Bare Legs and the Audience

IF SHE HADN'T DIED at 32 a couple of decades before next summer, V.R. Lang would probably still be a townie, and New York would probably still have sucked in an enterprising batch of her friends from Harvard (Lang herself never bothered with college). Violet Lang's family passed their desperate faithfulness to Boston on to her--the city and the decaying four-story brownstone they live in were the only reminders of their genteel past. In line with the family's tradition, she flirted with high society on Beacon Hill and avoided steady jobs. She was also a writer and an actress, which prompted her to associate with members of the academic set in Cambridge--who were trying pretty hard to show that they knew how to encourage and appreciate unstructured yet creative minds. But Lang never had much money, she was young, and she hadn't made a name as an author. These last items meant that her company was mainly fit for students.

The circle of people she broke into included names you see in print a lot now. The New York Review of Books serializes Edward Gorey's stealthily demented drawings. John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Frank O'Hara are lumped into what is termed the New York School of poets, since they stay around there without grudging its riff-raff. And, besides the memoir of Lang, Alison Lurie has written novels about middle America. No one picked up on V.R. Lang's work until her husband and Lurie decided to collect a few poems and plays. Lurie, in particular, seems to feel that death cheated Lang out of a chance that she deserved to assert herself. Lang used to like Gauguin's remark that "Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge." But these pieces won't attract enough attention to retaliate for the author's shoddy treatment.

You feel kind of sorry, because she comes across as a daringly imaginative, unusual and likeable person. Lurie's memoir presents a well-rounded survey of Lang's life that runs through about a third of the book. It's a suspicious way to begin, as though you are more apt to develop an interest in Lang's writing if you've been enticed by her experiences. There is something intriguing about a person whose earliest love affair might have started with seduction by a Red Sox player in the front seat of a red convertible that his fans gave him--especially when she won't verify the rumor but doesn't seem perturbed by it. But this is a distracting introduction to her poems and plays: it primes you for autobiographical allusions that may not exist. Although the change seems superficial, printing the memoirs after Lang's pieces might have shifted the emphasis back to them.

The plan of the book seems to represent a cynical reckoning on the reading public. It suggests that people will shrug off the question of an author's skill if their voyeuristic urges are satisfied. A less frenetic life probably wouldn't have been placed on a par with Lang's writing. Lurie's memoir leads you to Lang's work by way of a detour that impinges on her privacy unnecessarily. It is an approach Lang denounces in one of her verse-plays:

I always hear them laughing,

I always did. In chorus lines,

If anyone slipped or stumbled.

Or at our bare legs, or at our costumes.

At something. I hate the audience.

Something happens to them, hidden

All together in the dark and watching.

And Lurie often mentions Lang's reticence. She had a noncommittal way of referring to herself and others. If she was asked to describe a person, their name was about all that could be coaxed out of her. A feeling of coldness turns up often as a metaphor in Lang's writing, and it implies that the distance she keeps, her frigidity, is a way of defending her independence.

Lurie has set herself the task of focusing your curiosity on a stranger. Since the subject lacks initial interest, the style is crucial. Sometimes Lurie fails to realize that the punch line of a memory is easier to deal with if you were there, and her reflections are smothered by commonplace observations and a chummy attitude toward Lang. She doesn't come through with the kind of technique that gets around your indifference to, say, Gorey's insomnia, often enough: "I went upstairs. Ted had been up for hours he said. 'I don't really like sleeping lately,' he apologized, as if it had been an acquaintance of ours."

LANG'S WRITING is uneven too. She produces poems impatiently, without turning around to locate and pare away the bland passages. Perhaps her negligence results from the attitude that "Poetry can never be much more than a commentary, At best a breathless summation, for what words, What words existed before their source?"

Her drama is composed in free verse with a tendency to impose unnatural breaks in the dialogue. Particularly in "Fire Exit," set in a burlesque house, the language sounds stilted, as though the characters were parodying the contrived and choreographed world of their jobs. She deliberately scatters cliches through the speech of inarticulate dancers and comics--phrases they'd be likely to resort to in reality, but, as the author, Lang is not able to dissociate herself from their triteness.

"I Too Have Lived in Arcadia," which Lang calls a pastoral, contains a bizarre mixture of kitsch and Shakespearean poetic form. The verse is pretty fluid and the characters draw some fascinating comparisons between urban landscapes and the unwieldy structure and pathetic decline of prehistoric creatures. Chloris, a stubborn foe of science and technology, drone long-some, polysyllabic, hypnotic lists of the members of the biological categories:

...in Paleozoic seas, it was

By no means certain any Life

Except the lime-secreting algae,

Protozoa, annelid worms, and

Ancient trilobites of Proterozoic

Waters, could survive...

The effect of her monologue on an audience would probably be as incongruous as that of a theatrical experiment in which a couple exchanged the French words for various vegetables and listeners mistook them for endearments.

V.R. Lang's plays, at least, might garner a belated audience. Her keen sense of the theatrical has countered the recklessness of her peotics before--at an affecting reading shortly before her death, some of the spectators wondered if the shadows around her eyes had been deepened with greasepaint. Maybe Lurie hasn't admitted that the failure of her friend's writing to abide is less regretable than the loss of a strange improvisor of real experience.