Neither Bessie nor this man have much to do with the main action of the play. There is a question in my mind as to whether they really do much to illuminate it, but we will discuss this in a moment. In the course of the play, Bessie Smith dies offstage and this is the extent, on the surface, anyway, of her connection with this drama.
The play’s principal concern—I think—is with the character of a white Southern nurse. “Character” is perhaps not quite the word I want; rarely has less character been presented at greater or more unsympathetic length. I hesitate, possibly because I am a coward, to suppose this creature is intended, in any way, to represent the fair ladies of the South. And yet, she is clearly of no interest in herself, except clinically; and I must add that as I watched her, my own memories of Southern faces came flooding back, bringing with them the near-certainty that this horror, this emptiness, might very well be what the Southern face—and particularly the faces of the women—hide. I imagine that anyone who is old enough will not fail to be reminded of the faces and the personalities of the women who accused the Scottsboro boys of rape.
We first encounter this woman with her father—and they deserve each other—on the porch of their home. She is icily and methodically, and not for the first time—they certainly have nothing else to talk about—puncturing his delusions as to his person, his political ambitions, and his friendship with the mayor, who is a patient in the hospital where she works on the admissions desk.
The relationship between the father and daughter is absolutely unspeakable, as are almost all the other relationships in this play; but I was puzzled as to what, precisely, Mr. Albee wished me to make of it. It is a relationship which, like the character of the nurse, is really of no interest in itself, it being doomed, by the lack of resources in the people, to be static. They will have this conversation over and over, then they will die, or the curtain will fall: and what either we or they have learned in the meantime is a question.
It may be that Mr. Albee’s intention was to reveal, as forcefully as possible, the depth of the Southern poverty and paranoia, and the extent of the sexual ruin. But if this is so, then I think he has miscalculated.
I sympathize with him in the dilemma to which his raw material, his personages, have drawn him. I am an American writer, too, and I know how it sets the teeth on edge to try to create, out of people clearly incapable of it—incapable of self-examination, of thought, or literally, of speech— drama that will reveal them. But the solution is not, to my mind, to present these people as they see themselves or as they are; we must be enabled to see them as they have been or as they might become; otherwise, we merely judge them as specimens and feel nothing for them as human beings.
It has, perhaps, never been more difficult than it is now to illuminate the person beleaguered and bewildered by the irresponsibility and provincialism and worship of mediocrity which he, in his innocence, mistakes for democracy. On the other hand, it has possibly never been more important. So that I do not object to the deadly, hysterical stasis of the nurse, but to the fact that Mr. Albee never forces me to identify her inhumanity, her poverty, her terror, with my own.
For, in essence, the passionless brimstone exchanges which open the play are the play: the tone never changes, and we never learn very much more about the nurse, or the other people in the play, or about the community in which the action takes place. There is an arresting sequence between the nurse and a Negro orderly; but I must confess that the intention here was hopelessly muddled for me by the casting—I could not tell, at once, whether Harold Scott was playing a white man or a light Negro; and when it was clear that he was playing a Negro, I found myself distracted by the question of whether any Negro in the Deep South would so expose himself to this white witch. I did not know what to make of the intern, a dull type at best, it seemed to me; and whatever sympathy I might have been expected to feel for him was demolished by his incomprehensible passion to take the nurse to bed. (Whatever for?) This leaves, I believe, only the brief appearance of another, wonderfully distracted nurse, the offstage Bessie, and her last paramour.
And here, again, either I have totally misunderstood Mr. Albee’s intention, or he has miscalculated. I expected, at some point in the play, some ruthless flash which would illuminate the contrast between the wonderfully reckless life and terrible death of Bessie Smith and the whited sepulchre in which the nurse is writhing. But this does not happen. Bessie Smith bleeds to death, the nurse is the only character who knows who she is—earlier, her father had protested her addiction to “nigger” music—and the nurse succumbs to hysteria. She announces that she, too, can sing and, horribly, tries.
I think I understand Mr. Albee’s intention here, all right, but I think it fails of its effect: because there is no agony in it. People pay for the lives they lead and the crimes they commit and the blood-guiltiness from which they flee, whether they know they do or not. The effort not to know what one knows is the most corrupting effort one can make—which the nurse abundantly proves. But the anguish which comes when the buried knowledge begins to force itself to the light—which must be what is happening to the nurse upon the death of Bessie Smith—has driven countless thousands to madness or murder or grace, but certainly far beyond hysteria.
The American Dream turns out to be the gelded youth so admired here and now. It presents a much more bland and amusing surface, but can scarcely qualify, obviously, as a funny play. Its vision of the antiseptic passivity of American life, and the resulting death of the masculine sensibility, makes it more closely resemble a nightmare. I cannot synopsize this play, which offers even less in the way of story (and even more in the way of incident) than Bessie Smith. It begins at a marvelous clip, making its deadly observations with a salty, impertinent speed. (“I’ve got a right to all your money when you die,” says Mommy to Daddy, “because I used to let you lie on top of me and bump your uglies.” Daddy, needless to say, has long since given that up.) But it goes flat about halfway and finally surrenders much too quietly.
I came away with the feeling that it was a far better play than the author realized, and that he had given it up much too soon. Or that both plays were exercises, notes for work which Mr. Albee has yet to do. I imagine that he will find it necessary to do much more violence to theatrical forms than he has so far done if he is to get his story told.
It is possible that what I am really complaining about here is a certain coldness, intrinsic to Albee, which will always mar his work. But I doubt this. For one thing, the venom which has gone into the portraits of the nurse in Bessie Smith, and the parents in American Dream does not argue too great a detachment, but too indignant a distaste. And he has a strange way with language, a beat which is entirely his, which may be controlled by the head, but which seems to be dictated from the guts.
(1961)
Is A Raisin in the Sun a Lemon in the Dark?
This piece was written for Tone magazine as a rebuttal to a negative piece written by Chicago writer Nelson Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm, 1949).
Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965), a native of Chicago, was an acclaimed African-American author and playwright. She is best known for her landmark play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), which was the first play on Broadway written by a black woman and the first directed by a black man (Lloyd Richards). The leading male role was played by Sidney Poitier, who revived it for the 1961 movie version. Hansberry and Baldwin became good friends.
Interestingly enough, Baldwin had a rather contentious relationship with Richard Wright (1908–1960), author of the award-winning, best-selling novel Native Son (1940), upon which the play of the same name was based, a dramatic collaboration between Wright and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Paul Green. Orson Welles directed the first incarnation back in 1941. Wright had been Baldwin’s first big literary mentor—his hero, in fact—but Baldwin later would attack Wright’s work in print, accusing it of being a prime example of “protest fiction,” something Baldwin viewed as agitprop and inferior to high art. After Wrig
ht’s death Baldwin would lament their lapsed friendship and claim that he had only been trying to impress Wright by being a “good student.”
· · ·
BOTH Native Son and A Raisin in the Sun are flawed pieces of work, though this is clearly not the point of Mr. Algren’s argument. I do not place Native Son as highly as he does, and he claims too much for Richard Wright, who never found out many of the things Mr. Algren authoritatively speaks of him as “knowing.” Neither do I think that A Raisin in the Sun is the meretricious creation he takes it to be. Furthermore, unlike Mr. Algren, I find a profound connection between the two works, and even certain rather obvious similarities.
This, naturally, has everything to do with the difference between my point of view and Algren’s. Only politically, for example, does his rhetoric about being “rightful members of company of men” make any sense to me. Personally and artistically, it seems to me that this problem presents itself in ways which make the use of the word “rightful” rather questionable, if not rather terrifying.
In my own reading of Native Son, it seems to me that where the polemic is most strong, the novel is least true; and, conversely, that the real fury of the novel tends to complicate and compromise and finally, indeed, to invalidate the novelist’s social and political attitudes.
A Raisin in the Sun is not nearly so massive and it would seem to be far less angry. But this last is not the case. It is a very angry play indeed, and to say that it is angry about real estate is like saying that Native Son is angry about airplanes. Bigger Thomas, you will remember, stands about on Chicago’s street corners watching the airplanes flown by white men, wishing to rise into that sky. There are long exchanges between himself and his buddies, in which they pretend to be powerful, rich, white tycoons—“one of America’s bald-headed men” is the way the sister in Miss Hansberry’s play puts it, taunting her ambitious and conceited brother. The great flaw in Native Son is, it seems to me, involved with Wright’s attempt to illuminate ruthlessly as unprecedented a creation as Bigger by means of the stock characters of Jan, the murdered girl’s lover, and Max, the white lawyer. The force of Bigger’s reality makes it impossible to believe in these two; though one can, of course, protect oneself against Bigger’s reality by clinging to these shadowy and familiar figures; which is, indeed, in the event, what happened.
And the flaw in Raisin is not really very different. It involves the juxtaposition of the essentially stock—certainly familiar—figure of the mother with the intense (and unprecedented) figure of Walter Lee. Most Americans do not know that he exists. From the point of view of someone who knows that he exists and how bitter his life is, I could wish that the role of Lena Younger had been written with greater ambiguity. Part of the corrosive ambiguity of his mother’s role in his life. This brings up the whole question of the role of the mother in Negro life, and the peculiar and horrible problems of the Negro woman. This theme is never overtly stated, but it runs throughout the play. Each of the women, the mother, the wife, and the daughter, are, on their own levels, grappling with the problem of how to create a haven of safety for Walter, so that he can be a man, play a man’s role in the world, and yet not be destroyed. It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things. Every Negro woman knows what her man faces when he goes out to work, and what poison he will probably bring back. There is no guarantee that she will always be able to suck the poison out of him; the more particularly as the male’s aspirations, and his failures, are so thoroughly bound up with herself. And if he is living where Walter lives, with a “dream” of buying a liquor store, flying an airplane, buying pearls for his wife, hitting the number—the entire family teeters on the edge of disaster. With every move he makes to bring the dream closer, disaster becomes more probable. On the other hand, should the dream fade, he fades with it; so do they, the women: and disaster has overcome them.
This is the reason that Walter’s wife wearily tells him to eat his eggs. It is the reason his sister is so quick to turn on the brother she loves: she does not dare to trust his manhood, for it has no power in the world, and cannot protect her. And it is the reason, of course, that the mother plays so dominant a role in all their lives. She has been able to work when her husband could not find work. (All over the nation, at this moment, white matrons are extolling their maids and deploring their “no count” husbands). She has known what waited for Walter since his eyes opened on the world, and has tried to protect him from it. How can he fail, then, at the age of thirty-five, with his wife aging, and his son growing up, to flail about him like a man in a trap? For he is in a trap. And why, may I ask, and how, should his dreams be more noble than those of anyone else in this sad place? He is not presented, after all, as exceptional, merely as struggling—which is, perhaps, all things considered, quite exceptional enough.
I am not myself terribly worried about color TV and split-level houses, etc., since I consider my life to be already sufficiently compromised by the garbage of this century. My own rather melancholy feeling is that as long as people want these things, they will do everything in their power to get them; when they want something better, they will make it; all I can do in the meantime, it seems to me, is attempt to prove, by hard precept and harder example, that people can be better than they are. I see no point in railing against the American middle class as such. They are a pretty sorry lot, God knows, but they are suffering here in their tawdry splendor. What one has to do, I think, is undermine the standards by which they imagine themselves to live. As for the rise of the Negro into the middle class, I am not certain that what is happening in this country can be summed up quite so neatly. It doesn’t look much like a rise to me; it looks more like an insane rout, with white people fleeing to the suburbs of cities, hotly pursued by Negroes. In any case, by the time anything we can comfortably speak of as a “rise” has occurred, this country will be, for better or worse, unrecognizable.
Well, I think I may be running out of space. But I do not know what Mr. Algren has in mind when he speaks of the right of the Negro to be himself. What, exactly, is this “self” of which Mr. Algren speaks so boldly? How does Raisin in the Sun deny the Negro this right? There are a great many Negroes in real estate, for example, and there are even a few in advertising. Are they or are they not claiming their right to be themselves? What are the wellsprings of Negro life?
No, I cannot agree that Miss Hansberry has written a play about real estate. Perhaps the real difference between her play and Wright’s novel is that twenty-one years have passed and very little, for most of the Negroes in this country, has changed. Bigger died in his trap and Walter walks out of his, into the greater one. There is no other place for him to move. If he has left behind him something of value, it is up to those of us who know what value is to make certain that it is not entirely lost.
(1961)
As Much Truth As One Can Bear
SINCE WORLD WAR II, certain names in recent American literature—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Faulkner—have acquired such weight and become so sacrosanct that they have been used as touchstones to reveal the understandable, but lamentable, inadequacy of the younger literary artists. We still hear complaints, for example, that World War II failed to produce a literary harvest comparable to that which we garnered from the first. We will discuss the idiocy of this complaint later.
Let one of us the younger attempt to create a restless, unhappy, freewheeling heroine and we are immediately informed that Hemingway or Fitzgerald did the same thing better—infinitely better. Should we be rash enough to make any attempt to link the lives of some men with their time, we are sternly (or kindly) advised to reread U.S.A. It has all, it would seem, been done, by our betters and our masters. In much the same way, not so very long ago, it appeared that American poetry was destined to perish in the chill embrace of T. S. Eliot.
Neither I nor any of my confrères are wil
ling to be defined or limited in this way. Not one of us suffers from an excess of modesty, and none of what follows is written in a complaining spirit. And it is certainly not my purpose here to denigrate the achievement of the four men I have named. On the contrary, I am certain that I and that handful of younger writers I have in mind have more genuine respect for this achievement than do most of their unbearably cacophonous worshippers.
I respect Faulkner enough, for example, to be saddened by his pronouncements on the race question, to be offended by the soupy rhetoric of his Nobel Prize speech, and to resent—for his sake—the critical obtuseness which accepted (from the man who wrote Light in August) such indefensibly muddy work as Intruder in the Dust or Requiem for a Nun.
It is useful, furthermore, to remember in the case of Hemingway that his reputation began to be unassailable at the very instant that his work began that decline from which it never recovered—at about the time of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hindsight allows us to say that this boyish and romantic and inflated book marks Hemingway’s abdication from the effort to understand the many-sided evil that is in the world. This is exactly the same thing as saying that he somehow gave up the effort to become a great novelist.
I myself believe that this is the effort every novelist must make, in spite of the fact that the odds are ludicrously against him, and that he can never, after all, know. In my mind, the effort to become a great novelist simply involves attempting to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more. It is an effort which, by its very nature—remembering that men write the books, that time passes and energy flags, and safety beckons—is obviously doomed to failure. “Success” is an American word which cannot conceivably, unless it is defined in an extremely severe, ironical, and painful way, have any place in the vocabulary of any artist.
The Cross of Redemption Page 5
