The Real Harlem Gets Mugged in Corbin Novel : NO EASY PLACE TO BE <i> by Steven Corbin (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 417 pp.) </i>

“No Easy Place to Be,” purporting to be the story of the 1919-29 Harlem Renaissance (as seen through the eyes of three Harlem sisters), is a major disappointment. Instead of illuminating this fascinating time and place, Steven Corbin’s first novel reduces it to the level of absurdity.

The lives of the three sisters--Velma, a writer; Miriam, a nurse (and Marcus Garvey follower), and Louise, a Cotton Club dancer who passes for white--are potentially interesting. And some important questions--race consciousness, black feminism, and white patronage of black arts--are raised. But the language and situations are always either offensive or foolish. Moreover, Corbin’s three black male characters are lamentable in the extreme. Two are more or less homosexual, one is a brutal stereotype, and all hate women.

Velma’s story is pivotal. It is Velma who asserts her Negro feminism (on discovering that women are not welcome in the Harlem Writers Workshop) and ponders the fact that Renaissance visual artists seem to reflect their African heritage more easily than do its writers. (In blaming the influence of European culture, Corbin seems unaware that the African tradition was always visual and oral, never written.)

Velma struggles under the tyrannical condescension of a white Park Avenue sponsor(based on the famous “Godmother” of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston) who demands “gaity” and “exotic primitiveness” from her proteges, rather than social comment. Velma further asserts her race consciousness by being arrested for “lying-in” at a white beach.

Unfortunately, Corbin pays only cursory attention to these questions. He concentrates, instead, on a quasi- menage a trois romance between Velma and two Harlem writers--Rudy and Scott. Rudy, a homosexual, seduces Velma (in the course of “research” for a heterosexual love scene) and is then discovered by her in bed with a man. Scott (who is described as a “Negro Adonis,” with the kind of looks that “make even men want to gaze as he disrobed in a locker room or Turkish bath” is equally sexually ambivalent. And he is cruelly manipulative enough to allow Velma to discover him in flagrante with Rudy.”

Corbin’s sexual language is singularly regrettable. Rudy is discomfitted at watching Velma and Scott kiss and “listening to wet tongues and saliva swish around in a cramped automobile while the windows fogged.” And both the political potential of the Garvey movement and Harlem Hospital racism are virtually ignored in Miriam’s story--in favor of when and how “thrilling oral sex” brings her to the realization that she is a lesbian.

But despite the fact that Velma loves Rudy, Rudy loves Scott, and Velma and Scott sort of love each other--the trio remain fast friends. They also slide easily from success to success. “Did you know that the New York Times raved about your second novel today?” Velma asks Rudy. But the Harlem Renaissance itself is reduced to name- and place-dropping. W. E. B. DuBois (“such a small man”) and (“that wretch of a woman”) Helena Rubenstein--for example--appear at a Carl Van Vechten “literary soiree” where fountains gush “inexhaustible streams of Dom Perignon.”

Youngest sister Louise’s story of “passing” is most improbable of all. In terms of color, the sisters represent a 1920s “Rainbow Coalition.” Miriam, the oldest and darkest, looks to Africa. Velma, the middle sister--of middling color--longs for a black bourgeois life, with Ivy League offspring and a place “on the Connecticut shore.” But Louise, a Cotton Club dancer who has never heard of Duke Ellington, looks white and wants to live white.

Louise runs away from Harlem--leaving her Cotton Club costumes behind in a bedroom closet. (Most unlikely in view of a Cotton Club management that spent more on costumes than it did on chorus girls.) She marries a Princeton- educated Sicilian “playboy” (in the olive oil business) who installs her in a sort of early-MGM version of a Manhattan “mansion”--and permits her to chauffeur her own Rolls-Royce around New York. This improbable Princetonian (why a Sicilian? why Princeton?) has no idea that his wife is not white--although he picked her up in a Harlem bar in the company of two Negro men. His mother (visiting from Palermo) is suspicious, however--as are his canny Negro servants. (Louise’s “big butt” and “colored smell” and “temper” are the giveaways.) Louise’s white life falls apart simultaneously with the stock market crash and the birth of a baby who gets “darker and darker” by the month.

Harlem after the Crash, as Langston Hughes put it, is no longer “in vogue.” The three sisters (unlikely Chekhovians) can not escape their birthplace. Once again they are living together in Harlem--with Louise’s ever-darkening baby, and no sense of the havoc that the Depression will wreak on their community. The novel ends with Miriam and Louise “Christmas shopping”--and glutton-for-punishment Velma smiling at the prospect of spending Christmas with Rudy and “joining Scott in Paris in the spring.” Velma also vows, despite the end of Harlem’s big party, not to “stop dancing.”

Having pondered the meaning of the title “No Easy Place to Be”--I’ve decided that it probably means in the position of having to read this novel. For a picture of the Harlem Renaissance that does not insult the reader’s intelligence--I suggest either Jervis Anderson’s “This Was Harlem,” David Levering Lewis’ “When Harlem Was in Vogue” or Nathan Huggins’ “Harlem Renaissance.”