by Philipp Blom
After his visit to Russia, McKay remained in Europe for another twelve years. He traveled to Germany, then to France, where he settled for several years in the Paris expat community; after that he continued to Spain and Morocco. His restlessness may have been accentuated by his homosexuality, which also made him feel like a pariah, a man who could never take for granted that he would not be viciously attacked. But in contrast to older intellectuals such as Du Bois, who were full of hope for a better future, McKay felt that the war had shattered many of the ideals he had grown up to love: “And now this great catastrophe has come upon the world, proving the real hollowness of nationhood, patriotism, racial pride, and most of the things one was taught to respect and reverence.”23
To McKay and his generation, respect and reverence were yesterday’s virtues. A new and very different culture was celebrated in Harlem, and it attracted not only tourists but also other artists who were ready to understand the rhythms of the “new Negro” as the heartbeat of their own time. Their interest was not so much in the political debates within the black community but in its vibrant, defiant, and joyous cultural life.
The Creation of the World
BLACK MUSIC, HOWEVER, did not remain in a cultural ghetto. It was already being played on Broadway as well as uptown in Harlem, with Noble Sissle and the great ragtime pianist Eubie Blake producing highly popular black musicals as early as 1921. The 1920s musical was something quite different from its predecessor of earlier decades, the Viennese-style operetta; rather than “a play dotted with occasional songs . . . [it] was essentially a garland of songs and dances strung on a thin plot line, with occasional spectacular ‘production numbers’ planned at strategic points.”24
Although the field was dominated by white composers such as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and George and Ira Gershwin, the traffic-jam success of Sissle and Blake’s Shuffle Along and Chocolate Dandies had launched some legendary careers, including those of singer Paul Robeson and dancer Josephine Baker, at the time a teenage chorus girl.
Shuffle Along, described by Langston Hughes as “a honey of a show, bright, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes,” was the first production with black writers and an all-black cast to run in the heart of New York’s entertainment mile.25 During its phenomenal run of 484 nights, black audience members were no longer relegated to the balcony but sat in the main-floor seats, following a story whose characters were not burlesque minstrels but people with emotional complexity and depth, and whose music was inspired not by white vaudeville but by jazz bands.
The composer George Gershwin had first heard jazz when he was a child—he had roller-skated past a club and been spellbound by the sounds emanating from within. He came back time and again to immerse himself in the syncopations, unfamiliar harmonies, and song lines of this music, which he himself would later help to make famous with works such as Rhapsody in Blue (premiered 1924), which announced a new era from its very first tones, a drawn-out, dirty glissando on a solo clarinet that continues to cackle and laugh and eventually is joined by a muted trumpet and then by a piano.
There are still original recordings and piano rolls on which Gershwin himself plays the piece—his style not grand and symphonic but playful, fast-paced, and punctuated by stomps and whirls, conjuring up the image of exuberant revelers on a late-night dance floor somewhere in Harlem. The way was open for other composers to assimilate elements of jazz into their work, be it Maurice Ravel in the wonderful blues movement of his violin sonata (1923–1927), William Walton in his Façades extravaganza for voice and band (1923), or French composer Darius Milhaud, who had come across jazz on a visit to Harlem a year before the 1923 premiere of his ballet suite La création du monde.
Jazz was fun and new, but it could also send a political message. Opera composers began to use jazz elements as a signature of the new era, an era of universal human rights and of stories belonging to the little people, whether in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), in Ernst Krenek’s Johny spielt auf (1927), whose protagonist is a black jazz musician and which created a political scandal and was picketed by hordes of angry Nazis in front of the theaters, or in the early stage works of Kurt Weill, who would eventually go on to write Mahagonny (1927) and The Threepenny Opera (1930).
The range and complexity of black culture in a wider cultural sphere is epitomized by two stars of the stage whose character and ambitions could not have been more different. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1906, Josephine Baker had learned her musical craft in Shuffle Along but soon felt ready to strike out on her own, and in 1925 she starred in La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. The show was a wild success and went on tour through Europe.
Globe-trotting aesthete and diarist Harry Graf Kessler met Baker in Berlin the next year, at the home of playwright Karl Vollmoeller. Having been promised that “fabulous things” would happen that night, the cosmopolitan count recorded in his diary that he found the men “surrounded by half a dozen of naked girls and Miss Baker, stark naked but for a red gauze loincloth and the little Landshoff girl . . . as a boy in a dinner jacket. . . . The naked girls were lounging or dancing in between the four or five men in their dinner jacket, and the Landshoff girl, who really looks a picture of a boy, was dancing modern jazz dances with Baker to the sounds of the gramophone.”26 Berlin decadence had arrived.
The American dancer Josephine Baker became an international star, causing scandal and sensation wherever she went.
Baker’s skyrocketing fame rested in equal parts on her uninhibited sex appeal and her uncomplicated willingness to play to colonialist and racist stereotypes. Her most famous outfit consisted of nothing but a banana skirt combined with heavy, “oriental” necklaces and earrings and perfectly slicked-back hair, and occasionally offset with a huge tail of ostrich feathers. Her carefully honed appearance was a perfect mix of an imaginary Africa where all inhibitions stayed behind and a sophisticated, ultramodern sensibility of sleek, abstract stage sets and jazz rhythms. Her wildly ecstatic dances were sufficiently indecent to see her appearances banned in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Munich, which only increased her magnetic appeal to a public for whom she had become an orientalist erotic fantasy incarnate.
Like Baker, the actor and singer Paul Robeson owed his success to the stage and to his skill at portraying black characters in a predominantly white theater, but that is where the similarities end. Robeson was a college football star and class valedictorian who went on to graduate from Columbia Law School—an astonishingly accomplished young man who had drifted into acting as an extracurricular pastime and soon found himself starring in an off-Broadway production of Shuffle Along, as well as other plays. He had not intended to become an actor and actually worked as a lawyer for a while, but the racism he encountered in the legal profession, on the one hand, and his handsome physique, his phenomenally resonant bass-baritone voice, and the natural dignity of his appearance, on the other, made him an almost instant star at a time when many “African” roles were still played by white actors in blackface.
Robeson’s breakthrough came with Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, effectively a one-man play telling the story of an escaped convict who becomes emperor of a Caribbean island, only to be killed by the superstitious islanders. His success in that play led him to appear in the musical Showboat and to become one of the first black actors to play Othello, in London. Despite his distinguished career, Robeson constantly had to battle with racist attitudes and, in the United States, segregation. He became increasingly uneasy performing of a heritage that was not his own, and eventually enrolled at the University of London to study African languages and recover the historical roots of his identity. His interest in the cultural background of African Americans went hand in hand with a political awakening and gradual radicalization, which would eventually lead him to visit the Soviet Union and to become actively involved in politics.
“The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” wrote Willa Cathe
r in her essay collection Not Under Forty.27 The two parts resulting from this breakup were “the forward-goers” and “the backward,” the latter essentially those born before the last decade of the nineteenth century, with Cather herself “one of their number.” “The backward” showed little sustained interest in the Harlem Renaissance—O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones notwithstanding—but neither did America’s younger white writers, Cather’s “forward-goers.” Progressives such as John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck stuck to what they knew, and the decadents and cynics and experimenters—Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, Thomas Wolfe, and even, briefly, William Faulkner—were all in Paris, in the middle of their “summer of 1,000 parties.”28
·1923·
Beyond the Milky Way
On this plate (H335H), three stars were found, 2 of which were novae, and 1 proved to be a variable, later identified as a Cepheid—the first to be recognized in M31.
—Edwin Hubble, 1923
ON OCTOBER 5, 1923, ON MOUNT WILSON IN PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, our place in the universe was overturned forever. Edwin Hubble, a thirty-three-year-old astronomer and former high school teacher who had been working at the Mount Wilson Observatory for four years, wrote that he had discovered a Cepheid variable star within the galaxy known as M31 or Andromeda. Self-confident and ebullient, Hubble knew the importance of his discovery and could not wait to notify his predecessor at Mount Wilson, the astronomer Harlow Shapley, with whom he was engaged in a professional but not always very cordial rivalry.
Shapley had made a name for himself five years earlier with a series of papers on the size and architecture of our galaxy, the Milky Way. In contrast to received opinion, he had argued that it was larger by a factor of ten than the span of thirty thousand light-years that had been previously estimated. He had also made another startling claim: in this larger galaxy, containing uncounted stars and planets, our sun was not at the center—in fact, it was not anywhere near the center. Our solar system, one of a vast number of solar systems, was positioned on the sidelines of the immense Milky Way, sixty-five thousand light-years away from the galaxy’s center.
Though only a comparatively junior staff astronomer at Mount Wilson, Shapley was aware of the psychological implications of his discovery, as he wrote to his employer, George Ellery Hale: “The first man, away back in the later Pliocene, who knocked out a hairy elephant with his club, or saw his pretty reflection, or received a compliment, became suddenly conceited (it was a mutation) and there immediately evolved the first reflective thought in the world. It was: ‘I am the center of the Universe!’ Whereupon he took himself a wife, transmitted this bigotry of his germ plasm, and through hundreds of thousands of years the same thought without much alteration has been our heritage.”1 With his confident assertion, Shapley demolished the delusion to which a whole species had been subject.
A brilliant author with a robust sense of his own abilities, Shapley had seen his great chance when he was invited to present his opinions to an audience of specialists in “The Great Debate,” a confrontation in 1920 between the two most important but as yet unprovable views of the nature of the universe. While his opponent had argued that the Milky Way was not the only galaxy in space and that other nebulae that had been observed were in fact independent galaxies, Shapley had taken the position that most astronomers then agreed on: that there were no stars, nothing at all, outside the Milky Way and that our galaxy effectively constituted the entire universe. His fellow astronomers had duly taken note of the thirty-five-year-old Shapley and rewarded him the same year with the directorship of Harvard College Observatory.
A New Eye into Space
IN 1923, EDWIN HUBBLE was still a relative beginner in professional astronomy, but like Shapley, he was possessed of a firm belief in his own powers. Having studied mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy in Chicago and jurisprudence, Spanish, and literature at Oxford, he had returned from Britain after his father’s death in 1913 in order to help support his mother and siblings. After a year of high school teaching, however, he had gone back to school at the age of twenty-five to work toward a doctorate in astronomy. He spent the war years in the army but did not see active service, remaining in the United States with the rank of major. In 1919 Hubble was offered his first position as an astronomer, at Mount Wilson Observatory. He would continue to work there for the rest of his life.
Two years before Hubble’s arrival, the observatory had been fitted with the new Hooker telescope, the most powerful then in operation. It was a gigantic technological achievement. The 100-inch mirror at its center was ground in California from an enormous glass disc cast at the Saint-Gobain plant in Paris, then transported up a perilous dirt road to the observatory on the back of an early Mack truck. Installed with immense care, it saw first light in November 1919, giving California astronomers an instrument whose resolution and precision were unrivaled anywhere in the world.
Hubble set out to test the hypothesis that the universe might consist of multiple galaxies and that the Milky Way is only one among many. To reach a conclusion, he needed to have a reliable means of measuring the distance between Earth and any celestial object captured by his telescope. In the case of relatively close astronomical objects, the method involved fairly simple trigonometry: scientists measured the apparent change in position of a star at both extremes of Earth’s orbit around the sun, and then inserted that figure into a simple equation.
For very distant objects, however, the difference between the two observation points was not large enough to provide a useful result, and a different method was needed. It was found in a paper written twenty years earlier by a little-known but brilliant astronomer, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who had worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a “computer” for her male colleagues, cataloguing celestial data collected on photographic plates—a slow, painstaking, and boring job far below her intellectual capacities.
Leavitt had posited that a particular class of celestial objects, the so-called Cepheids, which were characterized by a periodic change in their brightness, might be used for such distance measurements. The full cycle of the dimming and intensifying of the light emanating from the star could vary from a few days to a few weeks depending on the object, but it was always stable in any single object. She assumed that the length of the cycle was determined by the size of the star, and that stars of the same size would have the same brightness and periodicity. By determining the period of a star, it was possible to draw conclusions about its size and therefore its maximum brightness. The further away a star was, the less bright it would seem from Earth. But if the period of a distant object was known, its distance could be determined by measuring its apparent brightness and contrasting that with its actual brightness according to its periodicity. The loss in luminosity became a measure of the distance.
Harlow Shapley had used Leavitt’s technique in his observations, which resulted in a vastly larger Milky Way than previously thought. Hubble, however, wanted to go much further. The new 100-inch telescope enabled him to find objects that had been all but impossible to identify and describe before. By measuring their period and brightness, he would be able to calculate their distance from Earth. The work took many long and cool nights in the observatory, its roof opened to the stars and the telescope moving almost imperceptibly slowly to keep up with Earth’s rotation. Hubble and his assistant would train the telescope on a spot in the night sky and take photographs with exposure times ranging from a few minutes to several hours. He needed to identify some faint signal that had not been analyzed before, evidence of a star that was too far away to be part of the Milky Way.
On October 5, 1923, Hubble recorded in his notebook that he had identified a Cepheid that was part of the Andromeda nebula, known to astronomers as M31. Shapley had calculated that Andromeda was a distant part of our own galaxy and that nothing lay behind it. But Hubble’s photographic plate of the Andromeda nebula, which to the untrained eye appears as a large s
mudge with fuzzy edges surrounded by irregular specks of stars, revealed a Cepheid that he calculated had a period of 31,415 days, making it a giant star seven thousand times brighter than the Sun.
The recorded star was so dim that it could not have been measured without Mount Wilson’s powerful new telescope. Its faintness and the length of its period indicated that the star must be one million light-years away from Earth, far outside the confines of Shapley’s Milky Way. The only possible conclusion was that there were stars and entire galaxies outside our own. “Dear Shapley,” he wrote with deceptive friendliness when his calculations were concluded in February of the following year, “You will be interested to hear that I have found a Cepheid variable in the Andromeda Nebula (M31). I have followed the nebula this season as closely as the weather permitted and in the last five months have netted nine novae and two variables.”2 Driving home his victory, he appended extensive data that proved his point.
Hubble went on to make further discoveries, the most important among which was his explanation for the redshift in the color of distant galaxies. It had already been assumed that the observable color shift in the appearance of celestial objects had some relation to their motion relative to Earth, namely, that the light waves of bodies moving toward Earth at great speed would be compressed and therefore appear slightly shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum, while objects moving away from the observer would have their light waves effectively lengthened and would appear redder than they would if they were stationary. Hubble could show that all distant celestial objects showed some redshift and that the change is more marked the further away the objects are, indicating that the more distant objects are traveling at greater speeds.
Through his observations, Hubble could express the distance and speed of a star in relation to its redshift in a mathematical formula, but he failed to grasp the last implication: if galaxies are moving away from one another, they must once have been closer together, much closer, and an event of immense force billions of years ago must have hurled them into space. It fell to the Belgian astronomer and priest Georges Lemaître to make the obvious connection in 1927: a universe that was still expanding away from a central point must have emerged from a “Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation.”3 The Big Bang was born in all but name.
