ELIA KAZAN: From the Periphery to the Centre

ELIA KAZAN: From the Periphery to the Centre

Mr. Kazan's first novel in 1962, America America, retraced the odyssey of an uncle, a Greek youth, who fled the poverty and persecution of Turkey and reached America despite numbing setbacks. The book was a best seller, and Bosley Crowther of The Times called Mr. Kazan's movie version one of the 10 best films of 1963. Kazan, by 1963, was a famous film and theatre director, but most people then and now do not know the names of film directors.

In 2003 Elia Kazan died at the age of 94. He was an influential director in film and theatre1 even if not that well known in the world of popular culture. Back in 1962 my own odyssey had just begun both in the Canadian Baha'i community, and in the community of higher education. I have remained in both these communities, in a wide variety of ways, for the rest of my life although, for the most part, in Australia after a brief decade in Canada.

Part 2:

In August 1962 my parents and I moved from what was then the small town of Burlington to another small town, Dundas Ontario. My father, then 72, and my mother, then 58, helped to form Dundas's first locally elected Baha'i council, This council is known as a spiritual assembly. I also did my matriculation, my grade 13 as it is called in Ontario, in 1962-1963. That year was the most demanding of my many years of academic life.

Many parents even then were trying to get rid of that 5th year of high school. The Ontario education system had five years of secondary education, known as Grade 13 from 1921 to 1988; grade 13 was replaced by Ontario Academic Credit (OAC) for students starting high school in grade 9 in 1984. OAC continued to act as a fifth year of secondary education until it was phased out in 2003, the same year Kazan died.

Both my Baha'i story and my grade 13 story are quite complex as they weaved their webs over the next four decades. I leave it to readers with the interest to Google to their hearts' content if they want to know what happened in these parts of my life-narrative.

Part 3:
Kazan was always far out on the periphery of my life even though he was one of the most famous film and theatre directors of the post WW2 age, the age which was my life. When his autobiography was published in 1988, Elia Kazan: A Life, I had just begun a lecturing job at a technical college in the CBD of Perth Western Australia. I also had a demanding life of several responsibilities in the Perth Baha'i community of some 1500, to say nothing of my tasks and duties as a parent and a father, a friend and a colleague. Kazan remained on the periphery of my 60 to 80 hours a week of various nose-to-the-grindstone occupations and obligations.

When Kazan died in 2003 I had retired from FT and PT work, had taken a sea-change as it is sometimes called, and was also slowly withdrawing from as much casual and volunteer activity as possible in order to reinvent myself as a writer and author, poet and publisher, online blogger and journalist, editor and researcher, reader and scholar. I was nearly 60 in 2003, and I had begun to organize my post-employment literary and scholarly life.

By the time The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan were published in 20142 I had been making the study of the collected letters of the famous people of history, mostly modern history, part of my literary life for 20 years: 1994 to 2014. Kazan had finally moved to the centre from the periphery. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Mervyn Rothstein in The New York Times, 29/9/'0 3, and 2Frank Rich, "A Review of The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan," The New York Review of Books, 4 November 2014.

Part 4:

When you got that Oscar
in 1999, just as I pulled-
the-plug from my 50 year
student-and-employment
life, you had not arrived
in my life, a life far from
the aimless & artistically
spent life that both you &
I experienced from time to
time as we each pursued our
relentless achievements and
objectives, goals & purposes
with an unstoppable drive, a
restless energy, and efforts to
find a rapport that would help
us be the nice guys whom many
people would like as we were driven
with an urgency within complicated
personalities, & our hardly existing
guilt, our tendency not to accept the
view which other people had of us.1

My conflict which began in 19522.3,
and yours, the same year, remained
with us all our lives, but followed a
quite different and circuitous route
through thousands of relationships.2.1//2.2

Part 5:

1 The view that other people have had of me, and of Kazan, varied from lavish praise to quite intense criticism. As I reflect on 70 years of being on the receiving end of the views that others have had of me, I find the subject is highly complex and I deal with that subject often in my memoirs, my autobiography and my several genres of writing. I will not deal with the details of that subject here.

2.1 Until his death, Kazan remained controversial in some circles for testimony he gave before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1952, a period that many, such as journalist Michael Mills, feel was "the most controversial period in Hollywood history." When he was in his mid 20s, during the Depression years 1934 to 1936, he had been a member of the American Communist Party in New York, for a year and a half. In April 1952, the Committee called on Kazan, under oath, to identify Communists from that period 16 years earlier. Kazan initially refused to provide names, but eventually named eight former Group Theatre members whom he said had been Communists. All the persons named were already known to HUAC, however. The move cost Kazan many friends within the film industry, including playwright Arthur Miller and actor Marlon Brando.

2.2 Until my death I will remain a member of the Baha'i community. The road, the journey, has had many high points and many low ones. It has taken me to the depths of despair and the heights of ecstacy. I have often wondered how much of this emotional roller-coaster has been due to my bipolar disorder.

When the world-embracing Spiritual Crusade was announced in October 1952, my mother had just begun to attend Baha'i activities in the small town of Burlington Ontario. I was only 8 years old. There were between 300 and 400 Baha'is in all of Canada and, perhaps, 200 thousand in the world, at the time.

2.3 My conflict, at least as I now see it in retrospect, was essentially a spiritual battle which will not end until my death.

2.3.1 Shoghi Effendi, in a telegram he wrote in October 1952, linked the completion of this decade-long enterprise, this crusade, with the fulfilment of Daniel's prophecy:

LET THEM AS THEY ENTER IT VOW ONE VOICE ONE HEART ONE SOUL NEVER TURN BACK ENTIRE COURSE FATEFUL DECADE AHEAD UNTIL EACH EVERY ONE WILL HAVE CONTRIBUTED SHARE LAYING ON WORLD-WIDE SCALE AN UNASSAILABLE ADMINISTRATIVE FOUNDATION FOR BAHA'U'LLAH'S CHRIST-PROMISED KINGDOM ON EARTH SWELLING THEREBY CHORUS UNIVERSAL JUBILATION WHEREIN EARTH HEAVEN WILL JOIN AS PROPHESIED DANIEL ECHOED `ABDU'L-BAHA ON THAT DAY WILL FAITHFUL REJOICE WITH EXCEEDING GLADNESS.-Messages to the Bahá'í World, 1950-1957, Wilmette, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1971, p. 44.

Thereafter the fulfilment of Daniel's prophecy, concerning the 1,335 days, became associated with the end of the Ten Year Crusade in 1963. In a letter dated 9 February 1953 on behalf of Shoghi Effendi to a group of Bahá'ís, for example, his secretary wrote:

"The purpose of the International Conferences, scheduled to take place during 1953, will be the world-wide propagation of the Faith. These Conferences will lay the foundations of the service of the Bahá'ís of the world for the great Ten Year Crusade ahead. God willing, this crusade will be consummated in the fulfilment of the prophecies of Daniel, and the achievement of the initial goals set by `Abdu'l-Bahá in the Tablets of the Divine Plan, whereby the world will be flooded with the Glory of the Lord." The year 1963 was also my first full year as a pioneer-traveller for the Canadian Baha'i community.

Ron Price
19/10/'14.