HARLEM HEYDAY

...17.95 Peopled by fascinating figures both black and white, elegantly written and lavishly illustrated, When Harlem Was in Vogue is nonetheless only a middling success...

...Brief participation in World War I and the exposure to racism in the Army are deemed sufficient explanations for the emergence of a new black militancy in the 1920s...

...DuBois emerges as an elitist, a black Puritan who disdained "low culture...

...In addition to displaying Lewis's gift for thumbnail characterizations and un-earthing the crucial organizational role played by Johnson, who seldom advertised his own accomplishments, this chapter quietly makes the point that black initiative, rather than the benefactions of Carl Van Vechten and other white supporters, gave form to the Harlem Renaissance...

...But long before the publication of Van Vechten's book Hughes had written blues poetry shaped by the music of his Midwestern youth...

...All these assessments are propositions which histo-rians would do far better to re-examine than to repeat...

...Communists cynically ex-ploited black protest movements...

...the reader can feel the changing concerns of Renaissance writers almost on a year-by-year basis...

...In so doing, Harlem develops, without elaborate theorizing, a subtle analysis of the cross pressures among black writers: the personal clashes, the arguments over racial propagandizing in art, disagreements over socialism, varying attitudes toward folk sources, and divergent styles of getting along with white supporters...

...For now, we can only thank Lewis for an entertaining chapter ofthat story...

...Most Afro-Americans," aecording to Lewis, looked upon organized labor with only slightly less hostility than they did the Klan...

...Harlem briefly housed an impressive collec-tion of writers and performers, and it acted, in Brown's telling phrase, as the "cash register" of the movement...

...As Sterling Brown long ago ob-served, Harlem was only one location for a much larger renaissance of black creativity...

...More vital than questions of specific Interpretation are questions concerning the very contours of the study...

...Marcus Garvey's movement based itself on West Indian support...

...Creative artists came mainly from the South, the Midwest, and the West Indies and must be placed in those contexts as well as in Harlem's...

...The problem is that the inherited wisdom which shapes the study is not sound...

...Countee Cullen was perhaps the only home-grown Harlemite to make a major mark in this flowering of Afro-American culture...

...A fair measure of thrill-seeking in an allegedly exotic and primitive environment was the prime motivation but the white faithful also included racial egali-tarians, sharp-eyed publishers, and party politicians...

...When the f?ll history of the renaissance of the 1920s is written it will focus neither on Harlem nor on high art...

...A few vivid passages describe individual night clubs, and an ex-traordinary interlude treats rent parties...

...His own literary judgments sometimes strike home, especially in his discussions of Fauset and White, but more often Lewis barely obtrudes, choosing instead to focus on the responses of contemporary fellow writers, publishers, patrons, and the public...

...All these virtues fail to make Harlem more than episodically interesting...

...and, preeminently, the sociologist Charles S. Johnson...

...Booker T. Washington, on the other hand, had "populist ideas" concerning education...

...To examine Harlem's vogue, it turns out...

...means to read literature and to sift through the correspon-dence of writers...

...Yet there is no sustained discussion of music, theatre, and dance, all of which contributed greatly to Harlem's popularity...

...Lewis suggests, for example, that Langston Hughes incor-porated folk elements into his writing when "with the sales of Nigger Heaven soaring [he] saw that the old genteel literary tradi-tions would no longer do...

...The themes of white and black diversity come together in his even-handed discussion of the response to Nigger Heaven, a 1926 novel by Carl Van Vechten, the exotica-seeker par excellence...

...Similarly, Lewis records a r?nge of motivations among whites participating in the Renaissance...

...Far and away the best chapter is a series of portraits of "The Six," a group credited with setting up a structure which supported black artists in Harlem in both their attempts to publish and to secure grants...

...Hughes's example suggests a final objec-tion...

...In the absence of any such discussion, treatment of how writers interacted with "low culture" is bound to be hollow...

...On the positive side, Lewis presents a lively and often penetrating sketch of the literary politics and sales efforts that made Afro-American writing a commodity at least somewhat sought after during the period between World War I and the Depression...

...The problem is not that Lewis has failed to do his homework—, rigorous research and flashes of insight abound...

...Just as Lewis shows a flair for brief biog-raphy, he also presents marvelous plot summaries of major literary works...

...David R. Roediger (David R. Roediger specializes in black history at Northwestern University...

...The group included the writer Jessie Fauset, the genius-of-all-trades James Weldon Johnson, the educator and editor Alain Locke, the novelist and civil rights leader Walter White, Casper Holstein, the kingpin of Harlem's organized gambling...