Incaution on A Grand Scale ELIA KAZAN: A LIFE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

"I imagine that, from time to time, you've thought my book unfair, ugly, and hateful," writes Elia Kazan, 78, toward the end of this bustling, bruising autobiography. "Here and there it is vulgar too." Well, er, yes, now that you mention it . . .

By this time, though, it is too late to cop a simple, honesty-is-the-best- pol icy plea for the work. Those who wholeheartedly agree with the author's self-review will have long since slipped out of the auditorium muttering to themselves. For those still glued to their chairs, a corollary to an old adage will probably have occurred: if it is still true that the only life worth living is the examined one, it may be that in 20th century America the only life worth examining is the headlong one. Incaution on the scale that Kazan has practiced it is now a rarity, not only in the arts but everywhere else in our public life. So is the range of Kazan's achievements, both authentic and dubious.

His first substantial recognition was as an actor playing a "Proletariat Thunderbolt" in the Group Theater's legendary Waiting for Lefty in 1935. More recently he has been dismissed as an "extinct volcano." Between those two notices he became what no American had ever been before, the dominant directorial force in both theater and film. His productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman defined Broadway's highest aspirations in the 1940s, and On the Waterfront did the same for American movies of the 1950s. In that period he also conceived and co-founded the most influential teaching institution in U.S. theater history, the Actors Studio. In addition, he earned the strident scorn of the Stalinist left and the enduring suspicion of simple-hearted followers of the party line because he was one of the most + prominent and least apologetic figures to name former Communist colleagues before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) when it was investigating the party's activities in show business. In the '60s he would absorb much of the blame for the failed first attempt to establish a repertory theater at New York City's Lincoln Center and amaze himself, among others, by becoming a best-selling novelist (The Arrangement).

A sense of worthlessness, Kazan says, is what drove him. It stemmed from his foreignness (he immigrated to the U.S. with his Greek parents when he was four); his lack of social status at Williams College, which he worked his way through as a fraternity-house waiter; and his lack of visible talent at the Yale Drama School. He acquired his nickname, Gadget (latterly Gadg), because the Group Theater people found him such a handy little guy to have around, "doing whatever I had to do to gain the tolerance, the friendship, and the protection of the authority figures in my life." He admits that it was this adaptability that led him to join a Communist cell, which contained some of the theater's more influential members, and it may not be unfair to speculate that his behavior before HUAC derived from the same source.

Harold Clurman, a director of the Group Theater, informed Kazan that his only gift was excessive energy. But that, of course, is a quality too often underestimated by intellectuals. Combined with his survivor's shrewdness in observing the behavior that betrays motives, it is what gave his productions both realism and driving power. Above all, it is what enabled him to survive the contempt heaped on him after his HUAC testimony. This is how he remembers his interior monologue at the time, addressed to his critics: "You can't hurt me; you haven't penetrated my guard; I can beat you at any game you choose to play, because I may not be smarter than you or more talented, but I never get tired and you do."

No conventional marriage -- for that matter, no conventional relationship of any kind -- could contain a natural force as powerful as Kazan's. If there is, indeed, something "ugly" in his book, it is his account of his 30 years with his first wife, Molly. She was a Yankee of the old-fashioned kind, high- principled and strong-minded. Her acceptance of him was, Kazan admits, the first sign that he might amount to something; her support and the stable home she provided were vital to his success. Yet he betrayed her constantly, in an obsessive love affair with Actress Constance Dowling that took years to unwind, and before, during and after that in more brief affairs than he can count or recount -- including one with a cheerfully complaisant Marilyn Monroe. "Sick," Kazan pronounces, then adds, "People make fun of the male crisis at 45. I had that crisis all my life. I knew there was more to life than I was getting, and I didn't want to miss out on anything."

That is Kazan's truest tone -- flat and harsh, undercutting his own attempts at rationalization with the bitterly truthful ring he cannot keep out of his voice. It is the voice of a man with no patience for poetry (he confesses that when he staged Archibald MacLeish's J.B. he simply moved the actors whenever he was bored, which was approximately every three lines) and no patience for ideological impositions, intellectual cant or institutional stability. It is perhaps a peasant's voice, valuing survival above all. But surely it is an actor's voice, one that knows it is impossible -- and finally maddening -- to play the same role the same way day after day. However you value the life it recounts, that voice is as compelling and seductive as any you are likely to hear this season.