by Dorothy West
He was Wallie to his friends, and his sycophants were legion. He could “dish it out” and there was no tongue that could return it. Perhaps if Harlem had produced his disillusion in drink, under his leadership something better might have come out of that period than the hysterical hosannas that faded on the subsequently stilly night.
Thurman was a slight man, nearly black, with the most agreeable smile in Harlem and a rich, infectious laugh. His voice was without accent, deep and resonant; it was the most memorable thing about him, welling up out of his too frail body and wasting its richness in unprintable recountings.
Oscar and Beulah Thurman had been responsible for his birth in Salt Lake City, Utah, on a hot August day in 1902. They were a mismated pair and indifferent parents. He was soon turned over to his maternal grandmother, who raised him and gave him as much love as was left to an aging woman who had been drained by her own brood.
Thurman had come into the world the unwanted shade of black. He was not his mother’s pride and joy, and his undesirability was made apparent to him. In his book The Blacker the Berry, the dedication reads: “To Beulah, the goose who laid the not-so-golden egg.”
He was determined to be a success, and through inclination chose the spectacular field of writing. His father was rapidly rolling downhill, and his mother was adding little to the family luster by her uncertain occupation in another city. In Thurman’s mind, to the handicap of color was added the tremendous task of overriding his heritage.
He read about the goings-on in New York, where Negroes and whites were mingling socially to discuss that elephant’s dance, Negro writing, remarkable not so much because it was writing, but because it was Negro writing.
He was twenty-three, and had just received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, where he had gone after four gainful years at the University of Utah.
He was writing a column called “Inklings” in The Pacific Defender, a Negro paper, doing pieces of topical interest on mildly controversial subjects, when wind of the “renaissance” blew West. He got very excited about it and was young enough to feel inspired. There in New York people like Carl Van Vechten, Fannie Hurst, H. L. Mencken, the Van Dorens, and others equally well known were talking shop with newly arrived young Negroes no older and maybe no wiser than himself. Their things were being published and hailed as masterpieces. Contests were in progress, and hotels heretofore closed to Negroes were hired for the award presentations.
Calling on the young Negro college graduates who were his contemporaries, Thurman tried to organize a literary group in Los Angeles. His friends, however, had not followed the Eastern activities with his interest. He tried to be a movement all by himself, and started a paper, which he personally financed. It failed, but he had a lot of fun doing it. After this abortive attempt to revolutionize the West, Thurman headed East.
Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Bruce Nugent, Rudolph Fisher, Jean Toomer, Eric Walrond were the new names. Thurman was later to say of Cullen, “[He] looms forth as the premier poet. There is a great possibility of his running dry, that is of exhausting his fund of inspiration.” And of Hughes, “[He] is by far the most original of the poetic group, if not a conscious craftsman. His potential worth is unpredictable and immeasurable.” Jean Toomer, Thurman felt, was the only Negro writer who had the elements of greatness. Toomer, however, has written little since his memorable Cane, and is far removed from Negro living.
A few older writers, Jessie Fauset, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Claude McKay, had preceded the renaissance. Although they were writers to be reckoned with, their age and activities set them apart from this younger group whose high spirits kept it on a continual round of gaieties. When the dawn came up like thunder, the new luminaries were still ablaze. Thurman fitted patly into this gayer crowd. Only Cullen, remote in his lyricism from the primal earthiness which Thurman extolled, looked at him askance.
There were a brief three months after his arrival when Thurman had no job and very little money. He said of that period, “I knew only one person in New York, and I wandered around for two or three months. Then I got a newspaper job, but the newspaper failed. Then I landed on the Messenger [Negro magazine now defunct, then under the capable editorship of A. Philip Randolph]. Then I was offered a job on The World Tomorrow, as circulation manager.”
The intermittent periods of unemployment did not matter, for that was the great sponge era; you ate at anyone’s mealtime, and conveniently got too tight to go home at your host’s bedtime. There were other means of survival. Downtown whites were more than generous. You opened your hand; it closed over a five spot. Or you invited a crowd of people to your studio, charged them admission, got your bootlegger to trust you for a gallon or two of gin, sold it at fifteen cents a paper cup, and cleared enough from the evening’s proceedings to pay your back rent and your bootlegger. There was usually sufficient money left to lay in a week’s supply of liquor and some crackers and sardines.
Thurman had settled in a private house, whose owner, a Negro woman realtor, thereupon turned it into a haven for the serious as well as for the pseudo litterateur. She was greatly attracted to Thurman because he was educated and knew with growing intimacy the Negro writers whose names had heretofore been only a bright legend to her. Thurman’s room with kitchenette, which his landlady called a studio, became the gathering point for whoever had the price of a pound of bologna or could contribute toward a jug of gin.
The landlady acquired the habit of dropping in, which had its advantages, since her sociability made it hard for her to be unsocial about the rent. She soon confessed her literary aspirations, however, and brought in her manuscripts expressly for approval. When an escaping splutter from Thurman released the pent-up laughter of the others, she was deeply wounded. Then and now a race-conscious woman, she cooled toward Thurman when his widening circle began to include unknown whites who were seen too often and at too odd hours coming in and out of the house. Thurman found another furnished room.
Later this landlady provided comic relief in his novel Infants of the Spring. When she recognized her likeness, she was loud in her reproaches. Voicing her feelings in the Negro press, she stated that should Thurman ever dare cross her path, she would yank him into her house, put him to bed until he sobered—she swore he would be drunk as always—and spend a satisfying morning telling him exactly what she thought of him. They did not meet, which was a pity, for each was genuinely fond of the other.
Thurman’s first job on the Negro periodical The Looking Glass lasted long enough for the appearance of his review of The New Negro, Alain Locke’s analysis of the flourishing period. Of this book Thurman wrote, “In it [The New Negro] are exemplified all of the virtues and all of the faults of this new movement, even to a hint of its speciousness. Many have wondered what this Negro literary renaissance has accomplished other than providing white publishers with a new source of revenue, affording the white intellectuals with a ‘different’ fad and bringing a half a dozen Negro artists out of obscurity.”
He was acquiring cynicism already and biting the hand that was feeding him. To him there were only one or two whites who did not patronize. The rest were exploiters, and since they were the important people, one must either wrap a handkerchief around one’s head or steadily insult them. This last, which was Thurman’s way, they found amusing, for they considered the Negro a childish creature not to be taken seriously. Thurman was a bad boy and therefore doubly endearing. Where the others were sometimes too docile, he was full of delightful surprises.
His attitude was no deterrent to job-getting and, although he continued to sponge on his friends, he was rarely unemployed. It was his way to carry a check for days, invite a succession of friends out for the evening, show them the check and bewail his inability to identify himself to the waiter. His guests would pay the bill. Since he was always stimulating, neither party was the loser. He rarely tried this trick with his own young friends. Instead he would inv
ite a string of them to join him as his guests, and an unsuspecting downtowner would foot the bill for the lot of them. The fall guy would expand with simple kindness while Thurman and his coterie went into peals of laughter which he imagined were peculiar to Negroes after a hearty meal.
Thurman was writing steadily, but just as steadily his life was growing more hectic, and his philosophy more confused. It was his nature to pull the pedestal out from under the plaster gods of other people.
He hated Negro society, and since dark skins have never been the fashion among Negro upper classes, the feeling was occasionally mutual. In The Blacker the Berry the dark-skinned heroine suffered many of the humiliations he would not have admitted having suffered himself. The book’s intent is satirical, but because of angry overemphasis it becomes a diatribe. He makes his black heroine more than a little unsympathetic, and color screams from every page. He appears in the book as Truman Walter, describing himself as “a small, slender, dark youth with an infectious smile and small features.” It is an accurate description, and the only complimentary one of a black person in the book. To the social group which he despised the book was not revelatory, for Thurman was never humble or apologetic, and he laughed very hard when things hurt him most.
Negro society was taking itself very seriously in those days. Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven was thought to be a documentary record of the way its wheels went round, and Harlem had become a mecca for the thrill-seekers. Downtowners sought any means to gain entree to uptown parties. Van Vechten could hardly lead the throng, for his unfortunate choice of title for his book, the exotic types he had portrayed as typifying Negro society, the whole exposé, caused a quick successive slamming of doors by all but the few close friends from whom he had drawn his chief characters.
Harlem, however, had had a taste of white patronage and had found it sweet to the palate. There was no party given which did not have its quota of white guests. The artists were the liaison group. They were not exactly an exemplary lot, but they knew the downtowners. A carefully worded note from a Harlem hostess, requesting them to bring a friend, color unimportant, would be correctly interpreted.
It was Thurman’s delight to take a whole entourage of whites, some of them sleazy, to these parties. He earned the enmity of many hostesses by his companions’ silly behavior and his own inability not to pass out and be carried bodily from a party. The conservative group disinherited him. Though he despised them for their insularity and their spring of privileged whites, still he allowed himself to personalize their changed attitude and to believe it was his black skin that had made him déclassé. He mocked their manners and their bastard beginnings, and divorced himself completely from a conventional way of life.
It was during this period that he first read Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Comparing as best he could the decaying European culture which Mann depicted and the confusion of life among the Negro upper classes, he urged his followers to read the book carefully. His enthusiasm bore fruit, and it was not long before his intimate friends, and those who received the suggestion secondhand, were walking through the streets and going to call with copies of The Magic Mountain under their arms.
Negro leadership was vested in the upper classes and Thurman could see little hope for the future from his observation of the imitative behavior of the men and women of this class. His social renunciation of them was quickly followed by intellectual renunciation, crystallized for the first time. He was equally hard on the nationalists and miscegenists, but he had no personal theory which he could substitute for those which he rejected.
Thurman’s life and emotions were increasingly complex. He began to surround himself with a queer assortment of blacks and whites of the lost generation. They clung to him like leeches, and although he saw them clearly and could evaluate them in a half dozen brutal words, he chose to allow them to waste the valuable hours of his ripening maturity. In his book Infants of the Spring, which tells their sad mad story, Thurman, who was admittedly the prototype of the hero, spoke in character when he wrote, “I cannot bear to associate with the ordinary run of people. I have to surround myself with individuals, unusual individuals, who for the most part are more than a trifle insane. Unless buttressed by stimulating personalities I am lost, no matter how despicable or foolish those personalities may appear in retrospect. They are the life of me … I am forced to surround myself with case studies in order not completely to curdle and sour.”
His way of living was almost wholly on the tawdry side. His friends were no longer confined to his writing colleagues. The profitless conversations and philosophical discussions which resulted in nothing constructive had finally wearied him. Now he held open house for the precious young men who were his new satellites, and had no privacy except in the rare moments of rage when he turned them out of his room, thoroughly castigated himself, and wrote for an uninterrupted stretch of forty-eight hours. Occasionally, too, he escaped to the suburban home of a married friend, and lived in peace and normalcy until a writing job was finished.
In the suburban home his sanity returned, and he always came back to the city with a sense of something lost. There was a child in that suburban haven whom Thurman loved. He wanted a child and was afraid that he had wasted his energy and would never be a father. He wanted to be thoroughly male and was afraid that he was not. He looked about his narrowing circle, and of the few women on the fringe of that group, there was none whom he would have wed.
Suddenly in the summer of 1928 he married. It was precipitous and provided a comic morsel for his entourage for months. Inevitably, he chose the first fresh face that pierced the thick fog of his horizon. The marriage was ill-fated from the start. Thurman uprooted himself and went housekeeping with his bride and her mother. His wife had been a teacher of business in a Negro college. Lately arrived in New York, she was thoroughly unfamiliar with bohemianism. Other women, however, were marrying artists and firmly entrenching themselves in Negro society. Thurman’s possibilities were realizable enough to make him a desirable husband.
The marriage lasted about six months. Thurman had long wanted to be a father, but he had not taken into consideration that he must first be a husband. When he did, it was too late to unlearn his oft-repeated philosophy of doing everything once before he died. Habits had taken hold of him that heretofore he would not have admitted were habits. He missed the drinking sessions, the all-night talk fests, the queer assortment of queer people, and the general disregard for established customs.
Under the announcement of his marriage in his scrapbook is penned, “Proof that even the best of us have weak moments.” That was braggadocio. With the failure of his marriage Thurman, for the first time, became uncertain of himself. Scandalous things were said about the disunion. Nothing was salvaged out of the nightmarish months. The people who aligned themselves with Thurman were the people to whom nothing was scandalous. To them he was not the marrying kind. This proved it. The disastrous interlude was over and better forgotten.
His wife had left his home the night before his collaborated play, Harlem, opened on Broadway. On opening night, he went around to the flat of some friends with his tie and collar in his hand. He was sober but too shaken to manipulate his collar or to tie his bowknot. He had wanted his wife to share in what he hoped would be his triumph, or to go out with him and get drunk in the event of a cold reception. That she could desert him at a crucial hour did not make him see that she was as much a failure as a writer’s wife as he was as a conventional husband.
She took very seriously the embarrassment of the breakup and went through a period of utter instability. Later she made a complete about-face, replaced her old gods, and became an active worker in the labor field.
With Harlem already in the back of his mind, Thurman had gone into the Theatre Guild’s Negro drama, Porgy, in the hope of learning the rudiments of stagecraft. His was a walk-on part, and his salary was sixteen-fifty weekly. He fought vigorously for an increase in pay for the supers. The fight was
won one week before he quit the company to sit in at the rehearsals of Harlem. Some months later his own cast made capital of this fight when it waged a similar one of its own.
Thurman collaborated with William Jordan Rapp on Harlem, which was a vivid cross section of lower-middle-class life. The play ran with fair success in New York and Chicago. He and Rapp had met at Macfadden Publications, where both were employed.
While working at Macfadden’s at Broadway and Sixty-third Street, Thurman would visit nearby friends on Sixty-sixth Street. It became a regular routine, for he was free from Macfadden’s by lunchtime. Over a table of odds and ends, occasionally augmented by his own contributions of a bottle half full of bathtub gin, for he was fond of these friends, he would laughingly give detailed synopses of the more lurid stories that were polished by his pen. Then he would settle down to a fantastic tale of his own, and, growing fascinated by his own fabrication, would ask for pad and pencil. Later the completed story would appear with some such pathetic caption as “I Was a Child-Bride.”
Thurman’s chief interest was magazine editing. The idea of a well-established magazine kept him hopeful when his ghostwriting and hack writing would have plunged him into deepest despair. Had he found sustained support for a literary publication, it is probable that he would have given up creative writing, which was not his proved forte, for critical analysis, in which his judgment was sound.
Under his guidance the young writing crowd had launched two literary magazines. The first, Fire, so christened by Zora Neale Hurston, appeared in 1926. Thurman outlined the magazine’s aims when he said, “[It] is a declaration of independence directed at certain cliques of blacks and whites who would shape our destinies. It is also a reply to the accusation we make ourselves that the present art boom is a mere fizzle. We seek to sift it down and preserve those elements in it worth preserving. And again it is a revolt against the conventional type of contemporary Negro magazine, pulsing with propaganda but devoid of art.” When queried as to whether or not he felt there was a distinctly Negro art, his answer was, “No, not a definite, distinctly Negro art. But because of the differences in the Negro’s background, there will be differences in what he writes and paints. There is bound to be a Negro note, but not a Negro art.”
