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?
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