The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories

Nella Larsen’s heroines are emotional nomads, women whose intelligence and genius for rebellion make them ill suited for the proscribed existence ordained by whites for blacks in 1920s and ’30s segregated America. No tragic mulattoes here. These prim, proper colored ladies bristle with discontent and yearning. But, most important, they are driven by the impulse to shape their lives rather than suffer them, even when their grasp is unsure and they are careening full tilt towards disaster.

In Helga Crane and Clare Kendry, Nella Larsen has created two characters that are rich, complex, and contradictory.
Quicksand
and
Passing
launch each woman on a quest for self that predicts the themes
of much of the most important writing in American literature of the last twenty years. Inevitably, any writer whose female protagonists resist the expected, the traditional, the “correct,” is dialoguing with the literary legacy of Nella Larsen.

I initially discovered Nella Larsen as an undergraduate enrolled in a Black American Literature course taught by Charles Larson at American University. Even now I recall quite vividly the breath-snatching shudder that gripped me as I read the final pages of
Quicksand
. I can’t remember any ending to a novel which frightened or warned me more effectively. I had not even become at that point the apprentice writer I would evolve into a few years later, but was a young woman reading everything I could find, questioning it and struggling to dredge up my own voice—a voice that, luckily for me, was nurtured and encouraged by parents who taught me that honesty and justice were more important than peace and quiet. I shuddered when I closed the final pages of
Quicksand
in 1970 because the cloistered world of academia allowed me on some level to intellectualize the bleak portrait of female destiny Larsen so deftly painted. And the powerful hold of the book for me sprang largely from the elegant timbre, the poise and remarkable beauty of Larsen’s style.

In 1990, having weathered the Reagan years, witnessed the feminization of poverty in America, the retrenchment of the nation’s commitment to social equality, having been married, become a mother, divorced, been a single parent, and remarried; having taught university courses disguised, I hope, as an intellectual agent provocateur, and told some of the still untold stories of my people in my own writing, now I shudder when I reach the conclusion of
Quicksand
for its eternal relevance.

At more moments in my life than I care to admit, I have been Helga Crane. Any woman who has searched for a metaphorical place in the sun, a job where she could be paid what she deserved (despite her ovaries), or sought to fashion a love, an affair, or a marriage based on respect and honor for self and partner, has been Helga Crane too. The angst, the tension that rivets the lives of Larsen’s heroines makes their dilemmas completely contemporary and timeless.

The tension between the individual and society, the yoke-like manner in which society encroaches, and the courage Larsen’s women find to resist predict writers as diverse as Ellison, Wright, Shange, and Walker. While the social milieu that Larsen explores is fairly insular, the black bourgeois, a thin sliver of 1920s black America, her vision is broad. The political and social debates of the period, the texture of the Harlem Renaissance, the specific fabric of Negro life, be it urban or rural, are captured with an eye for detail that is nearly surgical. While always delicate and often poetic, Larsen is tough-minded and withering in her critique of black bourgeois manners and obsessions.

The geography of the soul, the rocky, rich terrain of dreams, is in reality the setting for
Quicksand
and
Passing
. Helga Crane and Clare Kendry are women of enormous energy, talent, and sensitivity who find no release for or realization of those gifts in either black or white society. The real tragedy for both women is that there is literally no place for them to be somebody except in the arms of a man. Marriage is their only legitimate option. The worlds that created and confined them were neither large enough nor good enough for them. For these restless, spirited souls were hampered as much by the failure of imagination of those around them as by their own weaknesses. Both women could imagine themselves free from racial prejudice and, by extension, from sexual oppression—unfettered, whole; they just couldn’t make themselves that way.

I have often thought that Helga Crane could have been, in another time zone/reality/universe, a better painter than Axel Olsen. Her keen eye for observation, her sensuality, idealism, her hunger for life, wedded to the largeness and breadth of her female vision, would have created works to drench the eye and salvage the soul. At other times I have imagined Helga Crane as a dancer or, like Larsen herself, a writer, but one who would find a way to devise a more satisfying ending than the script the world had handed her. That’s what I have dreamed.

Literature at its best is a prescription. And the best writers imagine us all free. With Nella Larsen, I wait for the world to finally, one
day, listen to its scribes, the only conscience it sanctions and steadfastly ignores. And like Nella Larsen, I try to nudge the world closer to beauty and farther away from madness with every word I write.

Marita Golden

Until a decade ago, the erroneous “facts” concerning the life and career of Nella Larsen were nothing less than legion. Her brief literary career was said to have come to an abrupt halt because of the charges of plagiarism concerning her only published short story. After that awkward incident in 1930, she was said to have ceased her creative efforts and disappeared not only from the Harlem artistic scene but also from the consciousness of her many friends as well. Some of Larsen’s readers speculated that she passed for white—in the manner of the heroine of her 1929 novel,
Passing
. At the time of her death, there were no published obituaries. Her childhood, her parentage, and the date of her birth were incorrectly recorded, as
were many of the other details of her life. Worse, critics were content to accept hearsay instead of researching the actual facts, thereby perpetuating the distortions that Larsen herself often generated in order to conceal the painful events of her private life. One fact, however, is indisputable: if one classifies Jean Toomer’s
Cane
(1923) as a collection of his works—which most critics do, though some have argued it is a novel—then Nella Larsen is the major novelist of that coalescence of African American aesthetic expression during the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance.

In the early part of that fabulous decade, Larsen and her husband, Elmer Imes, were part of the Harlem elite, hobnobbing with some of the most famous people of the era: W. E. B. DuBois, Walter White, Jessie and Arthur Fauset, Charles S. Johnson (the editor of
Opportunity)
, James Weldon Johnson, and Carl Van Vechten. When Nella married Elmer in 1919, she must have been the envy of many of her friends. Elmer had a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Michigan at a time when most black Americans had not graduated from high school. Nella herself, a graduate of the Lincoln Hospital of Nursing, would shortly embark upon a second career. As a librarian at the Harlem branch of the New York City Public Library, she was clearly in the eye of the storm—the explosion in black artistic creativity that created what Alain Locke, in 1925, called the New Negro. Parties, cabarets, literary soirees. Harlem was the place to be, and Nella was very much a part of it. Her letters written during the early part of the 1920s illustrate that she derived a great amount of satisfaction from being one of Harlem’s intellectuals.

Exactly when and why Larsen decided to become a writer, it is difficult to tell. In an interview she gave to the
Amsterdam News
(May 23, 1928), she claimed that she had begun writing because of complications with her health. In that interview, Larsen is described as a “modern” woman who

Nella’s first publications, in 1920, were in
The Brownies’ Book
, a magazine for black children edited by Jessie Fauset. For those two articles, she used the byline Nella Larsen Imes, and she stated in the introductory remarks to each piece that she had spent her childhood days in Denmark. Thereafter, she worked on fiction for the adult reader, in time publishing two short stories in
Young’s Magazine:
“The Wrong Man” in January 1926, and “Freedom” in April of the same year. In later years, she would refer to these stones as “hack writing,” as she must have felt in part when she wrote them, since they were published under the pseudonymous anagram: Allen Semi. Most of the stones that appeared in
Young’s Magazine
would today be called pulp fiction; the writers have become as forgotten as the magazine itself.

Both of these stories were probably thrown up as warning signs for Elmer, who was a notorious womanizer and, by 1926, well on his way to contributing to the demise of their relationship. Under the surface narrative, both stories tell us that marriage is often a precarious balancing act, especially when spouses have not been honest with each other and have concealed aspects of their former selves. Both stories are free of any racial commentary—no doubt because of the magazine in which they appeared, though Nella herself at this early stage in her artistic career was known to waffle a bit about her racial origins.

By the time Nella’s first novel,
Quicksand
, was published in March of 1928, she had stopped working as a librarian. She had also decided to use her maiden name for her work, a decision that was probably interpreted by her friends as a clear indication that her marriage was in trouble. Though the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing, Nella could not have helped but be disappointed that it was not
Quicksand
that became a bestseller that year but Claude McKay’s much more sensational
Home to Harlem
. Still, she could take comfort in the fact that her novel received the better reviews, as well as an
award from the Harmon Foundation. The enthusiasm for
Quicksand
has only increased with the passing years.

Quicksand
is the story of an educated black woman’s inability to find her niche in the contemporary world. The scope of Helga Crane’s search is international (spanning America and Europe) and is exacerbated by the fact that she is not only middle-class but biracial. What separates Larsen’s novel from earlier works concerned with the plight of the tragic mulatto (Frances Harper’s
Iola Leroy
, 1892, or Charles Chesnutt’s
The House Behind the Cedars
, 1900, for example) is the depth of her characterization, as well as her superior narrative technique. Helga Crane was the most fully realized and convincing black woman depicted in American fiction to that date. Above all, hers is a portrait of loneliness and pain, despair and sorrow—qualities which bind her to the heroines of any number of later works by African American women writers: Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor.

The novel clearly draws upon autobiographical details from Larsen’s own troubled past, converting the raw materials of her life into an often spellbinding psychological portrait of her heroine. As a child, Helga is taught to regard her color with hatred and self-loathing. Like Larsen herself, Helga’s mother is white, her father black. The story describes a number of painful incidents in her adolescence when Helga is separated from the rest of her family. The eventual reality of her mixed heritage and subsequent loneliness follows her all of her life (both in the South and in the North in the United States, as well as in Europe) and destroys most of her relationships with other people once she becomes an adult. The novel’s grim ending implies that educated black women (sophisticated and cultured black women, middle-class black women) are trapped in a life that has few if any satisfactory alternatives. Intellect is a dangerous commodity; thinking leads to unhappiness and misery. The only possible escape is into emotion—abandonment of the mind. Larsen suggests that there can be no other escape from racism, and even a return to one’s roots, for a woman like Helga Crane, may offer only temporary solace.

Passing
, published the following year, was equally despairing in its depiction of the lives of middle-class black women. The story has frequently been misconstrued as Clare Kendry’s tragedy, since she is the character who has crossed over the color line, concealed her racial origins, and whose past is eventually discovered by her bigoted white husband. Larsen’s superior craft added new meaning to the subject implied by her title. No passing novel can be regarded as anything other than a strong indictment of American life; people are driven to such drastic measures because of American racism and the need for economic survival. When Irene first muses over Clare’s boldness, Larsen states, “She wished to find out about this hazardous business of ‘passing,’ this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly. What, for example, one did about background, how one accounted for one-self. And how one felt when one came into contact with other Negroes.” Yet the central story—for all of the realities of Clare’s unhappy life—is what happens to her childhood friend, Irene.

After several encounters between the two women, Irene Redfield’s almost morbid fascination with Clare Kendry’s fate becomes the novel’s main focus. It is Irene who cannot control her curiosity and thrusts her hand into the tar baby (Clare) and thereby finds herself trapped in a situation she never foresaw. Thus, the primary theme is not race (as has usually been interpreted) but marital stability.
Passing
describes Irene’s attempts to keep her marriage intact in the face of her husband’s possible adultery with Clare. In many ways, Larsen has written an old-fashioned tale of jealousy, infidelity, and marital disintegration. Although at the end Irene may believe that her “sudden moment of action” has released her from the threat of losing her husband, one cannot help pondering Brian’s absence in the final pages of the novel. In a strange transference of conditions, Irene has inherited Clare’s life of duplicity and isolation.

By the time
Passing
was published, the fault lines in Nella Larsen’s own marriage were so unstable that it was only a matter of time before the relationship would end. Clearly aware of this, she
began making preparations for her future, since her writing had not brought her economic security. She applied for and was awarded a Guggenheim in 1930, distinguishing herself as the first black woman to be so honored. Yet some of the glory was already diminished by charges that her story, “Sanctuary,” published in
Forum
in January of that year, had been plagiarized. (The accusations, published in a letter to the editor in the April issue, stated that “Sanctuary” bore a “striking resemblance” to Sheila Kaye-Smith’s short story “Mrs. Adis.”)

The power of Larsen’s story is undeniable. Race is the strongest tie that binds people together. Even though Jim killed her son, Annie will protect him because he is black. Nowhere else in her published work had Nella Larsen made such an emphatic statement about blackness. The story is terse, direct—totally convincing in its use of character and motivation, as well as in its successful employment of dialect (the sole piece of dialect fiction Larsen published during her career). Followers of her work coming upon “Sanctuary” must have been surprised. Did the story herald a shift in her attentions away from middle-class African Americans to that of the folk?

The Guggenheim year, which was spent mostly in southern Europe, permitted Larsen to gain new perspectives on her writing and her marriage, though not exactly the ones she may have expected. By the time she returned to the United States, early in 1932, both were essentially at a dead end. Still, she made one final attempt to patch up the relationship with Elmer, even to the extent of spending some months with him at Fisk University in Nashville (where Dr. Imes had been installed as a kind of one-man physics department). But the rift was apparently too wide for them to repair. Their divorce, which became official on August 30 of the following year, was described in scandalous headlines in three articles in the
Baltimore Afro-American:

Elmer’s mistress was referred to as “a white member of Fisk University’s administrative staff,” and Nella herself was said to have jumped out of a window and broken her leg.

Larsen’s withdrawal (her so-called disappearance) can be pinpointed to several of these congruent events in her life. Certainly, the negative publicity about her divorce (front-page headlines) must have been a bitter pill to swallow—even worse because Elmer’s mistress was a white woman. As she said of Imes years later to one of her coworkers, “He broke my heart.” So total was her sense of rejection that she lived for several years in a state of depression. One particularly revealing fact about her later life is that she identified herself as Mrs. Imes and not as Nella Larsen. (This is also the reason why critics failed for so long to locate her death certificate.)

Nella’s rejection by Elmer came almost simultaneously with the difficulties she was encountering with her writing. The charges of plagiarism after the publication of “Sanctuary” were seconded by intense backbiting by a number of her so-called writer friends, who were jealous of her recent successes. The similarities between the two stories are embarrassing. Yet she was too much of a consummate artist to have attempted such a deliberate borrowing. Furthermore, as a librarian she would have understood the consequences of such an act more clearly than almost anyone else. It seems much more likely that she possessed something akin to a photographic memory, and for that reason “Sanctuary” contains those telling similarities to “Mrs. Adis.” Perhaps, also, “Sanctuary” was written out of a need to prove to herself that she could survive as a writer, support herself between novels. When she submitted it to
Forum
, it was still months before she would learn the results of her application for a Guggenheim.

She could probably have lived with the public humiliation if her subsequent work had not met with such total rejection.
Mirage
, the novel that she wrote on her Guggenheim, was quickly rejected by Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher of her first two books. All that we know of that novel is what is revealed on the reader’s report, rejecting the novel: