Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago before Stonewall

18. Negro Arts and Literature

206 18 Negro Arts and Literature In 1934 Gertrude Stein visited Chicago to attend the opening of Four Saints in Three Acts, an opera she wrote to Virgil Thompson’s music with an all­black cast. Chicago was also the birthplace of Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote the play Raisin in the Sun; the adventurous hobo Willard Motley, whose novel Knock on Any Door became a Hollywood film; and in the Chicago Defender, “Simple,” the creation of Langston Hughes. In the first half of the twentieth century, African American theater groups staged plays intended for a black audience, while Caucasian groups strived for a white audience. One production that broke down that barrier by showing an all-black cast to a white audience was the opera Four Saints in Three Acts, with a libretto by Gertrude Stein and music by Virgil Thompson , both gay Americans living in Paris. In fact, Four Saints broke all the rules of theater; for example, when the opera opened at New York’s Wadsworth Athenaeum, the audience was brought to tears, a remarkable feat given the opera made no sense whatsoever. Even the title is misleading— Four Saints in Three Acts—the piece has four acts and features many, many saints. Nobody was surprised that an incomprehensible opera with a puzzling “plot” could stream from Stein’s pen, as she believed the sound of a word was more important than its meaning. She did with words what Picasso did with paint. Stein’s book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) was Negro Arts and Literature 207 published six months before the opening of Four Saints, and made her a bona fide star. Four Saints fell into the category of modernism, in which the artist intentionally discards traditional thought and seeks new ways to express ideas. Steven Watson, in his book Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism (1998), suggests that Four Saints was “developed hand in hand with the largely homosexual constellation of Harvard-trained art professionals who would define modernist taste in America.” After its successful run on Broadway, Four Saints opened in Chicago at the Auditorium Theatre on November 7, 1934. Stein and her entourage— her lover Alice B. Toklas, and the author and photographer Carl Van Vechten—flew into town from New York; it was Stein and Toklas’s first flight in an airplane. A solitary policeman was sent to the airport to guard Stein from “mobs of pursuers.” According to that day’s Chicago American, Stein’s press agent was heard to remark: “Oh, my dear, did you ever see so many persons so naively excited?” One reporter asked Stein about her book Tender Buttons. “Just when are buttons tender?” asked the reporter. “I don’t know,” answered Stein. “You’ll have to ask the buttons.” Although Four Saints had an all-black cast, the African American paper the Chicago Defender didn’t seem interested in the opera; its existence was noted, but beyond that nothing. The opening night was a major society event, with the Chicago American of November 8, 1934, reporting that Stein wore “a rich well-made dress of prune colored faille, she wore a single diamond brooch at her throat, a spray of orchids pinned where it seemed easiest to pin them, brown woolen hose, low-heeled walking slippers and—to and from the theater—the same smug and shapeless velvet cap she was wearing when she arrived at the airport earlier in the day.” The paper also noted the confusion of the audience: “It was with mixed emotions that society witnessed the premiere of Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, last night at the Auditorium. Whether to laugh it off or admit that it ‘had something’ . . . or give up and retire to the bar and forget about it—the veteran opera-goers couldn’t quite decide.” Another critic in the same paper wrote: The notoriety of this opera is due largely to the reputation of the librettist, but such value as the work possesses is due entirely to the composer. . . . A sillier and more meaningless book of words can scarcely be imagined. . . . Negro Arts and Literature 208 Mr. Thompson has created a trickle of music, much of it rather charming, and spread it thin through the arid wastes of Miss Stein’s nonsense. He finishes with: “We shall not see ‘Four Saints’ again and we...