American literary scholarship that has come a long way since Richard Wright's âI Tried to Be a Communistâ appeared i
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Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond, eds. Evelyn Louise Crawford and Mary Louise Patterson (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 434 pp. Reviewed by Ryan James Kernan, Rutgers University, New Brunswick Letters from Langston: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Red Scare and Beyond is a welcome contribution to the project of unearthing Langston Hughes’s domestic Communist ties and to the project of recovering the black left more generally, providing a history told through the correspondence that Hughes had with four of his closest confidants: Louise Thompson, arguably his closest comrade and his artistic collaborator both in the Soviet Union and with the Harlem Suitcase Theater; her husband William L. Patterson, one the US’ highest ranking black Communists; Matt Crawford, a prominent labor organizer; and his wife Evelyn “Nebby” Crawford. The volume’s editors, Evelyn Crawford and Mary Louise Patterson (the children of these two couples), contextualize and tie together some 30 years of black leftists’ epistolary history by offering narratives that situate the correspondence in contexts ranging from the personal to the geopolitical. The beauty of the work is thus aptly framed by Robin D.G. Kelly’s preface as a “rich and fascinating alternative narrative history of the American Left through Black eyes” (xi). This epistolary history complements the work of a generation of critics (including Cedric Robinson, Mark Naison, Mark Solomon, Eric Foner, and Penny Von Eschen) who have strived successfully to move beyond Cold War paradigms governed by dynamics that Naison summarized succinctly in his Communists in Harlem During the Depression as: manipulation, disillusionment, and betrayal (xv). These contributions to the archive of the black left, in turn, have been substantially complemented and enriched by histories “written from below,” like Nell Painter’s The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (and Kelly’s own Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. These works have helped to illuminate the experience of black people who lived through and participated in Communism’s shaping of the black left (and vice versa). In a similar vein, Letters from Langston contributes to a generation of African American literary scholarship that has come a long way since Richard Wright’s “I Tried to Be a Communist” appeared in perhaps the hallmark of anti-Communist tracts, The God that Failed. Hughes, the international left’s most prominent black author of the 1930s and 1940s, is central to nearly all efforts to uncover the buried political and literary history of the black left. This new volume, a kind of literary history told from the ground up, thus complements the work of critics like William Maxwell, Kate Baldwin, and James Smethurst who, focusing on Hughes, have allowed us to see the engagement between US black writers and the Communist Party as composed of something more than “narratives
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2 ALH Online Review, Series X of black writers suffering near-death experiences in party clutches” (3), as Maxwell puts it in New Negro, Old Left. Letters from Langston contains very few missives penned by Hughes that offer insight into either the poet’s creative processes or his evolving leftist politics. Despite (and because of) this paucity, the volume’s chief contributions lie in providing a refractive view of the poet as seen by his US black comrades and in offering the reader a good glimpse into what might be labeled Hughes’s US black radical reading community and social milieu. For example, most scholars of Hughes’s radical literary production will be delighted to find that he shared with these friends several of the poems he wrote during World War II and that, even as they praised his work, he also received pointed political criticism from Louise Thompson and William Patterson for publishing poems that, more or less, strived to articulate the “Double V” politic that the Popular Front shunned, tactics to which Thompson, Patterson, and the CPUSA in general subscribed. The kind of internal debate inside the US black left embodied by these critiques challenges long-held truisms, espoused in works, on one hand, like Eric Sundquist’s “Who Was Langston Hughes?,” that routinely denigrate Hughes’s work for pandering to a Soviet taste for anti-American propaganda, and, on the other, by work, like Anthony Dawahare’s “Langston Hughes’s Radical Poetry and the End of Race,” that routinely figure Hughes’s radical poetry as deracinated. Instead, it points to a poet who was just as attuned to the domestic communist critiques of his friends as he was to the fabled Party line—a poet whose work practiced its own brand of “black Marxism” and who saw blackness as something more than an epiphenomenon of global race capitalism. The editors’ decision to contextualize the correspondence inside an unapologetically black leftist history of much of the “American Century” is part and parcel to one of the volume’s chief aims;: to disrupt the Cold War narrative of Hughes’s relationship with the Communist Party as he told it to Roy Cohn before HUAC in 1953 and as it has been rehearsed in works like Arnold Rampersad’s seminal biography The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume II: I Dream a World 1942-1967. Given the dynamics that inform the nearperennial tendency among literary critics and editors to explicate Hughes’s poetry, in large part, by making recourse to his biographical details (and vice versa), this narrative—wherein a naive Hughes is seduced by the promises of the Party in the 1930s but ultimately finds himself disenchanted after Stalin signed Hitler’s “Nonaggression Pact”—has necessarily gone coincided with negative appraisals of Hughes’s “radical” poetic production of the 1930s. In its place, the editors position Hughes’s continued correspondence with his four leftist friends as testimony to an enduring, informed black leftist fidelity and politic. The editors take great pains to draw the reader’s attention to moments in the correspondence where
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Hughes and his leftist interlocutors discuss the finer points of Marxism and/or CPUSA controversies and doctrine. For example, readers like Jonathan Scott and David Chioni Moore—having hypothesized that a Hughesian brand of dialectical materialism informed his 1930s poetic production—will delight in the collection’s giving prominence to letters like the one Louise Thompson sent to Hughes on 2 January 1932 wherein she proudly informs him that, along with her growing understanding of Marxist dialectical materialism, her “pinkness” gained “a rosier hue from day to day” (45). More broadly speaking, the volume’s historical reappraisal of Hughes’s black left bona fides and finesse adds to historical and biographical reassessments of Hughes’s radical years, as did Faith Berry’s Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. Plus, it provides a historical archive that complements the plethora of recent literary scholarship that has sought to recover Hughes’s radical poetry from both a proletarian perspective, in works like Cary Nelson’s Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left and Seth Moglen’s Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism, as well as from perspectives more finely attuned to Hughes’s black left internationalist politics and poetics embodied, such as can be found in essays like Brent Edwards’s “Langston Hughes and the Futures of Diaspora,” William Scott’s “Motivos of Translation”: Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes,” along with Jeff Westover’s “Africa/America Fragmentation and Diaspora in the Work of Langston Hughes.” My own research on Hughes’s translations and translators has led me to believe that the poet’s career manifests an uninterrupted commitment to advance the causes of social justice for US blacks and the peoples of the African Diaspora by experimenting with a transnational array of poetics and modalities of expression. So I am remarkably sympathetic to the editors’ desire to entrench Hughes firmly in the pantheon of the black left. Nevertheless, and like most Hughes scholars who have endeavored to explore Hughes via his correspondence, I also know two things: first, a scrutiny of Hughes’s correspondence is central to an understanding of the poet and his literary production; and, second, it is virtually impossible to know Hughes through his letters. Indeed, those closest to the poet routinely confirm that to know Hughes was to know that no one ever knew Langston Hughes. Rather, and as this, the sixth collection of Hughes’s letters, confirms—Letters from Langston is preceded by Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925-1967; The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964; My Dear Boy: Carrie Hughes Letters to Langston; Selected Letters of Langston Hughes, and Langston Hughes and the South African Drum Generation: The Correspondence)—Hughes was a great many things to a great many people through the world. As scholars still await the first publication of the complete letters of any African American writer, we must continue to
4 ALH Online Review, Series X celebrate each new volume of correspondence for what it is: another of Langston Hughes’s worlds, another Langston.
