Maxwell Anderson’s song lyric ‘Lost in the Stars’ and his Ulyssean adaptation of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country

Etienne Viviers

doi:10.4102/lit.v38i1.1406

Abstract

This article inspects selected thematic and adaptive links between Alan Paton’s classic South African novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, and its stage adaptation for Broadway by Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill, the musical tragedy Lost in the Stars. Particular focus is given to the latter work’s title song ‘Lost in the Stars’, in order to examine a Ulyssean-inspired message contained in its lyrics, which concerns God’s purported abandoning of humankind. To understand this message more fully, an earlier and unrealised collaboration of Anderson’s and Weill’s called Ulysses Africanus is investigated, dormant material of which resurfaced in their eventual adaptation of Paton’s novel. After a discussion of certain intricacies of adapting Cry, the Beloved Country into Lost in the Stars, it is demonstrated that Anderson’s religious worldview was incompatible with that which permeates Cry, the Beloved Country, with the result that Paton was greatly unhappy with Lost in the Stars.

Highlights

Before Lord God made the sea and the land He held all the stars in the palm of his hand And they ran through his fingers like grains of sand, And one little star fell alone. the Lord God hunted through the wide night air For the little dark star on the wind down there – And he stated and promised he’d take special care So it wouldn’t get lost again. a man don’t mind if the stars grow dim And the clouds blow over and darken him, So long as the Lord God’s watching over them, Keeping track how it all goes on.But I’ve been walking through the night and the day Till my eyes get weary and my head turns grey, And sometimes it seems maybe God’s gone away, Forgetting the promise that we heard him say – And we’re lost out here in the stars – Little stars, big stars, Blowing through the night, And we’re lost out here in the stars
Having seen Lost in the Stars in a live production at Cape Town’s Artscape Theatre, late in November 2011, I was struck by the two-dimensional melodramatic depiction of black identity and black suffering that was realised out of Anderson and Weill’s blueprints for the work
In the light of Essie Robeson’s warning to Maxwell Anderson in 1939, when he set out creating Ulysses Africanus, Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima, Ol’ Mammy and Jack Johnson were all on stage that night

Summary

Introduction

Before Lord God made the sea and the land He held all the stars in the palm of his hand And they ran through his fingers like grains of sand, And one little star fell alone. the Lord God hunted through the wide night air For the little dark star on the wind down there – And he stated and promised he’d take special care So it wouldn’t get lost again. a man don’t mind if the stars grow dim And the clouds blow over and darken him, So long as the Lord God’s watching over them, Keeping track how it all goes on.But I’ve been walking through the night and the day Till my eyes get weary and my head turns grey, And sometimes it seems maybe God’s gone away, Forgetting the promise that we heard him say – And we’re lost out here in the stars – Little stars, big stars, Blowing through the night, And we’re lost out here in the stars. Even though Anderson and Weill ostensibly based their work Lost in the Stars on Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, the former turns out to be an adaptation of work that was initiated roughly a decade before the latter had even been written or published.

Results

Conclusion