Race, modernism, and plagiarism: the case of Nella Larsen's "Sanctuary".

"I'm in trouble." His hands were shaking a little.

"What you done?"

"I shot a man, Mrs. Adis." (Kaye-Smith 321)

"Ah's in trubble, Mis' Poole," the man explained, his voice shaking, his fingers twitching.

"W'at you done done now?"

"Shot a man, Mis' Poole." (Larsen, "Sanctuary" 15)

Written at the height of Larsen's career, the short story "Sanctuary" (1930) would also be her last publication. The similarities between her story and Sheila Kaye-Smith's were publicly noted, and her "plagiarism" caused a scandal from which she--as many critics have pointed out--would never quite recover. For most critics, too, the striking similarities between the two stories have remained an insurmountable and puzzling fact. Why would Larsen, a professional, successful writer and a librarian, put herself knowingly in such danger? No one will ever know the answer. Yet, this essay argues, regardless of her immediate motivation or the unknowable facts of the text's production, Larsen's allegedly "plagiarised" story and her public defense are important texts for the exploration of the relation between race, modernism, and plagiarism.

Larsen's story and the author's explanation defending its legitimacy raise fundamental questions about the relation between race and literary property. By reconsidering "Sanctuary" within the modernist strategies of racial masquerade, primitivism, and collage, this essay explores Larsen's relation to these aspects of modernism. Her form of plagiarism reveals that race became one way for modernism to resolve its reliance on two contradictory concepts of originality: that of the primitive, and that of the artist's personal creation and literary property. "Sanctuary" "failed"--and is worth reconsidering--precisely because it intervened in this racial hypocrisy of modernism's appropriation of "other" texts, voices, and traditions. Consciously written within the rich context of other modernist techniques of borrowing, imitating, and masking, "Sanctuary" and its defense are highly sophisticated modernist experiments that try to reconfigure the relation between race, modernism, and plagiarism. Ironically, Larsen's text might ultimately have been censored as "plagiarized" because its contribution to modernism may have been too original to be either recognizable or acceptable.

Larsen's Scandalous Plagiarism: The Case and Its Critical Aftermath

Literary Dirt," wrote Harold Jackman almost gleefully to Countee Cullen on January 27, 1930:

      Nella Larsen Imes has a story in the
   Forum for this month called Sanctuary.
   It has been found out.., that it is an
   exact blue print of a story by Sheila
   Kaye-Smith called Mrs. Adis which is
   in a book called Joanna Goodens Marries
   and Other Stories. The only difference is
   that Nella has made a racial story out
   of hers, but the procedure is the same
   as Kaye-Smith's, and ... the dialogue
   in some places is almost identical. If
   you can get ahold of the Forum and the
   Smith book do so and compare them.
   But isn't that a terrible thing. It
   remains to be seen whether the Forum
   people will find this out." (Davis 348)

The Forum people did find out, and they published a reader's letter that, as some others, pointed their attention to the similarities; the editor investigated and allowed Larsen to respond to the charges. In the April 1930 edition of the Forum, the journal expressed its support for Larsen by telling readers that they had examined her drafts and concluded that an "extraordinary coincidence"--such as the one when the incandescent lamp had been invented simultaneously by two different people--must have taken place (41). In the same issue, they also published Larsen's own explanation of the similarities, in which she claimed to have heard the story, a part of black folklore, from a patient of hers while working in a hospital.

Despite this explanation and the editor's backing, the aftermath of this scandal would devastate Larsen; according to many critics, it ended her career as a writer. Deborah McDowell, for example, asserts that, "despite her editor's support, Larsen never recovered from the shock of the charge. She disappeared from the literary scene and returned to nursing at Bethel Hospital in Brooklyn where she remained until her retirement. She died in Brooklyn in 1964, practically in obscurity" (x). (1) Cheryl Wall confirms that the "furor that developed soon after the short story appeared helped to ensure her silence" (132). (2) It is certain that even though Larsen was awarded the Guggenheim fellowship shortly after her Forum response and continued to write for some time, she never published again.

Critics dealing with Larsen's career and life have struggled with this moment. It is, after all, impossible to recount Larsen's literary story without coming to this troubling point. Wall who judges "Sanctuary" as a "failed experiment" at best, seems compelled to admit both that "the similarities are unmistakable" and that Larsen's explanation does not convince her. Wall concludes:

   Larsen's account may not be a total
   fabrication but it contains a signal
   flaw. No source for the story in the
   "folk" tradition has ever been identified.
   "Almost" folklore is what scholar
   Richard Dorson calls "fakelore." What
   seems a more likely scenario for the
   genesis of "Sanctuary" is that Larsen
   had read Kaye-Smith's story and recognized
   the affinity of its theme to
   African-American life. Then, perhaps
   unconsciously, when she began to
   write "Sanctuary" Larsen adapted key
   elements of "Mrs.Adis," much as was
   done in the theater where "black" versions
   of classic and contemporary
   plays were common. But she failed to
   acknowledge her debt. (133-34)

Charles Larson is palpably mystified and embarrassed by the incident:

   Larsen was an accomplished artist.
   As a librarian and as a professional
   writer, she fully understood the consequences
   of plagiarism. If she had wanted
   to borrow from someone else's
   work, why would she have done it so
   visibly? ("Mrs. Adis" had not only
   been included in Kaye-Smith's collection
   of short stories but had been published,
   originally, in the January 1922
   issue of Century magazine.) It seems
   more likely that Nella possessed something
   akin to a photographic memory,
   and for that reason "Sanctuary" contains
   all those embarrassing similarities
   to "Mrs. Adis." Perhaps also, it was
   written out of a need to prove to herself
   that she could survive as a writer,
   support herself between novels. When
   she submitted the story to Forum, it
   was still months before she would
   learn the results of her application for
   a Guggenheim. (98)

Ann Douglas, too, is visibly disturbed and baffled by this case. "This act of literary theft," she writes, "is still shrouded in mystery and unidentified pain. Was it an instance of what Freud called 'cryptamnesia,' unconscious theft? If, as seems likely, it was conscious borrowing, why didn't Larsen own the debt up in front? ... As a former librarian, as an accomplished and conspicuously well-read writer, Larsen must have known the resemblance would be detected" (86). Scholars tend to pose the same questions--and ultimately, due to lack of evidence, abandon them: Why would Larsen plagiarize? And why would she offer an explanation that could not really account for the supposed theft?

In "Passing from Paranoia to Plagiarism; The Abject Authorship of Nella Larsen," Beverly Haviland agrees that "Larsen's story is complicated" and that "the sympathetic reader of her work wants to understand this act of literary suicide because the loss of this talented writer is regrettable" (295). Offering a psychoanalytical explanation, Haviland suggests

   that the disturbances of [Larsen's]
   childhood, particularly her relations
   with her mother, left her vulnerable to
   the confusion of subject and object that
   characterizes both paranoia and plagiarism.
   It is not by chance that
   Larsen's story 'Sanctuary' is about
   mother-child relations, about an idealized
   black mother who protects even
   the murderer of her own son because
   of sentiments of race solidarity. By plagiarizing
   this particular story Larsen
   takes her revenge against her own
   loved and hated white mother who
   did nothing of the sort. Of course,
   Larsen alone suffers by this act of self-destructive
   revenge, suffers by losing
   the legitimation as author that she had
   won up to that point. (302)

Haviland concludes that "if Larsen did plagiarize (as I believe she did), this act of theft from a white woman who had an identity as an author can be understood as an act of aggression against her rejecting white mother. It is as if, by claiming this story as her own, Larsen is trying simultaneously to rewrite the meaning of motherhood by representing it positively and to replace the figurative mother who is the creator of the text" (304). Thus, to Haviland, Larsen committed this "literary suicide" in response to both her mother's rejection and her husband's affair with a white woman. (3) "By the self-destructive logic of paranoia," Haviland explains, "Larsen turns her aggression toward her husband and his white lover against herself, at once identifying herself with the white author of 'Mrs. Adis' and also rejecting her white mother by making the story 'black' by using dialect, which she never had elsewhere in her writing. She attempts to re-mother herself in a way that allows the Harlem literati to reject her in ways that may have felt all too familiar" (307).

As these critical accounts show, most critics have been unable to move beyond the conclusion that, consciously or unconsciously, Larsen did indeed plagiarize; they reached this conclusion not only because of the strong similarities between the two stories but also because Larsen's explanation cannot really account for them. From there, very little further work has been done; criticism, like Larsen herself, has, in a way, been silenced by this conclusion. This essay moves beyond this impasse of the riddle of Larsen's personal motivation and the pain over her "literary suicide." It reconsiders Larsens's story within the context of her own explanation and her other work, in relation to Kaye-Smith's text, and within the framework of modernism's appropriation and use of other texts and tradition. When read closely, Larsen's own explanation for her story, which indeed cannot account for the similarities between the two texts, does offer important keys needed to see her story "Sanctuary" not as a failure of originality or an embarrassing case of plagiarism, but as a daring and perhaps all too original modernist experiment and statement.

Larsen's Explanation and the Racial Politics of Literary Property

When Larsen offered her "Author's Explanation" to the public, she implicitly foregrounded the racial politics of the accusation and asked questions about the relation between race and literary property. Her explanation begins in a seemingly spontaneous way: "I have your letter with its astonishing enclosure this morning" and without "having as yet seen the Century's story." Simply "judging from the excerpts which you have sent me," Larsen offers the following account of the origin of her story. (4) In contrast to this almost casual preamble, the explanation Larsen presents is a very careful argument about the racial politics of literary writing and reading:

      In justice to the Forum and to
   myself, I wish to explain exactly how I
   came by the material out of which I
   wrote "Sanctuary." The story is one
   that was told to me by an old Negro
   woman who, in my nursing days, was
   an inmate of Lincoln Hospital and
   Home, East 141st Street, New York
   City. Her name was Christophe or
   Christopher. That was sometime during
   the years from 1912-1915. All the
   doctors and executives in this institution
   were white. All the nurses were
   Negroes. As in any other hospital, all
   infractions of rules and instances of
   neglect of duty were reported to and
   dealt with by the superintendent of
   nurses, who was white. It used to distress
   the old folk--Mrs. Christopher in
   particular--that we Negro nurses often
   had to tell things about each other to
   the white people. Her oft-repeated
   convictions were that if the Negro race
   would only stick together, we might
   get somewhere some day, and that
   what the white folks didn't know
   about us wouldn't hurt us.

      All this used to amuse me until she
   told some of us about the death of her
   husband, who, she said, had been
   killed by a young Negro, and the killer
   had come to her for hiding without
   knowing whom he had killed. When
   the officers of the law arrived and she
   learned about her man, she still shielded
   the slayer, because, she told us, she
   intended to deal with him herself afterwards
   without any interference from
   "white folks."

      For some fifteen years I believed
   this story absolutely and entertained a
   kind of admiring pity for the old
   woman. But lately, in talking it over
   with Negroes, I find that the tale is so
   old and so well known that it is almost
   folklore. It has many variations: sometimes
   it is a woman's brother, husband,
   son, lover, preacher, beloved
   master, or even her father, mother, sister,
   or daughter who is killed. A Negro
   sociologist tells me that there are literally
   hundreds of these stories. Anyone
   could have written it up at any time.
   (Larsen, "Our Rostrum" 41)

By giving Mrs. Christopher, an elderly black woman patient of hers between 1912 and 1915, as a source, Larsen predates the story before the publication of Kaye-Smith's in 1922. When she later explains that the story was actually part of black "almost folklore," existing in hundreds of versions, she defers the origin of the story even further, refusing that it could have specific ownership since "anyone could have written it up at anytime." This explanation challenges the very paradigm within which Larsen has been accused by moving her story out of a white written culture into a black oral culture, where ownership and originality are not relevant concepts. (5)

This move is dramatized by the "plot" of the explanation, in which Larsen herself learns to revise her understanding of authenticity, authorship, and origin; she slowly recognizes her mistake in seeing the story as Mrs. Christopher's personal story, the telling and origin of which can be placed in time and space and author. Once she talks to blacks--and removes herself from a white paradigm--she learns how to read the story not as "absolute" truth but as part of a racial commonwealth that belongs to all black people and that has been shaped and reshaped hundreds of times. In this story, then, Larsen describes her initial alienation from her traditions--the old (black) folks--in a white context. Within the drama of the story, she finds a way back to her roots and a tradition within which authorship and ownership of the story, telling in terms of one's own life and transcribing it onto paper, are nothing more than a form of stewardship of a folklore that no one can own--a form of stewardship Zora Neale Hurston famously took on in her work on African-American folklore and "Negro expression." Larsen's explanation of the production of her story, then, shifts her work into a context in which arguments about plagiarism become meaningless, inappropriate, even scientifically proven--through the confirmation of the Negro sociologist--to be naive (white) misreadings of the story and of black literary production in general. As the story tells of Larsen's own conversion to a different form of reading--a reading of texts that moves away from ideas about personal property of a story towards a sense of stories as commonly owned--it encourages the reader, too, to change their assumptions about reading and to grow in their understanding--or grow beyond their misunderstanding--of literary ownership. Since assumptions about literary ownership and the implied meaning of stories are culturally, even racially, determined, Larsen asks her readers to shift their paradigms, their way of reading, into a realm of black art in which plagiarism becomes an absurd concept.

The racial nature of this paradigm shift is accentuated by Larsen's starkly racial description of the hospital. Apart from the old woman, her source and a hospital "inmate," no one is named; characters are just labeled as black or white. (6) While the overseers are white, all the nurses are black. The atmosphere is oppressive and even paranoid, with blacks being coerced into reporting on other blacks. The story the old woman tells is thus not so much a personal story but a story of racial solidarity, a piece of underground political art--in the tradition of slave songs--given to Larsen to help her to understand and survive in the racist hospital. In an atmosphere of indiscreet, or forcible, disclosure, it celebrates the opposite: absolute racial solidarity. The story is thus marked as black art--a piece only a black person could have told another black person. It is not the property of one author but communal racial property.

Larsen's explanation also encodes her anger about blacks' potentially telling on each other in a white-dominated environment--comments we might read metaphorically as describing the difficult position the black writer holds within a white-dominated literary landscape in which a black man, such as Harold Jackman, might tell on her. (7) Thadious M. Davis notes that Larsen's scandal falls into a period among black writers in which "some of the New Negros were becoming hostile to their fellow artists" (346). Larson confirms that "literary backbiting and jealousy" had become "part and parcel of the movement itself" (96). "Perhaps, for this generation of African Americans," Haviland conjectures in the same context, "being able to identify oneself as an author was necessary to social advancement as literacy had been for the generation of slaves. Larsen's act threatened these newly gained (copy)rights" (305).

Larsen's explanation and the story it defends and situates can be read as a response to this state of affairs; both urge blacks to stop telling whites stories about blacks. In her defense, Larsen further reveals the racial character and the politics of notions of literary property and originality. She even confesses that she herself had lost touch with a black way of reading/ listening, which she only regained through the help of black elders' stories and a Negro sociologist explaining to her how to understand these stories. Larsen's explanation may not offer a satisfying account of how "Sanctuary" actually came about, but it does offer a fascinating comment on the racial politics of writing, reading, and folklore. It speaks to the pressures a black writer encounters in a white environment and her reconnection to a black tradition within which writers can be solidary rather than competitive with each other. The "commonwealth" of black folklore that Larsen describes in her explanation stands in stark contrast to the competitive atmosphere black Harlem writers like herself faced in their lives. It envisions a literary space in which literary suicide and murder seem impossible. In this sense, the story offers a trenchant critique of the racial politics of Larsen's literary environment, predicts the eventual end of Larsen's career as a writer, and explains her return to nursing as a meaningful and racially motivated step.

Theft on a Grand Scale: Racial Masquerade, Primitivism, and Racial Property Rights

If we accept the terms of Larsen's explanation for a moment, then we must conclude that far from Larsen's stealing the story from Kaye-Smith, Kaye-Smith instead appropriated black folklore to her own purposes. While such a scenario seems unprovable in Kaye-Smith's specific case, the dynamics that Larsen's explanation implies were at the very core of much modernist art and writing--as well as immediately relevant to Larsen's own personal context. (8) Larsen thus publicly directs her readers' attention to struggles over ownership of traditions and situates "Sanctuary" within a highly charged modernist context of massive racial borrowing and stealing.

The use of "other" traditions--particularly black tradition--was central to white modernism. Michael North asserts in The Dialect of Modernism that "linguistic mimicry and racial masquerade were not just shallow fads but strategies without which modernism could not have arisen.... Writers as far from Harlem as T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein reimagined themselves as black, spoke in a black voice, and used that voice to transform the literature of their time.... Dialect," he writes," became the prototype for the most radical representational strategies of English-language modernism" (preface).

Larsen was fully aware of this context; indeed, we know that she specifically admired one of the most famous pieces of modernist literary racial masquerade: Gertrude Stein's "Melanctha." Carl van Vechten wrote to Getrude Stein on May 28, 1927: "Nella Imes, one of the most intelligent people I know (you will see her in Paris next winter), says it is the best Negro story she has ever read (she is Negro herself)" (qtd. in Bums 146). "On February 1, 1929, Nella Larsen ... enclosed a copy of her recently issued novel Quicksand, with a letter of introduction to Getrude Stein" (Blackmer 230). "I have often talked with our friend Carl van Vechten about you," she wrote to Stein," particularly about you and Melanctha, which I have read many times. And always I get from it some new thing--a truly great story. I never cease to wonder how you came to write it and just why you and not some one of us should so accurately have caught the spirit of this race of mine" (qtd. in Blackmer 230). Stein was very pleased by the response; she wrote van Vechten early in 1929 that she "just had a charming letter from Nella Imes, it touched me a lot, I am waiting to write her till I get her book she promised me" (qtd. in Bums 192). The book was Quicksand. Later, in a letter postmarked January 29, 1931, she confirmed again to Van Vechten how much Larsen's admiration of "Melanctha" meant to her: "I think [Marie Doro's] letter and the one of [Nella Larsen] Imes['s,] whom by the way you never did get to come to see us pleased me the most of any of the letters I have ever seen about Melanctha, do thank her for me and some day you will bring her to see me" (qtd. in Bums 234-35). Even though Stein and Larsen never did meet, this exchange between Stein and Larsen suggests that they saw each other as fellow writers and modernists and that Larsen saw her own work within the context of modernism's racial borrowing. (9)

Indeed, Larsen had been fascinated by the idea of "blackening" white writing; "she had contemplated how certain works treating white characters might be translated into 'Negro' material." (10) For example, on November 12, 1926, Larsen wrote to Carl van Vechten that she found Francisco de Quevedo-Villegas's Pablo de Segovia "'marvelous'" and that "'A tale of a Negro ruffian told in this naive manner would be interesting. I think somebody, Mencken perhaps, has made this suggestion somewhere'" (Davis 351). When Larsen imagines retelling Villegas's "naively" told tale in the voice of "a Negro ruffian," she clearly asks a question about perspective and voice that is quite typical of modernist technique. (11) And she positions this strategy within modernism by giving as a source of the idea a white modernist writer. (12) Larsen's idea that it should be a "Negro ruffian" with a "naive" perspective further locates her move within the realm of primitivism that characterizes much of white modernism. Even though Van Vechten stressed to Stein that Larsen "is negro herself," Larsen's own idea of a "translation" of the materials into the voice of a "Negro ruffian" suggests that she saw such a "naive perspective" as a primitive racial mask far away from her own identity. We can see her here as educated, urban modernist experimenting with a mask much in the way a German urban modernist, let's say, may be experimenting with the voice of a peasant. We might also see her as a Danish American modernist putting on a black primitive mask. George Hutchinson points out that Larsen "is both 'black' and 'white,' and Danish-American'" and that she felt an "ethnic connection [with Van Vechten], apparently, through their mutual Scandinavian heritage" (446, 444). (13) Larsen, like other modernists, wanted to write in the "dialect" of modernism, to use North's terms, in a way that implies a great distance--typical of all primitivism--between her own voice and that of the primitive Negro mask she envisioned. Her imagined primitivist project thus complicates--or defies--the racial dimensions of some modernist primitivism.

Could we then read "Sanctuary" in such a primitivist context? Without a doubt, the publishers framed and presented the story in precisely that way. Winold Reiss's primitivist illustrations and decorations underline the modernist context within which the story should be read--particularly when compared with the lay-out of the Kaye-Smith story (see Figs. 1 and 2).

[FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED]

Reiss's presence as an illustrator of the text is significant and deeply appropriate. Reiss, who had also illustrated Locke's anthology The New Negro (Davis 347) and whom Locke called "a folk-lorist of brush and pallette" (qtd. in Stewart 17), had learnt primitivism in Germany (Stewart 21). His father, Fritz Mahler Reiss, had "specialized in sensitive studies of German peasants," a "theme" that "reflected the glorification of the peasant in later 19th-century Germany as the human link to the country's spiritual past." According to Jeffrey C. Stewart, "Winold Reiss developed as much passion for painting Indians as his father had for German peasants." He was influenced by the "obsession with Indians" that "had begun in the late eighteenth-century when Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Noble Savage primitivism spread to Germany" (21).

Studying art, Reiss "came under the influence of modern decorative arts movements such as Jugendstil and such international movements as Fauvism and Cubism"; he combined his interest in "primitive" subjects with modern ideas about abstraction (Stewart 22). Like other Munich modernists, including Kandinsky, Reiss also became interested in ethnography, and "like other modernists of prewar Europe, he recognized that non-Western art was a viable source for his aesthetic expression" (Stewart 23) Deeply embedded in his work was the "urge to return to the folk, to the primitive, and the peasant sources of his own creativity ... the ancient sources of his modernism, which involved the revival and elaboration of forms derived from peasant and pre-modern sources" (Stewart 36). Stewart describes Reiss as "an artist who fused the twin aspects of early 20th-century modernism--the effort to break away from Western 19th-century tradition, and, through primitivism, to reconnect with alternative (folk) traditions" (38). No wonder, then, that Reiss was chosen "in 1924, by Paul Kellogg, editor of Survey Graphic magazine ... to illustrate a special issue that would chronicle a new literary and cultural movement centered in Harlem"; Reiss "was commissioned to do portraits of Harlem residents and the 'New Negroes,' the young leaders of the Harlem Renaissance." The issue was a sensational success, and "Reiss's portraits were easily the most striking feature" (Stewart 48). (14) So it is not surprising also that he would be chosen to illustrate Larsen's story "Sanctuary."

In her own work, Larsen not only responded to literary primitivism but also to its manifestations in the visual arts. In Quicksand--the novel Larsen sent to Stein in her exchange with Stein about "Melanctha"--she had offered a complex and extended reflection on primitivism, with particular emphasis on Northern European primitivist painting. Hazel Carby notes that "the section of the novel set in Copenhagen confronted directly the question of the representation of blacks by whites. Helga's portrait was painted by a leading Danish artist, who created an animalistic, sensuous creature on his canvas. Larsen displaced to Europe an issue of central concern to the intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance: white fascination with the 'exotic' and the 'primitive'" (Carby 172). Thus, both Larsen's own writings and the visual presentation of the story allow us to read "Sanctuary" within a primitivist context.

In many ways, Larsen's text stands in the same relation to Kaye-Smith's as Reiss's illustrations do to those of "Mrs. Adis"; the former are modernist and primitivist, the latter much closer to 19th-century realist regionalism. Reiss's illustrations reduce lines to the broad strokes of the primitivist print, bringing things to the basic essence, whereas George Bellows's illustrations accentuate realist detail. Larsen performs similar strokes in her prose as Reiss does in his visual art, just as Kaye-Smith's writing resembles Bellows's drawings. Compare the following descriptions of the main male character, who arrives at the house of Mrs. Adis/Mrs. Poole to seek refuge:

      He was a big hulking man, with
   reddish hair and freckled face, evidently
   of the laboring class, though not successful,
   judging by the vague grime
   and poverty of his appearance. For a
   moment he made as if he would open
   the window; then he changed his mind
   and went to the door instead. (Kaye-Smith 321)

      He was a big, black man with pale
   brown eyes in which there was an odd
   mixture of fear and amazement. The
   light showed streaks of gray soil on his
   heavy, sweating face and great hands,
   and on his tom clothes. In his wooly
   hair clung bits of dried leaves and
   dead grass. He made a gesture as if to
   tap on the window, but turned away
   to the door instead. (Larsen,
   "Sanctuary" 15)

Mrs. Adis clearly has a narrative perspective belonging to the tradition of 19th-century realism, with a narrator who describes and judges the character according to his class and who has insight into the character's mind. Larsen's narrative, on the other hand, stresses much more elemental features (basic emotions such as "fear" and "amazement" and primitive elements of "dead grass" in his "wooly" hair); rather than examining the character in a social and psychological context, Larsen stresses visual impressions, actions, and racialized features. She observes "gestures" rather than "changes of mind." Larsen's text is modernist and primitivist to Kaye-Smith's class-bound and psychological realism.

In the next example, Larsen interrupts and rhythmically alters Kaye-Smith's narrative voice as she moves from descriptive to gestural prose:

      He had fallen into a kind of helpless
   doze, haunted by the memories of
   the last two hours, recast in the form of
   dreams, when he was roused by the
   sound of footsteps on the road. For a
   moment his poor heart nearly choked
   him with its beating. They were the
   keepers. They had guessed for a certainty
   where he was--with Mrs. Adis,
   his old pal's mother. Nearly losing his
   self-control, he shrank into the comer,
   shivering, half-sobbing. But the footsteps
   went by. They did not even hesitate
   at the door. He heard them ring
   away into the frosty stillness. (Kaye-Smith 322-23)

      By and by he fell into a sleep from
   which he was dragged by the rumbling
   sound of wheels in the road outside.
   For a second fear clutched so
   tightly at him that he almost leaped
   from the suffocating shelter of the bed
   in order to make some active attempt
   to escape the horror that his capture
   meant. There was a spasm at his heart,
   a pain so sharp, so slashing that he had
   to suppress an impulse to cry out. He
   felt himself falling. Down, down,
   down.... Everything grew dim and
   very distant in his memory....
   Vanished.... Came rushing back.

      Outside there was silence. He
   strained his ears. Nothing. No footsteps.
   No voices. They had gone on
   then. (Larsen, "Sanctuary" 16)

Even if we assume that Larsen indeed had Kaye-Smith's text in front of her, it is hard to consider her revisions "plagiarism." They come much closer to an experiment in literary voice and form. Larsen's alterations throughout are deliberate and formally consistent with modernist revisions of 19th-century narrative conventions and with literary primitivism. Larsen's use of Kaye-Smith's voice in "Sanctuary" is certainly as deliberate as Stein's use of a black voice in "Melanctha."

Yet, the critical responses to both authors' texts and their claims to originality were tellingly reversed. Initially, Stein's "Melanctha" was falsely considered an almost phonographically exact rendition of black speech. North writes that the "first readers of 'Melanctha' were promised photographic realism" (73). At the same time, it was important that the "photographer," so to speak, was not offering a self-portrait. It was crucial that the writer was a copier--or plagiarist, we might say--of black speech rather than the original voice. "The first publishers of the story," North reports, "did send a representative to Stein's studio to determine if she were in fact an educated native speaker, the language apparently coming a bit too close to crude reality for perfect comfort" (72). Stein's text, then, was valid and validated as soon as it was confirmed to be a white writer's masquerade, while Larsen's story was invalidated the minute it was understood to copy a white source. Although Larsen's exchange with Stein suggests that Larsen was aware of and interested in these practices of literary masquerade at the core of modernist writing, her defense of "Sanctuary" pointed to the underlying white assumptions about property rights that at once allowed white writers to copy black speech and forbid black writers to "copy" and color white writing. Yet we need to ponder the tension between the perfect comfort with a white writer replicating exactly black speech--as long as it is not her own, original voice--in the context of white modernism, and the discomfort with a black writer "blackening" and otherwise exactly copying white writing in the same context. What makes one revolutionary and the other fatal, one creative and the other criminal?

Larsen's modernist revision of Kaye-Smith, then, could be read as a gesture in tune with modernist concerns; but did it partially fail because, as Larsen's explanation suggests, literature, like the hospital, is run by white superintendents who punish black workers for "infractions of rules" and "neglect of duty"--both defined by whites and being rooted in white print culture and a white-defined sense of authorship, originality, and authenticity? If white writers appropriated black dialect to transform white writing, why shouldn't Larsen do the same? Colin Rhodes notes in Primitivism and Modern Art "the profoundly equivocal issue that lies at the heart of Primitivism, namely that, although artists might entreat the primitive as support and justification for projected cultural or social change, this alteration is always expected to come from within the West--there is never any question of the wholesale replacement of aspects of culture to which the Primitivist is objecting within the primitive itself" (13). It seems that a similar double standard might have been at play in Larsen's case. (15) Douglas observes: "the unequal treatment accorded black and white writers was sharply dramatized in 1930, when Nella Larsen was accused of plagiarism" (85); "in America, whites may borrow from blacks with impunity, but negro use of white materials is always suspect" (86).

"Originality is the Modification of Ideas": Zora Neale Hurston's "Shameless" Plagiarism

No modernist writer was more conscious of the complex interplay between race and plagiarism than Zora Neale Hurston. She, like Larsen, plagiarized (Hemenway 97). (16) In 1927 Hurston published "Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver," an article for the October issue of the Journal of Negro History. It was supposedly based on Hurston's interview with Cudjo Lewis; however, in Hemenway's words, "Hurston's essay about Cudjo Lewis is 25 percent original research and the rest shameless plagiarism from a book entitled Historic Sketches of the Old South." (96-97). Hemenway considers this lifting a "dramatic example of initial failure"; but, he concludes with some palpable relief, Hurston's career needs no absurd apologetics" because "she never plagiarized again" (98).

Hurston's own later reflections on originality and imitation may suggest that the act of "plagiarism" was actually shameless in a different way. Far from apologetic or even ambivalent, in "Characteristics of Negro Expression" (1934) Hurston confidently argues that claims of originality, and concomitant charges of lack of originality, are inevitably misguided, misleading, and based on wrongful postures of racial superiority. She writes:

      It has been said so often that the
   Negro is lacking in originality that it
   has almost become a gospel. Outward
   signs seem to bear this out. But if one
   looks closely its falsity is immediately
   evident.

      It is obvious that to get back to
   original sources is much too difficult
   for any group to claim very much as a
   certainty. What we really mean by
   originality is the modification of ideas.
   The most ardent admirer of the great
   Shakespeare can not claim first source
   even for him. It is his treatment of the
   borrowed material.

      So if we look at it squarely, the
   Negro is a very original being. While
   he lives and moves in the midst of a
   white civilization, everything that he
   touches is re-interpreted for his own
   use. He has modified the language,
   mode of food preparation, practice of
   medicine, and most certainly the religion
   of his new country, just as he
   adapted to suit himself the Sheik haircut
   made famous by Rudolph
   Valentino.

      Everyone is familiar with the
   Negro's modification of the whites'
   musical instruments, so that his interpretation
   has been adopted by the
   white man himself and then re-interpreted.
   In so many words, Paul
   Whiteman is giving an imitation of a
   negro orchestra making use of white-invented
   musical instruments in a
   Negro way. Thus has arisen a new art
   in the civilised world, and thus has our
   so-called civilization come. The
   exchange and re-exchange of ideas
   between groups. (Hurston 837-38) (17)

Hurston, like Larsen, challenges white definitions of originality and links claims of such originality to white oppression of blacks. In turn, she offers a definition of originality that comes close to the one that Larsen implies in her explanation: originality is the modification of ideas. Clearly, within that definition, Larsen's use of Kaye-Smith's story would have to be considered an act of originality rather than one of plagiarism. Furthermore, Hurston's theory of artistic exchange among differing groups allows us to reconsider the relation between Kaye-Smith's and Larsen's respective texts and to see Larsen modifying KayeSmith's modification of a story whose origin is lost; their relation may be seen as analogous to "Paul Whiteman ... giving an imitation of a negro orchestra making use of white-invented instruments in a negro way" (Hurston 838). Thus, rather than regarding Larsen's text as a theft of Kaye-Smith's, we might use Hurston's theory of originality as a way to reinterpret the relation between "Sanctuary" and "Mrs. Adis" as a civilized exchange and re-exchange.

Theft on a Small Scale: The Problematic Ethics of Collage

Hurston remained unapologetic about her plagiarism; indeed, she expanded the Cudjo piece into a later book-length version, which Hemenway describes as a "a highly dramatic semifictionalized narrative intended for the popular reader" (100). "This unpublished manuscript, written in 1931," he comments, "makes extensive use of Roche and other anthropological sources; although it skillfully weaves together the scholarship and Hurston's own memories of Cudjo, it does not acknowledge those sources." The lack of acknowledgments clearly discomfits Hemenway, who does grant that Hurston was doing this weaving as "an artist rather than as a folklorist or historian" (101). I would add that she was writing here as a modernist writer using a technique that characterized much of modernist writing: collage.

After all, even if Larsen could be said to be copying rather than coloring white writing, it is important to keep in mind that white modernists, too, were copying white writing. Just as Larsen describes to readers of the Forum, William Carlos Williams, for example, famously took stories from his patients, transcribing them after he met them. And he also plagiarized entire pieces of magazine fiction in his writing. "The mountain part--the sugar head--I copied verbatim from the Ladies' Home Journal," wrote Williams to Pound, "How shall I make that appear?" Hugh Witemeyer, who quotes this exchange as an example of Williams's "ambivalence about the problematic ethics of his collage technique," notes that despite Pound's advice to the contrary, "no sign of indebtedness is given ... in the published version of the text.... The plagiarism is apparent to anyone who compares Section XVII [of The Great American Novel] with [Winifred] Kirkland's article "'Mountain Mothers,' which appeared in the Ladies Home Journal in 1920" (2). Printing the texts next to each other, Witemeyer clearly demonstrates the plagiarism. Yet it remained undetected--or unremarked--until recently.

"Intertextuality becomes plagiarism when it goes unrecognized," Witemeyer rightly asserts to show that plagiarism is an intertextual technique like collage and pastiche with the difference of its success depending on invisibility. But when recognized, it opens up new interpretive possibilities: "then interpretation can begin to assess the cultural status or authority of the borrowed text and the hermeneutic implications of its appearance in the borrowing text" (10). Witemeyer sees Williams's piece as a reflection on the concept of originality itself: "Like found objects in a synthetic collage, these fragments are shored within a context established by the artist; in this case, paradoxically, the framework is a fluid, associative meditation on the ideal of pure, unconditioned originality" (2). He concludes his reading of Williams by suggesting that "The Great American Novel enacts the fallen linguistic plight of modernity by suggesting that plagiarism and its attendant guilt are inescapable conditions of verbal construction in a belated and impoverished world" (11).

Witemeyer's work on Williams can be used to begin reassessing Larsen's story "Sanctuary" and the racial politics of modernist intertextual technique. Once recognized, Larsen's story with the author's explanation provides a provocative reflection on modernism and its assumptions about originality, authenticity, and authorship. If Williams--himself a postcolonial writer--writes in a "belated and impoverished world," so does Larsen in her postcolonial response to Kaye-Smith's story. In Larsen's modernist experiment we see exposed "an aesthetic double bind in which the theoretical impossibility of originality confronts a definition of art that continues to depend on the perception of a certain originality," as Marilyn Randall describes it in "Appropriate(d) Discourse: Plagiarism and Decolonization" (525).

The Racial Double-Bind of Modernist "Originality"

"The history of critical thinking about mimesis has oscillated between the poles of fundamental human ambivalence about imitation," writes Walter E. Stephens in "Mimesis, Mediation and Counterfeit." "On the one hand, our preoccupation with origins, pedigrees and process leads us to exalt derivation as tradition, the metaphorical handing-along of something we prize. However, we also disdain and mistrust 'imitations,' 'copies,' and 'facsimiles'" (239). This ambivalence is crucial in understanding modernism's own struggle with originality. In a way, primitivism was a way of reconciling the two: a return to the origin as a way of being innovative and new. Such a construction of originality could only work if the origin was constructed as "other." As Rhodes puts it: "although artists might entreat the primitive as support and justification for projected cultural or social change, this alteration is always expected to come from within the West--there is never any question of the wholesale replacement of the aspects of culture to which the Primitive is objecting with the primitive itself" (13). Staging a 1914 exhibition of "African Negro Art," Marius de Zayas claimed that "negro art has awakened in us a sensibility obliterated by an education which makes us always connect what we see with what we know" (qtd. in Rhodes 13). As Wall struggles with Larsen's "fakelore," she effectively offers a key term for modernist practices. In a way, all primitivist writing can be considered "fakelore," an invented tradition, an imagined past of one's sell adapted entirely to one's own purposes.

Larsen's case highlights that modernism worked with these contradictory concepts of originality: the original as primitive and the original as literary ownership. Both forms of originality in this context can be seen as racialized concepts: one positing that something original and authentic can be found in nonwestern roots and in black speech, the other that the "original" artist is original in terms of a white print culture and its demands for legitimate ownership. The first form of originality is there for the white writer's return to modernize his own art; the second is posited by the white literary establishment and black writers' violation of such will not be tolerated, as the comparison between Larsen and Williams suggests. Larsen's modernist story "Sanctuary" defies these rules of plagiarism, and the author's explanation reveals her story, and one might say the production of the story, as a piece of black activist art.

Conclusion, or Nella Larsen's Fatally Original Imitation

Reiss's illustrations of "Sanctuary" are strong visual markers of the story's modernism. Imitation, copying, even theft were integral parts of much modernist writing, and Larsen wrote her story and her defense of it very much within this context. Douglas writes:

      Had [Larsen] pushed her reworking
   just a step further, as she was more
   than competent to do, she could have
   claimed that she was simply using the
   tactics of appropriation, translation,
   and transformation with which white
   men like Eliot, Pound, and Joyce had
   made their reputations and inaugurated
   the modern era. Perhaps she feared
   that what was acceptable in them
   would be condemned in her, would
   offer further proof to white observers
   of the negro's supposedly inferior
   powers of mind and originality; in
   America, whites may borrow from
   blacks with impunity, but Negro use of
   white materials is always suspect.
   Perhaps she was helpless in the face of
   so complex a moment of self-betrayal.
   So she closed her eyes, took the
   chance, and precipitated the punishment
   she feared. (Douglas 86)

How much further would Larsen have needed to push? Like Stein, she used black dialect; like Williams, she copied magazine fiction; and like Hurston, she understood that concepts of originality and plagiarism can and need to be questioned in part because they are connected to race. Deeply steeped in an environment that bristled with questions and transgressions of originality, she made her contribution to that context. But like these other writers, she, too, defined her own way. Her imitation, in light of the modernist context I have laid out, is indeed both responsive to that environment and original. The difference between her way of copying and that of other modernist writers and the role that race played in assessing such a difference is the original contribution of her fatal modernist gesture in "Sanctuary."

North shows that white writers sought out black dialect as black writers tried to flee from it. Larsen's experiment falls into the cracks of this phenomenon, and her explanation points to the racial politics that divide white modernism's use of black art and Harlem Renaissance writing. Her case, then, confirms the problematic but intricate connections between white and black modernist writings even as she herself disappears in the process. Pointing out this fatal and racially weighted link is Larsen's final published gesture. Harmful as it proved to her career as a writer, it is perhaps her most compelling modernist statement and critique.

Neil Hertz concludes in a study about academic discourse and plagiarism that "the enforcement of legitimate boundaries is a gesture of scape-goating which reveals and projects repressed anxiety about the authority of the dominant position and its relation to originality and authenticity of its own discourse" (qtd. in Randall 53839). Larsen's case can be very much read in the same way: to investigate modernist anxieties about the racial politics of primitivism and the legitimacy of intertextual techniques that include collage, translation, and plagiarism. Read in that context, Larsen's story challenged definitions of originality, experimented with the power of voice as form, and--as her explanation made explicit--inquired into the relation between race and authorship, authenticity, and originality. The fatally original imitation in "Sanctuary" does not only hold Larsen's strongest message about race, but it also contains her most interesting comment on modernism. Through her "plagiarism" Larsen reveals the racial aspects of modernism's struggle with originality.

Works Cited

Blackmer, Corinne. "African Masks and the Arts of Passing in Gertrude Stein's 'Melanctha' and Nella Larsen's Passing." Journal of the History of Sexuality 4.2 (1993): 230-63.

Burns, Edward, ed. The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl van Vechten 1913-1946, Volume I (1913-1935). New York: Columbia UP, 1986.

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood. The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1994.

Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux 1995.

Haviland, Beverly. "Passing from Paranoia to Plagiarisms: The Abject Authorship of Nella Larsen." Modern Fiction Studies 43.2 (1997): 295-318.

Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1977.

Hurston, Zora Neale. "Characteristics of Negro Expression." Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs and Other Writings. Ed. Cheryl Wall. New York: Library of America, 1995. 830-46.

Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 1995.

Kaye-Smith, Sheila. "Mrs. Adis." Century Magazine 103.3 (January 1922): 321-26.

Larsen, Nella. Letter from Nella Larsen to Carl van Vechten. 12 Nov. 1926. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT.

--. "Our Rostrum." Forum 83 (January 1930): 41.

--. "Sanctuary." Forum 83 (January 1930): 15-18.

Larson, Charles. Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1993.

Mallon, Thomas. Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism. New York: Penguin, 1989.

McDowell, Deborah E. "Introduction." Quicksand and Passing. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1986. ix-xxxvii.

North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.

Randall, Marilyn. "Appropriate(d) Discourse: Plagiarism and Decolonization." New Literary History 22.3 (1991): 525-41.

Rhodes, Colin. Primitivism and Modern Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1994.

Stephens, Walter. "Mimesis, Mediation, and Counterfeit." Mimesis in Contemporary Theory--an Interdisciplinary Approach: The Literary and Philosophical Debate. Ed. Mihai Spariosu. Philadelphia: Benjamin's, 1984. 238-75.

Stewart, Jeffrey C. To Color America: Portraits by Winold Reiss. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution P, 1989.

Wall, Cheryl. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.

Witemeyer, Hugh. "Plagiarism in The Great American Novel: The Ethics of Collage." William Carlos Williams Review 23.1 (1997): 1-13.

Yao, Steven G. Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Notes

(1.) See also Wall 136.

(2.) Haviland asserts: "After the scandal, Larsen never published again and wrote very little before disappearing from the world of Harlem literati in which she had flourished for several years" (295).

(3.) Haviland takes the term "literary suicide" from Mallon.

(4.) Larson comments that "although Nella begins her Forum response by stating that she hasn't yet read 'Mrs. Adis' ... it seems more plausible that she had read Sheila Kaye-Smith's story and, then, forgotten it" (97).

(5.) Haviland, too, argues that "Larsen resists the current social construction of authorship as having exclusive claim to an original story" (304).

(6.) Larsen's description of the hospital predicts the expressionism of a Richard Wright.

(7.) Another letter from Jackman to Cullen further accentuates the mean-spiritedness of the attack. Larson writes: "Jackman's letters to Cullen during the next few months contain a running commentary about the affair and not only demonstrate his rather spiteful character but the literary backbiting and jealousy that apparently had been part and parcel of the movement itself' (96).

(8.) Kaye-Smith's British context of regionalism and realism suggests no connection to African American folklore.

(9.) Blackmer reads Passing as a literary response to "Melanctha" in which "Larsen reconfigures the predicament and character of Melanctha Herbert in her portrayal of Clara Kendry" (232).

(10.) While reading and admiring "Melanctha," and considering coloring a white story, Larsen was also engaged in writing her "white novel" "Crowning Mercy" (Davis 282). "In it she turned away from African Americans and matters of race and toward a treatment of the white world that had been her training ground for fiction in her short stories in Young magazine. Astute enough to realize that some of the momentum was gone from the Renaissance movement, she was also cognizant of the lessening of interest in works by New Negro writers. Her solution was a novel about whites. She envisioned herself as a novelist, and a novelist without a racial designation before it. What she did not fully realize was that one aspect of her acceptance as a novelist was based on her racial affiliation" (282). When Davis reports that Larsen "had contemplated how certain white characters might be translated into 'Negro' material" (351), she puts Larsen's idea of "coloring a white story" within another important modernist context that complicated ideas of literary ownership and originality: translation. For an extended discussion of modernism and translation, see Yao. In many ways, "Sanctuary" could be read as a translation of "Mrs. Adis."

(11.) Davis points out that Larsen "may well have believed that there was nothing deceptive about using 'Mrs. Adis' as a storyboard for her work about black characters told in the same manner; the decade was, after all, one that accepted black adaptations of works by whites, particularly in the public world of the New York stage" (51).

(12.) The choice of Mencken as a possible source for this idea is also interesting since, as Douglas reports, "Mencken opened the pages of his magazine, American Mercury, to black writers and concerns, publishing fifty-four articles by and about blacks between 1924 and 1933" (81).

(13.) Hutchinson thus challenges readings that "[put] Van Vechten and Larsen in direct opposition-casting Van Vechten in the role of the white primitivist valorizing stereotypes about the Harlem 'jungle' life, and Larsen in the role of the black artist critiquing him and thus evading his clutches" (444). I strongly agree with his argument that we need to see" 'white' and 'black' American cultures as intimately intertwined, mutually constitutive" (3) and that "a study of the Harlem Renaissance inevitably must deal with the issue of its interracial dynamics" (15) as much as a study of modernism must. I hope that my essay contributes to what Hutchinson calls an "interracial perspective" on American modernism (31).

(14.) Stewart notes that Locke's The New Negro: An Interpretation was a book-length version of that issue (56).

(15.) In the letter in which she mentions the idea of retelling Pablo de Segovia from the perspective of a "negro ruffian," Larsen also comments on racial double standards: "Have you noticed that when Nordics talk against the admission of Negroes to their homes, etc., it is rank prejudice, but when we take the same attitude about white folks it is race loyalty?" (Letter to Carl van Vechten).

(16.) Hurston's plagiarism was revealed in 1972.

(17.) Later in her career, Hurston got into considerable trouble with literary property rights. Her collaboration with Langston Hughes on the play Mule Bone erupted in 1931 over literary property rights. Hemenway writes that" 'Mule Bone' is the reason Langston Hughes, a kind, gentle, forgiving man, never forgave Hurston for what he considered theft and dishonesty. 'Mule Bone' caused Zora Hurston, who had high hopes of making their collaborative efforts famous, to accuse her partner of stealing ideas and of sabotaging the play's production" (136).

Hildegard Hoeller is Associate Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. The author of Edith Wharton's Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction (2000) and co-author of Keywords for Academic Writers (2004), she has also published articles in American Literature, American Literary Realism, American Transcendental Quarterly, and other journals. This work was supported by a grant from the City University of New York PSC-CUNY Research Award Program. Dr. Hoeller thanks David Smith of the New York Public Library for his generous help.