Mr. Bonaparte was wrong and so was Marion Castle. No man is so simply made that he has a single nature which a wrong turn can violate. The violation, too, is in his nature. Both fist and fiddle were natural to Joe; both Hollywood and the escape from it were necessary to Charlie. The observer in Odets knew this; the idealist, the idealogue did not want to know. Alter the circumstances, rearrange the environment, brick off the false choices, said the latter, and the natural man will flower; home, love, happiness will become possible. This assumption had personal and artistic consequences for Odets.
He was a restless man. In his work and in his life, we can see the vacillation between a home which turns out to be a trap and a promised land that fails to keep its promises. That comic figure, the radical playwright in the fashionable Hollywood restaurant, is an oblique image for the artist who never found consolation in his art. The idealist in Odets could point Ralph toward the future, but the observer in him, who could see the self-pity and the weakness in the character, also knew that the making of Awake and Sing! did not bring peace. Odets did what was "ina [his] nature to do" and it was not enough. He ran, in disappointment, to Hollywood and ran back, in guilt, to the stage. "A job is a home to a homeless man," says Bernie in The Country Girl, but he is looking around for a real home or its equivalent in Georgie. Odets was still coping with the homelessness of art at the end of his life…. In an odd piece he wrote for Show, half fiction, half sociology, the profile of a mythical movie star, Odets quoted his friend Jean Renoir. The lines are aimed at the actor, but since he is Odets's invention, it is safe to assume that they were at some time spoken to the inventor himself: "Maybe, my friend, when you were given so many other gifts, you must grow used to the fact that happiness is not among them."
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