SOURCE: Newman, Judie. “Biographical Introduction.” In Alison Lurie: A Critical Study, pp. 4-27. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000.

[In the following essay, Newman provides an overview of Lurie's early life and education, her formative experiences with the Poets' Theatre, the origin of recurring themes and characters in her fiction, and the inadequacies of her critical appraisal.]

When Alison Lurie was first a student at Radcliffe, only one class in creative writing was available, taught by Robert Hillyer, a handsome minor poet whose manner struck Lurie as courtly, but curiously vague. (She did not suspect that he had a drinking problem.) For several weeks Hillyer collected the students' efforts, but never returned them, preferring to read aloud from his favourite books, slowly but with maximum emotion.

Finally one day he entered the room, pulled from his briefcase what looked like all the work he had ever received from us, heaped it onto the desk and sat down. We waited expectantly. “Yer-all-such-nice-young-ladies. Only you can't write, y'know. Wasting-yer-time.” Then he put his head down among our papers and passed out.¹

Hillyer was signally wrong about one, at least, of his students. Alison Lurie went on to produce nine novels, a volume of short stories, a biographical memoir, works for children, a study of the language of clothes, and two collections of fairy tales. She won widespread popularity for The War between the Tates, and became the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (1979) and a Pulitzer Prize (1985).

When John Leonard described Alison Lurie's prose as faultless as an English lawn—“One could play polo on such prose”²—he merely confirmed the prevalent view of Alison Lurie as an Anglophile, even in some ways a very English, type of American writer. Often compared to Jane Austen, Lurie tends to be seen as a paleface among all-American redskins, a writer of comedies of manners more in the mould of Henry James and Edith Wharton than of Twain or Melville. Lurie herself has conceded the influence of the nineteenth-century British novel, but as a product of gender. Given the relative lack of prominence of American women writers during her youth, she turned to British literary foremothers.

For a young American woman who wanted to write in the 1950s, there were very few role models. Hemingway and Faulkner offered me nothing. I wasn't going to write about bullfights or incestuous Southern families. I turned naturally to writers such as Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing, having grown up on the English Victorian Novel.³

None the less it is not for nothing that Gore Vidal dubbed her “the Queen Herod of modern fiction”, for Lurie's irony can be savage, her satiric thrusts all the more deadly for the deadpan manner of their delivery. As Derwent May commented, Lurie's readers often have no idea “what expression there is on her face as she contemplates the field of slaughter.”⁴ In the contests of her novels, the result of a resounding collision of values is rarely other than Pyrrhic victory; more often the action ends in a standoff among exhausted characters, whose foibles have been ruthlessly exposed.

Throughout her work, and in spite of her “European” reputation, Lurie has none the less focussed on that oldest of American traditions, Utopianism. In each of her novels a Utopian community—a college founded on an innovative Humanities course, a group of Beats, a millennialist sect, a colony of artists, a gay enclave, a group of progressives, feminists or (in several reprises) Liberal academics—provides the means to explore the boundaries between pragmatism and idealism, and to tackle issues of social conformity, engagement or detachment within a carefully circumscribed arena. The university campus is thus only one variant on the miniaturised or microcosmic space within which each plot is set. Influenced perhaps by her sociologist father and her own involvement in the Poets' Theatre, Lurie is particularly adept at delineating the effects of social role-play (or role-play tout court) upon characters whose sense of self is permeable at the boundaries and constantly shifting. When Erica Tate laments the fact that identity appears to be at the mercy of circumstances, she voices one of Lurie's central concerns.

Perhaps inevitably, given the focus upon the social construction of the self in American literature, Lurie also follows Twain and James in an emphasis upon the child as innocent eye, revealing the hypocrisies of circumambient adults. In her case, an informed knowledge of children's literature adds a consciously intertextual dimension to her adult fiction. Women's writing is always particularly sensitive to the ways in which female acculturation and socialisation are promoted by such “texts” as folklore, myth, fairy tales, movies and advertisements. Lurie's retelling of classic fairy tales in her 1980 volume, Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales, deliberately selects tales from the available body of folklore in order to reconstitute a tradition and to promote images of women as brave, clever, resourceful, able to defeat giants, answer riddles, and outwit the devil, rather than as waiting passively for their prince to come. Two other volumes for children, Fabulous Beasts and The Heavenly Zoo, are designed to facilitate imaginative liberation, in the one case in a Borgesian collection of legendary animals and their tales (e.g. “The Vegetable Lamb,” “The Basilisk”), in the other by recounting the stories of the stars, whether Greek, Biblical, Indonesian, or Native American. As well as editing a series of reprints of traditional children's literature, (Classics of Children's Literature, 1621-1932) Lurie has also published a variety of essays, now collected as Don't Tell the Grown-Ups, in which she emphasises the way in which children's literature can be subversive of the social norm, an aid to imaginative and thus to political freedom. For Lurie there is no distinction of seriousness between children's and adult literature—each category deserves equal attention.

Similarly her 1981 volume The Language of Clothes, a serious examination of the history and interpretation of costume, begins from the premise that one set of signs is translatable into another, that clothing may be envisaged as a sign system, and that human beings communicate in the language of dress. In each of her novels Lurie foregrounds a similar interaction—in specific terms, between novel and folklore, sociology, political science, or biography, or more generally between art and life. Despite a concern for craft which satisfies the most demanding formalist aesthetic criteria, Lurie never loses sight of the sense in which art and life interpenetrate, in which paradigmatic plots abound, not just in literary culture, but also in general culture. In consequence her readers gain a sense of real life as being structured according to patterns familiar from literary culture, just as literary culture may be structured according to patterns familiar from real life. As Susan Stewart expresses it in her intertextual study of folklore and literature: “our neighbourhoods are full of Madame Bovarys, Cinderellas, Ebenezer Scrooges, Constantine Levins and wise fools, as much as fictions are full of people from our neighbourhoods.”⁵ In this sense Lurie is distinct among contemporary American novelists in her ability to conjoin self-conscious forms with thematic meat. By employing intertextual devices, she calls into question received literary and cultural definitions, interrogating the relation of fantasy to reality, and displaying an intense fascination with levels of truth. In interview Lurie argued that

I think any way that we project ourselves into the world is a kind of sign. Like all signs, it can be genuine or false or something in between … When you write, put on a costume, or furnish a room, you are working in a system of signs that have a meaning just as a word has a meaning. It is an indefinite system because no signs will mean the same thing to any two people. But this is nevertheless the system we have to work in.⁶

It is worth remembering that when we say “novelist of manners” we are in fact often talking about fiction which pays close attention to the reading of social signs. Lurie's novels, like those of Wharton or James, are in some respects semiotic comedies, comedies of the sign.

In typically mischievous fashion, Lurie also offers a bonus for regular readers in the use of “carryover” characters (rather in the style of Barbara Pym or Anthony Powell) who reappear from one novel to another, often at a tangent to the main action. Principal actors in one novel (e.g. Erica Tate in The War between the Tates) may be mere asides in others (Erica in Only Children, Emmy in The War between the Tates, Paul Cattleman in Foreign Affairs) or have walk-on parts (almost everybody in The Truth about Lorin Jones). It is a technique which has two principal effects. Firstly, as the reader “recognises” a character, the impression is created (rather as in popular or series fiction) of a stable fictional world. At the same time the recognition of a character as belonging in another novel highlights fictionality. More generally therefore the technique interrogates the notion of a framed reality, reminding the reader that, in Tom Stoppard's phrase, every exit from the stage is an entrance somewhere else, that beyond the frame of art, life has its own horizons.

Alison Lurie's early experiences offer several clues to the prevalence of the Utopian scenario in her work and the characteristic opposition between idealistic commitment and ironic detachment. Born on 3 September 1926, in Chicago, and brought up in New York and White Plains, Westchester county, Lurie was the daughter of Liberals with left-wing leanings. (She remembers Norman Thomas, repeatedly a socialist presidential candidate, visiting the house). Her father Harry, Latvian-born, was a professor of sociology and became the founder and executive director of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, a social work agency. Sociological issues feature prominently in several of Lurie's novels, particularly in connection with the workings of small groups—fraternities in Love and Friendship, cults in Imaginary Friends—and social workers are major characters in Imaginary Friends and Only Children. Although Lurie's mother, Bernice Stewart, did not work outside the home, she was no conventional housewife. She had had to support herself from an early age following her father's death, had worked her way through college, and was then a journalist for the Detroit Free Press, editing the book and magazine section for some 15 years.⁷ Married in her early thirties, she was in her 35th year when her daughter was born. Lurie herself has ascribed her satiric viewpoint partly to background:

My father was a sociologist, my mother had been a journalist, and I think both of those professions are ones in which you can't help but take a step back from things. A sociologist is trained to do that and a journalist has to do that or else he or she would be sitting in the city room weeping all day long.⁸

The influence of idealistic and progressive parents clearly countered any easy detachment from social issues.

A second important influence was the manner of Lurie's birth—by the high-forceps delivery method, which left her damaged in one ear. As Lurie herself puts it:

I was a skinny, plain, odd-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a birth injury, and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer.⁹

By the age of eight or nine Lurie was fully aware of these disadvantages and concluded that no one would ever want to marry her, she would never have children and would remain an ugly old maid. She was proved wrong on all counts. (She has been twice married, first to Jonathan Bishop, from whom she separated in 1975 following his religious conversion, and then to Edward Hower, a fellow novelist. She has three sons and three grandchildren). Nonetheless as a child she noticed that adults praised her various creations, from fudge brownies to rag rugs and poems, as “perfectly lovely”, but “No one ever told me that I was perfectly lovely, though, as they did other little girls. Very well then, perfection of the work.” She turned to writing as both enormously enjoyable and as a magically transformative experience, a “kind of witch's spell”: “With a pencil and paper I could revise the world.”¹⁰ Lurie was the elder of two sisters. In “Witches and Fairies: Fitzgerald to Updike” she recalls the kind of fairy-tales in which there are two sisters, the older ill tempered, spiteful and plain, the younger gentle, kind and pretty.

I didn't have to read what her name was, I knew already: it was Jennifer Lurie. My baby sister, who everybody said was as good as she was beautiful, would grow up to marry the prince, while I would be lucky if I didn't end up being rolled downhill in a barrel full of nails.¹¹

The barrel of nails is the fate of the malevolent goosegirl in the story dramatised by plain Mary-Anne and beautiful Lolly in Only Children. Lolly goes on to a tragic fate in The Truth about Lorin Jones, while Mary-Anne achieves success, marriage and children. Unlike Jane Austen's world, adult sisters are relatively rare in Lurie's novels—with the exception of the antagonistic Myra and Dorrie in The Last Resort, and the sisters in “Rabbit,” one of whom is responsible for the other's death. Emmy, Verena, Catherine, Lorin, Mary-Anne, and Vinnie, are only children or have brothers, Erica Tate has a younger sister, described as perfectly horrible. No doubt a Freudian would have a field day with this material. The more prosaic explanation may simply be that which explains the high number of orphans in Victorian novels—the need to eliminate characters who would be redundant to the plot. In Lurie's fiction, nevertheless, ugly ducklings may become swans but swans have more of a tendency to turn back into ugly ducklings.

Significantly, like Mary-Anne and Lolly's, Lurie's childhood also included attendance at a day school, Windward, founded by progressive socialists. Lurie was part of this Utopian project from the ages of seven to twelve. She had attended a public (i.e. state) school for a year but the experience had not been a success. Lurie had learned to read at the age of four and was thoroughly bored in the sate system, which at that time in America focussed on the “three R's”. At Windward she had the run of the school library, there were excursions to local factories, pets and an ant-farm, the type of activities which are now fairly commonplace but were then very unusual. After Windward, Lurie went back to the state system for two years and then to Cherry Lawn, a coeducational school in Connecticut (Mike Nichols was a fellow boarder). Almost by accident she then enrolled at Radcliffe, planning to major in English. Once there, she swiftly discovered that if she chose instead to enter the recently created field of History and Literature, she could take Harvard courses, use the Widener library and have a Harvard professor instead of a Radcliffe graduate student as a tutor. The advantages were both intellectual and erotic. Radcliffe was then all-female, in the restrictive sense of the term. Men were allowed to visit only at specified times and in the public rooms on the ground floor. Upstairs the approach of any male (e.g. a plumber) was announced with warning shrieks of “Look out! Man coming.” Two thirds of Radcliffe women were virgins. Harvard did allow women in the undergraduates' rooms but only before six in the evening and providing that the door remained ajar. Lurie found these rules baffling. (“Didn't the Dean of Students know that sex could take place before supper?”)¹² Later she realised that they may have been introduced to enforce class principles, since they effectively prevented Harvard men from sleeping with any women with daytime jobs. Radcliffe students remained resourceful; three quarters of them were eventually to marry Harvard men. One room with a window opening onto a terrace was much in demand among the more adventurous women:

One of its occupants during my time later worked for a brief period as a high-priced call girl, while another became an English duchess.¹³

Lurie clearly enjoyed her years at Radcliffe, and felt lucky to be there, as opposed to her male contemporaries who were fighting in the war.

World War II was a central fact of adult life—it began on my thirteenth birthday, and when it ended I wrote in my journal: “It's not being war is hard to imagine. There's a kind of childish haziness around it, so that being grown-up means there being war”.¹⁴

Petrol, meat, butter and sugar were rationed and even in the affluent surroundings of Radcliffe the menu featured such appetising delights as Shrimp Wiggle and Carrot Surprise. The men whom the Radcliffe women met as freshmen had a tendency to vanish at the official draft age of eighteen and a half, Harvard Yard was full of Navy officers in training, and everyone knew, or knew of, someone who had been killed in action.

Though they were not protesting about it, the Radcliffe women knew that they were distinctly second class citizens in the Cambridge academic community, lodged at a chilly distance from the main campus, and invisible to their instructors who addressed mixed classes as “Gentlemen”. There were no women on the faculty, all Lurie's textbooks were written by men, and women could not usually use the Harvard libraries. Since society girls usually went to Wellesley or Smith, it was assumed that Radcliffe women were bluestockings; cartoons in the Harvard Crimson regularly portrayed them as “dogs”, ugly grinds. When Lurie's friends invited B. J. Whiting, a popular Chaucerian scholar, as guest of honour at a dinner, he looked at the design of grotesque exotic birds on his plate and remarked, “At Harvard we have pictures of the buildings on our china. Here, I see, you have portraits of your alumnae.”¹⁵ Rather than resenting this, the women laughed appreciatively. Lurie's first tutor, David Owen, dismissed all her questions with the remark, “The trouble with you is you're a worrier like my wife.” She counted herself exceptionally fortunate later to find, in Joseph Summers, a magnificent tutor. Lurie went to the lectures of F. O. Matthiessen, Harry Levin, I. A. Richards and Henry Aiken, and in her final year joined Albert Guerard's fiction seminar. (The group included future novelists Alice Adams, Stephen Becker, Robert Crichton, and John Hawkes). The writing of the present was not itself covered in Harvard courses. “The Contemporary Period” ended in 1922 with Aldous Huxley. Levin's course on Proust, Joyce and Mann was considered daringly modern.

Harry Levin's influence, however, was strong in another sense. If anything, it was drama rather than the novel which marked Lurie's years in Cambridge. Levin's courses on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama were enormously popular, and covered English drama from its origins in church ritual and mummers' plays to the closing of the theatres. Lurie wrote her undergraduate dissertation on the relation between the sexes in Jacobean comedy, focussing on Middleton and Heywood. Entitled “Love and Money” it considered the relation between capitalism and romance in the Jacobean period. (The History and Literature field had been created in part as the product of a feeling that literature had become too specialised and refined, and that one way to connect back to the world was through history). The dramaturgical interest of Lurie's fiction has a long pedigree. More importantly, perhaps, Lurie became involved at Harvard in the Poets' Theatre, founded in 1950, as a loose affiliation of writers determined to revive poetic drama. A fluid and eclectic group, the Poets' Theatre set out to generate work by poets who would also act, administrate, direct and sell tickets, while retaining control of their own writing, and promoting the emergence of a new American verse theatre.¹⁶ Already a published poet and the winner of a poetry contest, Lurie was a founder member, having become involved through Edward Gorey, whom she had met at Mandrake, a small arty bookstore run by the wives of two Cambridge graduate students. The group was very much a writers' theatre, and included Gregory Corso, Hugh Amory, James Merrill, John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Frank O'Hara, Richard Wilbur, Lyon Phelps, John Ciardi, Kenneth Koch, Richard Eberhart and V. R. (Bunny) Lang, among others. Dylan Thomas gave his first American reading of Under Milk Wood for the Poets' Theatre in the spring of 1953; Beckett gave them permission to do the first American production of All That Fall. Plays by Lorca, Middleton, Yeats, MacLeish, René Char, Paul Goodman and Louis Simpson were among those produced. Edward Gorey did many of the set designs and artwork, and his late-Victorian taste dominated the visual aspects of some productions. (Frowning cherubs recur on the posters).

The Poets' Theatre was in many ways a highly idealistic and Utopian project, on the part of a group who were deeply serious about the importance of art. Lyon Phelps composed a manifesto “The Objectives of the Poets' Theatre” in which he emphasised the need to foster a theatre which foregrounded language rather than visual effects. In addition:

the training of an audience is inseparable from the training of ourselves as poet-playwrights.¹⁷

At the first production (1951, O'Hara's Try! Try!) the audience laughed—and were roundly rebuked at the intermission by Thornton Wilder, who lectured them angrily on the importance of verse drama. Nora Sayre, an early member, saw the group as responding to an acute hunger for European culture. There were strong echoes of surrealism and several members wrote plays about Orpheus (known to the group as “Orpheus things”). Noh plays, which needed little or no scenery and few actors, and were therefore cheap to produce, were also popular. In Lurie's account¹⁸ the idea of reviving poetic drama was a response to the feeling just after the war that poetry had become too separated from real life and the common reader, that it should come out of the study and library, to reach a wider audience. Many of those involved in the early days had followed Harry Levin's courses, and had also read widely in Classical drama, particularly Sophocles. Although verse drama may therefore sound somewhat arcane, the Poets' Theatre was in fact looking out from the ivory tower to a wider world. “Orpheus things” were more intertextual or parodic than reverently classical. In V. R. Lang's Fire Exit, Eurydice was in a burlesque theatre, and Orpheus was the mainstay of the Mozartiana L. P. Record Company. Try! Try! may have been a Noh play, but it involved a returning veteran confronting his wife as he arrives back from the war—a highly topical theme. The European influence yielded, however, as the movement tipped towards a more essentially American theatre. The Beats were on the horizon—indeed several members of the group are now thought of primarily in connection with the Beat movement.

Like any theatre group, the Poets' Theatre was fairly tempestuous, the first of Lurie's Utopias to reveal its flaws. As Lurie remarks,

The emotional temperature of the Poets' Theatre in the early days was high, for most of the younger writers and their friends were in love with Bunny and with each other. There were secrets, confidences, collaborations, poems and dramas à clef passed from hand to hand, public quarrels and reconciliations, and the best scenes were not always played on stage.¹⁹

Flurries of telegrams of resignation citing “artistic differences” tended to arrive just before dress rehearsals, forcing defeat on the opposition. Money was scarce, and at first the group were essentially strolling players. At their first physical theatre, a small loft, there was so little backstage space that in warm weather the actors waited for their entrances in an alley outside the theatre, dodging garbage thrown out by a neighbouring restaurant. The auditorium held 49 on folding chairs. When a production sold out two more people could perch on a sink—through since it dripped it was a rather dampening experience. During one financial emergency invitations were sent out for a fundraising evening, at ＄2 to attend, ＄5 to stay away, and ＄6 to bring somebody who had not been invited. The group—effectively led by Bunny Lang—could be merciless at demolishing the pretentious. In the spring of 1952 they produced a one-act play, The Center, by Cid Corman, a Boston avant-garde poet. The play was tragic and symbolic. Characters included “The Old Man”, “Second Philosopher”, “A Child”. Lang, infuriated by Corman's lack of attendance at the casting meeting or rehearsals, dressed the actors in union suits (long underwear) dyed salmon pink, and replaced the chosen Stravinsky symphony with the Elephant Polka. The performance went extremely well—but as a comedy. Corman arose shouting with anger at the close, as the curtain went down to thunderous laughter and applause.

Corman was sharing the bill with Alison Lurie. Lurie was involved in the Poets' Theatre from 1950 to 1955, in the years when it was a bohemian and radical group. (Later the increasing need for money was to propel it into a more respectable academic and social milieu). There were a number of gay men in the group and a distinctly countercultural aura. When a fire inspector, about to threaten closure on safety grounds, asked V. R. Lang, “Do you have AC or DC?” she replied “Oh we have everything” and he promptly fled.²⁰ At this point only the most bohemian of Cambridge residents attended the productions. Lurie wrote two plays for it, kept minutes of its board meetings, and did the costumes and make-up for a large number of its productions. Although clearly very involved, she took a clear-sighted view of some of its participants. As she notes,

Among the original members as well as those that joined later not one was single-mindedly anxious to “revive poetic drama”. [Bunny's] motives were less worldly than most, for she did not principally hope to rise in society, to go on the professional stage, to get her poetry published, to become locally famous, or to meet possible lovers. Each of these ends was attained by some member of the theatre.²¹

This situation, in which young people confront choices between artistic or worldly goals, is treated ironically in Lurie's Smith: A Masque, performed on 21st and 23rd May 1952, as part of an evening of plays which also featured The Center and Richard Eberhart's The Visionary Farms. The production took place in the courtyard of the Fogg Museum, a location with excellent acoustics but no changing rooms. The actors dressed in the arched galleries above, terrifying the curators lest they damage some priceless painting or statue. Lurie appears on the playbill both as the author and (as Alison Bishop) as the costume designer. Smith was reviewed by Michael Maccoby in the Harvard Crimson.

The final piece, as a sharp contrast to the symbolism of the first and the morality of the second, is both superficial and amusing. This fantasy Smith: A Masque, by Alison Lurie, describes the dilemma of a young graduate who must choose a life's work. The graduate, played by Tom Kennedy, must select among Juno and wealth, Venus and artistic fame, or Minerva and scholarship. Smith, an obstinate fellow, will have none of them and the goddesses immediately despatch him to points unmentionable.²²

Maccoby found the performance thoroughly enjoyable, suggesting to him that the Poets' Theatre did not need to wrap themselves in “misty clouds of symbolism and obscure verbiage” to please their audience. A photograph (22 May 1952) in the Crimson subtitled “Pleasure or Knowledge” shows Kennedy trying to choose between the rival claims of Venus (Allyn Moss) and Minerva (V. R. Lang). Essentially a vaudeville sketch version of the Judgement of Paris, in rhymed verse, the play included songs for which Lurie wrote the words to well-known tunes (e.g. “Marbles and Chalk” an old blues song which was a favourite of Lang's). Smith, a young man clad in standard Harvard ingenu costume of chinos and seersucker jacket, opens the action by declaring his intention to avoid the fate of his audience and side-step the shackles of social conformity:

None of you live where you would like to live
Or do your real desire. You hesitate,
Middle-aged, greedy, guilty, second-rate.
You all got caught. I'm not going to get caught.
I'm not going to do anything I ought.
I'm going to live.

(p. 1)²³

Juno's temptations include the attractions of a Cadillac, a perfect tan and West Palm Beach which are roundly condemned by Venus as exemplifying bad taste:

Art after all demands integrity
Don't think that means you won't have fun with me.

(p. 4)

The picture she paints of the artist's career runs from a rented attic to the editorship of a review:

Which ten years later may devote to you
An issue. Half a century from now
Bons mots you made during domestic scenes
Will be retold in little magazines,
And, smiling graciously, you will allow
The Authorized Edition to appear.

(p. 5)

In response Minerva (in horn-rimmed glasses and an owl-topped academic cap) paints a dreary picture of Smith as a worn-out hack at forty-five, offering instead the delights of a scholastic career culminating in publication in PMLA. Smith remains untempted, proclaims his independence—and is carried off to Hell. “Enter Jones”—and the play begins again. Without wishing to overemphasise a work intended for laughs, the play shows a developed taste for satire and, in the three fates which the goddesses script for Smith, an interest in issues of social acculturation.

Smith was not Lurie's first experience of writing for the theatre. On 20th and 21st February 1952 the group presented “An Entertainment Somewhat in the Victorian Manner” which included tableaux vivants, lanternslides, musical interludes, poetry readings and short plays together with “Full Orchestra And Irish Harps”, according to the advertisements. Admission was free, since the performance took place in Christ Church Parish House, and no charge could be made for admission to a church. The Parish House was filled to capacity, with a big crowd. Lurie's contribution was Sir George and the Dragon: A Marionette Play.²⁴ There were four characters, George, Mrs. Why, Sir Hugh, and the Dragon, each played by two actors, once speaking, one miming. In interview Lurie described the play as a mock Christmas mummers' pageant, transferred to Cambridge with the characters given Cambridge identities. In the play Lurie exploits the disjunction between heroic, male pretensions and the bathetic realisation, in the character of George who opens the action lamenting that

This quasi-military dress
Is not authentic, I confess.
I bought my helmet at the Coop—
They told me it was meant for soup.

(p. 1)

From this reference (to the Harvard Co-operative Society in Harvard Square, which sold books, clothes and household items) the play translates the action into contemporary America, where the local community value their dragon as a useful heat source and a handy means of disposing of tiresome citizens. (He eats poets when necessary). Dressed by Brooks Brothers, George is the ultimate preppie, as is his friend Sir Hugh, a product of both Harvard and Groton (New England's most prestigious prep school), played by Hugh Amery who had been to both. Even the dragon has a Christmas box from S. S. Pierce, Boston's equivalent of Fortnum and Mason, and cordially invites his opponent to join him for a civilised drink before the duel. George, however, refuses obstinately. His role is ready-scripted by literary tradition and he will not deviate one whit from it.

DRAGON:
You want all the conventions Observed?
GEORGE:
Everything Malory mentions. The cry, the challenge, and the taunt.

(p. 5)

With the archaic cry of “Avaunt! Avaunt!”, battle is joined, and the dragon struck down, to the horror of the other characters who fail to appreciate the joys of traditional genre and rebuke the hero in no uncertain terms. George is defensive:

An artist can expect no praise
From those whose lives he strives to raise.
No member of the bourgeoisie
Ever appreciated me.

(p. 5)

But when Sir Hugh refuses to knight him, on the grounds that he has not committed any good deeds, merely “a mean dragonicide” (p. 6) George changes his tune. Artificial respiration restores the dragon to life, and to the accompaniment of supernatural voices off, drums, trumpets and lightning, the hero gains his title, to general rejoicing. No man is a hero to his dragon, however. The latter has the last words.

But who's congratulating me?
I go through this farce endlessly
And nobody ever knights me.

(p. 7)

Primarily an entertainment, the play none the less demonstrates a firm grasp of the conventions of the mummers' play, intertextually revamped, and a readiness to puncture aristocratic and artistic pretensions. George's slavish belief in the necessity of observing conventions—social or artistic—looks ahead to other characters in Lurie's fiction who find themselves ready-scripted into a damaged—or damaging—social identity. George is a figure of fun, but he follows a macho agenda:

I ought to do some noble deed.
I ought to kill something.

(p. 1)

Lurie's role was not only that of the dramatist. Costumes for the entire evening were in charge of “Mrs Jonathan Bishop”. The costs (＄18.57) included the rental of a helmet for Sir Hugh, a dragon's head, a Chinese hat and pigtail, and a colander. Arguably Lurie's experience backstage at the theatre may have been even more significant than her two experiences as dramatic author. She did the costumes and make up for a great number of the productions (e.g. John Ashbery's Everyman, Richard Eberhart's The Apparition, O'Hara's Try! Try!, and Lyon Phelps' Three Words in No Time). In interview Lurie commented that the experience of knowing how the theatre works is bound to have had an effect on her work:

You see what it's like behind the scenes and what the contrast is between the Poets' Theatre's (not very immense) glamour of what you see on stage and all the confusion and makeshift that goes on behind.²⁵

The legacy of the Poets' Theatre was a double one, firstly in the influence of drama (and of working in a small group with Utopian aims) on the content of Lurie's fiction, but secondly, and more prosaically, on the fact that her fiction was ever published at all. Lurie's writing career was not all plain sailing; there was a gap of some 10 years between her first short stories and the publication of Love and Friendship. Lurie's first major work, Leonard and Others, a novella written when she was just out of college, focussed upon a young instructor at a boarding school who falls in love with a student. It is striking that in this first work of fiction Lurie situated events within an institution—viewed from a decidedly dystopian perspective. In interview, Lurie commented on the sense at a boarding school of an “upbeat mystique, you know, we're all working together, we're having a wonderful time, we're cheering for the school team, and we're singing in the school choir. Everything is wonderful”.²⁶ Leonard Zimmern featured as a rather sour character, who saw the underside of the myth. Although the novella was never published, he was to survive as a character in almost all of Lurie's later novels. A second, full-length novel, The Guided Tour concerned four young Americans in Europe, Jamesian innocents abroad. Chloe Newcomb, the Jamesian heroine, bored by the guided tour which she is taking with her best friend and the latter's parents, meets two expatriates living on family money. As a result she comes to see the underside of Europe. If the guided tour offers a European proto-Disneyland, with scenery and exotic food as major components, the expatriates provide access to a Europe of poverty, desperation and crime. Set in 1950-51 the novel includes a particularly sinister expatriate living by his wits. It is never entirely clear if he has CIA connections, or is merely involved in black market activities, smuggling cars to Spain. As events unfold towards disaster, one couple remain in Europe, one return to America. Lurie had herself visited Europe in 1950, spending time in Britain and in Paris, Salzburg, Vienna and Munich. (Not merely tourist attractions; Munich had of course been badly bombed). The four chapters of the novel are each set in a different European city and the emphasis is very much upon the disjunction between tourist stage-sets and the historical wretchedness behind the scenes. Astutely foreshadowing later critics' comments on Lurie's coolness, V. R. Lang described it as written in a style of “stark impassivity.”²⁷

Lurie's published fiction also anticipated some of the concerns of her later work. In “A Story of Women,” published when she was just twenty years old, Daisy, a rather literary girl who has just read The Great Gatsby, dreams of going to Europe while submitting under protest to the attentions of her mother and emphatically domestic sister, who are fitting her for a party frock. The dress is made of white silk, closely resembling the mother's wedding dress. The opposition between the sisters' views and life-choices is skillfully dramatised, in an understated fashion, and the central dilemma (art or marriage) presented via indirection. “Hansel and Gretel,” published five years later, is a darker tale, reversing the central situation of the fairy tale, to feature old people, rather than children, at the mercy of authoritative others. Mr. Mahans (Hansel) and Rettie (Gretel) are residents in an old people's home, who walk out of its repressive precincts and into the realms of forest fantasy. The folktale elements are again understated. Rettie is the active figure; Mr. Mahans is passively led. He dreams that he will be eaten, presumably by the sinisterly named Dr. Hex. The twist on the tale is that this witch figure is inside the supposedly safe and protective institution; the witch's house in the forest is actually a welcome destination, a refuge in the flight from oppressive authorities in league with the family. The tale looks ahead to the escape of Vinnie Miner (Foreign Affairs) from the imprisoning conventions of age and sex, again with a mediating fairy tale structure, and to the folklore motifs of Only Children and Women and Ghosts.

By 1951 Lurie was the author of two substantial works of fiction, but had published only two short stories and a small group of poems. It would be 1962 before Love and Friendship saw the light of day. Lurie has given her own account of the years of rejection slips in “No One Asked Me to Write a Novel”²⁸

Twice in my life I deliberately tried to break the habit of writing. The first time I was 26; I hadn't had a manuscript accepted for five years, and my first novel had been turned down by six publishers.

(p. 13)

By now married with a two-month old baby, Lurie accepted her husband's breakfast suggestion that she cut her losses and give up:

After all, Alison, nobody is asking you to write a novel.

(p. 13)

Abstention lasted less than a May morning in the park.

Now that I wasn't a writer the world looked flat and vacant, emptied of possibility and meaning; the spring day had become a kind of glossy, banal, calendar photography: View of the Charles River. “This is stupid”, I said aloud. I stood up and pushed the baby home and changed him and nursed him and put him down for a nap—and went back to the typewriter.

(p. 46)

Two years later, now with two rejected novels and two children in diapers, Lurie gave up again, for over a year. Beset by well-meaning friends and relatives suggesting that she give more time and attention to her family and stop doing something which appeared merely to make her unhappy, she concluded that

Evidently, what we had been taught was true: a woman had to choose between a family and a career; she couldn't have both like a man. By marrying, I had lost my powers. I had published two children, but my two novels had been born dead.

(p. 47)

She threw herself into togetherness, family picnics, the baking of cookies and casseroles, and the other pursuits considered appropriate for a 1950s wife.

I told myself that my life was rich and full. Everybody else seemed to think so. Only I knew that, right at the center, it was false and empty … I passed in public as a normal woman, wife and mother; but inside I was still peculiar, skewed, maybe even wicked or crazy.

(p. 47)

For some thirteen months this state of affairs persisted. Then in 1956 V. R. Lang died suddenly of cancer. “Disturbed, even frightened” by the suddenness and senselessness of this loss, and by the way in which memories were already fading Lurie decided to put down on paper everything that she knew of her, as fast as possible before it could be forgotten. She wrote entirely without thought of publication, or indeed of any other reader at all.

First, I noticed that I felt better than I had in months or years. Next I realized that I wasn't writing only about Bunny, but also about the Poets' Theatre, about academia and the arts, about love and power. What I wrote wasn't the whole truth—I didn't know that—but it was part of the truth, my truth. I could still cast spells, reshape events.

(p. 47)

Above all Lurie realised that the point of Bunny Lang's life was that she had done what she wanted “not what was expected of her”. (p. 47). Lurie determined to write on, even if she were never to be published, since what she wanted to do was to write. Two years later friends who had read the memoir of V. R. Lang arranged for it to be privately printed. Two years after that the brother of another friend passed his copy to an editor at Macmillan, who asked if there was a novel—and accepted Love and Friendship, written almost without hope of publication, entirely for Lurie's own pleasure. The experience is one to which Lurie returns in The Truth about Lorin Jones, in which Polly Alter, a painter whose career has stalled, is kick-started back into creative activity by the experience of writing a biographical memoir of another artist, Lorin Jones. At the close of her story Polly also realises that she cannot tell the “whole truth” about Lorin, but that she can be true to her own knowledge of events. Interestingly Polly makes this decision after a trip to Key West where she also meets her future husband. Bunny Lang spent time in Key West with the man who was to become her husband, Bradley Phillips. Faced with as many versions of Lorin Jones as she has sources—alternately describing her as shy, schizoid, spiteful, unscrupulous or generous—Polly opts for a metabiography in which all her findings are pluralistically presented. In her introduction to Lang's collected poems and plays, Lurie comments that

when someone dies, each of the survivors is left with a slightly different image. With Bunny, who had so many moods and roles, these images were perhaps more different than usual.²⁹

Her memoir also discusses the way in which Bunny could slip smoothly into different parts—as society hostess, chorus girl, Irish charwoman, member of the Canadian WAC, carer for an elderly father, idealistically committed to poetic drama, yet capable of dreadful revenges. She adored disguise and when she turned up on Lurie's doorstep dressed in drab, middle-aged clothes, in her role as commission saleswoman for a “Your Child's Lifetime” photograph plan, she was almost unrecognisable. Rosemary Radley in Foreign Affairs—alternatively playing the roles of English lady and Cockney charwoman—owes something to Bunny Lang. Lang, however, was not just an actress, but also a director. “She spontaneously invented an interesting character for whoever she met.”³⁰ Since most of the young people involved in the Poets' Theatre were impressionable, and none too sure who they were,

They were excited to be told, and often behaved afterwards in line with Bunny's definition. Thus it might be said that today the character of everyone who knew Bunny is partly her creation.³¹

Lurie's own heroines are often exposed to similar scripting, for good or ill, both by individuals and society. Katherine Cattleman adopts the role of stereotypical California girl, and becomes unrecognisable to her husband. Vinnie Miner finds that Chuck Mumpson's repeated description of her as a good woman actually makes her do a good deed. Bunny Lang's acting abilities also highlight the extent to which role-play can move the actor from frame to picture, eliding the distinctions between life and art. In her final illness, she gave a poetry reading, haggard in black velvet, sobbing out a long elegiac poem until most of her audience were weeping,

but when the lights went up I could have sworn the dark circles under her eyes had been improved with greasepaint. Really dying, she still played at dying, as if she would make death just one more costume.³²

Lang's last play, Et In Arcadia Ego, a modern anarchist pastoral, took its central characters to a paradisal island, where utopia promptly went sour. Its metaphors centre upon the image of the Ice Age and the extinction of the dinosaurs. Despite this emphasis, Lang was unaware that the title phrase originally meant “death, too is in Arcadia” and when informed, promptly changed it to I Too Have Lived in Arcadia to dispel the suggestion. Lurie's latest novel, The Last Resort, makes a similar play with the notion of death-in-paradise, as a doomed hero in Key West attempts at several reprises to stage his death, only to be repeatedly thwarted, and eventually reprieved. Death is there only for others. Originally entitled Endangered Species, the novel focuses on the hero's career as a naturalist and his efforts to save the manatee from extinction. (Other species have already gone the way of the dinosaurs, despite his efforts). He is also writing a biography—though an ecological example of the genre, featuring a famous copper beech. As the novel demonstrates, Lurie's debt to V. R. Lang was not short-lived. Reading her memoir is an intensely moving experience. Perhaps because it is such an honest portrait the human being comes alive off the page, undimmed by reverence or sentimentality, and irritating, amusing or enchanting the reader by turns. Above all the book refuses to impose any easy paradigmatic structure on a very various life.

The facts of Lurie's own subsequent career are largely a matter of public record. It is no accident that Love and Friendship is set in Convers, a fictional New England campus which bears a strong resemblance to Amherst, where Lurie's husband taught from 1954-57, that The Nowhere City moves its location to Los Angeles, where he taught from 1957-1961, or that the fictional university in upstate New York of Imaginary Friends and the Corinth of The War between the Tates have been identified with Cornell, where he took up a teaching post in 1961. Along the way Lurie had worked as an editorial assistant for Oxford University Press, in the Boston Public library, and even as a ghost writer, writing up scientific data for articles by meteorologists, psychologists and city planners among others (Bonetti) while bringing up three children. Lurie herself began teaching courses in creative writing and children's literature at Cornell in 1969, and is now Frederick J. Whiton Professor of American Literature. (Children's literature was an astute and to some extent a pragmatic choice, since no other professor had laid a territorial claim to that field at Cornell.) She teaches part-time, allowing her to spend time writing, in her second home in Key West and in the London flat which she bought with fellow novelist Diane Johnson. Lurie regularly exchanges manuscripts with Johnson, for comments. Philip Roth also read a number of her earlier novels and offered constructive criticism. She remains true to her Liberal upbringing. (She allowed herself to be arrested during a sit-in at Cornell in protest against Cornell's investment policy in South Africa.)³³ Perhaps because of her progressive background and the strong role models offered by her mother and female teachers, Lurie does not seem to have felt victimised by men and has demonstrated a welcome ability to get round or over the obstacles before her. (Though one might note that it took her 10 years and four novels to get the lowest of teaching posts at Cornell). In interview Lurie made light of the problems faced in juggling work and family at a time when day care was generally unavailable.³⁴ She adopted a strategy of “play-pen pals”—other women who wanted time to paint or write—with whom childcare was shared. She also counted herself fortunate not to face the pressure to “get on” in a conventional career. Unlike other writers of her acquaintance she did not have to write to support herself financially. As a result of this rational and pragmatic attitude, Lurie rarely features among the role models for contemporary feminists. She none the less sees herself as working in a female line and identifies herself as a feminist. To Dorothy Mermin she commented that “I think it's a mistake to believe that there's one female line which is intensely personal, subjective, intuitive, emotional. That's not the only female line. There's also a line in Fanny Burney and Jane Austen that is just as true as the other.”³⁵ Rather than preaching to the choir, Lurie's feminism is intelligently strategic in method. In the same interview she comments that

Suppose you want to write a feminist novel today, and you don't want to convince only the converted. You want to convince people who are not seriously feminists, and you'd even like some men to read it. Well, if you write The Women's Room you're not going to get very many nonconverted readers.³⁶

Comedy poses particular problems for women writers, often triggering accusations of lightness or triviality. Lurie however argues that “that's just as good a way to get at things, to laugh at them, as to shout a them.”³⁷ Where polemical feminist writers tend to be dismissed as overserious (“women have no sense of humour”) women who are comic novelists habitually face accusations of lack of ballast. The cult of the victim (Sylvia Plath as icon) is almost as damaging as the myth of Superwoman. It would be easy (indeed it is akin to what Polly Alter considers à propos of Lorin Jones) to construct a biographical sketch of Alison Lurie which emphasised immigrant background, birth injury, sibling rivalry, academic misogyny, the tragic death of a close friend, domestic drudgery and a tune played on the second fiddle to husband and children. The paradigm is almost as familiar to the twentieth century reader as the “trials and tribulations” formula was to the nineteenth. It would be equally easy to emphasise Lurie's relatively comfortable background, private schooling, Ivy League education, class advantages, European connections and three residences. Life is, fortunately, rather more complicated than biography allows for.

As is fiction. An authentic fictional voice, Alison Lurie has attracted relatively little academic attention, perhaps because her portrayals of campus life are too close to home, perhaps because her sophisticated directness and intelligent wit are highly resistant to easy categorisation. In this respect readers have proved wiser than literary critics. Lurie's novels are eagerly awaited, in very different quarters, and widely reviewed. (After America and Britain, she is particularly popular in France). As one reviewer remarked, “The novels of Alison Lurie are almost enough to make one believe in the dubious notion that reading fiction is fun.”³⁸ Essentially realistic, her richly textured fictions are deceptively readable, their dramatic tone and scenic construction lending themselves successfully to other media. (Both Imaginary Friends and The War between the Tates have been adapted for television). Although sexual intrigue is generally the mainspring of her plots, Lurie's talent for satire, her concern with the interplay of fantasy and reality, her moral seriousness, and her interest in feminist issues make her a distinctive presence on the contemporary literary scene. Critical accounts of her work, however, remind one of the early response to John Updike, as someone who had nothing much to say but said it rather well. Though tending to highlight Lurie's prose style and sharp wit, critics rarely suggest an intellectual agenda to the works, and almost never a specifically American agenda. It is assumed either that Lurie writes comedies about the three M's—marriage, the middle classes and morality—or that she is a campus novelist working with a narrow palette and a restricted range of character types. Is she really “American” in her fiction? Or merely an East Coast paleface with her eyes looking firmly towards Europe? In what follows, I offer a different Lurie, profoundly engaged with intellectual and social questions, and firmly within an American tradition. This Lurie, I will argue, starts her career in Love and Friendship with an extended interrogation of the masculinist basis of American Transcendentalism, and of the homosocial basis of American culture, using a gay novelist and a wicked parody of male fraternity rituals to queer assumptions of heterosexual “normality”, a theme to which her latest novel, The Last Resort returns, satirising the sociobiological assumptions which are the ground of homophobia. The Nowhere City, a Hollywood novel, engages with the Adorno-Benjamin debate of the 1930s, on the significance of popular culture. Imaginary Friends turns its attention to a different version of Utopianism, the religious cult, basing its analysis on American small group sociology. Vietnam through the domestic lens is the topic of The War between the Tates which takes George Kennan's politics as its organising metaphor. Only Children moves back in time to the American Depression, using fairy tale and folklore motifs to underline the adult idiocies resulting from romantic paradigms and wish-fulfilment fantasies. Foreign Affairs, set in Europe, and haunted by Henry James, offers an emblematic rewriting of the “International Theme”, which comprehensively scotches most of the American protagonist's illusions about genteel traditions. Throughout, Lurie has an uncanny ability to serve critical, even radical, aesthetic purposes within a popular form. Even those volumes which appear most aesthetic in their focus—Real People, The Truth about Lorin Jones, and Women and Ghosts with their employment of the genres of diary, biography and ghost story to question the relationship between art and life—interrogate the psychological and the economic bases of art, in order to mount a full-scale attack on the assumptions of genteel good taste, and the literature that compromises with it. As the next chapter will demonstrate, it is no accident that this is a writer who saw her first novel publicly burned in America.

Notes

1. Alison Lurie, “Their Harvard.” In My Harvard, My Yale. Ed. Diana Dubois (New York: Random House, 1982): 41.

2. John Leonard, “Review of The War between the Tates,” New Republic, 171, 10-17 August 1974, 24-5.

3. Jay Parini, “The Novelist at Sixty,” Horizon March 1986: 22.

4. Derwent May, “Review of The War between the Tates,” Listener, 20 June 1974, 808.

5. Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1979), p. 26.

6. Martha Satz, “A Kind of Detachment: An Interview with Alison Lurie.” Southwest Review, 71 (1986): 198.

7. For this, and for other biographical information I am deeply grateful to the author herself who allowed me to conduct two interviews with her, in London, 7 June 1988, and in Key West, 19 February 1991.

8. Martha Satz, 195.

9. “No One Asked Me to Write A Novel,” New York Times Book Review, 87, 23 (6 June 1982), 13.

10. “No One”, 13.

11. “Witches and Fairies: Fitzgerald to Updike.” New York Review of Books XVII, 9 (2 December 1971): 6.

12. “Their Harvard”: 43.

13. “Their Harvard”: 44.

14. “Their Harvard”: 36.

15. “Their Harvard”: 42.

16. The history of the Poets' Theatre remains to be written. Lurie gives her account in her biography of V. R. Lang. See also Nora Sayre, “The Poets' Theatre: A Memoir of the Fifties.” Grand Street 3, 3 (1984), 92-105; and Frank O'Hara, Selected Plays (New York: Full Court Press, 1978), the appendix to which provides photographs of productions and set designs.

17. Box VII, Poets' Theatre Collection, Harvard Theatre Collection. Dated 28 November 1950, p. 5.

18. Key West Interview, 19 February 1991.

19. Alison Lurie, Poems and Plays by V. R. Lang (New York: Random House, and London: Heinemann, 1975): 14.

20. A pity in some respects as a fire later destroyed most of the records of the group. The surviving papers in the Harvard Theatre Collection are partly singed.

21. Poems and Plays by V. R. Lang: 19.

22. Michael Maccoby, “The Poets' Theatre”, Harvard Crimson, 23 May 1952.

23. The manuscript is located in the Harvard Theatre collection. It lacks page 9. Page references follow quotations in parentheses.

24. I am grateful to Alison Lurie for supplying me with her copy of the play, annotated with local references. Page references follow quotations in parentheses.

25. Key West Interview, 19th February 1991.

26. Key West Interview, 19th February 1991.

27. Letter from V. R. Lang to Alison Lurie, 3 November 1954, Houghton Library.

28. “No One Asked Me to Write A Novel,” New York Times Book Review, 87, 23 (6 June 1982), 13, 46-8.

29. Poems and Plays by V. R. Lang: xvi.

30. Poems and Plays by V. R. Lang: 27.

31. Poems and Plays by V. R. Lang: 28.

32. Poems and Plays by V. R. Lang: 52.

33. Molly Hite, “Belles Lettres Interview,” Belles Lettres 2 (July-August 1987): 9.

34. Dale Edmonds, “The World Seemed So Empty To Me If I Wasn't Writing.” Negative Capability 6, 4 (1986): 152.

35. Janet Todd (ed.), Women Writers Talking (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983): 83.

36. Janet Todd: 92.

37. Janet Todd: 91

38. Elizabeth Dalton, “Review of Real People,” Commentary 48, 2 (August 1969): 60.