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Writing Up the New Negro: The Construction of Consumer Desire in the Twenties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Chip Rhodes
Chip Rhodes
Affiliation:
Chip Rhodes is a graduate research assistant in The Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA, and will be teaching English at California State University, Los Angeles, from the fall of 1994.
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Extract

On the eve of the publication of his first novel, The Fire in the Flint, Walter White received a letter from T. S. Stribling, whose novel Birthright had inspired White to write Fire in the first place. Both novels tell the story of a Northern-educated black's return to his Southern hometown with the intention of uplifting the black community and improving race relations. In his letter, however, Stribling makes it clear that the similarities between the two novels end there.

Fire's main character, says Stribling, is so “poky in love making… I rather suspect a big healthy passion wouldn't have hurt.” He proceeds to criticize Fire's ending in which the main character is lynched following much violence against his family: “The repeated murder and the repeated burning is what I object to. That may be quite natural, and I admit that lynchings are monotonous, but art is the escape of life from monotony. ” At this point, it appears that Stribling is offering the standard critique of much politically-charged literature. He seems to be accusing White of being factually accurate, but aesthetically uninteresting. However, in a follow-up letter responding to White's defense of the novel's ending, Stribling criticizes White for being inaccurate:

Here you are, a young Negro writer with a very fine promise. I insist that you write in the big style, in the unhurried style that shows human beings as they are… Now White, detach yourself, my boy. Cut away, be a camera, not a gatling gun.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , August 1994 , pp. 191 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 For a more thorough discussion of the White-Stribling relationship, see Waldron, Edward E.'s Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978)Google Scholar. For a closer comparison of the two novels under discussion, see Birthright (New York: The Century Co., 1921)Google Scholar; The Fire in the Flint (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1924)Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., 65.

3 Ibid., 65.

4 Ibid., 66.

5 See Lewis, David Levering's excellent social history of Harlem in the twenties, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1979)Google Scholar, for an extended discussion of Negrotarianism.

6 Heyward, DuBose, Porgy (New York: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1925)Google Scholar.

7 Larsen, Nella, Quicksand and Passing, ed. McDowell, Deborah (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

8 Slavick, William H., DuBose Heyward (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), 57Google Scholar.

9 Heyward, 7.

10 Frank, Waldo's novel Holiday (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923)Google Scholar offers a more blatant version of this lapsarian narrative of history. In it, John Cloud, the protagonist, becomes a martyr to modernization when he refuses to defend himself against an erroneous charge of rape.

11 Heyward, 114–5.

12 Ibid., 118.

13 Ibid., 119.

14 Ibid., 119.

15 Ibid., 119.

16 Ibid., 121.

17 Aronowitz, Stanley, The Crisis in Historical Materialism (South Hadley: J. F. Bergin Publishers, 1981), 99Google Scholar.

18 Slavick, 76.

19 Neither Cane (New York: Liveright, 1975)Google Scholar nor Home to Harlem (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987)Google Scholar offers an uncomplicated reinforcement for the Negrotarian ideology. But both certainly can and have been read that way.

20 See Chapter Eight of Carby, 's Reconstructing Womanhood (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., 166–173.

22 Larsen, , Quicksand and Passing, 1Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., 59.

24 Ibid., 3.

25 Ibid., 4.

26 Ibid., 4.

27 Ibid., 6.

28 Ibid., 6.

29 Ibid., 67.