Backlisted - Passing by Nella Larsen

Episode Date: February 8, 2016

In episode 6 of the Backlisted Podcast we're joined by Sarah Churchwell, professorial fellow in American literature and chair of public understanding of the humanities at the School of Advanced Study, the University of London (phew) to discuss 'Passing' by Nella Larsen. Also, John and Andy discuss the book they've both been reading this week, Breakdown by John Bratby. Timings: (may differ due to adverts)7'29 - Breakdown by John Bratby20'16 - Passing by Nella Larsen* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

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Yes, you heard that right. From the crispest lettuce to the juiciest apples, Loblaws is committed to fresh, so you get the best fruits and veggies. Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. it's so it's so bizarre this book it's brilliant it's just brilliant i haven't had as much fun as this this year i mean you know reading these these strange exotic, kind of hot-housed madness. Anyway, let's not go too soon. Shall we start? Yeah, why don't we?

Have you got some chat? You've got a bit of chat. A little bit of chat. A bit of chat. Right, welcome to another edition of Backlisted, sponsored by Unbound and coming from the kitchen table in Unbound. I am John Mitchinson, publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller. I'm the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously.

And as usual, we're joined by the writer and bon vivant Matthew Clayton. Hello, Matthew. Hello, everyone. And our special guest this week to discuss Nella Larson's passing is Sarah Churchwell, Professor Sarah Churchwell. Well, thank heavens you said that. I was going to storm out of here. Professor for the Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London. Also an author, one of my favorite books of recent years, Careless People,

which is a brilliant reconstruction of what was happening at the time F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing Gatsby. So a literary detective work, but also brilliant reading and brilliant contextualising of that novel. And I guess that only leaves me to say... No, no, we're not doing that this week. No, because... We've both read the same thing.

I don't know if you'd heard, but a couple of weeks ago, David Bowie died. I did. Yeah, and we were all very sad about that. Very sad. One of the things that went into circulation after David Bowie died was a list that he had pulled together about five years ago of his hundred favourite books. And I've noticed

on Twitter, there's a Bowie book group hashtag already for people who are going to read the challenge of the hundred bowie books so i was wondering if he was a voracious reader everybody you know one of the things that's come out of all the all the people memorializing him is that he was never not with a book in his hand yeah i love that story about how in his latter years he had passed anonymously around new york by carrying a greek newspaper so that people just think, oh, there's a Greek bloke who looks like David Bowie.

Anyway, so we've got the list of 100 books. We'll try and put it up on the website or on the Facebook page if you haven't already seen it. But I thought it would be fun just to go around and see, truthfully, how many of these 100 books we'd all read. I will show my hand first. I've read 29 29 and that includes private eye magazine and viz so i managed to crawl my way to 29 and actually it would have been 28

if it wasn't for sarah choosing passing for us to read because passing is one of the books on this list i have to say i also added added, Passing added another one to me. I feel quite good. I thought I hadn't done terribly well. I'm 36. Very good. In the lead. It's not really a competition, is it, Matt? Let's be honest.

But there are some funny ones. The ones that I haven't read are funnier than the ones that I have. I mean, I think I've already said on this podcast, I've never actually read 1984. Still not ready. Yeah, yeah, 1984, yeah. There's books on this list that I have. I mean, I think I've already said on this podcast I've never actually read 1984. Still not ready. Yeah, yeah, 1984, yeah. There's books on this list that I really want to read. I really want to read Pacoon by Spike Milligan, which I've never read.

Which is great. I really want to read American Way of Death by our old backlisted favourite, Jessica Mitford, which I've never read. Also not on my list. And English Journey by J.B. Priestley. I have read. And how's that?

It's wonderful. So I'm the paltry list. And English Journey by J.B. Priestley. I have read. And how's that? That's wonderful. So I'm the paltry 29. You're 36. Matthew? How many? I clocked up 22, but what I found interesting was that lots of them, I'm really not sure whether I've read them or not. Billy Liar, have I read that?

I can't really remember. I only read Billy Liar last year. Having loved the film for 30 years, I only read the book last year, and I actually found the book disappointing. Isn't that terrible? It's because Schlesinger made several really significant changes to the plot in the film, which I'm so used to that when

I read the novel, I thought, oh, that's a shame. This is maybe a subject for another podcast, that misremembering stuff because you've seen film adaptations where things have changed in the film and I can't now, I mean, it would be hard for me to be able to remember what much of anything i think you don't you recall about less than five percent i mean the plot for some novels is almost beyond me you know what i thought when i was doing it was the way that i could work out whether i read it

or not was whether i remember the cover it wasn't whether I could remember the content. Let me tell you, as a key book-selling skill. Sarah? Well, you know, I have to say I'm a bit of a ringer here because I'm a professor of American literature and Bowie seems to have quite a predilection for American literature. Don't tool yourself down. There are an enormous number of American novels on this list, surprisingly so. And I am competitive as well as American.

So I have to say with some great pleasure that I have read 48 and left you all in the dust. Yes, you have. I was cross that I hadn't made 50 because I was so close to the halfway mark. Did your 48 include any issues of the Beano? I have never read The Beano. There you go.

You so easily get to 50. Or just Spike Mulligan. Spike Mulligan. Mulligan, sorry. See, I don't even know his name. So I'm Mulligan too. So I clearly have much reading to do. Oh, I've just seen one more.

I have read that. See? I have read Last Exit to Brooklyn. There you go. Me too. That's one of them. 37, Andy. I'm really sorry.

I mean, Bowie, there's a very strong presence here of 20th century American novels, and that's my field. So it would be really bad if I hadn't read them, honestly. It's a little bit like he took one of my courses. Is there a major American novel that you haven't read? Have you got a guilty secret? Oh, of course I have guilty secrets. I just have to think which one it is. I mean, have you honestly read John Dos Passos?

I have actually read John Dos Passos. You know why? Because, well, first of all, he's a friend of Fitzgerald's. I haven't read that much Upton Sinclair. I had to read The Jungle. The thing was we had to read it in high school. Has anybody read anything other than The Jungle by Upton Sinclair? Not that I'm aware of.

But the thing was that in high school I was a girly swat because I was the kind of girl who Sinclair? Not that I'm aware of. But the thing was, was that in high school, I was a girly swap because I was the kind of girl who was going to go on and become an English professor. So I read books even when I didn't like them. I just doggedly made my way through to the end. I know how that feels. And we end here, you were given the USA trilogy. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now I've liberated myself from that. I don't have to do

that anymore, but I did read the USA trilogy. Who would like to hear me talk about Finnegan's Wakes? Moving swiftly on. And Matt, our producer, Matt, we can't leave matt out this how many um i only got to 20 that's including the comics and that's basically because i've read every one of those music biographies including including uh the little richard book which is... Oh, great book. You know, John Savage's Teenage is a fantastic book. What Babaloo Bop is a brilliant book. Teenage. I'm terrible at that. It's too long.

Oh, no, it's wonderful. And Sweet Soul Music by Peter Goralnik. That's a wonderful book. And the weird thing is, I've never heard a record by David Bowie. So, but anyway, Passing was on this list, which was which is a actually was it a coincidence a novel that isn't on this is john bratby breakdown okay so now normally at this point or earlier in backlisted what we would do is john and i would ask one another which books we've been reading and um we've both been reading the same book because I read a novel.

Because you made him. I made him. I made him. Yeah, I made him. I read this novel by the painter John Bratby called Breakdown over Christmas. And I genuinely feel it's the most extraordinary, in the true sense of that word, novel that I've read for years. And halfway through it, I emailed John and said, please, please buy a copy of this book from Abe. Second, it's never come out in paperback. We have to be able to talk about it on Backlisted.

So before we talk about, I'm just going to say a bit for anyone who doesn't know who John Bratby was. He was a painter, a prolific painter, and in fact there is a retrospective exhibition of his work opening at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings this weekend, the first retrospective of his work. of his work um he was incredibly successful for a short period in the late 1950s and he was early to mid 60s he was to british painting what john osborne was the british drama wasn't he he was yeah kind of it was kitchen sink he's he is a he was a leading light of the kitchen sink school a group of radical realist painters who painted things like chip fryers and cornflake packets in really thick paint on massive canvases. And so he was kind of fated from the late 50s to the mid 60s, in which

time he wrote four novels, of which Breakdown is the first. And then he kind of fell out of favour after the mid-1960s, but he kept painting prolifically to the extent that he's estimated, he's estimated his est is only estimated because people don't actually know that there are at least 3 000 john bratby canvases in existence which is pretty amazing did tony hancock base any characters there are some

amazing a bit amazing um similarities between the rebel of the film which tony hancock plays a painter yeah when asked how he mixes his paint, he says, in a bucket with a big stick. And so on. And Ratby's paintings were the paintings, his actual paintings were the ones that Gully Jimson, the hero of the Joyce Carey novel. Hero.

Well, you know, anti-hero, whatever, protagonistagonist, antagonist, and Horse's Mouth, which was filmed in round about the sort of mid-60s. It was 59. 59. And this is a year before Bratby's novel came out. I'm speculating that Bratby, who became very famous as a result of these massive paintings being in the film The Horse's Mouth, may have approached a publisher, or have been approached by a publisher

to say, well, you know, you're associated with a film of a book. Do you have any books? His biographer, I'm just going to quote Bratby's biographer who described Bratby in the introduction of the biography as, quote, he was a violent alcoholic, completely self-absorbed, pathologically shy, combined pornographer and prig. He believed that drinking and masturbation were necessary for the self-loathing he needed to make art. And the journalist Andrew Lamberth has said,

John Bradley was a monster who possessed great talent. I knew him quite well over the last decade of his life and even contemplated writing a book about him before I learnt enough to put me off. And I'm saying all this because the novel breakdown is clearly autobiographical. And normally on Backlisted we read the blurbs on the backs of books. As you know, I'm just going to read you the blurb on the inside jacket of the novel breakdown.

It says this. John Bratby writes, This is a study of a man's decline. The man is James Brady, successful artist. Behind the lurid episodes, which include everything from near rape and murder to lunacy and a bicycle chain battle, is to be found a serious and continual explanation of the man's mental state, an exhaustive, careful, analytical explanation of why James Brady enacted the rake's progress. Superficially read, the book will present a juicy story. For those who want a more serious

side to their reading will, I hope, find that also in the book. James Brady is presented unsympathetically, and the book has many comic passages now and again i have drawn incidents from my own experience and distorted and exaggerated them into the regions of pure fiction i shall be highly amused if anyone thinks this book is autobiographical for if it was i would indeed be an awful mess capital a capital m that is the best blurb that is the best blurb we've had on backlisted actually it doesn't let up from there i mean it is extraordinary the energy of this book the structure is a complete nightmare it's basically the story of a breakdown or sort of two breakdowns because as he points out later on the

book the sensible thing to have done would have been a breakdown that would have ended in a suicide but no he then have to say the book is full of extraordinary lurid illustrations oh that's one of the wonderful things about it as well. Some of the prose is amazing. He also does, it put me in mind of B.S. Johnson, who we were discussing on the last podcast. He puts in a gratuitous scene, okay, in the middle of the book, which is a sort of basically a murder scene, you know,

lots of blood everywhere. And he is obviously self-consciously introduces it as a piece of dime novel writing. And then he, the asides to the reader are one of the joys of this book. At this point, we feel we have done our duty by the schoolboys, laborers, and excitement-starved clerks of this country.

We feel that we have jeopardized our claim to great literary recognition and that we may not now get the Nobel Prize for literature. We see ourselves sadly paying in our royalties at the bank to an adoring bank clerk, while the bank manager looks disapprovingly from the doorway of his office. We see that as we leave the bank, an errand boy excitedly points us out to his friend, and a book critic spits at us as we pass him. Such self-sacrifice must surely be rewarded in the halls of heaven.

But we are sad. We did so want to be another Faulkner or Joyce. What will our old headmaster say? I've got either so funny, you chose that, I picked up the next thing about that. This is a thing that I read and thought, God, I wish I'd written this.

Okay. He says, Now, dear reader, I'll present you with another small event in Brady's life and you'll have to work out unhelped whether it is relevant to our story or whether it's hoopty-doodle. After all, if you want to pick holes, go and rid a part of William Faulkner's noble novel sanctuary, which I'll quote for you.

Remember, Faulkner was given the Nobel Prize and this is considered his best work. Now get your thought-finding mind on this. Hooray! And then he goes on to say, and this is true, everybody. This is this is true john bratby speaks the truth we have to be tolerant to enjoy literature dear reader now if you have learned tolerance you can go ahead and enjoy the reading of the one great and we mean great in the aesthetic sense book that the egotistical james joyce wrote about himself you can pick holes in the greatest, but it won't do you any good. That's great, Matt. That's great.

It is brilliant. Now, having said, if you're interested in novels from the 60s and the art scene, or just crazy, lost, outsider work, Bratby wrote four of these novels. And when I started reading them, I was thinking,

why isn't this in print? Why hasn't somebody picked this up? And as I read on, I discovered why, which is very unfortunately, I have to strongly qualify my recommendation of this book by the fact that it contains some really unpleasant racial and domestic violence related material, which although Bratby would probably claim that it's part of the method of portraying the mind... The walk on the west of the world that he's writing about. The mind of the... Yeah, I found pretty hard to read, actually.

Yeah, particularly. So this afternoon I tracked down his dealer, his art dealer, not his drug dealer. Or maybe a dealer. I have to say say whatever he was on and that was interesting because um so is the guy that runs the gallery that deals in his work still said that his biggest influence and the thing that he felt closest to was colin wilson and the outsider and he said he was he was friends with colin so i think gives it a little context but

he also said that bradbury quite literally just tossed these off as quickly as he could and you know he wrote the books really quickly he was just interested in earning money some money from them but he actually at one point felt that that's what he was going to do he's going to become a writer rather than an artist you know the thing about this novel breakdown there are passages of utter brilliance which i don't think a more literary writer would be able to access there's all sorts of stuff about the way in which he uses color in prose is something a painter would do yeah and also how he how he's brilliant at taking little prose snapshots of scenes in a street for instance it's absolutely terrific one last thing so there's also kind of in jokes in there in a kind of bs

johnson way so the artist in the book, the main character in the book, passes a gallery and they see someone with really terrible paintings of hands, and that's a joke about Bratby himself being known to being very bad at painting hands. So I think there's lots of those. It's not just autobiography. There's lots of little jokes in there that if you knew him, you would completely understand. I do feel I need to also interject for the record, in case anybody is paying attention to the claims that he was making, that Sanctuary is not considered William Faulkner's best novel by anybody except possibly Graffy.

I edited down what Graffy actually writes. I figured you did. Does it involve a corncob? It does, yeah. Of course it would involve the corncob. That is more or less the only thing that anybody should remember. Nobody thinks that Sanctuary is Faulkner's best novel. So I found this thing, Matthew. I thought, I wonder if Matthew will get to this before I do.

But I guess you didn't. I was just talking about Parcoon by Spike Milligan, one of David Bowie's hundred books. And the actor Neil Pearson is also a rare book dealer. And he is currently selling a first edition of Breakdown by John Bratby dedicated to Spike Milligan. And I'm just going to read out the dedication to Spike Milligan. To Spike, 30th May 1968.

I'm reading Pacoon with the midday cup of tea. I'm at this point in time halfway through chapter five. Compared with Pakun, my book has a rollicking sense of fun, a deep appreciation of the squalid, capital S, and a comprehensive cast. Not that Pakun has not. For reading all 336 pages of this book which maggie has done there is a prize this can be obtained by making application to number seven hardy road black heath when there is a full moon in conjunction with the zed in the month and in a leap year the color of the nature of this book is black wine to accompany reading burgundy all the best john brilliant those with strong stomachs i think it's extraordinary and as you say bits and bits of it i think are as good as any english novel

published since the war it's and clearly as a figure i was like just to repeat that the the exhibition at the juror were down in hastings is the first retrospective of bratby's work and they actually issued an appeal to members of the public saying, if you have a Bratby, please share it with us, please bring it down. And Andrew Mayle, our friend Andrew Mayle, who's going to be a future guest on Backlisted, pointed out to me that in the Reggie Perrin novels by David Nobbs, CJ has a John Bratby hanging on his office wall. Apparently it's an adaptation of a Judith Krantz novel where all the art in it is bratby which sounds pretty really oh that's the best fact i've heard i can't imagine how

that has happened but apparently it's true i just my last little thing on bratby is i just love because with my unbound hat on for a moment i'd love to see that you know when we're thinking we're breaking new ground by putting interesting levels in for books funding and books on the inside flap of this first edition, you could send off to Bratley the first 200 readers who responded, got a signed print of some of the lurid and quite explicit illustrations of the book, which is great. I particularly like that one. That's the graph paper of his breakdown,

which looks a little bit like a pair of breasts. Of course. Funny that. Right. Anyway, enough of Bratby. We'll pick this up again after some marvelously witty and interesting adverts. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights. There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness end July 18th. $49 annual

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A day of sunshine? No. A box of fine wines yes uber eats can definitely get you that get almost almost anything delivered with uber eats order now alcohol and select markets product availability may vary by regency app for details nella larson i couldn't think of any link continuous or otherwise What's a gear change? What's a gear change? Smooth, Mitchinson. I couldn't think of any link, tenuous or otherwise. So listen, we asked our guests on Backlisted to choose a book, and Sarah came back pretty much straight away, didn't you,

with Passing by Nella Larson. And I will confess immediately that I had never heard of it. Which is the reason I chose it. And you actually made me feel better by saying, well, the reason I want to choose it is because I don't think many people in the UK have heard of it. And I hadn't heard of it. And not that many people in the US, for that matter. It's growing. And it's something that people encounter if they take classes on writers like Larson. And we'll talk about the kind of context in which she appears, I'm sure. But it's only in the last 10 or 20 years that she's starting to gain any kind of traction.

And she was one of the forgotten writers of her era for many decades. And yes, in my experience still, it's very much not known here. And since I was told that your whole raison d'etre was to bring books back into circulation that people have forgotten about. Good ones, that's the thing. Of course, exactly. One worth recovering yeah so before we talk maybe about passing itself i wonder if it would be helpful could you just tell us a bit about nella larson who she was and where she came from where she went to as well that would be great yeah well nella larson is best known for

two very very brief novels that are often published together. And I see several editions around our table are, in fact, these double headers. Her first novel was called Quicksand, which came out in 1928 and is reasonably autobiographical. It's very much drawn on her own experiences. And then this novel, Passing, which came out in 1929. And they're both about 100 pages. They're really brief novellas or long long short stories, if you like, even. Larson herself was the daughter of a white father and a black mother. Her father was Danish. Larson is spelled S-E-N. And in the 1920s in America, of course, it was still Jim Crow, the American name for apartheid. And Americans don't like it when I call it apartheid, but that's what it was. And that's what we should call it. And the rule, as I'm sure many people know, the law was what was known as the one drop rule, which said that if you had one drop of quote unquote, Negro blood,

you were legally considered a black person. And that meant that you didn't have the legal rights of a white person. So you're a second class citizen. So if you were mixed race, you were black. And of course, that rule was instituted in the 19th century by slave owners so that they could continue to rape their slaves and create more slaves for themselves. And they didn't want their slaves to inherit their property if they were allowed to be white. So what they said was, you followed the condition of the mother, which was the slave. And if you had any black blood in you, you were considered legally black and therefore able to be enslaved. But of course, the laws of biology don't follow the laws of racism. So the more mixing of races that you do, the whiter and whiter that people become. And then it becomes hard to tell whether somebody has quote unquote black blood or not. The question really is whether they have black skin. And so America got itself into a massive tangle from which it has not emerged. Of course, we still call Obama the first black

president, even though he is half black and half white in exactly the way that Nella Larson was. So Larson, like many people of mixed race in the era, found herself in, it was a really difficult social position to hold. It was the academic word that people like to use, liminal, right? She was in this kind of neither here nor there, and not fully embraced by the black community, not fully not embraced at all by the white community. And she actually ended up leaving America for a while. She went to Denmark, where she hoped that she would find a less racist experience, less racist people. And in fact, what she found was they were less virulently racist, but she was exoticized.

So she was very much kind of, she was passed around as this kind of bird of paradise and this kind of... Josephine Baker. Josephine Baker. Yeah. And so she felt often, wrote about the fact that she just felt that she was not at home anywhere and there was nowhere where she was accepted. And the sense of shuttling back and. And what Larson makes so amazing about, and so ahead of her time, is that she makes this very much a sexual question as well for both. In both novels, it's not simply a question of race, as if race were a simple question, but it's not merely a question of race. It's also always with Larson about sexual identity, and it's particularly about female power and how that relates to sex and race

and indeed class as well and passing involves all of these things and larson was acutely aware of these issues i want to come on in a minute to just talking about the artistic and literary scene that she made herself part of and indeed sprang from because i think that's an important part of understanding the book as well but before we do that I'd like to get Matthew and John maybe just say what you thought of the book coming to it blind I absolutely loved it and read it quickly and then read it again because I one of the things that is so remarkable about it is the precision of the language I've rarely read a book where the emotional nuance of a of simple domestic conversations has been better realized. Leaving aside, as it were, the subject matter of the book just purely as a technical exercise in rendering thoughts, in responses, in painting delicate but accurate pictures of how those emotions change within a conversation.

It's a remarkable, I think a remarkable novel and a remarkable, the thing that I came away with it feeling strongly is only fiction can do this. Only fiction can unpack such a, I mean, at the time, as you say, Sarah, at the time,

the idea of passing, of getting away with pretending to be a white for a black person. That was a huge issue at the time. It's still, it's still a kind of, this issue is, as we all know, is still fraught. But what fiction can do that almost nothing else, that no amount of sociological exegesis can, is what it feels like to be that person, what motivates you to be that person who is doing that. And then we'll go into more detail about the central relationship in the novel, which is a friendship between two black women or women of mixed race. So I found it completely extraordinary.

I liked it too. Matthew, what did you think? I read it on the Kindle, and that was a kind of interesting experience because I knew nothing about the book and I skipped the introduction so I went straight in to start with it took me 20-25 pages to even work out what era it was set in

and it's a weird way to read a book on a Kindle like that knowing nothing about it you feel kind of unstable to begin with so you have no idea what direction the book is going how did you figure out what the arrow was idea what direction the book's going what the arrow was what was the marker i looked it up in the end i really i was like because there's a bit in it where there's a car in it originally we thought it was in the 19th century then a car

appears and i was like god it's in the 1950s and then you know i looked it up and discovered it's it's 1929 so that was interesting the thing i like most about it was the dynamics of the friendship the central yeah because it was the dynamics of the friendship, the sensual relationship. Because specifically the ambiguity around the way that attractiveness, the role that attractiveness played in that relationship. I thought that was, I loved that. One of the things we're going to talk about, I think, is the difference between reading this book context-free and then beginning to understand more about the context around it. I had a similar experience to John, which is that I read it, and it made quite an impact on me. And then I read it again, having found out more about it.

It's so short, you can do that. Yeah. Now, we have to issue a warning at this point. On Backlisted, we'd normally try and remain spoiler-free. But we had a conversation before we started, and we said we can't really talk about this book and the subject of this book without talking about the ending. It's such an important part. So listen, if you haven't read this book and you want to read it based on what we've been talking about, switch us off now and come back later.

OK, so bye. Don't forget to come back, though. They've gone now they've gone now everyone so we normally as i said earlier we normally read a blurb from the back of the book i'm not going to read a blurb from the back of the book i'm going to read the first review that was published anywhere in the world of this novel it was by a writer called mary. It was in the New York Telegram on April 7th, 1929. And under the headline Passing is a Novel of Longings

this is what she wrote. I can't say whether I'd pass or not. And you really ought to have an opinion before you give your answer to passing. It is the story of two negresses, both light enough to pass for white. One does. She marries a white husband. She always has

hankering for her race, freedom, rhythm. The other marries a dark husband, has a dark child, passes when convention makes it more convenient, and is happy in her Harlem life. After years of separation, the two women meet. The one who went white longs for the comforts of the one who stayed black, so she comes to Harlem. Trouble results because the faker fell in love with the true one's husband. When the faker fell out of the seventh-story window, the problem was solved for Miss Larson. And here's the spoiler my object mary reynolds continues my objection to the book is that nella larson didn't solve

the problem knocking a character out of a scene doesn't settle a matter the problem presented the negro passing is vital to me and nella larson knows how to present it so it is more a question than it is literature that's interesting now most of the reviews of this book were pretty positive but lots of them quibbled with the ending and we um sarah and i were talking about that review earlier on and we we assume mary though we don't know but we assume mary reynolds was black given that she opens that she doesn't know whether she should pass or not. It would seem to be the only way to make sense of that statement, yeah. So what do we think about the ending or the endings?

Well, yeah, so it's a complicated thing. And I think that's actually a great little pre-see that Mary Reynolds offers there. I don't necessarily agree with her conclusions, but it's a terrific way of describing the novel and with great economy. So it's about these two women who've known each other since they were kids. They've lost touch. They get back in touch with each other. And they both can pass, but only one passes all the time. And her husband, her very racist husband, doesn't know that she's black, legally black. In fact, she's described at one point in the novel as – sorry, more than one point in the novel.

Larson makes it very clear. She's blonde. And one of the things that we have to do, I think, is – and I know I'm not yet answering your question, but I think it's really important before we even get to that question of the ending, is to realize that what Larson is saying to us is that a woman with white skin and blonde hair was considered black. And that what she's doing is making us ask, what does this word even mean? What does race even mean in such a context? And in fact, it's something that, so the protagonist is called Irene, and it's something that Irene's husband says explicitly to her at one point late in the story. They're talking about passing and about

how dangerous it is that Claire has decided to pass. And her husband, Irene's husband, who is too dark to pass, even if he wanted to, says, if he understood why people passed, he would understand what race is. And to me, it's a really important moment in the novel where Larson lays out front and center that race is not a given. It's not something that actually means anything, but America treats it as if it is both socially, politically, and legally. So, what she has is these two characters who have a kind of love-hate relationship. They've known each other forever. They are friends, but they're rivals. And what eventually, and they threaten each other. Their choices threaten each other because they're both making such different choices and they're both very anxious about the choices that the other one is making as if the one's made the right choice and maybe you've made the wrong choice. very unreliable perspective. She's not actually narrating the novel, so I won't call her an unreliable narrator. I'll get a little pedantic about that. But it's closely focalized through

her point of view, and she is a very unreliable, has a very unreliable perspective. And her point of view shifts all the time. It's really interesting. And every now and then, Larson will step in and tell us that she's a little bit self-deceiving, that Irene does something that Irene doesn't quiteiving, something that Irene doesn't quite admit or that Irene doesn't quite want to know. But mostly we watch Irene's thought processes as she thinks through how she feels about Claire and what she believes. Now, the blurb that you read,

Mary Reynolds takes the position that, so what happens is Irene over the course of the story becomes convinced that Claire and Irene's husband are having an affair. Claire is very, very beautiful, this white-skinned, blonde-haired woman. But as the novel also makes clear, she has what it calls Negro eyes. So she has these amazing black eyes with this blonde hair and a white face and luminous. And Irene becomes convinced that Brian and Claire are having an affair, but we're only ever inside

Irene's head about this. So we don't have any independent confirmation. Neither Brian nor Claire ever cops to this in the course of the story. So we don't actually know whether they are for sure. Although Irene becomes absolutely convinced of it. So the reviewer, Mary Reynolds there accepts Irene's point of view, but there is some question even about that. But once Irene is certain that her husband is having an affair with Claire, the friendship comes under great strain. Irene becomes very worried about what would happen, and she just wants to get Claire out of their lives. And then they're all at a party together, And Irene's very angry. And we are told, Larson tells us more than once that Irene is in a rage. And Larson very interestingly uses the word

consistently throughout the story, the word repressed, that Irene has repressed her rage, that she's pushing back this rage. She's determined to keep up a false front to make sure that everything looks okay. And she goes to this party with their mutual friends, determined that nobody's going to know what happens, or what she thinks is happening, what her suspicions. And what happens is that the racist husband bursts into the party. And Claire is standing by an open window. And through a moment of great confusion, window and through a moment of great confusion irene is standing right next to claire and claire falls out of the window and it is very much open to question why claire falls out of the window the the way it's presented is and and the way the people around uh them at this party um think is that claire either fell or the suspicion is that it was her husband who pushed

her because he's racing on her calling her terrible racial epithets because he's just discovered that she's black and that she's passing but there is since we're going full on spoiler shall I just go right for what the question is so there is a very very strong implication that Irene may have

pushed there's more than one strong implication that Irene may have pushed. There's more than one strong implication that Irene may have pushed Claire. She ran across the room, her terror tinged with ferocity, and laid a hand on Claire's bare arm. One thought possessed her. She couldn't have Claire Kendry cast aside by Baloo. That's her husband. She couldn't have her free.

And then the next thing is, you know, she can't remember what happened next, except that Claire disappears she says a little few lines after that Irene wasn't sorry, she was amazed incredulous almost what would the others think? That Claire had fallen? that she had deliberately leaned backward?

certainly one or the other not Dash so it's surely they would only think those two things deliberately leaned backward, certainly one or the other, not dash. Yeah. So it's, surely they would only think those two things and there must be a third possibility and the third possibility is, now it is, what happens is that then the other people think

that it's that Baloo pushed her. Yeah. So there, one could say that the third possibility is that Baloo pushed Claire, but since Irene is standing right there, she would presumably know that. I mean, I think this is one of the best written scenes. I mean, I think it's completely brilliant.

And you're left guessing to the end because there are so many possibilities. I'm not really one for people falling out of windows as a way of solving novels either, but this is brilliant. Can I go? falling out of windows as a way of solving novels either, but this is brilliant. Can I go? So there, I think there is a, there's a tiny little clue that for me makes it clear with those two pieces that we've just read out that she does push her. And it's wonderful because it's so novelistic and it's both on the same pages to this, um, these facing pages in my edition anyway, just before the scene that John just read out, uh, Irene's looking out the window and she throws her cigarette out the window.

And it says, the moon was just rising and far behind the tall buildings, a few stars were creeping out. Irene finished her cigarette and threw it out, watching the tiny sparks drop slowly down to the white ground below. And then when Claire falls, she says, one moment, Irene thinks, one moment Claire had been there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold, and then she was gone. And so she's just, I believe that Larson has just foreshadowed it just a couple of paragraphs before by showing Irene throw the flame of red and gold out the window and then out goes Claire. I would also say that the husband's response kind of lets him off the hook. Again, this is why I love fiction because you can't do this in a movie. It's just a really crap,

this would be a really terrible scene. Yeah, yeah. You know, what? So this is what she says. There was a gasp of horror and above it a sound not quite human, like a beast in agony. Nig, my God, Nig.

Nig is the name. He's unfortunate name for his wife, for his wife. And I sort of feel you wouldn't need to put that in about a beast. And, you know, if, if,

if, if you wanted to suggest that the husband had been even remotely responsible for this, we should also say that this, I'm keen to talk about how this ending was received and my, my theory about why it was received in such a way but we should also say that the book actually has two endings right depending on which edition yeah you bought relatively close to one another they all happened in 1929 so yes

so sorry i meant to say that and then i got excited by the cigarette and i forgot did she did she revise we don't know we don't know most editions now, what you'll find is a final paragraph that is from Irene's point of view. And the final two sentences are, through the great heaviness that submerged and drowned her, she was dimly conscious of strong arms lifting her up. And that phrase, also lifting her up, is very pointed in this novel. Dimly conscious of strong arms lifting her up, then everything was dark. And in a novel that's so concerned with racial politics, of course, and we've already just heard the line where the cigarette falls onto the white ground below. And now everything is dark. And this movement between white and dark is the movement of the

novel. It's the tension of the novel. So in most editions, you'll see that ending. I will be happy with that. Yeah, it's a good ending. That's the one I think that's what I've got. That's all I've got. Also, we haven't said yet, the novel opens with Irene fainting or feeling faint. She feels close to fainting because of the heat. And that's why she encounters Claire again for the first time in many years, because she goes up to an all-white hotel to the roof to cool off. So Irene passes when it's convenient and is very contemptuous of Claire's decision to pass.

But she doesn't admit to herself that she does pass when she feels like it. When it's useful, she'll pass too. She just doesn't do it all the time and she doesn't lie to her husband and her close friends. But she knows what passing is and she does it too. So she's disingenuous from the start. symmetry to it where she it starts out with her feeling faint and that reconnects her with claire and then to end with her feeling faint and everything being dark that she's somehow chosen the the um yeah the black side of her uh of her life if if you want to put it crudely um but so double tick excellent in the margin right from symmetry exactly well good patterns, you know, nice metaphors. And, but what happened was that in the first two editions, in 1929, there was one other paragraph, very short paragraph. And it originally ended like this. Centuries after she heard the strange man saying, death by misadventure, I'm inclined to believe, let's go up and have another look at that window. And that was how it closed. And then that paragraph dropped out of the third edition in 1929. So all

of these are happening very rapidly in 1929, and it disappeared. And there is no evidence in any of the archives to suggest how it happened. So there's no letter from Larson saying get rid of this or restore it or anything. So nobody knows why it dropped out, whether it was just a mistake or whether some editor came in and made the decision or whether Larson got in touch with her publishers and said, I think I've made a mistake. Get rid of this paragraph. You know, you read the contemporary reviews and they're positive. Yeah, they are positive reviews. Larson was quite well regarded. But they all make a point of saying how they don't buy the ending in the same way that the review that we just read earlier.

And I was thinking about this a lot. And I wonder whether it's because and this brings us on to the next thing to talk about, which is context. This was a novel produced in a very specific place and time by a writer who was very closely identified with a specific group and would have been published as a novel about the race issue right and so if that's the book you think you're reading in 1929 perhaps the ending doesn't seem you know appropriate to what you've been reading about but actually we read it from all these other perspectives i mean the thing that was most striking to me for a novel of this era was how how interior it is in terms of its psychology and actually going up and down building yeah yeah um to view this as a novel almost a journalist i guess what i'm saying as a journalistic account which is how it was published and how it would

have been received no i think you're right but yeah yeah, I think what you have is a novel that's written, as you say, in a context that's very much about what became known as protest fiction. And it became a very strong presumption that a black writer in the 1920s, writing a novel about, as you say, the quote unquote, race problem, was therefore making a political statement about that race problem and was taking a position on the race problem and indeed was taking a position on how to solve the race problem. The politics of passing and the politics of what it means to be black at this time are really for the first time during the Harlem Renaissance, which is what the era is known as. I just realized I haven't even said that yet. So in the 1920s, what happens is a great many really brilliant African-American writers, artists. Including Zora.

Including Zora Neale Hurston, including Langston Hughes, but also some lesser known writers who are really worth rediscovering. Jean Toomer, who wrote an amazing book called Cane. And they were all known at the time as the New Negro Movement, but now we call it the Harlem Renaissance, partly to get away from that term. Counté Cullen. Harlem became a kind of locus for great African-American talent in much the way that Paris was receiving much European and white American talent.

They were going to Paris. But there was this concentration, a really exciting time of ideas and energy and artistic output. And these brilliant black writers in particular coming forward and saying, we are not just these caricatured and characters in somebody else's fiction. Here's our voice. Here's our identity. Here's who we are. But we should also say that, A, that moment was pretty brief, right? And the second thing is that Larson said this herself, that she was able to be published by white publishers because the Harlem Renaissance was perceived almost like a great 20s fad.

One of the great, you know, these things that rise up and burn very brightly and then disappear. Well, there was a great deal of, cause she was published by Knopf. She was published by Knopf. How does Nella fit into this? So was she,

you know, there's only two books written by her. I know she was a nurse. How does she fit in with the other literary, the rest of the literary world then? Was she connected to it? She was absolutely connected to it. Yeah. She was friends with all

of them, or, you know, acquaintances with all of them, let's put it that way. They're all very much in the same social circles and reading each other's work and commenting on each other's work. So you'll see W.E.B. Du Bois reviews Larson. She's in conversations with Langston Hughes.

So they all know each other. They're all reading each other's work. Is she young at the time that she writes it? Yeah, she's 28, 29 all know each other they're all reading each other's work the time that she writes it yeah she's she's um 28 29 she was i think she was born in 1900 but i think that's right 1891 1891 so she's older than i thought so 1891 she would have been closer to 40 yeah so the big question what happens next yeah well indeed and what happened with larson was um a great deal of. She was working on her third book. She got a Guggenheim to work on her third book. And she was accused of plagiarism. And it was a there was a real scandal and she fell off the map. There's a really good biography that came out just a few years ago

called In Search of Nella Larson that actually tries to lay all this stuff out because Larson really did kind of disappear. One of the reasons... And sought, and we should add, and sought to disappear. Yes, absolutely. You know, wasn't rejected per se. Well, partly that, but part of her response to being rejected was to walk away from the whole thing. And did anyone, did it get to the bottom of the plagiarism? Is it, she doesn't strike me, she's such a careful, precise writer. She is. I believe it's one of those things where the jury is still out.

There are those who believe it, There are those who don't. Who was supposed to be the party that was plagiarised? A British writer whose name escapes me. Yeah, me too. I should know, but I can't remember. Not a well-known writer. Were we talking a large amount of material? No, it was a short story. The story as you read it is that she was so sort of disgusted by the way she'd been

treated exactly that she was humiliated and and furious uh went back to nursing and went back to nursing but also we would add that the moment this is why it's so interesting about this passing being a product of a place in time she also had a sense we think that the moment had gone yeah well what, remember this book, passing comes out in 1929 and we've only been talking about the racial context, but there's something that's pretty important that's about to happen in 1929, which is the stock market's going to crash. So all of the roaring twenties comes roaring,

if you will, to a halt. And the depression is on. And believe me, there wasn't a lot of spare energy and sympathy among the white people who suddenly find themselves losing all of their money and sympathy among the white people who suddenly find themselves losing all of their money and status and power and everybody's, you know, scrabbling. And suddenly they had found the whole Harlem Renaissance thing as part of the jazz age. It was all part of the

decadence of the age to be interested in black people like animals in a zoo. It was all part of this kind of carnivalesque atmosphere. And once that ends and the Depression comes, then that changed for most of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. The writers and the artists found that their publishers were going out of business. They didn't have an audience anymore. They weren't able to sell their books in the same way. Zora Neale Hurston

also ended up, famously, ended up a maid and was buried in an unmarked grave. And Alice Walker had to go find her and rediscover herston and and walker did that a little bit earlier and then larson just kind of happened next so this happened particularly to the black women writers of the era the men had a little bit more luck at sticking around which is partly what larson is getting at i mean it seems so tragic because you don't get a sense that this is a woman who has written herself out.

I mean, she's just getting going. Yeah. So passing does OK at the time. It goes through three editions and it sells five or six thousand copies, I believe. And then the book kind of disappears, doesn't it, for 40 years? When do people start reading it and then writing it again the thing i have to say about passing i did think when i when i realized how i have an edition here where which has like 80 pages of the novel and then 450 pages of essays about the novel and i did think well if this book didn't exist American academia would have invented it. In a sort of pale fire kind of way.

But it's so interpretable in so many ways on so many issues which are very alive in the States right now. Absolutely. And, well, I think anywhere. Yeah. Honestly, I think that that's what makes it great fiction. It is about race, but passing is every human culture there is an equivalent. Absolutely.

People, whether it's class, people, you know. It's a Gatsby, you know. It's trying to be what you're not and what you don't feel you are. And the fear of imposter syndrome, the fear of being uncovered. Exactly. Claire is also described throughout the novel in terms of masks consistently, that she wears this mask in the sense exactly that everybody is kind of wearing a mask. And Irene's very conscious of Claire's mask, but she's much less conscious of her own

masks, but she's wearing masks too. And one of the reasons why I think it still reads in such a contemporary way is because, as you just suggested, Andrew, we're still absolutely obsessed with and perplexed by questions of identity. And we're still seeking categories. And what I love about Larson is she explodes categories. She is not, I mean, she's interested in categories because she understands how powerful they are, but she doesn't believe in them. She is attacking categories here all the way through,

undermining them, shredding them whenever she can, exploding them, just saying these are not sufficient to who people actually are and what lives are actually like. I love that about the book, actually. That was probably my favourite thing about the novel is the switching constantly of points of view. You know, like we were talking about earlier, that Irene will tell you one thing,

then she'll tell you something else that doesn't match. The reaction shots are amazing. Yeah, exactly. You're right. It is. It's really cinematic. When she, you know, she loses control of her voice in a crucial scene with her husband. Also, reading about Noah Arsene's biography, she also, she left her husband or her husband left her. There was an infidelity in their marriage.

I mean, there's definitely autobiographical elements in the book. In both books, yeah. But that extraordinary thing of she loses control of her voice and then, you know, his reaction to her losing control. And that's in the moment that she knows what's happened between Claire and Brian, her husband. she loses control of her voice and then you know his reaction to her losing control and then it's that's in the moment that she knows what's happened between claire and brian her husband it's just it's great now we are keen now so you're having covered all these issues of our seats matthew do you have anything tenuous to bring to the conference well it's not really that tenuous

i think it's kind of, this week I wanted to... After last week's frankly... Yeah, so this week's fun was... Emasculating. I mean, ridiculous. Tenuous to the point of... I didn't want to humiliate Andy. So I've got nothing like that.

What I was interested in in this book was why when I read it on the Kindle it felt so contemporary, why I didn't immediately know when it had been written. So I just wanted to find out what else was published that year. Oh, 1929 was a good year for American literature.

Yeah, so, I mean, there's some extraordinary books. There's, you know, there's The Sound and the Fury, the Faulkner book, there's Farewell to Arms. Sound and the Fury is considered a much better book than Sanctuary, for the record. Take note, then. Take note. But also Farewell to Arms.

Yeah. But the two that I thought were kind of interesting and had some relevance to passing was Virginia Woolf's

The Woman of One's Own a very god I love this and All Quiet on the Western Front but also more extraordinary Edgar Rice Barrow's

Tarzan I think Tarzan and the Lost Empire was published there which also kind of really I think just shows the incredible range of views about all the stuff that's in there,

race, gender. It was really going on in 1929. The first Tarzan novel is about 1912, 1913, isn't it? We should say as well that Nella Larson probably read many of those books she works as a librarian she was the children's librarian the head children's librarian at the New York Public Library

that she had read Ulysses very early on, she got somebody to bring her a copy of Ulysses and actually she died she dies in 1964 and she just dies in bed she doesn't turn up for a shift at the hospital and they find her a week later

where she's sitting up in bed reading. So what will happen to one week where we'll be sat around the table, where's Andy? He's not here. Then he gets to work again. The final thing that has been interesting me this week is really thinking about that Bury list again

and thinking about us, what we're doing here, which is kind of recommending books to people. So I asked my brother, Ewan, who is just a guy that knows this stuff, if he could tell me... Is that a bit practical? Yeah. The reason why he knows this stuff is he wrote an amazing book called The Story of Writing, called The Golden Thread, The History of Writing.

So I asked him what if he could tell me when he thought the earliest record of someone recommending books to other people was. When was the first recommended reading list? And he came up with Cassiodorus in the sixthth century who was an Italian monk, he was also Prime Minister he's kind of the equivalent of the Prime Minister in Italy for a while and he wrote a book called Institutioni forgive my pronunciation

which was a reading list for monks at his monastery which was this is what monks need to read How many of them have you read? Very poor script. Well, listen. Yeah. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks, Sarah, so much. Brilliant. Brilliant choice, everybody. That book, if you just switch back on, you go into the ending. Yeah. Right. So after the aliens land, it's pretty crazy. Passing by Nellie Larson.

Get through the car chase. Passing by Nellie L by nonetheless we should also say you could buy that for your kindle for less than a pound uh so please do wonderful wonderful novel thanks for giving us uh an opportunity to read it my pleasure and uh you can find us on the usual places backlisted podcast on facebook at backlisted pod on twitter on the Unbound site, unbound.co.uk. See you next time. Bye. You can choose to listen to Backlisted with or without adverts. If you prefer to listen to it without adverts, you can join us on our Patreon,

patreon.com forward slash backlisted, where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted, the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks