Richard Bruce Nugent

Nugent at Madison Cafe Hoboken, 1982

Richard Bruce Nugent (born July 2, 1906 in Washington, DC , † May 27, 1987 in Hoboken , New Jersey ) was an American painter, writer, actor and colorful personality of the Harlem Renaissance .

Life

Nugent came from a solid middle-class family. The mother, a talented pianist, was a trained teacher, the father a Pullman sleeper car attendant. He died in 1920 when Richard was 15 years old. His widow moved to New York with the boy, but Richard Nugent's first stay there was quickly over. After he told his mother that he would henceforth live freely as an artist, he was sent back to his grandparents. In the art salon of Georgia Douglas Johnson in Washington he met Langston Hughes , with whom he became an intense friend from the very first minute. Nugent's first published poem, Shadows , was submitted by Hughes to Opportunity magazine . Nugent's first short story appeared in Alain Locke's authoritative anthology, The New Negro , in 1925 .

In August 1925, Nugent went to New York. He was living in the famous Niggerati Manor , like Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman , when the idea arose there of publishing a quarterly magazine to represent the cause of the young (exclusively devoted to the Younger Negro Artists ). So in the summer of 1926 he was a co-founder of Fire !! For whose first and last edition in November 1926 he wrote a short story and provided several drawings. After the financial failure of Fire !! magazine, which left all of its co-founders in debt for years, Nugent joined the acting troupe around DuBose Heyward . He toured North America and England with them for more than two years. The troupe performed the piece Porgy , which later served the Gershwin brothers as a model for their opera Porgy and Bess . In the 1940s he worked as a freelance writer.

On December 5, 1952, he married Grace Marr in New York City. She taught biochemistry at Columbia University and was one of the first lecturers at that university. Grace Marr knew that Nugent was gay, but hoped to "turn away" him from his homosexuality . For Nugent, marriage , apart from having a real and sincere interest in her, meant financial independence. However, he continued to live out his homosexuality. From the 1960s he said goodbye to the literary stage and was more concerned with cultural projects in Harlem and the history of this New York district. Grace Marr Nugent committed on December 4, 1969 suicide on the eve of the 17th anniversary of their wedding. She was very successful until the end. In the last years of her life she had given up teaching and was involved (also with great success) in a political women's project. There are no specific indications as to the reason for their suicide.

In the 1960s, when literary and cultural researchers became increasingly interested in the history of the Harlem Renaissance , Nugent became a rich source of information, which despite its relatively low literary output, was considered one of the best known unknowns or best kept secrets of this literary and cultural epoch -American history and thus, as a previously neglected insider, was able to chat about the origin and course of the movement.

In the 1970s, Nugent himself also experienced a kind of renaissance. With the advent of various, postmodern aspects of literary and cultural research (e.g. feminism , lesbian and gay movement , multiculturalism ), Nugent became a source on the Harlem Renaissance from the 1970s . In the last few years of his life, Nugent lived in poverty in Hoboken, New Jersey and relied on welfare and donations from friends. At the age of 81, he died on May 27, 1987 of compensated heart failure in Hoboken. Except for Dorothy West , he outlived all of his colleagues from the Harlem Renaissance.

A good character study of Nugent can be found in Wallace Thurman's novel Infants of the Spring in which the person of Paul Arbian is based on Nugent. This novel describes life in an artist colony similar to Niggerati Manor .

Nugent's oeuvre and selected examples

Most of his works are autobiographical . In them he deals with the black identity within the white society of the USA but also with different identities within the black culture. He published his first work Shadow at the urging of Langston Hughes in October 1925 in Opportunity Magazine . Later, after a black movement established itself (the Harlem Renaissance ), he criticized the uplift tendency within the Renaissance and the leaders of the movement, primarily addressing his own homosexuality and other issues such as hedonism .

He did this, for example, in the short story Smoke, Lilies and Jade . This greatly from Oscar Wilde influenced short story dealt explicitly homoerotic themes and was later the basis for the film Looking for Langston of Isaac Julien . The short story, a first version of the story submitted on toilet paper, was Nugent's contribution to the first and only issue of Fire !! November 1926. This piece drew more criticism than anything else in Fire !!. Since the magazine was designed from the outset to scare the black establishment with a scandal , it was believed that apart from other short stories and drawings, only one short story with homosexuality as a topic was missing. Legend has it that Thurman and Nugent tossed a coin who should write this story and Nugent won.

Nugent was one of the most creative and uncompromising minds on the Fire !! team. On the other hand, however, his work cannot easily be compared with that of his colleagues. Compare, for example, Wallace Thurman or Langston Hughes , as it was less characterized by continuity.

Together with Wallace Thurman and others, he succeeded in establishing himself as the voice of black youth within the Renaissance, adding a new facet to the movement and providing new arguments and approaches for discussion regarding the question of black identity.

In his drawings and graphics he combines homosexual, pornographic and traditional African elements and symbols. In Infants of the Spring , the drawings by Paul Arbian (Richard Bruce Nugent) are referred to as highly colored phalli . On the other hand, the Salome series plays with biblical motifs.

In 1937, Nugent published his only novel, Pope Pius the Only . Many other novels are unpublished to this day, such as For example, the novel Gentleman Jigger , which was accompanied by a plagiarism scandal and was published for the first time in 2008.

Works

Shadow (poem - October 1925)
Sahdji ( Stream of Consciousness- style short story - published in The New Negro in 1925 ) The short story was later rewritten into a play for the stage and published as Sahdji, to African Ballet in 1937.
My Love (poem - October 1926)
Smoke, Lilies and Jade ( Stream of Consciousness- style short story - November 1926)
Narcissus (poem - early 1933)
Pope Pius the Only (novel - published in "Challenge" in 1937)
On Harlem (short story - ca.1939)
On Georgette Harvey (short story - ca.1939)
On "Gloria Swanson" (Real Name: Mr. Winston) (Short Story - circa 1939)
The Now Discordant Song of Bells (short story - Spring 1989)
Slender Length of Beauty (short story - 2002)
Lunatique (short story - 2002)
Bastard Song (poem - 2002)
Incest (poem - 2002)
Who Asks This Thing? (Poem - 2002)
Gentleman Jigger (Novel - 2008)
Pattern for Future Dirges (Sonnett - previously unreleased)
Tunic with a Thousand Pleats (short story - previously unreleased)

literature

AB Christa Schwarz: Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Blacks in the Diaspora. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana 2003, ISBN 0-253-21607-9
Thomas H. Wirth: Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance. Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent. Duke University Press, Durham, NC 2002, ISBN 0-822-32886-0
Lars Banhold: 'One Story, Two Variations in Different Keys. Wallace Thurmans 'Infants of the Spring', 'Richard Bruce Nugents' Gentleman Jigger 'and the black urban middle class'. Ch. A. Bachmann Verlag, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-941030-64-0

Web links

www.brucenugent.com extensive website by Nugent biographer Thomas H. Wirth

personal data
SURNAME	Nugent, Richard Bruce
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American painter, writer, actor
DATE OF BIRTH	July 2, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH	Washington, DC
DATE OF DEATH	May 27, 1987
Place of death	Hoboken , New Jersey