{"id":127434,"date":"2018-07-11T11:00:33","date_gmt":"2018-07-11T15:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=127434"},"modified":"2018-07-12T14:48:10","modified_gmt":"2018-07-12T18:48:10","slug":"feminize-your-canon-dorothy-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/07\/11\/feminize-your-canon-dorothy-west\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminize Your Canon: Dorothy West"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our monthly column\u00a0Feminize Your Canon<\/a>\u00a0explores the lives of underrated and\u00a0underread female authors.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The career of the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West featured one of the most remarkable second acts in literary history. Almost half a century after her trailblazing debut novel, The Living Is Easy <\/em>(1948), West published her second novel, The Wedding <\/em>(1995), at the age of eighty-seven. It received an ecstatic reaction. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, at the time an editor for Doubleday and a fellow resident of Martha\u2019s Vineyard, had encouraged West to complete the long-gestated work, which West dedicates to the late Onassis. \u201cThough there was never such a mismatched pair in appearance,\u201d West writes, \u201cwe were perfect partners.\u201d Set on the Vineyard on a single summer weekend, The Wedding<\/em> is narrated by an irresistibly droll omniscient voice that veers across centuries to trace the knotty, reverberating heritage of an affluent African American family. An instant best seller, it was adapted for television by Oprah Winfrey. The ABC miniseries, starring Halle Berry, aired not long before West\u2019s death at ninety-one. When asked what she wanted her legacy to be, she said: \u201cThat I hung in there. That I didn\u2019t say, I can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the decades between her two novels, West published short stories\u2014she was one of the first black fiction writers to be published in the New York<\/em> Daily News<\/em>\u2014and for many years, she wrote columns for the Vineyard Gazette<\/em>. Yet her enormous early promise seemed destined to go unfulfilled. Her name was but a footnote to the Harlem Renaissance, of whose luminaries she was the longest living but, then and still, the least famous. One reason West gave for her long spell out of the limelight was that she felt alienated by the black militancy of the sixties. When watching television in that era, she said, \u201calmost all of the black people I saw, I didn\u2019t like what they were saying.\u201d Though she was already working on The Wedding<\/em>, she worried that its backdrop of privilege and its message of communality (\u201cColor was a false distinction; love was not,\u201d one central character muses) would go down poorly in an atmosphere abuzz with Malcolm X\u2019s revolutionary separatist rhetoric.\u00a0<\/p>\n

West\u2019s small-c<\/em> conservative outlook and her work\u2019s distinctive focus on upwardly mobile, status-conscious African Americans complicated her relationship with commercial publishing. Like her older contemporary Jessie Redmon Fauset, whose first novel was initially rejected because, the publisher stated, \u201cwhite readers just don\u2019t expect Negroes to be like this,\u201d West was caught between conflicting demands. When she submitted short stories that didn\u2019t mention the characters\u2019 race, magazine editors\u2014employing euphemisms like passion<\/em>\u00a0and vitality<\/em>\u2014would say they wanted stories about black people. (James Baldwin elicited a similar reaction after setting his second novel, the masterpiece Giovanni\u2019s Room<\/em>, among white expatriates in Paris. Knopf refused to publish it\u2014and not simply because they balked at a gay love story; only another Harlem book from their \u201cNegro writer\u201d would do.) Meanwhile, Houghton Mifflin, who had published The Living Is Easy<\/em> to critical acclaim but not commercial success,<\/em> turned down a precursor to The Wedding<\/em>. They found Where the Wild Grape Grows<\/em> \u201cbeautifully written\u201d but feared another book about the black middle class wouldn\u2019t sell. When West was passed over for a Rosenwald fellowship (grants of a thousand to two thousand dollars awarded to African American artists and writers), she suspected the judging panel of deeming her work not \u201cracial\u201d enough. \u201cWriters are always advised to write about what they know best,\u201d she later reflected ruefully, \u201cand the black middle class is what I know best.\u201d<\/p>\n

The scholar and writer Thulani Davis, however, has welcomed West\u2019s autobiographical portrayals precisely because her milieu is culturally underrepresented. \u201cThe complexity of our universe,\u201d Davis said after The Wedding<\/em> was published, \u201cis generally not reflected in the mainstream media, where blacks are usually viewed as working class, unemployed, troubled by pathologies. For me, all the pieces of the pie help give a more rounded view of our world.\u201d Davis also suggested that West didn\u2019t crave public renown. \u201cShe was a loner, content, self-sufficient. She lived without the need to be rich or famous, without those drives that are so typical of writers.\u201d<\/p>\n

West led a thoroughly unconventional twentieth-century existence. A female intellectual who never became a wife or a mother, she instead dedicated herself to writing. Her serious romantic relationships were with women. \u201cI did not want to get married and have to nurse a man,\u201d she said, \u201cbecause I\u2019ve seen that. The man becomes the woman\u2019s child.\u201d Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis, the authors of Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle<\/em>,\u00a0suggest that West\u2019s first love was Mildred Jones, an artist whom she met in 1932. And West\u2019s longest intimate relationship was probably with Marian Minus, a writer and political activist. The two women lived together in New York and Martha\u2019s Vineyard, where Minus, a capable mechanic, was often seen under the hood of a car while West passed her a wrench.<\/p>\n

Still, the always discreet and private West was untouched by headline-worthy scandal and uninterested in courting the kind of controversy that, especially for artistic women, fires the popular imagination. In a recent Slate<\/em> essay, \u201cRebel Girls and Children\u2019s Books: In Defense of Well-Behaved Women,\u201d the author Joanna Scutts critiques the pervasive tendency to valorize female role models for their uncompromising fearlessness and defiance in a masculine-coded \u201cheroic version of history.\u201d One of the books Scutts mentions is Vashti Harrison\u2019s best-selling Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History<\/em>, which among its forty worthy subjects features the writers Phillis Wheatley, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler\u2014but not West.<\/p>\n

Well-behaved from the cradle to the grave, West often said her strict mother had shaped her habits. Rachel West, the beautiful and dynamic South Carolinian daughter of emancipated slaves, cherished and cultivated her family\u2019s membership in Boston\u2019s established black bourgeoisie. Their New England society was a bastion of good breeding, she taught her daughter, where class was more important than color. When nineteen-year-old Dorothy moved to New York City in December 1926, Rachel warned that New Yorkers were \u201creal prejudiced.\u201d She cautioned that while those of \u201ca proper background\u201d\u2014that is, Boston Brahmins\u2014would not lower themselves to displays of ugly racism, no such manners could be expected in New York.<\/p>\n

Even with her mother\u2019s words ringing in her ears, West found the city exhilarating. Getting off the subway in Harlem with her cousin, the poet Helene Johnson, she discovered \u201call these colored people all over the place, just on street corners. We had never seen so many colored people \u2026 Of course we fell, as everyone does, in love with New York.\u201d West, who enrolled for writing classes at Columbia University, had already published short fiction: her first story appeared in the Boston Post<\/em> when she was fourteen, and thereafter she regularly won the paper\u2019s weekly short-story prize. Her vocation was clear far earlier, though. At age seven, she asked her mother if she could lock her bedroom door. \u201cI said I wanted to write stories and that you had to be by yourself when you wrote them because you had to think hard to make them come out right.\u201d<\/p>\n

West\u2019s career launched in earnest in spring 1926, when she and Zora Neale Hurston tied for second prize in a short-story contest held by the National Urban League\u2019s black culture journal, Opportunity<\/em>. West\u2019s entry, \u201cThe Typewriter,\u201d is an astonishing achievement for a writer not yet twenty years old. A breviloquent tragedy of the American Dream from the perspective of a sensitive middle-aged office janitor, the tale displays the preternatural empathy that was to distinguish all of West\u2019s work to come. The nameless protagonist, who as an \u201ceager Negro lad of seventeen\u201d had come north full of ambition and optimism, is defeated and browbeaten when the story opens. But he finds profound and unexpected solace in role-playing J. Lucius Jones, a \u201cdealer in stocks and bonds,\u201d while helping his daughter, Millie, practice typing and taking dictation. \u201cOccasionally\u2014and it must be admitted, ashamedly\u2014he made surreptitious ventures into the dictionary. He had to, of course. J. Lucius Jones would never say \u2018Y\u2019got to\u2019 when he meant \u2018It is expedient.\u2019\u2009\u201d \u201cThe Typewriter\u201d was also selected as an O. Henry Memorial Award story and published in a collection with work by Dorothy Parker, Edith Wharton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.<\/p>\n

At the Opportunity<\/em> awards dinner at a New York hotel, West met Hurston and other now iconic writers, including Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, and Langston Hughes. All would become close friends. That summer, West returned to Massachusetts and summered as usual at her family\u2019s Vineyard cottage, but the thrilling creative vanguardism of New York, with all its sophistication and intellectual promise, beckoned. Her parents were sympathetic. Rachel was proud of Dorothy\u2019s literary gifts, and her father, Isaac West, a former slave who left Virginia for the North after the Civil War and became a successful fruit merchant, likewise supported his precocious daughter\u2019s dreams. \u201cYour little head is for making books, writing books,\u201d he once told her. \u201cMine is for buying and selling bananas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Upon her return to New York that December, West was welcomed as the youngest member of the blossoming movement of extraordinary black writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians eventually dubbed the Harlem Renaissance. \u201cWe never even heard the words,\u201d West said in later life. \u201cWe were all single, we were all young\u2014the oldest was 30, which seems terribly young to me now. We were all on our own.\u201d Hughes affectionately christened her \u201cthe kid.\u201d To Hurston, who let West and Johnson stay at her apartment on West Sixty-Sixth\u00a0Street, she was \u201clittle sister.\u201d With Cullen, who found her \u201ca fascinating and lovable child,\u201d West enjoyed the new loosening of gender rules and attended drag balls. They even discussed marriage, though he was motivated less by romance than by the prospect of curing his homosexuality. Perhaps West thought the same. And Thurman was her trusted adviser, both for writing and life. According to West\u2019s biographer Cherene Sherrard, Thurman based the character of Emma Lou in his debut novel, The Blacker the Berry<\/em>, on his youngest friend. None of the group ever had any money, but they found ways to survive. West recalled: \u201cYou invited a crowd of people to your studio, charged them admission, got your bootlegger to trust you for a gallon or two of gin, sold it at 15 cents a paper cup, and cleared enough from the evening\u2019s proceedings to pay your back rent and your bootlegger. There was usually sufficient money left to lay in a week\u2019s supply of liquor and some crackers and sardines.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the following two decades, through the end of the Harlem Renaissance (an end that West attributed, in part, to Thurman\u2019s tragic, alcohol-hastened death at the age of thirty-two in 1934) and the years of the Great Depression, West kept writing while trying to keep afloat financially. She founded a literary magazine, Challenge<\/em>,\u00a0which she collaborated on with Minus and Richard Wright, until Wright ousted West in order to impose a more communist editorial stance. \u201cI guess you could say I was passive,\u201d West said of that hostile takeover. \u201cPlus, I was small and my voice soft.\u201d But she added, a touch acerbically, \u201cI was never crazy about Richard Wright because he was so timid and afraid of white people.\u201d<\/p>\n

During this period, West also worked as a welfare investigator and as an interviewer for the Works Progress Administrations\u2019s Federal Writers\u2019 Project. Due to her race and sex, resources that might have allowed her time to finish a novel were scarce. The artist colony Yaddo, for example, excluded African Americans until 1941, when its founding director, Elizabeth Ames, lobbied the board to join \u201cthe good society of those who are fighting against racial discrimination.\u201d Hughes was granted a fellowship, but it would be many years before Yaddo invited a woman of color.<\/p>\n

When opportunities did come along, there were often strings attached. West and Johnson were both sexually harassed by Carl Van Vechten, the bisexual writer and photographer who was a patron to many Harlem Renaissance figures, as well as a wielder of influence at Vanity Fair<\/em>. \u201cYou don\u2019t know what we had to go through back then, and I\u2019m so glad you don\u2019t,\u201d West told the author Deborah McDowell in 1985. \u201cIn so many ways, we were so helpless. In those days, the women were just like excess baggage or fair game.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1943, West drew a line under her formative years and went to live on Martha\u2019s Vineyard. Away from the tumult of New York, she completed The Living Is Easy<\/em>, which was published in 1948, when she was forty. A gripping historical satire of class and colorism that should be shelved alongside Wharton and Henry James, its charismatic main character is Cleo Judson, a social-climbing Bostonian matriarch based on West\u2019s mother. A feminist before the word was invented, West said, her mother \u201ccould just stand in a room and every eye was focused on her. She had some<\/em> personality, a strong personality.\u201d And Rachel West apparently loved the novel, even though Cleo is one of the most deliciously Machiavellian creations in literature. She has two goals, in service of which she doesn\u2019t hesitate to lie, scheme, and manipulate: to be wealthy and respected and to have her three sisters living under her roof and her control.<\/p>\n

Cleo, whose beauty and light complexion confer a high rank within Boston\u2019s early-twentieth-century black elite, regrets the \u201ccocoa-brown\u201d skin and \u201cgenerous nose\u201d of her little daughter, Judy, and is drawn emotionally and erotically to Lenore, the hostess of an infamous gambling den who \u201cpasses\u201d with her blonde hair and blue eyes. In this world, rendered as a kind of tragedy of manners, social striving and thrall to artificial markers of status take precedent over anyone\u2019s feelings or, indeed, their future happiness. When Judy is accepted, sight unseen, for a prestigious dance class, the teacher, on meeting her, \u201ccloaked her chagrin with a delicate clearing of the throat.\u201d As a child, West attended a similar class, where the mothers looked at her and said, \u201cWhat is that little dark girl doing here?\u201d<\/p>\n

Of all the romantic relationships depicted, only Cleo\u2019s sisters love their husbands. But Cleo is poised to willfully destroy their marriages, both to prevent the women from leaving Boston (where they are visiting) and because accepting the \u201clower class\u201d men as relatives would mar the image that Cleo has carefully constructed. After all, the day-to-day lives of Cleo\u2019s circle \u201cwere narrowly confined in a daily desperate effort to ignore their racial heritage. They did not consider themselves a minority group. The Irish were a minority group, the Jews, the Italians, the Greeks, who were barred from belonging by old country memories, accents and mores \u2026 Though they scorned the Jew, they were secretly pleased when they could pass for one. Though they were contemptuous of the Latins, they were proud when they looked European \u2026 There was nothing that disturbed them more than knowing that no one would take them for anything but colored.\u201d<\/p>\n

In The Wedding<\/em>, West offers a more nuanced and succinct take on the same themes. In the late summer 1953, the prosperous Coles family is gathered on the Vineyard for the nuptials of their lovely scion Shelby Coles to a white jazz musician. The impending wedding brings to a head the foundational illusion of their lives: that skin color is \u201ca direct barometer of virtue,\u201d as Shelby\u2019s sister, Liz, sarcastically puts it. West tracks the idea\u2019s evolution and its fallout by telling the stories of the family\u2019s ancestors, black and white, from back when \u201ccars hadn\u2019t yet been invented, cocktails hadn\u2019t yet been invented, and the idea of colored people taking vacations had not yet been invented either.\u201d In a more recent flashback, a young Shelby gets lost, and the islanders are on the lookout for a \u201clittle colored girl.\u201d But blonde Shelby isn\u2019t recognizable as such, and when she tells her name to a white mother, the woman is at first confused and then reluctant to ask if she\u2019s \u201ccolored.\u201d \u201cI couldn\u2019t do anything as awful,\u201d the woman says to her friends. \u201cSupposing she isn\u2019t? It might leave a scar.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWest\u2019s novel,\u201d Leon Forrest writes in the Los Angeles Times<\/em>, \u201cshows why the \u2018black is beautiful\u2019 commandment emerged from the depths of suppression, like a howling apocalypse.\u201d\u00a0 In the New York Times Book Review<\/em>, Susan Kenney compares West to William Faulkner and raves, \u201cIt\u2019s as though we\u2019ve been invited not so much to a wedding as to a full-scale opera, only to find that one great artist is belting out all the parts. She brings down the house.\u201d There were, of course, a handful of critics who found West\u2019s themes trivial and old-fashioned in a novel set during the most pivotal era of the fight for civil rights\u2014the very reaction West had originally feared. Yet today The Wedding<\/em> and The Living Is Easy<\/em>, with their complex portraits of underdocumented lives and sensibilities, read not as politically pass\u00e9 but as highly relevant to contemporary feminist debates around intersectionality, colorism, and hegemonic beauty standards.<\/p>\n

West\u2019s work is also timelessly cinematic, with painterly visual descriptions and pitch-perfect dialogue that ranges across class, region, race, age, and gender. When Winfrey optioned The Wedding<\/em>, a principal enticement was, in her words, its \u201cunique\u201d depiction of Oak Bluffs, the African American vacation enclave of Martha\u2019s Vineyard (though she was disappointed with it in reality and chose a grander location in Wilmington, North Carolina). The Living Is Easy<\/em> has never been adapted to film, but its snapshot of World War I\u2013era patrician black Bostonians is equally unique. And seventy years after the novel\u2019s publication, its propulsive plot and protofeminist antiheroine seem tailor-made for the prestige drama treatment\u2014and for the mass audience that West (not to mention the redoubtable Cleo) deserves.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for <\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable, <\/em>Longreads, <\/em>Newsweek, <\/em>The Daily Beast, <\/em>Salon, <\/em>The Awl, <\/em>Words Without Borders, and other publications.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our monthly column\u00a0Feminize Your Canon\u00a0explores the lives of underrated and\u00a0underread female authors.     The career of the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West featured one of the most remarkable second acts in literary history. Almost half a century after her trailblazing debut novel, The Living Is Easy (1948), West published her second novel, The Wedding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1048,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34367],"tags":[10421,32426,34678,32556,881,31648,3296,10893,9083,3826,34680,34679,34681,3844],"class_list":["post-127434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminize-your-canon","tag-audre-lorde","tag-countee-cullen","tag-dorothy-west","tag-harlem-renaissance","tag-james-baldwin","tag-joanna-scutts","tag-langston-hughes","tag-maya-angelou","tag-phyllis-wheatley","tag-richard-wright","tag-the-typewriter","tag-the-wedding","tag-wallace-thurman","tag-zora-neale-hurston"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFeminize Your Canon: Dorothy West<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The youngest member of the 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