Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  10 Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (AMS Press, 1953).

  11 Gwendolyn Brooks, “Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat,” in Selected Poems, pp. 103–6, at 103.

  12 Ibid., p. 104.

  13 Ibid., p. 106.

  14 Harry Belafonte, vocalist, “Man Smart (Woman Smarter),” probably composed by Norman Span, on Calypso (RCA Victor, 1956).

  15 In the recent Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Beacon, 2018), Imani Perry fills in many details. Perry discusses the indebtedness of “Flag from a Kitchenette Window” to Brooks’s work on p. 44.

  16 Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: An Informal Autobiography of Lorraine Hansberry, adapted by Robert Nemiroff (Signet, 1969), p. 36.

  17 Anne Cheney, Lorraine Hansberry (Twayne, 1984), p. 10.

  18 Hansberry, Young, Gifted, and Black, pp. 73, 85.

  19 Lorraine Hansberry, “The Negro Writer and His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism,” Black Scholar 12, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1981): 2–12, at 12.

  20 Lorraine Hansberry, “In Defense of the Equality of Men,” in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (W. W. Norton, 1985), pp. 2058–67, at 2066.

  21 Hansberry, Young, Gifted, and Black, pp. 98, 103.

  22 Perry, Looking for Lorraine, p. 59.

  23 The photograph is available on a webpage of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust, www.lhlt.org/gallery?page=2.

  24 Perry, Looking for Lorraine, p. 74.

  25 Lorraine Hansberry, “Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex: An American Commentary,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New Press, 1995), pp. 128–42, at 129, 128, 129, 130. Hansberry’s essay went unprinted until it appeared in this anthology.

  26 Ibid., pp. 139, 140, 141.

  27 Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959; repr., Benediction Classics, 2017), p. 61.

  28 In the resulting blitz of invitations and TV appearances, Hansberry defended the play against those attributing its success to the fact that “everybody associated with it was a Negro.” Its outstanding director and actors, she argued, made it a smash hit, along with her own awareness of Anouilh, Beckett, Dürrenmatt, Brecht, and O’Casey. [Lillian Ross], “How Lorraine Hansberry Wrote ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ ” New Yorker, 9 May 1959, p. 34.

  29 Hansberry, Young, Gifted, and Black, pp. 51, 63.

  30 Hansberry, Raisin in the Sun, pp. 92, 87.

  31 Langston Hughes, “Harlem” (1951), in Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (Vintage Classics, 1990), p. 268.

  32 Hansberry, Raisin in the Sun, p. 42.

  33 bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (Henry Holt, 1995), p. 67.

  34 Hansberry, “The Negro Writer and His Roots,” pp. 4, 5.

  35 Ibid., pp. 8, 10.

  36 Hansberry, “In Defense of the Equality of Men,” pp. 2060, 2064.

  37 Perry, Looking for Lorraine, p. 135.

  38 Adrienne Rich, “The Problem with Lorraine Hansberry,” Freedomways 19, no. 4 (4th Quarter 1979): 247–55, at 252.

  39 Hansberry, Young, Gifted, and Black, p. 137.

  40 See Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Lesbian/Woman (Bantam Books, 1972), pp. 121–22, as well as Kevin J. Mumford, Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), p. 18.

  41 Hansberry, Young, Gifted, and Black, p. 137. Too much of what we know about Hansberry has remained filtered through her well-intentioned husband, who after her death produced her so-called autobiography, To Be Young, Gifted and Black. According to Kevin Mumford, the restricted papers in the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture contain diary entries and letters about Hansberry’s responsiveness to female lovers, FBI files on her Communist affiliations, an essay on white backlash, accounts of recurrent bouts of despondency, and full runs of homophile journals that indicate “how deeply she felt about her lesbian desire.” E-mail from Professor Mumford to Susan Gubar, 21 Sept. 2017.

  42 Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Crossing Press, 1982), p. 242.

  43 Di Prima, Recollections, p. 73.

  44 Interview with Marion Kraft in 1986 in Conversations with Audre Lorde, ed. Joan Wylie Hall (University Press of Mississippi, 2004), pp. 146–53, at 149.

  45 Lorde, Zami, p. 24.

  46 Audre Lorde, “An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984), pp. 81–109, at 82.

  47 Lorde, Zami, pp. 59, 58.

  48 Ibid., pp. 86, 91, 100–103.

  49 “Memorial II,” in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 3; Lorde, Zami, p. 82.

  50 Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 26.

  51 Lorde, Zami, pp. 136, 133, 139, 142.

  52 Ibid., p. 126.

  53 Ibid., p. 232.

  54 Ibid., pp. 224, 178, 224, 187.

  55 Ibid., p. 204.

  56 Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s,” in Sister Outsider, pp. 134–44, 134.

  57 Tracy Daugherty, The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion (Macmillan, 2015), p. 80.

  58 Ibid.

  59 Joan Didion, “People Are Talking About” column, Vogue, January 1963, 34; quoted in ibid., p. 104.

  60 Daugherty’s biography draws from Noel Parmentel’s recollections of Didion; see The Last Love Song, p. 95.

  61 Joan Didion, “People Are Talking About” column, Vogue, July 1963, 31; quoted in ibid., p. 142.

  62 Betty Friedan, Life So Far (Simon and Schuster, 2000), p. 99.

  63 Ibid., p. 98.

  64 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique [50th anniversary ed.] (W. W. Norton, 2013), p. 83. She describes the education required for women in her book’s final chapter, “A New Life Plan for Women” (chap. 14, pp. 407–56).

  65 Friedan’s unpublished notes on Bruno Bettelheim’s The Informed Heart (1960), quoted in Kirsten Fermaglich, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957–1965 (Brandeis University Press, published by University Press of New England, 2000), p. 68. Fermaglich and Lisa M. Fine further contextualize this quotation in their introduction to the Norton Critical Edition of The Feminine Mystique (W. W. Norton, 2013), pp. xi–xx, at xv–xvi.

  66 Phyllis Lee Levin, “Road from Sophocles to Spock Is Often a Bumpy One; Former Co-eds Find Family Routine Is Stifling Them,” New York Times, 28 June 1960; quoted in Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, p. 10; for “the trapped American housewife,” see p. 14.

  67 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, p. 10.

  CHAPTER 3: THREE ANGRY VOICES

  1 See Sandra M. Gilbert, The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity (W. W. Norton, 2014), p. 205, for a description of the Eisenhowers’ menu. For descriptions and visuals of the Kennedys’ luncheon menu, see The Gilded Age Era blogspot, “Grace Kelly Visits the Kennedys,” 10 May 2014, thegildedageera.blogspot.com/2014/05/grace-kelly-visits-kennedys.html.

  2 “Jacqueline Kennedy in the White House,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/jacqueline-kennedy-in-the-white-house.

  3 See Mary Ann Watson, “A Tour of the White House: Mystique and Tradition,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 18, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 91–99, at 92, 95, and “A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy,” dir. Franklin J. Schaffner (CBS, 14 Feb. 1962).

  4 “When Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month,” Warhol explained, “I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face, the first Marilyns.” Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1980), p. 28.

  5 Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, ed. Aurelia Schober Plath (Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 473.

  6 Marilyn Hacker, “The Young Insurgent’s Commonplace Book,” Field, no. 77 (2007): 16–20 (Hacker’s contribution—a discussion of “Snapshots of a
Daughter-in-Law”—to a section titled “Adrienne Rich: A Field Symposium”). Within the next decade feminist critics were to criticize Friedan for omitting any discussion of working-class white women and women of color.

  7 Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Beacon, 2018), p. 164.

  8 “It didn’t bother me that much that [Kennedy] was dead,” Warhol recalled. “What bothered me was the way the television and radio were programming everybody to feel sad” (Warhol and Hackett, POPism, p. 77).

  9 The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen V. Kukil (Anchor, 2000), pp. 648, 647.

  10 Sylvia Plath, “Morning Song,” in Ariel (Harper, 1965), p. 1.

  11 Sylvia Plath, “Nick and the Candlestick,” in ibid., pp. 33–34, at 34.

  12 Plath, Letters Home, p. 446.

  13 For a granular account of this episode, see Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short and Blazing Life of Sylvia Plath (Knopf, 2020), pp. 700–35.

  14 Sylvia Plath, “Letter in November,” in The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (1981; repr., Harper, 2018), pp. 253–54, at 253.

  15 Plath, Letters Home, p. 446.

  16 Ibid., p. 468.

  17 Plath, “Stings,” in Ariel, pp. 61–63, at 61.

  18 Ibid., pp. 62, 63.

  19 Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Mariner, 1998), p. 277: “Sylvia . . . read ‘Daddy’ aloud [to her friend Clarissa Roche] in a mocking, comical voice that made both women fall about with laughter.”

  20 Plath, “Daddy,” in Ariel, pp. 49–51, at 50.

  21 “Script for the BBC Broadcast ‘New Poems by Sylvia Plath,’ ” appendix II in Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition (HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 195–97, at 195.

  22 Plath, “Daddy,” pp. 50, 49. It is of course deeply significant here that Otto Plath had to have his leg amputated after gangrene set in due to an advanced case of untreated diabetes. Sylvia blamed her father for never seeking medical attention.

  23 Ibid., pp. 51, 49.

  24 Ibid., p. 51.

  25 Plath, “Ariel,” in Ariel, pp. 26–27.

  26 Ibid., p. 27.

  27 The facsimile of Plath’s manuscript is reproduced in Ariel: The Restored Edition; see pp. 91–174.

  28 Plath, Letters Home, p. 491.

  29 Ted Hughes, “The Inscription,” in Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 1154.

  30 The Letters of Sylvia Plath, vol. 2, 1956–1963, ed. Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (Harper, 2018), p. 968.

  31 See Sandra M. Gilbert, “Introduction: The Treasures That Prevail,” in Adrienne Rich, Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, ed. Gilbert (W. W. Norton, 2018), pp. xi–xx, at xvi.

  32 W. H. Auden, foreword to Adrienne Cecile Rich, A Change of World (Yale University Press, 1951), pp. 7–11, at 11.

  33 Randall Jarrell, “New Books in Review,” Yale Review 46 (1956): 100.

  34 Adrienne Rich, “Juvenilia,” in Collected Poems: 1951–2012 (W. W. Norton, 2016), pp. 126–27, at 127.

  35 See Gilbert, “Introduction: The Treasures That Prevail,” p. xvi.

  36 Ibid.

  37 Plath, Unabridged Journals, p. 368.

  38 Ibid., p. 354.

  39 Adrienne Rich, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” (1982), in Essential Essays, pp. 198–217, at 212.

  40 Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971), in ibid., pp. 3–19, at 14.

  41 Adrienne Rich, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” in Collected Poems, pp. 117–21, at 117. Literarily, moldering wedding cake evokes Miss Havisham, the perpetually unmarried bride in Dickens’s Great Expectations, whose unconsumed cake has sat for decades in a cobwebby room while the marriage it was supposed to celebrate never took place.

  42 Ibid.

  43 Significantly, Rich always insisted that her children—and later, her grandchildren—call her “Adrienne,” as if “mother” and “grandmother,” those placeholders of family identity, might prove as ruinous as the cake “heavy with useless experience.” Yet by all accounts she was a loving parent and grandparent. Even more than Plath, however, she regularly transmuted the personal into the political and the poetical. The lovely essay “For Adrienne,” written by her granddaughter Julia Conrad, gives in a short space a vivid sense of the way in which Rich related to her family. See Massachusetts Review 57, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 799–804.

  44 Rich, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” p. 118. This last phrase is drawn from Baudelaire’s poem “Au lecteur” (“To the Reader”), in which he addresses both the reader and himself with some contempt: “Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!” Charles Baudelaire, “Au lecteur,” in Flowers of Evil and Other Works/Les Fleurs du Mal et Oeuvres Choisies, ed. and trans. Wallace Fowlie (1964; repr., Dover, 1992), p. 18.

  45 Rich, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” p. 118.

  46 Ibid., p. 119.

  47 Ibid.

  48 Ibid., pp. 120, 121.

  49 Ibid., p. 121. The passage from The Second Sex that yielded this vision was like yet unlike Rich’s literally fabulous conclusion to “Snapshots.” For Beauvoir, she is an archetypal and problematic figure, the very paradigm of the other who is the “second sex.” For Rich, however, in her otherness she becomes a utopian redeemer. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (1952; repr., Vintage, 1989), p. 729.

  50 Rich, “When We Dead Awaken,” p. 14.

  51 See John Ashbery’s review of Rich’s Necessities of Life, quoted in Albert Gelpi’s American Poetry After Modernism: The Power of the Word (Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 141. Ashbery dismissed her with faint praise as “an Emily Dickinson of the suburbs.”

  52 See Michelle Dean, “The Wreck,” New Republic, 3 Apr. 2016, newrepublic.com/article/132117/adrienne-richs-feminist-awakening.

  53 Adrienne Rich, “Blue Ghazals: 9/29/86,” in Collected Poems, p. 310.

  54 Angela Davis, quoted in Alan Light, What Happened, Miss Simone? A Biography (Crown Archetype, 2016), p. 103; Toni Morrison, quoted in David Brun-Lambert, Nina Simone: The Biography (Aurum, 2009), pp. 156–57; Amiri Baraka, quoted in Michael Gonzales, “Natural Fact: The Nina Simone Story,” WaxPoetics, 25 June 2015, backend.waxpoetics.com/blog/features/natural-fact-the-nina-simone-story.

  55 Both movies made about Nina Simone include these three incidents: see Nina, dir. Cynthia Mort (RLJ Entertainment, 2016), and What Happened, Miss Simone?, dir. Liz Garbus (Netflix, 2015).

  56 Nina Simone with Stephen Cleary, I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone (Da Capo Press, 1991), p. 26.

  57 Ibid., p. 42.

  58 Simone Signoret would go on to translate and produce Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in Paris.

  59 Light, What Happened, Miss Simone?, p. 59; Nina Simone, quoted in ibid., p. 136.

  60 Simone with Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, p. 77.

  61 Ibid., p. 78.

  62 Simone, quoted in Light, What Happened, Miss Simone?, p. 120.

  63 Simone with Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, p. 83.

  64 Perry, Looking for Lorraine, p. 129.

  65 Simone with Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, pp. 87, 89.

  66 Ibid., p. 90.

  67 Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam” (1964), Genius, genius.com/Nina-simone-mississippi-goddam-lyrics.

  68 Lisa Simone, quoted in Light, What Happened, Miss Simone?, p. 100.

  69 Nina Simone, quoted in Joe Hagan, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free: The Secret Diary of Nina Simone,” The Believer, no. 73 (1 July 2010), www.believermag.com/i-wish-i-knew-how-it-would-feel-to-be-free/.

  70 Nina Simone, “Pirate Jenny” (1964), Genius, www.genius.com/Nina-simone-pirate-jenny-lyrics.

  71 Angela Davis, quoted in Light, What Happened, Miss Simone?, p. 103; Ruth Feldstein, How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 96.

 
; 72 For “the United Snakes of America,” see Claudia Roth Pierpoint, “A Raised Voice: How Nina Simone Turned the Movement into Music,” New Yorker, 11 and 18 Aug. 2014, pp. 44–51, at 49.

  73 Nina Simone, “Go Limp” (1964), Genius, www.genius.com/Nina-simone-go-limp-lyrics.

  74 Angela Davis, Angela Davis—An Autobiography (Random House, 1974), p. 161.

  75 Stokely Carmichael, quoted in Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (William Morrow, 1985), pp. 451–52.

  76 Nina Simone, “Four Women” (1965), Genius, www.genius.com/Nina-simone-four-women-lyrics.

  77 Nina Simone, “Images” (1966), Genius, www.genius.com/Nina-simone-images-lyrics.

  78 Mary Anne Evans’s lengthy interview with Nina Simone about “Four Women” is reprinted in Light, What Happened, Miss Simone?, pp. 132–34. All of Simone’s comments about the characters that follow derive from this interview. In the biography, the interview appears in italics.

  79 Al Schackman, quoted in ibid., 134–35.

  80 Simone with Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, p. 117.

  81 Nina Simone, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” (1967), Genius, www.genius.com/Nina-simone-i-wish-i-knew-how-it-would-feel-to-be-free-lyrics.

  82 Simone with Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, p. 118.

  83 Nina Simone, quoted in Light, What Happened, Miss Simone?, p. 91. The description of her being worked “like a carthorse” is from Simone with Cleary, I Put a Spell on You, p. 114.

  84 Nina Simone, quoted in Nadine Cohadas, Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), p. 224.

  85 Simone, quoted in ibid., 162.

  86 Bryant Rollins and Les Matthews, “Candidates Warned: Must Deal with Black Nationalists and Integrationists or Get No Support,” New York Amsterdam News, 16 Oct. 1971.

  87 Hansberry’s lecture “The Nation Needs Your Gifts” is discussed by Perry, Looking for Lorraine, p. 197.

  CHAPTER 4: THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION AND THE VIETNAM WAR

  1 Philip Larkin, “Annus Mirabilis,” in The Complete Poems, ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 90.

  2 See Loren Glass, “Redeeming Value: Obscenity and Anglo-American Modernism,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 341–61.