With all resources, financial and human, at last combined in their right proportion and mixture, the show moves out from the dark, labyrinthine reaches of the warehouse and factory into the shop, or playhouse, to use the technical term.
The respectable investors now retire completely out of sight to speculate on the outcome, recounting and crowing over past successes. The merchant-producer, since he is already on another deal, having satisfied himself that the bill-boards clearly stipulate that he is part or sole owner of the shop, also takes a discreet retreat and leaves the stage to the manager and staff that must now fashion out how best to offer the general public the ware they have sold themselves to sell.
One other tricky part of the business is that the shop usually is owned by persons other than those stocking it with goods. And because such persons have no preference for one type of goods to another, they let their shops solely for profit, and therefore quality with them holds no premium. As long as they draw forty per cent of the gross takings, the ware and its sellers and managers may as well go hang indefinitely. And how is the balance distributed? After running costs and staff salaries and taxes have been met, the playwright, lucky fellow, gets his ten or so per cent out of which the broker or agent takes his own ten or so per cent and the net sum becomes the preserve of the producer- merchant who will then make proper settlement with those angels fluttering all along on the wings of dividends.
I did more than just simply window-shop on and off Broadway, the world’s largest shouting, I mean shopping centre for any kind of live or ghost entertainment. In the process I all but got sold myself into the bargain. Fortunately, there were about me always friends and officials who were most true and fit. Even before my arrival in the US, my friend Dick of Madison Avenue had written to say that he had on his own initiative sent copies of my play Song of a Goat to Mr Langston Hughes, the idea being that the old man who had contacts on Broadway would arrange a production with me on the spot. As it happened, I ran into Langston Hughes himself in East Africa in the course of a writers’ conference called by Nigerians’ art centre, Mbari, at Kampala in June 1962. He told me that it was a real shame he had up till then not seen a single copy of that play. Perhaps his secretary had. I reported this to Dick in my reply to his letter and there it might have all ended, since communications sort of broke down between us two, had I not at the last minute, so to speak, jumped the last plane for New York. And naturally in our reunion the issue re-opened itself. But it soon became clear to me that all my friend expected of my play was a ‘black’ production.
‘Why, Africa is right in the fore-front now,’ he said in his sincere winning way, ‘and right here in the US the Negro is in the consciousness of everybody. An African play by a Negro group should therefore make an instant hit.’
‘That appears to me pure politics,’ I said.
‘Perhaps that’s so, but the show will sure be a success.’
‘And the impression would be that a play written by an African cannot be performed by white people,’ I insisted. ‘We act Shakespeare at home.’
‘Oh, not that,’ Dick objected, and I said petulantly, ‘Oh, yes of course,’ after which we agreed to drop the matter for the time being. It was never again opened with anything like enthusiasm by any of us, and now that I look back I regret that I rejected Dick’s offer of help. I still do not subscribe to the unabashed politics and publicity gimmick he proposed for my play. But after seeing the lot of the Negro, which in the so-called emancipated world of the arts is even less a happy one and about which I shall have more to reveal later, I regard it now a great loss of opportunity for work and fun to many. Incidentally, Dick and I never quite hit it off together again after this. Of course a couple of telephone calls and letters passed between us, and one day Dick even took me to lunch at the Waldorf Astoria. But there were never more any serious talks or thoughts of a production, nor of the meeting he spoke of arranging for me with friends and colleagues of his on The New York Times and other top places.
Through Langston, with whom I became fast friends, more characters enter the story. Quite early in Nigeria and Uganda he had advised strongly against my accepting princeton’s offer of a fellowship for one whole academic year. Far better for an artist from Africa would be a few weeks’ visit to the US, possibly on a State Department ticket such as I said was then in the offing for me. All the same, I had taken the Princeton offer and on my arrival there, dropped the old man a note since it was impossible to reach him by telephone. He had been away on some tour to the Mid-West or somewhere but wrote immediately he returned home to Harlem, although funnily not before the AMSAC people had fallen quite out of the blue to say the Poet Laureate of the Negro had told them of my arrival in the US from Africa, and could I please come over to New York sometime about Christmas and speak to the American people on the state of writing in Africa.
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.
