“So much precious time goes by and it seems to me I get so little out of it,” Elia Kazan wrote to John Steinbeck in 1955. “I ask myself is this it? Is this why? Is this what I wanted to do? Is this why I accumulated what dough I have. I feel like a highly publicized meal ticket, some of the time, doing what the hell my wife and family and society expects of me and not at all — since I dont think originally enough — what I’d like to do. I can imagine great excitement to life again. But something prevents my going after it.”
Kazan’s sense of feeling aimless and artistically spent was rare for this relentless achiever, but certainly understandable. The letter was written when he was 45, midway through a life that would span almost another half-century. (He died in 2003.) But by this juncture Kazan had already amassed a momentous body of work in theater and film that testifies to his unstoppable drive and restless energy, qualities that spring from almost every page of “The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan,” a meaty volume edited by Albert J. Devlin with Marlene J. Devlin. (That “dont,” by the way, was Kazan’s: He couldn’t be bothered with properly punctuating contractions most of the time, as if life were too short for apostrophes.)
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