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To Thine Own Rage Be True
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13649 |
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BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1988 |
3,366 Words |
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Kenneth S. Lynn
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A LIFE
Elia Kazan
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988
848 pp., $24.95
From the mid-1940s through the '50s and into the first two years of the '60s, Elia Kazan--known to his friends and enemies alike as "Gadget" or "Gadg"--was the most successful director in the American theater and a golden boy in Hollywood as well. Among his many Broadway hits were The Skin of Our Teeth, One Touch of Venus, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Jacobowsky and the Colonel, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and Tea and Sympathy, while his film credits included Viva Zapata!, East of Eden, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Splendor in the Grass, and On the Waterfront. Yet at every point in this period, he declares in his relentlessly confessional autobiography, tersely entitled A Life, he was in a turmoil of revolt against himself for choking back the rage and hatred that were boiling within him. "I didn't like my public person," he writes. "I wasn't the man I wanted to be. I despised my nickname, for instance: Gadget! It suggested an agreeable, ever-complaint little cuss, a 'good Joe' who worked hard and always followed instructions. I didn't feel that way, not at all."
To explain this schizoid condition, Kazan harks back to his upbringing. He was born in Constantinople in 1909 to an Anatolian Greek family--a "freakish" family, he calls it, "in which there were traces of insanity." In addition to its personal problems, the family lived "in terror," Kazan asserts, of its xenophobic Turkish neighbors. The "Anatolian Smile" with which Elia's father, George Kazanjioglou, faced the world was a grimace that masked an enormous resentment. Unable to strike back at the Turks, the father ruled his family with such sternness as to cause Elia to fear him for most of his life.
Migrating to America shortly before World War I, the family eventually established itself in a comfortable apartment on the west side of Manhattan and later in suburban New Rochelle, for Elia's father was prospering as a rug merchant. Despite his father's success, however, Kazan insists that both his parents remained incorrigible "foreigners" who "lived here in suspicion and fear and never gained secure positions in this society." As for young Elia, he quickly became convinced that in order to survive on the streets and in school, he would have to do whatever was necessary to gain the favor of authority figures, be they adults or kids of his own age. During his undergraduate years at Williams College, where the big men on campus erroneously assumed he was a Jew and didn't pledge him to a fraternity, let alone introduce him to the leggy blondes who appeared in their company at weekend dances, his own "Anatolian Smile" seldom left his face. In his dealings with fellow graduate students at the Yale Drama School in the early 1930s he continued to rely on the ingratiating techniques of his boyhood, and he kept on doing so, he affirms, throughout his subsequent struggle to win a place for himself in the Group Theatre, a left-wing drama collective that Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford had formed.
Just as the adolescent Elia had enlisted in a Boy Scout troop for sycophantic reasons, so in his Group Theatre days he joined the Communist Party, not because he "gave a damn" about the party's ideals, but yet once again because of his terrible need to "be in good with ... power
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