A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell A Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary

By francisbooth and Francis Booth

Vera Caspary (1899 – 1987) was ahead of her time but is perfectly aligned with ours. Caspary put strong, independent women at the center of over twenty novels, while tackling sexism, racism, fascism and antisemitism head on in both her life and her work; in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover personally initiated an FBI investigation of her.

In the 21st century Caspary's novels have been republished by The Murder Room and The Feminist Press, showing the range of her writing and the breadth of her appeal.

Caspary's first published novel, The White Girl, 1929, concerns a young Black woman passes as white, very much akin to Nella Larsen's Passing, which came out later the same year. A 1930s family saga explored the Jewish experience in America. Then in 1942 Caspary turned the hard-boiled murder mystery inside out with Laura, putting a woman at its heart rather than the usual male detective and inventing the genre of the psycho-thriller. Laura was made into a highly successful film, as was its successor Bedelia, 1945, about "the wickedest woman who ever loved." Fritz Lang's great film noir The Blue Gardenia, 1953, was adapted from a Caspary novella. In the 1960s Caspary followed a gentle satire on sex in the suburbs with a searing Holocaust novel and then a "confession disguised as a novel" about communism in Connecticut; the final novels of the 1970s all explore the mystery of individual identity.

She made her living writing frothy, romantic stories and scripts for Hollywood movies and several of her novels were republished as lurid pulp paperbacks but at heart Vera Caspary was a connoisseur of classic British literature. One Caspary woman calls herself Haworth after the Brontë Parsonage and another is named Elaine after Tennyson's Idylls, while Stranger Than Truth pays homage to Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White and Bedelia echoes Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret. In False Face, Nina was "weaned on Browning and Keats, taught to use my eyes in Florence," and in The Dreamers Ernestine is plans a Ph.D. on George Eliot.

A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie is a monumental and ground-breaking study, examining all of Caspary's published fiction, setting her in the context of her contemporaries and celebrating the Caspary woman, a heroine for our time.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wu Wei Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227626530

Book preview

Table of Contents

A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell A Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary

The White Girl[3] (1929)

Ladies and Gents[25] (1929)

Music in the Street[37] (1929)

Anyone Can Wear Pink[51] (1930)

Thicker Than Water[52] (1932)

Marriage ’48[62] (1948)

The Weeping and the Laughter (1950)/The Death Wish (1951)[67]

Thelma[69] (1952)

False Face[71] (1954)

The Dreamers[72] (1975)

Suburb (1929)

Laura[75] (1942)

Sugar and Spice[94] (1943)

Bedelia[96] (1945)

The Murder at the Stork Club[108] (1945)/The Lady in Mink (1946)

Stranger Than Truth[111] (1946)

The Gardenia[113] (1952)

The Husband[118] (1957)

Evvie[121] (1960)

The Man Who Loved His Wife[124] (1966)

Ruth[130] (1968)

Final Portrait[132] (1971)

Elizabeth X (1978)

Stranger in the House[141] (1943)

A Chosen Sparrow[145] (1964)

The Rosecrest Cell[153] (1967)

Out of the Blue[154] (1947)

Wedding in Paris (1954)

Bachelor in Paradise[156] (1961)

About the Author

A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie

The novels of Vera Caspary

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francis booth

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Vera Caspary, publicity shot for Three Husbands, 1950

© Francis Booth 2021

From the cover of The Husband, 1957

Papa . . . was my first idol, a strong and ardent man, gifted at love and passionate in honesty. Do you know what your name means? he’d ask. Truth. A girl named Vera can never tell a lie.

Vera Caspary, The Secrets of Grown-Ups

From the cover of The Rosecrest Cell, 1968

This has been the century of the woman, and I know myself to have been a part of the revolution.

Vera Caspary, The Secrets of Grown-Ups

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She is carved from Adam’s rib, indestructible as legend, and no man will ever aim his malice with sufficient accuracy to destroy her.

Vera Caspary, Laura

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All my tales, whether gaily caparisoned with wealth or morbid in poverty, whether celebrating health or pain (for there are sanatoria and cemeteries as well as ballrooms), tell of man’s reliance upon woman, his need, blindness and final recognition. In its many beginnings, mutations and styles of narration, my story always concerns man’s search for the sympathy and satisfaction that only the heroine can bestow.

Vera Caspary, Evvie

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I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.

Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

From the cover of The Dreamers, 1975

Acknowledgements

to A. B. Emrys and Carol A. Stabile for going before

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Thanks

to Angie Phillip and Nava Atlas for unfailing support

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Love

to Denise for everything

From the cover of Laura, 1942   

From the cover of Bedelia, 1945

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Introduction

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Vera Louise Caspary (November 13, 1899 – June 13, 1987) put strong, independent women at the center of all her novels; the Caspary woman was well ahead of her time but is perfectly attuned to ours. In her thrillers and murder mysteries, Caspary tackled sexism, racism, fascism and antisemitism head on, from her first novel in 1929 to her last in 1975.

The White Girl, 1929, is about a young Black woman who passes as white, the same subject as Nella Larsen’s Passing, which was published just after it. In Laura, 1942, Caspary turned the hard-boiled detective story inside out, putting a woman at its heart rather than a male detective. Laura was made into a highly successful film, as was its successor Bedelia, about a woman who killed her husbands for the insurance money. Fritz Lang’s great film noir The Blue Gardenia was made from a Caspary novella.

Although she worked in Hollywood and many of her novels were published as lurid pulp paperbacks, Caspary herself was a connoisseur of classic British literature. One Caspary woman calls herself Haworth after the Brontë Parsonage; Stranger Than Truth pays homage to Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and Bedelia to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. 

In the 21st-century, Caspary’s works have been republished by both the Feminist Press and the Murder Room, showing the unique breadth of her appeal. A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie is the first work to examine all of Caspary’s fiction and celebrate the Caspary woman, a heroine for our time.

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I have split Caspary’s published fiction into categories: rather like the traditional separation of Shakespeare’s works into tragedies, histories and comedies, I have segregated Caspary’s works into psycho-thrillers, coming-of-age stories, comedies and political works. This is of course an arbitrary distinction, and by no means sanctioned by Caspary herself, but there is no doubt that she had different registers, different voices, different interests throughout her long writing career.

The first four novels all fall into the coming-of-age category, which includes individual as well as family sagas, but always concentrating on the female characters. After a gap of ten years between novels, Caspary wrote her first psycho-thriller (as the publishers called it), Laura, a novel which was a complete change of direction for her, almost an experiment, but which became her most famous novel and was made into her most famous film.

Caspary wrote only two novels that are really comedies, both subsequently made into films, though many of her screenplays are light comedies, so that in terms of her total output, including both fiction and film, comedy forms a large part.

Finally, although Caspary was politically aware all her life and politically active for a large part of it – she was a member of a Communist circle at one time, was followed by the FBI and grey-listed during the anti-Communist witch hunts in Hollywood – Caspary published just one story and one novel covering her political views.

A Life in Brief

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One day a friend of my sister’s brought to me a book called Spark, A Dog. The story began: Bow-wow-wow. My name is Spark. I am a dog. Tame stuff after Hans Brinker and Zauberlinda, the Wise Witch, but distinguished because it said on the cover By Rosalie G. Mendel, the name of the lady who had brought it to me. The magic words taught me that stories did not just grow in books but were written by someone I knew. At once I began printing miniature books, pinning together tiny folded sheets and lettering unevenly on the cover A STORY BY VERA LOUISE CASPARY.

The aim of this book is to tell the life story of Vera Caspary through her fiction, and not vice versa. Biographical and autobiographical detail is woven through this study, mostly coming from Caspary’s autobiography The Secrets of Grown-ups: An Autobiography, 1979, from which came the above quote about her very early life and her very early ambition to be a writer. Anyone interested in Caspary’s life is recommended to read this wonderful memoir. So, just a few words here about Caspary’s very early years.

Vera was the youngest child in her family by many years; there was a big gap between Vera and her sister and two brothers; her Jewish mother was so old when she had Vera that she felt she had to hide the pregnancy for shame. I was born by accident in the nineteenth century[1]. No one expected me on that November day, certainly not my mother, who had kept her shameful secret concealed under loose house robes. As a small child, while her older siblings were going out in the evening, Vera was sent to bed at eight o’clock, where she fantasized about being a writer. At school, she had a classmate named Eleanor whom she befriended just because her mother was a published author.

I had cultivated Eleanor’s friendship in fourth grade when I heard that her mother was an authoress. Except for Rosalie G. Mendel, author of Spark, A Dog, I had never seen a writer. Eleanor’s mother’s books were on the shelves of the library, displayed in bookstore windows, reviewed in the newspapers. . . I had become Eleanor’s best friend. I ate dinner at her house, stayed overnight and often, standing silent in the hall, looked through an open door to watch her mother, the authoress, sitting up in bed with a clipboard, writing a book.

From her earliest years, Vera’s dreams formed themselves into words, words which made themselves into stories. My dreams were stories of love, sacrifice and devotion. Never in the first person. The characters were made up and shaped to whim and desire. I told myself stories in full sentences. At a time when my reading was undiscriminating and diversified, my dreams combined the styles of Bulwer-Lytton and James M. Barrie with a touch of E. F. Benson or George Barr McCutcheon.

With those brief flashes of Vera’s very early life and ambition, we will leave biographical details and let them emerge through her fiction. However, Caspary did write some brief biographies of herself for the back covers of her novels, which are worth quoting here – even where they are told in the third person, we can probably assume that Caspary herself wrote them. They show her wry, ironic style as much as the novels they accompany and they provide snapshots – today we would say selfies – of her life at various times throughout her career.

Vera Caspary has been around. She has slaved in the advertising business, promulgated house-organs and throwaways, worked in a public dance hall, started a mail-order dancing course, edited Finger Print Magazine and Dance Magazine, interviewed stage celebrities, gone free to nearly every New York night club, written five novels, about twelve original motion picture stories and about half as many screen plays. Her movie original, The Night of June 13, was so successful that she resold the story six times. A genius in selling things by mail, she has distributed in this way cold cream, milking machines, dancing, singing, one-pipe furnaces, rat virus, Zane Grey, Sax Rohmer, heredity, and sex. To avoid sports of every kind, she goes in for building and buying houses, doing gardens, and giving parties. A Chicagoan by birth, she has a house in Connecticut, but most of her mail reaches her in Hollywood, where she works half the year in motion pictures.

From the back cover of Laura, 1942

She says that her writing career has been varied, and has no trouble proving it. Her first job was in a Chicago advertising agency. She sold all sorts of things by mail, and became an authority on correspondence courses. She did editorial work in New York, traveled abroad, and began writing short stories and novels. Her success with photoplays has kept her on call in Hollywood but she likes to be mobile and to get into the thick of things. To be a writer, she believes, "you must have a point of view in what you experience. You need to keep an ear and an eye always at the keyhole, without malice. After you have observed, and listened at keyholes, all you need is a will of iron to ride the beam.

From the back cover of Bedelia, 1945

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Vera Caspary wanted to be a writer. She never wanted to be anything else. Today she is one of our first-ranked novelists. But she is also something else. She is an incredibly vivacious and versatile woman with a cracking sense of humor.

At seventeen Vera Caspary failed to make an impression on Chicago newspaper editors. She settled for a job in advertising that gave her a chance to write. Chicago was then the center of feverish mail-order advertising activity. She provided the entire Middle West with a succession of surprises.

New York came next, where she doubled as magazine editor and free-lance writer. In two years she had four novels published and one play (in collaboration with Winifred Lenihan) produced. At that time she wrote The Night of June 13, the first of many original screen stories.

From the back flap of Stranger Than Truth, 1946

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I am married to I. G. Goldsmith, referred to as the British film producer. As of January 1952, he became an American citizen; he has also produced three American films. Our home is still the same, a hilltop in Beverly Hills. To this we retreat from Hollywood industry and Hollywood headaches. We cultivate a large, not too well disciplined, but magnificent garden of which we are annoyingly proud.

I sell stories to Hollywood picture Studios; also write to them, and in that order. The last of the stories, told to studio people the day before we left for Europe, was written in hotels in Paris and Rome. We have been traveling since January in Italy, France and Germany; blue home for three weeks, and are setting out again for the same countries, to which we’ll add England and Austria. I am a born tripper, follow maps and guidebooks, visit museums and taste all the foods. We shall live somewhere near Nice this summer; my husband will work at the old Rex Ingram Studios and I’ll set up a typewriter . . . but not for the movies.

From the back cover of Thelma, 1952

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And finally among these potted biographies, here is the introduction to Caspary’s Sugar and Spice, as reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1948.

In the mystery field the name of Vera Caspary evokes another name – laura, the title of Miss Caspary’s first detective novel and one of the major successes of this decade. laura was so popular in all its processings that one is tempted to think of the author as Laura Caspary . . . In the course of her varied writing career – advertising copy-writer, editor, novelist, playwright, screen-play writer, even correspondence-school teacher – Vera Caspary has proved herself an explorer of the aberrations of society. Her early work was ambitiously serious. In her first book, the white girl (1929), she dealt vividly, harshly, and realistically with the problem of a Negress who left the South for Chicago and posed as white. At that period in her literary growth Vera Caspary wrote in the hard, materialistic style of Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber. Subsequent novels showed her still probing social backgrounds, and in her 1932 novel, thicker than water, depicted the life of Portuguese Jews in Chicago, describing the subtle alterations . . . and the slow fading of orthodox observances.

After an interval of scripting for the films Miss Caspary created laura – something different from the run-of-the-mill detective story and done with a novel twist and much skill, according to Will Cuppy’s review. bedelia followed – a curious and clever tale in which Miss Caspary ably presented a pathological case history without so much as once finding it necessary to indulge in the special terminology of the psychiatric clinic. Completing a trio of so-called psycho-thrillers," her next book, stranger than truth, was compared by some critics with Kenneth Fearing’s the big clock.

Coming of Age

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The female bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel goes back in classic British women’s fiction at least as far as Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey[2]; we know that Caspary was an anglophile and a connoisseur of classic British fiction, especially the Brontës: the heroine of Murder at the Stork Club adopts the professional name Howarth after the Brontë Parsonage. In homage, Caspary drew heavily on Victorian British writer Wilkie Collins for the character of Waldo in Laura, and for the structure of both Laura and Stranger than Truth. She also probably drew heavily on Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret for the plot of Bedelia.

Like their predecessors, many of Caspary’s heroines who come of age in her stories are variations on Cinderella – tortured Cinderellas as one reviewer called Caspary’s characters – as Vera herself was, in relation to her much older sister Irma.

The fear that I would never grow up to become a beautiful princess was compounded by my mother’s frequent The baby isn’t pretty but she’s awfully cute. Even in this I could not compete with Sister. In addition to having naturally curly hair, playing the piano, keeping a theatre book and studying at the Art Institute, she was cute. In her early twenties a popular girl, she often remarked that one attracted fellows by being kittenish.

Some of the women who come of age in Caspary’s novels do so not when they are teenagers but when they are already physically mature – they are not so much coming of age as coming to a self-realization, an understanding of who they really are, like Emmy Arkwright in The Weeping and the Laughter and Nina Redfield in False Face. And in some of the stories, like Thicker Than Water we see a whole family coming of age over several generations.

Some of the stories I have classed as coming of age also have elements of the psycho-thriller, some of the mechanics of the mystery novel, but in the end the growth of the character is more important to Caspary than the solving of the puzzle; not that solving the puzzle in the classic mystery novel sense is ever Caspary’s central concern – the woman at the center of the story is always the most important thing in any Caspary novel.

The White Girl

[3] (1929)

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She had a white face, a white body, a white soul, but in her veins was Negro blood – a tragic condition that continually reached out to drag her back to the place from which she struggled so desperately to escape. What was her way out? This novel of a girl who passes is the sensation of the New Year.

Sears pre-publication announcement

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A powerfully written novel, charged with emotion and drama, depicting the life story of a beautiful white girl who had Negro blood in her veins.

Sears press blurb

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She had a white face. She had a white body. She had a white soul. She was a white girl in the real meaning of these words. Her wide set dark eyes were dusky mirrors, mysterious. With her fine black hair and white face she looked as if she might be a Spanish aristocrat – but in her veins was Negro blood. A tragic condition that continually reached out to drag her back into the life from which she struggled so desperately to escape.

With her, living together, are two other girls, both white, neither of them knowing the secret; the three totally different from one another, yet all making up the life of the girl today in a great city.

What her life might have been, how successfully she might have solved the problem cannot be foretold – had not love come along.

Back flap of the first edition, 1929

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Vera Caspary in The White Girl, has probed closer to the heart of the almost white Negro than any writer who has thus far attempted to portray the girl who steps over—passes in short. She has not allowed herself to be swept into conventional mental attitudes, nor silly sentimentality. There is a delightful absence of primitive passion, back to Africa, call of the blood, Racial consciousness urge for service, natural inferiority, primitive fear.

Alice Dunbar Nelson[4],

Washington Eagle, February 1, 1929

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My dear Mrs. Nelson:

Yesterday I received a copy of the Washington Eagle with your review of my book. I am still thinking . . and still unsuccessful . . in finding an adequate way of telling you how deeply moved I was by your appraisal of The White Girl.

I am timid about reading reviews because I am still haunted by the fear that this problem of Solaria’s was beyond my understanding. I did not attempt to solve any problem, because I can see no solution except in evolution. As you say the only unanswered question is Why does American life make such a tragedy possible? I’m quite frankly bitter about it because it all seems so unnecessary. Stupidity and ignorance are such unnatural, effete causes for tragedy.

But I feel too small and too feeble to find any logical answer to such a question, and my reason for choosing Solaria was that she represented an individual in an environment that would never be comfortable. Solaria was a damaged soul, and she represented, as far as I could discover, the most striking symbol of the thing I was trying to say.

It was, therefore, extremely gratifying to find in your review not only a clear understanding of what I tried to express, but a much simpler way of saying it. The matter of race consciousness is so much deeper than most people think. There is a saying among Jews that Jews can always spot their own kind, no matter how violent the protestations of Protestantism. The cause of this, I think, sensitiveness to racial characteristics. A Jew on meeting a stranger asks himself, is he Jewish? The non-Jew never bothers to classify strangers unless some violent characteristic arouses his race consciousness.

I hadn’t meant to take up much of your time, talking like this, but I am clumsily trying to thank you for reading my book, for writing of it so sympathetically, and for judging it with such tolerance.

Gratefully, Vera Caspary

148 West Eleventh Street, New York.

Letter to Alice Dunbar Nelson, February 3, 1929

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There has been lately an interest in how the other color lives. That interest had its influence in Nigger Heaven[5], reached its artistic height in Claude McKay’s[6] Home to Harlem. These books were concerned with the life of Harlem. They both mentioned the fact that some 20,000 men and women are passing in New York.

The White Girl is devoted exclusively to that phase of Negro life. It is about a girl who looked white, felt white, had white reactions, hated everything that was black. Finding it perfectly simple to be accepted as white, she entirely cut herself away from her race. . .

There is poignancy in The White Girl’s passion to be white, in her fears, in the picture of the mother of the man whom she was engaged to marry, so completely calm and understanding, but so demanding of her son’s devotion. All the emotions and reactions growing out of the situations, despite the somewhat hectic atmosphere of the book, are impressive.

The book undeniably is hectic, but the life which it depicts is phrenetic and therefore the atmosphere of the book and its material are at one.

There is something very like Bad Girl[7] about The White Girl – they have the same intense reality about them, the author in each case definitely and undeniably knows what she’s talking about and has not the slightest reluctance to tell what she knows. They are both terribly and memorably real.

Miss Caspary was born in Chicago and went to Wendell Phillips High School[8] and retains a vivid impression of her family being continually obliged to move on account of the inroads next door of colored families, so her publishers say, thereby smashing the illusion that The White Girl is autobiographical, and making the book even more remarkable as a record of observation and understanding.

Fanny Butcher[9], Chicago Tribune[10], February 9, 1929[11]

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A year after I’d begged to be allowed to write the photoplay course[12], I held in my hand a loose-leaf volume with an imitation leather cover. Since I’d written those two hundred and fifty-two pages I knew it was not impossible for me to write enough words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters to add up to a novel. I began at once, working at night on my portable typewriter. The story came to life at conception. It was about a girl growing up in Chicago, acquiring the attitudes of a middle-class family, rebelling, seeking independence, learning to accept reality, and choosing her own way of life. It is not unusual for a first novel to be autobiographical. . . Late in 1923 I finished the final draft. Three hundred pages rewritten and revised on second sheets, copied at last on white paper with those blessed words The End at last accomplished. I had proved that I could fill enough pages to make a book. Of their quality I was less sure. I could not look at my work objectively. Pride and anguish, hope and despair were too close to the surface.

Vera Caspary, The Secrets of Grown-Ups

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Eventually, having built up enough courage, Caspary gives the precious manuscript of The White Girl to her friend Jeannette’s elder sister, a high school English teacher, for her appraisal; with a few minor suggestions, the sister says she can see no reason why a publisher might not be interested. Someone whom Caspary knows knows someone who works for Bobbs-Merrill in Indianapolis who puts in a word about her advertising work and her new book; Caspary is asked to submit the manuscript. A dizzying moment in my life; I was tempted to stop strangers on the street and announce that a publisher had asked to read my novel.

After it is inevitably rejected, the typescript eventually finds its way to the literary agent Anne Watkins, who tells Caspary that the novel is too personal to be published but hopes that Caspary will let her handle any future works. She does. Watkins gets Caspary a three book contract with the Century Company, which includes the novel Ladies and Gents. But Century sit on the deal and Watkins submits The White Girl to the new and undistinguished publisher Sears & Company.

I would have preferred more celebrated publishers although I was happy at having the book accepted and rushed into print. Changes were suggested. The story had ended on what I believed was a note of wry honesty. The heroine, who had deceived and lost her lover had, like all working girls, to keep on with her job. The publishers wanted the story to end sensationally. Publishers and editors, I thought, must certainly be wiser than a young writer. I changed the ending.

In December I received the first copy. The White Girl by Vera Caspary. I could not be separated from the precious thing. I carried it with me at all times, slept with it beside my pillow. The book came out in January 1929. Reviews were better than I’d dared hope for. There was a rumor that I was a black girl who had written an autobiography. The book went into a second printing[13]. There was no great change in my life. No inches were added to my height; the shape of my nose was not altered.

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The White Girl bears comparison to several other novels about the subject of passing, released around the same time, mostly by black authors. Passing by Nella Larsen was first published, like The White Girl, in New York in 1929 but a few months later and appearing to more tepid reviews and fewer sales, though both novels have the same settings and subject. In Larsen’s novel, Clare, whose father is a janitor like Solaria’s in The White Girl, passes as white so successfully that her white husband never suspects she is black until later on when she reunites with an old friend who is involved in the (fictional) Negro Welfare League. When he finds out, the husband accuses Clare of being a ‘damned dirty nigger!’ Clare falls out of the window and dies, though it is not clear whether she was pushed or if she has killed herself rather than carry on with her life after her true racial heritage has been revealed.

In The White Girl, central character Solaria has a black family but is very striking and attractive to men of all races; like Clare she ‘passes’ successfully.

She was a tall girl with a languorous fine figure, small hips, exquisite breasts and a narrow head carried high on a sensitive neck. Her wide-set dark eyes were dusky mirrors, mysterious, hardly alive. Her nose was straight and arrogant, set bravely above a short upper lip. With her fine black hair and white face, she looked as if she might be a Spanish aristocrat.

In Larsen’s Passing, Clare’s friend Irene has a similar Hispanic look. They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a Gypsy. Never, when she was alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro. Like Clare, their mutual friend Gertrude has married later a white man. Irene reflects, though it couldn’t be truthfully said that she was ‘passing.’ Her husband—what was his name?—had been in school with her and had been quite well aware, as had his family and most of his friends, I that she was a Negro. It hadn’t, Irene knew, seemed to matter to him then. Did it now, she wondered.

Irene does not herself consciously try to pass and she is curious about Clare and this hazardous business of ‘passing, this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly. When Clare asks Irene if she herself never thought of passing, Irene answers quickly No. Why should I?"

For her own part, Irene in Larsen’s novel finds that her annoyance at women who try to pass arose from a feeling of being outnumbered, a sense of aloneness, in her adherence to her own class and kind; not merely in the great thing of marriage, but in the whole pattern of her life as well. Irene feels that she is betraying her race by helping Clare hide her origin from her husband but is also reluctant to betray her friend in support of her race:

she shrank away from the idea of telling that man, Clare Kendry’s white husband, anything that would lead him to suspect that his wife was a Negro. Nor could she write it, or telephone it, or tell it to someone else who would tell him. She was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race! The thing that bound and suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took none at all, something would be crushed. A person or the race. Clare, herself, or the race. Or, it might be, all three.

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Even closer even closer to The White Girl than Passing is Jessie Redmon Fauset’s[14] Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral, 1928, which is also about a black girl, Angela Murray, pale enough to pass, which she does, even though her sister Virginia – like Solaria’s brothers in The White Girl – cannot. Angela even cuts her sister when she is in the company of a white friends for fear she will be outed as colored. Like Solaria’s, Angela’s parents are proud of their race, but she is not.

The stories which Junius and Mattie told of difficulties overcome, of the arduous learning of trades, of the pitiful scraping together of infinitesimal savings; would have made a latter-day Iliad, but to Angela they were merely a description of a life which she at any cost would avoid living. Somewhere in the world were paths which lead to broad thoroughfares, large, bright houses, delicate niceties of existence. Those paths Angela meant to find and frequent.

Angela’s mother, also pale-skinned, also passes, but only part-time, only as an amusement; to her it is simply a game; It was with no idea of disclaiming her own that she sat in orchestra seats which Philadelphia denied to colored patrons. But when Junius or indeed any other dark friend accompanied her she was the first to announce that she liked to sit in the balcony or gallery. Angela’s father is amused by and encourages his wife’s escapades: Junius preferred one of his wife’s sparkling accounts of a Saturday’s adventure in ‘passing’ to all the tall stories told by cronies at his lodge.

At school, Angela has a friend who seems to be unaware of her racial background. When the friend finds out about Angela she is outraged. Colored! Angela, you never told me that you were colored! At this age, Angela is still color blind and has no idea of the implications. Tell you that I was colored! Why of course I never told you that I was colored. Why should I?

After their parents die, Angela and her sister share the money from the house and the insurance money; both end up in New York. But whereas Virginia embraces the life and people of Harlem, Angela stays downtown and enrolls in art college, still naïvely assuming her color will not be a barrier. She had not mentioned the fact of her Negro strain, indeed she had no occasion to, but she did not believe that this fact if known would cause any change in attitude. Artists were noted for their broad-mindedness. Still, even Angela sees the attraction of Harlem, the camaraderie, the community, the richness and seething flow of life in a walled city where everyone is equal.

Nowhere down town did she see life like this. Oh, all this was fuller, richer, not finer but richer with the difference in quality that there is between velvet and silk. Harlem was a great city, but after all it was a city within a city, and she was glad, as she strained for last glimpses out of the lurching L train, that she had cast in her lot with the dwellers outside its dark and serried tents.

But downtown, Angela still feels constrained from making close friends while Virginia is living with her. Two of the girls had asked her to their homes but she had always refused; such invitations would have to be returned with similar ones and the presence of Jinny would entail explanations.

Angela then meets the very white, very wealthy Roger. She had never seen anyone like him: so gay, so beautiful, like a blond, glorious god, so overwhelming, so persistent. She sees that marrying Roger could be her ticket to the life she covets. She saw her life rounding out like a fairy tale. Poor, colored—colored in America; unknown, a nobody! And here at her hand was the forward thrust shadow of love and of great wealth. But Roger turns out to be a racist: while he is having a meal in a restaurant with Angela, Roger insists that the management expel a colored family. Angela finally sees him in his true colors. He had blackballed Negroes in Harvard, aspirants for small literary or honor societies. ‘I’d send ’em all back to Africa if I could,’ Roger says to Virginia. It then turns out that he has no intention of marrying her but wants to set her up in an apartment as a kind of courtesan.

Angela does eventually come out, when she and another woman from the art college both win prizes to go and live in Paris. But the other woman is known to be colored and the prize is withdrawn on the grounds that other passengers on the boat to Europe may be offended by her presence. Angela is outraged and comes out as colored in sympathy, knowing that she will also lose her prize. However, both of them keep the money and Angela decides to go to Paris anyway, on her own. Before she goes, she is reconciled with her sister. All of the complications of these last few years,—and you can’t guess what complications there have been, darling child,—have been based on this business of ‘passing’.

*   *   *

Like Vera Caspary, Edna Ferber[15] was a Jewish woman author who began her personal fight against the rise of fascism early[16] and also wrote sympathetically about race. Ferber’s Show Boat, 1926, better known as a musical[17] and three films[18], is not about race specifically but it does have a subplot concerning passing. The characters in the novel all live on a showboat travelling up and down the Mississippi giving theatrical performances. Julie Dozier is one of the actresses, married to the actor Steve. Julie thinks no one knows that she had a black mother and a white father, but someone has found out and told the local sheriff in the town where the boat is moored – it turns out to be one of the engineers who liked Julie and was upset when she would have nothing to do with him.

Miscegenation. Case of a Negro woman married to a white man. Criminal offense in this state, as you well know, says the sheriff when he boards the boat. But before the sheriff arrives, Steve, to everyone’s astonishment, has sliced a sharp knife through Julie’s forefinger. "A