[In harmony with today's Google doodle, we repost this.]
“Our problems in America are very
much like yours,” I told the Africans, “especially in the South. I am a Negro, too.”
But they only laughed at me and
shook their heads and said: “You,
white man! You, white man!”
-- Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940)
[Unusual first-name, common surname; cf. Malcolm.]
I have lately been reading widely in European cultural
history of the 1920s and 30s, and in that context, re-reading the second volume
of Langston Hughes’ autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander (published 1956). It is one of the best books I have ever read. And it is far more gentle and ironic
and humorous, more universal in appeal, than the impression you would get from
the Wiki article on Hughes (which does not even discuss the book), which pretty much sees him in the lens
of identity-politics.
In that memoir, largely concerned with European travels, his
1932 trajectory improbably intersects that of another of my favorite writers,
Arthur Koestler: and it is
fascinating to read of their stay in Turkmenistan, first from Hughes’
perspective here, and then from Koestler’s (in Koestler’s own memoirs, and in
the fine biography by Michael Scammell). Their compresence on this outpost of the
world-historical stage, at that fraught time, is impossible to summarize or
even allude to in any illuminating way, absent the necessary background in the
Zeitgeist of the time. (Read The
Invisible Writing; read Out of the Night; read Memoirs of
Montparnasse ; read Mémoirs d’un revolutionnaire …)
I tend not to be drawn to books with titles like A Negro
Looks at Soviet Central Asia (1934) (which title was quite possibly imposed
on Hughes by his Bolshevik publishers), or Famous American Negroes
(1954), since I am not a Negro.(**) On
the other hand, I am not an Englishman either, and I love Dickens. It all depends on whether you are in
the hands of a great writer. And
in some of his books, Langston Hughes is that. -- Further, though a widely-traveled man of eclectic
culture, he was very, very American. Henry James, T.S. Elliot -- Europe can have ‘em. Langston we keep.
(** : By contrast, the title of his story collection, The
Ways of White Folks, is very appealing indeed, for I am fascinated by the
ways of white folks, some of whom I number among my best friends.)
~
We have commented elsewhere on the current overpuffing of
the literary merits (properly nugatory) of certain currently coddled groups (which
both decorum and due discretion
bid leave unnamed) -- based largely, one imagines, on the profiles of
who-all happens to work at the literary media these days. Black men, by contrast,
have been relatively quiet this past decade; if one gets the red-carpet treatment in the news, when not for some notable recent achievement, it is
likely not for being black, but for (something else). But there are treasures, not much trumpeted.
Langston Hughes shares some traits with another noted
American writer of mixed race, Barack Obama. (Yes, I know, he became President; but prior to that, his excellent
autobiography qualified him as, indeed, a writer.) Both had a virile, absent father, admired diffidently
from a distance; both spent a fair
number of years, as children or young men, outside an English-speaking
country; both were well aware of
their marginal status -- marginal with respect to just about any gestalt you
could name. (Langston may actually
have been marginal in a further respect not shared by Obama; don’t know, not important here.) And both turned this predicament
to ultimate good advantage.
There is nothing wrong, of course, from being a comfortable
member of the dominant community (ethnic or religious or what have you) in your
home country; but that background
does not, by itself, lead on to philosophy. The minority, by contrast, cannot help confronting
such matters. If the confrontation
collapses into futility, you wind up with Identity Politics. If it serves as a path to insight, you
get the world’s great literary observers.
~
One of the books I enjoyed during the years in Berkeley
after I had dropped out of graduate school for lack of the wherewithal to pay
the tuition, and lived (richly!) on literature rather than food, was Langston’s The Best of Simple. ‘Simple’
(or Semple, to the registrar) was, as
the vernacular version of his surname might suggest, a Naturkind, an ingénu, a naïf : and though this personality is archetypically American, the
European designations (for which I cannot, at present, think of a good English
equivalent), are in point, for I Wonder as I Wander provides a
surprising hint at the genesis of this character:
I have an affinity for Latin
Americans, and the Spanish language I have always loved. One of the first
things I did when I got to Mexico City
was to get a tutor, and began to read Don Quixote in the
original, a great reading experience
that possibly helped me to develop, many years later, in my own books, a
character called Simple
-- a kind of blend, as it were, of Sancho Panza and the
Quixote.
Another surprising detail from his Mexico days (since
American literati of the ‘20s and ‘30s were not generally a devout bunch):
I went to vespers every night in the old church just across the
street, lighted by tall candles
and smelling of incense.
Sometimes I even got up early in the morning to attend mass.
(Laus deô.)
~
By a biographical accident, it was the work of Langston
Hughes that first introduced me to poetry (beyond “Twinkle twinkle little star”
-- not that there is anything wrong with that
poem, either, in its place). My
parents were not bookish; yet
somehow, on their scantly-populated shelves, stood a “slender volume of verse”
(in the classic phrase of the time), its rich yellow hardcovers together actually thicker than the text
in-between, called:
The Weary Blues
by Langston Hughes
(Itself already a kind of monostich, I noted with astonishment.)
One I recall from memory:
Bring me all of your dreams, you dreamers.
Bring me all your heart-melodies,
that I may wrap them in a blue cloud-cloth,
away from the too-rough
fingers of the world.
I hesitate even to quote this, for the very reason the poet
cites: the too-rough fingers of
the world. It needs to nestle in
its octavo yellow covers, being
gently handled by my own slim fingers, aged nine. (It is not, in itself, on the level of “The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner”; but
remember: Up to that time, I had
met nothing much beyond the level of the Alphabet Song.)
~
Anyhow, here is a picture of the man, one that warms my heart. I could easily have selected one less
contentious; but Langston liked
his liquor, and his jazz, and the sweet feel of a woman -- and yes, he
sometimes enjoyed a smoke.
He was never one to kowtow to pieties (not even those of the Left).
 |
| Here's looking at you, kid. |
