From Village Voice, August 12, 1959, pp. 7–8. Reprinted by permission of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust.
A man can’t go out the way he came in … Ben, that funeral will be massive!
—Willy Loman, 1946We have all thought about your offer, and we have decided to move into our house.
—Walter Lee Younger, 1958
Some of the acute partisanship revolving around A Raisin in the Sun is amusing. Those who announce that they find the piece less than fine are regarded in some quarters with dramatic hostility, as though such admission automatically implies the meanest of racist reservations. On the other hand, the ultra-sophisticates have hardly acquitted themselves less ludicrously, gazing coolly down their noses at those who are moved by the play, and going on at length about “melodrama” and/or “soap opera” as if these are not completely definable terms which cannot simply be tacked onto any and all plays we do not like.
Personally, I find no pain whatever—at least of the traditional ego type—in saying that Raisin is a play which contains dramaturgical incompletions. Fine plays tend to utilize one big fat character who runs right through the middle of the structure, by action or implication, with whom we rise or fall. A central character as such is certainly lacking from Raisin. I should be delighted to pretend that it was inventiveness, as some suggest for me, but it is, also, craft inadequacy and creative indecision. The result is that neither Walter Lee nor Mama Younger loom large enough to monumentally command the play. I consider it an enormous dramatic fault if no one else does. (Nor am I less critical of the production which, by and large, performance and direction alike, is splendid. Yet I should have preferred that the second-act curtain, for instance, had been performed with quiet assertion rather than the apparently popular declamatory opulence which prevails.)
All in all, however, I believe that, for the most part, the play has been magnificently understood. In some cases, it was not only thematically absorbed but attention was actually paid to the tender treacherousness of its craft-imposed “simplicity.” Some, it is true, quite missed that part of the overt intent and went on to harangue the bones of the play with rather useless observations of the terribly clear fact that they are old bones indeed. More meaningful discussions tended to delve into the flesh which hangs from those bones and its implications in mid-century American drama and life.
In that connection it is interesting to note that while the names of Chekhov, O’Casey, and the early Odets were introduced for comparative purposes in some of the reviews, almost no one—with the exception of Gerald Weales in Commentary—discovered a simple line of descent between Walter Lee Younger and the last great hero in American drama to also accept the values of his culture, Willy Loman. I am sure that the already mentioned primary fault of the play must account in part for this. The family so overwhelms the play that Walter Lee necessarily fails as the true symbol he should be, even though his ambitions, his frustrations, and his decisions are those which decisively drive the play on. But however recognizable he proves to be, he fails to dominate our imagination and finally emerges as a reasonably interesting study, but not, like Arthur Miller’s great character—and like Hamlet, of course—a summation of an immense (though not crucial) portion of his culture.
Then too, in fairness to the author and to Sidney Poitier’s basically brilliant portrayal of Walter Lee, we must not completely omit reference to some of the prior attitudes which were brought into the theater from the world outside. For in the minds of many, Walter remains, despite the play, despite performance, what American radical traditions wish him to be: an exotic. Some writers have been astonishingly incapable of discussing his purely class aspirations and have persistently confounded them with what they consider to be an exotic being’s longing to “wheel and deal” in what they further consider to be (and what Walter never can) “the white man’s world.” Very few people today must consider the ownership of a liquor store as an expression of extraordinary affluence, and yet, as joined to a dream of Walter Younger, it takes on, for some, aspects of the fantastic. We have grown accustomed to the dynamics of “Negro” personality as expressed by white authors. Thus, de Emperor, de Lawd, and, of course, Porgy, still haunt our frame of reference when a new character emerges. We have become romantically jealous of the great image of a prototype whom we believe is summarized by the wishfulness of a self-assumed opposite. Presumably there is a quality in human beings that makes us wish that we were capable of primitive contentments [sic]; the universality of ambition and its anguish can escape us only if we construct elaborate legends about the rudimentary simplicity of other men.
America, for this reason, long ago fell in love with the image of the simple, lovable, and glandular “Negro.” We all know that Catfish Row1 was never intended to slander anyone; it was intended as a mental haven for readers and audiences who could bask in the unleashed passions of those “lucky ones” for whom abandonment was apparently permissible. In an almost paradoxical fashion, it disturbs the soul of man to truly understand what he invariably senses: that nobody really finds oppression and/or poverty tolerable. If we ever destroy the image of the Black people who supposedly do find those things tolerable in America, then that much-touted “guilt” which allegedly haunts most middle-class white Americans with regard to the Negro question would really become unendurable. It would also mean the death of a dubious literary tradition, but it would undoubtedly and more significantly help toward the more rapid transformation of the status of a people who have never found their imposed misery very charming.
My colleagues and I were reduced to mirth and tears by that gentleman writing his review of our play in a Connecticut paper who remarked of his pleasure at seeing how “our dusky brethren” could “come up with a song and hum their troubles away.” It did not disturb the writer in the least that there is no such implication in the entire three acts. He did not need it in the play; he had it in his head.
For all these reasons then, I imagine that the ordinary impulse to compare Willy Loman and Walter Younger was remote. Walter Lee Younger jumped out at us from a play about a largely unknown world. We knew who Willy Loman was instantaneously; we recognized his milieu. We also knew at once that he represented that curious paradox in what the English character in that English play could call, though dismally, “The American Age.” Willy Loman was a product of a nation of great military strength, indescribable material wealth, and incredible mastery of the physical realm, which nonetheless was unable, in 1946, to produce a typical hero who was capable of an affirmative view of life.
I believe it is a testament to Miller’s brilliance that it is hardly a misstatement of the case, as some preferred to believe. Something has indeed gone wrong with at least part of the American dream, and Willy Loman is the victim of the detour. Willy had to be overwhelmed on the stage as, in fact, his prototypes are in everyday life. Coming out of his section of our great sprawling middle class, preoccupied with its own restlessness and displaying its obsession for the possession of trivia, Willy was indeed trapped. His predicament in a New World where there just aren’t any more forests to clear or virgin railroads to lay or native American empires to first steal and build upon, left him with nothing but some leftover values which had forgotten how to prize industriousness over cunning, usefulness over mere acquisition, and, above all, humanism over “success.” The potency of the great tale of a salesman’s death was in our familiar recognition of his entrapment which, suicide or no, is deathly.
What then of this new figure who appears in American drama in 1958; from what source is he drawn so that, upon inspection, and despite class differences, so much of his encirclement must still remind us of that of Willy Loman? Why, finally, is it possible that when his third-act will is brought to bear, his typicality is capable of a choice which affirms life? After all, Walter Younger is an American more than he is anything else. His ordeal, give or take his personal expression of it, is not extraordinary but intensely familiar like Willy’s. The two of them have virtually no values which have not come out of their culture, and to a significant point, no view of the possible solutions to their problems which do not also come out of the self-same culture. Walter can find no peace with that part of society which seems to permit him and no entry into that which has willfully excluded him. He shares with Willy Loman the acute awareness that something is obstructing some abstract progress that he feels he should be making; that something is in the way of his ascendancy. It does not occur to either of them to question the nature of this desired “ascendancy.” Walter accepts, he believes in the “-world” as it has been presented to him. When we first meet him, he does not wish to alter it; merely to change his position in it. His mentors and his associates all take the view that the institutions which frustrate him are somehow impeccable, or, at best, “unfortunate.” “Things being as they are,” he must look to himself as the only source of any rewards he may expect. Within himself, he is encouraged to believe, are the only seeds of defeat or victory within the universe. And Walter believes this and when opportunity, haphazard and rooted in death, prevails, he acts.
But the obstacles which are introduced are gigantic; the weight of the loss of the money is, in fact, the weight of death. In Walter Lee Younger’s life, somebody has to die for ten thousand bucks to pile up—if then. Elsewhere in the world, in the face of catastrophe, he might be tempted to don the saffron robes of acceptance and sit on a mountain top all day contemplating the divine justice of his misery. Or, history being what it is turning out to be, he might wander down to his first Communist Party meeting. But here in the dynamic and confusing postwar years on the South Side of Chicago, his choices of action are equal to those gestures only in symbolic terms. The American ghetto hero may give up and contemplate his misery in rose-colored bars to the melodies of hypnotic saxophones, but revolution seems alien to him in his circumstances (America), and it is easier to dream of personal wealth than of a communal state wherein universal dignity is supposed to be a corollary. Yet his position in time and space does allow for one other alternative: he may take his place on any one of a number of frontiers of challenge. Challenges (such as helping to break down restricted neighborhoods) which are admittedly limited because they most certainly do not threaten the basic social order.
But why is even this final choice possible, considering the ever-present (and ever so popular) vogue of despair? Well, that is where Walter departs from Willy Loman; there is a second pulse in his still dual culture. His people have had “somewhere” they have been trying to get for so long- that more sophisticated confusions do not yet bind them. Thus, the weight and power of their current social temperament intrudes and affects him, and it is, at the moment, at least, gloriously and rigidly affirmative. In the course of their brutally difficult ascent, they have dismissed the ostrich and still sing, “Went to the rock, to hide my fare, but the rock cried out: ‘No hidin’ place down here!’” Walter is, despite his lack of consciousness of it, inextricably as much wedded to his special mass as Willy was to his, and the moods of each are able to decisively determine the dramatic typicality. Furthermore, the very nature of the situation of American Negroes can force their representative hero to recognize that for his true ascendancy he must ultimately be at cross-purposes with at least certain of his culture’s values. It is to the pathos of Willy Loman that his section of American life seems to have momentarily lost that urgency; that he cannot, like Walter, draw on the strength of an incredible people who, historically, have simply refused to give up.
In other words, the symbolism of moving into the new house is quite as small as it seems and quite as significant. For if there are no waving flags and marching songs at the barricades as Walter marches out with his little battalion, it is not because the battle lacks nobility. On the contrary, he has picked up in his way, still imperfect and wobbly in his small view of human destiny, what I believe Arthur Miller once called “the golden thread of history.” He becomes, in spite of those who are too intrigued with despair and hatred of man to see it, King Oedipus refusing to tear out his eyes but attacking the Oracle instead. He is that last Jewish patriot manning his rifle in the burning ghetto at Warsaw; he is that young girl who swam into sharks to save a friend a few weeks ago; he is Anne Frank, still believing in people; he is the nine small heroes of Little Rock; he is Michelangelo creating David and Beethoven bursting forth with the Ninth Symphony. He is all those things because he has finally reached out in his tiny moment and caught that sweet essence which is human dignity, and it shines like the old star-touched dream that it is in his eyes. We see, in the moment, I think, what becomes, and not for Negroes alone, but for Willy and all of us, entirely an American responsibility.
Out in the darkness where we watch, most of us are not afraid to cry.
1. Editor’s note: Catfish Row is the fictional setting of Porgy and Bess, based on Cabbage Row in Charleston, South Carolina.