class. His brilliant closing essay on Van Vechten's Niger Heaorcn is far more interesting today than the novel itself. Richard Bruce Nugent wrote "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" under the name of Richard Bruce so as not to disgrace the family name. That its theme is explicitly homosexual and its sensibility utterly incompatible with the work ethic made it, of all the pieces in FIREll, the primary target of hostile middle-class critics. We recognize in Bruce the quintessential Bohemian-a harbinger of the counterculture forty years before its time. Hughes presents him in The Big Sea
Bruce Nugenr took
it
IFIREIJ] around
New York on foot and some of the Greenwich Village bookshops put it an display, and sold it for us, But then Bruce, who had no job, would collect the money and, on account of salary, eat it up before he got back to Harlem.
The Nugent persona disappeared from pubiic life in the Thirties and Forties, only to be re-invented by the Beats of the Fifties and the flower children of the Sixties. Astoundingly, Bruce himself survives in the original. He reports that after FIREJ/ appeared, Du Bois
asked him, "Why don't you write more about Negroes?"
To which Bruce responded, and I'm a Negro, aren't I?"
a principle implicit in obstacles, the artist must express the truth within himself. That the artist must do so, not for art's sake, but for his own sake, his people's sake, and for the sake of humankind. And that neither self, nor truth, nor art can be divided into boxes labelled "Black" and "Vhite", or "High" and "Low".
In this exchange is expressed
FIREII-that despite all
FIREIJ, then,
is a
concrete manifestation of
Langston Hughes' artistic credo, ftrst set forth inThe Nation only five months before FIREI I itself appeared: We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we
stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.
Few indeed are destined to succeed so brilliantly at that which they set about to do.
"I write about mysel{ ThomasH.Wirth
THE FIRE!! PRESS