TheLearningCurve

THE JEWISH KING JAMES VERSION

James Wood
03 August 2005

When Saul Bellow died in April this year, it did not escape notice that his most vocal appreciators were English. The New York Observer wondered why the most prominent tribute by a distinguished fellow novelist – Ian McEwan’s piece, first published in the Guardian, and then reprinted the following day on the op-ed page of the New York Times – was not by an American. In his moving eulogy, McEwan mentioned essays on Bellow by Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and myself. McEwan’s most recent novel, Saturday, bears a long epigraph from Herzog.

McEwan gave a fine account of what Bellow had meant to him, and in particular of the joy to be taken in Bellow’s metaphors and similes – Pierre Thaxter, the toes of his feet pressed together “like Smyrna figs”; Professor Kippenberg, a great scholar with bushy eyebrows like “caterpillars from the Tree of Knowledge”; Cousin Riva, a middle-aged woman whose shape has broadened: “She had come down in the knees like the jack of a car, to a diamond posture”. He went on to suggest that English readers and writers may respond to a nineteenth-century amplitude in Bellow’s work that is felt to be lacking in the post-war English novel; we relish the “generous inclusiveness” of these books, their seething variousness – the lawyers (like Tomchek, whose breath “was sourly virile”), the rabbis (such as one whose “soft big nose” is “violently pitted with black”), the crooks, the seductresses and impractical, haughty intellectuals (like the art critic Victor Wulpy, who “wore his pants negligently”). Though we have London, we envy Bellow his Chicago. (And his Manhattan.) These books, heMcEwan continued, are “the embodiment of an American vision of plurality”.

But there may be another reason for Bellow’s appreciative British audience (the Scottish poet John Burnside also wrote lyrically of Bellow shortly after his death). This has to do with what could be called the submerged Englishness of his prose. The claim seems at first eccentric: surely it’s the American otherness, the august raciness, the Yiddish slang, the demotic bustle of mixed registers that beautifully affront our proper sense of Anglican rhythm and measure. Bellow himself, in accounting for his meagre record of publication in The New Yorker, used to say that that magazine’s editors were playing by Fowler’s rules – by implication, a goy dispensation unable to appreciate the Jewish rule-breaker. In this country, indeed, there has been a strain of English disdain for Bellow’s prose, uttered over the years by Kingsley Amis, Auberon Waugh and A. N.
Wilson, which seems to represent a Fowler-like recoil from the scrambled Americanness of his writing.

But, first of all, no one has disputed the Dickensianism of Bellow’s gnarled physical portraits. The writer who pictures Cousin Riva as resembling a car jack, or the wooden-legged Valentine Gersbach as resembling a gondolier, is clearly related to the Dickens who likens Uriah Heep’s mouth to a post office. And
Bellow also possesses a Dickensianism of sentence: the English influence declares itself at the level of rhythm. Nothing seems, at first sight, more American than The Adventures of Augie March, with its Melville-like onrush. At the novel’s close, Bellow writes about the Atlantic Ocean: “it wasn’t any apostle-crossed or Aeneas-stirred Mediterranean, the clement, silky, marvelous beauty-sparkle bath in which all the ancientest races were children. As we left the harbor, the North Atlantic, brute gray, heckled the ship with its strength, clanging, pushing, muttering; a hungry sizzle salted the bulkheads”. Melville and perhaps early Robert Lowell cluster behind these sentences. But Dickens is there, too, the Dickens who likes to pile up compound phrases: “a bawling, splashing, link-lighted, hackney-coach-jostling, patten-clinking, muddy, miserable world”. Or take a sentence like this description of a hot summer night in The Dean’s December: “It had been one of those choking, peak-of-summer, urban-nightmare, sexual and obscene, running-bare times, and death panting behind the young man, closing in”. And here is Conrad, with his description of the London night in The Secret Agent: “Night, the early dirty night, the sinister, helpless and rowdy night of South London”.

The excitement of Bellow’s prose has to do with its pressing mingle of sounds, a complex of Russian, American, Jewish and English influences. But, above all, the influence of the Bible cannot be overestimated. Bellow grew up reading the Old Testament in Hebrew. As a little boy, and unusually for a Jewish child, he fell
in love with the Gospels. (He was in hospital for weeks with peritonitis, where a missionary handed him the New Testament.) And as an adult he became a keen reader of the King James Version, a copy of which was at his bedside in the last weeks of his life. Seize the Day registers all these different voices. On the one hand, it is one of the most Russian of American novellas, filled with Dostoevskian and Tolstoyan metaphysical yearning. But it is also in constant dialogue with English verse; explicitly when the hero, Tommy Wilhelm, recalls stray fragments of Keats, Milton and Shakespeare, and implicitly, in a passage like the following:

"But at the same time, since there were depths in Wilhelm not unsuspected by himself, he received a suggestion from some remote element in his thoughts that the business of life, the real business . . . the highest business was being done. Maybe the making of mistakes expressed the very purpose of his life and the essence of his being here . . . . And though he had raised himself above Mr Perls and his father because they adored money, still they were called to act energetically and this was better than to yell and cry, pray and beg, poke and blunder and go by fits and starts and fall upon the thorns of life. And finally sink beneath that watery floor – would that be tough luck, or would it be good riddance?"

Behind this intensely Jewish-American entreaty (I reckon that most English writers would not place “still” where Bellow places it – “still they were called to act” – but would render a more normative “they were still called to act”) is “Lycidas” (the “watery floor”), but also Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”: “And thus with thee in prayer in my sore need / Oh! Lift as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! / I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”. We may also hear an insistently biblical sound in the way Bellow has adapted the Shelley: the rugged power of those primal verbs “pray and beg, poke and blunder”, and the way Bellow uses “go” (“go by fits and starts”), which recalls the gravity which the Authorized Version accords that commanding verb (“For it was said to me by the word of the Lord, thou shalt eat no bread nor drink water there, nor turn again to go by the way thou camest”, 1 Kings 13: 17; “Go ye up unto this feast: I go not up yet unto this feast: for my time is not yet full come”, John 7: 8) – even if the thorns don’t make us think of the parable of the sower, whose seed, like poor Tommy
Wilhelm’s, “fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it” (Luke 8: 7). Something similar occurs when, in the same novel, Bellow delivers this beautiful line about Manhattan: “In full tumult the great afternoon current raced for Columbus Circle, where the mouth of midtown stood open and the skyscrapers gave back the yellow fire of the sun”. The simple but grand diction of a mouth that stood open is matched by the skyscrapers, which don’t just reflect but give back the fire of the sun. Manhattan suddenly sounds 2,000 years old. The Psalmist of the King James Version has a similar fondness for pungent verbs: “All they that see me laugh me to scorn; they shoot out the lip, they shake the head . . . . They [the bulls of Bashan] gaped upon me with their mouths” (Psalm 22, verses 7 and 13).

Good English prose often finds itself falling into the great English founding rhythm, iambic pentameter, or something pretty close to it (egfor instance, Virginia Woolf’s “The day waves yellow with all its crops”). Bellow’s prose, with its colloquial interruptions and its habit of mixing high and low registers, rarely sounds exactly English. But it often sounds biblically English. In Herzog, Moses Herzog is about to board a train at Grand Central Station, and remembers family train trips in Montreal:

"The whole family took the car to the Grand Trunk Station with a basket (frail, splintering wood) of pears, overripe, a bargain bought by Jonah Herzog at the Rachel Street Market, the fruit spotty, ready for wasps, just about to decay, but marvelously fragrant. And inside the train on the worn green bristle of the seats, Father Herzog sat peeling the fruit with his Russian pearl-handled knife. He peeled and twirled and cut with European efficiency. Meanwhile, the locomotive cried and the iron-studded cars began to move. Sun and girders divided the soot geometrically. By the factory walls the grimy weeds grew. A smell of malt came from the breweries.
The train crossed the St. Lawrence. Moses pressed the pedal and through the stained funnel of the toilet he saw the river frothing. Then he stood at the window. The water shone and curved on great slabs of rock, spinning into foam at the Lachine rapids, where it sucked and rumbled. On the other shore was Caughnawaga, where the Indians lived in shacks raised on stilts. Then came the burnt summer fields. The windows were open. The echo of the train came back from the straw like a voice through a beard. The engine sowed cinders and soot over the fiery flowers and the hairy knobs of weed."

This is characteristic Bellow, and it would be hard to find a better example of his lyrical richness and his Tolstoyan sensuality of detail: “and through the stained funnel of the toilet he saw the river frothing”. To the English ear, the prose sounds, at first, magnificently improper. To begin with, Bellow loves run-on sentences – or, if not technically run-on, then something like a little gulp, an extra breath, in which the sentence continues where many writers would end it and start a new one. So we have “pears, overripe, a bargain bought by Jonah Herzog at the Rachel Street Market, the fruit spotty, ready for wasps, just about to decay, but marvelously fragrant”. And of course the prose is here
mimicking the run-on of memory itself, a Jewish-American version of Joycean stream-of-consciousness. But at the same time, Bellow ends his sentences unexpectedly – or inserts short sentences justwhere you don’t expect them: “Sun and girders divided the soot geometrically. By the factory walls the grimy weeds grew”. Again, it is the Bible we can hear. It is present in the obtrusive lyricism of “By the factory walls the grimy weeds grew”, which gently borrows from Psalm 137, “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down . . .”. It is present in the repeated connective “and” (the particle waw of biblical Hebrew): “He peeled and twirled and cut with European efficiency”. And we can hear it in the distinctive internal repetition: “Father Herzog sat peeling the fruit with his Russian pearl-handled knife. He peeled and twirled and cut with European efficiency”. Robert Alter has written about how full both Old and New Testaments are with “semantic parallelism”, also common in ancient Hebrew poetry, which is the art of saying the same thing in a second clause with only a slight variation. This is faithfully carried over from the Hebrew into the King James Version: “He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth” (Psalm 72); “Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth; and mine age is as nothing before thee” (Psalm 39); “What is the Almighty, that we should serve him? And what profit should we have, if we pray unto him?” (Psalm 21). Bellow’s habit of circling repetitively around a character, of pouring new but similar descriptions onto the same portrait, seems indebted to the biblical example. “Father Herzog sat peeling the fruit with his Russian pearl-handled knife. He peeled and twirled and cut with European efficiency”: one can imagine a biblical colon between those two sentences.

Repetition is the thing that journalistic editors always try to eliminate from one’s copy; but poets, and prose writers of distinction, understand what repetition does – understand that when you repeat a word with deliberation, the word undergoes a change in coloration. Here is Bellow in his short story “Zetland: A Fragment”:

"Zet and Lottie swam into New York City from the skies – that was how it felt in the Pacemaker, rushing along the Hudson at sunrise. First many blue twigs overhanging the water, then a rosy color, and then the heavy flashing of the river under the morning sun. They were in the dining car, their eyes heavy. They were drained by a night of broken sleep in the day coach, and they were dazzled. They drank coffee from cups as heavy as soapstone, and poured from New York Central pewter. They were in the east, where everything was better, where objects were different."

It was Martin Amis who, in conversation, pointed out to me the beauty of that phrase, “the heavy flashing of the river”. Bellow always knows what to do with the word “heavy”, Amis said. Yes he does, and here he also knows how to repeat it – “heavy flashing,” “their eyes heavy”, “cups as heavy as soapstone”. The
English master of repetition is D. H. Lawrence, who has had a greater influence on Bellow than has yet been properly acknowledged. In his Paris Review interview, Bellow confessed to a special interest in two modern writers,
Lawrence and Joyce; Sea and Sardinia was one of Bellow’s favourite pieces of English prose. It is also one of Lawrence’s greatest achievements, where biblical repetition is used with the utmost delicacy: “Wonderful to go out on a frozen road, to see the grass in shadow bluish with hoar-frost, to see the grass in the yellow winter-sunrise beams melting and going cold-twinkly. Wonderful the bluish, cold air, and things standing up in cold distance”. Like Bellow’s, Lawrence’s prose, at its best, is an attempt at totality, in which all the elements of writing can be employed; it is why the prose of both writers sounds at once antique (poetic, lyrical, romantic, scriptural) and modern (cranky, individual, self-interrupting, vocal). Lawrence describing a dirty Sicilian farmhouse can sound eerily like the narrator of The Adventures of Augie March:

"And he led the way down the passage, just as dirty as the road outside, up the hollow, wooden stairs also just as clean as the passage, along a hollow, drum-rearing dirty corridor, and into a bedroom. Well, it contained a large bed, thin and flat with a grey-white counterpane, like a large, poor, marble-slabbed tomb in the room’s sordid emptiness; one dilapidated chair on which stood the miserablest weed of a candle I have ever seen: a broken washer-saucer in a wire ring: and for the rest, an expanse of wooden floor as dirty-grey-black as it could be, and an expanse of wall charted with the bloody deaths of mosquitoes. The
window was about two feet above the level of a sort of stable yard outside, with a fowl-house just by the sash. There, at the window flew lousy feathers and dirty straw, the ground was thick with chicken-droppings. An ass and two oxen comfortably chewed hay in an open shed just across, and plump in the middle of the yard lay a bristly black pig taking the last of the sun. Smells of course were varied."

One can see why Bellow was so fond of Lawrence – the crooked vitality of the voice (“Smells of course were varied”), the eccentric choices (“a hollow, drum-rearing dirty corridor”), the knuckly adjectives (“lousy”, “bristly”), the sentences at once loose and melodic, rushed and worked-at. Both Bellow and Lawrence are fond of the adjectives “marvellous” and “lovely”. Both writers enjoy omitting the definite article: “standing up in cold distance”; “in full tumult the great afternoon current. . .”. Like Bellow, Lawrence constructs Shakespearean or Dickensian compounds, and uses colloquialisms and slang, and pungently simple verbs (Lawrence’s “things standing up in cold distance” resembles Bellow’s mouth of Manhattan standing open), and big Melvillean onrush: “after such marvellous ringing blue days”, a phrase from Sea and Sardinia, is very close to Melville’s description of being becalmed in Moby-Dick: “the warmly cool clear ringing perfumed overflowing redundant days”. Bellow, too, enjoys amassing gorgeous adjectives: Lake Michigan is seen, in Humboldt’s Gift, as “the limp silk fresh lilac drowning water”. Both writers, of course, see the world with finely estranging eyes: Lawrence notices a fire in a grate as “that rushing bouquet of new flames in the chimney”. Were I to give a single example of Lawrence’s humour and his utterly musical sense of the exact weight of each word, it would be his description of King Victor Emmanuel and “his little short legs”. Short is not the same as little; the two words enjoy each other’s company, and “little short legs” is more original than “short little legs”, because it is jumpier, more absurd, forcing us to stumble slightly over the unexpected rhythm.

Lawrence, the most biblical of modern English novelists, can be seen as the bridge that links the Hebrew-biblical side of Bellow with the English-biblical side, the Jewish with the Anglican (Lawrence, apparently, translates well into Hebrew because of this biblical metre in his prose). And perhaps, too, Lawrence is the twentieth-century writer who most obviously links Dickens to the American master.

August Wilson, who chronicled the African-American experience in the 20th century in a series of plays that will stand as a landmark in the history of black culture, of American literature and of Broadway theater, died yesterday at a hospital in Seattle. He was 60 and lived in Seattle.

The cause was liver cancer, said his assistant, Dena Levitin. Mr. Wilson's cancer was diagnosed in the summer, and his illness was made public last month.

"Radio Golf," the last of the 10 plays that constitute Mr. Wilson's majestic theatrical cycle, opened at the Yale Repertory Theater last spring and has subsequently been produced in Los Angeles. It was the concluding chapter in a spellbinding story that began more than two decades ago, when Mr. Wilson's play "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" had its debut at the same theater, in 1984, and announced the arrival of a major talent, fully matured.

Reviewing the play's Broadway premiere for The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote that in "Ma Rainey," Mr. Wilson "sends the entire history of black America crashing down upon our heads."

"This play is a searing inside account of what white racism does to its victims," Mr. Rich continued, "and it floats on the same authentic artistry as the blues music it celebrates."

In the years since "Ma Rainey" appeared, Mr. Wilson collected innumerable accolades for his work, including seven New York Drama Critics' Circle awards, a Tony Award, for 1987's "Fences," and two Pulitzer Prizes, for "Fences" and "The Piano Lesson," from 1990.

"He was a giant figure in American theater," the playwright Tony Kushner said yesterday. "Heroic is not a word one uses often without embarrassment to describe a writer or playwright, but the diligence and ferocity of effort behind the creation of his body of work is really an epic story.

"The playwright's voice in American culture is perceived as having been usurped by television and film, but he reasserted the power of drama to describe large social forces, to explore the meaning of an entire people's experience in American history. For all the magic in his plays, he was writing in the grand tradition of Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, the politically engaged, direct, social realist drama. He was reclaiming ground for the theater that most people thought had been abandoned."

To honor his achievements, Broadway's Virginia Theater is to be renamed the August Wilson Theater. The new marquee is to be unveiled Oct. 17.

With the exceptions of "Radio Golf" and "Jitney," a play first produced in St. Paul in 1981 and reworked and presented Off Broadway in 2000, all of the plays in the cycle were ultimately seen on Broadway, the sometimes treacherous but all-important commercial marketplace for American theater. Although some were not financial successes there, "Fences," which starred James Earl Jones, set a record for a nonmusical Broadway production when it grossed $11 million in a single year, and ran for 525 performances. Together, Mr. Wilson's plays logged nearly 1,800 performances on Broadway in a little more than two decades, and they have been seen in more than 2,000 separate productions, amateur and professional.

Each of the plays in the cycle was set in a different decade of the 20th century, and all but "Ma Rainey" took place in the impoverished but vibrant African-American Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Mr. Wilson was born. In 1978, before he had become a successful writer, Mr. Wilson moved to St. Paul, and in 1994 he settled in Seattle, where he died. But his spiritual home remained the rough streets of the Hill District, where as a young man he sat in thrall to the voices of African-American working men and women. Years later, he would discern in their stories, their jokes and their squabbles the raw material for an art that would celebrate the sustaining richness of the black American experience, bruising as it often was.

In his work, Mr. Wilson depicted the struggles of black Americans with uncommon lyrical richness, theatrical density and emotional heft, in plays that gave vivid voices to people on the frayed margins of life: cabdrivers and maids, garbagemen and side men and petty criminals. In bringing to the popular American stage the gritty specifics of the lives of his poor, trouble-plagued and sometimes powerfully embittered black characters, Mr. Wilson also described universal truths about the struggle for dignity, love, security and happiness in the face of often overwhelming obstacles.

In dialogue that married the complexity of jazz to the emotional power of the blues, he also argued eloquently for the importance of black Americans' honoring the pain and passion in their history, not burying it to smooth the road to assimilation. For Mr. Wilson, it was imperative for black Americans to draw upon the moral and spiritual nobility of their ancestors' struggles to inspire their own ongoing fight against the legacies of white racism.

In an article about his cycle for The Times in 2000, Mr. Wilson wrote, "I wanted to place this culture onstage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves."

Mr. Wilson did not establish the chronological framework of his cycle until after the work had begun, and he skipped around in time. Although "Radio Golf," the last play to be written, was set in the 1990's, "Gem of the Ocean," which immediately preceded it in production (it came to Broadway in the fall of 2004), was set in the first decade of the 20th century.

His first success, "Ma Rainey," which took place in a Chicago recording studio in 1927, depicted the turbulent relationship between a rich but angry blues singer and a brilliant trumpet player who also wants to succeed in the white-dominated world of commercial music. From there Mr. Wilson turned to the 1950's, with "Fences," his most popular play, about a garbageman and former baseball player in the Negro leagues who clashes with his son over the boy's intention to pursue a career in sports. His next play, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," considered by many to be the finest of his works, was a quasi-mystical drama set in a boardinghouse in 1911. It told of a man newly freed from illegal servitude searching to find the woman who abandoned him.

The other plays in Mr. Wilson's theatrical opus are "The Piano Lesson," set in 1936, in which a brother and sister argue over the fate of the piano that symbolizes the family's anguished past history; "Two Trains Running," concerning an ex-con re-ordering his life in 1969; "Seven Guitars," about a blues musician on the brink of a career breakthrough in 1948; "Jitney," a collage of the everyday doings at a gypsy cab company in 1977; and "King Hedley II," in which another troubled ex-con searches for redemption as the Hill District crumbles under the onslaught of Reaganomics in 1985.

As the cycle developed, Mr. Wilson knit the plays together through overlapping themes and characters. Many of the primary conflicts concern the dueling prerogatives of characters poised between the traumatizing past and the uncertain future. The central character in "Radio Golf" is the grandson of a character in "Gem of the Ocean." The guiding spirit of the cycle came to be Aunt Esther, a woman said to have lived for more than three centuries, who was referred to in several plays and who appeared at last in "Gem." She embodied the continuity of spiritual and moral values that Mr. Wilson felt was crucial to the black experience, uniting the descendants of slaves to their African ancestors.

A Fruitful Partnership

Mr. Wilson's career was closely linked with that of Lloyd Richards, who became the first black director to work on Broadway when he staged the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, Lorraine Hansberry's "Raisin in the Sun," in 1959. Ms. Hansberry's warmhearted but clear-eyed play about the struggles of a black family to move up the economic ladder in Chicago shares with Mr. Wilson's work a focus on the daily lives of black Americans, relegating the oppressions of white culture to the background.

Mr. Richards, the dean of the Yale School of Drama and the artistic director of Yale Repertory Theater from 1979 to 1991, was also the head of the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference in Connecticut when Mr. Wilson submitted "Ma Rainey" to the program. ("Jitney," begun in 1979, had been submitted and rejected twice.) When it was accepted, Mr. Richards helped refine the work of the then-unknown writer and first produced and directed it at Yale Rep, where its success instantly established Mr. Wilson as an American playwright of singular talent, perhaps the greatest American stage poet since Tennessee Williams.

Mr. Richards would help shape and direct the next five plays in Mr. Wilson's cycle, ending with "Seven Guitars," which arrived on Broadway in 1996. Each play was refined through a series of productions at Yale and other regional theaters before moving to New York. (Most grew significantly shorter along the way: Mr. Wilson's work was most often criticized for excessive length and sometimes belaboring its ideas. In a celebratory review Mr. Rich wrote when "Joe Turner" opened on Broadway, he nevertheless noted, "As usual with Mr. Wilson, the play overstates its thematic exposition in an overlong first act.")

This formula replicated in a noncommercial arena the tryout circuit that had once been commonplace for plays aiming for Broadway, a method of development that ran aground as the costs of theater skyrocketed. The process, which also involved Mr. Wilson's longtime producer, Benjamin Mordecai, the managing director of Yale Rep during much of Mr. Richards's tenure, was important in defining a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship between the country's not-for-profit regional theaters and its Broadway-centered commercial establishment. (Mr. Mordecai, who was involved with all of Mr. Wilson's plays in one capacity or another, died earlier this year.) More significantly, the collaboration between Mr. Richards and Mr. Wilson was the most artistically fruitful in American theatrical history since Elia Kazan's association with Arthur Miller and Williams.

An Atypical Education

Mr. Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, in Pittsburgh. He was named for his father, a white German immigrant who worked as a baker, drank too much and had a fiery temperament his son would inherit. He was mostly an absence in Mr. Wilson's childhood, and it was his African-American mother, Daisy Wilson, who instilled in her six children a strong sense of pride and a limited tolerance for injustice. (She once turned down a washing machine she had won in a contest when the company sponsoring the event tried to fob off a secondhand item on her.) Mr. Wilson legally adopted her last name when he set out to become a writer.

Eventually Mrs. Wilson divorced Mr. Wilson's father and remarried, and the family moved to a largely white suburb. As the only black student in his class at a Roman Catholic high school, Mr. Wilson gained an awareness of the grinding ugliness of racism that would inform his work. "There was a note on my desk every single day," he told The New Yorker in 2001. "It said, 'Go home, nigger.' " Mr. Wilson attended two more schools but gave up on formal education when a teacher accused him of plagiarizing a paper on Napoleon. At 15, he chose to continue - but essentially to begin - his education on his own, spending his days at the local library absorbing books by the dozen.

Mr. Wilson acquired an equally valuable education outside the library walls, hanging out and listening to the Hill District denizens pass the time on stoops, in coffee shops and at Pat's Place, a local cigar store. Eventually the voices he absorbed while hanging loose with retirees and sharpies in his 20's would re-emerge in his plays, sometimes with little artistic tampering.

Mr. Wilson acquired his first typewriter with $20 he had earned writing a term paper for one of his sisters at college. But he preferred to write in public places like bars and restaurants and had a particular affinity for composing on cocktail napkins. Only when he settled into his career as a playwright did he become comfortable writing at home, in longhand on yellow notepads.

By the time he was 20, Mr. Wilson had decided he was a poet. He submitted poems to Harper's and other magazines while supporting himself with odd jobs, and began dressing in a style that raised eyebrows among his peers. While most of the young men of the time were dressing down, Mr. Wilson was always meticulously turned out in jackets, ties and white shirts selected from thrift shops. Later he would be known for his trademark porter's cap.

Inspired by the Black Power movement then gaining momentum, Mr. Wilson and a group of fellow poets founded a theater workshop and an art gallery, and in 1968 Mr. Wilson and his friend Rob Penny founded the Black Horizons on the Hill Theater. Mr. Wilson was the director and sometimes an actor, too, although he had no experience, and learned about directing by checking a how-to manual out of the library. The company was without a performance space and staged shows in the auditoriums of local elementary schools. Tickets were sold, for 50 cents a pop, by chatting up people on the streets right before a performance.

But Mr. Wilson's aspirations as an author were still being channeled into poetry; after an abortive effort to write a play for his theater, he set aside playwriting for almost a decade. He came home to drama almost by happenstance. Mr. Wilson moved to St. Paul in 1978 and started working at the Science Museum of Minnesota. His task: adapting Native American folk tales into children's plays.

Homesick for the Hill District and growing more comfortable with the playwriting process, he started channeling the Hill voices haunting his memories as a way of keeping the connection alive. "Jitney," begun in 1979, was the result. It was produced in Pittsburgh in 1982, the same year that "Ma Rainey" was accepted at the O'Neill Center. (Mr. Wilson's first professional production was of a prior play adapted from a series of his poems, "Black Bart and the Sacred Hills," staged by St. Paul's Penumbra Theater.)

In a 1999 interview in The Paris Review, Mr. Wilson cited his major influences as being the "four B's": the blues was the "primary" influence, followed by Jorge Luis Borges, the playwright Amiri Baraka and the painter Romare Bearden. He analyzed the elements each contributed to his art: "From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don't write political plays. From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality." He added two more B's, both African-American writers, to the list: the playwright Ed Bullins and James Baldwin.

Although his plays achieved their success in the white-dominated theater world, Mr. Wilson remained devoted to the alternative culture of black Americans and mourned its gradual decline as the black middle class grew and adopted the values of its white counterpart. He once lamented that at convocation ceremonies at black universities, the music would be Bach, not gospel.

When a Hollywood studio optioned "Fences," Mr. Wilson caused a ruckus by insisting on a black director. In a 1990 article published in Spin magazine and later excerpted in The Times, he said, "I am not carrying a banner for black directors. I think they should carry their own. I am not trying to get work for black directors. I am trying to get the film of my play made in the best possible way. I declined a white director not on the basis of race but on the basis of culture. White directors are not qualified for the job. The job requires someone who shares the specifics of the culture of black Americans." (The film was not made.)

He was a firm believer in the importance of maintaining a robust black theater movement, a viewpoint that also inspired a public controversy when Mr. Wilson clashed with the prominent theater critic and arts administrator Robert Brustein in a series of exchanges in the pages of American Theater magazine and The New Republic, and later in a formal debate between the two staged at Manhattan's Town Hall in 1997, moderated by Anna Deavere Smith.

The contretemps began when Mr. Wilson delivered a keynote address to a national theater conference in which he lamented that among the more than 60 members of the League of Regional Theaters, only one was dedicated to the work of African-Americans. He also denounced as absurd the idea of colorblind casting, asserting that an all-black "Death of a Salesman" was irrelevant because the play was "conceived for white actors as an investigation of the specifics of white culture." Mr. Brustein referred to Mr. Wilson's call for an independent black theater movement as "self-segregation."

At the sold-out debate at Town Hall the friendly antagonists essentially restated their positions publicly. "Never is it suggested that playwrights like David Mamet or Terrence McNally are limiting themselves to whiteness," Mr. Wilson said. "The idea that we are trying to escape from the ghetto of black culture is insulting."

A Legacy of Stars

Mr. Wilson was dedicated to writing for the theater, and resisted many offers from Hollywood. (His only concession: adapting "The Piano Lesson" for television.) He didn't even see any movies for a stretch of 10 years.

But the list of well-known television and film actors who first came to prominence in one of Mr. Wilson's plays is lengthy. Charles S. Dutton scored his first success as the trumpeter Levee in the original production of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," a role he reprised nearly 20 years later when the play was revived on Broadway in 2003, with Whoopi Goldberg in the title role. S. Epatha Merkerson, now known as Lt. Anita Van Buren on "Law & Order," appeared opposite Mr. Dutton in "The Piano Lesson" on Broadway.

Other notable actors who appeared in one or more of Mr. Wilson's plays include Angela Bassett, Roscoe Lee Browne, Phylicia Rashad, Courtney B. Vance, Laurence Fishburne, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Keith David, Viola Davis, Delroy Lindo, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Leslie Uggams and Brian Stokes Mitchell.

Mr. Wilson's first two marriages, to Brenda Burton and Judy Oliver, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Constanza Romero, a Colombian-born costume designer he met when she worked on "The Piano Lesson"; and two daughters, Sakina Ansari (from his first marriage) and Azula Carmen Wilson (from his third). He is also survived by his siblings Freda Ellis, Linda Jean Kittel, Richard Kittel, Donna Conley and Edwin Kittel.

Mr. Wilson did not write plays with specific political agendas, but he did believe art could subtly effect social change. And while his essential aim was to evoke and ennoble the collective African-American experience, he also believed his work could help rewrite some of those rules.

"I think my plays offer (white Americans) a different way to look at black Americans," he told The Paris Review. "For instance, in 'Fences' they see a garbageman, a person they don't really look at, although they see a garbageman every day. By looking at Troy's life, white people find out that the content of this black garbageman's life is affected by the same things - love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. Recognizing that these things are as much part of his life as theirs can affect how they think about and deal with black people in their lives."

In describing his own work, Mr. Wilson could be analytical or offhand. A soft-spoken man whose affability masked a sometimes short temper, he was a connoisseur of the art of storytelling offstage and on. Here's the story behind all his characters' stories, in his own words: "I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story. I'm not sure what it means, other than life is hard."

DISCOVERING A PLAYWRIGHT WITH CLASS

By Julia Keller

For most of us, our real first taste of literature comes when our keisters are fixed firmly, if reluctantly, in the hard chairs of a high school English class.

There's the smell of sweat and hair spray and the hip cologne in which someone has vastly overindulged, and that funky odor from a book bag in the third row that might be attributable to a week-old burrito -- but who really cares to speculate? -- and there's the turgid feel of time as it slows to an arthritic crawl while you wait . . . for . . . the . . . final . . . bell.

In the midst of all that misery, however, there's also the rare, glorious moment when homework turns into an epiphany.

That's how it is sometimes for students who read an August Wilson play, say two teachers who have introduced hundreds of high schoolers to the earthy rhythms of the late playwright's works, to the explosive power of his plots and brittle verisimilitude of his characters.

`Something new'

"These kids have a wide reading experience, but August Wilson is something new," says Bill Lovaas, an English teacher at Oak Park and River Forest High School.

A teacher for more than three decades, Lovaas assigns "Fences" and "The Piano Lesson" in American literature and American studies courses.

His colleague, Mike Dorame, also teaches Wilson's plays and reports much the same reaction: Students often are surprised by the works.

"It takes a while for the characters to grow on them," Dorame adds. "Wilson's characters are abrasive.

"But by the end, they really like it."

Wilson, who died last week at 60, is naturally the focus of a great deal of scholarly attention. The critical essays in the wake of his death appeared in all the usual places and said all the usual things -- he's a major figure in the American theater, he won big prizes, his language is authentic and inspired, his epic cycle of plays about the black experience in 20th Century America will long endure, he's a giant of a writer in an age of diminished expectations.

But there's another side to Wilson's work. There's the moment in a high school English class when a kid reads aloud from "The Piano Lesson," and even though he's not a professional actor and even though he might utter the words in a shy, halting way, so as not to be embarrassed in front of his peers, something special happens, and the classroom is transformed, and none of the kids sitting there is ever quite the same again.

It might be the moment when Boy Willie, the character who wants to sell his family's piano and buy the land upon which his ancestors worked as slaves, declares:

I ain't gonna just take my life and throw it away at the bottom. I'm in the world like everybody else . . . I'll tell you something about me. I done strung along and strung along. Going this way and that. Whatever way would lead me to a moment of peace. That's all I want. To be as easy with everything. But I wasn't born to that. I was born to a time of fire.

Both Dorame and Lovaas ask their students to read the plays aloud in class, and that's when the magic happens, they say. That's when Wilson's language -- which is, to put it charitably, a bit blunter and more profane than what you're likely to hear in your average classroom -- really grabs hold of the students, and what seemed like mere words on the page suddenly becomes something different. It becomes the love and rage and tenderness and woe of the African-Americans whom Wilson chronicles in his plays.

First and last time

Because not every student will continue to study literature in college, this is, for many, the first and last time they'll be dealing with a Wilson play.

It's a moment beyond the reach of critics, outside the province of theater historians.

"Prose can be so passive," Lovaas says. "If you can have the kids master a few scenes, act it out, it adds more to the study of literature. You can lend your voice to the page.

"The plays are difficult in terms of subject matter, but when we read them aloud, the students really rise to the occasion and grasp what Wilson is doing."

Students often think of "literature" as something marked by stilted, pompous-sounding language -- the kind of dialogue you'd never hear spoken on the street. But with Wilson, what you hear in the world is what you get on the page.

"They enjoy the change," Lovaas says. "They like the freshness in the language and the characterizations. Students connect with the characters through the music of the language. His plays add to their knowledge of the world they're experiencing every day."

And for a teacher, reading the plays over and over again for each succeeding class is not a chore, Lovaas adds. "Each time you do it, you catch a nuance. You find something different about the character, a different lens."

When Lovaas arrived at his office last Monday, several students were waiting for him. They wanted to know if he'd heard the news, which he hadn't -- the news that the playwright had died.

But in a larger sense, Wilson is still talking, only now the words are coming from the kids who read his plays and find the familiar rhythms, feel the patterns and echoes of the things they already know.

"In a diverse high school," Lovaas says, "Wilson's work offers opportunities for students from other backgrounds to talk about their lives."

jikeller@tribune.com

IT WAS OUR GREAT PRIVILEGE TO HAVE WILSON AMONG US

October 9, 2005

He called them "moments of privilege," the hard-won times when the writing became less like work and more like channeling the spirits.

"You have to be able to recognize moments of privilege," August Wilson told me last year. "Sometimes you walk right by and miss 'em." The playwright lived his restless and very full life searching for those moments.

He was a man given to the poetic gesture. He said he'd started buying first editions of books that might matter, in his estimation, to his younger daughter, Azula Carmen Wilson, then 7. (The titles weren't all peaches and cream: One of the first he bought, Wilson said, was "Hitler's Willing Executioners.")

"The time goes by, it goes by so fast," he said last year.

He was on the road all the time: One more trip to one more city for one more production of one more August Wilson play. If it was a new play, he'd be rewriting. If it was a revival of an older Wilson play, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" or "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" or "Jitney," he'd be doing an old friend or a group of longtime colleagues a favor by being there in person.

So many Wilson characters cannot find their song without a literal journey to go with the poetic one. Wilson, who died Oct. 2 of liver cancer at age 60, was no less a Wilson character than the ones he wrote.

Dream roles

The ones he wrote became meat and drink for a formidable array of actors on Broadway and elsewhere: Charles S. Dutton, Phylicia Rashad, Angela Bassett, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Roscoe Lee Browne. In Chicago, he won't lack for celebration. "Two Trains Running" continues at Pegasus Players through October. The Court Theatre revives "Fences" early next year. The Goodman is working on a festival of his 10 major works for the 2006-07 season.

The eight Wilson plays that made it to Broadway before his death garnered more than 50 Tony Award nominations. Those who won Tonys include Ruben Santiago Hudson ("Seven Guitars"), Laurence Fishburne ("Two Trains Running"), L. Scott Caldwell ("Joe Turner's Come and Gone") and in a ferocious performance seen at the Goodman prior to New York, James Earl Jones ("Fences").

The first time I saw the man behind the plays, I was 21 and reviewing, for the Minnesota Daily, the craziest damn show I'd ever seen, an African-American Wild West fantasy, with songs, called "Black Bart and the Sacred Hills." Wilson by this time had moved from his native Pittsburgh to St. Paul, where he hooked up with the good people of Penumbra Theatre. I cannot stress to you how little cultural context I had at that age, as well as being the palest whitey in Honkytown, to properly assess what Wilson was up to in that promising mess of a play. I remember seeing the author sitting in the back, laughing, checking out the audience, in Penumbra's bare-bones community center space.

Two years later, in 1984, Wilson attended the O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference with a new piece, the one that followed "Ma Rainey" and "Fences": "Joe Turner's Come and Gone." The staged reading of his play took place in the outdoor theater, in thick hot July air. Breezewise, nothing that night was coming up from the vicinity of Long Island Sound. But the play would've melted an iceberg. When the actor playing Herald Loomis, thunderstruck and wild-eyed, described his vision of bones of his Middle Passage ancestors rising up out of the water, you thought to yourself: Here is a moment of privilege.

The third time I saw Wilson I was in New York to interview him for the Broadway premiere of "Fences." He was staying, as usual, at his affordable lodging option of choice, the Edison. He talked all night, and the three bottles of Bulgarian red wine lasted from 11:30 p.m. or so until about 4, when we went out for coffee and ended up at the Times Square McDonald's, which in 1987 was the only place open at that hour in the theater district.

I couldn't get enough of the way the man sounded when he talked. His voice was all cigarettes and Bessie Smith and Charles Mingus. Wilson's debt to the blues is legendary, but of the Mingus album "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady," he told me last year: "That's it. That's the whole universe in one album."

An open book

Wilson gave freely of his time to the newspaper and magazine writers with tape recorders. Too freely, surely, if his immediate family had been given more of a vote in the matter.

He said he wanted to act; he certainly had the presence and the voice for it. He did act, in fact. At last year's Chicago Humanities Festival, Wilson ditched the usual speechifying for an excerpt from his autobiographical solo show, "How I Learned What I Learned." Those in attendance learned plenty, and listening to Wilson's gliding reminiscence was like hearing a Coltrane tenor line for the first time.

Also last year, at a dinner at Crofton on Wells honoring Wilson's receipt of the 2004 Tribune Literary Prize, the writer was joined by his older daughter, Sakina Ansari. Wilson had by then attended a lion's share of such dinners. Even as his fortunes on Broadway waned in recent years, even with the wobbly quality of his later efforts, his presence and value on stages around the world never abated. And the prizes and huzzahs rolled in like waves.

When it was time to go, Wilson stood up at the dinner table and said he'd like to read a short speech from "Fences." In tones at once hushed and vivid, he spoke from memory the lines of Troy Maxson, talking about the time he wrestled Death for three days and three nights.

"I can't say where I found the strength from. Every time it seemed like he was gonna get the best of me, I'd reach way down deep inside myself and find the strength to do him one better.

"I ain't going easy," he said. His audience's collective moment of privilege came and went. Nobody at the table missed it. Then August Wilson said thank you, and goodbye.

mjphillips@tribune.com

Installed at his regular table at his regular cafe in Cairo, a daily rendezvous that only illness could cancel, Naguib Mahfouz observed the anonymous crowd swarming the city streets with an eye that was tolerant, humane, sometimes ironic or arch, but never malicious. He was the voice and the memory of these lives, complex, small, grandiose, magnificent or modest — from the students who came to consult him to the waiters who served him his habitual coffee.

Balzac said that because the novel is the private history of nations, a real novelist must be able to plumb the depths of society. Mr. Mahfouz fit this description perfectly. You can’t understand Egypt without Mr. Mahfouz — without his characters, with whom every reader, Arab or not, can identify. In the days since his death, many have noted how Mr. Mahfouz helped Western readers understand the Arab world. But perhaps even more important, he helped the Arab world understand itself.

Before Mr. Mahfouz, the novel as literature — literature as map to understanding — was not part of Arab culture. In fact, until the beginning of the 20th century, Arabs didn’t write novels, in large measure because Arab society didn’t recognize the individual. Only in 1914, with “Zainab,” by Hussein Haykal, published as a serial, did what is considered the first real Arabic novel appear.

And it really wasn’t until the 1950’s, and the publication of Mr. Mahfouz’s “Cairo Trilogy,” that the Arab novel arrived as a major genre of literature. In the trilogy — “Palace Walk,’’ “Palace of Desire” and “Sugar Street” — Mr. Mahfouz described the lives of three generations of a family that stood in for a country making an epic transition of its own, from tradition to a halting form of modernity.

From a Western perspective, it is difficult, I imagine, to understand the cultural power these novels exerted. Even before Mr. Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in 1988, the trilogy had the effect of liberating a generation of Arab writers. Young writers like Haydar Haydar and Fadhil al-Azzawi didn’t write like Mr. Mahfouz, but his books and his stature gave them the confidence to persevere in examining everyday life.

In his own generation, there is Yahya Haqqi, whose 1954 work “Good Morning!,” about an isolated Egyptian village’s passage into modern life, is a milestone in the history of the Arabic novel. There are also Taha Hussein and Tawfik al-Hakim, two important observers of their society who critiqued Western culture.

Like the characters in his novels, Mr. Mahfouz found himself at times trapped between tradition and modernity. His 1959 book “Children of the Alley,” which was not anti-Islamic but took liberties with the histories of the founders of the three monotheistic religions, was condemned by clerics, and after they complained to President Gamel Abdel Nasser, Mr. Mahfouz promised to not allow its future publication. (To Mr. Mahfouz’s dismay, a pirated edition of the book showed up on the sidewalks of Cairo.)

His relationship with Islamic militants continued to be an uneasy one. In 1994, they tried to stab him to death. Still, he had no hatred for them. He knew that their actions were dictated by ignorance, and as he said from his hospital bed, they had nothing to do with Islam. He hated conflict and supported the 1979 peace accords with Israel, a stance that led to boycotts or bans of his books in some Arab nations.

Mr. Mahfouz tried all styles of writing, including experimental novels. This amused him. His language, classical and conservative at first, became more inventive, incorporating what he heard in his neighborhood, which he never left. He didn’t travel. It’s said that he left Cairo once or twice, no more. He was an immobile voyager, an explorer of the human soul seated in a cafe.

It’s also been said that Mr. Mahfouz was a realistic novelist. This is not the case. Realism doesn’t exist, because life, especially life in Cairo, is itself a fiction, unfathomable, inexhaustible, where drama jostles with comedy, where tears run from joy or chagrin. Mr. Mahfouz didn’t have to invent situations or characters; it was sufficient for him to observe the people around him.

In “Sugar Street,” the death of a main character is signaled in a few words: “The master has left the house.” The same words apply today, to Naguib Mahfouz, master of the Arabic novel.

Tahar Ben Jelloun, the winner of France’s Goncourt Prize for “The Sacred Night,’’ is the author, most recently, of “The Last Friend.’’ This article was translated by The Times from the French.

WHY ARTHUR MILLER MATTERS: FOUR ESSAYS

# 1: Even if you missed his plays

# 2: Always a man of his words

# 3: His plays, our conscience

# 4: We are all Willy Loman

DISCOVERING A PLAYWRIGHT WITH CLASS

By Julia Keller

IT WAS OUR GREAT PRIVILEGE TO HAVE WILSON AMONG US