Charles T. Davis lecture on the Harlem Renaissance at the University of Iowa, April 9, 1970

Speaker 1: The broadcasting service of the University of Iowa, in cooperation with the Department of English and the afro American Studies program at the university presents a series of lectures by Black specialists as material for the university's course, Afro American literature. The lecturer for this week is Charles T. Davis, Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, speaking on the Harlem Renaissance, here is Professor Davis. Charles T Davis: I'm proud to say that the renaissance at the University of Iowa continues. And as I walked along the river, from Iowa house to this auditorium, I seem to see much stronger than before the evidences of green. I can only think, of course, that our own continued preoccupation with the renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance is responsible for that change. As a consequence, I will tomorrow, give my concluding lecture and with some reluctance, terminate our consideration of the renaissance itself. It seems to be perhaps, that there are certain risks involved in that. And so, I am looking for ways to avoid terminating the Renaissance and I think I have discovered one. Charles T Davis: And instead tomorrow of talking simply about the termination of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s, and the factors that are responsible for that, I shall shift to look at a new development of the 1960s, the Black Arts. And the emphasis of that lecture will be on this new development in the 1960s with the perspective which is provided by our study of the Harlem Renaissance. And so what I am announcing today is not really a change of topic. It's rather a change of emphasis, which seems to be appropriate, in light of our discoveries in our discussion, and in our exchanges that we have had this week so far. Charles T Davis: But today, I do want to talk about the city. And I have given a somewhat titillating, exciting, provoking title, I hope, to this discussion today, the syncopated tempo of the city. And I shall have to say something about that before this hour is over. You know, of course, that the Renaissance was an urban movement. So that the city offers an essential background for all artistic developments associated with the Renaissance. And this is a matter of great consequence. It suggests, of course, that the interest in the south is basically pastoral. And by this, I mean, that Toomer views the rural Georgia that he talks about, and presents to us in Cane, with the sensibility of a city man, as Virgil might, or Wordsworth might, or Melville might. And the values of a rural excursion are directly related to a sensitivity to the inadequacies of an urban life. What I'm simply saying, of course, is the basis of the pastoral. And it seems to me that it's important for us to understand that these elements exist here in the Harlem Renaissance. Charles T Davis: Also, the interest in Africa could only develop against the background of the city. As I pointed out, the Renaissance conception of Africa is much more dependent upon art objects and art critics available at last, and they still are only in the city. It's much more dependent upon that, than upon any direct experience, of course, with the continent of Africa. Now, the city offered not merely a scenic backdrop, which is what I have been describing, limiting or channeling the possibilities for development. It presented the substance for art too and that is the topic of the lecture today. Though Toomer wrote the urban sketches in Cane with Washington DC, and for one story, you recall Chicago in mind. Toomer is not typical in this respect. Invariably, for the writers of the Renaissance, New York was the city or that part of New York above 125th street named Harlem by the Dutch. This was the area of particular concern. Now Harlem as a place of residence for blacks, was a relatively recent development in the 1920s. Charles T Davis: Indeed, the new scene barely proceeded the formulation of a new mythology. An interesting fact in itself, one that you are prepared to accept of course from my introduction on Monday. James Weldon Johnson and Claude McKay have written illuminating studies of the growth and the distinctive features of Black Manhattan. In your text, The New Negro, you will find a short essay by Johnson on Harlem that will support supply important information. But let me offer now, just a few facts that serve to suggest for us, an important historical perspective for our discussion today. New York has always had a Black population. And by that I mean of course from the 17th century on. About the middle of the 19th century, most of the Negroes in New York lived around Washington Square. Now this was true because the square was the center of the elegant social life of the city and Negroes in general found jobs in domestic service in the homes of the rich. As late as the 1880s, Johnson reports, the bulk of the Black population lived on streets that are familiar to us in another context. Sullivan, Thompson, Bleecker, Grove, Minetta Lane, all located of course, since you recognize these names in Greenwich Village, and evoking memories of the devotees of art and freedom of the 20s and associations with Edna Millay, Floyd Dell and others. Charles T Davis: I say memories, because the village today has lost every vestige of that gay, creative time. Around 1890, the center of the Negro population moved to the upper 20s and lower 30s west of Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Then in 1890, another northward push occurred, this time to West 53rd Street, the seat of an emerging Black culture of some distinction. Since the hotels there were frequented by Negro actors, musicians, composers, dancers, writers, vaudevillians. It was only after 1900 that the leap to Harlem took place. Over speculation in real estate, and over expansion in the construction of houses were the immediate reasons for the movement of Black people. The critical area was that located east of Lenox Avenue because of the, partly because of the lack of ready transportation facilities. There was in those days, no Lenox Avenue subway, only the 8th Avenue elevated. Which meant that residents around 7th Avenue to the west of Lenox Avenue had a convenient form of transportation not available to residents living to the east of Lenox Avenue. The first Negroes occupied houses on 134th Street East of Lenox Avenue and spread north and south from that point. Resistance from white residents of the area came when blacks attempted to move west of Lenox. But this crumbled when Negro real estate men organized and secured the resources to finance the push westward. Charles T Davis: The flood of migrants from the south and the West Indies created congestion in Harlem, which appeared nonetheless, to achieve some stability as a community. Roughly 175,000 Negroes lived in the area at the time of the Renaissance. 75,000 more than could be found in any southern city. Now, the building of the Harlem community offered materials to the Black artist. The fiction of Rudolph Fisher, his tales, his novels, especially the novel The Walls of Jericho, published in 1928, describe the problems of the residents of Harlem. The Walls of Jericho deals with the consequences of the purchase by a Negro of a house in a neighborhood previously white. Charles T Davis: So you begin to see that there's some reason for my discussion, my description of the development of Harlem. The short narratives in The New Negro, and I hope that you've had a chance to read these, these short narratives examined the difficulties of the new migrants. In The City of Refuge, the vulnerability to criminals of King Solomon Gillis, fresh from North Carolina, and inordinately proud of the Black policeman he sees directing traffic on 135th Street, in vestiges, the shift in attitudes toward or the adjustment to the city itself. The adjustment involving in this instance the old time religion. Charles T Davis: The matter of Fisher's fiction then comes directly from the Harlem experience and seems, on the face of things, not to be different from any contemporary naturalistic treatment of the urban situation. But there are differences. One is language. Fisher, amazingly sensitive to dialects and speech patterns, consciously uses the talk of the street. The contemporary "Harlemese," the linguistic ancestor, if I can use that term for it, of the hip expressions we used to hear a few years ago, and of what is sometimes called rapping today. I hope that my knowledge of contemporary slang is sufficiently adequate to keep me from appearing to be a square. Charles T Davis: The reliance upon a special language in The Walls of Jericho is so strong that Fisher attaches a glossary at the end of the book, offering translations into standard English. And you can learn from this, the distinction between a dicty and a rat. A dicty would be a well to do resident of Harlem, a member of the middle class in Harlem, a rat would be an ordinary citizen, without the advantages of a dicty. Or the difference between a boogie and an ofay. A boogie, some of you may know is a word, one of many, for the negro and ofay, which you should know of course, is the word for a white person. And the very fine shade of emotion separating a man who is high from one who is tight. I'm not sure that I should venture to indicate what that distinction is. Charles T Davis: Highness would suggest, I think, a pleasant state of inebriation. Tightness suggests a kind of toughness. A kind of toughness possessed by an individual, the sense that he has of himself. His inability to take much, toughness would be of the distinction, I think there. Now, Fisher reveals his tie to the Renaissance through his insistence in this way that the special language of the common black man in New York has a value beyond the common speech that we employ. It has, he would insist, more animation. Charles T Davis: It suggests that the movement of a livelier imagination. It swings, in short. The sounds that we hear seem syncopated. Not corresponding, if you understand the precise definition of syncopation, which means just a little bit off the beat, not corresponding somehow with the rhythms of ordinary speech. Now Fisher's characterization, is touched too by emerging Renaissance ideals, but far less than his language. Shine, the giant piano mover in The Walls of Jericho, displays some qualities of what we should call or what we can call the typical Renaissance hero. He is cool. That is to say, equipped with an inner sense of equilibrium, unruffled by alarming or catastrophic occurrences occurring around them. Charles T Davis: I'm told by the young that that remains still to be a virtue of some kind. He has courage, loyalty to his comrades, and common sense, though he has little education. He attracts people to him through his superior strength. But Shine at the end of the novel is about to set up in the moving business. About to be set up, I should say, in the moving business by dicty lawyer named Merritt, and seems well on the way to becoming part of the respectable middle class, if not a dicty himself. This and we recognize it clearly is nothing less than corruption of a profound kind if we accept as purer models, the heroes of other Renaissance novels. No novel had a greater influence upon the Renaissance than Claude McKay's Home to Harlem published also in 1928. Charles T Davis: Now, the language of McKay's novel, seems simpler, less attractive, less exotic, than that which we find in Fisher's novel. But the characterization is, on the other hand, more consistent. When I say consistent, I mean that it tends to follow more consistently emerging Renaissance models for characterization. The important character in Home to Harlem is Jake. And the description of Jake, I think, is one which will indicate to us what the typical Renaissance hero is like. Jake is like Shine in possessing no education, like Shine in being courageous, like Shine in having a certain kind of equilibrium. But Jake has other qualities, which are even more important than that. Jake has a rhythm, which is uniquely his. When Jake comes to town, women are unfailingly attracted to him. He has a certain essence, a certain vitality, a certain power that no one else possesses. Charles T Davis: There's one other quality that Jake possesses too, which is important and this is that Jake has no middle class aspirations. He is not vulnerable to corruption the way Shine was. He doesn't desire to become a dicty. He has no intentions of going off to school. He doesn't intend to go into business for himself. He's essentially a vagrant moving from one job to another. His values are values that are non material. He discovers happiness. He finds love. He finds excitement. He has a life In short, which presents a model, which precisely contradicts that of respectable middle class citizens that exist around him. Charles T Davis: So we see that in Jake, and we feel in the Fisher's novel, a movement toward it, but we find it culminating in the characterization of Jake that in Jake, we have the realization of a typical Renaissance hero, one based on the mythology that we find emerging in the Renaissance. Now, I must shift to consider certain other aspects of the city in the Harlem Renaissance. When we look at the poetry, we see even more evident there than in the fiction, the pressure of the city. I suppose the first indication of such a pressure will be the fact that we see in poems, images that come to us from jazz music. That come to us from the cabaret, from the dance, from blues. And what is important in poetry too, is the fact that not only do we find these images, which reflect the discovery of the new subject matter, we find that certain artists, notably of course, Langston Hughes, certain artists, try to discover, to shape a form that will reflect the new experience in music. The new experience that one finds, in dancing. The new experiences that one could have in the Harlem cabarets in the 1920s. I have now a number of illustrations to suggest the impact of these new influences here in the 1920s. Charles T Davis: I want to begin not with Hughes, but with Claude McKay. And I wish to begin first with a poem about Negro dances. That is the title of this poem of Mckay's. "Lit with cheap colored lights, a basement den, with rows of chairs and tables on each side. And all about young dark skinned women and men drinking and smoking merry, vacant-eyed. A Negro band that scarcely seems awake, drones out half heartedly, a lazy tune. While quick and willing boys their orders take here and to and from the near saloon. Then suddenly, a happy little lilting note is struck. The walk and hop and trot begin under the smoke upon foul air afloat. Around the room, the laughing puppets spin to sound the fiddle, drum and clarinet, dancing their world of shadows to forget. Charles T Davis: It is best to sit and gaze. My heart then dances to the lithe bodies gliding slowly by. The amorous and inimitable glances that subtly pass from roguish eye to eye. They left a gay like sounding silver ringing that fills the world, the whole wide room from floor to ceiling, a rush of rapture to my pride soul bringing the deathless spirit of a race revealing, not one false step, no note that rings not true unconscious even of the higher worth of their great art, the serpent-wise glide through the syncopated waltz. Dead to the earth, and her unkindly ways of toil and strife. For them The dance is the true joy of life." Charles T Davis: You should notice some things about the poem. One, that the basic position of the speaker is outside of the experience. He's observing these dances as they dance before him. He makes an effort, does he not, to record for us the peculiar qualities that he thinks are important about the dancing. He suggests, for example, that in the laughing, in the sound of fiddle, drum, and clarinet one finds a unique world that is not readily available to other people to the ordinary people living in our middle class society. He comments rather wisely in the second stanza on the significance of that world. No effort really is made to capture in the art itself, the form of the music, or the excitement of the dance. Charles T Davis: And so when we move from Mckay, to Hughes, we move to a poet much more experimental in this respect who makes a much more serious effort to capture actually, in the art form itself, something of the essence of the excitement which the poet feels. I have several poems of Langston Hughes that I wish to read to you. Hughes has been called quite properly, the poet laureate of Harlem. And it's not simply for these quite exciting poems that I shall read to you now that record for us various aspects of music and dance in Harlem, but for the subsequent record of Harlem, what happens to Harlem in the 1930s and 40s and 50s and into the 60s. It's for that record too, that Hughes deserves the title, poet laureate of Harlem. Charles T Davis: Listen now to this poem. Compare it with the poem that I've just read to you of Claude McKay's. This poem, of course, is Jazzonia, by Langston Hughes. "Oh, silver tree! Oh, shining rivers of the soul. In a Harlem cabaret, six long headed jazzers play. A dancing girl whose eyes are bold, lifts high a dress of silk and gold. Oh singing tree. Oh, shining rivers of the soul. Were Eve's eyes in the first garden just a bit too bold? Was Cleopatra gorgeous, in a gown of gold? Oh, shining tree. Oh, silver rivers of the soul. In a whirling cabaret, six long headed jazzers play." Charles T Davis: The effort here is to capture the excitement itself. In this response obviously of the poet speakers. And almost like the blare of a trumpet, we have what? Oh, silver tree, or shining rivers of the soul. Notice that that exclamation is repeated, as if it were a kind of chorus as we move through the poem. And notice that with each reputation, or repetition, I should say, there is a reputation of course involved here, too. But with each repetition, we have just a slight change. One riff is not quite like the other riff. And so we think, indeed, that it's possible that the model for these changes, as well as the model for the chorus itself, is one that might come obviously, from jazz itself, the kind of jazz that Hughes might hear in one of those jazz dens in Harlem in the 1920s. Charles T Davis: Notice that there are other elements in the poem too. Descriptive elements. Elements that serve to interpret the experience too. The descriptive elements give us some sense of scene. The Harlem cabaret, the long headed jazzers, why should they be long headed? I suppose long headed because the instrument becomes a part of the head, or conceivably long headed because they are wiser than us long headed in this respect, you can take your choice of theories. But essentially, we are concerned not only with the music, but with a dancer or a dancing girl. And notice this part, "Were Eve's eyes in the first garden just a bit too bold?" It suggests something of the quality of the art, brash, vulgar, loud. Was Cleopatra gorgeous in a gown of gold? Similar references there. But it suggests something more than the qualities of the music or the characteristics of the dance. It suggests that these things are ancient, old, connected with a very old society with Eve, with Cleopatra, old and somehow desirable. Old and perhaps not wholly accepted by a middle class society. And so we have two aspects of Renaissance mythology at work, do we not in this simple point of Langston Hughes? Charles T Davis: It's a tribute to the music. But at the same time, it suggests that this is an aspect of culture that connects and links us to an old tradition that we have somehow lost sight of. Jazzonia then there are other poems of Langston Hughes that accomplish rather different things. There is, for example, a poem called "The Cat and the Saxophone (2 am)." The time is interesting, if nothing else. A poem that suggests something about the quality of jazz music too something about the circumstances in which that music is produced. Suggesting to us little bit something of the lyrics that that came out of the music of this time. Charles T Davis: Listen to this poem. "Everybody. Half pint, Gin. No make it, loves my baby, corn. You like liquor don't you honey? But my baby, sure, kiss me. Don't love nobody, daddy but me. Say, everybody. Yes. Wants my baby? I'm your, but my baby, sweetie, ain't I? Don't want nobody, sure. But then let's, me, do it. Sweet me, Charleston, mama." An ingenious an clever little poem using of course one of the great songs coming out of the 1920s. Suggesting the quality of life surrounding it, suggesting something of the excitement of the music. What it means for the people who participate in making the music and that interpolation of half pint and corn and the scene that has to do with the love making, sure kiss me, daddy and the references to the dance that some antiquarian still do today, the Charleston, mama. These are all references that flesh out obviously, the melody, which constitutes the basis of this poem. Charles T Davis: Now Hughes is not only interested in jazz, he was interested in blues. And there is a difference. It's in the blues that we have recorded, and those of you who have heard the great voice of Bessie Smith, or of Ida Cox and others, or more recently, Joe Thomas, and other more modern blue singers of that kind, blues is different in a sense from jazz. In a sense that it does record something of the miseries of, of urban life in a quite strict form. And so we find here, in the "Blues Fantasy" which I should read of Langston Hughes a deliberate effort to follow the form of the blues. It's repetition especially. Charles T Davis: Let me read it to you. "Hey, hey, that's what the blues singers say. Singing minor melodies, they laugh. Hey, hey. My man's done left me. Child, he's gone away. My good man's left me. Babe, he's gone away. Now the crying blues haunts me night and day. Hey, hey. Weary, weary trouble. Pain. Sun's going to shine somewhere again. I got a railroad ticket. Pack my trunk and ride. Sing them sister. Got a railroad ticket, pack my trunk and ride. And when I get on the train, I'll cast my blues aside. Laughing, hey, hey, laugh aloud. Hey, hey." Charles T Davis: Very accurately recorded is the form of the blues there. Actually "my man's done left me child he's gone away" could be sung very easily by Bessie Smith, or some other great blues singer of that kind. And this, "Hey, hey." Terribly important this is these are the interpolated expressions, the sounds of either ecstasy, or of acute unhappiness, if you will, so that that one finds actually, and even hearing blues today, this kind of expression. If you want to understand just how it works, one can listen say to James Brown, or listen to a singer of that kind who will use this kind of "hey", or "baby" or reference of that. So what I'm trying to suggest is that this is an accurate record that Hughes is making here. Now what he is, in fact, creating is a new art form, which is based on music. Now, Hughes was so versatile, that he was able not only to record jazz and blues, but he can sometimes record the action that occurs in a dance. And so my next poem, "Song for a Banjo Dance", is a rather specific and rather documented effort to do just that. Charles T Davis: Now, listen to this poem now. "Shake your brown feet honey. Shake your brown feet child. Shake your brown feet, honey. Shake them swift and wild. Get way back, honey. Do that low down step. Walk on over, darling. Now come out with your left. Shake your brown feet, honey, shake them honey chile." You sense it that in the first stanza that's done only obviously description but choreography of the way, obviously, this dance should be performed. "Sun's going down this evening might never rise no more. The sun's going down this very night, might never rise no more. So dance with swift feet, honey. The banjos sobbing low dance with swift feet honey might never dance no more. Shake your brown feet Liza shake them Liza chile. Shake your brown feet Liza. The music soft and wild. Shake your brown feet Liza the banjos sobbing low. The sun's going down this very night, might never rise no more." Charles T Davis: I can't, of course, leave this poem without saying a word about a little bit reasonably typical Renaissance philosophy, which intrudes into this poem. Intrudes obviously so easily that we don't object to it. I'm referring specifically, of course to these lines, "Sun's going down this evening might never rise no more. Sun's going down this very night, might never rise no more." This is the philosophy you see not unrelated to Jake's philosophy in Home to Harlem, that one must live fully for the moment. That one must exploit the world fully, the rich world as much as we can capture of it. That one must affirm sense experience. And that one must not count on what is going to happen tomorrow. Charles T Davis: [inaudible] through obviously, all of the artistic expressions that I've examined with you today would be perhaps something of that philosophy. I want to allow more time today, because you may not have it tomorrow for discussion. So I wish to come to a conclusion with the formal part of our work together the conclusion of this lecture and I wish now to invite certain questions from you. I've allowed a little more time today because I assume that this is the part of the Renaissance you know best. The dance, the jazz, the blues, these things that have been so memorably captured by Hughes and his poetry. Charles T Davis: Yes. Speaker 3: [inaudible] Charles T Davis: That's a very good question, what Wright thinks of it. There's no evidence that Wright ever uses this kind of material in any of his work or he was obviously less interested in it. One can't think that he did not hear it in Chicago, even in the 1930s. One has to remember, however, that that was the time of the depression and so one would hear fewer things of this kind, much less music. There was much less joy of the sort that I've been documenting here and so one has to remember that in thinking what Wright does record. Wright's record, in terms of kind of, basic expression of this kind, is very good when he's recalling his memories in Mississippi. Charles T Davis: When he recalls his, as perhaps you might recall, the play of boys, for example, along the side of pond. The language they use, their expressions, the games they use. And so he has a sensitivity to this. And there is a use to a certain extent, in these Mississippi allusions of music. But when we get to the city, Wright's city is far too grim. The environment, in general, far too hostile to permit the kind of relaxation, the kind of nonchalance, the kind of ease that we sense in those lyrics that I've read to you from Hughes. I think that's the answer. As a fundamental difference in outlook that Wright possesses in the 1930s, as he began to do his writing first in the John Reeds clubs, and to do his publishing first in publications of the Communist Party. There wasn't much room for this sort of expression there. Though there was nothing, obviously, wrong with Wright's ear which was excellent. Yes. Speaker 4: [inaudible] Charles T Davis: I didn't quite hear your question. And when I do, I do intend to repeat it. Would you put it again for me, please? Speaker 4: [inaudible] Charles T Davis: Certainly it was present generally in the 20s. A business for living for the day. The difference in a sense is the form that it takes. The living for the day in this instance, is identified with the duration of the art form itself, with the dance, with the music. Whereas living for the day, as we find it, perhaps in This Side of Paradise, a novel by Fitzgerald, or living for the day as we find it, say, in Ernest Hemingway's the Sun Also Rises is much more concerned with attitudes having to do with a relationship between a man and a woman or the capacity to love or the capacity indeed, to feel other things and only loosely linked, I think, to art forms in the way that we find it here. The difference as your question would indicate, is a difference rather in degree, one would say, rather than a difference in time. Yes. Speaker 5: You had a question yesterday about [inaudible] upon African audience, I wonder if there were artists from overseas artists, writers, musicians [inaudible] Charles T Davis: Certainly, the question is, were there people attracted to Harlem? Musicians, artists, people from overseas? Of course, they were. Many artists came to America often with the stated purpose of going to Harlem to see what was going there. One found in Harlem, at a particular group or meeting of musicians, one might find not only white American musicians, but occasionally strangers, foreigners coming from overseas who wish to sit in on the music there. Equally important, in some ways, as the visits that were made to Harlem, by Europeans and by others, would be the fact that there was a great migration, obviously, to Europe too of Black musicians and of Black artists. So that one had the sense of times that in Paris, one found the extension of what one discovered on 135th Street, in various parts of Paris, where certain Black artists were to be discovered providing their music too. Charles T Davis: And so when we have much of this coming to an end, at the end of the decade of the 20s, and being sharply reduced, of course, we find it surviving, in some ways, in European capitals, notably in Paris. The jazz music, and some of the jazz musicians remained in Paris. And some people who were fixtures of the age, the Renaissance age in the 1920s, established various interesting enterprises in Paris. Restaurants of various kinds, other things of that sort. Are there other questions? It seems to me that you should respond more readily to this because this is material which is obviously close to you and one wonders, if you have examined this fully as you might your own experiences with your own music of your own day sufficiently, if you don't have more questions to raise on this particular point. Yes. Speaker 6: [inaudible] Charles T Davis: The question is that, is this, growing up in the 50s one tended to discount anything that happened in the 20s. And I suppose the question applies immediately to some of the artistic expressions that we've been talking about here. The answer is no doubt that what you say is absolutely true that this is precisely what did happen. That those people growing up in the 50s tended to discount what had happened in the 20s. As a consequence, we have a kind of repetition of discoveries. A going over of the same ground. Charles T Davis: This is particularly evident in literature, but it's also evident in some measure in in music. One needs only to point out the peculiar adaptation of blues, that has occurred, obviously, in within recent years, to suggest to us something of the durability of the blues as a form. It seems to me too that some of the more serious musicians say, in the 1950s, and in the the 1960s and I would go back even to the 1940s, some of the most serious musicians were not as forgetful as some of the rest of us were, and that they did build on the continuity that came from the 1920s. Charles T Davis: And we have, obviously, in the music, which emerges at this time, are beginning with people like Gillespie and Parker, coming up through Coltrane and Monk and others, a genuine continuity, perhaps which is more meaningful in terms of serious musicians in their work. And then it is, if we look simply at evidences of this, that we find popular culture. That's probably a question for which there's no simple answer but that seems to be a reasonable stab at this time now. Yes. Speaker 7: [inaudible] Charles T Davis: Yes. Very shrewd observation. The question is, how well was Mckay known? How well was Fisher known? And the further question was put, actually an observation made rather than a question, is that in the instance of Fisher, it is to be assumed that his basic audience was white since he included the glossary for "The Walls of Jericho", he would not have to do that for a black audience. Now, let me answer all of those questions. One is that McKay and Fisher, were authors, largely known to a restricted audience, I would say, an audience, essentially urban, essentially middle class, mostly white. Since there was some tendency, obviously, unfortunately, for Black people during these years not to buy books, but to buy something else, mostly white. And so the answer to the insertion of the glossary, is that answer as it's intended finally, for a white audience. Charles T Davis: On the other hand, we know that that's far too simple. Though basically, a white audience's is held in mind, a white audience is considered obviously necessary for the author. Obviously, it is necessary if the book is going to be published. If a white audience did not exist, the book wouldn't be published at all, if they did not think the book would be accessible to the white audience. But this is too simple. Because the strength of these works, it seems to me, rests in the fact that there are discoveries made in Home to Harlem, and in The Walls of Jericho, that only could be made by people, by authors who knew something about the Black people about whom they are writing, something that white people did not know. In short, they could assume, and I think, assume correctly, that a Black audience, the small one, which they possessed, would simply nod its head and assent to the discoveries, which they put on the pages of the of their books. Now, obviously, because the audience is essentially white, perhaps some distortion did in fact, occur. Charles T Davis: It seems to me that in poetry, that we find less evidence of that distortion. And that in poetry, we have Hughes assuming, for example, that if the music finds an audience in Harlem in the 1920s, sufficiently large, if the music is successful in achieving this, a poem modeled on the music can do this too. It seems to me that Hughes makes fewer compromises in this respect. He's much more experimental, in using the substance of the experience that he is trying to record for us here. In some ways, this difference is a difference in form. In the sense that fiction in general, I suspect up until very recently, always tended perhaps to be somewhat more conventional, than perhaps, poetry and that poetry possibly lends itself to more experimentation. Charles T Davis: That's only the wildness and vagueness of assertions, but it seems to me probably that it has some measure of truth in it. Yes. Speaker 8: [inaudible] Charles T Davis: You asked the question... Yes. You asked the question in terms of Mckay that the point is made that a white audience could not have understood McKay's Home to Harlem and involved in the point is the suggestion that the language was so foreign, that a white audience would not comprehend it. Actually, McKay's language is not so exotic as that. And that would not be even the linguistic problem that we find some time in Fisher. The other part of the question was perhaps more important. True, the white audience did not find anything which would be comparable to the Black hero of Home to Harlem, the nonchalant hero, disinterested obviously in middle class aspiration, floating from job to job, having the kind of basic primitive rhythm that seems to sustain him in life, discovering wine, love, good times, happiness, wherever he could. Charles T Davis: Now what would attract of course the white audience is the escape from the humdrum of middle class existence. What they did not know, perhaps, was the form of that escape. And so it seems to me that we do have a kind of conjunction which makes sense to me, that it's perfectly possible for a white audience to respond to Home to Harlem, even though they don't bring any experience, obviously, to the details of the characterization of Jake. As a matter of fact, that might even be an advantage since they don't bring experiences that would make them understand just what it is that Jake feels. They feel something more essential, the impulse to remake themselves to get away from an existence which they deplore, from a mechanical civilization which is too restricted that they most certainly feel though the shape of the escape may be something which is novel. Yes. Speaker 9: [inaudible] Charles T Davis: I'm very happy you mentioned that. The question is, why I did not say something about simple? Simple, of course, is the great character who likes the news. And my simple answer to that question, which is not simple is the answer of time. Simple was born some 20 years later, not during the period of the Renaissance. I think Simple is to be related to the homely wisdom of the characters that you find in Fisher, and the characters that you find in Mckay. It's, again, the reason for not mentioning him is the fact that he comes later, but I'm very glad you brought it up so that I can mention Simple and invite you to read Simple and some of Simple's stories and adventures with the renaissance in mind. Speaker 1: That was Charles T. Davis, Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University with today's lecture. This series of programs is presented by the Broadcasting Service of the University of Iowa, in cooperation with the Department of English and the afro American Studies Program at the University as material for the course Afro American literature. Today's presentation originated as a live broadcast at 1:30pm April 9th, 1970 from Shambaugh auditorium and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the Broadcasting Service of the University of Iowa.