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Show FALL 2013 UHQ pp 304-385_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 9/16/13 1:25 PM Page 361 WALLACE hENry ThUrMAN Encouraged by his overall success as a playwright and novelist, Thurman continued his literary career in the following decade. In 1930, he collaborated with Rapp on a three-act play, Jeremiah the Magnificent, which he based on Marcus Garvey’s UNIA “Back to Africa” movement of the post–World War I era. The play remained unpublished and was only performed once after Thurman died.83 In 1932, Thurman published two more novels: Infants of the Spring and The Interne. Thurman dedicated Infants to his mother, Beulah: “The goose who laid a not so golden egg.”84 Set in Harlem during the 1920s, the story revolves around Raymond Taylor, a young black author. In this novel, Thurman suggests that the pretentious writers who surround Taylor (who, many believe, he based on well-known figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including Hughes, Locke, Hurston, and Nugent, and their ever-present supporter-patron, Carl Van Vechten) had destroyed their creativity with their decadent lifestyles.85 He vigorously attacks black writers and their white patrons, who praise everything produced by black authors regardless of its quality. Critics gave Infants a reception much like that of Blacker. Several wrote that Thurman examined too many issues; one critic wrote that the novel was “clumsily written.” While one critic “found its dialogue” to be “often incredibly bad,” another concluded that “there are monotonous speeches, an unclear thesis and a lack of unity.”86 Others praised Thurman for his frank discussion of black society. In the Saturday Review of Literature, Martha Gruening wrote, “No other Negro writer has so unflinchingly told the truth about color snobbery within the color line, the ins and outs of ‘passing’ and other vagaries of prejudice. . . . [Its] quota of truth is just that which Negro writers, under the stress of propaganda and counterpropaganda, have generally and quite understandably omitted from their picture.”87 Some observers considered Infants one of the first books written expressly for black audiences and not white critics.88 Thurman wrote his third and final novel, The Interne, in collaboration with Abraham L. Furman, whom he met while working at Macaulay’s Publishing Company. The novel portrays medical life in an urban hospital through Carl Armstrong, a white doctor, whose ideals are shattered because of the corrupt behavior of the staff and the bureaucratic red tape. He saves himself by leaving.89 Critics could not agree whether Thurman’s account of 83 Klotman, “Wallace Henry Thurman,” 267–68; According to Amritjit Singh,Thurman wrote a number of other plays that are not extant today. Singh also notes that “some scholars have mistakenly ascribed the plays Singing the Blues (written by John McGowman) and Savage Rhythm (written by Harry Hamilton and Norman Foster) to him.” Singh and Scott, Collected Writings, 312. 84 Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (New York: Macaulay, 1932), front flyleaf. 85 Klotman, “Wallace Henry Thurman,” 270. 86 Terrell Scott Herring, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Manor: Infants of the Spring and the Conundrum of Publicity,” African American Review 35, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 586. 87 Martha Gruening, “Two Ways to Harlem,” Saturday Review of Literature (March 12, 1932): 585. 88 “Wallace Thur man,” Afr ican Amer ican Literature Book Club, accessed July 17, 2013, aalbc.com/authors/Wallace.htm. 89 Klotman, “Wallace Henry Thurman,” 272. 361 |
