This is by Nella Larsen (1891-1964). It was published in 1929, and is well and truly part of the Harlem Renaissance (as was Jean Toomer's Cane). So that was one good reason for reading it. Another was that it came recommended by two of my favourite literary Substackers, Haley Larsen and Petya K. Grady.

I listened to the audio version, which was superbly read by Tessa Thompson (she, incidentally, played the lead character, Irene Redfield, in Netflix's black-and-white adaptation of the book, released in 2021).

The subject, as the title indicates, is "passing", ie, passing yourself off as something other than Black. The strategy came up in discussions of Toomer, and also in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, by James Weldon Johnson.

Larsen's is a brilliant, brilliant exposition of the causes and consequences of "passing". But it's much more than that. It's an exploration of female friendship, marriage, and the whole tricky business of being Black in 1920s America.

Beware spoilers from here on in. There's a shocking ending, and nobody should miss the superb way Larsen handles it.



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The plot is quite simple. It's a third-person narration, and the point of view throughout is Irene's. She's Black, but she can and does "pass" occasionally -- "for the sake of convenience, restaurants, theatre tickets, and things like that". We wince every time we hear about the necessity for this sort of thing...

Irene is actually passing (I'll leave off the inverted commas, but take them as read each time) in the rooftop cafe of a smart hotel in Chicago when she bumps into Clare Kendry, a childhood friend and our other key protagonist. When Clare, before introducing herself, stares at her insistently, Irene wonders: "Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?" At the possibility of ejection, a wave of "anger, scorn, and fear" washes over Irene. We know, then, from this early point, the stresses that passing imposes.

Irene is doing OK in life. Her husband (Brian, who definitely couldn't pass) is a doctor; she has a nice house, and two kids, and smart clothes, and a sprawling social circle.

Clare, on the other hand, has made a career of passing. Her husband, John Bellew, is white. He has no idea of his wife's true heritage. And, we soon discover, he's an out-and-out racist, with nothing but bile to spew out about Black people. So this is already a very, very high-stakes game Clare is playing. She has a daughter, but wants no more children: "I nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear that she might be dark. Thank goodness, she turned out all right. But I'll never risk it again. Never! The strain is simply too-too hellish."

But Clare raises the stakes still further by attaching herself to Irene's Harlem circle. That initial meeting in Chicago, she tells her friend in the letter we read right at the beginning of the book, before the Chicago flashback, has reminded her of how much she is missing: "You can't know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of."


Melbourne, 2011. The year 1929 saw the publication of Colette's Sido; Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September; Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife; and (in serial form) Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. Meanwhile, Wall Street crashed; Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize in Literature; Serge Pavlovich Diaghilev died; and Rabindranath Tagore visited Saigon. And in Melbourne, the Russell Street Substation assumed its current guise...

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Brian advises Irene not to let Clare "pester" her. People who pass are never satisfied, he says; they always come back. Irene is still fascinated by the whole phenomenon: "We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it."

Be that as it may, Irene has little choice. Soon her friend is a regular part of her life. She muses:

"Clare, it seemed, still retained her ability to secure the thing that she wanted in the face of any opposition, and in utter disregard of the convenience and desire of others. About her there was some quality, hard and persistent, with the strength and endurance of rock, that would not be beaten or ignored. She couldn't, Irene thought, have had an entirely serene life.

"Not with that dark secret for ever crouching in the background of her consciousness. And yet she hadn't the air of a woman whose life had been touched by uncertainty or suffering.

"Pain, fear, and grief were things that left their mark on people. Even love, that exquisite torturing emotion, left its subtle traces on the countenance.

"But Clare -- she had remained almost what she had always been, an attractive, somewhat lonely child -- selfish, wilful, and disturbing."

Irene keeps suggesting to Clare that she is playing a really dangerous game. If Bellew -- given his extremist views -- finds out she's consorting with people in Harlem, there will be hell to pay. And what about her daughter? "Children aren't everything," Clare responds. And then she confesses to Irene that she has no "proper morals or sense of duty". She continues: "Why, to get the things I want badly enough, I'd do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away. Really, 'Rene, I'm not safe." This corroborates something Irene told us right at the beginning about Clare: "There was about her an amazing soft malice, hidden well away until provoked. Then she was capable of scratching, and very effectively too."



***

Two things to note here:

One is that we see EVERYTHING from Irene's point of view. So we really don't know if we're getting a fair picture of Clare. Irene clearly both fears her and admires her.

The other is that our attitude to Irene changes as we go along. We start out sympathetic. Clare really is way too pushy; it's understandable that she'd be annoying. But then that sympathy starts to evaporate. Irene accuses Clare of wanting her own way. And yet the two are not dissimilar in that area...

Irene talks about "that instinctive loyalty to a race". But poor Gertrude, another friend of hers and Clare's, comes in for some pretty scorching disloyalty when they meet, very much along classist lines: "Gertrude, Irene thought, looked as if her husband might be a butcher... Her over-trimmed Georgette crepe dress was too short and showed an appalling amount of leg, stout legs in sleazy stockings of a vivid rose-beige shade."

And then there's Brian. He's unhappy as a doctor, and as a Black person in America. At one point he was keen to go to Brazil, where he thinks the racial situation is better. But Irene won't hear of it. Where Brian and his family belong, she argues, is in New York. End of.

She's also living in a kind of cloud-cuckoo land. When Brian talks of a recent lynching, she shushes him: Not in front of the boys. Brian counters that the boys have to know about these things, because there's no escaping them: "If, as you're so determined, they've got to live in this damned country, they'd better find out what sort of thing they're up against as soon as possible. The earlier they learn it, the better prepared they'll be."

At one point Irene intercepts a look of Clare's that contains "something groping, and hopeless, and yet so absolutely determined that it was like an image of the futile searching and the firm resolution in Irene's own soul". Yes... We always resent in others what we fear in ourselves...



***

But Clare, it seems, is starting to encroach a little too much. Irene has always resented what she thinks of as "Clare's 'having' nature". At one point she tells us: "The trouble with Clare was, not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk as well." And suddenly it seems to Irene as though her cake is in danger...

We need to remember that we see things only from Irene's perspective. So when Clare starts to cry unrestrainedly one evening, after that conversation about doing anything to get the things she wants, it is "for no reason that Irene could discover".

We have no external yardstick, then, by which to assess the lightning bolt of insight that leads her to suspect that Clare is having an affair with Brian...

She acknowledges that she has no proof. It's all suspicion. But Brian is clearly not happy; and things have clearly changed.

And that's when Irene starts to wonder, "What if...?"

What if something happened to make Bellew decide to go abroad earlier, or otherwise remove Clare from the scene? What if Margery were ill or dying? What if Bellew discovered Clare's origins? But that last one won't fly. If Clare is cut loose by Bellew, she's all the more available for Brian...

"Then came a thought which she tried to drive away. If Clare should die! Then -- Oh, it was vile! To think, yes, to wish that! She felt faint and sick. But the thought stayed with her. She could not get rid of it."

And circumstances keep underlining -- in Irene's view, at least -- the reality of the affair. After an argument, Brian says: "I wanted to get [the children] out of this hellish place years ago. You wouldn't let me. I gave up the idea, because you objected. Don't expect me to give up everything." For Irene, this means he shouldn't be expected to give up Clare.

Nor does Clare seem concerned any more about her husband's learning the truth: "I'd come up here to live. Harlem, I mean. Then I'd be able to do as I please, when I please."

Irene is now more convinced than ever "that everything had happened between them". And yet she is determined not to let Brian go.



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MAJOR spoiler now: Last chance to stop reading!

Clare, Irene, and Brian are all at Felise's party, a long way up in a high-rise building. At first listen, I couldn't quite believe what I'd heard. Surely not... I had to dig out a text, and read that final section line by line.

The sequence of events:

-- Irene, overheated, opens a window.
-- John Bellew unexpectedly storms in. He accuses Clare, in vile language, of being Black.
-- The men spring forward to restrain him.
-- Clare stands at the window. "She seemed unaware of any danger or uncaring. There was even a faint smile on her full, red lips, and in her shining eyes."
-- Irene is maddened by this smile. She doesn't want Bellew to reject Clare: "She couldn't have her free."
-- "What happened next, Irene Redfield never afterwards allowed herself to remember. Never clearly. One moment Clare had been there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold. The next she was gone." Through the window. And all those floors down...
-- Everyone rushes downstairs. Irene stays behind.

I'll reproduce the next bit at some length, because it's the creepiest thing:

"Gone! The soft white face, the bright hair, the disturbing scarlet mouth, the dreaming eyes, the caressing smile, the whole torturing loveliness that had been Clare Kendry. That beauty that had torn at Irene's placid life. Gone! The mocking daring, the gallantry of her pose, the ringing bells of her laughter.

"Irene wasn't sorry. She was amazed, incredulous almost. What would the others think? That Clare had fallen? That she had deliberately leaned backward? Certainly one or the other. Not --

"But she mustn't, she warned herself, think of that. She was too tired, and too shocked. And, indeed, both were true. She was utterly weary, and she was violently staggered. But her thoughts reeled on. If only she could be as free of mental as she was of bodily vigour; could only put from her memory the vision of her hand on Clare's arm!

"'It was an accident, a terrible accident,' she muttered fiercely. 'It was.'"



To resume the sequence:

-- Irene heads downstairs.
-- She wonders briefly about the consequences if Clare's not dead. But she is. "Irene struggled against the sob of thankfulness that rose in her throat."
-- Another guest is suggesting Clare fell. "'It's impossible, I tell you! Absolutely impossible!' It was Brian who spoke in that frenzied hoarse voice, which Irene had never heard before."
-- They ask Irene. She it was, after all, who was beside Clare...
-- An official suggests Bellew might have pushed her. No, no, says Irene. "She just fell, before anybody could stop her."
-- Irene loses consciousness for a bit. "Centuries after, she heard the strange man saying: 'Death by misadventure, I'm inclined to believe. Let's go up and have another look at that window.'"

And that's the end.

A note of threat and danger -- an underlying pulse -- is powerfully sustained all through the book. I was aware of it from the beginning, and listened with foreboding. But when you look back through the text, you see that it's positively studded with statements that seem to acquire an ominous double meaning once you know the end. And yet it's so lightly done...

And what, we wonder, will happen next...? Can Irene live with herself? Will Brian intuit the truth? What underground fuse has been lit by those events, and can the family avoid being ripped apart when it blows?

In all, a most satisfying read.

***


Nella Larsen

And what of Larsen herself?

Her mother was Danish; her father, who disappeared (or died -- it's all a bit mysterious) when she was two, was West Indian. She was schooled in a white environment in Chicago until 1906/7, at which point she moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and was part of a predominantly Black educational scene.

She studied nursing, and practised for a while. Then she worked for a few years as a librarian: "Her initial placement was on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but she transferred to the library’s 135th Street location to be closer to home and to the heart of the Harlem Renaissance." She was already part of a circle that included W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes.

With Passing, her second novel, she became the first African-American woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship. But she never published again... A scandal blew up around a short story she wrote in 1930. Accused of plagiarism, she was eventually exonerated, but her career was tainted. None of the works she produced in the 1930s was accepted for publication. Meanwhile, marital problems led to a divorce; and financial problems eventually led to a return to nursing.

You can't help but feel we're all the poorer for this trajectory.