Author Seeks a Renaissance for a Lost Era

Steven Corbin wrote his just-published novel, “No Easy Place to Be,” on a desk next to the washer and dryer in the small laundry room of his 1910 Los Feliz duplex apartment, where the phone sits on the floor and he must exert himself to answer calls.

His spacious living room is bare except for an old couch facing the fireplace. In the large dining room, there’s only an old cabinet and a dining table pressed against the wall.

There’s a reason for his home’s spare decor--and it’s not just financial.

“I need space for my characters to walk around so I can understand them,” Corbin, 35, says. “The characters are allowed to bring themselves to the surface where I can see and hear them. And I talk to them.”

He might, for example, chat with Velma, a character from his book. “I’ll say, ‘I don’t know, Velma. Would you really do that?’ I need to play out their development.”

For Corbin, the latest twist in his development as a writer came with the publication of his first novel, set in the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s in which blacks from Africa, the West Indies and across the United States mingled their talents in a remarkably explosive, romantic, creative and productive way.

Corbin spent two years researching the seminal period of black life and wrote his 447-page work, which experts say is one of the few novels ever published by a Los Angeles black, in seven months.

“I wanted to say something about black writers,” Corbin explains, adding that he believes the Harlem Renaissance “is a missing chapter (that) I wanted to put back into American history. No one knows about the Harlem Renaissance, and that’s a large error. That’s offensive to me.

“What’s even more offensive is that the only thing we remember about the Harlem Renaissance is the Cotton Club, where blacks danced and sang and did buffoonery. We do not . . . remember our novelists, our playwrights and our great actors such as Paul Robeson.”

Family Tales

But as a youngster in Jersey City, N.J., Corbin recalls hearing his grandmother’s riveting stories of the Cotton Club, where all-black revues performed for white-only audiences. He heard her tales of thousands of blacks taking elegant Sunday strolls on 7th Avenue. Later, he learned about the artistic and intellectual fervor in Harlem during the Renaissance, when singer-actor Robeson, black nationalist Marcus Garvey, scholar Alaine Locke and authors such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston all were powerful forces.

He felt he could best capture the time, not with a historical study, but in a work of fiction “on a grand scale--to show all that went on.” He blends the elements into the story of three Harlem sisters: one who longs to return to Africa, another who tries to pass for white and a third who writes novels.

His readers visit nightclubs, rent parties, artists’ soirees, white philanthropist’s mansions and meetings of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Assn. His characters run into Robeson, Hughes, Hurston, Duke Ellington and the white artists who socialized with them, including playwright Eugene O’Neill and composer George Gershwin.

Early reviews give Corbin high marks for his historical accuracy but criticize how his characters interact and cite other flaws. “While his dialogue is sometimes pointed and vivid, too often the writing is stilted and woefully cliched,” said Publishers Weekly, adding that Corbin has produced “an interesting but flawed treatment of a period of great social flux.”

Shrugs Off Critics

Corbin seems unruffled by the faint praise.

Of critics, the 5-foot-10 author whose rippling arms show that he has lifted his share of weights, says simply, “I never agree with what they say, and I don’t know what they look for. So I don’t worry about that.”

What Corbin is interested in is developing his writing skills, which he only recently began to tap.

Corbin’s mother was a housewife. His father, who attended college, managed a supermarket. He has two brothers and attended Essex County College in Newark, N.J., before earning a scholarship to USC’s cinema-television school, where he stayed for two years before he ran out of money and left in 1977.

He then supported himself by working as a legal secretary. He formulated ideas for screenplays, which he never wrote, and finally figured what he really wanted to be was a novelist.

“I had to decide whether I could really work in Hollywood, in terms of writing something I could get made,” he says. “At that time, there was a real dearth of black product coming out, so that was working against me. And everyone in this town was a screenplay writer. It was a joke. People would say, ‘Oh, you’re a screen writer? That’s nice. What do you really do?’

”. . . So I just got up one day in 1981 and went to the typewriter to write a story, as best I knew how. It was a short story, which grew into a novella. Although I really did not know what I was doing, that led me into a segue. I thought, this sounds pretty decent, and if I can write this, I should be able to do a novel.”

Discovering Black Literature

His decision followed a belated introduction to literature. He read little before college but began devouring novels at school.

“I think college made me realize my life was not complete unless I was reading,” he says, adding that after he left school, he began reading black writers, particularly James Baldwin.

“I never had any black lit in high school or college,” he says. “I was catching up. People would talk about ‘Invisible Man,’ ‘Native Son,’ ‘Black Boy’ or ‘Another Country’ and I would say, ‘Oh, so I have a predecessor in black literature.’

“From reading fiction I learned, ‘Yes, you can write novels.’ From reading James Baldwin, I learned, ‘I must write them.’ What Baldwin said to me was that, ‘We must create and disseminate the written word to perpetuate our own history. It’s our responsibility to tell our story.’ ”

Corbin--who, besides working as a legal secretary, took jobs as a word processor, script typist and cab driver--wrote a novel in 1982. It went unsold.

Persistence Is Rewarded

But he stuck to his work and produced “No Easy Place to Be” in 1984. Six years after he started writing, Simon & Schuster bought his novel and paid Corbin an advance big enough so he could quit his other jobs.

Malaika Adero, the Simon & Schuster editor who bought Corbin’s manuscript, said it had the elements of successful fiction: “It had glamour. It had sex. It had race. It had things that dazzle. The Uptown social life of Harlem in the ‘20s--it’s a very romantic period. That helped tremendously.”

Corbin wrote another novel in 1986, which the publisher is considering. If it does not sell, he will write another.

“I knew I was going to be published some day,” Corbin says, exuding confidence. “I knew there was a place in the American literary family for me. That’s the only propeller that kept me going.

“I think it’s a very eclectic audience and that I write stories white people want to read. You do not have to be of the black experience. I meet all kinds of people and I try to write about those people.

“I don’t think it’s any different than Larry McMurtry writing ‘Lonesome Dove’ with one black character. A story is a story. That is what readers want. I think I know what readers want and that is what I try to give them.”