A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean
James DaviS
Eric Walrond James DaviS
Copyrighted Material
Introduction A Harlem Story, a Dias
J
a Story
ean Campbell deposited a check for $850 at Barclay’s Bank on Barbour Street in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1969. It was an advance on the sale of the reprint rights for a book her father published to great acclaim in 1926, the first tangible benefit she and her sisters received from his writing. Liveright Publishers, a New York firm, had sold Eric Walrond’s lugubriously titled short story collection, Tropic Death. A check for $150 had been mailed to the author in London in early 1966 and, when he died that August, the balance of his $1,000 advance was made out to his estate. It was a closing scene that Walrond himself could have written, the sort of bitter irony that ends his stories. Finally, the literary labor he performed as a young man was profitable as he was headed for his grave; finally, he was providing for his daughters, from whom he had been estranged for forty years; finally, a West Indian family received royalties for a book by a West Indian about West Indians. Composed in Harlem, set in the Caribbean, and now profitable in London and Kingston, Tropic Death had traced a path across generations through the diaspora. The book was Walrond’s calling card and claim to fame, and although he did not live long enough to see its reissue, the knowledge of its impending sale had cheered him immensely. He considered himself a failure, and he was not alone in this opinion. A heralded prose writer and respected journalist of the
2 = Introduction
Harlem Renaissance, he never published another book-length work. By the mid-1960s, few of his friends and fewer scholars knew of his whereabouts. An immigrant to New York from the Panamanian city of Colón, born in British Guiana (now Guyana) to Barbadian parents, Walrond had made a strong impression in 1920s New York. “Anyone who ever met him remembered him,” said one close friend, “as soon as he entered the room you knew he was there.”1 Almost no one knew he was there, however, by the 1960s. The former Guggenheim Fellow had all but vanished into a quiet suburb north of London, working at an export firm near St. Paul’s Cathedral. In addition to Tropic Death, he had placed roughly 150 publications in nearly 40 periodicals in at least five countries, a record of uneven but compelling work that belies the one-hit wonder label. His tumultuous, peripatetic life and the radical, innovative writing to which it gave rise are this book’s subject. When Robert Bone, the author of two pioneering studies of African American literature, began work on a biography of Walrond in the 1980s, he sought to solve the mystery of why “after so promising a start, he was reduced to silence.”2 In a sense, Bone had the advantage of proximity to important sources, including Walrond’s nephew, who contacted family members and conducted extensive research. Their book was not completed, however, extending the obscurity into which Eric Walrond had drifted.3 But the intervening years have been propitious, not only revealing additional archival materials (thanks principally to Louis Parascandola and Carl Wade) but also because of a paradigm shift in the study of Caribbean “New Negro” writers and transnational black writing broadly. This is therefore a very different book from the one Bone had in mind, despite drawing on some of the same materials.
A Harlem Story Walrond was at the social and institutional center of 1920s Harlem. “I venture to say there isn’t another fellow in town anywhere near his age with as wide an acquaintance,” said the painter Aaron Douglas.4 Ethel Ray Nance, Walrond’s colleague at Opportunity magazine, recalled him as
Copyrighted Material
Introduction = 3
“a person that held our little group together and built the group, because he had the faculty of bringing in interesting people. If Eric walked down the street, someone interesting was bound to show up.”5 “Suave” and possessed of a “rippling wit,” as historian David Levering Lewis notes, Walrond was a regular at Harlem’s literary gatherings, often accompanied by the poets Countée Cullen and Langston Hughes; their friends Harold Jackman and Arna Bontemps; Jessie Fauset, literary editor of The Crisis; and the artist and poet Gwendolyn Bennett.6 He also befriended Shirley Graham, who later married W. E. B. Du Bois; Alain Locke, philosophy professor and “midwife” of the New Negro movement; Casper Holstein, head of the Harlem numbers racket; Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity; and Carl Van Vechten, author of Nigger Heaven. They thought him a “top-notch writer,” Nance said, charismatic, a generous friend, and a hustler with shrewd business sense. A journalist by training, Walrond worked for two important black periodicals, first as associate editor at Negro World, the journal of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), then as business manager at Opportunity, the journal of the National Urban League. At opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, the UNIA advocated a separatist, race-first platform while Opportunity, led by the indefatigable Johnson, a Chicago-trained sociologist, championed interracial cooperation. Johnson called Walrond one of the few “Negro writers who can, with complete justice, be styled intellectuals,” a remark that is striking when one considers that Walrond never completed college.7 Walrond was a more important catalyst for the New Negro movement than has been recognized, including a critical role in a 1924 dinner event at the downtown Civic Club that launched the movement, introducing black writers to New York’s publishing establishment. His journalism focused on literature and the arts, but he also covered history and politics. Once his talent became known outside Harlem, he published in Vanity Fair, Current History, The New Republic, and The Smart Set, among others. His recent arrival from the Caribbean did not prevent editors from identifying him as an authority on African American culture, from the Charleston dance craze, to the Harlem cabaret scene, to the Great Migration.
Copyrighted Material
4 = Introduction
But fiction writing was Walrond’s passion, publicly recognized first in an Opportunity story contest and in Locke’s anthology The New Negro (1925). The publication of Tropic Death the following year with a prominent firm was a major coup for a black writer. The publishers of O’Neill, Dreiser, Pound, and Eliot, Boni & Liveright had a highbrow imprimatur and a number of bestsellers as well. Tropic Death exhibited the technical innovation and aversion to sentimentality prized among American modernists, and its fidelity to Caribbean speech and folk culture was unprecedented. The book drew frequent comparisons to Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Sterling Brown recalled these two books as the era’s “brilliant high marks in fiction” and Walrond’s talent as “tremendous.”8 Even genteel critics, such as Benjamin Brawley and Du Bois, were impressed with Tropic Death despite its many disreputable characters and fatalistic tone. Du Bois called it “a distinct contribution to Negro American literature,” “a human document of deep significance and great promise.”9 On the heels of Tropic Death, Walrond placed a story in the inaugural issue of The American Caravan, obtained a $1,000 advance for a second book, and won three prestigious awards: a Harmon Foundation Award “for Excellence in Literary Achievement by a Negro,” a Zona Gale Scholarship to study at the University of Wisconsin, and a Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct research in the Caribbean. Donald Friede, vice president of Boni & Liveright, wrote, “I believe him to be the outstanding Negro prose writer of this country, and [. . .] I believe that his work will in time place him among the important writers in America—both Negro and white.”10 These were major accolades for someone just a few years removed from his job as a clerk in a Manhattan hospital, living with his aunt in Brooklyn. Given these achievements and the praise that followed, why is so little known about him? One reason is that he left New York and never published another book. He failed to fulfill expectations. By leaving Harlem at the height of his fame and the movement he helped invigorate, he sabotaged his promising career, publishing sporadically and never moving back to the United States. His departure is often cited as his downfall. But why did he leave? Where did he go, and why? What did he go on to write? In 1979, David
Copyrighted Material
Introduction = 5
Levering Lewis noted that another Harlem writer saw Walrond “in a London railway station in late 1929,” and “that was about the last heard of him.”11 But since then, Harlem Renaissance scholarship has broadened its scope beyond the United States, and the Caribbean diaspora has been the subject of extensive research. Both developments have encouraged extranational modes of inquiry. In these contexts—a transnational understanding of the Harlem Renaissance and a diaspora approach to Caribbean writing—Walrond’s significance takes on a different cast. Born on the Caribbean coast of South America, Walrond was raised in a village near Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados, by middle-class parents. He received an English education at St. Stephen’s School for Boys, then spent his adolescence in Panama, where many West Indians, including Walrond’s father, moved to find work. William Walrond was “caught up inexorably in the stream of history,” his son wrote, “like the migrants of every race, colour and nationality then flocking to the country through which Uncle Sam was cutting a canal” (“From” 1). After completing his schooling, he began writing for an English-language newspaper, Panama’s Star & Herald. When the opportunity arose in 1918, he left for New York. Ten years later, he packed his bags again and left for Europe. Walrond’s peripatetic career has impeded examination of his life and work. He defies categorization as a conventional immigrant writer or Harlem writer. This book tells a different sort of story, a diaspora story in which Walrond’s restless itinerary is an inducement to inquiry rather than an obstacle.
A Diaspora Story Although we begin with Walrond’s youth in a Caribbean region in the throes of upheaval, the richness of his diaspora story is best suggested by considering England, most of whose black residents before World War II were students and seamen. This was a generation before the SS Empire Windrush deposited nearly five hundred Caribbean passengers at Tilbury docks in 1948, inaugurating a new phase in black British history. Walrond
Copyrighted Material
6 = Introduction
shared common experiences with other pre-Windrush intellectuals, such as C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and Una Marson, forerunners to the West Indian writers who established a full-fledged literary movement after World War II. London’s small but active black community galvanized anticolonial sentiment through a vibrant transnational periodical culture. Walrond wrote for Garvey’s journal The Black Man, publishing trenchant critiques of imperialism and English “liberality” and contributing articles to mainstream papers such as London’s Spectator and The Evening Standard and New York papers such as The People’s Voice and the Amsterdam News. This book considers Walrond’s career in England in relation to the anticolonial movement and the resistance black Britons mounted against the “colour bar” at home. But Walrond differed in many respects from his contemporaries, not least because he did not remain long in London, moving in 1939 to Bradford-on-Avon in rural Wiltshire County. During his twelve years there, he was from all accounts the town’s only black resident, and among the perplexing questions about Walrond’s life is why he stayed as long as he did. Though it was only a ninety-minute train ride from Paddington Station, life in Bradford-on-Avon was a far cry from London. Interviews with his neighbors shed light on this period about which little was previously known. Walrond took a job at the Avon Rubber Company and quietly went about his writing, sending articles to London, New York, and even Nashville, Tennessee, interminably revising a manuscript about the history of Panama. Were it not for the war and the onset of severe bouts of depression, Walrond may have been more adept at advancing his career. Instead, he was admitted to the Roundway Psychiatric Hospital in 1952 as a voluntary patient. At Roundway, with 1,300 residents, he found a sense of support he had been lacking. The hospital engaged patients in activities rather than subjecting them to confinement, and Walrond helped establish The Roundway Review, a literary journal. A fortunate reference in 1957 from Nancy Cunard resulted in an extensive research assignment. The first performance of “Negro poetry” was to be staged in London, and Walrond’s involvement encouraged him to apply for a discharge from
Copyrighted Material
Introduction = 7
the hospital. The London to which he returned was changed considerably. Within months, the Notting Hill riots of 1958 expressed white workingclass resentment toward the former colonials who had made England their home. The violence yielded an ambivalent response: an affirmation of Afro-Caribbean culture, on one hand, represented in the inception of Carnival, and on the other hand, the restriction of immigration through the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. Walrond lived just long enough to witness these birth pangs of modern black Britain, to see the rise and fall of the West Indian Federation movement in the 1960s, and to glimpse, in the founding of the Caribbean Artists Movement, the stirrings of postcolonial literature. Living modestly in a North London suburb, he suffered a series of heart attacks, including a fatal one in 1966.
Chombo , Negro, Coloured: Negotiating Race Across Borders Walrond was more disappointed than anyone that he did not publish another book after Tropic Death. The Big Ditch, his history of Panama, was advertised in Boni & Liveright’s fall 1928 catalog. It never appeared. He was reduced to serializing some of it in the 1950s in The Roundway Review. The obscure publication failed to right his career or mitigate his disappointment, but a close reading of its fifteen installments reveals a work of tremendous potential, much of it realized. Walrond’s research was prodigious, and his vision of Panama’s centrality to the black Atlantic was prescient. Just as James’s famous history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938), traced the tensions French imperialism generated among classes, races, nations, and stakeholders in Haiti, all mediated by the figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture, The Big Ditch reframed Panama’s role in the Caribbean and beyond, casting the maneuvers of the French and Americans as a pivotal transition in colonial history and placing the revolutionary Pedro Prestán at the narrative’s center. Walrond was keenly aware of Panama’s place in the “El Dorado” myth. From the conquistador Hernán Cortes, to the U.S. diplomat John Lloyd Stephens,
Copyrighted Material
8 = Introduction
to Ferdinand de Lesseps and Theodore Roosevelt, the prospect of putting a canal through the wasp waist of the Americas signaled the irresistible promise of commerce and national glory. Walrond’s history, though uneven, is a document of startling scope and analysis. Had it found a capable editor it may well be cited as a pioneering study. The remnants of the Panama book dispel a rumor that Walrond spent his time in France in dissolution.12 Like many expatriates, he passed his share of Paris evenings (and early mornings) carousing. But he was also immersed in the archives, as evidenced by his research into Panamarelated developments in France and elsewhere. If Walrond was not prolific there, he was far from idle. The heterogeneity of Paris’ black community represented a departure from Harlem. There, Walrond had translated the Caribbean for North American readers, not only in Tropic Death but also by editing a Caribbean issue of Opportunity and bringing a Caribbean perspective to his essays. In France and England, his Caribbeanness signified differently, and his decade in the United States distinguished him from the colonial intellectuals in the metropole. Two tensions that were central to Walrond’s career emerge from his Caribbean background. Above all, the Caribbean instilled a thoroughgoing skepticism toward monolithic notions of race. The differences in ethnicity, religion, language, class, and culture that were conventionally subsumed under the designations “Negro” or “Coloured” fuel much of his work. But the Caribbean also fostered a race radicalism, a desire to identify and challenge white supremacy. Despite his Anglophilic education, Walrond developed an early awareness that the racism he encountered derived from colonial relations. Nowhere was this clearer than in Panama, where locals called him a chombo, a racial slur, and Jim Crow segregation was imposed by the United States. Hence the ongoing tension for Walrond between his desire to affiliate with other people of color, drawing him to Pan-Africanism and anticolonialism, and a competing desire to deconstruct the category of blackness as itself an expression and instrument of white supremacy. The Caribbean also cultivated in Walrond a discerning analysis of the region’s colonial history, from the “liberal” English, to the “business imperialism” of the French and Dutch, to
Copyrighted Material
Introduction = 9
U.S. “colonialism without colonies.” He was alert to nationalist rivalries, cultural paternalism, and the capitalist quest for larger markets, cheaper materials, and flexible labor. Nonetheless, although he found these features of Caribbean colonialism pernicious, the resulting arrangements of people and cultures intrigued him. He was fascinated by linguistic polyphony, intercultural contact, political alliances, and emancipatory social movements. Hence another recurring tension—he abhorred state practices of colonialism, but the complexity of the resulting societies fired his political and aesthetic imagination. We begin, then, in the Caribbean, where the indigenous people of the hemisphere first encountered Europeans, where enslaved Africans first landed, and where the plantation system and its triangle trade yielded the heterogeneous societies that animated Walrond’s writing. The descendant of a Scottish planter and an African woman he freed from slavery, Walrond was a living testament to the convoluted history of the Caribbean and the age in which he was born.