In an envelope marked:
Personal
God addressed me a letter.
In an envelope marked:
Personal
I have given my answer.
“Who knows better than I,” Langston Hughes once wrote to a friend, “what letter writing entails?” Certainly he knew much about letters. With a crowded life that put him in touch over the decades with thousands of people, the mail was crucial to starting and keeping friendships and to doing business. He admired people who answered letters promptly. His friend Carl Van Vechten, for example, received a flood of mail but usually answered each piece on the day it reached him. Hughes was not so disciplined. In fact, at one point he called himself “the world’s worst letter writer.” Another time, he confessed to stuffing away a swelling pile of unanswered pieces. “Two drawers are full,” he noted, “so I’m moving my sox over.” All the same, he wanted to be a faithful correspondent. “I leave you now,” he ended a letter in 1944, “to consider the stack of mail on top of mail piled on the bed. I cannot take my rest until I unpile some of it.”
Later in life, living near one of the noisier sections of Harlem, he wrote through the night, when the brownstone row house he shared was likely to be quiet. Then, at three or four or five o’clock, or even later, he sat at his typewriter and pounded out letters (more than thirty on many nights) that went all over the world. This was in addition to writing the poems, novels, short stories, plays, autobiographies, histories, translations, opera libretti, song lyrics, children’s books, and newspaper columns, as well as editing anthologies and other volumes, that made so many people long to be in touch with him.
Hughes also knew the importance of saving letters. “I guess I never throw anything away ever,” he admitted, but he valued letters highly. When Van Vechten founded in 1941 at Yale University an archive devoted to African American culture, Hughes agreed at once to donate all of his papers, including letters to him and also carbon copies of virtually all the letters he wrote. Years passed before he learned that this gift was tax-deductible, but he needed no financial incentive to be diligent about his promise. “I got 30 letters today,” he noted in 1958, “which took me all day to read, answer, and get ready for Yale.” When Van Vechten complained that too many black people seemed indifferent to the archive, Hughes agreed that most of them were “not collection minded.” He thought differently. “Those of us who do know and do care,” he gently lectured his friend, “will just have to redouble our efforts … and include in those efforts … the bestirring of others.”
His love of letters is also seen in his verse. In “Personal,” reprinted above, he refers to the epistolary form with a studied lack of emotion. However, “A Letter to Anne” (1927) is an aching message—“Since I left you, Anne, / I have seen nothing but you”—addressed to a young woman who had stolen his heart in Paris three years before, as he tells us in his autobiography The Big Sea (1940). “Dear Lovely Death” (1930) both praises and questions death essentially in the form of a letter (“… Dear lovely Death, / Change is thy other name”). Also basically a letter is his popular poem “Theme for English B” (1949), in which a young black student from the South, now living in Harlem, turns a teacher’s request for a personal essay into a poignant message to him (“You are white— / yet a part of me, as I am a part of you”). In “Letter” (1951), a son writing to his mother from the big city slips $5 into the envelope “to show you I still appreciates you.” Political protest seizes the form in “Open Letter to the South” (1932) and in the radical “Letter to the Academy” (1933). War seemed to heighten Hughes’s interest in this respect. Covering the Spanish Civil War led him to poems that linked the antifascist cause there to antisegregation efforts at home. These works include “Letter from Spain” (1937) and “Postcard from Spain: Addressed to Alabama” (1938). World War II brought pieces such as “Dear Mr. President” (1943), in which a black soldier denounces racism in Alabama as he and his buddies train there to defend democracy, as well as “Will V-Day Be Me-Day Too? (A Negro Fighting Man’s Letter to America)” (1944). A generation later, Hughes’s opposition to the war in Vietnam was probably behind “Official Notice” (1967). It begins: “Dear Death: / I got your message / That my son is dead.”
The sheer quantity of Hughes’s letters, as well as their quality, has much to do with his basic love of people. His choice to live in Harlem when many others were fleeing the “ghetto” starting in the 1950s underscores this point. In 1960, he mocked those who complained that Harlem was a “congested” area. “It is,” he agreed. “Congested with people. All kinds. And I’m lucky enough to call a great many of them my friends.” He reached out to whites, too. Starting in 1951, he exchanged letters for over ten years with a small-town Kansas housewife who on an impulse—“I had no idea who you were”—had taken one of his books out of her local library. Like all letter writers, Hughes was sometimes manipulative. On the whole, however, he simply liked people. If he was lonely in essential ways, his main response to his pain was to create a body of art that others could admire and applaud. And letters generated mainly by his art, whether ostensibly about business or pleasure, would always be a crucial feature of his life.
Hughes’s acute need for other people sprang from his ingrained sense of neglect as a child. His ambitious father, incensed at racism, left his family behind and moved to Mexico when Hughes was an infant. His mother, pursuing her own dreams, often lived so far away that he felt deserted by her as well. Hughes grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, mainly with his maternal grandmother; but she, too, was remote. He recalled her as “old, old” and almost forbiddingly silent as she lived with her memories. Her first husband had died in 1859 fighting alongside John Brown at Harpers Ferry. Her second husband, Hughes’s grandfather, who died before Langston was born, had also been a radical abolitionist. Left alone too much of the time, Hughes as a child came to believe “in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.”
After his grandmother died in 1915, he spent a year in Lincoln, Illinois, with his mother and her second husband. Then, with a move to Cleveland, Ohio, a new world opened for him there at Central High School. He published poems and stories in its monthly magazine; as a senior, he became editor of the school annual and Class Poet. Graduating in 1920, he spent a year with his father in Mexico, where he had also spent the summer of 1919 after his father suddenly reentered his life. Father and son did not get along. Disdaining both poetry and his fellow black Americans, James Hughes wanted his son to study mining and settle in Mexico. Langston, who wanted to live in New York City to be near or in Harlem (“the Negro capital of the world,” someone had jubilantly proclaimed it), applied for admission to Columbia University. Convincing his father to fund at least one year there, he left for New York in September 1921.
Our volume opens with a letter to his father that Hughes mailed that month from New York. Polite on its surface, it hides a truth he faced squarely only later: “I hated my father.” Hughes never saw him again. Disenchanted by racism and academic stodginess at Columbia, he withdrew after one year. He then set his sights in a new direction. In June 1921, while still in Mexico, he had published his first poem in a national magazine. This work, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” had appeared in The Crisis, the monthly journal of the New York–based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). From that point, Hughes longed to live by his writings. He also aimed to make African American culture central to his art, even as he reached out to the wider world. Chasing this dream, in the next few years he roamed the United States and the world. In addition to his time in Mexico, he traveled in 1923 up and down the west coast of Africa. He went to Europe, staying for some months in 1924 in Paris. From 1926 to 1929, while he earned a BA at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, he did not lose his passion for foreign lands, or for poetry. He went to Cuba and Haiti on brief trips; into the South and then out West on a year-long (1931–1932) reading tour; in 1932, to the Soviet Union for a year, with intense months spent in Central Asia; to China and Japan; and around the world before coming home in 1933.
The literary fruit of these years would include two books of poetry, a novel, a landmark essay about the Harlem Renaissance, a play that later reached Broadway, a children’s book, and a short story collection. With this work, Hughes laid the foundation of a career that eventually spanned five decades. In the 1930s, he endured poverty at times but published some stunning radical poems; he wrote and saw produced several plays; he was a war correspondent in Spain; he wrote the screenplay for a Hollywood movie; and he finished an autobiography. In the 1940s Hughes worked in support of the U.S. war effort, published three more books of poetry, coedited a major anthology of black American verse, started a weekly newspaper column that lasted twenty years, and collaborated on a successful Broadway opera, in addition to other efforts on the stage.
In the 1950s, even as he endured punishing right-wing attacks, including an appearance by subpoena before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s feared subcommittee on “un-Americanism,” Hughes became only more productive and versatile. He published additional books of verse, story collections, and children’s books; a second volume of autobiography; other opera libretti; and so on. By 1960, as he began the last decade of his life, he was in full flight as an author. Sometimes he wondered if he took on too much in trying to avoid poverty. Signing contract after contract for new projects, he mocked himself about being little more than “a literary sharecropper,” toiling away for next to nothing “on a publisher’s plantation.” Even so, his reputation as a skilled man of letters grew, and the volume of letters destined for Yale swelled accordingly.
In the early 1920s, young Hughes slipped easily from style to style in his letters. According to his mood he could be lyrical, romantic, flirtatious, ironical, sardonic, allusive, casual, objective, or businesslike. Sober or even stony with his father, with someone else he could be, at almost the same time, a blushing ingenue. “I’m stupid and only a young kid fascinated by his first glimpse of life,” he ventures in 1923 (at twenty-one) to an older man he wants to charm, even as his compulsive name-dropping shows his anxiety about becoming a man of culture and also being seen as one. “Have you seen Chaliapin in ‘Boris’?” he asks breathlessly about the renowned Russian singer in the opera Boris Godunov. “It’s the experience of a lifetime. And did you see the Moscow Art players? I couldn’t get in, so I comforted myself with seeing the ‘Chauve Souris’ for the third time.… I suppose you saw Barrymore’s Hamlet, and maybe ‘Rain.’ ” He almost swoons as he writes home from a freighter off the coast of Africa: “And tonight the sunset! Gleaming copper and gold and then the tropical soft green after-glow of twilight, and now stars in the water and luminous phosphorescent foam on the little waves about the ship and ahead the light of Freetown toward which we are steering through the soft darkness.” And yet he also shows in other letters written about the same time utter sobriety. The truth seems to be that if he hated his father, he had something of his father’s capacity for business and the law. No wonder that his longtime friend Arna Bontemps, a prudent man himself, would note at one point Hughes’s “usual thoroughness and feeling for essentials.”
Eventually, posturing and purple lyricism would disappear from his letters, making way for a narrower but more mature range of expression in which qualities such as vitality, determination, compassion, and humor dominate. Rage is absent: Hughes remained polite no matter how deeply someone wounded him. In the 1930s, he penned several bitter political poems but even in that period he was considerate in writing to people who offended him. When, for example, an eminent white writer pressed him in 1943 to help the American Red Cross—blithely ignoring its racist practices, which included separating “black” blood from “white” blood in its blood banks and founding segregated Red Cross Clubs abroad—Hughes controlled himself in venting his anger. “Hitler could hardly desire more,” he wrote tersely. “General Douglas MacArthur may be right when he says, ‘The Red Cross never fails a soldier.’ Certainly it has failed thirteen million Negroes on the home front, and its racial policies are a blow in the face to American Negro morale.” However, he never went beyond such a rebuke in any of his surviving letters.
Of all the challenges Hughes faced in setting out to be a writer, perhaps the most surprising is one we hardly expect to find in the case of a person so proud to be hailed by blacks as the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race.” This challenge asked Hughes, who had grown up in tiny, isolated communities of blacks, to learn basic truths about African American culture as a whole before he could be at home among those he eagerly saluted in verse as “My People.” In a 1929 letter he admitted that almost three years passed at Lincoln University, with its virtually all-black student body, before he felt comfortable facing black strangers: “Only now am I beginning to be at all at ease and without any self-consciousness in meeting my own people.” In the early 1920s, Hughes began to rectify this deficiency. Through the agency of letters he met black achievers such as the renowned W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis; its literary editor, Jessie Redmon Fauset (“my own brown goddess”); Countee Cullen, his congenial major rival among the younger poets; and Alain Locke, the Oxford-trained professor of philosophy at Howard University in Washington who would edit the bible of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro (1925). Letters also paved the way for Hughes to interact with other writers who were remaking African American literature. These meetings, and those he sought with ordinary folks, emboldened his sense of self as a black American and made possible the decisive cultural force he longed to become.
His relationships with other young black writers would be crucial. Hughes’s letters to them underscore above all his refusal to make of their inevitable competition with one another a “Battle Royale” for the scraps that whites tossed at times to artists of color. His letters starting in the 1920s to writers such as Jessie Fauset, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, and Claude McKay flesh out the particularities of black life and art in that era but also underscore his generosity and humility. Some of these writers shared his principles, but others did not. Among the finest and longest letters here are those between Hughes and the Jamaican-born poet and novelist Claude McKay. These two men, who loved vagabonding, were also alike in mixing strong race pride with liberal humanism. Intelligent and well read, they hated the snobbery that often marred black middle-class culture. In his letters to McKay, Hughes typically gave a free rein to opinions and expressions he normally kept in check. “This summer I didn’t do anything,” he confessed in one 1930 message. “Had gotten awfully bored with LITERATURE and WHITE FOLKS and NIGGERS and almost everything else. Borrowed money, and spent it all lying on the beach at Rockaway and sleeping in the sunshine.”
Of all the black writers, however, he grew closest to Arna Bontemps. They wrote far more letters to one another—thousands of them—than they wrote to anyone else. Although people often mistook them for one another, they were different in key ways. A Seventh Day Adventist, Bontemps was religious where Hughes was secular to the bone. Bontemps was a family man with several children, while Hughes never married or fathered a child. Hughes roamed the world, but Bontemps generally stayed put, with a long career spent in Nashville as head librarian at Fisk University. But their respect and affection for one another led to several coauthored and coedited books, including children’s fiction such as Popo and Fifina (1932) and important edited volumes such as the anthology Poetry of the Negro (1949). Their letters make up a generally uninhibited, if never sensational, trove of information and opinions about people and events of mutual interest over the greater part of Hughes’s life.
Hughes’s letters also document his remarkable eagerness to help younger people. Meeting Ralph Ellison (then twenty-three), up from Alabama on his first morning in New York City in 1936, Hughes took pains to unite him with Richard Wright. Through Wright, Ellison would become a fiction writer. Hughes took pride in “discovering” writers, as in the case of Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker Alexander, and Alice Walker. Approached by Brooks and Walker while they were still teenagers, he read their poems and urged them on. Dazzled on meeting Alice Walker, then twenty-one (she was, he wrote Bontemps, “ ‘cute as a button’ and real bright”), he published her first story to appear in print. Brooks and Walker would win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and fiction respectively, and Ellison would win the National Book Award in fiction. When his novel Invisible Man appeared in 1952, Hughes was ecstatic. “Ellison is my protégé!” he exulted. “Dick Wright and I (me first because I introduced him to Dick) started him off writing—and look at him now. Wonderful reviews!”
Some black writers were his friends at first but then were not. A trove of letters here documents the ugly collapse of his friendship with Zora Neale Hurston after she accused him around 1931 of being a liar for claiming coauthorship of their play, Mule Bone. A regular guest in Hughes’s home, Ellison nevertheless developed a disdain for him as an artist and intellectual. After the grand success of Invisible Man, Ellison didn’t always hide these feelings. As usual, Hughes refused to strike back in public. Instead, he vented his dismay mainly in occasional bitchy ripostes fired off in letters. “Ralphie is getting real baldheaded,” he noted to Arna Bontemps in 1958, “—further proof that he is an intellectual.” He had a similar experience with James Baldwin. In 1953, Baldwin took a gratuitous swipe at Hughes in his and Richard Gibson’s much noticed article “Two Protests Against Protest.” “The young writer,” they advised their readers, “might do well to impress upon himself that he is the contemporary of Eliot, Valéry, Pound, Rilke and Auden and not merely Langston Hughes.” But although the remark stunned and angered Hughes, he was gallant when he wrote Baldwin about it: “I agree that the more fences young writers jump over, the better. What a bore if they kept on repeating the old! More power to you!”
He was charitable again that year when Knopf sent him the galleys of Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). Hughes didn’t like the book. Baldwin, he told Bontemps, “over-writes and over-poeticizes in images way over the heads of the folks supposedly thinking them.” Nevertheless, he sent Knopf a blurb for the dust jacket. In 1956, assessing Baldwin’s essay collection Notes of a Native Son in The New York Times Book Review, Hughes characterized Baldwin as a “thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing, and amusing” writer. Baldwin, whose literary stock had soared by this point, probably thought Hughes’s tone altogether too jaunty. He bided his time. Three years later, when the roles were reversed and he reviewed Hughes’s Selected Poems (1959) in the same journal, he opened with a wicked blow: “Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts—and depressed that he has done so little with them.” Furious, Hughes backed away from Baldwin, although they exchanged notes now and then. (Years after Hughes’s death, in an interview for a documentary film about Hughes, Baldwin would praise the older man’s art as essential to his own understanding of Harlem while he was growing up there.)
Hughes disliked literary pretentiousness, whether in Ellison, Baldwin, or Melvin Tolson, a learnedly allusive ultra-modernist poet. His objection to Tolson’s work probably grew after the reactionary white Southern critic and poet Allen Tate (who previously had refused to meet Hughes or any other black writer while in the South) lavishly praised Tolson’s work even as he implicitly dismissed that of Hughes and other blacks. Writing to Bontemps about Tolson’s Harlem Gallery (1965), Hughes cited arcane lines such as “O Cleobulus / O Thales, Solon, Periander, Bias, Chilo, / O Pittacus, / unriddle the pho[e]nix riddle of this” to ridicule both this kind of poetry and Tolson himself. “I say, MORE POWER TO YOU, MELVIN B.,” Hughes chortled. “GO, JACK, GO! That Negro not only reads, but has read!” Nevertheless, Hughes included Tolson in his anthologies—although in one letter here he asks Tolson to change a poem slightly to make it clearer to the reader. (Tolson did so.)
The time would come, ironically, when militant blacks would find Hughes’s poetry too tame for their taste. One sticking point would be his relationship with LeRoi Jones, a gifted poet and editor. Jones would change his name to Amiri Baraka as he became the undoubted leader of the aggressive Black Arts movement starting around 1965. Hughes had actively sought out and praised Jones starting in the late 1950s, while Jones was still living with his white wife, Hettie Cohen, in Greenwich Village. Out of the blue, Jones received a fan letter from Hughes that left him amazed and grateful. By 1965, however, Hughes saw Jones somewhat differently. That year, Hughes’s column “That Boy LeRoi” in the New York Post disapproved of Jones’s more shocking, anti-white new plays, notably The Toilet, which is set in a urinal at a boys’ school. The column upset some blacks. Addressing one protester, Hughes defended himself with his characteristic grace. “More power to you, too,” he replied (at three in the morning, he noted), “for so frankly expressing your opinions. It would be a sad day if the young writers all agreed with the old.”
We see Hughes’s spirit of inclusiveness again in his many letters sent to Africa as colonial rule ended there, sometimes after bloodshed, in the 1950s and 1960s; or, in the case of South Africa, when the antiapartheid cause badly needed foreign allies. In the course of editing timely anthologies such as An African Treasury (1960), or as a judge in literary competitions sponsored by Drum magazine of South Africa, he exchanged letters regularly with Africans. At his home, he received so many visiting African writers sent by the United States Information Agency (USIA) that he worried that he had become, unpaid, “the official host of Harlem.” He toured Africa privately and on behalf of the United States. (In contrast, Ralph Ellison, for example, declined all invitations to visit Africa.) Hughes was proud to be present in 1960 when Benjamin “Zik” Azikiwe, a former schoolmate at Lincoln University, was sworn in as the first governor-general of independent Nigeria. He corresponded with and met writers whose work would become celebrated, including the poet and president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, who saw Hughes’s early work as a major inspiration for the Negritude cultural movement he helped to launch; from Nigeria, the novelist Chinua Achebe and the future Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka; from South Africa, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane, and Peter Abrahams; and from Kenya, Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Hughes was a near-legendary figure to these men, but he reached out to them simply as one writer to another. After reading Abrahams’s autobiography, Tell Freedom (1954), in galleys, he sent Abrahams, still largely unknown, a fan letter. “It’s all wonderful!” he gushed. “I love that book! So alive and immediate and real and moving!”
He also reached out to “ordinary” folks in Africa. Impatient with pomp and circumstance amid poverty and repression, he sneered in private at Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, who presented Hughes with a gold medal in Addis Ababa after Hughes recited a poem he had written in his honor; but Hughes had done so only because U.S. diplomats had begged him to write it. With African commoners he was eager to be friends. As a result, a young Nigerian policeman named Sunday Osuya later became a legatee in Hughes’s will. His letters to and about Africans underscore the bond he felt with a continent he had first visited when he was twenty-one. Africa was integral to his broad sense of black identity as well as his expansive sense of humanity. Hughes had kept the faith even as many other black Americans, ashamed of Africa because of Hollywood’s consistently demeaning images, wanted little or nothing to do with the “Dark Continent.”
If Hughes had to learn about the complexities of black culture, he faced a similar challenge with whites although he had lived among them all of his life. His relationship to them took on a new aspect once he became a grown man and one determined to be a writer. Again and again, he would have to depend, during decades of lawful bigotry in America, on the kindness and the fairness of white strangers as he negotiated the tricky, often treacherous territory of publishers, editors, producers, agents, reviewers, book buyers, booksellers, foundations, and so on. Undoubtedly, Hughes was lucky to have come of age in the decade following World War I. With the war over, a substantial part of the nation began to relax some of its inhibitions and to question some of its viler prejudices. The rising popularity of the blues and jazz, and of musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, and George Gershwin, helped to propel this change. Contradictions, of course, abounded. The Jazz Age was also the era of Prohibition. Racist atrocities, especially lynching, still went on, often with impunity. But certain doors began to crack open in the 1920s that had been shut tight to blacks.
Hughes tapped on these doors carefully but with some confidence. He knew some whites intimately and he had succeeded among them in school. Unlike most blacks, he had never attended a Jim Crow school (Lincoln University did not bar white students, and all of its professors were white). At high school in Cleveland his classmates were mainly white Christians and Jews of immigrant stock; his best friend had been a Polish American boy. But even in college he had felt the sting of racial injustice. In 1921, Columbia had assigned him a room in Hartley Hall only because someone on its staff had blundered. The university let in a tiny number of blacks annually but denied them university housing. At Harvard a year later, President A. Lawrence Lowell publicly vowed to bar blacks from the school altogether rather than allow them to live with whites in the dormitories. It is essential to acknowledge that Hughes, like virtually every other black American, faced racism in one form or another almost every day of his life, even after the Supreme Court in 1954 in effect decreed an end to segregation.
In the 1920s, perhaps the key challenge for an ambitious but principled “Negro” was how to get ahead without losing one’s self-respect. Hughes’s letters show him proceeding in this regard with an almost princely confidence touched by an appropriate humility. He seemed assured and optimistic when many other blacks were cynical and bitter. When rebuffed, he seemed to shrug off insults. He chose to look ahead. His friendship with the wealthy, sophisticated, and ebullient Carl Van Vechten proved crucial to his future. From their second meeting, when Hughes accepted a poetry prize at a gala event in Manhattan in 1925, they quickly bonded. Within days, Van Vechten had convinced his own publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, to bring out Hughes’s first book, The Weary Blues (1926). Thereafter, Knopf would be Hughes’s main publisher, and Van Vechten would be his friend for life.
Van Vechten’s championing of racial integration and of black writers and musicians in particular had been sudden; by 1925 he had become “violently interested in Negroes,” he admitted. “It was almost an addiction.” Although some blacks, cynical about smiling whites in general, shunned him, Hughes did not. In 1925, when Van Vechten begged for help in preparing an article for Vanity Fair on the blues, about which he knew almost nothing, Hughes sent him detailed advice even as Countee Cullen, for one, kept his distance (“I know,” he snidely wrote a friend, “that Carl is coining money out of the niggers”). The letters between Hughes and Van Vechten are as entertaining as they are informative. If the colorful Van Vechten set the basic tone, Hughes responded in kind. He even replicated the fey verbal bouquets his friend tossed in closing many letters. “Tulips and jonquils to you!” Hughes signed off once in 1955, more than thirty years after they first met. But Hughes was no sycophant. From the start he showed that he saw them as virtual equals—and himself as superior at times, as when he stated flatly in 1925 that his own taste in the blues was more complex than his friend’s (“you like best the lighter ones … and I prefer the moanin’ ones”). At times they disagreed. In 1933, Van Vechten advised Knopf not to publish a new book of verse Hughes had proposed. Bluntly he wrote Hughes that “the revolutionary poems seem very weak to me.… I think in ten years, whatever the social outcome, you will be ashamed of these.” No matter—the friendship endured. Now and then Van Vechten saved Hughes by lending him money. His help was crucial in 1938, for example, when Hughes’s mother died and he couldn’t afford to bury her. (Hughes repaid his loans as soon as he could.)
Another important white friend, with lots of letters between them, was Noël Sullivan of California. Meeting first in 1933 in San Francisco, where Sullivan owned a mansion, they remained friends until Sullivan’s death in 1956. He encouraged Hughes to spend a year (1933–1934) living rent-free in a cottage he owned in Carmel. There, Hughes finished the embittered collection of short stories The Ways of White Folks (1934). In dedicating the book to Sullivan, Hughes took its epigraph from one of the stories: “The ways of white folks, I mean some white folks.…” Later, Sullivan sheltered him again for more than a year when Hughes, nearly destitute, was being hounded by his right-wing opponents. Unlike Hughes, Sullivan was a religious man, a Roman Catholic. Liberal on subjects such as civil rights, the death penalty, and cruelty to animals, he was relatively conservative about global politics. However, Sullivan saw Hughes as a brave artist of uncommon integrity, just as Hughes appreciated Sullivan’s humanity and generosity.
Perhaps the most important of Hughes’s extended contacts with the white world involved editors and publishers. Except for a few newspapers and magazines, all of his publishers were white. Letters show that he had trouble with blacks as well as whites. The black Chicago Defender newspaper, where he had a weekly column for over twenty years, tried at one point to break his contract and pay him less because they could sign up syndicated white columnists at a much cheaper rate. For a while, the Defender simply stopped paying him. Editors at The Crisis, on the other hand, sometimes ignored his wishes about the use of his poems. With white publishers the problems were different. On the whole, they didn’t care, as he did, about reaching black readers as a distinct group. He knew that blacks bought far fewer books than whites did, but he wanted his publishers to try harder in this respect. He liked to point out, impishly, that black people would indeed buy books—if the books were brought to them, as he did on his reading tours. Hughes also disliked much of the work of the skilled white artists invariably chosen to illustrate his books. Often he found the drawings demeaning, if unintentionally so.
Undoubtedly his main publishing contact was Blanche Knopf, with whom he exchanged many letters. A brilliant woman living somewhat in the shadow of her lordly husband, Alfred, she signed up most of the writers, especially the foreigners, who made Knopf a prestigious as well as a profitable imprint. In 1925 she had given Hughes his first book contract mainly on Van Vechten’s say-so, but she also published several other black authors at a time when many of the other major houses were still reluctant to do so. She edited his work herself when she could have passed him on to an assistant. However, their relationship had its rough patches, in which race and class played roles. After three books by Hughes, she rebuffed his proposal for a volume of his radical verse. (Resentful, Hughes addressed his next letter to “Mrs. Knopf” rather than to his customary “Blanche.”) Nevertheless, they worked together smoothly on his next book, The Ways of White Folks, with Blanche Knopf unfazed by its bitter tone. A few years later, however, she riled Hughes again when she asked for deep cuts in his autobiography The Big Sea. Certain black personalities who meant much to him were of much less consequence to her and, presumably, to the book buyers Knopf depended on, and she wanted them pruned from the text. Backed by Van Vechten, Hughes resisted Mrs. Knopf’s request while making some cuts. In the early 1950s, with his books of verse selling weakly, she refused Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). She also declined his request for a “Selected Poems” volume—although she brought it out later, in 1959. She also turned down his outline for another volume of autobiography, which later earned good reviews as I Wonder as I Wander (Rinehart, 1956).
Despite these rebuffs, Hughes returned to Knopf whenever Mrs. Knopf wanted him back. He knew how much she and her firm had done for his career. Around 1960, after she took over the leadership of the company, she passed Hughes on to an extremely able younger editor, Judith Jones. Together, Hughes and Jones produced his experimental book-length poem Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), in a colorful, somewhat complex format that he loved. Jones also saw into print, just after he died, Hughes’s snarling The Panther and the Lash: Poems for Our Times (1967).
While his way with publishers was relatively smooth, Hughes’s dealings with other aspects of the white world were vexed by all sorts of controversies. Some were troubles endemic to the world of art, especially the stage; some were disputes of a political sort that threatened to silence him as an artist; and some, also potentially destructive, were of a more intimate kind.
Much of the trouble came from Hughes’s almost fatal attraction to the stage. Constantly at work on dramas, comedies, operas, cantatas, traditional musicals, gospel musicals (a form he said he invented), and the like, he found himself often lunging from one mini-crisis to another. In a 1953 letter to James Baldwin he warned the novelist: “If you want to die, be disturbed, maladjusted, neurotic, and psychotic, disappointed, and disjointed, just write plays! Go ahead!” His letters are rich in evidence of such volatility. They start wrenchingly with Zora Neale Hurston but also include his clashes four years later with Martin Jones, the bigoted white producer of Hughes’s first Broadway play, Mulatto (1935). Jones made sensational, shabby changes to the script, dared to list himself as its coauthor, and treated Hughes with open contempt. After the first Broadway performance he threw the traditional party but invited neither Hughes nor the star of the show, Rose McClendon, who was the only other black person involved in the production (whites played the other black roles). He also refused to pay Hughes even as the show ran and ran on Broadway. Finally he tendered through an agent a check to Hughes for $88.50, as if to say that Hughes was lucky to get any money at all.
Working with the composer Kurt Weill and the playwright Elmer Rice on the Broadway opera Street Scene (1947), Hughes basked in its success until a sudden dispute with Rice over royalties from the lyrics angered him, especially since his contracted share of the profits, 2 percent, was unusually low for a Broadway lyricist. Although Hughes fought Rice over his claims, he was as diplomatic as ever in doing so. Eventually he and Rice reached an agreement. Not so with the moody black composer William Grant Still. For years their relationship had been cordial. “Really, you are unique among collaborators,” Still had lauded Hughes in 1945. But their friendship died in 1949 just after their opera Troubled Island, about the Haitian Revolution, opened at the City Center in New York. When newspaper critics panned Still’s music as derivative and lackluster, he took out his resentment on Hughes by refusing to speak to him. Hughes was hurt but not astonished. Writing to Bontemps in 1948 about Still and another composer with whom he was working, Hughes noted dryly: “Both of my opera people are behaving as though they smoked reefers between every note.… I am not given to displaying temperament. I just sit calmly and let them blow their tops.”
That other composer was the German émigré Jan Meyerowitz. Their first opera, The Barrier, based on the play Mulatto, reached Broadway in 1950 but flopped there. Nevertheless, the men kept working on other projects. Over the years, Hughes was called upon to weather Meyerowitz’s many stormy fits of rage. (Hughes’s respected drama agent dumped Hughes as a client after she refused to deal anymore with Meyerowitz.) Finally, in a 1960 letter, Hughes told Meyerowitz that he was done working as a librettist—although, characteristically, he made no mention of his friend’s outbursts. “I see no point,” he wrote instead, “in spending long hours of thought, and weeks of writing seeking poetic phrases and just the right word—and then not enough of the librettist’s lines are heard for anybody to know what is being sung.… And NO money is made.”
Politics, however, presented perhaps the most dangerous threats to Hughes’s career. He had been a socialist sympathizer ever since high school in Cleveland, when delirious kids at Central High, most of them of East European immigrant stock, had celebrated the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia by parading a red flag around the grounds. His radicalism in the 1930s led him to compose fierce poems—and, later, to a campaign of retribution waged against him by anticommunists. It began in earnest in 1940 with the noisy picketing of a major literary luncheon at a hotel in Pasadena, California, intended to capitalize on the appearance of The Big Sea. Frightened, the sponsors canceled the event on the day itself. His enemies tried to make sure that Hughes paid dearly for poems such as “Goodbye Christ,” “Good Morning Revolution,” and “One More ‘S’ in the U.S.A.” (“Put one more s in the U.S.A. / To make it Soviet”). In 1953, summoned before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s feared subcommittee, Hughes was forced to surrender. In a televised hearing, he repudiated his radical past. His sheer relief when the ordeal was over comes through in a letter he sent to Frank D. Reeves, his main lawyer in Washington. “No words—and certainly no money,” Hughes wrote, “(even were it a million dollars) could in any sense express to you my gratitude or from me repay you for what you’ve done for me in a time of emergency. Without your able help and kind, considerate, patient, and wise counsel, I would have been a lost ball in the high weeds or, to mix metaphors, a dead duck among the cherry blossoms!”
This letter gives us a glimpse of the deep-seated sense of vulnerability that Hughes’s persistent graciousness never fully concealed. On the whole, his letters, especially after he became a radical, give only an oblique sense of his emotional core, insofar as one can identify with certainty that core in anyone. As for intimate feelings, we have little to go on. We have a few mildly romantic letters to or about women, notably those to Sylvia “Si-Lan” Chen (Leyda), the Trinidad-born dancer he met in Moscow in 1932–1933 and who later married the noted American film historian Jay Leyda and settled in America. But such letters don’t tell us much. The absence of love letters is puzzling. Was Hughes’s devotion to his work so complete that he had no time for love? Did he destroy such letters, denying them tenure at Yale? Or did he ask others to destroy them upon his death? (No one has said that he did so.) In any event, we have a paucity of love letters to women, and none to men, if Hughes ever wrote any of those.
In this respect, perhaps the most telling documents here are a series of drafts of letters Hughes wrote around 1930. These drafts suggest depths of self-doubt and self-loathing seen nowhere else in his correspondence—although they are clearly reflected in many of his poems. Critics have generally ignored these bleaker, nonracial, and nonpolitical poems even though they make up a substantial part of Hughes’s poetic output. Works such as “Exits” (1924) or “A House in Taos” (1926) reflect the stark quality of emotional or existential bleakness with which Hughes lived—and fought—much of his life.
These drafts (the letters themselves are lost) were addressed to the major patron of his life, the wealthy, elderly, inspiring, but also somewhat terrifying Mrs. Charlotte Mason, or “Godmother,” as she made some of her dependents call her. For at least two years Mrs. Mason lavished money, praise, and what seemed like love on Langston. She gave him a generous monthly stipend, decked him out in fine clothes, entertained him at her luxurious home on Park Avenue, visited him at Lincoln University when he studied there, and let him squire her to fancy Manhattan functions such as the opera. All the while, she sought to drive him to artistic heights that would reflect what she, a prophet, saw as the unique spiritual essence of Africa.
Hughes evidently fell in love with Mrs. Mason, as a son loves his mother. (His relationship with his real mother was almost always vexed, and he perhaps hated her, just as he hated his father.) And when Mrs. Mason suddenly threw him out, without a real explanation, he became violently ill. Cast off, he pleaded desperately for reinstatement. “I am not wise, Godmother,” Hughes wrote in one particularly agonized appeal. “The inner soul is simple as a fool, sensitive as a sheltered child, at odds too often with the reasons of the mind, a coward hiding in the dark, wrapping itself in the cloak of art when, too sick with loneliness, it must go out for air or die. The soul is deaf and dumb, and the body cannot speak for it.… The body lies too often to itself. The soul looks on in silence—and moves away. There are too many things it does not understand.” But Godmother never changed her mind. Broken, Hughes spent months recovering from this crisis—if indeed he ever recovered fully from it.
Selected Letters of Langston Hughes offers a body of writing invaluable to our understanding of a writer once seen by critics as essentially shallow. To most of them, he was at best a charming brown minstrel boy who, going off to the big war against white racism, beat his drum bravely but plaintively, ineffectually. They judged him as lacking a complex inner life and the ability to produce enduring art.
The truth, as his letters suggest, is that Hughes’s life was a struggle that he won. He emerged victorious by virtue of his unfailing commitment to art, his unconditional devotion to black America, and his democratic desire to embrace all people. He created a body of work that is uneven in quality, to be sure, but also invaluable in the end. He also possessed a compelling emotional and intellectual integrity. His brief poem “Personal,” which forms the epigraph to this introduction, was written near the middle of his life. In its modest way it captures something essential about his sense of himself. It suggests a being living afloat in a dangerous but also wondrous world. He lives on, buoyed both by a sense of the power of the uncanny absolute and also by his faith in the redeeming power of artistic language, as well as the integrity of honest silence.