Frank Marshall Davis: The Fire and the Phoenix, A Critical Biography by Kathryn Waddell Takara, and; The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor by Paul Kengor (review)

Arnold Rampersad, in an early 1990 essay, profoundly repositioned the study of African American biography when he rejected hagiography (“let us now praise great men”) and epic (“the subject succeeding against all odds”) as life writers’ goals, and urged instead an analysis of the subject’s life as social and historical critique and adapted psychological exploration. At about this same time, cultural critic Cary Nelson proposed new considerations of the studies variously called “literary archeology,” “foundational scholarship,” and “recovery efforts.” Nelson unerringly pointed to the past as having a shaping influence on the present. His theory enabled an understanding of the continuity of past and present as viewed through the freshness of our current modes of scholarship. In a sense, the revisionist perspectives of psychological critique and recovery efforts become the challenge confronting Kathryn Waddell Takara’s Frank Marshall Davis: The Fire and the Phoenix. Simply put, how does a biographer make Davis new and relevant again?

Frank Marshall Davis (1905-1987) occupies a curious place in the history of American and African American literary history, cultural studies, and journalism. During the years 1935-1948, arguably his heyday, Davis found himself in the midst of volatile poetic and political discourses, focusing on yet another effort to resolve the conflict between vaunted American ideals and the general denial of rights and privileges to African Americans. In December 1948, he departed the truculent ferment of Chicago for the seemingly quiescent, racially tolerant U. S. territory of Hawaii. This relocation not only removed Davis from an epicenter of political turmoil on the mainland, but also deposited him into the dustbin of historical anonymity. The publication of The Fire and the Phoenix attempts the work of reclaiming and restoring him, as Professor Takara writes, to “the canon of literary Black history both as a representative African American writer of the Black Chicago Renaissance period, and as an outstanding editor, journalist, columnist, and poet.”

The task of writing a critical biography of a man who was once the center of public acclaim but today remains shrouded in mystery to readers is indeed daunting. Generally, the most significant challenge for a biographer is to define the ideas and expectations that make “critical” understood as an analytic goal. But Professor Takara eschews a more conventional, scholarly methodology for one privileging personal experience. She first met Davis in Hawaii in 1972, and enjoyed an acquaintanceship that lasted for fifteen years until his death in 1987. The Fire and the Phoenix, as she writes, “is my account of my friendship, research, and work with [him] through the years.”

En route to unraveling, analyzing, and explicating this complicated man, Professor Takara establishes some very ambitious goals. Chief among them is an exploration of “the transformative processes of growth, corruption, and healing in [Davis] as he changed from an alienated black youth into a public figure, social critic, and writer in a racially divided society.” To do so, she enters the world of social psychology. There, however, she chooses not to buttress her argument with the most recent scholarship undergirding the fine studies of Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Malcolm X. She leans primarily and often uncritically on Richard Bardolph’s 1959 monograph The Negro Vanguard, and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967). A heuristic grounded in black psychology is commendable, but an analysis rooted in forty-five-year-old scholarship raises serious questions about its efficacy as an explanatory model. Take the assertion she makes that Davis suffered from victimization, defeatism, alienation, and isolation. An older model is less capable of demonstrating persuasively how Davis extricates himself from this psychological mire and develops a personal narrative of ascent...