Letters to Molly, John Millington Synge to Maire O'Neill 1906-1909 ed. by Ann Saddlemyer (review)

1972 BOOK REVIEWS 213 notes that, despite the eye and ear for the substance of life as lived, Odets nonetheless based his characters on types and followed John Howard Lawson's lead in his use of dialogue, at once daring and subtle. These notes on the Odets plays illuminate even those which had neither the critical success nor the staying power of Awake and Sing. Curiously, when Weales has finished his analysis of some of the weaker works. they take on a new interest and attractiveness, though it would not be wise to revive them if one had to have this book in hand in order to savor the hidden qualities. The play has, finally. to speak for itself. One of the first plays I ever worked on in university was Awake and Sing. As a California farm-boy. I found Bessie. Myron, Moe, Ralph, and Hennie complete exotics, and their world an infinitely depressing mystery. At first, that is. As rehearsals progressed and the drama took visible, viable shape, thanks to director Arthur Klein and a University of California (Berkeley) cast which was mostly Brooklyn-born, the Berger family and its dreams and disappointments became very real to me. In large measure, that was Odets' doing. Not long after, I saw the road-show of The Country Girl and was not much impressed. A trivial piece of theater, a bit of melodrama with clinical overtones, I thought. Now, I write this the day after finishing the book and having seen the new John Houseman production of The Country Girl. Although Maureen Stapleton was too old to play Georgie. and George Grizzard does not seem right for a Bernie Dodd, they played with such drive and conviction that, with Jason Robards' thoroughly believable alcoholic actor, they proved Weales right on the score of Odets' eminent theatricality. But they also supported his contention that thisand the "minor" dramas, too-are not trivial or possibly even failures, if one understands what Odets was trying to do with them, to make them say. When Bernie Dodd tells Georgie she could be a "home" for him. I couldn't forget the excellent revelation Weales had given of this line and similar ones. in relation to Odets' own sense of loneliness. I would not intrude the vertical pronoun "I" in this review, were it not for Weales' own intense sense of personal reaction in discussing and evaluating the Odets dramas. He has even cultivaed a very personal writing style. replete with parentheses of the sort the late critic Yvor Winters used to call "damnably awkwardl" Perhaps it is too much to think of Clifford Odets as a Tonio Kreuger, always on the outside looking in, patiently observing as an artist must. Yet that would seem to have been partly true. Marriage did not work for him as easily as it does for some characters on stage. New York and Hollywood. dramas and screenplays , both were sets of magnetic poles that pulled him back and forth-and almost apart. GLEN LONEY Brooklyn College, CUNY LETTERS TO MOLLY, JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE TO MAIRE O'NEILL 1906-1909, edited by Ann Saddlemyer. Cambridge. Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. xxvii+833 pp. $11.00. Ann Saddlemyer, in this ably edited. handsomely printed edition of a series of letters often alluded to but hitherto unavailable, emphasizes the temperamental differences between Synge and Molly Allgood: "Molly's activities, choice of friends. 214 MODERN DRAMA September dress, reading, in fact her whole style of life, are subject to the closest scrutiny and bluntest comment..•. It could not have been·easy for a young girl, no matter how engrossed in her first love, to satisfy such obsession with perfection. When one considers in addition the vast difference in artistic temperament, the endurance of their relationship is even more impressive: Synge, the self-conscious, introspective craftsm~n whose sense of irony pervades and often shapes even his most tender love letters; Molly the instinctive, sometimes careless, nearly always impatient. frequently brilliant mimic. And both admitted to violent fits of temper." The judgment is surprisingly severe, not only because all of Molly's letters apparently disappeared when Synge died (did Synge destroy...