There was more to Langston’s letter than words of welcome; it also carried an invitation asking me to the première of a new gospel play of his due then to open at some Jerusalem or Abyssinia Negro Church in Brooklyn. And so to New York City I went, losing several hours in a real Dantesque wandering underground that must have taken me to either Staten or Coney Island. Eventually, however I did arrive at the church in Brooklyn, a building that ironically used to be a playhouse. If the play, a loose-limbed affair stringing together gospel songs, spirituals, sermons and straight narrative about the life of Jesus Christ, had any merit to it at all, the production and performance that night hardly did anything to bring it out. Instead there was a running battle (with leaders and members of the choir all on one side and on the other the huge barrel of a pipe organ) as to which could pound and bawl best. The din over in the vast and almost empty auditorium, I filed out with others in obvious relief, and what was more, ran into Langston himself.
‘Hi, John Pepper!’ he gripped my hand.
‘Hi, Langston!’ I returned his warm clasp.
‘Glad you could come to my play. But meet me in the foyer, will you? I must see some people right now.’
There was an exhibition running in the foyer. On display and obviously without discrimination were works by all sorts of Negro authors. I had not thumbed through more than half a dozen when Langston ambled back with a number of friends and admirers in full tow. I immediately recognised a large, black lady among them as the director and narrator in Langston’s hit gospel musical Black Nativity which I had seen some weeks back in London. ‘Vinette Carroll’ Langston introduced her, ‘And Barbara Griner’ he turned to the pretty white girl with her. There were several more new names and fresh faces dropped at that point, and to all of them Langston presented me as Africa’s greatest playwright!
‘Well, let’s go in somewhere and have a drink,’ he said, and we trouped after him into the wan-lit night and cutting chill outside. No room in the first pub, but right next door some very understanding early customers moved over so that we could all four of us sit at one table. It was a tight squeezing job, but the beer came in quick and before long we were deep in it and in close cultivation of one another.
‘So you saw our show in London?’ Vinette laughed in her unique baritone voice, ‘Barbara here co-produced it, you know.’
‘I see – yes, I saw it on my way here and found it terrific. But why aren’t you there now?’
‘Vinette has been back home for some time now,’ Barbara offered, ‘but the show is still in Europe.’
‘Do you know they actually drew the West End audience into spontaneous singing and clapping? It was so amazing a thing to happen with a people famous for their self-consciousness and respect that you could almost forgive those West End straight-necks for being out of step and tune,’ I recalled.
‘Oh, I miss London,’ Vinette said simply, and for a few seconds we all sipped at our glasses of beer in silence.
‘Any plans to tour Africa?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yes, as soon as we can raise the money. But the group is returning home first to play at the Lincoln Center in the Christmas week,’ Barbara showed her cards.
‘You must come to it,’ Langston asked me, bringing us more bottles from the counter. ‘You should see his Song of a Goat,’ he told the girls.
‘Oh, and what’s that?’ they both laughed at the same time.
‘That’s his play, of course,’ Langston laughed back – ‘the greatest in Africa.’
‘Oh, you must let us see it so we can do it,’ Barbara offered.
‘Yes, you must send us copies; we’d love to direct it,’ Vinette joined in.
‘Of course he will,’ Langston approved.
‘I don’t know if you’ll like it,’ I said a little confused.
‘Oh, isn’t he being shy now?’ both girls laughed together.
Later with Langston gone one way, they gave me a lift in Barbara’s compact car all the way to my lodgings down Washington Square in Greenwich Village. By now it was late and getting really frosty; so we exchanged addresses and telephone numbers, promising to meet again soon.
That was the last time I saw Barbara. Vinette I met again at Langston’s during a small house party for the South African actor and author Bloke Modisane, then on a speaking tour of Negro Colleges in the South. Copies of my play did not reach me early either from my publishers at home or from Northwestern University Press, my US publishers. But as soon as they came in the New Year I called Barbara a couple of times while in New York. She was either away at her theater, the house-keeper or maid would say whenever I rang the house, or when I called the theater, some receptionist or secretary would say Mistress was away at the house. On the one occasion however when I got on to Barbara herself, she was too busy to see me, and her voice sounded so distant that I ran short of Courage and didn’t dare go and see her on the Tuesday she said I should come over to her theater on 43rd Street by Times Square.
With Vinette, there occurred a slight variation to the theme of alienation and drifting apart. She persuaded me to post her my play for her to read in the peace of her apartment. This I did, adding two others, The Masquerade and The Raft both of which I had just done at Princeton. For weeks afterwards, I could not get anything out of Vinette. She was either too caught up with teaching classes and with a play of Archibald MacLeish she was doing or she was too baffled with the several tax papers she had to complete for the revenue people. I said that was all right since I was off to Canada anyway to observe the April Elections there.
‘Oh, I should be ready for you then,’ she sent rich heavy ripples down the line between us, ‘and we certainly will do something together.’
However, I returned from Canada in a fortnight, and Vinette apparently had not moved one step or shifted from her original position. The Macleish production still left her prostrate and the income tax papers were still flying about her as furiously as ever before. Now she was even thinking of a teacher-director job in Africa. Wouldn’t that be a fine break, she asked. I said, of course, yes. And how was the situation in Nigeria? Quite promising, I said, and that as a matter of fact an old teacher and friend of mine had just finished a recruitment drive in the US for experts for his new school of drama at my old college. How sad she didn’t know about all this! Yes, I agreed, but then, I added, how was one to know a famous figure like her would want to move from a high pedestal at home. Oh that! she said. A break would be great all the same. And is it possible to do anything now, say, like getting in touch with this director fellow? I said there would not be any harm in trying. And so on this low key Vinette and I had our dying fall together in the matter of reading and mounting a play of mine on or off Broadway.
A performance of another kind, also still-born, was the proposal from the executive directors of the Columbia Lecture Bureau that I do a lecture tour of America for them. Theirs came as a complete surprise call one afternoon in December. As I was out on the first occasion, they left urgent word that I call collect in New York from Princeton. Next I had a personal interview with them in their towers close by Little Carnegie Hall. I was made to cool my heels in the anteroom by some secretary girl, after which I was ushered into the presence of a kindly looking old lady with pale blue eyes. Another more spare and sprightly came in through another door, and stood over me all through our meeting. They had launched a poet like Auden and would like to do the same with me from August to April! Would it be cheaper for all of us for me to return home first in summer as I had planned and then fly me back again for the tour, they asked. Or could I stay on in the US and be doing something in the interval? Anyway, all that could be settled later. And meanwhile I could appear on some guest programme of the Columbia Broadcasting System with which they had sister connections.
‘Now have you a party card?’ The kind old woman fired me a surprise query.
‘What do you mean?’ I laughed nervously.
‘I mean do you carry a Communist Party card?’ she asked pointedly. Again I laughed nervously.
‘No, we are serious,’ the other standing over me impressed upon me. ‘We should like to know whether or not the Communist Party operates in Nigeria and if so whether you belong to them.’
‘You need entertain no fear there,’ I assured them through my laugh. ‘The US still gives us aid.’
Eventually, however, we agreed that I mail them my work which they said Miss Frost, Robert Frost’s own daughter and as much a poet in her own right as she was their own star reader, would advise them on the presentation.
‘Have you, like the English, a title like poet-laureate?’
The kindly old lady fondled her hands. ‘We’d love very much to present you as Africa’s Poet-Laureate!’ At that I laughed again and nervously too, adding to her obvious disillusionment that luckily for the arts in Nigeria, they were managing very well without the afflatus of some government-paid clown and lackey. After mailing my stuff to the august corporation sometime about Christmas and the New Year, I never heard from its directors again. At first, I thought the long illness and then the ripe fall of Robert Frost had prevented his daughter and housekeeper and bednurse, all combined in one, from acting in respect of an unknown African poet. But the months rolled by, and the sudden season of my departure came, and nothing happened, to quote the Wilfred Owen dirge.
Ruth Stone proved a different kind of companion and guide altogether. She and her husband Sam, a top engineer at the American Telephone Company, for whom he has recently co-designed the first machine to harness successfully the revolutionary principle of Laser beam, had come to my AMSAC talk just before Christmas with the simple aim of collecting more material for the thesis she was doing on theater in Africa. Instead I became a rare piece in her collection! A couple of days after our first meeting, a long distance call was put on to me at the Graduate College in Princeton. It was Ruth calling. She wanted to produce and co-direct with some Nigerian Professor at Adelphi College my play Song of a Goat. Did I mind? I said not at all, except that my publisher’s agent had just written to say Brandeis University had placed order for twenty or so copies of the play which must mean they wanted to do something with it. In addition, a Mr Martin Magner and his photographer wife, both of whom I had met at a Christmas party at Langston Hughes’, had expressed a keen wish to have the play on in their own theater at Youngstown, Ohio. None of this however would put off Ruth; as I soon came to know, she was impossible to resist. She was not in any sense a professional, she hastened to assure me, but for seven years had been the sole director of an arts centre serving the two million odd suburban community of Long Island. And it was for this centre so much like Ibadan’s own Mbari of which she was a long distance member that she would like to co-direct Song of a Goat while I was still available for a personal appearance at the production. This she put sometime in the spring. Another proposition, more ambitious by far, would be a try at an off-Broadway showing with a mixed cast, but one or two people with name and money had first to be drawn into the cause. All this called for time and planning, and could I allow her a chance? That same week I took the train to Great Neck, had a big late lunch cooked for me by Ruth, and from that day on formed a firm friendship with her and Sam and their two teenage daughters Julie and Joanne that survived all my US strain.
The Stones took me to several shows in the city. Our first outing together was to the Metropolitan Opera for a performance of Ariadne auf Naxos. The night turned out to be rather remarkable. First, Karl Böhm, who had been a personal friend and colleague of the composer, conducted entirely from sweet memory with Leonie Rysanek in the lead, and secondly the opera, opened in English only to modulate violently into the original German. It left one somewhat rattled. But more interesting for us three was the seating plight in which we found ourselves. Perched on a couple of decks high on the steep cliff that is the side of the huge ugly stone quarry they call the Metropolitan, we could only see the players far away and way down below us, who looked like pin-headed puppets tripping up in a pirouette. The fall of the curtain after the long prologue and induction came therefore as a real relief.
‘Come with me,’ Ruth called to Sam and me. Her restless inquiring eyes in and out of her spy-glass had spotted a box by the stage right at the other sheer fall of the hall. Only one lady sat there in solitary glory.
‘She won’t let us in,’ Sam protested.
‘Oh, why not? She’s all alone and surely wouldn’t mind our joining her,’ Ruth swept us along. Next she got hold of a distinguished looking usher, and before the old man knew what was afoot, prevailed upon him to lead the way to the box ‘Can you resist her?’ the old man threw wide his hands when I could not contain a laugh. So into the box we all marched.
‘Here you are, lady,’ the usher bowed us in.
‘Yes, thank you so much,’ replied Ruth, bowing out the man. And then turning that same winning smile of hers upon the lady seated inside, she stated simply as a matter of course that we had come to swell her company.
‘Well, that’s all right by me,’ said the lady seated inside the box, ‘except that the box is not mine really.’
‘Oh, that’s fine, then,’ Ruth soothed her, and looked over to Sam and me to see how comfortable we were in the seats she had already settled us in. Then the curtain rose for the opera proper, and with that fell our joint fortunes. A solid shadow of a man emerged suddenly, darkening the entrance to our box.
‘Please come back with me to your seats,’ he said briefly and with supreme blandness.
‘Why, the lady here invited us in,’ Ruthremonstrated with him.
‘Sorry, madam, but you don’t want me to lose my job. So come with me, please,’ the shadow said in a voice still more portentous than fate.
‘Oh, surely the lady who owns the box does not mind our staying,’ Ruth insisted, appealing to that august personage. But no help came from that high state. Instead she said:
‘Oh, no, I told you the box was not mine,’ and then she added something to the effect that she was the wife of some manager or director at the Metropolitan, but by this time we had been marched out and consequently lost her mumbling in the music then pouring all over the place. On the way, Ruth, irrepressible as ever, steered Sam and me into another private box, this time occupied by its legitimate owners, an elderly couple who regarded us sternly in turn through their lognettes and then very wisely returned their attention to the business on hand. We had not even bothered to say hello but flopped straight into the first empty seats we saw vacant in the box.
We went to several more shows together, Harold Pinter’s two plays The Dumbwaiter and The Collection, in a double bill off Broadway, and John Gielgud’s star-studded revival of The School for Scandal supplying both ends of the beat. I arrived for the latter in heavy snow and on a train more than two hours behind schedule but got in all the same ahead of Ruth and Sam. They found me on the outskirts of a large crowd crushing their way through the foyer of The Majestic.
