A Tribute to Dorothy Bryant

Dorothy Bryant (1930–2017) was a brilliant writer whose work deserves much more attention. She excelled both as a novelist and a playwright. My favorites of her works are the prophetic fantasy novel, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You; her work of historical fiction, Confessions of Madame Psyche; and the play Dear Master. Dorothy’s complete works span twelve novels, seven plays, and two books of nonfiction. She explored an amazing array of genres, including historical fiction and drama, fantasy, mystery, criticism, and realistic novels set in the present day. 

Dorothy Bryant

I met Dorothy in 1994 when I was working on the first English translation of Horace, a novel by George Sand. I was trying to find a voice in English that was the equivalent of Sand’s sculpted French prose. Dorothy had written the deeply moving play Dear Master, based on the correspondence between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, where she created authentic conversations in English between those writers. I sought out Dorothy’s guidance and support. She was an incredibly kind and encouraging mentor, and a spellbinding and witty storyteller in conversation. 

She was born Dorothy Mae Calvetti to an Italian-American immigrant family in San Francisco’s Mission District. Dorothy grew up in a working-class household where her father ran a small gas station and her mother was a homemaker and office worker.

Dorothy (left) with sister Rose

She attended Mission High School, where she felt she did not have the most rigorous education. She longed to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley, the leading public university on the West Coast. But Dorothy’s older sister Rose had gone there and did not finish a degree, and their parents did not want to risk a repeat. They told Dorothy they would only pay for her to attend San Francisco State College (now University). Dorothy, who loved piano, applied there and majored in music, graduating in 1950. She particularly enjoyed playing the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach. I wonder if Dorothy’s skill in creating dialogue was shaped by the Bach of the Two-Part Inventions.

After graduating from college, Dorothy began teaching at the age of 23. She and her first husband, Lou Ungaretti, already had a son and daughter. In the late 1950s, Dorothy taught Music and English in San Francisco at Lick-Wilmerding High School, which then only admitted boys. Dorothy also led the glee club there and wrote the music and lyrics for the school plays.

Dorothy Bryant teaching at Lick-Wilmerding High School, 1950s

She went back to San Francisco State College and earned a Master’s degree in Creative Writing in 1964. Dorothy then taught at Contra Costa Community College for many years, and created that campus’ first Black history course. Dorothy was a beloved instructor. She wrote in her novel Anita, Anita, “… nothing is so intoxicating as teaching. It is the closest thing to loving… ”

Dorothy began her literary career with the novel Ella Price’s Journal, published in 1972 by a major press, Lippincott. That book was way ahead of its time in taking seriously the struggles of married women who worked in the home.

 

By virtue of that success, Dorothy was able to get a literary agent, who then read the manuscript of her second novel, The Comforter, later retitled The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You. But the agent flatly refused to represent her book. He told Dorothy, “I don’t want to show this to anybody because I don’t want to prejudice publishers against you.” Because of his negative reaction, Dorothy gave up on sending the book to editors. On the recommendation of her second husband, Bob Bryant, she decided to self-publish it, calling her publishing company Ata Books, after the fantasy world in the novel. The book sold out its first run within two years, and Random House approached Dorothy to reprint it. Their one caveat was that they wanted to change the title to The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, a phrase from the book, and Dorothy agreed.

Dorothy Bryant with son John and husband Bob Bryant at John’s college graduation, 1972

A pioneering work of the fantasy genre, The Kin of Ata depicts a world where happiness is measured not by material success or status, but by how harmonious a person’s dreams are. This farseeing book has become a classic and has stayed in print for 50 years. It remains Dorothy’s best-known work.

Following that difficult experience with the agent, Dorothy elected to self-publish almost all her subsequent books. They span an incredible range of settings, subjects, and genres, from the epistolary novel Prisoners; to her mystery Killing Wonder; to Confessions of Madame Psyche, an exploration of the craze for seances that a hard-luck young woman exploits in the San Francisco of the era of the great earthquake of 1906, which won the 1987 American Book Award. To replace the role of editor, Dorothy relied on friends such as Anne Fox to critique her self-published manuscripts.

 

Dorothy began writing for the stage with her play Dear Master. The original 1991 production featured the stellar cast of Barbara Oliver as George Sand, and Ken Grantham as Gustave Flaubert. The play was so well received that it launched Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre, named for George Sand’s actual given name, Aurore. Dorothy’s husband Bob Bryant, a contractor, built the seating and stage for the theater in Berkeley’s historic City Club, designed by architect Julia Morgan.

Barbara Oliver as George Sand and Ken Grantham as Gustave Flaubert
in Dorothy Bryant’s Dear Master

Someone recently asked me who were some of my favorite playwrights, and I named Tom Stoppard, Jez Butterworth, and Dorothy Bryant. I included Dorothy primarily on the basis of Dear Master, because in that play she takes the static material of a written correspondence between two writers and turns it into the most moving and memorable drama about a literary friendship that explores deep questions about life.

Dorothy’s other plays also focused on historical topics, including The Trial of Cornelia Connelly. The plot revolves around the stranger-than-fiction case of a woman in the 1840s whose husband deposits her in a nunnery so he can become a priest. When the husband changes his mind a year later and tries to reclaim his wife, she refuses. The husband then goes to court to force his wife to return.

 

As with all of Dorothy’s historical fiction and dramas, she meticulously researched The Trial of Cornelia Connelly. She often traveled to verify sites and events in her works. For her historical romance novel Anita, Anita, based on the life of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s wife, Dorothy retraced the couple’s epic journey from Brazil to Uruguay to Italy. Neither of those historical projects brought Dorothy wealth or fame, but I greatly admire that she followed her literary passions and interests, regardless of whether they led to popular successes.

 

Dorothy Bryant was also no stranger to controversy in her literary career. Before feminism became fashionable, Dorothy was outspoken in her depiction of the challenges of women. She also created sympathetic working-class characters of a kind rarely seen in post-World War II U.S. fiction. Her nonfiction includes Writing a Novel, a book on the writing process; and Literary Lynching, a survey of unofficial censorship by groups of readers

 

Dorothy was hardly one to toe the party line. She was just as tough on hypocrisy on the left as she was on elitism on the right. In that sense, Dorothy Bryant reminds me a great deal of George Orwell. She was not afraid to call it as she saw it, no matter who might take offense. Dorothy Bryant’s willingness to disregard accepted dogmas and to aim always for the complex truth is much needed in our current intellectual landscape.

 

Many thanks to Dorothy Bryant’s daughter Lorri Ungaretti for providing much of the information in this blog.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

A Tribute to Barbara Oliver (1927–2013)

This week the San Francisco Bay Area received the very sad news that the wonderful actor, director, and arts administrator Barbara Oliver passed away on May 20, 2013. Barbara cofounded the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, California, and served as its artistic director from 1992 to 2004. This blog is dedicated to Barbara. 

                                                              Barbara Oliver

Here is a tribute to Barbara from one of her close collaborators, the writer Dorothy Bryant, author of the play Dear Master (which Barbara appeared in) and numerous novels, including the amazing The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You and Confessions of Madame Psyche.

“The idea for Aurora Theatre Company began in the late 1980s with a luncheon conversation with Barbara (just turned 60) about the paucity of plays featuring older leading ladies. In my ignorance I offered to write a two person ‘reading’ based on the friendship between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert. (I had no idea of the work and the cost of what seemed like a modest effort to fill some time before Barbara got another role with a ‘real theater.’)

“A year of research later, plus another year of mostly unpaid public readings (followed by my rewriting) by Barbara and Ken Grantham (and other actors) transformed this ‘dialogue’ into a play, performed successfully at the Berkeley City Club, (where she [Barbara] was a trusted member), and the beginning of Aurora Theatre Company. Her achievement was monumental—a fact I learned (knowing nothing about how a play went from page to stage) as we moved along. I would never have attempted such a thing without Barbara’s staunch belief that it could work, and her willingness to do these readings, her incredible savvy about climbing all the hurdles to production, her use of contacts built by solid respect for her work at Berkeley Rep and other theaters. She was totally creative and totally practical. Whenever we hit a snag that might have made others give up, she would nod thoughtfully and then work her way toward a solution.

"Thanks to her I wrote five more plays that were performed here and in other cities. Barbara had taken what had seemed like a setback and transformed it into an opportunity to display and use all of her talents, which, with her quiet, unassuming manner, few people knew she possessed. I learned a lot from her.”

My own connection with Barbara also began through the play Dear Master. I was teaching a summer literature class for high school students at UC Berkeley in 1995, and we were reading a translation I’d done of the novel Horace by George Sand, and a novella by Flaubert. To make that period come to life for the students, I persuaded the university to host a reading of Dear Master, with Barbara recreating her role as George Sand. Barbara was so moving and wise and memorable in that part. She embodied George Sand.

After that Barbara supported my efforts at playwriting, which were very rough at the beginning. I was working on a play that consisted mostly of dramatic monologues, and Barbara gently informed me at one point, “It sometimes helps if the characters talk to one another when they’re onstage.” She was infinitely patient and read draft after draft of my plays, but she never failed to let me know when I could do better—had to do better. Barbara was a fantastic and enormously generous mentor, and she had a great respect for writers.

After retiring from the Aurora Theatre, Barbara couldn’t stop developing new plays, and she founded a reading series called Four New Ones, where each year she planned to direct staged readings of plays in progress. She only got through the first year because of commitments to act and direct for other companies.

She directed several staged readings of another play of mine, Things I Didn’t Know I Loved. I admired the way that Barbara worked with the actors, choosing people she respected highly, and letting them find their way into their roles.

I had a chance this week to speak with Barbara’s daughter, Anna Oliver, who is a costume designer. Anna shared a few of her memories of her mom.

“My mom’s dad was a missionary, a Northern Baptist preacher. When she was three years old, my mom went with my grandpa and grandma to India. She came back to the U.S. when she was seven, speaking Hindi.

“When my mom was very young she used to listen the Metropolitan Opera on the radio on Sunday afternoons. She wanted to be an opera singer. It was outside the norm for the world she grew up in to go on stage.

“There were several roles she performed that she talked a lot about. Studying drama at Carnegie Tech, she played Cordelia in King Lear. One of the roles she was most challenged by but most glad she did was in The Chairs by Ionesco, at the Aurora Theatre. She also enjoyed doing The Gin Game there opposite my dad, Bill Oliver, though it was somewhat harrowing because my dad was ill.

“In her directing, she did a lot of George Bernard Shaw, and adored it. She also directed Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Aurora—that was Babs at her best. She was very happy with the production of Wilder Times [short plays by Thornton Wilder] that she directed at the Aurora in 2012. The short Wilder play The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden—a lot of that was informed by Barbara. She knew those folks.

“My mom always said that theater is a three-legged stool—the play, the production, and the audience. It can’t stand without all three of those. What struck me about her perspective was how much the audience mattered. My mom cared so much about writers and language, but theatre for her was communication to a purpose—to connect with an audience.

“She was generous and gracious, but it wasn’t all selfless. She did it because she loved the theater. She genuinely believed in the transformative power of theater.”

Working with a Writing Mentor, Part 1: Trusting the Advice

In the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to be a novice writer again when I tried to go outside my main genre of poetry to write plays. Since almost all of my earlier work was poetry, my first attempt at a play was basically a series of dramatic monologues, loosely stitched together. Luckily I had a very experienced mentor to help me in my first efforts as a playwright: the late Barbara Oliver, founder of the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, California; a veteran producer, director, and actor who brought many new plays to fruition. Barbara actually said to me after reading my first play, “You have to have the actors talk to each other when they’re on stage,” which gives you an idea of how unfinished that script was. Several years later, when I wrote my third play, Things I Didn't Know I Loved, based on the life and poetry of the Turkish writer Nazim Hikmet, Barbara Oliver read and critiqued many, many drafts of it.

Barbara provided me with numerous valuable suggestions on each version, telling me not to get too caught up in the research I had done, and dig for the drama in each scene. There was one scene in particular that Barbara objected to, but I wouldn’t let go of it. She quoted for me a comment she had heard the playwright David Mamet make, "Writing a play is like building an airplane. You have to get rid of everything that impedes the thrust." Think how streamlined a jet is. 
So Barbara convinced me to take out an entire scene that I was very attached to, a scene that involved Nazim’s relationship with the Turkish head of state, Ataturk, whom he had a complex admiration for and conflict with. But that scene didn’t move ahead the story of Nazim Hikmet’s life enough to merit its inclusion in the play. Working on my own, I would never have cut that scene, but at a certain point, I realized that Barbara just knew more than I did. She had decades of experience producing plays, some productions that had worked, some that had flopped, and she just knew. So I took her word for it and cut the scene. At times, you just have to go on faith and trust your mentor. I'll talk more about the mentoring relationship in my next few blogs.


Other recent posts about writing topics:
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4  
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;  Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka