Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 9, 1995 TAG: 9504070096
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY NICHOLAS BASBANES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
At 87, Dorothy West is enjoying all the attention she has been getting lately. Not only has she published her first novel in 47 years, but she's also being honored as the lone survivor of an artistic phenomenon that flourished in the 1920s and '30s - the Harlem Renaissance.
"The first time I realized that I was the last one from that group still alive was at a dinner they gave for me a while back at Radcliffe College," West said in an interview in her modest home on Martha's Vineyard island. "The woman who introduced me said that Dorothy West is the last person from the Harlem Renaissance still with us, and that all the others are gone."
Despite West's advancing years, "The Wedding," an engaging novel set on Martha's Vineyard in 1953, makes clear that even though "all the others are gone," she remains a vibrant literary voice.
The daughter of a former Virginia slave who earned prominence after the Civil War in Boston as a produce merchant, West went off to New York City at the age of 18 to accept a literary prize she shared with Zora Neale Hurston (1901-1960).
West's entry in the 1926 contest, conducted by the Urban League's Opportunity magazine, was a short story called "The Typewriter." The following year, she landed a bit part in the original stage production of "Porgy," the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatization of a DuBose Heyward novel and the basis for George Gershwin's great folk opera, "Porgy and Bess."
Because she came from a family of means, West in 1934 was able to establish an African-American literary magazine known as Challenge; three years later, with Richard Wright as co-editor, she founded New Challenge, a more politically concerned journal which published the work of many black writers.
"We never called what we were doing the Harlem Renaissance, that all came later," West recalled. "What we did know was that something very exciting was going on; people were doing creative things, and it was special. That kind of thing only happens once in history. We were all so innocent then."
In addition to Hurston and Heyward, West's friends and colleagues during this time included such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Alain Locke, Wallace Thurman, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Bennett, Claude McKay and the noted poet Countee Porter Cullen, who once asked her to marry him. "I was afraid to get married," West said. "I always wanted to be a writer, you see, from the time I was a little girl of seven."
For more than 50 years, West has lived in the fairy-tale town of Oak Bluffs, a community of charming gingerbread cottages long known as a retreat for successful African-Americans. The small shingled house she has occupied since 1943, in fact, was once her family's summer residence.
While there is no neighborhood in Oak Bluffs known as the "Oval," such a place comes vividly alive in her new book. "The Oval was a rustic stretch of flowering shrubs and tall trees, designated on the old town maps as Highland Park," she writes. "The narrow dirt road that circled it was Highland Avenue."
Though largely fictional, her evocation of the neighborhood has such resonance that when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis first drove the 15 miles from her own summer retreat to meet with West in Oak Bluffs to discuss the work-in-progress, she had to ask for directions. "The first day Mrs. Onassis came to me, she asked people, 'Where's the oval?' She knew how to get around on the island, but she couldn't find the place I was writing about. She assumed it was a real place, but nobody knew where it was. I guess she finally said to someone, 'Where does Dorothy West live?' and they told her how to find me."
Though petite in stature, West is full of energy and good will. Her mind is a whirlwind of memories and impressions, and she is eager to share them all. Laughter comes easily for her, though occasionally there is sadness, even tears. "It bothers me that I never asked my father what it was like to be a slave," she offered at one point. "He was born a slave and freedom came when he was 7, but I never asked what it was like."
With the release of "The Wedding," West said that Doubleday is now planning to issue a volume of her short stories.
Nicholas Basbanes is a Massachusetts journalist who writes frequently about books and authors.
by CNB