“He’s started another novel, nothing to do with Harlem.” In a softer voice she added, “He was never jolly, but I’m told he gets up every day. I think he’ll be fine, with time.”
“What’s become of Eva’s book?”
Through a series of legal negotiations Julia could only imagine, the jewelry recovered from the Half-Shell’s backstage had been awarded to Goldsmith’s publishing firm to resolve their claims against Eva. After liquidating the collection and deducting their expenses, Goldsmith had allowed the rest of the money to go to Jerome, along with the remaining fragments of manuscript recovered from Wallace’s library. He’d accepted the money but wanted nothing to do with the manuscript. Duveen had snatched it up.
“Pablo took it for research,” Julia said. “He’s writing his own Negro novel. He jabbers about it constantly, so I suppose Arthur Goldsmith will publish it and Pablo will scamper off to the bank yet again. He’s become quite famous lately—Vanity Fair teases him about his heavy tan. If anything he’s whiter than ever. I doubt he leaves his apartment before sundown.”
Julia picked at the knotted string. The package was light and soft. She couldn’t imagine what was inside. She didn’t want to open it, but she knew her reluctance was childish. Thoughts of Eva were still raw, but she needed to remember her friend more, not less, in all the ways she’d been rare and wonderful.
The knot yielded, and the paper fell away. Roughly folded into a thick square was the shawl Eva had borrowed the night she’d dined at the Plaza. Julia fingered the fine wool. As she lifted it to shake out the creases, a smaller envelope dropped to the floor.
Philip retrieved it. Julia took it but hesitated, tapping one corner lightly with a fingertip.
“Go on,” he said. “If he could write it, you can read it.”
Julia eased open the seal.
Her Waterman pen was wedged diagonally inside the envelope. She closed her eyes against the memory of his need of it in that wretched hour, then laid it on the composing stone and pulled out a folded rectangle of paper. Wrapped around it was a sheet of stationery. She had to puzzle out Jerome’s handwriting, small and angular as sparrow tracks.
She read the message aloud:
Miss Kydd, I have learned to say least when I feel most. Haste cheapens honesty. So I simply send you this poem, which you saw naked at its birth, the squall before the song. Eva and I would be honored by whatever typographic raiment you might choose to bestow upon it. With sincere gratitude, Jerome Crockett.
Julia unfolded a sheet of newsprint, already velvet along the creases, striped with the crabbed palimpsest poem she’d seen in his hiding place at the Half-Shell. With it was the typescript. He’d given it the title of his ill-fated first novel, taken from the concluding line to Eliot’s “Prufrock”: “Till Human Voices Wake Us.”
Beneath the title, Jerome had added a dedication: For my wife—my lost, best life.
Julia’s fingers curled around the sheet. It was too much. Before he’d left town, she’d been shy to ask if she might print one of his poems, but now that he’d obliged, she couldn’t bring herself to read it. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t lift her gaze.
Philip took the papers and laid them aside. He unbent her fingers, one by one, as if each was a just-born poem, still ink smudged and uncertain, but later—soon, tonight—a song.
“Will you teach me?” he said, after some time, looking about her half-assembled studio. “To set type? To squawk in double-pica Baskerville?”
She eased her hand free and considered. More than a sentence or two of twenty-four-point lead type would test his wrist strength and deplete her font.
“If you teach me to blow smoke rings.”
AFTERWORD
The 1920s was a watershed era in American literary history. This novel explores the tangled intersection of two of the decade’s most dynamic developments: the coming-of-age of the modern American publishing industry and the important cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.
While Europe’s storied traditions lay broken or exhausted after the Great War, American writers and artists represented youth and vitality: fresh voices, subjects, and styles. As a new generation of editors and publishers sought to champion this bold energy and declare the nation’s literary preeminence, a new generation of African American writers and intellectuals asserted their place on that stage.
This novel is my attempt to shine some light on the interplay between those two great ambitions: how each served the other’s ends, embracing their kindred aspirations, and also how their interests often worked to cross-purposes. Like any story about such aspirations, it is ultimately about power. I hope readers, with Julia, may gain some insight into the power dynamics among the players—what was achieved, and at what costs.
Several real people inspired characters in this novel, though I’ve privileged fictional freedom over strict biographical accuracy. Notable among them is Carl Van Vechten, a flamboyant white novelist, literary scout, and self-described tour guide and promoter of all things Harlem. In 1924 he became “addicted to Negroes,” as he put it, and quickly grew famous for lavish parties featuring leading black intellectuals, musicians, writers, and artists, including Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. In 1926 Knopf published Van Vechten’s controversial novel Nigger Heaven, whose title alone ignited a polarized reaction in Harlem and beyond.
Chief among other players in the era’s lively literary community who inspired characters is Bennett Cerf, a high-spirited twenty-seven-year-old vice president at Boni & Liveright who
