Eugene O'Neill--All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924)

Our first repeat author. There is a lot of O'Neill on this list. Shakespeare turns up the most, and I am pretty sure Dickens is second, but O'Neill may be the third most represented author in this program.

I knew almost nothing about this play going into the reading. It seems to have been relegated to the national literary attic for most of the past forty years or so, probably until people can figure out how to pull it out and handle it safely. It is about racial division, and really is a pretty daring and pretty strong take on the subject for the mainstream theater in 1924. O'Neill obviously was a white male, and perhaps no one is interested anymore in what he would have had to say about the American racial situation, but I am interested in it, especially since it is a significant departure from the way most other white guy American writers of the time (i.e. Booth Tarkington, F Scott Fitzgerald, even T S Eliot) seemed to regard it. O'Neill was immersed pretty seriously in the cultural and artistic life of this period, and he must have felt that the race issue impacted him in some way and that he had something to say about it. <I only wish I were so impacted and engaged in life>.

The 1960s introduction to the play in the IWE is truly a missive from a foreign country. Fifty years on, it defies contemporary intellectual propriety in about every way, though its intentions are clearly good and liberal in the context of its own time. I will reproduce it in its entirety:

This is a penetrating study of a controversial subject. A white girl, Ella, marries a Negro man, Jim, and she loses her mental balance. It is a foreseeable consequence in psychology and is not subject to controversy. On the message of the play, however, the United States divides on sectional lines. Generations of Northern students have been taught that the play is a protest against our culture, in its implanting of ineradicable prejudices. Southerners rather see in it a warning against the natural perils of miscegenation; and of course the warning is there, protest or no. The title is from a Negro spiritual.

The famous actor Paul Robeson was the original Jim on the stage.

I am a northern student (as was O'Neill himself, at one time), so I suppose it is natural that I am inclined to assume that the first interpretation is closer to the intention of the author than that it is a warning against miscegenation.

The sets and stage directions in this, particularly in the first act, have a bold, modernist character about them that strikes one. The first three scenes of the first act are set on 'a corner in lower New York' where two streets converge, with intervals of some years between them. Tenements stretch away down each of the streets, one of which is populated exclusively by white people, the other exclusively by black people. Popular songs of the various eras depicted are heard--different ones on each of the streets--and as the years progess the streets are emptier and the noises 'more rhythmically mechanical, electricity having taken the place of horse and steam'. The fourth scene, in some ways the central and most jolting one in the play, takes place 'in front of an old brick church...people--men, women, children--pour from the two tenements (on each side of the yard), whites from the tenement to the left, blacks from the one to the right. They hurry to form into two racial lines on each side of the gate, rigid and unyielding, staring across at each other with bitter hostile eyes'. In truth I admit that if somebody--whether an angry female (whether of color or not), a pouty, sarcastic gay, or maybe even a straight white guy who suspiciously managed to stay in everyone's good graces--were to write something like this into a contemporary play, I might not trust the accuracy of the vision or find the same level of attraction to it that I have done here. Age also has a way of clarifying what in at attitude or vision is solid or deep and what wasn't that I have a hard time delineating in the present.

From a British production.

I also can't repeat enough how much I love the American language and literary consciousness of the 1920s and 30s. Every time I come back to this period it really hits me. Unfortunately I am very much in many of my habits and worldviews stuck in this period and cannot relate very well to people who are alive now and the things they care about.

The second act, with its scenes in the apartment, struck me as very reminiscent, in its mood, setting, and sense of frustrated male hopelessness, of A Raisin in the Sun. In a broad sense, of course.

Oona (1925-1991), Eugene O'Neill's extremely attractive daughter, who at age eighteen married Charlie Chaplin, who was fifty-four at the time, and went on to have eight children with him. The playwright did not approve of the marriage, after which his relationship with his daughter was severed.

The Challenge

1. Sam Harris--Waking Up......................................550
2. Daniel E. Dennett--Consciousness Explained.....144
3. Dan Smith--The Child Thief................................110
4. Julie Cross--Whatever Life Throws at You............71
5. Eva Stachniak--Empress of the Night....................68
6. Ezra Pound--Cantos...............................................39
7. Leann Harris--Second Chance Ranch......................8

The winner this time is subtitled A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, which is something I might read, though the concept is not one that obsesses me. However, my local library does not have a copy of it, and I am not inclined to seek it out. There were some promising contestants this time, though. The Dennett book I think is supposed to be for an intelligence level above the general level, and the Ezra Pound, though finishing weakly in 6th place, was the result of a small alteration I have made in the process to try to get more serious books into the contest. I am betting the next Challenge gives us something we can actually read.

Paul Robeson sings the title song. It's a very good song. Obviously no one needs my pronouncement on the matter, but as a person who I am sure most knowing people would agree has and knows nothing of soul or anything in that way, the fact that I still like the song might be of interest to people who are in the same boat. 

O'Neill referenced a number of old songs, some of which I was familiar with, some of which I was not (but all of which I want and think I should be) into the stage directions. There was "Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage":

"Little Annie Rooney", here in one of the better efforts of the Lennon Sisters:

"I Wish I Had a Girl"

"When I Lost You"

"Waiting For the Robert E Lee"

"Frankie and Johnny"

"Annie Laurie"

"Old Black Joe"

Merry Christmas.

All For Love, or The World Well Lost--Dryden (1678)

I think this is the third time I have read this; I wonder if it probably will be the last. The first time was in October of 2004, and I thought it very good. The second time, a small report of which I made on my other blog in 2009, I thought much less of it, probably because on that occasion I was reading it alongside other Cleopatra plays, Shakespeare especially, but also Shaw and even Samuel Daniel, to which I thought it compared unfavorably. My judgment on this third reading is somewhere in between those of the previous two. The verse struck me once more as admirable and worthy of respect in itself; and as I was not as immersed in the story and particular set of characters over multiple versions as I had been on the second occasion, the manner in which they happened to be depicted here was not as off-putting to me. I am sure that none of these plays/novels/movies written 1500+ years after the events that inspired them are particularly accurate in terms either of history or characterization; however Dryden's characterization struck me as the weakest and least probable of the set when read alongside the others. However as I said, It did not bother me much on this occasion, and indeed I scarcely noticed it.

There is a picture on the page I linked to of my then 5, now 11 year old son holding up my Modern Library copy of Twelve Famous Plays of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. My other book list loves Restoration drama, so I have read eight of the twelve famous plays for that, and numerous others from the period besides. At least five of the twelve are also on the IWE list and there may be as many as seven--I am not certain off hand whether Goldsmith and Congreve made it or not--so it has proven to be a volume worth having.

I have come over the years to enjoy Restoration plays when it chances that I have to read them, as I have come, I must admit, to enjoy sampling from most of the major genres and periods in literary history. I am not a very fierce reader, particularly with regard to the authors of the past, the value of whose surviving work, at least in the better examples, always seems to me to outweigh their deficiencies. The Restoration was not, I will say, one of the literary eras that I took to right from the start; as a teenager especially, I could make nothing out of it at all. Over a period of years and reading many plays and poems and other books from and about the period I have attained enough familiarity with it that it has acquired an interest for me as something definite and fairly important, and I even have a little fondness for it as a distinct entity in the family, or college, of literary history, people I look forward to seeing at a party every once in a while, especially here at holiday-time. That said, my feeling in reading them is still different from that I have in reading certain other genres to which I am perhaps closer in spirit. Reading long passages of formal verse especially requires some degree of alertness and concentration, and does an admirable job of keeping fuzzier emotions at bay.

I thought this was the only Dryden play to make the IWE list, but I see that The Conquest of Granada has also made it, so we aren't quite done with him yet. Like most modern people, I do not respond to Dryden overly strongly (as you see, I am having difficulty in writing about him)--indeed, it is hard to tell whether anyone has really done so, even in his own time. He was the poet laureate and the leading playwright and public critic and literary man of his age, but even then he doesn't seem to have had a lot of rabid disciples or imitators. He was very good in the technical aspects of writing. His sentences and verses have a kind of neat quality about them as far as being constructions of words and sounds meant to convey thought. Like a lot of writers of his general class, I suppose he ultimately lacks power in the high degree. But to my mind he and his period are still worth knowing in some degree.

The Challenge

I've decided to keep the Challenge as it has been for a little while, take it up if anything interesting should chance to win, and if not, then keep moving along the main list.

1. Jack Campbell--The Last Fleet: Guardian..........................................241
2. Vicki Alvear Shecter--Cleopatra's Moon..............................................56
3. Jacob Abbott--Cleopatra.......................................................................39
    H. Rider Haggard--Cleopatra................................................................39
5. Si Sheppard--Actium 31 B.C.: Downfall of Antony and Cleopatra.........6

I don't remember what this time's winner is about--I think it's a modern sci-fi/fantasy type thing, of limited literary interest. My library doesn't even have it. So I will move right on to the next book on the list.

Susan Glaspell--Alison's House (1930)

Four of the next five works on the IWE list are plays, along with one short novel. So I should continue to make a rapid progression through it for a while longer.

Alison's House won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1930. Even though its author is a woman, writing in an era when women were supposed to be underrepresented among playwrights, and its namesake subject a genius female poet who has some similarities to Emily Dickinson, it has fallen into obscurity. It has been out of print for years, there are very few copies of it available on the internet, and most of those are over $100. As I want to collect at least some edition of all the books on this list--and most are either available very cheaply or I have them already--I was hard put to find anything available for under $50, let alone 15, which is at the outer edge of what I usually consider resonable. I finally came across a volume of Six Plays published in London in 1930, which looked to be a compendium of that year's major dramas on both sides of the Atlantic--in addition to Alison's House, it also included Marc Connelly's Green Pastures, which is also on the IWE list, as well as something by Elmer Rice (Street Scene)*--for eight bucks, though unfortunately as it had to be sent from New Zealand the shipping and handling was an additional twelve. But I was able to get my book, and not suffer an interruption in the program.

As I think this play is not widely known, I will briefly recapitulate its story, setting, and character. It is set on December 31, 1899, which everyone in the play considers to be the last day of the 19th century, and that there is significance in the fact. Alison, the titular poetess, has actually already been dead for twenty years, but her elderly sister has continued to live in the family house they shared, which is substantial and cultivated, and is situated along the Mississippi river in Iowa (Glaspell was a native of Davenport, Iowa, presumably the unidentified nearby city where Alison's brother, a lawyer, and his children live). They are not the Vanderbilts as far as wealth goes, but all of the men in the family either are attending or seem to have attended Harvard, which in 1899 indicates a pretty rarified status, especially in Iowa. As the elderly sister is becoming too infirm to live by herself in the old house anymore, the family has decided to sell it off and bring auntie to live with them in town. As the transfer is to take place the next day, the first day of the 1900s, they are spending the new century's eve cleaning the old place out. In addition to Alison's brother and sister, there are the brother's three children: the frustrated, dutiful older son and his even more rigidly correct wife, whom he does not love; the younger son, who is verge of flunking out of Harvard and is trying to save his skin by getting some gossip about his famous but mysterious dead aunt to feed his voracious English professor; and the wayward daughter who ran off with the husband of one of her friends and had been in effect banished from the family before turning up on the occasion of the house closing. There is also a reporter from a Chicago newspaper who has gotten wind of the house being sold and is sniffing around for a possible story, and the attorney's 'secretary', whose mother was the woman he really loved and whom it is strongly hinted is really his daughter. While there was a literary group interested in buying the house and preserving it as a museum, it appears as if the house is going to be sold to some vulgar townspeople who plan to turn it into a summer tourist resort. This all unfolds very compactly and neatly in the course of the play, which has an excellent construction. In reading it has a considerable amount of atmosphere also, with the imminent change of century and departure from the house and the sense that a comfortable familiar is about to be gone. It is also of course written in the language and style of its time, which has a cleanness and honesty and--awareness (?) of the essential details of its world, and their significance--that I do not find to my satisfaction in own writing at least, and not much in that of contemporary writers.

So as a means of amusing myself and escaping into the past I rather liked this, and again congratulated myself on finally allowing myself to take up this antiquated, and heavily middlebrow (though with a lot of real literature on it) list, which really does give me a pleasure that my life had come to lack through my years of unsuccessfully striving to become someone other people would approve as intelligent. If you were to ask me "How good is it?" and "What are its insights?" and insist on my defending such positions as I took, I would say 1) It is overall quite good, it is the work of an intelligent person, it evokes mood and feeling, pays tasteful homage to a period, a class of characters, and a somewhat iconic personage in our history without being overbearing about it; and 2) That is more difficult. However, the theme of elusive love, or loving an inappropriate person and being unable to find a love that is more acceptable, is a dominant one in the play, effecting at least five of the characters, including Alison, and seems to have been the wellspring of her celebrated poems. We are also reminded of the inevitability of death, not only of individuals but of generations, and cultures, etc, but with the suggestion at least of continual rejuvenation and the possibility of art to transcend the strictures of normal human time. So there is that. The play is not an absolute joke intellectually, at least not to people in the 85th-95th percentile range of intelligence or so. This group could get something out of the exercise of reading it.

It happens that I recently (late October) saw another play that was explicitly about Emily Dickinson, The Belle of Amherst, a one woman show written by William Luce, first produced in 1976. I went to this because my sister-in-law was the actress. The play was staged in a circa 1903 stone library that has been converted into a kind of community function hall. It was great to be out and to see a live performance with that degree of intimacy. The material was engaging, and the effect was probably greatly aided by seeing this particular story in New England the week before Halloween, which is an especially New England-y (in the Emily Dickinson sense) week. I don't know if it would be the same seeing it in Miami, which is where my sister-in-law currently works. It was really good to get out of the house, and they even had a little wine and cheese reception afterwards. You may laugh, but I never get to go to things like this. I almost felt like a real adult.

The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge

The challenge is dying. Another lackluster selection of titles and another murder/detective novel as a winner. Who reads all these detective novels? I know some of them are literature but the vast majority of them are exactly alike. The detective is always supposed to be some kind of superior super-intellect with a deep understanding of men and the organization of society, yet the books are always stupendously boring. I am going to have to revamp the system again to try to produce results more in line with what I am looking for.

1. The Beautiful Mystery--Louise Penny.......................................................................................1,111
2. Chance of a Ghost--E. J. Copperman...........................................................................................62
3. With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century (ed. Douglas Valentine)............2
4. Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections Since Antiquity (ed. James Raven).....1
    The FSG Book of 20th Century Italian Poetry...............................................................................1
6. Cambridge Companion to 20th Century English Poetry (ed. Neil Corcoran).................................0
    Earth-Moon--Ted Hughes.................................................................................................................0

*The remaining plays in this collection are Badger's Green by R.C. Sherriff, Down Our Street by Ernest George, and the intriguing sounding Socrates by Clifford Bax. 

"Her brown hair is parted in the middle, and held loosely at the neck. She is looking straight ahead, as if into something. But she is really waiting for the right word to come. They came, you can tell that. They were willing visitors. She didn't have to go out and pull them in. There is a knock at the door. It's me. I am crying. She makes a funny little face. She says, 'Tell Alison.' I tell her Jimmy Miles has knocked over my mud house. She says, 'You can build a fort, and put him in it.' She tells me the story of the bumble-bee that got drunk on larkspur and set out to see how drunk you could get in heaven. And what became of her thoughts--the thought I interrupted?"

--Sample from Alison's House

This plaque is in Iowa City?

Alice in Wonderland--1933

The Annontated Alice gave a list of all the Alice film and TV adaptations. It didn't seem to love any of them, including the 1951 Disney version (though there was a 1936 Mickey Mouse cartoon based on the Alice books that was described as "brilliant"). The one that was referenced the most was a 1933 Paramount production, which looks somewhat interesting, at least, and it had a lot of big names in the cast--W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty, Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, Gary Cooper as the White Night. Alice was played by Charlotte Henry, whose career did not really go anywhere after the break of getting this role. I have not seen this movie apart from these short clips on You Tube.

I found the Mickey Mouse cartoon. I'm not a cartoon expert, and it's 2:30am, but it seems pretty good.