Letters from Amherst. Samuel R. Delany
So Rhoda went to a pay phone and called Beverly Sills and began to explain: “We’ve finally decided the way we’re going to do it.
“At the end of Act II, we’re going to stop the whole opera. Dead in its tracks, Beverly! The cast is going to gather on the stage, and we’re going to perform the third act as a cantata—no movement, no actions, just characters stepping out of the chorus and singing. Suddenly the whole performance will simply paralyze into total and complete stasis! It’s going to be breathtaking!
“You know as well as I do, Beverly—people have been complaining about the rehearsal time available here for years; the lack of funding, the lack of facilities. Well, besides being about the economic oppression of the American Black, this is also of course a meta-opera … about that! And what better way to dramatize it? Certainly for the cast, this is really an opera about the oppression of the American opera as a theatrical form. They’re singers, and that’s what they’re really concerned about. It’s about performance standards. It’s about what can and can’t be done in the theater today with a serious work because there’s no money, no time, and no margins for doing it properly. And you’re going to have it, right on your stage—the audience will be devastated, I promise you! People will be talking about it for years!
“There was,” Ms. Levine went on with her story, “absolute silence on the other end of the phone. Finally, Beverly said to me: ‘Rhoda, how much time do you need?’
“So I said: ‘Oh, I thought about eighty-three hours.’ And Beverly said: ‘You’ve got it!’” And Rhoda sat back at the crowded round little hotel table, slapping her knees while we laughed.
I still think it was a thoughtless production. While she certainly delivers a good anecdote, I think she’s a director who has no notion (or possibly experience) of what images will carry in a space that size and what images won’t. Dramatic stage arrangements that are perfectly acceptable on a 25 foot proscenium for a three-hundred seat house can be simply invisible in a thousand-plus seat hall the size of the three major theater spaces at Lincoln Center.
But I enjoyed her story.
The next day, I had a very pleasant lunch with Richard Howard, Honor Moore, and Peter (The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty) Klappert, at which Richard told us all about a course he’d taught the previous year, called American Ecstatics: It covered a whole range of people, such as Whitman, Isadora Duncan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Sounded just fascinating.
At the actual panel, I met an interesting young man, an historian and writer on economics named Walter (Mortal Splendor) Mead. My piece—the one I sent you last week—opened the panel.5 But the real winner among the formal presentations was Allan Gurganus’s piece, which, when it’s printed, I’ll send along. It would be unfair to try and reproduce it informally, since it was so carefully done. Later, while the informal part was going on, and after I made my point about [Guy] Davenport, Richard threw in that a few months ago he’d been talking to Hugh Kenner on the phone.
Kenner has always been one of Davenport’s biggest supporters. But Kenner had been complaining to Richard that he just found the sexual content of Davenport’s more recent material “absolutely embarrassing” and simply didn’t know how he was supposed to deal with it. Richard pointed out that the whole area of pedophilia really puts people off. And I pointed out that Davenport’s characters never cross any real, legal line. Nevertheless they stray so close that it becomes that much more bothersome—because the line is so clearly in the reader’s mind.
Both Allan Gurganus and Marianne Hauser had stressed in their pieces the responsibility of the writer to cross boundaries and write about people other than themselves. Men must try to write from the position of women. Women must try to write from the position of men; rich, poor, and all other boundaries must be breached by the writer of fiction.
I made the point toward the end that, however these boundaries were crossed, we had to remember that these same boundaries represented differences in power relationships. Thus, a man writing from the position of a woman was crossing one power boundary and a woman writing from the point of view of a man was crossing another. Hauser had cited some of the criticism she had received in the forties when she’d written a first person novel as a man. I pointed out that what this criticism had actually meant was: “How dare you, a woman, usurp this particular male field of power.” And that a man writing as a woman seldom gets such criticism because the male writer assuming a firstperson female persona is moving down the power scale, not up.
On the aisle, toward the back of the ballroom in which all this was going on, a little brown woman in a red tam and bundled up in a lot of orange down coat was nodding intently at just about everything I said.
When the panel was over, a great young bear in glasses and a woolly sweater, with a mass of curly hair caught back in a small ponytail, came running up to the table, put his chin over the edge of the pale blue cloth (spotted now with water between the several microphones and Styrofoam cups), and said: “Mr. Delany, I just wanted to tell you: I’ve probably read everything you’ve published. And for years I’ve always thought you were one of the finest writers in America—and certainly the most underrated one. I’m so glad to get a chance to meet you. May I give you this?” and he handed me a copy of Mortal Splendor.
“Thank you,” I said. “Eh, what is it …?”
“It’s my book,” he said.
“Oh!” I said. “Well, thank you very much …”
Then said young bear turned around and dashed back off into the crowd.
That afternoon in my room I started reading the nicely printed trade paperback with the rather impressive encomiums on the back.
Fifty pages on, and I’d realized that (one) it was quite well written and (two) it was even better in its thinking. It’s an analysis of the “American Empire” with an extremely cogent set of suggestions on what the country might do to get it together.
The last program of the day was a reading with novelist Toby Olson and poet Sonia Sanchez. Olson is a six-foot-ten bearded, white-blond woodsman of a fellow (I exaggerate, but not by much). He was always at the center of an entourage—and seemed very much into himself. A couple of times I addressed friendly remarks to him, but he never answered. Perhaps because his head is so far above mine, he just didn’t hear me.
Alas, I don’t much like his work. It’s not awful. But it’s as sexist and as homophobic as one can get away with these days and still be taken seriously (by those who don’t think sexism and homophobia are all that serious after all …) and I listened to him with a mental blue pencil striking out excess verbal baggage in his prose on a pretty regular basis.
When Sanchez got up to read, I realized she was the brown woman in the orange coat who’d been nodding so enthusiastically in the back of the room during my panel.
Marilyn has mentioned her to me on several occasions—and has apparently arranged readings for her a few times. The mentions were always somewhat mysterious: “Have you ever heard Sonia Sanchez read?”
I’d say no.
And Marilyn would say: “You really should,” then go on to talk about something else.
I don’t have too much to say about the poems. I suspect they’re probably pretty good. Certainly I didn’t find myself editing them down the way I had done with Olson’s prose. But Sanchez’s performance was stunning.
First off, I use “performance” not in the sense of drama, but rather in the sense of the way poetry—not theater—should be performed. And I don’t mean that she was at all restrained. The energy level was jaw-dropping and electric. And, between the poems, she became a kind of political David Antin. She chanted the intra-poetic material at such a level that it almost came out stronger than the poems. Her message is straight Dickens:
Love one another, and we’ll all make the world a better place.
But it’s a nice one. And I think