"Something in Print"

Issue #1: Paul Green on publishing, teaching playwriting, and perseverance

In this, our first edition of Paul Green’s Cabin, we offer three passages from the playwright. The first two come from the transcript of a 1975 interview conducted by the Chapel Hill photographer and historian Billy Barnes.

Paul Green tells Barnes about his childhood fascination with the idea of being a published writer. Unbeknownst to her son, Green’s mother, Bettie Byrd (who died when Green was 13), was quietly crafting and submitting poetry to publications in rural Harnett County where they lived. Green’s discovery of her writing practice was stirring. He goes on to talk about how his mother also created a household where music was ever-present. These two powerful influences—poetry and music--would set the stage for Green’s eventual creation of the symphonic drama--a new theatre genre that he pioneered in the late 1930s with “The Lost Colony” in Manteo, North Carolina, and still in production there today.

I remember once, there was a woman that came by our house and my mother introduced us. She had written a book. She lived up somewhere in Wake County, and she had published a little book of poems on her own, but the fact that there was a little book that had her name in it was so thrilling. Why should the fact that there was something printed have such an effect? Well, it represented sort of an unknown world of accomplishment to me, something in print. And it still is effective in a way.

I would often hear my father say, “Well, I see in the paper where Josephus Daniels is going to be Secretary of the Navy,” or something. Well, the phrase, “I see in the paper where…,” the fact that it was a printed thing took it out of the harum-scarum, incidental world into something more permanent and more worthy of admiration.

So, when I happened to come across this little county paper and seeing my own mother’s name in print, it had a happy shock to it. I rushed down to the porch. We had an old back porch. My mother was churning away. She was always busy, busy, working and singing. Music was such a concomitant joy to her always in her work. She would sing hymns like “Amazing Grace” or “How Sweet the Name” or “Everlasting Arms” or “A Fountain Filled with Blood,” terrible, but all those things were spiritually comforting and muscle-easing as she would churn away with an old up-and-down churn. It took a lot of strokes to make the butter come. And she sometimes would get a little bit irritated and talk to the milk and chant the old rhyme, “Come, butter, come. Come, butter, come. For I want some. For I want some.” As she went up and down, up and down.

It was very early soaked into me the wonder and the comfort of music in man’s daily life. And the quality of music, I didn’t particularly consider. It was just the fact that there was a world of music that was brought down and yoked into the practical world and made the practical world more illuminated and happier.

So, the music and the printed word all were of one piece. She was always doing things with her hands and her mind was busy and her mind was outreaching. I don’t know where she got this ambition to get out of one condition into something better. I don’t know where she got it, maybe her hard life. But that day we started talking about the one item of her poetry that she published.

Later in his conversation with Barnes, Green talks about his approach to teaching. After graduate study at UNC and Cornell University, Green was recruited to teach philosophy at the University of North Carolina. He would eventually move from the philosophy department, however, to work alongside his UNC playwriting mentor, Professor Frederick Koch, who encouraged his students to create folk plays about everyday people and events.

In drama, the kind of drama that I believe in, the essence of it is a story. Actually, playwriting is only the telling of a story in action. So, in working with students, I have always tried to make it sound as simple and easy as possible in order not to frighten them. Mr. Koch here, in his folk plays, would talk and make it sound inviting and not discouraging. That way, he got people timidly started, and some of them became bolder, and he got a lot of fairly good little plays.

When I was in Cornell, we had a very brilliant English professor named Martin Sampson. He gave a course in playwriting, and he didn’t get a play out of anybody because he was so brilliant that he would take a script that someone would bring in and tear it to pieces. Rather than encouraging the guy to make it better, he destroyed him. The whole year I was there, he had, I guess, fifteen or twenty people in playwriting class. They learned an enormous amount about the drama but none of them got encouraged to make drama.

Let playwriting be part and parcel of life and nothing special. Of course, there are people [with special gifts]. To my way of thinking, this fellow that I early got absorbed in, Edgar Allan Poe, I would say that he was certainly the most authentic genius this country has produced, if genius has some kind of abnormality and fire, some hallucinatory nature. He was truly something.

--Paul Green interview with Billy Barnes, Chapel Hill, NC, March 1975 (lightly edited for clarity)

After receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for “In Abraham’s Bosom,” his first Broadway production, Paul Green accepted an invitation in the early 1930s to work in the film industry as a screenwriter in Hollywood, even as he was also trying to oversee the staging of several of his plays around the country. During this period Green received a letter from a former student who had been graduated from UNC in 1931. The young man, Charles Sikes, wrote to Green about his passionate desire to become a writer. Sikes moaned that he was displeased with his first efforts and was trying to decide whether to try to become an actor or keep at the writing. Green’s thoughtful reply further affirms the playwright’s philosophy and lifelong generosity as a teacher, a model which would inform the work of many future writing teachers across North Carolina and beyond.

Tentatively I think of three places you might head for in your search—New York, Los Angeles, or Chapel Hill. Before giving any definite advice, I should like very much to talk with you. At this distance though, it seems to me that Chapel Hill would be the best bet. Would you be interested in coming up here and taking a course in writing under Phillips Russell or playwriting with Mr. Koch—? Not that either of these men, or anybody for that matter, could provide you with a complete answer. You are wise enough to know that lies within yourself. But they could offer you a means for trying your hand at writing. If that is the career you prefer—it makes no difference if you do feel that what you write now is not so very good—then I would say give yourself a chance. The finest things usually come through long apprenticeship both in technique and in struggle, and Beethoven, Dante and the other great ones of the world stand as witnesses to that truth. We can all learn a lot from trees. The biggest ones, the strongest ones, have a slow and turmoiling growth, and in their youth no doubt feel that they will never arrive to the stature of some of the giants in the forest. But day by day, year by year they keep building towards the light. Yes, trees must be often terror stricken, unhappy and ready to quit, but the life force in them refuses to be whipped. So let it be with you and me. If you are around this way any time call me up. We might have a session about these things. I need it too.

— A Southern Life: Letters of Paul Green, 1916-1981, edited by Laurence G. Avery

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