(Opportunity, October, 1926)

ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY IN HARLEM - A Review

By James Weldon Johnson

From its intriguing prologue to its tragic end, here is an
absorbing story. Whether you like it or dislike it you will read it
through, every chapter, every page. Mr. Van Vechten is the first
white novelist of note to undertake a portrayal of modern American
Negro life under metropolitan conditions. Mr. Van Vechten is also the
only white novelist I can now think of who has not viewed the Negro as
a type, who has not treated the race as a unit, either good or bad.
In Nigger Heaven the author has chosen as his scene Harlem, where Negro
life is at its highest point of urbanity and sophistication, and there
the entire action of the story is played out. The economy of stage
Mr. Van Vechten imposes for himself enables him to gain in dramatic
intensity but it does not limit him in the scope of the action. The
story comprehends nearly every phase of life in the Negro metropolis.
It draws on the components of that life from the dregs to the froth.

It was inevitable that the colorful life of Harlem would sooner
or later claim the pen of Carl Van Vechten. He has talen the material
it offered him and achieved the most revealing, significant and powerful
novel based exclusively on Negro life yet written. A Negro reviewer
might pardonably express the wish that a colored novelist had been the
first to take this material and write a book of equal significance and
power. Mr. Van Vechten is a modernist. In literature he is the child
of his age. In Nigger Heaven he has written a modern novel in every
sense. He has written about the most modern aspects of Negro life,
and he has done it in the most modern manner; for he has completely
discarded and scrapped the old formula and machinery for a Negro novel. He

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has no need of a *deus ex machina* from the white world either to involve or evolve the plot. There is, of course, the pressure of the white world, but it is external. The story works itself out through the clashes and reactions of Negro character upon Negro character. Its factors are the loves, the hates, the envies, the ambitions, the pride, the shamelessness, the intelligence, the ignorance, the goodness, the wickedness of Negro characters. In this the author pays colored people the rare tribute of writing about them as people rather than as puppets. This representation of Negro characters in a novel as happy or unhappy, successful or unsuccessful, great or mean, not because of the fortuitous attitudes of white characters in the book but because of the way in which they themselves meet and master their environment - a task imposed upon every group - is new, and in close accord with the present psychology of the intelligent element of the race. The only other full length novel following this scheme that I can recall at this moment is Jessie Fauset's *There Is Confusion*. It is a scheme for the interpretation of Negro life in America that opens up a new world for colored writers.

There are those who will prejudge the book unfavorably on account of the title. This was the attitude taken by many towards Sheldon's *The Nigger*, perhaps the finest and fairest play on the race question that has yet been successfully produced in New York. This attitude is natural, but it is probable that the reaction against the title of the novel will not be so strong as it was against the title of the play which was produced sixteen years ago. Indeed, one gauge of the Negro's rise and development may be found in the degrees in which a race epithet loses its power to sting and hurt him. The title of Sheldon's play was purely ironic, and the title of *Nigger Heaven* is

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taken from the ironic use of the phrase made by the characters of the book. But whatever may be the attitudes and opinions on this point, the book and not the title is the thing. In the book Mr. Van Vechten does not stop to burlesque or caricature. There are characters and incidents in the book that many will regard as worse than unpleasant, but always the author handles them with sincerity and fidelity. Anatoles and Rubys and Lascas and number kings and cabarets and an underworld there are as well as there are Mary Loves and Byron Kasons and Olive Hamiltons and Howard Allisons and Dr. Lancasters and Underwoods and Sumners and young intellectuals. There are, too, Dick Sills and Buda Greens, living on both sides of the line, and then passing over. It is all life. It is all reality. And Mr. Van Vechten has taken these various manifestations of life and, as a true artist, depicted them as he sees them rather than as he might wish them to be. But the author again as a true artist, deftly maintains the symmetry and proportions of his work. The scenes of gay life, of night life, the glimpses of the underworld, with all their tinsel, their licentiousness, their depravity, serve actually to set off in sharper relief the decent, cultures, intellectual life of Harlem. But all these phases of life, good and bad, are merely the background for the story, and the story is the love life of Byron Kasson and Mary Love.

Mary is a beautiful, golden-brown girl who works as an assistant librarian in one of the New York public libraries. She is intelligent, cultured and refined. She is sweet, pure and placid until she meets Byron; she remains sweet and pure, but her placidity is shattered; the emotions which she sometimes feared she did not possess are stirred to the depths. Byron, bronze-colored, handsome, proud,

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impetuous and headstrong, has just been graduated from the University
of Pennsylvania. At college he had made a literary reputation in the
university periodicals; his professors had encouraged him; so he comes
to Harlem to make writing his profession and to conquer New York. He
and Mary first meet at a gay week-end house party given by a wealthy
woman of the smart set at her country home on Long Island - a house
party at which Mary is sadly out of place. They meet again at a dinner
given by the Summers, one of the well-to-do, cultured colored families
of Harlem. Byron calls to see Mary at her home, and the beginnings of
love burst into a flame. The author makes an idyl of the awakening of
love in Mary's heart. Byron starts out buoyant and sanguine. He
receives a small monthly allowance from his father, but he must work
to supplement that sum while he makes his way as a writer. He smarts
under the rebuffs he meets with in trying to find work he considers in
keeping with his training. He grows bitter and cynical under failure.
He finally takes a job as an elevator boy, but this job he fails to
hold. In the meantime he is devoting such time as the distractions
of New York leave him to irresolute efforts at his writing. But there
is something wrong with his stories, he sends them out and they
regularly come back. Byron begins to slip. Mary tries to give him
the benefit of her intelligent opinion and her knowledge of literature
but his pride will not let her. His pride also keeps him from going
for assistance to the Summers and other influential friends to whom
his father had given him letters; he does not want to be "patronized"
by them. Byron cannot adapt himself, he cannot bend the bars of his
environment to accommodate his own needs and desires. He has already
failed, but he is not yet lost. Mary's love is what he needs to keep
him steady, but the very fullness of her love raises for him a wall

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which his rebellious nature will not permit him to get over or through.
Mary's love has developed in a two-fold manner, passionately and
maternally; she jealously wants her handsome young lover wholly for
herself, and she wants to watch over him and guide and protect him as
she would a child, which in many respects he is. Byron is irritated by
her jealousy and her attitude of guardianship he resents. He realizes
that he is a failure compared to the young intellectuals and professional
men of Mary's acquaintance and he feels that she, too, is pitying him,
is patronizing him; and he will not be patronized. He begins to think
of the fascinating, exotic Lasca Sartoris, whom he had met and danced
with at a big charity ball. Her wit and beauty had amazed him and the
talk about her purple past had stirred his imagination. He compares
the tender, solicitous Mary with this superb woman, Lasca, who tramples
all conventions under her shapely feet, who recognizes no limitations,
who takes what she wants. Why couldn't he know intimately such a
woman? That would be life - that would be inspiration.

One day Byron receives a letter from Russett Durwood, the
editor of a great magazine, asking him to call regarding a story he
had sent in. It is the story that carries all of Byron's hopes, his
great story. He forgets all about Lasca. He rushes as fast as his feet
can carry him to Mary. It is Mary to whom he wants to break the good
news. He is again the buoyant, sanguine and the lovable Byron. He is
sure of success now, he has regained his self-confidence and self-
respect, Mary's love and solicitude are now grateful to him. The
outcome of the interview is a lecture from the great editor on the
defects of the story. He has sent for Byron because he is interested
in Negro literature and Negro writers. He has seen from parts of
Byron's story that he has talent and ability and can write. But

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"why in hell" doesn't he write about something he knows about? Negro life - Harlem - West Indians, Abyssinian Jews, religious Negroes, pagan Negroes, Negro intellectuals all living together in the same community. Why continue to employ the same old clichés that have been worked to death by Nordics? Why not use this fresh material before a new crop of Nordics spring up and exploit it before Negro writers get around to it? Byron is stricken dumb, he can make no answer. He drags himself out of the building and makes his way to Central Park. Through whirling emotions of disappointment and heartbreak there surges a flame of fury. He will go back to the editor and tell him what he thinks of him; he will not stand to be treated as a Nigger. But he does not; instead, he sinks upon a park bench discouraged, disheartened, beaten. He hears a woman's voice calling him, he raises his head to see Lasca beckoning him from her luxurious limousine, Lasca, who takes what she wants.

She takes Byron. She showers him with all the fragrance, the beauty, the wild ecstasies, the cruel-sweets of love that her perfect body and her lawless soul know. Byron, now, has not only failed, he is lost.

And yet his is a fate before which self-righteousness should take no occasion to preen itself. One must, indeed, be much of a prig not to make some allowances for youth caught in the circle of the lure of Lasca, the courtesan supreme. Lasca keeps Byron for a period, then, as she had done others before, she throws him out, banishes him wholly, and takes Randolph Pettijohn, the number king. From here on Byron's journey downward is steep and fast. His moral disintegration is complete. He pleads, he raves, he broods. He becomes obsessed with the desire for revenge; and he procures a revolver and haunts the cabarets, lying in wait for the two objects of his hatred. One night

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in the Black Venus, drunk to the point of irresponsibility, he sees
the number king enter. While Byron is tring to bring together his
dissolved will for the accomplishment of his purpose a shot rings
out and Pettijohn falls dead. The shot had been fired by Anatole,
the Scarlet Creeper, who also had a grudge against the number king.
Byron, playing his futile role in the drama out to the end, springs
up, stands over the prostrate form and is emptying his revolver into
the dead body when the law lays its hands upon him. An absorbing, a
tragic, a disquieting story.

Byron is at many points a symbol of the tragic struggle of the
race thrown as it is in an unsympathetic milieu and surrounded by
fateful barriers. But Byron's story is especially true as an
individual story. It is the story of many a gifted and ambitious
young colored man who has come up to New York as the field for success,
and has been sucked in and down by the gay life and underworld of the
great city. It is the story of talent and brilliancy without stamina
and patience. The theme has been used before. Paul Laurence Dunbar
used it in a measure in The Sport of the Gods, and I myself skirted
it in a now forgotten novel. But never before has it been so well
and fully used.

The book is written with Mr. Van Vechten's innate light touch
and brilliancy, but there is a difference; Van Vechten, the satirist,
becomes in Nigger Heaven Van Vechten, the tealist. In every line of
the book he shows that he is serious. But however serious Van Vechten
may be, he cannot be heavy. He does not moralize, he does not
over-emphasize, there are no mock heroics, there are no martyrdoms.
And, yet - Mr. Van Vechten would doubtless count this a defect - the

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book is packed full of propaganda. Every phase of the race question,
from Jim Crow discriminations to miscegenation, is frankly discussed.
Here the author's inside knowledge and insight are at times astonish-
ing. But it is not the author speaking, he makes his characters do
the talking, and makes each one talk in keeping with his character.
If the book has a thesis it is: Negroes are people; they have the
same emotions, the same passions, the same shortcomings, the same
aspirations, the same graduations of social strata as other people.

It will be a revelation, perhaps, a shock to those familiar only
with the Negro characters of Thomas Nelson Page, Thomas Dixon and
Octavius Cohen. It is the best book Mr. Van Vechten has done, and
that is saying a good deal when we remember Peter Whiffle.

<u>Nigger Heaven</u> is a book which is bound to be widely read
and one which is bound to arouse much diverse discussion. This
reviewer would suggest reading the book before discussing it.