Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to Younger Negro Artists. Published 267 West 136th St., New York City. December, 1926. $1.00.
In Fire, a new quarterly “devoted to younger Negro artists,” the youth section of the New Negro movement has marched off in a gay and self-confident manoeuver of artistic secession. The bold, arresting red and black of its jacket is not accidental—this is left-wing literary modernism with deliberate intent: the Little Review, This Quarter, and The Quill are obvious artistic cousins. Indeed one’s first impression is that Fire is more characteristic as an exhibit of unifying affinities in the psychology of contemporary youth than of any differentiating traits of a new Negro literary school. A good deal of it is reflected Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Dreiser, Joyce and Cummings, re-cast in the context of Negro life and experience. This alone would be significant as an opening up of the sluicegates of the closed and long stagnant channels of Negro thought; but there is back of this obvious rush toward modernism also a driving push toward racial expression. The churning eddies of the young Negro mind in the revolt from conservatism and convention have not permitted this to come clearly and smoothly to the surface; one can only glimpse it in spots and feel it in the undercurrents. For the present, the racialism of this interesting young group is more of a drive than an arrival, more of an experiment than a discovery.
The list of editors and contributors presents an interesting roll-call: of names already well-known like Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, and Aaron Douglas, the brilliant young artist whose work is really the outstanding feature of the issue; of names rapidly forging to the front, Zora Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, Arthur Fauset, Arna Bontemps; and significant newcomers, Helene Johnson, John Davis, Waring Cuney, Edward Silvera, Lewis Alexander and Richard Bruce. Wallace Thurman, as editor of the initial number, has marshalled them into a charging brigade of literary revolt, especially against the bulwarks of Puritanism. The strong sex radicalism of many of the contributions will shock many well-wishers and elate some of our adversaries; but the young Negro evidently repudiates any special moral burden of proof along with any of the other social disabilities that public opinion saddled upon his fathers. Like the past generation that found a short-cut to emancipation in fighting for freedom, these ardent youngsters hurdle the non-combatant positions of respectability to the firing line of moral challenge and reform. But if Negro life is to provide a healthy antidote to Puritanism, and to become one of the effective instruments of sound artistic progress, its flesh values must more and more be expressed in the clean, original, primitive but fundamental terms of the senses and not, as too often in this particular issue of Fire, in hectic imitation of the “naughty nineties” and effete echoes of contemporary decadence. Back to Whitman would have been a better point of support than a left-wing pivoting on Wilde and Beardsley. However, we hope and expect that in subsequent issues, the younger Negro literary movement will establish its own base and with time gain a really distinctive and representative alignment.