Lilith (play)

Lilith was the longest in gestation of all Sterling’s works. Sterling began Lilith on the fifth of September 1904, when he and his wife Carrie lived in Piedmont, California. In two afternoons he wrote the play’s entire first act.^[6] He didn’t have his first act polished enough to show his mentor Ambrose Bierce until six years later, in 1910.^[7]

At that point, Sterling doubted he could finish Lilith, so he put his draft away for seven years.^[8] Credit for reviving Lilith goes to Nebraska poet John Neihardt, best known for Black Elk Speaks. After Carrie divorced Sterling in 1914, he visited Neihardt’s home in Bancroft, Nebraska. Sterling told Neihardt about his unfinished Lilith, and Neihardt urged Sterling to work on it again. Sterling did not, so for three years Neihardt badgered him by mail, mentioning Lilith again and again until Sterling picked his play up again in 1917. Neihardt responded: “So at last it has come to pass that my Scipionic cry—Hodie, hodie, Lilith scribenda est! [Latin for “Today, today, Lilith must be written!”]—has had some effect? Hooray! It's the very best kind of news. If you had told me that your rich Uncle had just given you a check for a hundred thousand, I would have been but little moved. But I know now that you are most probably writing your masterpiece, and that it is a matter for rejoicing.”^[9]

Neihardt visited Sterling in San Francisco from late February through early March 1918. Sterling showed Neihardt his unfinished draft play.^[10] By this point, Sterling had acquired more experience writing plays in blank verse, including his well-reviewed The Play of Everyman. He completed a “rough” first draft of Lilith on April 3, 1918.^[11] “I have followed the main poetic (dramatic) tradition as to the form of the poem,” he later explained, “but have put more sheer beauty (I hope) into it than has gone into other American dramatic poems, for the reason that I was after more than drama. I made the poem moon-haunted, as a symbol of the illusory quality of love and idealism generally, and I ended it with a contrast between pleasure and pain as indicative of that strangest and most awful of human faculties, our ability to be happy when we know others are in agony. I can never forgive myself nor humanity for that. … I think that the poem, in its modernity as to astronomical truth, and its conception of pleasure and pain as the two realities goes deeper in thought than other American dramatic poems, for it does not take life as a bad joke, for pain demands more pity than that.”^[12]

Sterling completed a finished draft titled Lilith: A Dramatic Poem later in 1918 and sent it to potential publishers.^[13] He gave his original manuscript in gratitude to Neihardt, who responded: “I have read Lilith at a single sitting, and it was certainly a fine experience. Apart from the mood of the whole (which is of supreme importance) there must be no less than one hundred lines that are as bewitching as any in the Language.”^[14]

Act One: In the garden-close of a medieval castle in France, King Urlan walks with his twenty-year-old son, Prince Tancred, speaking fondly of the king’s dead queen, Tancred’s mother. They come upon Lilith in a diaphanous green robe. Powerful lust overcomes both men. When asked her name, Lilith refuses to identify herself but says her sisters are Joy and Death. The king sends Tancred away and asks Lilith to become his queen. He promises to give her three chests of gems. She wants only one specific ruby. His dead queen wears that ruby. The king refuses and offers: “Take all else, and rule.” She refuses his offer. He threatens her with fire and torture. She says she cannot be restrained by manacles nor burned by fire and tells him to show his sword. The king unsheathes his sword, which Lilith touches, and his blade falls in fragments. He says he might give her the ruby. She says she will return tomorrow, turns, and disappears.

The next morning finds Prince Tancred and Lilith in the garden-close. He lusts for her, and she says her price is the ruby on his mother’s corpse. Tancred refuses. Lilith embraces him and he gives in. In the castle’s vast, dark, vaulted crypt, Tancred holds a torch and with Lilith searches for his mother’s tomb. They find it. Tancred lifts the silver lid and sees his mother’s corpse. He hesitates, but Lilith goads him and he takes the ruby. King Urlan appears and calls Tancred “traitor.” The two men and Lilith quarrel over the ruby. The men draw swords and fight. Lilith thrusts the torch in the King’s eyes, blinding him, and he is wounded by Tancred’s sword. King Urlan dies. Lilith takes the ruby and tells Tancred she will return in seven years.

Act Two: Seven years later, Tancred and his friend Gavain ride horses to a wizard’s cavern seeking forecasts of their futures. They do not like and cannot understand the wizard’s prophecies. Tancred and Gavain ride next to a lake. Tancred sings “A Song of Friendship.” They stop at the lake and strip to swim. Tancred swims to an islet with marble ruins where Lilth rises up from the water. They embrace, kneeling. Gavain shouts from the far shore. Tancred rises to go to him, but Lilith persuades him to stay. They hear Gavain twice more, but Tancred stays to embrace and kiss Lilith. Then she slips from Tancred’s arms, tells him his friend is dead, and sinks into the lake.

Act Three: Three years later, Tancred rides a horse up hills toward snow-capped mountains. He meets a shepherd, Geoffrey, who offers the traveler a place to sleep in his home. Tancred and Geoffrey’s daughter Amara fall in love. In the autumn of the next year, Lilith appears to Tancred. She persuades him to leave the shepherd’s home to find adventure. A week later in a wood they hear young women sing a dirge. The women are part of a funeral procession, with young men bearing Amara’s body. Tancred stops the procession and speaks of his regret. The funeral cortege resumes. “Tancred turns alone to the mountains.”

Act Four: Twenty years later on the wall of a castle in snow-covered mountains, a cook, Odo the fool, and Raoul the troubadour talk. Their King Gerbert has a new young woman, Jehanne, who might be a witch. They also distrust fifty-year-old Tancred, who has lived in the castle in “his narrow cell” for seven years, searching for wisdom. In the throne room, Jehanne—who is Lilith—persuades King Gerbert to invite Tancred to a banquet to interrogate him and see if he is a threat. Three days later, at a banquet, the king, Lilith, the archbishop, and the chancellor decide Tancred’s ideas are heretical and dangerous. He will be tortured and executed. The king’s men-at-arms take Tancred away.

Two days later, at midnight, Tancred is locked in a tower room. Lilith appears. She makes the tower walls and roof disappear, and debates with Tancred over what they see. She fails to persuade Tancred to change his views to save his own life.

The next midnight, next to a fountain in a castle garden, Jehanne-Lilith seduces Raoul. They hear Tancred’s groans of pain coming from a small, low dungeon window; he is being tortured to death. Raoul stuffs Lilith’s ears with rose petals so she cannot hear Tancred’s groans and the two have sex on the grass.

During Sterling’s lifetime, three editions of Lilith: A Dramatic Poem were published.

By April 1919, Sterling’s play Lilith was turned down by at least four publishers. He decided he would pay to print it. His lover and songwriting partner Mrs. Rosaliene Reed Travis suggested an inexpensive printer: her mother, Anna Morrison Reed. Sterling hired Anna Reed to print and bind his play. She regarded Lilith as “the most wonderful dramatic poem that has yet been written. I am proud to think that I have had something to do with presenting it to the world.”^[15] Sterling received his copies of Lilith: A Dramatic Poem in early December 1919. The first edition was limited to 300 softcover books. Sterling signed and numbered each one, and also hand-corrected twenty typographical errors in each book.^[16] Sterling gave away 150 copies of Lilith and turned over the other 150 to San Francisco bookseller-publisher Alexander Robertson to sell for him. They sold out in a week.^[17]

The directors of the prestigious Book Club of California were impressed by the play Lilith, but not by its first edition, deciding “the printing job was wretched and so full of errors that the Club’s edition was issued to give the dramatic poem a corrected text and a handsome and lasting format.”^[18] In 1920, the Club published the first hardcover edition of Lilith in a beautifully-designed 350-copy limited edition.^[19]

Six years later, New York publisher Macmillan Inc. published Lilith in hardcover with an introduction by best-selling author Theodore Dreiser, who wrote: “more definitely than in any play or poem I have ever read is presented the ensorcelling power of sex or passion which so persistently betrays men and women to their ruin. … It is compact of a noble and haunting sense of beauty. … It rings richer in thought than any American dramatic poem with which I am familiar.”^[20] Sterling believed using favorable quotations to sell books was undignified, but he did allow Macmillan to use a quotation from Dreiser’s introduction on the front cover of his book’s dust jacket—the only time in his life he ever allowed a quotation on the front of a book.

Only after the Macmillan edition was issued did someone notice that on page 44 a line of stage direction was printed upside-down. The publisher recalled all undistributed copies and cut out page 44 and page 43 (its reverse side). Macmillan then printed new pages 43 and 44 and hand-glued them into each remaining copy of Lilith. Approximately half of Macmillan copies are the uncorrected first state and half the fixed second state.^[21]

In The New Republic, poet Léonie Adams hated the play: “Mr. Sterling is a veteran poet … but this grandiose effort betrays him to his worst side, to an almost wholly derivative verse, to all manner of rhetoric, the tawdrily pretty, the grotesque, the pompous.” Poetry journal Voices said Lilith "is of that most heinous of all possible things; it is—Shakespearean. Unashamedly a closet-drama, it gives vent to some of the most stilted and most inane outbursts of Elizabethan grandiloquence that we have witnessed for quite a long time. It is neither poetic nor is it modern."^[22] No other reviewer disliked the play so strongly.

The New York Times reviewer called Lilith “the finest thing in poetic drama yet done in America and one of the finest poetic dramas yet written in English.”^[1] Booklist, the journal of the American Library Association, wrote: “There are few recent dramatic poems which are so rich in substance as this one. Beyond the beauty of the scenes is the richness of the thought. The form of the poem is also a thing of beauty.”^[23] Saturday Review of Literature said: “Mr. George Sterling and the publishers are to be thanked for giving to the general public this deeply moving philosophic poem.”^[24] In Outlook, poet Arthur Guiterman pointed out that Theodore Dreiser’s glowing “Introduction” to Lilith might not be unbiased: “If you ask me, I think that Mr. Dreiser is a friend of Mr. Sterling, and that Lilith is an interesting dramatic poem or poetic play, containing passages worthy of Mr. Sterling’s deservedly high reputation.”^[25]

After Sterling's death, Australian poet Sydney Elliott Napier reviewed Lilith and concluded: "A perusal of it satisfies me that the great opinion of his work which is held by his contemporaries in the United States is justifiable. … In an appreciatory introduction by Theodore Drieser[,] he claims for Lilith that it 'rings richer in thought than any American dramatic poem with which I am familiar. … It is compact of a noble and haunting sense of beauty.' It is a great claim, but I believe it is a sound one."^[26]

No production of Lilith has been known to be staged. Even before Lilith was published, Sterling had interest from theatrical producers, but he talked them out of it. Sterling felt his play had too many sets and too large a cast to be produced profitably.^[27] Dancer Ruth St. Denis wanted to perform the play, but she asked Sterling to make major revisions. Her production never happened.^[28]

Author Upton Sinclair told Sterling Lilith was too long, and Sterling replied: “In the first place, it’s not too long: you must remember that it’s not an acting but a reading play; and it can all be read aloud in an hour and a half! … However, if the thing were to be acted, I should of course do some cutting, especially of the longer speeches. My friend Earnest Wilkes, who writes plays and has four theatres, wanted to produce Lilith, but I have refused to let him lose money on over-shooting the tastes of the public pig.”^[29]

The many settings in Lilith, its large cast, its special effects, and the musicians for its songs—factors which would make a stage production costly—seem appropriate for a filmed production, but to date no motion picture nor television version has been created.