"Death by Misadventure"
Author: Nella Larsen
Recommended Text: Passing
Death by misadventure, I’m inclined to believe. Let’s go up and have another look at that window. ~Passing by Nella Larsen
There is a noir element to reading Nella Larsen’s Passing that isn’t apparent until the final pages, which is, perhaps, one of the reasons I keep returning to the beginning. Read those first lines in the voice of Humphrey Bogart reflecting on Irene Redfield’s guilty but also shameless conscience and lose yourself in Passing again, this time as a mystery. Lurking in every passage are clues to the enigmatic and provocative relationship between the sometimes influential, sometimes sanctimonious, and often dowdy Irene and glamorous, mysterious, but dangerous Clare.
The novel opens:
“It was the last letter in Irene Redfield’s little pile of morning mail. After her other ordinary and clearly directed letters the long envelope of thin Italian paper with its almost illegible scrawl seemed out of place and alien. And there was, too, something mysterious and slightly furtive about it. A thin sly thing which bore no return address to betray the sender. Not that she hadn’t immediately known who its sender was. Some two years ago she had one very like it in outward appearance. Furtive, but yet in some peculiar, determined way a little flaunting. Purple ink. Foreign paper of extraordinary size.” (1)
Is there anything more tantalizing than a novel that opens with a “sly” and “furtive” letter on Italian paper, already hinting at the cosmopolitan figure to come, a chameleon of a woman who has transformed herself from starved child to femme fatale?
Clare’s transformation in the first several pages of the novel is from “a pale small girl sitting on a ragged blue sofa” (1) to “An attractive-looking woman, was Irene’s opinion, with those dark, almost black, eyes and that wide mouth like a scarlet flower against the ivory of her skin. Nice clothes, too, just right for the weather, thin and cool” (6). And by the end, because all great femme fatales must die or disappear “One moment Clare had been seen there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold. The next she was gone” (91).
Who is Clare Kendry? And what is her hold on Irene?
When I read this novel I want to imagine myself as an armchair detective, sipping a glass of wine some evening in a dark but cozy corner of my library, or perhaps tucked away in one of the New York speakeasies sipping a cocktail and perusing a few more pages as I wait for a friend because it is the New York of mysteries as much as the Harlem Renaissance that is evoked by this slim novela to which I’m tempted to apply Truman Capote’s phrase “too brief a treat.”
What is it about urban literature and mystery that goes hand in hand? Baudelaire, a translator of Poe, was himself inspired by Poe’s detective fiction, and Poe is often attributed as one of the earliest (if not the first) detective fiction authors, his urban tales of murder based on real life crimes set the literary historical stage for the connection between city literature and mystery that is here picked up by Nella Larsen, who, herself, was inspired by the courthouse drama that was unfolding in New York at the time, the infamous Rhinelander vs. Rhinelander a case of divorce between a man from a prominent old New York Family (Edith Wharton too was related to the Rhinelanders) and a mixed-race woman who was accused of having concealed her race (the court eventually ruled in her favor that Rhinelander was well aware and no deception had taken place).
The novel is full of urban tropes. A crowded, hot city reaching a boiling point (a setting we will certainly return to in upcoming posts regarding another iconic Jazz Age novel of New York). People who are a mystery to each other, who have no antecedents and can more easily conceal their past than in a small country town. Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” and its contrast between the city and the town comes to mind. Urban blasé, a lack of caring created by the overwhelming milieu of the crowd. And at the same time, it is also this crowd that creates the possibility of the racial mixing that Irene is so hopeful is a sign of progress toward ending segregation. Cities can be represented as cosmopolitan milieus where prejudice cannot survive the daily confrontation with overwhelming diversity. But cities are also represents as dens of iniquity, places where danger lurks in the crowd. Larsen is too complex a writer to represent urban environments in this way, though her characters certainly have their different uses and anxieties about New York.
The novel opens and closes with crowds and female bodies pushed to the precipice of consciousness and of life. Irene and Clare’s first meeting is precipitated by urban overwhelm. When Irene becomes overheated in the crowded Chicago streets she nearly faints and in a foggy desperation she finds herself at a white only rooftop restaurant having asked a taxi driver to take her somewhere where she can get tea. A case of mistaken identity, the taxi driver misidentifies her racial belonging and Irene, under at least the guise of fatigue makes an exception and passes, which is how she ends up in a place where the also passing Clare could be found. Clare, it turns out is representative of the tie between the cosmopolitan and the urban. Not only does she appear in Chicago and New York, but during the war she lived in Europe, referring to Paris and Budapest the narrative demonstrates her insider knowledge of European cities.
Like many urban novels, Passing features barely fictionalized settings and characters with clear real life versions. The Drayton, where Irene gets her fateful cup of tea is the Drake Hotel in Chicago. Irene summers in Idlewild. She gets her flyers printed “on a Hundred and Sixteenth Street” (42), one of the great joys of being familiar with the layout of New York are these types of references to street numbers in New York novels, and immediately knowing the area. Irene lives somewhere in the hundreds off Seventh Avenue. The novel is full of these vague numbered locations that lend an air of reality by giving the reader a basic but real geography of Irene Redfield’s movements and some sense of where her friends live. John Bellew stands in for Rhinelander, Hugh Wentworth for Carl Von Vechten.
Anyway, I need to get back to work, so I’ll have to reluctantly leave the streets of Passing and the sleuthing to you. So, I’ll ask my question again:
Who is Clare Kendry? And what is the nature of her connection to Irene Redfield?
The version of the novel I have linked to is published by Chemeketa Press which is a press based out of Chemeketa Community College. I selected this version of the book because the press’s mission of making affordable versions of books for students seems like a laudable venture. There are other great versions, for example, the Norton edition (and Norton Press is collectively owned by their employees which also makes it a great press to support) which includes supplemental materials. I encourage you to consider supporting your local bookstore by purchasing from them, but should you want to support Maison Metropolitanist as a digital learning space buying through the affiliate link at Book Shop (linked above) is one way you can do so. For now, proceeds from the Maison Metropolitanist shop will go directly into the cost of running this project.