Reviewed by J. A. Barnes

Richard Bruce Nugent, one of the young artists of the Harlem Renaissance, never completed the roman à clef he began in 1928. When he died in 1987, he left several drafts, and from these, editor Thomas Wirth constructed Gentleman Jigger, A Novel of the Harlem Renaissance. It is risky business to cobble together a writer’s unfinished manuscript to create the novel the author intended. In the effort to “remain faithful to Nugent’s intent and…style,” Wirth admits, “[c]opyediting was kept to a minimum.” The result is less than satisfactory as literary art. Loosely structured, disjointed, verbose, and ultimately unsatisfying, Gentleman Jigger is still a valuable contribution to the literature of the Renaissance for its insider’s look into issues of race, color, class, and, especially, sexuality among the various constituents of Jazz Age New York.

Nugent does little to disguise his alter ego in the novel, Jerome Stuartt Brennan, a “vagabond poet” who comes to New York from Washington and lands within the inner circle of the young lights like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Wallace Thurman. As an inhabitant of “Niggeratti Manor,” who reportedly had an excellent recall of people and events, Nugent recants the daily doings of the talented and well-connected, the inhabitants of Harlem and the downtown whites who found Negroes so fascinating. In a sometimes disjointed narrative and wordy passages of exposition, the novel follows the young, light-complexioned homosexual Stuartt from Harlem to Greenwich Village to Chicago and back to New York as he challenges the conventions of race and sexuality at a time when revelations of homosexual relationships would have been groundbreaking and shocking. Nugent was the first African-American man to write openly about being gay, in his prose poem for the magazine Fire!!, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.” Gentleman Jigger, says Arnold Rampersad, “radically alter[s] the landscape of Harlem Renaissance literature…mak[ing] it impossible to evade or suppress the central role of gay writers in this cultural period.”

The novel reveals little more about the Renaissance that readers of Hughes, Hurston, and Thurman don’t know already. Considered a satire in the same vein as Thurman’s Infants of the Spring, it is not as biting as that work. Readers get little of the sense of the jazz in this Jazz Age novel. While the characters frequent the uptown nightspots, we learn more about their drink orders than we do about the entertainment. Neither are the characters well formed. Rusty (Thurman) lives with Stuartt and appears frequently in the first part of the book, but Tony (Hughes) and Nona (Hurston) drift in and out of the story, their characters remaining flat and static. Nor does Gentleman Jigger clear up any questions about the sexuality of these fellow writers, particularly about Hughes. The focus is on Stuartt, the Gentleman Jigger (a very light Negro who could pass for white).

Stuartt shares an apartment and a bed with Rusty, but it’s not at all clear that the relationship is physical. The novel is more frank when recounting Stuartt’s sexual involvements with Italian gangsters in New York and Chicago. The intelligent, lively poet and artist charms his way into bed with dangerous men who outwardly profess scorn toward “queers.” Stuartt manages to stay alive and unhurt even when he upsets his lover Orini, said by Nugent to be based on Lucky Luciano.

Stuartt provides Orini his first experience of gay sex. Afterwards, Stuartt tells him, “You’re one of the handsomest people I’ve ever seen, and your hair is lovely. But you’re still Orini to me,” and the Chicago gangster in anger says, “You lousy little punk.” Stuartt’s intelligence, quick wit, and moxy soothe Orini’s temper and later allow even Stuartt’s discarded gangster lovers to remain friendly. These qualities in Stuartt provide the most engaging aspects of the novel. Through little effort of his own, Stuartt becomes a successful artist and wins his place in the pantheon of Renaissance artists. Equally as effortlessly, he emerges as an intriguing character, especially as he provides a look into the life of Nugent himself, one of the lesser-known Negro artists from the period.

Although it is a novel in need of editing, Gentleman Jigger provides readers with a new experience of and a new voice from the Harlem Renaissance, and is therefore a valuable resource and an interesting read.