The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen

A New Edition of the Fiction that Defined the Harlem Renaissance

The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen

By Nella Larsen, introduction by Erika Renée Williams

296 pages. Everyman’s Library. $27.00.

There is a scene that occurs again and again in Black American fiction. It is the moment when, in an otherwise normal interaction, the racial hierarchy suddenly but inevitably re-asserts itself. Typically, a white character, who had seemingly been talking with a Black character as an equal, will subtly (but to all observers very clearly) invoke the color line, as a way of reminding the Black character of their inferior position. 

A particularly haunting example of such a scene takes place in Nella Larsen’s short story “Sanctuary.” In the deep south, a sheriff visits Annie, an elderly Black woman, to inform her that her son has been killed, but even here the sheriff makes sure to include his true feelings towards Black people: “Obadiah was a mighty fine boy. Ef they was all like him – I’m sorry, Annie.”

What makes the story so memorable is that Jim, the man who the police were looking for, is hiding in the house with Annie’s help. Until the police officer came, neither Jim nor Annie realized that Jim had killed Annie’s son (Jim had stabbed a man in a nighttime brawl, not knowing who his victim was). Hearing the sheriff’s words, Jim tenses up, afraid Annie will reveal his location; however, the racial menace of the police, underscored by the sheriff’s aside, is so hateful to Annie that she does not reveal that Jim is in her house. Once the police leave, Annie kicks Jim out, leaving him with these words: “Nevah stop thankin’ yo’ Jesus he done gib you dat black face.”

In Nella Larsen’s fiction, the dominating subject is not so much racism as racial solidarity. What does a Black person owe to other members of their race? Must they help each other evade racism, even those to whom they feel personal animus? Must they be political activists? These are the questions Larsen grappled with in the two novels she published during her brief literary career in the 1920s. And from pressing on these two questions, she found not answers but art.

In her novel Quicksand, Larsen turned her gaze towards how the Black community can assert hierarchies of its own through class or colorism. The protagonist is a young woman named Helga Crane, who, at the start of the novel, has grown sick of her job as a teacher at a prestigious Black academy in the south. The place is too strict, too parochial for her, and gives too much power to the members of prominent Black families. Before leaving, she meets with the head of the school, whose lofty rhetoric almost causes her to decide to remain on as a teacher, until he tells her, “You have dignity and breeding.”

This last aside reminds Helga that her worth at the school will always be partly judged on her background – and that, despite the head’s seemingly kind words, she will always be looked down on for coming from a poor, mixed-race family, with a gambling-addicted father and a white mother. Disgusted, she leaves the school for her home of Chicago, and from there travels to Harlem, eventually moving in with Anne, the niece of a prominent Black civil leader and herself an outspoken advocate for Black uplift.

Unlike Anne, Helga Crane is an aesthete. She has no interest in social issues, and faintly scorns political engagement – the whole idea of Black uplift or even civil rights activism bores her. She prefers to occupy herself with decadent books, exotic home furnishings, colorful dresses, and nightclubs. At first, the glamor and freedom of Harlem seem perfect for her – the struggles of the rest of Black America are distant in Harlem, and Helga is able to cultivate her sense of beauty. But after a year or so, Helga begins to feel alienated once more, as if she is somehow out of place.

Helga travels to Copenhagen, where she has family on her mother’s side. In Denmark, she is a curiosity; her family treats her well, she is quickly inserted into the city’s social circles, and a prominent local artist paints her portrait. Despite the seeming advantages of Denmark compared to America for a Black woman, Helga’s position in the country is not a completely free one. The artist who paints Helga’s portrait also asks Helga to marry him, but not before making some remarks indicating she is of loose sexual morality; her family, too, pressures her into this match. It is in Copenhagen, more so than anywhere else Helga visits, that she is confronted with the idea that she is someone else’s property, and that her only purpose in life is to do the bidding of her owners. Helga leaves Europe and returns to America, where she goes through several more personal convulsions, never finding, despite her great hopes, anywhere she feels permanently at home in.

Quicksand is Larsen’s best work. It is a very pessimistic book: happiness is ephemeral, disappointment all-pervasive, and God non-existent. What marks it out from other pessimistic American fiction of its time period, besides the perceptive reflections on racism and African-American life, is its narrow focus on Helga’s spiritual journey, which Larsen treats with sympathy and seriousness. Life may be a joke, a folly, a march of suffering to the void, but Helga’s aspirations are not a delusion – they are an indication that she is reaching towards the highest questions of life.

Helga’s spiritual discontent comes partially from her disgust at the pervasiveness of race as a means of organizing human beings, as well as that of an aesthete in a commercial, utilitarian milieu but finally also the particular discontent of a Black woman in this situation. To get married and have children is practically the only respectable option anyone thinks she has (and all the non-respectable options are likewise connected to sex). Indeed, Anne, Helga’s roommate in Harlem, frames Helga’s reluctance to get married as part of a broader social problem: “The race is sterile at the top. Few, very few Negroes of the better class have children.” That perpetuating a race is just about the most spiritually and emotionally “sterile” reason to start a family is no doubt part of the reason Helga feels trapped in Harlem, even among putative members of her own race.

Most of the characters in Quicksand, as well as in Passing, are among the upper crust of Black society, and they generally avoid speaking in any kind of city slang, and especially not in any Black vernacular. Larsen too avoids writing in urban American English, and instead deploys a very formal, latinate prose. She is not always successful; she over-uses adverbs, and she can lapse into writing very stilted, abstract, and bad sentences: “Subsequent failures had augmented her feeling of incompetence, but she resented the fact that these clerks were evidently aware of her unsuccess.”

But Larsen’s prose also has a rhythm to it, a flow that makes her novels very engaging reads. The close (but third-person) focus on the thoughts and feelings of Helga Crane allows the prose to have an intimacy, as in this description of Helga’s experience watching a revival at a Black church: “And as Helga watched and listened, gradually a curious influence penetrated her; she felt an echo of the weird orgy resound in her own heart; she felt herself possessed by the same madness; she too felt a brutal desire to shout and sling herself about.” The adjectives “curious,” “weird,” and “brutal” might not seem to add much, but they emphasize the emotional upheaval that strikes Helga at this point. The repetition of “felt” is not as distracting as you would think it would be; it too brings us closer to Helga. Prose like this makes us feel, by the end of the novel, that we have lived Helga’s life.

Passing, Larsen’s second novel, is about what happens when the color line is hidden, and the tensions that build in anticipation of its being revealed. In Chicago, Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black woman visiting the city from Harlem, is able to have tea on the roof of a fancy hotel because she passes for white. “They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a Gypsy,” she thinks. Unexpectedly, she meets with Clare Kendry, an old childhood friend who is also passing for white. But Clare takes passing to another level: she is married to a white man who knows nothing about her racial background, and is in fact extremely racist.

Clare’s husband is a banker, and had taken her across Europe, but now Clare lives with him in New York, and she wants to experience life in Harlem. Unlike Helga Crane, who keeps herself at a remove from whatever scene she finds herself in, Clare seems to dive in deeply, without much reflection, to whatever pleasures are on offer wherever she ends up. She is soon a fixture of Harlem parties, particularly racially mixed ones where she dances with both Black and white men. As she does this, she inserts herself more and more into the well-ordered life of Irene, threatening to upend her calm, middle-class domestic life.

As Clare grows more and more bold in her secret life as a Black woman (while still playing the role of a white woman to her husband), Irene comes to a hideous moral quandary: she can reveal to Clare’s husband that Clare has been passing for white, or can she can continue to have her life overtaken by this interloper from her past. This climax has a moral gravity that cannot be solved; its mystery and irreconcilability is what has made Passing gather more and more appreciative readers since its first publication.

Nella Larsen’s fiction has been republished with some regularity in the past three decades. Even so, it is gratifying to see a new edition of her complete fiction (which consists of just two novels and three short stories), with an illuminating introduction by the scholar Erika Renée Williams. Quicksand and Passing complement each other when read together. One is an epic and the other a tragedy, and their two perspectives seem to sum up the emotional life of their era.

As I wrote above, Larsen created fiction defined by its artistry, not its political message. My sense is that she shared some of Helga Crane’s mistrust of prominent Black activists in Jazz Age Harlem. They are too moralistic and too parochial, composed of a small elite that share all the same slogans but are afraid to confront white supremacy. At the same time, her fiction shows that there is no easy way for a Black person, even a rich and energetic one, to simply opt out of a racist world. The word “passing” is close, in sound and etymology, to the word “passive.” Only some of Larsen's characters can pass as white but almost all of them are passive. When they have a choice to make in their life, they try to ignore or avoid it, and they prefer a life of comfort to a life of struggle. These are not just personal foibles: they are in part the result of racism, which in Quicksand and Passing appears largely in its negative characteristics, as a force that covers parts of the world and parts of life in a shadowy darkness. After “Sanctuary” was published, a minor literary scandal erupted around Nella Larsen,¹ and she would never again complete any work of fiction.

1.  Larsen was accused of plagiarism: critics pointed out that her story “Sanctuary” very closely resembled another short story published several years before: "Mrs. Adis" by Sheila Kaye-Smith. She had her defenders at the time, though scholars today that Larsen very likely did base “Sanctuary” on "Mrs. Adis" in the way her detractors alleged. Erika Renée Williams, who wrote the introduction to this volume of Larsen’s fiction, has also found other instances of plagiarism from Larsen, as Wiliams documents her in article “A Lie of Omission: Plagiarism in Nella Larsen's Quicksand.” However, since this article sits behind an academic paywall, I am unable to assess Williams’s claims.