I had the privilege of being asked to appear on a Brecht panel and was most disappointed at not being able to do so because of the gathering build-up at Princeton against my extra-mural activities. But I did make a closed-door discussion led by the German director. Also there that day was Mr Alan Schneider who a few years back had directed The Caucasian Chalk Circle for the Arena stage in Washington, DC, and had a current hit with Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a family fracas among faculty members and wives too long by a half and with an end that might just as well never have come at all; it came out of nothing in the third act. Mr Schneider made it clear he always tried to do what the playwright wanted done, but one thing he was still not very sure of was all this talk about the East Berlin master’s method. Didn’t the master himself show a change later? And how many of his apostles and disciples now really agree among themselves? At this stage of the discussion, with the German thumping for words to get across through an official female interpreter with whom several other unofficial ones disagreed quite often, I ventured to mention that at Ibadan we had gone straight for the play and did not appear to have lost anything substantial to the theorists in the process.
‘Oh, no, that wasn’t what I meant at all,’ Mr Schneider quickly put the record straight and poor me in my proper place. Notwithstanding such differences and denials The Good Woman that had looked so raggle-taggle at casting and rehearsals achieved realization late in March far much greater than anybody had dared anticipate.
Apparently, the Actors’ Studio is even more of a dealer in rarer, original ware, or at least so it lays claim to be. Founded by Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis and Cheryl Crawford, its aim was that ‘the development and stimulation of the individual talent would create a trained ensemble of actors that could serve as the necessary and essential foundation for a theater’ – which really is people. Just before I left the United States in May, members of the club had for the first time in their history, and indeed of the theater anywhere, got themselves a playhouse on Broadway all on their own initiative although of course with generous gifts and funds from perennial benefactors like Ford. Yes, it is rare for ordinary members to steal the lead from the boss, but members of the Actors’ Studio happen not to be simple ordinary folks. A look at the cast for its first production, the slow pallid marathon of Strange Interlude by that giant Eugene O’Neill, provides a representative picture of the stars within the studio’s galleries. Betty Field, Ben Gazzara, Pat Hingle, Geraldine Page, Geoffrey Horne and others on that cast are names scintillating on the American sky, over-crowded with constellations. On the day of my first visit there new admissions included Sidney Poitier. Nor has the Studio quite forgotten those exciting days, not far gone, when Marilyn Monroe though not really a member used to attend classes under the personal tutorship of Mrs Lee Strasberg.
Snobbery seems therefore to be a danger to the real wares of the Actors’ Studio. Quite understandably, it scowls at glossy catalogues and brochures for self-advertisement and hands out instead only a few sober sheets of typewritten matter to those who care so much for the state of the soul of the theater they seek what salvation the studio has found for it. The Studio boasts of auditions topping the thousand mark every single year, and out of all this only a bare average of six get the great privilege and honour of being selected. To my query whether this was symptomatic of the present rot in the theater or merely the exiguousness of room I got a somewhat stony stare not completely void of a snub. What is more, members of the Studio must be working actors, directors and playwrights. In a market where there are many more wanting to sell than there are articles of value, this to say the least sounds a hard if not absurd test.
I knew a girl who was the proud winner of the national award for the best supporting performance of that year. Her quiet, delicate, and self-absorbed style came out clear even in the Studio under the baleful eyes and dog-eat-dog criticism of colleagues and incipient rivals. In that brief scene I saw her in she was an air hostess back in town, meeting in a bar after several years her first boyfriend, now a married man and father. He would like their affair to start again but she has already been through many ports and nothing is exciting to her any more. Playing opposite her that day was a popular TV star on New York national networks and the complaint from her as well as the young man who directed them was their difficulty in getting away from the personal magnet of the man. Several weeks after, I saw the same girl a second time, this time on TV and on somebody’s show featuring Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. Her toothy grin was unmistakable, and so was her poise and self- assurance. In such circumstances who would have thought she had been out of a job for weeks past? But in her open uninhibited manner, a little loud perhaps, she laughed that she was fast getting used to queueing up for her weekly dole from the Social Security people. And what became of her membership card at the Studio while she was not working I do not know.
Still more niggling is the unemployment factor when applied to those of the American theater who happen to be black. Obtaining a regular job on or off Broadway calls for patent assets and of course a certain amount of luck and the right connections. A black skin, however, is a sure liability except of course in those proverbial caste-typed parts of slave or servants. Producers of Broadway, like the publicity men of Madison Avenue, are so full of respect and regard for the feelings of their white sponsors and clientele they prefer not to take the risk of ruffling and offending their tastes by using coloured people in roles where they are not normally seen in real life as lived in a vast area of the United States of America. Respectable citizens switch on their TV sets or buy tickets for a play to get relaxation and amusement, not to be reminded of the ugly and unpleasant facts in life. Indeed it may safely be said that all they pay to watch is escape stuff, fairy tales like Oliver with all of Dickens’ teeth and talons extracted and taken out of it. The story even goes that so touchy has this issue become, a show was put on about the subway riders of New York without a single dark face showing! This was elimination and escape through the foulest pipe of all, for who else walks most the dark under-ground of New York but the sweltering oppressed blacks?
The politics of colour however seems to be permeating today the entire American scene, and changes for the better and more normal are therefore becoming actually visible to the naked eye which does not view things from coloured glasses or through inverted telescopes. And in the theater world, when I was there, this was nowhere more evident than the appearance of a Negro judge, albeit silent, in an episode of the famous TV serial Sam Benedict. Perhaps the long run of Genet’s The Blacks at St Marks’, featuring an all black cast in a blistering assault on white supremacy before an intimate audience almost all white night after night is an indication too of the present civic rights upheaval now promising to change the face of the land. But until it is reasonably complete good actors, directors and playwrights, only incidentally of a different colour from the majority, will continue to find it doubly difficult getting a regular day’s job. I had a girl friend who was in The Blacks but had been out of it and of any other bill for more than a year. ‘A theater for the Negro people!’ she used to cry. And all her hopes of getting one were centred on an organization like AMSAC who in turn would solicit aid from white genii like Rockefeller and Ford!
Another confusing point about the conflict between the promoters of the straight unashamed commercials of Broadway and the few champions for quality and talent like the Actors Studio is the sliding one is likely to observe in the scale of standards.
From the high pedestal of a panel discussion within the precincts of the Actors’ Studio, pundits like Lee Strasberg himself and that great exhibitionist of emotions and director Harold Clurman would declare in one breath a score on Broadway nothing to go by and cite example after example of success – all of them, it seems, from Broadway! There must be method with a capital M, they insist, a marriage of mind and action not just among the actors, director, and playwright, but one between them and members of the audience, for it is only after such a fusion the play finally arrives out of the script or copy originally submitted. Yet eventually, it is the box office takings that come to count!
One must not be too uncharitable and churlish. The task facing the producer-director with a mission is no mean one. It seems to me a change has first to be made with those he is out to serve. The American spectator-public is touchy about many things. It avoids colour like leprosy, and eschews anything demanding thought or dealing with attitudes and beliefs foreign to its conditioned consciousness. Thus a play like Brecht’s Mother Courage with Oscar-winner Anne Bancroft for the principal part never had a chance of getting to the public’s heart. Contrary to the excuses that were given about chronicles, caption drops and waits for scene-changing, I rather incline to believe that it was the theme of play that sent away the public in droves, leading to closure in under three weeks. And the view over Broadway is littered with the corpses of many a promising recruit, although it must be added by way of epitaph that a good number of them died prematurely as they deserved, uncommitted, mercenary, lifeless and unsung.
One such disaster, in fact, a double one involving Max Frisch, became also my misfortune. His Andorra was opening on Broadway and ‘off’ at the Maidstone was his Firebugs. Both were to open in the same week in what, despite the newspaper blackout, was rightly touted through notices on radio and TV as well as service calls on phones as a Frisch Festival in New York. And to be there himself the Swiss German dramatist flew in all the way from Europe where these same plays were already playing to crowded audiences in more than sixty playhouses. Naturally, I felt very close to the whole show, for wasn’t Stanley, the producer of the second piece, also going to do my play with Ruth his friend? So one drivelling night Ruth, Sam and I drove over to Stanley’s for what was intended as a launching party for a show that had been put off more than twice or so before. ‘Where’s Max Frisch?’ I asked, not seeing anybody infested by all the other guests as houseflies crowd a cube of sugar. ‘Away in Mexico,’ Stanley laughed very manfully. ‘He was so upset he broke his glasses and took off immediately with his pretty secretary to Mexico.’ As the saying goes, we did not at that point know exactly whether to cry or laugh. But Stanley was laughing again and passing us more sweets between drinks and the dishes to come. Andorra, he said, had opened, was it Wednesday or Friday, and closed the same night. His own show (we saw it at rehearsals, didn’t we?) opened on Thursday. ‘Come over one day before it folds up on Sunday,’ he laughed. ‘Oh, sure, we will,’ we said in one hollow voice. But Stanley knew as well as we did that there would be no such day and we all settled down to what for a funereal party did not lack the frenzy of mourners wanting to forget a loved and lost one. And with that also faded my hopes of a production on or off Broadway.
5
The American Dream
De Tocqueville’s history is still held to be America’s best testimonial. In the one hundred and thirty odd years since it was given, the great rambling loghouse of America all but fell down in a heap, as foreseen by the visiting Frenchman. True, old Abe Lincoln who was then head of the house gave his life in spite of himself to preserve a semblance of family unity. But bonds between the feuding relatives were already badly broken, and attempts to have them forged again have since proved a mockery. For not only have they resulted in the uprooted statues of the South being put up again and indeed on higher stands, but the so-called freed black bondsmen of the family lost their iron-cast chains only to be turned into ragged tramps and squatters on God’s own rich estate, which they had sweated more than beasts of burden to build.
Almost at the same time and in the long harrowing aftermath of reconstruction and reaction, members of the small band of robber barons, operating on railway and shipping lines as well as in vast mines and banks spanning the entire continent, were piling up by hook or crook their fabulous billions on the ruin and rise again of the American house. In the predatory process, they established for the good of all that great American myth and apologia of the self-made man, the smart guy who makes good where all others have failed. Later came the universal crash on Wall Street after the Great War, and for a short but terrible period there grew the real scare that the entire structure and fabric of the house that the Yankee had built handsomely for himself would cave in and collapse. But that amazing cripple Franklin Delano Roosevelt was prompt on the scene, and what the colossus of Wall Street, J. P. Morgan, himself had failed to prop up with his indefinite stock of dollars, the cripple successfully mended with words of comfort for America’s forgotten man, holding out the promise of a New Deal for all. His firm, resourceful hand, especially during those first hundred days of his long rule that like Napoleon’s last were so full of fate, may have effectively plucked the firebrand of revolution away from reach of hordes of arsonists then roaming the American estate. But it must be said that it took the outbreak of the Second World War that was the wreck of others to put limping America back on her feet, and flood her house with yet more ill-gotten gains.
All these are events and adventures enough to mark or change for ever for good or bad the face of any hero or idol. But quite on the contrary, the one image that America would like to see of herself has not only remained untouched and unbruised where all others have lost either limb, head or life itself, just as it is with those super imperishable heroes of Wild West brawls, but its native owners have made it an article of faith to defy every visitor to dare deny that the American fetish and shrine is the one and only true, supreme and eternal cause to worship everywhere. Within a week of my arrival in Princeton in September 1962 it became clear to me as branches on trees stripped bare by autumn that the constant concern of every American I came in contact with, from the professor to the professional hostess and even the publican, was to convert me, an unbelieving foreigner and African. Indeed the shock seemed to be that this was necessary at all; the gospel really ought to have reached and sunk into me already.
Princeton however was not taking any chances with us Parvin Fellows. There was a special seminar we had to attend every Thursday afternoon from just after lunch to before supper all the days of our stay there. It met regularly at a library in the Woodrow Wilson building, and always the subject for sale was American Civilization, as if knowledge of this was all we needed to make us better able to perform our various duties back in our own countries. We were not addressed immediately by that charming salesman of American ware Mr Max Lerner. That was to come later – in the winter term, and when discontent began to show visible if undeclared on many a face other than my perennially sullen one. ‘The first session we ever had I remember like an afternoon dream. Starting out severally from our individual minor pursuits for the day, participants soon converged at the place of pilgrimage, and rather hushed and as if expecting some revelation any moment, we all took the one road and staircase to the library. Already waiting there at the head of five heavy tables in horse-shoe formation and behind a pile of books, sat Colonel Robert Van de Velde, one-time of the US Army and an acknowledged authority on psychological warfare. Sharing the place of honour with him was a slender taut gentleman of thirty-five or thereabouts: Professor Shaw Livermore of the History Department at Princeton, and a fellow member of the great Democratic Party of America on whose platform he was at that very moment seeking election as an Honourable Member of the Borough Council of Princeton, as the Colonel introduced him. The rest of us from abroad found our natural positions down on their either side.
All in all we made quite a collection, perhaps even more so than the old piece hung up there on the wall showing the august signatories to the Treaty of Versailles with Princeton’s own President Woodrow Wilson in prominent display: a journalist from South Korea, another from Poland, an agriculturist from Haiti, a general (unfortunately not uniform) from the Republic of Somalia, a diplomat from Syria, a literature licentiate of the University of Dakar from Dahomey, a junior civil servant in the Prisons Department from Nigeria, a lawyer and research fellow from Yugoslavia and poor me known simply as a journalist from Nigeria and wanting to be accepted too as an artist. ‘We miss our Indian friend who should have been with us here today,’ the Colonel announced solemnly. ‘But much as he wanted to come with the blessing of the Indian Government, he also happens to be directly in charge of government information, and right now is training all the guns at his command on the Red Chinese at the North-west Frontier.’ The lesson had begun.
But first of all, there were recommended books to distribute. The reading list included The First American Revolution, a glowing account of the Thirteen Colonies on their Eve of Independence by Clinton Rossiter who in 1954 ‘was chosen by the Fund for the Republic to direct a scholarly survey of Communist influence in American life,’ Edmund S. Morgan’s The Birth of the Republic: 1763–89, a study, in the Chicago History of American Civilization, of the high ideals that raised petty protests over tax to a historic fight for freedom, and The Nation Takes Shape: 1789–1837 by Marcus Cunliffe who tells, again in the Chicago series, of how dream and reality interplayed to form an undying democracy for America under Washington through to Jackson. Other authorised readings for the Parvin group were The Response to Industrialism by Samuel P. Hayes, yet another epic from the Chicago pantheon, Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday, greeted by the London Spectator as ‘the most important book written about America,’ A. A. Berle’s over-smooth story The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution, and bringing up the rear in grand finale was The New Age of Franklin Roosevelt by Dexter Perkins, fittingly again in the Chicago History of American Civilization.
‘We had thought of issuing you these books to use for the duration of your programme here. That would have meant collecting them back from you just when you are thinking of returning home to your various countries and would want to take along with you real fine studies of America.’ Colonel R. W. Van de Velde deployed the tools of persuasion piled in front of him. Then he went on, ‘But we now think that the best idea would be to make you buy them, that is, at a token fee of $10 for the whole lot. Now that’s a real bargain for you.’ He managed a laugh down his triple chin, pushing out the books for us to pass for inspection among ourselves. Not that there was really room for choice; each title on the authorised catalogue had to be read for the weekly seminar that came to form a rigid if hollow heart to the course. ‘Now, over to you, Professor,’ the Colonel turned to his colleague. And for the next three hours and more we were taken by way of a map sprawled out on the wall on a full tour of the vast unknown wilderness across the seas that religious zealots and fanatics, first from England and then Europe, and other characters destitute and desperate for gold, land and freedom, all in that order, farmed in a matter of a few years into the nation that today is the mightiest, the richest, and the freest man has ever set eyes on since the sun rose first on the chaos that was then the universe.
The account we heard that afternoon and were to hear dinned into us in one form or another day after day was one not unworthy of the deed. But most remarkable perhaps was the double figure of the old Colonel and the young professor silhouetted as a piece against the ochre parchment on the wall, one with stick in hand, the other supplying a running commentary, as they led us headlong in the footsteps of America’s intrepid pioneer and founder, first in his settlements stringing the Atlantic seaboard from Maine and Massachusetts to Virginia and Florida, then up through the Mississippi and the Ohio and the Missouri behind the Appelechians into the Mid-West Plains and deserts, and finally over the Rockies through passes scaled only by help of military expeditions after the Civil War and the roundabout passage of the Panama into the gold rush and sunshine of California sprawling unexploited between Canada and Mexico.
Even more significant, when the marathon exercise was over, as became still more evident with other sessions and professors, was the image of the Colonel sitting at the head of affairs, solid and silent like a lighthouse, but every now and again breaking in with a rare flash of illumination to offer correction to any inadvertent misstatement made by his learned colleague who may not have had at his disposal all the facts as officially interpreted. That one unchanging ‘testimonial’ by de Tocqueville had just faithfully to be adhered to. And true to test, the occasion always called for polar comparison. In the good old days it used simply to be ‘America is all innocence and Europe all evil.’ Today the formula, now a warcry, has become ‘The US is God-fearing and free while the Soviet Union enchains, and is of Satan’s party.’ This kind of effort seemed to me rather like that of some middle-aged careerist in public life for ever seeking assurances from others about his success and achievement. It hardly matters that those he seeks to impress have little or no interest in the subject. But because he is not very sure himself that he has fulfilled all the promise and predictions his all-wise teacher set out in his school-leaving testimonial, he would very much like others, and they need not be his superiors or equals alone but any junior and subordinate as well, to say to his hearing and comfort that he has not done a bad job of it at all, but in point of fact has positively made good.
Now, as everybody but the narcissistic Yankee well knows, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his Democracy In America in 1831–2 rather more in hope and expectation of what America the overgrown, acquisitive youth could become, especially when compared with the thorough mess of a career Old Mother Europe had made for herself, than in praise or appreciation of anything then in actual practice anywhere. The Utopia and theory had not quite been achieved, even though the American founders seemed to have had all the fair chances of starting on a fresh slate. There were however, fine traits he saw developing in the child that had run away from home to be on his own, and these if fully developed should make of him something near that ideal figure towards the realization of which the older countries of the world seemed to have forfeited their chances. The Frenchman observed and analysed a number of these qualities and attitudes which he thought peculiar to the people he was visiting. Chief of them were the American’s idea of commerce and trade, his concept of a classless society, his suspicion of a government strong and purposeful at the centre, and his belief in equal opportunity, that every citizen has a right to a fair and open share of what there is of the land and nature’s bounty.
All these remain fine and high ideals, and nobody denies that the early American founders and pioneers, among the later breed of whom de Tocqueville moved during his visit, did in spite of their rapacious tendencies have a creed to live and fight by. Thus one of them, John Quincy Adams, could proudly say: ‘Revolution took place in the minds of the people in the fifteen years before Lexington.’
An unshakeable belief in the personal ownership of property and the right to protect it with all the means possible as never enjoyed by his fathers and brothers back in Europe lay behind it all. ‘I was drying my saddlebags,’ says the gentleman in Pound’s Cantos, ‘and four yeomen in the bar room were talking politics: ‘‘If,” says one, ‘‘they can take Mr Hancocks’ wharf and Mr Rowe’s wharf, they can take my house and your bam.” So he was ready to take up gun at once not only in the unequal fight with the original owners of the land he was tilling by the labour of another, but also as soon as Congress cried out against tax prerogatives of an imperial master overseas.
And if things got too hot and uncomfortable in Boston with the whole town hunting him down as a witch or disciple of the devil, the old intrepid American tiller could always sell up his farm or brewery, hitch the family fortune to a waggon, and with the Bible and a true-barrelled gun in hand, set out further afield to carve a new place for himself in the sun and virgin country still unexplored and open to the claim and title-deed of first come first served. There was always the chance of moving out to try again one’s luck and pluck if the initial strike and hope that brought in the first instance the settler out of oppressive Europe happened to prove vain. Today however, the frontier has vanished for ever from the reach of descendants of men and women who trudged miles into hostile forests and deserts leading nobody knew where. ‘Oh, you exaggerate!’ said the political professor. ‘Surely an American still enjoys today a degree of mobility and choice obtainable nowhere else in the world.’ Yes, if an American packs his job up in one state or city, the chances of a break for him in another may still show reasonably even. But that is not saying his trail will parallel that walked by his fore-bears. The very fact that he would be looking up to another for employment belies the comparison. The pioneer before him was his own master with God himself as confidante. The automobile may be a wonderful improvement upon the wagon, and the fact that one can always stop a few nights today in motels, however synthetic their hospitality, is a prospect less dangerous than walking into the righteous ambush of Red Indians. But arrival at last would be at a stereotyped industrial centre into whose inevitable whirl and pull the present-day adventurer soon gets sucked, and if he is not fast and firm with his grip, a clean sweep-out into the vast cess-pit of more than six million unemployed and bums may well be the wages, for all his independent striking out.
In the cold light of this vision of a horizon really already lost President Kennedy’s slogan of New Frontiers opening out to Americans suddenly falls into proper perspective.
But it seems hardly likely the ordinary American citizen (in so far as any American is ordinary at all!) will want to shed his testimonial and dream. Just before Christmas, I took a cab in New York in order to be punctual for a talk I was scheduled to give that night. Like most cab-drivers in that city, mine turned out to be most talkative and forth-coming, and before I had plumped into my seat, we were right away on a quick exchange of the latest news. It was blackout time, then with the newspapers. And as it so happened, on our route we drove past Times Building.
‘Look over there!’ The cab-driver pointed out the pickets about the place. ‘They are workers on strike. Not even President Kennedy can tell them to go back to work. Now that’s the great thing about us in America. In Ghana and Russia they’d all be shot.’
I laughed out loud which rubbed him up the wrong way.
‘That’s the honest truth,’ he declared. ‘The President can’t ask me to go out to work if I don’t have a mind to.’
‘Yes,’ I said as sweetly as I could, ‘why should he – when it would be for the profit of some other person no freer than you? Over in Ghana and Russia you’d be working in state-owned plants. So why should you strike? You’d be killing the plant you pay yearly tax on.’
‘That’s right,’ the cab-driver licked his lips. ‘I never thought of that.’
Later when he dropped me and in my hurry I tipped him more than I should have, he leaned out of his car-window and almost whined: ‘Brother, but I don’t get this business of state owning plants.’
‘How could you?’ I called back, and ran straight into an elevator going up.
At Edison, a real industrial hub off New Brunswick, I had been put on the carpet for the same reason by a group of big industrialists and businessmen gathered there for the opening of a new factory making new types of electric lamp shades that diffuse light evenly about a room. This was during my visit to The Home News in the course of which the paper’s industrial and scientific reporter (or correspondent as he preferred to call himself) invited me out in his Herald Coupé, about which he was full of apologies, principally in respect of its small size.
‘You come from Nigeria?’ They all swamped me, making me look every big indeed.
‘Yes,’ I said, turning to as many of them as I could take in at once. ‘And when are you going to market your wares there?’
‘Not immediately,’ said the managing director of the new plant. ‘Our plans don’t extend even to Europe yet.’
‘Tell me,’ some big shot cut in. ‘Why do all you new African states go for state-ownership of business?’
