After a four-year hiatus, during which I only blogged about investing, I have decided to commence blogging again about literature, music, food, drink, race, religion, philosophy, and my life . . .
The New Yorker writes of Jeffrey Stewart’s new biography of Alain Locke, The New Negro: “At more than nine hundred pages, it’s a thudding, shapeless text, despotic in its pedantry and exhausting in its zeal, marked by excruciating attention to the most minuscule irrelevances.”
This goes too far. Stewart’s is by no means an excellent biography. But I like it better than the previous one, Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth’s Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher. Stewart digs up some great material, delves deeply into questions of sex, forthrightly calls Locke out on his condescension and misogyny, and fills his book with terrific portraits of those with whom Locke parried. My favorite part of the book is Stewart’s multilayered attack on the art collector Albert Barnes. Stewart not only really understands Locke in a way that I think Harris and Molesworth failed to, but understands Locke’s peculiar milieu. I found very interesting, for example, Stewart’s argument that Jessie Fauset, editor of the Crisis and sometime lover of W. E. B. Du Bois, had a crush on Langston Hughes despite the twenty-year difference in their ages.
But remarkably, despite the length of the book, there are important things missing. Zora Neale Hurston studied with Locke at Howard, where he encouraged her literary ambitions, but this gets only a brief mention. And utterly inexplicably (unless I missed it), Stewart leaves out altogether Locke’s voyage to Germany in 1932, when he traveled with Ralph Bunche on the same boat as Hughes and a large contingent of African Americans bound for Russia to make a Communist Party–backed movie about racism in the US. On board, Locke disparaged Hughes and his friends viciously in letters he sent to his patron, Charlotte Mason, and when he bumped into Langston, the latter refused to shake hands.
Stewart also gets a number of things wrong. For instance, Hurston did not attend the 1924 Civic Club dinner that was more or less the “coming out party” for the Harlem Renaissance; the anecdote Stewart tells of Zora’s behavior that night happened more than a year later, after the May 1925 Opportunity awards dinner.
But with all its flaws, the book offers many riches, and creditably makes a fascinating figure more fascinating than he has ever been before.
And beyond that, is there a real point to The New Yorker's disparagement? Even if it were entirely just, I fail to see what such an extraordinary dismissal of a book accomplishes besides making its writer look mean-spirited.
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