5 - Elmer Rice and the cinematic imagination

Summary

In a letter dated 21 august 1922, postmarked east hampton, Elmer Rice writes his boyhood friend and legal counsel Frank Harris to say that he has just emerged from an experience that has left him “limp.” “It was grand though!” he declares. “The best time I've had in years and years.” The experience to which he refers was the intense composition of his expressionist work The Adding Machine (1922; 1923), a play he wrote in only seventeen days. “It's very different from anything I've ever done,” he notes. “It's new – a radical departure in technique and subject matter (for me, at any rate).” Although he goes on to admit that he doesn't know whether the play is any good, he enthuses that it was “the most spontaneous, the most deeply-felt thing I've ever done.”

For the moment, then, I'm out of the bog in which I've been floundering. The sense of frustration which has been choking me for four years has abated. I actually feel a consciousness of liberation, a relief from a state of psychic congestion which I cannot help believing strongly akin to that physical congestion which the physiologists tell us finds relief in a sexual orgasm. This may strike you as far-fetched, but it comes nearer to conveying my present condition than anything else that occurs to me.

(letter 8/21/22)