Violet Ranney Lang

Violet Ranney "Bunny" Lang (married name Phillips, 11 May 1924 – 29 July 1956)[1] was an American poet and playwright.

Biography

Born into a wealthy Boston family, Violet R. Lang was a debutante who began college at the University of Chicago but dropped out to join the Canadian Women's Army Corps in World War II. After the war, she was an editor for the Chicago Review (founded in 1946) and published some of her work in Chicago's Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. By 1950, Lang had returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she became a friend of Frank O'Hara.[2] At the Poets' Theatre[3] she appeared, with John Ashbery, in the first production of O'Hara's play Try! Try! (1951). Among the poets of the New York School, she was a close friend to Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, and Kenneth Koch.[4] For a brief time in 1951 she was a burlesque dancer in Boston. She picked up Gregory Corso on the streets of New York City and persuaded her friends in Cambridge to help him live on a dorm room floor in Harvard's Eliot House. Her play I Too Have Lived in Arcadia (1954) is based upon her love affair with the painter Michael Goldberg.[2]

During her lifetime, Lang published widely in respected literary journals and wrote and starred in two verse dramas: Fire Exit (1952) and I Too Have Lived in Arcadia (1954). She was a founding member of the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where both of these plays were performed.[5]

... Lang's best-known play, Fire Exit, is a protofeminist rewrite of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in a burlesque house in New Jersey. At its end, Eurydice chooses to be alone rather than get back together with a bullying, self-pitying Orpheus.[6]

Her play, "Fire Exit," is marred by a peculiar alternation between an unfamiliar hillbilly dialect and the strained grandeur of the classical allusions. Yet there are moments of triumph that suggest a talent which had no chance to unfold.[7]

Her father was Malcolm Burrage Lang (1881–1972), a 1902 Harvard graduate who was an organist and director of music at King's Chapel, Boston.[8] Her mother was Ethel Ranney Lang, whose father Fletcher Ranney was a Boston lawyer.[9] Violet R. Lang was the youngest of the six children (all daughters) of Malcolm and Ethel Lang, who raised their family at 209 Bay State Road.[8] In April 1955 at Christ Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Violet R. Lang married Bradley Sawyer Phillips (1929–1991).[10][11][12] She died of Hodgkin's disease at age 32. Frank O'Hara wrote a series of poems from 1956 to 1959 in mourning her death.[2]

References
  1. Violet Ranney Lang Phillips at Find a Grave
  2. Diggory, Terence (2009). "Lang, Violet R. (Bunny) 1924–1956". Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets. pp. 279–280. ISBN 9781438119052. p. 280
  3. "The History of The Poets' Theatre". The Poets' Theatre (poetstheatre.org).
  4. Lang, V. R.; Lurie, Alison (1975). V.R. Lang: Poems and Plays, With a Memoir by Alison Lurie. Random House. p. xvi. ISBN 9780394499048.
  5. "V. R. Lang 1924–1956". Poetry Foundation (poetryfoundation.org). 2019-12-06.
  6. Nelson, Maggie (December 2007). Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions. University of Iowa Press. p. 63. ISBN 9781587296154.
  7. Bingham, Sallie (26 October 1975). "V. R. Lang". NY Times.
  8. Johnston, James (22 May 2011). "Malcolm Burrage Lang". Margaret Ruthven Lang: A site about Margaret Ruthven Lang and her music.
  9. Bacon, Edwin M., ed. (1916). "Fletcher Ranney". The Book of Boston: Fifty Years' Recollections of the New England Metropolis. Book of Boston Company. p. 459.
  10. "Miss Violet Lang Wed; Bride in Cambridge Church of Bradley Sawyer Phillips". NY Times. 16 April 1955.
  11. "Phillips, Bradley, 1929-". SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Content).
  12. Theroux, Alexander (14 February 2011). The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. Fantagraphics Books. p. 81. ISBN 978-1-60699-384-2. (Bradley Phillips's father was the archaeologist Philip Phillips.)
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