V. R. Lang, a Forgotten Queen Bee of Modern Poetry
And here is Lang, in an unnamed poem, in dialogue:
At once we sense a closing in. The lines are curter, slanting toward aphorism; a rhyme rings out; and “cuneiform,” which for O’Hara is one verbal flourish among many, allows Lang to deliver a singular shock. What’s clear is that to position her as O’Hara’s “muse,” as more than one commentator has called her, is demeaning and dead wrong. They were creative trading partners, and the trade was mutual and free. “At 11 each morning, we called each other and discussed everything we had thought of since we had parted the night before,” O’Hara wrote. In one poem, dedicated “To V. R. Lang,” he hymns her as “friend to my angels (all quarrelling),” and in “A Letter to Bunny” he pays tribute to her editorial gifts. When one of his poems threatens to turn into “a burner full of junk,” O’Hara says, it is Lang who comes to the rescue. “You enable me, by your least / remark, to unclutter myself, and my / nerves thank you for not always laughing.”
One project that consumed both Lang and O’Hara was the Poets’ Theatre, which was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1950. The opening night, on February 26, 1951, was attended by such luminaries as Thornton Wilder, Richard Wilbur, and Archibald MacLeish. Among the delights on offer that evening was a play by O’Hara, “Try! Try!” (hardly the most propitious of titles), with set designs by Gorey. It was directed by Lang, who also played a character named Violet—clad, in the words of O’Hara’s biographer Brad Gooch, “in her rattiest white sneakers and a faded red and white apron.”
The very phrase “Poets’ Theatre,” it must be said, does not inspire huge confidence, being a compound of two unstable elements. One might as well speak of embezzlers’ Jell-O. The atmosphere, according to Alison Lurie, who observed it at close quarters, was one of “rehearsals, feuds, affairs, debts, and parties.” Yet solid achievements were registered in the ensuing years, such as a reading of Djuna Barnes’s “Antiphon,” which was attended—at Lang’s brazen invitation—by T. S. Eliot. Lurie argues that, although Lang was not much of an actress (she reserved her most expert shape-shifting for life offstage), her trick was to treat those around her as if they were playing parts. “They were excited to be told, and often behaved afterwards in line with Bunny’s definition,” Lurie writes.
To be honest, the whole setup sounds exhausting. Things came to a head when Lang wrote a play of her own, “Fire Exit,” which had its première in 1952. “She directed it, produced it, and starred in it. She also chose the cast, designed the costumes and sets, arranged the music and lighting, did the publicity, and managed the theatre,” Lurie tells us. For some of the in-house regulars, evidently, such imperiousness was too much, and a campaign was mounted to “Stop Bunny.” On the other hand, you have to ask: Was Lang beset by anything more than the exasperation of every poet and every novelist—the loss of control that arises when words are released from the confines of the page and encouraged to run free in the theatre, or onscreen, at the whim of other voices and under the guidance of other hands?
The irony is that “Fire Exit,” whatever the ordeal of its conception, emerges as a careful comedy, touched with pathos. How performable it might be, these days, is open to debate, but Lang’s ear for casually loaded prattling does not desert her:
The woman these people are talking about is Eurydice—often hailed as “Eury”—and the musician is Orpheus. Lang’s leaning into myth recurs in her second play, “I Too Have Lived in Arcadia.” (Neither drama is reprinted in “The Miraculous Season,” but both were appended, with a generous helping of poems, to Lurie’s memoir when it was reprinted in 1975. Beautiful spidery illustrations by Gorey preface each section of Lurie’s book.) “Arcadia” sprang from an agonized affair between Lang and an abstract painter named Mike Goldberg; as dramatis personae, they are Chloris and Damon, who inhabit a desolate Atlantic island. They are joined by an irate third party, Phoebe, plus a poodle named Georges. He is not a happy dog: “Lady, not to eat and not to love / And to no purpose but to live it up / And have a ball, was I brought into life. / The plot grows sad, no longer good for laughs.”
For anyone who champions Lang, the question has to be: Could you spot her work without her name attached? What, if any, are its distinguishing marks? Well, for one thing, get a load of the animals—an arkful of them prowling the poetry, frequently when they are least expected. “O he has a wildebeeste’s eyes, not nice, / And a tongue like an ice pick.” To and fro Lang ranges in creaturely time, back into prehistory: “The Brontosaurus / Stand and watch, their pale, already weedy eyes / Are hurting them, and their unmanageable crusted limbs.” Human beasts are rarely alone, and far from secure at the apex of the animal kingdom. “Cats walked the walls and gleamed at us,” “Where lovers lay around like great horned owls,” and “We lay fat cats under a milkweed sky.”
Those last three, it should be emphasized, are all first lines. Lang is, in the richest sense, a promising beginner. Out of the blocks she launches herself, like a sprinter in spiked shoes. Feel the whoosh as her openings hurtle by: “Darling, they have discovered dynamite.” “Here was the fright, the flight, the brilliant stretch.” “Spring you came marvellous with possibles.” (The last of those is from “The Pitch,” which was published in Poetry in 1950. It should be anything but possible to write an arresting line about springtime, more than half a millennium after Chaucer, yet Lang pulls it off.) As often as not, the preliminary burst is comic, as we barge into a tête-à-tête or the fallout from a filthy private joke: “Why else do you have an English Horn if not / To blow it so I’ll know to let you in?”
