Nella Larsen’s Passing

A Review of Nella Larsen’s Passing

With an Examination of the

Literature of Passing 

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Spring 2019

Passing

Nella Larsen

Restless Books ($19.99)

In 1922, a year before publishing his monumentally unclassifiable “holy avalanche of words,” Cane, Jean Toomer responded to a query by the editors of the literary journal the Liberator asking him to describe his background and history, which like his fiction also defied simple classification:

Racially, I seem to have (who knows for sure) seven blood mixtures: French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian. Because of these, my position in America has been a curious one. I have lived equally amid the two race groups. Now white, now colored. From my own point of view I am naturally and inevitably an American.

It’s telling that Toomer, who had such a broad American mix of bloodlines, would refer to living amid just two race groups, white and “colored,” a brutally simplistic but also blurry divide that he was to pass back and forth between again and again. He describes himself in this biographical letter as a spiritual fusion of the races, but in discussing the literary exploration that was leading him toward Cane he was clear about which connection most nourished his art:

Within the last two or three years… my growing need for artistic expression has pulled me deeper and deeper into the Negro group. … It has stimulated and fertilized whatever creative talent I may contain within me.

Jean Toomer

Forced to live as a complex mix in a country that only saw black and white, it’s no surprise that Toomer’s art leaned toward the demographic and aesthetic that encompassed the most number of shades and that wasn’t singularly bent on excluding him. In the early twentieth century a number of novels addressed the subject of African Americans “passing” for white, and the personal and artistic gravitation that Toomer describes in his letter mirrors and defines one of the most striking aspects of this very American mini-genre. “Passing” as a concept derives from the act of passing from one race (usually black) into another (always white), so that a mixed-race person “passes” for white. But there’s much more to the term, both personally and artistically, and the fiction work that has not surprisingly come to represent this subject matter most to later readers, Nella Larsen’s succinctly named 1929 novel Passing, traces this arc out of and then back toward blackness, as do nearly all the other novels dealing with this subject.

Nella Larsen

In Larsen’s Passing, which has been newly republished by Restless Books, one of two light-skinned childhood friends, Clare, has passed into white society and married a wealthy white man, and after a chance reunion with Irene, who occasionally passes for white when going to restaurants and stores, the two adult women rekindle an uneasy friendship. Despite living a luxurious life as a white woman, Clare is lonely for the community she grew up with, and she spends more and more time with Irene and Irene’s husband, Brian, and probably (but not definitively) begins an affair with Brian. Just as Irene starts to get suspicious and has fantasies of outing Clare to her shockingly racist husband, John, she and another clearly black woman run into John in downtown Manhattan, which makes him realize that Irene is black too, and that by extension his wife Clare may be as well, which quickly leads to a disastrous denouement.

The timing of this episode’s unlikely coincidence challenges the novel’s believability, but what’s fascinating is that along with the theme of characters passing for white and then yearning to pass back into blackness, this narrative contrivance appears in all four of the major novels on this subject written by early-twentieth-century African-American authors. A novel about passing has to have a scene of exposure, or near exposure, and Passing employs the device of coincidence to bring about this crucial scene in much the same way that Jessie Redmon Fauset did in her 1928 novel Plum Bun, which imported many of the themes and devices of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, which in turn derived much of its method from Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1900 novel The House Behind the Cedars. This is not to dismiss these landmark novels at all, but rather to examine their artifices seriously, because the study of art is all about pattern recognition, and it’s fascinating to trace the design of theme-and-variation though each of these four radically different works.

In Fauset’s Plum Bun an African-American family of four has two light-skinned members, the mother and the protagonist daughter, and two who are much darker, the father and the other sister, and when the protagonist, Angela, recognizes what access to the world this gives her, she moves from Philadelphia to New York, changes her name, and begins her adult life as a white woman. As she explores both the outer world and her inner self from this new vantage point, however, she becomes increasingly isolated and yearns to reconnect with her roots. A coincidence almost exactly like the one in Passing, which was published a year later and which was clearly riffing on Fauset’s version, nearly outs her in downtown Manhattan to her shockingly racist beau, and then another astonishing coincidence that same day sets in motion the events that lead to the novel’s final re-shuffling of connections, which while being a bit overly neatly arranged is nonetheless deeply moving and satisfying. While Passing is a tightly controlled and formally deliberate Jamesian novel of manners, Plum Bun is a luxurious and expansive work, with a luscious prose style and a narrative voice whose freshness and verve overwhelm all of its shortcomings. Of these novels on the subject of passing, Blum Bun is the deepest pleasure to read, because Fauset’s voice and mind are the most alive and modern and generous, seizing all the newness of the literature of the 1920s and leaving behind the labored weight of the Victorian era, which Larsen curiously returns to the next year in Passing.

Plum Bun’s immediate (and also somewhat distant) precursor, Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, was originally published in 1912 as an anonymous memoir purporting to be true. Then in 1927, at the height of what for lack of a better term we call the Harlem Renaissance (see Langston Hughes’s 1940 memoir The Big Sea for an astute criticism of this problematic designation), he republished the book as a novel, and under his own prestigious name, just a year before Fauset published Plum Bun. Johnson was one of the few polymaths of his era who can legitimately be compared to the towering Paul Robeson, and this far-ranging novel captures an extraordinary amount of his vast scope.

Johnson’s unnamed narrator is the natural son of a southern black mother and a white patrician father who sends mother and child away to the north when he plans to marry. Apparently white, the narrator discovers at school that he’s in fact considered black, and he subsequently learns how to navigate the color line when needed as he pursues a life as a pianist who can play both concert music and ragtime. Becoming the personal musician and confidante to an unnamed millionaire, the two go to Europe, where the narrator has an epiphany and decides that his calling is to go back to the American south to study black musicology as a black man and to transform it into a new kind of formal concert language. It’s this profound calling that most matches Toomer’s description of finding his artistic nourishment in African-American culture, and in how he recasts it into complex new voicings, but then as Johnson’s narrator is collecting source material in the south he witnesses a lynching, which the book describes in excruciating detail, and as a result he abandons his blackness entirely. He then goes to New York, eventually becomes a successful businessman, marries a white woman, and has two children. The two coincidences that warp the thread of this exceptional novel come when the narrator happens to be seated next to his white father at an opera in Europe, and again later when with his white fiancée at a New York museum he runs into a black childhood friend from the south, which leads him to admit his history. In the end his fiancée accepts him but later dies during childbirth, and as the narrator looks back on his life he deeply regrets abandoning his musical mission and the race that fostered it, having exchanged his birthright, like the Biblical Esau, “for a mess of pottage.”

Like biological life, art replicates itself in fascinatingly mimetic ways, and Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars seems to serve as all of these later novels’ structural blueprint and precedent, even as each of their styles and voicings radically diverge. Wildly outdoing all of the later novels’ improbable aspects, to the point where the pattern of stagy coincidence seems to have become unshakably embedded within with the theme of black return in novels that take up this subject, The House Behind the Cedars reads like a no-holds-barred gothic extravaganza as it builds its outrageously artificial hall of mirrors around its very real and very grave subject matter.

Born the lefthand son of a black mother and a rich white father in an obscure town in North Carolina, the light-skinned John Walden changes his name to John Warwick and leaves for South Carolina, where he becomes a successful white lawyer. Surreptitiously returning home ten years later, he induces his sister Rena to leave their mother alone and join him in South Carolina to help raise his newly motherless children. After a nine-month interim at finishing school, so that she can plausibly join her brother in living among the codes of white people, Rena arrives in John’s South Carolina town just in time to become the belle of a mock-chivalric jousting tournament, attracting the favor of the knight who takes all the honors and who in triumph crowns her the Queen of Love and Beauty. This faux knight, George, happens to be John’s client, and he’s in town from North Carolina for an extended legal entanglement, and when Rena dreams that her mother is dying and then receives a letter confirming her mother’s sickness, she writes George a cryptic letter and rushes home. Left alone for a while with time on his hands, George decides to go take care of some unfinished family business in the selfsame North Carolina town where Rena and John come from, ushering in a dizzying series of coincidences that involve several mislaid letters, including one that’s blown by a gust of wind into a neighbor’s hands, and a flurry of other letters that have to wait to be read by someone present who’s literate. A tragicomedy of errors of course leads to Rena being outed to George, which leads her to renounce her whiteness and to dedicate her life to teaching black children in the south’s newly established black post-bellum schools. But the school where she’s assigned happens to be in the vicinity of George’s distant hometown, which leads to a labyrinth of even more outrageous artifice, including a case of Brontëan brain fever that ultimately leads Rena back to her hometown to die among the only people who really love and understand her. It’s perfectly outlandish, and a bizarre prelude to Chesnutt’s gravely harrowing 1901 novel, The Marrow of Tradition, but as things keep forging forward, the reader eventually realizes that this novel is a mirrory maze of words and letters, and despite the very real gravity of what’s at stake—or perhaps multiplied by it—it’s a riot to sit back and watch Chesnutt’s mad puppet show play out.

Brilliantly shrugging off all of these thematic and formal skins, it’s naturally the groundbreaking maverick Toomer who disregarded all precedent as he addressed the subject of passing in “Bona and Paul,” one of his quasi-novel Cane’s oneirically interrelated vignettes. Building on the overwhelming influence of Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, Toomer imports a disorienting and revitalizing dose of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce into the conversation, just the way that fellow Anderson acolyte William Faulkner would do years later, but with a rigorous artistry on Toomer’s part that preempts and undercuts Faulkner’s first-draft versions of Joycean Modernism. Dreamily and nightmarishly following a light-skinned college student, Paul, as he and his Nordic roommate Art go out to a fancy Chicago restaurant with their dates, Bona and Helen, the episode elliptically weaves Paul in and out of connection with his companions, who all suspect that Paul isn’t really white. After a series of contretemps that may or may not actually take place, the group leaves together, but Paul stops to confront the restaurant’s black doorman, who seems to understand and judge all of what’s happening. Reluctantly and angrily caught up by his connection to blackness, Paul loses sight of Bona, and when he goes out to look for her afterward, she’s gone. It’s an untidy and unresolved ending, but one that fits both the complexity of the subject matter and the disorientating technique of the new Modernist aesthetic.

An illustration from Passing
by Maggie Lily

Regarding the new edition of Passing, Restless Books has commissioned a solidly useful introduction by novelist and critic Darryl Pinckney, as well as beautifully surreal illustrations by the artist Maggie Lily of the novel’s stole-and-cloche-clad flapper characters, but the text unfortunately lacks explanatory notes, which in the current Penguin edition fill in much of the book’s missing referents and contexts and assumptions. This is not a novel or a subject or an era of literature to be taken lightly, and every nuance matters when unfolding its portrayal of the insane and mutating relativity of our country’s brutal racism. Looked on from an outside observer, books on the subject of passing must seem like some kind of bizarre dystopian science fiction, where pasty white people are considered to be black because they have a single drop of black blood in them, and where in order to escape the stigma of blackness they have to live a lie as a white person, which by all objective measure they actually are, and then despite their pallid hue they end up finding their native integrity among the black people they’ve tried to leave behind and don’t at all resemble. It’s absolute lunacy. But that’s life on Earth, where the madness of reality outstrips the madness of any art we could ever invent, so that even the theatrical artifices that Larsen and her peers employ in dealing with this subject read like pale-fire reflections of the wholly artificial roles that we all walk through every day. Should these novels all be more realistic? Perhaps. But so should reality.

—David Wiley