Wallace Thurman: A Western Renaissance Man

G E R A L D H A S L A M Sonoma State College Wallace Thurman: A Western Renaissance Man Western writers—from Cooper to Waters— have long bemoaned the loss of rural, natural values and warned of the dangers of city life. And city life has pretty well managed to live up to most of the dire predictions. Still, for Afro-Americans—“the immigrants within,” as Bernard Weisenberger has termed them1—the city offered special hopes, and their migration from the rural South to the urban North was to produce many remarkable literary figures, most notably Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. The “flight to the city,” as the more dramatic historians have called it, has conceived diverse literary progeny, from the naturalism of Stephen Crane and Theodore Drieser, through the wild exotocism of the so-called Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s, counterurban to the free form “hippy” writers of our own day such as Richard Brautigan and Gary Snyder. One young man, Wallace Thurman, traveled from the Inter­ mountain West, to the urban West, finally to the evil East itself, and became a luminary in the Harlem Renaissance, yet he re­ mains an enigma. Described by Hughes as “a strangely brillant black boy, who had read everything, and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read,”2 Thurman was a Westerner not only by birth and education, but also in terms of his candor, his egalitarianism, and his ultimate rejection of the hollow aspects of urbanization. Yet he was no great admirer of the West’s treatment of Negroes either. Born and educated in Salt Lake City, the black-skinned Thur­ man was conspicious indeed. His own experience parallels that of one of his characters who “not only was . . . the only dark-skinned 1Behnard A. Weisberger, “ The Immigrant Within,” American Heritage, Vol. XXII, No. 1 (Dec., 1970), pp. 32-39, 104. sLangston Hughes, The Big Sea, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), p. 234. 54 Western American Literature person on the platform, . . . (but) also the only Negro pupil in . . . .school.”3 He enrolled in the University of Southern California following high school, but was generally disappointed with his treatment in Los Angeles, especially his treatment by social-climbing Negroes. Like other young black intellectuals, Thurman made the pilgrimage to Harlem during the 1920’s; almost immediately he thrust himself into the midst of what Alain Locke called the New Negro Movement.4 A man of many talents, who tried “to be some modern represenative of the true Renaissance Man,”5 he soon embarked upon a journalistic career by serving as an editor of The Messenger, an influental Negro magazine. He worked along­ side A. Phillip Randolph, and became a close associate and friend of George Schuyler, considered by some the H. L. Mencken of Negro journalism and a pioneering satirical novelist. In 1926 he joined Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennet, Zora Neal Hurston, John P. Davis, Aaron Douglas, and Bruce Nugent in founding the short-lived, brillant journal, Fire, which was intended “to burn up a lot of the old, dead, conventional Negro-white ideas of the past.”6 Thurman’s articles in The New Republic, The World Tomorrow, The Independent, and The Bookman, among other periodicals, soon made him a principal spokesman for that re­ markable period of intellectual change and growing pride that laid the groundwork for much of the outstanding Afro-American art that followed. Hughes and Thurman seem to have enjoyed a particularly candid relationship. Thurman once told the young poet, for ex­ ample, that The Messenger reflected the policy of whoever paid best; buying what were to be Hughes’s first published short stories for that journal, he told him that they were bad, but not as bad as others submitted. In The Big Sea Hughes discussed another aspect of Thurman’s career: . . . Thurman became a ghost writer for True Story and other publications, writing under all sorts of fantastic names, like Ethel Belle Mandrake or Patrick Casey. He did Irish and Jewish and Catholic “ true confessions.” . . . Later he ghosted books. In fact, •Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry (New York: The MacMillian Company, 1970), p. 5. ‘See Alain Locke (ed...