And Bid Him Sing: A Biography of Countée Cullen
by Charles Molesworth
University of Chicago Press
304 pages, $30.
THE EARLY LIFE of the first published poet of the Harlem Renaissance is wreathed in mystery. Probably born in 1903, in Louisville, Kentucky—or perhaps in New York City, or, as some have maintained, Baltimore—Countee LeRoy Porter was the child of a single mother. He spent his early years in poverty with his grandmother, and perhaps his grandfather, in Harlem. In his early teens he was adopted—perhaps informally, perhaps legally—by a popular and highly respected Harlem minister, Reverend Dr. Frederick Cullen, and his wife, after which Countee L. Porter became Countée Cullen. Thereafter, he always styled his first name with the accent, and he nicknamed himself “Tay.”
Cullen rocketed to fame in the five years between starting college at NYU and receiving his master’s degree from Harvard, and by 1927 only Edna St. Vincent Millay was garnering more popular and critical attention. Before going to Harvard, he’d made the acquaintance of Carl Van Vechten, who was quoted as saying in a 1925 issue of Vanity Fair: “All his poetry is characterized by a suave, unpretentious, brittle intellectual elegance.” A scholar of poetry and of the Harlem Renaissance, Charles Moles-worth has written what his publisher touts as “the first full-length critical biography” of Countée Cullen. For that reason, it is easy to overlook the occasionally dry summation of his early school years. More compelling is the author’s close reading of selected poems in this very well-researched biography. Although author-artist Richard Bruce Nugent was the only openly gay member of the Harlem Renaissance, Molesworth has uncovered coded messages in letters between Cullen and his friend Alain Locke, in which lovers—current, potential, past—are referred to by their initials in carefully concealed turns of the phrase. (Locke, a closeted gay man, was the third African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard and was a primary force in the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement.) Cullen, who read Edward Carpenter on Locke’s recommendation, told Locke in a letter, “I loved myself in it.” Cullen dedicated many poems to men, regardless of whether he had an intimate relationship with them. For example, there’s a poem called “Tab-leau” that’s dedicated to Donald Duff, a Caucasian man who was one of his lovers. Cullen himself is hiding in plain sight, and his preferred poetical voice—what Molesworth calls “high English Romanticism”—is on display. The first two stanzas read: Locked arm in arm they cross the way, From lowered blinds the dark folks stare, In her Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (2003), scholar A. B. Christa Schwarz wonders whether the first word of the poem (“locked”) is intended as a play on Alain Locke’s last name. Another scholar, Alden Reimonenq, whose influential essay “Countée Cullen’s Uranian ‘Soul Windows’” (in Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color, 1993), noted that Cullen frequently “layered” gay and racial themes, as in his epic poem “The Black Christ,” which is about a black man who is falsely accused of rape. But Cullen did go out with women, and his brief marriage, in 1928, to Yolande DuBois (daughter of W. E. B., who helped him get a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in France) has been recounted in numerous sources. Cullen and his friend Harold Jackman went on the honeymoon together, and the new Mrs. Cullen followed later. But Moles-worth finds previously hidden details: Mr. and Mrs. Cullen spent a weekend in Philadelphia following their very extravagant wedding, and Yolande Cullen returned to her teaching position immediately thereafter. Owing to economic circumstances, she had to stay behind while Cullen, Jackman, and the Rev. Cullen (whose health issues required that his son accompany him) left for France. Yolande Cullen arrived several months later. Molesworth provides a nuanced understanding of their brief marriage, based in part on letters between W. E. B. DuBois and his daughter. In 1932, Cullen’s only novel was published. It remains, as a New York Times reviewer stated, “an excellent and highly readable book that should not be missed.” It is readily available thanks to the 1991 anthology My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countée Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Gerald Early. In it, Cullen wove together two stories: one about a poor con man, newly arrived in Harlem, and the young woman who falls for him; the other about the high-society goings-on of the young woman’s employer and her crowd. This is, in part, a roman-à-clef in which the fictional Constancia Brandon and her Booklovers’ Club are stand-ins for A’Lelia Walker and her salon. Walker had named her salon “The Dark Tower” in honor of one of Cullen’s poems and of his column in Opportunity, the monthly magazine of the National Urban League. The characters Walter Derwent and Bradley Norris can be seen as stand-ins for Carl Van Vechten and Richard Bruce Nugent. Needing a steady source of income during the Depression and still wanting to continue his annual trips to Paris, Cullen became a teacher in the New York school system, where one of his students was James Baldwin. Cullen was in a relationship with actor Edward Atkinson when he remarried in 1940. This second marriage, to Ida Roberson, seems to have been a happy one, consisting of frequent outings to concerts and plays, and it appears that the new Mrs. Cullen was not aware of Atkinson’s role in Cullen’s life. Cullen also wrote children’s books, a play, and at time of his death in 1946 was working on what was to become the musical St. Louis Woman. Charles Molesworth’s book is an important addition to the scholarship on Countée Cullen. The publication of the latter’s collected letters, which are being edited by Thomas Wirth, will shed more light on Cullen’s personal and public lives.
The black boy and the white,
The golden splendor of the day
The sable pride of night.
And there the fair folk talk
Indignant that these two should dare
In unison to walk.
