Guardian Review

Writing alongside Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, West was the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance. Diana Evans asks: why were her books overlooked for so long? Little sister" to Zora Neale Hurston. "The Kid" and would-be wife of Langston Hughes (he didn't say yes). Rediscovered at 85 by Jacqueline Onassis. Adapted by Oprah Winfrey starring Halle Berry. Dorothy West, by her own description, was the "best-known unknown writer of the time" - the time being, ostensibly, the Harlem Renaissance, though her first novel was not published until 1948, her second almost 50 years later. But Harlem was where it all began: that sizzling, surging artistic retaliation of the 1920s, of which West, fresh from the black elite of Boston, found herself a part. She was one of its youngest members, and at the time of her death in 1998 the last one standing. Her career is a rare, enigmatic melange of obscurity, revival and longevity. Hurston and West were roommates for a while after sharing second place in a short-story competition run by the journal of the National Urban League civil rights organisation, which was what first brought West to New York. Following a year in Russia with him in 1932 she did ask Hughes to marry her, in writing, though they dispersed into their own identities, marriage becoming instead an object of dark scrutiny and dispensable complexity in West's fiction. Subversions of convention were more suited to her palette, and the bohemian whirl of writers and artists gathering around New York's 125th Street and beyond proved nurturing and irresistible; there was also the poet Countee Cullen, novelist and poet Claude McKay, and writer and editor Wallace Thurman, in whose loft she would often be found, sitting on the floor. While most of her comrades were writing about African American working-class life, West's was a thoroughly middle-class milieu, drawn from the realities and observations of her privileged background as the only child of one of Boston's richest black families. She wrote "posh black" at a time when "broke black" was in vogue, and this sits at the heart of her flickering obscurity, a myopia in mainstream culture that struggled to perceive blackness as anything more than one-dimensional. Her first novel, The Living Is Easy , although critically acclaimed, was not a commercial success, and this was taken as fair indication that the reading public had no interest in "black writing" that did not mirror their limited understanding of "black experience". West did not 'do' civil rights, yet her work is deeply concerned with the warped permeations of race into everyday lives There was no room for nuance in the story of the great racial oppression. This was no place for chauffeurs and piano lessons and private tutors and maids and first world problems and "lawn croquet and lemonade", as featured in West's second novel The Wedding , a bestseller on its publication in 1995 and swiftly televised by Winfrey's Harpo Productions. Convinced there was no appetite for the subtler, inner politics of the black bourgeoisie, she had became apathetic. It took Onassis - then a Doubleday editor and neighbour of West at her home in affluent Martha's Vineyard - to persuade her otherwise and coax her back to work on the novel, the precursor to which had been rejected by her publisher in the belief that it wouldn't sell. West did not see herself as a political writer. She hated the Black Panthers and the drastic divisive doctrine of pre-Mecca Malcolm X. She did not march or "do" civil rights, yet her work is deeply concerned with the insidious and warped permeations of race into everyday lives. The Wedding , set in Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s, is about colourism: it's about the profound psychological impasse posed by the way in which slavery and colonialism pictured black deliverance in the emulation of whiteness. As well as providing important insights into the emergence of the African American middle class - the waiters and porters saving their tips and sending their sons to high school, the starting of small businesses, the gradual generational learning of a new "style of living" involving summer residences and wearing silk - West's work illuminates further subtleties that broaden our understanding of slavery's bitter legacy and the American social strata. She writes of the difference between the showy black New Yorkers and the more reserved Bostonians who are not quite ready to flaunt their diamonds. She tells of the "Southern aristocrat's uncompromising contempt for poor whites", and also of the ironic yearning of many blacks who had travelled north, freed from the threats of lynching and the Klan, for the "indescribable beauty of the South [that] would haunt them forever" and "make the babbling old beg to go home and die". West's father, Isaac, was born into slavery. He was seven years old when it ended, and later travelled north from Virginia to become a wealthy grocer, an example of triumph over circumstance that West writes about movingly in her essay The Gift. Her mother, Rachel, was the daughter of emancipated slaves from South Carolina, a charming dynamo of a woman who insisted on good breeding and good behaviour from her daughter. Such close familial connections to the horrors of the trade render West's voice both inherently political and deeply empathetic, able to address with equal conviction the trauma of captivity and the peaks and pitfalls of freedom. West began writing stories at the age of seven, and was first published at 14, in the Boston Post. She was still only 17 when she tied with the already established Hurston with her story "The Typesetter", which opens The Richer, The Poorer , her collected essays and short fictions covering the period between 1926 and 1987. A graduate of Boston University and the Columbia University School of Journalism, she toyed with acting for a while with a bit part in the original stage production of Porgy and Bess , and when the whirl of the Harlem Renaissance was over founded a quarterly literary magazine, Challenge, to try to revive it. This failed, but was revisited briefly in 1937 with co-editor Richard Wright (whom she "was never crazy about ... because he was so timid and afraid of white people"), and she subsequently worked as a welfare investigator in Harlem as the Great Depression deepened. This provided material for several stories, capturing poor black people in moments of fleeting fortune to highlight their plight, such as the boy given a coin by his father in "The Penny", and the married couple thrown into welfare anxiety after a gambling win in "Jack in the Pot". In 1940 West began writing two short stories a month for the New York Daily News - the first black author to do so - and continued until 1960. She left New York in 1943 to settle permanently in Martha's Vineyard, and there also contributed columns to the Vineyard Gazette. She neither married nor mothered, but cared for relatives while working on her writing. The longevity of West's fiction is the result of its relevance to both historical and modern concerns, its consistent acknowledgement that modernity is the unfortunate manifestation of history. Her themes are intimate yet universal: take, for example, her exploration of the murky innards of marriage in stories such as "The Envelope" and "Fluff and Mr Ripley", of the unsettling mysteries of death in "Funeral", and the anguish of a black parent who wishes their child personal freedom but bows instead to the burden of race in "An Unimportant Man". She is a writer of huge compassion and acute observation, and also of dazzling style. There is a mystery to her sentences, a creeping idiosyncrasy, a lush and dreamy boldness. She does not shy from the full dramatic potential of a death scene or a love scene, but reaches instead, like the best writers, for the almost unimaginable, the weird and the unexpected. A woman gets out of bed one morning feeling cold, and the cold slowly becomes death, and West tells us, in this scene from The Wedding , "Out of the intensity of her physical oneness had come a mystical communication in which she had taken his dying into the warm bed of her body, not to die with him, not to die for her, but to fight for his life with the supernatural strength the resisting flesh stores for the hour before eternity." Her tone is loosely biblical and alluring, investing her characters with a deep humanity while luxuriating in the power of description and the beauty of language. Her poetics abound, a man with a voice like "a cello, a flute, a clap of thunder", a phantom woman who "drifted out of his arms". It is most often women whose voices are lost in the canons of literature and its movements, and it is more often black women. West's contributions to the documentation of her world may have been routinely suppressed and misunderstood by the short-sightedness of mainstream culture, but her work is more relevant than ever. There must be room for nuance, for subtlety, it reminds us, for the myriad distinctions between people and communities. By showing the whole of something you show the truth, the true picture, not just one part of it, and we understand more widely, feel more generously, connect more powerfully, with greater wealth of spirit. "Color was a false distinction; love was not," she wrote, and that is a message that will continue to resound.