Notes
NOTES chapter . the background . A new coast guard (to use the newer terminology) station was built down the beach from the old one. Both the old and the new figure in Susan Glaspell’s play The Outside, first done by the Provincetown Players in . chapter . edmund wilson’s provincetown in the twenties and thirties . The most interesting of these is the unjustly forgotten Love Among the Cape Enders (). Its broad canvas surveys Provincetown in its halcyon days. Many of the quirky characters are modeled on real people, the most famous of whom is Eugene O’Neill (Bill Travis in the novel). All in all, Kemp creates a mock-epic, teeming with literary allusions as well as references to historical events (the visit of a Portuguese naval flotilla bearing wine to the Prohibition-deprived residents, the ugly confrontation between the local Ku Klux Klan and Catholics). All this plays out against a powerfully rendered natural background. Bathos turns to tragedy. Human passions, as intense as they are often misplaced, bring fulfillment to some, death to others. Sexual desire coexists with mystical philosophy. The “liberation” sought by the Cape Enders (read “Dead-Enders” for some), natives and bohemians alike, hardly makes them happy, but it affords us, the readers, an unforgettable view into a crazy exuberant world whose bubble was soon going to burst. . Susan Glaspell (–) came to Provincetown from the Midwest with her husband George Cram Cook in ; in they bought a house at Commercial Street. The couple would also buy a farmhouse on Higgins Hollow Road in Truro (near the Millay rental of ). Glaspell then built on the property a tiny studio among the pines. Here, away from the Provincetown seasonal mayhem, she could concentrate on her writing. Cook, whom everyone called “Jig,” was older than Susan and had left his previous wife and two children to begin a new life with Glaspell. A dynamo of manic energy, Cook wrote poetry, fiction, philosophicalpolitical tracts; most important for posterity, he founded the Provincetown Players and then established it in New York. He spent his last years in Greece, whose culture , ancient and modern, irresistibly attracted him. He was accepted and revered by the local people around Delphi, where he settled. After his death in Greece in , Glaspell wrote a romantic memoir, mostly about him, Road to the Temple. By far the better writer of the two, Glaspell is today best remembered for her hardhitting plays. (The advice to turn to playwriting from fiction came from her hus- band.) The Outside () presents a haunting evocation of Provincetown’s outer reaches. The one-act play’s setting is a former lifesaving station modeled on the O’Neill house (which Wilson later rented). Its occupants are two unhappy women: Mrs. Patrick, a rich cosmopolitan whose husband has left her, and Allie Mayo (played by Glaspell in the first Provincetown Players production), the local woman she employs as a servant. Allie has lost her husband, a fisherman, at sea many years earlier. When the coastguardsmen bring the body of a drowned man into the house, both women are forced to confront the dead inertia of their lives. Their attitude contrasts with that of the homespun coastguardsmen, who must face death often, while having accepted the mission to save lives wherever possible. Face-toface with the corpse on the floor, the women overcome the silence that has stifled their communication with each other and the world outside. They speak of the trees that sustain the land in its ongoing struggle with the ever-encroaching sea. Allie senses the oncoming spring, which promises hope to this desolate, hurtful place. At the end, when the coastguardsmen remove the dead man, even Mrs. Patrick acknowledges the Outside (i.e., the Atlantic), not just as a taker of life, but as a challenge to the living. One of Glaspell’s best novels, Fugitive’s Return (), also shows a lonely, heartbroken woman against a Cape Cod landscape. The overall moral is similar to the play’s: it involves transcending self-centered suffering in favor of an active commitment to lived life. By advocating female solidarity and mutual assistance over heterosexual love, the novel bears a distinct feminist message. It traces the odyssey of Irma-Lee Shroeder, an Iowan, who moves with her architect husband to a Cape Cod community like Truro (where Cook and Glaspell had bought an old farmhouse ). After the heroine’s husband leaves her, their young daughter dies. The story begins with Irma-Lee...
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