WHO WAS THE “LOVELY PORTUGUESE” WOMAN, DEAD IN NEW ORLEANS? -George Monteiro

(Paul Cézanne 1839-1906)

WHO WAS THE “LOVELY PORTUGUESE” WOMAN, DEAD IN NEW ORLEANS?

George Monteiro

First some background. On April 4, 1923, Walter McClellan’s one-act, The Delta Wife, was staged at the Le Petit Theatre due Vieux Carre, in New Orleans. In 1924 it was published by D. Appleton in its Modern Plays series, edited by Frank Shay. In 1925 Frank Shay, as director of the Provincetown Barnstormers, included the play in its summer season, along with Eugene O’Neill’s Gold and Susan Glaspell’s The Verge. The Delta Wife was subsequently staged, during the week of May 2, 1927, by the Memphis Little Theatre of Memphis, Tennessee, in the week-long Little Theatre Tournament for the David Belasco Trophy, at Frolic Theatre, New York, and received one of the two prizes awarded, each in the amount of $200. It was reviewed: “The Delta Wife of the Memphis group was a play of no little timeliness, dealing with a man and a woman trapped in a hut by the rising waters of a Mississippi flood. Except for a slight bit of overwriting, particularly in the woman’s part, it was an authentic endeavor undoubted dramatic effectiveness…”¹ Three years later, as the New York Times reported, The Delta Wife was presented by “the Curtain Club of the College of the City of New York at the Y.M.H.A., Ninety-second Street and Lexington Avenue.” Its long life extends itself at least to 1949 when it was presented by the Cranford Dramatic Club, a community theatre in Cranford, New Jersey.² There is no evidence that he McClellan ever had another play produced, if indeed he wrote other plays.
It is not Walter McClellan as playwright, however, that has piqued my interest and prompted the question raised in my title, but McClellan as poet, who was an early contributor to the Double Dealer, the fabled New Orleans small magazine started in 1921. To the summer 1921 issue McClellan contributed a sonnet, “Arrangement in Black and Gold,” with the words “New Orleans, 1821” in italics below the title. The title itself appropriates James Abbott McNeil Whistler’s title for his portrait of Robert Montesquiou-Fezebsac.

The lovely Portuguese is dead,

Tall candles burn about her head.

Her negro slave, Lili-Alixe,

Prays with an ivory crucifix.

Until strange men knock on the door,

And walk upon the painted floor. . .

O men who bear this poor dead woman

Unto that place where nothing’s human,

Behold your shadows this noon day

And know that she is less than they.

Rejoice that these black phantoms move,

Your living presences to prove:

Yourselves that still the heavy sun

Finds here alive, and shines upon.

The identity of “the lovely Portuguese” is unknown as is the seemingly historical occasion identified only as “New Orleans, 1821.” It occurs to me that the poem may be based on a painting, engraving or illustration of some sort. But nothing is certain.
As for the details of Walter McClellan’s life, all that I have discovered to date is that he contributed a second poem to the Double Dealer, “Gayoso Girls are Golden,” which was reprinted in The Bookman (Mar. 1923), p. 37, along with “Tosti’s Garden,” his one poem in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (date unknown), and that he seems to have hailed from Memphis, Tennessee, or thereabouts.

Notes

1. “Little Theatres in Finals Tonight,” New York Times (May 7, 1927), p. 15; “British Group Seen in Theatre Tourney,” New York Times (May 6, 1927), p. 20; and The Best Plays of 1926-27 and the Year Book of the Drama in America, ed. Burns Mantle (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947), pp. 521-24.
2. “Curtain Club to give Two Playlets,” New York Times (Dec. 2, 1930), p. 25.

George Monteiro is Professor Emeritus of English and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University, and he continues as Adjunct Professor of Portuguese Studies at the same university. He served as Fulbright lecturer in American Literature in Brazil–Sao Paulo and Bahia–Ecuador and Argentina; and as Visiting Professor in UFMG in Belo Horizonte. In 2007 he served as Helio and Amelia Pedroso / Luso-American Foundation Professor of Portuguese, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Among his recent books are Stephen Crane’s Blue Badge of Courage, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature, The Presence of Pessoa, The Presence of Camões, Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop and Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Among his translations are Iberian Poemsby Miguel Torga, A Man Smiles at Death with Half a Face by José Rodrigues Miguéis, Self-Analysis and Thirty Other Poems by Fernando Pessoa, and In Crete, with the Minotaur, andOther Poems by Jorge de Sena. He has also published two collections of poems, The Coffee Exchange and Double Weaver’s Knot.