Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman's Life Unveiled

Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman's Life Unveiled. Thadious M. Davis. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. xxiii + 465 pages, illustrated. $34.95. Thadious Davis's exhaustive search into census records, school records, and birth, death, and marriage certificates in Chicago results in a startling revelation early in her comprehensive biography of one of the most important, if enigmatic writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance. For years, it was believed that Nella Larsen's father was a colored Danish Virgin Islander who died early in her childhood. Davis challenges this story and argues compellingly that Larsen fabricated the tale of his early demise. It appears that the narrative was actually a metaphor the young Larsen created for her father's rejection of his dark-skinned daughter--the daughter who threatened his chances of successfully passing for white. This rejection resulted in Larsen's placement in a home for gifts in Chicago, and later in her sojourn to Fisk Normal School in Nashville where she became familiar with the world of the black middle class--a world with which she would for the rest of her life retain an essential yet ambivalent connection. This important discovery exists as only the first of many critical findings in Davis's biography of Larsen. Davis has sifted through mountains of letters, recorded innumerable phone conversations and interviews, and researched an array of official records to develop her portrait of this novelist. She uncovers much new information about Larsen's education, her supportive and nurturing, but ultimately failed marriage, her close friendship with Carl Van Vechten, her elitism, and the reclusive manner in which she lived out her last twenty years. Throughout the four hundred and sixty five pages of this biography, Davis underscores Larsen's prodigious efforts to construct multiple versions of her public identity. The metamorphosis of Larsen's name from Nellie Walker to Nellie Larson to Nella Larsen to Nella Larsen Imes represents the repeated transformations of self she underwent. This string of identities--and the complex emotions that may have accompanied them--serve as Davis's thematic foundation for the biography. Davis points out that the "greatest tension in [Larsen's] life was between truth and meaning, or the transformation of truth into its signifiers and significations." In her attempts to separate out the truth of Larsen's life from its conflicting signifiers, Davis presents an immense amount of information about Larsen's environment. For example, in her efforts to trace Larsen's early years, Davis provides us with extensive information on Fisk Normal School and University. Readers learn of the ratio of African Americans to whites in Nashville; the school's mission and purpose; its physical facilities; the uniforms students were required to wear; and the rules governing student behavior. What remains unavailable, however, is much specific information on Larsen herself; there are no letters from this period and few people are still alive who can shed light on her stay at Fisk as a student. Davis's perhaps overly extensive re-creation of the environment in which Larsen lived cannot take the place of information about the woman herself. It is at these moments when truth and meaning seem to conflict, for as Davis observes, it is "a multiplicity of stances and a plurality of perspectives" assumed by Larsen that gave her "the ability to envelope herself in distinct, and mutually exclusive personae that complicated her responses to her surroundings and other people." Detailed descriptions of the environment aid us only in our speculation. Used very effectively by Davis are letters Larsen wrote between 1920, when she published her first stories in a children's magazine, and 1933, the year of her divorce from Elmer Imes. This section of the book occupies nearly three hundred pages of text and includes references to and citations from nearly every prominent actor in the Harlem Renaissance. …