Where ideology and artistry clash

A native of Chicago, Hansberry, who was born in 1930 and died in 1965, is often credited with revolutionizing American theater with her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, which depicted black life with a degree of acuity and sensitivity that was uncommon at midcentury. Yet Hansberry agitated for a very different sort of revolution, too: Having inhaled all the fashionable leftist ideology of her day, she was an unabashed advocate for Marxism. In her earnest wish to be part of a time of sweeping change, Hansberry was just the sort of person Gornick surely had in mind when she wrote of the appeal of communism in the Western world. “The Communist Party had given her insights about herself that she had never considered,” Shields writes of Hansberry. “Because of it, she had moral authority; she belonged to the brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind.”

The author of previous biographies of Harper Lee and Kurt Vonnegut, Shields is well equipped to evoke the cultural context out of which arose A Raisin in the Sun, a play that, upon its debut on Broadway, garnered instant acclaim and something even more precious: genuine staying power. “No other play from that era is more widely anthologized, read, or performed than Hansberry’s most famous work, written when she was just twenty-nine,” writes Shields, who notes that only Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman remains as popular.

A Raisin in the Sun deserves its high reputation. To tell the story of the fictional Youngers, a black family in Chicago who contend with racial prejudice, housing discrimination, and assorted interpersonal crises, Hansberry tapped her own family background: When she was still a girl, her father, a prosperous real estate broker named Carl Augustus Hansberry, initiated a groundbreaking legal fight against a racially restrictive covenant that prohibited his family from residing in a white neighborhood, a battle that resulted in the Supreme Court issuing a ruling in his favor in the case Hansberry v. Lee.

In Shields’s telling, this was not the makings of hit theater in the late 1950s. At the time, the black experience was reflected on Broadway in musicals such as Porgy and Bess, as well as the occasional Jazz Age-era revival such as Shuffle Along, “but a straight drama about a black family didn’t have the panache to fill the big venues on Forty-Second Street — it was a matter of economics,” Shields writes. Yet Hansberry’s gifts as a dramatist, not to mention the participation of actor Sidney Poitier, who starred in the original Broadway run and later headlined a successful film adaptation, resulted in a hit that spawned numerous revivals and regional or student productions.

Yet the ubiquity of A Raisin in the Sun should not inure us to the radicalism of its creator. Disavowing the Republican Party to which her family belonged, Hansberry became an enthusiastic booster of hopeless Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace. She was a prolific contributor to the black newspaper Freedom, the publisher of which, the great American bass baritone (and sadly misguided communist sympathizer) Paul Robeson, once said of Stalin: “Here was one who was wise and good — the world and especially the socialist world was fortunate indeed to have his daily guidance.”

One has the sense that Hansberry was weighed down by the commitments and obligations of being on the far Left during the postwar period. “Her aim was to depict the humanity of the people under an economic system she wanted to overturn, capitalism, to replace it with socialism,” Shields writes, describing something less than the ingredients for art in its purest form. Shields notes that Hansberry’s application of “Marxist utilitarianism,” her attempt to scrutinize every issue through a socioeconomic lens, resulted in strained judgments about art, especially cutting-edge art. She rejected the existentialism not only of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot but also Richard Wright’s The Outsider. Her early enthusiasm for Sean O’Casey’s heavy-handed play about the Irish working class, Juno and the Paycock, ominously foreshadows the clunkiness of some of her own later work, although her denunciation of the apolitical musings of the Beats is invigorating: “Perhaps they are angry young men, but insofar as they do not make it clear with whom or at what they are angry, they can be said only to add bedlam to this already chaotic house.”

Let it never be said that Hansberry, a closeted lesbian whose one marriage, to songwriter Robert Nemiroff, ended in divorce, lost sight of who or what she was angry at, and her rage at the treatment of black people in the United States and throughout the world was surely righteous. Yet one reads this fulsome account of Hansberry’s life with a sense of opportunities lost, not just because of the simple fact that Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at age 34 but because her life was cut short before her work could deepen and before her political soul could mature. She was denied the chance to understand, as Susan Sontag did, that Reader’s Digest grasped the truth about communism better than the Nation all along, or to realize, as Norman Mailer did, that art is an imperfect vessel for strictly political aims.

To his credit, Shields is alert to the contradictions in Hansberry’s short life, even when his subject is not: After the financial success of a song co-written by Nemiroff, “Cindy, Oh Cindy,” Hansberry was free to dive into her own writing — and untroubled by the irony. “She was wealthy because her entrepreneurial husband had ridden a trend at the most consumeristic end of the music business — teen records,” Shields writes. “But she preferred to skip the moral ambiguities involved in actually realizing the dream and seemed oblivious to them even in her own life.” A Raisin in the Sun remains great, but let us mourn the absence of a later Hansberry play in which she tried to make sense of the rich stew of her own remarkable, abbreviated, contradictory life.

Peter Tonguette is a frequent contributor to the American Conservative, National Review, and Wall Street Journal.