Passing Glory

The re-examined life of a Harlem Renaissance luminary.

IN SEARCH OF NELLA LARSEN

A Biography of the Color Line

By George Hutchinson

Belknap/Harvard Univ. 611 pp. $39.95

George Hutchinson has delivered a definitive biography of the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen (1891-1964). The author of the novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), Larsen was the daughter of a seamstress from Denmark and a black laborer from the Danish West Indies -- now the U.S. Virgin Islands -- who met in Chicago. Scandalous by U.S. standards, the romance between Larsen's parents was natural given their shared Danish language and roots, Hutchinson notes. "That he was 'colored' and she 'white' would not have seemed the obstacle most 'native' Americans considered it," writes Hutchinson, an English professor at Indiana University.

"Even those whom Americans would consider dark-complexioned . . . could be designated 'white' on the basis of social position and reputation, and Virgin Islanders had a whole series of intermediate designations for those between 'Negro' and 'white,' " Hutchinson reveals. "Unlike his daughter, [Larsen's father] may never have considered himself a Negro."

Hutchinson's exhaustive and masterfully rendered narrative neither confirms nor refutes claims, in previous biographies, that Larsen's father died before she "was old enough to know anything about him." To be sure, she suffered mental anguish as the mixed-race daughter of a woman likely perceived to be of "ill repute." Her self-esteem already fragile, Larsen endured a devastating blow at about age 6 when her mother remarried a "man of her own race," with whom she had another daughter. Now an embarrassment to her white stepfather, mother and half-sister Anna, the brown-skinned Larsen was effectively banished from her family by age 16 and forced to fend for herself. Hutchinson writes: "Tangled feelings of love and abandonment, anger and self-loathing, empathy, shame, and powerlessness stamped Larsen's emotional development in childhood and shaped the attachment problems that would afflict her until she died."

And yet, in the time-honored tradition of "making a way out of no way," Larsen persevered. Countering previous Larsen biographers, Hutchinson persuasively shows that she visited Denmark as a child with her mother, and, after a year at Fisk University, later returned to Copenhagen, where she lived from 1908-12. She then studied nursing in New York and secured a job at Tuskegee University hospital in Alabama. Dismayed by the lack of professionalism at the facility, Larsen returned to New York and worked as a public health nurse. After her marriage to a prominent black physicist, she became a librarian.

Encouraged in her literary pursuits by a white, activist librarian who worked in Harlem, Larsen made the transition from nurse to librarian to celebrated writer in about six years. By the late 1920s, she had published two novels centered on the complexity of skin color that would be hailed as among the best offerings of the Harlem Renaissance. Luminaries ranging from entertainer Ethel Waters to Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca (then touring Manhattan) sang her praises.

"Passing" is a term commonly used in reference to light-skinned blacks who disclaim their African lineage and pass for white. In his widely read review of Larsen's novel Passing , W.E.B. DuBois raved: "[Larsen] explains just what 'passing' is: the psychology of the thing; the reaction of it on friend and enemy . . . . If the American Negro renaissance gives us many more books like this, with its sincerity, its simplicity and charm, we can soon with equanimity drop the word 'Negro.' Meantime, your job is clear. Buy the book."

In his rigorous analysis of the childhood trauma Larsen suffered and its impact on her life and career, Hutchinson challenges previous scholarship, notably Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance (1994), by Thadious M. Davis, and Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen (1993), by Charles R. Larson. The author argues that both books, in varying shades and degrees, present erroneous images of Larsen as a "tragic mulatto" tormented by her interracial heritage.

Citing lackluster research and flawed interpretation in the Larson and Davis texts, the author bemoans their legacy. "As I read these books, I recognized a pattern not atypical of the way children from interracial families had often been misunderstood and -- there is no other word for it -- pathologized," Hutchinson writes. "At crucial junctures the evidence seemed lacking and the conclusions unwarranted. . . . [Larsen's] novels supposedly allowed [her] to discharge her feelings of violence against her mother and to achieve a precarious stability through identification with her black father. A black child's psychological identification with a white parent, after all, can only be debilitating, we have been led to believe."

Although strongly sympathetic toward Larsen, Hutchinson is not uncritical of a woman who, at the height of her literary success, revised a story by Sheila Kaye-Smith, a well-known white writer, and published it as her own. "There is something self-destructive about this act of near-plagiary, as if, disoriented by her sudden fame and the glamour of her new social world, Larsen subconsciously had to puncture the fairy tale," the author observes.

Hutchinson also quotes numerous letters from Larsen to Carl Van Vechten -- an influential white patron of Harlem Renaissance figures -- that reveal unflattering aspects of her personality. Here's Larsen's 1930 dispatch to Van Vechten and his wife, from Nashville: "Carl would adore the Negro streets. . . . And the Negroes themselves! . . . Mostly black and good humoured and apparently quite shiftless, frightfully clean and decked out in the most appalling colours, but somehow just right."

By the 1940s, Larsen had survived a messy divorce. With royalties from her writing unpredictable, she returned to nursing. "She kept a trim, attractive appearance and dressed with style, sporting beautiful jewelry," Hutchinson writes. "To her regular nurse's uniform she added a striking purple cape."

Larsen's flair cloaked a deep sorrow. A recluse by the end of her life, she was likely rejected during a desperate last attempt, in the 1960s, to reconnect with her half-sister. As Hutchinson tells it, Anna Larsen Gardner and/or members of her family reputedly turned the once-celebrated writer away at the door. Told after Larsen's death that she was the sole beneficiary of the author's $36,000 estate (about $217,000 today), Gardner claimed never to have known that Nella Larsen existed. In a breathtaking end to a brilliant biography, Hutchinson writes that Gardner accepted the check. ·

Evelyn C. White is the author of "Alice Walker: A Life."