In the last few weeks I’ve read all of Nella Larsen’s fiction. This isn’t as impressive as it sounds – Charles Larson’s edited Complete Fiction collection of Larsen’s works contains only three short stories, none of which are her best work, and the two short novels Quicksand and Passing. It’s a slim volume, not much thicker in total than many literary novels.

I came to Larsen by a circuitous route, through criticism and biography, rather than her works. I was browsing a recent issue of PMLA and came across Barbara Hochman’s “Filling in Blanks: Nella Larsen’s Application to Library School,” a close reading of a single document from the writer’s life. I wasn’t overly impressed by the article itself: there wasn’t enough in the application itself, I think, to provide a framework for reading, and without careful use of other archival sources –which the article didn’t manage to do– the filling in of the blanks ended up being an exercise in speculation. But this got me thinking of Larsen herself, and her position as perhaps the most prominent novelist in the Harlem Renaissance. I’d come across Passing before, in the 1990s, as a graduate student, curious about Larsen’s liminal position, looking through overlaid lenses of race, gender, and sexuality at texts that seemed unbound by stable identity categories. Curiously, Larsen’s world in New York in the 1920s also intersected with my own unwritten biographical explorations of the life of Somerset Maugham. Maugham visited New York in the twenties on several occasions, and he and Larsen had friends in common, notably the writer, literary entrepreneur, and later photographer, Carl Van Vechten.

Hochman’s article led me to George Hutchinson’s monumental In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line. Hutchinson’s biography admits, right at its beginning, the impossibility of its task. Larsen’s early and late life were lived in obscurity, and she left no personal papers. Only during the 1920s and the 1930s, during the Harlem Renaissance, did she burn brightly, and come to the attention of others. Her entire fictional output, as I mentioned above, occupies a single paperback. As Hutchinson points out, her biography has been distorted, and her fiction often given radically different interpretations, in order to make her serve the needs of various presents. She was often disbelieved, and her two extended visits to Denmark, where her mother was born, dismissed as fiction. Such inability to take her life and works at face value extends to other facets of her life. Larsen defended herself against charges of plagiarizing a story by Sheila Kaye-Smith as her story “Sanctuary” by arguing that it was based on a folk tale told to her years before. Larsen’s defenders have argued for a more sophisticated understanding of alleged plagiarism as modernist textuality, but they have rarely, as Rosemary Hathaway notes, taken Larsen at her word. The story is, however, a commonly circulated oral narrative.

I won’t say too much about the writing here. Quicksand and Passing are both compelling reads, and there’s something very quietly subversive about the prose. Here’s a tiny sample, from the end of Quicksand, describing Helga Crane’s discovery of a new marriage partner – “In some strange way she was able to ignore the atmosphere of self-satisfaction which poured from him like a gas pipe.” For me, Quicksand seems more complex, and wider in its reference, than Passing, despite the canonical status of the latter.

What I am very interested in, though, is the life, and the way the life is remembered. It’s a life which is commonly read in terms of a writer’s career. In this view, Larsen was a failure. She achieved prominence, only to lose it: she could not find a publisher for the novels she wrote in the 1930s, and after her divorce she gradually lost touch with many of her friends in the literary world in Harlem and outside. She died in obscurity, her white half-sister only begrudgingly acknowledging her when money was left to her in Larsen’s will. Hutchinson sees the life differently, as an enactment of social history. Larsen’s mother was a white Danish immigrant, her father –as far as we know – an immigrant from the Danish West Indies, who vanished early in her life. For Hutchinson, Larsen’s fate in her family and literary career reflect changing constructions of race in the northern US from the early twentieth century onwards. Larsen was born in Chicago before the hardening of a racializing “color line”: as a young woman, she could not escape it, and it destroyed her connections to her birth family. Larsen’s work lost popularity because of its themes of passing and its questioning of racial categories among the urban middle classes: it lost ground to newer, more activist black and African American writing, re-emerging only with the popularity of new forms of scholarship questioning racial essentialism. Hutchinson, like every biographer, has an unspoken motive – to stress the contributions of white intellectuals to the Harlem Renaissance – and at times perhaps at times he pushes this view forward too strongly.

 There’s another way in which the life might be written, though, and that is through Larsen’s long vocation as a nurse, in which she achieved considerable success and seniority before her marriage, and to which she returned for the best part of two decades later in life. It’s easy to trace this life in her works: “Sanctuary” came from a story told to her by a patient, while much of Quicksand is marked by the shadow of her time working in the hospital at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, where she was head nurse, in effect running the hospital. She had a crucial role as a public health nurse in countering the flu pandemic in the Bronx in 1918, and returned to nursing for almost two decades at the end of her life. In one perspective, then, her experience as a novelist was only an interlude in the life, lengthier than but otherwise comparable to her role as a librarian in New York Public Libraries.

Rephrasing Larsen’s life in this way, I think, counters the focus on the personality of the author that seems to be given so much emphasis in the last twenty year under neoliberalism. In the last twenty years we’ve had an explosion of MFAs in Creative Writing, of literary prizes, and of writers’ festivals. In one way this is very welcome, in that it’s good to bring literature and reading processes to public attention. But there’s also something disconcerting to me about the focus on the writer’s personality in such fora. I’ve served as a judge on prizes and chaired many writers’ festival panels, as well as appearing as a featured writer at festivals myself. Some writers can talk very precisely about craft, and others about their personal experiences. Some are very insightful about politics, or society. Yet if you rounded up a group of similar people who weren’t writers you’d get equally interesting, and in all likelihood more diverse, opinions expressed. In a lecture at the 2017 Singapore Writer’s Festival, Junot Diaz noted that when he used to give such talks at the beginning of his career, most of the audience consisted of readers of his books. Now the majority of the audience were not readers, but aspirant writers. There’s a sense here that the idea of being a writer and a social identity associated with it has become more important than the writing itself, that the focus on personality, networking and self-promotion in this identity project fits very neatly into broader (neo)liberal constructions of the creative economy.

Larsen, little given to self-promotion, writing fiction strongly touched and troubled by an ethics of care, and living a life not contained by literary celebrity, may perhaps provide a quiet counter to this. And in beginning to reading Larsen this way, I’m fully conscious of how I, like Hutchinson, am using her biography selectively to support my own changing life story.