First Important Young Writers English Literature Essay

In addition to the timely and definitive appearance of Lockes The New Negro, a series of literary contests and dinners sponsored notably by Opportunity magazine but also by the Crisis – and deliberately including some of the leading white writers, editors, and publishers of the day – helped to set the stage for the high phase of the movement in the second half of the decade. By the end of 1925, many of the major young artists identified their careers with the fate of the movement. The poet and novelist Arna Bontemps arrived from Los Angeles, as did the editor, novelist and critic Wallace Thurman; from Washington, D.C., came the Florida-born Zora Neale Hurston, whose novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), although published after the end of the movement, should nevertheless be seen among its greatest achievements; the fiction writer Rudolph Fischer, by training a physician, also saw himself as a serious writer; the artist and poet Gwendolyn Bennett came from Texas, drawn by the palpable sense of excitement in Harlem. A little later, from New England, came the poet Helene Johnson and her cousin Dorothy West, notable as a writer of fiction and as an editor. These were only some of the young artists drawn to Harlem by the renaissance there.

Patrons and Friends The deliberate courting and inclusion of leading whites in the Harlem Renaissance have led to questions, at times acrimonious, about the role of patronage – that is, white patronage – in the movement and even about the authenticity of the movement as an expression of African American culture if the renaissance depended so heavily on goodwill of whites. The truth probably is that such involvement was important and even necessary to the movement, so deep was the historic chasm in the United States between the races because of segregation and racist beliefs; if books by blacks were to be published, something more than simple merit would have to be involved. In particular, Charles S. Johnson of Opportunity and the National Urban League, seeing nothing but benefits in an association between blacks and whites, worked assiduously and ingeniously to stimulate such contacts.

Perhaps the two leading white figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance were Carl Van Vechten and Charlotte Osgood Mason. Van Vechten’s interracial parties broke new ground on the New York social scene, but he also used his influence as a fashionable novelist and critic to help launch certain careers, notably that of Langston Hughes. (Countee Cullen and a few other writers, however, were decidedly wary of Van Vechten’s help.) Van Vechten’s novel of Harlem life, Nigger Heaven (1926), became a best-seller, although many blacks were utterly alienated by the title. Through the dispensing of sums of money, Mason, an elderly woman of volatile temperament and sometimes arresting ideas, supported a number of black artists in this period, including Hurston, Hughes, and Locke; unlike Van Vechten, however, she did not hesitate to subject her beneficiaries to her powerful notions concerning parapsychology, the matchless force of folk culture, and the dangers of “civilization.” In addition to Van Vechten and mason, publishers and editors at houses such as Knopf; Macmillan; Harcourt, Brace; Macaulay; and Harper played a quieter but no less effective role in lowering the barriers between black writers and the major means of publication in the United States. The black writers eagerly seized these opportunities.

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Emerging Conflicts Among the black writers themselves certain significant tensions became more serious as the movement grew. One such tension was occupational, in the sense that the writers and artists lived with the uneasy knowledge that their world was in crucial ways distinct from that of the masses of blacks, almost all of whom, as Langston Hughes once wryly observed, did not know that the Harlem renaissance was going on. Another tension was generational – the growing antagonism between many of the older writers and editors and the younger set. James Weldon Johnson, among others of the old guard, had little difficulty with the new writers; his collection of prose pieces based on the black sermon, God’s Trombones (1927) showed that he was still capable of innovative flights of creativity. However, the most powerful voice of the old guard, that of W. E. B. Du Bois, was less conciliatory. Increasingly disturbed by the apparent “immorality” of some of the new works, as well as by their lack of political seriousness, Du Bois organized in the Crisis a symposium, The Negro in Art, which appeared over several issues in 1926. Evidently dissatisfied with many of the responses, he openly criticized several of the new works. He was especially hard on Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem, which Du Bois linked caustically with van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, previously dismissed in the Crisis as “an affront to the hospitality of black folk and to the intelligence of white.”

To most of the younger artists, including Thurman, Hughes, Hurston, and even the relatively conservative Cullen, the essence of the renaissance was freedom – freedom for them to create as they saw fit, without regard to politics. What freedom meant practically was another matter. Hughes expressed his freedom by insisting on racial commitment on the part of the black artist; Cullen expressed his own by abjuring jazz and blues verse in favor of conservative forms. In his landmark 1926 essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, Hughes insisted that the black artist must recognize that his or her link to Africa was a precious resource; Cullen preferred to suggest instead, as in his long poem Heritage (1925), that Africa was a source of confusion and ambivalence. Both, however, sought freedom from the political constraints that an older generation considered an essential part of the duty of the black artist. In 1926, many of the younger artists banded together to produce a new magazine, Fire!!, which promised “to burn up a lot of old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas of the past.” Unfortunately, the magazine, weakly supported by the public and, indeed, by the artists themselves, lasted only one number.

Drama, Poetry, Fiction Many of the younger writers were interested in the theater, but few made it a priority during the most important years of the Harlem Renaissance. The success of Shuffle Along in 1921 led to a vogue of such reviews and to many imitations of this compendium of song, dance, and humor. However, black involvement in more orthodox drama as part of the renaissance was far more restricted, and less attended by even provisional successes. Throughout the 1920s, the best-known dramas of black life were undoubtedly written by white artists such as Eugene O’Neill and Paul Green of North Carolina. The outstanding black talent was probably Willis Richardson, whose best-known play was The Chip Woman’s Fortune (1923), the first serious play by an African American to be staged on Broadway. Richardson was, however, a resident of Washington, D.C., where he had been moved to write plays after seeing, in 1916, Angelina Weld Grimké’s highly controversial Rachel, about racial persecution and its psychological effects. This controversy, about propaganda versus art, stimulated the theatre in Washington but produced few new plays of quality.

In 1926, responding to this dearth of serious drama in New York involving blacks, Du Bois established the Krigwa Little Theatre movement. He asserted four basic principles: “The plays of a real Negro theatre must be: 1. About us. That is, they must have plots which reveal Negro life as it is. 2. By us. That is, they must be written by Negro authors who understand from birth and continuous association just what it means to be a Negro today.” The other principles called for the theater to be “For us” – catering mainly to black audiences, and “Near us” – that is, in a black neighborhood “near the masses of ordinary Negro people.” The first two Krigwa productions, Compromise and The Broken Banjo, were by Willis Richardson, and Krigwa failed to inspire any important young New York playwrights. In the 1930s, Langston Hughes would emphasize drama with some success in his career, and his play about the South and miscegenation, Mulatto (1935), would have the longest run of any play by an African American on Broadway until Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in the 1960s. Nevertheless, drama was almost certainly one of the weakest areas of achievement in the Harlem Renaissance.

Around 1928, the emphasis among the writers of the renaissance seemed to shift decisively away from poetry toward fiction. Poets such as Cullen, Hughes, Bontemps and others continued to publish in magazines, but far fewer books of verse appeared; perhaps the only notable event of this sort was the appearance of Sterling Brown’s folk-inflected Southern Road in 1932. In 1928 came Du Bois’s novel Dark Princess, which was in large part his attempt to exemplify the idealistic, politically engaged fiction he preferred. More authentic that year to the mood of the age, however, were Rudolph Fisher’s Walls of Jericho; Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, about one woman’s chronic unhappiness with life and her descent into a self-imposed, tawdry marriage; and Claude McKay’s epochal Home to Harlem, which celebrated the pleasures as well as the complexities of black urban life.

Still later in the renaissance came additional novels by McKay, Jessie Fauset, and Thurman, including the latter’s The Blacker the Berry (1929), about skin-color fixation within the black community, a subject also of interest to Nella Larsen, as in her Passing (1929). In 1930 came Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter, about a young boy growing up in the Midwest. Arna Bontemps turned from poetry to write his first novel, God Sends Sunday (1931), based on the life of a beloved, fun-loving uncle whose approach to living contrasted with the strictness of Bontemps’s Seventh Day Adventist Religion. Also in 1931, the satirist George Schuyler, whose essay in the Nation in 1926, The Negro Art Hokum, ridiculing African American race consciousness, had provoked Hughes’s Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain there, published the satirical novel Black No More. Satire was prominent again in Wallace Thurman’s novel Infants of the Spring (1932), in which several of the major figures of the renaissance are easily recognizable under their thin disguises, as Thurman lampooned many of the excesses and posturings of the Harlem Renaissance.

The Great Depression Although it is convenient and even accurate to include Hurston’s lyrical 1937 novel about one woman’s growth into mature self-confidence and self-fulfillment, Their Eyes Were Watching God, within the boundaries of the movement, it is also clear that by that year the movement was absolutely finished, although the talent of many of its writers was hardly exhausted. The Harlem Renaissance had been dependent in large part on a special prosperity in the publishing industry, the theater, and the art world. The crash of Wall Street in 1929 was the beginning of the end for the movement, which swiftly declined as the country lurched toward the Great Depression in the early 1930s. Conditions for blacks in New York City, and especially for blacks in Harlem, make a mockery of the heady enthusiasms that had led to the characterization of the 1920s as the Jazz Age, an era of reckless fun. Unemployment and the rise of crime (although the latter was mild compared with conditions a half-century later) damaged the image and the reality of Harlem as an artistic and cultural paradise. A civic explosion, often called the Harlem Riot of 1935, underscored the radically altered nature of the district and the lives of the people there.

The renaissance was over, to be revived in significantly different forms at later points in African American history. What did it achieve? Some critics, skeptical of the role of patronage and insistent on more militant and radical political approaches, have suggested that the cultural movement achieved little. Such a view may be short sighted, however. The art of the Harlem Renaissance – in poetry, fiction, drama, music, painting, and sculpture – represents a prodigious achievement for a people hardly more than a half-century removed from slavery and enmeshed in the chains of a dehumanizing segregation. In this movement, black American artists took stock of the lives and destinies of their people against the backdrop not only of the United States but also of the world. A sense of the modern overhangs the period, although the African American approach to the modern – insofar as one can speak of a single, collective African American approach – would be in many ways quite distinct from the pessimism and even despair of European attitudes to the same question.

In this period, black American artists laid the foundations for the representation of their people in the modern world, with a complexity and a self-knowledge that have proven durable even as the African American condition changed considerably with the unfolding of the twentieth century. The term renaissance is entirely appropriate, for in that decade or so a loose but united gathering of black artists, located most significantly in Harlem, rediscovered the ancient confidence and sense of destiny of their African ancestors and created a body of art on which future writers and musicians and artists might build and in which the masses of blacks could see their own faces and features accurately and lovingly reflected.

PART TWO

On Being a Black Man in White America

From the moment he first stepped ashore off the first slave ship, the African American male has sought to demonstrate both his manhood and his individual identity. It was not easy then, or is it today, for an African American male to be a “man” in his country of birth. This is especially true if he is poor as well as black. Nevertheless, African American men have never given up on the ideal that, if given the opportunity, they can make a valuable contribution to the social and economic well being of America. In their writing, African American male writers express their joy, sorrow, pain, love, and hate. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., expressed the essence of being a man when he said: “A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.” Throughout history, men – King among them – have died for their beliefs. What follows is an introduction to the work of four outstanding African American novelists: Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, whose approaches to the complexities of being a black male in white America only add to the unity in diversity that characterizes African American literature within the larger context of American literature.

1

Jean Toomer: Exile

When William Dean Howells and Lyrics of Lowly Life made Paul Laurence Dunbar famous in 1896, Nathan Eugene Toomer was a two-year-old infant in the home of his grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, still remembered as the only known Negro to serve as acting governor of a Southern state. Twenty-five years later, Jean Toomer seemed certain to eclipse the fame of both Dunbar and his own grandfather.

Writers and editors vied with each other to predict his success. Waldo Frank, who became a close friend, marveled about his dramas:

“On the whole, my dear Jean Toomer, I am enormously impressed by the power and fullness and fineness of your Say…. A man whose spirit is like yours so high and straight a flame does not need to be told that he has enormous gift.” [1] 

John McClure, the editor of Double Dealer, was the first to publish Toomer’s writing. After examining selections, he wrote, “The work which you showed us three weeks ago seems to all of us not only full of rich promise but, to a great extent, of rich fulfillment.” [2] About the same time at which Toomer was sending Frank news of this reception, Frank was confessing his humility about his projected book, Holiday (1923):

“I am probably presumptuous to write about the Negro, and particularly since I know you who are creating a new phase of American literature (O there’s no doubt of that my friend).” [3] 

After accepting a story for publication, Lola Ridge, American editor of Broom, boasted that Toomer’s work would endure and would be studied by later generations. [4] The highest accolades came from Sherwood Anderson, who, having read Toomer’s manuscripts in the ofrice of Double Dealer, immediately succumbed to Toomer’s verbal magic. Anderson wrote, “Your work is of special significance to me because it is the first negro [sic] work I have seen that strikes me as being really negro.” [5] Without mentioning the writings of Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, and James Weldon Johnson (or explaining his qualifications for determining the authenticity of “Negro work”), Anderson intensified his praise a short while later, “You are the only negro . . . who seems really to have consciously the artist’s impulse.” [6] 

These judgments and predictions were based entirely on a few poems and sketches, the first of them published in September 1922. Cane (1923), a collection of his works, increased the number of boosters. Robert Littell of The New Review and Montgomery Gregory of Opportunity reviewed it enthusiastically. Allen Tate wrote to Toomer to praise the genuine and innovative quality of the technique and the absence of the caricatured pathos of many whites who wrote about the South. [7] William Stanley Braithwaite, an Afro-American critic, exulted,

“in Jean Toomer… we come upon the very first artist of the race, who with all an artist’s passion and sympathy for life… can write about the Negro without the surrender or compromise of the artist’s vision. … Cane is a book of gold and bronze, of dusk and flame, of ecstasy and pain, and Jean Toomer is a bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature.” [8] 

Beneath these paeans, only a few discordant notes were sounded. In a letter to Sherwood Anderson, John McClure hoped that Toomer would not limit himself to realism. Although he believed that Toomer could rise to prominence in realism if he chose, McClure insisted that Toomer’s chief talent was lyrical. As a realist, he would be better than most other writers; nevertheless, he would be doing what other talented realists could do as well. By following the African urge and rhapsodizing, however, he would be creating a unique style. In this vein, he could produce his best work and could appear as a commanding and solitary figure among American authors. [9] Anderson also was worried:

“When I saw your work I was thrilled to the toes. Then I thought ‘he may let the intense white men get him. They are going to color his style, spoil him.’ I guess that isn’t true. You’ll stay with your own, won’t you?” [10] 

The worries were justified. Despite his continuing, sometimes desperate efforts during the next twenty-five years, Jean Toomer never again sold a book to publishers.

For a decade publishers and critics remembered his name. Then Depression seized America, and war, and a new generation of writers. Jean Toomer was forgotten except by those who had once read Cane. They mourned his silence. Not knowing him, they did not know that he had failed. Certainly they would never have surmised that so talented a writer would be silent unless he desired to be, for Cane is not the kind of book for which a writer expends all his talents into one meteoric flame. Ignorant of the letters in which he begged agents and publishers to release his words to the world, the literary cult of Toomer worshippers mourned his silence, and tried vainly to explain the reasons for it. But the only reason they could conjecture seemed so distasteful that once they had uttered it, they relapsed into silent sorrow.

To comprehend the significance of Cane and the frustration attending Toomer’s silence, one must look beyond literature into the social and intellectual world of America during the twenties and thirties. In that generation, many Afro-Americans agreed with W. E. B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson that intellectual and artistic achievements would elevate the status of the race. Benjamin Brawley and Carter Woodson unearthed and publicized the major and minor contributions of black politicians, scientists, artists, musicians, writers, and educators. Charles Johnson, editor of Opportunity, and Alain Locke of Howard sought out promising Afro-American writers to present to America. Such a sustained effort to identify artistically and intellectually talented Afro-Americans increased Jean Toomer’s importance among Negro historians. They could commend him without any fear that critics would accuse them of exaggerating his ability. He was a talented artist, and he was nationally acclaimed. Even more important, as the historians of literature knew, Anderson’s evaluation was accurate. In 1923 Toomer was the most talented Negro writer America had bred.

In the thirties and even the forties, therefore, the mourning over Toomer’s silence was loud because the voices of those who regretted the loss of literary contributions were joined by the voices of those who regretted the loss of a weapon in a sociological battle. But the mourning was embittered by the suspicion that the actual reason for Toomer’s silence further demeaned the race: that the fair-skinned Toomer had repudiated the race, had married a wealthy woman, and had disappeared into the mainstream of America. Respect for his talent sustained his memory, but conflicting feelings of envy and bitterness toward the man provoked comments which run the gamut of the emotional scale. At one end is the amused or indifferent tone of those who congratulated him for being able to escape the difficulties of living as a black man in America. At the other is the strident tone of those who alleged that he lost his ability to write when he ceased being a Negro. The moderate tone is suggested by Robert Bone, who believed that Toomer stopped writing because Cane proved to be an economic failure.

Truth is complex when it must be surmised from letters and notes, and when that truth itself is partially submerged in the emotions of a writer who cannot see it clearly. Nevertheless, the shadow, the outline at least, of truth about Jean Toomer can be discerned sufficiently. His failure was predictable. Outwardly, he was a man who immediately impressed people as an individual predestined to succeed. Tall, handsome, gifted with what Arna Bontemps has described as an hypnotic voice, confident in manner, and talented as musician, writer, and lecturer, he, like Richard Cory, glittered when he walked. Inwardly, despite his belief, or prayer, that he would be great, [11] Toomer was an exile, a Flying Dutchman, vainly searching for a haven in which he might moor.

The actual beginning of Jean Toomer, writer, probably can be dated from the spring of 1920. While chasing many gleams, he had read extensively in atheism, naturalism, socialism, sociology, psychology, and the dramas of Shaw. To these scientific, philosophical, and social writings, he had added Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, the romances of Victor Hugo, and the verse of Walt Whitman. After his abortive crusade in the shipyard, he had reaccepted capitalism as a necessary evil. Dismayed because his atheism had shocked a Quaker girl, he had reaffirmed his faith in God and in religion, even though he refused to believe in orthodox creeds and churches. [12] Introduced now to a literary world of such people as Lola Ridge, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Waldo Frank, he was dazzled with the prospect of retiring from and philosophies into a cultural aristocracy.

Looking back from a diary written in 1930, he saw the Toomer of the early twenties as a vanity-burdened poseur who adopted the manners of a poet, a poet’s appearance, and a French-sounding name – Jean. A more objective observer sees a seriously confused young man of twenty-five, who was not content to be average, but who had discovered nothing at which to be great; who wanted to guide, to instruct, to lead, to dominate, but who would withdraw completely if he could not; and who habitually discontinued studies with startling abruptness, not because he had mastered them, but because he had lost interest or, as with music, had decided that he could not become a master. This, however, was the tortured soul hidden by the ever present mask of intellect, confidence, and charm which caused Waldo Frank to write, “You are one of those men one must see but once to know the timbre and the truth of.” [13] 

When he had exhausted the six hundred dollars, Toomer returned to Washington to spend the next year working at the Howard Theatre and preparing himself for a career as an author. His reading was amazingly varied: Waldo Frank, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, American poets, Coleridge, Blake, Pater, Freud, Buddhist philosophy, Eastern teachings, occultism, the Bible, Robert Frost, Sherwood Anderson, Dial, Poetry, Liberator, The Nation, The New Republic. Although he later asserted that he destroyed most that he wrote during the period, he preserved one play, “Natalie Mann,” completed by February 1922, and fragments of an autobiographical novel.

In both works, although be censured the hypocritical, repressive morality of middle-class Negroes and advanced his philosophy that successful individuals are those who have won freedom and integrity for their souls, Toomer pleaded for Afro-Americans as he would never do in fiction again. In “Natalie Mann,” he attributed the restrictive morality and superficial values of middle-class Negroes to their misguided attempts to conform to the false morality of the American white man. He accused American white men of debauching black women and of crushing the artistic, political, and industrial careers of all black people who are sensitive to pain. In the extant fragments of his autobiographical novel, he is even more acerbic. Harry Kenton, an Afro-American who is darker in color than Eugene Stanton (Toomer’s self-portrait), curses America: “My family has been here for generations. But they’re colored. They’re not Americans yet. Any cockeyed louse with a white skin can come over here from lousy Europe and become an American. I can’t.” Rebelling against this society which rejects him, Ken deliberately refuses to conform to the acceptable patterns. [14] 

A trip to Georgia in the fall of 1921 provided Toomer with additional material about his major interest at the moment – the African American. As an acting principal in Sparta, Georgia, Toomer learned the folk songs, the folktales, and the folkways of Southern blacks. After three months he returned to Washington in November. Inspired, he feverishly began writing poems and sketches about the South, especially women of the South. Eight months later he admitted to Frank that he had drained himself, [15] but by that time he had completed most of the sketches and poems on which his reputation rests. In September 1922, Double Dealer published Storm Ending, a poem, and Liberator published Carma, a short story. By the end of the year, Broom had accepted a sketch, and the Modern Review had requested material. In January 1923, Boni and Liveright sent him a contract for the publication of Cane. Jean Toomer seemed to have found himself at last.

Cane inspires critical rhapsodies rather than analysis. As Robert Bone wrote,

“A critical analysis of Cane is a frustrating task, for Toomer’s art, in which ‘outlines are reduced to essences,’ is largely destroyed in the process of restoration. No paraphrase can properly convey the aesthetic pleasure derived from a sensitive reading of Cane.” [16] 

It is not a novel, not even the experimental novel for which Bone pleaded to justify including it in his study of novels by Negroes. It is, instead, a collection of character sketches, short stories, poems, and a play, which forms one of the distinguished achievements in the writings of Americans. The first section of the book is composed of sketches, stories, and poems based on life – especially the life of Afro-American women – in Georgia. The stories of the second section, located in Washington and Chicago, were written to bring the collection to a length respectable for publication in book form. The third section is a drama set in Georgia. Toomer’s supreme talent in his best prose work is the ability to suggest character lyrically. Restricting his vision to one or two traits of personality, he tells a story intended merely to help the reader perceive the individual.

Six women are the focus of the first section, the most appealing part of Cane. One is Karintha, who personifies the physical beauty for which men yearn:

“Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child, Karintha carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down . . .” (Cane, 1)

“Karintha, at twelve, was a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live. At sunset, when there was no wind, and the pine-smoke from over by the sawmill hugged the earth, and you couldn’t see more than a few feet in front, her sudden darting past you was a bit of vivid color, like a black bird that flashes in light… Already, rumors were out about her.” (Cane, 1-2)

Then,

“Karintha is a woman, and she has had a child. A child fell out of her womb onto a bed of pine-needles in the forest. Pine-needles are smooth and sweet. They are elastic to the feet of rabbits.” (Cane, 4)

“Karintha at twenty, carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down. Karintha…” (Cane, 5)

As “Karintha” typifies Toomer’s style, so the protagonist typifies his women. Elizabeth Loguen complained about the unreality of his female characters. They all love, she believed, as Toomer thought women should. [17] Perhaps this judgment is accurate. Each in her own way is an elusive beauty, who charitably or indifferently or inquisitively offers her body to men who will never understand her soul. Each portrait haunts the reader as the woman haunted the narrator, who seeks the