Letters from Langston: From the Harlem
Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond
Edited by Evelyn Louise Crawford & MaryLouise Patterson
University of California Press. 440 pages, $27.95
THROUGHOUT his prolific career Langston Hughes addressed volatile issues of racism, poverty, and war. Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond displays the acclaimed poet’s socialist ideals and those of four likeminded friends with whom he corresponded from 1930 until his death in 1967 at age 65. The letters are held together by well-researched notes on black intellectuals’ battles for racial and economic justice, and they paint a vivid picture of the poet’s exuberant mind. Disappointingly, the collection offers little insight into Hughes’ life as an almost certainly gay man in a brutally right-wing era.
Evelyn Louise Crawford and MaryLouise Patterson culled the letters from the Hughes archive at Yale University. A majority were written by the poet and most of the others by the editors’ parents, William and Louise Patterson and Matthew and Evelyn (“Nebby”) Crawford. Chronologically ordered, they show how broad events intersected with daily life in the Patterson and Crawford households and in the life of their “fitful family member,” Langston Hughes. Letters from the 1930s and 40s highlight economic collapse and rising fascism. The notorious Scottsboro case saw nine black teenagers tried and convicted on trumped-up charges of assault and rape, with the U.S. Communist Party supporting their legal defense. Soon after, Louise (then Thompson) led a group of young black men and women on a trip to Moscow, at Soviet expense, to make a film about race. The group included Hughes, Patterson, and Crawford. The project was dropped when the U.S. contractor for a huge Soviet dam complained, but the travelers’ belief in socialism survived. After returning to Harlem, Hughes wrote a play, Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South, which ran for a record-breaking 373 performances. The radical democratic vision that he and other black activists shared prompted their boycott of the film Gone With the Wind because it justified slavery. During World War II, they conducted a “Double V” campaign to defeat Nazis abroad and racism at home. But reactionary backlash grew. Congress approved the Smith Act, which set criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the government. Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson publicly excoriated Hughes as “a red devil in black skin,” citing lines from “Goodbye Christ,” a poem critical of capitalist religion written during his Moscow stay. When The Saturday Evening Post published the entire poem, it stirred an outcry, and Hughes told friends he would be “laying off political poetry for a while … [and]going back … to nature, Negroes, and love.” Harassment intensified in the 1950s, and while Hughes had produced patriotic speeches, poems, and songs, he was pursued. His poems “Goodbye Christ” and “One More S in the USA” were read into the Congressional Record. Called to testify before the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the poet denied having ever been a member of the Communist Party, a true statement, and he repudiated his early work. Why did he do this? Letters from Langston does not offer a clear answer. But in addition to being a black man, a writer, and a leftist, Hughes was almost certainly gay, albeit closeted. Evidence for this can be found in his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940); in a 1961 short story, “Blessed Assurance”; in poems such as “Cafe 3 a.m.,” “Desire,” and “Young Sailor”; and in letters outside this collection. Hughes’ friends included gay black writers, like Richard Bruce Nugent, and white ones, like Carl Van Vechten. He probably knew the Subcommittee was after not only “Red Scare” suspects but “Lavender Scare” ones as well, and felt afraid. Which brings up another issue. The editors avoid taking a stand on Hughes’ sexual orientation. Their parents were close friends of the poet but “were not privy to this facet” of his life, they surmise, or “perhaps knew not to ask [about it]if he wasn’t forthcoming.” The footnote to a letter Hughes wrote from Carmel, California, in 1941 suggests that his complaints about arthritis were to cover embarrassment at being hospitalized for gonorrhea—but that’s as far it goes. Given the editors’ extensive research, sidestepping the question of sexual identity seems puzzling. The mystery is confounded by inclusion of provocative but unexplained details, such as a black-and-white photo on the cover and one inside showing Hughes and Louise Thompson hugging each other on the voyage to Russia, and a few warm early letters they exchanged. Letters from Langston gives an excellent account of the racial and political challenges faced by this extraordinary writer. With 671 boxes of letters, manuscripts, and photographs resting in the Yale archive, maybe Hughes will find a biographer who can decipher his more hidden struggles, too. ________________________________________________________ Rosemary Booth is a writer and photographer in Cambridge, Mass.
