BY TOBI HASLETT
Alain Locke led a life of scrupulous refinement and slashing contradiction. Photographs flatter him: there he is, with his bright, taut prettiness, delicately clenching the muscles of his face. Philosophy and history, poetry and art, loneliness and longing-the face holds all of these in a melancholy balance. The eyes glimmer and the lips purse.
It was this face that appeared, one summer morning in 1924, at the Paris flat of a destitute Langston Hughes, who put the scene in his memoir "The Big Sea." "Qui est-il?" Hughes had asked through the closed door. He was stunned by the reply: A mild and gentle voice answered: "Alain Locke."
And sure enough, there was Dr. Alain Locke of Washington, a little, brown man with spats and a cultured accent, and a degree from Oxford. The same Dr. Locke who had written me about my poems, and who wanted to come to see me almost two years before on the fleet of dead ships, anchored up the Hudson. He had got my address from the Crisis in New York, to whom I had sent some poems from Paris. Now in Europe on vacation, he had come to call.
During the next two weeks, the middle-aged Locke, then a philosophy professor at Howard University, snatched the young Hughes from dingy Montmartre and took him on an extravagant march through ballet, opera, gardens, and the Louvre. This was the first time they'd met - but, after more than a year of sighing letters, Locke had come to Paris flushed with amorous feeling. The feeling was mismatched. Each man was trapped in the other's fantasy: Hughes appeared as the scruffy poet who had fled his studies at Columbia for the pleasures of la vie boheme, while Locke was the "little, brown man" with status and degrees.
Days passed in a state of dreamy ambiguity. "Locke's here, "Hughes wrote to their mutual friend Countee Cullen. 'We are having a glorious time. I like him a great deal." The words are grinning and sexless. Hughes had found a use for the gallant Locke: an entree to the bold movement in black American writing then rumbling to life. Cullen was gaining renown; the novelist Jessie Fauset was the literary editor of The Crisis; and Jean Toomer's "Cane" - a novel in jagged fragments - had trumpeted the arrival of a new black art, one chained to the fate of a roiling, bullied, "emancipated" people. "I think we have enough talent," W.E.B. Du Bois had announced in 1920, "to start a renaissance." Locke drove it forward and is remembered, dimly, as its "dean." Whoever knows his name today likely links it to "The New Negro: An lnterpretation," a 1925 anthology that planted some of the bravest black writers of the nineteentwenties- Hughes, Cullen, Toomer, Fauset, Claude McKay; Zora Neale Hurston- squarely in the public eye. "The New Negro," which appeared just a year after Locke's summer visit with Hughes, launched the Negro Renaissance and marked the birth of a new style: the swank, gritty; fractious style of blackness streaking through the modern world.
Jeffrey C. Stewart's new biography bears the perhaps inevitable title "The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke." But the title makes a point: the New Negro, that lively protagonist stomping onto the proscenium of history, might also be thought of, tenderly, as a figure for Locke himself. Stewart writes,
Locke became a "mid-wife to a generation of young writers," as he labeled himself, a catalyst for a revolution in thinking called the New Negro. The deeper truth was that he, Alain Locke, was also the New Negro, for he embodied all of its contradictions as well as its promise. Rather than lamenting his situation, his marginality, his quiet suffering, he would take what his society and his culture had given him and make something revolutionary out of it.
Here was a man who enshrined his passions in collections, producing anthologies, exhibitions, and catalogues that refracted, according to Stewart, an abiding "need for love." But even love could be captured and slotted into a series. Stewart tells us that among Locke's posthumous effects was a shocking item that was promptly destroyed: a collection of semen samples from his lovers, stored neatly in a box.
Meticulousness was a virtue among Philadelphia's black bourgeoisie, the anxious world into which Locke was born. On September 13, 1885, Mary Locke, the wife of Pliny, delivered a feeble, sickly son at their home on South Nineteenth Street. Arthur LeRoy Locke, as the boy was christened, spent his first year seized by the rheumatic fever that he had contracted at birth. The Lockes were Black Victorians, or, as Alain later put it, "fanatically middle class," and their mores and strivings shaped his self-conception and bestowed upon him an unusual entitlement to a black intellectual life. Pliny was well educated - he was a graduate of Howard Law School - but he suffered, as a black man, from a series of wrongful firings that scrambled the family's finances.
Roy (as Alain was known in childhood) was Pliny's project. "I was indulgently but intelligently treated," Locke later recalled. "No special indulgence as to sentiment; very little kissing, little or no fairy stories, no frightening talk or games." Instead, Pliny read aloud from Virgil and Homer, but only after Roy had finished his early-morning math exercises. He was being cultivated to be a race leader: a metallic statue of polished masculinity. But he was powerfully drawn to his mother. Pliny opposed this, and worked to shred the bond. Locke later recounted that his father's death, when he was six, "threw me into the closest companionship with my mother, which remained, except for the separation of three years at college and four years abroad, close until her death at 71, when I was thirty six. "Under the watchful care of the struggling Mary, Roy became a precocious aesthete. And he proceeded, with striking ambition, from Central High School to the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy to Harvard.
Alain, as he was now called, fashioned himself as a yearning man of letters. Enraptured by his white professors, he decorated his modest lodgings in punctilious imitation of their homes. Not quite five feet tall, he had bloomed into a dandy, strutting down the streets of Cambridge in a genteel ensemble-gray suit, gray gloves, elegant overcoat-while displaying a shuddering reluctance to associate with the other black students at Harvard. They weren't "gentlemen," and, when a black classmate introduced him to a group of them, he was appalled:
Of course they were colored. He took me right up into the filthy bedroom and there were 5 niggers, all Harvard men. Well, their pluck and their conceit are wonderful. Some are ugly enough to frighten you but I guess they are bright. ... They are not fit for company even if they are energetic and plodding fellows. I'm not used to that class and I don't intend to get used to them.
This is from a letter to his mother, and the bile streams so freely that one assumes that Mary indulged the young Locke's contempt. But his arrogance followed from the strangulating tension between who and what he was: blackness was limiting, oppressive, banal, a boorish hurdle in his brilliant path. "I am not a race problem," he later wrote to Mary. "I am Alain LeRoy Locke."
He'd arrived at Harvard when William James and then John Dewey had electrified philosophy in America under the banner of pragmatism, a movement that repudiated idealism and tested concepts against practice. Locke, who also became a devotee of the philosopher and belletristic aesthete George Santayana, went on to become the first black Rhodes Scholar - though as soon as he got to Oxford he was humiliated by white Americans, who shut him out of their gatherings. The scorn was instructive: the foppish Locke joined the Cosmopolitan Club, a debate society composed of colonial elites, who exposed him to the urgencies of anti-imperial struggle and, crucially, to the gratifications of racial and political solidarity. He finished a thesis - ultimately rejected by Oxford - on value theory, while slaking his sexual thirst in pre-Great War Berlin. He returned to Harvard to earn his Ph.D. in philosophy, for which he submitted a more elaborate version of his Oxford thesis, before joining the faculty at Howard. Mary moved down to Washington, where she was cared for by her doting son.
Locke's other devotions were ill-fated. Much of his erotic life was a series of adroit manipulations and disastrous disappointments; Langston Hughes was just one of the younger men who fell within the blast radius of the older man's sexual voracity as they chased his prestige. He fancied himself a suitor in the Grecian style, dispensing a sentimental education to his charges, assistants, proteges, and students - but hungering for mutuality and lasting love. Locke had affairs with at least a few of the writers included in "The New Negro." His desultory sexual romps with Cullen stretched over years-though Cullen himself would flee the gay life by marrying W.E.B. Du Bois's daughter Yolanda, in a lavish service with sixteen bridesmaids and thirteen hundred guests. Her father described the spectacle in The Crisis as "the symbolic march of young black America," possessed of a "dark and shimmering beauty" and announcing "a new race; a new thought; a new thing rejoicing in a ceremony as old as the world." To Locke, it was a farce.
He found his own way to stay afloat in the world of the black elite. Pliny had wanted his son to be a race man, and now Alain was lecturing widely and contributing articles to Du Bois's Crisis, which was attached to the N.A.A.C.P., and Charles Johnson's Opportunity, the house organ of the National Urban League. But he stood aloof from the strenuous heroism of Negro uplift, and what he thought of as its flat-footed insistence on "political" art. Locke was a voluptuary: he worried that Du Bois and the younger, further - left members of the movement notably Hughes and McKay - had debased Negro expression, jamming it into the crate of politics. The titles of Locke's essays on aesthetics ("Beauty Instead of Ashes," "Art or Propaganda?", "Propaganda-or Poetry?") made deflating little incisions in his contemporaries' political hopes. Black art, in Locke's view, was mutable and vast.
Not unlike blackness itself. In 1916, Locke delivered a series of lectures called "Race Contacts and Interracial Relations," in which he painstakingly disproved the narrowly "biological" understanding of race while insisting on the power of culture to distinguish, but not sunder, black from white. Armed with his pragmatist training, he hacked a path to a new philosophical vista: "cultural pluralism."
The term had surfaced in private debates with Horace Kallen, a Jewish student who overlapped with Locke at both Harvard and Oxford. Kallen declared that philosophy should, as his mentor William James insisted, concern itself only with differences that "make a difference"- which included, Kallen thought, the intractable facts of his Jewishness and Locke's blackness. Locke demurred. Race, ethnicity, the very notion of a "people": these weren't expressions of some frozen essence but were molded from that suppler stuff, tradition-to be elevated and transmuted by the force and ingenuity of human practice. He could value his people's origins without bolting them to their past.
His own past had begun to break painfully away. Mary Locke died in 1922, leaving Alain crushed and adrift. But her death also released him, psychically, from the vanished world of the fin-de-siecle black elite, with its asphyxiating diktats. As he moved into modernism, he found that his life was freer and looser; his pomp flared into camp. At Mary's wake, Locke didn't present her lying in state; rather, he installed her, alarmingly, on the parlor couch - her corpse propped like a hostess before a room of horrified guests.
"The New Negro," which appeared three years later, stood as proof, Locke insisted, of a vital new sensibility: here was a briskly modern attitude hoisted up by the race's youth. The collection, which expanded upon a special issue of the magazine Survey Graphic, revelled in its eclecticism, as literature, music, scholarship, and art all jostled beside stately pronouncements by the race's patriarchs, Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. The anthology was meant to signal a gutting and remaking of the black collective spirit. Locke would feed and discipline that spirit, playing the critic, publicist, taskmaster, and impresario to the movement's most luminous figures. He was an exalted member of the squabbling clique that Hurston called "the niggerati" - and which we know, simply, as the Harlem Renaissance.
The term has a crispness that the thing itself did not. It was a movement spiked with rivalries and political hostility- not least because it ran alongside the sociological dramas of Communism, Garveyism, mob violence, and a staggering revolution in the shape and texture of black American life, as millions fled the poverty and the lynchings of the Jim Crow South. The cities of the North awaited them-as did higher wages and white police. With the Great Migration came a loud new world and a baffling new life, a chance to lunge, finally, at the transformative dream of the nation they'd been forced, at gunpoint, to build. Modernity had anointed a new hero, and invented, Locke thought, a New Negro.
But he hoped that this new figure would stride beyond politics. Radicals irked him; he regarded them with a kind of princely ennui. In his mind, the New Negro was more than mere effect: history and demography alone couldn't possibly account for the wit, chic, or thrilling force of "the younger generation" to whom he dedicated the volume. In the title essay, Locke presented a race whose inner conversion had flown past the lumbering outside world. The Negro leaped not just from country to city but, crucially, "from medieval America to modern." Previously, "the American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact," he wrote, but now, "in Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is--or promises at least to be-a race capital."
Black people had snapped their moorings to servitude and arrived at the advanced subjectivity lushly evinced by their art: their poems and paintings, their novels and spirituals. Aaron Douglas had made boldly stylized drawings and designs for the anthology, which rhymed with the photographs of African sculptures that dotted its pages: masks from the Baoule and the Bushongo; a grand Dahomey bronze. Negroes were a distinct people, with distinct traditions and values held in common. Their modern art would revive their "folk spirit," displaying a vigorous continuity with their African patrimony and an embrace of American verve. "So far as he is culturally articulate," Locke wrote in the foreword to his anthology, "we shall let the Negro speak for himself"
The sentence shines with triumph; it warms and breaks the heart. Behind Locke's bombast was the inexorable question of suffering: how it forged and brutalized the collective, forcing a desperate solidarity on people not treated as such. The task that confronted any black modernist - after a bloody emancipation, a failed Reconstruction, and the carnage of the First World War was to decide the place, within this blazing new power, of pain. Locke preached a kind of militant poise. His New Negro would face history without drowning in it; would grasp, but never cling to, the harrowing past. In the anthology, he cheered on "the lapse of sentimental appeal, then the development of a more positive self-respect and self-reliance; the repudiation of social dependence, and then the gradual recovery from hyper- sensitiveness and 'touchy' nerves." So the book's roar of modernist exuberance came to seem, in a way, strained.
But also lavish, stylish, jaunty, tart; bristling with whimsy and gleaming with sex. "The New Negro" thrust forth all the ironies of Locke's ethos: his emphatic propriety and angular vision, his bourgeois composure and libertine tastes. "What jungle tree have you slept under, / Dark brown girl of the swaying hips?" asks a Hughes poem, titled "Nude Young Dancer." Locke liked it - but was scandalized by jazz. And though he wrote an admiring essay in the anthology on the passion of Negro spirituals, he also chose to include "Spunk," a short fable by Hurston about cheating and murder.
Locke relished every titillating contradiction but shrank, still, from political extremes. Hoping to avoid the charge of radicalism, he changed the title of McKay's protest poem from "White House" to "White Houses" an act of censorship that severed the two men's alliance. "No wonder Garvey remains strong despite his glaring defects," the affronted poet wrote to Locke. "When the Negro intellectuals like you take such a weak line!"
And such a blurred line. In a gesture of editorial agnosticism, Locke brought voices to "The New Negro" that challenged his own. Among the more scholarly contributions to the anthology was "Capital of the Black Middle Class, " an ambivalent study of Durham, North Carolina, by E. Franklin Frazier, a young social scientist. More than thirty years later, Frazier savaged the pretensions and the perfidies of Negro professionals in his study "The Black Bourgeoisie." A work of Marxist sociology and scalding polemic, it took a gratuitous swipe at the New Negro: the black upper class, Frazier said, had "either ignored the Negro Renaissance or, when they exhibited any interest in it, they revealed their ambivalence towards the Negro masses." Aesthetics had been reduced to an ornament for a feckless elite.
The years after "The New Negro" were marked by an agitated perplexity. Locke yearned for something solid: a home for black art, somewhere to nourish, protect, refine, and control it. He'd been formed and polished by elite institutions, and he longed to see them multiply. But the Great Depression shattered his efforts to extend the New Negro project, pressing him further into the byzantine patronage system of Charlotte Mason, an older white widow gripped by an eccentric fascination with "primitive peoples." Salvation obsessed her. She believed that black culture could rescue American society by replenishing the spiritual values that had been evaporated by modernity, but that pumped, still, through the Negro's unspoiled heart.
Mason was rich, and Locke had sought her backing for a proposed Harlem Museum of African Art. Although the project failed ( as did his plans for a Harlem Community Arts Center), Mason remained a meddling, confused presence in his life until her death, in 1946. During their association, he passed through a gantlet of prickling degradations. Her vision of Negro culture obviously didn't align with his; she demanded to be called Godmother; and she was prone to angry suspicion, demanding a fastidious accounting of how her funds were spent. But those funds were indispensable, finally, to the work of Hughes and, especially, Hurston. Locke, as the erstwhile "mid-wife" of black modernism, was dispatched to handle the writers-much to their dismay. He welcomed the authority, swelling into a supercilious manager (and, to Hughes, a bullying admirer) who handed down edicts from Godmother while enforcing a few of his own.
The thirties also brought revelations and violent political emergencies that plunged Locke into a rapprochement with the left. Locke the glossy belletrist gave way to Locke the fellow traveller, Locke the savvy champion of proletarian realism. There was a fitful attempt to write a biography of Frederick Douglass, and a dutiful visit to the Soviet Union. But he was never a proper Communist. After the Harlem riot of 1935, he wrote an essay titled "Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane" for Survey Graphic, in which he pronounced the failure of the state and its economic system, but congratulated Mayor LaGuardia on his response to the riot, while also cautioning against both "capitalistic exploitation on the one hand and radical exploitation on the other." Frazier thought this a mealymouthed capitulation; taking Locke on a ride around Washington in his Packard coupe, Frazier screamed denunciations at his trapped, flustered passenger.
Locke was middling as an ideologue, but remained a fiercely committed pragmatist. The rise of Fascism saw his philosophical work make crackling contact with politics. "Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace," a lecture delivered in the early nineteen-forties, took aim at the nation's enemies and their "passion for arbitrary unity and conformity." He sometimes groped clumsily for the radical language of recrimination: inching further from his earlier aestheticism, he praised Richard Wright's "Native Son" as a "Zolaesque J'accuse pointing to the danger symptoms of a self-frustrating democracy." And he remained riveted by the Negro's internal flight. One of his most gratifying contributions was his advocacy of the painter Jacob Lawrence, and his sixty-panel tribute to the Great Migration. (Inspecting a layout of Lawrence's series in the offices of Fortune, Locke exulted that "The New Masses couldnt have done this thing better.") Lawrence had expressed what Locke, with his fidgeting dignity, couldn't quite: the anger, the desolation, and the bracing thrill of a people crashing into history.
Locke was still driven by a need for order, for meticulous systems: the project that towered over his final years was "The Negro in American Culture," a book he hoped would be his summum opus. "The New Negro" anthology had been a delectably shambling sample of an era, confected from disparate styles and stuffed with conflicting positions. But "The Negro in American Culture" - he'd signed a contract for it with Random House, in 1945 - was to be the lordly consummation of a life spent in the service ofblack expression. The book is a fixture of his later letters: either as an excuse for his absences ("It's an awful bother," he apologized to one friend, "but must turn out up to expectation in the long run") or as something to flaunt before a sexual prospect. Mason's death had sapped some of his power, so this new mission refreshed his stature and his righteous purpose.
But he couldn't finish the thing: his health was failing, he was stretched between too many obligations, and he was consumed, as ever, by the torment of unrequited love. His life was still replete with younger men to whom he was an aide and a guide--but not a sexual equal. "What I am trying to say, Alain," the young Robert E. Claybrooks wrote, "is that you excite me in every other area but a sexual one. It has nothing to do with the differences in ages. Of that I'm certain. Perhaps physical contact was precipitated too soon - I don't know. But I do know, and this I have withheld until now, an intense feeling of nausea accompanied me after the initial affair, and I know it would be repeated each time, if such were to happen again." Solomon Rosenfeld, Collins George, Hercules Armstrong: the names flit through the last chapters of Locke's life, delivering the little sting of sexual insult. By the end, he called himself "an old girl." Yet Stewart's biography aims to heave Locke out of obscurity and prop him next to the reputations he launched. 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 is touching-and strangely fitting. Stewart's research arrives at a kind of Lockean intensity. But even Stewart's vigor falters as Locke's own scholarly energies start to wane. "Locke's involvement with the race issue," Stewart finally admits about "The Negro in American Culture," "had been pragmatic, a means to advance himself-to gain recognition, to be esteemed, and ultimately to be loved by the people."
Love: the word is applied like glue, keeping this vast book in one preposterous piece. Locke's most lasting lover was Maurice Russell, who was a teenager when he found himself looped into Locke's affections. "You see youth is my hobby, " Locke wrote him at one point. "But the sad thing is the increasing paucity of serious minded and really refined youth." Russell was there-along with a few other ex-beaux-in 1954, at Benta's Funeral Home, on 132nd Street in Harlem, after Locke's death, from congestive heart failure. W. E. B. Du Bois and his wife, Shirley; Mrs. Paul Robeson; Arthur Fauset; and Charles Johnson all paid their respects to the small, noble figure lying in the coffin, who perhaps would have smiled at a line in Du Bois's eulogy: "singular in a stupid land."
The New Negro was a hero, a fetish, a polemical posture-and a blurry portrait of a flinching soul. But Locke took his place, at last,in the history he wished to redeem. "We're going to let our children know," Martin Luther King,Jr., declared in Mississippi in 1968, "that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe." Locke's class had cleaved him from the "masses" - and his desires had estranged him from his class. From this doubled alienation sprang a baffled psyche: an aesthete traipsing nimbly through an age of brutal rupture. Wincing from humiliation and romantic rejection, he tried to offer his heart to his, race. "With all my sensuality and sentimentality," he wrote to Hughes after Paris, "I love sublimated things."
Originally appeared in The New Yorker, May 21, 2018
Photograph by Gordon Parks
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