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By Ice, Fire or Decay?

Paradise Lost: A Play in Three Acts by Clifford Odets. Random House

The New Republic 86. April 1936. Also in The Philosophy of Literary Form

After having been led, by the explicitly formulated objections of some dissenters, to expect that I would dislike Odets’ “Paradise Lost,” I finally went to see it, and liked it enormously. I even found that the scandalous number of entrances and exits did not bother me, except in a few instances where the action was not paralleled by a similar movement in the lines themselves. And though I had in the past complained against propagandists who compromised their cause by the depiction of people not worth saving, and had been led to believe that Odets transgressed on this score, I found on the contrary that the characters, for all their ills, possessed the ingredients of humanity necessary for making us sympathetic to their disasters. To me there was nothing arbitrary about the prophetic rebirth in Leo’s final speech. And as I had witnessed, not pedestrian realism, but the idealizations of an expert stylist, I carried away something of the exhilaration that good art gives us when, by the ingratiations of style, it enables us to contemplate even abhorrent things with calmness.

The opportunity to examine the play in print has even heightened my admiration, by revealing the subtlety, complexity and depths of the internal adjustments. For all his conscious symbolism, the author has not merely pieced together a modern allegory. His work seems to embody ritualistic processes that he himself was not specifically concerned with—and I want to discuss them briefly.

At the close of Act I, as the characters listen to Pearl playing the piano upstairs, Gus says: “And when the last day comes—by ice or fire—she’ll be up there playin’ away.” I consider this the “informing” line of the play. “By ice or fire.” It is interesting that, in The Partisan Review, James T. Farrell, who wrote a book called Judgment Day, should have objected to a work having this eschatological theme as its point of departure. But Farrell is in the stage of pure antithesis, turning his old Catholicism upside down—and hence preferring, for the time at least, the simple, hard-boiled reversal of his religious past. Odets may be more complex, admitting elements that Farrell could not admit without a corresponding expansion of his esthetic frame. Farrell’s resistance is justified on the grounds of self-preservation, rather than as a mature act of critical appraisal.

Along with the “ice or fire” epigram, I should note the significant credo of Pike who, within the conditions of the play, comes nearest to the “proletarian” philosophy: “I’m sayin’ the smell of decay may sometimes be a sweet smell.” And taking these two passages as seminal, I should say that the play deals with three modes of “redemption”—redemption by ice, fire or decay—and finally chooses the third. Like certain ancient heresies, it pictures the “good” arising from the complete excess of the “bad,” as the new growth sprouts from the rotting of the seed.

The first act rejects “redemption by ice.” In its simplest objectivization, we find the situation placed before our eyes in the form of Ben’s statue on the stage. The friends, Ben and Kewpie, had been under ice together; they had been skating with a third boy, when the ice broke and their friend had drowned. The spell of this “life-in-death” is still upon them. As Ben formulates it later: “We’re still under ice, you and me—we never escaped!” And again: “‘Did we die there?’ I keep asking myself, ‘or are we living?’ “ The first act establishes this situation—and Acts II and III show us the author’s attempts to shape a magic incantation whereby the spell is broken.

Act II, by my analysis, considers and rejects “redemption by fire.” It is in this way that I would locate the symbolic element underlying the remarkable realism of Mr. May, the professional firebug. Leo refuses to accept his impotent partner Sam’s proposal that they solve their financial troubles by employing this man. But Pike, the proletarian furnace tender (who would thaw the ice), had proclaimed his belief in “redemption by decay.” He is thus the bridge between Sam’s fire solution and Leo’s rebirth from decay. And we complete the pattern in the third act where, as the process of decay is finished, Leo’s prophecy of rebirth sprouts from the rotted grain, and the curtain descends.

I might note other features of the internal organization. Thus, Pike’s mere entrance at times foreshadows the “fatality” of the plot. For he knocks at the door (1) just as Julie has said, “When the time comes—” (2) when Gus has said he would like to “go far away to the South Sea islands and eat coconuts,” and (3) when, Clara having asked “Is it the end?” Leo has answered, “Not yet.” At these crucial moments, Pike’s message is in the offing. But whereas the message remains the same throughout the play, Leo (the “father”) must assimilate it in his own way, as he does by conscientiously completing the symbolism of the rotting grain. (The same basic pattern of thought may be seen in the “conscientious corruption” of Andre Gide, who has significantly entitled his autobiography “Si le grain ne meurt.”)

Approached from this angle, Krutch’s doubts as to the play’s statistical value (its actuarial truth as a survey of the bourgeoisie) may seem less relevant. If a poet happens to have the sort of imagination that revivifies an old heresy in modern details, how would he go about it to put this imaginative pattern into objective, dramatic form? At other times, he might have externalized the pattern as a struggle between angels and demons, or between Indians and settlers, or between patriot and foe, or in the “war of the sexes,” etc. At present, in keeping with current emphasis, he may symbolize it with relation to an interpretation of historic trends, where its “prophetic” truth is enough. Incidentally, the subjective origin of the pattern need not impair the objective validity of the symbols used. If the bourgeoisie is oppressed by loss of certainty, one may have many good objective reasons for externalizing the pattern of his imagination in this form, particularly as the pattern itself may have been established in the individual poet precisely by the effects of the same frustrating process.

Our approach also may have bearing upon the comments of Stanley Burnshaw, who observed in The New Masses that the play erred as political strategy. Inasmuch as the proletariat must expect the petty bourgeoisie to become its allies, he asks, how could people so decayed have the vitality to assist in the tremendous work of establishing a new order? This objection is justified only if one does not believe in the Odets formula for redemption, remembering only the ash and not the Phoenix that arises from the ash. But if one follows the Odets ritual to the end, the objection is weakened. By the Marxist formula, the complete “proletarian” would require no process of rebirth. He would grow up with his morality. He and it would be one. But the bourgeois would have to “come over,” dropping the morality that made him and taking another in its place. Converting the situation into drama, we should require rebirth, the ritualistic changing of identity, rather than merely a superficial matter of climbing off one band-wagon and climbing on another. And we should require the dramatist to deepen and broaden the process as greatly as possible.

Thus, I question whether we can appreciate the play by a simple “scientific” test of its truth, as in Farrell’s naturalistic bias, Krutch’s census-taking requirements or Burnshaw’s question of united-front tactics. A more integral test is to be found, I submit, in a consideration of the play as ritual. And those who respond to its ritual will be enabled to entertain drastic developments, without drawing simply upon a masochistic desire to be punished.

Criticism of Poetry

Once when I was analyzing the symbolism of sun and moon in Coleridge’s poem, ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ a student raised this objection: ‘I’m tired of hearing about the symbolic sun in poems, I want a poem that has the real sun in it.’

Answer: If anybody ever turns up with a poem that has the real sun in it, you’d better be about ninety-three million miles away. We were having a hot summer as it was, and I certainly didn’t want anyone bringing the real sun into the classroom.

—The Rhetoric of Religion (9)