Antonin Artaud, Man of Vision by Bettina Knapp (review)

1970 BOOK REVIEWS 231 NEGRO PLAYWRIGHTS IN THE AMERICAN THEATRE, 1925-1959, by Doris E. Abramson. Columbia University Press, 1969. $12.50 clothbound. $2.95 paperback.. Miss Abramson has a wonderful subject, pUlsating with life-unexplored tracts of the past, leading up to an exciting present; more, a work of constructive criticism could hold seminal power for the future. She does nothing with it. Instead she offers a drab specimen of routine research. and inadequately carried out at that. I can see little evidence of serious research outside the New York scene. In her preamble she does not mention the Hapgood Players, the Horizon Guild, or the Chicago Ethiopian Art Theatre of 1923, or Detroit's later Concept East~ She does not mention Willis Richardson's plays; Chip Woman's Fortune inaugurated the Chicago Theatre. Richardson lacked dramatic technique, but compensated by vigor of language. More serious is the omission of Angelina Grimke's Rachel, a grim story handled with considerable skill. and a much more important work than most of the plays she cites. Again, there is a totally inadequate account of the vital meeting in November 1950, at which the Council on the Harlem Theatre was formed; the resolutions passed at that meeting were of major importance, as Miss Abramson ought to know, since she quotes an insignificant sentence from an article by Loften Mitchell which discusses them; she does not mention Harold Holifield, Gertrude Jeanette or Julian Mayfield, whose plays were performed there, and one wonders whether the only way of following up Ossie Davis's Alice in Wonder, about which we would like to know more, was a letter to the playwright. Again, her bibliography does not mention Darwin Turner's article on "The Negro Dramatist's Image of the Universe" in CLA. Journal for 1961; it contains DuBois's articles in Crisis in April 1915 and july 1918 but not his more relevant article of May 1962; it contains Hoyt Fuller's symposium in Negro Digest for January 1968, but not his "Black Theatre in America" in April (though items are included up to May of that year) nor Owen Dodson's article is the same issue; it does not cite Liberator at all, though Clebert Ford had an important study of Lorraine Hansberry in 1964 and there have been other useful papers. Critically too the work is defective. Of course you can't go far wrong in dealing with the unfamiliar, and her account of William. Wells Brown's The Escape or Joseph S. Cotter's Caleb the Degenerate is of some interest. But when we come to A Raisin in the Sun we are aware that Miss Abramson is working with no critical tools; she rejects detailed analysis and gives us a hotch-potch, ending with a few snippets of second-hand judgments, and no comprehensive evaluation at all: yet there was a rare chance for the reappraisal of a play which at least held the significance of success. It is noticeable that in her brief account of Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie, she quotes perhaps seven conflicting evaluations without giving any judgment of her own of this important play. Above all she is unable to look at her theme from the inside, to enter into and communicate the problems and challenges which face the black playwright, and which have faced him in a slightly different social climate. What a missed opportunity. What a pity. JOHN FERGUSON The Open University, London ANTONIN ARTAUD, MAN OF VISION, by Bettina Knapp, with a preface by by Anais Nin. New York: David Lewis, 1969. 233 pp. $6.95. When Antonin Artaud died in 1968, he had for a couple of years been released from a mental institution. He had been confined for almost ten years. Although 232 MODERN DRAMA September in his difficult life he was always aided by a small circle of friends and had gained some respect if not celebrity as a writer in Paris, he was thought of essentially as the author of The Theater and its Double, a gifted but pathetic failure who was unfortunately mentally unstable. In the United States, his name was virtually unknown . The situation has changed. Artaud...