September 1982 vol.3, No. 6

The Living Is Easy
by Dorothy West

Reviewed by Suzanna J. Sturgis

The Living Is-Easy, first published in 1948, is a spare narrative about the costs of "passing" and the other side of upward social mobility. Set in Boston around World War it is a story of that city's black upper class and of one woman, Cleo Judson, who seeks admission to it. The Living Is Easy has the ring of tragedy; it contains a hero Cleo, who cannot see where her schemes are leading her, and an outside world that is oblivious to her efforts. So many people are warped and broken in this novel that the reading is anything but easy.

Cleo, poor and Carolina-born, is manipulative from the beginning and intensely ambitious, and her marriage to Bart Judson, a wealthy businessman much older than she, gives her the opportunity to realize her ambitions. She is determined to give her daughter, her three sisters, and her nieces and nephew what they don't want - entree into the upper class and, the cost is terrible: Cleo single-handedly ruins her sisters' marriages, consistently cheats her own husband and treats him like shit, and systematically destroys her daughter's spontaneity.

And for what? Already Cleo's circle includes men and women brought up to be ladies and gentlemen in the upper-class WASP tradition who are left helpless as well as penniless when the family fortune collapses. The black upper class is not a white aristocracy that can count on passing its money and privileges on to the next generation; the Judsons are entirely dependent on Bart's current income. Intensely color-conscious themselves, these people pretend that color doesn't matter in the polite world: the result is that they delude and completely isolate themselves. They scorn blacks recently arrived from the South and won't, risk their gentility to oppose racist “justice” ; organizing politically, as the Irish are doing, is beneath them; yet the white upper class, at least in the novel, does not acknowledge their existence.

Dorothy West grew up in this culture and became an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, does not preach but her story has something of the flavor of a parable. She tells her story from a distance, with both understanding and irony. The result is an important novel and a valuable piece of social history.