, Clurman, Odets, “Elia Kazan and Franchot Tone” discussed this issue interminably. Lawson—perhaps the most celebrated member of the Group—“argued that Clurman’s plan was unrealistic, that one could not serve art and Mammon at the same time.” Events proved, said Lawson with no hint of satisfaction,“that I was right.”2 The fissures between Lawson and the Group may have been as harmful to the latter as the former, for he wielded wide influence on their brightest star, Clifford Odets, and his absence was not helpful to Odets. Clurman admitted that it was Lawson who “brought Odets an awareness of a new kind of theatre dialogue.”3 Odets scrutinized Lawson’s Success Story assiduously , “studying the part[s] and writing down how I thought I would approach it as an actor.”4 Lawson had first met Odets at the “Group’s summer headquarters at Dover Furnace, New York in the summer of 1932.” Thus began an intense friendship that continued keenly “about a decade after 1932.” They “met many times.” Toward the conclusion of this decade of upheaval, “there was quite a clash” between the two on the matter of “art and social responsibility ,” and Lawson “warned” his protégé that “the present trend of his work,” specifically Golden Boy and Rocket to the Moon, “was weakening his art.” Though not unsympathetic to the aims of the Group, he accused its members of “misinterpreting Stanislavsky” since they “wanted to find the true emotion in everything—but it was the false emotion, the tragic-comic pretense , that was the heart of Chekhov as it was of Brecht.” “Odets,” Lawson lamented, “was never able to see this rich contradiction in American middle class life, the only [life] he knew.”5 “One of the difficulties with Odets, I should suppose,” mused Lawson, “is that he was not an analytical or intellectual person.”6 Like Richard Wright and James Baldwin, these two writers who had so much in common clashed abrasively. At the “Third Congress of Writers” in New York in 1939, “there was quite a clash between us about art and social responsibility ,” recalled Lawson, and once more he warned his erstwhile protégé “that the present (psychological) trend of his work . . . was weakening his art.” Again, this proved to be a “shock” to Odets.7 “Can Waiting for Lefty be considered seriously as a work of dramatic art?” Lawson asked rhetorically, then answered,“I believe the answer must be no,” it “was not a good play.” By way of contrast, Lawson consistently praised another contemporary, Lillian Hellman, referring to her as “the most significant playwright of the later thirties.”8 Odets was near the center of Lawson’s dispute with the Group, for during this period, he recalled,“when Odets was turning from his first attempt to deal with working class material to a more natural and more honest use of middle-class material (which in turn led him into a cul-de-sac) I was having a bitter argument with the Group.” Lawson “argued that there had to...

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