CHAPTER FIVE
Sappho’s Poetry
May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than sinew, sensitive than nerve.
—Theresa Cha, writing as Sappho1
LORRAINE WROTE TO HERSELF late on Christmas night in 1955: “It is curious how intellectual I have become about the whole thing—I don’t mean about you. I mean about me—and what I apparently am. My unhappiness has become a steady, calm quiet sort of misery. It is always with me and when for a moment something or other stirs me from its immediate ravages (thank God that is still possible)—I wonder at its absence. I suppose I am grateful that the overt hysteria has passed.”2
Around that time, Lorraine drafted a play called Flowers for the General. The protagonist, Maxine, is a college student whose schoolmate Marcia falls in love with her. Marcia is outed as a lesbian and attempts suicide. Maxine comforts Marcia, who in turn confronts Maxine with the knowledge that Maxine has also loved a woman. Maxine insists that despite her desires, she will marry her boyfriend anyway. It is a melodramatically composed and yet realistic story. It could have easily been true.
Critics write about Lorraine’s sexuality in varying ways. Some debate whether she should be outed as a lesbian. I believe that if we take her work seriously, we must talk about sexuality. I take the careful preservation of Lorraine’s writings in which she explored and expressed her sexuality seriously. Though her romantic relationships remain, for me, somewhat opaque, it is unquestionable that her desire for women and her love of women was meaningful as part of her politics, her intellectual life, and her aesthetics, as well as her spirit. I could not possibly write a portrait of her as an artist without it.
“IT.” Lorraine was intellectual about everything, including persistent desire and yearning. She was active too. She joined the Daughters of Bilitis. It was, as they were called back then, a homophile organization, devoted specifically to lesbians. The name came from Pierre Louys’s 1894 poetry collection The Songs of Bilitis. Louys’s verses personify one of Sappho’s courtesans, “Bilitis,” and Louys plied her with erotic poems. Daughters of Bilitis provided an obscure yet meaningful reference for the group. Founded in San Francisco by partners Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, within four years the organization grew from a small group of eight women to one with chapters in five cities and dozens of members. In 1956, they began publishing the Ladder, a magazine with articles, fiction, and opinion pieces all related to the lives of lesbian women. As with almost all the members, Lorraine’s belonging to the Daughters of Bilitis was quiet. It was dangerous to be out.
But Lorraine’s belonging was also passionate, as with most of what she committed to. She wrote two letters to the Ladder, both signed with her married-name initials: L.H.N. In the one she wrote in 1957, she displays a moving eagerness and intensity:
I’m glad as heck that you exist. You are obviously serious people and I feel that women, without wishing to foster any strict separatist notions, homo or hetero, indeed have a need for their own publications and organizations. Our problems, our experiences as women are profoundly unique as compared to the other half of the human race. Women, like other oppressed groups of one kind or another, have particularly had to pay a price for the intellectual impoverishment that the second class status imposed on us for centuries created and sustained. Thus, I feel that THE LADDER is a fine, elementary step in a rewarding direction.3
She ended the letter wanting to know how things were on the West Coast, and why there seemed to be more developed homophile organizing out there. Lorraine was an organizer, after all. “Considering Mattachine, Bilitis, ONE, all seem to be cropping up on the West Coast rather than here [on the East Coast] where a vigorous and active gay set almost bump one another off the streets—what is it in the air out there? Pioneers still? Or a tougher circumstance which inspires battle?”4
Lorraine’s letter to the Ladder several months later, in August, was less about sexuality and more about feminism. It reads less like a letter to the editor and more like a letter to Simone de Beauvoir. She wrote about how the hostility toward same-gender-loving people had the same root as the domination of women. And she believed that feminism had something to offer both. This might seem like a fairly commonplace understanding today, because we associate the liberation of women generally with the liberation of desire and human connection, but in 1957 feminism and lesbianism were not necessarily, and not frequently, understood as being at all connected. That Lorraine made them so was a sign of her holistic approach to exploring her place in the world and the world itself. She believed facing profound ethical questions of her age ought to be the province of women, not just men. In this endeavor, conventions of marriage, children, and sexuality would all necessarily be challenged according to Lorraine.
In November of 1958 Lyon and Martin traveled from California to the East Coast and during that trip they furtively met with Lorraine. In advance, they’d written her, and she invited them to come to her home. They called early, at 7 a.m. (Lorraine described herself as someone who usually woke up at 11 or 12), and despite her apparent irritation at the early morning hour, she welcomed them. They described her as “Smart, pretty, and gracious.”
They recalled, “She was very nice to us but said that she ‘just couldn’t get more involved’ with the Daughters.”5 By that time Lorraine was not officially a member of the Communist Party, although she still considered herself along the socialist-communist spectrum. But her politics were increasingly of her own critical fashioning. She was a feminist, anticolonialist, and Marxist, and her sexuality became an essential part of her thinking through human relations.
And “IT” changed her life. Her calendar attests to periods of lovely socializing. One gets the sense, however, that her depression, introversion, and relentless intellectualism sometimes got in the way. This is clear in a letter she wrote to Robert upon her first visit to Provincetown, a resort community in Massachusetts that, like Ajijic, was known to be welcoming to artists and gay and lesbian people. As usual, she was taken by the beauty of the landscape: “The setting is quite beyond anything you or anyone else (including the various and assorted writers) had described. This surely is nature more lovely and more perfect and dramatic than I have seen elsewhere in the world—it is marvelous in the original sense of the word.”6
Yet she also unloaded anxieties and insecurities in her letter to Bobby. This, too, was characteristically Lorraine. On the one hand, she is passionate and unflinching; on the other, a bit tender and nervous. She wrote of attending an art opening with the foreign editor of the Daily Worker, Joseph Starborin, and his wife. It was, according to Lorraine as she expected: “smeary, sick, meaningless contemptible trash.”7 Lorraine was surprised, however, that her company didn’t share her disaffection for the show. Doris Levin, a specialist in Asian antiquities and the wife of the Bauhaus-inspired jeweler Ed Wiener, curtly shut Lorraine up. Edwin Burgum, a literary critic and Marxist who taught at NYU, also disagreed with her. And it got even worse. She wrote: “I won’t go into it all here but suffice it to say that the Starborins make a great differentiation between abstract painting and non-objective painting and can go on at great and mistaken length about ‘more than one way to look at reality’ which is the worst of all bullshit when it comes to art, yes I am angry about it because at the back of their arguments seems to lie the idea that I am a bit of a sectarian who will outgrow it all as the ‘Soviets’ are doing??? ME—sectarian!”
It was odd for anyone to imply that Lorraine was fixated upon divisions within the left; after all, she was an ecumenical believer in freedom. On this point, it seems Burgum did defend her. But by that time she was already upset with the man she called “so heavily intellectual as to be tiresome . . . as well as historically inaccurate on occasion.”
Though insecure and disgruntled while there, Lorraine also exercised her artist’s gift for keen observation. “Already the main thing Provincetown reminds me of is Ajijic (Mexico). Same people, same circumstances, scenery, art shows and cocktail parties and I have been advised about six times already by different people that ‘one either likes it—or one doesn’t.’”8 Lorraine’s choice to spend the rest of her visit writing and alone indicates that she didn’t take to Provincetown as much as she had to Ajijic. Lorraine’s playful, critical, fiercely intellectual disposition was offset by her melancholy, a simultaneous yearning for solitude and a deep loneliness. The discomfort she experienced in various places no doubt intensified those feelings.
It is telling that she wrote to Robert about her time in Provincetown. Later, some of Lorraine’s friends saw Robert as “getting in the way” of her life as a lesbian. This was particularly a problem, according to a girlfriend-turned–friend, Renee Kaplan, once Lorraine became involved with Dorothy Secules, her longest relationship.9 Lorraine sometimes brought Robert, Dorothy, Renee, and others together socially, although I am not sure how successful that was. It certainly could have been awkward to have one’s husband always present in the middle of living a life as a young lesbian. And though Robert was deeply committed to ensuring Lorraine’s place in the canon of great American artists—even until his dying day—their attachment couldn’t have always been easy for him either after the romance had ended. Regardless, the ongoing connection was not one way. Robert was not merely holding on to Lorraine—Lorraine also held on to him—and he was, to all appearances, her best friend even when he angered and frustrated her. Theirs may not have been a romantic union, but it was a union.
From the perspective of someone who has spent years mining pages to see who Lorraine was as an artist, that Robert, his second wife, and her daughter left neatly maintained folders with her writings on lesbian themes is a gift to Lorraine and to those of us who love her that cannot be denied. Yes, the writings remained shrouded for many years. But they were maintained. His dedication to her craft extended decades beyond her life.
Among the pieces in those folders are the short stories Lorraine published in the Ladder, and also ONE, a homophile publication that featured more work about men than women. She did so under the pseudonym Emily Jones. It was her second pseudonym. According to the FBI, she also wrote articles for the socialist publication the Daily Worker under the nom de plume John Henry, after the steel-driving Black folk hero. That reference is clear. Emily Jones is more curious. The Jones perhaps was taken from Claudia Jones. Emily is intriguing. It could be that she was thinking of the poet Emily Dickinson, especially in her loneliest of days. Or maybe it was just that, together, Emily and Jones sounded like a nondescript and unidentifiable person.
The stories she wrote as Emily Jones, published and unpublished, were about love and desire. They are part of the early Lorraine, the writer before Raisin made it to Broadway. Her voice in them is tender.
“The Anticipation of Eve” was published in the December 1958 issue of ONE. The protagonist is a young newspaperwoman named Rita, short for Marguerite. She, like Lorraine, is a Midwesterner with a French name who has moved out East. The action of the story takes place on a visit to her cousin Sel, who is also a transplant from the Midwest and recently married. Sel and Dave have an infant son. Rita feels warmly toward them, and comes to their home with the hope of revealing a secret, thinking: “It is horrible to make a beautiful thing a dreadful secret, horrible for anyone.”10 Rita believes she can divulge her secret, because Sel and Dave are unconventional, they support Negro rights, and even (here Lorraine displays her cutting wit) men having beards. “It was because of all these things and others that I had decided to tell them about my secret—whose name was Eve.”11
But then Sel interrupts Rita’s internal conversation with her plan to set Rita up with a man named Kevin. Dave attempts to dissuade her, but Sel persists: “Let’s face it honey, you’re twenty-six. You’re beautiful and all that but you are twenty-six.”12 Sel’s insistence that she be married soon sticks in Rita’s throat as she realizes that, to Sel, marriage “was the beginning and end of life.” Sel says further, “You can’t go on living with roommates for the rest of your life Marguerite.” There is a small implication that perhaps Sel’s insistence is rooted in her suspicion. But Rita reflects, “I had been so careful about all the obvious things” and, moreover, “they had seen Eve only a few times and I rarely mentioned her at all. . . . I knew they had to consider my relationship with my roommate as cordial but perhaps a little unpleasant. . . . In three years Eve had remained an unimportant enigma to them.”13 Sel provokes further, implying Eve must be “loose” or in some other way shameful.
Rita loses the impulse to tell them about Eve: “Suddenly it all seemed very remote and alien; something that might after all in spite of beards and Negro equality, turn the simple good face into something hostile and painful and yes, frightened. It might be a terrible mistake.”14
Rita removes herself from the moment with her thoughts. She recalls meeting Eve while on an interview assignment and being both disturbed and compelled by her eyes. It is a sly inversion of the biblical story of Eve in which she is the temptation rather than the tempted.
Rita then thinks about how she, not Sel, was the pretty and desired one in their hometown. But now Sel believes she has something over Rita because she has adhered to conventions of womanhood. Rita has her own union, however. She thinks of Eve’s hands, one bearing the ring Rita gave her. She wears it even in public. And the gift that Eve offered Rita in return, “the little flat, gold heart, on the fragile almost invisible chain which she said could hide from the world, yet lie quite near my heart.”15
Perhaps she should tell them, she thinks, but is interrupted by the baby, “little Davie,” crying.
Rita is left alone with Dave. At first she suspects he knows: “Didn’t know how or how long, but I could see he knew.” But then it seems she is incorrect. Dave says, “‘This guy, this Kevin,’ he waved his hand in something that could have been an unfulfilled ballet gesture, ‘he’s gay as a Mardi Gras parade, you know what I mean?’”16
Rita likens the moment to being on the battlefield, when a man can feel only relief when he sees his buddy fall instead of him. She responds in the expected way, saying that his sexuality is horrible. “And then it was clear to me why I could hate myself. I realized at first that there had been a sadness in Dave, a trouble, a disturbance, but now a voice had concurred, had spoken from everyday and in front of my very eyes I saw his lips turn town.”17 Dave’s words are hateful, and Rita observes, “It was 1956 and the ‘clean’ were still casting out the lepers.”18
But something else is behind Dave’s words. He says he knows the guy well, he spent time with him, and that “he doesn’t want to be helped.”19 The sadness and disturbance in Dave’s face suggests there might be some intimacy and identification between Dave and Kevin . . . and Rita. This suggestion deepens as Dave cautions Rita not to tell Sel about Kevin.
This queer and layered moment is interrupted by Sel reentering the room with the baby. She tells Rita, “This is what being a woman is,”20 referring to the child in her arms. It is as though Lorraine has created in her the very embodiment of what she saw Simone de Beauvoir writing against. Lorraine wrote, regarding The Second Sex, “The problem then is not that woman has strayed too far from ‘her place’ but that she has not yet attained it; that her emergence into liberty is, thus far, incomplete, primitive even. She has gained the teasing expectation of self-fulfillment without the realization of it, because she is herself yet chained to an ailing social ideology which seeks always to deny her autonomy and more—to delude her into the belief that that which in fact imprisons her the more is somehow her fulfillment,”21 meaning the conventions of marriage, domesticity, and children.
Rita not only yearns for but also has found something else far more fulfilling. When she leaves her cousin’s apartment, it is as though she at once retreats and escapes. It is night, and Rita is enchanted by the sweetness of spring air and her anticipation of her Eve is not a damnation but a resurrection. At first, she rues the noble things she did not say to Sel, then doesn’t care, because
I could think only of flowers growing lovely and wild somewhere by the highways, of every lovely melody I had ever heard. I could think only of beauty, isolated and misunderstood but beauty still, and only beauty. Someone had spoken to me of something they thought was unclean and sick and I could think only of beauty and spring nights and flowers and lovely music. [. . .] Someday perhaps I might hold out my secret in my hand and sing about it to the scornful but if not I would more than survive. By the time I reached our block I was running.22
It is tempting to think of Lorraine’s cousin Shauneille whose name sounded close to Sel; whose husband was named Donald while Sel’s was named Dave. Shauneille and Lorraine were close, had grown up together in Chicago, and both moved to New York and became playwrights. But I cannot say this story is autobiographical, in whole or part. What I can say is that the tension she captured, between family and gender expectations and the way homophobia could crush intimacies in the most heartbreaking of ways even as romantic love made space for them, was absolutely real.
Two things stand out for me in Lorraine’s Emily Jones work. One is the importance of the out-of-doors. In her most famous published work, interior domestic spaces are always important, so much so that the apartments become characters. They are sites of intimate reckoning with large social forces and also the closest of relations. But in the Emily Jones work the moments of deepest reckoning happen in the public, whether outside or in restaurants or clubs. If anything, The Anticipation of Eve shows that this public space motif is not a simple metaphor for the difficulty of the closet and the desire for public recognition. Rather it seems as though a freedom from a certain form of domestic constraint gives breathing room, and possibility. Her characters yearn for fresh encounters and fresh air.
The second distinctive feature of the Emily Jones fiction, for me, is found in its aesthetics. Lorraine reveled in female beauty. She poked fun at Simone de Beauvoir’s hypocrisy in harshly judging women’s adornment: “The writer brilliantly destroys all myths of woman’s choice in becoming an ornament; and the charm of it is the photograph then on the dust jacket which presents a quite lovely brunette woman, in necklace and nail polish—Simone de Beauvoir.”23 Lorraine teasingly suggested that perhaps it was pleasure and not just constraint that shaped the Parisian philosopher’s style. Likewise Lorraine was unapologetic about her own appreciation of beauty, whether natural or artifice, writing, “Nor, need we despair for the promotion of beauty anywhere. Scent, jewelry, rouges have undoubtedly assumed some cultural identification with womanhood that hopefully will henceforth be independent of an association of the centuries of slavery which has been the lot of woman.”24
Apart from her pseudonymous fiction, Lorraine didn’t spend much time writing about women’s beauty. Maybe she worried that it would sound frivolous (or even too feminine) in comparison to the way many of her literary heroes wrote character descriptions. Perhaps she worried that her attentiveness to female beauty might be too revelatory. But in truth, these lush descriptions were in line with a tradition of Black women’s writing with which Lorraine was familiar, from Harlem Renaissance novelists Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset to the Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks.
And yet, most of the Emily Jones fiction doesn’t feature Black characters or focus upon race at all. It seems odd. Because it is not as though Lorraine thought race was superfluous when it came to her sexuality. She mentioned it in her letters to the Ladder. Maybe she avoided it for the same reason James Baldwin gave for not dealing with race in his 1956 queer novel Giovanni’s Room. He said of it in an interview,
I thought I would seal Giovanni off into a short story, but it turned into Giovanni’s Room. I certainly could not possibly have—not at that point in my life—handled the other great weight, the “Negro problem.” The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book. There was no room for it. I might do it differently today, but then, to have a black presence in the book at that moment, and in Paris, would have been quite beyond my powers.25
Maybe a discussion of race would have complicated matters for Lorraine too. Or it might have been the case that she was simply trying to provide what her largely white audience was seeking. Or she was depicting a world that seemed to have not yet made space for a woman like her, not really. There was already a long history of Black lesbian artists, writers, and musicians. But the downtown scene she traveled in was overwhelmingly white.
However, race is a theme in one of the published and at least one of the unpublished Emily Jones stories. In both, the Black woman character is opaque though admired and ultimately triumphant. There is hope in these works, and a bit of resentment.
“Chanson Du Konallis,” published in the Ladder in September 1958, begins with the sentence “She was exquisite,” referring to a Black jazz chanteuse.26 Though the protagonist, an upper-class, blond white woman named Konallia and nicknamed Konnie, observes her husband’s excitement about the singer somewhat mockingly, she is also captivated:
The cheek bones high; the full lips sensuous beyond description; and the eyes like dark slanted slashes across the face. . . . The eyes! Konnie shifted in her seat and looked quickly to the table. What a strange moment. It had happened before in life. On the street; parties; in classes in school years back; the thing of being surrounded by many people and finding another girl’s or woman’s eyes, commanding one, holding one’s own. It was extraordinary. Pleasant, she thought. No, not pleasant. Terrifying because of the kind of pleasure it brought.27
Konallia Martin Whitside, the reader learns, possessed a cultivated reserve that frustrated her husband. She prided herself on maintaining control over rebellious thoughts and spontaneous action. And yet this control is wildly overstated. Underneath the surface, Konallia’s fantasy about the woman is a sensuous spectacle, reminiscent of Jean Toomer’s classic Harlem Renaissance work of experimental fiction, Cane:
Egyptian queens . . . striding along mammoth corridors in the temples (or palaces or whatever the hell they usually strode along) graceful the way only queens could be (one was taught!) . . . in something white and tight and gathered at the hips with those long pleats hanging down to the golden sandal tops. . . . Anyhow—Egyptian queens . . . very young, very supple and very beautiful with the stiff black hair hidden under those curiously attractive head dresses. . . . No—not Cleopatra, she was Greek or something. This particular queen would be darker—like the Nile without moonlight; with high cheek bones and—full, impossibly sensuous lips—like—like her!28
Konallia struggles with the rules of her class and caste in this moment of pleasure. She asks herself, “Who were all those dead people who were deciding things from their graves?”29 Those past respected generations of illustrious attainment had nothing to do with her, not really, and yet she felt bound by their expectations.
Konnie’s husband, Paul, invites the singer, Mirine Tige, to the table. Mirine dismisses his small talk and condescending statements about France and turns the questions and comments on Konallia, asking her if she’d liked France and complimenting her accent (as Paul did of Mirine’s). Before departing to finish her singing, Mirine tells Konnie that she reminded her of someone she knew in France, by way of explaining her attentiveness. She calls meeting them pleasant, but Konnie thinks it was not pleasant, although there was pleasure. That is the difference between satisfaction and desire.
The story ends sadly. Her husband is sated, but Konnie expects she will have to drink to “make it easier.” And curse the figures of her desire: Paris, Egyptian queens, and a girl named Lila she once knew. There is a doubleness in this story. We have to imagine that Konnie, though a WASP, shared some of Lorraine’s own feelings of class and caste pressure. Lorraine was raised to “never betray the race” and to maintain middle-class respectability. Despite having scandalized her mother politically, she had mainly succeeded in being a proper bourgeois daughter. Living publicly as a lesbian would have been an entirely different matter.
And yet, Lorraine was also in a sense like Mirine. She was one of the few Black women and few political radicals in the lesbian set to which she belonged. She was different and likely faced projections of some fantastic imaginings of what her Blackness and womanhood meant. In truth, she saw herself, and other Black women, as more liberated than their white counterparts. Lorraine wrote, in an unpublished essay on Simone de Beauvoir, “We have been, even the black slave woman, paradoxically assuming perhaps the most advanced internal freedom from a knowledge of the mythical nature of male superiority inherent in our experience as chattel.”30
The dance between steeliness and vulnerability repeats itself throughout the Emily Jones fiction, and it is a reflection of Lorraine’s interior life. In her diaries and her letters she questions and judges herself, at times finds herself intolerable. She is melodramatic and even adolescent. When the writing treats queer sexuality, this personal vulnerability is fully expressed artistically. I do not think this is because her vulnerability existed wholly around her sexuality. After all, “she was scared of heights, tunnels, water, planes, elevators and hospitals.”31 She once wrote to Robert a panicked note in response to him having traveled by plane: “I can tell you know that that was a positively horrible Saturday that you all left on that damn thing—I am now convinced that they should be banned. . . . YOU ARE NEVER TO FLY AGAIN.” Put plainly, she was generally a scaredy cat. But when she wrote on queer themes she was better able to access that emotional register, a tense and immediate sense of fear, than anywhere else in her work.
Lorraine’s community of lesbian friends provided an important social world and undoubtedly facilitated her literary ventures in this period. One woman, however, stands out among the others. Molly Malone Cook was a Californian transplanted to the Village and five years Lorraine’s senior. She worked as a photographer for the Village Voice and later would build a life in Provincetown with her long-term partner, the poet Mary Oliver. When they were together, Molly took photographs of Lorraine. These photos are different from all the others and tell a story in and of themselves. In them, Lorraine does not have her race-woman armor on as she usually does. Nor is she posed. She is casual, tomboyish. Her hair is mussed. Her back curved, adolescent, languorous, and playful at once. The light and wonder that we know must have often been in her eyes, because of her wicked humor and deep curiosity, I have seen only Molly capture on camera. The images are a dance of love.
In general, Molly’s photographs are dynamic and social, sensitive yet lively. The subjects are clear, yet their edges are soft. Her portraits are painterly. As an artist she shared some things with Lorraine: a brilliance when it came to framing and staging the social and the intimate at once, a sensitivity to the dynamic relations between beings within the allotted space. Molly also shared Lorraine’s tenderness for vistas. They both made staging look natural. They were masters of portraiture. In that vein, the plays Lorraine would later write are novel-like. They include narratives beyond what is standard for theatrical productions. Their stage directions include epigraphs and sense making, not just scene setting. They are works of art that are composed for readers and also theatrical viewers. And, unsurprising from an author who started as a visual artist, their scenes beg to be painted, hence, the magnificent stills that remain from the Broadway productions.
Both Molly and Bobby were part of Lorraine’s life as she wrote Raisin. But only one is known publicly. As the story goes, one evening in the summer of 1957, Lorraine shared the play she was working on with Philip Rose. She and Bobby hosted him in their apartment at 337 Bleecker Street. I do not know if this was before or during or when her relationship was just beginning with Molly, but it doesn’t really matter for this anecdote. She and Bobby hosted together regardless of who she was with. Bobby and Lorraine fed Rose spaghetti for dinner and banana cream pie for dessert. And they read him the draft of the play. Rose was captivated by A Raisin in the Sun. The trio talked into the night and the next morning. After he had returned home, Rose called Lorraine and said he wanted to get the play to Broadway. It was a life-changing moment, and like many, one she shared with Bobby. The entanglement and intimacy, the way Bobby was a lifeline to her work, was unceasing, even as she was finding her way with lovers, including with Molly, who was her kindred spirit.
Years later, Mary Oliver would describe what I believe was Molly and Lorraine’s relationship, though she deliberately doesn’t name Molly’s lover as a matter of care and respect. Just suppose it was Lorraine. It would say something that rings so true:
In 1958 and 1959 she traveled by car across the country to California, leisurely, through the south and back through the northern states—taking pictures. She had, around this time, an affair that struck deeply, I believe she loved totally and was loved totally. I know about it, and I am glad. I have an idea of why the relationship thrived so and yet failed, too private for discussion also too obviously a supposition. Such a happening has and deserves its privacy. I only mean that this love, and the ensuing emptiness of its ending, changed her. Of such events we are always changed—not necessarily badly but changed. Who doesn’t know that, doesn’t know much.32
The fabric—dead ancestors, living expectations, a husband, a series of political causes, all those things mattered—but so had love.
Lorraine and Molly were together and then split as she was developing A Raisin in the Sun, around the time it went through tryouts in various cities, the cast was composed, and money was raised to put it on Broadway. Molly, someone with a brilliant eye for composition, must have seen and to some degree influenced what others would see on stage and film: the simple poignant triangles between characters at odds yet intimately bound. Reading her joint memoir with Mary Oliver, I came across a journal passage of Molly’s that I just knew had to be about Lorraine. Cook wrote sometime in the 1980s,
Last night I turned on the TV and there she was,
It was wild. Her voice. I couldn’t replay it.
She spoke only a few words. It was mind-boggling.
I wonder if I shall ever be able to
come back to listen and watch her again.
Strange I should have fixed the VCR just a
Moment before she came on.
Well I never thought I would see her again—
Knew I would never hear her voice again in
This world. Oh I did always think I would
See her again and hear her voice again but,
Not in this world.33
But I didn’t know for sure. I just felt it and hoped it. It seemed so right. After Molly and Lorraine’s relationship ended, perhaps around 1958, Molly drove across the country. Then she met Mary in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s home in Provincetown. They built a life. And Lorraine became famous.
After Raisin is also after Molly. Lorraine’s life changed. My story of her love life thereafter becomes even more impressionistic, but it deserves a bit more treatment here before I turn back to Lorraine’s work of writing and politics. For a while, Lorraine dated Ann Grifalconi, a public school teacher, writer, and visual artist who had been trained at Cooper Union. From some time in 1960 until her dying day, Lorraine loved Dorothy Secules, a fiercely opinionated and smart blonde who climbed the ladder from working as a receptionist at Loft Candy Company to an executive. Her eyes were bright blue; her gaze in photographs is knowing. From her high school yearbook photo I learned that Dorothy’s youthful nickname was Dick. Dorothy was there beside Lorraine at key life moments, as were other women. Lorraine wrote in her diaries of their beauty, her desires, time spent together on dates and in the most intimate, sweet moments. Though Lorraine sought out what she described as “women of accomplishment,” her lovers didn’t become interlocutors for Lorraine the artist. Perhaps they were inspirations for characters; probably they were. But to the extent that queerness appears in subsequent texts, and it does, it does not connect to specific women in any way that I have explicitly traced. Their company, however, brought threads of joy that appeared throughout her art and ideas.
In 1960, fresh off of the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine bought a building at 112 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. Dorothy was a renter and Lorraine took the top floor. The FBI was aware of this purchase, and agents looked for Lorraine there. The notes of the FBI agent who was following her describe how he physically checked all residences on Waverly Place from McDougall to Bank Street in the last week of March and the first week of April, but didn’t find her anywhere. On March 30, the agent used a pretext to ask Bobby about why he lived at 337 Bleecker Street while Lorraine lived elsewhere. Based upon his response, the agent wrote in his notes, “It is believed that the purpose for these two addresses is for business reasons inasmuch as during the above-mentioned pretext subject’s husband stated that his wife was unavailable for interview. The subject’s husband mentioned that this was the customary practice of his wife whenever she was engaged in writing.”34 The FBI seemed to have accepted this explanation because an interview with a mail carrier revealed that Lorraine was not receiving mail at Waverly Place but rather on Bleecker Street. It appears that thereafter the FBI stopped watching the Bleecker Street address.
In Lorraine’s datebook for March 28, 1960, as the FBI were attempting to surveil her domestic situation, she wrote to herself:
Are you happy in your present living? Or are you looking for something else, or do you just want to play? You see, I must know because it is Spring . . .
Have toys—will play
I wish to light up the stars again.
The FBI’s frustrated efforts to peer into her life coexisted with a marvelous though morose period of self-exploration. On April 1, 1960, she wrote two columns in her datebook titled “I like” and “I hate.” They read:
| I LIKE | I HATE |
| Mahalia Jackson’s music | Being asked to speak |
| My husband—most of the time | Speaking |
| getting dressed up | Too much mail |
| being admired for my looks | My loneliness |
| Dorothy Secules eyes | My homosexuality |
| Dorothy Secules | Stupidity |
| Shakespeare | Most television programs |
| Having an appetite | What has happened to |
| Slacks | Sidney Poitier |
| My homosexuality | Racism |
| Being alone | People who defend it |
| Eartha Kitt’s looks | Seeing my picture |
| Eartha Kitt | Reading my interviews |
| That first drink of Scotch | Jean Genet’s plays |
| To feel like working | Jean Paul Sartre’s writing |
| The little boy in “400 Blows” | Not being able to work |
| The way I look | Death |
| Certain flowers | Pain |
| The way Dorothy Talks | Cramps |
| Older Women | Being hung over |
| Miranda D’Corona’s accent | Silly women |
| Charming women | As silly men |
| And/or intelligent women | David Suskind’s pretensions |
| Sneaky love affairs.35 |
The lists are mundane and profound. The great joy of her sexuality and also its difficulty courses through them. Lorraine the passionate and opinionated intellect and the aesthete are there. One also gets a sense of how trying fame could be: from the challenge of writing again after one has become a star to the desire to be out of the public gaze and also her frustrations with superficiality. But on the other hand, she delighted in being physically admired. Contradictions are a universal part of the human personality. Hers are fascinating: a vast intellect and a girlish charm, wisdom and wonder, pensive and playful, depression and exultation. These lists were two of the first publicly circulated artifacts asserting Lorraine’s sexuality. They were, in a sense, irrefutable evidence of the sort that travels quickly in the digital age. Their loveliness aided their circulation. Essays and articles have been written about these lists, and there could be more. It is a testament to the delicate strength of her pen that even this exercise in simple accounting became poetry.
When I first read the lists, my eyes kept returning to the items I especially liked: Eartha Kitt (it seems Orson Welles was not the only one who found her the most exciting woman in the world) and “the little boy in ‘400 Blows.’” The François Truffaut film was just a year old when Lorraine was writing. It starred a troubled boy named Antoine who is treated with clinical distance and disdain by his mother and stepfather. Antoine is also mistreated at school. Anguished, he becomes a truant and a runaway. He is ultimately jailed for stealing a typewriter, and then sent to a reformatory school by his mother where he receives psychoanalytic counseling. In the facility, the children are berated and brutalized for their failures to be properly disciplined according to the rules of gender, sexuality, and decorum. A film that begins as Antoine’s desire for connection becomes Antoine’s quest for emancipation. In the final scene he escapes from a soccer game at the facility. He slips under a fence and runs until he reaches the ocean. The final scene is a close-up of his face as he stands in the water.
Lorraine wrote this list in the early days of her fame. Her deep ambivalence about it is palpable. In 400 Blows, Antoine escapes to the shoreline. He also escapes from the game. Lorraine loved the little boy, and she did not.