I bounce around a lot between reading books and articles, which means sometimes it takes me years to finish a given book. (After three years, I finally finished Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which I must be among the tardiest to recommend.)
The various platforms of Kindle have been a big help. My wife, Kristine, recently gave me (and insisted I use) an iPhone 5 on which I installed a Kindle app. I didn't expect to use it much. Even when reading digitally, I like to look at something that looks like a page, and reading a paragraph or two at a time on a small screen struck me like trying to eat a bowl of soup with a tea spoon. But it turns out that it works just fine for certain kinds of books. It seems to be a good match with The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan, a bite-sized format for bite-sized communications.
I'm midway through it and haven't read the letter that excited the most comment when the book was first published, a letter he wrote to his wife Molly telling her he's slept with Marilyn Monroe and that he's unapologetic about it, but hopes Molly won't be so foolish as to divorce him.
I am as interested in the sex lives of the talented and famous as most other people, but what has grabbed me so far about the book is a chance to be exposed to his private voice. I grew up admiring Kazan's movies. I felt I'd stumbled on someone who spoke for me. (I was a teeanger.) Then I found out about his informing during the McCarthy era and went through a period of feeling betrayed.
Reading the letters, I am still very disappointed indeed by that chapter in his life, but what compels is the various voices that emerge from him depending on who is the correspondent. In letters to Jack Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck, he is filled with compliments about their wisdom; in letters to others he writes about what assholes Warner and Zanuck are. He makes casual references to "fags," but he corresponds with Tennessee Williams with an intimacy and a rare sympathy for his friend's challenges and difficulties.
The letter which made a particular impression on me recently was one to his wife in which he talks about his dismay at looking at his film adaptation of John Steinbeck's East of Eden. He has convinced himself that it's a bad picture and he goes into detail about what the thinks is a thematic muddle he should have caught. The film, of course, was very warmly received and God knows the students I showed it to in the spring were caught up by it.
It is thematic muddle he's warning against in the letters I'm currently reading to Tennessee Williams in preparation of staging the premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I knew, of course, that Kazan had pressured Williams to do some drastic surgery on Cat. (In fact, Williams published Cat with two different thirds acts -- the one he had originally written and the one Kazan urged him to write.) The correspondence, which reveals Kazan's considerable dramaturgical skills, illuminates the issues they had to resolve before Kazan was willing to commit to directing the play.
It seems that whenever I read a book, ancillary material drifts into view. My friend, actor-journalist Gary Houston, sent along an old review of a Chicago production of Arthur Miller's After the Fall. The review is by an old acquaintance named Larry Bommer, and it does much to explain why the play is a disaster. The play is something Miller protested was not autobiographic. The second act is his thinly-disguised version of what went wrong with his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. The first act is about a friend who named names to Congress during the McCarthy era. That friend is easy to identify as Kazan. And, of course, he asked Kazan to direct it and Kazan did.
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