GLR July-August 2025

plores 1971’s Self-Portrait in a Paris Bath House . The paint ing is a surprising work, as Delaney was generally furtive and uncomfortable with his sexuality (while also desiring a partner beyond the occasional pick-up). According to Leeming, De laney compartmentalized his personal life, with one group of his friends knowing nothing about the other. In this late self portrait, however: “Delaney sits in the bathhouse not as a peep ing lech but as an adorned figure perhaps receiving guests in an open-arched room. ... Delaney’s bathhouse is a temple to restoration and eroticism.” The final section of the book explores how Baldwin and De laney have shaped the work of current artists and writers. De scribing Delaney’s art in a letter to Harry Belafonte, Baldwin’s assessment also applies to the writer himself: “He brings great light out of the terrible darkness of his journey, and makes his journey, and his endeavors, and his triumph, ours.” Greatly enhanced by 32 color plates of Delaney’s paintings, Speculative Light ’s scholarly investigations into the Baldwin Delaney relationship are easily accessible to the general reader. The book is valuable to anyone curious about the interplay be tween different genres of writing (fiction vs. nonfiction) or styles of painting (abstraction vs. realism), as well as the cross pollination between different forms of artistic expression.

the streets of Greenwich Village with Delaney, who pointed down to an oily puddle, saying only, ‘Look.’ Baldwin realized he could see all the lights and colors of the city in the puddle’s iridescence, and in that moment, learned to trust his sight.” Critic D. Quentin Miller finds versions of Delaney’s life story recurring throughout Baldwin’s fiction as “the model of the vic tim-artist who takes on the cultural burden of his society and suffers in order to show us the value of the light that can ‘re deem and reconcile and heal.’” For Miller and Indiana Uni versity professor Walton Muyumba, Delaney’s influence is strongest in some of Baldwin’s more formally experimental and often overlooked “mixed form” works: the novel If Beale Street Could Talk , the essay-memoir hybrids No Name in the Street and The Devil Finds Work , and his recently rediscovered chil dren’s book Little Man, Little Man . Section Three of Speculative Light turns to Delaney’s paint ings and the “contradiction” between his abstract work and his more realistic portraits. A cultural theorist and poet who fre quently uses music to advance his work, Fred Moten hails the artist as “the greatest painter of and with yellow in the history of the world,” considering the abstract representations of the jazz he loved. Tyler T. Schmidt, author of Desegregating De sire: Race and Sexuality in Cold War American Literature , ex

A Crack in the Harlem Closet

B Y WAY OF the complicated life of poet Countée Cullen and the influence of the Harlem Renais sance, an autobiographical med itation emerges from Kevin Brown’s combination of family recollections and literary essays: Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance: A Personal History .This en gaging narrative, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, is structured in

ished childhood. Unlike Shapland, Brown keeps his subject at an emotional remove, so the narrative of Cullen’s life comes off as more of a standard biography. This al lows him to put himself in the position of his readers as he begins to recognize truths about Cullen and his circle that lead him to reflect upon his own choices: “I abandon my own novel, forty-five years and two marriages ago, to begin my personal search

T HOMAS K EITH

COUNTÉE CULLEN’S HARLEM RENAISSANCE A Personal History by Kevin Brown Parlor Press. 196 pages, $23.95

24 essays that are initially focused on Cullen and other mid 20th-century Black writers, then weave in responses to Cullen’s work by Black artists and writers of the last forty years. Much like Jenn Shapland in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers , Brown tells his own version of the story of discov ering another writer’s life, although he does so in a more cir cumspect and tangential way than Shapland did. He begins with a biographical narrative, including sources and footnotes, all in a concise and easy style, about Cullen coming to terms with his same-sex attractions and his two marriages—the first to the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, which lasted for two years and ended in divorce when Cullen confessed his attraction to men. Brown devotes much of the book to Cullen’s life with his sec ond wife, Brown’s own great-grandmother, Ida Mae Robertson Cullen-Cooper. Cullen’s primary dilemma was trying to recon cile the world of high society with that of literature, where he felt more comfortable with his sexual nature and his impover Thomas Keith most recently contributed a critical essay to Early Sto ries by Tennessee Williams from the University of Iowa Press. July–August 2025

for a usable past: the fiction you are now reading.” In nearly every instance, Brown’s relationship to literature, history, and a Black æsthetic is that of a discerning observer and interpreter. He is not possessive of the legacies he writes about, nor does he insinuate himself into the narratives. Rather, the his torical information he gathers provides a lens through which he can view his own development: “Until I’d become a working writer myself, until the challenges of sustaining creativity on a daily basis beyond middle-age became real to me, I simply had no way of imagining Countée as a struggling writer.” Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Andy Razaf, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, Claude McKay, Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, and many oth ers—who all seem to have known each other—make appear ances as Brown positions the 1920s and the Harlem Renaissance as a global movement. By casting light on connections and di vergences between the worlds of literature, jazz, blues, religion, politics, education, and science, he dispels the notion that there is a unified identity or experience among the African diaspora, proposing instead a serendipitous flowering of Black achieve

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