When Helga Crane, the main character in Nella Larsen’s novel “Quicksand,” walked through the streets of Copenhagen, people were amazed. “Her dark, alien appearance was to most people an astonishment,” wrote Larsen, an acclaimed Harlem Renaissance author. “Some stared surreptitiously, some openly, and some stopped dead in front of her in order more fully to profit by their stares.”
More than 90 years after the publication of “Quicksand,” Larsen’s 1928 novel about a mixed-race woman’s unsuccessful journey to find her place in the world, a Black person might not receive a second glance exploring the Danish capital, which has seen a marked rise in the number of immigrants, including from Africa and the Middle East. While some things have changed drastically, many of the sights that Larsen’s fictional Helga Crane came across in Copenhagen remain much the same.
The cyclists crisscrossing the city are as ubiquitous today as they were when Helga learned to dodge the “innumerable bicycles like a true Copenhagener,” as is the city’s striking and colorful architecture. (UNESCO named it the World Capital of Architecture in 2023.) Denmark has often been ranked among the happiest countries in the world.
Larsen never explicitly wrote about her own day-to-day activities in Copenhagen. But biographers and critics have long regarded “Quicksand” as a semi-autobiographical work. That view was reinforced by revelations about Larsen’s life in Denmark. One of Larsen’s biographers, George Hutchinson, uncovered a passenger manifest that recorded Larsen’s travel from Denmark, and a Danish genealogist, Shari Jensen, discovered that Larsen’s relatives lived in Copenhagen at the same address as the relatives of the fictional Helga.
The novelist, born to immigrant parents, Mary Hanson, from Denmark, and Peter Walker, from the Danish West Indies, had lived in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago. Her mother later remarried a white Dane, and Larsen was raised in a white Danish household in Chicago, a rapidly growing and increasingly segregated city. Larsen spent years in Denmark as a child and then as a teenager and young adult. In 1912, she returned to the United States and later wrote “Quicksand,” her first novel, with its middle section devoted to Copenhagen. Published by the respected Alfred A. Knopf publishing house in 1928, the book was widely reviewed, including in The New York Times. W.E.B. DuBois, the sociologist and leading Black activist of the Harlem Renaissance era, praised it as “a fine, thoughtful and courageous piece of work.”
Larsen was propelled to literary stardom with the back-to-back publications of “Quicksand,” and her 1929 novel, “Passing,” for which she is best known, as the Harlem Renaissance cultural movement took shape in the 1920s. “Passing,” which was adapted into a well-received 2021 film, is about childhood friends, both light-skinned, who reconnected from opposite sides of the color line as adults, with one meeting a tragic end. Larsen won a 1930 Guggenheim fellowship based upon the success of her two novels — a first for a Black female author.
But before she found acclaim, Larsen very likely lived with relatives at Maria Kirkeplads 2 in the working-class Vesterbro section of Copenhagen, a now gentrifying neighborhood where today Larsen would see markets selling plantains and vegetables popular among the immigrant communities, African shops selling hair for braiding, a shawarma restaurant and cafes.
As an African American scholar who has studied the Harlem Renaissance and the experiences of Black Americans living in Denmark, a country I’ve visited 18 times, I have been retracing Larsen’s footsteps in Copenhagen for the last two years. I was eager to see the things and places that made an impression on her (and Helga).
Before Larsen’s Helga arrived in Denmark, she taught at a Black boarding school in the American South. Unsettled by the school’s racially fraught standards, Helga left in search of a space more aligned with her own multiracial identity. When Helga contacted her mother’s white relatives in Chicago, Larsen wrote, her Uncle Peter’s new wife treated her with contempt and her uncle gave her $5,000 and encouraged her to go to Denmark.
In Copenhagen, then an overwhelmingly white city, Helga’s Aunt Katrina and Uncle Poul paraded her around as an object. “You must have bright things to set off the color of your lovely brown skin. Striking things, exotic things,” her aunt said. “You must make an impression.” Helga described her status as a “decoration. A curio. A peacock.”
The innovative food culture of Copenhagen, home to some of the world’s most famous restaurants, including Noma and Alchemist, is an ever-present motif in Larsen’s book. Smørrebrød, the classic Danish open-faced sandwich, plays a supporting role. Helga “partook of an infinite variety of rich cakes and smørrebørd,” Larsen wrote.
“She liked it, this new life,” the author wrote of Helga, who later “wondered just how many of these delicious sandwiches she had consumed since setting foot on Denmark’s soil.”
Larsen, I imagine, would have patronized Selma (if only it had been open one century before). Selma is the first Copenhagen restaurant specializing in smørrebrød to earn a recognition by the Michelin Guide. Selma, in the Indre By (Inner City) neighborhood, was awarded a Michelin designation in 2019.
I dined at Selma with Martyn Bone, an associate professor who has taught “Quicksand” in his English literature class at the University of Copenhagen. We talked over lunch in 2022 about other African American literature with Black protagonists in Copenhagen. The author Richard Wright, well known for the novel, “Native Son,” wrote a short story, “Big Black Good Man,” about a racial misunderstanding set in the Scandinavian city.
After a multicourse meal, I took a stroll for a few blocks to cross Queen Louise’s Bridge, where Helga often found herself “loitering on the long bridge,” which divides two lakes. It is still a fine location for a languorous respite, taking in the passers-by strolling and cycling across it.
I later turned my attention to Gammel Strand, a picturesque street in central Copenhagen bordering the narrow Slotsholmen’s Canal. The street more than a century ago was where fishmongers sold their products, and where Helga’s appearance “always roused lively and audible, but friendly, interest, long after she became in other parts of the city an accepted curiosity.”
Today, there is a granite statue called “fiskerkone,” or fisherman’s wife — a nod to the history of that location where Helga encountered a woman who asked her, “to what manner of mankind she belonged.” She replied, “I’m a Negro.”
The street is now lined with stylish restaurants and cafes and a modern art gallery, Gammel Strand. It has a lovely canal-side eatery, the Cafe Lille Fugl, serving classic Danish pastries. At an outdoor table, you can watch tourist boats glide by and look across the canal to the commanding view of the ochre-colored Thorvaldsen’s Museum.
You can venture across the canal to Christiansborg Palace on the island of Slotsholmen, a grand, neo-baroque building and seat of the Danish Parliament. Visitors can take tours of the Royal Reception Rooms, as I did in 2021 with my study abroad class of American college students whom I taught about African-American expatriates in Denmark. Just a few blocks away is Amalienborg Palace, the official residence of King Frederik X, where every day at noon there is a changing of the guards. Larsen wrote of Helga taking in the formal ceremony, “the pageant of the blue-clad, sprucely tailored soldiers in the daily parade.”
In her inner dialogue in the novel, Helga Crane reassessed her views of Blackness in her Copenhagen experiences and in the United States.
The novelist was remarkable in approaching the subject of race as a modernist, rather than drawing on Southern tropes or vernacular to convey her characters’ Blackness, said Thadious M. Davis, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied and written about Larsen’s work. Davis said the fictional Helga’s travels demonstrated a “determined effort to attain a space within which all parts of her identity can coexist.”
But while Larsen was celebrated as one of the Harlem Renaissance era’s most promising writers in the late 1920s, she was largely forgotten by midcentury, only to be rediscovered in the late 1970s by African American female professors who included her novels in their classes and academic writing. Her novels are now taught in literature and Black studies courses on mainly American college campuses.
Heidi W. Durrow, a mixed-race American author who proudly calls herself an “Afro Viking,” said Larsen was her literary muse. Larsen’s “Danish identity wasn’t simply a genealogical or biological fact but a lived identity and experience,” said Durrow, the author of the novel “The Girl Who Fell from the Sky” and the daughter of a Danish immigrant mother and an African American father. “During her lifetime there wasn’t a real ability to have a conversation about her multiracial identity.”
Larsen was alienated from the life of the Black middle class, with its emphasis on school and family ties, its fraternities and sororities, because of the circumstances of “her low birth,” “mixed-race parentage” and her lack of a college degree, wrote Darryl Pinckney, an author and critic, in an introduction for a recent edition of Larsen’s novel “Passing.” “She also wasn’t on the side of Black critics who valued art and literature by Blacks as the cultural arm of the freedom struggle,” Pinckney wrote. “She would always be on her own, her own secret.”
One night, I was drawn to a location in “Quicksand” that is the setting for one of the book’s most memorable scenes. It is the historic Cirkus Building in the heart of Copenhagen, a circular building completed in 1886 as a venue for circus performances. It is now a venue for special events and dinner shows. Larsen wrote of Helga’s dismay at the kind of entertainment she saw on display there.
The protoganist was initially mortified to watch two Black Americans sing and dance in a vaudeville show. She noticed the people in the crowd “clapped and howled and shouted for more!” But Helga was “not amused” by their performance. “Instead she was filled with a fierce hatred for the cavorting Negroes on the stage. She felt shamed, betrayed, as if these pale pink and white people among whom she lived had suddenly been invited to look upon something in her which she had hidden away and wanted to forget,” the novelist wrote.
“Larsen wanted readers to feel how difficult — impossible really — it was for Helga to try and escape racism; racism and sexism follow her wherever she goes,” said Carla Kaplan, a professor of American literature at Northeastern University who wrote the introduction for a recent Norton Critical Edition of “Quicksand.”
After Helga spent two years in Copenhagen, her initial excitement slowly turned into feelings of “discontent” and “restlessness,” common refrains in the novel. “This knowledge, this certainty of the division of her life into two parts in two lands, into physical freedom in Europe and spiritual freedom in America, was unfortunate, inconvenient, expensive,” Larsen wrote.
As Helga boarded a ship back to the United States, her sojourn ended with “Good-bye, Denmark! Good-bye. Good-bye!”
Larsen left too, publishing “Quicksand” 16 years later. After returning to the United States, Larsen would marry, publish two novels, later divorce and then vanish from Harlem’s literary and artistic scene. Her reticence prompted one author to suggest that she was “the most elusive” of Harlem Renaissance writers. She returned to her first profession, nursing, to support herself, and had a fatal heart attack in obscurity in 1964 in a Manhattan apartment at age 72. She reportedly died while reading a book in bed.
“It was a fitting end for a woman whose entire life had been a story of swift erasure,” according to an obituary in The New York Times.
But Larsen is not forgotten. Durrow, the self-described Afro Viking writer, installed a headstone on Larsen’s unmarked grave in 2006. The epitaph reads, “A Novelist Remembered.”
The post Looking for the Restless Soul of Nella Larsen in Copenhagen appeared first on New York Times.
