Paul Green of Chapel Hill

 
 

by Paul Green

1917 Trifles of Thought

41925 The Lord’s Will and Other Carolina Plays

1926 Lonesome Road, Six Plays for the Negro Theatre

1927 The Field God and In Abraham’s Bosom

1928 In the Valley and Other Carolina Plays

1928 Wide Fields

1931 The House of Connelly and Other Plays

1932 The Laughing Pioneer

1935 Roll, Sweet Chariot

1935 This Body the Earth

1985 Shroud My Body Down
1987 Johnny Johnson

1937 |The Lost Colony

1939: The Enchanted Maze

1989 Out of the South

1941 The Highland Call
1941 Native Son (with Richard Wright)

1943 The Hawthorn Tree

1945 Forever Growing

1946 Salvation on a String

1948 The Common Glory

1949 Dog on the Sun

 

by Agatha Boyd Adams

1929 Contemporary Spanish Literature in English
Translation (with N. B. Adams)

1936-46 Adventures in Reading (eleven numbers)

1941 The Old North State

1944 Nature Writers in the United States

1945 <A Journey to Mexico

1948 Contemporary Negro Art

1949 John Charles McNeill: a Biographical Sketch

1950 Thomas Wolfe, Carolina Student: a Brief Biography
1951 Paul Green of Chapel Hill

 

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PAUL GREEN OF CHAPEL HILL
by

Acatua Boyp ADAMS

Edited by Richard Walser

 

CHAPEL HILL
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA LIBRARY

1951

 
 

iy PREFACE |

“This biography has been written in response to a need for a

book about Paul Green,” Agatha Adams noted early this year.

| “There has been a steadily growing expression of interest in his

personality and his work, not only from North Carolina, about

| whose people he has written so lovingly and faithfully, but from

| all over the United States. His reputation has increased greatly

since he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927, but no biographical study

of him has been published since Barrett Clark’s sketch, which ap-

i peared over twenty years ago .... Paul Green is still actively

I; productive; a complete analysis and evaluation of his work must

i await the future literary critic and historian. The story is told

here as far as possible in Paul Green’s own words, or in those of
his contemporaries.”

Sitting at her desk in the Library Extension Department at
Chapel Hill, Agatha Adams had pondered for some time the re-
quests which came for information about various Tarheel writers.
The demand was always greater than the availability of the scat-
tered clippings which she had to send out. As the need had to be
met, she took upon herself the task of gathering together all the
sources, and then of writing down the stories of those authors
most frequently inquired about. To what might have resulted in
humdrum monographs, she lent her considerable talents as a
writer. In 1949 appeared her biographical sketch of John Charles
McNeill, in 1950 her study of Thomas Wolfe. Even before she

 

; started research upon these two, she had begun the writing of her
story of Paul Green. She read everything about him in the Uni-
versity library; she talked with Green himself, with his family
and friends. As she wrote, the pages mounted higher and higher.
It was eventually apparent that this was no “brief biography,” but

Convitan’, 166i, BY 2 full-length study. Finally when she had finished and when she
THE UNIVERSITY OF NoRTH CAROLINA PRESS

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Se ne ee eee Tees ee er NAS NES SAG ITE

 
RTAE

realized that it would have to be considerably reduced before it
could be included in the series published by the University of
North Carolina Library, she jotted down the principles for its re-
vision. Her death in March left the task uncompleted.

Born, bred, and educated in Virginia, Agatha Boyd Adams had
lived most of her adult life in North Carolina, where her husband
is professor of Spanish at the University. She came to love her
adopted state, a love which she proved by the workmanship of
the series of biographies which the present one concludes. Her
facility in languages, her competence as a librarian, her ability
as a writer were characteristics highly regarded by those who
knew her; and her admirers were many.

The editor, in preparing the present manuscript for publication,
has carried out as faithfully as he could the plans which Mrs.
Adams left for revision. Principal deletions are lengthy commen-
taries on the plays and a few long passages on Paul Green’s pri-
vate life. In the main, only two additions have been inserted, and
those for the sake of completeness: the note on the Bollingen
Award in section XXIV, and section XXVI entire.

The original manuscript is deposited in the University of
North Carolina Library, where it will be available for reading
by all serious students of Paul Green and his place in the history
of the American drama.

R. W.

Department of English
North Carolina State College
Raleigh

23 October 1950

vi

 

I,

II,
III,
IV,
V.
VI.
VIE,
VIII.
IX,

XI.

XII,
XIII.
XIV.

XV.

XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
XIX.

XX,
XXI.
XXII.
XXIII.
XXIV.
XXV.
XXVI.
XXVII.

 

CONTENTS
PART I
Page
mane Veins re a sero n cored Ue SRE se
ROmowines Up oh soon: ils eee 5 ea
Tae Unnvenrey aia ia a eae De
Wonrn Was ! juga ci i gid eda
AGAIN aT THE Universiry — Cai:
Tue Carozina PLayMaKERS — Breiner Sorat ROPME REN PO) 18
A Hose iw Cant Poi ie se we |
Them Rawson a en oo
Fone PAWS aie ice kde ce ae TNA Y.
PUTRI TRIN aii eth eins 34
OR TO lc eae
PART II
Fen A RAM fet te. 43
ae M@GEN “AGAIN 800 So rs dceor net ae palsies Sf
Sa RUN mr Sarena i a a eee 49
-viecoandltern cnet anna ss ec EMTS EAS NG MEN REN <i ee
sits pte ico MSs OES RR RS AY 57
a ach NON LE URE EEET Birt EE 63
mega s anh Berber Sromting oc
wine speninierie Fame ick i as 67
PART III
ee Nee Caleta. ci ls ee
Pee Wiese Clay cea eo a ee
Unvorutan Causes snp A Puy
More Movigs anp THE Rapio CD
A Mertente Poudetet i a ee
Tew Connie Quake: i a ee
Forres oe Ous. Parties ccc a ee
COOL ON sili a ee

Vii

-_-
 

Part |

 

“ |. the true theatre must live
and be among the people... .”
 

 

 

 

MN TAAL ALTARS VALAE

I. EARLY YEARS

UST AFTER World War I, the Lillington Cats could

beat any other baseball team in Harnett County. Dur-

B ing the long hot eastern North Carolina summer, all

ay the other little communities, Angier and Coats and

Dunn, Fuquay Springs and Christian Light and Chaly-

beate, had to admit that the Lillington team could usually out-

play them. At least one reason for the Cats’ strength was their

Pitcher, a tall broad-shouldered young man who could pitch fast

balls with his left arm as well as with his right: His name was
Paul Green.

The Harnett County News enjoyed recording his exceptional
skill. “Green, Lillington’s star twirler, allowed the Bensonites
only one bingle . . . Paul sure had ’em guessing. Left, right:
left, right, is the way he handed it to the Lee County lads...
Green, the ambidextrous star of the Cats, held the strong Sanford
aggregation to three hits... .” He could slug them at the bat,
too. “Paul Green just can’t keep from hitting ’em . . . Zachery
(from Raleigh) says that Paul Green throws the crookedest ball
he ever struck at... .”

The twirler made news in other ways, although it appeared in
much less gaudy language. On February 10, 1921, the local
newspaper carried on the front page the headline Paut Green,
Praywricut, over a notice that “The Miser” and “The Old
Man of Edenton,” by “Paul Eliot Green of Lillington, one of
the most successful of the local playwrights,” were to be produced
in Chapel Hill. This is probably the first public indication of
the gifted pitcher’s major talent. Not many months later, a
modest statement announced that a Kenan Fellowship in Philoso-

 
eae

4

Aaay EL

“RMT NCS RY

fe SBTC RE TE TF

Be TIE eT

 

 

 

2 Paut Green or CHAPEL HILi

phy for graduate study at the University of North Carolina had
been awarded to Paul Green.

Already the outline of a many-sided personality had begun to
take shape. Who was this young man who could star in profes-
sional baseball, write plays, and win awards in philosophy? It
seemed a long stretch from a dusty Harnett County diamond to
the remote heights of Kant and Hegel. People around Lilling-
ton knew him as one of Mr. William Green’s boys, from a farm
in the Pleasant Union neighborhood. He had gone to Buie’s
Creek Academy, had taught school, had fought overseas in the
war, had gone up to the University. Some said that he wrote
poetry, and it was generally known that aside from poetry, phi-
losophy, and playwriting, he was a mighty man at stripping
fodder and picking cotton.

William Archibald and Betty (Byrd) Green, the dramatist’s
parents, were descendants of the English and Scotch settlers of
the Cape Fear region. Before the Civil War, his paternal grand_
father, John Green, owned a large plantation operated by slaves.
John Green had been a member of the County Court, and in
1860 had been responsible for building the first school house and
employing the first teacher in that section. He, like most of his
neighbors, lost practically all his property during the Civil War.
He died just at its close.

Betty (Byrd) Green’s father, William Byrd, was a preacher
and singing teacher, and had composed several hymns. His in-
tense love of music caused him on one occasion, after losing his
temper in an argument over some fine point in music, to dash off
to the University of North Carolina to settle the dispute, leaving
a wife and several children at home. He did not graduate at
the University, but stayed there long enough to satisfy his curi-
osity. By all accounts, this grandfather possessed a strong and
vivid personality. His artistic interest and, according to local
standards, “queer ways” brought him into conflict with the nar-

ey

 

 

Earty YEARS 3

row Calvinism of the community. There is even a story that
once he was turned out of the church because he had strayed from
the rigid standards of his neighbors.

Betty Byrd inherited her father’s musical gifts. Asa girl she
studied the organ at Buie’s Creek Academy. Her teacher, Nolie
Benson, remembered her as a “bright-eyed girl, a great dreamer,
and smart as a whip.” After she became Mrs. William Green,
she played the organ in the country church. And she saw to it
that there was always music in the Green home.

Her husband, William Archibald Green, owned and worked
a large farm in one of the most fertile regions of the state. Most
of his acres were planted in cotton, the favorite “money crop” of
his day. Like practically all the other farmers of Harnett County,
he “lived at home,” in the saying of the country; that is, he
raised on the place in abundance, the food which the family
needed. On the farm he employed both white and Negro tenant
labor. He was known in his section as a hard-working, progres-
Sive, and successful farmer, liked and respected by all who had
dealings with him. The Harnett County News described him as

« . id . .
one of our most popular and highly esteemed citizens in this
section.”

Paul Green was born March 17, 1894. His father, William
Green, had three children by an earlier marriage, all of them
considerably older than the family of his second marriage. Betty
Green’s first child, Lura, died in infancy. Her second baby was
Mary; and the third, Paul. All the children looked somewhat
alike, distinguished by curly hair, clear gray eyes, and well-cut
features,

They were brought up to share in the work of the farm. Paul
knew all the chores which fall to a boy’s lot on a big farm: driv-
ing home the cows, splitting wood, keeping the kitchen woodbox
filled, setting out young plants, chopping cotton, spreading guano,
feeding chickens and pigs. The Green children also had the
freedom of the woods, the fields, and the river. They went
x RTM AY CER SRE

 

 

 

 

 

4 Paut GREEN OF CHAPEL HILL

wading and swimming in the near-by streams, fished for catfish
and yellow-bellies in the creeks, set rabbit traps, gathered chin-
quapins to string in long chains, made whips of the inner skin of
mulberry bark, and chased lightning bugs in the summer twilights
to put into glass jars full of vile-smelling incandescence. One
of Paul’s great joys always was to build. He and his brother
Hugh shared this enthusiasm and made the most of all the op-
portunities afforded by the acres of woodland and the miles of
creeks and the availability of old bricks and lumber. The boys

built dams across the small streams to spread the water into pools

for wading; they built forts against wild Indians for hunters
and pioneers; they built hideouts and club houses. Their build-
ing operations covered almost a mile, from Neil’s Creek on the
west edge of the farm to Buie’s Creek on the east. One of Paul’s
most successful building undertakings was a playhouse for his
younger sisters; its two rooms were large enough for Erma and
Caro Mae to walk around in.

In another building venture Paul and Hugh set up a store in
partnership with a Negro playmate, Thornton, the son of tenants.
The store bore across the front a sign painted in tar in big straggly
letters, “Green and Thornton.” Their stock in trade consisted
of such items as tobacco, candy, chewing gum, coffee, and baking
soda. Most of the goods were either eaten by the proprietors or
given away, and the enterprise lasted only a few weeks. Paul
hunted possums and squirrels with Negro boys, went fishing
with them, learned along with them the lore of woods and water.
Race prejudice undoubtedly pervaded the neighborhood climate,
but it never had conscious expression in the Green house.

Paul Green’s interest in music had been aroused early. Mrs.
Green used to play and sing for her children such old hymns and
songs as “How Sweet the Sound,” “Helen of Kirkonnel Lea,”
and the “Lament of Flora Macdonald.” She taught music to
her older children, especially Gladys, who showed exceptional

 

 

Earty YEARS 5

talent, but as the family became larger she could not spare the
hours for formal teaching. By the time that Paul had grown old
enough to begin five-finger exercises, there were too many
younger children for her to spend time at the piano with him or
to compel him to practice. She always seemed to feel that Paul
was the exceptional child, and teaching him to play would have
given her the keenest pleasure.

From his mother, Paul inherited not only an enthusiasm for
music, but also a great love of reading. Mrs. Green’s father had
owned a large library for that day and section, and she enjoyed
reading from her early girlhood. Later, when she became the
mother of a large family, she would frequently get up at four
o’clock in the morning to read in peace before the houseful of
children began to stir. William Byrd’s library had been sold
and scattered at the time of his death. That was unfortunate;
for there were never many books in the Green home and no
public library in the community, not even a Sunday School library.
But all of the children grew up with an eagerness for books, and
a wide-awake intellectual curiosity.

Paul’s earliest introduction to the word “book” implanted
deeply in him the conviction that books are important, even
sacred. When he was about three years old, his mother took him
to see his grandfather, an old gentleman with a long beard, lying
ill in bed. The little boy reached for a book on a shelf by the
bed and dropped it. His grandfather roared, “Take that brat
out of here. I don’t want him fooling with my books.” Although
that terrifying experience sometimes returned to him in night-
mares, it also spurred his determination. Perhaps his grand-
father’s angry interdiction made books seem all the more desir-
able. Paul learned to read early. One of his favorite places
te read was the well-house, where he could curl up with a book
and enjoy himself apart from the noisy family and farm world.
Such aloof behavior on Paul’s part puzzled his practical father.
ed

Ln SR TN VY AY

 

 

 

6 Paut Green oF CHaPEL HILi

William Green would shake his head over his son’s vagaries and
say, “That boy’s just like his grandfather, old Bill Byrd.”

II. GROWING UP

The school to which the Green children went for six months
of each year was about a mile away from the farm. To reach it,
they had to cross a creek and to walk through woods of longleaf
pine and holly, which remained green after the black oaks had
lost their foliage. In the spring the mauve and white of redbud
and dogwood sprinkled the woods. The schoolhouse was a one-
room frame building, shabby and badly in need of paint. In
winter, which can be sharp even in eastern North Carolina, a
woodstove scorched the children near it and froze the taller pupils
in the back row. A different teacher presided nearly every year;
some of them were good, others almost illiterate. One of the
best, J. A. Parham, later managing editor of The Charlotte Ob-
server, boarded with the Green family. In after years he re-
membered Mary Green, the eldest daughter, as the brightest
child he had ever taught. Mary, who never had the chance to
continue her education, made a much deeper impression on this
teacher than did Paul. Even though he failed to live in Par-
ham’s memory, Paul even in his days in the one-room school
proved himself a competent and conscientious student. He had
an instinctive desire to excel in whatever he undertook, either in
games or in studies.

This happy childhood of work and play, farm and school and
the outside world, was interrupted for young Paul by a long ill-
ness in his tenth year. This illness had a marked effect on his
life. No one at first knew what was the difficulty. His upper
right arm became sore and painful and seemed to be wasting
away. After the family doctor admitted that he did not under-

 

Growine Up 7

- it, his parents sent Paul to Johns Hopkins, where the
€ was diagnosed as osteomyelitis. An operation removed
“Meee sing the upper arm and replaced it with a silver
sacl, . - period of the illness, which lasted for almost
pee en 270 : himself to write with his left hand. One can
"oS a at those months of pain and inactivity meant to a
pee asthe ustomed to the freedom of the country. It is cer-

€ sensitive imagination and the vivid memory which
have found expression in his poetry came to help him in the

seclusion of illness. Perhaps, in part at least, the young dreamer
enjoyed that seclusion.

The real significance of the illness in the shaping of his char-
acter 1s to be found in his determination to get well. When he
returned home from the hospital, he learned to play baseball with
his brothers and friends, and acquired that skill which was to dis-
tinguish him when he pitched for Lillington. He took every
Opportunity offered by farm work to build up his physique. He
Succeeded so completely that it is almost impossible to realize
that he was ever ill. His appearance has always conveyed a sense
of power and strength. The child who had been through a year
of serious sickness grew up tall and robust, with a finely modeled
head above his broad shoulders.

A second blow, much deeper and more far-reaching in the ef-
fects upon the developing personality of Paul Green, occurred
when he was twelve. His mother died suddenly. She was still
a young woman, only forty-three. The frightened little children
were awakened in the middle of a cold rainy January night and
called into their mother’s room. Paul, the oldest boy, ran across
the fields to get help from a neighbor.

Mrs. Green’s death left fourteen-year-old Mary as the head
of the family. The children remember that their practical, con-
scientious father was “singularly inept at household needs.” The
work of the big farm absorbed him completely, and his wife had
 

 

 

 

 

8 Paut GreEN oF CHAPEL HILL

always managed the home. He must have been bewildered at
finding himself alone with a flock of small children, and turned
to steady level-headed Mary for the direction of the family. At
fourteen Mary Green met her sudden responsibility admirably
well, becoming mother, counsellor, and confidante to the whole
family.

Meanwhile, in his determination to overcome the handicap of
his illness, Paul Green threw himself into the work of the farm
so wholeheartedly that he developed unusual skill and muscular
strength. Pulling fodder was in those days considered one of
the most difficult and heaviest of farm chores. The tough leaves
of corn had to be pulled down from the standing stalks and hung
up to dry before being made into bundles for feed. Paul could
pull fodder faster than any one of his section. As he grew
taller, he found that the job of cotton-picking was even more
back-breaking; but his performance was so rapid that in a contest
he was adjudged the champion cotton-picker of Harnett County.

After Paul Green had gone as far as possible in the local
school, he entered nearby Buie’s Creek Academy, which has since
been re-named Campbell College, in honor of its founder. In
the somewhat shabby buildings of this old-fashioned Baptist
school, he had the good fortune to find a gifted teacher in the
founder, James Archibald Campbell.

Every morning he walked the two and half miles from home
to Buie’s Creek. School was out at four o’clock in the afternoon.
After walking home, he would do his farm chores, eat supper,
and on Friday nights walk back to the Academy again for a meet-
ing of the debating society. He certainly never felt sorry for
himself; in fact, he felt pleased that he was privileged to do all
this.

At the Academy Paul also had his first experiences in public
speaking. One commencement he delivered the oration for his
society. The oration was of course written by the speaker him-

 

 

Growinc Up 9

self. The society also had a representative who delivered the
declamation, a discourse written by some great person in history—
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty
or give me death” speech, or any other selection giving expression
to high ideals and the will to do great deeds. The fact that Paul
chose to give the oration instead of the declamation was another
example of his ambition and his urge to put his thoughts on paper,
Gold medals were awarded to the winners, and while Paul did
not win, his written speech was obviously superior. The trouble
was that he failed to deliver it with assurance and forensic flour-
ishes. It did not “catch on.”

Before he graduated from the Academy, Paul Green had made
up his mind that he wanted to go to the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mr. Campbell used all of his influence,
which was considerable, to persuade him to choose Wake Forest
College instead. There, in a small denominational school, the
soul of his favorite pupil would presumably be safe in the shelter
of the Baptist orthodoxy of the period. The University, non-
sectarian by its charter, had a reputation for liberalism if not for
downright free-thinking. But his efforts failed, and Paul re-
mained firm in his choice of the University. |

It was not, however, possible for him to go to Chapel Hill the
year he graduated from the Academy. His father, with a family
of young children, could not afford to send him to college, and
Paul set about raising the money for himself. One of his re-
sources was to play professional baseball for Lillington. He
continued this for several summers, even after he had entered
the University. Another way of earning money was to teach
school. In September 1914 he became principal of the school at
Olive Branch in upper Harnett County, about half a mile from
the village of Kipling. His staff consisted of one teacher, besides
himself. He was only nineteen, and some of the boys and girls
he taught and disciplined were not much younger. But they
 

SLY SESE REDO CER TET SIRT RI AED TEE I PY PST PS GS TP SEN TOA TE SS St I

be ETE ODE OE RN 8 OPTS a RO

10 Paut Green oF CHapet Hit

knew his prowess on the diamond, and that increased his prestige.
He served as principal of this school for two years, and accumu-
lated what he considered enough money to pay his way at the
University.

At long last the great day came: he was ready to go to the
University. With little money either in his pocket or available
in the bank in Lillington, he told his family good-by. He was
several years older than the average freshman, but he reasoned
he could do the four years’ work in three. He mounted the high
two-horse wagon, took his place beside his father, and off they
drove to the railroad station four miles away.

III. THE UNIVERSITY

Paul Green reached Chapel Hill on a hot September day in
1916. As the train approached the college town, the long high
ridges of Orange County had almost a suggestion of mountains
to the boy from the flat expanses of Harnett County. This same
region seemed dull and ugly to Thomas Wolfe, when he came
to it from Asheville that same year, with the glories of the Blue
Ridge fresh in his memory. The Piedmont section of North
Carolina has no spectacular beauty, but a subdued loveliness which
grows with familiarity. The Chapel Hill ridge is one of those
spurs which stretch out like giant fingers to hold the eastward
sloping plains.

After a long ride on a coach sooty from soft coal smoke, Paul
landed, along with other freshmen and returning students, at a
siding called University Station, some ten miles out in Orange
County from the University. Here he changed to another train
which brought him, not to Chapel Hill, but to the near-by village
of Carrboro. The incoming students were hailed by Negro hack

Ceram seem ememcnmppinnes

 

_Tue University 11

drivers calling the names of their boarding houses and competing
for the favor of driving the newcomers into the village.

Chapel Hill has always had somewhat the look of a town in
a forest clearing. The woods come close to the town, and the
town reaches out into the woods. In 1916 the village consisted of a
few streets of frame houses, most of them white and always with
comfortable porches and yards, set around the edges of a leafy
campus arched by tall oaks. The business district was only one
block long.

It was in the gathering shadows of another war that Paul Green
entered the University, and his stay was consequently brief. He
at first lived in Smith Dormitory but soon moved out and found
a room of his own in a private home. The little boy who liked
to read in the well-house had grown up into a man who needed
solitude and space for his thoughts. The noise, the rough and
tumble crowding of a dormitory were not for him. Already,
also, he was more serious about his work than the average college
freshman; he had had to work and save to get there, and he was
determined to reach out and take all that the University could
give.

The room in which Paul Green lived during his freshman
year was in a house on Franklin Street, where the Methodist
Church now stands. He remembers that his landlady there had
two great prides: her frequently asserted kinship to President
Woodrow Wilson, and her musical ability. She used to call her
students in to listen and applaud while she played the piano and
sang.

Paul, the solitary and dreamer, found delight in walking
through the woods that stretch southward from the campus toward
Morgan’s Creek. Here an intricate web of vague paths, worn by

generations of picnic-loving students, led to such favorite spots
as the Meeting of the Waters and Laurel Hill.
 

 

5. a A TG AY

bY ETE NE 2 OLE TE Pe Tg

12 Paut Green oF CHAPEL HILt

But it was not only enchantment that Freshman Paul found

in his rambles around Chapel Hill. If he explored westward
instead of south, he found the shanty town of the Negroes,
tumbling over some of the most sweetly curved hillsides in the
vicinity and looking toward some of the widest views. These
unpainted cabins, tar-paper shacks, and outhouses were probably

the first view of a Negro slum for the country boy; and they
made a deep impression on him. Here were the “Tin Top Al-
leys,” the cafes where fights got started on Saturday nights, the
small frame churches of boisterous worship and equally boisterous
grief, the crowded boarding houses, the barber shops that served
as clubs, the gathering places for song and guitar playing and
banjo picking.

During his freshman year Paul Green studied hard. The
student weekly newspaper, The Tar Heel, published in February
1917 a list of twenty freshmen with the highest grades. The
list included Paul Green, but not Thomas Wolfe, his classmate.
In addition to studying, Paul also found time for writing. His
poems appeared frequently that year in The Carolina Magazine.
Most of them show little talent. In May the young poet ex-
claimed:

O awake thee, my love, for the dawn’s breaking fast,
And a soft light is bathing the hills;

All the joy of the morn since the long night is past
Like old wine through my soul strangely thrills.

A sketch in the same number of The Magazine, “Evening on the
Farm,” describes a sunset in more or less conventional phrases,
but shows accurate observation of such details as the notes of a
harmonica from a Negro cabin, the evening cries of whippoor-
wills and katydids. “Bats fly zig-zag, catching insects. Bull
frogs boom.” Such love of rural detail fills the poetry of his

mature writing.

rr

 

 

Tue University 13

From the point of view of his future development as a play-
wright, the most significant thing that happened during Paul’s
first year at Carolina was that he wrote a play, won a prize for it,
and saw it produced. “Norman Foerster, who was one of the
finest English teachers ever to appear at the University of North
Carolina, announced in class one day,” says Green, “that the
seniors had decided to do a play at Commencement and were
holding a contest for original scripts. He advised me to try my
hand. I took a chance at the thing and happened to win out.”

This prize-winning play, called “Surrender to the Enemy,”
told, in the author’s words, of “a Southern gal’s heart surrender
to a Yankee captain, in opposition to her father’s wishes.” The
story was based on a Chapel Hill scandal just after the Civil
War, when Ellie Swain, the University President’s daughter, mar-
ried Brigadier-General Smith B. Atkins of the United States
Army, a romance which upset the little community and may have
been indirectly responsible for the closing of the University. The
imitative style of this first attempt of Green’s at playwriting has
little relation to his later work. He has himself suggested that
his manuscript may have been the only one submitted in the
contest.

“Surrender to the Enemy” was produced in the Forest
Theatre, which had in those days none of the stone towers, walls,
and seats which now adorn it. A hillside cleared in the woods
and sloping down to a little glade, it had the grace of tall trees
to frame the stage, and on a late spring evening, the fragrance of
honeysuckle and the sparkle of fireflies. The audience sat on
rugs or pillows, digging their heels into the soft earth to keep
from slipping. Up this hill Paul Green stumbled and fled the
night of his first play, frightened by “the life and blood of the
thing” in action on the stage, and embarrassed by the whispers
of “There he goes!” “And then the awful giggles and titters
 

 

 

8 DOTNET ETA PA GP TRO

MEPL A GAREY EOE AT GATS Ta Dy

 

 

Paut GreEEN OF CHAPEL HILL

that smote upon my tingling ears! I aged considerably before I
reached the dark peace of my little old room. . . . That experi-
ence was what could be called exquisite anguish.”

The production of his prize-winning play was one of the last
events of Paul’s first year at the University. It is perhaps not
too far-fetched to guess that from it came some of the impulse
toward the outdoor plays of his mature years.

IV. WORLD WAR I

When Paul Green entered college, World War I was already
in its third year. In April 1917 the United States declared war
on Germany. The slogans of the period, the “war to end war”
and the “battle for democracy,” carried a powerful appeal for
Paul Green the idealist, with his strong belief in human freedom.
He did not wait, as he might well have done, to finish his fresh-
man year at the University, but interrupted his studies to enlist.

Before going to France, he set up a little signpost. Although
in those days money was far from plentiful for him, he paid a
printer in Greenville, South Carolina, seventy dollars to print a
small collection of his poems, with the title Trifles of Thought
by P, E. G. These youthful verses show no unusual promise,
though some of them have the flavor of his best writing. They
are principally epitaphs, eulogies, war poems, and a few Negro
dialect pieces. The poems themselves are unimportant, the act
of publishing them significant.

During the war he served as private, corporal, sergeant and
sergeant-major with the 105th Engineers, 30th Division, an outfit
which was brigaded with the British Army. Later he became
second lieutenant with the Chief of Engineers at Paris. Through
this experience with an engineering division, he acquired a know]-

 

Wortp War I 15

edge of surveying and considerable skill in map-making. ‘This
ability proved of service to him later in planning and designing
the outdoor theatres at Campbell College, Manteo, Williams-
burg, and Washington.

For four months of his war years Paul Green was in actual
combat on the Western Front in Belgium. He has not at any
time written or talked very intimately of this period. His service
in the Army interrupted but did not fundamentally change the
dream of the boy who had set himself the task of interpreting
the folk of his own country; the close contact with human suf-
fering, however, helped to widen his sympathies and to relate
his segment of North Carolina to the whole world.

Two poems published in The Carolina Magazine after his
return from France reflect his experience. The first, “Rebellion,
a Song,” by P. E. Greene (sic) appeared in November 1919. This
rather brutal little piece on realistic trench warfare is a long way
from the slightly May-mad freshman who was writing for the
Magazine in the spring of 1917. The second war poem, pub-
lished in December 1920 and called “Song of the Dead,” ex-
presses a loathing of war:

We are the dead who speak
After long nights of woe
Hearing the wild shells shriek,
The hurrying to and fro
Of armies upon the hill,
And dead men under the plain
Broken and lying still
Are cold in the falling rain.

Green’s student poems indicate clearly that from the first he
Saw war, not as a spiritualizing experience, but as an ugly, waste-
ful, and stupid horror.
St SROWON TMG LA YT

 

 

 

 

Vv. AGAIN AT THE UNIVERSITY

The University to which Paul Green returned as soon as pos-
sible after his war experience was alive and growing. An obscure
young member of the faculty, Harry Woodburn Chase, had just
been made president. He maintained the liberal tradition in
which the University had been founded, and under his leader-
ship it entered into a period of genuine intellectual growth.

Another returned soldier, Frank Porter Graham, who had
seen service with the Marine Corps, taught history in Chapel
Hill that fall and had been newly appointed Dean of Students.
Archibald Henderson, versatile mathematician, biographer and
historian, became one of the early sponsors of the Carolina Play-
makers, an interest which was to continue actively. Edwin Green-
law, Dean of the Graduate School and Head of the Department
of English, fired his students with a love of Spenser’s poetry,
and stimulated younger teachers. Greenlaw taught Paul Green;
so also did Norman Foerster and James Holly Hanford, both of
the English Department. Horace Williams expounded his
Hegelian philosophy.

In 1919, as he had before, Paul Green shunned the dormi-
tories, and found quarters in a two-room cottage in the yard of
an old house on Cameron Avenue, rooms which he shared with
Bryce Little, now a lawyer in Seattle. The yard was crowded
with old elms, crepe myrtles almost as tall as trees, and a pleasant
wilderness of spirea and japonica and other flowering bushes.
In this seclusion he found the quiet he needed for his task. Older
than the average college student by two years of teaching and
two more of war, he had no share in that adolescent loafing on
the Carolina campus which Tom Wolfe enjoyed and described so
nostalgically in Look Homeward, Angel.

In contrast to Wolfe’s record, Paul Green’s is that of a soli-
tary and hard-working young man, who made slight impression

 

 

AGAIN AT THE UNIVERSITY 17

on his fellow students, and no effort at all for leadership in
campus circles. The only club he joined besides the Harnett
County Club was Sigma Upsilon, a writing club to which Wolfe
also belonged. He never joined a social fraternity. In December
1919, with “Other Judases,” a tale of western Carolina, he won
the prize of five dollars in gold offered by The Carolina Maga-
zine for the best short story submitted. He found no time for
his favorite sport, baseball; but instead he played the violin with
Mrs. J. M. Williams, a teacher and able musician who lived
across Cameron Avenue from his rooms. He played remarkably
well for one self-taught. But for the most part, he remained
aloof from the usual pleasures of college life. In the Yackety
Yack for his senior year there is no picture of him, and he 1s
mentioned only as class poet. LeGette Blythe was voted the best
writer in the class of 1921,and Jonathan Daniels the class prophet.
In spite, however, of his aloofness from student activities, Paul
Green during his stay at the University felt the impact of some
of the major influences which have had a share in shaping both
his work and the course of his life. The teaching and the phi-
losophy of Horace Williams made a profound impression on him
and are to a considerable degree reflected in his later writing.
Many of Horace Williams’ students worshipped him almost
in the manner of disciples. A missionary at heart, he had com-
mitted himself zealously to the task of waking up the minds of
youth. The philosophy he taught was strongly rooted in Hegel-
ianism, but even more strongly in the whole soul and individuality
of the man. In teaching he ceaselessly endeavored to question,
to stir curiosity. The facile, the stereotyped, the pat answer
aroused his impatience. He compelled his students to concen-
trate on the essence of the thing, the “Begriff.” As a prod to
drowsing minds he frequently reversed or gave a new twist to a
statement previously made; he exalted the virtue of inconsistency 5
he was a master of equivocation, of the technique of shifting
 

 

CR SERN IOUS a2 Den AB aa EVOL ORGS

) APR LT AORN

— ~

 

£9 EDIT TR WO ETN A PT SP TREO

 

18 Paut GREEN OF CHAPEL HILL

ground. A student would invariably protest. “But, Dr. Wil-
liams, last week you said ... ,” in answer to which he would
drawl, “O, Mr. Smith, haven’t I taught you anything? Haven’t
I changed you at all?” Not every one responded to this indi-
vidual ‘mode of teaching; and the irreverent and skeptical on the
campus referred to him as the “Horse” and attempted to bait
and trap him. But many of those who did respond to his teach-
ing drew from it the direction and set of their adult lives. One
of them, Thomas Wolfe, said: “He communicated his own alert-
ness, his originality, his power to think.”

In the increasing mysticism of Green’s more mature writing
and in his concern with spiritual values may be found an echo of
such statements of Horace Williams as “The material is the
shadow of things—the spiritual alone abides.” Student Paul
Green found in Williams a teacher whose ideals were congenial
with his own. Williams led him to elect philosophy as his major
subject, to spend two years of graduate study in philosophy, and
in his later life to devote considerable time to exploring the writ-
ings of the Hindu mystics.

VI. THE CAROLINA PLAYMAKERS

Horace Williams led Paul Green toward philosophy, but at
the same time another strong influence drew him toward the
writing of plays. In 1918, while Green was still in France, Pro-
fessor Greenlaw persuaded Frederick H. Koch to come to Chapel
Hill from the University of North Dakota, where he was already
reputed as an apostle of folk-drama. The Carolina Playmakers
were established that year. Green’s interest in playwriting had
of course been quickened by his prize-winning freshman play:

After that though [he said] I didn’t set my heart on playwriting, for I had
always been more interested in poetry and short stories than anything else. Then
in 1919 Proff Koch came riding in from the Dakota prairies, his arms full of

   

19

 

~Tue CarRoLinA PLAYMAKERS

plays and his head full of dreams. In no time a stage was set up, and everybody
near and far, little and big, black and white realized for the first time that he,
said body, was an artist of some sort—mainly a dramatic artist... . 1 chose
the last. And after a few productions, 1 was caught fast in my choice and had

struck acquaintance with all the bat-like terrors that inhabit the shadows of
the stage.

Frederick Koch was a thin, wiry enthusiast with a big idea and
the gift of making his enthusiasms contagious. In teaching young
people to write, he insisted that they write of what they knew
first-hand, the familiar, the well-remembered; he directed them
to the natural, historical, and legendary folklore of that region
which they had known from childhood. Barrett Clark, who knew
the man and his work intimately, says that to Koch “the theatre
was something not apart from life, but literally a part of life.
He helped to make the theatre a function of life and a means of
interpretation.” Proff, as he was always called on the Carolina
campus, possessed to a high degree the ability to release the crea-
tive spark in his students. The fact that this able impresario was
at hand when Paul Green returned from France marks a sig-
nificant point in the latter’s development as a writer. He found
a teacher ready to encourage his ambitions and to work with him,
and also he found a stage equipped to produce his plays. By the
fall of 1919 the Carolina Playmakers were already a working
organization with facilities set up for producing plays, and all the
excitement of a fresh experiment. It seems quite possible that
had this not been true, had not the Playmakers been at that time
the most lively creative group on the campus, Green might not
have become a playwright at all.

The philosophy of playmaking which urged Paul Green to-
ward the rich fund of legend, folkways, human tragedy and
comedy of the eastern Carolina countryside, he has stated as
follows:

Most of the plays I have written can be designated as folk plays, and I know
this seems a narrow boundary. Perhaps it is, but since the “folk” are the people
 

cores

 

 

 

OCA FIDE LTS

oO PNET ANTS

ee so ee et ee

  

who
others who are more foreign and therefore less real to me. Not for a moment

do I claim to have done justice to an inspiring subject matter, but the challenge
is there, clearer, sharper, more compelling every day. For there is sometaing
in the life of “the people” which seems of deeper significance so far as the
e of the universe goes than the characters who might be termed sophis-

Paut GREEN OF CHAPEL Hii

seem to matter most to me, I have little interest in trying to deal with

natur
ticated . 2.

The first play to be produced by the Carolina Playmakers was
“When Witches Ride,” by Elizabeth Lay. “The most effective
plays produced this year were written by Elizabeth Lay and
Harold Williamson,” says the 1919 Yackety Yack, thus slighting
Thomas Wolfe’s “The Return of Buck Gavin,” also produced
that year. Elizabeth Lay graduated from the University in June
1919, but continued her connection with the Playmakers, with
the imposing title of Field Agent for the Bureau of Community
Drama of the Extension Division of the University. It was
through her work with the Playmakers that she first met Paul
Green when he returned to the University in 1919. She designed
the set for the first of his plays which the Playmakers produced,
“The Last of the Lowries,” during the season of 1920-1921.
Two more of Green’s plays were produced that same season:
“The Miser, A Farm Tragedy,” and “The Old Man of Eden-
ton, a Melodrama of Colonial Carolina.” By the following year,
the friendship of Paul and Elizabeth had progressed to the point
of writing a play together: “Blackbeard, Pirate of the Carolina
Coast.” This collaboration was the beginning of a life part-
nership.

The years which Paul Green spent at the University, his
studies and his association with the Playmakers, left strong im-
prints which are observable in his later work. While it is not
possible to question the actuality of these influences, an evaluation
of their precise strength and extent presents considerable diffi-
culty. It may be suggested that many critics of his plays, espe-

 

 

A Home 1n Cuaper Hii 21

cially of the earlier symphonic plays, have admitted to a sense of
confusion, and that his audiences have at times been bewildered.
Does this lack of clarity, this wavering ambivalence, stem from
the classroom of Horace Williams, that master of evasion and
equivocation? And was it altogether fortunate that the entice-
ments of playmaking attracted the young poet from Harnett
County? No reader of Paul Green’s plays and novels can fail
to realize that at heart he is essentially a poet. Not only in the
lyrics which gem most of his plays, and the frankly poetic dramas,
but even in his most realistic prose, poetry is implicit. In his
delight in natural beauty, his ability to evoke a mood, his brood-
ing humanity, his gropings toward the inexpressible, there is
poetry. Might these qualities have found freer expression in
poetry unhampered by rules of drama? And finally, how account
for that angry resentment toward conventional education ex-
pressed later in The Enchanted Maze and Forever Growing?
Surely these are not the expressions of a man who felt that his
creative gifts had been released and encouraged by his college
experience. Had Paul Green, perhaps unconsciously, felt frus-
trated and disappointed by what he received at the University?
Those who knew him in his college days recognized him as a
youth of unusual potential ability; whether or not he was enabled
to realize that potential to the fullest can only be considered at
some future time.

VII. A HOME IN CHAPEL HILL

Whatever the extent of the University’s influence on Paul
Green as a writer, the town of Chapel Hill has been his choice
as a home ever since. Through his association with the Play-
makers he met the woman who became his wife, Elizabeth Lay.
The Greens’ was by no means the only romance which had its
 

 

 

 

= 29 ERTIES Me wea. Ne Tay

 

 

Paut GreEN oF CHAPEL HILL

beginnings in work with the Playmakers, but it was destined to
be one of the most significant. No one who has known the Greens
together could fail to perceive their genuine congeniality of spirit.
Paul Green could have found nowhere a companion with deeper
understanding of his aims and aspirations.

Before coming to the University of North Carolina, Elizabeth

Lay graduated from Saint Mary’s Junior College in Raleigh and

taught for a year in a country school in Northampton County.
Her childhood had been spent in Concord, New Hampshire,
where her father, the Reverend George Lay, an Episcopal min-
ister, taught Greek at Saint Paul’s School. He came to North
Carolina as rector of Saint Mary’s School. Later he was rector
at Beaufort and then retired to Chapel Hill. There were five
daughters and two sons in the family. Elizabeth had grown up
in an atmosphere of books and of the spirited discussion of ideas.
A tall, strongly built girl, she had an unusual mass of copper-
colored wavy hair, a direct and friendly way of smiling, and blue
green eyes with a deep light in them. During her college years
she had already shown promise as a writer, and her poems and
sketches appeared regularly in The Carolina Magazine. She took
part in student government affairs, sang in the choir of the
Chapel of the Cross, and found time not only to act in and to
write plays, but to design and build scenery for the Playmakers.

Her engagement to Paul Green was announced in Chapel Hill
in April 1922. He was then completing a year of graduate
study in philosophy under the direction of Horace Williams.
They were married in July in the Episcopal Church in Beaufort
by Elizabeth’s father.

That fall the Greens went to Cornell University, where Paul
continued his study of philosophy, and Elizabeth worked as spe-
cial lecturer for the New York State College of Agriculture,
somewhat the same type of work which she had learned to do for
the Extension Division in Chapel Hill. During the year at Cor-

   
 

A Home 1n Cuapex HItu 23

nell, Paul Green did not lose sight of the kind of writing which
he wished to do. The News and Observer (Raleigh) printed
three “Carolina Sketches” which he sent in. The second of these,
a description of a Negro convict, carries the germ of a fully de-
veloped scene in Potter’s Field and also of the powerful convict-
camp chapter in This Body the Earth. It reveals the beginning
of that horror of capital punishment which has made him oppose
it publicly ever since. The News and Observer also published
that year two realistic country poems of Green’s, “After the Fu-
neral” and “Tucker Oak.”

Even in faraway Ithaca, Paul Green’s ties with Harnett
County remained strong. He wrote several times to the news-
paper expressing his great interest in the community “sing,” which
he had previously helped to organize at Buie’s Creek. This was
a county-wide gathering in Lillington to sing folk songs and hear
old-time fiddlers. Green wrote that he hoped to see it “grow
into a State and ultimately a national institution.”

After a year at Cornell, the Greens returned to Chapel Hill,
where he had received an appointment to the University faculty.
Their first home was a big old sprawling house on Strowd’s Hill,

‘a grove at the eastern edge of the town. In those days, sisters

and brothers, both Lays and Greens, Playmakers, and fellow
students kept the Green home in a continual uproar. Looking
back on that time, one of Green’s sisters has wondered if perhaps
the young couple might not have liked to be alone; but they
never were, nor did it occur to her then that they might wish it.
Green’s need for solitude, already observable in his student days,
has throughout his life run parallel with an equally strong need
for drawing people about him, especially the members of his
family.

His two younger sisters, Erma and Caro Mae, lived with the
Greens during their years as students at the University. Caro
Mae later married Phillips Russell, biographer and teacher of
 

 

 

24 Paut GREEN oF CHAPEL HILL

creative writing, and still lives in Chapel Hill. Paul Green and
Erma collaborated in writing a folk play “Fixins, the Tragedy of
a Tenant Farm Women,” which the Playmakers produced in
1924. Both of these sisters have the gift of writing and the vivid
personalities which are part of the Green inheritance. Eliza-
beth’s sisters, Ellen, Lucy, Virginia and Nancy, also lived with
the Greens at one time or another when they were studying at
the University or just visiting; her brothers, George and Henry,
were frequent visitors. Not only long discussions, but music also
gave them recreation; Paul enjoyed playing his fiddle with one
of his sisters at the piano, and they all loved to sing.

His appointment in the University was as instructor in the
Department of Philosophy. He proved an effective teacher, took
his responsibility seriously, and was genuinely interested in his
students. The obligations of a full-time teaching load did not,
however, prevent his writing; he kept steadily at work on short
stories, poems, and plays.

He also made the fullest use of the reading opportunity which
the University Library offered him. Here was a chance to satisfy
that hunger for books which had been his since childhood. His
wide reading in fiction, drama, and philosophy greatly enriched
his teaching; and he was able to convey to his students his own
enthusiasm in world literature.

The Greens’ first child, Paul Junior, was born in 1924. That
same year they had been forced to build a house, not being able
to find one to rent in Chapel Hill, which was even then crowded
by the rapid expansion of the University. The new home was
built in what is now known as the Glen, a hillside sloping south
and east between Franklin Street and Battle Park, where no one
but the enterprising Greens would at that time have thought of
building. The site had the advantage of being near town and
campus, and yet secluded and close to the woods. Two years
after they had moved into the house in the Glen, when Paul

 

Sn

 

ar

Tue REVIEWER 25

Junior was still just a “knee baby,” a daughter, Nancy Byrd,
was born.

His growing family, and probably also the presence of the
many friends drawn to the Glen by the Greens’ hospitality, soon
made Green feel the need for a place where he could have more
seclusion. He built for himself in the woods near-by a barnlike
structure which he could use as a study. The Greens’ home in
the Glen had become more and more a gathering place for writers
and those who wanted to write or to talk about books and writing,
both native Chapel Hillians and others. Among them would
often be the James Boyds from their home in Southern Pines;
Lamar Stringfield, the flutist and composer; Allen Tate and Caro-
line Gordon, from The Fugitive Group; Emily Clark, editor of
The Reviewer; and many others, first local and Southern writers,
and then as Green’s reputation grew, national figures. If the
South experienced a literary awakening in the twenties and thirties,
Chapel Hill and the Paul Green home were among its focal
points.

VIII. THE REVIEWER

Teaching, writing, gardening, playing tennis, entertaining
friends, spending long hours at night in literary or metaphysical
discussions—surely such was a full enough way of life for a
most vigorous and ambitious young man. Yet the Greens showed
an amazing capacity for taking on work during these crowded
days when their children were babies. Both Paul and Elizabeth
had early become interested collaborators for “The Literary
Lantern,” a column of book reviews and book news begun in
1924 by two members of the English Department in the Univer-
sity, Addison Hibbard and Raymond Adams. Their expressed
purpose was to relate the column especially to Southern litera-

 
= ——— SSS

   

 

26 Paut Green or CHAPEL HILL

ture. Howard Mumford Jones succeeded them as editor, and
Elizabeth Green took over from him. During her editorship
she continued the policy of emphasis on regional literature, a
policy to which later editors have not always adhered. For a
long time “The Literary Lantern” was almost a Green family
enterprise. Phillips Russell, who married Caro Mae Green,
followed Elizabeth as editor; then Caro Mae presided until 1945,
the longest span of any of the editors.

In 1925, Paul Green accepted another responsibility and ac-
tivity, the editorship of the moribund Reviewer. The Reviewer
had a leading place in the literary interests and artistic creative-
ness in the South and in the country at large. This “little maga-
zine,” founded in Richmond in 1920, had never been able to
get on a firm financial basis, although its list of contributors reads
like an honor roll of the writers of the period. The Richmond
editors were worn out with the effort. In December of that year
Paul Green wrote to Emily Clark in Richmond that a board
newly formed in Chapel Hill felt sure that they had got together
enough money to see the magazine through at least five years,
and offered to take it over under his editorship. The members
of the board, in addition to Green, were Gerald Johnson, the
biographer and editor, then in his brief two years as Professor
of Journalism in Chapel Hill; Addison Hibbard, a member of
the English Department and afterwards Dean of the College of
Liberal Arts at Northwestern University; and Nell Battle Lewis,
pungent and respected columnist of The News and Observer.

Since The Reviewer had published Green’s play, “In Aunt
Mahaly’s Cabin,” in April 1924, before his first book appeared, he
had some reason to feel kindly toward the magazine. When The
Reviewer accepted this play, Green wrote Miss Clark, “I’m just
beginning this writing business, stumbling, sweating, blindly at
times, pushing on—lost in a greater quandary than poor Blue-
Gum Ed in this play.”

 

petiaitin nei citeetn, See tatiana aia eee

 

 

 

Tue ReviEWwER a7

In the January 1925 issue of The Reviewer, the first under
the new management, there appeared “A Plain Statement about
Southern Literature,” by “P. E. G.” In it the new editor pro-
tested against the insincerity and obvious falseness of earlier
Southern Literature, as exhibited, for instance, in such a “literary
morgue” as The Library of Southern Literature.

I ‘* . . 4
; ‘ not declaring [he wrote] for a complete renunciation of the past in
outhern letters, but rather for a truer and fresher interpretation of our en-

vi . . . .
ronment and our relations to that environment; for a rejuvenation of our

spiritual instincts so long dead to curiosity and wonder; for a food to feed
upon different from the sweetened wind and other cotton-candy stuff dished

out by our party leaders and preachers and windy gullibles .. . that loud ranting
note . .. the usual Southern rhetoric and spectacular hyperbole [bestowed upon]
earth-departing spinsters, shave-tail poets, ninety-days wonders, crossroads
philosophers, minute Alfred Tennysons, and nostalgic, whimpering Poes.

This statement not only set the tone of The Reviewer, but is
significant as a revelation of Green’s own standards and the type of
writing which he wished to avoid. His revolt against the facile
sentimentality of Southern literature may help to account for
his inability to set free completely the deepest poetry within him.

The poor paper and print of the issues for that year indicate
The Reviewer's struggle for survival. On August 9, 1925 “The
Literary Lantern” recorded:

The current number of The Reviewer is out, a bit late, ’tis true, and one

copy at least horribly put together and printed. The magazine has been having
about the usual vicissitudes of new publications,

In short, the magazine’s career in Chapel Hill was a repetition
of what it had been in Richmond: distinction without money. ' By
the end of 1925 Green had begun to feel the strain of the un-
relenting deadline, the financial anxiety, the everlasting demands
Which interrupted and drained his creative energies. The board

met in November and admitted it was impossible to continue
publication.
 

 

 

 

28 Paut Green or CHAPEL HILi

In the course of its all too brief career, The Reviewer had been
a valiant and significant venture. The literary climate of the South
was changing, and the little magazine had been one of the most
sensitive of wind-and-temperature indicators.

IX. FOLK PLAYS

The busy years of Paul Green’s teaching and his editorship
of The Reviewer were fruitful in writing too. From the full
storehouse of his childhood memories, he drew most of the ma-
terial for his earlier works.

One of the folk plays which Green had written as a student,
but which had not been produced by the Playmakers, may well
be taken, as Barrett Clark suggests, as “a sort of prologue to what
he had determined to make his life work, the story to be gradual-
ly written down in stories, novels, plays, of my home folks, black
and white!” The play is “White Dresses,” which Clark considers
the “first of his plays to show unmistakable signs of genius.” This
brief and harshly realistic episode of the love of a Negro girl for
a white boy and of her utter defeat by the boy’s father is set forth
in sharp sincerity. Archibald Henderson has recorded the intense
argument which occurred in Chapel Hill in 1921 over whether
or not the Playmakers be allowed to produce a play with such a
theme. The Chapel Hill decision was against it, and the Play-
makers had to omit it from their bill. B. R. Lewis, however,
selected “White Dresses” for his collection of Contemporary
One-Act Plays, where Paul Green appeared in the goodly com-
pany of Barrie, Lady Gregory, Chekhov, Sudermann, and Strind-
berg. Another play of about the same time, “The Lord’s Will,”
stirred up so many protests in Burlington, North Carolina, when
the Playmakers first acted it there, that they decided to drop it
from their repertory. Already in these first years of writing Green

i

ees oe ee

 

 

Fork Purays 29

had given indication of his ability to stir up controversy, of his
boldness in attacking social wrongs, and his deep concern for the
humiliated and dispossessed.
The clear purpose which he expressed in regard to his life work
ts one to which he has adhered ever since, unless the Hollywood
years and the historical dramas are to be considered deviations. He
once wrote: “From its beginning three hundred years ago, until
the present, North Carolina has made no lasting contribution to
the art of the world. Several million people have lived and died
here, and no one has set himself aside in high-minded and intel-
ligent devotion to record a single one of these lives... .” The
phrase “intelligent devotion” precisely describes how he ap-
proached his task of interpreting the lives of the country people
with whom he had grown up.
Not only was Paul Green’s purpose clear from the start, but
his talent was quickly recognized and encouraged. He did not
have to face the disappointments and long frustrations which many
writers suffer. From his student days on, Paul Green was hailed,
first by his teachers, later by such critics as Howard Mumford
Jones and Barrett Clark, as a man of exceptional talent. This does
not imply that everything had been easy for him; he was an ex-
tremely hard worker, and a sensitive and complex personality who
always met conflicts head-on. He possessed to a high degree the
artist’s everlasting dissatisfaction with his own work. In speaking
of The Common Glory, when he was sweating over shaping and
completing it, he sighed and added, “But then I’ve never really
finished The Lost Colony .... 1 still want to rewrite it.” This
was said at a time when he had achieved enough acclaim to make
him complacent. His defeats have come from within, from the
failure that is part of the tragic paradox of the genuine artist:
no matter how great the poet’s facility (and Green’s is consider-
able), words can never quite catch within their net the shining
dream entire and whole. The actuality in print is always less than
the imagined design.
 

 

 

 

ao eeeraer an

 

 

30 Paut GREEN OF CHAPEL HILL

Although Green’s plays and stories seldom carry specific dates
of action, they are almost invariably placed in the latter years of
the nineteenth or the first decade of the twentieth century in rural
eastern North Carolina, the period and locale of his boyhood and
his most vivid memories. Even in his earlier plays he began to
explore and shape that “Little Bethel” neighborhood, which has
become more and more specific in his imagination and which fol-
lows pretty clearly the Cape Fear Valley. The time and locale
are important for an understanding of his plays. The economic
and social conditions pictured in them, both in the way of living
of the sharecropper and the Negro, have by now changed some~
what for the better. Perhaps Abraham McCranie, of In Abraham’s
Bosom, could get an education now at Shaw University in Raleigh
or at North Carolina College in Durham, and then fulfill his am-
bition to teach his people. Perhaps Etta and Hardy Gilchrist of
The Field God could find some help for their complex troubles
in a less isolated and bigoted community. The farms and villages
of Shroud My Body Down, This Body the Earth, Tread the
Green Grass, and most of the others, were remote from cities;
automobiles were still scarce, there were no radios, roads were
unpaved and sometimes impassable, country schools were few and
poorly taught, and the influence of the churches tended to swing
between the extremes of austerity and the hysterical emotionalism
of revivals.

“The Last of the Lowries,” written while Green was still a
student, had utilized the romantic story of the Croatan outlaws,
who lived in a near-by county and whose legend must have been
long familiar to him. In the other plays and stories written at this
time, his characters are either the Negroes or white farmers and
sharecroppers of the Cape Fear region. “The Hot Iron,” “The
End of the Row,” “The Prayer Meeting,” “Old Wash Lucas,”
and “Your Fiery Furnace” were first published in Poet Lore
during 1923 and 1924. The young dramatist had won esteem,

= GME LL ELE ee

Fork Prays 31

though very little money. “Your Fiery Furnace” later became the
third act of In Abraham’s Bosom. Six one-act plays of Negro life
were collected in 1926 into the volume Lonesome Road. “The
Lord’s Will,” called “a tragedy of a country preacher,” is one
of the earlier expressions of the author’s interest in the religious
conflicts of ingrown communities. In these first plays are to be
found in germ most of the themes which have been developed
more roundly in later works, even essentially in the historical
dramas: the bitter fate of the Negro, the Negro’s ambition to
tise, his frustrations, the white man’s injustice and blind cruelty,
love between Negro and white, the angry resentments bred by
the pressures of small neighborhoods, the defeated aspirations
of the tenant farmer, the tragedies caused by intense yet ignorant
religious feeling, the decay of old families in the Old South. In
these first plays Green forged the language which is especially
his: the use of the local specific word, the speech cadences of
Negroes and unlettered white, the echoes of hymns, prayers and
Sermons, Biblical phraseology, the moving rhythms, the sudden
poetry. The plays of Green’s first years reveal many other aspects
of his talent and style which have continued in his later work.
Among these are the ample and detailed stage directions, as care-
fully worded as the dialogue and often containing nuggets of
character portrayal and descriptions which convey the tone and
atmosphere desired. (Note, for example, the poetry of the final
Stage direction of In Abraham’s Bosom: “The wind blows through
the house setting the sparks flying.”) In the length and detail of
these stage directions, the author at times seems to be straining, as
he does in other instances, against the conventional limitations of
the theatre, attempting toconjure up in a paragraph or two a whole
locality, an entire and complex social climate.
— of the most popular of Green’s short plays of Negro life,
€ No ’Count Boy,” introduced a new strain in his work, that
of fantasy. Here again the poet in him sought expression. “The
 

 

 

 

 

32 Paut Green oF CuHapet HILi

No ?Count Boy” is an exquisitely rounded unit, too bubble-light
to touch with any heavy finger of parable. This story of a seven-
teen-year-old Negro girl, her hard-working practical betrothed,
and the wandering dreamy boy who almost enchants her with his
tunes and tall tales, carries a suggestion of the yearning of all
youth for faraway places, for escape from the commonplace.
It proved very successful on the stage and isa favorite in the rep-
ertory of the Carolina Playmakers. “The No ’Count Boy” was
first produced by the Studio Players at the Little Theatre in
Chicago in the winter of 1924, and later at the Dallas Little
Theatre. In the spring of 1925 the Dallas group brought the
play to New York, where it won the Belasco Cup in the National
Little Theatre Tournament. This prize was one of the first in-
stances of national recognition of Paul Green’s talent.

The critics were already interested in Paul Green, notably Bar-
rett Clark. In his preface to Lonesome Road, published the fol-
lowing year, Clark wrote an estimate of Green’s work to date:

I feel that his greatest gifts are his instinctive talent for seizing upon a
dramatic situation, his poetic imagination, and his intuitive knowledge of char-
acter. I believe that poetic imagination is what our theatre stands most in need of.
We have skilled technicians a-plenty, and in O’Neill a great artist of many.
aspects. But as yet we have no genuine folk dramatist besides Paul Green. If
he were at this moment to cease writing he would be entitled to a place of
honor in the development of the American drama, But he is only beginning.
Was any beginner ever better equipped?

Barrett Clark has called Green’s “The Prayer Meeting” the
“first successful attempt to introduce into our theatre the full-
blooded Negro, the healthy animal, neither a downright villain
nor a dreamy Uncle Tom sentimentalist.”

Paul Green’s interest in the Negro is undoubtedly related to
a general quickening of appreciation of Negro art and Negro life,
but his concern goes much deeper than any trend or literary fad;
it had been aroused in early childhood, in a region quite remote

TT TS RE

 

33

Fork Pays

from the ripples of literary fashion. He likes Negroes as people,
likes their music, their humor, their speech, their spontaneous
poetry, and he feels deeply the injustice which they have suffered.
His parallel concern for the plight of the white tenant farmer
strengthens the conviction that his sympathy for the Negro 1s
rooted in his distress over all mistreated people; it is but one facet
in his larger realization of man’s inhumanity to man. He was of
course encouraged by Koch’s teaching to turn to his own early
experience for the materials of drama, and there he was con-
fronted with two impressive instances of that inhumanity: the
fate of the Negro and of the tenant farmer, to whose tragedies
his sense of justice as well as his sense of drama responded. ;
Green’s Negroes are fully developed and comprehended in-
dividuals. He writes of them from within, not as the white man
sees them, but as they aspire and love and crack jokes and sing,
struggle and suffer, eat and drink and hate and fear and die. He
knows how to catch the poetry and the humor of their speech, the
pathos and the comedy and the searing tragedy of their lives.
His sympathetic portrayal of Negro character has contributed
toward that greatly to be desired increase of understanding be-
tween the races which is apparent in the South. He has also in
many practical ways consistently proved himself a friend of the
Negroes in his own town, employing them at generous wages,
lending them money, going on notes and bail for them, giving
his influence and prestige to any undertaking for their advance-
ment, and in all his dealings living up to the spirit of his convic-
tions. Although he has frequently been called by that old unfair
Southern tag based on prejudice, “nigger-lover,” he has not been
a blind or even always an enthusiastic admirer of the race. Occa-
Sionally in despair over the shoddy performance of some Negro
to whom he has given work, he shakes his head sadly and calls
them “sorry, shiftless, no count”—slave words. That is, he sees
them not as martyrs but as human beings, with the short-comings
 

 

 

 

 

 

34 Paut GREEN OF CHAPEL HILL

of human nature tangled with those imposed upon them by social
injustice. This clarity is especially apparent in In Abraham’s
Bosom, where the aspirations of Abraham are defeated by his own
people.

X. PULITZER PRIZE-WINNER

In the first six years after graduation from college, Paul Green
had published some twenty-one plays. Two collections of his
plays, under the titles The Lord’s Will and Lonesome Road, had
appeared in print. Green spent the summer of 1926 at the Mac-
Dowell Colony in New Hampshire, and during this period of
freedom from classroom routine wrote steadily. DuBose and
Dorothy Heyward were also at Peterboro that summer, working
on the dramatization of Porgy.

Before going to Peterboro, Green had finished the three-act
version of In Abraham’s Bosom. This play had its origin in a one-
act play of the same name, first published in Lonesome Road,
which became the first act of the fully developed drama. Although
this first act is a unit in itself, it contains the seed of the subsequent
acts; the reader wants to hear the rest of Abraham’s story and has
a foreboding of his tragedy. The manuscript went the rounds of
the commercial producers, all of whom rejected it. At last the
Provincetown Players accepted it, thus writing another chapter in
the long story of the contribution of little theatres and art theatres
to the history of drama in this country. A company of Negro ac-
tors, under the direction of Jasper Deeter, first produced Jn
Abraham's Bosom at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich
Village. The play ran from December 30, 1926, to March 5,
1927, drawing increasingly larger audiences as the news of its ex-
cellence circulated through Manhattan. It finally moved uptown
to the Garrick Theatre. The author himself had not expected it

TR LTE LET RET

a

 

Puuirzer Prizz-WINNER 35

to do so well, and expressed surprise at the encouraging reviews
during the run of more than two months.

The author has described his play in the subtitle as “The Biog-
raphy of a Negro in Seven Scenes.” The story of Abraham Mc-
Cranie is one that Green was to retell in other forms, for the theme
greatly appealed to him; basically, it is a tragedy of aspiration
and defeat. The fact that the characters are Negroes, and the
locale the author’s familiar turpentine forests and small-town
slums of North Carolina, does not detract from, but rather
strengthens, the universality of the theme. Abraham McCranie, a
mulatto farmer, has an ambition to teach school, in order
to help other members of his race to improve themselves by educa-
tion. His defeat comes from baffling forces, his own ignorance,
the slothfulness of his race, the hatred of his son, the weariness of
his loyal wife; finally, driven to bitter half-mad desperation,
when he feels fate closing in on him, he strikes out in a frenzy
and kills. The scenes have the rough texture of reality, both those
in the pine woods of the first act, and those in wretched cabins and
slum rooms. The speech is pungent, tingling, alive with poetic
flashes and cadences. These Negroes are individuals; never roman-
ticized, they appear in all their complexities of yearning and
weakness, vice and generosity, weariness and anger and bewilder-
ment. In one aspect, the play is a passionate argument for the
Negro’s right to education, or rather an exposition of the bitter
fruits of denying him an education. The plea is reduced to its
simplest terms. “Give a nigger a book and des well shoot him,”
says one of the characters in the first act; this summarizes the
wry and tortured action of the play.

In May 1927 In Abraham’s Bosom received the Pulitzer
Award for drama. There was hearty rejoicing in the house in the
Glen. For Paul Green the honor somewhat cushioned his disap-
pointment over the closing of the play; for contrary to his earlier
disavowals, the good reviews had led him to hope that it would run
 

 

 

 

 

36 Paut Green oF CHaPet HILi

longer. For brothers and sisters, friends and townspeople, it was an
occasion of prideful joy. Even larger areas began to feel compla-
cent at having borne, however unwittingly, a thus-crowned author
in their midst. This was the first time the prize in drama had come
South. Hatcher Hughes, a graduate of the University of North
Carolina and also a former member of the faculty there, had won
it in 1924 with Hell-bent fer Heaven, but at the time he was
teaching at Columbia University.

The critics did not unanimously share the enthusiasm of Green’s
friends and admirers over the award. Barrett Clark surmised that
some of them who expressed displeasure had not taken the trouble
to go downtown to the Provincetown Theatre to see the produc-
tion. Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times said of the deci-
sion, “The judges this year had the courage of discernment, and
they have directed attention to Mr. Green’s talents at a time
when the larger public still knows nothing about him,” and then

pointed out how well Ju Abraham’s Bosom fulfilled the terms set
forth for the prize:

For the original American play performed in New York which shall best

represent the educational power of the stage in raising the standard of good
morals, good taste and good manners.

Atkinson went on to deplore the timidity of this wording, wish-
ing that

it sang of truth and beauty rather than of education. For in recalling the
passionate eloquence of Mr. Geen’s drama we think of its sincerity, its

strength and its understanding more naturally than we remember its good be-
havior.

Other plays of that year which were considered for the Pulit-
zer Prize were Broadway by Philip Dunning, Saturday’s Children
by Maxwell Anderson, The Silver Cord by Sidney Howard, The
Barker by Kenyon Nicholson, and Daisy Mayme by George Kelly,
all of which had longer runs and more box-office success than Jn

:

 

 

Tue Fietp Gop 37

Abraham’s Bosom. The season on Broadway had been by no
means a dull one. Yet the award went to a play which was no
great popular success, written by an obscure young playwright,
produced by a Negro company in an out-of-the-way theatre.

After the award, the play was revived in May. Green did not
like this attempt to cash in on the Pulitzer publicity, and expressed
forceful disapproval in a telegram:

I wish to protest against it absolutely, Have thought of arguments against
my attitude but still I feel that this capitalizing of a windfall is illegitimate
and vulgar. Let Adraham rest with some dignity in his grave; there is a damnable
cheapness about this sudden bestirring over the Pulitzer soup (the publicity,
that is, not the prize itself). I will have nothing to do with it and wish that
you would do what you can to stop the movement. ...

With his passion for revision and his dissatisfaction over his
own work, Green had become aware by that time of all the weak-
nesses of the play and had no wish to see it put on again. But
regardless of his veto, the play was reopened on May 8, 1927, for
two weeks only. In the fall the Provincetown Players revived it
again for a brief run and later sent it on the road.

XI. THE FIELD GOD

At the same time that the manuscript of Jn Abraham’s Bosom
was being rejected by various publishers, The Field God, his
second full-length play, had followed the same course. It was
finally tried out in Brooklyn in April 1927 and had short runs ip
New York at the Greenwich Theatre and at the Cort. Robert
McBride published it along with Jn Abraham’s Bosom in 1927.

The central figure of The Field God is Hardy Gilchrist, a

successful white farmer, a strong defiant man who refuses to bend
to religion in accordance with the demands of his sickly wife and
Pious neighbors. In his self-sufficiency he admits no need of help.

299669
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

38 Paut Green or CuapeL Hii

The drama unfolds his punishment for a passionate love, punish-
ment which comes partly from accident, partly from his unjustly
treated tenants, partly from his narrowly pietistic neighbors. In
spite of long torture, Hardy at the end still defies God.

Many strains reminiscent of Green’s boyhood days are here:
the realistic scene of hog-killing, the power of the church in an
isolated community, the similar power of neighborhood gossip,
the cringing hatred of tenants toward the owner. Perhaps in
the back of his mind lingered that old story of his grandfather, an-
other gay and proud personality like Hardy Gilchrist, who was
said to have come into conflict with the local church. Although the
love of Hardy and Rhoda isa credible one, and although the con-
flict of wills sustains interest throughout, there occurs in this play
more than a trace of that obscurity which confused later audi-
ences in, for instance, Shroud My Body Down. The reader fails
to be sure of what the author offers him. Is earthly love to be
chosen in defiance of the observances of conventional religion?
Shall the strong man resist the forces of superstition? Are the re-
straints of a bigoted church and community a denial of life itself?
Or is the author interested simply in presenting a picture of the
cruelty and sadism which thrive on prejudice? It is Paul Green,
the poet and mystic, who is writing here of the naturally religious
man who has lost for a while beliefs which are deeply ingrained
:n him. The drama of the conflict between man and God strongly
attracted Green as a writer, perhaps because he had not fully re-
solved that conflict within himself.

When The Field God opened in Chicago in 1930, one en-
thusiastic critic said. “If In Abraham’s Bosom, which Mr. Green
also wrote, was worth a Pulitzer Prize, The Field God ought to
have two.” Paul Green’s colleague, Addison Hibbard, writing in
“The Literary Lantern” found that it marked a distinct advance in

Green’s development.
Walter Pritchard Eaton, in The New York Times, February

ee _—_

 

Tue Fieip Gop 3?

]
te. 194 8, commented on the poetry and the local significance of
Teen's writing as revealed in these two long plays:

gue, yet to make predictions about Paul Green, the young in-
Sls te Piehsene jonas of North Carolina, who learned to write vivid one-act
his two long: pls BC s comeies there, and who last Winter showed New York
(htationdly ys, “The Field God” and “In Abraham’s Bosom.” He un-
stiffly in the ‘. sses dramatic talent of a high order, if as yet moving somewhat
poetry which =e form, He also possesses, like ONeill, a strong vein of
welled nsmutes the realism of his prose into rhythm and envelopes his
North Gusta tag Ce beauty, . . . He writes of the life of his native
i aie die 3 he demonstrates that out of the amateur and academic theatre
we an come a genuine and powerful expression of the local life. His
ys may well become weapons for the liberalizing of the lives of his people.
 

 

music and even the dance as an intersify-
ing adjunct to drama, and perhaps a re-
conception of the uses of space on the
4ge.. 4.”

i 3 os rh OG “, . . this may involve some fusion of
‘
‘
/

 

 

 

 

cana ci LTO TE TTL ELLE LLG ERE LEN LEE TT

 
 

 

 

 

XII. GERMANY AND ENGLAND

In 1928 Paul Green received a Guggenheim fellowship for a
year abroad to study the European theatre. He decided to go to
Germany because he felt the theatre there was venturing into
experimental fields. He and Elizabeth both wished to avoid Amer-
ican tourists and to live close to the people, in order to learn to
know them and to speak the language. For these reasons they took
a flat in one of the poorer sections of Berlin, not far from the
Tempelhofer Airport. Green immediately began a conscientious
study of German grammar, and his wife had daily practical ex-
perience in using the language in marketing and talking to the
scrubwomen who came in to help with the cleaning. The flat was
near a small park where the children, accustomed to the woods
of Chapel Hill, could have some outdoor play; and soon both
little Paul and Nancy Byrd were enrolled in a kindergarten run

by Sisters of a Lutheran order.
Keeping house in a foreign country with two small children

is not an easy task under any circumstances, and that winter proved
an extremely difficult one for the Greens. For one thing, it was the
coldest winter that Europe had known in seventy-five years, re-
membered as the winter when the canals in Venice froze. Berlin
was bitterly cold, and the only heat in the Greens’ flat came from
a porcelain stove. Later they moved to a house in the suburb of
Dahlem, where they were much more comfortable. Here they had
a garden, and the children could be outdoors more. They also ac-
quired a nurse and household helper, Erna Lamprecht, who be-
came a loyal friend and accompanied them to England and later
to Chapel Hill, where she remained for eighteen months. The
Greens kept in touch with her; and after the end of World War
II she wrote them that as the American soldiers came into Berlin
she scanned their faces, searching “for my enemy, who is just
little Paulie.” In 1949 the Greens succeeded in bringing Erna to
 

 

Ly acura mer eere enon manne

we saa 2 cesta oes

 

44 Paut GREEN OF CHAPEL HILL

this country and established her and her family on a farm in

Orange County.
In spite of household difficulties, Paul and Elizabeth Green

managed to do what they had come to Berlin for; they went con-
stantly to the theatre, seeing all kinds of plays from the most
frivolous of comedies and light opera to the most serious and
thought-provoking experimental plays. They saw such great
German actors of the period as Moissi and Werner Kraus. They
met Kurt Weill, who later came to Chapel Hill. They went to
many movies, both German and Russian. They made friends with
Julius Bab, Professor of Drama in the University of Berlin, and
through him became interested in the work of the Volkstheatre.
Frau Bab, who had been educated in England, translated I A bra-
hams Bosom into German; it was published in Berlin in 1929.

With his usual diffidence, Paul Green presented few of the
letters of introduction to prominent German writers and theatre
people which had been given to him before he left America. He
felt handicapped by his lack of facility with the language and
somewhat shy about meeting the great and near-great. The Ber-
liner Zeitung sent an artist to do a cartoon of him, and an article
about him appeared in the newspaper, but he did not care to trade
on the publicity which might have been his as a Pulitzer prize-
winner.

Nonetheless, he was stimulated and enriched by his experiences
in Germany. His enjoyment was vividly expressed in letters to his
friend, Proff Koch. At first the German theatre disappointed him.
“Most of what I’d seen of the Reinhardt shows struck me cold,”
he wrote. But then he discovered the Moscow Jewish Theatre, di-
rected by Alexis Granowsky. He wrote:

Well, here is the most astonishing folk theatre I’ve ever met! Marvellous

‘to me. Grotesque and human, puppet-like, musicalized, stylized, unreal and

other-worldly. I felt I must tell you about it! The plays are done in Yiddish,
but the strange tongue but adds to its exotic charm. For once I have been sztis-

om

GERMANY AND ENGLAND 45

fied with the conventions of the stage. Here it is a child’s theatre, too—few
Properties, but all attention on make-up, ballet movements, mass formations,
color, lighting—all submerged in and generating a strange dream-likeness, the
artless (and yet fibered pattern) theatre of play, of the folk. During the Jast
month I’ve wished many a time that you could see what Granowsky has done
and tell me what you thought of it. You might not agree. But I do know that
you would agree that something as new and full of “fine excess” could be done
with the folk songs and customs in North Carolina. We must do that Virginia
Dare sort of lyrical song-drama some of these days. And what we could do with
the mountain ballads! I’ve always been interested in the relation of music and
drama, and have always felt that opera was not the solution. Granowsky has
reached a sort of solution which has given its own art forth, and it satisfied me.

" Much of this letter is important for an understanding of
Green’s later work. Already, in 1928, he was brooding over “that
Virginia Dare sort of lyrical song-drama,” the germ of The Lost
Colony; he was thinking of ways to bring together music and
drama in a new non-operatic but harmonious blend. This experi-
ment accounts for the technique of Tread the Green Grass, Shroud
My Body Down, The Enchanted Maze, Johnny Johnson, and
Roll, Sweet Chariot, and comes to full flower in the “symphonic
dramas.” ; ;

At the end of the first year Paul Green’s Guggenheim fellow-
ship was extended for another six months. In June 1929 the fami-
ly went to England. They found a comfortable flat at 72 Temple
Fortune Lane. In London as in Berlin, Green was hesitant about
following up the introductions which had been given him. He had
a ready-made friend there, Mrs. Frank Vernon, an American who
had lived for a long time in London. She had become interested
in some of Green’s early plays, and had translated one of the most
macabre of these, “In Aunt Mahaly’s Cabin,” for the Grand
Guignol Theatre in Paris, where it had been produced. Soon after
the Greens arrived in London, Mrs. Vernon gave a party for
them, at which they met various literary notables, among them
Rebecca West. But the acquaintances initiated there did not de-

 
 

 

 

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a - - — —

 

 

46 Paur Green or CHAPEL HILi

velop into any significant associations. Green preferred to go his
somewhat solitary way, spending much time at the theatre.

For the most part, he got no such stimulation out of the Eng-
lish theatre as he found in the Moscow Art Theatre. In October
1929 he wrote to Koch:

The theatre here is, as usual, rather tame. No combining of forces, every
manager on his own—clubs, subscription theatres, halls, carrying on individually,
and with little inspiration or comprehension so far as one can see... . These
producers won’t organize, go on feeding rough recognizable pigs soft dove
food. For the English theatre public is about like that of America—tively,
healthy as a pig, and anxious for good trough feed as well as walking in the
parlor, and like all publics, easily fooled by those whom they think superior.
They will come running time without end to the rattle of an empty basket,
hoping for corn and never getting it, and what they need of course is not sound
and wind but something else. Maybe it will be provided. . .. Anyhow, I would say
that a good organization somewhat like the American Theatre Guild is the
only thing that will pull the present English drama out of its riveted coffin.

While in London he became interested in the work of the Arts
League of Service, a travelling group of actors who were also their
own stage hands and producers, very much in the manner of the
Carolina Playmakers. “This is something alive,” he wrote, “but
it’s rather small to play much part in the public’s likes and dis-
likes.”

St. John Irvine had given Green a note to George Bernard
Shaw, one introduction which he finally presented. In a letter
to Koch he described that visit:

Shaw did about 99% of the talking . . . he asked several questions about
Chapel Hill, his friend Archibald Henderson, life in the South, O’Neill, and so
on. Then he began on philosophy and talked for half an hour by the clock
without my saying a word, or wanting to, for that matter. He reviewed the old
dispensation—as he called it—before Darwin, the coming of the natural out-
look, ending with the advent of Einstein on the scene. Then he talked about
Einstein, whom he greatly admires, told one or two anecdotes of their acquaint+
ance, and then swung around to the present-day scene of thought in England—

GERMANY AND ENGLAND 47

G.B.S., Haldane, Bertrand Russell, and others. Half the time he was jollying
and half the time serious, but always with a flow of words—never hesitating,

never too involved—rushing on with bits of anecdotes, etc.

Finally I asked some guestions which Jed around to the drama—by way of
modern religious feeling for science, especially in physics and astronomy, which
so many dramatists and theatre artists are trying to use on the stage. He is
keenly alive to all sorts of possibilities and thinks, unlike most Englishmen lve
met, that the talkies have a tremendous future. Then followed lots of incidents
about his speaking for the talkies, experience in writing plays, etc., etc. From
his talk at this point I had a feeling that he had in mind a grandiose dramatic
work which would make use of some modern religio-scientific idea, calling for
the most stage devices in production of it. 1 didn’t ask him, for it was none of
my business, and he didn’t tell me outright, but such was my feeling about it, my
impression. Finally I rese to go, but he moved his hand and said he’d spare
another five minutes. He began again and talked for another fifteen minutes
with hardly a pause. Well, I'll tell you in detail when I get back about our
conversation—the many, many things he said or suggested, and I believe that
he is the youngest man in Europe and about the only zcmaining hope for the
English drama of the present period—still the Shaw drama, of course.

Far more memorable for Paul Green personally and of greater
significance in his work than his visit to Shaw, was his visit to the
Wessex of Thomas Hardy. He had always considered Hardy one
of the greatest of novelists; Hardy’s deep feeling for the country,
for the locality, his understanding of the hearts of simple folk,
and the poetry inherent in all of his writing had a very direct ap-
peal for the interpreter of eastern North Carolina. He made a de-
tailed record of it in a typewritten manuscript called “Notes on a
Trip to Hardy’s Country,” which is now in the Library of the
University of North Carolina. Green had come to Dorchester with
a letter of introduction to Mrs. Hardy in his pocket. On the first
day of his stay he walked toward Max Gate and looked at the
entrance but “decided not to present it.” Another day he got up his
courage and went in to have tea with Mrs. Hardy, in her Vic-
torian sitting room embellished with plush and bric-a-brac and
many pictures. He had carried out his dream of visiting the coun-

 
ee

Pc en ar ea

tole geese

 

 

it

 

 

48 Paut Green oF Cuapet HILi

try which Hardy had made so distinctively his, as Green himself
was to make the Little Bethel region his own literary homeland.

XIII. THE GLEN AGAIN

On returning to Chapel Hill, Green resumed his position on
the faculty of the University as an assistant professor of philos-
ophy. A student of his during that period has left an impression of

the quality of his teaching:

His teaching is not pedantic, not didactic, not conventional, not scholarly,
not academic; it is not any of those things which college and university students
wearily take for granted in their professors. His teachirg is persuasive as all
art is persuasive. . . . Not only is his subject matter unacademic; his manner
is completely so. No one has ever seen him standing on one of those nice defi-
nitely bounded teaching rostrums, and nobody ever will. He stands sometimes,
but most often he sits, not behind the desk, but informally upon it. With

brooding intensity he talks.

Propping his chin in his hand, he reflects on the misery of the poor white
tenants in eastern North Carolina, or on the industrial system and mechanical
living. And he is quite likely to say with fervor which is not philosophical but
lyrical: “Yeah. That’s no help for us.” And always his thinking evolves from
a definite image, a particular scene such as a Negro hocing corn, a particular
color and feeling. He evokes these as he does in his plays.

The house in the Glen became more than ever a gathering
place for people with literary and musical interests. These parties
were stimulated somewhat by the presence of Wilbur Daniel
Steele, the short story writer, who with his wife and two small
boys came to Chapel Hill in 1930. This was for Steele a return
to his native state, since he had been born in Greensboro; but he
had lived out of North Carolina most of his life, and his work has
very little local or regional flavor. The Steeles rented the big
white house on East Franklin Street which Greenlaw had built.

j=

Tue House or CoNNELLY 49

This house is just across from the Glen, and the Steeles and
Greens became congenial friends as well as neighbors.

There was often music and dancing at the house in the Glen.
At one time Green organized a quartet made up of E. E. Ericson,
William Olsen, Phillips Russell, and himself; they met weekly
at his house, and he proved himself a most meticulous director of
part-singing, insisting that they take it seriously and sing well.
On other evenings, ascetic-looking James Boyd of Southern Pines
would do a lively breakdown, or Jonathan Daniels of Raleigh
weave his way through a Virginia reel.

It was during the early thirties that Paul Green became for a
brief time involved in another venture in lauching a “little maga-
zine.” Contempo, founded in 1931 by by Milton Abernethy and
Anthony J. Buttitta of Chapel Hill, ran a brief, brilliant course
and contributed to the excitement of the life in the village. Green
became a contributing editor in 1931-32, along with Louis Adamic,
Barrett Clark, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, and Lewis Mum-
ford. In February 1932 Green was succeeded on the editorial

board by William Faulkner.

XIV. THE HOUSE OF CONNELLY

Paul Green’s next success in the theatre, The House of Con-
welly, was produced in New York by the Group Theatre at the
Martin Beck in October 1931. The Theatre Guild had bought
an option on The House of Connelly soon after Green won the
Pulitzer Prize, held it two years, and then turned it over to the
Experimental Group. The production was an immediate success.
At the first performance, the actors had to respond to fifteen cur-
tain calls. The bashful and nervous author, who had watched the
play from a seat high in the gallery, refused to come down for

a curtain speech.

 
 

 

 

Paut GREEN OF CHAPEL HILL

The House of Connelly is in a sense a deviation from Green’s
other work to this date, since it deals with an outmoded, impov-
erished self-styled aristocracy, rather than with simple country
folk. In this play Green has his say about that legend which every
Southern writer of his generation had either to face or to turn
away from: that dream, or delusion, of lost grandeur, a stubborn
old dream which dies hard. Thomas Wolfe attempted it unsuccess-
fully in his play Mannerhouse. It has been kept alive, at least in
part, by the survival of the old houses that bear witness to a
more spacious way of life whose economic props were swept out
by war and change. The action of The House of Connelly takes
place in such a mansion at about the turn of the century; that is, at
a period close enough to the Civil War for its memories to be
poignant, and far enough away for the whole pre-war way of life
to be completely outdated. The play can be understood only with

an awareness of the period.
The story is a simple one: Will, the son of landowners who

have lived too long on past splendors and failed to accept the
realities of a changed world, is brought to his senses by his love

First SyMpHONIC DRAMAS

 

is the tragedy, which in essence veers close to the ridiculous, of the
South’s nostalgia for lost magnificence, a magnificence consider-
ably exaggerated by memory. In the play Uncle Bob remarks that
the family have lived in the house one hundred and fifty years,
which means that it must have been built about the middle of the
eighteenth century. f

It is possible that this play is written less from deep memory
and experience than Green’s others; it has somewhat less im-
mediacy, somewhat more literary flavor than the others. In no
play is his sense of theatre surer; in none is he less experimental
and adventurous.

XV. FIRST SYMPHONIC DRAMAS

There is perhaps no great significance in the fact that almost
all of Paul Green’s contributions to college publications during
his student days were poems. Many young writers naturally turn
first to poetry. But a familiarity with the whole of his work to

date convinces one more and more that here is a poet who is still at
times groping toward his fullest expression. He has never been
satisfied with conventional dramatic formulae, has always been
irked by rules, and has refused to trim his plays to meet the exi-
gencies of sets and props. In many of his plays the lyrics, the
poetry, carry the real significance, the heart of what he wants to
say. Such songs as Tapley’s in Shroud My Body Down blend the
reality and the beauty of his childhood experience:

Deep to the bud and clean to the little leaf
Set your plants if you want ’em to live,

But never clod the little leaf

For the little leaf is the mouth. ...

for Patsy Tate, daughter of a tenant, who wakes him from his
sterile dream of the past to meet the responsibility of the farm.
) His awakening comes only after the suicide of an uncle, the death
of his domineering mother, and the departure of his “fine lady”
sisters; his past is irrevocably destroyed. The atmosphere, the
Hi climate of false pride, of exaltation of family, the conflict be-
tween these ideas and the actual needs of living in a practical
world, are skillfully and deftly conveyed. The two huge Negro
women, Big Sue and Big Sis, who serve as a Greek chorus or com-
mentary to the drama, are coarse figures of earth, in sharp counter-
point to the mincings and posturings of the Connelly women. The
somber characterization of Tate, and Patsy herself, gay and

healthy with a strong feeling for the land, typify Green’s interest
in the tenant farmer’s hopes and frustrations. But the main theme

—————————
Ses —

 

eS ete ot RUN ROE ENN SN EE STE oe rT Bae ene
——— ae OL

[’ve been out at three in the evening
The dew was still in the little bud,

 
 

 

Paut GreEN OF CHAPEL HILL

And the humming birds all green and gold
Would be drinking from ’em since the mid of day... .

In his novels and short stories, poetry is implicit in his evocations
of the Carolina country and of the moods of his people. Green,
the poet, shaped into Green, the playwright, presents a problem
that cannot at the present time be unriddled. Thomas Wolfe, like
Green, profoundly influenced by Koch and the Playmakers, final-
ly gave up the struggle to confine his colossal torrents of words
within the limits of the theatre. Paul Green has refused to give
up the effort, but has sought instead to enlarge those limits.

This need for poetic expression, coupled with his need ‘for
music, probably inclined him toward the original form of the
plays which he has called symphonic dramas. In these, through the
use of poetry and music, he has sought to suggest more of the
human subconscious, the overtones and nuances of experience, than

can readily be put into words.

Sunk into my earliest remembrance as a child [he wrote] were the foik-
dance, folk-song, the ballad, the mammy lullaby, the instrament—the fiddle,
the banjo, the harmonica, the knocking bones, and country church organ. They
were as native and integral to the life of the people among whom I lived as the
Bible, the hymnbook, the hoe, the rake, the plough, the axe and blade which
fitted so snugly to their heart and hand. When finally at the assumed age of
accountability I tried to write plays and see them set upon the local stage, these
musical expressions of voice and instrument kept pushing themselves up, in
humps and rivulets of song as a clamorous part of the material with which I
had to deal. There was no escaping them. Everywhere and like the subterranean

energy of a mole they left their tracery in my tended plans.

And he still remembered what Alexis Granowsky, of the Mos-
cow Jewish Theatre, had said to him in Berlin:

I think the musical drama or musical play offers greater opportunity than any
other. . . . For instance, the. use of musicalized pantomine, speech, and facial
expression can liberate all those imaginative overtones of human psychology
which straight realism can never touch. Also by the use of music all sorts of
conventions and needs which. otherwise’ might obstruct and disintegrate a pro-

First SYMPHONIC DRAMAS

 

duction to nothingness can be got around—short cuts in scenery, properties,
and staging methods can be obtained. Further, it is easier to go straight to the
heart of your story, to reach its inner expressive symbolism, and most vital

meaning.

That is the kind of music-drama toward which Green steadily
worked. Because he lacked formal musical training, he had not
been able to compose music for his plays or even to arrange it. In
1930, when Lamar Springfield came to live in Chapel Hill, Green
found in him a trained and highly endowed collaborator who
could interpret his themes in terms of music.

He had first met Stringfield in France, where the latter played
the flute in the band of the 105th Engineers; in fact, Green re-
members that the first time he saw him, Stringfield was briefly
in the guardhouse for some clash between artistic temperament
and military authority. By the time he came to Chapel Hill, the
young flutist and composer had already distinguished himself. In
1928 he had won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his suite “From
the Southern Mountains.” He decided to make his home in Chapel
Hill because of the interest in folklore already manifest there
through the work of Paul Green, the Carolina Playmakers, How-
ard Odum, and Guy Johnson. Stringfield was bubbling over with
plans and ideas for collecting and preserving folk songs, for an
institute of folk music, and most especially for a state symphony
—ideas which were later to assume definite and permanent form.

The first of Green’s plays for which Lamar Stringfield wrote
the score was Tread the Green Grass. In this, the music is not
“Gncidental,” but conceived of by the author as a closely inter-
woven part of the play itself, taking up and carrying on the mean-
ing beyond those limits where words must always stop. Barrett
Clark found that Tread the Green Grass “marks an important
point in this playwright’s artistic development.” It was not, how-
ever, a new point. A glance back over the plays written prior
to this reveal that almost all of them contain lyrics, old songs,
 

 

 

 

54 Pau Green oF CHAPEL HILi

snatches of spirituals, hymns, dance tunes, music heard off stage.
Music has been to him neither an ornament nor an extra, but one
more basic tool of expression. In his usage, “symphonic drama”
means neither opera nor a play with musical accompaniment, but
an artistic unit in which music is much more closely integrated
with words and action than in either of these forms.

The demands of Tread the Green Grass for extraordinary re-
sources of lighting, dancing, acting, music and scenery, frightened
professional theatre managers. The play was first produced in
July 1932 by a non-commercial group, the Department of Drama
at the University of Iowa. Both Green and Stringfield went to
Iowa for the opening night, and The New York Times sent
Barrett Clark to review it. Of the first night Clark wrote that
the production was “a harmonious whole that held a large audi-
ence more than two hours in a hall where the temperature never
fell below 100 degrees.”

The author describes Tread the Green Grass as “a folk fantasy
with music and dumb show.” In his curtain speech in Iowa he
spoke of it disarmingly as “just a little fairy tale.” But its im-
plications are far from simple; it attempts to reveal, through
poetry, music and drama, the conflicts in an adolescent girl be-
tween the imaginative longings stirred by her newly awakened
senses and the rigid beliefs and practices of religious morality in
which she has been brought up. The drama moves on two planes,
one the realistic countryside of Green’s other plays, the second a
plane of fantasy in which Tina’s dreams and fears of witches and
gnomes, of sin and hell-fire, are projected on the stage by music,
dance, and pantomime. Tina is a “sister” to Lora, another adoles-
cent lost in a harsh Calvinistic world, to appear later in Shroud
My Body Down; and Young Davie, Pan or the Devil or both, is
certainly close kin to the “No ’Count Boy.” Here again is re-
vealed that tragic conflict between the austerities and prohibitions

 

First SyMpHONIC DRAMAS 55

of orthodox Protestantism in one of its sterner forms, and the
yearnings and desires of natural man.

‘The influence of the Moscow Art Theatre is clearly percep-
tible in this stylized, fantastic drama, dealing with the inner
struggles and complexities of human personality, in a framework
somewhat removed from reality. From this point on, the effort
to amplify the limits of the stage by the use of music becomes
an essential element in every one of Paul Green’s plays. Of
this effort he has said, writing specifically of Roll, Sweet Chariot:

Here it is 1934 in the theatre and still 1 am writing plays without conscious
regard for their feasibility on the stage. Mechanical skill has slowed the modern
stage to whirl on its axis and mindlessly to scale the proscenium; more suave
than an acrobat, it can land on its feet and receive the plaudits of the populace
without so much as a panting breath. Ilusions are created by a system of gears—
never mind what illusions—an illicit kiss is timed by a chronometer, and yet
I am making plays which are difficult to effectuate on the stage.

So I am told. I cannot recall the names of the managers who told me, or
how many, since Potter's Field was first written. Now it is called Roll, Sweet
Chariot, and is being produced by a manager who has found no insuperable
obstacle in a stage direction which states “a blast is heard nearby, and the shacks
are crumbled.” By some slight devising, perhaps of a bolt or a screw, a play-
wright’s imagination has been permitted to conquer over mechanics and a
necessary tragic phase to be punctuated.

Obviously, feasibility was not the whole issue. Managerial reticence be-
comes a cascade of fear when some convention of the theatre is about to be
overthrown. The undifferentiated audience, which comes to the theatre hoping
to see what it expected to see, to learn what it already knows, is haunting as a

ghost. In Hollywood, when the Great Common Denominator eludes the
writer’s brain, he may as well give in to the maggots. No breath-taking wizardry
of mechanics was needed to bring Roll, Sweet Chariot to the stage. No wild
tornado roaring from the wings. Was the difficulty perhaps the presence of
another dimension in the drama—still remarkably unfamiliar in this decade—
the dimension of music?

I have not written a play with music, or a play to which music is incidental,
cr an opera, Unlike Porgy and The Green Pastures, songs are not introduced
 

56 Paut GreeEN OF CHAPEL HILL

as concomitant atmosphere. Singing voices and melodies parallel the play to
color and shade the characters, to intensify the dramatic action, to offer, if
they can, their own interlinear message. Music is an unconscious, and to me,
inevitable filter in the writing of drama.

Roll, Sweet Chariot (a revision of the play published first in
1931 as Potter’s Field in a volume with The House of Connelly
and Tread the Green Grass) is a development of sketches and
plays previously written; the idea for it had been held and shaped
in the author’s mind for a long time before it reached this three-
act version, probably ever since his college days. Briefly, it is a
panoramic drama of a Negro community, with a great many char-
acters who contribute to build up the total picture of a Southern
slum closely resembling that on the western outskirts of Chapel
Hill. The approach of a new concrete highway threatens the teem-
ing community with destruction, as the white’s man’s civilization
blindly obliterates the rich values of humor, song, relaxed living,
which are inherent in Negro life.

The play was produced in New York in 1934, with music by
Dolphe Martin. In spite of an excellent cast, headed by Frank
Wilson, Rose McLendon, and Warren Coleman, the play lasted
only seven performances. The author, who watched in agony the
first-night performance at the Cort, felt that everything went
wrong. “The actors,” he said, “played separate and aloof solitaire.
The voice of the Almighty (the white man’s law), which had
been placed high in the scenery loft by means of a loud speaker,
blew a fuse in the midst of its stern admonition to the struggling
and wayward Negro villagers. The already puzzled audience broke
into laughter.” Green was so upset by the limping performance
that he went out into the street, listening anxiously for any sound
of applause. “But none came. A man came out instead, irate, hot
and bothered. He was a big fellow, and to my then disordered
imagination he looked at least seven feet long. ‘Play or no play!’

 

 

 

 

Ho.Ltywoop 57

he said, ‘I’m going to smoke.’ It was Bob Benchley, and I knew
We were sunk.” ;

The New York critics did not altogether like it; some were
bored by it, finding the many characters and the intricate counter-
point of dialogue tedious and confusing; others hailed it as legiti-
mate experimentation in a new dramatic form.

XV. HOLLYWOOD

Paul Green’s desire to transcend the limitations of theatrical
production, to increase the expressiveness of the theatre, may sup-
ply at least one answer to a question that has occasionally been
asked him: How can an artist of such obvious integrity and seri-
ousness have gone to Hollywood? For to Hollywood he went in
1932, with a contract to write for Warner Brothers. The needs
of a growing family unquestionably played a part in his decision
to put aside being a professor and to pick up some ready money.
Two more daughters had been born to the Greens, Betsy in 1930
and Janet in 1931. There were, too, the demands of a house-
hold operated on the basis of hospitality and generosity extending
beyond the family to servants, needy students, and aspiring writ-
ers. The answer seems obvious on practical grounds.

Green was also tempted to the movies by his wish to experi-
ment, to find out whether or not this new medium offered a solu-
tion to that tantalizing search for ways to make the spoken word
upon the stage convey more meaning than it ever had before.
Could the films do things the traditional stage could not do?
Could they enrich and illumine drama?

Back in 1915 Paul Green had been deeply moved by The Birth
of @ Nation. He rode over thirty-five miles of miry road from

 

 

sR TE DI Tie ad
 

 

58 Pau Green or CHapet Hitt

Lillington to Raleigh to see this really great picture, and he real-
ized at once its power over the audience:

A frenzy ran among the spectators like fire among broomstraw. There were
yells and shouts, clenching of fists and loud unashamed oaths... .. 1 saw The
Birth of a Nation many times, and its effect on the audience was always much
the same... :

Another silent film which impressed him was Charlie Chaplin’s
Shoulder Arms, which Green saw in 1919 ina French cantonment
for American soldiers. “He was the divine magician playing with
the bauble of our souls for an hour. . . and from that day to this
I have followed wherever he leads.” Later on Green went ten
times to see Chaplin in The Gold Rush. It was with these mem-
ories and conceptions of the power of the movies to stir and
delight the human heart that he went to California.

It was a very serious young writer who first appeared in Holly-
wood. Lee Shippey, columnist of the Los Angeles Times, has
given a gently derisive but at the same time respectful picture of
Green when he arrived:

Paul Green is one of those serious Southerners, He looks at life very earn-
estly, almost as earnestly as he does at Paul Green.

When he joined the staff of Warner Brothers a few weeks ago, story after
story was submitted to him, all of which he read intently and rejected. “I
think they would all be merely wasting my time,” he said. So the studio turned
these stories over to other men to write, and Green is writing a story for George
Arliss around the great character of Voltaire.

He considers Paul Green’s time much too valuable to waste.

He has demonstrated “the importance of being earnest” even in Hollywood.
Last year he came out here, but declined to do certain things. Unless he could
write a story sincerely he declined to write it at all, no matter if the salary per
week was several times as much as he had received before. So his contract ended.
This year he was recalled to finish unfinished work in his own way. Which
comes pretty near to establishing a record.

Shippey drew these optimistic conclusions much too quickly;
Green has never yet succeeded in establishing his independence to

afin ROGET

 

Hotiywoop 59

Write film stories in exactly his own. way. The story of his associa-
tion with Hollywood is one of a series of disillusionment, fall-
ings-out, reconciliations, final farewells and attempts to patch up.
He incorrigibly hopes that he will find in the films that art medium
which he conceives them potentially to be, and he is repeatedly
disappointed by the producers’ lack of daring, sincerity, and ideal-
ism. He usually leaves Chapel Hill with an air of martyrdom
not always convincing to his colleagues on the faculty to whom
the salaries of filmdom sound fabulous; and he always has an air
of relief at being back home again.

Paul Green has told in his own words the story of his hopes
and disappointments in the movies. Here is his first reaction to

Hollywood:

Here were hundreds of acres of buildings where dreams were manufactured,
where thousands of peopie went in and out early and late creating millions of
feet of film on which were imprinted little shadows which, placed against a
steady light, acted, talked, and danced and spun their thousand-and-one tales of
ambition, love, hope, or despair.

The first thing to do was to see inside and get acquainted with the goings-on.
And so I did, and tried to understand what I saw. I read all the books on the
movies I could get, both European and American. I poked about in the cutting
rooms, the wardrobes, the projection rooms and the construction departments.
I read the engineers’ handbook on light and sound devices. I made myself fa-
miliar with all the camera terms from “angle-shot” to “wipe-off.” And the
more I learned the more enthusiastic I became. Here indeed was the creation
of the machine age which was the equal of the Word as spoken by the men of
old. Here was a medium infinite and universal in its power, able to depict
anything—whcether in heaven, or earth, or hell; whatever of man’s relation to
man or man’s deepest submerged self. For the first time in history a completely
democratic art form was available, capable of answering any vital demand made
upon it by the imagination of any human being. For the first time in the history of
the world we had a dramatic medium in the movies which could be understood by
black and white, yellow or red, the only requirement being that the audience
must be able to see or hear—better if it could do both. For pantomime is and
can be understood by all men of whatever race, creed, or calling. . . .

 
fn

 

 

60 Pau Green or CHape.t Hitt

For several weeks I labored on a script, trying to measure up in some degree
to the camera which was to express the story I had to tell. No one hurried me,
nobody said do this or that, Apparently I was left free to do as I chose. What
was this nonsense I had heard about the cramping power of Hollywood and its
slave-driving methods with writers? 1 began to doubt tales of woe which
brethren of my kind had been wont to tell. At last my script was in some sort
of final shape, and conferences with producer, director, leading actor, and men
of the technical staff began. The scenario was read, discussed, and tentatively
accepted. I was pleased to find that the boss men said only a little revision was
needed here and there and the thing would be ready for shooting. The revisions
suggested scemed sensible enough, and I gladly tried to make them. So the script
was finally delivered into the producer’s hands, and I began another job while
it was being shot. Now and then, I would hear a report from the lot that “every-
thing was going fine,” and I was beginning to feel some pride in the fact that
this picture was to be a little better maybe than the general Hollywood product.
A few times I went on the set and watched the making and came away with
nothing but admiration for the studio and its employees. How hard and seriously
everybody seemed to be working...

When the picture was finally completed, I went down town to see it. It
turned out to be a straightforward, level, and unimpressive thing. Whatever
touch of inspiration I thought I had in writing it was gone. On referring to my
script, I found a bit here, a bit there, this end of a scene, this key line of a
scene changed or left out. Somebody had been there while I was gone. I dis-
cussed the matter some days later with another writer... . “Yes”, he said “they

gave your script to me to look over. I hope you didn’t mind. We often have to do
that.”

“Do what?” I asked.

“Well, smooth things up. You see, your script leaned too much toward one
of those cussed artistic productions, and that’s a thing no studio will allow.
There’s not a cent of money in them.”

“How do you know there’s not?”

“Listen, this is a business out here, not an art.”

Thus the democratic and omnipotent medium, which had held
out to Paul Green the possibility of expressing all his dreams and
imaginings, proved to be just another cautiously curbed and manip-
ulated machine for making money.

Hotitywoop 61

The studios have a product to sell to the masses of the world [added Green],
and in order to sell to everybody they think they must strike a common denomi-
nator of general illiteracy and bad taste. Perhaps they must. Their pictures are
standardized by what they consider to be the intelligence quotient of the ma-
jority of people in the small villages and crossroad places.

During this first stay in Hollywood Paul Green wrote the
script for Voltaire and also the movie versions of Kroll’s Cabin in

the Cotton, in which Richard Barthelmess starred, Phil Stong’s
State Fair, James Cozzens’ Dr. Bull, and David Harum. The
three last were all vehicles for Will Rogers. Not one of them
satisfied Green’s hopes.

In 1934 the movie version of his The House of Connelly,
meaninglessly renamed Carolina, had its world premiére at the
Carolina Theatre in Charlotte. It was directed by Henry King,
with Janet Gaynor and Lionel Barrymore as the stars. Whatever
subtlety and suggestiveness the original had were lost in the movie,
whose scene in a grasp at low-country glamour had been trans-
planted to South Carolina. The attempt at Charleston romance
dulled the overtones and smeared the biting reality of the play,
resulting in a pastiche of the old South, complete with white
columns, juleps, moonlight, and magnolias. It disappointed all

who had liked the play, and especially the author, who thus had

forcibly brought home to him the failure of the movies to enhance
legitimate drama.

In spite of his disillusionment and his distrust of the cramping
effect of censorship, he did not immediately lose faith in the po-
tential development of the movies as a medium of expression. Hol-
lywood must free itself, he thought, from the domination of
money and censorship; the two are very closely linked, since the
censor keeps the producers informed as to what the public will
stand for and what it wants and what will call forth protests from

pressure groups. The movies of the future must be free to experi-
ment. What he likes to call “the imaginative cinema” must recog-

 
 

 

 

 

62 Paut Green or Cuapert Hitt

nize its difference from the art of the theatre as well as its resem-
blances.

But in each the poet as a creator shall be supreme. In the cinema he has a means

of universal and infinite power—the camera... . And under such conditions

poetry will again return to the stage, and the freedom that Shakespeare knew in
his Elizabethan theatre will be ours with greater enchantment. And whereas
the new cinema art form will be the imaginative sight and sound unlimited, so
the new theatre will be the home of the imaginative word and vitalized being
unbound. And once more, as in the days of Shakespeare, we shall be able to parade
before our vision all the manifestations of nature and the subtleties of the mind
which are usable in the movie medium. And once more music in the theatre
will return to us, above which the high poets’ words are calling.

This was written in 1934, just two years after his experience
with Hollywood. Here spoke not only the unquenchable idealist,
but the sincere artist.

Back from this sojourn in Hollywood, Green became interested
in starting a “little cinema” movement, which might have upon
the movies the same liberating and vivifying effect that the “little
theatre” movement had had upon the commercial theatre. He also
attempted, without success, to secure funds from the Rockefel-
ler Foundation to establish at the University of North Carolina
a school of instruction in the writing and production of moving
pictures. He still hopes to see such a school set up as a pioneer in
the South in college motion picture work. It would be a natural
associate of the Playmakers’ work in developing original plays,
and of the Communications Center in radio work. One of his
projects for such a school would be the recording of folk speech
and folk tales in natural settings. This is a dream which has not
yet been realized.

Some ten years later, after a six-months interval in Holly-
wood working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on the dramatization
of A. J. Cronin’s The Green Years, he somewhat reversed his
earlier criticisms of motion pictures.

GREENWOOD 63

The movies are the great peoples’ theatre [he said to a reporter from The
News and Observer in December 1944], and they are getting better and bet-
ter. . . . The position of movie writers is constantly improving, and the ten-
dency now is toward allowing these writers to publish their works which here-
tofore have been pooled and discarded when their purpose had been served.

XVII. GREENWOOD

One result of his work in Hollywood was that when Paul
Green returned to Chapel Hill, he felt secure enough financially
to give up teaching and to spend all his time writing. Since then
he has continued an informal and unpaid connection with the De-
partment of Dramatic Art at the University. When at home in
Chapel Hill, he is available for conferences with students of crea-
tive writing and with the Playmakers.

The house in the Glen, even though it had been more than
doubled in size, began to seem overcrowded, with four young
children and many visitors. Even the cabin study was not secluded
enough. Paul Green felt that the near-by woods and slopes of the
Glen fenced him in too closely. He wanted, he said, a place he
could see out from. During an afternoon ramble while he and
Elizabeth were students in the University, they had picked out
a place which looked idea] for a home site. Somewhat southeast
of Chapel Hill, about two and a half miles from town, a long
wooded spur stretches out from the main ridge on which the vil-
lage is built. The eastern tip of this spur juts like a promontory
from a green sea of meadow land. The woods had been cleared
away from this end, and the land falls away on three sides, slop-
ing down to a gentle little stream in the low ground. There are
wide views on every side except toward the highway. As a farm
house had once stood there, the location had several tall elms
to arch over it; and there were still some flowering shrubs, spiraea,

 
 

 

64 Pau Green or CuHapert Hitt

flowering almond, the common ones of the region, planted long
ago. In 1933 Paul Green bought a two-hundred acre tract of land
including this farm. He did not, however, build a home there im-
mediately. Instead, he put up a four-room cottage, whose pine-
panelled study, with its immense field-stone fireplace, afforded
a retreat to which he could come and write when the Glen be-
came too noisy and which could serve as headquarters for the di-
rection of farming operations.

Because of Green’s gift for attracting friends, the study, as
he then called it, came to serve another purpose. With a leaping
fire in the great cavern of a fireplace, with hamburgers to broil
over the coals, with music and dancing and congenial friends, the
study became the scene of memorable evenings. Green had found
somewhere an old-fashioned parlor organ, which he greatly en-
joyed playing. Frequently Fred McCall would play his guitar,
or some of Green’s Negro friends would make music for the
crowd.

This study formed the nucleus of the Greens’ present home.
Two large wings were built on either side of it, the result being
a comfortable-looking white clapboard house which stands against
the surrounding sky and distant valley with a gesture of welcome.
The airiness of the elms enhances without cutting off the view.
A small formal flower garden, over which Elizabeth Green works
hard and long, has been laid out to one side. Beyond it an exten-
sive vegetable garden supplies food for the family and friends,
and great quantities for canning. Green has always done a great
deal of the manual work on the farm; he enjoys cutting down
trees, sawing up logs, digging ditches, and running the tractor.

The new house at Greenwood contained, among other expand-

ed quarters, a large living room with another big fireplace, and
three walls of book shelves from floor to ceiling.

XVIII. NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES

From the beginning Green had written not only poetry and
plays but prose pieces, sketches, and short stories. In the twenties
these began to appear in some of the North Carolina newspapers,
and also in The Reviewer, The Southwest Review, and The At-
lantic Monthly. In 1928 McBride published a collection of his
short stories under the title Wide Fields. The author was still
somewhat under the spell of playmaking; he gave in dramatic
style at the front of this little book the time, “the latter part of
the nineteenth century and the first decade or so of the twentieth”;
the place, “Little Bethel neighborhood in eastern North Caro-
lina”; and the characters, “Men, women and children of that
countryside.” The themes are those familiar in his plays: the con-
flict between conventional religion and pagan delight in life, the
privations and defeats of the tenant, the uncertainties and joys
and returning cycles of farm life. There are foreshadowings here
of later works; for instance, “Her Birthday” suggests the themes
of a lost aristocracy of both The House of Connelly and The
Laughing Pioneer; the conflict in “The Devil’s Instrument” is
that of The Field God and Tread the Green Grass; “A Tempered
Fellow” has a hint of the fully developed story of Alvin and
Ethel Barnes in This Body the Earth, The texture of these stories
is honest homespun, substantially woven of such well-observed and
well-remembered details (sometimes poetic, sometimes realistic)
as spider webs wet with dew on the cotton, tiny pink and silver
clouds called in the country “rain-seeds,” katydids, and whippoor-
wills, tying up fodder, spreading compost, cutting cornstalks, and
the carefree joshing of a cornshucking party.

The Laughing Pioneer, Paul Green’s first novel, which ap-
peared in 1932, continues the story of the Little Bethel communi-
ty. As in the short stories and plays, the description of the setting
is based on accurate knowledge of the soil and farming conditions

 
 

 

 

 

66 Pau Green or Cuapet Hitt

of the coastal plain of eastern North Carolina. This story of the
attempt at rehabilitation of an ancient and decaying estate reminds
the reader of The House of Connelly, as does the picture of an
anachronistic aristocracy. Danny, the “laughing pioneer,” is the
eternal gypsy, the dreamer who must see beyond the horizon; he
represents freedom, love of beauty and song, all the lovely quick-
silver quality of life repressed by and forever escaping the narrow
bounds of a prejudiced neighborhood. He appeals to Alice Long,
the spinster nurtured on “pride and negligence and death,” but
the dark tides of bigotry and “poor white morality” overwhelm
her in the end. As in all of Green’s work, the details of landscape
and folkways are sharply etched; hog-killings, revivals, the coun-
try store, Christmas serenaders, sermons, night-riders, broken
fences overgrown with sassafras, loblolly pine and beggar’s lice,
the sound of a horse’s hoofs clopping on icy roads, of hens going
to roost in catalpa trees—these are real and immediate. The minor
characters, the Negroes and the children, live with a vitality which
the main characters, especially Alice Long and Rorie Armstrong,
do not fully possess. Green’s hand is less sure when he portrays
the local bluebloods in their post-war desolation than when he
creates Negro and sharecropper characters. The period of the
novel is that of The House of Connelly, about the turn of the
century.

A second novel, This Body the Earth, which followed in 1935,
is far richer in substance and more successfully worked out than
The Laughing Pioneer. Indeed, it is probably the most moving
and most genuine portrayal in American fiction to date of the life
of a Southern sharecropper. The novel recounts the life history
of Alvin Barnes, but it is also the biography of a class of a re-
gion.

The scene is again that Little Bethel neighborhood. The peri-
od is 1885-1920, years which may well be taken as the time of
most of Green’s writing before the historical dramas. The charac-

New Dramatic Forms 67

térs belong to that class of tenant farmers who are always moving
on, playing the “eternal games of puss-in-the-corner,” always
hoping for better land, a kinder landlord, weather more favor-
able to the cash crops. The novel begins and ends with a child
crying for home. Alvin Barnes, who happens to be stronger, more
ambitious, more determined than the rest of his family, resolves
that he will rise above his class, that he will by his own might be-
come a landowner; into this resolution he puts all his brawh, all
his will and his soul, and he almost succeeds. He is defeated in the
end by the wretched system of “big fish eat little fish,” tenants
enslaved by debt to landlords, who are in turn enslaved to banks
and holding companies. Even more than The Laughing Pioneer,
this novel is written out of deep memory. The details of cotton
and tobacce farming, of barn-raising, of logging, of marketing
crops have a fourth dimensional quality which can come only
from actual experience. Alvin’s life moves through the rhythm
of the season, clearing, planting, cotton-picking, corn-gathering,
marketing, harvesting, and starting all over again. The reader
follows with quickening suspense his struggles to own his land
and to defeat the system; the drama of his defiance is well sus-
tained. Many of the scenes cling to the memory, especially the
tender and poignant episode of Rassie in the first chapter, the
account of floating logs down to Fayetteville and young Alvin’s
adventures in that glittering city, the orgy of the Holy Rollers’
revival, the box party at which Alvin outbids all rivals for Ivy’s
box, and the genuinely terrifying scenes in the convict camp.

XIX. NEW DRAMATIC FORMS

Paul Green has maintained a decided loyalty to the Carolina
Playmakers, who produced and published his student plays, even
to the extent of entrusting to them the production of some of his

——
 

 

 

 

 

 

68 Paut Green or CHaper Hiri

later and major dramas. Shroud My Body Down and The En-
chanted Maze both had their premitres in Chapel Hill, one in
1934 and one in 1935. Both of them aroused long and at times
heated discussion in the University community.

The Playmakers produced Shroud My Body Down just fif-
teen years after the production of Green’s first Playmaker play,
“The Last of the Lowries.” Lamar Stringfield composed the musi-
cal score. An over-critical audience, many of them on familiar
terms with Paul Green as friends and neighbors, felt themselves
qualified to tear his play to pieces and rewrite it for him. And
tear it to pieces they did. Mystification was probably the most con-
spicuous reaction. What is it about? What actually happens? What
in the world is Paul driving at? Meetings were held for the sole
purpose of discussing the play. Bridge games were broken up
and dinner parties stimulated by arguments over its meaning.

Shroud My Body Down remains a somewhat enigmatic play.
Much of the initial confusion resulted from the type of produc-
tion which the Playmakers, schooled in realism, gave it. The au-
thor’s subtitle is “A Folk Dream.” On the second page of his
manuscript he has written “To be produced by living actors trained
in the manner of marionettes and with masks when so specified.”
Here is evident the influence of the Moscow Art Theatre. He
wished to remove the action of Shroud My Body Down a step
away from reality, to have it acted on a different plane, a real
scene reflected in a mirror. This slight but perceptible distance
from reality is part of the perennial charm of the marionettes,
and a similarly stylized and dreamlike production would probably
clarify Shroud My Body Down. It is not a narrative of actual
events, and any attempt to interpret it as such breaks down in
confusion.

As in his symphonic dramas, Green has thought of this play
as interwoven with music, underlining and expanding the mean-
ing of the lines. The author has perhaps attempted here to weave

New Dramatic Forms 69

together too many different elements. The theme seems at times
to be a study of the adolescent personality of Lora, her gropings
toward emotional expression, her vaguely incestuous desires, her
impulses toward ideal beauty, and the final tragic overshadow-
ing of Lora by her father’s consciousness of sin; at other times
the theme is the tragedy of Graham himself, the proud Calvinist
who denies life and who is finally destroyed by his denial.

Mr. Graham willed one thing and God another
and all these years he’s fought
Against God’s will.

Shroud My Body Down seeks to transcribe, in terms of their
own subsconscious dreams, the stifled emotions of inarticulate peo-
ple; the task the author set himself is an almost impossible one,
which needs for adequate expression the full enhancement of mu-
sic. The people of the play belong to the Little Bethel neighbor-
hood; they live close to the earth.

The Enchanted Maze, which the Playmakers produced in De-
cember 1935, stirred up even more excitement in the University
town. The discussions of Shroud My Body Down had been for
the most part on a literary plane, with glances at aesthetics, theo-
ries of drama, music and staging, no personal feelings being in-
volved. The Enchanted Maze, however, had been announced as
“a satire on the American educational system,” and it is possible
that a substantial part of the audience in Chapel Hill, not over-
joyed at being satirized, went prepared at least for disagreement.
Although a program note disclaimed any attempt to portray a par-
ticular university, it was impossible to see the play in Memorial
Hall in Chapel Hill, with full awareness that Green had spent
most of his mature life in this university town, without placing
his scenes at the University of North Carolina. For the same rea-
son, the local and topical and controversial nature of the play
makes it difficult to evaluate from a literary point of view.

Like Shroud My Body Down, The Enchanted Maze employs

(EF A ES ca ‘ eer snainsiiaiiliaiatitetaiaiatiemtainiecie ” ai
 

 

 

 

 

70 Pau Green or Cuaper Hitt

music as auxiliary to the spoken word, although the music is far
less important in interpreting it, since the events are actual, not
dreams and the waverings of the subconscious. Shroud My Body
Down mystified Chapel Hill; The Enchanted Maze irritated the
community. In brief, the play describes the experiences of Billy
Parker, who goes through college seeking some assurance, some
absolute response to his search for the ideal, and is continually
disappointed by the sterile, uninspired, and baffling instruction
which he encounters. A mystic at heart, he finds that facts as pre-
sented in scientific courses, far from providing him with clues
to the mystery of life, rather convince him of the futility of exist-
ence. Green weights the scales against university teaching, how-
ever, because he does not in this play introduce his hero to any
classes in the humanities; perhaps Billy Parker might have found
in great literature nobly interpreted the beauty and significance
which he so desperately sought. Green has elsewhere admitted
that in at least one instance he found such inspiration in an Eng-
lish classroom. As a critique of the average college curriculum
the play is one-sided; as a series of scenes of college life it has
moments of humor and of truthfulness. Green has been accused
of lacking a sense of humor; the scene in which the loyal fraterni-
ty brothers are trying to “cram” the football star sufficiently full
of Macbeth to pass an examination is a strong denial of that lack.

During the three days that the play was being presented on the
campus, discussion flared again and again as to how far the indig-
nations and disillusionments of Billy Parker were applicable to the
University of North Carolina, specifically, and to American uni-
versities in general. The News and Observer (Raleigh) in an
editorial commended the University for its tolerance in allowing
the play to be presented on the campus. “Of course the play is
not local in its connotations,” said Proff Koch. “It is an honest
endeavor on the part of the playwright to represent conditions
common to all American Universities . . . . Billy Parker is a

Nrw Dramatic Forms 71

highly sensitive youth lost in the maze of the modern world. He
is by no means typical of every university student.”

In The Enchanted Maze Paul Green had his say about uni-
versity education. In Johnny Johnson, another play with music,

' he wrote a commentary on the tragic folly of war. Not as mysti-

fying as Shroud My Body Down, nor as controversial as The En-
chanted Maze, it lacks the haunting poetry of the first and the
pungency of the second. The sound basic concept of the natural
good man lost and driven in the herd insanity of war is told in
three acts and thirteen scenes. The play has humor, indignation,
sadness, and at times satire, but in many instances the fantasy
strays into burlesque. Kurt Weill, whom Paul Green had first met
in Germany and who had later come to Chapel Hill to work with
Green, composed a biting counterpoint of music for Johnny John-
som, contributing greatly to the atmosphere. The Group Theatre
produced it in New York in November 1936, to the considerable
bewilderment of the critics, who reacted much as the Chapel Hill
audience had to Shroud My Body Down. Brooks Atkinson, who
had been continuously sympathetic with Green’s experimentation
and who had always recognized his fundamental poetic quality,
wrote of Johnny Johnson in The New York Times:

“ Part fantasy, part musical satire, part symbolic poetry in the common in-
terests of peace; and also, one is compelled to add, part good and part bad,
since new forms cannot be created overnight. There are many interludes in
Mr. Green’s work when both the satire and the idealism wither away to restless
emptiness, Although Mr. Green is an honest and exultant poet he is not a vir-
tuoso theatre man... . This column proposes to celebrate a sincere and generally
exalting attempt to put on the stage an imaginative portrait of recent history.

From the biographical point of view, the significance of John-
ny Johnson lies in its revelation of what those months on the
Western Front in 1918 meant to the mind and heart of a young
poet, the impassioned reaction of a man of sense and feeling to
the colossal stupidity of war. Green’s attitude was not, however,
 

 

 

 

72 Paut Green or Cuapet Hit

that of the pacifist. In 1943, after he had seen his only son go in-
to World War II as an ensign in the United States Navy, he
wrote to a friend:

War is and always has been the great tragedy of man, specifically and
generally. It is an experiment and experience in ultimate waste. It is the sneak-
thief destroyer and whoring accomplice of corroding time, the cruel and
malign marauder of humanity’s sweet hopes. The one proof that the world is
not yet civilized is that we continue to indulge in it. One cannot say too much
against war. Jesus is right, all the great religious teachers like Gandhi are right,
in declaring it a method of madness and no way out at all for man and his
troubles. Rather it only adds to these troubles, intensifies and magnifies them.
These teachers are right when they say that the one way to get rid of war with
its killings, burnings, and mutilitations is to renounce force forever as a practice
among men, have nothing to do with violence—be a conscientious objector like
you, if you will. It is hard for a thoughtful kindly man to stomach war with its
rot and stench and vomit of blood, and the more so if he happens to have an
extra touch of the artist’s urge and sensitivity as you have. Twenty-five years
ago when I enlisted in the first world war I believed it true and I believe it now.

In all these plays Paul Green experimented with a new dra-
matic form, groping toward a closer intergration of music and the
spoken word, and a more stylized production than is generally
familiar. In these plays Green also tried to put upon the stage the
subconscious, the dream, the inner tension, the tangled shadows
and half-realized overtones of human experience. It may be that
he had not fully mastered the form he was trying to shape; it
may also be that these plays were never given exactly the kind
of production which they demanded. They were written not to
be read, but to be acted; lines, which on paper seemed thin and
subdued, on the stage came alive and danced and glowed to music.

Part III

“. .. yet all these things can be put to use
in what, some years ago, I began to call

the symphonic drama... .

»
 

 

 

 

XX. THE LOST COLONY

In one of the letters which Green wrote to Proff Koch from
Germany, back in 1929, he alluded to his hope of writing “that
Virginia Dare sort of lyrical song-drama.” The story of Sir Wal-
ter Raleigh’s colonists, vanished forever from the outer fringe of
the American wilderness, had fascinated him from childhood. He
probably had it in mind when he wrote:

Who among us has told the story of the lonesome seashore, of the early settlers
along that ocean, of the wrecks and disasters there? Along the empty sand banks
lie the rotting ribs of many a ship, the disappearing records of struggle and death.
In this wide and barren land of sand and battered trees are symbols of man
and his bravery enough to. move an army. And yet through all these years
they have failed to touch the heart of a single North Carolinian. . . .

For years this dream of a play which would tell fittingly the
romantic Roanoke Island story had been carried around in his
poet’s mind, as writers do carry around and shape within them
ideas which appeal to them strongly. Yet when he was first asked
by the Roanoke Island Historical Association to write a pageant
to celebrate the 350th Anniversary of the birth of Virginia Dare,
he not only poured cold water on the project, but, in the words of
W. O. Saunders, President of the Association, “released the whole
of Niagara.” Paul Green does nothing by halves, not even dis-
couraging a foolish idea.

“Green Opposes Island Pageant” headlined The News and Ob-
server on April 13, 1936—a headline that reads strangely years
later, in view of the subsequent history of the Manteo drama.
But the fantastic high-flown plans of the Association irritated and
aroused the farmer in Paul Green, his practical humanitarian side.
At a banquet in Manteo on April 12, held for the purpose of dis-
cussing plans for the celebration, W. O. Saunders had unfolded
grandiose outlines of a “gorgeous, spectacular, intimate pageant-
drama that would attract the plaudits of the English-speaking

 
 

 

 

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76 Pau Green or Cuapet Hiri

world and would bring millions of tourists from all parts of the
world, just as millions are attracted to Oberammergau in the hills
of Bavaria.”

“There’s not a chance it would work without a more religious
motive behind it,” muttered Green to the Oberammergau part.
Saunders went on to suggest that the islanders

. . « should live history to the point of allowing their hair to grow long and
affecting the speech of the Elizabethan period if necessary, and perform this
history in a pageant that would be a national epic three or four times a week

during the five months of the tourist season, and at the same time the fishermen _

could produce fish and the farmers vegetables, fruits, poultry, eggs and dairy
products to feed the tourists and Roanoke Island would never have to be de-
pendent on the government. Every spare room could be rented and at the same
time the primitiveness of the island could be preserved... .

The idea of having the Roanoke Island natives go Elizabethan
was too much for Paul Green’s common sense and country humor.
“If I had a house and an extra room,” he said, “I would hate like
the devil to be bothered with some belly-aching tourist.” He
went on to point out with considerable fervor the basic economic
needs of the islanders for more decent living conditions, and dis-
missed the whole idea of writing a pageant and exploiting the
tourists by saying,

Nuts to it. What should be done would be to have some professors come to
Dare County to make surveys and report to other parts of the State how Dare
County people can all own their homes and have them freshly painted.

In an editorial headed “History, Hair and Tourists” The News
and Observer commented on this interchange between Green and
Saunders:

There ought to be room for a middle ground betwcen the Roanoke Island
Historical Association and Paul Green.

A good many North Carolinians will share Mr. Green’s distaste for the
proposal that Roanoke Islanders make an appeal to tourists to the point of letting
their hair grow long in the Elizabethan manner, affecting Elizabethan idiom

Ate

a ae

Tue Losr Cotony 77

in their speech, in general living on and off the stage a life in the terms of
Elizabethan pageantry. Such a business might attract tourists. It would cer-
tainly make the islanders “quaint,” if not a little queer.

But not all North Carolinians will share Playwright Green’s passionate
certainty. . . . Not all tourists are belly-achers and it ought not to be necessary
for all natives to play quaint for profits. . . . Roanoke Island has true historical
resources which deserve development. . . . But to turn hearty islanders into
uncertain actors, to attempt to make for tourists a village quaintness like that

which Oberammergau made, at least originally, for God, would be going just a
trifle too far.

In North Carolina tourists are not only welcome but wanted. But it ought

to be possible to make this State attractive to tourists without requiring natives
to go about with hair in their eyes.

So far, no Roanoke Islanders have grown Elizabethan hair
and adopted the speech of sixteenth-century England. But many
of them have developed into no “uncertain actors”; most of them
have prospered from the success of The Lost Colony and the
present situation at Manteo is not far from a realization of the
original design of Saunders and the Historical Association. More
than a thousand people are now involved in the production; they
include actors, musicians, staff, technicians, workmen, citizens.
And the thousands who come each summer to see the production
must be housed and fed while they are on the island.

In spite of his annoyance at the absurdity of the proposals, the
idea of writing a play about Virginia Dare for the anniversary of
her birth stirred a response in Green’s imagination. By the end of
April 1936, he had promised to have the play ready for produc-
tion by the summer of 1937. At the time he made this decision,
Paul Green had under consideration a contract from Samuel Gold-
wyn which would have paid him over a hundred thousand a
year. He returned the contract unsigned because he wanted to
stay in North Carolina and write the drama of its first settlement
as he felt it should be written. From the point of view of his de-
velopment as an artist, this decision was a major turning point. It

a
  

 

 

 

 

 

78

   

Paur Green or Cuapet Hit

has led to the creation of symphonic historical dramas, and to the
writing of such plays for Manteo, Fayetteville, Williamsburg, and
Washington. Others are still in the outline stage.

Interest in commemorating the founding of the Roanoke Is-
land Colony goes back to 1880, when a group of islanders and
some of their Edenton aceite. met to consider an appropriate
community festival and formed the Roanoke Island Memorial
Association. One of the first undertakings of the Association was
to buy the site of the original “Citie of Ralegh,” at that time
a farm in a wooded sixteen-acre tract along the edge of Roanoke
Sound. Later they put up the Virginia Dare monument. This
group also sponsored memorial services each year on Virginia
Dare’s birthday, August 18. Very few people could go to the serv-
ices, since in those days the only way to reach Roanoke Island was
by boat across the sound. Some from Edenton used to attend, and
a number of islanders. Roanoke Island remained one of the most
isolated spots in the state until 1930, when a bridge from Nag’s
Head and the Wright Memorial Bridge over Currituck Sound
gave it two cables to the mainland.

The two bridges opened up the island to tourists, who were
not slow in discovering its “quaintness.” The bridges also made
it possible to consider plans for a larger celebration. In 1932 the
newly formed Roanoke Island Historical Association secured the
help of the Works Progress Administration in restoring the fort,
chapel, and village as nearly as possible as they must have been in
the brief days of John White’s colony. Soon a sixteenth- -century
village of thatched cabins built of rough-hewn logs grew up
again among the pines and myrtles and yaupon trees of the island.
In 1934 the islanders presented for two performances a pageant
based on the story of the Lost Colony. Although this community-
produced pageant was little more than the rough outline of a
drama, it had a moving sincerity and simplicity. Paul Green
began to think of his Virginia Dare play as a community drama,

 

Tue Cosr Cotony 79

to be produced and acted and shared in by the country people and
fisher folk of Roanoke Island. Such indeed it has become.

Paul Green has told part of the story of the development of
the Lost Colony project:

One of the plans was to hold a nationwide beauty contest to select the girl who
should play Virginia Dare. At that time they didn’t know, nor did I, that when
the play came to be written she would be a baby and remain so. In all our minds
was the legend that she grew up to be a beautiful maiden, fell in love with the
Indian chief Manteo’s son, married him, and became the mother of a brave race
that somehow evaporated into thin air, As Mr. Fearing, Mr. Saunders, and
others went on with their work, I who had always been interested in the ro-
mantic and tragic story of these early colonists joined with them. But our com-
bined efforts produced little more than pledges of money and cooperation, and
with the deepening of the depression they amounted to little. Then came the
W. P. A. and saved us. Mr. Fearing and his helpers got a project approved to
build the theatre, and I sct about writing the play. With the aid of Congressman
Lindsay Warren, 25,000 memorial fifty-cent coins were minted by the United
States which were sold to collectors for a dollar and a half each, Through this
means some funds were raised to pay the necessary proportion of materials for
the project. And so we were started. But only started, for as the size of the
production grew the need for more money increased. The night we opened we
were deeply in debt. At least Mr. Fearing and certain local business men were.

- Although Paul Green is a long way removed from the com-
monly held idea of a typical college professor, he has retained
the professorial habit of painstaking research. Before beginning to
write The Lost Colony, he prepared himself by reading every-
thing he could find on the history of the period. He spent a great
deal of time in the North Carolina Collection of the Library at
Chapel Hill; it is scarcely possible to pick up a book on the early
history of the State or of the first settlements in this country which
does not bear his name on the borrower’s card. He studied
thoroughly not only the history but also the music of the sixteenth
century, the church music, the popular airs, the folk tunes; for
from the first he thought of the Roanoke Island play as another
 

 

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“symphonic drama.” The author himself prefers the word play
for these historical productions rather than pageant, because, he
says, “they tell a story; and the characters are individuals, not
types, as is usually the case in masques and pageants.”

The final result was, however, so warmed by the poet’s imagi-
nation that it is much more than accurate history dramatically
presented. It has that touch beyond the ordinary, that inexplicable
quality of illumination and excitement which distinguishes true
poetry. This is the quality which has moved and stirred thousands
of spectators. The material was ready at the author’s hand, in one
of the most pathetic and at the same time fascinating episodes in
the history of the United States, but he has lifted it up and colored
it with implications richer than fact. When it became known that
Green was writing the play, someone remarked, “Well, at last,
Paul won’t be able to write about a tenant farmer.” But in a
sense that is exactly what he has done, for his hero is a dispossessed
English farmer seeking new land and a better life, the same goal
that continually eluded Alvin Barnes in This Body the Earth;
his rugged Londoners reach toward the New World with the
same hunger that drives the sharecropper from one farm to an-
other. The land of fragrance and fruitfulness which the first re-
porters to see it had described to the London Company held out a
fair promise of escape from meagreness and poverty. The whole

drama expresses again the author’s deep sympathy for the denied,
the outcast, and the lost:

For here once walked the men of dreams,
The sons of hope and pain and wonder,
Upon their foreheads truth’s bright diadem,
The light of the sun in their countenance,
And their lips singing a new song—

A song for ages yet unborn,

For us the children that came after them—
“O new and mighty world to be!”

They sang,

“O land majestic, free, unbounded!”

Tue Losr Cotony 81

‘The dream of the men and women who established the first set-
tlement on Roanoke Island, at the thin edge of the vast dark
wilderness into which they disappeared, is still the world’s dream,
a better life and a fairer one for all mankind.

Green made no attempt to suggest a solution of the riddle of
the disappearance of the colonists. He implies that, after a winter
of famine and disease and death, they were frightened away from
their stockade by the sight of a Spanish vessel offshore. The giant
cloud of the Spanish Armada, which at that time darkened all
England, stretched across the sea to shadow also this poorest and
most fragile of her outposts. At the end of the play the colonists,
shouldering their pitifully few possessions, begin that long jour-
ney into the western wilderness which so many later Americans

followed.

Now down the trackless hollow years
That swallowed them but not their song
We send response—

“O lusty singer, dreamer, pioneer,
Lord of the wilderness, the unafraid,
Tamer of darkness, fire and flood,

Of the soaring spirit winged aloft

On the plumes of agony and death—
Hear us, O hear!

The dream still lives,

It lives, it lives

And shall not die!”

In the creation of The Lost Colony Paul Green succeeded in
that harmonious integration of music and drama, that enlarge-
ment of the realm of drama, toward which he had been working.
The setting favored him—the whole Atlantic for a backdrop, the
cky full of summer stars for a ceiling. Here he had escaped from
the “picture-frame stage” convention; the outdoors gave him a
freedom and a range impossible in any theatre, and he made the
most of it by employing three stages in a long panorama, by shift-

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ing lights from side to side, thus creating continuous movement in-
stead of the staccato interruption of scenes, and by unifying the
whole with music.

It would be difficult to imagine The Lost Colony without
music. The play employs all the arts of the theatre—dance, pan-
tomime, lighting; but the glorious music at once frames, enhances,
and illumines the action. The score is not original, but compiled
from songs, hymns, dance tunes, and carols of sixteenth-century
England. Many of the tunes are familiar, since they have survived
in church hymnals; stately strains from the Anglican liturgy lend
sonority to the score, and their familiarity for most hearers in-
creases the emotional impact. The more solemn music is bright-
ened and embroidered by such lively melodies as “Green Sleeves,”
“Good Ale,” and “The Mermaid.” After Green had selected
the airs he wished to use, Lamar Stringfield and Adeline McCall
arranged the score. The words of many of the lyrics were writ-
ten by Green, and at least one by Elizabeth Green. The music
conveys the whole mood and atmosphere; here is truly a “music-
drama.”

Brooks Atkinson, who reviewed The Lost Colony for The
New York Times after the first production in 1937, describes it

+++ a8 a pageant that has made an extraordinary versatile use of spectacle, sound,
pantomime and cadenced speech. . . . [It] is an uncommonly impressive evoca-
tion of the daring that seeped into this country from the wave-beaten beaches
just north of Hatteras. For Paul Green . . . and the others who have contributed
to a community celebration have approached their work in a reverent mood.
They believe in what Sir Walter’s men were trying to do amid the pines and
cypresses at the water’s edge. . .. Being chiefly a community enterprise, it over-
flows with sincerity. For the simple things, when they are honestly intended,
are both humbling and exalting. They are more religious than sermons, They
are the truth of the spirit that oftentimes makes men greater than they mean to be.

From its initial performance, The Lost Colony has had a
tremendous appeal for audiences. Its most effective advertising

Tue Losr Cotony 83

has been through those who have seen it and say that here is a de-
light not to be missed. James Street, the Chapel Hill novelist, told
someone who admitted to not having seen it, “I’d crawl on my
hands and knees all the way from Chapel Hill to Manteo rather
than miss that play!”

The original plan had not been to repeat the performance ex-
cept for special celebrations, but the planners had reckoned with-
out the drawing power of Green’s creation. Before the summer of
1938 many letters had been received asking that the play be con-
tinued for a second summer, and the producers decided to repeat
it. Large audiences saw it each summer from 1937 through 1941;
after that it had to be closed for four years because of World War
II. The play reopened in the summer of 1946. In 1941 the State
took formal recognition of The Lost Colony as an institution of
importance to North Carolina by underwriting it to the extent of
$10,000 a year if necessary, “to serve as a year-to-year guarantee
of the continued presentation of this historical and patriotic
drama.” This is the first time that a state had ever underwritten
such an enterprise. By the end of the 1950 season, more than
450,000 people had seen The Lost Colony.

From the beginning, the play had been financed as a coopera-
tive, non-profit undertaking. The gate receipts were used for the
salaries of actors, musicians and stage hands, and for maintain-
ing the stage setting and production. This immensely successful
play meant very little in financial return to the author.

The year 1941 was full of recognition for Paul Green, in ad-
dition to the formal adoption of The Lost Colony by the State.
In January the National Institute of Arts and Letters elected him
a member; and he went to New York to be inducted in a ceremony
in Carnegie Hall, at which time he was greeted by his friends
Struthers Burt and James Boyd, already members. In June, West-
ern Reserve University conferred upon him the honorary degree
 

 

 

 

 

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84 | Pau Green or CHaApet HItt

of Doctor of Letters, thus bringing this very unacademic professor
into the academic fold. In his citation, President W. G. Leutner
spoke of Green as a “creative genius whose artistic expression in
novel, poetry, and drama has made the common life, the warm
passion, and the spiritual striving of the people of your native

state a precious heritage of the nation and the English-speaking
world.”

Also in 1941, his projected book about the Little Bethel Com-
munity, “Mr. Mac, the Folk History of a Neighborhood,” won
the Robert McBride Prize. The novel as such was not published,
though much of the material was used later in Dog on the Sun
(1949). The working draft of the original book, with the author’s
notes, is still in the vault of the North Carolina Room at the Uni-
versity Library. It consists of a collection of folk anecdotes, lore,
superstitions, tales, character sketches, all built around the warm,
canny and lovable character of Mr. Mac, miller, antiquarian, and
local historian, whose prototype is certainly the Register of Deeds
of Harnett County, with whom Paul Green had spent so many
interesting hours as a boy.

XXI. THE HIGHLAND CALL

The success of The Lost Colony made Green the obvious choice
of an author when the Cape Fear Valley Historical Association de-
cided that they had as interesting a story as the folks at Manteo,
and would also like to celebrate their history in drama. The cele-
bration took place at Fayetteville in November 1939. It was
actually a sort of four-ringed circus, designed to commemorate
not only the first settlement of the Cape Fear Valley, but also
three other important North Carolina sesquicentennials.
One hundred and fifty years ago the newly created State had rati-
fied the Federal Constitution, had ceded the western lands which

Tue HicHianp CALi 85

formed Tennessee, and had chartered the first state university.
The University joined with the State in celebrating these events.
There were ceremonies, speech-making, parades and gatherings in
Fayetteville, all embellished with brave plaids, the flourish of
bagpipes, and much glorification of local Scottish tradition.

Green wrote The Highland Call as an important part of this
celebration. The subtitle describes it as a “symphonic play of
American history in two acts with hymn tunes, folk songs, bal-
lads and dance.” The first production took place in the Auditorium
in Fayetteville on November 30, 1939, with actors from the Car-
olina Playmakers. It was not in any sense the community enter-
prise that The Lost Colony had been from its beginning. The first
audiences were responsive and pleased, stirred by the traditional
melodies, the fine emblazonment of Cape Fear legend and his-
tory, the appealing story of Flora Macdonald. The color and
vitality of The Highland Call charmed the audiences. The play
was presented again at Fayetteville in the autumn of 1940, and
there was some talk of making it an annual event, but World
War II intervened, and the play has not been revived since.

The Highland Call takes up the story of Flora Macdonald
and her family in defeat and exile as they leave Scotland for the
new world, and follows them through the confused and dubious
days of the American Revolution. All but three of the characters
in the play are historical personages who actually lived in the Cape
Fear region. The materials are much nearer to Green’s early mem-
ories than those of The Lost Colony; the fact that he dedi-
cated the play to his mother, “Another Flora,” indicates that he
felt the material very close to him. The blood of these Scottish
settlers was in his inheritance; he had heard of Flora Macdonald,
Jennie Bahn MacNeill, and the battles between the Whigs and the
Tories from his childhood. They are as native to the Cape Fear
region as cotton, yellow jasmine, pitcher plants, and dogwood.
Dramatic situations are plentiful, and ringing convictions, and

 
 

  
  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paut Green or CHAPEL Hitt

high idealism. Possibly because of the choice of Flora Macdonald
as a heroine, the author seems at times to be pleading the cause of
the British king against the colonists. Actually, Dan Murchison,
who stands for all those who have come to the new world to find
freedom, utters some of the bravest words of the play; but the
really noble figure of Flora Macdonald, courageously loyal to
her oath, overshadows him. In a sense this play is a continuation
of the story of The Lost Colomy, adding another act to the dram-
atization of the establishment of the country, and reaffirming
America’s destiny as the refuge and hope of oppressed people.
Here, as among the English colonists who left London for
Roanoke Island, are humble and hungry folk, who, afire with
belief in a new chance, have turned their backs on bleak Scotland
and a heritage of war. Like John Borden in The Lost Colony,
Dan Murchison is blood brother to Alvin Barnes and to Abraham
McCranie. The Highland Call is one more movement in Paul
Green’s growing symphony of the American dream.

As in the case of The Lost Colony Green’s writing of The
Highland Call was preceded by careful research into the history
of the period and the locality. Through such research he because
convinced that the American Revolution was much more closely
a bitter civil war than American popular histories have been in-
clined to describe it. The divisions between Whig and Tory were
often quite literally between brother and brother. The real Flora
Macdonald was determined to keep her oath at whatever cost.
Her tragedy is therefore one of defeat and denial. Because of
the sympathy aroused for her, the audience cannot receive from
that defeat the emotional lift which they experience from the
superb assurance at the end of The Lost Colony.

The music for The Highland Call is made up of traditional
Scotch ballads, dances, hymns, and carols. Charles Vardell, of
Salem College, Winston-Salem, composed the organ overtures

 

Tue Hicuianp Cai 87

for both acts, weaving into them the folk music of the Highlands.
The other airs and melodies were collected and chosen by Green.

Green also collaborated with Charles Vardell in a cantata to
commemorate the 175th anniversary of the founding of the
Moravian community at Salem. The original plan called for a
religious drama to be presented as part of the traditional Moravian
Easter ceremony. Green’s contribution to it finally took shape as
a long unrhymed poem which Vardell set to music for chorus and
orchestra. Song in the Wilderness embodies some of the ideas of
both The Lost Colony and The Highland Call, the quest in the
new world for freedom and human dignity and righteousness:

Here in the heart of these deep woods,

In the peace and bosomed richness of these hills,
Our forefathers came seeking a dwelling place,

A shelter for themselves and the light they cherished.
Not by hate and the iron fist, they said,

But by love and the friendly open hand

Shall a man survive the greenery of his days

And reap the mellow harvest of his soul.

Here upon this very spot, this sacred place, they stood
And set their living credo up, a faith,

Like a tree to flourish by the waterside.

Song in the Wilderness was first presented as one part of the
Fifth Piedmont Music Festival in Winston-Salem in June 1947.
The Music Festival that year coincided with the 175th anniver-
sary of the founding of Salem College. The cantata, composed by
Vardell for a chorus of mixed voices with a baritone solo and or-
chestral accompaniment, was sung by a chorus of three hundred in
the R. J. Reynolds Memorial Auditorium. The music, clearly
phrased in the modern idiom, perhaps lacks the romantic senti-
ment which the poem suggests, although musicians find it interest-

ing and satisfying.

 

 
 

 

88 Paut Green or CHAPEL Hitt

The idea of historical presentation, combining the resources
of folk music and legend in the vitalizing of local history, has
continued to appeal to Paul Green. One reason for his interest in
regional plays is to be found in his conviction that the theatre in
the United States needs decentralization.

There should be more active producing theatres in all the
states, instead of the present concentration in New York. The pres-
ent summer theatres in the North and East should be extended
over the entire country and should play the year round. “As
long,” he says, “as the American drama stays bottled up in the
narrow neck and cul-de-sac of Broadway, we can expect nothing
better than what we have.”

XXII. UNPOPULAR CAUSES AND A PLAY

During the summer of 1940 Green collaborated with Richard
Wright in converting the latter’s novel, Native Son, into a play
for Broadway. The theme of the novel, the shaping of a criminal

' by social and economic pressures, appealed strongly to the author of

In Abraham’s Bosom. This is the story of a Negro whose crime
results from society’s denial of his basic rights.

In the American democratic theory [he said], we have a method of stimulat-
ing first by the theory of equality, and then we have tokens which frustrate.
Every year we stimulate college boys and tell them to go forth, and there’s
nowhere to go.

That’s not altogether confined to one race. We have sixteen million people
who mainly because of their color don’t have the opportunities we have. In a
democracy every tub should stand on its own bottom—everybody ought to have
a chance to develop his full talents. In Native Son Bigger Thomas could have
got a job shining shoes, but he didn’t want that and perhaps his ability was far
above that. But he was frustrated and he committed a horrible crime, as the
only way he could express himself.

 

Unpopu.ar CausEs anD A PLay 89

Green’s swift and instinctive championship of the underdog,
no matter whom or what he is under, has not by any means been an
idealism expressed only in poetic phrases. He has frequently gone
to great trouble and expenditure of both time and money to de-
fend some one who seemed to be getting an unfair deal. In such
cases he has shown a complete disregard of expediency, of local
opinion, of possible unpopularity of his stand. One of the most
conspicuous instances of this reckless willingness to help others
occurred in 1934 in the case of the “Burlington dynamiters.” Dur-
ing a strike in one of the Burlington, North Carolina, mills, a
stick of dynamite exploded in a seldom-used corner of the mill.
The damage done amounted to less than a hundred dollars. Six
mill hands were arrested, charged with attempting to dynamite
the mill, and given sentences of from two to ten years each. Some
of their friends, who felt that justice had not been done, came to
Chapel Hill and appealed to Paul Green and William T. Couch
of the University Press for help in getting the case reconsidered.
After checking the facts, Couch and Green became convinced that
the defendants had not been proved quilty beyond a reasonable
doubt. As Couch put it, “The law had functioned in a haphazard
manner, and had left the way open for prejudiced persons to
secure the conviction of possibly innocent men.” Thus convinced,
Couch defended the alleged dynamiters in cogent articles for the
newspapers in which he pointed out the State’s previous ugly rec-
ord in cases growing out of industrial disputes. Paul Green got in
his car and drove around the State to find lawyers who would have
the courage to take on the case in defense of the mill hands. He
finally appealed to the governor. The case was reopened, and

the sentences commuted.
In another instance, during World War II, Green again took

up an unpopular cause, that of a faculty member who had been

selected by the Office of War Information as one of a group to go
to Germany and teach democracy. Prior to 1941 this teacher was

 
 

 

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90 Paut Green or Cuapet Hit

reported to have expressed pro-fascist opinions in his classroom
and even on occasion to have published such opinions. A campus
group who questioned his competence as an interpreter of democ-
racy suggested that the Office of War Information should look
into his record; and as a result of the investigation, the professor’s
appointment was cancelled. Paul Green felt that the man had
been made the victim of a petty academic witch hunt, and defend-
ed him with all the force of which he was capable, at the risk of
endangering some very close friendships.

Another crusade to which Paul Green has given himself whole-
heartedly is that to abolish capital punishment. In Roll, Sweet
Chariot and in the convict-camp chapter of This Body the Earth
and in several of his later short stories, he has vividly pictured
the darker sides of the State’s prison system. In letters to news-
papers and in public addresses he has again and again denounced
the evil futility of killing a man because he has done wrong.
Change him, help him, change the society, the system which has
produced him, but do not take away his life, pleads Green the
humanitarian. In 1947 when he was asked to speak in the Uni-
versity Library about his projected Williamsburg play, he
‘launched instead into a violent denunciation of capital punish-
ment, including a description of an actual execution, which star-
tled and shocked an audience assembled for nothing more disturb-
ing than a literary tea.

His belief in the dignity of human life and in the individual’s
right to justice probably influenced Green in his decision to col-
laborate in dramatizing Native Son. The theme of the novel is
related to Green’s deepest interest. Richard Wright came to Chap-
el Hill to work with Green, and much of the writing was done in
the log-cabin study on Green’s farm.

The ending of the play gave both authors a great deal of trou-
ble. The last chapter of the novel consists of a long conversation
between Bigger Thomas and his sympathetic Jewish lawyer, who

 

 

 

Unpoputar Causgs anp A Pray 91

has failed to get him a reprieve. Through this conversation and
through his previous association with the lawyer, Bigger ap-
proached an understanding of the complex pressures which had
made him a murderer. The far-reaching implications packed into
this chapter offered many difficulties to the playwrights. In the
dramatic version, the conversation with the lawyer is greatly con-
densed, with a consequent increase in dramatic intensity. The scene
closes with Bigger’s “Death Lament” as he is led off to execution.
Paul Green visited Death Row in the state prison in Raleigh, as he
had many times before, to get atmosphere and understanding for
this scene.

Native Son opened in New York in 1941, with every possible
advantage of setting and interpretation. Orson Welles and John
Houseman were the producers, and Canada Lee played the role of
Bigger Thomas. The ten vivid scenes were presented without in-
termission, a method which contributed to the effect of mounting
tension.

Brooks Atkinson again stressed Green’s poetic gift:

For Paul Green and Richard Wright, who wrote the stage version of
“Native Son,” are men of muscle, character and contrast, and they have written
a forceful drama with thoughtful deliberation, Mr. Green is a North Carolina
poet who is a philosopher, a man of religion and a defender of democracy.
Mr. Wright is a Mississippi Negro who has lived and worked in the North; he
is a realist, an atheist and a Communist. They are both interested in the welfare
of the Negro race. They regard Mr. Wright’s noyel as a psychological docu-
ment that helps to explain the corrosive effect of race prejudice, The novel,
which was published last year, was shockingly violent in some of its scenes.
The play is less horrific; some of the ghastly details of the original narrative
have been eliminated or altered; the long defense of Bigger Thomas, the mur-
derer, which dominated the last third of the novel, has also been sharply com-
pressed,

Native Son had a successful run on Broadway in 1941 and was
reopened for a run at popular prices in 1942.
 

 

XXIII. MORE MOVIES AND THE RADIO

During the early 1940’s Paul Green spent much of his time
in Hollywood, writing scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer. He
bought a house in Santa Monica, where the family lived for sev-
eral years. His eldest daughter, Nancy Byrd, was married there.

Green’s later association with Hollywood and the making of
films proved no more satisfactory to him as an artist than his first
experiences had been. He spent considerable time in conference
with Eddie Rickenbacker in preparation for writing a script based
on Rickenbacker’s war experiences, but later gave this up because
he found it impossible to work with the producers. He also worked
for a while on the script for Adventure, which was to feature Greer
Garson and Clark Gable, but gave up in disgust. He wrote an
original screen story about life in a Southern mill village, which
gave him some personal satisfaction because he felt that he had
made an honest presentation. MGM paid him handsomely for
this, but rejected it for production as too realistic a deviation from
the usual pattern. Thus all of his efforts to write sincerely (and he
is incapable of writing otherwise) were turned down. In speaking
of his experience with the films, he burst out, “The men who con-
trol the movies are menaces to civilization.” And in a Raleigh
talk in April 1947, he again expressed his disappointment:

Now of all the machines which man has created for his own betterment and
self-expression, none it seems to me is loaded with greater possibilities than the
motion picture; here is an invention which is unlimited in its power for progress
and good—for entertainment of the finest sort, for inspiration, glory, grandeur,
whatever term you wish to use in describing human nature with its ideals, its
vagaries and vanities. There is nothing like it and never has been before—not
the radio, phonograph, newspaper, hardly books even—for its impact on the
shaping of people’s lives, their thinking, manners, customs and their deeds... .

But are the movies fulfilling their potential greatness? Hardly, The
manipulations of the moneymakers have led to a clever and scandalous exploita-

More Movies AND THE Rap1o 93

tion of the public’s human weaknesses and have flooded us with sensationalism,
melodrama, novelty, glitter, froth and shine, thus forcing this mighty medium

into a portrayal of our own country, for instance, as a land of excesses, of easy

money, of poverty and crime, of gangsters and tough guys, of dull and ignorant
politicians, of furred and empty-pated ladies, of cheap success, of hokum heroism,
of easy sex, wastefulness, bad manners, and adolescent intelligence.

In a letter, Katherine Anne Porter spoke of meeting Paul
Green in Hollywood, “of all places. The honest, tender and
gifted soul stood out like a stalk of good sugar cane in a thicket
of poison ivy.”

Paul Green has also experimented with plays for radio. One
of the first of these, 7e Southern Cross, published in 1938, deals
with the power of the dead past, a theme not unlike that of The
House of Connelly, and touches also upon the Confederate migra-
tion to Texas. Especially interesting because of its relation to The
Common Glory is the radio play The Critical Year: A One-Act
Sketch of American History and the Beginning of the Constitution,
The action takes places in Boston ten years after the American Rev-
olution is over, when Paul Revere and Daniel Shay decided to peti-
tion George Washington to take the lead in forming a strong
central government. The author’s concept here of the difficulties
and agonies of the American Revolution is identical with that
which he has developed more fully in The Common Glory.

In 1941 Pauil Green collaborated with James Boyd in a series
of radio plays designed “to give expression to their faith in Ameri-
can democracy.” Green’s contribution to this series was a script
called “A Start in Life,” which Canada Lee acted on the air; the
story is virtually the same as that of his short story, “A Fine Wa-

gon.”

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XXIV. A MATURING PHILOSOPHY

Paul Green’s honest idealism, which cannot tolerate the de-
basement of the movies, found expression in the two volumes of
essays published during the 1940’s: The Hawthorn Tree and
Forever Growing. The Hawthorn Tree, made up of sketches,
many of which had previously appeared in The Carolina Play-
book, The Theatre Arts Magazine, and The New York Times,
contains much that is important for a thorough understanding of
the author. The first essay, “Preface to Professors,” emphasizes
the fact that Green the dramatist and poet has remained also at
heart the teacher. Here the ideas dramatized in The Enchanted
Maze and expanded further in Forever Growing are given fuller
expression: his conviction that college teaching often blunts and
cheats the aspirations of the young:

They wanted something to believe in, something to move their souls, to help
them keep their drive and increase it, something to lift their faith in themselves
and the human race and a universal and benignant rightness which men call
God,

+ we professors, we keepers of wisdom .. . have Jost our religion, our
inspiration for living, and with us lies the responsibility most for what our
young people are and may be.

These words gain significance when one recalls that they were
written during World War II. The world conspicuously needs a
new curriculum; the old ways of teaching have miserably failed
to enable men to live together in peace, or even to live at all.

In these two volumes of essays are to be found Paul Green’s
ideas on art and life, his unshakable belief in man the artist and
creator: “By the very nature of his being, man is a living soul and
not an animal . . . he carries in his heart the divine imperative of
the Maker’s will from whence he came.” Implicit here are his
reasons for opposing capital punishment, and for his unstinted en-
couragement of creative effort in others. Art and religion are close

A Marurinc PHILOsoPpHY 95

together in Green’s thinking; the eternal creative spirit in man
is one manifestation of God.

Green’s ideal of democracy is basically a religious one; he sees
its goal as “the fashioning of an ever more perfect world in which
all men should share.” Here is the core of that American dream
which he has dramatized explicitly in the four historical plays, but
which underlies all of his work.

The essay on “Music in the Theatre” is the clearest statement
to be found anywhere of what he has been working toward in his
“symphonic dramas,” and of his concept of music as an essential
tool in dramatic creation.

In Salvation on a String and Other Tales of the South (1946)
Green continued the story of the Little Bethel community. The
setting and the characters have the warm feeling of familiarity
for any one who has followed his writing; it enlivens the picture
of acountry neighborhood. The stories range in variety from the
pathetic and at times the sentimental to the salty and humorous.
In the story for which the volume is named, the ridiculous climax
is built up with great skill, and the details of the country revival
are vivid with the sharp clear colors of a Breughel painting. What
might be told briefly as a bawdy yarn expands here into a complex-
ly woven commentary on the folkways of a region. Many of
these stories in their dramatic quality and the natural rhythms of
the dialogue show the playwright’s deftness. “Fine Wagon,” the
story with which the book closes, stands out as one of the most
moving things that Paul Green has ever written. Without a word
too’ much or too little, he brings to life a little Negro boy and
indicates his inescapable future. As surely as in the first act of
In Abraham’s Bosom, the seeds of tragedy are seen to stir and
sprout in this tender and flawless episode.

In Paul Green’s most recent collection of short stories, Dog o#
the Sun (1949), the story of “Fine Waogn” is continued in “Sun
Go Down.” Here the reader experiences the humiliation of the
 

 

96 Paut Green oF CHapet Hitt

little boy, his realization of his parent’s plight, and the fore-
shadowing of his father’s death. Green is at his best here in the
realistic, imaginative creation of a lonely child straying in the
woods. Several of the stories in this volume are centered around
a Southern university town. One of the most effective, “Educa-
tion South,” describes the funeral of a young Negro boy in a
cemetery at the edge of the campus, as the singing of the Negro
mourners causes one professor after another to close his class-
room windows. “The Ghost in the Tree” moves subtly from a
’possum hunt in the present to a Civil War raid, and tells on two
different planes the story of a white boy murdered long ago and
the anguish of a Negro boy because his father has been electro-
cuted. The familiar themes of Green’s writing are all present
here: abhorrence of capital punishment, distrust of university
education, sympathy for the hurt and the suffering and the un-
justly treated. The title, from the country saying “Dog on the
sun, fair weather soon gone,” indicates the threat to civilization
which, Green feels, issues from our social and economic injustices.

These prose writings of Paul Green’s later years reflect a
graver and less exuberant personality. He has tended to with-

_ draw more and more from active social life, although his greeting
for friends is as warm as ever. He has felt an increasing need for
retirement and solitude, for concentration upon his work. Through-
out his later writing he has evinced a deepening concern over the
problems of man’s fate and his relationship to God.

Now in his fifties, Paul Green still looks youthful, without a
strand of gray in his thick dark hair. Whatever his reasons, there
can be no question about the increasingly ascetic pattern of his life;
he no longer needs the conviviality which he enjoyed in the twen-
ties and early thirties. Yet in spite of this tendency to withdraw,
he has always responded willingly to any call for help, whether
it be literary, financial, political, or civic.

One of the diversions in which he has continued to participate

A Marurinc PHILOSOPHY 97

is the informal writers’ group, which meets on Sunday nights in
Chapel Hill for discussion and mutual criticism. This group, which
has had a surprisingly long existence, has always been flexible and
changeable and peripatetic, meeting at various places, but fairly
frequently in the big library at the Greens’ home. At one time
or another it has included Betty Smith, Foster Fitz-Simmons,
Josephina Niggli, Phillips and Caro Mae Russell, Clare Leighton,
and Charles Mills, among others. Betty Smith once said that she
might never have finished A Tree Grows in Brooklyn without the

constant prod of knowing that she must have something to read
at the next gathering; for the only fixed rule was that each member

must bring in something which he had written. At these meetings,

Green showed himself an exacting critic, upholding high stand-
ards; at the same time his kindliness made him know how to

soothe and restore a wounded author’s ego if the going-over had
been too rough. In later years this group changed character some-

what; instead of being as at first composed of struggling young
writers, it included at least two authors of best-sellers, Betty Smith
and James Street. Their presence, while probably stimulating, was
also at times difficult and embarrassing for the less successful.
Whenever the tensions inevitable in such a group effected an im-
passe, Green would plead earnestly and effectively for the circle’s
continuance. The project is very close to his heart because of his
interest in helping others to release the creative impulses within

them.

On February 9, 1949, the Fellows in American Letters of the
Library of Congress announced the awarding of the Bollingen
Prize for Poetry to Ezra Pound for The Pisan Cantos as a work
which “represents the highest achievement in American poetry.”
The Fellows, appointed by the Librarian of Congress, included
besides Paul Green, such figures as Conrad Aiken, W. H. Auden,
T. S. Eliot, Katherine Anne Porter, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate and
Robert Penn Warren. Violent protests from all over the country
 

 

98 Pauv Green or Cuapet Hitt

immediately came in; for Pound had finished The Pisan Cantos at
an Army prison camp in Italy, where he had been confined on an
indictment of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda during
World War II. The committee said it would not “permit other
considerations than that of poetic achievement to sway the deci-
sion.”

In the ensuing literary storm Paul Green was silent, and it was
not until August that he finally admitted that he had not gone
along with the other members of the committee when they had
voted for Pound. Though personal attacks had been made on the
committee personnel, Green refused to retaliate or to take part
in the controversy. He telegraphed The Saturday Review of
Literature: “I am not indignant about anything. I think the laugh
is on us Fellows of the Library of Congress... . I am willing to
let it go at that.” And to Allen Tate he wrote: “The Fellows made
a tactical mistake in awarding Pound a prize by way of a taxpay-
€r’s institution— if of no other sort—and there has been enough
pother over it, and so let’s get on to other matters.”

Paul Green could scarcely be said to live in seclusion, since he
is surrounded by a lively and extremely interesting family. Young
Paul, after his discharge from the Navy, entered North Carolina
State College at Raleigh, where he majored in physics, and then
went on to graduate study in electrical engineering. He demon-
strated his own share of the creative endowment of the family by
inventing, while still a student, an automatic plotting machine,
which saves much work in plotting mathematical solutions, and
speeds research work in electrical engineering. He received his
master’s degree in 1948, and that same year married Dorrit Gegan
of Boston. They made their home in Oxford, North Carolina,
where Paul Junior worked with the State College Experiment
Station in testing cured tobacco by the use of electronics, an in-
teresting throwback, this, to his father’s youthful experiment in

Tue Common Gtory 99

raising tobacco. Nancy Byrd and her husband, Sam Cornwell,
lived in Chapel Hill during Sam’s student days. Their baby, the
first grandchild, was named for Elizabeth. Byrd continued her
original work with the Carolina Modern Dance Group, in which
her young sisters were also interested. Betsy had from early
childhood shown that she had inherited the family talent for
music, and continued her study of piano at the University of
North Carolina and then at Oberlin College. Janet had already
begun to write with ability and promise, and graduated from high
school in 1949 as valedictorian of her class.

XXV. THE COMMON GLORY

When Paul Green visited Williamsburg, Virginia, in the sum-
mer of 1938, he immediately saw this restoration of an eighteenth-
century town from a dramatist’s point of view.

I felt that the whole thing was made for some sort of living dramatic activity
to be restored there. Here was architecture at its best. The past was here
again in all details of housing, dressing, costumes, utensils, books, music, and the
attendant trappings of a people once living but now dead and gone. But
where were the people themselves? So why not a drama in which they could
come to actual being on the stage and live out again some of the plans and
purposes which once actuated them in this identical environment.

So I talked to several people about the possibility of an outdoor play—the
mayor, the representatives of the restoration, several members of the state gov-
ernment, historical societies, the antiquities group. Quite a lot of interest was
shown. Tentative plans were got underway, some small amount of money was
pledged—and I began thinking about the drama.

The Williamsburg play was originally announced for the sum-
mer of 1940, but the threat of war made it impossible to go ahead
with the plans for building a theatre and financing the project.
Green returned a sum of money which had been advanced to him
ae) mane ar mene

 

100 Paut Green or Cuapet Hiri

for expenses. But the idea of the play, the fascinating possibilities
in the richness of Virginia history, remained to tempt his skill and
to quicken his imagination.

In 1946, when it became possible again to consider the project,
the Jamestown Corporation, heir of the earlier Virginia Peninsular
Historical Association, was organized with Colgate Darden, now
president of the University of Virginia, as one of the active spon-
sors. That summer Paul Green resumed his research and plans for
the play. In the beginning he tried to build his story around the
first Virginia colonists, John Smith, Pocahontas, John Rolfe, and
their fellow adventurers in the New World, with the intention of
presenting the play on the site of Jamestown. This plan had to
be given up because of the swampy land of Jamestown Island;
and its distance from any large town would have made far too
costly the installation of adequate sewage. Thus for once, at least,
literature was shaped by plumbing. In order to secure “modern
conveniences” for cast and spectators, it was decided to build the
theatre near Williamsburg, and the author changed his locale
accordingly; thus Thomas Jefferson became his protagonist in-
stead of, possibly, John Smith. In establishing a theatre in Will-
iamsburg another eighteenth-century tradition was revived; as
early as 1716 there had been a theatre near the old Capitol.
George Washington witnessed there the first performance in this
country of The Beggar’s Opera, presented by actors and musicians
from London; sometimes “young gentlemen of the college” ap-
peared in such plays as Addison’s Cato and The Drummer.

Paul Green at first attempted to plan a play in which the main
characters would all be imaginary, and historical figures would
move only on the outskirts of the drama, thus avoiding the compli-
cated difficulties of putting well-known characters on the stage. But

the compelling personality of Thomas Jefferson would not be
denied:

The more I have studied the works of this man the surer I am that he is one

 

 

THE Common Gory 101

of the world’s great figures. As few men have seen he saw a vision of right-
eousness, yes, just that, the righteous way of life, that would constitute the
common glory of all men. We owe him more than any of us dream of... . It
takes a wise people to measure up and be worthy of a wise man and Jefferson
was just that. In my play I hope to interpret him in such a way that we will
feel nearer to him and what he stood for. As one of his biographers said in
listing his accomplishments, he was almost incredible. And that makes it tough
for me, to try to dramatize the life and make credible the character of an almost
incredible man. But I have great hopes to do it. For as a right hand ally in
the endeavor is the noble and mystic art of music. With music the unbeliev-
able, so inflooding and emotionalizing is its power, the unbelievable can be
made believable.

Thus Green undertook the task of dramatizing familiar his-
torical persons and events, a task which resulted in The Common
Glory. When he was writing of Sir Walter Raleigh’s lost colonists,
he could give his imagination free play to create where little was
known. And the characters in The Highland Call, although actual
persons who had once lived in the Cape Fear region, were not so
familiar to the audience as school book figures. But with historic
personages as well known as Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry,
Benjamin Franklin and the rest, his imagination had to be dis-
ciplined and controlled by fact. An added difficulty lay implicit
in the cult of “Mr. Jefferson,” perhaps not entirely peculiar to
the State of Virginia, but certainly very strong there, making it
practically an act of treason to tamper with the sacrosanct figure.
Another limitation which the dramatist faced arose from the fact
that it had been planned to invite school children from all over
the State to the performances of the Williamsburg play; that is,
it could not be in any sense a high-brow production. The author
had to find, as the editor of The Richmond Times-Dispatch ex-
pressed it, “a common denominator interesting to the old and the
young, the learned and the unlearned, the high school student
from Hanover Courthouse and the visiting historian from Seat-
tle.” Within these well-defined limits, Paul Green went about
 

102 Paut Green or Cuapet Hitz

the research, the vast amount of reading which must precede the
actual writing of such a play, and the planning of the scenes
with their interpretation of history in words and dance and music.

Green not only wrote the play but took an active part in plan-
ning and designing the outdoor theatre which was built especially
for it. The site selected for the theatre, on the Jamestown road
not far from the College of William and Mary and the end of
Duke of Gloucester Street, has unusual natural beauty. The
: amphitheatre slopes through a forest of century-old beeches and
: a lesser growth of hollies, tulip poplars and oaks, to the end of
Lake Matoaka, which stretches behind the stage to darker forests
beyond. The mighty trees stretch high above the stage and frame
the play in a delicate baroque design of leaves and branches. These
trees were very dear to Paul Green; he defended them against all
the hazards of building, the designs of engineers and electricians.
“But,” he confided somewhat plaintively, “I have to watch them
like a hawk. The minute I turn my back somebody goes and cuts
down a tree.” The roofless theatre is of Williamsburg brick in
Georgian design. Two tall towers which contain the lighting equip-
ment and the organ rise from the sides of the triple stage. The
-comfortable seats, the stage machinery, the dressing rooms, are
all of the best. The author, remembering the primitive days of
The Lost Colony, took great delight in exhibiting this elaborate
perfection.

The money necessary to build the theatre and provide for the
costly production was raised by the State of Virginia. No money
from the Rockefeller-sponsored Williamsburg Corporation went
into it; quotas were assigned to different cities and towns, and the
entire State cooperated in this celebration of Virginia’s heritage.
In this sense, Te Common Glory is even more definitely a state-
wide enterprise than The Lost Colony.

The Common Glory had its premiére on July 17, 1947. The
first night was heralded with considerable fanfare; special trains

 

 

THE Common Giory 103

brought officers of the Commonwealth and various notables, among
them Governor William Munford Tuck, former Governor Col-

gate Darden, and Lady Astor, born Nancy Langhorne of Mirador
in Jefferson’s own county of Albemarle.

The author’s own word, given to the press on the day of the
opening, make clear his purpose:

I hope that all who see this Virginia historical drama will be encouraged to
believe more and more in the great American dream, which is not a vision of
one nation as opposed to another, or one people precedent over another people,
but a vision of the Common Glory, common to all men, freedom, justice, and
a righteous society of men and brothers all over the world,

As in the case of The Lost Colony, Green considered the early
performances of The Common Glory a rough draft which he
would revise many times. Watching the play constantly from
various parts of the theatre, he observed weaknesses and began at
once to make changes. The intimate scenes, such as the dialogue
between Jefferson and his wife on Christmas Eve, worried him
especially. He realized that such episodes, although they sounded
well on paper and even in rehearsal, did not go over to a large
audience in such a big amphitheatre, and later they were omitted.
After a few nights, the scene at the burial ground at Monticello
was also taken out, and two deeply moving pantomimes, the dig-
ging squad of Negro slaves and the procession of the wounded and
the sorrowing, had been added; neither of these appeared on the
first printed programs. In spite, however, of this somewhat fluid
and uneven state, The Common Glory in its first summer was im-
mensely successful. The synthesis of music, light, color, dances,
words, pantomime and action, toward which the author had been
moving in other plays, seemed here in great measure to have
been achieved. The splendid tones of the organ, the soaring young
voices of the William and Mary choir, the melodies of dance
tunes, of battle songs, the solemn anthems of the Anglican liturgy,
 

104 Paut Green or Cuapet Hitt

the gay colors of eighteenth-century costumes, and the moving
poetry, wove together a genuine enchantment.

Jetterson’s personality had many facets; Green chose to present
him a young man bowed down with sorrows and responsibilities,
his heart torn with grief over the illness of his wife, his spirit
heavy with the burdens of governorship, the threat of impeach-
ment, the agonies of the Revolution. The author emphasized not
only Jefferson’s personal suffering, but the bitter cost in human
pain of establishing the new nation. The ending of the play had
a fine suggestiveness, with the Virginia pioneers ready to set: out
from Richmond for the beginning of their long journey to the
Blue Ridge and beyond. .

The play was not, however, all solemn. The comic characters,
Cephus Sicklemore and Mammy Huuzzit, were well imagined and
well integrated into the body of the drama by Cephus’ reluctant
enlistment and service in the Continental Army. And there were
many moments of tenderness, lively color and gaiety, such as the
minuet at King George’s court, dancing on the green at Williams-
burg, the romance between the pretty Tory, Eileen Gordon, and
the young Revolutionary officer, Hugh Taylor.

The stage directions for The Common Glory indicated clearly
that the author thought of both light and music as allies, even as
actors, in the total harmony which he was creating. He personi-
fied the organ in such directions as “comment from the organ,”
and endowed it with separate creative ability in “A low humming
begins in the chorus, joined later by a soft but high and shimmer-
ing harmony of the organ in the treble clef, a shimmering like
bright luminous wings beating in the air. A pulse beat is sounded
in the organ.” Some musicians criticized Green’s taste in his choice
of the electric organ to accompany his historical plays. This choice
had a practical side, since only such an organ could produce suffi-

cient volume to carry in a large outdoor amphitheatre. The organ
had the sustaining and the longest role in the play.

a

Tue Common GLory 105

No original music was composed for The Common Glory. In
searching for appropriate music, Green went through many col-
lections of English and Scottish carols, songs, ballads, and march-
ing tunes. He selected some six hundred airs, from which the
music in its final form was adapted. The score, partly martial and
patriotic, more often liturgical, contributed to the emotional effect
of the drama. In Green’s choice of music, as in his historical
characters, he ventured to use the familiar and even hackneyed,
and by his poetic touch to endow these with fresh grace.

All audiences have enjoyed The Common Glory. One of the
best indices of this is that during the first summer they increased
steadily, averaging about 1800 a night. According to the original
plan of the sponsors, several hundred school children saw each
performance. When the run ended, the management estimated
that approximately 90,000 people had seen the play.

There were inevitable mutterings of criticism and displeasure,
especially directed toward the dramatist’s interpretation of the
personality of Thomas Jefferson. One stalwart Virginia lady was
heard to mutter as she left the amphitheatre: “The very idea...
putting words in Mr. Jefferson’s mouth he never would have
said.” This referred to Jefferson’s wish to write into the Declara-
tion of Independence a clause which would free the slaves. His-
torical evidence supports this passage which had displeased the
lady. Green had not been able to perform the miracle of giving
Virginians their favorite son just exactly as each of them imagined
him, but he had succeeded in delighting a great many people. An
initial criticism that the play lacked an important climax was
later met by lengthening the speeches of Patrick Henry and Jef-
ferson on the bluffs at Richmond and by underscoring with music
and lighting effects the meaning of these speeches. Here, in Jeffer-
son’s words, as in his personality throughout, the author chose to
stress responsibility, sacrifice, sufferings, and struggle. Here is no
facile jingoism, no Fourth of July flag-waving; here is instead
 

106 Pau Green or Cuapet Hip

an austere and stately declaration of the new nation’s responsibility
toward the rest of mankind.

This dramatization of sophisticated and wealthy intellectuals of
eighteenth-century Virginia may seem a long way from the scenes
and characters of Paul Green’s early work. Yet in a sense it is also
an expression and summation of all that he had thought and pas-
sionately believed. Through the personality of Thomas Jefferson,
and through a declaration of the ideals for which the American
Revolution was fought he made a moving statement of his own
convictions. Here are, vigorously asserted, the underlying themes
of all his writing: Man’s right to freedom, to equality of op-
portunity; the power of righteousness; the need for a moral di-
rection and purpose in life. Here is his championship not only of
the Negro, but of all oppressed minorities. And here in utter sin-

cerity is that religious conviction which grew steadily as his phil-
osophy matured.

XXVI. FAITH OF OUR FATHERS

’ The fourth of Green’s symphonic dramas to express the evolu-
tion of the American dream was surely the most difficult task
which the dramatist had yet faced. Far more so even than Jeffer-
son, the figure of George Washington was one long since cast into
bronze, as cold as the sharp outlines of the famous monument
which bears his name. To breathe actual life into the hero who
had been the cherry-tree-chopping lad of the Grant Wood pic-
ture, the Gilbert Stuart portrait of the postage stamp, and the
marble demigod of public parks and government buildings was a
prospect which would have defeated a lesser dramatist. Yet in
George Washington, Paul Green saw the American dream reach-
ing toward its consummation. The Lost Colony had told of its

 

FaiTH oF Our FatrHeErs 107

beginnings, The Highland Call of its struggles, The Common
Glory of its realistic foundation, and now Faith of Our Fathers
would tell of its initial victory.

The opportunity for Green to write the play began in 1947
when Congress authorized .a celebration of the 150th anniversary
of the establishment of the City of Washington as the seat of
the federal government. The occasion was to be signaled in 1950
by a variety of events to be planned by the Sesquicentennial Com-
mission. In 1948 Green arrived in Washington and agreed to write
a play on the character of George Washington if a suitable out-
door theatre should be provided. The following year President
Truman met with the Commission, and it was decided to erect
such a theatre near the heart of the city on a site in Rock Creek
Park previously chosen by Green and Commission Director Ed-
ward Boykin. Six months later Congress appropriated the money,
and in December groundbreaking exercises were held. Since more
than three months passed in clearing the forest and grading the
site, construction of the theatre was delayed till April 1950, only
a hundred days before the planned opening. Actually it was not
until August that Faith of Our Fathers finally reached the stage.

Meanwhile the dramatist and his co-workers had been furious-
ly busy. As Green first saw the new drama, it was to be based on
five days in the life of George Washington with tentative title
“The Merciless Days.” The playwright read countless books on
the First President, went through tomes of his correspondence.
In Boston, New York, and Washington he perused stacks of ori-
ginal manuscripts in the archives. He visited West Point, Valley
Forge, Philadelphia, Annapolis, and other spots associated with
his subject. He was determined that this was to be no pageant.
“Pageants deal with subject matter and therefore do not have a
story line, while drama has a sound story line.” Green’s very first
thought was to portray Washington “as a warm-blooded human
being, as he must have been before the biographers and historians
 

108 Paut Green or Cuapet Hitt

got hold of him. He was a moulder of the future, vibrant and
alive.” As the writing progressed, Green decided to abandon the
five-days story and to place Washington against a background of
those difficult years from 1783 to 1799. But he was determined
that the human figure should stand out from the confusion of
those conflicting years of our early national life. He wrote;

It is the author’s hope that when the play is over, the public will have got
pretty much the full impact of the lusty complete man, from youth to age,
with, as I said, the emphasis being on the later years of Washington’s life. For
these years summed up in themselves his experience as a man, a fighter, a devoted

husband, a citizen, a farmer, a noble and practical pioneer, a figure of inspiration
to all those who have come after him!

The play opens on a winter day in Annapolis in 1783 when
Washington returned to the Continental Congress his commission
as general of the Revolutionary Army. Then come scenes which
illustrate the troubled years which followed, and show the con-
tinuing reliance of the struggling republic on Washington for
leadership. His acceptance of this leadership, his selection as presi-
dent, and the tribulations of those years as the Father of His
Country till shortly before his death conclude the play. Through
it all there shines forth a man who loved his home and family—
a man of political astuteness in dealing with men of such divergent
but honest views as Jefferson and Hamilton and with Patrick
Henry and Isaac Bell—a man who kept his country from further
wars—a man of high moral fortitude. The playwright makes it
clear that only with a leader of such justice and courage could the
young nation have survived in a hostile world.

To relieve the high seriousness of such a portrayal, Green em-
ploys as his comic character Washington’s own body servant and
general factotum, Billy Lee. This is a departure from the humor-
ous inventions of the first three historical regional dramas, Old
Tom, Sandy Ochiltree, and Cephus Sicklemore. Billy Lee is made
to order, for as a necessary personage, the dramatist could utilize

Faitu or Our FatrHers 109

his rich Negro humor asa contrast to those sometimes almost over-
whelming national issues. For romantic interest, Green plays up
the love between Lucy Bridgers, a young relative of the Wash-
ingtons, and Frederick Bell, son of one of Washington’s most ir-
ritating opponents.

Paul Green wrote as his subtitle, “A Symphonic Drama with
Music and Dance, Produced by the National Capital Sesquicenten-
nial Commission, and Based on George Washington’s Part in
Founding the American Republic and Lauching the Young Na-
tion on Its Career.” The words music and dance are significant,
for they make important Green’s word symphonic. Pantomime
and poetry are present too—and costumes and staging and light-
ing—and the whole is a workmanlike fusion of all the accouter-
ments of the theatre.

An interesting sidelight to Green’s preparation of the play for
production is the difficulty which he had in choosing a name for
it. He had been jotting down possible titles for some time, had
in fact collected over a hundred. One evening he stumbled on a

century-old hymn with words accredited to an English clergy-
man, Frederick W. Faber.

Faith of our fathers! Living still

In spite of dungeons, fire and sword
Oh how our hearts beat high with joy
Whene’er we hear that glorious word!
Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
We will be true to Thee till death,

He wrote:

Those words at once ended my search. They are so appropriate to the inner
conflict of a troubled young nation that was led to victory by the faith of one
resolute man. The very title summons up visions of a long line of patriots who
haye stood fast through fiery trials, through storm and strife, through batcles
and crises, who have laid down their lives, poured out their blood, and kept the

eres
 

 

110 Pau Green or Cuapet Hitt

faith, that George Washington’s dream of a free United America might come
true.

By the end of May 1950 the script had been completed, and
the enormous task of selecting personnel for the production was
underway. Except for several professional actors, the large cast
was drawn primarily from amateurs in and around Washington
and from members of drama classes in the near-by universities,
Rehearals began before the theatre was finished, though busy
workmen speeded toward the deadline. Opening night was set
for August 4.

A brilliant first-night audience of over 4,000 was on hand, in-
cluding President and Mrs. Harry Truman and daughter Mar-
garet, Washington representatives of diplomatic, military, and
government agencies, and hundreds of North Carolinians who
went up especially for the occasion. It was their first view of
an open-air theatre which is undoubtedly the finest in the coun-
try. Built at a cost of over half a million, with 4,059 seats, and
a triple stage 158 feet wide, an orchestra pit for 60 musicians,
and a stage-area to accommodate 250 actors, it was indeed a tre-
mendous contribution to the cultural life of the national capital.
The Commission had spent almost $100,000 in mounting the
play, the 400 costumes alone costing approximately $22,000. As
the thousands of first-nighters sat in the forest auditorium sur-
rounded by trees with dark blue skies overhead scattered with
stars, Paul Green suddenly heard the first note of the organ, saw
the dimming of the lights, and glanced to the left where two nar-
rators, a young man and a young woman, rose to start the telling
of his new chapter in the story of the American dream:

In these woods and among these Potomac hills the men of the Republic once
walked and rode and made their plans—dreaming of a great Federal City which
some day should be—the capital of a mighty nation. And out of their dream-
ing more than a hundred and fifty years ago this city has come to pass,

lj

Fairu or Our FatHers 111

The following morning the newspaper critics were kind and
sympathetic, but they were not sure that Green had accomplished
completely the task which he had set himself to do. It was, how-
ever, something almost naively patriotic, something intensely re-
ligious, something magnificantly poetic, which they had seen. As
they sat at their typewriters, with their consciences even then well
aware of the fighting not two months old in distant Korea for
those things in which our Founding Fathers believed, they knew
they had seen the ultimate victory of the dream which is Paul
Green’s and every true American’s.

In The New York Times Brooks Atkinson wrote with sincerity:

But the things I like most in Mr. Green’s drama are fleeting suggestions here
and there that in our years of destiny men thought that the country was going
to the dogs, that toxes were ruinous, the Government bankrupt and all poli-
ticians either fools or crooks. To give “Faith of Our Fathers” depth and
significance Mr. Green might go a little further into the natural bewilderment
and anxieties of the revered men who succeeded in getting us started. They
had to make courageous decisions that have affected the long life of the nation.
They had to put a practical foundation under the idealism of the charter.

XXVII. CONCLUSION

The planning and writing of historical regional dramas has con-
tinued to absorb Paul Green’s energies and gifts. “Hardly a day
goes by,” he says, “that I don’t get a letter from some section of
the United States asking me to come and write a symphonic drama
and help build a theatre to stage it in.” The development of this
movement gives him great satisfaction, since he feels it approaches
that people’s theatre which he has always desired to see established
in this country. “The true theatre must live among the people,”
not bottled up in “the hollow haunts of Broadway.” The coopera~
tive community nature of the Manteo, Williamsburg, and Wash-

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32 Paut GREEN OF CHAPEL Hii

ington dramas, the cheapness of admission to these spectacles, the
vast numbers of people who have enjoyed them—all are represent-
ative of what he would like to see in a genuine grassroots nation-
wide theatre.

He has travelled a great deal in California looking for the ideal
site for a future symphonic drama of the West. The beauty and
the colorful and pious history of the Spanish missions has at-
tracted him powerfully as a theme. “The days of those old
monks,” he muses, “moved to the rhythm of prayer. Everything
they did, waking and sleeping, cooking and eating, planting and
harvesting, was a religious rite... .” The Ojai Valley appeals
to him as probably the best place for building a great outdoor
theatre “under the dry and rainless stars.”

In his own state Green helped to select a site outside of Fay-
etteville and near Fort Bragg for the erection of an outdoor
theatre in which productions of The Highland Call could be re-
sumed. The intention of the community was to make of this an
annual celebration of the Scottish settlements in the Cape Fear
Valley.

Fortunately, no conclusion to this biography can be written.
Paul Green’s work is still very much in progress. A man of abun-
dant energy and vitality, he has a rich store of as yet unrealized
dreams and ideas. His work has shown both consistency and the
power to expand: consistency in the underlying theme of compas-
sion for and championship of those who are denied basic human
rights; expansion in enlarging these themes to an application be-
yond the bounds of locality.

From a point of view so near to a living writer, it is impossible
to say whether or not his books will supply that lack which Paul
Green himself deplored in 1928 when he said: “North Carolina
has made no lasting contribution to the art of the world.” Even
with a consideration of the towering figure of Thomas Wolfe,
who burst upon the scene in 1929, it is possible, looking back on

 

ConcLusion 113

the body of Green’s work, to say that Green has “with high-
minded and intelligent devotion” recorded the lives of his fellow
countrymen. He has been one of the most faithful and the most
illuminating interpreters of the rural life of North Carolina, and
through his intimate knowledge and understanding of one locality
has been able to interpret also the South. Good sense and good
judgment have made him willing to confine his writing to the
area of his own observation and knowledge; imagination of heart
and brain has enabled him to progress from that simple area to
larger concern with the fundamental problems of mankind. Pas-
sion for justice for the Negro and the sharecropper led in his
thinking to a passion for justice for all humanity, a belief in democ-
racy as a way of human righteousness. The social and economic
problems of Harnett County grew, in the historical plays, into
the problems of the young United States, and by implication, of
all human kind. Proff Koch used to admonish his students to
“Cast down your nets where you are.” Paul Green took that ad-
monition to heart, and in the familiar and the near-at-hand he
has found universality.

As an interpreter of the South, Green has followed an indi-
vidual as well as a thoroughly sincere course. He has avoided the
romanticism and sentimentality which he so vigorously condemned
in his first manifesto as editor of The Reviewer. He has also to a
large extent avoided that Gothic quality in Southern writing which
appears in the gargoyles and grotesques of realists such as Cald-
well and Faulkner. That this has not always been true of Green’s
work is illustrated by at least one macabre story about the man who
cheated the buzzards, and by his occasional preoccupation with
death. It probably cost him something to cut that burial scene
from The Common Glory. But on the whole his picture of the
South as he knows it has been free of romantic embroidery and
extravagances. In the steadiness and balance with which he has re-
garded the scene from his own angle of vision, he is not unlike

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114 Paut GREEN oF CHAPEL HILL

that otherwise so different novelist, Ellen Glasgow. He lacks her
irony, and the scenes which he depicts are farther from Richmond
in spiritual climate than in actual geography; but the temper of
observation, the sure knowledge of the familiar, the compassionate
understanding, the lack of distortion, are similar in tone. For
the most part, Green has been able to describe his section of the
South without getting too excited about it, without creating angels
and devils in a realm of fantasy. Perhaps in some plays, notably
Tread the Green Grass and Shroud My Body Down, he has suc-
cumbed to the Southern impulse toward the ornate and the
strange; but the main body of his published work concerns a very
real segment of the rural South, described with honesty and
sanity. His South is one of potential abundance of wasted and
eroded land, of cruel injustice and of true neighborliness, of
laughter and music and tragedy and courage and futility and as-
piration; in short, a region peopled by human beings instead of by
social and economic charts and ciphers and statistics, or by unrecog-
nizable grotesques.

The mood of his generation, and his own intrinsic sincerity, de-
termined that Green should write realistically. The poet that he
naturally is, however, has almost always been dominant. This
combination of poetry and realism forms part of the individual
quality not only of his interpretation of the South, but of his work
as a whole. Abraham McCranie inhabits a harshly realistic world
of denial and deprivation and crime; yet his dreams and aspiration,
his passion and his torture, are illuminated with poetry. In The
Common Glory, the American Revolution moves forward in all
the reality of human pain, but beyond this reality the author’s deep
understanding of heroic idealism lifts and shapes the play into a
poetic whole. It is a matter for speculation whether or not in a
different literary climate from the realistic one of the United
States in the 1920’s and 1930’s Paul Green might have written

CoNCLUSION 115

only poetry and poetic drama; it is a matter for gratitude that the
pull toward realism never overwhelmed the poet.

Poetry inheres not only in the lyrics of his plays, not only in
the quick response to beauty of all sorts, but most essentially
in his concern with noble issues and basic truths. He has never
let himself be drawn into writing meretriciously; he has never
denied his dedication to man’s long climb toward righteousness,
his profound convictions of justice and injustice, right and wrong.
In spite of his association with Hollywood, he has never written
with one eye on a possible sale to the movies; he has steadily and
consistently written what he believes with all the vigor of a sin-
cere and honest man.

Unlike most writers, Paul Green has written no book which can
be interpreted as autobiographical, although there are such pas-
sages, notably in This Body The Earth. In spite of the fact that
he is introspective to a degree, his creative energies have been
turned outward; he has used his own experiences, obviously, but
always to create characters other than himself. In all of his plays,
novels, and essays no one character can be singled out as the
author himself, in the sense that Eugene Gant and George Web-
ber are both Thomas Wolfe. Green has not yet told us, from with-
in himself, what it was like to be a young poet growing up on a
North Carolina farm in the years before World War I, nor how
he saw France and Belgium and the Western Front, nor what he
experienced as a mature and somewhat aloof student at the State
University, nor what his early successes, his continuing efforts
as a writer, with outward recognition balancing inner dissatisfac-
tion, have meant to him. Perhaps the clues to his personality must
always be sought, as his present biographer has done, through sug-
gestions in his published work.

From the early folk plays of his Playmaker days, to the de-
veloping and expanding regional dramatic productions typified
 

 

 

 

116 Paut GREEN oF CHAPEL HILL

by the symphonic dramas, Paul Green has remained true to his
purpose and his ambition to write plays about the people and for
the people, to be produced not by commercial backing, but with
the design of bringing music and poetry and color and drama with-
in easy reach of people in communities far from Broadway. In this
movement he has been an innovator. He has also pioneered in the
combination of music and drama in a closely interwoven form.
He has always suggested and pointed the way toward greater
harmonies of interpretation.

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