I cherish Emerson
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion, it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who, in the midst of the world, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. -Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Symbols and Signs. A short story by Vladimir Nabokov
May 7, 1948
For the
fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what
birthday present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind.
Desires he had none. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant
with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for
which no use could be found in his abstract world. After eliminating a number
of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the gadget line,
for instance, was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle—a
basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.
At the
time of his birth, they had already been married for a long time; a score of
years had elapsed, and now they were quite old. Her drab gray hair was pinned
up carelessly. She wore cheap black dresses. Unlike other women of her age
(such as Mrs. Sol, their next-door neighbor, whose face was all pink and mauve
with paint and whose hat was a cluster of brookside flowers), she presented a
naked white countenance to the faultfinding light of spring. Her husband, who
in the old country had been a fairly successful businessman, was now, in New
York, wholly dependent on his brother Isaac, a real American of almost forty
years’ standing. They seldom saw Isaac and had nicknamed him the Prince.
That
Friday, their son’s birthday, everything went wrong. The subway train lost its
life current between two stations and for a quarter of an hour they could hear
nothing but the dutiful beating of their hearts and the rustling of newspapers.
The bus they had to take next was late and kept them waiting a long time on a
street corner, and when it did come, it was crammed with garrulous high-school
children. It began to rain as they walked up the brown path leading to the sanitarium.
There they waited again, and instead of their boy, shuffling into the room, as
he usually did (his poor face sullen, confused, ill-shaven, and blotched with
acne), a nurse they knew and did not care for appeared at last and brightly
explained that he had again attempted to take his life. He was all right, she
said, but a visit from his parents might disturb him. The place was so
miserably understaffed, and things got mislaid or mixed up so easily, that they
decided not to leave their present in the office but to bring it to him next
time they came.
Outside
the building, she waited for her husband to open his umbrella and then took his
arm. He kept clearing his throat, as he always did when he was upset. They
reached the bus-stop shelter on the other side of the street and he closed his
umbrella. A few feet away, under a swaying and dripping tree, a tiny unfledged
bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle.
During
the long ride to the subway station, she and her husband did not exchange a
word, and every time she glanced at his old hands, clasped and twitching upon
the handle of his umbrella, and saw their swollen veins and brown-spotted skin,
she felt the mounting pressure of tears. As she looked around, trying to hook
her mind onto something, it gave her a kind of soft shock, a mixture of
compassion and wonder, to notice that one of the passengers—a girl with dark
hair and grubby red toenails—was weeping on the shoulder of an older woman.
Whom did that woman resemble? She resembled Rebecca Borisovna, whose daughter
had married one of the Soloveichiks—in Minsk, years ago.
The
last time the boy had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s
words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded had not an
envious fellow-patient thought he was learning to fly and stopped him just in
time. What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and
escape.
The
system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a
scientific monthly, which the doctor at the sanitarium had given to them to
read. But long before that, she and her husband had puzzled it out for
themselves. “Referential mania,” the article had called it. In these very rare
cases, the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled
reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the
conspiracy, because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than
other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the
staring sky transmit to each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed
information regarding him. His in- most thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in
manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks
form patterns representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept.
Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. All around him, there
are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still
pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses,
lynchers at heart; others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the
point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely
misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every
minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very
air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were
limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the
torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of
his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and
still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up,
in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.
When
they emerged from the thunder and foul air of the subway, the last dregs of the
day were mixed with the street lights. She wanted to buy some fish for supper,
so she handed him the basket of jelly jars, telling him to go home.
Accordingly, he returned to their tenement house, walked up to the third
landing, and then remembered he had given her his keys earlier in the day.
In
silence he sat down on the steps and in silence rose when, some ten minutes
later, she came trudging heavily up the stairs, smiling wanly and shaking her
head in deprecation of her silliness. They entered their two-room flat and he
at once went to the mirror. Straining the corners of his mouth apart by means
of his thumbs, with a horrible, mask-like grimace, he removed his new,
hopelessly uncomfortable dental plate. He read his Russian-language newspaper
while she laid the table. Still reading, he ate the pale victuals that needed
no teeth. She knew his moods and was also silent.
When he
had gone to bed, she remained in the living room with her pack of soiled
playing cards and her old photograph albums. Across the narrow courtyard, where
the rain tinkled in the dark against some ash cans, windows were blandly
alight, and in one of them a black-trousered man, with his hands clasped under
his head and his elbows raised, could he seen lying supine on an untidy bed.
She pulled the blind down and examined the photographs. As a baby, he looked
more surprised than most babies. A photograph of a German maid they had had in
Leipzig and her fat-faced fiancé fell out of a fold of the album. She turned
the pages of the book: Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin, Leipzig again, a
slanting house front, badly out of focus. Here was the boy when he was four
years old, in a park, shyly, with puckered forehead, looking away from an eager
squirrel, as he would have from any other stranger. Here was Aunt Rosa, a
fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad
news, bankruptcies, train accidents, and cancerous growths until the Germans
put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about. The boy,
aged six—that was when he drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet, and
suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man. His cousin, now a famous chess player.
The boy again, aged about eight, already hard to understand, afraid of the
wallpaper in the passage, afraid of a certain picture in a book, which merely
showed an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel
hanging from the one branch of a leafless tree. Here he was at ten—the year
they left Europe. She remembered the shame, the pity, the humiliating
difficulties of the journey, and the ugly, vicious, backward children he was
with in the special school where he had been placed after they arrived in
America. And then came a time in his life, coinciding with a long convalescence
after pneumonia, when those little phobias of his, which his parents had
stubbornly regarded as the eccentricities of a prodigiously gifted child,
hardened, as it were, into a dense tangle of logically interacting illusions,
making them totally inaccessible to normal minds.
All
this, and much more, she had accepted, for, after all, living does mean
accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere
possibilities of improvement. She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that
for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the in
visible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the
incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this
tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of
neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds
that cannot hide from the farmer.
It was
nearly midnight when, from the living room, she heard her husband moan, and
presently he staggered in, wearing over his nightgown the old overcoat with the
astrakhan collar that he much preferred to his nice blue bathrobe.
“I
can’t sleep!” he cried.
“Why
can’t you sleep?” she asked. “You were so tired.”
“I
can’t sleep because I am dying,” he said, and lay down on the couch.
“Is it
your stomach? Do you want me to call Dr. Solov?”
“No
doctors, no doctors,” he moaned. “To the devil with doctors! We must get him
out of there quick. Otherwise, we’ll be responsible.... Responsible!” He hurled
himself into a sitting position, both feet on the floor, thumping his forehead
with his clenched fist.
“All
right,” she said quietly. “We will bring him home tomorrow morning.”
“I
would like some tea,” said her husband and went out to the bathroom.
Bending
with difficulty, she retrieved some playing cards and a photograph or two that
had slipped to the floor—the knave of hearts, the nine of spades, the ace of
spades, the maid Elsa and her bestial beau. He returned in high spirits, saying
in a loud voice, “I have it all figured out. We will give him the bedroom. Each
of us will spend part of the night near him and the other part on this couch.
We will have the doctor see him at least twice a week. It does not matter what
the Prince says. He won’t have much to say anyway, because it will come out
cheaper.”
”Can I
speak to Charlie?” a girl’s dull little voice said to her now.
“What
number do you want? . . . No. You have the wrong number.”
She put
the receiver down gently and her hand went to her heart. “It frightened me,”
she said.
He
smiled a quick smile and immediately resumed his excited monologue. They would
fetch him as soon as it was day. For his own protection, they would keep all the
knives in a locked drawer. Even at his worst, he presented no danger to other
people.
The
telephone rang a second time.
The
same toneless, anxious young voice asked for Charlie.
“You
have the incorrect number. I will tell you what you are doing. You are turning
the letter ‘o’ instead of the zero.” She hung up again.
They
sat down to their unexpected, festive midnight tea. He sipped noisily; his face
was flushed; every now and then he raised his glass with a circular motion, so
as to make the sugar dissolve more thoroughly. The vein on the side of his bald
head stood out conspicuously, and silvery bristles showed on his chin. The
birthday present stood on the table. While she poured him another glass of tea,
he put on his spectacles and reëxamined with pleasure the luminous yellow,
green, and red little jars. His clumsy, moist lips spelled out their eloquent
labels—apricot, grape, beach plum, quince. He had got to crab apple when the
telephone rang again. ♦
The happiness of your life depends
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts
When fiction becomes fact: The monster baby
There is old grave in King County Washington that reads “Monster Baby.” A story spread across the internet that the entombed child was an actual monster-child that was ….for whatever the reason……condemned to an early grave. Actually, Monster is a surname, an Irish surname and the child in the grave didn’t live long enough to name, a common occurrence in the 19th century.
No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed
No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined. -Harry Emerson Fosdick, preacher and author.
Playwright opportunities
Your 2022 Hear Me Out entry must in some way refer to some naming and its impact on the characters you’re revealing. As always we hope you will find your own way into our festival theme and we do not require the use of any specific words, language or stylistic choices. We only ask that your character grapples with our festival theme WHEN WE NAME IT in some way.
And remember: your monologue must introduce us to a character who is talking to another person (or group of people). Short stories and essays will be disqualified.
***
The Gallery Players in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York, is seeking plays for its 26th Annual Black Box New Play Festival to be held in January 2023. Each play selected will be given a black box production with non-equity actors. Playwrights must be available via Zoom or some other virtual venue for rehearsals and use this as an opportunity to continue work on their play.
***
Submissions are now being accepted for Paradox Theatre Works’ second annual New Works Festival Showcase 2022, entitled “THE LIVING ROOM”.
Seeking original short plays 10 minutes in length that have not been produced in the Chicago area before, from playwrights from across the globe. This year’s festival is focused on scenes that occur in “The Living Room”.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** HANSBERRY ***
When the Los Angeles-based artist Alison Saar was commissioned a little over four years ago to sculpt a statue of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, she had just one thought: “Am I the right person for the job?”
“I don’t really work with likenesses,” said Saar, 66, whose artwork focuses on the African diaspora and Black female identity. “But they said, ‘No, no, we want it to be more of a portrait of her passion and who she was beyond a playwright.’”
The request had come from Lynn Nottage, the two-time Pulitzer-winning playwright, as part of an initiative she was developing with Julia Jordan, the executive director of the Lilly Awards, which recognize the work of women in theater. The Lorraine Hansberry Initiative was designed to honor Hansberry, who was the first Black woman to have a show produced on Broadway.
“She’s just part of my foundational DNA as an artist,” Nottage said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “Throughout my career, if I needed to look to structure, or storytelling, or inspiration, I could go to ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ this perfect piece of literature.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/arts/design/lorraine-hansberry-statue-times-square.html
***
In 1937, prominent businessman Carl Hansberry bought a home in the white South Side Woodlawn neighborhood just south of the University of Chicago. White mobs greeted the family and a brick almost hit eight-year-old Lorraine Hansberry. At night her mother, Nannie, patrolled the house with a gun.
The mobs didn’t run out the Hansberrys. The courts did. Anna Lee, a white neighbor, sued arguing a restrictive agreement prevented the sale of blacks to the neighborhood. Illinois courts agreed and the Hansberrys were forced to leave. Racially restrictive covenants consistently kept blacks in residential segregation. Those convents prevented African Americans in Chicago and elsewhere around the United States from buying or renting homes in white neighborhoods. On the South Side of Chicago, the overcrowded Black Belt housed too many families in too many shoddy conditions. White home improvement associations served as gatekeepers to prevent blacks from moving into their neighborhoods.
More...
https://www.thehistoryreader.com/historical-figures/lorraine-hansberry-and-chicago-segregation/
***
In recent years, the puzzling paradox of how a Black lesbian Communist became a darling of mainstream America has been explored in multiple biographies, including Imani Perry’s “Looking for Lorraine” and Soyica Diggs Colbert’s “Radical Vision,” and in Tracy Heather Strain’s documentary “Sighted Eyes / Feeling Heart.” Shields’s portrait is the latest attempt to expand our sense of the personal struggle behind the public figure, and to illuminate the many contradictions that she sought to live and work through.
Hansberry was not raised to be a radical. She was born in Chicago in 1930, the child of an illustrious family that was well regarded in business and academic circles. Lorraine’s father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, was a real-estate speculator and a proud race man. When Lorraine was seven years old, the family bought a house in a mostly white neighborhood. Faced with eviction by the local property owners association, Carl fought against racially restrictive housing covenants in court. Shortly before the case was argued, a crowd of white neighbors gathered outside the Hansberry home. Nannie, Lorraine’s mother, stood watch with a gun. Someone hurled a brick through the window, narrowly missing Lorraine’s head. When the police finally arrived, one officer remarked, “Some people throw a rock through your window and you act like it was a bomb.” It was 1937. The bombing of Black families would come.
More...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/24/the-many-visions-of-lorraine-hansberry
***
Freedom Archives online
Freedom (1951-55) was a newspaper founded in Harlem, New York by activists Paul Robeson and Louis Burnham during the Cold War and McCarthy eras. It openly challenged racism, imperialism, colonialism, and political repression and advocated for civil rights, labor rights and world peace. Its writers and contributors included W.E.B. Du Bois, Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry.
http://dlib.nyu.edu/freedom/
***
During a protest against racial discrimination at New York University, she met Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish writer who shared her political views. They married on June 20, 1953 at the Hansberrys’ home in Chicago.
In 1956, her husband and Burt D’Lugoff wrote the hit song, “Cindy, Oh Cindy.” Its profits allowed Hansberry to quit working and devote herself to writing. She then began a play she called The Crystal Stair, from Langston Hughes’ poem “Mother to Son.” She later retitled it A Raisin in the Sun from Hughes’ poem, “Harlem: A Dream Deferred.”
Her second play, THE SIGN ON SIDNEY BRUNSTEIN'S WINDOW, about a Jewish intellectual, ran on Broadway for 101 performances. It received mixed reviews. Her friends rallied to keep the play running. It closed on January 12, 1965, the day Hansberry died of cancer at 34.
Although Hansberry and Nemiroff divorced before her death, he remained dedicated to her work. As literary executor, he edited and published her three unfinished plays: Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers? He also collected Hansberry’s unpublished writings, speeches and journal entries and presented them in the autobiographical montage To Be Young, Gifted and Black. The title is taken from a speech given by Hansberry in May 1964 to winners of a United Negro Fund writing competition: “…though it be thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic, to be young, gifted and black!”
More...
https://www.chipublib.org/lorraine-hansberry-biography/
***
The thing about history is that you don’t get answers to questions you don’t ask. Sally Hemings was a forgotten slave until Annette Gordon-Reed came along. Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War forward were said to play no meaningful role until black scholars ferreted out the facts. And Lorraine Hansberry had nothing to do with the lesbian liberation movement until 1976, when an editor revealed the playwright’s surprisingly radical correspondence on the subject.
Black gays and lesbians have been erased from our community’s history with surprising thoroughness. March on Washington planner Bayard Rustin labored away on behalf of the greater good for decades while having his own humanity shunted by fellow movement leaders. Duke Ellington’s genius writing partner Billy Strayhorn’s contributions have been profoundly obscured. And many of the artists who peopled the Harlem Renaissance have had their queer lives entirely straight-washed.
More...
https://www.theroot.com/lorraine-hansberrys-gay-politics-1790869060
***
New York Times Review, March 29, 1959
Vivid Drama About A Poor Negro Family
by Brooks Atkinson
Although the acting in Lorraine Hansberry's A RAISIN IN THE SUN is vehement, it never seems excessive. Under the direction of Lloyed Richards, the scenes of crisis in the script touch off explosions in the performance. But the explosions never give an impression of being arbitrary.
For Miss Hansberry has written a homely play about the day-to-day anxieties of a Negro family on the South Side of Chicago. Some of the troubles are uproariously funny; some of them are harrowing. Since the characters have great capacity for feeling, the emotional range is wide. The nervous, tensely paced performance of Sidney Poitier as the wayward son and the highly wrought performance of Claudia McNeil as the unyielding matriarch have solid footing in the script. Everything is of a piece - writing, staging and acting.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/1959/03/29/archives/raisin-in-the-sun-vivid-drama-about-a-poor-negro-family.html
***
Lorraine Hansbery Interview (1959) audio only
Playwright Lorraine Hansberry discusses her play "A Raisin in the Sun" and theater in general; last 10 minutes is a reading of "Chicago: South Side Summers" from "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black."
Credit to: Studs Terkel Radio Archive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkFR_6DGJ3o
***
This week, Basic Black discusses legendary playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote 'A Raisin in the Sun.' Panelists: Lisa Simmons, director of the Roxbury International Film Festival; Tracy Heather Strain, producer of 'Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart,' a documentary about Hansberry; Kim McLarin, associate professor at Emerson College; and Michael Jeffries, associate professor at Wellesley College.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DahYuoC1bbk
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