Du Bose Heyward: A Critical and Biographical Sketch

by Hervey Allen

It is no exaggeration to say, and not a derogation for the purpose of argument to admit, that in the final analysis most of those who have essayed the task of depicting provincial conditions in the South, involving the essentially differing peculiarities of minor Southern localities where the plantation, industrialism, the negro, and the Mountain White are all factors—it is we repeat, no derogation to say that for the most part those who have attempted to handle these themes in a major literary way have fallen short of the mark.

This situation has largely arisen from the fact that only those who were natives of the South could understand the genuine realities of the conditions they undertook to depict. Yet there was another complication, those who were born in the South by the traditions of their birthright were often inhibited from assuming an attitude toward their own section, one that is necessary to project a work of art. This attitude may be described as that of the "intimately-detached".

Such was very largely the condition of present day American letters in regard to matters "South" when in 1925 Mr. Du Bose Heyward of Charleston, S.C., contributed his comment on the negro. The scene of the story is laid in one of the oldest plantation communities on the continent slowly melting from its former outlines in the crucible of "progress".

The Book Porgy* (the "g" is hard as in "gate") may be said to have combined or expanded the highly wrought technique of the best type of realistic dramatic short story with the more ponderable bulk of the novel, and from the standpoint of diction to have attained with a natural felicity all the dignity and beauty of a highly-wrought style. Its early appearance was greeted with acclaim, and the first glow of enthusiasm was sustained and enhanced by the more judicious and pondered praise of careful critics. Porgy, indeed is the first American novel about the American negro which depicts him faithfully, as he exists in a particular place, and yet presents him as a purely artistic but faithfully realistic study of a phase of human life. Mr. Heyward and his first novel were thus a nice example of a particular environment producing an artist peculiarly capable of exploiting the intriguing differences of his province in universal terms.

* "Porgy", the name given to Mr. Heyward's hero by the colored fishermen who lived in and about Cat-fish Row and plied their trade by sailing out of Charleston harbor to the black-fish banks, is the local name for black-fish, hence the derivation of the nickname.

The author was born and raised in Charleston, S.C. He first saw the light in August, 1885, inheriting from a long line of Revolutionary and Colonial ancestry the essential American traditions and the philosophy of aristocratic planters nurtured upon almost feudal plantations.

In the late 1880's and throughout the 1890's the South as a whole, particularly the "Carolina Low Country" about Charleston, was still in the throes of the aftermath of Reconstruction. Mr. Heyward's family, like thousands of others, had lost their property as a result of the Civil War, and he was from the first forced to confront not only an extreme private poverty but the then all but hopeless economic condition of his section. At an early age he became the sole support of his widowed mother and struggled manfully and hopefully against "a sea of troubles".

Yet there was a fortunate side to all this, one then difficult to see, but present nevertheless. The very difficulties of the place into which he had been born forced the future chronicler of its charms and grotesqueness into an intimate contact with the life of the locality, and permitted him to drink it in through understanding eyes. The aftermath of the Civil War had put a premium upon living for being rather than living for possession. One did not of necessity appear in the latest fashions in Charleston ball rooms, yet the balls and the traditions of the society which they represented went on. The old city continued in her old ways. To a visitor it seemed as if time had been arrested. Mr. Heyward was intimately familiar with it all. The place, indeed, became a part of him, yet it did not too entirely possess him.

Summers were spent in the mountains of North Carolina, where he first came into contact with the "People of the Hills." There was a brief interlude of painting about Tryon, N.C., in a "cove" of the Appalachian ranges that catches the breath of spring before any of the others. The lessons of the brush were afterward remembered by the pen. Then there was a season spent in the far West recuperating from an illness. This was shortly before the World War.

Mr. Heyward's "bit" was done in South Carolina in organizing war work among the negroes of his section in coöperation with certain gentlemen of Charleston who were chosen for their knowledge and tact. It was an interesting, a valuable, and a vital experience. In the meanwhile, there were a few short stones. The pen had been found. It was not quite sure yet what it had to say, but some of the methods of publishing and the way to an audience had at least become plain.