One eye among the blind

Charles Marowitz

The Divine Pastime Harold Clurman (Collier Macmillan £3.95) I owe a great deal to Harold Clurman. During the mindless 'fifties when I was serving Uncle Sam to make America 'safe for democracy,' Clurman's theatre-reviews in the Nation, penetrating the flak of McCarthyism like sunbeams through a cast-iron sky, kept me sane. For me, he has always represented a kind of beacon of sanity in a country deluged with Madness.

Clurman's voice has always been unique in America. Its authority derived from the fact that he was, with Cheryl Crawford and Lee

Strasberg, founder of the Group Theatre, the Only permanent theatrical influence that

country ever produced. And yet, despite his social-realist orientation, he was no blinkered naturalist but a cosmopolitan man-of-the theatre who fully recognised that the works of Beckett and Genet, writers to whom he is ternperamentally opposed, were more important than the latest Neil Simon or William Inge. Throughout the 'fifties and 'sixties, Clurman's European-based artistic equilibrium combated the idiocies of Broadway, indicting its hit-ormiss philosophy for the most sensible reason of all — that it prevented the organic development of American artists and squandered the considerable talents thrown up on its stages. To get the true measure of a man, you have to examine his enthusiasms rather than his dis likes. Clurman fostered and first produced Clifford Odets, profoundly understood and appreciated the nature of Tennesee Williams's talents, championed writers as dissimilar as Albee, Brecht and Le Roi Jones, and articulately, described the components of each of his different enthusiasms. Being a director first and

foremost, his pieces are often preoccupied with the acting chemistry by which plays produce

their effects. This has been both a strength and weakness for, try as he might, he has never been able entirely to avoid second-guessing anoiher director's production. (Discussing E.rando's Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire he criticises the moment when the character, having raged for his wife to be returned from the protective custody of the next-door neighbour, humbly buries his head against her body, lifts her into his arms and carries her off to bed. "Kowalski," writes Clur

!Tian "at that moment is any man; it is not integrated with the attributes of the play which

re9uire5 that Kowalski at all times be some what vile" — an observation which stems from Clurman's, not Kazan's, conception of

Kovvalski as `vile' and `animalistic.' What Clurthan does not acknowledge is that the criticism ho. Ids water only if the director and actor share his remorseless conception of Kowalski's character which, clearly, neither did). It strikes me that Clurman had been soMething of a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind. His intellect is workmanlike rather than searingly original, but his public has been so regularly exposed to intellectual sterility that Clurman's own sensibility gains prominence because of the flatness of the surrounding t:itiritryside. When he writes, "The critic's main Job • . . is not to speak of his likes or dislikes as Pleasure or distaste alone, but to define as exactly as possible the nature of what he examines," I wonder it he, or his readers, baulk at this homespun paraphrase of Matthew Arnold And when he writes, "At best, the critic

,,, an artist whose point of departure is another artist's work. If he is truly a fine critic, he will make his reader something of an artist as well," does he realise that, using a somewhat denuded prose-style, he is simply re-stating Oscar Wilde? But the influences on a critic mean nothing. It is the way they colour his personal tone-of-voice that either credits or debits the influence, and Clurman's judgements, however one may disagree with them, brim with unmistakable personal fervour. The wellspring of his writing and his personality is 'thirties-bred, socialist-inspired, Jewish-clad humanism. His fundamental caring about people makes him rebel against the harsh dismissals of 'small talent' and the brutal way in which the American theatre treats both its hopefuls and its proven talents. While other critics spout a moral, variety-styled commercial judgements, Clurman sees beyond the materialistic moment to the men and women pouring their life's blood into the theatre and insists that the sacrifice be acknowledged along with its varying degrees of success. As he himself realises, this comes dangerously close to an argument coddling mediocrity, but the danger in the American situation is not that mediocrities may be over-praised but that real talents may be snuffed out by unjustifiably high standards. Clurman is commendably even-tempered. He is not given to the histrionic outbursts of a John Simon, for instance, who is more concerned with the trail of dust he leaves behind than the direction in which he is going. Clurman sees small-beer for what it is, and doesn't grade it according to the criteria of vintage champagne. Even when he is pleased (as he was with the early Osborne and Pinter), he always laces his approval with admonishment. Beware, he seems to be continually saying, if you overvalue early achievement, you may make future achievements impossible. Always, in all of his aesthetic examinations, he remembers (and continues to remind us) that behind art are people and the 'artist,' special as he may be, is only a special kind of human being and not a creature from another planet.

Occasionally, he spends time belabouring the obvious; i.e. that theatrical art is not a branch of literature but an art in its own right: or that the artist's neurosis is the taproot of his work and so long as he functions, it is a commendable and not a debilitating trait. One feels here again that this is the one-eyed man guiding the blind. Perhaps only in America need essays be written on these subjects with such exhortatory vigour. As if the American critic were first obliged to engage the philistinism of his public before getting down to cases. Every page of The Divine Pastime is readable, but on some subjects, Clurman is peerless: on Odets for instance, giving the ultimate analysis of that writer's schizophrenia, lurching towards any identification with those who are socially-oppressed and, at the same time, pursuing a thinly-veiled lust for personal success; on the coming-of-age of the American theatre and the early, almost-forgotten influences that preceded Eugene O'Neill and the Theatre Guild, and of course, on Broadway, a subject on which Clurman is physiologically knowledgeable.

When they (the Broadway audience) are pleased, they act wildly surprised, as if they hadn't expected this could happen; when they are displeased. they are outraged, as if no one had the right to offer them anything less than superb. Generally they sound as if the point of a theatrical performance were the opportunity it offered then to form an opinion of it. The impression made by these audiences is that of a group composed entirely of investors or those who had been asked to invest — and refused. In such an atmosphere, the play always seems much better or much worse than it is.

That was writfen in 1952, but the Broadway syndrome is exactly the same today, and no one has described it quite so accurately.

I was not vastly impressed with Clurman's On Directing which seemed to dwindle into anecdotage and did not fully grasp the geist of contemporary theatre-practice, but The Divine Pastime is not Clurman being pedagogical but being himself. The personality that issues from the pages of his book is of a witty, caring, wholly-committed, highly-cultivated American for whom theatre is one (perhaps the most rewarding) aspect of life, but whose priorities concerning life and art are squarely on the side of life. Receiving an Honorary Degree from Boston University, Clurman told his audience, the, function of art could be described simply as 'having fun.' This is not a simplification. It is the burning, philosophical truth behind all theories and techniques, and the fact that Clurman has discovered it makes everything he says about theatre pertinent to life.

Charles Marowitz, an American, is director of the Open Space Theatre in London.