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Accounts of Charles W. Chesnutt’s writing career typically have taken the shape of a rather steep bell curve: after an apprenticeship of several years practicing the craft and achieving occasional publication, his stock quickly rose with two successful short-story collections and then, just as quickly, dropped as the author’s novels failed to attract the popularity of his stories, leading him to abandon ¤ction writing and resign himself to the business of legal stenography and local political work. This standard narrative of Chesnutt’s life is complicated by the fact that he never entirely stopped writing ¤ction after the failure of The Colonel’s Dream in 1905. Numerous critics have attributed Chesnutt’s relative silence after 1905 to his disillusionment, reinforced by the public’s apatheticresponse to The Colonel’s Dream, with ¤ction writing as a form of political advocacy.1 In the late 1990s, however, the appearance of two previously unpublished novels by Chesnutt— Paul Marchand, F.M.C. (c. 1921) and The Quarry (c. 1928)—forced critics to reassess the author’s late career. These 1920s novels do not, precisely speaking, represent a return to optimism. Although Chesnutt appears to have believed that the “New Negro” movement, or Harlem Renaissance, represented a change in artistic sensibilities from which he and other African American artists might bene¤t, the novels themselves reveal an enduring pessimism about how the questions of representation and identity raised in his earlier novels might now 131 5 “The Category of Surreptitious Things”  Paul Marchand, F.M.C. and The Quarry be answered. Perhaps encouraged, as William L. Andrews suggests, by ¤lm projects based on his previous novels (Literary Career 265), or by the serial republication of The House Behind the Cedars in 1921–1922, Chesnutt (wrongly) thought that a new work might reach an audience, but there is no expression of con¤dence that his audience would respond rightly to the issues he would raise. It seemed clear to Chesnutt that there was now an expanded audience for “books by and about colored people” (Essays and Speeches 514). In his address upon receiving the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1928, he rather defensively explained , in retrospect, that “I had to sell my books chie®y to white readers. There were few colored book buyers” (514). Matters seemed to be changing, so that (as he claimed with undue optimism in the 1926 essay “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?”) “[t]he dif¤culty of ¤nding a publisher for books by Negro authors has largely disappeared” (Essays and Speeches 491). Nonetheless , the audience consuming African Americans’ ¤ction continued to be predominantly white.2 Such a situation was both full of possibility and fraught with risk from Chesnutt’s perspective. Black writers had the opportunity to gain a hearing, but the conditions of that hearing were, as they had always been, stacked against African Americans due to the endurance of racist assumptions and stereotypical tastes. Despite the artistic recognition gained by some, there was little evidence that in the larger culture blacks would be able to control their destinies to a greater extent than before. Like a number of others among the older generation of Harlem Renaissance writers, notably including W. E. B. Du Bois, Chesnutt’s response to this state of affairs smacks of conservatism. He admonishes younger black writers to create idealized black characters—“[i]f there are no super-Negroes, make some,” he inveighs in “The Negro in Art” (Essays and Speeches 492)—and in the famous 1931 essay “Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem” he decries the tendency toward “brilliantly written” novels in which, nonetheless, “there is not a single decent character”(547). Based on such statements as these, it would be easy to conclude that Chesnutt endorsed an approach in which African American characters would be represented as exclusively virtuous, strong of character, and politically moderate—the better to placate mainstream white sensibilities.That conclusion would be only partially correct, leaving out the degree to which creating politically effective characters and texts remained a vexing problem in Chesnutt’s mind. Though the expansion of publication opportunities for African Americans opened up new possibilities, making the resumption of a novel-writing career seem worthwhile, it did not, for Chesnutt, answer the aesthetic and technical questions he faced as a politically oriented writer. It merely raised the stakes. True, in “The Negro in Art,” Chesnutt impels African American writers to  chapter 5 132 produce positive black characters: “Why does not some...

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