Darwin Turner lecture, "Survey of Black Literature #8," July 30, 1969

Darin Turner: The Harlem Renaissance was rediscovered after James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison made clear to Doctoral candidates in literature that there were Afro-Americans capable of writing. I am not being unduly cynical about this, for many years students in graduate schools who were interested in studying Negro Literature or were discouraged from it. The time of the dramatic shift came after Baldwin and particularly after Ralph Ellison. Within a period of 18 months, there were numerous critical articles about Baldwin and Ellison. If you want to look in PMLA sometime it's horrifying to discover how many things have been written about Baldwin and Ellison. They are the Black Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville of American literature. Darin Turner: But only so much can be written about a man who had produced only one novel. Therefore, it became necessary for people to look for others. Now, obviously they look back to Richard Wright and see what's still remembered, but after they exhausted Wright, then they started looking backwards and bumped into the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance seemed to be an exciting period. It was part of the grand decade of 20th century America. The decade that was perhaps the most exciting before the 1960s, a decade that is disturbingly comparable to the 1960s. I don't know whether any of you happen to have any money in banks or in stocks, but economists are reminding people on editorial pages that what happened in 1929 could happen in 1969 if America is not careful, because apparently there is this boom in the stock market to the extent that almost everybody who can invest is investing. Darin Turner: Now, this is not the only comparison between the 1920s and 1960s that seems startling. There's a sense of a search for value in this decade that characterize the decade of the '20s already. And I realized that I am telling many of you, what is already old hat. Something that you've gotten from history, something that you've gotten from literature. World War I was supposed to have been the war to end all wars. It was supposed to have been a war fought for democracy, liberty and so forth and so on. And some of the young men who went to fight in that war discovered what young men had been discovering for centuries. That no matter what reason was given for fighting it, war was hell. They came back to America and wrote about what they felt to be a lost world. A world of people searching, groping for an ethic, groping for values. You know, the names John Dos Passos was one, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner. Darin Turner: Young intellectuals who felt that in some way, America had not found itself. Now, in the 1960s there is the same idea. In the 1920s, young people of America were rebelling against what they believe to be the repressive moral standards of the generation which had preceded them. You realize of course that any generalization like the one that I'm making is stereotyping entire nation. Nevertheless, there was a cry for moral freedom, a freedom which they had not known in life, a freedom which they certainly had not known in literature. Remember that at the beginning of the 20th century, William Dean Howells was writing that American writers should not write the kind of trash that the Russians were writing. American writers should not write anything that would shock the young female American readers. A generation had grown up really taught according to this standard, the young people of the '20s were rebelling against it. They were wearing short skirts that their mothers or better still their grandmothers because the mothers were wearing the short skirts too. Short skirts that the grandmothers didn't approve of. Darin Turner: Liquor was to the 1920s what drugs are to the 1960s, there was a fewer or about what was happening to the younger generation about whether America would manage to come out of this the same time the economy seemed to be at an all time peak. People had money to spend at least some people had a lot of money to spend and they spent it on entertainment as they are spending it today. Today, somebody is supposed to get upset about whether a ballplayer earning $100,000 for nine months of play, if that long will have a retirement policy, which will bring him, I think it's $50,000 if he doesn't collect until he is 50 or 65, something incredible like that. Darin Turner: Now this can make the headlines today because we are idolizing sports stars. Now this idolatry started in the '20s. That was the first real period of national worship of Babe Ruth in baseball, of Bill Tilden in tennis, Red Grange in football that was a period of the worship of entertainers. It was the heyday of Rudolph Valentino and all of the interest in the chic motion pictures of that time. Darin Turner: Now, in this period, the figure that emerged as a figure of some interest was the Black man in America, who was considered by much of society, a noble savage living the kind of life that the people of society wished that they could be able to live. Now, never believe a person who dreams about the life of another person, if it's possible for him to imitate that dream. Cooper in the 19th century was ennobling the Indians, and some American writers, some American sociologists in the 1920s wanted to ennoble the Black American the same way. If white Americans had trouble with the repressive morals of their society and all they had to do was to look at those Black Americans, those gay uninhibited people who had no problem and who could spend all evening laughing and singing and drinking and dancing. And who had wonderful times on weekends and who were always so gay and charming whenever anyone went uptown to Harlem. Darin Turner: And Harlem was the tourist attraction of New York city in the 1920s, the more white tourists were attracted the more contrived the entertainment in Harlem became. Increasing numbers of Harlem nights spots were segregated open only to white tourists and to the Black people sitting at tables who seem to be customers, but who were actually entertainers ready to put on their act at a moment's notice for the tourists. The Black people retreated into what Langston Hughes called the all-Black rent party, which they gave not merely to raise the rent so Langston Hughes says, but to get away to themselves away from the white tourists for a while, so they could really be themselves. The Black man was the noble savage in the 1920s. Darin Turner: And as people became interested in Black people, naturally they became interested in the culture of Black people just as they are in the 1960s. There were three figures, particularly significant in the development of interest in Black writers. The three were Carl Van Vechten, a white writer, Charles Johnson at that time, the editor of Opportunity Magazine, also a sociologist and later the President of Fisk University. The third was Alain Locke. Van Vechten became a white patron of Negro artists. He was interested in the artists as people, gave parties, assisted them financially and perhaps came a little closer to them than most white writers and most white patrons did. He saw a difference between the Harlem that was presented to the tourists and the nightspots and the Harlem that was represented by the Negro intellectual class. And he wanted to present these two worlds in a single book, which he made the mistake of calling Nigger Heaven. Darin Turner: Now, Van Vechten did not intend any harm with the title. He had gotten sufficiently close to Afro-Americans, they thought he understood them, but he did not understand at least one taboo. The one is that a white person, no matter how close doesn't use the term publicly. And the second is that this is a term which can be bandied about among Negroes without contempt, but is not to be used publicly at least not in the 1920s. One immediate reaction to the book was the fact that Van Vechten never should have used the title. He said that he was referring to the gallery of movie theaters into which Negroes were segregated and trying to show that Harlem had the same relationship to New York city. That that isolated gallery, the nigger heaven of the movie theater has to the movie theater itself. Van Vechten in the work gives pictures of Negro life, which may seem incredible in some ways, Van Vechten felt that his readers would find some of the pictures incredible. Darin Turner: He was emphasizing what Rudolph Fisher called the Dicktie Society. The upper middle-class Negro, well-trained in education, professional person. These characters in Van Vechten's works actually are almost straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald's works. They're characters living the same kinds of lives as far as possible. They speak French to each other about as much as they speak English, or they seem to, they're concerned with their trips abroad. They're always discussing art and literature and music and in some ways they seem to be a rather stuffy group. Nevertheless, Van Vechten was concerned with proving to his readers that Black Americans of this type existed. Darin Turner: On the other hand, he was very concerned with showing also what he felt to be the natural pagans spirit of the Black American. Beneath the dicktie exterior was a pagan heart. He says, for instance, "We are for the most part pagans, natural pagans. But when we were slaves we turn naturally and gratefully to a religion which promised joy everlasting, and a reunion with relatives. Now, when oppression has been removed from some of us, we revert quite simply to paganism." Now that's the surest kind of bunk you want to read. Van Vechten probably felt it. He was trying to emphasize this particular quality of spirit, but contrast this with, let's say the writing of Rudolph Fisher, who in the same period is concerned with presenting the same type of group, to be a pagan in this particular group would have been to defeat what that particular group was trying to do. Darin Turner: Those who were most obviously the pagans were the young people who were trying to prove above all else, that they were different from other Americans, that they work truly the creatures of joy that white America had said that they were. Now, let me go back to that for just a moment. The writers who are most pagan are the writers you find after 1925, 1926. The writers who are concerned with showing that people in Harlem were having a wonderful time because they were living naturally. By the time most of these people were writing, they had already read from white Americans that Black Americans in Harlem were living naturally and were having a good time. They knew that publishers would buy these pictures and they sold the pictures jubilantly. How much they believed of what they wrote and perhaps more importantly, how long they believed what they wrote is something that you need to be concerned with in this particular period. Darin Turner: The second person to influence the development was Charles Johnson. As the editor of Opportunity Magazine, Johnson sought out young Black talent, gave the writers an opportunity in his magazine, sponsored short story contests, poetry contests, published the winning efforts. But perhaps the most important of the three was Alain Locke. A distinguished editor, a man who has been called Afro-America's foremost philosopher and the chief interpreter of the Harlem Renaissance. He was born in Philadelphia, elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, received a BA in Philosophy. There he was the first Afro-American to be selected as a Rhodes Scholar. He studied three years at Oxford, one year at University of Berlin earned a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard. Darin Turner: For almost 40 years, he taught at Howard University, principally taught philosophy, but in the 1920s he was the one man who perhaps did most to stimulate and guide artistic activity among young Negroes. He had studied African culture, he had traced its influences upon Western Civilization, and he felt that this was an untapped field for Negro artists. That they should study African culture for their themes or their subjects. He urged young Afro-Americans if they did not look back to Africa for themes and subjects, at least look into the life of the Afro-American. He was very successful in influencing some young artists, one of his least known and perhaps most important contributions to the American theater is his influence upon Katherine Dunham, who looked back to Africa for styles and subjects in dancing. And I think did more than she has been credited with to change the dancing in American musical comedy from that which would have been found in the Ziegfeld Follies to the style that we identify today as the present style of musical comedy. Darin Turner: In 1925, Survey Graphic asked Alain Locke to edit a special issue that would be on Negro culture. Again, just as in the '60s in the '20s some magazines were interested in special additions on the Negro. Locke edited this, he expanded it later in the year into a book that is out of print now, but that you should get ahold of if you possibly can. A book called The New Negro: An Interpretation. This is a collection of essays interpreting various aspects of the culture of Afro-Americans. It includes stories and poems illustrating the talent of the young writers. Darin Turner: Now, what was the Harlem Renaissance? The term renaissance suggests a rebirth. It was far from that. Negro writers had been writing during the period from 1907 to 1920, but very few white publishers, very few white American readers had been paying any attention. Almost lost in that period were writers that we're not going to spend time on in this class because we don't have the time. You will find some of their work included in one of your two anthologies, writers such as Fenton Johnson, Joseph Cotter Sr, Joseph Cotter Jr, James McGirt. Writers who are unknown even today who are not remarkably good, but who were producing during the period and were not being published by the nationally recognized firms. Darin Turner: The Renaissance then was not a rebirth. It was a rediscovery by white America of the existence of Black talent. The rediscovery came partly through the social reasons that we've discussed already. The interest in the Afro-American as a noble savage, as a representative of a certain type of life that white Americans in their spare time might want to have. It was a rediscovery also on interest by some white writers. Many of the best known writers of the period took their turns in writing about Negroes, Eugene O'Neill in such works as The Emperor Jones, All God's Chillun Got Wings, but we'll save O'Neill till our discussion about drama near the end of the course. William Faulkner in his first novel characterize the patient ones who endure. Darin Turner: Sherwood Anderson was fascinated by the Black stevedores he had seen in South Carolina. Retained an image of them "Strong, tall savage, Black, sweating, grinning, singing." He felt that there was a spirit here that he wanted somebody to capture on paper. He tried to get Jean Toomer to write the story, Jean Toomer wouldn't do it and Sherwood Anderson wrote his story called Dark Laughter. You might want to look at the book it's a very interesting book in many ways. Anderson has one theme in particular, he's afraid that Negroes will be merged with white Americans and that they will lose something in this merging. Darin Turner: He also had very marked opinions about the morals of Negroes. At one point he wrote, "Negro women have no moral sense. They will do anything. They like it maybe don't pretend not to like it. That's what makes the whites so angry about them when they think about it." Now that's a very interesting statement coming from a book in which the only women who engage in illegitimate activities are white. One wants to believe that Anderson was trying to be ironic and yet at times he definitely didn't succeed. He thought of course, that the part of the Negro, which should be emphasized was the naturalness, the beautiful singing, the love for singing and so forth. White writers then took an interest in Negroes. If any date can be singled out as the beginning of the Renaissance by Black writers, that date probably is 1921. Darin Turner: In that year, a musical comedy titled Shuffle Along was produced in Harlem. It was written by Black people, perhaps the best known is Noble Sissle, one of the four writers. It was produced and directed by Black people, it starred Black people, the performers were sufficiently good that Josephine Baker, who in a couple of years was to be an international sensation, was just a performer in the chorus line in this show. It was a sensation in Harlem and it was taken downtown in 1922 and marked the return of the Black entertainer to the downtown theater. Darin Turner: The literary beginning came in the same year with a production by a man who was not a North American, Claude McKay, who was born in Jamaica, who spent most of his life outside the United States, but who has been identified with the Harlem Renaissance. In 1922, McKay published a book of poems called Harlem Shadows. This was followed in 1923 by Jean Toomer's Cane, C-A-N-E. A work that has sometimes been described as an expression of the spirit of the Southern Negro, an expression in fiction equivalent to the expression of Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk in non-fiction. Darin Turner: With no disrespect for Jean Toomer, whose writing I admire very much I will be trying to show why that's not true. Why Cane was almost an accident, a literary miracle in many ways. It's difficult to say exactly when the Renaissance ended most probably the beginning of the end came in 1929. Let's face it as I've been saying for about a half hour now, the Negro was a fad. Fads were possible when people had money, when money ran out, then the fads were the first to be dropped. Negro writers were not less talented in the '30s, but publishers were not as anxious to publish their works because there weren't as many people interested in reading about the Negro characters. The beginning of the end, probably came in 1929. If you want a convenient date, let's use the date 1931, which Arna Bontemps likes to use. He says, "There was this grand exciting period of the Renaissance, I was there. Everyone was publishing everybody was happy then I published a novel and everything came to an end." And in 1931, Arna Bontemps published God Sends Sunday. Darin Turner: In our discussion of the earlier period, the theme that we've been emphasizing was the theme of the effort of the Black publicist, the Black writer to prove that Black Americans, the best Black Americans conformed exactly to the standards of white America. Now, the theme of the work of the writers of the 1920s is quite the contrary. Their purpose generally was to show the uniqueness of Black people in America, to show how they were different. Except for the work of Dunbar literature of the earlier period was rather somber. It had a purpose. The literature of this period is gay, if there's any tone which dominates the writing of the '20s, it is the tone of gaiety, of laughter. Always with the caution that writer after writer added that the gaiety masked an undercurrent of sorrow, of melancholy. Darin Turner: Rudolph Fisher, for instance, wrote that the laughter of the Negro might be his greatest weapon against the white man. He thought of the situation in which an antagonist is simply disarmed by the fact that his opponent takes all blows and continues to laugh. Langston Hughes in his novel during the period emphasized again, this quality of laughter. Laughter one, the second dominant quality coming through unmistakably is pride in being Black. Pride in being Black. That was not true in the earlier period. The earlier period, the writers were emphasizing the fact that these were people who deserved to be treated as other Americans, who were just like other Americans except for a difference in skin color. In the '20s these were not just like other Americans, they were different and they were emphasizing the difference and taking pride in it. Now- Student : [inaudible]. Darin Turner: No I didn't but as I was about to say, at that point we will stop. Tomorrow we will talk about Claude McKay and after McKay we'll talk about Jean Toomer.