Selected Letters of Langston Hughes: Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel

S.S. West Hassayampa,¹⁷
Jones Point, N. Y.
February 6, 1923.

Dear Mr. Locke:¹⁸

I have had your delightful letter for a long while and I have wanted to answer you sooner, but so many things have intervened, a bad cold and a birthday,—I am twenty-one! And then I am a terrible correspondent. But I should like to know you and I hope you’ll write to me again.

It is too bad I am not living in New York anymore. I am missing so many interesting people. I am chasing dreams up here, though, and that’s an infinitely more delightful occupation even than being in New York, where all my old dreams had been realized; college, (horrible place, but I wanted to go), Broadway and the theatres—delightful memories, Riverside Drive in the mists, and Harlem. A whirling year in New York! Now I want to go to Europe. Stay for a while in France, then live with the gypsies in Spain (wild dream, isn’t it?) and see the bull-fights in Seville. My Spanish is good from having lived in Mexico and there’s no sport in the world as lovely as a “corrida de toros,” to those who like them.

Jeritza is wonderful, isn’t she?¹⁹ I fell in love with her last year and waited at the stage door for a smile and a rose. But have you seen Chaliapin in “Boris”?²⁰ If you haven’t, please do. It’s the experience of a lifetime. And did you see the Moscow Art players?²¹ I couldn’t get in, so I comforted myself with seeing the “Chauve Souris”²² for the third time, and Jane Cowl’s Juliet.²³ I suppose you saw Barrymore’s Hamlet,²⁴ and maybe “Rain.”²⁵ I have been telling all my friends to see it—“Rain”—but none of them take my advice. For me, it’s the finest thing, aside from “Hamlet,” I’ve seen this season, and stands out in my mind as “Anna Christie”²⁶ from last year’s plays.

Countee²⁷ told me about seeing the “World We Live In”²⁸ with you. He has been doing some very beautiful poems lately, hasn’t he?

Jones Point is about forty miles up the Hudson from New York—a little white village almost pushed into the water by the snow-covered hills. And the Hassayampa is one of five “mother ships” anchored in the river in a forest of masts and cables belonging to a hundred other long old sea-going boats waiting for the Subsidy to pass, or something to happen to take them back to the sea. The sailors up here are the finest fellows I’ve ever met—fellows you can touch and know and be friends with. And after the atmosphere of college last year, being up here on the long ships is like fresh air and night stars after three hours in a dull movie show.

No I haven’t a single dramatic sketch.

I would be glad to hear from you again and to enjoy your friendship.

Sincerely,
Langston Hughes

Box thirty-seven,
Jones Point, New York,
March seventh, 1923.

TO ALAIN LOCKE [ALS]

Box Thirty Seven
Jones Point
April Sixth, 1923

Dear Friend,

I am sorry I have been so long in writing you but it seems that letters are always my hardest tasks—not the actual writing of them, but the getting ready to write them. And the time slips by so rapidly! But I did enjoy your last letter a great deal and I believe that you are a Sympathetic friend. So many friends aren’t. They are only well meaning.

I can quite understand why you like the Germans. I like them, too,—those whom I have known. I met a number of them in Mexico (our housekeeper happened to be a German lady and they were delightful people).

Do you teach Greek or the classics? I have read nothing but the Odyssey and a few of the tragedies but love them. They were the only things college gave me, (other than a supreme dislike for college). But I am glad that I’ve known Telemachus and the beauty of Homer’s wine dark sea. The Odyssey is truly a marvelous thing!

Up here I have been reading Nietzsche and Conrad, Walt Whitman and Pio Baroja.³⁷ Down in New York I saw “Will Shakespeare,” Jane Cowl’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Nazimova’s “Salome”³⁸ and the Moscow Art Players do “The Lower Depths”.³⁹ Did you ever see Duse⁴⁰ in Europe? I want to. And did you ever see Mimi Aguglia? She and Grasso ⁴¹ gave some very fine performances at the Irving Place Theatre last winter. I saw them do Benavente’s “Malquerida.” I didn’t get to hear a single opera this winter, and I wanted to, especially those of the “Ring”.⁴² But I did both hear and see “Liza” and it’s a perfect diamond of joy!⁴³ Didn’t you think so?

Tell me sometime about the Howard Players and your work with them.

Do you know a young fellow at Howard by the name of Moon (Edward, I believe) from Cleveland?⁴⁴ We both graduated there in the same year. And do you know Jean Toomer?⁴⁵ I have liked some of his work very much in “The Liberator” and “The Crisis.”⁴⁶

An Easter card from Countee |Cullen| in Washington told me that he was having a delightful time. You must be a charming friend for poets. And you say that we are reaching the poet’s dangerous age. I don’t know, but anyway I do want your help, and friendship, and criticisms. And how good you are to offer them to me! So I am sending you an envelope of poems to read. I am afraid that none of them are particularly good, but if you should like any of them well enough to send out for me, I would be very glad. I had thought of Poetry and the Little Review, but then I was afraid |they weren’t| good enough for one nor eccentric enough for the other.

I shall perhaps be here only a month or so more, until the spring comes over the high hills and down to the river’s edge. There are fruit trees all along the west bank waiting for flowers. I’ve had a glorious winter. I’ve made strange friends for whom I care a great deal and met many poets, although they never write their poems, and potential artists, who do not develop their talents (but I have persuaded one to take a correspondence course and another to try to enter an art school when he goes to New York). And there have been nights of sailor’s chanties and songs in Swedish and German, Italian and Spanish, and games, and stories of days on sailing ships, and trips around the Horn, and nights in Bombay and Cape Town. Do you wonder that of my four volumes, Nietzsche and Conrad, Walt Whitman and Pio Baroja, I have finished and well read but one? Of course, I’m stupid and only a young kid fascinated by his first glimpse of life, but then after so many years in a book-world and so much striving to be a “bright boy” and an “intelligent young man” it’s rather nice to come here and be simple and stupid and to touch a life that is at least a living thing with no touch of books.

But I am boring you, no? Anyway, I hope you’ll write me soon.

Sincerely,
Langston Hughes

¹ In 1903, James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934) began work at the American-owned Pullman Company in Mexico City. Fired without explanation in 1907, he moved to Toluca in 1909 to work for the American-owned Sultepec Electric Light and Power Company. Eventually, he owned property in Mexico City, a house in Toluca, and a ranch in the mountains nearby.

² His father, who wanted Langston to become an engineer and settle in Mexico, agreed to fund one year of study at Columbia, with the prospect of further support if he did well as a student. Father and son got along poorly. Writing about the summer of 1919, which he had spent with his father in Toluca, Hughes later declared in The Big Sea that it was “the most miserable I have ever known. I did not hear from my mother for several weeks. I did not like my father. And I did not know what to do about either of them.”

³ C. L. Rossiter was a New York–based executive of the Sultepec Electric Light and Power Company.

⁴ R. J. M. Danley, another official of the Sultepec Electric Light and Power Company, was an American colleague of James Hughes in Mexico. He and his wife also made a personal loan to Hughes of $250 (see letter dated October 27, 1921).

⁵ Founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), The Crisis is the monthly magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This appearance marked Hughes’s first publication in a national magazine with an adult readership (in January, his poems “Fairies” and “Winter Sweetness” had appeared in The Brownies’ Book, a magazine for black children, with ties to The Crisis). The poem was reprinted later that year in The Literary Digest, which had a mainly white readership.

⁶ Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961) was the literary editor of The Crisis from 1919 to 1926, and the author of There Is Confusion (1924) and three other novels. Hughes wrote in The Big Sea that Fauset, along with Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke, had “midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being. Kind and critical—but not too critical for the young—they nursed us along until our books were born.”

⁷ The student-run Columbia University Spectator published four poems by Hughes using the pseudonym “LANGHU” or “LANG-HU.” However, as Hughes wrote in The Big Sea, “when I tried out for the Spectator, they assigned me to gather frat house and society news, an assignment impossible for a colored boy to fill, as they knew.”

⁸ When the French writer René Maran (1887–1960) received the Prix Goncourt in 1921 for his novel Batouala, he became the first person of African descent to win it. Since 1903, the Prix Goncourt has been awarded annually for the best new book of prose written in French. Hughes would meet Maran in Paris in 1924 (see letter dated July 4, 1924).

⁹ Augustus Granville Dill (1881–1956) was the Harvard-educated business manager of The Crisis until 1928, when his mentor W. E. B. Du Bois summarily fired him after his arrest by the police for alleged homosexual activities. In The Big Sea, Hughes loyally described Dill as “a short, voluble man of middle-age who, besides running the magazine, was a fine musician on the pipe organ and the piano forte (as he always said) as well. He attended the Community Church, where John Haynes Holmes preached, and sometimes played the organ for services there. He told them of my poetry, and that church was, I believe, the first church in which I was invited to read my poems.”

¹⁰ In May, James Hughes suffered a severe stroke. Although he made a substantial recovery, his right arm remained paralyzed.

¹¹ In The Big Sea, Hughes wrote: “I had no intention of going further at Columbia.… I felt that I would never turn out to be what my father expected me to be in return for the amount he invested. So I wrote him and told him I was going to quit college and go to work on my own, and that he needn’t send me any more money. He didn’t. He didn’t even write back.”

¹² Bertha Schultz was James Hughes’s housekeeper. She became his wife in January 1924.

¹³ A German liberal newspaper published from 1911 to 1934.

¹⁴ The landmark musical Shuffle Along, which opened in 1921, helped to launch the Harlem Renaissance. It was written by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, with music and lyrics by Noble Sissle (like Hughes, a graduate of Central High in Cleveland) and Eubie Blake. The four men comprised the first African American team to develop a successful Broadway show.

¹⁵ Bert Williams (1874–1922) was one of America’s greatest vaudeville stars. After the death of his partner, George Walker (c. 1873–1911), who had been a childhood friend of Hughes’s mother in Lawrence, Kansas, Williams pursued a successful solo career. He joined the Ziegfeld Follies as its only black performer and became its highest-paid star.

¹⁶ Despite his year at Columbia, the color line barred Hughes from many jobs before he was hired to work on a vegetable farm on Staten Island belonging to two Greek brothers and their wives. In The Big Sea, he wrote that they “didn’t care what nationality you were just so you got up at five in the morning and worked all day until it was too dark to see the rows in the field.” Despite the long hours, he found this job deeply satisfying.

¹⁷ In mid-October of the previous year, Hughes had started to work as a mess boy at Jones Point. The U.S. Shipping Board mothballed a large fleet of vessels there (109 during Hughes’s tenure) after World War I. Hughes served aboard the Oronoke, the Bellbuckle, and the West Hassayampa.

¹⁸ With degrees from Harvard and some years at Oxford, where he had been a Rhodes scholar, Dr. Alain Locke (1886–1954) was the chair of the Department of Philosophy at Howard University in Washington, D.C., from 1921 until his retirement in 1953. His books include The New Negro (1925), The Negro in Art (1941), and (with Bernard J. Stern) When Peoples Meet: A Study in Race and Culture Contacts (1942). Sent Hughes’s address by Countee Cullen, Locke wrote in February to tell him that each of Hughes’s friends “insists on my knowing you. Some instinct, roused not so much by the reading of your verse as from a mental picture of your state of mind, reinforces their insistence.”

¹⁹ The Austrian American soprano Maria Jeritza (1887–1982), who sang the part of Marietta in the first Vienna performance of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt in 1920, reprised the role at her Metropolitan debut in 1921.

²⁰ The Russian operatic bass singing star Feodor Chaliapin (1873–1938) performed the title role of Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1921.

²¹ The Moscow Art Theatre was founded in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Their innovative approach to theatrical production helped to create modern theater. The Moscow Art Theatre began its American tour with an eight-week engagement in New York City that opened at Jolson’s 59th Street Theatre on January 8, 1923.

²² The Chauve-Souris, or the Bat Theatre of Moscow, was a theater group led by Nikita Balieff (1876?–1936), a vaudevillian and former member of the Moscow Art Theatre. On February 3, 1922, Balieff and his troupe began an engagement lasting seventeen months in New York City. The Chauve-Souris gave its four hundredth performance on January 4, 1923, in honor of the recent arrival of the Moscow Art Theatre company in America.

²³ A playwright and actress, Jane Cowl (1883?–1950) appeared as Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at Henry Miller’s Theatre on 43rd Street in Manhattan in 1923.

²⁴ John Barrymore (1882–1942) performed the title role of Shakespeare’s Hamlet at the Sam H. Harris Theatre on Broadway from November 1922 to February 1923.

²⁵ Rain: A Play in Three Acts (1923) is John Colton’s adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s short story “Miss Thompson,” later called “Rain” (1921).

²⁶ Anna Christie won Eugene O’Neill the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1922.

²⁷ Countee Cullen (1903–1947), Hughes’s close friend and literary rival, was a major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Unlike Hughes, he preferred traditional forms, such as the villanelle and sonnet, and found his main inspiration in the European classics. He won several literary prizes for poems that appeared in periodicals such as Opportunity, The Crisis, Harper’s, and The American Mercury. In 1925, Harper & Brothers published his first volume of poetry, Color.

²⁸ The World We Live In, also known as The Insect Comedy or The Insects, was written by the Czech brothers Josef and Karel Capek. It ran on Broadway at Jolson’s 59th Street Theatre from October 1922 to February 1923.

²⁹ The Bookman, a prominent American review published from 1895 to 1933, accepted neither “Joy” nor “Tragedy.” “Joy” first appeared in The Crisis in February 1926. “Tragedy” (its first lines are “Pierrot / Took his heart / And hung it / On a wayside wall”) was retitled “Heart” and first appeared in One-Way Ticket (1949).

³⁰ Ernestine Rose (1880–1961), a white librarian and social activist, organized popular evenings of poetry readings, lectures, and social events at the 135th Street Branch Library in Harlem.

³¹ William M. Kelley (1894–1958) was the editor of the Harlem-based New York Amsterdam News. The paper published the poems “A Black Pierrot” and “Justice” in its April 4 and April 24, 1923, issues.

³² Ridgely Torrence (1874–1950), a white poet, dramatist (the landmark Three Plays for a Negro Theater, 1917), and editor of The New Republic from 1920 to 1924, prepared a special number on blacks for the magazine The World Tomorrow (May 1923). He chose three poems by Hughes (“Dreams,” “Our Land,” and “Poem: For the portrait of an African boy after the manner of Gauguin”). This marks the first time Hughes’s work (apart from reprintings) appeared in a journal circulated mainly to a white audience.

³³ Probably Donald Duff, a close friend of Countee Cullen and Harold Jackman, with ties to the leftist magazine The Liberator. Cullen dedicated his poem “Tableau” to Duff.

³⁴ La Vie Parisienne was an erotic French magazine.

³⁵ Cullen read some of Hughes’s poems as well as some of his own at a poetry reading at the 135th Street Branch Library.

³⁶ Hughes asserts in The Big Sea that he left because “I thought it was about time to leave the dead ships and find a vessel that was moving. So I quit the fleet and went back to New York, determined now to get on a boat actually going somewhere.”

³⁷ Pío Baroja (1872–1956) was a Spanish author whose trilogy of novels, La Lucha por la Vida (“The Struggle for Life”), published between 1922 and 1924, depicts the world of the Madrid slums.

³⁸ The world-famous Russian-born actress Alla Nazimova (1879–1945) partially financed, produced, and starred in Salomé, a silent screen adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play of the same name. The film was released in February 1923.

³⁹ The Lower Depths, first produced by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1902, is perhaps the best-known play by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky (1868–1936).

⁴⁰ Eleanora Duse (1858–1924) was a renowned Italian actress. At Jones Point, Hughes had read Gabriele D’Annunzio’s novel The Flame of Life (1900), in which he drew on his intimate friendship with Duse. Later that year, when Hughes attended the premiere of Duse in Ibsen’s La Donna del Mare at the Metropolitan Opera House, he was disappointed: “She seemed just a tiny little old woman, on an enormous stage, speaking in a foreign language, before an audience that didn’t understand.”

⁴¹ Mimi Aguglia (1884–1970) and Giovanni Grasso (1873–1930) were Italian actors and two of the founders of the Sicilian Theatrical Company.

⁴² Richard Wagner’s four epic operas The Ring of the Nibelungen (1853) are often called The Ring Cycle.

⁴³ Liza, an all-black musical comedy, introduced the dance sensation called the Charleston to New York during its run on Broadway from November 1922 to April 1923.

⁴⁴ Probably Henry Lee Moon (1901–1985), a friend from his teenage years in Cleveland who later worked as a prominent journalist for the New York Amsterdam News and as editor of The Crisis. Moon also accompanied Hughes and twenty other young African Americans on a visit to the Soviet Union in 1932 to work on a film (soon abandoned) about American race relations.

⁴⁵ Jean Toomer (1894–1967) was an influential African American poet and fiction writer. Published that year (1923), his book Cane is a collection of poems and stories about black life in Washington, D.C., and in the rural South. The sections of Cane that appeared in The Liberator are “Georgia Dusk” (September 1922), “Carma” (September 1922), and “Becky” (October 1922). “The Song of the Son” appeared in The Crisis (June 1922).

⁴⁶ The Liberator was the successor to the Greenwich Village left-wing magazine The Masses.

⁴⁷ Hall Johnson (1888–1970), an African American choral director, composer, and violinist, set Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son” to music. Passionate about preserving the spirituals, he founded the renowned Hall Johnson Choir in 1925.

⁴⁸ A. E. (Alfred Edward) Housman (1859–1936) was an acclaimed British classics scholar and poet. His collection of lyrical verse A Shropshire Lad (1896) brought him international fame. Floyd Dell’s article “Private Classics,” which appeared in the January 1923 issue of The Liberator, discusses Housman’s volume Last Poems (1922).

⁴⁹ Robert T. Kerlin (1866–1950), a controversial white professor of English and History, edited the landmark anthology Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923), which includes Hughes’s poem “Negro.” In 1921, the Virginia Military Institute fired him because of his various publications on behalf of black rights.

⁵⁰ Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), an Italian poet and playwright, was the author of the novel The Flame of Life (1900). See also letter of April 6, 1923, fourth footnote.

⁵¹ Whitman’s group of poems called “Calamus,” introduced in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, is often noted for its homoeroticism.