From the upper middle-class club of AMSAC to the ‘family’ night gatherings that branches of the New York Public Library in Harlem sponsor in a sort of healthy rivalry among themselves, it is not really a long walk. These occasions, usually ones of friendly encounter, sometimes between local writers and their readers, and at other times on a triangular level with visiting African authors brought in, provide a ‘culture’ dose for those of the lower income brackets herded in Harlem as junkets downtown cater for the dilettanti whose one distinction, to quote Frazier, is an indisputable capacity for conspicuous consumption. Apart from that, the taste and indeed the fare are the same between both circles. Each asked me over as a speaking guest, and on each ‘at home’ host and guest were happy to part, never to cultivate each other’s company again. Such was the unpleasantness and nausea felt on both sides, a professional hostess, who floats promotion parties for upcoming artists of all kinds, called for her smelling salts, took a sniff or two as my grandmother would her snuff, and turning to an equally embarrassed friend at one of these affairs, said in everybody’s hearing: ‘Of course, the young man may be a genius. But how can I possibly ask friends over to meet him when he shows such a penchant for making enemies?’
There was so much that was wrong with the house of the blacks in America, even among themselves and on the level of artists, that the most well-mannered cousin calling from abroad could not help but be openly critical – unless of course a primitive pride in the family and an equally primitive urge to clean it out and make the place better for all were lacking. It was a unique and rich experience sharing with the black citizens of America their growing excitement and sense of discovery towards Africa, a place only vaguely remembered by them before, and that with absolute shame and horror, from memories of an irrevocable fall, as Christians years ago recalled the doings in the Garden of Eden. Now, not only has this place they had been taught all their lives to look upon as a jungle full of fatal fruits and serpents turned out to be a rich and open plantation farmed all along by foreign squatters for their own benefit, but the black sons of the soil have at last actually risen and driven the exploiters back across the seas from where they came. And it was no mean or distant performances that could be kept out or distorted for the ears of the people. Today, even the bum on Harlem’s 125th Street, although he may not be able to read the New York Times that prints all the news that is fit to print, and although he may not own a TV set to tune to community-minded stations, can see with his own eyes all the black diplomats at the UN.
Going from one independent country in Africa to another still burning to have its turn, I had observed a similar sense of vicarious satisfaction and feeling of elation that the enemy is at least out of the city gates, although other than those one is defending. In the United States, however, the joy appears even more intense among the emergent Negro. Their goal, though is not the African one of expelling the host, but that of kitchenmen, laundry-hands, motor-boys and noncoms, all of them long restricted to the lowest ranks in the armed forces for no just and legitimate cause, demanding at long last a fair share in the victory and spoils with colleagues really having no special abilities and merits to set them up and apart in permanent positions of privilege.
Out of this new emotional response to Africa among the Negro in America has come a great love for everything African. It is all very heart-warming that a Negro can now get up today and declare the roots of his origin even if he cannot be as definite or far-reaching as President Kennedy disclosing his Irish ancestry to Newark voters also of that extraction. But when he goes collecting masks, and imitations at that, without knowing their religious and social symbols and observance; when he goes sporting drums, called over there tom-toms, in blissful belief that anybody can beat on them, however different in kind and intention, and produce the famous talk for all to grin at; if he goes collecting music from Africa and proclaiming each piece ‘simple’ and ‘folksy’; then such an ‘Afro-American’, making a profession of his faith among the uninitiated, more silly than cynical, must be called to order before he misleads himself and others into total perdition.
A greater danger still is the habit of identifying this phoney, gushing business partly or wholly with the genuine historical stand of Negritude as established by Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor, or with the African Personality, to use Kwame Nkrumah’s flamboyant slogan, which is better known in the States. There is an interesting feedback here. The idea of the African Personality, especially in its political context, derived of course from the Pan-African Movement of Marcus Garvey and Dr Du Bois, and although both prophets naturally were never ones to listen to each other, it was to lost black people of America they preached their sermons of Africa that must be redeemed, of an exodus back there, and of the glory and splendour that were its past. It is an irony of fate that today the black educated of America should be falling back upon the very doctrine they rejected and pooh-poohed half a century or so back. That they helped to hurl stones at both wisemen and still would deride them today should the two appear in Alabama or New York City may seem overstating the point. But both men are hardly ever remembered except by a few doubtful faithfuls squabbling on the fringe of Harlem’s murky streets and slums. And more still, the spirit of union which has consecrated for better for worse several heroes and leaders in Africa, providing for each of their people a pivotal point, has apparently either bypassed America or presented her with so many candidates that they confound themselves.
On the other hand, what seems to dominate the field on the cultural front is the tendency among writers, editors and critics, college professors within the cult not excluded, to form themselves into associations for mutual promotion and admiration. As a pure reaction against a society that either from sheer indifference or discrimination strains from its main stream of literature works by Negro authors, this, like Negritude, would be a welcome stand and declaration, to create fresh new pools and channels out to sea. Unfortunately the current does not seem to be clear or cutting deep. Rather members of the club, swimmers, trainers and spectators alike apparently prefer playing their own brand of game which is not bad, except that poor performances and low standards are everywhere applauded to the sky for the simple reason that they are by fellow members of the camp. And to thicken the cheers are the voices of patrons and promoters who naturally must be listened to and respected. Since everybody knows the rules, the patrons and promoters, usually honorary members from outside, play back the game by every time repeating the same fatuous and harmless platitudes and stereotypes like: ‘negro writers express deep feelings,’ ‘the characters they create carry great humour and human warmth,’ and ‘the Negro hero is a simple, sweet soul.’ All of this may be true but not the speciality or preserve of the Negro writer and people. And this is typical of the rich larding these people apply on their skin, a possible attempt to heighten or hide its existence.
Club members seeking compensations for a complex that shows them poor flounderers in life’s stream of conflicting identities and links sometimes ask new-found associates from Africa whether there are any excavations for ancient and lost civilizations going on there, and if so, whether bards have sung them in epics. Not satisfied with the totem in hand, they would have broken pillars and parchments to convince denigrators like Senator Ellender that their black folks and cousins back in Africa did own and create something! At a Langston Hughes party in Harlem, I even heard the further claim that the first American cowboy, not just in literature but in real life and history, was a Negro. Like jazz and other great contributions of the Negro people to American culture, the whites had promptly seized upon it and stolen the patent. A most reassuring claim that was, especially as it came from Professor Rosey Poole, a white woman promoter of the association.
Under such pull and push, it is a miracle writers of real worth have emerged at all among the Negroes. The lately over-lionized James Baldwin, the long silent Ralph Ellison, and self-effacing Sam Allen who really is the poet Paul Vessey, and Papa Langston Hughes himself, everywhere styled the poet-laureate of the Negro people and the Shakespeare of Harlem, easily come to mind. But even these are often loved for the wrong works and for reasons merely sociological and extra-literary and artistic. Poetry, they say, should get as near as possible to music, but when music is made to replace poetry, then it is another matter entirely. Thus it is very painful to hear critics, otherwise perfectly sound and intelligent, picking on the ‘blues’ of Langston Hughes as examples of his best work when there is evidently a corpus of good poetry to the man. But such pieces are as much chosen for the ‘authentic manner’ in which they reproduce the ‘idiom and rhythm’ of the blues as for the virtue they make of being black, and black to the palms and bottom.
Undoubtedly, the temptation of the one theme and motif to choose and of what apparatus and form to present it in overwhelms many a writer, but more so should he happen to be black, and therefore of Africa or America. The tendency I found much more among black authors in America than in Africa, where it is menace enough, is to fall for the blackness of it and forget all art. In Africa both publishers and public unabashedly give a strong impression of praying for this to happen, but then it is a gimmick to be expected, as a great majority of them are at present European, and therefore still have to get out of that terrible hangover feeling of being in a special relationship with exotic and simple natives. Little wonder a lot of people today are making capital out of the theme of encounter, that is, of black meeting white, and the conflict and complication therefrom for the African. All this is fine timber. But it still requires a good carpenter and cabinet maker to turn it into beautiful furniture. Unless one is a gifted and genuine craftsman, what comes to pass for a work of art is a wobbly, ugly stool that should better have remained the piece of log it was before the author began hacking it around. And such logs do in fact make extraordinary seating in the square and market place in front of the ancestral hall.
Coming to the States, where indigenous publishing and a literate, local reading public should really be no problem the black-white theme takes on fresh colorations, albeit of a leprous kind! The point, often so belaboured from the defending end here, is not that Negro authors write only about the Negro. Who else can any author write for and about except his own people he knows so well? The real quarrel is that most Negro writers see their subject at one point and position only – that of protest and prayer. As a result and perhaps without any intention of so doing, they have helped to create and establish a fresh set of stereotype figures and faces capable of expressing only certain simple emotions and gestures, none of which has to do with anything complex or cerebral, or with the mystery and permanence of the mask.
On the contrary, like the one-piece orchestra whose sole member is a piano, so much effort and energy has gone into pounding out of it the desired harmony, that spectators, especially if they pay to get admitted to the concert as is usually the practice, may well be forgiven and indeed praised for honesty and integrity if they hiss and grow restless on their seats at false notes and an undistinguished, in fact, appalling performance. A cry of ‘Take to the cornet!’ from somewhere in the audience would then be a brotherly act, not the taunting of a perverse critic. But that exactly was the angry reaction at a Harlem meeting to a suggestion of mine that for a picture of the Negro as a problem in his country it would be a far more rewarding exercise and experience to depend on a trained social scientist who documents the case with living facts rather than on some novelist palming off an ill-dressed and undigested story out of which sticks the contended bone of colour. An artist if anything should be an inventor, a creator of new things with use and beauty out of ordinary familiar pieces and material lying around. If he is content merely to rehash or dress up old stocks and frames better left alone or which anybody can perfectly well ham up if he has a mind to, then all distinction falls down, and we are again among the tinkerers and salesmen.
Rejection, however and not in the arts alone, is rotten eggs and tomatoes to a group protesting genuine identity, and demanding respect and recognition that ought to have been theirs by right of birth as human beings and citizens of the United States. Such natural acceptance and respect should not be a payment or bonus awarded to a few acquiring the right accent and desk. And when it has been so for as long as grandmother can remember, bottles and bricks should be expected in return – which is the healthy, virile development now breaking out all over the American field and front.
But to borrow an image from James Baldwin, which he in turn was probably not echoing from the old spiritual but unconsciously from the Prophet Elijah’s address to the first Black Moslem convention in Washington, the great fire to follow from bitterness, if not now directed and kept in control, will certainly carry disaster for all. For who is it to be turned upon? Upon the whites, of course, who bought the black-man and have kept him ever since in one form of chain or another in the land of the free. But what of the blackman’s brother in Africa who sold him into slavery for a few tinsels and drink? And the Negro himself who all these years has been content to rattle his shackles, to breed behind the bars of discrimination, and to regard the debilitating cobwebs of so-called toleration drifting in Northern cities and states as the earnest of the covenant long promised in the skies. Joseph the Dreamer rose out of bondage to greatness and embraced his brothers who sold him into slavery, and they say, even forgave his foreign master Potiphar and the mistress who sought the damnation of his soul. Hearing Malcolm X, the Black Moslem torch-bearer, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior, who had just been bombed out of his home, and Dr Roy Wilkins of the NAACP all address the first ever united front Negro meeting at Harlem’s 125th Street, it was to me as clear as the rain that was pouring then that the leaders spoke in different tongues. Which of them was understood by the huge section of the audience that defied the path of thunder and lightning to hear the case for action, it is still too presumptuous to tell.
4
Among Actors
‘Here in Princeton we deal only with the classics,’ Professor Downer of the English Department told me. ‘But did you say you have written a play? And is it in English, if I may ask?’
I said yes, and the Professor was kind enough to offer:
‘Let’s see your play some time then, shall we?’
‘I’ll see if I have a copy left,’ I said.
‘Oh, it’s been published, has it?’ the Professor sat back in his chair and took a closer look at me. ‘Was that in London? And at what theater there did it appear?’
I told him I had not got that far yet, that I was completely home-spun. What there was of my career in the theater seemed likely to snuff out there.
‘Oh, no.’ The Professor would not have me give up so early. ‘If as you say you have written a play in verse that has been performed in several places in your native Africa, I guess you must have your hand on something. Now,’ he added expansively, ‘is this play of yours a comedy or tragedy?’
‘I don’t quite know,’ I laughed nervously.
‘Well, it isn’t a one-acter, or does it run to three?’
‘You wait,’ I laughed more, getting up to go, ‘and you’ll see for yourself!’
The Professor rose up too, and as he saw me to the door, said kindly: ‘Sorry we can’t be of more help to you, but let’s see your play sometime.’
From the McCosh where this interview had taken place I returned to the manager of my Princeton career at his offices in the Woodrow Wilson School building on George Washington Street. A huge, gnarled oak tree directly outside was being sawed down at the base and because the rattling of the motor engine made everything around tremble so, my manager’s secretary and I had a difficult time of it hearing each other speak in the first room she occupied, providing a protective front and cover for the old colonel inside. But we knew each other well, and I went past her with the two of us giggling at the purring sound outside, and with hands to our ears. The Colonel too had his attention distracted to the doomed tree outside.
‘You know they are moving this building some distance from here to make way for the new Woodrow Wilson –’
‘Yes, I have heard the story that it is going to be moved bodily out of here. Is that true?’
‘Well, it sounds crazy, but it’s true.’ The Colonel laid aside my doubts, sorting out in the process the several pens and pencils lying in line on his large table.
‘It’s hard to believe,’ I said half shouting, half laughing above the throbbing motor outside.
‘Well, so it is,’ the Colonel conceded. ‘But the group taking on the job claim they have moved a twenty-storey building down a whole block in New York, and not a single brick or glass pane was lost in that operation.’
‘How do they do it?’ I asked, honestly thrilled.
‘Apparently, they first carve out and level up the ground round whatever structure they want to move,’ the Colonel explained to me, gathering together again the pens and pencils he had been sorting out. ‘Then they saw through the entire building at that basement level and drive through it appropriate rails and wheels. It is with these they slide the building out to whatever new site has been picked on. In this case, they have some two hundred yards to travel. And as you can see, they need all the room they can get.’
‘When is D-Day?’ I asked. ‘I must see the operation, whatever happens.’
‘You are not alone there. All of Princeton, town and gown, is waiting anxiously for the big day. It should be sometime in the spring, although nobody knows for certain. But now, tell me,’ the Colonel ordered the conversation to another course, ‘how did you get on with the Professor?’
I told him the little there was to the story, and he was full of understanding.
‘Shall I put you on direct to the McCarter people then?’ he offered.
I said yes, and he promptly picked up his telephone: ‘Is that Mrs McAneny? This is Bob Van de Velde … not bad … And how are you? Haven’t seen all of you for a long time … I myself have been down with a heavy cold … Yes, Barbara has been running the show as usual … Well, I have an interesting young man here from Nigeria, one of our Parvin Fellows this year … Yes, he’s a journalist in his country, but apparently has some interest in the theater … Yes, he says he has written a play himself which has been mounted in his native country … That’s good … Should I send him to you direct … Oh, yes, he speaks English … O.K. Then, over to you.’
I thanked the Colonel for all his troubles, and he said, Oh no, that I was welcome to all of them, especially as I had constituted myself into a one-man mission for my country, now asking for this and next minute for that other thing, all in the name of fair exchange and mutual knowledge of each other. He even walked half way to the door with me, and seeing me look at the doomed tree then just tottering outside his window, he joined me in the joke and hope that the ugly trunk would seek better vengeance elsewhere than fall over the great Woodrow Wilson School building, which incidentally was itself being moved anyway.
At the McCarter Theater, its General Manager, Mrs Herbert McAneny, a stoutish elderly matron, very warm and bustling, accepted me instantly and on equal terms. Their autumn series, which they captioned ‘The Mediterranean Heritage’ was due to open that week or so, and would I like to see the boys at work on the sets for Sophocles’ Antigone which was going to be the curtain raiser for the season, as she showed me around? Yes, I said, I would very much.
‘Come with me then to the stage.’ She took my hand, and deposited me among the stage-hands. But they were all clinging to and hammering away at the bleak backdrop of the oncoming Greek family feud, and as one of them was kind enough to explain to me several days after, I know very well how at that stage of a production it is absolutely impossible to turn the mind on anything else in the world, least of all receiving strange visitors. All the same we became fast firm friends, and there and then Mrs McAneny, in the thick hail of tickets issued me two complimentary ones, the second for my date, she was careful to explain.
‘Well, I haven’t got myself one yet,’ I laughed awkwardly.
‘Time you did, then,’ she teased.
Later, she was to ask me to many more shows, and so for me a fresh breath of air blew into the stifling house I had come to find Princeton.
Somewhat of an artificial hand fitted on to the college, the McCarter Theater is not quite a natural organic part of the body proper of Princeton, as Yale’s School of Drama is with that University. As a result, it has not much power of free movement, and actually has not been able in its rather long career to pick up new habits and exercises by way of experiment as would a true living theater. Instead, as so aptly put by Professor Downer who by virtue of teaching drama in the English Department heads the theater’s faculty committee, the McCarter Theater busies itself only with the classics preferably as they appear each academic year on the English syllabus at Princeton.
‘They are a trust body with their own resident company and quite independent of college control,’ the Colonel had earlier made me understand. ‘The one thing we expect is that by the time a young man passes out of Princeton, he should have had a fair chance of knowing his dramatic heritage. That’s what the McCarter exists for, to present decent, respectable drama parents would take their children to at home.’
And true as steel, the McCarter in the season I was there rolled out a thoroughly proved and tested repertoire. Only like all things well tested and proved, this had been already safely done elsewhere by experts other than the present users. It fell in two parts. The first was ‘The Mediterranean Heritage’ we glimpsed earlier in passing, and it offered Sophocles’ Antigone with the ‘satyr’ of A Phoenix Too Frequent by Fry on the same bill just as it was done in ancient times. This double, self-counter-pointing piece was then followed by Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors, Albert Camus’ Caligula and Desire Under the Elms by America’s own giant of the theater, Eugene O’Neill, all in that order. The other half of the season, running into the spring term, was straddled by the tall series ‘Ladders of Ambition’, with each terrible rung of it showing man in his various, vain fortunes. Thus it began very appropriately with Julius Caeser who as every school-boy knows was terribly ambitious and therefore had to die, brought in Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme for plenty of belly-laughs more, it seems to me, at the expense of the Moslem and oriental Caliph than of the foolish French burgher, after which came in quick contrast Brecht’s Galileo (to which the students’ newspaper had urged everybody to take along their beautiful dates despite the ugly fact that the author was a dammed communist) and finally Fuente Ovejuma of the Spanish master Lope de Vega.
The last play, it was painstakingly pointed out in the programme sheet, was ‘not really a proletarian manifesto’ as modem left-wing producers would wrongly have people believe, but ‘like all Spanish “golden age” plays and like much Elizabethan drama, it is primarily concerned with order and disorder; social disorder seen as cosmic disorder, and the restoration of order constituting a re-establishment of cosmic harmony under love.’
Of the entire McCarter achievement I recall two incidents, both perhaps slight in themselves, but because one provided for me a commentary on the calibre of the company and the management as the other did on the quality of the community and audience the theater serves, they become quite significant. After Antigone, I stopped with Mrs McAneny at the box-office.
