Title: Du Bose Heyward - A Critical and Biographical Sketch
Author: Allen, Hervey
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Du Bose Heyward - A Critical and Biographical Sketch" ***


  DU BOSE HEYWARD

  _A Critical
  and Biographical Sketch_


  By

  HERVEY ALLEN



  INCLUDING CONTEMPORARY ESTIMATES
  OF HIS WORK



  GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

  NEW YORK    _Publishers_    TORONTO



  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  _Du Bose Heyward_

  CAROLINA CHANSONS
  (with Hervey Allen), 1922
  SKYLINES AND HORIZONS, 1924
  PORGY, 1925
  ANGEL, 1926

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA



  "_his unforgettable characters move
  . . . in a lavish, yet reticent,
  magnificence of highly organized prose._"

  --NEW YORK TIMES.



Du BOSE HEYWARD

_A Critical and Biographical Sketch_

By HERVEY ALLEN

There was a fashion amongst a certain school of critics and
_literati_ of former years to go about the country with dark lanterns
ready to flash their microscopic spot lights upon this or that
author, as he emerged for a brief moment from the great North
American obscurity, and to proclaim that he had or certainly would or
could write the great American novel.  It was then the custom to say
that in poem or story he had caught the essential verities of the
great universal American type.  For a while the little spotlights
would play hopefully upon someone, and then be turned elsewhere.  At
last, like the gentleman from Athens who searched with a lantern for
another equally mythical person, the critics, who were looking for
the great American novelist and his novel, passed away with the hope
which animated them, and were seen and heard no more.

Through the 1890's and 1900's the steam-roller of an industrial
democracy continued its leveling and standardizing processes which
few outstanding literary personalities were able to resist.  Then the
American writers and critics at large, especially since the World
War, may be said to have suddenly realized, indeed to have
discovered, two startling but paradoxical facts, _i.e._, that at last
there was a typical and very standard American type, but that he or
she was not altogether a desirable person, and secondly and by
contrast, that the country was not just one level, usual United
States, but in reality a union of many different localities with
varying backgrounds, traditions, and philosophies.  Out of these
provincial cultures might be expected to come the variants from the
standardized types, variants whose differences were not only
picturesquely or quaintly interesting, but of essential human value.

It is on these two themes, either that of standardization or of
sectional difference in character, that the major utterance of
creative literature in America during the past decade or so has
busied itself both in poetry and prose.

Mr. Sinclair Lewis may be said to have achieved the characterization
par excellence of the standardized America in _Main Street_ and
_Babbit_.  Of the studies of sectional and provincial types there
have been many poor and a few fine ones in prose.  In poetry, Robert
Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson have been most distinguished in
dealing with New England.  In the drama Eugene O'Neil has frequently
found his finest _métier_ in the provincial.

Peculiarly tempting, to those artists who have desired to present the
more extreme provincial types of character, has been the wide field
of the South, "Uncle Sam's Other Country", where the feudal tradition
of the plantation, the isolated Mountain Whites, or the realm of the
negro have successively, but not always successfully, engaged various
pens.  A host of names in this connection might be quoted both of
authors and of titles, many of which would be familiar.

In the last few years, the negro, owing largely to the fact that his
emigration in large numbers northward has suddenly called him to the
attention of our metropolitan writers--who now find that he is a
reality in their midst instead of a romantic myth or a minstrel
character--the negro thus, has become the preoccupation of
innumerable writers in prose and poetry, but more especially in music.

It is no exaggeration to say, and not a derogation for the purpose of
argument to admit, that in the final analysis most of those who have
essayed the task of depicting provincial conditions in the South,
involving the essentially differing peculiarities of minor Southern
localities where the plantation, industrialism, the negro, and the
Mountain White are all factors--it is we repeat, no derogation to say
that for the most part those who have attempted to handle these
themes in a major literary way have fallen short of the mark.

This situation has largely arisen from the fact that only those who
were natives of the South could understand the genuine realities of
the conditions they undertook to depict.  Yet there was another
complication, those who were born in the South by the traditions of
their birthright were often inhibited from assuming an attitude
toward their own section, one that is necessary to project a work of
art.  This attitude may be described as that of the
"intimately-detached".

Such was very largely the condition of present day American letters
in regard to matters "South" when in 1925 Mr. Du Bose Heyward of
Charleston, S.C., contributed his comment on the negro.  The scene of
the story is laid in one of the oldest plantation communities on the
continent slowly melting from its former outlines in the crucible of
"progress".

The Book _Porgy_* (the "g" is hard as in "gate") may be said to have
combined or expanded the highly wrought technique of the best type of
realistic dramatic short story with the more ponderable bulk of the
novel, and from the standpoint of diction to have attained with a
natural felicity all the dignity and beauty of a highly-wrought
style.  Its early appearance was greeted with acclaim, and the first
glow of enthusiasm was sustained and enhanced by the more judicious
and pondered praise of careful critics.  _Porgy_, indeed is the first
American novel about the American negro which depicts him faithfully,
as he exists in a particular place, and yet presents him as a purely
artistic but faithfully realistic study of a phase of human life.
Mr. Heyward and his first novel were thus a nice example of a
particular environment producing an artist peculiarly capable of
exploiting the intriguing differences of his province in universal
terms.


* "Porgy", the name given to Mr. Heyward's hero by the colored
fishermen who lived in and about Cat-fish Row and plied their trade
by sailing out of Charleston harbor to the black-fish banks, is the
local name for black-fish, hence the derivation of the nickname.


The author was born and raised in Charleston, S.C.  He first saw the
light in August, 1885, inheriting from a long line of Revolutionary
and Colonial ancestry the essential American traditions and the
philosophy of aristocratic planters nurtured upon almost feudal
plantations.

In the late 1880's and throughout the 1890's the South as a whole,
particularly the "Carolina Low Country" about Charleston, was still
in the throes of the aftermath of Reconstruction.  Mr. Heyward's
family, like thousands of others, had lost their property as a result
of the Civil War, and he was from the first forced to confront not
only an extreme private poverty but the then all but hopeless
economic condition of his section.  At an early age he became the
sole support of his widowed mother and struggled manfully and
hopefully against "a sea of troubles".

Yet there was a fortunate side to all this, one then difficult to
see, but present nevertheless.  The very difficulties of the place
into which he had been born forced the future chronicler of its
charms and grotesqueness into an intimate contact with the life of
the locality, and permitted him to drink it in through understanding
eyes.  The aftermath of the Civil War had put a premium upon living
for being rather than living for possession.  One did not of
necessity appear in the latest fashions in Charleston ball rooms, yet
the balls and the traditions of the society which they represented
went on.  The old city continued in her old ways.  To a visitor it
seemed as if time had been arrested.  Mr. Heyward was intimately
familiar with it all.  The place, indeed, became a part of him, yet
it did not too entirely possess him.

Summers were spent in the mountains of North Carolina, where he first
came into contact with the "People of the Hills."  There was a brief
interlude of painting about Tryon, N.C., in a "cove" of the
Appalachian ranges that catches the breath of spring before any of
the others.  The lessons of the brush were afterward remembered by
the pen.  Then there was a season spent in the far West recuperating
from an illness.  This was shortly before the World War.

Mr. Heyward's "bit" was done in South Carolina in organizing war work
among the negroes of his section in coöperation with certain
gentlemen of Charleston who were chosen for their knowledge and tact.
It was an interesting, a valuable, and a vital experience.  In the
meanwhile, there were a few short stones.  The pen had been found.
It was not quite sure yet what it had to say, but some of the methods
of publishing and the way to an audience had at least become plain.

The present writer remembers first meeting Mr. Heyward only a few
months after the Armistice.  He came into the room one day, naming a
mutual literary acquaintance and a common interest in writing as the
occasion for the call.  He brought with him as his first impression
an unusual sense of ease and virile-sensitiveness--an impression that
remained.

About the hospitable fire of one who was rich in the lore of the
past, literary experience, and living, we continued to meet.  The
result of the association was an arrangement to collaborate on a book
of poems in which it was agreed to treat some of the legends and the
landscapes about Charleston from various points of view.  Mr.
Heyward's literary interest was at that time mainly in verse and the
result was the publication the following year of _Carolina Chansons_.

During the same year while the poems were underway, through the able
assistance of many friends, there was organized in Charleston the
_Poetry Society of South Carolina_.  This in a certain sense proved
to be the spark that kindled the now widely spread interest in modern
poetry in the South.  Requests for advice and assistance poured into
the little "poetry office" at Charleston, and Mr. Heyward in
particular, although he was then conducting an active business in the
city, found himself called upon for lectures, readings and literary
consultations throughout the South.  It was in this way, as a poet,
that his name first became generally known.

In the meanwhile, he had been dividing his summer vacations between
his own studio-cabin in the North Carolina Mountains and the
MacDowell Colony at Peterborough, N.H.  Under the combined
inspiration of North and South Carolina landscapes and the facilities
for undisturbed writing provided by the MacDowell Colony, his first
book was followed about a year later by another volume of poems
dealing most notably with the mountains of North Carolina and the Low
Country of South Carolina.  It was therefore entitled _Skylines and
Horizons_.

His poems had been appearing here and there in magazines and it was
rapidly becoming evident that Mr. Heyward's real life work lay in the
realms of literature.  The flair toward letters was considerably
strengthened in 1923 by his marriage to Dorothy Hartzell Kuhns, a
professional playwright, and it was not long afterwards that he
definitely severed all active business connections and retired to
write _Porgy_ in the vicinity of the Big Smokies in North Carolina,
where he owns a small "farm."  The manuscript of _Porgy_ was put into
its final form at the MacDowell Colony and published in the fall of
1925.  Coincident with the appearance of his first novel, Mr. Heyward
made a lecture tour through all but the far western states.

Mr. Heyward's third book and first novel, _Porgy_, which has already
been alluded to, is based on some of the actual adventures in the
life of a real negro who was, until within a very short time, a
familiar figure about the streets of Charleston.  Porgy was a beggar.
He had lost both legs and drove about in a little cart only a few
inches high, behind an olfactorily memorable goat.  There was no more
grotesque, or picturesque figure in America, and his history, as Mr.
Heyward soon learned, did not belie his appearance.

About the story of this colored cripple, who had played an important
role in the life of old Cat-Fish Row, a venerable and incredible
negro tenement along the Charleston water-front, Mr. Heyward wove his
plot.  It was more than a fine narrative.  It was the actual life of
the colored race, seen through clear eyes, and enacted in genuine
dialect on a stage magnificently set.  As for the setting in which it
takes place, only those who have seen for themselves the real
background of the book will be able fully to appreciate the fine
restraint with which the artist has gained his effects.

Perhaps the most significant thing about the book and its author was
the fact that, for the first time, certainly in this generation, a
novel had been written about the character of an American negro which
was at once true to life and a work of art.  Mr. Heyward did not
regard his material from any standpoint except that of the literary
artist.  He did not pity, patronize, suggest, assume the white man's
burden, or try to add to or lighten that of the colored man.  In
other words, in _Porgy_, the author was Du Bose Heyward, writer,
reporting a cross section of human life Ethiopian, in English prose.
There was no moral propaganda whatever.  Mr. Heyward does not offer
his solution of the "negro problem," nor any scheme to do away with
hurricanes, of which last, by the way, in _Porgy_ there is the most
memorable description of one written by an American since Gertrude
Atherton's _Conqueror_.  The storm in _Porgy_ is a synthesis of
several which the author witnessed in Charleston, notably the great
hurricane of 1911.  In _Skylines and Horizons_ he had already treated
the theme most successfully in verse.

_Porgy_ will very shortly appear in moving pictures, and a dramatic
version upon which the author and his wife have collaborated will
also shortly appear in New York on the legitimate stage.

For the past year or so Mr. Heyward has been dividing his time
between Charleston and his farm in the North Carolina mountains near
Hendersonville while he has been steadily at work upon his second
novel, _Angel_.

_Angel_ also treats of a Southern scene, but this time Mr. Heyward
has chosen as the _locale_ of his plot the mountains, and for his
heroine one "Angel," a daughter of the "People of the Hills."
Through long residence and association, the author is thoroughly
familiar with his material, and it is to be expected that in _Angel_,
he will give us a novel of the Poor Whites of the mountains that will
complement his fine and nationally significant story of the Negro of
the Low Country.

HERVEY ALLEN





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Du Bose Heyward - A Critical and Biographical Sketch" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.