Thurman, Wallace

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Wallace Thurman

Born August 16, 1902

Died December 21, 1934

American novelist, playwright, editor, essayist, short story writer, and poet

Editor of the daring one-issue literary magazine Fire!!, Wallace Thurman was also a talented writer.

One of the most active, energetic, and multitalented participants in the Harlem Renaissance, Wallace Thurman was considered a leader of the group of young writers and artists who formed its most daring core. In addition to his own literary works, Thurman contributed to the movement through his editorial efforts and his sometimes biting—or even bitter—criticism of its excesses. Central to his work and, indeed, to his own personal life was the issue of color-consciousness and prejudice within African American society: Thurman felt that many blacks looked down upon those among them with the darker shades of skin (including himself). Despite his impressive achievements, Thurman always doubted his own talents; his death at the age of only thirty-two made him an even more tragic figure.

Reading and writing at an early age

Thurman was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, a city with a very small African American community. His father, Oscar, left the family when Thurman was very young (Thurman met him only once again, much later in life), and his mother, Beulah, had five other husbands during her lifetime. Thurman seems to have been more attached to his grandmother, "Ma Jack" (Emma Jackson), than to anyone else in his early life.

A nervous boy who was often ill, Thurman loved to read and developed an early sense of himself as a writer, producing his first novel at the age of ten. During his high school years he read many different kinds of books, from classic literature by authors like English playwright William Shakespeare (1564–1616), French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), and Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) to works by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (pronounced NEE-chuh; 1844–1900) and Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Thurman also enjoyed watching movies, a passion he would retain all his life.

In 1919 Thurman enrolled at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, but he soon transferred to the University of Southern California, where he planned to pursue a medical degree. Instead, he ended up following his own earlier desire to become a writer, and he left the university in 1923 without even earning his undergraduate degree. For the next year and a half he wrote a column called "Inklings" for a black newspaper and also worked at the U.S. post office, where he met another young black writer, Arna Bontemps (1902–1973), who became his close friend. Thurman then edited a magazine called the Outlet, but it was discontinued after six months. When Bontemps announced his plan to go to New York City and join the new literary movement developing in Harlem, Thurman decided to go with him.

Making his way in Harlem

Thurman arrived in Harlem in September 1925. At first he supported himself through odd jobs (including working as an elevator operator), but finally he went to work for a publication called the Looking Glass; the editor, Theophilus Lewis, could not afford to pay Thurman a salary but gave him a place to stay and food to eat. Thurman performed a number of tasks, and he did so well (he was said to be able to read eleven lines of text at once) that Lewis recommended him to the Messenger—a prominent black journal—for a job as literary editor.

In this position Thurman was able to promote the work of the young writers he had met since arriving in New York, among them poet Langston Hughes (1902–1967; see biographical entry), whose first published short stories appeared in the Messenger. While working at the Messenger, Thurman sometimes expressed a rebellious attitude toward the older leaders of the African American community (especially civil rights advocate and Crisis editor W.E.B. Du Bois [1868–1963; see biographical entry]), who he felt were more eager to imitate whites than to support and appreciate real, ordinary black people.

A leader of the younger artists

Meanwhile, Thurman was leading the kind of life that conservative people like Du Bois found offensive. Along with some of his artistic friends—including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960; see biographical entry), and artist Richard Bruce Nugent (1906–1987)—he was staying in the wildly decorated and always lively boarding house of Iolanthe Sydney, the proprietor of a Harlem employment agency who supported her tenants' creative efforts by letting them stay rent-free. This group of young African Americans believed they were creating something new and daring as they explored their racial heritage through their art and struck out on their own individual paths, and they saw Thurman as their leader.

A slender young man with a slightly feminine manner and a high-pitched laugh, Thurman had a rapid-fire way of talking, and what he said was often brilliant. Due to his heavy drinking, sexual confusion (he was probably homosexual and seems to have felt guilty about it), and lack of money, his personal life was usually in disarray, but he worked very hard. He believed in creating art for its own sake, rather than using it to achieve political ends such as racial equality, and he held his own and others' writing to a high standard. Despite his popularity with the friends among whom he worked and played, Thurman always felt like an outsider—an attitude that was apparently connected with his very dark skin. He believed that lighter-skinned blacks considered him and other darker-complected people inferior.

The short, bright life of Fire!!

Thurman's first big achievement of the Harlem Renaissance was his editorship of the daring, high-quality, but short-lived journal Fire!! Hughes and Nugent had come up with the idea of a publication that would showcase the spirited, and sometimes experimental, work of the period's younger writers and that would thumb its nose, so to speak, at the "proper," conservative members of the Talented Tenth (Du Bois's term for the upper crust of African American society, whose members were expected to promote racial progress through their accomplishments and respectability). Hughes and Nugent asked Thurman to edit the journal, and he dove into the project with his usual energy.

The least of Thurman's problems was the content of Fire!!, for all the members of the magazine's editorial board (including Thurman, Hughes, Nugent, Hurston, artist Aaron Douglas [1898–1979; see biographical entry], poet Gwendolyn Bennett, and Harvard undergraduate John Davis) would contribute work, and pieces also came from poets Countee Cullen (1903–1946; see biographical entry), Helene Johnson (1907–1995; see Chapter 3), and Arna Bontemps, along with an essay by Arthur Huff Fauset (1889–1983). Fire!!'s foreword announced in a poem format its bold intentions: "FIRE ... flaming, burning, searing, and penetrating far beneath the superficial items of the flesh to boil the sluggish blood / FIRE ... a cry of conquest in the night, warning those who sleep and revitalizing those who linger in the quiet places dozing."

Thurman's biggest challenge was raising the money needed to produce the high-quality publication he envisioned. He wanted Fire!! to be printed on slick paper that would show off the contents in their best light. Hard-pressed to collect much money from the equally impoverished members of the editorial board, Thurman borrowed one thousand dollars to publish Fire!!, and in the end he was personally responsible for this debt (which took him four years to pay off). His colleagues at the magazine World Tomorrow, where he was now working , felt sorry for him in his penniless condition and gave him a check to buy a winter overcoat.

Fire!! generates heat

The publication of Fire!! in November, 1926 did indeed generate the heat its creators had intended. All of the brightest stars of the Harlem Renaissance (who were then known as members of the New Negro movement) were represented, and several contributions were clearly meant to shock the magazine's more stodgy readers. Richard Bruce Nugent's impressionistic short story "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" contained references to homosexuality, and Thurman's story "Cordelia the Crude" offered an alarmingly realistic view of Harlem life, complete with rent parties, gambling, drinking, prostitution, and murder.

It's not surprising, then, that most of the Talented Tenth expressed disgust for this publication of the younger generation. The well-known African American critic Benjamin Brawley (1882–1939) reported that he had tossed Fire!! into the fire, and W.E.B. Du Bois was said to be offended by the mere mention of the magazine. Fire!! would not, however, prove to be a long-term irritation, for the journal ceased publication after one issue. Its high cost—one dollar per copy, which was very expensive in the 1920s—caused many readers to borrow Fire!! from friends rather than buy it themselves. Getting the magazine distributed was also a problem that its editor failed to solve; in addition, many copies were destroyed when an apartment where they were being stored caught on fire, giving a new and ironic meaning to the name Fire!!

A marriage and a new project

After working for some time as circulation manager at the white magazine World Tomorrow, Thurman was hired as an editor by the Macauley publishing company, becoming the first African American to hold such a position in a white firm. In September 1928 he surprised his friends (who believed him to be homosexual, or at least not interested in marriage) by marrying Louise Thompson. Two months later Thurman launched a new project called Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life, which was supposed to be a general-interest magazine with both literary works and essays and articles on a variety of topics.

This time Thurman was not financially responsible. And, unlike Fire!!, Harlem was not meant to shock. Among its offerings were short fiction and poetry by Hughes, poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson (1886–1966) and Helene Johnson, essays by Alain Locke (1886–1954; see biographcal entry) and Walter White (1893–1955), illustrations and sketches by Aaron Douglas , theater and book reviews, and a guide to where to go and what to do in Harlem. This new publication proved no more successful than Fire!!, but at least in this case Thurman had not gone into debt to get it published.

A play about Harlem's seamy side

At the same time, Thurman was working with a white collaborator, William Jourdan Rapp (an editor of True Story magazine), on a play based on his short story "Cordelia the Crude." With a cast of sixty actors, most of whom were not professionals, the play—called Harlem—opened on Broadway on February 20, 1929. Harlem centers on what happens to a black family that moves from the rural South to a northern city. The parents, Pa and Ma Williams, are hardworking people with three children, two of whom work to help support the family and one, Cordelia, who gets involved with Harlem's shadiest people and activities.

Forthright in its portrayal of such topics as gambling, gang warfare, and prostitution, Harlem got negative reviews from some critics, especially those who represented the Talented Tenth. They claimed that Thurman's highlighting of this underside of African American life would give white society the wrong impression. Other critics, however, praised Thurman for presenting a slice of the real Harlem and for tackling controversial subjects head-on. The play ran for ninety-three performances, was taken on tour by three road companies, and returned for a second Broadway engagement. Thurman became a celebrity for a brief period.

By this time Thurman's marriage had collapsed, and he and Thompson became involved in a bitter battle over the financial support she would receive after their planned divorce. Thurman traveled to Hollywood to investigate the possibility of a film adaptation of Harlem, and there he also worked on two more plays that were to be part of the trilogy he and Rapp had envisioned. Harlem was to be followed by Jeremiah the Magnificent, based on the real-life story of Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), a charismatic, ambitious black leader who had encouraged many ordinary African Americans to be proud of their hertitage before being imprisoned for fraud. Thurman finished this play, but it was never produced during his lifetime, and he never finished writing the third play in the trilogy, Black Cinderella, about a color-obsessed black couple who favor their light-skinned daughter over her darker sister.

Writes The Blacker the Berry

While traveling in the West, Thurman visited his mother in Salt Lake City, and he later reported to his friends that members of her church who had heard about the racy content of his popular play had prayed over him, beseeching God to turn him from his evil ways. Thurman returned to New York downhearted for two reasons: he had not been able to drum up interest in adapting his play for film, and his dispute with his wife was no closer to being resolved. He was drinking heavily, and Harlem hostesses dreaded his arrival at parties, for invariably he would end his evenings by passing out.

Thurman's mood was not much lifted by the publication of his first novel, The Blacker the Berry, in early 1929, for as usual he felt that his work was not up to the high standards he had set for himself. The novel takes its title from an African American folk saying, "The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice," which Thurman uses as an ironic reference to the prejudice experienced by blacks with darker skin.

The central character, Emma Lou Morgan, is the only dark-skinned member of her family, and her parents openly favor her sister over her. She also experiences discrimination within her community of Boise, Idaho, and at the University of California. Emma Lou moves to Harlem, assuming that surely in this progressive center of black life her own lot will improve. But she is mistreated there as well and has a humiliating affair with a light-skinned man named Alva. After a disastrous attempt to lighten her skin with strong chemicals, she finally realizes that she must reject the false values of those around her and accept herself as she is.

The Blacker the Berry has often been described as an autobiographical novel, for Thurman too felt that his dark skin had prejudiced other blacks against him. Reviews of the novel at the time of its publication were mixed, but most critics now agree that although it is not of top-rate literary quality, The Blacker the Berry effectively portrays a problem that few African American writers were willing to confront.

Satirizing the Harlem Renaissance

Thurman's second novel, Infants of the Spring (1932), chronicles the experiences of a group of black writers in Harlem, all of whom closely resemble Thurman and his Harlem Renaissance friends. The novel is a satire that reveals the pretensions of these young people who think that they and their work will change the world. The story is told primarily through the character of Raymond Taylor, a writer who, like Thurman, wants to create high-quality literature that is neither decadent (in a state of moral decay or decline) nor too focused on racial issues.

Among Taylor's friends and colleagues are Dr. Parkes (modeled after Alain Locke), who tells the young writers that because of their work, "new vistas will be spread open to the entire race"; the rather mysterious poet Tony Crews (modeled after Langston Hughes); and Sweetie May Carr (modeled after Zora Neale Hurston), who is taking advantage of white people's new interest in African Americans for her own benefit. The novel ends with the suicide—carefully planned to have a dramatic effect—of the daring artist and writer Paul Arbian (modeled after Richard Bruce Nugent, although Nugent did not kill himself), who seems to embody all the faddishness of the New Negro movement.

Once again, Thurman's novel received mixed reviews. Some critics complained that Infants of the Spring contained too much conversation and too little action, while others praised its realism; in later years many reviewers would view the novel as a reflection of Thurman's personal bitterness and dissatisfaction. In any case, Thurman took the negative reviews to heart and continued to feel that he was not yet the writer he had hoped to become.

A third novel and two film scripts

In the course of his work at Macauley's, Thurman met a white writer named Abraham L. Furman, with whom he wroteThe Interne (1932). This novel about the training of young doctors at New York's City Hospital was intended to expose the sub-standard practices and behavior that went on there. Reviewers, however, found the novel poorly written and overly dramatic.

In 1934 Thurman was hired to write film scripts for the Hollywood production company of Bryan Foy, Jr., who was interested in making films about social issues. Thurman spent several months living in California and wrote two scripts, High School Girl (1935) and Tomorrow's Children (1934). The latter tale of a poor white family features a seventeen-year-old girl who supports her usually-pregnant mother and alcoholic, unemployed father, along with a number of siblings who are all either physically or mentally disabled. Social welfare authorities want to sterilize (make incapable of reproducing) the parents and daughter, but a priest intervenes to squelch this plan. The story raises the question of whether the state has the right to decide whether people may or may not have children, and it exposes the different kinds of justice available to rich and poor Americans.

" ... it all died with him."

Thurman returned to New York in May of 1934, exhausted and in ill health after many long, late nights of drinking in California. His doctor told him he should quit drinking, but he disregarded this warning and spent the month after his return in constant carousing. Many parties would end with Thurman either passing out or threatening to jump out of windows and kill himself. Finally he collapsed, and he was taken to City Hospital, the same institution he had vilified in The Interne. There he was diagnosed with tuberculosis (a life-threatening disease of the lungs), and he spent six months in the hospital, growing weaker and weaker with each passing day. Thurman died on December 21, 1934.

On Christmas Eve, Thurman's friends gathered for his funeral, an occasion that shocked these young people into an awareness of their own mortality. Some observers classify it among several events that marked the true end of the Harlem Renaissance. "[Thurman] was our leader," remembered writer Dorothy West in a 1970 article in Black World, "and when he died, it all died with him."

For More Information

Books

Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. "Portrait of Wallace Thurman." In TheHarlem Renaissance Remembered. Edited by Arna Bontemps. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Knopf, 1981.

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

O'Daniel, Therman B. Introduction to The Blacker the Berry, by Wallace Thurman. New York: Collier, 1970.

Walden, Daniel. "'The Canker Galls ...'; Or, The Short, Promising Life of Wallace Thurman." In The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined. Edited by Victor Kramer. New York: AMS, 1987.