Some time ago I got lost in reading every scrap I could find on the internet about Lorraine Hansberry. A particular delight was listening to her actual voice in this interview with Studs Terkel which I massively recommend.
https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/lorraine-hansberry-discusses-her-play-raisin-sun
One of many gems from her letters, notes and journal entries, were these lists she would write each year – of likes, dislikes, regrets, etc. In 1959 she writes:
I hate
…
My loneliness
My homosexuality
Stupidity
…
Jean Genet’s plays
Jean Paul Sartre’s writing
Not being able to write
Death
Pain
Then in 1962:
I like
69 when it really works
The first scotch
The fact that I almost never want the third or even the second when I am alone. Praise fate!
The inside of a lovely woman’s mouth
The way little JW looks in the movies
Her coquettishness
Her behind—those fresh little muscles
Parts of the lingering memory of a betrayer
What I would give to have bumped into Lorraine Hansberry at a party sometime between 1959 and 1962.
I was reminded of these delights, when while on my attachment I opened the notebook I’d brought with me. There on the front page was one of Lorraine’s journal entries from 16th September 1964, which I had carefully transcribed into my own notebook. And all I can say is, I related:
“I sit at this desk for hours and hours and sharpen pencils and smoke cigarettes and switch from play to play – Sidney, Touissant, Les Blancs and – nothing happens. I begin to think more and more of doing something else with my life while I am still young. I mean, almost anything – driving an ambulance in Angola or running a ski lodge in upstate New York, instead of this endless struggle. I expect the theatre will kill me.”
The great tragedy is of course that she died just four months after she wrote that, criminally prematurely, at the age of 34 – a fact which, whenever I remember it, breaks my heart anew.
