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WHERE’S THE BARBED WIRE?  
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John Lahr
May 2, 2024
London Review of Books
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_ Hartigan’s book is the first full-length examination of
Wilson’s life and art since his death in 2005 from liver cancer.
There is both a need and demand for the story of how he and his work
came to be. _

August Wilson, Wikipedia

 

August Wilson: A Life 
by Patti Hartigan
[[link removed]].
_Simon and Schuster, 531 pp., £30, August
2023, 978 1 5011 8066 8_

August Wilson​ wrote standing up at an accountant’s desk on which
he had pinned the mottos ‘Take it to the moon’ and ‘Don’t be
afraid, just play the music.’ His Century cycle, whose ten plays
bear witness to African American experience in the 20th century,
decade by decade, turned historical catastrophe into imaginative
triumph. It has no equal in theatrical literature. In its ambition and
achievement, Wilson’s Herculean endeavour outdid even Eugene
O’Neill, who completed only two of his projected eleven-play cycle.
‘I took it as my credo,’ Wilson wrote, ‘and sought to answer
James Baldwin’s call for a profound articulation of the Black
tradition that could sustain a man once he left his father’s
house.’

With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out to
dramatise the ‘dazed and dazzling ... rapport with life’ which
allowed African Americans to navigate a white world not of their
making, a world that did not recognise their gods, their manners,
their mores or their humanity. ‘I happen to think that the content
of my mother’s life,’ Wilson said, ‘her myths, her
superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry, the smell of
her kitchen, the song that escaped from her sometimes parched lips,
her thoughtful repose and pregnant laughter – are all worthy of
art.’ He added: ‘There’s no idea in the world that is not
contained by Black life.’

Wilson spent more than twenty years on the Century cycle, writing the
first play in 1979 and the last in 2005. Behind his desk was an
Everlast punching bag. When he was in full flow, he sometimes pivoted
in exhilaration and unleashed a barrage of jabs at it. By 2001, when I
visited the neon-lit Seattle basement that served as his office for
a _New Yorker_ profile, he had pummelled the bag so hard he’d
knocked it off its chain. Between bouts of writing, he retreated to a
corner chair to smoke and to listen to his characters.

Marion McClinton, the director of his later plays, called Wilson
‘the heavyweight champion’. He was referring to his great
undertaking, but with his large forehead, broad chest and heavy-set
frame Wilson looked the part. His fight was not in the ring, however.
‘What we lack,’ he wrote in 1995, ‘is the ability to give the
ideas and images we have of ourselves a widespread presence.’
Wilson’s portrayal of the struggles, manners, humour and ceremonies
of Black Americans challenged both white America’s cultural
indifference and what Zora Neale Hurston called ‘the muteness of
slavery’. ‘The average, struggling, non-morbid Negro is the
best-kept secret in America,’ Hurston said as late as 1950.
Wilson’s first commercial play, _Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom_,
staged in 1984, may have been experienced by Black audiences as
testimony; to white audiences it was still news.

In their theatrical dramatisation down the decades from property to
personhood, Wilson’s unmoored characters form a kind of fever chart
of the trauma of slavery. In its historical trajectory the Century
cycle takes African Americans through the shock of freedom in the
1900s (_Gem of the Ocean_); the reassembling of identity in the 1910s
(_Joe Turner’s Come and Gone_); the struggle for power in the 1920s
(_Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom_); the dilemma of embracing the history
of slavery in the 1930s (_The Piano Lesson_); the promises made and
broken to those who served in the Second World War (_Seven Guitars_);
the fraught adaptation to the bourgeois values of the 1950s
(_Fences_); the continuing injustices of the 1960s (_Two Trains
Running_); disenfranchisement during the capitalist takeovers of the
1970s and 1980s (_Jitney_, _King Hedley II_); and troubled
assimilation into the mainstream in the 1990s (_Radio Golf_).

Taken collectively, the plays dispute America’s myth of itself as a
redeemer nation. The white immigrants who arrived on its shores left
their past for a better future; Africans had their past taken away.
This historical calamity was also a spiritual one. In life, Wilson
suffered this tormenting nostalgia and wrote out of it – ‘the
blood’s memory’, he called it. The cycle incarnated the redemptive
power of tradition in the character of Aunt Ester (‘ancestor’),
who appears in four of the plays. She lives at 1839 Wylie Avenue in
Pittsburgh and at the age of 349 is as old as slavery. ‘I keep my
memories alive. I got to feed them otherwise they’d eat me up. I’m
carrying them for a lot of folk. All the old-timey folks,’ she says
in _Gem of the Ocean_. Citizen Barlow visits her wanting his
afflicted soul ‘washed’; Aunt Ester works her voodoo and
imaginatively connects him to his past – the City of Bones, where
millions of slaves drowned on the Middle Passage. He leaves ‘reborn
as man of the people’, according to the stage directions. Wilson was
both a necromancer communicating with the dead and a pilgrim
‘walking down the landscape of the self’, as he described it.
‘It is in many ways a remaking of the self in which all of the parts
have been realigned, redistributed and reassembled into a new being of
sense and harmony.’

Wilson, whose given name was Frederick August Kittel, was born in 1945
into a family where racial division was the undertow of his parents’
feud. He was the much wanted first son and fourth of six children born
to Daisy Wilson, an African American, and Frederick (‘Fritz’)
Kittel, a German baker. ‘I don’t think he ever fit here in
America,’ Fritz’s eldest child, Freda Kittel, told me. ‘I
don’t think he ever accepted Black people. Or the culture. I think
for my whole family there’s a deep sense of abandonment.’ The
family lived in a $40-a-month apartment in the Hill (known locally as
Little Harlem), a lively mixed community, a five-minute drive from
downtown Pittsburgh. Wilson remembered his father being ‘mostly not
there. You stayed out of his way if he was.’ But Wilson was privy to
many of Fritz’s violent drunken scenes: throwing bricks at their
window, which forced the children to take cover under the bed;
trampling to smithereens the bags of pastries he’d brought home to
feed the family; ripping the stove door off the cooker at a
Thanksgiving dinner. On the rare occasions when Fritz was at home and
sober his very presence was tyrannical. ‘We had to sit down. We were
not allowed to talk,’ Freda recalled. ‘We were not allowed to
play. It was complete silence.’

Daisy doted on August and, according to Freda, ‘felt that August was
the best and smartest’ of her brood. (He had an IQ of 143.) Daisy
told her children to ‘be the best of whatever you are.’ ‘She
made me believe that I could do anything,’ Wilson said years later.
He became, inevitably, the apple of his own eye too. He was
competitive, a bad loser, and porous: at once highly sensitive and hot
tempered. (‘He broke my jaw with one punch,’ his sister Donna
reported; she was 21 at the time.) Even as a youngster Wilson
exhibited the imperiousness of an idolised child. In the
neighbourhood, he answered to the nickname ‘Napoleon’.

As a teenager, however, most of his battles with the world ended in
retreat. He quit his mostly white prep school, Central Catholic, after
punching out a student for a racist taunt – there went the dream of
getting into Notre Dame and becoming a lawyer. He quit Clifford B.
Connelley Trade School after a teacher knocked him off his stool –
there went his chance to learn a trade. At Gladstone High School, at
the age of fifteen, he ripped up his typed twenty-page paper on
‘Napoleon’s Will to Power’ after the teacher asked him to prove
he’d written it – there went high school. Wilson never returned
and never earned a high school diploma. He was, he said, ‘a graduate
of Carnegie Library’, where he spent five hours a day. Over the next
four years he read some three hundred books. At seventeen, he briefly
enlisted in the army. After coming second in the officer training
school test he was told that, according to army rules, he had to be
nineteen to qualify. Soon afterwards, he quit the military – there
went his dream of becoming a four-star general. Wilson wandered
to LA and worked for a time in a pharmacy. But it seems he was
doling medicine of a different kind. ‘He had trouble with the
law,’ his widow, Constanza Romero, told me. ‘He doesn’t like to
talk about it. He was in San Quentin. I thought he was joking.’ Of
all his teenage abdications, perhaps the most punishing was losing his
mother’s faith in him. ‘It was relentless,’ Linda Kittel said.
‘She told him he was no good, that he would amount to
nothing ... It was agony for him. He was often denied food. She
would take the food out of the refrigerator, put it in her bedroom,
lock the door ... She didn’t want him in the house upstairs.’

At twenty, Wilson was already a veteran of disappointment. Opportunity
hadn’t knocked; it rarely did for the residents of the Hill. ‘The
opportunity on Centre Avenue in 1965 was the opportunity to die an
early death,’ Wilson recalled in his one-man show _How I Learned
What I Learned_. ‘Opportunity to buy some dope. Opportunity to steal
something. And if you’re lucky, an opportunity to maybe find a
girlfriend.’ He had faith in himself but the world didn’t reflect
him back. ‘I just always felt that the society was lined up against
you. That in order to do anything in the world you were going to have
to battle this thing that was out there. It wasn’t gonna give you
any quarter.’ He gave himself a heroic mission, avoiding the
roadblocks of academic credentials, bureaucracies and bosses: he would
be a poet. ‘Writing was the only thing society would allow me to
do,’ Wilson told me:

I couldn’t have a job or be a lawyer because I didn’t do all the
things necessary. What I was allowed to do was write. If they saw me
over in the corner scribbling on a piece of paper they would say:
‘That is just a nigger over in the corner scribbling on a piece of
paper.’ Nobody said: ‘Hey, you can’t do that.’ So I felt free.

The day he set up shop as a writer, Wilson walked downtown to
McFerran’s Typewriter Store, paid $20 for a black Royal Standard and
lugged it back to his basement apartment. He put a piece of paper in
the machine and typed out a variety of possible noms de plume: Fred A.
Kittel, Frederick A. Kittel, Frederick A. Wilson, A. Wilson, August
Wilson. He marked the day of his literary beginning as 1 April 1965
– the day of his father’s death. Over time, as he dummied up a
destiny, writing would be Wilson’s vindictive triumph over his
father, erasing from his own story both his father’s name and his
race.

On that first day, Wilson typed up some of his poems and sent them
to _Harper’s_, which promptly rejected them. He had to wait until
1969 to have a poem published, but he persevered. ‘I had a sense of
myself as being grand,’ Wilson said. ‘It was the way I carried
myself. I thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread.’ At
the height of the counterculture, Wilson strutted the Hill like an Ivy
League dandy in a second-hand tweed jacket and necktie, pipe in his
mouth. The posture was both a mask and an admission: he was lost.
Chawley Williams, a drug dealer turned poet who befriended Wilson
early on and to whom Wilson dedicated _King Hedley II,_ said:
‘August wasn’t really Black. He was too dark to be white, and he
was too white to be dark. He was in no man’s land.’

In 1965, rummaging through a junk shop, Wilson found a bootlegged 78
with the label: ‘Bessie Smith – _Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet
Jelly Roll Like Mine_.’ Wilson had heard rock and roll and pop songs
as a child but never the blues. Smith’s sound was a revelation.
‘The universe stuttered and everything fell to a new place,’ he
said, adding: ‘I had been given a world that contained my image, a
world at once rich and varied, marked and marking, brutal and
beautiful, and at crucial odds with the larger world that contained it
and preyed and pressed it from every conceivable angle.’ Wilson
found himself laughing with delight. He played the song 22 times. The
experience, he said, was ‘a birth, a baptism, a resurrection and a
redemption all rolled up into one’. The record marked the beginning
of his sense of himself as ‘a representative of a culture and the
carrier of some very valuable antecedents’. He came to think of
himself as a ‘bluesman’: ‘I turned my ear, my heart, and
whatever analytic tools I possessed to embrace this world. I elevated
it, rightly or wrongly, to biblical status.’

The Hill, that ‘amalgam of the unwanted’ as he called it, turned
out to be Wilson’s university, ‘the singular most important thing
in my development as a writer and a playwright’. His blues lens
turned the drama of the streets into ‘life being lived in all its
timbre and horrifics’:

The Hill had a vibrancy, a shimmy. If you walk up Centre Avenue
there’s always people shouting. I was getting a ride up Centre
Avenue with this guy in this convertible. I heard some gunshots, and I
told him to stop the car, and I didn’t even bother to open the door.
I just hopped out of the car and ran down to where the gunshots were.
And I’m like: ‘What’s happening?’ And there’s this woman
chasing the man around the car, and he poked his head up, and –
boom! – she shot him in the face. Not only did I see it, but, after
the guy got shot in the face (someone grabbed her), he’s walking up
the street, and I’m like walking right beside him, like looking at
him. You know, I wanted to see this. And he was bleeding. He asked
this guy, he said: ‘Man drive me to the hospital.’ The guy said:
‘You ain’t gon’ get all that blood in my car.’ I was right
there. This is going on – I remember one time I didn’t go to bed
for like, damn near three days, because every time I’d go to bed I
felt like I was missing something. And I’d jump up, three o’clock
in the morning and run out there. All kinds of life going on. It was
like, wow!

The blues aesthetic also gave Wilson a new frame for interrogating the
people around him. When a local person died, whether he had known them
or not, Wilson felt compelled to pay his respects at West’s Funeral
Home. He hung out at the pool hall and cigar store where the elders
gathered. They called him ‘youngblood’; he called them ‘walking
history books’, repositories of wit, customs, wisdom, some of which
would find its way decades later into his plays. ‘I really wanted to
know how they survived,’ Wilson told me. ‘How do you get to be
seventy years old in America?’

Patti Hartigan’s​ rookie 530-page biography of Wilson brings to
mind a line from Karl Kraus: ‘No ideas and the ability to express
them, that’s a journalist.’ Hartigan, who was a theatre reviewer
for the _Boston Globe_, is passionate about her subject,
indefatigable in her pursuit of anecdote and, as she told
the _Provincetown Independent_, ‘loved, loved, loved the
research’. That’s her narrative problem. She harvests a plethora
of detail, but she doesn’t know how to make it dramatic. Her clotted
prologue muddies the scene of Wilson, now famous, returning to
Pittsburgh in 2003 for the funeral of his homie Rob Penny, only to
have the Penny family bar him from speaking. ‘August ... had been
silenced because of his own success,’ she writes. But why the
annihilating envy? Hartigan tells us that Penny had preceded Wilson at
Central Catholic, that he was a track star, that in their Black
activist days he took the name Brother Oba and Wilson was Mbulu, that
he was chairman of the University of Pittsburgh’s Africana
department. What she doesn’t tell the reader at this point is that
Penny wrote more than thirty plays, that _King Hedley II_ was
dedicated to him_,_ that Penny released Wilson’s great gift when he
answered Wilson’s tyro question about how to make characters talk
– ‘You don’t. You listen’ – and, crucially, that Penny sent
the wannabe playwright a brochure for the National Playwrights
Conference with ‘Do this!’ scribbled on it. Wilson did as Penny
said. At the age of 33, Wilson may not yet have found his theatrical
voice, but he’d found his ticket to ride.

Hartigan’s book is the first full-length examination of Wilson’s
life and art since his death in 2005 from liver cancer. There is both
a need and demand for the story of how he and his work came to be.
Wilson made his plays, he said, ‘fat with substance’; Hartigan’s
dutiful trawling merely makes her book fat. Much of her sleuthing is
useful but in the way that a travel guide is informative: you get data
without depth. She won’t risk interpretation. Only in one line on
her final page does Hartigan admit the biographical problem that
bedevils her enterprise: the Wilson Estate declined to authorise the
biography. As a result, she has no primary sources: no letters, no
early plays, no poetry, no access to family, no way to get close to
Wilson’s pulse. She can assert, she can gossip, but she can’t
show. ‘I hope readers will get a sense of his eloquence
nonetheless,’ she concludes in her author’s note. The short answer
is: no – they can’t and they won’t. Where she can’t quote,
Hartigan is forced to paraphrase – another narrative quagmire.
Wilson is a great storyteller; Hartigan isn’t. Wilson’s words
swing with lyric power; Hartigan’s prose has as much clout as a
popgun.

Photograph of August Wilson and Lloyd Richards on the set of The Piano
Lesson, 1987. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Her glib palaver is most regrettable in her account of Wilson’s
relationship with his major director, Lloyd Richards, whom he called
‘my guide, my mentor, my provocateur’. Their collaboration on six
plays of the cycle was as intimate and as important to American
theatre as that of Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams. In both cases,
the plays were a kind of co-creation, and the alliances are what made
them shine.

The path that led Wilson to Richards was long and tortuous. Although
he’d dabbled in community theatre in Pittsburgh and had even
directed a few plays (he and Penny founded the Black Horizons Theatre
in 1968), Wilson had no significant exposure to theatre proper. Until
1976, he had never seen a professional production. He had read no
dramatic literature: no Williams, Miller, O’Neill, Chekhov, Ibsen.
It was only when he moved with his white soon to be second wife, Judy
Oliver, to her home town of St Paul in 1978 that his interest in
playwrighting began in earnest. He wrote children’s plays on
science-related subjects for the Science Museum of Minnesota; the
Penumbra Theatre mounted a disastrous satirical musical, _Black
Bart_, based on his poems, and a handful of other plays were consigned
to his bottom drawer. In one of those experiments, _The Coldest Day
of the Year_, a man and a woman sit on a bench, and the woman says:
‘Terror hangs over the night like a hawk.’ Hartigan claims that
Wilson ‘cultivated the image of a neophyte who sprang, fully formed,
into a playwright’ – but, as his stilted line illustrates, by any
professional standard Wilson _was_ a neophyte.

The catalyst for his transformation was not so much the stage as the
state of Minnesota, whose entire Black population of 55,000 was the
size of the Hill. ‘There weren’t many Black folks around,’
Wilson said later. ‘I got lonely and I started to create them. I
could hear the music. I could hear the language for the first time.
Until then I hadn’t valued the way Black folks talked. I’d always
thought that in order to create art out of it you had to change
that.’ The move coincided with his discovery of Romare Bearden,
whose paintings of Black life had for Wilson the same wallop of
exhilaration as the blues. ‘I try to explore,’ Bearden once said,
‘in terms of the life I know best, those things which are common to
all culture’ – just what Wilson now set about doing.

He wrote _Jitney_ in ten days, sitting at Arthur Treacher’s Fish
and Chips, and sent it to the National Playwrights Conference. The
conference, held every year in Waterford, Connecticut, had been
established to help young dramatists work on flawed but promising
plays. _Jitney_ was rejected at least twice. In 1982, Wilson
submitted a four-and-a-half-hour version of _Ma Rainey’s Black
Bottom_, which was accepted. It was in Waterford that Wilson met
Richards, who had become director of the conference in 1968 and would
stay in the role until 1999, developing plays by Derek Walcott, Wole
Soyinka, John Guare, John Patrick Shanley, Wendy Wasserstein and many
others.

When they joined forces, Richards was 63 and Wilson was 37. Every live
wire goes dead without connections, and Richards had them. So Wilson
could quit his job as a short-order cook and devote himself to
writing. Richards helped him secure grants and gave him access to the
Yale Repertory Theatre’s facilities, sending him to the sound booth,
the paint shop, the lighting designer. ‘He was a big sponge,
absorbing everything,’ Richards told me. ‘He had a lot to learn
and he knew it.’ As Wilson learned structure, ‘he was also
learning everything else.’ Richards wasn’t a man of many words,
and he chose those words carefully. He had his own quiet runic way of
teaching. ‘I don’t function dictatorially. I don’t give the
answer. I try to provoke the artist to find the answer I want him to
find. He’s got to make it his own.’

Hartigan gives Richards weasel-worded props. ‘Richards, who worked
steadily in the theatre and had just helped usher Athol Fugard’s _A
Lesson from Aloes_ to Broadway, was looking for a fresh Black
voice.’ (In fact, Wilson went looking for Richards.) Does having
directed the first play by an African American ever staged on Broadway
– Lorraine Hansberry’s _A Raisin in the Sun_ (1959) – or being
dean of the Yale Drama School and artistic director of the Yale Rep
sound like no more than ‘steady’ work? Hartigan can’t see
Richards’s belt without hitting below it. ‘Richards, for all his
talent, had not been able to shepherd other writers to such
acclaim.’ But he’d been doing just that since the 1950s. The
depth, polish and reach of Wilson’s plays were directly the result
of Richards’s pedagogy, both in their construction and in the unique
production network that Richards and his associate Benjamin Mordecai
developed to give Wilson’s plays a gestation period longer than any
playwright in the history of American theatre. The path led from the
National Playwrights Conference to Yale to regional theatres and then
to Broadway. The series of pre-Broadway regional runs – six in the
case of _King Hedley II_ – allowed Wilson to incorporate the
actors’ discoveries, deepen his characters, refine and rewrite his
storylines and polish his dialogue. When the play finally arrived on
Broadway, it was rock solid and ‘shining like new money’, to use
Wilson’s phrase. It would be fair to say that without this process
and Richards’s nurturing there would be no Century cycle.

When they began collaborating, Wilson recalled, the actors in
rehearsal would ask him about his characters, and Richards would
answer for him. ‘The old fox knows what’s going on,’ Wilson
thought and kept quiet. But, with increasing success and theatrical
savvy, Wilson found it hard to keep playing the protégé. By now he
knew what he was doing, and he wanted more control over his plays. In
1991, after Richards stepped down from Yale, he suggested that he,
Wilson and Mordecai form an equal partnership to put on _Seven
Guitars_. Wilson’s lawyer argued for an arrangement that would have
given Wilson 52 per cent, Richards 33 per cent and Mordecai 15 per
cent of the proceeds. Richards was outraged and stood firm, but the
nature of the relationship had changed. They had been on the road
with _Seven Guitars_ for four months when Wilson wrote to Richards
complaining that the show ‘does not look like a well-rehearsed
production with high production values’. One of Wilson’s proposed
remedies was that he read his notes to the cast. Richards rightly shot
down the idea, saying it would be like ‘two people trying to conduct
the same orchestra at the same time’.

There was no missing the truculence in Wilson’s letter: ‘If you
agree to work on resolving these issues which I think are
essential ... we need to meet in LA to discuss ways of
accomplishing this.’ Richards correctly read Wilson’s words as a
threat and called him out. ‘Despite its bill of particulars,’ he
replied, ‘I don’t think you said what was on your mind,’ going
through all Wilson’s points before coming to the issue of
the _froideur_ between them:

August, over twelve years, our pattern of work has been the same.

Through writing, conversation and rewriting, we have attempted to get
as complete a script as possible before setting a date for production.
Then we have worked in rehearsal and at performance, with my checking
with you at every break to be sure that we were on the same track and
discussing your thoughts and mine, before giving notes. This was true
at rehearsal and at performance. You were my third eye, a position I
thought I held for you as a writer. This changed in Boston.

You acquired an assistant to whom you dictated and who handed me a
sheaf of notes when I was ready to give notes. There was no discussion
or exchange which was very valuable. This act split the working
relationship in many ways and caused a distance to happen.

By the time _Seven Guitars_ opened on Broadway, the show had come
together well enough to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony
Award and run for just over two hundred performances. By the end of
it, however, Wilson and Richards were barely speaking. Richards could
work with Wilson; but, as he said, he ‘couldn’t work for him’
– or for the private partnership, Sageworks, which Wilson had set up
with Mordecai. From now on Wilson would get a producer’s, as well as
an author’s, share of the profits.

Rejecting Richards’s stately, boundaried approach, Wilson chose
Marion McClinton to direct his next production, a revised version
of _Jitney_. McClinton, who had directed a number of second
productions of the plays, was nine years younger than Wilson. In
Richards, Wilson may have lost a father, but in McClinton he’d found
a brother who sat shoulder to shoulder with him at the director’s
table and who hung on, and extolled, his every word. ‘It’s
August’s language – the rhythm of hurt, the rhythm of pain, the
rhythm of ecstasy, the rhythm of family – which sets him apart,’
McClinton said. ‘He shook the American theatre until it finally
began to part its eyes and see all of its invisible men and women. He
helped with a shove mightier than Samson gave the pillars in the
Philistine temple, and brought down the walls of ignorance.’

‘Don’t go out there and show your colour,’ Wilson’s mother
used to admonish him. He dedicated his adulthood to making a proper
spectacle of Blackness. ‘Blacks know the spiritual truth of white
America,’ he said. ‘We’re living examples of America’s
hypocrisy. We know white America better than a white America knows
us.’ His plays are a redress for the apathy of the white
imagination. With their tatterdemalion eloquence, his disputatious
folk call out this mendacity. ‘A nigger with a gun is bad news,’
Holloway, the restaurant _philosophe_ in _Two Trains Running_,
says. ‘You say the word “gun” and the word “nigger” in the
same sentence and you in trouble. The white man panic. Unless you say:
“The policeman shot the nigger with a gun.”’ Even as they’re
aware of the terrible and unreachable forces that rule their lives,
Wilson’s characters take their emptiness and try to fill it up with
something. Within their hand-to-mouth existences, they are capable of
making a gorgeous fuss, sometimes joyously pronouncing themselves to
the world: they beat out field chants with kitchen utensils (_The
Piano Lesson_), do the ‘Joe Louis Victory Walk’ (_Seven Guitars_),
perform voodoo to contact their drowned ancestors (_Gem of the Ocean_)
and, of course, sing the blues. ‘White folks don’t understand
about the blues,’ Ma Rainey says. ‘They hear it come out, but they
don’t know how it got there. They don’t understand that’s
life’s way of talking. You don’t sing to feel better. You sing
’cause that’s a way of understanding life.’ These exhibitions of
high spirits play as the African American way of enlarging life,
heroic refusals to suffer.

There are only three white characters in the entire Century cycle. But
the white world is a ghostly, formidable presence on Wilson’s
hardscrabble population. In _King Hedley II_, King observes that as
a slave he would have been worth $1200 and now he’s only worth $3.50
an hour. ‘Where’s the barbed wire?’ he says. ‘They got
everything else. They got me blocked in every other way.’ Black men,
according to Wilson, are ‘a commodity of flesh and muscle which has
lost its value in the marketplace’. Toledo, the only literate member
of Ma Rainey’s band, explains to the others that they’re ‘left
over from history’: ‘The problem ain’t with the white man. The
white man knows you just a leftover ... he the one who done the
eating and he know what he done ate. But we don’t know that we been
took and made history out of.’ In _Two Trains Running_, Holloway
jokes away the tragedy of white innocence, barricaded inside its own
story from seeing its crime of devastation. ‘People kill me talking
about niggers is lazy. Niggers is the most hard working people in the
world. Worked three hundred years for free. And didn’t take no lunch
hour.’

‘Trapped in a history which they do not understand’ was the way
Baldwin described the white population’s predicament. ‘And until
they understand, they cannot be released from it. They have had to
believe for many years and for innumerable reasons, that Black men are
inferior to white men.’ The Century cycle speaks directly to
America’s ferocious and ongoing political brawl over its historical
narrative. Wilson’s characters, as he put it, are ‘continually
negotiating for a position, the high ground of the battlefield, from
where they might best shout an affirmation of the value and worth of
their being in the face of a many-million-voice chorus that seeks to
deafen and obliterate it’. He boxes clever, facing a white audience
with a paradox at once dangerous and thrilling: if the whites are
wrong about the Blacks, then they are wrong about themselves. It’s
subtle storytelling, but it requires time to build compelling
resonances, in most cases well over three hours – the major
objection from the press corps who prefer two-hour traffic. ‘My
plays _are_ talky,’ Wilson said. ‘I say shut up and listen. They
are about Black men talking and in America you don’t too often have
that.’

Hartigan spends most of her book following the progress of Wilson’s
plays, but not much on his process or the particular equipoise of his
prose, which flows between ‘trash talk and near choral transport’,
as Henry Louis Gates Jr described it. Wilson spent a good portion of
his waking hours just following his characters as they gradually found
their story over each play’s long gestation period. He compared his
patchwork approach to Romare Bearden’s collage technique. ‘I just
write stuff down and pile it up, and when I get enough stuff I spread
it out and look at it and figure out how to use it,’ he told the
playwright Suzan-Lori Parks_. ‘_You start to build the scene and you
don’t know where the scene’s going ... You shift it around and
organise it ... until you have a composition that satisfies you,
that expresses the idea of something, then – bingo – you have a
play.’ According to Jack Viertel, an unofficial dramaturge for seven
of Wilson’s plays, ‘he had an almost religious faith that through
constant rewriting the story would tell itself; he would invent it in
the process as the play went by.’

Wilson didn’t drive; he didn’t do email; he didn’t answer the
phone; and, with the exception of a few Martin Scorsese films, he
didn’t go to the movies. He didn’t see many plays beside his own.
He stuck to his last. His mind was more or less in a perpetual reverie
about finding and wrangling his stories. By his own calculation, he
spent about three months a year at home in Seattle with Constanza and
their daughter, Azula, who called him ‘the slippery guy’. ‘He
just doesn’t reach that intimate part of everyday life,’ Constanza
told me. ‘I call him the deepest pool I have ever met in my life.
You can throw a rock inside this man and you never see it hit
bottom.’ Despite his ‘unquenchable affection for women’, as
Hartigan coyly puts it, Wilson’s first love was his writing.

Just before he died, the Virginia Theatre on Broadway and 52nd Street
was renamed the August Wilson Theatre. It was a gesture of particular
significance to Wilson, one which went beyond money or acclaim. ‘We
both, Black and white, are victims of our history,’ he said. ‘And
our victimisation leaves us staring at each other across a great
divide of economics, privilege, and the unmitigated pursuit of
happiness.’ His plays did the heavy lifting of imagining the other.
‘He knew audiences on Broadway were largely white,’ Viertel said.
‘He wanted to say: “Look, look at this. You people never look at
this. You don’t understand the richness of it; and the poetry of it;
and the joy of it; and the tragedy of it. It’s here for you. Take a
look.”’

_JOHN LAHR’S Arthur Miller: American Witness is out in
paperback. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh won the
National Book Critics Circle Award._

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