The Negro Artist and the Racial Manor: Infants of the Spring and the Conundrum of Publicity.

Somehow, somewhere, black writers and creators had lost control of their subjects and, with them, some of the Harlem Renaissance. (Mumford 155)

In a recent essay on the critical reception of Jennie Livingston's acclaimed documentary Paris Is Burning (1991), Philip Brian Harper proposes that the "subversive edge" the film would seem to promote is, in fact, anything but subversive. Arguing that the cultural capital that minority drag queens acquire through their filmed performances is predicated upon the loss of their agency and the loss of their privacy, Harper convincingly suggests that Livingston's subjects are wholly dependent upon the cinematic medium for public recognition. In effect, the queens are "the product of a discursive process over which they have no control." Hence what critics have often considered to be the drag queens' personal subversion of gender norms is, instead, inextricably tied to the one person who controls, edits, and manipulates their representations--Livingston, the white director (55). This scenario, it seems, is far from unique. In fact, the problematic of privacy, property, and subject position that Harper discovers at work in the House of Xtravaganza can also be found in another locale, namely Niggerati Manor, the setting of Wallace Thurman's 1932 roman clef Infants of the Spring.

Like Harper's "subversive edge," Infants of the Spring too reveals just how little control minority subjects actually have over their own representations. After the residents of Niggerati Manor, an apartment colony of Harlem's bohemian artists, throw a wild rent party, culminating in what can only be called an interracial sex orgy, Dr. Parkes, a thinly veiled caricature of Alain Locke, comes knocking at the Manor's door. Dismayed by the Manor's decadence, Dr. Parkes informs Ray, a thinly veiled portrait of Thurman, that the press will no longer turn a blind eye to the house's prurient behavior. In fact, editorials in newspapers such as The New York Call have righteously proclaimed that

"these young people should be brought to their senses. They should be made to realize the futility and danger of the path they had chosen, the rosy path to hell. They should be taken aside and reasoned with[;] then if this failed the white light of publicity should be shed upon their activities and their innate viciousness and duplicity exposed to the world."

Raymond laughed as he finished reading.

"Surely you don't take this tripe seriously?"

"It's not a matter of taking it seriously," Dr. Parkes answered solemnly.

"It's a matter of protecting yourself from unnecessary attacks on your reputation. This is a new day in the history of our race. Talented Negroes are being watched by countless people, white and black, to produce something new and something tremendous. They are waiting for you to prove yourselves worthy so they can help you. Scandal stories in the newspapers certainly won't influence the public favorably."

"My habits and my life are my own business. I intend to live just as I please, regardless of yellow journalism, of a public which might offer me material aid should I, in their opinion, prove myself worthy." Raymond's words were crisp and angry. (197-98)

This impassioned exchange suggests the links among publicity, privacy, and the New Negro artist that I will be tracing throughout this essay. Though the subject of their fiery debate is ostensibly the Manor's wild reputation, the conversation between Ray and Dr. Parkes is also a battle over what exactly a literary public sphere should be. Dr. Parkes sees the presentation of private personality within the literary public sphere as an integral part of the New Negro project. Thus the Manor's party animals had better shape up and fly right or else they will lose the public's favor. Ray, however, insists that one's private biography has nothing to do with the literary public sphere; the Negro artist should never have to submit to the "white light of publicity."

To better understand their disagreement, we might turn to Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, a work that charts the definitional shift over which these two intellectuals so vehemently fight. In an oft-quoted claim, Habermas contends that a culture-debating public has transformed into a culture-consuming one. According to the German sociologist, individuals once left the domesticity of their private homes and entered into the public domains of salons, coffeehouses, and print in order to debate, criticize, and formulate issues of politics, citizenship and art. But with the rise of "yellow journalism" at the turn of the nineteenth century, Habermas finds that the public sphere no longer concerned itself with issues of serious debate. Instead, "for the newspaper's publisher...this meant that he changed from being a merchant of news to being a dealer in public opinion" (182). In the words of Rosa Eberly, "the generation of publicity has changed from bottom-up to top-down; whereas publicity used to be a function of the public debates among many, Habermas sees publicity in the social welfare state as controlled or manipulated from positions of power" (107). Along with this structural transformation, the public-private divide that once defined the public sphere has collapsed. In fact, "the public sphere itself becomes privatized in the consciousness of the consuming public; indeed, the public sphere becomes the sphere for the publicizing of private biographies, so that the accidental fate of the so-called man in the street or that of systematically managed stars attains publicity, while publicly relevant developments and decisions are garbed in private dress and through personalization distorted to the point of unrecognizability" (Habermas 171-72). No longer, Habermas suggests, is the (literary) public sphere a congregation of private individuals discussing art and letters, a condition that Ray would earnestly advocate. Instead, the public sphere now fetishizes "stars" and their private biographies. And this shift, Ray senses, does a disservice to artists, since it deprives them of their privacy and forces them to capitulate to the public's opinion: "'They should be made to realize the futility and danger of the path they had chosen'" (Thurman 198). Consequently, the New Negro rebuts Dr. Parkes by adamantly insisting that he "intends to live just as he pleases," regardless of what the public might think.

But curiously, while New Negro artists such as Ray may find the pubic sphere (epitomized in The New York Call) stifling, the changes that Habermas notes were actually quite advantageous for most white modernists. In particular, Ann Douglas notes that "the dangerous business of attention management and exploitation fascinated all the writers [of the 1920s], whether as subject matter, as life-style, or both. Not one of them initially ruled out the possibility--the artist's version of the American Dream--that s/he could be at once status-soaked elite author, conscientious craftsperson, and mass artist or mass image" (71; emphasis added). While her claim may be over-generalized, Douglas shows in her overview of "mongrel Manhattan" how white artists such as Marianne Moore, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, and others wooed the public spotlight in order to evoke this "mass image." Writing during a period that witnessed the e mergence of mass communications and the advent of public relations, these American modernists frequently and willingly collaborated with institutions of publicity. Often, they were intimately familiar with advertisers, editorialists, and gossip columnists such as Franklin P. Adams, Robert Benchley, and Donald Ogden Stewart, publicists who successfully fashioned the New York literary scene into a "gymnasium of celebrities" (Douglas 64). This "fascination and familiarity with advertising on the part of New York's leading performers, artists, and writers did not," Douglas notes, "represent an artistic compromise or sellout on their part, though some of them [notably Fitzgerald and Hemingway] later saw it that way" (68). Rather, for these white modernist/celebrities, public exposure was much welcomed because the institutions of publicity served to enhance the authors' public reputations-as well as the sale of their works. And since "a number of authors got the treatment that we today associate largely with movie and rock stars," these writers obligingly presented their private, intimate lives for mass consumption. Because the benefits of publicity far outweighed the disadvantages, the loss of privacy that public exposure demanded rarely troubled them. As Moore once said," 'celebrity costs privacy,' "but, Douglas finds, "she did not seem to mind" (71).

Recent re-evaluations of the Harlem Renaissance have shown that the New Negro project, too, was deeply influenced by changes in the literary public sphere. According to George Hutchinson, "the Harlem Renaissance followed not only (as is often stressed) the black migration and World War I but also the emergence of a whole new matrix of magazines centered in New York City.... Significantly, before the teens, these magazines either did not exist or were under the control of more conservative editors, a fact that has a lot to do with the timing of the Harlem Renaissance" (126). Specifically, black and white publications such as The Crisis, Opportunity, Messenger, American Mercury, and The Liberator (to name but a few) were absolutely integral to the dissemination and institutionalization of New Negro art. These publications, Hutchinson painstakingly details, actively promoted and funded the voices that made the movement. In fact, he finds that white journals such as The Liberator "encouraged types of ideological and artistic freedom and experimentation that the African American editors either shied away from or did not appreciate. Such, at least, was the belief of several of the authors, including McKay, Toomer, Thurman, and Hughes" (129). Thurman in particular frequently held that "black editors ... hampered artistic freedom. The New Negro artist 'revolted against shoddy and sloppy publication methods, revolted against the patronizing attitudes his [black] elders assumed toward him, revolted against their editorial astigmatism and intolerance of new points of view'" (129-30).

But concentrating solely on these particular institutions of publicity neglects to note that newspapers such as The Inter-State Tattler, The New York News, The Amsterdam News, and The New York Age also played a vital role in fashioning the Harlem Renaissance. Like the journals, these dailies and weeklies trumpeted the activities of Harlem's literati. Editorials; gossip columns; ads for books, poems, and plays; society reviews; and city news briefs often commented on the public projects and private lives of Harlem's cultural elite. And like many white modernists, African-American artists also found themselves under the public gaze. Their private lives too became public property. (1)

Yet while white modernists such as Moore or O'Neill often viewed their public display as a blessing, African-American artists such as Thurman's Raymond see public exposure as a curse, a hindrance to artistic production rather than an aid. For Ray, the institutions of publicity certainly do not encourage "types of ideological and artistic freedom and experimentation." Rather, he assumes that "the white light of publicity" is blinding. What should open up avenues to artistic success instead appears to be a racial panopticon:" 'Talented Negroes are being watched by countless people, white and black, to produce something new and something tremendous.'" Accordingly, unlike the white modernists, Ray affirms his right to privacy and denounces the court of public opinion: "'My habits and my life are my own business'" (198). His caustic replies to Dr. Parkes suggest that institutions of publicity--both white and black--promoting the Harlem Renaissance stifle an individual's artistic vision. True to his enfant terrible image, Thurman's protagonist implicitly contends that publicity ruins the Harlem Renaissance.

Given the bitterness of Ray's remarks, I am going to argue that, in Thurman's opinion, the institutions of publicity paradoxically thwarted, rather than advanced, the Negro artist's career. First, though some white journals did provide the New Negro with the freedom of artistic expression, both the black and the white press repeatedly demanded that the Negro artist represent the race. Individual artists, Thurman notes, were usually made out to be public representatives. And since the press constantly demanded representations that reflected the community's self-image ("'This is a new day in the history of our race'"), the artist's particular vision was compromised. Or, as Thurman states, "new points of view" were generally not condoned. New Negro art, that is, had to forge a group identity; and the New Negro artist had to speak as and for a communal "we." Second, like white modernists, Negro artists were often considered literary celebrities; and as celebrities, mass newspapers constantly policed their private lives. Or, as Dr. Parkes proclaims," 'Scandal stories in the newspapers certainly won't influence the public favorably'" (198). But unlike most white modernists, who basked in their uniqueness, African-American modernists had different expectations placed on them by the press. Celebrity status was only granted to the Negro artist under the condition that s/he function as a public representative. Consequently, for Thurman's protagonist and other African-American modernists, an individual's singular artistic vision was difficult to achieve; and privacy--the right to be left alone--was almost impossible to obtain. Though Ray states that he "'intend[s] to live [or write] just as [he] please[s],'" the institutions of publicity repeatedly demanded otherwise.

Ray's heated exchange with Dr. Parkes thus prompts two interrelated questions that deeply troubled the author of Infants of the Spring. First, how can the black artist/celebrity maintain privacy in his or her modern(ist) public arenas? And second, if the Harlem Renaissance has been corrupted by the institutions of publicity, what alternative modes of artistic production can be imagined? Thurman's fictional answer to these seemingly insoluble problems, which I will discuss in the second half of this essay, may explain why he perpetually viewed the Harlem Renaissance as a failure. But before I turn to Infants of the Spring, I want to explore a bit more the social field that initially gave rise to these questions.

What Dr. Parkes wants, and what Ray adamantly refuses to become, is a public figure--a Race Man--for the New Negro Movement. "For the African-American Talented Tenth of the Jazz Age," Douglas writes, "publicity in its broadest sense, from commercial entertainment to militant race journalism, was political strategy" (303). Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s essay on the trope of the New Negro supports her broad claim. Gates finds that, prior to the 1925 publication of The New Negro anthology, leaders of the black community attempted to reconfigure the race's public image. To combat centuries of racial stereotyping, intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington strove to refashion the black public into New Negroes, a class of respectable, impressive-looking, and well-mannered black professionals. These New Negroes were then to become the figureheads for the black folk, the public representatives of the race. Or, as Gates puts it, "Douglass... was the most representative colored man both because he rep resented black people most eloquently, and because he was the race's great opportunity to re-present itself in the court of racist public opinion. Black Americans sought to re-present their public selves in order to reconstruct their public, reproducible images" (129).

Residues of this 1890s project can still be found in writings such as W. E. B. Du Bois's 1926 "Criteria for Negro Art" and Alain Locke's 1925 "Enter the New Negro." Throughout his lengthy career, Du Bois firmly insisted that Negro art promote public, socially redemptive images of the black race. In "Criteria for Negro Art," for example, he unabashedly contends that "all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda, for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy" (103). But paradoxically, if Negro art is to gain black folk freedom, it also has to have a prescriptive recipe, the most important ingredient being "racial uplift." For Du Bois, the New Negro artist had to create exemplary works that portrayed the race in a kindly light, from which it follows that the artist had to stand in for the race as a whole.

Locke's New Negroes were also to become paragons of the black community. Through art, Locke assumes, the New Negro would overturn the Uncle Tom stereotype once and for all. And "with this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic phase.... The migrant masses.., hurdle several generations of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing happens spiritually in the life-attitudes and self-expression of the New Negro.. . . From this comes the promise and warrant of a new leadership" (631). Focusing primarily on "the life of the Negro community" and the "warrant of new leadership," Locke takes for granted that Negro art will be subsumed under the umbrella of a nationalist race project (634). This call for public representatives deeply irritated independent black modernists. To cite one case in particular, in 1926 Thurman, Hughes, Hurston, and others published the avant-gardist journal Fire!!, an art for art's sake magazine "meant to shock" (Lewis 192). Fire!! delivered on its promise and caused quite an uproar when it first appeared. In his memoir The Big Sea, Hughes writes that "none of the older Negro intellectuals would have anything to do with Fire. Dr. Du Bois in the Crisis roasted it. The Negro press called it all sorts of bad names, largely because of a green and purple story by Bruce Nugent, in the Oscar Wilde tradition, which we had included" (237). Though its artists tried to extend the boundaries of what was considered "Negro art," Fire!!'s troubled history points to the difficulty any black writer experienced when s/he tried to break free from the figure of the public representative.

Harlem's elite intellectuals were not the only ones interested in artists who would advance the race; the black press played a significant role as well. Since the New Negro was presented as a public figure, Harlem's intelligentsia frequently relied on the black newspapers to publicize their project. These newspapers, in turn, depicted writers such as Thurman, Hughes, Hurston, Claude McKay, and a slew of others as both public representatives and literary celebrities. "From 1923 onward," David Levering Lewis gushes, "the skies over Harlem shimmered with new stars, candidates for Charles Johnson's ambitious program to promote racial advancement through artistic creativity" (50). (2) His is no slight exaggeration. Following the surprise success of Thurman's 1928 Broadway play Harlem, he found his image plastered on page 13 of the April 10, 1929, edition of The Amsterdam News. The caption below reads, "Wallace Thurman, who used to write for The Messenger [sic], had hardly released his much spoken of book, 'The Bla cker the Berry,' when the play 'Harlem' went into immediate success at the Apollo Theatre.... In a brilliant gesture Thurman has paid his compliments to a local theatre by sending Emma Lou and her 'sweety' to one of the midnight shows." But Harlem's press did more than just celebrate its artists' achievements. Newspapers such as The Inter-State Tattler, The New York News, and The New York Age were also quick to reveal the personal lives of Harlem's cultural elite. One column published in the 1929 News, "GOSSIP ABOUT AUTHORS," told its readership that "'Langston Hughes, a rising young poet, has withdrawn temporarily from active poetic duties. He is to graduate from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in June. More power to him. Countee Cullen remains abroad. We hope he will gain Parisian inspiration for another excellent book of verse'" (qtd. in Osofsky 148). This public exposure, however, was not always so generous as these quotes might suggest; scandal stories certainly did not influence the masses favorably. Cullen's troubled marriage to W. E. B. Du Bois' daughter Yolande, for instance, was perennial front-page fodder for the black tabloids, as whispers from his closet were splashed across the headlines of dailies such as The Amsterdam News. And Du Bois himself immediately fired Augustus Dill, the managing editor of The Crisis, once the public press revealed the editor's homosexuality (Chauncey 264).

Exhibiting the New Negro artist as a famous public representative was not the preoccupation only of the black press and the elite intelligentsia, however. The white press usually presented these artists as extraordinary as well. Unfortunately, this characterization often verged on stereotyping, as George Schuyler suggested in his caustic "Advice to Budding Literati" in 1926:

... Negro intellectuals who have the itch to write... should by all means move immediately to New York City. ... Having arrived at the mecca of suckers, sharpers, cabaret proprietors and other such bandits, they should immediately get in touch with that group of about twenty New Negroes who represent the intellect of the Negro race so admirably. ... Some mediocre ability to write will be helpful. ... Success depends, however, on the ability of the striving writer to do the Charleston, sing the spirituals, and chatter amiably with the abandon supposed to be characteristic of members of a race with a primitive background....Very shortly some of the white writers or editors who dote on having "intelligent" Negro proteges under their wing, will invite them to offer a manuscript for scrutiny with a view to publication....Such a matter should always without exception be bizarre, fantastical and outlandish, with a suggestion of the jungle, the plantation, or the slum. Otherwise it will not be Negro literature and hence not acceptable. (qtd. in Van Notten 106-07)

To achieve fame in the white public sphere, Schuyler facetiously suggests, the New Negro artist must accentuate racial difference to the point of caricature; s/he must become extraordinarily ordinary.

National bestsellers such as Claude McKay's Home to Harlem played into this demand for "the jungle [and] the primitive," and McKay achieved celebrity status in the white press for his exaggerated portraits of Harlem life. (3) Likewise, as cultural historian Kevin J. Mumford has noted, numerous travel guides published during the 1920s cast Harlem residents as exotic primitives and Harlem itself as a "site of pleasure" that whites could journey into to unleash their repressed sexual desires (143). These slumming texts (written mainly by whites) only served to enhance the denigrating images that the Harlem Renaissance was trying to overturn. Consequently, we can draw a parallel between the black public sphere's reception of the New Negro artist and the white public sphere's fascination with the Negro. While the black press demanded public representatives to uplift the race, so too did the white press often demand public representatives to confirm racial stereotypes.

In sum, black artists of the Harlem Renaissance occupied a paradoxical position within the literary public spheres of the late 1920s, a position quite distinct from that which many white modernists experienced. Harlem's New Negro elders and the press together manufactured a "star system" that advanced the New Negro project. In the name of racial uplift, both turned the Negro artist's (private) personality into public display. Depicted as extraordinary public bodies--fascinating personalities--in the black and white papers, these New Negro artists were never considered ordinary citizens with ordinary rights to privacy. Instead, the institutions of publicity effectively turned them into celebrities who were to lead the community and bear the burden of black representation, stereotypical or not. Frequently viewed as exemplary, these private figures thus became public goods that had to make good. And it followed that, if the black artist were to publish his or her work within the literary public spheres of modern ism's heyday, or if the black artist were to be funded, s/he had to conform to this protocol. After all, Ray notes that the public will offer "material aid" only if the New Negro artist proves himself "worthy" (198). This is the conundrum of publicity to which my title refers.

Wallace Thurman's 1932 novel Infants of the Spring addresses this conundrum by concentrating on a select group of artists who reside at a house one bohemian sarcastically calls Niggerati Manor. Critics almost uniformly panned the book when it first appeared. In a review for The New York Herald Tribune, Rudolph Fisher stated that "there is too much expositional and argumentative prattle on race prejudice and communism. ... The theme is the early demise of the so-called New Negro" (16). Likewise, an anonymous critic for The New York Times Book Review felt that Infants of the Spring was a "pretty inept work. It is clumsily written. Its dialogue...is often incredibly bad. Its characters...are ciphers" (22). One critic in Opportunity even went so far as to say that "there are monotonous speeches, an unclear thesis, and a lack of unity" (89). More recent re-evaluations of Thurman's work have similarly suggested that "the novel is so poorly done it hardly seems possible that the best-read, most brilliant, and most u ncompromising of the Harlem artists could have written it" (Lewis 277). But the lack of unity and thematic incoherence that continue to trouble the novel's critics are precisely its central point. Mimicking the style of one of Thurman's favorite writers, Thomas Mann, Infants of the Spring is a novel of and about conflicting ideologies-- The Magic Mountain transformed into the Racial Manor. And since Thurman's novel operates as a modem allegory, his characters do function as "ciphers" in order to illuminate the various clashing problematics of the New Negro Movement. Each figure, I believe, represents a particular stance on the conundrum of publicity for black artists-whether it be the artist's relationship to the gossip column, the courts, or the black and white press. Taken as a whole, the residents of Niggerati Manor present the reader with a vitriolic indictment of the internationally famous project that became known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Like the "picture personalities" of their day, the artists of the Manor are quite literally "persons who expose themselves to public view for hire." (4) As the novel's protagonist Ray tells Stephen, a Nordic fresh off the boat from Scandinavia," 'It just so happens that my present landlady is a visionary as well as a business woman....She knew the difficulties experienced by Harlem artists and intellectuals in finding congenial living quarters, and reasoned that by turning this house over to Negroes engaged in creative work, she would make money, achieve prestige as a patron, and at the same time profit artistically from the resultant contacts'" (19). Put simply, Euphoria Blake took a private home, partitioned it into apartment units, and turned the house into a public spectacle for the benefit of the Negro artist, the Negro community, and, lest we forget, herself. For the most part, her plan has been a success, since the residents of Niggerati Manor have become well known in the black and white press. Pelham Gaylord (George Jones), a subservient resident utterly lacking artistic talent but full of artistic ambition, originally came to the Manor to meet these famous celebrities: "He was overjoyed when Raymond moved into the house. For it had been bruited about that he was soon to emerge as one of the black hopes of Negro literature. George also knew that most of Raymond's friends were in some measure known to the public for their poems, stories, or drawings. Their names were often mentioned in magazine and newspaper articles" (123-24).

Indeed, the residents of Niggerati Manor are artist/celebrities who bear the burden of black representation. Dr. Parkes tells a gathering of these young literati, "'You are the outstanding personalities in a new generation. On you depends the future of your race. You are not, as were your predecessors, concerned with donning armor, and clashing swords with the enemy in the public square. You are finding both an escape and a weapon in beauty'" (233-34). Similarly, in order to emphasize the public nature of their artistic lives, the narrator repeatedly uses metaphors of publicity to describe the residents: under "the public gaze" (21), "forced themselves into the spotlight" (22), "the wide public highway" (220), "public legends" (200), "prate publicly" (136), "the white light of publicity" (198), "outstanding personalities" (31). Their constant public exposure, in turn, becomes a synecdoche for the larger project that is the Harlem Renaissance:

There had been throughout the nation an announcement of a Negro renaissance. The American Negro, it seemed, was entering a new phase in his development. He was about to become an important factor in the artistic life of the United States. As the middle westerner and the southerner had found indigenous expression, so was the Negro developing his own literary spokesman.

Word had been flashed through the nation about this new phenomenon. Novels, plays, and poems by and about Negroes were being deliriously acclaimed and patronized. Blues shouters, tap dancers, high yaller chorus girls, and singers of Negro spirituals were reaping much publicity and no little money from the unexpected harvest. (61-62)

But despite the accolades accorded such individuals, the novel spends most of its time dwelling on the detrimental effects that public exposure has for the Negro artist. It might be worthwhile, then, to focus for a moment on two artists--Paul and Pelham--to see how the institutions of publicity negatively influence the residents of Niggerati Manor. Paul, the brilliant aesthete who cultivates a life of decadence, and Pelham, the subdued artist who lacks any talent whatsoever, would seem to be polar opposites. But upon closer examination, their circumstances are, in fact, quite similar.

Nowhere are the contradictions of public exposure more evident than in the scandal that Pelham's poetry provokes. A better housekeeper than poet or painter, Pelham initially moved from New Jersey to Harlem "to gain fame and fortune as an artist" (123). Excited to find himself sharing the same space as Ray and his fellow artist Paul, "he considered them as gods far up the Mount Olympus he himself was trying to scale" (124). Pelham emulates these accomplished New Negroes, and though "the extent of his ineptitude was abysmal," he remains convinced of his genius and oblivious to his lack of talent. Frequently, he reads his banal poems or shows his atrocious artwork to the residents of Niggerati Manor, who frankly suggest that "he attend an art school.... Paul told him that he was a Dadaist. Eustace, Raymond, and Euphoria acquiesced. Only Stephen scoffed, and his scoffing was discounted by Pelham, because Stephen was white, and white people would naturally resent a black genius" (125). Disgruntled by the Manor's a mbivalent reception of his work, Pelham soon finds a new audience--an actress and her two young girls--who offer to disseminate his work throughout the literary public sphere. "The lady had promised," the narrator tells us, "to present both the poem and portrait of her daughters to her art club.... The cognoscenti might scoff or remain enviously silent. The public would acclaim, and he would at last reap the fruit of his sowing" (118-19). Finally, Pelham believes, he has found "an appreciative audience" (127).

But Pelham's plan is ruined once the lady charges him with the rape of her daughter. The only evidence she has are several poems that Pelham writes for the young girl, one of which is entitled "To Gladys":

Oh you who I adore

And do anything for

Remember the song

Entitled let's do it

The bees and the birds

All do it

So why not you and me?

Though the poem was meant to gain Pelham "public honor and prestige," the actress capitalizes on the poem's sexual innuendo and accuses Pelham of molesting her daughter. He is brought to jail; she publicly denounces him; and the court sentences him to six months in prison. Consequently, in his desire to emulate the artists of Niggerati Manor ("Said he wanted to write like Paul"), Pelham's public face is marred (162): "'I'm ruined, Ray, I'm ruined,' "he moans in prison. " 'I ain't done nothin', and they keep me in jail.... Everyone'll look down on (205). In other words, Pelham finds himself trapped in the conundrum of publicity. Though he tried to write a work that would win him public fame, the actress, the public, and the courts collapse his intellectual property--the poem-with his personal property--his private life. His arrest, Dr. Parkes tells Ray, will taint the public image of the black race:" 'Don't you think this scandal when publicized will hurt all of you who lived here with Pelham?'" (181). And lat er, Dr. Parkes remarks to Ray that" 'the newspapers here in Harlem are bound to make a sensation out of Pelham's case. They'll embroil you in it and all who come here'" (196). While Pelham wants to write original works like Paul or Ray, his poems are instead seen as an imitative corruption of the New Negro project. As an exemplar, Pelham must maintain a respectable, ordinary private life. But once the black press conflates Pelham's private property--his personality--with his public poems, he is derided for failing to meet the standards set by Harlem's intellegentsia, and his work and life become scandalous. Because he has no right to privacy, Pelham's image is ruined at the precise moment he becomes a public figure. Fame, for Petham, is infamy; instead of accolades, he finds notoriety and public humiliation.

In contrast, Paul Arbian, a brilliant bohemian, courts notoriety. In a heated discussion on race and writing. Stephen tells Ray that

"You baffle me. Were you like Paul or Eustace or Pelham, I could analyze you immediately. Paul has never recovered from the shock of realizing that no matter how bizarre a personality he may develop, he will still be a Negro, subject to the snubs from certain ignorant people. The fact distresses him, although he should ignore both it and the people who might be guilty of such snubs. He sits around helpless, possessed of great talent, doing nothing, wishing he were white, courting the bizarre, anxious to be exploited in the public prints as a notorious character. Being a Negro, he feels that his chances for excessive notoriety a la Wilde are slim. Thus the exaggerated poses and the extreme mannerisms. Since he can't be white, he will be a most unusual Negro." (59)

A self-proclaimed "genius," Paul spends his days reading "Blake, Dowson, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Poe, and Whitman" and delighting in the paintings of "Whistler, Gauguin, Picasso, and Zuloaga" (24). Self-consciously decadent, he also infuriates practically everyone he encounters with his devil-may-care attitude and feigned savoir-faire. Stephen chooses to read this "excessive manner" as abnormal. Paul may claim that he is a unique artist, but he still remains dependent on the white press for recognition. It follows, Stephen argues, that Paul can achieve celebrity status only through his bizarre behavior, not his intellectual achievements. And since he is a Negro "subject to the snubs from certain ignorant people," the white press insists on seeing him as a racial stereotype, a decidedly ordinary figure. Unlike the white artists whom Paul emulates, then, he is still seen as representative by the white press, and he fights this image through campiness, decadence, and exaggeration; he fashions a personality that is de liberately "bizarre" and becomes a "most unusual Negro." Yet his histrionic actions only confirm Ray's hunch that" 'the more intellectual and talented Negroes of my generation are among the most pathetic people in the world today'" (225). In Ray's opinion, Paul has become a freak, abnormal. And as a prime example of the New Negro project, Paul turns the Harlem Renaissance into a freak show, a public spectacle "'peopled with improbable monsters'" (222). (5)

But Paul's odd behavior also makes perfect sense. Ray tells Stephen that" 'Harlem has become a state of mind, peopled with improbable monsters. There are a quarter million Negroes here, and it is fashionable to take notice of a bare thousand.... The rest are ignored. They're not interesting. Because we live in an age when only the abnormal is interesting'" (222). That is, the abnormal--the extraordinarily ordinary--has become the typical. The (white) press can see Paul only as a Negro--a racial artist--and, by extension, a "curiosity" (221). Paul strives to break out of this frame by refusing racial stereotypes that underscore the primitive or the folk. He chooses instead to capitalize on his notoriety, his difference within racial difference. Unlike Pelham, who recoils at the thought of becoming a walking scandal, Paul embraces excess to refute stereotypical images associated with the black race. But since the white press demands a public representative rather than a unique individual, Paul can only find fam e through a series of actions that become increasingly bizarre. He writes to the Shah of Persia and Gabriele D'Annunzio, informing them that he" 'do[es] not follow in the footsteps of the herd. For I too am an artist'" (223). This odd behavior culminates in his suicide, the only chance he finds "to make himself stand out from the mob." Having "wooed the unusual, cultivated artificiality, defied all conventions of dress and conduct...perhaps he had decided that there was nothing left for him to do except execute self-murder in some bizarre manner" (280-81). Like Pelham, Paul quite literally has to lose his personality--his private self--to become a public figure. Despite their disparate circumstances, Paul and Pelham are both ruined by the institutions of publicity.

So if celebrity status leads to suicide (or vice versa) and publication results in the loss of the private self and artistic integrity, how then can the black artist/celebrity maintain privacy in public? "'Negroes won't like me because they'll swear I have no race pride,'" Ray tells Steve, "'and white people won't like me because I won't recognize their stereotypes. Do you know Steve, I'm sick of discussing the Negro problem, of having it thrust at me from every conversational nook and cranny'" (214-15). It is interesting to note that the only survivor of Niggerati Manor's eventual downfall (besides Euphoria) is the one artist who refuses to expose his "own particular complex"--Ray Taylor (58). Unlike Paul, who insists on becoming a "most unusual Negro," and unlike Pelham, who unwillingly becomes a most unusual Negro, Ray tries to discard the marker of race altogether. As he tells Dr. Parkes, "'Can't you see that my generation, or at least the more forward of my generation, is tired of being patronized and pa tted on the head by philanthropists and social service workers? We don't always want to have to beg and do tricks. We want to lose our racial identity and be acclaimed for our achievements, if any'" (200). What Ray wants is to acknowledge the fact of racial difference--and then forget about it: "Could not Negroes and whites ever get together and act like normal individuals or must there always be this awareness of color and this striving to gain favor?" (95). Refusing the category of the public representative, he insists that the Negro artist has to be" 'an individualist. And that is the only type of Negro who will ever escape from the shroud of color, those who go about their own business, and do what they can, whether it be in business or in art'" (217; emphasis added).

Eleonore Van Notten reads Ray's "lack of race-loyalty" as a symptom of "Thurman's own sense of victimization, alienation, and injustice. He had been unable to develop any satisfactory race identity in a black environment in which his dark complexion marked him as inferior" (283). But it seems to me that this analysis fails for two reasons. First, Van Notten neglects to note that Ray longs for an artistic scene that devalues racial consciousness. And second, Ray never resides in a solely black environment. In fact, he refuses to be an "isolationist." Like the other Negro artists of Niggerati Manor, he appreciates his associations with many whites and chastises Dr. Parkes for his hypocritical behavior, since the race leader" 'always spend[s] fifty percent of [his] time in New York with white people'" (199). Ray's lack of race-loyalty instead seems to stem from his tenuous relationship to both the black and the white literary public sphere. Because both the black and the white presses fetishize race, he rightly argues that the Negro artist has become" 'a curiosity ... even to ourselves. It will be some years before the more forward will be accepted as human beings and allowed to associate with giants'" (221). Ray wants the Negro artist to be acclaimed for his intellectual property--his artwork--not his public personality. Only when Negro artists reject the role of the representative celebrity, he believes, will they be able to "go about their own business" and live as they please, regardless of yellow journalism or a public that might offer them "material aid" (198).

But when Ray struggles to "free himself from race consciousness" (147), he is soon thwarted by black publicity. Following Pelham's scandal, Samuel Carter, a white proponent of racial uplift, arrives with Dr. Parkes at Niggerati Manor. The two corner Ray and advise him to move out of the house. "'Now don't misunderstand,' Samuel spoke hurriedly. 'We may seem to be taking liberties with your personal affairs, but you'll understand, won't you, that we are your friends?'" (196). Samuel and Dr. Parkes justify this invasion of Ray's privacy because editorials in the black press have accused the New Negroes of "libeling their own people, injuring them, insulting them by being concerned only with Jezebels, pimps, and other underworld fauna. Thus they aided and abetted those whites who would have the world believe that the Negro was an inferior, worthless creature, not capable of appreciating or indulging in the better things in life" (197). As spokespersons for the Harlem community, both Sam and Dr. Parkes deride the residents of Niggerati Manor for their private associations (now publicized in the press). Fearful that these artists will become "public legends," Parkes tells Ray that, if the residents refuse to shape up, "the white light of publicity should be shed upon their activities and their innate viciousness and duplicity exposed to the world" (198). Ray scoffs at Parkes's remarks, telling him that" 'I agree with you perfectly. But I insist that it is my own business' " (200-01). Consistent with his individualist creed, Ray insists on his inherent right to be left alone. He affirms his privacy despite threats that the press will ruin his reputation, as it did Pelham's.

Perhaps this fiery exchange can explain why Ray has difficulty with writing in general. Concerned about his friend's lack of productivity, Stephen asks him,

"Just when are you going to begin work on your novel, Ray?"

"I don't know, Steve," Raymond had answered. "I can't get started. Something holds me back"

"Laziness?"

"Partially."

"Lack of material?"

"You know it isn't that. Haven't I often outlined the thing for you? I know that I want to write... but ..." He shrugged his shoulders. "Something holds me back."

Stephen had shifted his gaze and lit a cigarette.

"Are you afraid," he asked, "of exposing your own peculiar complex?" (58)

Despite appearances, what Ray fears is not necessarily "exposing his own peculiar complex." Rather, he fears exposure in general. Though he insists that the Negro artist must be judged by universal standards of artistic excellence, Ray is wary of presenting his work in the literary public sphere because he knows that he will be judged as a Negro, not as an individual. And he also knows that he will receive "material aid" only if he conforms to the demands of public representation (198). What he longs for, and what he obviously cannot have, is a space free from the white lights of publicity, a room of his own that will allow him to cultivate his particular artistic vision rather than speak for the race as a whole. And this condition, Thurman argues, is endemic for many New Negro artist/celebrities. Indeed, in Negro Life in New York's Harlem, Thurman wrote that "living conditions are ribald and ridiculous [for many working-class Negroes and Negro artists]. Rents are high and sleeping quarters at a premium.... T here is little privacy, little unused space" (12-13). Consequently. Thurman suggests that Negro artists were being forced to relinquish their private space in order to meet the escalating price of rent: "Hence we have hundreds of people opening up their apartments and houses to the public, their only stipulation being that the public pay twenty-five cents admission fee and buy plenty of the food and drinks offered for sale" (41).

It is for this reason that Ray has a panic attack after visiting Pelham in jail. Walking the streets of New York, "he wanted to be in the open, to be away from constricting walls, jabbering people, and ear deafening noises. But the street afforded a poor sanctuary....He grew dizzy, distraught, and unexpectedly found himself leaning against a building....He pressed harder and harder against the surface of the building. After what seemed like hours of effort, it gave way, and his body began to penetrate into its stone....He was safe in his cranny. The protective stone had entombed him" (206-07). Since his private home has become a public spectacle, and since his private life has become a public display, Ray strives to find some public niche where he is invisible, where he can be private in public, and where he can be free from the prying eyes of the press who patrol his activities and censure his writing. Like Ellison's Invisible Man, Ray too wants a hole where he is free from the pressures of racial identity. But he is called back from this "Nirvana" (206) when two police officers discover a "coon" lying in the city streets (208). Soon after he finds privacy within a public space, Ray is once again interpellated as a stereotype, a representative of the Negro race.

But ironically, Ray once had an "inviolate" private space. When Stephen enters his life, the two immediately forge a deep friendship:

Stephen had been in New York for a month now, and most of that month had been in company with Raymond. Their friendship had been something precious, inviolate, and genuine. They had become as intimate in that short period as if they had known each other since childhood. Infact, there was something delightfully naive and childlike about their frankly acknowledged affection for one other. Like children, they seemed to be totally unconscious of their racial difference. It did not matter that Stephen's ancestors were blond Norsemen, steeped in the tradition of the sagas, and that Raymond's ancestors were a motley ensemble without cultural bonds. It made no difference between them that one was black and the other white. There was something deeper than mere surface color which drew them together, something more vital and lasting than the shallow attraction of racial opposites.

Their greatest joy came when they could be alone together and talk ... talk about any and everything. They seemed to have so much to say to one another, so much that had remained unsaid all of their respective lives because they had never met anyone with whom they could converse unreservedly....It was only when their talk veered to Harlem that they found themselves sitting at opposite poles. (34-36)

In Stephen, Ray finds someone unconcerned about racial uplift and someone who does not demand that Ray speak for the black community. The two instead experience a "precious, inviolate, and genuine" relationship free from the burdens of racial representation. "It made no difference between them," the narrator states, "that one was black and the other white." Further, in contrast to the utilitarian salon that Dr. Parkes later tries to establish in order to promote the community's image, Stephen and Ray want something a bit more cosmopolitan. They do not feel the need to make art socially useful and together talk for hours about European writers: "To Raymond, Thomas Mann and Andre Gide were the only living literary giants. Andre Gide was not on Stephen's list, but Sigrid Undset was. Neither liked Shaw. They agreed that Dostoievsky was the greatest novelist of all time, but Stephen had only contempt for Marcel Proust, whom Raymond swore by, but didn't read" (35-36).

More importantly, unlike Dr. Parkes or Sam, Stephen does not take liberties with Ray's personal life. Though they share their ideas with one other, their private properties--their personalities--remain their own. The two inhabit, in the words of sociologist Georg Simmel, a zone of "free interaction and equivalence which is the fundamental condition of sociability" (135). And since race is not an issue, Ray and Stephen find "the most pleasurable, most transparent, and most engaging kind of interaction--that among equals" (Simmel 133). Interestingly, only when "their talk veer[s] to Harlem" do the two find themselves "sitting at opposite poles." In sum, this private/public space, Ray believes, presents the optimum conditions for artistic creativity. (6) Blacks and whites are not forced to speak from raced subject-positions, and individuals gather together to discuss and debate topics. In doing so a cosmopolitan community is forged. (7) And through this ideal, which Ray and Thurman both embrace, the artist's per sonal life is not policed; his right to privacy is assured; and, through pleasurable, equable conversation, new ideas emerge.

But this utopian atmosphere could not, and did not, sustain itself during the late 1920s and early 1930s. In fact, Stephen eventually leaves Niggerati Manor because he cannot look past "'the excrescences on the essential [Ray] ... that dovetail into the essential me'" (192). Though Ray is at first baffled by Stephen's departure, he later tells his friend that he empathizes with Stephen's "phobia": "'This environment is enough to provoke almost any type of mental or physical malady'" (193). This "emotional hangover" that Ray and Stephen both experience by the novel's conclusion recalls the night of the rent party mentioned in my introduction. As the party escalates, and inhibitions break down, "whites and blacks clung passionately together as if trying to effect a permanent merger. Liquor, jazz music, and close physical contact had achieved what decades of propaganda had advocated with little success. Here, Raymond thought, as he continued his search for Stephen, is social equality. Tomorrow all of them will h ave an emotional hangover. They will fear for their sanity, for at last they have had the chance to do openly what they only dared do clandestinely before" (186-87). Unlike Ray and Stephen's intimate talks, bodies connect at the rent party solely because of race. And according to Ray, this fascination with racial difference--in public print or in live sex acts--constitutes the core of the Harlem Renaissance: "This, he kept reminding himself, is the Negro renaissance, and this is about all the whole damn thing is going to amount to" (187).

There is little surprise, then, that Infants of the Spring closes with the bitterly ironic image of a "black skyscraper, modeled after Niggerati Manor, and on which were focused an array of blindingly white beams of light. The foundation of the building was composed of crumbling stone. At first glance it could be ascertained that the skyscraper would soon crumble and fall, leaving the dominating white lights in full possession of the sky" (284). Constantly under the spotlight, celebrated and censured by the public press, and derided for failing to produce redemptive art, Thurman's artist/celebrities purportedly never found the private space necessary to produce what the author considered to be lasting works of art. In his opinion, the "dominating white lights" of publicity overwhelmed their particular visions. Infants of the Spring's take on the Harlem Renaissance thus gives an entirely different twist to Hutchinson's suggestion that "it was not only [that] the New Negro experiment was co-opted and forgotten or repressed as it was absorbed" (341; emphasis added). Ray tries in vain to stave off the intrusive forces of publicity, to distance himself from "racial consciousness," to claim ownership of his personal image, and to maintain a private space conducive to original artistic production. Throughout the novel, he demands that his art be seen as an individual achievement and longs for the right to be left alone. Given the white and the black press's demand for a public representative, however, such an environment was an impossibility. Or, as Kevin J. Mumford contends, "Somehow, somewhere, black writers and creators had lost control of their subjects and with them, some of the Harlem Renaissance" (155). The Harlem Renaissance that Ray--and Wallace Thurman--wanted was definitely not the one they got.

Yet perhaps the most bitter irony in this heavily ironic novel is that Thurman himself, in order to expose this "white light of publicity," explodes the boundaries of public and private that his central protagonist so wants to maintain. Through the novel's romana-clef elements, Thurman could be accused of participating in the diminishment of Harlem Renaissance privacy. Revealing the personal lives of the black community's literary elites, Infants of the Spring too is obsessed with the private biographies of Harlem's artist/celebrities. But I believe the novel does so in order to illustrate the pernicious toll that the demand for a public representative takes on the African-American writer. For these Negro artists in their racial Manor, then, celebrity cost privacy. But as Infants of the Spring exemplifies through its fallen, failed characters and its tell-all narrative strategy, the price of fame paradoxically cost personality as well.

Terrell Scott Herring, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is writing a dissertation on American modernism, mass culture, and the politics of publicity. Mr. Herring offers his special thanks to Bill Maxwell and Tim Dean, discerning readers, astute teachers.

Notes

(1.) Here I also follow Harper in noting the legal precedents for this condition. Deftly reading Jane M. Gaines's reading of Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis's 1890 essay "The Right to Privacy," he suggests that the late-nineteenth-century piece "manifests the metonymic shift from concern for sacred precincts,' per se, to concern for the personal quality of the effects and activities potentially located in and associated with them" (51). Consequently, "what we witness [in 'The Right to Privacy'] is the movement from private life 'safe from the public eye' to the notion of the personal" (Gaines 180). Personality, that is, now becomes private property.

Though Harper does not historicize this shift, I would add that, by the mid-1920s, the mass public had expressed keen interest in questions of publicity and the invasion of privacy. Several best sellers were published that addressed the public's anxiety over the gaze of the press. One prime example, John Dewey's 1927 The Public and Its Problems, presents a scorching indictment of the institutions of publicity. Railing against advertisers and public relations specialists in rhetoric that practically mirrors Ray's response to Dr. Parkes, Dewey states that "the physical agencies of publicity which exist In such abundance are utilized in ways which constitute a large part of the present meaning of publicity: advertising, propaganda, invasion of private life, the 'featuring' of passing incidents which violates all the moving logic of continuity, and which leaves us with those isolated intrusions which are the essence of 'sensations'" (169). For Dewey, these institutions of publicity thwart "intellectual freedom." Individuals are terrified that they will no longer "own" their personal thoughts or their personal image (168).

For many, such excessive paranoia was well-founded. By the late thirties in fact, one figure--the star--was perpetually excluded from privacy right altogether. In the 1938 case Maxine Martin v. F. I. Y. Theatre Co., for example, the court decided that "persons who expose themselves to public view for hire cannot expect to have the same privacy as the meek, plodding stay-at-home citizen. The glamour, genuine or artificial, of that business removes the participants from the realm of the average citizen" (qtd. in Gaines 185). In other words, though the ordinary citizen considered her personality to be her private property, the celebrity's image was always seen as public property. As Daniel McQuail points out in an insightful essay on privacy and the mass media, "the star-system makes the personality of the star 'public property': it sanctions the invasion of privacy" (183; emphasis added). Some modern artist/celebrities, such as Moore, would have had little problem with this decision. The circulation of their pr ivate lives within the public press only served to heighten their status as stars. But for Ray, the need to differentiate between the work of art and the artist's image ("I intend to live just as I please") is acute, to say the least. The Lockean Dr. Parkeas would like for him to conflate the two and become a public representative. Ray refuses in order to maintain his diminishing right to privacy.

(2.) For more on the relationship between public representatives and literary celebrity, see Dyer; Carby.

(3.) For more on the vital role of the primitive in modern urban communities, see Torgovnick.

(4.) The term picture personalities comes from Richard deCordova's book of the same title. Exploring the emergence of the star system in early-twentieth-century American cinema, deCordova cites "three aspects of the picture personality's existence in [public] discourse: the circulation of the name; the 'image,' taken in the broad sense to denote both the actor's physical image and the personality that is represented as existing within or behind it; and a discourse on the actor's professional experience" (73). I have found this definition extremely useful in thinking through the relationship between the Negro artist and celebrity status.

(5.) For a detailed account of the freak show and its central role in the formation of America's national and racial identity, see Bogdan. Chapter 4, "Exotic and Aggrandized Modes of Presenting Freaks" is particularly pertinent to Paul's case.

(6.) This pleasurable space of equals is also a space of home-ness, of sameness. For more on the homoerotic and homosocial undercurrents of Thurman's text, see Amritjit Singh's foreword to the 1992 edition.

(7.) In Color & Culture, Ross Posnock notes that this ideal social space was the hope of many African-American intellectuals, traces of which were found in Hellenistic culture: "Greco-Roman Stoics developed the notion of a world citizen and stressed human interconnectedness" (11). This ancient model, which Posnock sees many black intellectuals and writers advocating, centers around "civic" participants "who are severed from family, tribe, class, and caste" (16).

Works Cited

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Carby, Hazel. Race Men. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of a Gay Male World. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

deCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996.

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Eberly, Rosa A. Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000.

Fisher, Randolph. "Harlem Manor." New York Herald Tribune Books 21 Feb. 1932:16.

Gaines, Jane M. Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black." Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 129-55.

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Harper, Philip Brian. Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations. New York: NYU P, 1999.

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. 1941. New York: Hill & Wang, 1963.

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Lewis, David Levering. When Hariem Was In Vogue. 1979. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Locke, Alain. "Enter the New Negro." Survey Graphic 6 (Mar. 1925): 631-34.

McQuail, Daniel. "The Mass Media and Privacy." Privacy. Ed. John B. Young. Chichester: John Wiley, 1978. 177-92.

Mumford, Kevin J. Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

Osofsky, Gilbert. Hariem, The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890-1930. New York: Harper, 1968.

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Simmel, Georg. "Sociability." 1910. On Individuality and Social Forms. Ed. Donald N. Levine. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971. 127-40.

Taylor, Louis. Rev. of Infants of the Spring. Opportunity 10 Mar. 1932: 89.

Thurman, Wallace. Infants of the Spring. 1932. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1992.

--. Negro Life in New York's Harlem: A Lively Picture of a Popular and Interesting Section. 1927. Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1928.

Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modem Lives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.

Van Notten, Eleonore. Wallace Thurman's Harlem Renaissance. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.