SOURCE: "The Early Harlem Novel," in the Phyton Quarterly, Vol. XX, No. 1, pp. 25-31.

[In the following excerpt, Arden examines the first published fiction set in and inspired by Harlem, focusing on works by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Rudolf Fisher, and Countee Cullen.]

Three fine novels published within the past few years give eloquent testimony to the continued vigor of "the Harlem novel," as compared, for example, to the disappearing "immigrant novel." The variety alone impresses us: Eugene Brown's Trespass¹ delicately probes the implications of a Negro-white love affair; William Krasner's North of Welfare surveys the violence of the "dark ghetto's" slums and gangs; and Evan Hunter's Blackboard Jungle brings to dramatic focus all the vague stories we hear about teachers' problems in a "bad" neighborhood.

The Harlem novel has, in short, come of age. The setting now lends itself to good and bad fiction, to delicate psychological exploration or to social propaganda, and addresses itself both to special readership and to the general public.

I propose to look back, however, and describe something of the beginning of Harlem fiction, and to remind the reader of a nearly-forgotten but nearly-great novel which was the forerunner of the whole school. The novel I speak of is Paul Lawrence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods (1902), the first novel to treat Negro life in New York seriously and at length.

A naturalistic novel, The Sport of the Gods embodies something of the "plantation-school concept,"² which implies that the Negro becomes homesick and demoralized in the urban North. The inexperienced youths in this novel, Joe and Kitty Hamilton, migrate from the South to a treacherous New York environment which deterministically produces their degeneration and disaster. When Joe Hamilton finally strangles his mistress after many sordid scenes, a character in the novel exclaims:

Here is another example of the pernicious influences of the city on untrained negroes. Oh, is there no way to keep these people from rushing away from the small villages and country districts of the South up to cities, where they cannot battle with the terrible force of a strange and unusual environment?

The answer is that

the stream of young negro life would continue to flow up from the South, dashing itself against the hard necessities of the city and breaking like waves against the rock,—that until the gods grew tired of their cruel sport.³

The attitude of the Hamiltons toward New York and their experiences in the city follow a familiar pattern, reminiscent of all "evil city" folklore. In The Sport of the Gods, New York at first represents a promised land of freedom, where the protagonists expect to shed their troubles and start a fresh happy life.

They had heard of New York as a place vague and far away, a city that, like Heaven, to them had existed by faith alone. All the days of their lives they had heard about it, and it seemed to them like the centre of all the glory, all the wealth, and all the freedom in the world. New York. It had an alluring sound.⁴

But fate in this naturalistic novel is inexorable, and the forces of the city, so alluring and yet so disastrous to the inexperienced, quickly demoralize Joe and then his sister Kitty. A visit to the Banner Club—"a social cesspool"—starts Joe's decline, and a place in the chorus starts Kitty on a life which includes "experiences" obviously leading to no good end for her.

At the time Dunbar wrote this novel, there was not yet a Harlem as we know it today. Just after the turn of the century, most of New York's Negroes lived in cramped quarters near the Pennsylvania Railroad Station (the region to which the Hamilton family went on arrival), or else wedged in amongst the Irish on San Juan Hill. Another colony existed on West 53rd Street, but the Negroes there were mainly stage folk, musicians, and journalists—and even there the over-crowding was notorious.

By the turn of the century, more room somewhere on the island of Manhattan had to be made for the Negro. The needed space was found in Harlem, a district which had been by-passed by many of the white people expanding north into new sections. In 1905 an apartment in one nearly empty building on 134th Street near Fifth Avenue was rented to a Negro family, and soon the rest of the building was filled up by Negroes who followed. Other apartment buildings were then opened to Negro tenancy, the area spreading westward to Seventh Avenue by 1910. In the two decades that followed, the Negro population in New York grew from less than sixty thousand to more than two hundred thousand, most of the arrivals settling in Harlem. The greatest increase took place during the First World War, when many Southern Negroes flocked to Northern industrial centers and swelled the established Negro communities.

For a time, the white residents did everything possible to stem the tide. They attempted to buy up houses occupied by colored tenants and have them vacated; they strove to prevent white realtors from selling or renting to Negroes.⁵ But it was all to no avail. One great factor, that of money, worked in the Negroes' favor. Needing the apartments so desperately, they paid two or three times as much rental as the whites. Downtown they were badly cramped for space, and repeated incidents of interracial strife were breaking out in Hell's Kitchen, the Tenderloin, and San Juan Hill. The Negroes arriving from the South served further to increase the pressure to expand the Harlem beachhead. By the end of the first Great War, the battle for Harlem was settled decisively in the Negroes' favor.

Their victory, however, was to prove a bitter one. Forced to pay exorbitant rents, families had to double up in apartments to meet the rentals, and even then extra boarders had to be taken in. Every space was utilized—sometimes even bathrooms were improvised to serve as extra bedrooms.⁶ Thus did Harlem become the most densely settled Negro community in the world, extending from 125th Street to 147th Street between Fifth and Eighth Avenues, and soon to press downtown to meet the Puerto Ricans surging up from 110th Street.

In the 1920's Harlem and its celebrities began to attract wide attention, white folk swarming into the "back ghetto" in the search of "exuberant escape in the socalled exotic primitivism of Negro cabaret life."⁷ In fiction, Carl Van Vechten was the first to capitalize successfully on the new, swarming Harlem, though he and his imitators were really following the lead of Dunbar in treating the comparatively unworked scenes of Harlem low-life. Indeed, Van Vechten expressed the indebtedness of his Nigger Heaven (1926) to Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods by writing that Dunbar

described the plight of a young outsider who comes to the larger New York Negro world to make his fortune, but who falls a victim to the sordid snares of that world, a theme I elaborated in 1926 to fit a newer and much more intricate social system.⁸

That "intricate social system," however, gets lost in the sensationalism of Nigger Heaven, which paints Harlem with too obvious a gusto. Van Vechten must have been fascinated by the barbaric rhythms of Negro jazz, the intoxicating dances, and the wild abandon of cabaret life after midnight; or at any rate, he must have known that his readers would be. His book enjoyed immediate popularity and became, according to Hugh M. Gloster, "a sort of guide book for visitors who went uptown seeking a recreation of the primitive African jungle in the heart of New York City." The songs and snatches of the "blues" by Langston Hughes incorporated into the text of Nigger Heaven also helped to enhance the reputation of the book. Roi Ottley, in another study of Harlem, joined in crediting the Van Vechten novel with doing much to establish Harlem as a great vogue; Ottley also points out, however, that the loose money and the jazziness of the 'Twenties were basically responsible for Harlem's short happy career as the Mecca of the thrill-seeker.⁹

But the sensational qualities of Nigger Heaven do not obscure the fact that Van Vechten had much of serious interest to say about the urban Negro. The major problem he discusses is the rejection of the Negro by a predominantly white society. There are no sermons pleading "tolerance," but the injustice of segregation is expressed by one character who bitterly remarks, "A white prostitute can go places where a coloured preacher would be refused admission."¹⁰

Much more subtle, however, is the whole conflict between the growing race consciousness of the Negro and the opposite pressure of the white society, a conflict which turned Negro against Negro. Reflecting the "Africa for Africans" movement led by Marcus Aurelius Garvey in the years just following the First World War, the Negro intelligentsia demonstrated a rousing enthusiasm for primitive African art pieces and Negro folk spirituals, matters which figure predominantly in the characterization of Mary Love in this novel. But in spite of all the outward signs of chauvinism, the Negro world of Harlem made frantic attempts to emulate white cultural values. Mary speaks heatedly, for example, of advertising statistics which showed that "her race spent more money on hair-straighteners and skin-lightening preparations than they did on food and clothing."¹¹ The way to success for a Negro, to put it as plainly as possible, was to be as much a white as possible, to be something, in short, which he was not.

This pressure to conform and imitate was bound to produce all sorts of disruptive tensions, both personal and communal. The Negroes' problem, like the immigrants' problem, was that of the outsider. The "ghetto," both for immigrants and Negroes, was not only geographical but cultural. To leave one's own "kind" in favor of the great, white, "American" world was possible only after an intense conflict of loyalties. Van Vechten cleverly organized these tensions around one central and provocative consideration: that the Negroes have succumbed to white values to such a degree that amongst the Negroes themselves there is a pervasive system of color prejudice. The very dark, kinky-haired, negroid-featured of them were at the bottom of the social ladder, which was a situation not peculiar to New York alone or to the Jazz Age. Charles W. Chesnutt had earlier described a Cleveland "Blue Vein Club" among Negroes in The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899). The protagonist of the title story in this collection must choose between the faithful black wife of his youth and a refined "light" woman of his own caste. The problem in each case is rooted in a compulsive urge to imitate white values and the attacks of conscience which inevitably follow.

At the top of the ladder were those Negroes for whom it was possible to pass as white, a decision often made on the basis of disillusionment. Dick Sill, a cynic who "passes," hotly defends his position to Byron, the young hero of Van Vechten's novel, who has just returned to Harlem from the University of Pennsylvania. Dick is a lawyer, but, he says, "the race doesn't want colored lawyers. If they're in trouble they go to white lawyers, and they go to white banks and white insurance companies. . . . Most of 'em . . . pray to a white God. You won't get much help from the race."¹²

Byron, living amongst such tensions, is himself a sorry figure of confusion. Outwardly, he is a model hero of fiction: he is handsome, well-educated, comes to Harlem with letters of introduction to influential leaders, and is loved by women both good and bad. Actually, his way of living becomes more and more dissolute, and he spends much time whining that the whole world is against him. He wants to be a writer and he is living in a Negro metropolis which is practically unknown in any real sense to the outside world; but he insists upon writing wild melodramatic tales of miscegenation completely outside the realm of his experience. We are not surprised that his stay in Harlem ends abruptly with an act of sordid, pointless violence.

Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) bears many similarities to Nigger Heaven, though McKay has insisted that he is in no way indebted to Van Vechten. The germ of Home to Harlem was supposed to be a 1925 short story of McKay's which had been entered without success in a contest conducted by Opportunity magazine. Although Nigger Heaven was published in 1926, McKay explains that he did not read it until 1927, by which time he had almost completed the expansion of his two-yearold short story into a novel.¹³ To the reader in 1928, however, McKay's novel must have seemed very much a part of the Van Vechten vogue, in its descriptive tours through Harlem's cabarets, pool rooms, gambling dives, dance halls, and houses of prostitution.

As in Nigger Heaven, the more sensational elements of the novel are balanced by the treatment of serious racial questions. The two main characters are Jake, who deserts the United States Army in Brest because he is put to work in a labor battalion rather than allowed to fight, and his friend Ray, a sensitive, well-educated Negro who has an aversion for Harlem low-life. Confused by a social order under white domination, Ray can see no meaning to his existence, and can find none in his wide reading. Dimly he begins to feel that his education has shackled rather than freed him and that his greatest contentment would be to lose himself "in some savage culture in the jungles of Africa."¹⁴

Another novel of the Van Vechten type is Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (1929) about Emma Lou Morgan, whose black skin alienates her from a lightskinned family in Idaho, from her classmates at the University of Southern California, and finally from her Harlem lover, a mulatto-Filipino. There is the familiar exploitation of Harlem local color in scenes of midnight vaudeville shows, ballroom dances, and frenzied drinking in speakeasies. The very material, in other words, which had once been regarded as destructive in the "evil city" novel, was now manipulated to suggest a romantic view of the big city. Gaiety in New York came to mean living in a state just this side of hysteria; and the Harlem tour began to loom as large as the Rockies in the imagination of the tourists.

It is clear that by the end of the 1920's a stereotyped Negro of Harlem had been created, acknowledged, and assumed; his existence seemed confined to drink, sex, gambling, and brooding about racial matters, with an edge of violence always in view. In attempting to distinguish the new Negro from what had been the "typical Negro" in earlier fiction—"no minstrel coon off the stage, no Thomas Nelson Page's nigger, no Octavus Roy Cohen's porter, no lineal descendent of Uncle Tom"¹⁵—the Van Vechten-McKay-Thurman school created another type as damaging and unrepresentative as that which was replaced. Amongst the Harlem writers themselves, a counter-movement of realism in Negro fiction grew and was given impetus by Rudolf Fisher and the influential Countee Cullen. Less interested in the exotic and animalistic aspects of Negro life, Fisher and Cullen attempted to provide a more representative picture which would show that in Harlem, too, there was some regard for quiet living, hard work, serious thinking, and mature standards of morality.

The Walls of Jericho (1928) by Fisher realistically describes the general social life of Harlem, including glimpses of church life, the Sunday promenade on Seventh Avenue, and the annual costume ball of the General Improvement Association (an organization probably suggested by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) The Harlem scene is treated with considerable detachment, and Fisher masters the Harlem slang so skillfully that he has been called the peer of Ring Lardner in idiomatic writing.¹⁶

Countee Cullen's personal background fitted him admirably to write One Way to Heaven (1932), a novel which deals intimately with the place of church and religion in the lives of Negroes in Harlem. The son of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, founder of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, Countee Cullen is able to include descriptions of watch-night meetings, conversions of sinners, and other services of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, all of which bear the mark of authenticity. The job of the Negro writer, Cullen once said, is to "create types that are truly representative of us as a people,"¹⁷ thus explaining both the strength and the weakness of his novel. One Way to Heaven offers a sane, realistic picture of typical Negro urban life; but it also suffers by the creation of types rather than individuals, and by a looseness of construction which strings the events together in such a way as to make their sequence seem almost accidental. Cullen, for all his good intentions, thus emerges as a less compelling novelist than Van Vechten or even Claude McKay, though when taken together, the exotics and the realists were already suggesting that Harlem offered the materials for extraordinary fiction.

Perhaps the most important thing to say about the Harlem novel is the most obvious: a new character in American fiction was created. Just as the plantation Negro was typical of Nineteenth Century fiction, so in our own day the prototype was the Negro in an urban, industrial environment. There he was confronted with new pressures evolving from a new mise en scène and a set of social imperatives different from those which had once dominated his tradition. The process of choice sometimes proved ennobling and sometimes corrosive. The novels which sought to represent him found a need for newer and larger dimensions, for this urban Negro was more pliable, less likely to fit into stock categories than any of the earlier Negro characters. The Harlem novel, in short, has made possible the development of such variety in characterization that a third dimension has at last been added to the Negro in fiction.

¹ Published in hard covers in 1952, but better known in the paperback of 1954.

² Hugh M. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (Chapel Hill, 1948), p. 46.

³ Paul Lawrence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (New York, 1902), pp. 212, 213-14.

⁴Ibid., pp. 77-78.

⁵ Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York, 1940), pp. 16-20.

⁶Ibid.

⁷ Gloster, op. cit., p. 113.

⁸ Carl Van Vechten, "Introduction," p. vii, in James W. Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (New York, 1928).

⁹ Gloster, op. cit., p. 158; and Roi Ottley, New World AComing (Boston, 1943), p. 66.

¹⁰ Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (New York, 1926), p. 46.

¹¹Ibid., p. 11.

¹²Ibid., p. 119.

¹³ Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New York, 1937), pp. 282-83.

¹⁴ Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (New York, 1928), p. 274.

¹⁵Ibid., pp. 63-64.

¹⁶ Gloster, op. cit., p. 177.

¹⁷ "The Negro in Art," The Crisis, XXXII (August, 1926), 193.

* Dissertations were not published then. The Alain Locke Memorial Committee plans a publication of Locke's thesis.