Playing Amanuensis to Inner Urges: Masculinity, Authorial Anxiety, and Wallace Thurman’s Typewriter

© 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press

When Wallace Thurman announced his engagement to Louise Thompson in 1928, after just two months of courtship, tongues wagged: Harlem’s audacious “young upstart” was to marry the typewriter of his forthcoming novel, The Blacker the Berry (1929).[1] Alain Locke—the self-appointed “mid-wife” of America’s New Negro Renaissance, which Thurman represented—immediately wrote to tell Thompson “how much I envy any man who has you for both a wife and secretary.”[2] Others cynically echoed Locke’s point. Reflecting on their friend’s marriage to that “very effective typist,” Langston Hughes quipped to Claude McKay in September 1928 that it “isn’t a bad combine for a literary man who doesn’t like to copy his own manuscripts.”[3] What else could Thurman mean by the engagement, given he confessed to McKay he did “not believe in marriage for an artist of any type”?[4] Nevertheless, the marriage did not pay such dividends; in fact, it proved costly. The intelligent, well-liked Thompson, a recent Harlem arrival who had resigned from a teaching post in the Jim Crow South and was working as an amanuensis while preparing to undertake postgraduate studies in social work, separated from him within six months. She then sued him for $50 alimony per week (more than her weekly wages), and accused him of homosexuality; after which, Locke introduced Thompson to his wealthy white benefactor Charlotte Osgood Mason, who was seeking a typist for two of her beneficiaries, Thurman’s friends Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. From exile in Utah, Thurman wrote to William Jourdan Rapp, with whom he was co-writing the play Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life (1929), that he was left struggling to prepare the manuscript for publication without a replacement typist:

I went downtown in search of a typist. There are no colored stenographers about. Undaunted I found a public stenographer in one of the downtown offices. Smilingly I presented her with my manuscript. . . . With hostility she regarded me. And icily informed me that she was much too busy to take any work. Still smiling I departed, came home, packed up the manuscript, took it to the postoffice and sent it to a girlfriend of mine in Los Angeles. (Thurman, Collected Writings, 155)

Unable to find an unprejudiced salaried stenographer who would serve a Black client, given by 1930 women constituted 95% of that profession, of which only 0.5% were Black; yet unwilling to waste hours on reproductive labor that would encroach on the productive aspects of writerly labor, Thurman not only found himself “using up all his ‘Harlem’ money paying alimony,” as Hughes updated McKay on June 27, 1929.[5] Thurman also paid his friend LaVelle Jones fifteen dollars for stenography services, a sum he could not confirm was either “reasonable or expensive” (Thurman, Collected Writings, 160).

This remarkable, if salacious, tale of an author and a typewriter’s disastrous marriage deftly illustrates the social intricacies of the textual division of labor as well as the new reality of modernity and authorship with which Black authors contended from the 1920s. To examine the fallout of that intimate, yet professional encounter between two supposedly distinctive types of writers exposes just how densely mediated the Harlem Renaissance was, and what concerns, constraints, and anxieties underwrote its mode of textual production. Despite how so many African American authors’ “careers were predicated on some form of editing, whether by way of magazine editors, publishing house editors, opinionated patrons, disagreeable collaborators,” or “their own perfectionism,” few scholarly accounts have engaged in “a critical examination of the process by which the literature of the Harlem Renaissance was drafted, edited, revised, and produced,” Joshua Murray and Ross Tangedal have observed.[6] One of the central, yet invisible facilitators who have been omitted from the history of the Harlem Renaissance are the typewriters: a term referring simultaneously to a machine and its typically female operator. Accordingly, the question of how the cultural logic of those processes and social relations of literary production might have informed the content of its literature has largely gone unaddressed.

The intention of this essay is to begin recovering the typewriter’s cultural logic in the Harlem Renaissance, through an examination of Thurman’s novels The Blacker the Berry and Infants of the Spring. From the late nineteenth century, the typewriter formed a uniquely effective parallel type to that of the author, at a crucial moment when ideologies of manhood and genius administered in American public life were destabilized. The concept of culture within modernism was more broadly delineated by this dichotomy; for, the modernist “idea of the aesthetic that emerged in opposition to commercial culture” had “as its parallel a model of the author defined in contradistinction to the clerk.”[7] Although their tools were the same, the author of the aesthetic anxiously insisted upon their dissimilarity to the typist, who was merely the writer of commerce: the realm from which the modernist author sought to liberate art. As Katherine Mullin notes, the typewriter invited “authorial anxieties about mechanical writing, creative autonomy, and the arrogation of intellectual agency,” given how the machine, and the feminized sociological type attached to it, “courted questions about authorial integrity within an increasingly pressurized literary marketplace, where writers thought themselves at the mercy of agents, publishers, and librarians increasingly viewed as ‘tradesman.’”[8] Increasingly considered “women’s work” from the late 1880s, stenography formed a key symbol of the feminization of mass culture against which the artist struggled. By depicting the inevitable encounter between authors and typewriters in the 1920s mode of textual production, a relationship that was defined by and performed within the pressures of the marketplace, an author like Thurman could codify, define, and thus contend with what type of writer he was distinguishing himself from: a commercial writer, whose creative urges were emasculated by the constraints of white middle-class values.

In what follows, I trace that author-typewriter nexus—namely, fictionalized encounters between typewriters and authors—in Thurman’s self-referential novels, The Blacker the Berry and Infants of the Spring, two illustrative cases of the evolving cultural logic of the typewriter in relation to New Negro authorship and masculinity. Although in both novels, an author is anxious to differentiate themselves from the tradesperson the typewriter represents, I argue that Thurman disrupted and queered the expected racial but also heterosexual terms of their engagement, in that both authors and typewriters are represented as complex characters struggling against the gendered and racial stereotypes that define their roles. In The Blacker the Berry, the customary encounter between typewriter (feminine/reproductive) and author (masculine/productive) is narrated from the perspective of a woman who fails to secure a stenography position due to her dark complexion. When she meets an author based on Thurman himself who seeks to liberate her bourgeois “type,” that encounter inspires mutual recognition of their own failures to transcend the gendered and racial stereotypes ascribed to their professional identities. Thurman redeveloped this textual strategy in Infants of the Spring, after he became more intimately acquainted with publishing procedures due to his literary editorship at Macaulay. Written after his marital separation, Infants of the Spring concerns an unproductive, sexually ambivalent writer based upon himself, whose amorous attachment to a Black professional typewriter resembling Thompson disrupts his perceptions of authorship as synonymous with masculine productivity and typewriting as synonymous with feminized reproductive labor.

Rather than insist upon the typewriter as a straightforward binary opposite to the male author, my argument suggests that Thurman’s typewriter thus served as a nuanced symbol of authorial anxiety: the creative response to the heterogenous concerns, pressures, and risks commercial professionalization posed to men and women writers within the New Negro movement. By observing the patterns of authorial anxiety that govern the author-typewriter nexus in Thurman’s novels, this essay suggests that while the cultural work of the literary typewriter has rarely been linked to the professionalization of African American literature circa the 1880s–1930s, it clearly had significant bearings on gendered views of authorship especially after 1919, when an emergent group of authors labelled “the New Negro” attempted to curate a durable modern Black literary tradition. On the one hand, Thurman’s authorial anxiety reflected the aesthetic alternatives explored by young male authors who felt alienated by the New Negro movement’s producerist discourse of “racialized manliness within the context of a hegemonic, white, middle-class manhood that was defined through, and performed in, the marketplace.”[9] This led Thurman, McKay, and Hughes to demarcate alternative masculinities, not always in unproblematic ways. The anxiety such masculinist racial discourse inspired often led Thurman to dismiss Black women novelists like Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset as middlebrow, for example. His views of authorship thus propagated the marginalization of women writers within the movement observed by Cheryl Wall, Claudia Tate, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, and others.

On the other hand, to refocus Thurman’s views of authorship in relation to typewriters also sharpens our sense of the discursive and textual inequalities operating within and beyond Harlem Renaissance literary culture. As we shall see, by fictionalizing his own authorial processes in relation to professional typewriters, Thurman offered a nuanced reflection of the unequal ways that Black men and women experienced and contended with their marginalization within literary culture, complicating our understanding of how gendered as well as racial difference underwrote the Harlem Renaissance and modernism more widely. These revelations are even more urgent, considering how many Black women now deemed central to the history of African American literature and modernism worked as stenographers at various points, often to facilitate their art: including Thompson, but also Pauline Hopkins, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Helene Johnson. Blending realism and reality, Thurman’s author-typewriter nexus deviated from common myths regarding sexual identities and professional types, subsequently disrupting the hegemonic modernist stereotypes of the white male genius whose cultural authority is vouchsafed by his juxtaposition against a typewriter who is both feminized and racialized. Thurman’s novels thus productively elucidate the role these historically marginalized women writers contributed to the New Negro movement and modernism more widely, as well.

Harlem’s Gendered Mode of Textual Production

As one of modernity’s new sociological types, the Typewriter—popularly imagined to be a pretty, single, white woman—was positioned “at the intersection of changing gender roles, new technology, metropolitan experience, and modern capital.”[10] At that historic juncture, the modern author also emerged as a less clearly defined sociological type, who must navigate the evolving dynamic of art, mediation, and commerciality of modernist literary culture. In African American literary history circa 1886–1900, stenography formed an important medium for contemplating the differences between those two types, to determine how literature differed from the new kinds of labor in which the Black middle-class could potentially engage after Reconstruction. The surge of typewriters in American businesses increasingly called into question the categorical differences in writing trades where typewriting was essential from the late 1880s, including the overlapping spheres of business, journalism, and literature, thus unsettling idealistic views of authorship as liberated from commerce within discourses of racial uplift.[11] Because that surge was facilitated by the feminization of reproductive clerical labor, especially typewriting and secretarial work, it further contributed to gendered reappraisals of the ideology of genius that had sustained the hegemonic view of authorship as a white, male enterprise throughout the nineteenth century. Given how stenography was a form of highly specialized labor that required skill and knowledge, it was initially regarded as a respectable trade for both Black men and women. Typewriting was perceived as a noble “stepping-stone to some sort of pursuit which would give more play to the exercise of the higher mental faculties, and larger rewards in the way of wealth and fame,” the stenographer-turned-author Charles Waddell Chesnutt told the Ohio Stenographers’ Association (of which he was president) in one 1889 speech, tracing the same pathway he but also Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and Alice Dunbar-Nelson took.[12] From Chesnutt’s unpublished “white-life” novel A Business Career (1898), to Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), the first novel to feature a Black stenographer, typewriting was initially conceived in African American literature as a professional gateway toward the realms of intellectual play and creativity liberated from the political economies of society, which is what authorship signified for many.

The primary cultural logic of the typewriter was to distinguish what an author was—namely, the custodian of intellectual labor and creative play—by representing what they were anxious not to become: a mere tradesman of words. That cultural logic neatly aligned within the specific goals of an emergent African American tradition of literature after 1900, when many aspiring Black authors including Thurman aimed to “write ‘great literature’” in spite of the fact that no African American had yet done so.”[13] Given by 1928, the typewriter machine had become a ubiquitous staple of literary production and the typist an almost obligatory character in modernist literature, what remained “novel” about the typewriter in African American literature was the New Negro writer’s reconception of the profession’s association with fantasies, anxieties, and myths regarding gender, race, and labor in the context of segregation—and, no less crucially, concerns over the changing role of the Black artist within that political matrix. Authors faced diminishing autonomy over their creative labor and increasing pressure to conform to commercial models that sustained that system; those “younger Negro artists who create,” as Hughes put it in “The Racial Mountain,” were expected to “pour racial individuality into the” commercial “mold of American standardization.”[14] For a movement structured around such authorial anxiety, there was no superior analogy for the author’s rebellion against these productional constraints than the opposition between typewriter and genius. However, due to the feminization of the former profession from the late 1880s, that parallelism increasingly presented as a problematically engendered struggle over textual authorization. Though the typewriter rarely appeared as a fictional type in that earlier period, professional typewriters—mostly women—now frequently appeared in the Harlem Renaissance literature in ways that suggest an urgent preoccupation with the densely mediated webs of textual processing in which those authors themselves were engrossed.[15] As they encountered each other in fiction, authors were often depicted as possessing some sort of cultural superiority over that alienated, feminized type, most often a light-complexioned Black woman due to discriminatory hiring practices in the typewriting industry that regarded the vocation as synonymous with a white, female, middle-class identity.[16] This juxtapositional textual strategy enabled the Black literary genius a degree of elevation above his peers by subscribing to the logic that the “opposite of genius is typist,” a dynamic that “encapsulates the very aspects of textual production whose absence demarcates the aesthetic: commercialism, collaboration, materiality, usefulness ” (Price and Thurschwell, “Invisible Hands,” 2). For, although individual authors may have enjoyed drafting, by pen or typewriter, professionalization meant that to bring literary works to publication required voluminous repetitive, time-consuming labor.

Given publishing houses “increasingly demanded clear, therefore typewritten, copy” from as early as the 1890s, authors commonly outsourced that reproductive labor either to a salaried or contract typist; or a private, unwaged typist, often a trained friend, relative, or spouse (Jensen, “Using the Typewriter,” 261). This distanced the author from the image of the writer as an industrial rather than a creative laborer. For Black writers, like Thurman, this meant searching for a non-bigoted stenographer, if they could afford one; or typing drafts themselves, if time was not of the essence. Mounting evidence of increasing productivity demands upon individual authors is scattered throughout letters of this period. Writing in May 1925 to her friend Annie Meyer, a harried Hurston, for instance, observed that her “typewriter is clicking away till all hours of the night. I am striving desperately for a toe-hold on the world.”[17] Such was McKay’s fate, too, in 1927; whilst penniless in France, he “wasted precious time trying to get an old typewriter to save on typing costs” to copy his Home to Harlem manuscript for Harper & Bros.[18] A wealthy benefactor could also conveniently arrange and subsidize typewriter services, but this method had hidden costs attached. Locke, Hughes, and Hurston turned to Charlotte Osgood Mason, a white patron dubbed the “Godmother” of the New Negro Renaissance. In return for providing living and publication expenses, including a generous stipend for stenography services, she often applied “pressure” for Hughes “to produce” literature to deadline that aligned with her preconceived views of Black aesthetics (Gilyard, Louise, 71). In an unsent letter drafted to Mason on June 6, 1930, a sheepish Hughes avowed, “I must never write when I do not want to write. That is my last freedom. . . . Then when you tell me that you give me more than anybody ever gave me before—($225 a month—my allowance and half of Louise)—and that I have been living in idleness since the first of March—I must feel miserable ashamed” (Hughes, Selected Letters, 92–93). Thurman’s estranged wife, Thompson, assisted on Hughes’s Not Without Laughter, which Mason funded on the proviso it be completed by 1930. A “sympathetic and excellent typist,” Thompson received a monthly stipend of $150 from Mason, who also financed Hughes and Hurston’s writing studio in Westfield, New Jersey, during which time they secretly collaborated on their folk play, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, without Mason’s approval.[19] As the author began to “cut and re-write, page after page,” Thompson “must have done certain pages over for [him] so often” that “she could have recited by heart their varying versions,” Hughes recalled (Hughes, Big Sea, 305). According to Keith Gilyard, “Louise kept the typewriter keys jumping in tune with the author’s voluminous revisions,” as Hughes “recognized the allure and intellect of someone who was no ordinary typist”; that is, not a mere textual contractor. [20]

The relationship of Harlem writers to white patrons proved ungratifying in the long-term. Indeed, as Hughes and Thompson labored to meet Mason’s key performance indicators, the former recognized that a conceptual kinship encircled the two types of writers. That became clear during the infamous souring of the triangulated relationship between Hurston, Hughes, and Mason over Mule Bone, when Hughes confessed to Thompson that Hurston had accused him of conspiring to give their typist, whom she did not recognize as a professional equal, “a large interest in the profits of the play” (Hughes, Selected Letters, 107). As a correspondent rather than an employee, Thompson accompanied Hughes, Dorothy West, and “a huge assortment of baggage including a typewriter, record player and a big box of jazz records” to the Soviet Union in 1932 to produce the film, Black and White.[21] Breaking with Mason emboldened Hughes, like Thompson, to pursue radical politics, yet left him to fund his own art’s production. When earlier in his career, Hughes revealed to Harlem’s notorious white raconteur Carl Van Vechten that he meant to quit his eye-straining job, rent a room, and purchase a typewriter to “see what devoting one’s life to one’s art is like,” he had not anticipated the complex social forces that loomed behind artistic genius (Hughes quoted in Rampersad, Life of Langston, 114). Because he “must make a living by my pen—typewriter, to be exact—and since the market for Race and Russian stuff,” i.e. the radical ideas he aspired to write about, “is distinctly limited, I see no reason why I should not weekly turn to LOVE . . . in the best American Caucasian 100% slick paper fashion,” he grumbled to Maxim Lieber in November 1934 (Hughes, Selected Letters, 169–170). Hughes contemplated a future in which the costs of his serious writing must be subsidized by vulgar exploits: moonlighting as a white writer, scribbling commercial trash, using anonymized typescript to conceal his race lest his friends “‘think [he] was trying to pass’” (Hughes quoted in Rampersad, Life of Langston, 299). In another letter to Noël Sullivan, he complained that “Authors ought to be ashamed of themselves, just writing and writing” whatever they could sell to earn a living; “but then I guess it’s the system!!! . . . Will Upton Sinclair give us all a typewriter and a quiet place” (Hughes, Selected Letters, 168)? Echoing A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf’s influential treatise on the social disadvantages facing women authors, Hughes joked that if California’s socialist gubernatorial candidate could guarantee Black writers’ autonomy over the means of literary production, “I would certainly vote for him” (168).

The problematic mode of textual production rehearsed above clearly impacted how the New Negro writer perceived authorship and masculinity. One of the most vivid illustrations of the anxious structure of feeling that context inspired is Thurman’s fictionalization of those people and processes in The Blacker the Berry and Infants of the Spring, given his fiction often chronicled his own reality. In both cases, Thurman utilized the commonplace modernist author-typewriter nexus. Like Hughes, Thurman became increasingly aware that authorship was, like all writing, socially conditioned labor; literature’s value was not only culturally, but economically determined, its production incurring costs. Moreover, the product did not always pay financial or ethical dividends, given it was produced within a hierarchy that was racially and sexually segregated, and ultimately conditioned by the supply and demand of white middle-class consumption. It was that industrial reality, which the feminized and racialized typewriter seemed to signify clearer than almost any other figure, that inspired authorial anxiety at the very moment that African American authorship was supposed to be splendidly “Coming of Age,” as Locke suggested in The New Negro.[22] This disquieting revelation—that despite the ostensible sexual and professional barriers between them, the typewriter was not so dissimilar from the author—ultimately underwrote Thurman’s version of the author-typewriter nexus. The typewriter machine, and its female operator, not only seemed to symbolize the laborious aspects of writerly labor that the New Negro writer was forced to contend with in their professional life. She/it unsettled the bourgeois perception that a producerist discourse of racialized manliness could divorce high culture from the political pressures of labor and the market.

Not My Type: Encountering the Author in The Blacker the Berry

As one of the canonical figures of the Negro Renaissance, Thurman “entered the literary field, like Chesnutt, Johnson, and Toomer before him, and like Hurston and Wright after him, believing he could write “‘great literature’ in spite of the fact that no African American had yet done so,” Michael Nowlin observes (Nowlin, Literary Ambition, 102). The protagonist of The Blacker the Berry (1928), a very dark-complexioned aspiring typewriter, Emma Lou Morgan, has commonly been interpreted as personifying Thurman’s anxieties over intra-racial discrimination; Emma Lou’s upbringing in Boise, education at the University of South California, and migration to Harlem at the height of the “Negro vogue” there in the 1920s was loosely modelled on Thurman’s personal experiences. Yet, she was also the embodiment of Thurman’s authorial anxieties, which were linked to what he saw as the New Negro’s crisis of masculinity.

Emma Lou’s worldview is mired by a repertoire of racialized and gendered bourgeois social types that do not apply to her reality. Her thwarted ambitions to become a typewriter parallel the concerns of an inhibited writer, like Thurman, who felt the burden of producing great art in a commercial model that rewarded mediocrity: i.e. writers like Fauset and Larsen who wrote novels that he felt affirmed the bourgeois worldview Emma Lou must overcome in order to accept the parts of herself she has been conditioned by society to abhor. As a child, Emma Lou was ostracized for her dark skin by her light-complexioned family, who are affiliates of the Bluebloods: a white supremacist society whose goal is to eliminate what they perceive as the dark, inferior elements of the race through selective reproduction. Scarred by that upbringing, when Emma Lou migrates to Harlem, she attempts to refashion herself into a professional type ingrained in white middle-class values and typologies: the Typewriter. Conditioned by her family’s prejudices, she deems that people who “really mattered, the business men, the doctors, the lawyers, the dentists, the more moneyed pullman porters, hotel waiters, bank janitors, and majordomos, in fact all of the Negro leaders and members of the Negro upper class, were either light skinned themselves or else had light skinned wives.”[23] Tellingly, the only people who matter are professional men who not only aspire to emulate white bourgeois values, but whose masculine superiority is vouchsafed by their higher rank in the office hierarchy than their female counterparts: stenographers, amanuenses, or secretaries, discrete roles that tended to be blurred in the public discourses.

Emma Lou’s bourgeois, individualist fantasies of talent and creativity are dependent on her professional ambitions, in which stenography in this case forms what Chesnutt called the “stepping-stone” to social success, rather than cultural success. To disentangle Emma Lou’s romantic desires for self-improvement from the reality of that segregated white-collar workforce, Thurman manipulates hegemonic realist tropes of femininity and labor in ways that will effectively contrast his depiction of masculinity and authorship later in the novel.[24] Her dreams are untenable: with the increasing Taylorization of the modern office after 1919, which created a scientific managerial rubric intended to suppress the “inner forces” of white-collar employees, clerical workers such as stenographers became little more than “machine attendants,” according to the prominent sociologist C. Wright Mills.[25] Yet the prestige of white-collar positions like stenography could still be claimed by appealing to the professions’ sociological but also typological whiteness, an optical illusion achieved by the sphere’s purported elevation from professions in which non-white women predominated: domestic, farm, and factory labor.[26] Slowly, Emma Lou’s auspicious outlook recalibrates to that reality when she arrives in one of Harlem’s many employment offices. As she approaches “the harassed woman at the desk,” her class pretensions dissolve into the soundtrack of clamoring typewriters and clinging telephones: the mechanical hallmarks of a Fordist modernity (Thurman, Blacker, 732).

“I—I want a job.” R-r-ring. The telephone insistently petitioned for attention, giving Emma Lou a moment of respite, while the machine-like woman wearily shouted monosyllabic answers into the instrument, and . . . tried to hush the many loud-mouthed men and women in the room. . . . While waiting, Emma Lou surveyed her fellow job seekers. Seedy lot, was her verdict. Perhaps I should have gone to a more high-toned place. . . .

“What kinda job d’ye want?”

“I prefer,” Emma Lou had rehearsed these lines for a week, “a stenographic position in some colored business or professional office.” (732)

The mechanical, disorientating scene bears a striking, seemingly deliberate resemblance to Helga Crane’s experiences in the employment offices in Quicksand (1928) written the previous year by Nella Larsen, whose characters Thurman renounced for “outrag[ing] the reader, not naturally as people have a way of doing in real life, but artificially like ill-managed puppets.”[27] The contrast Thurman accentuates between light-complexioned heroines like Helga and Emma Lou is that the latter’s appearance does not conform with the racialized and feminized type, despite how that character perceives herself as embodying the profession’s social attributes. “Visualiz[ing] herself trim and pert in her blue tailored suit being secretary to some well-groomed Negro businessman,” she imagines typing alongside “other girls in the office, too, girls who, like herself, were college trained and reared in cultured homes, and . . . get in with the right sort of people” (Thurman, Blacker, 739). Intoxicated by the romantic secretarial type circulated through popular fiction and media, she wonders if she “would . . . be able to take dictation at the required rate of speed,” and if “her fingers” would “be nimble enough on the keyboard,” but convinces herself that it could not take “over one day to adapt herself to her new job” (740). When Emma Lou is invited to interview at Angus and Brown, “an old Harlem real estate firm” that exploits the district’s Black middle-class housing boom, the reality principle finally sets in; for, the moment the owner realizes she is dark-complexioned, a pretty, light-complexioned typewriter apologetically ushers her out, which exacerbates her racial difference by defeminizing her, because her sense of what womanhood is derives from a stereotype based upon white superiority (740).

To recover her lost sense of feminine identity, Emma Lou desperately throws herself into a one-sided love-affair with Alva, a light-complexioned lothario who is ashamed of her complexion but seeks to financially exploit her. Alva introduces Emma Lou to a group of artist acquaintances, who use him to mediate their engagement with Harlem’s proletariat, with whom they seek to forge an idealistic class alliance. Because of Harlem’s “complex but interdependable social structure,” Alva became “acquainted with a young Negro writer, who had asked him to escort a group of young writers and artists to a house-rent party,” a “phenomenon” of which they “had heard much” but “none had been on the inside of” due to “their rather polished manners and exteriors” and “were afraid they might not be admitted” (774). Thurman’s social network, notoriously dubbed the “Niggeratti” by Zora Neale Hurston, appear under fatuous pseudonyms: Thurman as “Truman Walter”; Hughes as “Tony Crews”; Hurston as “Miss Cora Thurston”; Bruce Nugent as the flamboyant “Paul”; Aaron and Alta Douglas as themselves; and Thurman’s white Canadian lover Jan Harald Stefansson as “Ray Jorgenson,” whose attendance mortifies Emma Lou.[28] Given Alva is well “aware of her intellectual pretensions, and felt that she would be especially pleased to meet recognized talents and outstanding personalities,” he hopes this party will satisfy Emma Lou’s desire to meet his actual friends, who would disapprove of her dark complexion (Thurman, Blacker, 774).

When the failed typewriter comes tête-à-tête with a fictional version of Thurman himself, Emma Lou’s middle-class conformism, which makes her wish to emulate the fraught social relations of clerical labor in the first place, now becomes the self-referential means by which Thurman divests his own anxieties over race, masculinity, and authorship. Throughout the narration of the party, Thurman juxtaposes Emma Lou’s narrow perspective on sexuality, race, and culture against the scandalous dialogue of the artist group, to denaturalize how typological myths inculcate individuals into the webs of ideology that structure society. Despite her bourgeois “intellectual pretensions,” Emma Lou is intrigued but ultimately underwhelmed by the amiable Tony Crews, whose prominent book of poems—i.e. The Weary Blues (1925)—she has “not seen or read,” but has “often noticed his name in the newspapers and magazines” (775). Her initial delight to meet a celebrity soon sours, as she realizes he does not resemble the male author type; she detects “pimples on his face,” which “didn’t fit in with her mental picture” of what a great poet would look like. Whereas Tony appears effeminate, Cora Thurston defeminizes her authorial identity, by inflating her insult at Alva introducing her as a “lady,” which she “hopes” Emma Lou is “not either.” The scandalized Emma Lou’s slanted perspective of artistic identity and gender creates an ideal analogy of the middlebrow readership Thurman sought to shock by envisioning ambiguously gendered, queer, bohemian artistic types blossoming among a lively, but disorderly miscegenated proletariat.

Thurman’s professional anxiety seems to inform the sense of disconnection these artists who strive to break down gendered and sexual norms face when encountering the masses they portend to speak for, an adventure Truman calls their “‘pilgrimage to the proletariat’s parlor social’” (784). When the discussion segues into the controversial topic of the increasingly common problem of intra-racial prejudice against darker-complexioned people, Emma Lou cannot understand how they could “so dispassionately discuss something that seemed particularly tragic to her” (780). It turns out that Emma Lou and the lead discussant Truman Walter, who “with all his hi-faluting talk, disgusted her immeasurably,” both attended the University of Southern California. Despite their common educational background, Emma Lou cannot do what the artist seemingly does: set aside her own fears, anxieties, and prejudices to engage in the circulation of ideas. The bitter animosity Emma Lou feels for Truman reimagines the parallel between author and typewriter from the latter’s perspective, whose disgust masks her internal shame over her remoteness from the white, middle-class type she adulates.

Simultaneously, although Truman appreciates the difficult sociological position Emma Lou inhabits, he also fails to engage her on a humanistic level; his dispassionate, logical reasoning merely confirms to her that "[s]he couldn’t comprehend all this talk.” When the group arrives at the rent party, Emma Lou feels more socially disconnected than ever, retreating into an unintelligible reverie; while the authors hungrily absorb all the invaluable literary material Harlem has to offer:

Every one was exceedingly animated . . .

“Isn’t this marvellous?” Truman’s eyes were ablaze with interest and excitement. Even Tony Crews seemed unusually alert.

“It’s the greatest I’ve seen yet,” he exclaimed. (782)

Emma Lou forms the personification of the imagined realist reader, whom the author—Truman, but also Thurman—seeks to convert by forcing her to confront the social ideologies to which she is naturalized. However, Truman—if not Thurman himself—fails to communicate with her in terms that will unfetter Emma Lou’s/the reader’s deeply entrenched views of race, but also sex, labor, and art.

As it informed The Blacker the Berry’s depiction of race, masculinity, and authorship, Thurman’s author-typewriter nexus operated as a multifaceted textual strategy. Even as Thurman reinforced the intellectual opposition between the aspiring typewriter Emma Lou and the aspiring author figure based upon himself, both of whom fail to conform to the gendered and racial expectations of their professional “type,” he characterized the protagonist with anxieties regarding race, social alienation, and sexuality that many—including his future wife—presumed were autobiographical. This kind of metafictional loading led reviewers including Du Bois to commend its social themes whilst condemning its aesthetic execution; in particular, its intractable obfuscation of fact and fiction. Curiously, when Thompson “eagerly typed his manuscript of The Blacker the Berry,” she purportedly detected “that Thurman was very much the dark, traumatized Emma Lou Morgan, a victim of intraracial discrimination,” even though he was now “the dark man spending more and more time with one of the fairest black women in Harlem” (Gilyard, Louise, 63). That Thompson interpreted both Emma Lou and Truman Walter as derivatives of Thurman’s character raises crucial implications regarding race, masculinity, and the cultural logic of the typewriter he reengineered; including the fact that the novel’s author-typewriter nexus revealed the novel’s nature as a heavily mediated text.

Playing Amanuensis to Inner Urges in Infants of the Spring

When Thurman rewrote those same characters and events of his previous novel in Infants of the Spring (1932), a satirical roman-à-clef about the Harlem Renaissance, he reversed the narrative perspective from that of the professional typewriter to that of the literary writer. “It is the first thing I have ever let write itself, playing amanuensis to some inner urge,” was how Thurman described to Rapp the birth of his Infants, the first draft of which was born at approximately 5 a.m. on Sunday, August 18, 1929, after he spent all night feverishly typewriting at his grandfather’s house in Utah (Thurman, Collected Writings, 159). It was a declamation of individual talent; no self-appointed literary “midwife” like Locke, nor any meddling white “philanthropists” or “social workers,” delivered his masterwork—one of the complaints about Harlem’s mode of textual production that the young author protagonist Raymond Taylor raises in the novel.[29] Yet, the mediated nature of the text ran far deeper than Thurman’s individualistic idealism afforded. It was written from self-imposed exile, after Thompson spread rumors of his homosexuality throughout Harlem (accusations Thurman never cared to officially deny), in retaliation for him slandering her over her costly divorce terms (Thurman, Collected Writings, 143). Despite severe, ongoing health issues, it was an intensely productive period in Thurman’s career. In 1929, he used his proximity to Hollywood to experiment in the potentially lucrative enterprise of screenwriting “talking movie[s],” working in Warner Bros. “B” film division after the financial failure of Fire!!, his literary little magazine (173) (van Notten, Wallace, 296).[30] He published several plays, screenplays, reviews, a second novel, all of which yielded meagre financial returns; he also edited another little magazine, Harlem, which likewise failed. By 1931, he had returned to New York, commencing steady employment as a popular fiction editor for The Macaulay Company: a middling New York literary publishing house that had published minor works by established writers like John Dos Passos and William Carlos Williams. The commissioning editor there, V. F. Calverton, also sought to capitalize upon the Harlem Renaissance’s revenues.[31]

Thurman’s authorial relationship with Macaulay was constructive; they clearly shared his views of what might sell. They published Blacker, and commissioned Thurman’s The Interne (1932), the novelization of a play he had written about white medical students (Thurman, Collected Writings, 167). It was allegedly co-authored by Abraham L. Furman, an unestablished white writer who not incidentally was the “lawyer-brother” of Macaulay’s president (van Notten, Wallace, 296). Thurman felt comfortable enough to personally negotiate a book contract on behalf of his friend Dorothy West. He wrote to the president Mr Furman “most eloquently . . . of Macaulay’s damning the easily published and untalented Fausets and Larsens and pleading for recognition of potential talent from a newer and renovated generation” like West, whose breakout story “The Typewriter” (1926) depicted a blue-collar father whose daughter’s typewriting career intensifies his sense of emasculation in Jim Crow America (Thurman, Collected Writings, 172). Although his literary relationship was productive by numbers, it was still business, as Thurman often clarified. When in January 1932, literary critic Granville Hicks wrote to inform him how “disappointing” he found Infants, Thurman blamed Macaulay for holding him to an unrealistic publication schedule to fulfill the $500 advance; although he “tried [his] darnedest to back out of the deal,” the “publisher wanted his manuscript,” and because he was “broke,” he submitted a “most disappointing novel” regardless (Thurman, Collected Writings, 167). Remarkably, Macaulay hired Thurman as an editor specializing in popular fiction, a virtually unprecedented appointment given he “was the only black to hold such a prominent position with a major publishing firm during the Renaissance,” according to Hughes (Hughes quoted in Klinski, “Macaulay,” 759). While in 1928 Thurman had followed Rapp in “join[ing] the editorial staff of the Macfadden Publishing Company,” a vast “media empire” that specialized in racy pulp magazines, his promotion to editor-in-chief at Macaulay meant he gained an even more privileged insight into how literary houses operated, including their problematic internal social relations (Gleeson-White, Silent Film, 97). In June 1934, the year Thurman left the company, Macaulay’s good reputation faltered when half its “employees participated in the first strike to take place in a publishing house,” followed by a “second strike in September 1934” that forever altered “the relationship between the National Labor Relations Board and publishing houses,” including the federal codification of the publishing industry to align its practices with nationwide labor regulations.[32]

In revisiting Thurman’s endeavors in pulp film and fiction and/in relation to his editorial work, Sarah Gleeson-White has compellingly argued that he “learned much from his employment at Macfadden and Macaulay” (Gleeson-White, Silent Film, 98). It is indeed intriguing to revisit Thurman’s fictionalizations of the author-typewriter nexus in relation to that radical political matrix, as well as that juncture in his writing and editing career; to imagine that, being now employed on the production side of literature’s conception, he became hyper-aware of the dense webs of socially mediated labor literature entailed, and how slim the categorical differences between different types of writers and producers were. These insights clearly informed Infants’s provocative depiction of masculinity, authorship, and textual labor activated once again by the appearance of a typewriter. Those same anxieties that in The Blacker the Berry were merely suggestive, filtered through the lens of an aspiring typewriter locked out of the world of imaginative possibility, were now front and center, as Thurman narrativized his own milieu to examine the authorial anxieties of a writer who contemplates the same uncertain industrial future that he himself faced.

The protagonist Raymond Taylor, Thurman’s alias, is an aspiring but creatively impotent novelist so engrossed in living the Harlem Renaissance, and crippled by the pressures of professional standardization it entailed, that he cannot fulfil his potential literary genius. Raymond’s anxiety over not meeting his artistic potential is connected to the broader pressures of the literary commercialism, here summarized by the omniscient narrator:

Novels, plays, and poems by and about Negroes were being deliriously acclaimed and patronized. . . . And yet . . . nothing, or at least very little, was being done to substantiate the current fad, to make it the foundation for something truly epochal. (Infants 34)

Although Raymond is the same self-referential author who appeared as Truman Walter in The Blacker the Berry, in Infants, we are given deeper insight into the writer’s ambitions and anxieties. Raymond

wanted to write, but he had made little progress. He wanted to become a Prometheus . . . and carry a blazing beacon to the top of Mount Olympus so that those possessed of Alpine stocks could follow in his wake. He wanted to do something memorable in literature . . . which could transcend and survive the transitional age in which he was living . . . but he was becoming less and less confident that he was possessed of the necessary genius. (89–90)

The heavy pressure to produce means the uncertified male genius has become, in the text’s ideology, an effeminate, mindless typewriter: not a masculine Prometheus heroically conquering what Hughes called the Racial Mountain; but a persecuted Sisyphus, chained to a fate of repetitive labor that is disconnected from any meaningful, productive intellectual labor. Raymond is concerned that until he, or any other artist “who had climbed aboard the bandwagon actually began to do something worth while, there would be little chance of their being permanently established” (34). Presumably, “most Negroes of talent were wont to make one splurge, then sink into oblivion,” leading him to wonder whether that phenomenon resulted out “of some deep-rooted complex,” namely a state of authorial anxiety, or “a lack of talent.” He is anxious to differentiate his kind of authorship from those middlebrow “Negro writers who had nothing to say, and who only wrote because they were literate and felt they should apprise white humanity of the better classes among Negro humanity” (54). Yet, what Raymond begins to recognize is that this inertia does not simply result from Black authors capitulating to the mediocrities of what was valued by white middle-class culture; but what editors, publishers, benefactors, and readers demanded the Black writer produce for them to fund, publish, circulate, and consume their literary works.

It is telling that Raymond, a talented but unproductive writer, in several key points is drawn not only in contrast to a female typewriter but to the typewriter machine itself, which becomes the symbol of creative impotence and unstable masculinity for the male author who relates uncomfortably to typewriting. At various junctures in the novel, Raymond’s increasing anxiety towards his professional future results in personal creative inertia that is signified by an image of him “busy at his typewriter,” composing letters in one instance, and typing a short literary review in another (120, 54). Leading up the Manor’s infamous Donation Party, one of the novel’s key chapters, Raymond assumes the role of social amanuensis, his “typewriter and the telephone” becoming “overworked” as he “bid[s] people to report to Niggeratti Manor on the designated night” (107). Despite Raymond’s industriousness, very little fictional output of his own materializes. Early in the novel, he confesses to his love-interest Lucille, a professional secretary-typist based upon Louise Thompson, that he has only completed the first chapter of his novel (42). When the Manor’s most recent arrival Stephen Jorgenson, a white Canadian, inquires when Raymond is “going to begin work on [his] novel,” Raymond replies, “I can’t get started.” It is not “laziness,” or the “lack of material,” but something more elusive: “I know what I want to write . . . but . . . [s]omething holds me back” (32). Stephen’s diagnosis is that Raymond suffers from self-imposed racial isolation: “‘You stand on a peak alone, superior, nonchalant, unconcerned’” (33). This is only partially true; several blockages converge in Raymond, each bound up with feelings of masculine impotence. His sense of authorial identity is tested by his unspeakable homoerotic, miscegenetic friendship with Stephen, feelings he cannot bring himself to officially consummate and thus reroutes into spirited discussions of cultural politics. Raymond’s relationship with Stephen is further complicated by the latter’s relationship with two Black women, Aline and Janet, who are lovestruck by his whiteness. Yet, this erotic impotence that Stephen and Lucille inspire merely indicates the urge to procrastinate stimulated in Raymond by the “Niggeratti Manor”; ironically, a cohabitational house established to harness the productivity of Harlem’s artists. As a social space designed by the landlord, Euphoria Blake—an artist, turned Marxist radical, turned entrepreneur—that household “defies the bourgeois separate spheres doctrine” separating bodies along gendered and racial lines, as much as it is “the locus of both the domestic sphere as lodging and the marketplace sphere of ‘creative work’ and ‘artistic profit,’” Anna Pochmara argues (Making of the New Negro, 125).

Raymond’s productively unproductive typewriting is foiled by Locke’s ideal New Negro, DeWitt Clinton—a caricature of Harlem’s laureate du jour, Countee Cullen—whom Raymond imagines with his “eyes on a page of Keats, fingers on a typewriter,” his “mind frantically conjuring African scenes” (Thurman, Infants, 146). That it was Harlem’s worst kept secret that Du Bois’s son-in-law Cullen, whose aesthetic typified the New Negro’s heteromasculinist rhetoric, was also privately struggling to manage his own queer ambivalence, only adds to the irony of the depiction of authorial anxiety above.[33] DeWitt Clinton is expected not only to maintain his professional integrity in relation to his responsibilities to depict Blackness through narrowing stereotypes, but over the heterosexual masculinity authorship for many implied. Those pressures converge in Raymond’s image of the poet, poised in a state of “franticness,” syntactically frozen before his writing machine (no participle animates the fingers on the typewriter) in facing the racialized subject matter to hand and feeds into the central debate inside and outside the novel over the modernist disruption of African ancestral aesthetics. In one of the most important chapters of the novel, which narrates the event of Harlem’s first (and last) literary salon, Locke’s avatar implores an assembly of young writers to mine their “primitive” roots, like DeWitt Clinton. Thurman’s narrator rejects the masculinist self-posturing of the poet-typewriter DeWitt, who disconnects himself from his actual identity to exploit the exotic, ancestral depths of ‘primitive’ Blackness that will gratify white, bourgeois readers. Among the ensuing bickering, Paul Arabian (Bruce Nugent’s alias) and Raymond deny possessing ties to anywhere outside of the United States, advocating an individualist approach to literary production rather than an imaginary collectivism rooted in faddism.

Yet it is not only the machine, but the female typewriter Lucille—a character based upon Thurman’s estranged wife, Thompson—who most intensely activates the author’s visceral anxiety. In those scenes noted above depicting male authors’ writing processes, the artist who strives for machine-like productivity, but whose authorial anxiety diminishes his procreative urges, is redirected into images of emasculated writers deskbound before their typewriter machines, including DeWitt and Raymond. The lone voice who protests masculinist productivity is Lucille, a “secretary to the publicity manager of a well-known liberal organization” (ostensibly a coded reference to Thompson’s fellowship at the National Urban League), with “olive brown skin,” and “dark, heavily lashed eyes” (Thurman, Infants, 41). Thurman carefully distinguished how Lucille is a character, not a stereotype; she is an individual who happens to type words for a living, whose identity is nevertheless constrained by prevailing views about her professional identity. Unlike so many modernist depictions of typewriters and secretaries, who like T. S. Eliot’s typewriter of The Waste Land (1922) appear as little more than the eroticized automatons of a feminized mass culture, the typology attached to that professional role does not define Lucille’s character; for this reason, she is able to disambiguate stereotypes of authorial masculinity that Raymond himself uneasily replicates, by way of contrast. Lucille openly challenges Raymond’s views on labor, gender and sexuality, and art by introducing him to the wider context of Harlem’s textual production, as the following dialogue indicates:

“How’s the job?” Raymond asked.

“Monotonous as ever. I’m damn tired of liberal organizations. I’d like to work for a Babbitt [right-wing, uncultured whites] for a change, but Babbitts no like brownskin secretaries.”

“Why not try a brownskin Babbitt?”

“I like salary for my work for one thing, and I don’t like to do bed duty after hours . . . My idea of heaven would be some place where there were no typewriters, adding machines, or sentimental persons prating of creating goodwill between whites and blacks.” (43–44)

What Lucille reveals about her office work, which oscillates between experiences of innate boredom and the intense risks of sexual harassment, richly reveals why the office secretary formed an ideal parallel to their author counterpart. Despite Thompson’s personal enjoyment in assisting Hughes, Hurston, and Arna Bontemps in a professional capacity, her concerns that the social equality movement is quite literally being underwritten by an unevenly gendered division of labor also clearly agitate Lucille, who imparts those views to Raymond. Inhabiting the role of both a complex character who feels constrained by her gendered stereotype, she is both more and less what is necessary to define the likewise unstable category of “author” Raymond represents.

Indeed, Lucille’s discussions with Raymond reveal how he, too, is caught between a character and a type, as he struggles to negotiate his professional and personal identities through inadequate stereotypes of masculinity and authorship. Lucille and Raymond’s flirtatious, yet unclearly defined friendship becomes increasingly strained after his white friend Stephen’s arrival in the Niggeratti Manor, when it becomes clear “they were drifting apart” as Raymond comes to terms with his surfacing queer desires (42). His insecure sense of his own masculinity renders him not only sexually but professionally impotent. That insecurity results from Raymond’s mutual repressed desires for Stephen, but also, his jealousy regarding Lucille spending “ninety-nine percent of [her] time, in the office and out” with white businessmen, whom he worries she will sleep with (43). He makes the common mistake of conflating professional and sexual identities, including his own. Raymond’s professional ambitions are bound up with his untidy romantic entanglements; for, on three “occasions now, twice with Stephen and once with Lucille,” the “unwelcome characterization” that he was a “self-deluded posturer” afterward “seemed apt in the light of what they had said” (90). He feels fraudulent because his queer ambivalence and lack of productivity do not align with the producerist masculinity imposed on Harlem’s young writers, in Summers’ terms (Summers, Manliness, 206).

Raymond’s authorial anxiety surfaces through undulating motifs of symbolic fertility and sterility that underwrite the imaginative representation of writing. Raymond’s strained relationship with Lucille peaks when she begins an affair with his stereotypically masculine housemate Bull, a “burly Negro” who possesses limited capacity for reflection before action, and habitually assaults white men and seduces white women in revenge for the traumas he experienced in the South. In Amritjit Singh’s interpretation of the novel, Lucille is “an office secretary who likes Raymond but prefers Bull because he is ‘at least a man, and knows how to get what he wants,’” which is presumably the opposite of the effeminate, indecisive Raymond.[34] After a drunk, uncharacteristically aggressive Raymond fails to consummate his desires with Lucille by force on the night of the notorious Rent Party, she falls pregnant to Bull—yet another point in which the novel’s realism deviates from reality. Thurman provocatively connects reproductive textual labor to the theme of sexual reproduction: Raymond organizes her abortion, after which they reconcile and contemplate matrimony. During Raymond’s half-hearted marriage proposal, Lucille threatens to assault him with his own typewriter within a week of matrimony, hardly emulating the subservient typist-wife stereotype Locke imagined Thompson to be (Thurman, Infants, 169). Lucille foregoes a future of motherhood (reproductive labor) to become a different order of reproducer: not the office secretary, but the author’s amanuensis who will deliver his now rapidly developing novel draft, a fictionalization of The Blacker the Berry. This is a partial reflection of the author’s reality; as their correspondences indicate, the relationship between Thurman and Thompson was primarily an intellectual affair, which was consummated through Thompson typing Thurman’s drafts (Gilyard, Louise, 64). Yet, Raymond and Lucille’s relationship signifies a broader truth, in that it fictionalizes how sexual and professional identities problematically overlap; in this case, the emasculation the typewriter’s sexual independence flares up in the author is a rerouting of his broader anxiety that he is failing to meet his artistic potential. As was the case in Blacker, this self-reflexivity further points to the densely mediated nature of the text itself, partially divesting Thurman of the fraught social relations of literature’s commercial production in which he directly participated.

Having repressed his homosexual desires for Stephen and secured Lucille’s affections by the novel’s denouement, thus symbolically conquering the stereotype of virile manhood Bull embodies, Raymond stands poised to conform to the kind of authorial type befitting the New Negro’s constrictive masculinist rhetoric. After Euphoria Blake evicts the unruly tenants to make a dorm for more respectable “young bachelor women,” Raymond and Lucille decide to cohabitate, and the Niggeratti disbands (Thurman, Infants,165). In a fitting synthesis of Thurman’s broader queering of the typewriter-author nexus, the only housemate who has delivered on his creative urges is Paul: the alias of Thurman’s openly gay housemate, Bruce Nugent.[35] In the novel, Paul appears as an eccentric, self-promotional avant-gardist. Underneath the title of Paul’s novel, a versified epitaph is inscribed to the idols of decadence after whom he models an alternative, queer vision of masculine authorship: Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wilde, whose “golden spores of decadent pollen / I shall broadcast and fertilize.”[36] Accompanying it is a drawing of

a distorted, inky black skyscraper, modeled after the Niggeratti Manor, and on which were focused an array of blindingly white beams of light. The foundation of this building was composed of crumbling stone . . . the skyscraper would soon crumple and fall, leaving the dominating white lights in full possession of the sky. (Thurman, Infants, 175)

Symbolically removing himself from the producerist realm of authorial masculinity that the typewriter signified, Paul produced his novel using an instrument that one Oliver Typewriters advertisement featured in The Crisis referred to as the typewriter’s “primitive” Other: the pencil, a contraption that metaphorically suggests the writer’s wavering commitment to the permanency of ideas and a lack of professionalism that the typewriter machine symbolizes.[37] Paul’s novel is found beside the bathtub in which he has committed suicide: “What delightful publicity to precede the posthumous publication of his novel, which novel, however, had been rendered illegible when the overflow of water had inundated the floor, and soaked the sheets strewn over its surface” (Thurman, Infants, 174–175). Although he melodramatically deconstructed the manuscript into individual leaves to carpet the floor, he “had not foreseen the possible inundation, nor had he taken into consideration the impermanency of penciled transcriptions” (175). Having broken with standard professional practice, his lead etchings fade into oblivion; they will “broadcast” or “fertilize” nothing. The crumbling “Niggeratti Manor,” imprinted not in pencil but in “inky black,” looks set to fall, the dream of the Harlem Renaissance housed within its walls to collapse alongside it, leaving only commercial “white lights” to wash out the sky where a speechless Raymond’s nobler ideas have failed to materialize.

Whilst this inky flourish spells the potential expiration of Raymond’s aesthetic potency as much as Paul’s, the dialectical upshot is that ink’s effect upon Thurman, whose typewriter who gave lasting meaning to the Harlem Renaissance it immortalized. By drawing upon the typewriter’s conceptual resonances as a feminized Other to the literary writer, Thurman gave new definition and meaning to the author’s social role, breaking down inhibitive gendered and racialized stereotypes that constrained the New Negro writer in the process. In doing so, he divested himself of some of his authorial anxieties regarding the fraught social relations of art and labor.

Afterword

“The moment a Negro writer takes up his pen or sits down to his typewriter,” wrote James Weldon Johnson in 1928, “he is immediately called upon to solve, consciously or unconsciously, this problem of the double audience.”[38] Yet, when an aspiring author sat down to their typewriter, it furthermore served as a reminder of the systemic pressures to conform to what patrons, editors, and publishers demanded they write, based on an essentialist view of the masculinist authorial type. As two densely mediated texts, The Blacker the Berry and Infants of the Spring are among the most intriguing, intricate representations of authorial anxiety within the Harlem Renaissance. With Thompson’s assistance, Thurman self-reflexively contemplated the commercial pressures facing the aspiring Black author who yearned to be seen as more than a tradesman, even whilst he recognized certain parts of himself in that counterpart. The encounters between authors and typewriters he depicted sublimated professional concerns that were tortuously bound to his personal relationships, including his domestic relations with his own typewriter and wife, Thompson, who typed his first novel, and whom his second novel immortalized. As he narrated and transformed his own writerly labor into artistic content, he created an illuminating textual matrix in which the author’s personal affairs and professional anxieties merge with the processes of creating, editing, publishing, and distributing literature, inside and outside the text.

While Thurman was not alone in contemplating authorship and manhood by appealing to the femininized typewriter type, his depictions of such encounters between differentiated types of writers crucially called into question the viability of bourgeois mythologies of masculinity, productivity, and intellectual labor that circulated in this formative period in African American fiction. If one’s “writing tools . . . also wor[k] on our thoughts,” in Friedrich Nietzsche’s apocryphal estimation, the typewriter and its system of labor was clearly contributing to Thurman’s thinking about the New Negro’s purpose within the segregated, heavily mediated system of textual production in the 1920s and 30s.[39] The highly self-referential nature of his subject merely makes the gendered and racialized aspects of that authorial anxiety more visible than in other texts. Because of the white, heteronormative stereotypes attached to typewriting as a profession, by reconstituting that type, Thurman elicited new possibilities for exploring unvendible themes of queer desire, class antagonism, and racial conflict. In the two novels discussed, the text’s negotiation of masculinity, labor, and authorship is activated by the typewriter’s differentiation from the literary writer: professionally as well as sexually. That said, Thurman’s author-typewriter nexus differed from many modernist conceptions of the typewriter that reinforced popular white heterosexual stereotypes. By contrasting the author against his female typewriter counterpart in ways that disrupted the expectations of gender, race, and labor attached to those social types, Thurman perceptively plotted the new horizons of Black authorship within the broader vicissitudes of modernism.