In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (review)

There’s a fascinating and telling moment near the end of George Hutchinson’s massive biography, In Search of Nella Larsen. In an episode reminiscent of Alice Walker’s “Looking for Zora”—specifically the scene in which Walker searches for Zora Neale Hurston’s then-unmarked grave in a cemetery that “looks more like an abandoned field” (104), a scene that has become emblematic for many scholars looking for “lost” black women writers—Hutchinson recounts walking up and down the rows of a section of Brooklyn’s Cypress Hill Cemetery ironically called the “Garden of Memory.” Sweating, tired, and deeply frustrated at not being able to find the grave of Larsen—who authored two central novels of the Harlem Renaissance, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929)—Hutchinson becomes convinced that he “had missed something” or had “gotten something wrong” (482). But even though he bluntly says “I gave up,” that action propels him back to the cemetery’s offices—in essence, back to the archive—where he realizes that even though there is no headstone, there is, nonetheless, a small record card listing the author’s name. Nella Larsen, he concludes, “was there all right, in the gap at the center of the Garden of Memory” (482).

What is most stunning about In Search of Nella Larsen is that, in his dogged persistence and his consistent attention to gaps and silences in our cultural memory, Hutchinson creates a definitive, carefully documented, eminently readable, and rich biography of a figure who was tagged by Mary Helen Washington as the “mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance” (1). Two previous biographers have attempted such work—Charles R. Larson in his 1993 Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen and Thadious Davis in her acclaimed 1994 Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance; in doing so, these scholars gathered significant sources and set fascinating groundwork for Hutchinson’s study. However, countless basic details about Larsen’s life have remained unknown, many errors have been made, and Larsen has largely continued to be, in Hutchinson’s words, a “shadow” (1).

Hutchinson carefully traces Larsen’s life from her birth in Chicago to Mary Hanson, a white immigrant from Denmark, and Peter Walker, her still-hazy black husband from the Danish West Indies, on 13 April 1891. Hutchinson details her time in the household of her mother and her white step-father in Chicago, extended stays both in Denmark and at Fisk University, nurses’ training in New York City, and a teaching post at Tuskegee Institute. He presents in great depth her complex negotiation with the Harlem Renaissance—from her training as a librarian and work in the New York Public Library system (including at the lively 135^th Street Branch) to her early attempts and significant growth as a writer. Comprising almost half of the volume, the book’s coverage of the Renaissance years demonstrates Hutchinson’s rich sense of the period—knowledge that first led to his well-received 1995 Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, in which he challenged critics to recognize that “links between modern American cultural nationalism, cultural pluralism, and the Harlem Renaissance were more deeply rooted, more personal, more political, more enabling, and more pervasive than anyone has so far suggested” (31). But Hutchinson also shares information garnered from previously un- or under-utilized sources like Larsen’s library school application and the daybooks of Carl Van Vechten. His readings of both Quicksand and Passing—as well as several of Larsen’s shorter pieces—are nuanced and attend to his biographical discoveries without falling into the trap of over-simplistically reading Larsen’s fiction as thinly veiled autobiography. Hutchinson is equally diligent and careful in his attention to the post-Renaissance years—years marked by a number of failed attempts to produce another novel, the dissolution of her marriage to physicist and professor Elmer Imes, a period when she “virtually disappeared” into what may well have been substance abuse, and a reemergence...