The present writer remembers first meeting Mr. Heyward only a few months after the Armistice. He came into the room one day, naming a mutual literary acquaintance and a common interest in writing as the occasion for the call. He brought with him as his first impression an unusual sense of ease and virile-sensitiveness—an impression that remained.
About the hospitable fire of one who was rich in the lore of the past, literary experience, and living, we continued to meet. The result of the association was an arrangement to collaborate on a book of poems in which it was agreed to treat some of the legends and the landscapes about Charleston from various points of view. Mr. Heyward's literary interest was at that time mainly in verse and the result was the publication the following year of Carolina Chansons.
During the same year while the poems were underway, through the able assistance of many friends, there was organized in Charleston the Poetry Society of South Carolina. This in a certain sense proved to be the spark that kindled the now widely spread interest in modern poetry in the South. Requests for advice and assistance poured into the little "poetry office" at Charleston, and Mr. Heyward in particular, although he was then conducting an active business in the city, found himself called upon for lectures, readings and literary consultations throughout the South. It was in this way, as a poet, that his name first became generally known.
In the meanwhile, he had been dividing his summer vacations between his own studio-cabin in the North Carolina Mountains and the MacDowell Colony at Peterborough, N.H. Under the combined inspiration of North and South Carolina landscapes and the facilities for undisturbed writing provided by the MacDowell Colony, his first book was followed about a year later by another volume of poems dealing most notably with the mountains of North Carolina and the Low Country of South Carolina. It was therefore entitled Skylines and Horizons.
His poems had been appearing here and there in magazines and it was rapidly becoming evident that Mr. Heyward's real life work lay in the realms of literature. The flair toward letters was considerably strengthened in 1923 by his marriage to Dorothy Hartzell Kuhns, a professional playwright, and it was not long afterwards that he definitely severed all active business connections and retired to write Porgy in the vicinity of the Big Smokies in North Carolina, where he owns a small "farm." The manuscript of Porgy was put into its final form at the MacDowell Colony and published in the fall of 1925. Coincident with the appearance of his first novel, Mr. Heyward made a lecture tour through all but the far western states.
Mr. Heyward's third book and first novel, Porgy, which has already been alluded to, is based on some of the actual adventures in the life of a real negro who was, until within a very short time, a familiar figure about the streets of Charleston. Porgy was a beggar. He had lost both legs and drove about in a little cart only a few inches high, behind an olfactorily memorable goat. There was no more grotesque, or picturesque figure in America, and his history, as Mr. Heyward soon learned, did not belie his appearance.
About the story of this colored cripple, who had played an important role in the life of old Cat-Fish Row, a venerable and incredible negro tenement along the Charleston water-front, Mr. Heyward wove his plot. It was more than a fine narrative. It was the actual life of the colored race, seen through clear eyes, and enacted in genuine dialect on a stage magnificently set. As for the setting in which it takes place, only those who have seen for themselves the real background of the book will be able fully to appreciate the fine restraint with which the artist has gained his effects.
Perhaps the most significant thing about the book and its author was the fact that, for the first time, certainly in this generation, a novel had been written about the character of an American negro which was at once true to life and a work of art. Mr. Heyward did not regard his material from any standpoint except that of the literary artist. He did not pity, patronize, suggest, assume the white man's burden, or try to add to or lighten that of the colored man. In other words, in Porgy, the author was Du Bose Heyward, writer, reporting a cross section of human life Ethiopian, in English prose. There was no moral propaganda whatever. Mr. Heyward does not offer his solution of the "negro problem," nor any scheme to do away with hurricanes, of which last, by the way, in Porgy there is the most memorable description of one written by an American since Gertrude Atherton's Conqueror. The storm in Porgy is a synthesis of several which the author witnessed in Charleston, notably the great hurricane of 1911. In Skylines and Horizons he had already treated the theme most successfully in verse.
Porgy will very shortly appear in moving pictures, and a dramatic version upon which the author and his wife have collaborated will also shortly appear in New York on the legitimate stage.
For the past year or so Mr. Heyward has been dividing his time between Charleston and his farm in the North Carolina mountains near Hendersonville while he has been steadily at work upon his second novel, Angel.