The Cross of Redemption (6 page)

The point of this introductory column—for the readers of the
Urbanite
will be hearing a great deal from me—is that the theater is perishing for the lack of vitality. Vitality, humanly and artistically speaking, has only one source, and that source is life. Now, the life actually being led on this continent is not the life which we pretend it is. White men are not what they take themselves to be, and Negroes are very different—to say the very least—from the popular image of them.

This image must be cracked, not only if we are to achieve a theater—for we do not really have a theater now, only a series of commercial speculations which result in mammoth musicals, and “daring” plays like
Compulsion
and
Inherit the Wind
, which are about as daring as a spayed tomcat—this image must be cracked if we intend to survive as a nation. The Negro-in-America is increasingly the central problem in American life, and not merely in social terms, in personal terms as well.

I intend, from time to time, in discussing the theater, to return to this point, for I think the time has come to begin a bloodless revolution. Only by a more truthful examination of what is really happening here can we realize the real aims of the theater, which are to instruct through terror and pity and delight and love. The only thing we can now do for the “tired businessman” is to scare the living daylights out of him.

Both the Albee plays at the York Theatre—
The Death of Bessie Smith
and
The American Dream
—left me rather waiting for the other shoe to fall. Both plays seemed to promise more than they delivered; but I am not at all certain that I know what it is that they promised. This is not, by the way, meant as a complaint or as a joke. I don’t mind—in the theater, at any rate—having my cozy expectations swept out from under me; and I’m the type that enjoys being forced to ask myself just what the author had in mind. I was hardly ever moved “to the heart,” as we say, by either of the Albee plays, but I
was
mystified, enraged, amused, and horrified. I don’t know if you will like them or not, but I think you ought to see them.

To take the plays in the order in which they were presented:
The Death of Bessie Smith
takes place in the Deep South, much of it in a thoroughly demoralizing hospital. There is not a single attractive person in this play, unless one excepts the offstage Bessie Smith, and the good-natured but simple-minded type who takes her on the journey which ends in her death.

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)

·      ·     ·

B
OTH
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.