Artists and Stereotypes: Thomas Wolfe's Acquaintance with Clifford Odets (Biography‪)‬

While much biographical scholarship on Thomas Wolfe has been published over the last seventy years, only a few of the numerous studies mention his brief mid-1930s acquaintance with Jewish playwright Clifford Odets. Most biographers name-drop Odets either to establish that Wolfe knew him, as does David Herbert Donald when he writes--erroneously--that Odets "begged him to endorse his new play, Clash by Night" (435), (1) or to discuss Wolfe's thoughts on Communism, as does Henry Volkening. Volkening's notes for "Tom Wolfe: Penance No More" (2) state that Wolfe "disliked those who associated themselves with 'movements,' who wanted to make literature subserve Communism, etc., as for example Clifford Odets, whom Tom thought absurd" (qtd. in Bruccoli and Bruccoli 83). However, in the most recent biography of the writer, Thomas Wolfe: When Do the Atrocities Begin? (2007), Joanne Marshall Mauldin provides a more detailed picture of Odets, one that relies heavily on stereotypes that dogged the playwright throughout his career. She describes him as being "Hollywood-and New York-oriented, promiscuous, self-centered, self-destructive," one whose personality traits--especially when coupled with his professional insecurities--mirrored Wolfe's own (179-80). Even though she freely admits the writers' similarities, Mauldin needlessly maligns Odets in chapter 8 of her book. In discussing Wolfe's funeral, she accuses the playwright of "showboating" (188), claiming that "self-aggrandizement had everything to do with Odets coming to Wolfe's funeral" (180). This accusation is especially harsh and unfair. While Odets did "deliberately rub elbows with famous and successful people" throughout his life in order to boost his self-worth and "to win their public support" (Brenman-Gibson 384n), his feelings for Wolfe ran much deeper than Mauldin acknowledges. By the time Odets wrote his article "When Wolfe Came Home" for the New York Times in 1958, he had developed a feeling of kinship with the novelist's artistic passion and personal loneliness that went beyond merely using him to further his own artistic success. Like Wolfe, Odets realized that contemporary critics had reduced him to a caricature that would prove damaging to his artistic legacy. Unfortunately, the perception of Odets as a Communist writer who sold out to the lucre of Hollywood made him easy fodder for literary scholarship in much the same way that Wolfe's ungainly size had been used against him. Many theatre critics and playgoers were disappointed that the Great White Hope of Broadway--so deemed by Time magazine in December 1938 (3) --turned from the brilliance of writing socially conscious, agitprop plays that celebrated the working class to being a mere Hollywood hack who, during the 1940s, worked on popular movies in order to feed his growing family. Unfortunately, hostile feelings still affect discussions of Odets today, continuing, as in Wolfe's case, to obscure a complex artist with a one-dimensional caricature. Odets's knowledge that he shared a critical fate similar to Wolfe's made their brief acquaintance hold special meaning for him late in his life.