"Call me Paul": the long, hot summer of Paul Green and Richard Wright.

Bauer, Margaret D.

My life with Paul has had many surprises. And the thing that surprised me most was an indication of my lack of understanding and appreciation of the extent of his commitment to civil rights. I had no idea he had the boldness and the originality and the human understanding to come out more strongly than anyone else in the state on a very unpopular question, which we used to call in those days, "the Negro problem." I was constantly being not only surprised but scared by the things he would say. Really. I joked about it, but I expected almost any night to wake up and find a cross burning on the front lawn. And maybe I was rather disappointed that it didn't happen!

--Elizabeth Lay Green, The Paul Green I Know

As to my letters ... [n]o doubt there are personal matters in them, but what the heck!--all of us make our records on earth such as they are and they are irrevocable anyway and why try to control them after the fact. So, so far as I am concerned they are wide open.

--Paul Green, in Laurence Avery, ed., A Southern Life:

Letters of Paul Green, 1916-1981

IN 2001, I WAS FORTUNATE TO HAVE COME INTO MY HANDS A MANUSCRIPT by North Carolina native James R. Spence, author of two books, The Making of a Governor: The Moore-Preyer-Lake Primaries of 1964 and Portrait of a Place and Time: Recollections of a Farmer's Son. The almost three-hundred-page typescript, then titled "Young Paul Green, The Years 1894-1937," covers the life of this North Carolina playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and social activist from his childhood through the opening of his best known work, the symphonic drama The Lost Colony, which has been performed in Manteo, North Carolina, every summer since 1937, except for the years of World War II when blackouts were ordered along the eastern coast. Green, a contemporary (and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill classmate) of fellow North Carolina writer Thomas Wolfe, is, like Wolfe, one of the original playwrights of the Carolina Playmakers. Spence's biography of Green is based on interview conversations the author conducted with the writer and members of his family; other recorded interviews with Green; excerpts from Green's diaries; quotations from letters and telegrams in the Paul Green Papers; and various biographical sources, from Elizabeth Lay Green's biography of her husband, The Paul Green I Knew, to Bette Davis's autobiography, in which she talks about her first role as a vixen, which happened to be in the first movie that Paul Green worked on, Cabin in the Cotton (1932).

Upon being asked by the Spence family and the Paul Green Foundation to pursue publication of the deceased author's manuscript and in proceeding through the various editing stages to prepare it for submission to a publisher, I realized that James Spence relied most heavily on Paul Green's own words to tell the story of the playwright's auspicious beginnings: Spence quotes extensively from interviews with the writer (his own, as well as those of Rhoda Wynn, Billy Barnes, and Jacquelyn Hall, all conducted in the 1970s), from Green's diaries, from letters written by Paul Green, and from Green's writing about writing and about his life in his own essays and sketches collected in several volumes of the Green canon. Thus, the book is largely an autobiographical biography. The book's author is clearly an admirer of the writer and of the man. I became an admirer as well, even as I found the flawed (more interesting) man within Spence's idealized hero, and my own work on a later piece of the Green biography, events that occurred beyond the scope of Spence's manuscript, also explores this writer through a variety of lenses--his own words, as well as historical and biographical sources that together tell a multi-faceted tale.

H.L. Mencken's essay "The Sahara of the Bozart" came up a few times in Spence's interviews with Green, and Spence addresses Green's achievement of "watering" the South's cultural and artistic desert with his own work. Indeed, Spence even told Green, he was "tempted to call this book 'Watering the Sahara' because ... that's what you've been doing all these years ... you've been involved in watering the Sahara down here." He continued, "A thread that runs through this whole thing ... is that when you started, it was a Sahara just like Mencken said it was, and just look how it has flowered since then" (Spence 9 Aug. 1979). (1) Spence is obviously among those who continued to appreciate Green's contribution to Southern letters past the playwright's heyday. Reading Spence's manuscript (and listening to his recorded interviews) reminds us of Green's reputation in his own day--that his early Pulitzer Prize for the play In Abraham's Bosom in 1927 brought him national attention from Broadway to Hollywood, both places in which he would find work for years to come, including the opportunity to adapt Richard Wright's Native Son for the stage.

Ironically, although Paul Green's talents were widely recognized while he lived, since his death he has been largely overlooked by Southern literary scholars, with the notable exceptions of Laurence G. Avery, who has edited a collection of Green's letters, A Southern Life (1994); a volume of his writings, A Paul Green Reader (1998); and a reprint of The Lost Colony (2001); and of John Herbert Roper, author of a 2003 biography, Paul Green: Playwright of the Real South. Though Avery and Roper have certainly recognized Green's contribution to Southern letters and published scholarly works appropriate for such a writer (all but one of the volumes listed above, however, published after Spence's death in 1995), there is still relatively little scholarship on Green's individual works (including the Pulitzer Prize-winning play); and the biennial meeting of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature rarely includes a single paper on this major Southern playwright. Green is still well known in his home state, but largely thanks to the continued performance of The Lost Colony. Besides the content of The Paul Green Reader, the recent edition of The Lost Colony, and a recent reprint of his novel This Body the Earth, published by the Paul Green Foundation, his works are all out of print.

If not for my role as editor of the North Carolina Literary Review (NCLR), I would probably have to count myself among those scholars who have overlooked this major figure of the Southern Renascence. Living in North Carolina and regularly teaching a North Carolina literature class, I would likely be aware of Green's authorship of The Lost Colony and perhaps of In Abraham's Bosom (though it has never been performed south of the Mason-Dixon line, so is not a play familiar to Southerners, or even Southernists), (2) but while preparing NCLR's tenth-anniversary issue some years back, I read most of Green's short fiction in search of a story we might reprint, which then led me to learn of his work on Native Son when, searching for images to publish with the story we had selected, we found photographs in the Paul Green Papers of Green with Richard Wright. But Spence's manuscript and the recorded interviews that inspired and informed it have introduced me to the vast Green canon--the numerous plays and screenplays, the novels, and the poetry, in addition to the short fiction I'd already read. There is much in Green's body of work to be explored in scholarly studies of the period, the region, and the various genres in which Green wrote. And there is much as yet untouched material (not even used by Spence himself) in the recorded interviews with the writer--those conducted by James Spence as well as the others--that literary and film scholars, historians, folklorists, and sociologists would find of value. (3)

For example, there is some provocative Richard Wright material in the Spence interviews not covered in Spence's book, which, as already noted, covers Green's life only up to the opening of The Lost Colony in 1937. (Green adapted Native Son for the stage in 1940; it opened on Broadway in 1941.) I was struck, upon listening to the recordings as I edited the Spence book, that during Green's recollections of working with Wright, this left-leaning North Carolina writer seemed suddenly conscious that he, a man known for his liberal ideology and social activism in a Southern state even before the Civil Rights Movement, may have been somewhat patronizing toward his African American colleague. Twice while talking to Spence, Green noted that he called Wright "Dick" while Wright referred to him as "Mr. Green." "Why didn't I tell him to call me Paul?" Green asked himself during his conversations with his would-be biographer. Then, upon reading the transcripts of other Green interviews, I found him expressing this concern repeatedly. (4) Evidently, this question weighed on his mind during the last decade of his life (Green died in 1981). Indeed, not too many years before he began being interviewed by those interested in his own life and work, in his 1967 response to Wright biographer Constance Webb, Green alluded to this regret: "Now that I look back on my short association with Dick Wright I groan inside that I didn't have more understanding of what he was suffering in the white man's world. Maybe we could have got closer together, maybe not" (Avery 650).

After completing a draft of this article drawing from the materials gathered while working on Spence's Paul Green book, I consulted several Wright biographies to read about these events from the Wright perspective. I found much of what I cover in the pages to follow in Hazel Rowley's 2001 Wright biography, but though I use some of the same print sources as Rowley, I also draw substantially from unpublished interviews that Rowley did not use. She quotes from Jennie Hall's interview with Green, included in Hall's master's thesis, and only alludes to the others then available in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Spence's interviews were not yet there). Of course, too, rather than as a chapter in Wright's biography, my examination of this piece of literary history, in which I explore the various perspectives on this story, considers the significance of the memory to Paul Green.

In a telegram dated 6 May 1940, Green wrote (to Cass Canfield, President of Harper and Brothers, publisher of Richard Wright's Native Son):

HAVE JUST READ RICHARD WRIGHT'S TERRIFIC NATIVE SON CONGRATULATIONS TO HIM AS AUTHOR AND YOU AS PUBLISHER I FEEL THE BOOK WOULD MAKE A FINE PLAY AND I SHOULD LIKE TO TRY MY HAND AT DRAMATIZING IT SINCE IN THAT WAY ALL MATTERS COULD BE DISCUSSED AS WE WENT ALONG WOULD YOU LET ME HEAR WHAT HE THINKS OF THE IDEA (Avery 311)

The offer was forwarded to Wright, who was in Mexico at the time, and in Wright's reply to Green he alluded to having received numerous such offers but that Green's was "the only offer to dramatize the book that has interested me" because he was impressed with "the manner in which you handled the Negro character in your play, 'Hymn to the Rising Sun'" (Avery 311). But when Wright biographer Constance Webb contacted Green in the late 1960s, he did not mention this telegram as he reconstructed events for her:

Sometime after Wright's novel came out and was making a success, one of the producers of the Group Theatre approached me about dramatizing it. I glanced rather hurriedly through the book and reported that at that time I wasn't in position to undertake it. Later Paul Reynolds, Wright's agent, got in touch with me about it and said that he had talked to Wright and he, Wright, would like for me to do it. Then I read the book pretty closely and was somewhat horrified at the brutal part in it dealing with the burning of Mary Dalton's body. But I was deeply interested in Wright's Dostoevskian character-digging (the dialogue between him and the lawyer Max) especially in the last pages.

I finally told Reynolds I would undertake the job but I had some requests of my own to make. (Avery 645-46)

Green would repeat his recollection that Wright had contacted him first to the various interviewers who recorded conversations with him during the next decade of his life. For example, he began the story to James Spence: "Richard Wright had acted in a play of mine in Chicago" (Spence 24 Oct. 1974). Green is referring to the 1936 production by the Chicago Federal Negro Theatre of Hymn to the Rising Sun, which Wright had tried to produce (not act in). Green called his play "an attack on the chain gang system in North Carolina," but the Chicago mayor called it "pornographic" "because of its indecency" (the play refers to masturbation), and the play was cancelled (Wynn IV-9). (5) By that time, however, Wright had already been transferred to another section of the Federal Theatre after having trouble with the black actors who found Green's play "denigrating to Negroes." Hazel Rowley explains that the actors found it "neither entertaining nor uplifting ... to act the part of black prisoners whipped and debased on stage" (114), but Wright appreciated such elements of "realism" in the play, and he remembered Paul Green when it was time to select a playwright from those who had offered to help with dramatizing Native Son. (6) In his biography of Green, Roper contends that "Wright knew what other African American artists knew: if you wanted a serious role that treated thoughtfully of black issues, then there were Paul Green plays." Roper contrasts Green's work of the period with, for example, Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones, which, "pathbreaking as it was ... had ... moments of stereotyping and otherwise playing to racism" (186). Roper notes, too, Wright's awareness that Paul Robeson had turned down the role of the title character in Green's Pulitzer Prize play because the play was "too spirit-dampening at a time when Robeson wanted to portray hope and promise" (186-87). The reader familiar with Wright's work can safely surmise that the same tragic vision that Robeson shied away from, Wright would find appealing. And confirming these theories about Wright's selection of Green among his choices of writers to dramatize his novel, in a 1941 typescript, corrected by Wright, of numbered answers to interview questions from a "Mr. Bower" (the questions are not included, and the Bower is not further identified), the author of Native Son wrote, "I had read some of Green's plays and liked them tremendously. Especially did I like that brutal one-act play of his, Hymn to the Rasing Sun. I think it was on the strength of that play alone, that I decided to accept Mr. Green's offer" (Kinnamon and Fabre 41). (7)

Green told both Wynn and Spence his story of being Wright's choice to adapt his novel for the stage, though he also mentioned to Wynn that his own friend Cheryl Crawford, one of the original founders of the Group Theatre in New York, first mentioned the Wright novel to him (thus recalling the telegram Green had sent Wright's publisher). In this interview, Green says that at Crawford's recommendation he read the novel, but upon doing so told her he could not write the script (Wynn IV-7-8). He explained to Spence one reason he came to change his mind (here again contending that Wright had come to him rather than vice versa):

Well they were looking around for someone to dramatize [Wright's] book, [and Wright] said he'd like to get Paul Green to dramatize it. I'd never met him, so ... I read the book, and I said, "I can't do it; it's too brutal." So I turned that producer down. Well [then] I [got] this message from Wright [and] another producer came into the picture--Orson Welles.... Well, I thought.... I'd love to work with Orson Welles; he's a good man; I'd learn something. (Spence 24 Oct. 1974)

The Welles motivation goes along with one Wright biographer's theory: "Green was not tempted until he heard that Orson Welles and John Houseman were likely to get the stage rights for a Broadway production. Then he decided that he would, after all, put in a bid for the dramatization" (Rowley 213). To Wynn, Green also noted another reason he decided to work on a script based on a book that, he said, "offended" him: "I guess I had a real feeling for Wright, and I wanted to do something if he wanted me to do it, although I had never met him" (IV-9).

Given his reservations about the novel, Green worked out with Wright's agent three conditions for writing the stage play:

When I agreed to do the dramatization I had an agreement with Paul Reynolds, Richard Wright's agent, that I would be allowed to do three things to the original story. One was to make Communism comic, if I wanted to ... and that if I needed to introduce new characters I had that right. Another thing was that the protagonist, the hero Bigger Thomas, in the novel, goes to his death without ever accepting any sense of his own participation in his fate. And I had maintained that all human beings--certainly a man lying in death row day after day and thinking and thinking would not degrade himself so much as to say I had nothing to do with this. The very consciousness of a human being means some sort of self-responsibility. Even if he's mistaken, he would think so [that he had some role in his fate]; he wouldn't deny that he [had] the power of choice. But in the novel, it again and again is shown that Bigger Thomas is a product of his environment. And no man ... would ever accept that he had nothing to do with his own life. (Spence 9 Aug. 1979) (8)

Green added to Wynn, "I just couldn't leave him [Bigger Thomas] without some growth, some development" (IV-10).

During an interview with Spence, Green noted that once he had worked out with Wright's agent this agreement about how he might adapt the novel, he added another request: "And then I said I would love to get Wright to come and stay around where I could confer with him. He was in Mexico [but] it worked out, and he came up" (Spence 24 Oct. 1974). Roper surmises that Green had an ulterior motive for bringing Wright to Chapel Hill. As Roper puts it, "Paul Green was all set to sock damnable Jim Crow right in the snout" (188). Roper describes how the two writers "worked on the play script in a very public way so that the campus and the community knew all about it" (189). They did some work in a log cabin on Green's property that he used as his studio, and they worked in Bynum Hall on the University of North Carolina campus.

Green described to Spence collaborating with Wright: "What is interesting, he never wrote one line of the dramatization. I tried to get him to. I said, 'How about trying your hand at writing a scene?' And he did; he went over and wrote it and it was beautifully written but it had no climb no drama.... It was novelistic so I couldn't use him" (Spence 24 Oct. 1974). This recounting may be a bit misleading, however. Wright did acknowledge Green's "most valuable contribution [as] that of helping me to compress a vast mass of novelistic material," but he also wrote, "We collaborated pretty closely, working together daily.... We would meet each morning, decide upon the contents of two scenes, and then retire to some quiet place to write. We would meet again in the afternoon to compare notes and map out plans for further work." For example, Wright explained, "We mapped out a division of work regarding dialogue. We would both work at a scene until we felt we had packed it with all the necessary action. Mr. Green would then compress it. After that, I would go over it, making sure that the dialogue and imagery were negro and urban" (Kinnamon and Fabre 41).

Confirming Wright's version of the collaboration, Ouida Campbell, who served as the writers' secretarial support during their collaboration in Chapel Hill, reported in an article she wrote for the university's Carolina Magazine that both writers would on occasion dictate dialogue. Evidently, the two writers discussed the material at great length as Green drafted the play, so while Wright may have only contributed minimally to actually writing the script, he did play a key role in how it was written. In her discussion of the writers' debates over the character of Bigger Thomas, Campbell suggests that the tragic hero of the draft that was written in Chapel Hill was a composite of the two writers' visions: "He was about equally divided: one half Mr. Green's Bigger--sensitive, misguided, puzzled about life in general; and the other half Wright's Bigger--full of hate and fear, cunning, but at the same time looking for an answer to the questions that rise in his mind" (23).

Quoting from Wright's responses to Bower and from Campbell's essay, Rowley also counters Green's perception of having done most of the writing, but she interprets Green's attitude as he recalled events for his interviewers in the 1970s as merely "embarrassed about the way he had treated Wright that summer of 1940" (218). Listening to and reading a variety of interviews with Green reveal, more than embarrassment, a man troubled by this part of his past, as will be discussed later. Rowley also suggests that "Green's memory was flawed" regarding the writing credits for this script: "It was understood from the beginning that the play would be published under joint names." Rowley notes, too, "In all of Green's meticulously kept contracts and correspondence ... there is no sign of any such clause" (219) that would have given Green an exclusive byline. "In fact," Curtis R. Scott points out, "the joint authorship and division of royalties had been worked out in contracts signed at the beginning of the collaboration" (5). Yet Green remembered inviting Wright to share his byline after they had completed the first draft of the script. This memory seems to have been prompted by the recollection of how he and Wright had discussed the material as Green wrote:

But he was so good and he'd come to the office and sit and I'd discuss and then I'd write. So then I asked him how about signing the script with me. And so he did, so it's written: "Dramatized by Paul Green and Richard Wright." So ... I don't know, I thought we got along well, but looking back I can see I was just ignorant. I called him Dick, he called me Mr. Green ... all the time we associated. (Spence 24 Oct. 1974)

Perhaps it was hearing himself, as he recounted events, sound somewhat grudging about sharing his byline with the novelist that led Green to a more candid reflection upon their relationship. Then, recalling this difference in how the two men addressed each other apparently disturbed Green, for as mentioned previously he would repeat this concern to his various interviewers.

Elaborating upon Wright's visit to Chapel Hill to work on the dramatization, Green noted how the university's chancellor, Robert House, gave the two writers office space on campus. Green remembered the heat of that summer, and he transitioned from this climatic characteristic of the South directly to another defining regional characteristic--race relations:

It was hot, gosh we didn't have air conditioning.... The strange thing about this race thing, he'd call me Mr. Green, I called him Dick. Now why in the heck I didn't say, "now Dick, quit that; call me Paul," but I didn't. And when we had him out [to Chapel Hill], he didn't stay with us; I didn't quite go that far, I was afraid it would bother him maybe, and then we didn't have room with the children. But I had him out to lunch. (Spence 9 Aug. 1979) (9)

Green then recalled that, during Wright's visit to the Green home for lunch, their housekeeper "was so upset; we went out in the kitchen [and] she said, 'That's a black man, you're gonna eat with him?' I said 'sure.' She said, 'How can I serve him?' I said, 'You just forget and behave yourself.'" Green explained to Spence, "You see she was caught in the old tradition." (Perhaps he was, too, given the paternalistic "behave yourself.") (10)

In his Green biography, Roper avoids such anecdotal reminiscences, noting that another historian found "in her own investigation ... a complex intermingling of fact and fable that makes it hard to let the history transpire for us"; so Roper merely alludes vaguely to "threatening murmurations from segregationists" during Wright's visit. He suggests that "Green had to stand guard in figurative if not literal sense to protect his visitor" (190), but Green told Webb, Spence, Wynn, and Jennie Hall one story about Wright's visit to Chapel Hill in which he also "stood guard" quite literally one night. This anecdote suggests what was going on in Chapel Hill outside of the university office where these two men collaborated so civilly and productively:

Well we were nearing the end, and the phone rang--this is incredible--and it was Bob House [the UNC chancellor]. Bob says, "Paul, is that colored fellow still with you?" I said, yes. He says, "Well ... I trusted you and I gave you office space so [you] could work on campus with this man, and now, heirs about to break loose." And I said, "What Bob?" He says, "Down at Eubanks's drug store, your cousin [--] is in there with a pistol and several men, and they're talking about running this fellow out of town." And he said, "You better do something in a hurry." And I said, "Oh lord." He says, "Go down there, right now, and hurry." So I was talking on the phone right in front of Dick Wright, but I didn't let on what it was. I said, "Oh sure, that's fine." I said, "Dick, it's near five o'clock; it's time to knock off." ... And so I hurry down there and there's or [--]--he's six feet five; he'd been a boxer. And I said, "[--], what can you do [about this]?" He says, "We're gonna do it ourselves." I say, "Could I talk to you a minute? Come outside please." And I got him outside away from these other guys. And I say, "Listen, [--] for God's sake, I told the chancellor, we are right at the end of our work. And if you do this, the shame is on this university and on you and almost all [the town] and on me. Hold off. Tomorrow I'll take him to the train. We're finished; I'll take him to the train." And he said, "Well I ain't gonna promise nothing." I said, "Well, if you do this [--], you'll just ruin my work and hurt this man. He's a great writer; black as he is has nothing to do with [it].... "He said, "I won't promise nothing." Well, he went back in the store. That night I went to the boarding house where Wright stayed, and I sat all night in the cotton patch out in front of that house.... I couldn't get any cops because at that time they'd be on [--]'s side. So I just sat down there in the cotton patch all night long, determined that if anything happened they'd have to kill me.... Well nothing happened. And the next day we worked hard and we finished and I took Wright to the train and I never told him anything about this. (Spence 9 Aug. 1979)

It was inevitable that Green would repeat the same stories to his various interviewers (especially since the recorded interviews were all conducted around the same time), and it is interesting to compare one against the other. Whereas Green reported to Spence, for example, that House referred to Wright as "that colored fellow," when he told the story to Wynn, he has House use Wright's name (IV-16) and in the story transcribed by Jennie Hall the chancellor calls Wright "[t]his boy" (63). (11) The Wynn interview also includes the detail that Green's cousin "was armed" and Green's theory about what apparently stirred people up:

 The occasion of it was this secretary [Ouida Campbell]--she was
 giving a party at Carrboro for Wright. I didn't know it. I would
 have advised her against it. But ... she was pretty free, you know,
 and frank and, bless her, she was all for good things--but the word
 got out that she's had this party in honor of Richard Wright and it
 was mixed, and the mill people got up. And then they came and
 appealed to the chancellor, somebody did, and the chancellor called
 me and--oh, gosh! We are such as we are. "What fools we mortals
 be!" (IV-16)

Public disapproval of Richard Wright's "invasion" of a usually segregated place during his collaboration with Paul Green was not limited to their collaboration in the Jim Crow South. Green also told Wynn a story about when he and Wright reconnected in New York to do some rewriting for Orson Welles and John Houseman:

 He'd come in from where he was staying out on Long Island and we'd
 work there in the hotel where I had a room. After he'd come over a
 day or two the manager called me and said, "What goes on, Mr.
 Green, up in your room?" And I said, "We're working on a play
 that's being produced--of Mr. Wright's." He said, "Yes, but he's a
 colored man and he's coming in here and going up in the elevator
 with other guests and--when you spoke to me once about working in
 your room I didn't know it was going to be a constant thing. I
 thought maybe you were going to work once or twice with this man.
 But now he's here every day and we just can't have it."... In the
 meantime, Wright had come in for work and he was up in the room and
 the manager had called me and I had gone down. When I came back in
 the room, Richard looked at me and said, "That was the manager
 objecting to me--is that right?" And I said, "I'm afraid that's
 right." He said, "Let's go back to Chapel Hill where there's some
 freedom." I'll never forget that. (IV-15)

In his interview with Wynn, Green transitioned from this anecdote to the story recounted previously of how he may have waylaid violence against Wright on the black writer's last night in Chapel Hill, beginning: "But things happened in Chapel Hill that I never let him know about, that could have been very tragic" (IV-15). (12) Green's interviews, therefore, somewhat undermine Roper's characterization of the collaboration in Chapel Hill as "a sunny start for what quickly became a very stormy period of teamwork once the script was returned to Broadway for the final phase of rewriting, casting, and production" (190). As noted, Ouida Campbell had perceived in Chapel Hill the writers' different perceptions of Bigger Thomas, so perhaps the writers' mutual appreciation of each other's talent only kept an inevitable storm from erupting while they enjoyed each other's company during their work together. Wright biographer Rowley also called the relationship "congenial" (220), but John Houseman perceived an "uneasy collaboration" (Houseman 464) right from the start that would question the theory that the writers' appreciation of each other's talent helped them to work well together, for Houseman believed that "[w]hether from his exalted position as veteran playwright and Pulitzer Prize--winner or from some inate [sic] sense of intellectual and moral superiority ... Green's attitude in the collaboration was ... insensitive, condescending and intransigent." In his memoir Run-Through, Houseman reports that he went to Chapel Hill to meet with the two writers before they began work and then again when they were finished. While he relays Wright's assurance that Green had been "courteous, thoughtful, and hospitable in his treatment of his black guest," Houseman also felt that Green "was incapable or unwilling to extend this equality into the professional or creative fields" (463). According to Houseman, Wright went along with Green at this time because he did not want to "risk a public disagreement with a man like Paul Green. There were too many people on both sides anxious to enjoy a dogfight between a successful black intellectual and a white Southern writer of progressive reputation--an avowed 'friend' of the Negro people" (464-65).

Like Green, Houseman was recalling these events from a thirty-year distance, and both Laurence Avery and Curtis Scott have enumerated several errors in Houseman's Run-Through recapitulation (as well as expressed regret that "because it seems authoritative and is entertaining, Run-Through is the basis of most later discussions of the play" [Avery 676], particularly since Houseman is "the only principal player to have published an account of the dramatization" [Scott 6]). In addition to the errors Avery and Scott have noted, Houseman mistakenly credits Green for courageously "inviting Wright to live in his home during their collaboration" (Houseman 463), reminding the reader that his version of

this story is also based on memory and thus subject to misremembering. (13) Curtis Scott's explanation for Wright's "remarkabl[e] flexibil[ity]" during the collaboration is less sensational than Houseman's: "His attitude may surprise today's readers, for whom Wright holds an established place in the pantheon of great American novels [and who may have never heard of Paul Green]. But in 1941, the thirty-two-year-old Wright was himself somewhat overwhelmed by the success of his first novel. Suddenly, he found himself in the company of writers and artists whose work he deeply admired, among them Paul Green. At the time of the Native Son collaboration, Green was widely regarded as one of America's greatest playwrights" (23).

In a letter written after reading Run-Through (dated 30 June 1973), Green also reminds Houseman of one of the original agreements he made with Wright's agent: "that in the play Bigger Thomas should come to the realization that he was at least partly responsible for the character he was and therefore had some responsibility for the fate that fell upon him" (Avery 677). Furthermore, Houseman's perception might have been tempered by the fact that he had wanted to help with the script himself and that he did not think Green was the right match for the script. From the biographer's perspective, Rowley agrees with Houseman that the collaboration was "unequal," but like Scott she lists the writers' differences more objectively as the differences between a seasoned playwright and a new, younger novelist faced with the difficulty of adapting a novel for the stage (220). She considers the different but not contradictory philosophies reflected in the two writers' works and how such differences would affect how each viewed Bigger Thomas (220-21), but she also quotes a letter Wright wrote to Green the following October, in which he said he liked Green's plans for the ending of the play (233).

Maybe he did, but when the script (and the writers) arrived in New York, Welles and Houseman supported Wright's original vision of Bigger Thomas against Green's. Green's version of events, his lengthy account of what happened to the script--and to his relationship with Richard Wright---once rehearsals began, is interesting:

I had written it as they had agreed for me to write, that Bigger Thomas in the death house begins to become conscious that he too is mixed up in this thing. And Welles walked up and down and he said, "No, no.... We mustn't do that...." "Well," I said, "This is the way human beings are. You yourself, ... you know you've had something to do with who you are. You can't say, 'I'm the result of my daddy and my mammy and the environment and nothing else.' ... Orson Welles, you yourself know you're partly responsible for who you are. You have the power of choice. Even if you didn't have the power of choice, you think you have, and therefore you're responsible.... It's a waste otherwise. This fellow ... in talking to Mr. Max, his lawyer, he's struggling. And when he says, 'But, Mr. Max, after I killed that girl and they started hunting for me, that's the first time, Mr. Max, I ever felt alive. Man, man, I was keen and I could hear, I could see, I was watchful.... I was Bigger Thomas then--I was a real man.' And that starts him thinking and he comes out in the end with some sort of statement. But at the end he grabbed a pistol from a guard in my version and he could have shot his way out but ... he stood there and he makes a decision.... He decides as a man, 'No, no!' And at the moment of that decision--he'd always sort of dreamed of being an aviator. And at that particular moment the mail planes are heard going over the building and he hears it and he looks up and calls, 'Fly them planes, boys, fly them planes. I be with you soon, I be with you soon.' And he walks right straight on into the light that streams from the open door of the death house, and the foolish priest behind him saying, 'I am the resurrection and the life and so on.' But Bigger Thomas goes to his death sort of the creator of his own death." And oh, the more I talked and preached the more gesticulation [from] Houseman and Welles. And finally I said, "Well, Richard Wright, it's your book. And I retire. You end it the way you want to." So they ended it the way they had planned, with Bigger Thomas behind the bars with his hands upheld like the crucified Jesus--I mean stretched out as if he was on the cross. And the whole thing saying at the end, "Look, white folks, what you've done to me!"--which had its punch and its pathos, but to me, talking about preachment and propaganda, it surrendered to that. And for one time I the preacher was more the artist, I think than the other way around. (Wynn IV-17-18)

By this time, however, Green's script had gone to his publisher, revised only as far as removing the part about Bigger grabbing the guard's gun, but otherwise closer to Green's ending than the Broadway ending. (14)

In Houseman's version of events, Green seems more bitter than resigned, as he sounds in his own recounting of events, and perhaps Houseman was not too far off in this case, for as Green continues his story, we learn that

on the opening night I didn't go up--I thought it was Richard Wright's evening. But in the meantime, the New York Times had a method--I've done it many times--on the opening of a play they get the author to write a piece about it. So Brooks Atkinson called me up one day about that time and he said, "We have a piece, a nice thing here, from Richard Wright for the opening of Native Son."... I said, 'I'll bet you it's a good piece of writing, Brooks." And he said, "Well, it is, and it's rather long. It's about five thousand words, which is much more than we usually print."

And I said, "Why don't you publish it?" ... And he said, "Well, we're thinking--I'm considering--I thought I'd call you ... because it's an attack on you." ... I swallowed and gulped once or twice and I said, "Well, that's all right if it's a good piece of writing; why don't you ... publish it?" ... He said, "In this piece Wright makes the whole point that you don't understand the Negro ... that the white South just cannot understand the Negro. Paul Green's a rather nice fellow, but he's just"--Well, Brooks didn't use the word "stupid," but anyway ... I kept thinking about it and I still believe that he should have published it. He didn't say they were not going to publish it or that they would publish it, but ... Sunday came and I go to get the Times expecting to see the piece and it's not there. The next Sunday I go and I don't see it. If it was ever published I don't know it.... But I know it would have been a good thing because Wright was a good writer. And he was artist enough too to have such good writing, images, and his lyrical flow of lines, so that although it might have hurt me to the heart I still would have recognized his right--Richard Wright's--to do it, and would have to admire what he did. (Wynn IV-18-20)

Despite Wright's opinion of Green's knowledge of African Americans and Green's insistence upon the role of individual choice in one's fate, the white Southerner did recognize that Wright's life experience as an African American made him the writer he was: "It made him sing this tragic song, the pain. Maybe in happier circumstances he would have been a bond salesman or something, but out of this tribulation of himself and his race he wrote these fine things" (Wynn IV-20). But despite contending during this interview that the essay should have been published, Green had suggested otherwise to Wright in his reply to a telegram from Wright telling Green about the article he'd written (in his telegram Green does not mention having spoken to Atkinson about Wright's article already): "I am sure your article for the Times is a good one, but wonder whether it is wise to make public at this time any past difference of opinion between the authors. Since the published ending is so nearly in line with the stage version except for a little cutting here and there don't you think we had better stand or fall together on the production?" (Rowley 244). (15) No one seems to know whether Wright took Green's advice or Atkinson pulled the article, but whatever the case, Wright's article, in dramatic form and called "The Problem of the Hero," was not published in the New York Times or anywhere else. (16)

Green continued his story of the production of the play Native Son with compliments to Orson Welles and expressions of appreciation that Welles did use Green's idea of running the play without intermissions (the lights would go down and music would play during brief set changes) or programs (which were given out as the audience left the theatre). Then he told an amusing story about seeing his name on the marquee with Wright's:

It was rather funny--Noel Houston and I went up to New York for something and we passed the St. James Theatre and the sign painters were painting on the side of the building in great big letters, "NATIVE SON BY PAUL GREEN AND RICHARD WRIGHT "--great big letters. And I was so impressed. Noel says, "Look at that, man, you got your name up there in big, big letters!" So some time later I passed there and there was a fellow painting the whole thing out, and he painted in "ORSON WELLES'S PRODUCTION" and then in little teeny letters "Paul Green and Richard Wright." And then when it opened, Welles had around the marquee ... great ... silken banners.... All around it was "Orson Welles's Native Son." (Wynn IV-20-21)

Green returns to complimenting Welles after reporting this display of the great director/producer's ego. Green could laugh about this memory in 1974, but by that time, too, he would have the memory as well of the review headlines, which (except in North Carolina of course) would feature Welles, as well as the novel's author. Green's own name would again be in small print within the body of the review, and he knew, too, that the play that was performed was not entirely the play he had written--so his story about Welles may also have been intended to mock the man who had taken so much credit for a collaborative production. Back in 1941, Green admitted in his 16 April diary entry that he was not enjoying the play's positive reception: "Native Son, bastard and mutilated as it is, doing well with the public. Can't get much pleasure out of seeing it succeed since one edge of its truth has been chiseled and blunted off." (17) Still expressing appreciation for Welles (perhaps hoping to be involved in another Welles production), he would also write to Wright's agent saying, "The ending is, I think, still weak, whereas it could have almost lifted the audience out of its seat. Still, I think we are all lucky--and we owe a lot to Welles" (Rowley 246-47).

Green would write Reynolds again when the play was having financial problems: "Well, the chickens come home to roost crippled or not. The murder should have been played as Bigger's nightmare remembrance--as Wright and I first conceived it, and the final scene should have shown Bigger Thomas becoming more of a man. But it's all past now" (Rowley 248). In spite of this last statement, suggesting he was putting it all behind him, the playwright was clearly disturbed by the events, which he would recall (and revise) in interviews three decades later. The progressive thinker/civil rights activist was also a flawed human being with his own pride and perhaps even prejudices, all of which he was facing in his last years.

A year after the death of Richard Wright, Paul Green would begin a letter to Wright's agent, Paul Reynolds, by expressing his regret that the two writers did not understand each other better: "I always admired him and counted him a friend, though to my sorrow and regret he often seemed not to understand my intent nor me his need--and vice versa. Both of us failing--in an environment which then as now murks up the truth by which men try to live." He adds, "God rest him--no, I won't say that, for that's part of the trouble with that environment, us calling on God to do this or that and thus obviating responsibility when we ought to be kicking our own behinds (it can be done) to spur us into humane and intelligent action" (Avery 602). And indeed, both before and after meeting and working with Richard Wright, Paul Green was a man of action who took responsibility for trying to right wrongs committed by other members of his race against those of Wright's race. As he said of his goal for the stage production of Native Son:

My contention all along has been that if when the play is over the audience fails to feel a closer kinship between black and white, as well as a sharp antagonism to injustice and discrimination, then we have failed somewhat in our purpose. Brotherhood, cooperation, more love for one another should be the net result. The melodrama of ill-feeling, antagonism and hate is the last thing, I am sure, that any of us want. (Henderson M10)

In the various Paul Green interviews there are numerous stories about Green's social activism in Chapel Hill, reflecting how he used his reputation to work on what he referred to as "the race problem." In the Paul Green Papers are letters to and from famous writers like Richard Wright, including correspondence that reflects Green's other endeavors to bring African American writers to then still-segregated UNC--James Weldon Johnson, for example, in 1923, long before Green's collaboration with Wright. Green reported to Wynn that when he (a new faculty member at the time) was unsuccessful in persuading university administration to allow Johnson to read on campus, he hosted a reading by Johnson at his own home (XII-7-8). But Green not only supported the Wrights and Johnsons of his artist world, he also sought to help the (real) Bigger Thomases of his home state, bringing attention to the horrors of chain gangs and the inequality among the races reflected on death row, threatening at one time to alert the media to see what he had witnessed upon visiting one prison if the governor didn't take action to stop the inhumane treatment of inmates (and he did incorporate what he witnessed into his novel This Body the Earth). Indeed, one can trace in the literature, interviews, and letters of Paul Green the social activism of this Southern playwright, which reflected his egalitarian ideology and seems to have prompted Wright's selection of him as the appropriate scriptwriter for Native Son.

Works Cited

Avery, Laurence G., ed. A Southern Life: Letters of Paul Green, 1916-1981. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1994.

Campbell, Ouida. "Bigger is Reborn." Carolina Magazine (Oct. 1940): 21-23.

Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Trans. Isabel Barzun. Second ed. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993.

Green, Elizabeth Lay. The Paul Green I Know. Chapel Hill: North Caroliniana Society, 1978.

Green, Paul. The Paul Green Diary. 8 vol. typescripts. North Carolina Collection. Louis Round Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

--, and Richard Wright. Native Son (The Biography of a Young American): A Play in Ten Scenes. New York: Harper, 1941.

Hall, Jennie Turner. "A Change in Philosophy: Richard Wright's Native Son to Paul Green and Richard Wright, Native Son, A Play in Ten Scenes." Thesis. North Carolina State U, 1970.

Henderson, Archibald. "Paul Green, Carolina Playwright with Gumption to Go Native." News and Observer [Raleigh] (23 Mar. 1941): M10.

Houseman, John. Run-Through: A Memoir. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.

Kinnamon, Keneth, and Michel Fabre, eds. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993.

Roper, John Herbert. Paul Green." Playwright of the Real South. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2003.

Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright." The Life and Times. New York: Holt, 2001.

Scott, Curtis R. "The Dramatization of Native Son: How 'Bigger' Was Reborn." Journal of American Drama and Theatre 4.3 (1992): 5-41.

Spence, James R. Audio Recordings Relating to Paul Green, 1974-1979. #5170 Southern Historical Collection. Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

--. The Making of a Governor." The Moore-Preyer-Lake Primaries of 1964. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1968.

--. Portrait of a Place and Time." Recollections of a Farmer's Son. Winter Park, FL: Discovery Publishing, 1991).

Wright, Richard. "The Problem of the Hero." Richard Wright Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Wynn, Rhoda. Interview with Paul Green, February 1974. Southern Oral History Program Collection. #4007 Southern Historical Collection. Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Young, Thomas Daniel, Floyd C. Watkins, and Richmond Croom Beatty, eds. The Literature of the South. Rev. ed. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1968.

MARGARET D. BAUER

East Carolina University

(1) This discussion of Mencken's essay and Green's contribution to Southern literature, quoted from the lames R. Spence audio recordings relating to Paul Green, 1974-1979 (#5170, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Wilson Library), inspired the title I chose for Spence's book. Subsequent quotations from Spence's interviews with Green will be cited parenthetically in the form above, with the author's name and the date of the interview from which the quotation is taken.

(2) In Abraham's Bosom has not appeared in any of the Southern literature anthologies since the 1968 revised edition of The Literature of the South, edited by Thomas Daniel Young, Floyd C. Watkins, and Richmond Croom Beatty.

(3) This introduction, to this point, has been adapted from my Editor's Preface to James R. Spence's Watering the Sahara: Recollections of Paul Green from 1894 to 1937 (North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Office of Archives and History: 2008).

(4) For example, he asked himself the same question during a 30 April 1975 NPR interview (a recording of which is in the Paul Green Papers, T-3693/11), in which Green talks primarily about Native Son. He also alludes to how the writers addressed each other during their collaboration (though he says "Richard" instead of the nickname "Dick") in a 1970 interview with Jennie Turner Hall, which she conducted with Green for (and appended to) her M.A. thesis (Hall 62).

(5) Rhoda Wynn's 1974 interviews with Green are in the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; quotations from Wynn's interviews with Green will be cited parenthetically in the form above, which includes the tape and page numbers that appear on the typed transcripts in the Southern Historical Collection.

(6) Michel Fabre explains that another reason Wright asked to be transferred from the Federal Negro Theatre to the Experimental Theatre was because of "Communist pressure and threats," but Fabre also notes Wright's complaints about the actors. Fabre alludes to Wright's "I Tried to Be a Communist," in which "Wright maintains that the actors balked at playing roles that did not correspond to the 'good Negroes' of vaudeville" (133). In his letter to Green in response to Green's offer to dramatize the play, Wright had noted that he had "had to resign my job as publicity director of the Federal Negro Theatre in Chicago a few years ago because I fought for a production of your 'Hymn to the Rising Sun.' Indeed, I had to fight both Negroes and whites to get them to see that the play was authentic" (Avery 311).

(7) It is interesting that Wright uses the same word here ("brutal") that Green used in talking about Wright's novel.

(8) Much of this story is also recapped by Green in his letter to Webb, quoted from earlier, but since that letter is included in Avery's collection of Green letters (644-52), I have decided to draw from the as yet unpublished (and thus not so readily available) interviews.

(9) When he talked with Wynn about Wright's visit to Chapel Hill, Green noted that he "got Wright a place to stay where the schoolteachers out at the ... Negro high school [lived]." He went on, "My secretary ... would come by every morning and pick him up and come to the office and then in the afternoon she'd take him home" (IV-13). It is interesting to note that in his Green biography, Roper describes the Carrboro neighborhood where Wright lodged as "literally across the tracks from Chapel Hill." According to Roper, this area housed "many of the custodial and physical plant staff for the university" (190); Roper does not mention schoolteachers. Wright's biographer described Wright's housing in this way: "Paul Green had found him a room in a boardinghouse in the black area between Chapel Hill and the white, working-class, cotton mill district of Carrboro. Just a few streets away from the university, with its handsome old buildings and spreading five oaks, the black district was a different world. The streets were unpaved; the houses were shabby." She also begins this section noting that Wright "could not go to the Carolina Inn, where visiting scholars usually stayed. He could not eat in the restaurants next to the university" (Rowley 217).

(10) Green also told a similar story to Jennie Hall, in which he made clearer that his housekeeper was black and explains that he told both of his black employees of the impending visit of a "wonderful Negro writer" and instructed them to "just behave yourself" (Hall 60), for, as Rowley notes in quoting this, "[b]lacks were not used to serving blacks" (Rowley 214).

(11) He also told this story in his letter to Webb, Wright's first biographer, though he left his cousin's name out in that telling, and to her he added that, in response to House's concern that "[t]his thing could get out of hand and give the University a black eye," he said, "I'm not thinking so much about the University.... I'm thinking about Richard Wright. I don't want anything bad to happen to him" (Avery 648).

(12) According to Rowley, "Wright did know about the threats, since years later in Paris he laughed about the episode with an acquaintance from Chapel Hill," writer Daphne Athas (225).

(13) Putting the various sources together, with the help of Rowley's Wright biography, one realizes that Wright did stay with the Greens when he first arrived in Chapel Hill from Mexico in June 1940. After their preliminary meetings, Wright left with Houseman for New York, then went on to Chicago and returned to Chapel Hill in July to work on the script with Green until August; during this second period in Chapel Hill he stayed in the boarding house mentioned previously (Rowley 214-17).

(14) According to Rowley, Orson Welles was furious about the published version of the play and demanded that his name, Houseman's, and Mercury Theatre be removed from its jacket (240,247). The names do, however, still appear on the title page of Native Son (The Biography of a Young American): A Play in Ten Scenes by Paul Green and Richard Wright (1941). See Houseman's discussion of Green's reaction to the changed ending (for the production) and his own reaction to the publication with Green's ending (Houseman 471-72), about which Green told Wynn, "I didn't know it at that time, but Houseman didn't like me at all.... He didn't show it so much, but later on ... in his latest book he has several pages attacking me for my mismanagement and misdoing of the Native Son script" (IV-14-15). Green talks more about Houseman later on in the Wynn interview and, in spite of their differences, graciously calls Houseman's book Run-Through "a very good book on the American Theatre" (IV-23), suggesting that at least after thirty years he was not so bitter as Houseman had recalled. Indeed, he not only expressed this same praise for the book directly to Houseman (before questioning Houseman's account of the Wright/Green collaboration) but also concluded this letter, "I wish you long life and happiness" (Avery 677).

(15) Green does not mention writing Wright when he recounts his conversation with Atkinson to Webb either, and in that telling his tone is angry rather than resigned (Avery 651).

(16) "The Problem of the Hero" can be found in the James Weldon Johnson Wright Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. I thank this library for sending a photocopy to me. The dramatic essay is not, incidentally, so critical of Green as Atkinson suggested. It appears merely to be Wright's recollection of their philosophical debates over their different perceptions of Bigger Thomas.

(17) Green's diaries are available in the Paul Green Papers, and eight volumes of typed transcripts of the diaries are also available in the North Carolina Collection of Wilson Library, also at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.