"Ruth" is a poem of anticipated love. Ruth speaks of herself as knowing Boaz's desire and providing conditions for its fulfillment in the privacy of her soul and dreams: "In my soul your glances sweetly blossom / And fulfill themselves / When my eyes turn to sleep" (WB, 160). The focus on Boaz's, not her own, fulfillment and, later in the poem, an angel's and not her own "song of Ruth" make Ruth curiously secondary even while she speaks. Yet Ruth presents herself as desiring and constructing a situation that will make her a symbol of courage and love. Lasker-Schüler also emphasizes Ruth's importance by including two poems about her and Boaz in this edition of Hebrew Ballads; no other couple receives more than one poem. In "Boaz," Lasker-Schüler depicts Ruth as harvesting Boaz's heart as it grows towards her, contrasting such reaping implicitly with the more common association of harvest with death. Ruth searches for cornflowers
Bringing sweet storm
And glittering playfulness
Over Boaz's heart
Which sways so high
In his grain field
Toward the foreign reaper [WB, 255]. 55
Hebrew Ballads does not depict women loving women, but the poem "Eve" contains several elements of socially coded gender reversal. In explicit contrast to Weininger's Weib, Eve is more conscious and more historically minded than Adam; she is the "thousand-stemmed memory" which "lie[s] heavily on your [Adam's] life" (WB, 162). While referring to exile, Eve's words convey no apology or regret; she describes herself as having a soul of "sprouting love" and "expelled desire" and cherishes Adam's beauty and confusion: "your lips are of rosy silk-softness / As were the blossoms of Eden's trees"; "you tremble in anticipation / Don't know why your dreams groan // you have bowed your head low over me." 56 In "Eden's Voice" (Die Stimme Edens), Lasker-Schüler even presents Eve as having "wrested the day" from God and created herself and her "Gotteseele" from her own womb (WB, 126). This portrait of Eve is entirely sympathetic, which is consonant with Jewish, not Christian, tradition. She reasons, keeps the complex historical record ("thousand-stemmed memory"), and has a "sprouting" soul. While Adam is beautiful, soft, afraid, and unknowing, she is erotically desirous, unafraid of the future, and a poet.
"Sulamith" is a more conventional love poem, yet like "Eve" its speaker expresses no regret for her experience or desire. Sulamith, the beloved in the "Song of Songs," is in this poem actively desirous:
O, on your sweet mouth I got to know
Too many holinesses!
Already I feel the lips of Gabriel
Burning on my heart. . . . [WB, 165]
The effect of her "blooming heart's sorrow" is that she
drift[s] in space,
In time,
In eternity,
And my soul burns away in the evening colors
Of Jerusalem. 57 [WB, 165]
Like Esther's blessedness, this speaker's passion transforms her into a part of the mythic Jewish landscape. To see the fading sunset is to know Sulamith, to reflect on those erotic "holinesses" she learned, just as to smell fresh wheat is to know Esther's fragrance. Each experience is fleeting but will come again. As Eve represents memory and desire so powerful they have been exiled, or Ruth the courage to choose exile at a moment of loss, Sulamith represents the power of erotic passion.
In an era when writers like Otto Weininger and Karl Kraus were denying even the consciousness of women, Lasker-Schüler's portrayal of women as speakers and lovers honored by God and men at least claims an equality of spirit and will for them, even if the manifestations of that will remain largely within the realm of stereotypical spheres. Reading the poems with an unidentifed speaker as if this speaker were the poet herself (as in "My People" or the poems addressing God), the volume provides greater evidence of complex female desire, intelligence, and spirituality. Men and more traditionally depicted women (Esther, Ruth) come early in the volume while "Eve" and "Sulamith" appear later in poems addressing or depicting Lasker-Schüler's (not the Jewish tradition's) ideal God who is vital, playful, actively creative, and approachable. Lasker-Schüler makes these women less radical in their life choices and independence than she herself was but also places them in a world where there is at least a temporary resonance between desire, expression, and the physical world. The fact that neither Eve nor Sulamith addresses her lover by name also creates a strong continuum between these poems of self-aware women celebrating human love and those where an ungendered speaker intimately addresses God: "God, I love you," ("Gott, ich liebe dich") the poet cries in "Zebaoth" (WB, 162) or "I'd like to eavesdrop near your heart" ("Ich möchte nah an deinem Herzen lauschen") in "To God" (An Gott) (WB, 160). Such speakers defy Wilhelmine gender categories of "woman" as the merely sexual body and "man" as the creative, god-like spirit, just as poems like "Pharaoh and Joseph" or "Jonathan and David" defy stereotypes of masculinity by having men manifest and voice dependency and tender longing and by linking their bodies (as well as women's) with the earth's food, scent, and beauty.
Even more strikingly, given their historical context, many poems involve the union of foreigners or people of different social classes: Joseph the Jewish slave lives in exile in Pharoah's Egypt; David the young shepherd's son was ordered to live in the palace of Jonathan's father, King Saul; Ruth begs as a stranger in Boaz's field, as Lasker-Schüler emphasizes by calling her "the foreign reaper" at the end of "Boaz"; Sulamith learned "holiness es" from the angel Gabriel; and God is a different order of being from humans even when at His most communicative. Other poems, "Jacob und Esau" and "Moses und Joshua," present men of equivalent status but different life choices and opportunities. Related to this communication or love between those representing difference is a broader pattern of norm breaking or reversal of expectations: God's mercy to Abraham; Pharoah's love of Joseph instead of the "sweet scented" women; Boaz's love of the foreign beggar; the king's smiling at Esther rather than punishing her for her request; the transformation of Sulamith's sorrow into beauty that fills the horizon; and the rascal's reversal of God's and Satan's realms. Here social power expresses itself through love or affection, generosity, and acceptance, bypassing the hierarchical boundaries it would conventionally protect.
Moreover, social power is secondary to the power of expression in these poems. Their speakers are the social underlings, the foreigners, the exiles (Joseph, David, Ruth, the poet in relation to God), and their words--not the status of their lovers--construct what is of value in the relationship and the poem. The social hierarchy is not overturned, but the openness of communication and the egalitarianism of love suggest that it is of limited importance. Similarly, Lasker-Schüler does not overturn the hierarchy of gender norms, yet the strengths of her female speakers and her own flexibility in adopting the male gender at least unsettle them.
Lasker-Schüler's volume does not construct a democratic world. Indeed, as her fantasies of kingship and the "crowning" of friends in an imagined "Thebes" suggest in her novel The King, the poet does not oppose the idea of monarchy or social inequality as such. Her implied protest then is not against Wilhelm II as Kaiser but against any ruler who (like Wilhelm) practices and promotes uses of power inconsistent with those she praises in her poems. For example, while in her volume a God, father, or king may command individual behavior even to the point of potential sacrifice, he takes no delight in power for its own sake and practices no wanton aggression. The volume's only act of destruction (as opposed to the apparently natural decay of the "rock-bone" of "My People") occurs in "Abel" and stands isolated in the volume as the poet's protest against all acts of human brutality. The speaker seems not only to ask Cain "Why did you kill your brother?" but also to ask how any "you" might choose to destroy life when the rewards for cherishing it are so rich. Every murder, the poet implies, injures the world; Abel's "blood deeply stains the heavens" (WB, 164). For Lasker-Schüler, killing brings sorrow, not heroism, material gain, or apocalyptic possibilities of new and greater life. Hence, while not explicitly protesting against militarism, Hebrew Ballads distinguishes itself sharply from the work of Lasker-Schüler's contemporaries in lamenting any loyalty that leads to war and refusing to see war as enabling a later utopia.
Love is the most powerful concern unifying the poems of Hebrew Ballads and unifying the individuals within poems, whether between two men, a man and a woman, or an individual and God. This love is spectacularly free of aggression, jealousy, or possessiveness, which are among the most frequent themes of biblical and other love narratives. Instead, it is erotic, tender, at times sorrowful, and associated with the beauty and fecundity of nature. It does not aggrandize the loving self and does not serve any other purpose or master. Such bonding, especially in those poems where men love men, stands in marked contrast to Expressionist Bruderliebe through its manifestation of affectionate and erotic desire rather than exclusion and superiority. These lovers do not monumentalize each other (and hence, indirectly, themselves or the poet) but focus on intimacy. Moreover, in two cases, these couples link Jew and Gentile, and the heroic re of every poem, whether the socially powerful one or not, is always Jewish in an age when Jewishness was broadly seen as weak or "feminine." Lasker-Schüler's heroes play, love, speak with God, and "sing" poetry. They "practice speaking with" another, that is, engage in dialogue, not commands, judgment, or manifesto making.
While the idea of actual people only writing poetry and loving in a troubled world--like that of 1914--would be frightening, the fact that these res are or consort with rulers suggests that they have constructed states--national and emotional--that make such behavior appropriate as well as desirable. Hence they presuppose temporary utopian moments or states. Within such moments, Lasker-Schüler does not portray the psychological complexity of adult love but models an ideal of tenderness between people of different nations and unequal power where the ostensibly less powerful is more honored (David, Joseph, Ruth, and perhaps Eve).
Through such depictions of love, Lasker-Schüler also proposes radically egalitarian communication among unequals in place of the prevailing hindrances to communication constructed by nationalism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny. If there is even one exiled Joseph to shelter the heart of the native Pharaoh in his "blood," both Egypt (or Germany) and the Jews may survive, she suggests. One Esther can save the Jewish people from extermination through her courage in speaking with the king and because of his--and God's--love for her. And every Boaz can save an alien Ruth from hunger and loneliness, and every Ruth can bring a Boaz to spiritual and physical delight. The titles alone of several poems, with their simply paired names, suggest dialogue and relationship rather than hierarchy or event. 58 Legalistic judgment bows to affection and mercy in "Abraham und Isaac," and in "Jacob und Esau" the latter chooses to abandon his birthright rather than being tricked out of it, leaving both brothers satisfied. Even in "Abel," where the speaker condemns Cain's murder, the tone of the poem is sorrowful bafflement rather than blame or a stance suggesting moral superiority. Similarly, rather than a Nietzschian despair over a God that is dead, this volume's several poems addressing God suggest that divine presence is at worst temporarily withdrawn.
While the dominant notes of the volume are erotic longing or sorrowful loss, play is also an important element of the communication Lasker-Schüler represents in relationships and constructs through word coinages, rhyme, and metaphor. The poet's participation in the widespread association of play with youth again may reflect a hopefulness about the future. Play that torments others (even sheep) is punishable, while the play of friendship, love, or personal idiosyncratic wildness marks the players' blessedness or creativity. As others have noted, celebration of play marks several early twentieth-century works. 59 Most famously, Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil that perhaps we shall discover our inventiveness in "nonsense" (Blödsinn), that realm in which "we, too, can still be original, say, as parodists of world history and God's buffoons--perhaps even if nothing else modern has a future, precisely our laughter may yet have a future." 60 But whereas Nietzsche encourages a minimal hope--we may achieve the originality of parody--Lasker-Schüler moves towards greater affirmation with her non-parodic rewriting of the Jewish and Christian biblical past and her concluding "rascal" (Schlingel) rather than Nietszche's "buffoon" (Hanswurst).
Hebrew Ballads challenges cultural norms through repeated modeling of other, better life choices. In Lasker-Schüler's poems, unlike in Wilhelmine Germany, personal love is valued above duty to a state or political affiliation; women are honored equally with men, and love as powerfully; poetry and creativity are valued above institutional or inherited power and destructiveness; and teasing playfulness, including the ability to laugh at oneself and at others, takes a higher place than philosophy or intellectual understanding. A people and nation that play, love, and cherish poetry do not define themselves through territorial expansion, persecution of "alien" others, or divisive reason. Mikhail Bakhtin puts theoretically what Lasker-Schüler's poems imply:
The serious aspects of class culture are official and authoritarian; they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations and always contain an element of fear and of intimidation. . . . Laughter, on the contrary, overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations. Its idiom is never used by violence and authority. 61
Given the volume's emphasis on love and play, readers in Lasker-Schüler's time would have understood its values as "feminine." The crucial distinction, however, is that precisely these values in Lasker-Schüler's poetry link the human being with God and hence constitute human soul (Geist), the highest of the qualities assumed by her culture to be "masculine" and the single quality associated most fully with genius and the divine. In this sense, Hebrew Ballads instructs its readers in values more becoming to a people claiming divine preference or right, whether that Volk is Jewish or German, than those of militaristic and masculinist Wilhelmine Germany.
By titling her volume Hebrew Ballads, Lasker-Schüler veils the poems' contemporary significance. As "ballads" the poems suggest the romance of an earlier, simpler time. As "Hebrew" ballads, they suggest both a specificity in relation to traditional Judaism that the volume does not deliver and a distance from Christian culture that is equally misleading. The speakers and protagonists of these poems belong to the most familiar cultural stories for Jewish and Christian readers, even though the actual moments portrayed are mostly apocryphal. In this sense "Hebrew" functions not to orientalize or defamiliarize the tradition but to foreground a common inheritance. The form and manner of the poems are misleading as well. More love lyrics than ballads in genre, the poems appear to retreat into the private realm even while celebrating a homo- and heterosexual, male and female tenderness and eroticism that were hotly debated along lines of gender, morality, and psychology at the time. The fantastic images and (according to one's perspective) either inaccurate or revisionary representation of biblical res--Jacob as a buffalo, Pharaoh and Joseph as lovers, a speaker who swings on clouds and can trick God without punishment--may suggest that the volume is pure fantasy with no relation to a world careening wildly toward war and revolution. Yet as Peter-Klaus Schuster comments in his essay on Lasker-Schüler's exchange of drawings with Franz Marc, "the pursuit of the miraculous is a gesture of defiance, and it is the only way to prevail over reality" (DS, 49). Lasker-Schüler's work is not miraculous, but fantasy is key to her inventiveness. Hebrew Ballads does not take an already defined side in the political battles of its day, but its patterns of alternative modeling are clear. The National Socialists, then, may have been more accurate readers than many of Lasker-Schüler's friends in recognizing that her work was indeed "hostile" to prevailing German assumptions, in 1914 as well as in the 1930s.
Lasker-Schüler's fantasy in this volume and in her prose is undeniably utopian, but, for her, no vision of utopia, whether past or future, can be sustained. In the mythic past of her wild Jews, Cain kills Abel, Jonathan chooses to follow his father into battle, and Moses dies in what appears to be heart-wrenching prayer. Moreover, the despair of "My People" is answered only through representations of this mythic past, leaving the volume's opening scene of decay and flight intact in the present. The volume's conclusion can also be read more as a question than as a response to the questions of the first poem. In the world's beginning, human mischievousness or disobedience was part of a cosmic joke that caused laughter.
The most utopian moment of Hebrew Ballads comes in the poem "Reconciliation" (Versöhnung), where the speaker prophesies at the poem's beginning and end that "A great star will fall in my lap"--perhaps the star of Judaism itself (WB, 166). This hint of maternity, however, is contradicted by the poem's representation of humans as scared, tired children, and the play in the poem's title, which echoes "Versöhnungstag" or Yom Kippur. Perhaps with this poem Lasker-Schüler wants to suggest that even though suffering, or having greatly sinned, the Jewish people will again attain a grace in which "God overflows." 62 The poem may also refer to the destructive divisions of prewar Germany and the consequent need for "reconciliation" or "atonement." This is the strongest utopian moment of the volume, but the fact that it is followed by "Moses und Joshua"--a poem ending with Moses' death before entering Canaan, "As his tired lion's soul cried out to God"--suggests the apocalyptic nature of its prophecy (the speaker claims "When we embrace, we do not die") (WB, 167). The "great star" may fall only when all Jews return from their wandering to this promised land. The future's promise in this sense seems less hopeful than the idea that the thought of "reconciliation" (or the practice of Yom Kippur) can bring humans to overcome their fears and "embrace." In her fiction, where Lasker-Schüler is most explicit in constructing a fantasy world, utopia also most explicitly cannot be sustained. For example, in The King, Prince Jussuf commits suicide at the end, unable to face his own loneliness, losses, and mistakes. While there is no such final despair in Hebrew Ballads, the poet embeds her poems of utopia among others powerfully lamenting isolation and loss. The volume's expression of hope and despair suggests how qualified her faith is that the world she can imagine might be realized.
The political focus of Hebrew Ballads is a zeitgeist, not a specific event or person. Hence perhaps the volume is difficult to place politically. Eavan Boland writes of "the confusion of the public and the political" in Irish poetry and defines the political poem as "a continuing action which revises, in some decisive way, the perceived relation of power between an inner and outer world." 63 What Else Lasker-Schüler writes is simultaneously a public (religious) history and a fantasy. Without addressing public issues of the social or national sphere, her work revises the perceived relations of power in the world it constructs as an alternative to that in which the poet lives.
Cristanne Miller is W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor of English at Pomona College. She is author of Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar , Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority , and co-edited The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore with Bonnie Costello and Celeste Goodridge. She is currently working on a project focused on Berlin and New York, called Women Shaping Modernism.
* Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 107, 109.
2. In this sense my argument differs from that in two recently edited collections of essays--Politics and Poetic Value, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and The Politics of Poetic Form, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Roof Books, 1990)--while also borrowing from both. The former focuses primarily on public, topical engagements with politics, while the latter focuses on formal and linguistic structures ideologically interpreted.
3. Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art, 107.
4. Hebrew Ballads is Lasker-Schüler's fourth volume of poetry. In 1917, she published Collected Poems and in 1943 her final collection of verse, My Blue Piano. On Lasker-Schüler's publications and their reception, see Marbacher Magazin 71 , ed. Erika Klüsener and Friedrich Pfäfflin, a special issue of letters, texts, and pictures by or pertaining to Lasker-Schüler; hereafter abbreviated as MM.
5. Among current critics, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Gottfried Benn und Else Lasker-Schüler: Giselheer und Prinz Jussuf (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1997); and Judith Kuckart, Im Spiegel der Bäche finde ich mein Bild nicht mehr: Gratwanderung einer anderen Ästhetik der Dichterin Else Lasker-Schüler (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1985), are most attentive to the stresses of daily life that must have affected Lasker-Schüler's writing. Lasker-Schüler's son was born in 1899 and died of tuberculosis in 1927. Until this time, much of the poet's money went to her son's schooling and medical support.
6. Lasker-Schüler to Max Gaffner, 1 August 1937, in MM, 292. Lasker-Schüler is asking Gaffner to arrange the permit for her return to Zürich, which he does. She makes a similar claim publicly in the New Zürich Newspaper, 28 January 1937, in response to a negative review of her play Arthur Aronymous: "I have never been politically active. . . . it would never occur to me to be politically active in a host country" (quoted in Erika Klüsener, Else Lasker-Schüler [Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980], 116).
7. In 1938, an internal memo to the chief of the SS and German police claims that "Through lectures and writing [Lasker-Schüler] tried to corrupt the spiritual and moral worth of the German woman," and that she published essays "hostile to Germany" (14 July 1938, memo from Secret Police Berlin office to Director of the S.S. and Director of the German Police in the Federal ministry; quoted in MM, 298). This memo recommends that Lasker-Schüler lose her German citizenship, which occurred two weeks later.
8. The originals read "diese Dichtung [lebt] mitten unter den Maschinen Mitteleuropas 'als eine himmlische Fremde'" (Ernst Lissauer, Das Literarische Echo, 18:1300f.; quoted in MM, 109); "Der absolute Dichter, völlig unbürgerlich, unbekümmert, Märchenmench!" (Camill Hoffman, Kunstblatt [spring]: 61; quoted in MM, 144).
9.
10. For an analysis of this montage, see Maud Levin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 22-31.
11. See also ELS, 251ff. on such beatings.
12. "Yussuf" is the Arabic form of Joseph. Lasker-Schüler also called herself "Malik," Arabic for king. In a 1922 letter, she calls her work "Arabian Jewish history" (arabische Judengeschichte) (quoted in Sonja Hedgepeth, "Überall blicke ich nach einem heimatlichen Boden aus": Exil im Werk Else Lasker-Schülers [New York: Peter Lang, 1994], 153; hereafter abbreviated EW). The poet's choice of Arabic rather than German or Hebrew designations is another part of the mosaic of her character.
13. See ELS, 37.
14. Werner Kraft, ed., Else Lasker-Shüler, Verse und Prosa aus dem Nachlaß (Munich: Kösel, 1961), 158; Paul Pörtner, "Poesie lebte" in Else Lasker-Shüler: Ein Buch zum 100. Geburtstag der Dichterin, ed. Michael Schmid (Wuppertal: Hammer, 1969), 183; quoted in ELS, 47. The original reads, "Sie machte Politik wie sie dichtete: spontan und phantastisch."
15. See ELS, 153-5, 158. Bauschinger sees the poet's protest against the exploitation of poets by publishers in an essay entitled "Ich räume auf" as her only revolutionary act. She interprets everything else as generosity: "helping people was as necessary to her as writing letters" (ELS, 303). Anecdotes and letters mention several political activities Lasker-Schüler initiates to help friends or that she directs privately toward individuals--most famously, going to Russia to try to free Johannes Holzmann from political imprisonment, helping Wieland Herzfelde escape military service, and writing both Mussolini and the Pope (at different times) to enlist their aid for the Jews against the Nazis. For contemporary critics arguing that Lasker-Schüler's writing manifests her political engagement see Kuckart, Im Spiegel der Bache, 83, 93-4; Gottfried Benn und Else Lasker-Schüler, 11, 128; EW, 114, 127, 138-40; and Ruth Schwertfeger, Else Lasker-Schüler: Inside This Deathly Solitude (New York: Berg, 1991), 46, 114, 139-40; hereafter abbreviated DS.
16. Lasker-Schüler dramatically reorganized Hebrew Ballads after 1914 and continued to add new poems until 1923.
17. The original reads:
Der Fels wird morsch,
Dem ich entspringe
Und meine Gotteslieder singe . . .
Jäh stürz ich vom Weg
Und riesele ganz in mir
Fernab, allein über Klagegestein
Dem Meer zu.
Hab mich so abgeströmt
Von meines Blutes
Mostvergorenheit.
Und immer, immer noch der Widerhall
In mir,
Wenn schauerlich gen Ost
Das morsche Felsgebein
Mein Volk
Zu Gott schreit. [Else Lasker-Schüler: Werke und Briefe,
Kritische Ausgabe
(Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1996), 1:157;
hereafter abbreviated WB.]
In translating the poems, I have consulted DS; and Lasker-Schüler, Hebrew Ballads and Other Poems, trans. Audri Durchslag and Jeanette Litman-Demeestere (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1980). In contrast to these translations, mine strive for literal accuracy.
18. As evidence that Lasker-Schüler does not see German and Jewish aspects of herself as primarily in conflict with each other, even while not feeling fully a part of either German-Christian or traditional Jewish communities, the poet refused to allow Hebrew Ballads to be translated into Hebrew because, she claimed, "they are in fact written as [or in] Hebrew" ("sie sind doch hebräisch geschrieben" (quoted in Heinz Politzer, "Else Lasker-Schüler," in Expressionismus als Literatur: Gesammelte Studien, ed. Wolfgang Rothe [Munich: Francke Verlag, 1969], 219).
19.
Shaukelte, hei!
Auf dem Atherei,
Und meine Wollhärchen flatterten Ringelrei.
Neckte den wackelnden Mondgroßpapa,
Naschte Goldstaub der Sonnenmama,
In den Himmel sperrte ich Satan ein
Und Gott in die rauchende Hölle.
Die drohten mit ihrem größten Finger
Und haben "klummbumm! klummbumm!"
Doch Gott hat nachher zwei Donner gelacht
Mit dem Teufel über meine Todsünde.
Würde zehntausend Erdglück geben
Noch einmal so gottgeboren zu leben,
So gottgeborgen, so offenbar.
Ja, ja,
Als ich noch Gottes Schlingel war.
20. Schlingel is best translated "rascal" because of its connotations of youth, but the word does not imply cuteness (synonyms are "do-nothing," "idler"). Also, Schlingel is more distinctly male than "rascal," standing for "young boy" in some parts of Germany.
21. For example, "jäh" (sudden, steep) is an adjective, not an adverb, but appears in "My People" as though modifying "Stürz" (rush, fall); in "In the Beginning," "zehntausend Erdglück" combines the coined noun-combination "Earth+happiness/luck" with a number that logically must modify either it or the verb "would give" although its form is nominative--literally, "ten thousand Earth-happiness."
22. In an era of great poetic experimentation in Germany, Lasker-Schüler's style was distinctive. As Bauschinger writes, there was "no model for Hebrew Ballads" in Lasker-Schüler's or any other poet's previous work (ELS, 77, 312). On poetic style at the turn of the century, see Edgar Loehner, "Die Lyrik des Expressionismus," in Rothe, Expressionismus als Literatur, 107-26.
23. Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Character: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (1903; Munich: Matthes und Seitz, 1980); hereafter abbreviated GC.
24. Ford Madox Ford, "Women and Men," The Little Review (March 1918): 39, 40.
25. Pieces by Weininger appear, for example, on 9 June and 29 September 1910, although neither is principally about gender. On such publications, see Barbara Wright, "'New Man,' Eternal Woman: Expressionist Responses to German Feminism," German Quarterly 60 : 582-99; hereafter abbreviated "NM."
26. See ELS, 128. Jacques Le Rider writes, "Without the eager and constant support of Karl Kraus, Otto Weininger's books would never have become 'great classics,' read and attended to by the whole avantgarde" (Jacques Le Rider, Modernité viennaise et crises de l'identité [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990]; quoted in EW, 87). Kraus reprints a chapter of Weininger's Sex and Character in Die Fackel in 1910. Laurie Teal, "The Hollow Women: Modernism, the Prostitute, and Commodity Aesthetics," Differences 7, no. 3 : 80-108, uses Kraus's writing as primary evidence of the deeply rooted misogyny of European modernism.
27. Else Lasker-Schüler: Briefe an Karl Kraus, ed. Astrid Gehlhoff-Claes (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1960), 31.
28.  Das hier aus der Berlin Wochenschrift Der Sturm zitierte Gedichte gehört für mich zu den entzückendsten und ergreifendsten, die ich je gelesen habe, und wenige von Goethe abwärts gibt es, in denen so wie in diesem Tibetteppich Sinn und Klang, Wort und Bild, Sprache und Seele verworben sind. [Kraus, quoted in ELS, 111]
29. Karl Kraus, quoted in Else Lasker-Schüler: Dichtungen und Dokumente, ed. Ernst Ginsberg (Munich: Kösel, 1951), 570.
30. The original reads: "Das Weib hat so viel Geist, als ein Spiegel Körper hat" (Karl Kraus, Beim Wort Genommen [Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1955], 188; quoted in Teal, "The Hollow Women," 103). See also "NM," 593. Lasker-Schüler was aware of Kraus's attitude towards women, as she notes in an essay on Kraus published in Der Sturm, where she compares him to "a true Don Juan" who hates women because he cannot live without them. She then comments, "I prefer to meet Karl Kraus among 'war-counciling' men" (Lasker-Schüler, Der Sturm, 19 May 1910, 90).
31. Otto Weininger himself approved some aspects of the women's movement, supporting women's legal equality as long as it was not confused with her moral or intellectual equality with men.
32. As a point of comparison, Emily Dickinson attended a college for women in the U.S. in the 1840s. For general information on women's lives and the women's movement in Germany, see Ute Gerhard, Unerhört: Die Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990); and the documents in Eva Kolinsky, Women in Twentieth-Century Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
33. See Gerhard, Unerhört, 260-1.
34. See ibid., 170-1, 199-200, 223; and Marion A. Kaplan, The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Jüdischer Frauenbund, 1904-1938 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 7, 72. As Paula Hyman also argues, although rights for women were expanding by the first decade of the twentieth century, rhetoric for the "true Jewish woman" remained conservative (Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995], 27; hereafter abbreviated GA).
35. See "NM," 593. The one exception, according to Wright, is Hedwig Dohm, a radical feminist already in her eighties by the time she began writing in Die Aktion. Interestingly, Dohm praised Lasker-Schüler's work: "I love books that are very personal, a true reflection of the creative man or woman. Such a book is [Lasker-Schüler's] Peter-Hille-Buch. . . ."(Hedwig Dohm, Der Tag, 6 July 1910, 1; quoted in MM, 52).
36. Because Yussuf never grows to manhood and Lasker-Schüler marks herself as "feminine" through jewelry even when dressed as Yussuf, as well as celebrating female sexuality in her writing, "androgynous" seems a more accurate category than "male" for the poet. This idea is widely circulated among Lasker-Schüler scholars; see DS, 71; ELS, 118, EW, 117-20, and Kuckart, Im Spiegel der Bache, passim). According to Kaplan, such bohemian dress would have been seen as particularly improper within the Jewish bourgeois community, which encouraged Jewish women to dress moderately in order not to call anti-Semitic attention to themselves; see Kaplan, Jewish Feminist Movement, 22, 201.
37. Lasker-Shüler to Jethro Bithell, 22 March 1910, Lieber gestreifter Tiger: Briefe von Else Lasker-Schüler, ed. Margarete Kupper (Munich: Kösel, 1969), 1:54.
38. Lasker-Schüler to Jethro Bithell, 6 November 1909, Lieber gestreifter Tiger, 32.
39. See Kaplan, Jewish Feminist Movement, 22, 87. One should note that both women's organizations and intellectuals in England and the U.S. were also nationalistic in this period.
40. Ernst Bloch, quoted in Levin, Cut with A Kitchen Knife, 29. Alfred Wolfenstein, "Jüdisches Wesen und Dichtertum," in Expressionismus: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1910-1920, ed. Thomas Anz and Michael Stark (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1982), 382-7; hereafter abbreviated M, similarly imagined a convergence of the fates of Jews and Germans stimulated by revolution and war. See also Hans Otto Horch, "Expressionismus und Judentum: Zu einer Debatte in Martin Buber's Zeitschrift Der Jude," in Die Modernität des Expressionismus, ed. Thomas Anz and Michael Stark (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1994), 120-43, on both Wolfenstein and Bloch.
41. The original reads: "So aber wir faulen an hohen Pultsitzen / Und bröckeln zu Mehlstaub in Wartsälen bang / . . . Und wünschten auf herbei einen großen Weltkrieg" (Johannes Becher, quoted in Klaus Vondung, "Mystik und Moderne: Literarische Apokalyptik in der Zeit des Expressionismus," in Die Modernität des Expressionismus, 144). Vondung quotes similar passages from Bloch, Gustav Sack, Jakob van Hoddis, Georg Heym, Alfred Heymel, and Arnolt Bronnen.
42. The original reads: "Wie hätte der Künstler, der Soldat im Künstler nicht Gott loben sollen für den Zusammenbruch einer Friedenswelt, die er so satt, so überaus satt hatte! Krieg! Es war Reinigung, Befreiung, was wir empfanden, und eine ungeheure Hoffnung.
43. Alfred Henschke, "Bußpredigt," Die Weißen Blätter 5 (July-September 1918): 106-8 (written June 1917); quoted in M, 322.
44. Lotz had dedication poems from one man to another specifically in mind, but the term is broadly applicable in this period. See Hermann Korte, "'Mitten in mein Herz': Else Lasker-Schüler's Widmungsgedichte," Text + Kritik: Zeitschrift für Literatur 4 : 33; hereafter abbreviated "MH."
45. The original reads: "Diese Poesie der 'Bruderverse' feiert den Männerbund verschworener Kameraderien in Vorschein menschheits-und welterlösender Visionen."
46. Korte even reads Lasker-Schüler's poem "Franz Werfel" as an ironic commentary on Johannes R. Becher's "hymn" to monumental brotherhood, "To Franz Werfel" ("MH," 29). Loehner also sees Lasker-Schüler's distance from what he calls the prevailing "comrades of mankind" strain of Expressionism ("MH," 116). Retrospectively, one might also note the irony in Gottfried Benn's dedication of Söhne [1913, Sons], which is filled with the language of brotherhood, to Lasker-Schüler.
47. Notions of brotherhood may also be related to the active public support for male homosexuality among the German-speaking avant-garde. According to Wright, for example, Alfred Wolfenstein championed the rights of male homosexuals, as did Rudolf Leonhard (both were Jewish Expressionist poets), and in 1910 Kraus published an essay in Walden's Der Sturm claiming that "'acquired homosexuality' . . . is the right of ethically and aesthetically superior men" (quoted in "NM," 590). During the teens and early 1920s, Berlin seems to have provided the kind of center for gay men that Paris did for lesbians.
48. In Oldnewland (Altneuland), Herzl gives women political equality with men but has them choose exclusively domestic occupations. Nordau popularized the term "muscular Jewry" (Muskeljudentum) and emphasized physical strength in Zionism's "manliness"; see GA, 143-5. Lasker-Schüler admired Herzl and praised him in her Hebräerland, also reporting there that he called her an "angel," "one of the thirty-six just ones, holy people transformed unknowingly on earth" (Herzl, quoted in Lasker-Schüler, Das Hebräerland [Zurich: Oprecht, 1937]; reprinted in Gesammelte Werke [Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1962], 2:931).
49. See Kaplan, Jewish Feminist Movement, 16-17.
50. See Jakob Hessing, Else Lasker-Schüler: Biographie einer deutsch-jüdischen Dichterin (Karlsruhe: Loeper Verlag, 1985), 32-4. On Lasker-Schüler's Judaism see EW.
51. The original reads:
Rannte in den Urwald an die Flüsse,
Stillte dort das Blut der Affenbisse.

Politzer, "Else Lasker-Schüler," 220-1, writes about the prescriptural aspects of this poem and interprets Jacob's smile as the act that distinguishes the human race from beasts.
52.
53. The original reads:
Sein Herz aber liegt in meinem Blut . . . Rauscht auf meinem Grund.Darum dichten meine Lippen
Große Süßigkeiten
Im Weizen unseres Morgens.
54. The original reads:
Immer nimmst du still im Kusse Abschied.
Und was soll dein Herz
Noch ohne meines--
Deine Süßnacht
Ohne meine Lieder.
55. The originals read:
In meiner Seele blühen süß deine Blicke
Und füllen sich,
wenn meine Augen in den Schlaf wandeln
and
Bringt süßen Sturm
Und glitzernde Spielerei
Über Boas Herz;
Das wogt ganz hoch
In seinen Korngärten
Der fremden Schnitterin zu.
56. The original reads:
Und du zitterst vor Ahnungen.
Weißt nicht, warum deine Träume stöhnen.Und ich liege schwer auf deinem Leben,
Eine tausendstämmige Erinnerung.
. . . Du hast deinen Kopf tief über mich gesenkt.
The ellipses in the penultimate line are Lasker-Schüler's.
57. The original reads: "O, ich lernte an deinem süßen Munde / Zuviel der Seligkeiten kennen!"; and
Und ich vergehe
Mit blühendem Herzeleid
Und verwehe im Weltraum,
In Zeit,
In Ewigkeit,
Und meine Seele verglüht in den Abendfarben
Jerusalems.
58. See "MH," 25, for this observation in relation to Lasker-Schüler's dedication poetry, which is also markedly dialogic in structure, especially in comparison to typical poetry of dedication of the time. See also ELS, 174.
59. Most importantly, see Angelika Koch, Die Bedeutung des Spiels bei Else Lasker-Schüler in Rahmen von Expressionismus und Manierismus (Bonn: Bouvier, 1971).
60. The original reads: "[W]o auch wir noch original sein können, etwa als Parodisten der Weltgeschichte und Hanswürste Gottes,--vielleicht dass, wenn auch Nichts von heute sonst Zukunft hat, doch gerade unser Lachen noch Zukunft hat!" (Jenseits von Gut und Böse/Zur Genealogie der Moral, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988], 224).
61. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 90.
62. Yom Kippur appears to have been the only Jewish holiday celebrated by Lasker-Schüler's family; see ELS, 164.
63. Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 187, 190.
In The Big Sea, Langston Hughes describes the authorship dispute that ended his collaboration with Zora Neale Hurston by insisting that theirs "was not really a literary quarrel." 1 He discredits Hurston's claim to sole authorship of Mule Bone and denies any artistic basis for their quarrel by indicating that Hurston was motivated by irrational jealousy of another woman:
She said, yes, she had sent the play to her agent [under her name only] because she felt that if the play were ever produced I would only take my half of the money and spend it on a girl she didn't like. Besides, the story was her story, the dialogue her dialogue, and the play her play--even if I had put it together, and she didn't want me to have any part in it. Girls are funny creatures! [BS, 332]
Although Hughes's story is misleading and self-serving, when read on a rative level it does highlight Hurston's artistic motives for ending the collaborative relationship by recapitulating the literary strategy that caused the dispute. In the spring of 1930, when Hurston and Hughes began planning a dramatic comedy based on Hurston's short story "The Bone of Contention," Hughes structured the play around a romantic triangle, thereby displacing and altering the artistic and political themes at the center of Hurston's story. Unwilling to accept this disruption of her artistic vision, Hurston ultimately stopped working with Hughes, wrote a new version of the play, claimed sole authorship of the drama, and stopped production of the collaboratively written version.
Although Hurston succeeded in preventing production or publication of Hughes's preferred version during her lifetime, his romantic triangles have dominated the reception of the play and critical accounts of the collaboration. In 1991, Mule Bone was produced at Lincoln Center and published in a full-length version for the first time, through the advocacy of George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The cover of this edition promises "the complete story of the Mule Bone controversy," and, toward that end, includes Hughes's account from The Big Sea, Robert Hemenway's and Arnold Rampersad's accounts from their biographies of Hurston and Hughes, respectively, and numerous letters written while the play's authorship was being disputed. 2 Both biographers focus primarily on problems of "patronage and personality," including the triangle of Hurston, Hughes, and Louise Thompson, the "girl" whom Hughes says Hurston "didn't like" (ZNH, 136). Despite assurances that Hughes's relationships with Thompson and Hurston were both platonic, Rampersad concludes that Hurston "acted like a lover spurned" when she ended the collaboration (LH, 136).
In his introduction to the Harper edition, Gates indicates that he finds Rampersad's reconstruction of the conflict most accurate, but characterizes the conflict as "a complex and bizarre incident that will forever remain impossible to understand completely, beclouded in inexplicable motivation." 3 Gates makes no reference to Ruthe T. Sheffey's 1987 article about Mule Bone, the only critical analysis that examines the play's texts for evidence of artistic disagreement and, consequently, the only one that identifies Hughes's insertion of a romantic triangle as the cause of the Hurston-Hughes split. Sheffey demonstrates that Hughes's romantic triangle displaced Hurston's focus on religious and political power, compromising the original folk themes incorporated into "The Bone of Contention" and "negat[ing] any movement in the direction of female wholeness," a transformation that "must have justifiably enraged Hurston." 4
I build on Sheffey's argument by considering how Hughes's insistence on romantic triangles affected representations of artistry and authorship in the play, as well as Hurston's efforts to redefine existing notions of authorship through collaboration. 5 Through a feminist analysis of the genetic history of Mule Bone, including two previously unexamined drafts at the Library of Congress, I will reconstruct Hurston and Hughes's writing process, reevaluate Hurston's versions of Mule Bone, and reposition Hurston's and Hughes's problems of "patronage and personality" in relationship to ideological disputes about definitions and representations of authorship, artistry, and authority. 6
On 12 April 1928, Hurston wrote Hughes from Florida, initiating the Mule Bone collaboration by proposing that he join her in creating a "new," "real Negro art theatre." 7 Hurston was planning to bring her own versions of southern black folk performances to New York, but in doing so, she faced three major, interrelated obstacles: her patron Charlotte Osgood Mason's ownership of her folk materials; the mainstream demand for stereotypical, minstrel-like representations of blacks; and the need to find a form that would bridge the gap between performance conventions of the New York art theatre and those of the southern black rural community. 8 All of these obstacles posed significant problems of authorship and authority for a woman of the rural South seeking to develop a reputation as an African American author. As Hemenway has noted, in the late 1920s, Hurston was searching for an intellectual approach and new literary genres that would integrate the folk artistry of Eatonville, the anthropology of Barnard College, and the aesthetic revolution of Harlem. To her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries, however, Hurston's anthropological work and performances of Eatonville folklore at Harlem parties tarnished her reputation as an aspiring literary author. Men such as Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Bruce Nugent, and Arna Bontemps read Hurston's intellectual struggle to integrate seemingly disparate elements as a lack of artistic commitment. 9
Hurston hoped that collaborating with Hughes would help her to overcome all of these obstacles. As a fellow "godchild" living near Mason in New York, Hughes was particularly well situated to advise Hurston on how to handle Mason (LH, 183). In the summer of 1928 Hurston suggested that Hughes help her persuade Mason when possible and evade her if necessary: "Could you broach the magazine article to [Godmother]? I couldnt very easily. . . . Shall we work on [our show] at once? I am willing if you are. I know that G[odmother] would never consent for me to do so, so you will have to take it all in your name." 10 Hurston apparently thought that Mason would be more likely to approve a magazine article than a theatrical endeavor and was willing to circumvent Godmother's control of these folk materials by putting them in Hughes's name. Her priority here was not authorship credit but the creation of a new African American drama, a goal she believed would be best achieved through collaboration.
Hughes seemed an ideal artistic collaborator. Unlike most other Harlem Renaissance writers, he had a genuine interest in southern folklore. In 1927, after an accidental meeting, the two took an extended automobile trip from Mobile to Manhattan, discussing plans for an opera and sharing their knowledge and ideas about folklore along the way. Hurston had a deeper background in southern folklore, possessing not only the southern upbringing that Hughes lacked but also the knowledge gained from the anthropological field work she had just completed. Nonetheless, Hughes had spent some time in the (mostly urban) South collecting conjure lore and folk expressions. 11
The letters Hurston sent Hughes upon her return to southern fieldwork in 1928 and 1929 indicate that she found Hughes a sympathetic and useful sounding board, a helpful collaborator from afar: "I am collecting the expressions, similes, etc as you suggested but that is another instance of our thoughts clicking." 12 Hughes provided both useful advice and positive reinforcement for Hurston's ideas. Not infrequently, Hurston's thanks are extravagant: "Without flattery, Langston, you are the brains of this argosy. All the ideas have come out of your head." 13 As long as Hurston was in the field, receiving Hughes's suggestions from a distance, using them as she liked, and in undisputed control of her working process and textual products, she could afford to be extravagant in her praise and generous with offers of authorship credit.
Most important in their long-distance relationship was the technique Hurston devised for loosening the tongues of her informants using Hughes's poetry. At each new location, Hurston organized storytelling sessions, which she began by reading from Hughes's Fine Clothes to the Jew. Hurston reported excitedly that "they are making it so much a part of themselves they go to improvising on it. . . . One man was giving the words out-lining them out as the preacher does a hymn and the others would take it up and sing." 14 The ease and enthusiasm with which these folk artists assimilated Hughes's poetry into their own performances implied a compatibility of Hughes's and Hurston's aesthetics that struck Hurston forcefully. Yet, this free-flowing exchange between Hurston and her folk sources again places Hughes at a disadvantage imposed by distance. His fixed textual contributions are manipulated by Hurston and her informants through performance and improvisation. This experience, combined with Hurston and Hughes's car trip together, led Hurston to believe that Hughes was particularly well-suited not only to write the type of drama she envisioned but also to participate in the type of collaborative process she was seeking.
Hurston and Hughes finally had the opportunity to work together on their play in the spring of 1930. Both were living in Westfield, New Jersey, roughly an hour from Manhattan, because Mason believed they would get more writing done away from the distractions of New York City. The most vivid picture of the early writing process in Hemenway's and Rampersad's accounts is of Hurston "reducing [Hughes and their stenographer-typist, Thompson] to helpless laughter as she acted out all the parts" (ZNH, 137-8). The powerful image of Hurston acting out all the "male and female roles in a variety of voices" suggests that Hurston's performances played a central role in the writing process and the shaping of Hurston's and Hughes's identities as (co)authors. (LH, 184) 15
In thinking about Hurston's and Hughes's conceptualization of a collaborative authorial identity, we can imagine the effects of Hurston's performances in a variety of ways. Initially, having just returned from fieldwork where she and her informants improvised on each others' contributions, Hurston would have viewed these performances as an excellent way to bridge the gap between group vernacular folk performances and solitary writing--and among her identities as "anthropologist," "raconteur," and "author." She may have expected Hughes to perform as well, participating in a creative process like vernacular folk performance, with its permeable boundary between artists and audience who swap roles frequently so that all are potentially artists themselves. But Hughes's apparent failure to produce performances comparable to Hurston's suggests that Hurston's oral creative practices established an uneven relationship between them. The nature of this inequality was probably variously interpreted by the different participants. In Hurston's mind, Hughes may have appeared to act primarily as an audience member opposite her own role as artist. She may have viewed these performances as an opportunity to test and hone her material in front of an ideal audience member--an oral invention and editing process through which she revised her work-in-progress. Hurston no doubt acquired an even stronger sense of ownership over her research materials as she performed all of the parts before Hughes and Thompson. In these performances, Hurston not only dominated the stage but also literally embodied the developing text.
Hughes, meanwhile, would have viewed these performances from a different vantage point. Perhaps he mentally classified Hurston as the "folk" during her performances, equating her with the characters she performed. This elision was made more likely by Hurston's status as an Eatonville native and Hughes's familiarity with Hurston's presentation of Eatonville folklore at Harlem parties even before she had made any formal anthropological expeditions. In this conration, Hughes becomes author-anthropologist, encouraged by Hurston's extravagant praise and offers of authorship credit in her letters from the field, interpreting and structuring what he viewed as Hurston's "naive" or "primitive" performances of material that was unrefined, unstructured, unwritten, and, as yet, unauthored.
We need not imagine that Hurston and Hughes each consistently held to a single vision of their roles as collaborators throughout their writing process. I consider it much more likely that they each imagined their roles and working relationship in different ways at different times. What we do know is that, when the two collaborators argued over authorship credit in 1931, each privileged the definition of "authorship" and "the writing process" in his or her respective self-interest. Hurston claimed sole authorship using the vocabulary of performance, "It was my story from beginning to end. It is my dialogue; my situations." In response, Hughes documented his coauthorship with texts and the vocabulary of the writer, telling Spingarn that the plot that he and Hurston initially agreed upon was "largely worked out and constructed by myself, and the whole action outlined in my own handwriting." 16 A knowledge of their different backgrounds suggests that their different vocabularies represent not only rhetoric for the promotion of their individual interests after the working relationship dissolved but also the different conceptions of artistic creation that they valued most throughout the writing process. Hurston was more committed to and at home with a vernacular model of artistic creation than Hughes was; Hughes associated the writerly acts of selection, outlining, and (hand)writing with authorship.
Even before the collapse of the collaborative relationship, Hurston's and Hughes's differing approaches to artistic creation would have had a strong influence on their decision-making process. Hurston's reliance on vernacular techniques may have been a handicap when she faced a conflict in a collaborative writing situation. Although, as her other works demonstrate, "telling lies" can be used to express conflict between individuals and to reveal power relations, these vernacular approaches are based on turn-taking that allows an audience to hear multiple and competing tales about a single character or theme. 17 There is no need to settle on a single version of a story, as there is in the linear dramatic plots that dominate Broadway, or on a final written version of a script that will displace other possible versions. Hurston's experiences in Eatonville and Polk County apparently did not prepare her to win an argument with Hughes about the structuring of a drama. As a consequence, Hughes's romance plot structures most of the manuscripts and typescripts of Mule Bone, as well as the published edition available today.
We do not have access to Hurston's oral performances during the writing process, but we do have her initial approach to fictionalizing the folktale on which Mule Bone is based. "The Bone of Contention," a short story she wrote before collaborating with Hughes, is an excellent starting point for a play designed to mediate between the southern black vernacular tradition and the black Broadway musical of the 1920s, a goal both Hurston and Hughes shared. Its plot and themes demonstrate the complexity and power of black folk culture through interwoven representations of folklore and politics in an all-black Florida town. 18 The catalyst for town conflict is a t over a wild turkey, which is won when one hunter, Jim, hits the other, Dave, over the head with the hock bone of Brazzle's yellow mule. This personal, physical t is soon incorporated into the ongoing religious conflict between Eatonville's Methodists and Baptists as well as the more recent political conflict between the two men who would be mayor--the incumbent, Joe Clark and the new Methodist minister, Reverend Simms.
These political conflicts are used as material for an exploration of the process of artistic and cultural creation in Eatonville. Each Eatonville resident retells the tale of the t: outside the courtroom "the children [engage] in fisticuffy trials of the case"; inside, adults engage in pretrial argument by playing the dozens, or "specifying," across church and class lines (MB, 34). During the official trial, African American preaching is the discourse of authority in the courtroom.  Everybody knows dat de further back on a mule you goes, de mo' dangerous he gits. Now if de jawbone is as dangerous as it says heah, in de Bible, by de time you gits clear back tuh his hocks hes rank pizen [poison]. [MB, 38]
By depicting the entire community engaged in interpreting and retelling Dave's initial story of the t, Hurston demonstrates the many ways Eatonville residents draw on black vernacular tradition both to enact and to settle conflicts. Subtly, Hurston suggests that those who fail to appreciate the potency of black vernacular artistry are Philistines who will be defeated by the power they do not recognize.
"The Bone of Contention" stands out as a perfect vehicle for the reinvention of 1920s black Broadway musicals for a second reason: its similarity--to a point--with the decade's prototype, Shuffle Along. Created in 1921 by Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, and a talented cast of black performers, Shuffle Along both pushed the envelope and established the pattern that would be recycled, exploited, and rigidly imposed on subsequent black musicals by profit-hungry white producers well into the 1930s. Shuffle Along was the first major, financially successful black musical on Broadway as well as the production that ended the taboo on serious love scenes in black Broadway shows. For the remainder of the 1920s, black musicals appeared regularly on Broadway, but the profitability of Shuffle Along soon led white producers to take control of the form. Their formula prevented any frequent departures from the use of minstrel-like malapropisms and chicanery as the basis of the shows' comedy. 19
Even in 1940, Hughes was still "thrilled and delighted" by Shuffle Along, which featured outstanding performances by the comedy team of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, as well as Sissle and Blake:
Shuffle Along was a honey of a show. Swift, bright, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes. Besides, look who were in it: the now famous choir director, Hall Johnson, and the composer, William Grant Still, were a part of the orchestra. . . . the internationally celebrated Josephine Baker [was] merely in the chorus. Everybody was in the audience--including me. [BS, 223-4]
What captured Hughes's enthusiasm was not the script but the talented, later famous performers, the music and dancing, and the show's tremendous popularity. This enthusiasm remained in spite of the fact that by 1928, according to Rampersad, "all the new plays about blacks affronted him" (LH, 160). Hughes's complaint about a "terrible" new Miller and Lyles musical captures his objections to the body of black Broadway revues and Shuffle Along imitators that controlled the field in the late 1920s; they presented only hackneyed black stereotypes, including "a listless chorus in blue overalls, the obligatory cotton field scenery, [and] stale jokes about blacks stealing" (LH, 160).
Hughes apparently hoped to push several steps beyond the pale Shuffle Along imitators by taking what he enjoyed about the original--the music, dancing, and comic performances by African Americans (and the Broadway popularity they inspired)--and adding what even the original had lacked--a solid script that rejected more of the stereotypes. "The Bone of Contention" was an ideal vehicle for reforming the stereotypes of Shuffle Along while still providing a plot that might seem familiar enough to appeal to Broadway audiences and producers. Both the musical and the short story include a conflict among men who would be mayor in an all-black town. In Shuffle Along, political conflict is largely an excuse for displays of chicanery, theft, and foolishness by two of three mayoral candidates, and the idea of black political candidacy seems a source of humor in itself. In contrast, in "The Bone of Contention" town politics are produced through a complex interplay of religious conflict and personal ambition, and there is nothing inherently funny about black politics. Shuffle Along relies in large part on malapropisms, slapstick, and comic ineptitude to produce laughs. "The Bone of Contention" focuses on displays of verbal and physical prowess rather than buffoonery and draws specifically on rural southern folk traditions. 20 All of these elements of "The Bone of Contention" are utilized in Mule Bone.
Hurston and Hughes used southern folk sources to rere the relationship between North and South found in typical black Broadway musicals. Such shows often make a rative trip from South to North, beginning with songs that harken back to good old plantation days (e.g., "Bandanna Days" in Shuffle Along) and ending with songs about life in the North, which is red either as more confusing (e.g., "On Patrol in No Man's Land" in Shuffle Along) or more sophisticated (in Dixie to Broadway and Blackbirds). 21 In contrast, Mule Bone starts and ends in the South, celebrating the folk artistry of an all-black town rather than longing for plantations, slavery, and mammies. As I will discuss below, the one character who returns from the North, Daisy, is associated with whites and threatens traditional black southern folk culture.
 In the tradition of Walker and Williams, Johnson and Cole, and the two Shuffle Along duos--Sissle and Blake and Lyles and Miller--the central characters of Mule Bone sing and dance for the audience. However, in an interesting departure from the typical black musical (and "The Bone of Contention"), Dave and Jim are a song-and-dance team in the plot as well. The change allows Hurston and Hughes to incorporate music and dance into the plot fairly realistically rather than presenting a skimpy, undeveloped plot as an excuse for a musical revue. This change also facilitates a major revision of previous representations of black men as collaborators. Leading male duos in black Broadway musicals had typically been partners in crime in the plot. In Shuffle Along, Steve and Sam collaborate only provisionally; the majority of their relationship consists of their repeated betrayals of each other and of Jimtown. They betray their original partnership as co-owners of a grocery store, first by running against each other in the election, next by stealing from the store to buy votes, and finally by hiring an investigator when they become suspicious of each other. The two men also betray the town by forming a secret political alliance, promising that the winner will make the loser Chief of Police. As soon as Steve wins the campaign, he betrays all those he made promises to, including, initially, Sam. In short, the plot demonstrates that there is no honor among thieves--or black male collaborators. The only honest mayoral candidate in the play, Harry Walton, does not have a male collaborator but rather a lady-love who stands supportively behind him in a respectable feminine manner.
Mule Bone's representation of collaboration turns Shuffle Along on its head by making black male artistic collaboration a positive force in the cultural life of Eatonville. By transforming Dave and Jim of "The Bone of Contention" into a song-and-dance team that functions in both a professional context (playing for white folks) and a folk context (playing for the Eatonville community), Hughes and Hurston give them dual status as authors and folk artists who are central to Eatonville's cultural life. Rather than treating the partners as a constant double threat to good government and each other, Hurston and Hughes treat conflict between team members as a rarity that hurts both team and town. In Shuffle Along, both cooperation and conflict between black male collaborators is criminal, and such collaboration is inevitably both corrupted and corrupting. In Mule Bone, only the rare conflict between black male collaborators is criminalized.
Hurston's careful development of the team of Lonnie and My Honey in Polk County demonstrates that the positive reinvention of the black male musical team was as important to her vision of a "real Negro art theatre" as it was to Hughes's. 22 However, Hughes pushed through another textual transformation that Hurston, in the end, could not abide: the substitution of a woman for a turkey as the object of contention between Dave and Jim, a change that led to the excision of most of the positive representations of black women's artistry. By structuring the plot around the conflict produced by a romantic triangle, Hughes set in motion a mechanism that defined the female love object and male-female relationships as threats to the male collaborative relationship at the center of Eatonville's cultural life. Hurston had included no romance plot and no such negative evaluation of women in "The Bone of Contention." This transformation eventually drove Hurston to end the collaboration.
Hurston's dissatisfaction with the romantic triangle is best illustrated through an examination of the collaboration in relation to the unpublished Mule Bone manuscripts. The earliest extant notes for the play, written in Hughes's hand, focus on Daisy and make no reference to the turkey (N1:1). 23 This suggests that Hughes's decision to focus on the romance plot was made very shortly after Hughes and Hurston came together to work on their play in the spring of 1930. Rampersad and Gates have indicated that Hughes "plotted out" the play; Hemenway (with Sheffey in agreement) specifically states that "the turkey was dropped (over Hurston's objections) and a girl made the root of the argument," but no critic cites early notes or drafts documenting Hurston's side of this dispute, nor have I found any. 24 Nonetheless, I agree with this assessment; plentiful evidence documents Hughes's resistance to Hurston's later efforts to insert the turkey and deemphasize the romance plot, including a letter he wrote to Spingarn, as well as Hurston's individually written draft, titled De Turkey and de Law, and Hughes's revisions, discussed below. 25 All extant early notes for the play are in Hughes's hand, which suggests the possibility that these notes represent only the ideas he preferred and exclude Hurston's other early contributions.
The substitution of a woman for a turkey would obviously have far-reaching implications. In all likelihood, Hughes wanted to provide the play with a structuring device that would be familiar and, therefore, saleable to Broadway producers and audiences. Sheffey argues that to Hurston, who had grown up in Eatonville, "the play could legitimately turn on political and religious power structures of Afro-American men" but that in 1930, these power structures would have appeared "ludicrous" or "even unthinkable" to the whites who would be the majority of the audience for any economically successful Broadway production and that "Langston, remembered by friends and foes as a playwright who kept a realistic eye on box office receipts" therefore wanted to deemphasize those power structures ("HH," 50-1). Hurston seems to have been persuaded temporarily by Hughes's argument in favor of a romance, but the manuscripts suggest that the authors were unable to agree on what kind of character this new female love interest would be. No other character underwent as many changes. For the duration of the writing process, the depiction of Daisy swung back and forth between an artist re and a dangerous temptress who draws men from their art and their community obligations.
The earliest notes begin with a subtitle, "New Gal in Town," that positions Daisy as the invading outsider (N1:1). The brief character descriptions in these notes refer to some of the basic political structures of "The Bone of Contention." The Mayor and the Baptist minister, "old-timers," who "run the place" and "understand" it, are being challenged by the new Methodist minister. The only reference to a woman other than Daisy is in a few lines of dialogue attributed simply to "Woman": "In Daytona they locks men up fo' beatin' women.  In contrast, Daisy, "dis pretty, strappin' gal done come down here from up North," is an attractive, "flirtacious," "real free-lover," who sings, dances, and wears fancy clothes to attract attention. Neither woman is derived from Hurston's short story. Daisy's ease of movement among male lovers and admirers stands in stark contrast to the fixed position of the Eatonville "Woman." In these notes, Daisy has at least the potential to function as a positive, independent woman who will shake up the "old timers," male and female.
In the first extant typewritten draft of act 1 (D1:3), however, Daisy is stripped of her status as a singer and dancer and is portrayed primarily as a seductress antagonistic to community values. At her first appearance, Daisy "enters hippily, conscious of her clothes, 'She-ness,' sportily dressed." She repeatedly threatens the mainstay of Eatonville culture, the festivities stemming from performances by Dave and Jim who play together less often now that they are chasing Daisy. The two men slow their playing when Daisy makes her first entrance. She stops their performances by "pretend[ing] not to have been entertained" and by causing the t that ends with the use of the mule bone. A brief outline of the second act indicates that Daisy attends the trial. It ends with "Old Sister" explicitly blaming Daisy for Eatonville's troubles: "Lawd--dis Northern-dressed gal done broke up de Society of dis holy town." Although the groundwork is laid for the power struggle between Reverend Simms and Mayor Clark (sic) early in act 1, the political struggles are left largely undeveloped, even in the notes for act 2. Instead, attention is focused on the romantic triangle; Daisy's aggressive female sexuality is the primary cause of community strife.
The next group of notes (N1:2-N1:5) focus again on the political conflict between Baptists and Methodists that originated in "The Bone of Contention" and introduce a new and threatening alliance between Daisy and the white community. Two proposed endings for act 3 highlight this connection. In the first, she closes the play with: "I'm gonna stick by my white folks from now on. Dog-gone all men!" In the second, Dave sees Daisy approaching, "fat and hot and puffing," her attractiveness gone. The "five o'clock whistle blows. Daisey leaves [Dave and Jim] to go back to her white folks. Dave and Jim look at one another shamefacedly. Both tricked, and begin to damn women" (N1:2). The connection between Daisy's gender and her loyalty to whites over blacks will be developed more subtly in later drafts. Daisy is also removed from the trial on the grounds that she must go to work for her white employers. This absence limits Daisy's role and power, cements her status as a female outsider, associates her more clearly with the whites, and makes the village-wide conflict more a result of internal Eatonville politics and less a result of the invasion of an outsider. Daisy becomes a catalyst rather than a primary cause of Eatonville's conflict.
The next draft (D1:4) contains evidence suggesting that Hurston had grown uncomfortable with such a negative portrait of the leading female character. This draft elaborates on early indications that Daisy would be an artist re. In D1:4, she appears on the scene as a Harlem sophisticate, "dressed in the latest Harlem fashion with her hair slicked down a la Josephine Baker, fingers covered with rings, rather flashily dressed." The invocation of the name and image of Shuffle Along's most famous chorus girl suggests that we will be seeing revisions of Broadway stereotypes of black women to accompany the new approach to the male song-and-dance team. In Shuffle Along, her first big break, Baker was the darkest woman in the chorus, an attribute that, at the time, seemed to limit her to the role of "high-steppin' clown" rather than exceptional beauty. 26 But by 1925, in La Revue negre in Paris, she successfully developed an on-stage/off-stage image as an exotic, erotic beauty. Although today most believe that this persona coincides too closely with the stereotype of the black woman as "supersexy noble savage," in the 1920s, Donald Bogle argues, Baker's new professional and personal identity represented a step beyond Broadway limitations that many American black women respected and celebrated: "In the black community there had long been a fantasy of another world, another place and time, where the black woman would be seen for her unique brown beauty. In essence and act, Josephine Baker had escaped and lived out the fantasy for women back home." 27
In D1:4, Hurston recreates Daisy as a woman who travels to a faraway, exotic city and acquires a newly glamorous, sophisticated image, just as Baker did. Although this "Harlem Daisy" is not fully elaborated, her initial entrance suggests that she was to become a more complex character with something valuable to contribute to the Eatonville community. In this draft only, Daisy is welcomed warmly by a "general rush of villagers" (women as well as men) and speaks to the new minister, promising to come to church. Her interest in reestablishing a connection with one of the community's central institutions makes her much less threatening to Eatonville's values. This is also the only draft in which Daisy has returned from a recognizable and specific black community (Harlem) rather than a foreign but vague North associated only with flashy clothing and service to white employers.
Additionally, all of the changes in Daisy's character in this draft increase her resemblance to Hurston herself. This Daisy lived in Eatonville, traveled to Harlem, and then returned home (as Hurston did to collect folklore). She is no longer the new girl in town or simply a Maitland resident; this Daisy is compared to a Harlem Renaissance artist. What clinches the comparison--and indicates that Hurston wrote this segment herself--is that, for the first time, this Daisy makes a grand entrance that resembles the one Hurston will write for herself a few years later in Mules and Men. Both the Harlem Daisy and Zora of Mules and Men are joyfully welcomed by the folks in Eatonville, both make contact with old friends and become acquainted with new residents, and both ask to join in local activities. In Mules and Men, Zora explains that, despite her northern accoutrements, her "diploma and a Chevrolet," she "was still just Lucy Hurston's daughter Zora" when she returned home to Eatonville. 28 Daisy, in this draft, seems destined to be similarly reincorporated into the community, despite her new Harlem chic. In contrast to other drafts, Daisy's freewheeling flirtatiousness is consonant with the behavior of other Eatonville women. Her first entrance is positioned immediately after Teets and Bootsie dance with Joe Lindsay and Walter Thomas, and, earlier in the act, a married woman is shown flirting with Hambo while her husband is out of town. Friendly flirtations initiated by both women and men seem a natural part of town life.
But in the next draft (D1:5), the Harlem Daisy is crossed out--apparently by Hughes--never to appear again. Penned-in corrections and additions make D1:5 substantially similar to all subsequent drafts of act 1 that Hughes worked on and to the Harper edition. Daisy, in these drafts, has been firmly repositioned as an outsider, different from the Eatonville women. The warm reception she receives from the "general rush of villagers" in D1:4 is replaced by the specifically sexual interest of the men on the store porch. Daisy's freewheeling sexuality once again seems out of place; the flirtation between the married woman and Hambo is excised, and Daisy's first entrance is connected with Walter's ominous assertion that friendships among men are inevitably threatened when disputes over a single woman arise.
Why was the Harlem Daisy eliminated? The answer seems to lie with the romance plot, including the ultimate rejection of Daisy in act 3. In act 1, Daisy stands out as a woman who refuses to be limited to one man. In all extant drafts of act 3, Daisy demonstrates her independence by agreeing to marriage only on her own specific and, for Jim and Dave, unacceptable terms. After a traditional courtship exchange demonstrates Daisy's desire to marry and a ritualized contest ends with Daisy declaring Jim the winner, she demands to know where they will live and how they will support themselves. Dissatisfied with Jim's vague answers about wandering away from Eatonville and continuing to perform, Daisy insists that her future husband take a steady job as a yard man for her white employers. In so doing, she asserts her intention to become an equal partner in marriage at the cost of Jim's dedication to his art and of Dave and Jim's collaborative artistic relationship--a cost that the play clearly defines as prohibitive. She also refuses marriage on their terms in favor of servitude to white employers. 29 Act 3 signifies on Broadway stereotypes of lazy black men by demonstrating that Dave and Jim's refusal to work--as domestic servants--is actually a choice to do the important cultural work of their community instead. 30 In contrast, Daisy uses her fluency in the traditional language of courtship for purposes that would be detrimental to black (male) artistic production.
The romance plot, including the treatment of work described above, had already been planned when Hurston created the Harlem Daisy in N1:2 and N1:4. Even the draft in which the Harlem Daisy appears (D1:4) includes references to her disruptiveness that potentially contradict the warmth of her reception. To incorporate the Harlem Daisy into the play completely, Hurston and Hughes would have needed to work through a broad range of issues, including the relationship between Harlem and southern black culture, the role of black women as performers in folk versus Broadway settings, the relationship between black women and black men as artists, and, perhaps most importantly for Hurston, the relationship between an Eatonville native influenced by a northern aesthetic and the folk (artists) who remained at home. A well-developed exploration of any of these issues would have created a very different play than the version she and Hughes had nearly completed when she left the collaboration in May 1930. Mules and Men, which Hurston was structuring and writing during this period, demonstrates her interest in pursuing these issues, and Hurston's subsequent musical comedy, Polk County, demonstrates her desire to explore them in dramatic form. Indeed, in Polk County Hurston successfully addresses the issues raised by the Harlem Daisy when she had escaped the restraints imposed by her contract with Mason and her collaborative relationship with Hughes. 31 Hughes, as I shall demonstrate, objected to any disruption of his romance plot. If Hurston and Hughes had inserted the Harlem Daisy into act 3 as outlined, allowing her to be rejected by both Jim and Dave, they would have created a parable of inevitable conflict between Eatonville and Harlem culture, an end result neither author could have wanted.
By late May of 1930, Hughes and Hurston had completed well developed drafts of act 1, act 2 scene 1, and act 3 using Hughes's structure (D1:8). This script, which would prove to be the last collaboratively written version, approves Dave and Jim's decision to earn their living by playing for the white folks, portraying this form of white patronage as a necessary and acceptable accommodation to economic reality that leaves men free to participate in the creation of black art and black community outside of working hours. In contrast, Daisy, although an able talker, is not, in the end, a professional artist. Her presence in Eatonville is destructive to black (male) artistic production, and her relationship with white employers is judged not as a necessary accommodation but as a betrayal of her (former) community.
Hurston had good reason to view the objectification of Daisy as an attack on black women's artistic authority and integrity and, consequently, on her own artistic vision and authority. If Hughes had encouraged her to develop the fictionalized self-portrait begun with the Harlem Daisy, the result might have been a more rounded portrait of a woman as both a creative artist and a sexual human being, as Big Sweet is in Polk County. Instead, Hughes insistently refocused attention on Daisy as a sexual object. One of the play's "village wags," Walter, has a conversation with Daisy early in act 1 that elucidates the structural imperatives that govern her role in Hughes's romance plot:
Walter: Dem boys been de best of friends all they life, till both of 'em took after you.
Daisy: I ain't tried to break 'em up.
Walter: Course you ain't. You don't have to. All two boys need to do is to git stuck on de same girl and they done broke up . . . right now! Wimmen is something can't be divided equal. [D1:8 and MB, 59]
A woman, Walter's remark indicates, naturally disrupts the relationship between two men who simultaneously desire her. Once such a love triangle is established, it must be resolved in one of two ways: by one man gaining possession of the object (hence Walter urges her to "tell us which one you laks de best"), or by both men rejecting the object in favor of their relationship with each other, as Dave and Jim ultimately do in act 3 (MB, 59). 32 If the woman seeks to retain her independence and her relationship with both men, she, of necessity, exerts a counterforce upon this cultural convention that Hughes's romance plot is not designed to accommodate.
At this moment in the writing process--when Daisy's position as a demonized sexual object had just been fully elaborated--Hurston departed Westfield to go South, telling Hughes that she would work on the climactic trial scene of act 2 while she was away. Hemenway attributes the departure to her perception that Hughes was trying to make Thompson more than a stenographer and typist; Rampersad simply quotes Hughes's comment in The Big Sea that Hurston was "restless and moody, working in a nervous manner" (BS, 320). Both biographers argue that Hurston's desire to consolidate her relationship with Mason while Hughes's was deteriorating strongly influenced the breakup, either in May or in the fall. Both indicate that Hurston avoided Hughes when she returned in September and failed to keep appointments to work on the play with him in November and December, but neither notes Hughes's own report that during that same period Hurston wanted to "put the turkey back in the story and cut down on the girl-interest." 33 Additionally, both state that Hurston copyrighted her own version of Mule Bone under her name only in October and solicited Carl Van Vechten's advice on her own version (D2:1) in mid-November, but neither appears to have located that version or interprets these moves as signs that dissatisfaction with the collaboratively written script may have motivated her May departure or the subsequent authorship dispute. 34 Indeed, Rampersad mentions Hurston's draft only in an effort to establish Hurston's intentional deceitfulness, inaccurately asserting that she "sent it to Van Vechten without mentioning Hughes's name" (LH, 195).
In fact, Van Vechten wrote that Hurston sent her script with a cover letter stating, "Langston and I started out together on the idea of the story I used to tell you about Eatonville, but being so much apart from rush of business I started all over again while in Mobile and this is the result of my work alone." 35 This statement reveals much about Hurston's conception of authorship. First, it indicates that, by this time, Hurston had abandoned the idea that collaborative authorship was the best approach to creating her Mule Bone; only with full authorial control could she redeem the play. Second, it demonstrates that Hurston believed she had a just claim to sole authorship of her play based on both oral and written uses of the material. Far from hiding her collaborative relationship with Hughes, Hurston acknowledged it to a man who was Hughes's friend as well as her own. She asserts her claim of sole authorship on two grounds: first, that she started anew, writing a unique version on her own, and, second, that she already had a claim to authorship of the material from a time before the collaboration, when she told the source story to Van Vechten. He accepted her explanation without question until Hughes pressed his claim.
The tendency of critics other than Sheffey to overlook the importance of Hurston's revisions is less surprising when one considers the state of the archival material. At the time they were writing, only act 2 of Hurston's version had been discovered, and the only extant descriptions of her complete version(s) were the derisive assessments Hughes penned during the authorship dispute. 36 More recently, I have discovered that De Turkey and de Law, which Hurston registered at the Library of Congress under her name only on 29 October 1930, is a complete copy of one of Hurston's individually drafted versions of Mule Bone (verifying my supposition that act 2 of the draft of Mule Bone that Hughes sent to the Library of Congress on 19 January 1931 was lifted from Hurston's version). These drafts have allowed me to date the other extant drafts held at Howard and Yale with much greater certainty than was previously possible (see appendix). The Howard and Yale archives, which Hemenway, Rampersad, Sheffey, and Bass and Gates relied upon, hold only act 2 of Hurston's "individually authored" version(s) and only in fragmented, modified form, as interpolated into one of Hughes's later revisions of act 2 for the Gilpin Players (D3:2). 37
Although De Turkey and de Law is clearly a version of Mule Bone, Hurston substantially revised the play structurally and thematically to provide more positive representations of women as folk artists and citizens. Most importantly, Hurston eliminates the artistic relationship between Dave and Jim, thereby removing the structural imperatives that defined Daisy as an enemy of black artistic production. In De Turkey and de Law, as in previous versions of Mule Bone, Dave and Jim are friends turned rivals, separated by their competitive courtship of Daisy, but in De Turkey and de Law, Dave is a hunter, not a dancer, and Jim plays guitar primarily for the pleasure of town residents. The number of references to Daisy's white employers in act 1 is reduced in De Turkey and de Law, reflecting her decreased role and decreased threat in this version. Daisy remains a powerful sexual magnet, juggling not only Dave and Jim's interest but also the successful advances of Lum Boger. In De Turkey (as in D1:4, with the Harlem Daisy), however, Daisy's flirtatiousness is a part of normal town behavior, naturalized by new segments in which the various men court the town women. Indeed, much of act 1 focuses on the aggressive behavior of a large number of girls and boys and women and men, who flirt and compete within and across gender lines. And, significantly, Hurston replaces Daisy's self-centered, feminine cry for help at the end of the coauthored version of act 1 ("Now who's gonna take me home?") with the aggressive scheming of Lum, who takes advantage of Dave's and Jim's absence to instruct Daisy, "tell yo' mama to put on de hot water kittle. I'll be round there before long."  Hurston also improves the status of women and girls as folk artists by revising the depiction of other female characters. She eliminates the early misogynistic representation of the fat, demanding Mrs. Roberts, who begs Joe Clarke for food and henpecks her husband, by beginning the play instead with an enhanced exploration of the interaction among children--particularly older and younger girls--playing Chick Ma Chick Ma Craney Crow. 38
Having eliminated the artistic collaboration of Dave and Jim, Hurston is free to restructure the play to be more like "The Bone of Contention," reestablishing the emphasis on intraracial politics and the folk artistry of the town as a whole rather than emphasizing the professional artistry of the two male protagonists. Part of this restructuring is the return to the turkey as an object of contention. In De Turkey and de Law, Dave, whom the other men acknowledge as the best marksman in town, competes for Daisy's attention by promising to shoot her a wild turkey. When Jim claims he can do the same, their Eatonville neighbors ridicule the thought, urging Jim to stick to his own forte, music making. Offstage, both men hunt turkey, and Dave returns to the stage near the end of the act, reporting that he shot a wild turkey and then fought over the bird with Jim, who claimed to have shot it himself. Dave tells the audience that Jim used the hock bone of Brazzle's yellow mule to strike him and win the battle; consequently, Dave asks for Jim's arrest and expulsion from the town. In De Turkey and de Law, as in "The Bone of Contention," the hock bone never appears on stage; its importance lies not in its physical properties but in its political and rative uses. And unlike the earlier collaboratively written versions of Mule Bone, act 1 of De Turkey and de Law ends with several pages of argument among the town folks, which immediately place the t in symbolic political and vernacular circulation.
Act 2 of De Turkey and de Law, the first full extant version of the act, again demonstrates the value Hurston placed on representations of women's skillful use of black vernacular as well as on the reinstatement of the turkey. Her scene 1 (also included in the Harper edition) takes place on a street in front of one or two houses--the women's domain--in contrast to the store porch, which is controlled by the men. This short scene displays the women's ways of discussing and enacting town politics among themselves and subjects the men who pass by (Clarke, Lum, Reverends Simms and Childers, Dave, and Lindsay) to the women's critical gaze--a reversal of the gender dynamic in act 1. The trial scene (scene 2) opens with arguments between the (female and male) Methodists and Baptists before the official trial and closes with the ministers making their arguments and Mayor/Judge Clarke delivering his verdict. These portions of the trial scene were retained by Hughes in his revised versions and were later incorporated into the Harper edition (MB, 108-20, 131-8). The midsection of Hurston's trial scene is devoted to the turkey, however. Clarke attempts to get Marshall Lum Boger to present the turkey as evidence but eventually learns that, after Lum prevented Jim from seizing it, he allowed Mrs. Taylor to cook it and many of the town members to eat it. The difficulties Clarke encounters in attempting to get the turkey incorporated into the trial point humorously to the town members' appropriation and use of the t for their own specific purposes. (These difficulties also resonate with the trials Hurston encountered in her effort to get the turkey incorporated into the script.) When Dave indicates that he wanted to give the turkey to Daisy as a gift, Daisy's mother stops all further discussion of her daughter. This act of silencing calls attention to Hurston's deliberate reinstatement of folkloric components of the story in place of the previous focus on the romance plot.
The dialogue in act 3 of De Turkey remains similar to that in previous drafts of Mule Bone, except that, here again, the turkey is inserted as one of the objects of contention and the artistic collaboration is eliminated. Thus, when Daisy asks first Jim and then Dave to marry her and work for her white employers she is asking them to sever their male friendship and leave the all-black community of Eatonville, but she is not threatening black artistic production in Eatonville. In rejecting her, the men continue to prioritize black men's friendship and economic independence over romance, but the cultural life of Eatonville is never seriously endangered.
As I will discuss below, De Turkey and de Law is substantially similar to the version of Mule Bone (D2:1) that she gave to Van Vechten a few weeks later. Upon first reading her version, Van Vechten was impressed enough to send the script, without Hurston's knowledge, to Barrett Clark, a reader for the Theatre Guild. In his capacity as an employee of Samuel French, Clark offered the script to Rowena Jelliffe, director of the Gilpin Players, a black acting company located in Cleveland. Jelliffe was enthusiastic. On January 15, the day before she received the script from Clark, Jelliffe happened to see Hughes, who was staying with his mother in Cleveland. Jelliffe casually mentioned to a shocked Hughes that she had acquired a comedy by Zora Hurston called Mule Bone. 39
Because we do not have a complete copy of that version of Mule Bone, we are forced to rely on information in Hughes's letters of January 1931, when he was attempting to reestablish his authorship credit and artistic control of the play. Hughes's comments must be interpreted with caution, for his personal interests at this time were opposed to Hurston's and, as Hemenway has already documented, his accounts of the collaboration often contain self-serving inaccuracies and omissions. For example, in a letter of 21 January 1931 to his lawyer Arthur Spingarn, Hughes created an inflated picture of his contribution to the script, indicating that it was his own idea to make Dave and Jim representatives of warring Baptist and Methodist factions, whereas we know that this religious conflict was previously included in Hurston's "The Bone of Contention." 40 But, while Hughes's attributions of credit and his evaluation of Hurston's script are suspect, I have no particular reason to doubt his basic descriptions of the plot, and these descriptions lead me to conclude that this version of Mule Bone (D2:1) was quite similar to De Turkey and de Law, but included two additions: Hurston sent two possible endings to act 1 and two versions of act 3--"the original that [Hurston and Hughes] did together last spring [and] a new version, based on and very much like the original," a description that could apply to act 3 of De Turkey and de Law. 41
Fair or not, Hughes's evaluation of Hurston's script affected its immediate (as well as its long-term) reception and ultimately led Hurston to cancel the production. As soon as the script arrived in Cleveland, Hughes took action to regain both authorship credit and artistic control, arguing to Spingarn and Jelliffe that Hurston's version was
(An awful way to send out a manuscript, evidently leaving the producer his choice of acts and endings. In fact the whole thing is perfectly amazing. Maybe she has lost her mind!) . . . [Mrs. Jelliffe] liked my version of the first act much the best (because it does have order and climax in construction, whereas Miss Hurston's insertion of the turkey threw the whole thing out of gear, as she simply put it in to an act that had not been written for it.) 42
Hughes's comments do not acknowledge that Hurston had originally sent her version to Van Vechten for advice--not to a producer for consideration. She may have included multiple endings of act 1 and multiple versions of act 3 because she regarded this version as a rough draft, or she may have been willing to consult with performers (as a result of her previous experiences with folk artists). And, in persuading Jelliffe that Hurston's version was "out of gear" when measured against conventional Broadway standards, Hughes prevented her from seeing that Hurston was working to invent a new form that was derived from vernacular folklore and performance conventions. After persuading Jelliffe that Hurston's version of Acts 1 and 3 should be rejected in favor of the collaboratively written version and that he should edit act 2 to complement them, Hughes began his campaign to persuade Hurston to authorize his revisions, successfully enlisting the assistance of Spingarn and Clark. He told Hurston that she could have a greater share of the royalties, specifically suggesting a two-thirds/one-third split to Spingarn, a concession indicating his awareness that the play was more hers than his. 43
Critics have favored Hughes's perspective in judging the flurry of letters that documents the authorship dispute. Hurston's repeated assertions that the play was entirely hers have been characterized as either the understandably vengeful response of a wronged friend (by Hemenway) or the self-deluded beliefs of a slightly mad genius (by Rampersad). 44 A reevaluation of the correspondence in light of the genetic history of the text indicates that Hurston had attempted to get Hughes to authorize her own plans for revision before finally proceeding with her efforts to deauthorize him. In his January 21 letter to Spingarn, Hughes casts himself as the unknowing and innocent victim of Hurston's disingenuous behavior, stating that when he returned to New York in November, Hurston canceled, failed to attend, or came unprepared to a series of appointments. Hughes buries his one obtuse reference to their artistic dispute--"she thought we ought to put the turkey back in the story and cut down on the girl-interest"--amid a catalog of Hurston's cancellations and "nervous" behavior, carefully omitting his own opinion about Daisy and the turkey in this paragraph. He can therefore conclude, "since we . . . had had no disagreements about our work on the play together or anything else, I put down her actions to a rush of other work, and perhaps nerves." 45 His description is hardly credible in light of the archival evidence.
Hurston's response to Hughes's construction of events is recorded indirectly in a letter Spingarn sent to Hughes, dictated "in Miss Hurston's presence":
Miss Hurston insists that the account you gave me of your collaboration in the play is grossly exaggerated and that virtually all of the play was written by her. She says that you should not have been surprised when the script arrived in Cleveland with her name thereon as the sole author, as she showed you this script last Fall with her name on it as sole author and that you made no comment at the time, except to say, couldn't there be two versions, so if we could not sell the one, perhaps we could sell the other. 46
What exactly transpired between Hurston and Hughes in the fall? The archival evidence supports Hurston's statement that by November she and Hughes were championing two very different versions of the play. Although Hughes may not have realized that Hurston was going to circulate her version under her name only, I suspect that by November at the latest, he knew more about Hurston's version than he was later willing to acknowledge. If he had spoken of the artistic disagreement, his claim would have been less convincing. Hurston's statement that Hughes had suggested letting the market settle their artistic dispute is credible in light of the more conventional nature of his preferred version.
Even Hurston's claim "that virtually all of the play was written by her" is reasonable when one values Hurston's performances as a form of authorship, as she did, and views the play in light of the dispute. Hughes's primary contribution to Mule Bone was, as he so often said, "its construction," or structure, and he seems to have created that structure by making the romantic triangle the center of the plot and by selecting the portions of Hurston's performances and writing that would be included in the drama. Her version, as even Hughes admits, deemphasized his romance plot in ways he considered completely unacceptable and rejected his selection of folklore, reinstating the turkey that he had eliminated. In rejecting his structure, Hurston rejected his primary contribution and, in the face of Hughes's resistance, had ample artistic and ideological motivations for denying him coauthorship in her version.
Although Hughes tried to appease her with a greater share of the royalties, Hurston was more interested in artistic control than in financial rewards. On January 20, she sent Jelliffe two telegrams, the first authorizing the production and the second voicing concerns about the "integrity of [the] script" and stipulating that "not one word must be altered except by me." 47 Jelliffe disregarded this stipulation, allowing Hughes to proceed with his revisions--elimination of the turkey, restoration of the professional male artistic collaboration, and reemphasis of the romantic triangle. As he revised, Hughes eliminated the primary scene that represented women's ways of wielding black vernacular, the street scene that opens act 2 (De Turkey and D3:2-D3:4). The Gilpin Players' production, then, would have excluded any representations of women as professional artists comparable in status to Dave and Jim, would have cut representations of women's artistry and power to a bare minimum, would have identified the central female character as a threat to black artistic production, and would have diluted the focus on town politics and folklore that Hurston had taken pains to reinstate.
From Hurston's perspective, Hughes had butchered her Mule Bone. Her refusals to reestablish the collaborative relationship and to authorize the Cleveland production were not primarily personal, emotional, or financial responses; they were first and foremost actions promoting her authorial interests, artistic goals, and ideological positions. Although I am persuaded by Hemenway's assertion that Hurston felt betrayed by Hughes's growing friendship with Thompson and by both biographers' assertion that Hurston had much to gain financially by strengthening her relationship with Mason, I argue that these factors are subordinate to the artistic and ideological dispute. 48 Hurston aligned herself with Mason and against Hughes in January 1931 for the same reason that she had enlisted Hughes as her collaborator and co-conspirator against Mason from 1928 to 1930--to realize her own vision of a "real Negro art theatre." By 1931, circumstances had changed; Hughes was now the impediment to Hurston's goals, whereas Mason was in a position to be helpful. It is difficult to imagine what else Hurston might have done at this point if she wanted to see her own version of Mule Bone staged.
Characteristically, Hurston performed memorably in the service of her goals. Van Vechten and Hughes both describe Hurston's scenes of lamentation and indignation over the course of the winter. 49 By late January, Hurston saw Hughes not only successfully asserting his claim of coauthorship (with Thompson firmly on his side) but also successfully regaining artistic control of the script via Jelliffe. 50 If Hurston was to prevent Hughes's vision of the play from eclipsing her own, she needed to take additional action. It was then that Hurston told Mason that Hughes and Thompson were having an affair and had gone "off to his rooms" while she alone worked on the play. 51 Although we can never establish Hurston's motivations for this accusation with absolute certainly, I would suggest that she was playing the role of the trickster by executing an ironic reversal--signifying on Hughes's imposition of a romance plot on her tale of politics and artistry by imposing a (second) romance plot on their own battle for artistic authority.
Hurston's romance plot was successful in that it stopped production of Hughes's final version of Mule Bone. But Hughes, an able signifier himself, turned Hurston's romance plot against her by again triangulating--casting her as a stereotypically jealous female and himself as the innocent object of a "funny creature[']s" irrational reaction to "a girl she didn't like." His story of the collaboration in The Big Sea and the papers he used to document his claim of coauthorship, now preserved in the archives, have shaped subsequent literary histories and have served as the basis for the published edition of the play.
Taking a new look at the genetic history of the text leads me not only to theorize a new cause of the battle for authorship credit but also to reevaluate the impact of mainstream conceptions of authorship on the resolution of the dispute. When Hughes turned Hurston's folklore against her, creating a portrait of Eatonville that diminished women's artistic authority, Hurston was unable to regain sole authority over the text and was driven to sacrifice the play along with the collaborative relationship. This turn of events resulted in no small measure from the concepts of authorship accepted by Hurston's and Hughes's New York literary and theatrical communities, which privileged writing and "construction" over oral performance as methods of authoring a text. This general definition of authorship also contributed to the creation of the literary reputations of the individuals concerned. As Van Vechten wrote Hughes in response to his first claim of coauthorship:
Zora's performance is not very pretty, but I am not surprised. . . . Even if she has entirely rewritten the play in a version of her own, she had no moral right to do so without getting your permission. . . . So, perhaps you had better put yourself on record by telling a few people what you have just told me . . . you have standing as a writer and Zora has not and people will believe you. 52
Van Vechten's prediction was accurate; the people who mattered (those who controlled the production and publication of the play) did believe Hughes. Hughes's established reputation as a poet, marked by his recently acquired Harmon Gold Award for Literature, stood him in good stead. Hurston's reputation as a raconteur did not. In the end, Hurston could find only one method of preventing Hughes's preferred version of Mule Bone from taking the stage. In using it, she acted not "like a lover spurned" but like an aspiring author silenced and dismissed.
Hurston's reputation has risen, collapsed, and risen again since 1931. Although Hughes remains the more prominent literary author in the 1990s, Hurston's standing as an anthropologist and a recorder and transformer of Eatonville's folklore has been well established by Mules and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the renewed interest of critics and artists, including Hemenway, Gates, Bass, Rampersad, Sheffey, and Alice Walker. The rebirth of Hurston's professional reputation in the 1980s and 1990s led Bass to reinsert a representation of Hurston into Mule Bone for the play's 1991 premiere at Lincoln Center. In Bass's new opening, Hurston first enters the scene "with a diploma and a Chevrolet" to capture Eatonville's folktales and then disappears into the crowd, becoming one of the town's single women. 53 This representation of Hurston as folklorist and Eatonville resident contextualizes and authenticates the 1930s racial humor for 1990s audiences. 54 It also specifically borrows language from the same segment of Mules and Men that is anticipated in Hurston's depiction of the Harlem Daisy, demonstrating a simultaneous, interlinked need for deleted elements of Hurston's work and for an onstage representation of Hurston's (enhanced) literary and anthropological authority. In 1931, Hurston did not have the authority necessary to get her Mule Bone staged, but in 1991, when theatre practitioners wanted to make Eatonville's artistry accessible to New York art theatre audiences, they invoked the name and image not of Josephine Baker but of Zora Neale Hurston.
Rachel A. Rosenberg is a lecturer at Northwestern University's University College, where she teaches writing and drama courses. She is also an Assistant Director of External Affairs at The University of Chicago Law School.
* I am indebted to Christine Froula, Sandra Richards, W. B. Worthen, Susan Manning, Terry Mulcaire, Barbara Baumgartner, John Bishop, Edward Ernst, Lisa Limburg-Weber, and Elizabeth Montgomery for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank Esme Bahn, Joellen ElBashir, Patricia Willis, and Mary Wolfskill for their assistance at the archives. My research was made possible in part by a Dissertation Year Grant from the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects of Northwestern University.
1. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940; New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 1991), 332; hereafter abbreviated BS.
2. See Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, ed. George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991); hereafter abbreviated MB. After Hurston's death, Hughes published a portion of Mule Bone in Drama Critique, see Langston Hughes and Zora Hurston, "Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life: Act III," Drama Critique 7 (spring 1964): 103-7. See also Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), hereafter abbreviated ZNH; and Arnold Rampersad, I, Too, Sing America, vol. 1 of The Life of Langston Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), hereafter abbreviated LH.
3. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "A Tragedy of Negro Life," in MB, 6.
4. Ruthe T. Sheffey, "Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes's Mule Bone: An Authentic Folk Comedy and the Compromised Tradition," The Zora Neale Hurston Forum 2 : 49-60; hereafter abbreviated "HH." See Zora Neale Hurston, "The Bone of Contention," in MB, 25-39. Rampersad does not analyze the drafts. Hemenway conducts a detailed analysis of only one draft, which appears to be the final draft Hughes prepared for the Gilpin Players (D3:4; see appendix). Even Sheffey devotes only about three paragraphs to a detailed analysis of specific rough drafts, and she does not indicate where they are located in the archives. Hemenway and Rampersad frequently do not indicate which sources they used to support specific statements.
Hemenway's opening endnote for the Mule Bone chapter indicates that his main sources are Hughes's letter to Arthur Spingarn of 21 January 1931, partial drafts and one complete draft of Mule Bone at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC), Hughes's account in The Big Sea, his own unpublished interview with Louise Thompson Patterson of 22 June 1976, and a series of letters held at MSRC, which he lists in LH, 158. My analysis will document and evaluate sources in detail.
5. To discuss authorship in a way that reflects Hurston's aesthetic vision, I define the term "author" specifically as a professional creator of art (i.e., one who is paid, expects to be paid, or is institutionally recognized as a creator of high art) and an "artist," more broadly, as any creator of art--including "professional artists" ("authors") and "folk artists." In Eatonville's world of folk art, singers, guitar players, dancers, and storytellers are the creative artists most closely equivalent to composers, choreographers, or playwrights on Broadway or in the "art theatre." For this reason, I will not use the terms "author" and "artist" to distinguish between writers and performers or among types of art created (e.g., music, dance, literature). These two kinds of distinctions are typical of the mainstream American and European understanding of art. Hurston's alternative understanding breaks down the boundaries among genres, between written and oral culture, and among creators, performers, and audience. My definitions recognize Hurston's move towards these forms of integration, as well as the distinction between professional artistic activity and folk artistry, which evolves in her dramatic writing between Mule Bone and Polk County and is central to her struggle to define her identity as an author. See Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy Waring, Polk County: A Comedy of Negro Life on a Sawmill Camp with Authentic Negro Music (Stephen Kelen d'Oxylion, 1944; James Weldon Johnson papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.); hereafter abbreviated PC.
6. See the appendix for an overview of the relevant drafts of Mule Bone. The Library of Congress recently announced the discovery of ten carbon copies of play manuscripts by Hurston, including Mule Bone, registered for copyright by Langston Hughes on 22 January 1931, and De Turkey and de Law, registered by Hurston on 29 October 1930 ("Zora Neale Hurston Playscripts Found in the Library of Congress," Library of Congress press release, 24 April 1997). I had discovered the Mule Bone manuscript in 1995. Neither manuscript has been evaluated by scholars in print before now. My approach was influenced by the discussion of feminist textual criticism in Brenda R. Silver, "Textual Criticism as Feminist Practice: Or, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf Part II," in Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation, ed. George Bornstein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 194.
7. Hurston to Hughes, Maitland, Fla., 12 April 1928, James Weldon Johnson papers, emphasis in original.
8. See Samuel A. Hay, African American Theatre: A Historical and Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Allen Woll, Black Musical Theatre: From "Coontown" to "Dreamgirls" (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989); hereafter abbreviated BMT.
9. See ZNH, 63-5.
10. Hurston to Hughes, Eau Gallie, n.d. [summer 1928], James Weldon Johnson papers.
11. See LH, 107, 134, 150-2; and ZNH, 61, 86, 104.
12. Hurston to Hughes, Eatonville, Fla., 8 March 1928, James Weldon Johnson papers. See also Hurston's letters to Hughes of 8 March 1928, 12 April 1928, and 10 July 1928, ibid.
13. Hurston to Hughes, 10 July 1928, James Weldon Johnson papers.
14. Ibid.
15. Hemenway and Rampersad probably derived this information from their unpublished interviews with Louise Thompson Patterson.
16. Hurston to Hughes, New York City, 18 January 1931, in MB, 212; Hughes to Spingarn, 21 January 1931, in MB, 231; my emphasis.
17. See, for example, Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1937); idem, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942; New York: Harper, 1991); and idem, Mules and Men (1935; New York: Harper, 1990).
18. See Sheffey for a discussion of these themes in "The Bone of Contention" and the argument that Hughes disrupted Hurston's exploration of these themes.
19. See BMT, 56-93. Gates, "Tragedy," 16-17, also suggests that Hurston and Hughes were consciously seeking to counter Shuffle Along imitators.
20. See Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, Sissle and Blake's "Shuffle Along" (sound recording, Okeh Records 1921; reissued by Library of Congress, New World Records [NW260], 1976); see also BMT, 65-9. For information about specific African American folk sources used in Mule Bone, see ZNH, 146-56.
21. See Sissle and Blake's "Shuffle Along"; see BMT, 126 for an analysis of Dixie to Broadway and Blackbirds.
22. See my "Dramas of Collaboration in Twentieth-Century Women's Theatre and Fiction," (Ph.D. diss. Northwestern University, 1997), 81-113, for a discussion of the relationship between Polk County and Mule Bone.
23. Draft and note numbers, which will be cited parenthetically, refer to the appendix chronology.
24. See ZNH, 138; LH, 184; and Gates, "Tragedy," 11. "HH," 54 cites Hemenway.
25. See Hughes to Spingarn, 21 January 1931, in MB, 232; and drafts D2:1, D3:1-D3:4.
26. Donald Bogle, Brown Sugar: Eighty Years of America's Black Female Superstars (New York: Da Capo Press, 1980), 44.
27. Ibid., 51.
28. Hurston, Mules and Men, 2.
29. See Gates, who believes that Daisy's rejection of Dave and Jim "tempers" her objectification and Hurston and Hughes's occasional tendency to "reinscribe the explicit sexism of [the vernacular] tradition" ("Tragedy," 22), as opposed to Sheffey, who uses this scene to demonstrate that Daisy is "impotent," "powerless," and "servile" ("HH," 58).
30. See the discussion of "Signifyin(g)" in Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
31. Polk County teaches its audience interpretive strategies for distinguishing "authentic" from "unauthentic" representations of African American culture by bringing together northern and southern as well as male and female artists and by signifying on Porgy and Bess to warn its audience that Broadway inevitably distorts the authentic African American artistry of southern black communities; see my "Dramas of Collaboration," 81-113.
32. See the discussion of romantic triangles and homosocial desire in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
33. Hughes to Spingarn, 21 January 1931, in MB, 232. See ZNH, 138; LH, 185, 196.
34. See ZNH, 167; LH, 195. Neither critic cites Hurston's 29 October 1930 version under its registered title, De Turkey and de Law, suggesting that they did not find it.
35. Hurston to Van Vechten, quoted in Van Vechten to Hughes, New York City, 19 January 1931, in MB, 217.
36. See Hughes to Spingarn, 21 January 1931; and Hughes to Van Vechten, Cleveland, Ohio, 19 January 1931, in MB, 218-20.
37. Act 2 scene 1 of the draft Hughes sent to the Library of Congress appears to be the draft that Hurston and Hughes wrote collaboratively in the spring and was included in a slightly revised form in Hurston's De Turkey and de Law. I regard this scene as being primarily Hurston's because it focuses on female characters and because Hughes eliminated it in the final versions he edited (D3:2-D3:4).
38. In this game, a big girl playing "mother hen" protects the younger children playing "chicks" from a boy who plays a "hawk."
39. See ZNH, 140; and LH, 195. Hughes and others hoped that a Cleveland production could be the first step toward a production on Broadway and possibly even a movie (see ZNH, 144). Although Hurston and Hughes intended Mule Bone for Broadway, Clark's diversion of the play to the Gilpin Players suggests that it challenged Broadway norms enough to be considered more appropriate for a less commercial venue that was more clearly dedicated to African American interests.
40. See ZNH, 145-6.
41. Hughes to Spingarn, 21 January 1931, in MB, 233.
42. Ibid.
43. See Hughes to Hurston, Cleveland, Ohio, 20 January 1931, in MB, 221; and Hughes to Spingarn, 21 January 1931, in MB, 239.
44. See Hurston to Hughes, 18 January 1931, in MB, 213-14; Hurston to Mason, 20 January 1931, in MB, 225; Spingarn to Hughes, 24 January 1931, in MB, 244; ZNH, 142; and LH, 199.
45. Hughes to Spingarn, 21 January 1931, in MB, 231-2; emphasis mine.
46. Spingarn to Hughes, New York City, 24 January 1931, in MB, 244-5.
47. Two telegrams from Hurston to Jelliffe, 20 January 1931, sent at 5:32 p.m. and 7:04 p.m., in MB, 225.
48. See ZNH, 138-9; and LH, 193.
49. See Van Vechten to Hughes, New York City, 20 January 1931, in MB, 223; and Hughes to Spingarn, Cleveland, Ohio, 3 February 1931, in MB, 259-63.
50. See Hughes to Van Vechten, 19 January 1931, in MB, 220; Hughes to Spingarn, 21 January 1931, in MB, 235; Hughes to Spingarn, Cleveland, Ohio, 26 January 1931, in MB, 246; Thompson to Hughes, New York City, 28 January 1931, in MB, 252-3; and Jelliffe to Spingarn, Cleveland, Ohio, 30 January 1931, in MB, 257.
51. Entry, 22 January 1931 in Mason's notebook, quoted in LH, 196.
52. Van Vechten to Hughes, 19 January 1931, in MB, 216.
53. See Linda Winer, "A Precious Peek at a Lively Legend," New York Newsday 15 February 1991; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics' Reviews 52 : 393.
54. John Lowe indicates that the Hurston character identifies the show as the result of her fieldwork. He also describes the resistance Gates encountered in 1985 when he began his campaign to produce the play, including the objections of more than fifty African American writers and theatre professionals who regarded the comedy as stereotypical; see John Lowe, "From Mule Bones to Funny Bones: The Plays of Zora Neale Hurston," The Southern Quarterly 33 (winter-spring 1995): 69.
Sources and locations of drafts are cited parenthetically in abbreviated
form; all materials at MSRC are located in Box 94-15, Arthur Spingarn
Papers; numbers after MSRC indicate folder numbers.
Abbreviations: AS, Arthur Spingarn; LH, Langston Hughes, LoC, Library
of Congress.
This chronology refers only to the most important manuscripts and
typescripts; for a fuller description of all archival drafts except De
Turkey and de Law, see my "Dramas of Collaboration," 451-81.
THE TEXTS:
1. Bass and Gates's description of the archival draft that they relied upon (MB, 43) does not correspond precisely with my findings at the archives. I am corresponding with Gates on this topic.
Appendix: The Genetic History of Mule Bone
DATE
No.
DESCRIPTION
Phase 1: Collaboration
Spring 1930 (late
March-May)
N1:1
Notes in Hughes's hand
(MSRC 380).
D1:3
Partial draft of act 1
(MSRC 380).
N1:2-1:5
Notes for all 3 acts
(MSRC 381).
D1:4
Draft of act 1,
including Hurston's
Harlem Daisy
(fragments in MSRC
389).
D1:5
Draft of act 1, with
Harlem Daisy crossed
out (MSRC 389).
late May
D1:8
Drafts of act 1,
perhaps act 2 scene 1
(street scene), and act
3 (LoC).
Phase 2: Hurston's Version
October 1930
De Turkey and de Law
A complete version
including the 1st
extant draft of act 2 (2
scenes),substantially
revised act 1, and
partially revised act 3,
with artistic
collaboration between
Dave and Jim
eliminated and turkey
reinstated (LoC).
Summer-November
1930
D2:1
Complete version, with
turkey,including two
endings to act 1, two
scenes in act 2 (street
and trial scenes), and
two versions of act 3,
including
collaboratively
written version and
new version by
Hurston. (Only act 2
survives, in unaltered
form at LoC, in
fragments at MSRC
383, 384, and 388.
acts 1 and 3 described
in LH to AS, 21 January
1931.)
Phase 3: Hughes's Revisions
19 January 1931
D3:1
Hughes combines copy
of Hurston's draft of
act 2 (D2:1) with copy
of acts 1 and 3 from
last collaboratively
written version (D1:8),
and sends it to LoC to
be copyrighted under
both their names (LoC;
LH to AS, 19 January
1931).
Mid-late January
D3:2
Hughes's earliest
revision of Hurston's
act 2 interpolates
pages from her draft
(D2:1)(MSRC 384, 388).
D3:4
Hughes completes final
draft for Gilpin
Players, retaining acts
1 and 3 in a form
nearly identical to
D1:8, eliminating the
street scene and
rewriting the trial
scene of D2:1 to
eliminate the turkey
(MSRC 379 and
Beinecke).
1964
Hughes submits D3:4 to
Drama Critique
(Beinecke); act 3 is
published under both
their names.
Phase 4: Posthumous Publication and Production
1991
HarperPerennial
publishes play, edited
by Bass and Gates.1
Mule Bone premieres at
Lincoln Center.
Note
6.3 33-56
Ni même on renouvelle le monde en reprenant la Bastille Je sais que seuls le renouvellent ceux qui sont fondés en poésie 1
Poet, art critic and promoter, literary critic, journalist, editor and publisher, novelist, dramatist, movie-script writer, prankster, pornographer, and impresario of the Parisian avant-garde, Guillaume Apollinaire is regarded as everything except a political man. 2 He himself promoted this view. Writing to the editor of La Plume in 1902, he claimed to have nothing to say about politics, a subject that is "detestable, deceitful, sterile, and injurious" ("haïssable, mensongère, stérile et néfaste"). 3 In thousands of pages of prewar writing, he signed only one article that might be considered political thought. 4 The fact that he turned to political subjects during World War I might be explained contingently in terms of his enthusiasm for the war experience and his recognition of its historical import. Yet, paradoxically, never was there so relentlessly public a life as Apollinaire's, and no one has ever dedicated more energy to the promotion of art as an answer to the spiritual malaise of modern life. In that sense, his indefatigable production of criticism as well as his unending public performance of self were nothing if not political both in intent and effect.
When we look closely at his one published piece of political philosophy, the paradox begins to unravel. Based on premises drawn explicitly from Spinoza's Ethics but also from Nietzsche, Apollinaire argued that politics in the sense of government is nothing but the pursuit of power by politicians and that any notion that it might promote social improvement misunderstands the human condition. Humans may express genuine sympathy for their fellows, but this sentiment is always subordinate to a primary egotism. While an individual may be gratified by helping another individual, acts of so-called "charity" which minister to the collective serve only to salve the consciences of the rich and powerful. Similarly, "politics does have the often forgotten aim of aiding others en bloc" ("La politique n'a pour but, souvent oublié, que de les aider en bloc"), but government is too blunt an instrument to succeed in any such endeavor, excepting perhaps that of allowing politicians to imagine themselves virtuous. 5 Is there, then, no genuinely collective mode of social redemption? Though the question is not addressed here, it is notable that, less than a month later, Apollinaire would see in Picasso's early painting precisely the force capable of reawakening "the profound self-knowledge that humanity had of itself" and giving us back the "eyes" necessary for entering into the social world of children, mothers, beggars, and forlorn old men. 6 It was an argument for the socially redemptive power of avant-garde art to which he would return on many subsequent occasions.
This essay will argue that Apollinaire's apparent apoliticism was a mask for his deepest conviction, one to which he dedicated his life: that only through the visionary power of avant-garde art could men and women living in modern mass societies regain their human capacity for the concrete experience of life, a capacity that had withered amidst the abstractions of commodified, urban existence. Far from representing a solution to this modern crisis, the issue-oriented, materialistically self-interested politics shaped by newspapers and propelled by the wheeler-dealing of the democratic electoral process only compounded it. This public sphere merely reinforced the mechanical, quantitative, and ultimately nihilistic modes of thought underlying modern industry and science. A revitalized public sphere would depend crucially upon the restoration of aesthetic vision, language, and performance to a position of genuine centrality in modern political life. In a properly aesthetic public sphere, art would reconnect with daily life and with concrete, national traditions, thus reviving the national spirit and reconsecrating civic energies.