No Easy Place To Be
By Steven Corbin
Simon & Schuster, 444 pages, $19.95
Scholars and pundits may be arguing for centuries about when the so-called Harlem Renaissance formally ended or began, but all will agree that it represented a rich, productive and colorful era of intellectual and artistic achievement by black Americans. Roughly from the advent of World War I-which saw, for the first time, massive numbers of black soldiers coming home from tours of duty at the European front-until 1929, when the U .S. economy bottomed out, unprecedented national attention was given to the activities and accomplishments of gifted, New York-based blacks.
It was a time of great hope, when Afro-American novelists, poets, playwrights, editors, scholars, journalists, actors, orators, singers, dancers, musicians, painters, sculptors, film-makers, social activists, political organizers and entrepreneurs consorted and interacted with each other, as well as with sympathetic and supportive whites.
But as with the Jazz Age of the 1920s and the Beat Generation of the 1950s, the reality of the Harlem Renaissance, for all the learned papers and volumes devoted to it in recent years, is fast becoming blurred and romanticized in the popular mind. Given the visionary and imaginative powers of James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, Nella Larsen and W. E. B. Dubois, it is hardly surprising that history and myth, reality and
romanticism, fact and fiction have gotten jumbled. There is, after all, something of the novelist in the best historians, and fiction set in the past is sometimes more persuasive than a textbook.
”No Easy Place To Be” is a novel penned in a rambunctious, contemporary-pop style and set during the Harlem Renaissance. The author, Steven Corbin, is a graduate of the USC Film School, which might be irrelevant were his novel`s characterizations, scenes and carefully measured pace less cinematically conceived.
Narrating the parallel adventures and misadventures of Miriam, Velma and Louise Brooks, a passionate and driven trio of sisters, each with her distinct goal or problem to overcome, Corbin takes readers on a bustling, melodramatically charged tour of Harlem`s fabled upper-crust ”happenings,”
from the dawning to the twilight of the Twenties.
The Brooks sisters` amazing mother, Elvira-a transplanted Atlantan who has built up a profitable beautician practice in her busy Harlem flat-is as down-to-earth and devoted to the social advancement of her daughters as any of the noble matriarchs depicted in the ”Race” fiction of that day. ”In her mind, there existed no worse frustration than her inability to shelter her girls from life`s poisoned arrows. Lord, she prayed, what am I gonna do?”
What Miriam, Elvira`s oldest, does is become a nurse and an avid follower of Marcus Garvey, the flamboyant, Jamaican-born racial nationalist who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which is still simplistically remembered as having promoted a ”Back-to-Africa” movement. ” `White folks and onions,` Miriam tells her mother, `make you wanna cry.` ”
Louise, the youngest Brooks sister, is a paradigm of the tragic mulatto. Physically attractive, and pursued by black and white men, Louise is light-skinned and fair-featured enough to pass for white but feels herself to be the family misfit. Unable to find suitable work following her graduation from high school, she becomes a chorus girl at the infamous Cotton Club, where
”white patrons from every corner of Manhattan save Harlem slummed in the atmosphere of jungle music, as artifical palm trees swayed to the throbbing beat.”
There she meets Vittorio, a millionaire Sicilian playboy. ”He epitomized the man of her dreams. Yet she knew that as a poor little colored girl from Harlem . . . she didn`t stand a chance. But she could dream.” Changing her name to Anna Luisa Carcionne, she moves to Greenwich Village, blots out her burdensome family background, and lets her dream of marriage come true.
However, it is the story of Velma, the middle sister, that holds together this reckless, fast-moving novel. A recent college graduate, Velma is in love with literature and the work of Hughes, Hurston and Toomer. Big sister Miriam has warned her that public interest in books by Negro writers is only a passing fad, but Velma nonetheless barges into the pretentious Harlem Writers Workshop, even though ”she`d heard through the literary grapevine that women weren`t too welcome here. Great, she thought, story of my life. Had she allowed life`s obstacles to stand in her way, she never would have attended Barnard; nor would she have embarked upon a career as a writer.”
At the workshop, Velma meets the handsome young novelist, Zachary Rudolph (” `Please call me Rudy . . . as in Valentino.` ”) Their passion is soon consummated, and Rudy vows to help Velma get published. Even though their ardor cools once Velma catches him in bed with a man, Rudy quietly uses his clout to get DuBois to run one of Velma`s stories in The Crisis, the official NAACP publication. Rudy also puts Velma in touch with his pal Alain Locke, the influential critic and educator.
At a literary soiree thrown by Carl Van Vechten, the white writer, photographer, archivist and negrophile, Velma is introduced to her idol, the cosmopolitan novelist G. Virgil Scott. (” `If Adonis were Negro,` Velma thought, `he would look like this.` ”) But Velma doesn`t yet know how brilliantly self-destructive this difficult Harvard man will turn out to be. By the time her own first novel, ”Chameleon,” appears, Velma, Scott, and Rudy have become enmeshed in a torturous menage a trois that will take four years to untangle itself.
In fashioning this yarn, Corbin has certainly done his homework. Yet, like most historical novelists, when it comes to choosing between accuracy and drama, he takes the path of least resistance. It is hard to believe, for example, that Velma Brooks and Zora Neale Hurston could have attended Barnard at the same time and not even known about one another. Moreover, Hurston`s reputation as a great American writer has been established only over the past 20 years; her contemporaries did not hold her work in such high regard.
But it is shallow characterization and overly contrived plot devices that weaken this imaginatively conceived first novel. Perhaps it was not Corbin`s intention to produce a work of high art. Nevertheless, it is not easy for characters who are less than fully realized or individuated to mount the stage alongside the actual giant intellects and large-than-life artistic and literary figures who peopled the Harlem Renaissance.
So literary sages and Black History buffs may do a lot of groaning as they breeze through this warm-hearted novel, which often reads as though the author might have had either a movie or a television mini-series in mind. But others just might place Corbin and ”No Easy Place to Be” right up there with the big bandleaders of pop storytelling.
