A Review of Nella Larsen’s Passing
With an Examination of theLiterature 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
