The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories (2 page)

Two other novels that she wrote after her return to the United States met with similar disapproval. Thus, there was a series of rejections
that thwarted her career (both as artist and as wife) in the early 1930s at the same time that the Depression had slammed a door on the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro was no longer in fashion.

The alimony that Elmer paid her ($150 a month) until his death in 1941 was apparently adequate for Nella’s well-being and may possibly have been her only source of livelihood during the 1930s. About the time of his death, however, she returned to her earlier profession: nursing. By February 14, 1944, she had worked herself up to Chief Nurse at Gouverneur Hospital, in New York City. She lived nearby on Second Avenue, more at a geographical distance from Harlem than an emotional one. Beginning with the Manhattan telephone directory for 1955/1956, she is listed as “Imes, Nella L. Mrs.” In all of her nursing positions, she was known as Nella Imes. In September of 1954, her position at Gouverneur was changed to Night Supervisor. Then in 1962, some months after she was mugged, she transferred to Metropolitan Hospital, as a Supervisor of Nurses, a position she held until her retirement. She was found dead in her apartment the following year: March 30, 1964.

The mysteries of Nella Larsen’s life after the Harlem Renaissance—a series of responses to repeated rejection—are all the more revealing when juxtaposed with a number of events of her childhood. Yet many of these details are difficult to access because she rewrote her early life as if it were one of her novels. The dust jacket for
Passing
, for example, informed readers that

Much of this information is true, some is possible fabrication. Although she always claimed that April 13, 1893, was the date of her birth, the year in fact was 1891, in Chicago. A close friend of the Larsen family for nearly fifty years claimed that Nella’s mother told her on several occasions that Nella was born in New York and that her father was an African American chauffeur for the family for whom she (Marie Hansen) worked.

When Nella’s mother married Peter Larsen, February 7, 1894, their child (Anna) was already a year and a half old. Census documents and the death certificates of these three people help establish some of the details concerning the Larsen household. The most revealing fact (from the 1910 census) helps us speculate about what had already happened. In the category listing family information (“Mother of How Many Children;” “Number Here”), a “1” has been written. “Number Now Living” also indicates only one. Thus, not only was Nella no longer living with them (she would have been nineteen) but she may have been written out of their lives.

Something traumatic may have happened to Nella between the years 1894 (when her mother married Peter Larsen) and the time of the 1910 census. Exactly what that event was we may never know, but there are certainly clues in
Quicksand
. Early in the novel, Helga is described as a “solitary girl with no family connections.” When Helga declines her Danish suitor’s proposal, she informs him, “‘If we were married, you might come to be ashamed of me, to hate me, to hate all dark people. My mother did that.’” Other comments (such as “her unloved, unloving, and unhappy childhood”) scattered throughout the narrative support the thesis that Helga Crane is a thinly disguised portrait of Larsen herself. Perhaps the most revealing support of this conjecture, however, comes from Anna, who not only inherited all of her half-sister’s estate when Nella died, but remarked to a family friend, “‘Why, I didn’t know that I had a sister.’”

For years, those of us who probed into the realities of Larsen’s childhood concluded that her claim that she had spent part of her childhood in Denmark was erroneous. On her 1929 passport application for her Guggenheim year, she wrote “never” in the space provided
for an indication of earlier applications. George Hutchinson, however, has demonstrated that Americans did not need passports to visit Scandinavia in the early part of this century. From ship manifests of the time, Hutchinson also has shown that Larsen made at least two trips to Denmark—one as a child, the second as a teenager, possibly in the latter instance staying overseas for several years. In
Quicksand
, Copenhagen becomes for Helga Crane neutral territory, free of racial prejudice, quite possibly the opposite of what Larsen herself had encountered in the States.

After the Harlem Renaissance, some of Larsen’s friends speculated that she herself was passing, like her heroine Clare Kendry. Such a radical move would have been totally inconsistent with her sense of pride and justice. She was proud of her race and her own accomplishments.

The fact is that after returning to her earlier nursing profession—which should be looked at as a positive act—she excelled. In the eyes of her peers at Gouverneur Hospital, Nella became an exemplary worker, who instilled in others a sense of respect and admiration. “She really loved people,” one of them told me, “especially the sick. She would see that anything could be done to help them.” She was dedicated to her career and frequently rewarded for her superior efforts. Though reclusive and lonely when away from the hospital, at work she accepted the mandate of her profession. That there was no obituary to record her death hardly mattered. Her funeral was attended by forty or fifty of her coworkers.

Nella Larsen Imes was a sad, beautiful, lonely woman—elegant (as her pictures show us), sophisticated, witty, cultured, urbane. Tragedy and disappointment were constants in her life, yet she ultimately worked out a pattern of survival that permitted her to administer to the sick and the downcast, as she inched along her own lonely pathway toward obscurity and oblivion. As she effaced herself and became more reclusive, her professional life soared. She knew, even if she was not rewarded in kind, that the pain of the inner soul can be mitigated by others and that invisibility is often one’s only guarantee of survival.

—Charles R. Larson

This is the only complete edition of Nella Larsen’s fiction, including her three published stones and the correct ending for
Passing
. Deborah E. McDowell argues erroneously for omitting the final paragraph of
Passing
because the second printing of the 1929 Knopf edition inadvertently omitted it. McDowell argues that Larsen was a perfectionist and decided to change the ending of her novel. Perfectionist she may have been, but there is no evidence for this conjecture. Rather, the missing final paragraph of the second printing would appear to be the result of a dropped printer’s plate.

D
AVIS
, T
HADIOUS
M.
Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance
. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

H
UTCHINSON
, G
EORGE
. “Nella Larsen and the Veil of Race.”
American Literary History
(Summer 1997), 329–49.

L
ARSON
, C
HARLES
R.
Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen
. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993.

To make these texts from the 1920s more accessible to the contemporary reader, minor changes have been made with spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and spacing. British spellings (“colour” instead of “color”) have been altered throughout. Obvious typographical errors in the original texts have been corrected.

“Rich man, poor man
,
Beggar man, thief
,
Doctor, lawyer
,
Indian chief.”