A Magnificent Blond Beast: Exploring the Implications of Harlem Renaissance Writer Wallace Thurman as Ghostwriter of a Forgotten Celebrity Gossip Memoir

Whit Frazier Peterson

doi:10.7311/pjas.14/2/2020.07

Abstract

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the original blonde bombshell Peggy Hopkins Joyce. According to Hopkins’ biographer, however, Basil Woon, an English playwright and gossip columnist was supposed to have been the ghostwriter of this book. My paper will address this discrepancy by focusing on the lack of evidence supporting the Woon theory, and through an analysis using stylometry, close reading and an examination of historical documents, I will argue that Thurman is the more likely candidate as a ghostwriter for Hopkins’ memoirs, just as Hughes suggests. I will be looking specifically at the way the text, which is presented to the reader as a diary written by Hopkins from her early youth to the present day, satirizes the shallowness and excesses of the “roaring twenties.” I will argue that the text is clearly ironic and satirical in style and approach and not only satirizes celebrity, but also a society that unselfconsciously celebrates celebrity, much the way Thurman satirizes the excesses of the Harlem Renaissance in his novel Infants of the Spring. In conclusion, I will show how this book, which has been largely dismissed as celebrity gossip, is transformed into something highly literary by the way Thurman, as ghostwriter and editor, takes Hopkins’ life story and turns it into a satire of the excesses of an era.

Highlights

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me, the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the original blonde bombshell Peggy Hopkins Joyce
The implications for Wallace Thurman having written Peggy Hopkins Joyce’s memoir, or having ghostwritten the memoir are fairly important, and if we can add this book to the canon of Harlem Renaissance productions, it adds another interesting aspect to the work and thought of the Harlem Renaissance writers
The book, when viewed through the lens of Thurman’s pen, becomes a biting satire of American consumer and celebrity culture, which was just coming into its own, with Peggy Hopkins Joyce as the first example of a celebrity being famous for no particular skill other than being a well-known socialite and tabloid celebrity

Summary

A Digital Analysis of the Text

Analyzing the text digitally presented several challenges. The first was procuring a digital copy of the text. In order to get a good sense of how the book’s style stood in comparison to other books of the era, I assembled a corpus of forty-two additional texts, all published between the years 1920 and 1940 (taking into consideration the 1930 publication date of Men, Marriage and Me). I have included two texts by Maurice Dekobra, the ghostwriter of Transatlantic Wife, Peggy Hopkins Joyce’s second book This in itself presented a few challenges. The reason for this is that Macauley, the publishing house that published Men, Marriage and Me as well as Dekobra’s English language books, was both a French and English-language publisher, and it appears that Transatlantic Wife, Peggy Hopkins Joyce’s second book, was ghostwritten by Dekobra in French, and translated by an unnamed party into English (Macauley Special Records, https://library.osu.edu/). A full list of the books that appear in the corpus can be found as an appendix to this article

Method

Conclusion