Infants of the Spring by Wallace Thurman

First published: 1932

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Satire

Time of work: Mid-1920’s

Locale: Harlem, New York

Principal Characters:

• Raymond Taylor, a young black writer
• Paul Arbian, a daring writer and painter
• Stephen Jorgenson, a student from Copenhagen, for a short while a roommate to Raymond
• Samuel Carter, another white character, a liberal missionary with a goal of “saving” black people
• Eustace Savoy, a would-be classical singer who disavows all interest in Negro spirituals
• Pelham Gaylord (George Jones), a would-be portrait artist
• Euphoria Blake, the owner of “Niggeratti Manor,” where many of the characters live
• Lucille, Raymond’s confidante and sometimes girlfriend

The Novel

Infants of the Spring is a satire of the temper and of the major and minor figures of the Harlem Renaissance. As such, the novel details a number of artists and their struggles to be faithful to their artistic visions, along with their knowledge that what they produce has consequences for African Americans as a group. Efforts to maintain artistic integrity while promoting social causes produce individuals who are often culturally confused and display divided loyalties.

The characters who live at Niggeratti Manor, a fictional Harlem brownstone that has a real-life counterpart, are mainly younger artists trying to arrive on the literary, artistic, and music scenes. Many of them perceive a mission to produce a counter-movement to the ideology advocated by the Harlem Renaissance’s more notable and older members.

Raymond Taylor, the central consciousness, is one of the manor’s more talented writers and offers a running commentary on action at the manor. The plot of the novel moves forward when Raymond meets Stephen Jorgenson, a graduate student from Copenhagen, Denmark, who has come to New York to study for a Ph.D. at Columbia University.

Raymond and Stephen become instant friends. When they become roommates, the two are constantly together, so that when Raymond comments on what is happening at the manor, he and Stephen spend long hours discussing it. Moreover, Stephen is initially fascinated with black people, their culture, and their struggles for racial equality and artistic integrity. Soon, though, Stephen’s Scandinavian upbringing, coupled with an interest in Raymond that he cannot explain, causes him to judge the residents of the manor. He tires of their drunken escapades, their attacks on the missionary Samuel Carter, and their inability to get anything done. His talks with Raymond become tinctured with a veiled acidity that sours their relationship. Before this rupture in their friendship, a number of events take place at the manor that move the plot forward and showcase the odd cast of residents.

Paul Arbian constantly tries to shock people with overt discussion of his bisexual nature. He even brings to one of the parties a young man who, he promises, will disrobe for the crowd at a designated time.

Eustace Savoy, in his failure to accept his black musical heritage of Negro spirituals, disgusts Raymond, Stephen, Paul, and others. Most believe that his hatred of his culture and his desire to express European classical music is a symptom of what is wrong with the ideology of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance.

Pelham Gaylord, who has little talent as a portrait artist, is arrested for raping a teenage girl who lives on the third floor of the manor with her mother. His arrest brings a certain amount of scandal to the manor that Dr. Parkes (Thurman’s satirical treatment of Alain Locke) thinks is detrimental to what the older generation of black leaders has been trying to accomplish.

Dr. Parkes’s control over the Harlem Renaissance’s acceptable forms of creative expression is captured in a scene at the manor. Several recognized artists join the manor’s usual crew for a “distinguished salon,” with Dr. Parkes presiding. Dr. Parkes comments that African Americans’ future depends on what these artists create and how they carry themselves. Much dissenting discussion ensues. This and other similar events spell the demise of Niggeratti Manor, and it is not long before Euphoria Blake, the landlord, gives all the artists eviction notices. She concedes that her experiment has failed.

At the novel’s end, most of the manor residents have retreated from their earlier lofty and unrealistic goals of creating art that makes a difference. Paul Arbian, in his final effort to both shock and to create something new, commits suicide, with the pages of an experimental novel he has written all around his body. Only Raymond seems destined to create the kind of work the others had wanted to.

The Characters

As a satirist, Thurman has some help in his creation of characters, for many of them follow closely the known traits of their real counterparts. This is especially true in his depiction of major players of the Harlem Renaissance who are only minor characters in Infants of the Spring. During the scene in which Dr. Parkes presides over his “distinguished salon,” numerous artists are presented, and each conveys a sense of the person on which he or she is modeled.

Sweetie May Carr (Zora Neale Hurston) is a short-story writer who, the narrator records, is known more for her outrageous and ribald behavior than for any significant literary production. She is depicted as acting in the manner preferred by her patrons—she is primitive and agreeable, and she tells earthy “darky” stories as a way to dupe her patrons out of money.

Tony Crews (Langston Hughes) is already a standout of the movement, having had two volumes of poetry published. White critics loved his work. Most black critics did not, because of his honest treatment of black urban life that included such subject matter as gambling, prostitution, and rent parties. He is quiet, always smiles, and maintains a sense of mystery.

DeWitt Clinton (Countée Cullen), already praised by the older black leaders of the Harlem Renaissance as the poet to emulate, basically took black themes and used traditional Romantic poetic forms to express them. When he arrives at the salon, he is accompanied by his ever-faithful male companion.

The major characters of the novel demonstrate Thurman’s ability, within satire, to create original fictional people. Most are highly individualized. Some, including Paul, had never appeared in African American literature before this novel.

Raymond, as the novel’s protagonist and central consciousness, is the most fully realized of all the characters, and he, like other characters, shares an affinity with a real-life personage of the Harlem Renaissance, namely Wallace Thurman. Raymond develops as a character through Thurman’s use of the third-person omniscient point of view and through the abundance of dialogue that helps to sustain the novel’s structure. Quite simply, Thurman’s characters talk a lot.

Raymond is variously portrayed as moody, impatient, a complainer, a literary snob (he thinks André Gide and Thomas Mann are the only living writers of any real merit), secretive, a first-class bohemian, and a conservative, a man not in control of his feelings but still deeply reserved. This duality extends to other areas of his life. He has yet to develop a satisfying heterosexual relationship with Lucille, his girlfriend. They talk, have dinner, and go to films, but they are not intimate with each other. He has made it clear to Lucille that he does not want their relationship to move to that level, yet he is jealous when she tires of his antics and begins to date Bull, a man who will treat her as a woman.

When his friendship develops with Stephen, he is aware of how meaningful it is, but he does not consider an analysis of it that might suggest all the reasons why he and Stephen are so compatible. Stephen, however, has considered the possibility that he is in love with Raymond. Lack of encouragement from Raymond is as much a reason for his departure from the manor as is his discontent with the other residents.

Raymond fares better in his analysis of the arts movement itself, with its rigid proscriptions for artists. Raymond is not sure if he can or should create art that is meant to improve the social conditions of African Americans. He is not sure if his art is to be political or aesthetic, and, like Thurman, he alternates between the two, perhaps favoring the “art for art’s sake” ideology.

Paul, on the other hand, seems less concerned with what others might think of his paintings and drawings, even though he is always demanding an audience. Rather than spending much effort analyzing what he might do, Paul does. He is always working, even if he is drunk. He, more than any of the other characters, directly and consistently challenges Dr. Parkes’s way of thinking. Some of Paul’s characterization, and how he creates his art, relates to his sense of himself as the “other.” In acknowledging his bisexuality, Paul achieves a freedom that both assists him in his development as an artist and defeats him. His kind of freedom has few outlets in Harlem of the 1920’s. His need for attention and his final creation, his own death, capture his alienation and his uniqueness.

Critical Context

Thurman’s second novel, Infants of the Spring, is part of a body of African American literature, written during the Harlem Renaissance and after, that is as critical of black people as it is of the conditions that black people struggle against. Like his contemporaries Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes, for example, Thurman often turned his critical eye on black leaders and black middle-class society.

Thurman’s attempts to offer alternatives for black artists, especially the younger ones who had something new to say, are contained in Fire!!, a literary journal he founded and edited, and Harlem, a more general and less bold periodical. Furthermore, in his first novel, The Blacker the Berry (1929), he castigated the black middle-class community for its negative treatment of darker-complexioned African Americans and its adherence to white middle-class values that often had little to recommend them.

Thurman’s criticism of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance makes its most significant argument by exposing the ways in which the movement prevented younger artists from doing their work. He notes a contradiction when leaders such as Dr. Parkes (Alain Locke) insist that the movement intends to bring freedom and equality to black people but who then block the avenues through which artists might find access to an audience. Artists who challenge authority have little place to turn and no freedom to express creativity. This is disturbing to Thurman. His exposé of the temper of the cultural renaissance of the 1920’s is his resistance to cultural authority.

Most initial reviewers of Infants of the Spring either liked it or hated it. Those who applauded it thought Thurman captured a reality that was lacking in other works of the period. Those who despised it thought it was wrong of him to present dissension among black artists and leaders to the general public.

Infants of the Spring is a faithful account of one of the twentieth century’s most productive times for black artists and an account of the movement’s effects on some artists who wanted to be different.

Bibliography

De Jongh, James. Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Examines major historical and literary events that made Harlem a culture capital. Suggests that Harlem as a cultural center is the main theme in Infants of the Spring.

Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976. General overview of the development of the African American novel. Sees Thurman as an important dissenter among writers of the 1920’s and 1930’s.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Good readable general discussion of the contexts and people that made the Harlem Renaissance so important to black culture. Significant discussion of Wallace Thurman.

Perkins, Huel D. “Wallace Thurman, Renaissance ‘Renegade’?” Black World 25 (February, 1976): 29-35. Sees Thurman as an instigator of new thought and direction during the 1920’s.

West, Dorothy. “Elephant’s Dance, a Memoir of Wallace Thurman.” Black World 20 (November, 1970): 77-85. A reflection on who Wallace Thurman was, by a woman who was a part of the Harlem Renaissance.