Tributes

by Bradford Morrow

  What I found most troubling was the discussion of the poems: not so much interpretations as detailed tracings of the connection between names and images with the real-life people and events they refer to. Thus lines that I had given a more fanciful or imaginative reading suddenly seemed too grounded. Overall, rather than giving me a deeper appreciation of the poems, it made them seem more narrow. Or, as my writing students like to say about poems that use a lot of personal references, “We like it better when we don’t know who the people in it are.”

  In all fairness, City Poet is a biography, not literary criticism, but what it helped me to realize is the problematic way in which the whole notion of biography (and not this one in particular) limits our reading of O’Hara’s work.

  More than any other poet I can think of, O’Hara’s life is constantly equated with his poems in a very literal way, thereby giving the impression that there are no levels to his work. Serious critics who have never quite known what to make of O’Hara’s writing, with its playful disregard for traditional ideas of what a poem could and could not be, have been content to look no further than the autobiographical surface. And in some of his comments, O’Hara himself is guilty of creating the impression that any in-depth explication of his poems is simply belaboring the obvious. Perhaps in the old-fashioned sense of conventional symbolism this is the case. But it strikes me as truly ironic that we could take a writer like O’Hara whose life and work are so much about levels of artistic mediation and somehow turn him into a realist.

  Romantic, heroic, tragic—O’Hara is an ideal figure on which to project our fantasies about the life of the artist, though hopefully not at the expense of his work. Grudgingly, the literary establishment has included him in the canon, but I can’t help feeling uneasy over the possibility that it’s the man and not the poems they’ve canonized.

  Perhaps another way to think of this is simply that Frank O’Hara hasn’t been dead that long, and therefore his writing is still tied to his life and those that knew him, in a way that makes the work difficult to interpret freely. I’m not saying we should completely disregard the unique way O’Hara used his life and transformed it in his poems. But I do think that if O’Hara is to remain a vital influence, then his words must belong to everyone—and not just those who knew him best. Only then can new ways to interpret his work emerge, apart from even his own intentions for it.

  There is something deeply satisfying about the myth of Frank O’Hara, as if it provided poetry with a face and a name for what previously were only philosophical ideas, a life that becomes a work of art and vice versa. And yet the two sides of the equation—his life and his poems—are not true equivalents. Given the choice, perhaps some would actually prefer the man. Not me. I have his poems. His poems are enough.

  Langston Hughes. 1939. The Granger Collection, New York.

  Langston Hughes:

  “If You Can’t Read, Run Anyhow!”

  Kevin Young

  THE CHALLENGE LANGSTON HUGHES PRESENTS is not that his work is obscure, his life operatic, or achievements invisible—rather Hughes as person and poet presents too much, is far too accessible. His personal history seems clearer than Dickinson, less tragic than Dunbar; like Whitman, his writing seems to need no explanation. Here, of course, lies the danger with Hughes, a writer who remains what I call “deceptively simple.” Or, as a student of mine unwittingly, even intuitively reversed, Hughes is “simply deceptive.” For all his clear language, precise diction and even his famous folk character Jesse B. Semple, Hughes is anything but.

  This early life of the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race”—a title Hughes wore with pride—speaks of the Great Migration of the early parts of the century. Born in Joplin, Missouri, he was uprooted & lived with his grandmother in Lawrence & Topeka, Kansas. Most people don’t think of black folks when they think Kansas; fewer would dream of poetry. However, as a fellow Topekan, I feel a special connection to Hughes & this early & by all accounts alienating portion of his life. Something in his poems’ easygoing yet reserved tone feels forged from that Kansas background. Such pragmatic skepticism has been an open heartland secret to anyone who has lived there; is what over the years has kept Kansans going through drought & locusts & floods; and is what ultimately kept Bob Dole from winning the 1996 presidential election.

  Kansans understand this skepticism verging on cynicism—and admit it to no one. We choose instead to export wheat & tornadoes & oddly enough, black poets. Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American Pulitzer Prize winner, was born in Topeka though she lit out for the greener or at least taller pastures of Chicago by the time she was a few months old—this move to the big city also characterizes Kansans, including Hughes, who eventually settled & died in Harlem, U.S.A. Like Joyce’s Ireland, or Baptist Heaven, Kansas is a place defined by its absence, by distance. Not just the leagues that place contains, but the lengths from which we can see it well.

  With this distance in mind, perhaps we can better understand Hughes’s relation to his work & arguably his life—what I call his poetics of refusal. This painful Kansas past helps explain the “distance” sometimes found in his poems, as well as their underlying melancholy. In many ways, this ironic distance simply recasts a blues aesthetic—one in which “I don’t got a gun, and I’m too blue to look for one.” Du Bois’s double consciousness becomes in Hughes’s hands a double negative that for the blues author & audience adds up if not to a positive, then to a “dark” humor. Laughing to Keep from Crying, as Hughes named a collection of short stories; even more refusal is found in the title of his “novel” of the life of a boy in Kansas, Not Without Laughter. For Hughes & us “blues people,” survival means the small distance between despair & laughter, between having & not, between buying a gun to off yourself & not being able to afford the bullets.

  The difference between the blues figure & the hard-luck, absurdist stereotypes of minstrelsy so prominent in the early parts of the century is one of form—and audience. Both are things Hughes understood innately, and responded to—almost to a fault, in the case of audience, sometimes crossing the line he recognized between poetry & lighter verse. Of course, the innovations that Hughes achieved, in championing the folkways and form of the blues seem obvious or easy now, but when he published his The Weary Blues (1926) and even more importantly, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), he caught hell. The black bourgeoisie came down on Hughes the hardest, terming him the “Poet Low-rate of Harlem” for writing about common folk, what today’s tastemakers might call “negative images”: janitors, adulterers, juke jointers, bad men, loose women, real people people people. And what advice he gave them people! “Put on yo’ red silk stockings,/ Black gal. Go out and let the white boys/ Look at yo’ legs.” Even today such images get read as “literal advice” and not, as Hughes called it, an “ironic poem.”

  “We know we are beautiful. And ugly too,” Hughes wrote in his groundbreaking manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), arguing against either whitewashing our images to make ourselves look better, or against (as he signifies on the unnamed “young poet,” most likely Countee Cullen) wanting to be white. After climbing the mountain, Hughes dug in, breaking first ground, trying to dig his way back to the motherland by way of the Mississippi.

  Interestingly enough, for such a landlocked childhood, Hughes’s first famous poem was “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a classic sounding, long-lined, Whitmanesque reverie. In many ways the poem foreshadows what some have called literary Garveyism, a returning to African roots—and in taking the “white man” out of Whitman, Hughes taps into a larger Zeitgeist, taking us through the rivers Congo, Nile, the “Euphrates when dawns were young” and, ultimately, a river of the dead that unlike the mythical Lethe, refuses to forget. Or ignore his blackness—listen to the reason Hughes gives for writing the poem on a journey to see his expatriate father in Mexico: “All day on the train I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people. I didn’t understand it,
because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much.” This long memory & literary acceptance of his own blackness, of the “motherland” as opposed to his “father’s land” is part of his appeal, a defining quality of his long literary life.

  But in describing his early life in his stunning autobiography The Big Sea, Hughes leaves out plenty. Arnold Rampersad, Hughes’s biographer, literary executor and champion, sums this up this way: “In The Big Sea, deeper meaning is deliberately concealed within a seemingly disingenuous, apparently transparent, or even shallow narrative. In a genre defined in its modern mode by confession, Hughes appears to give virtually nothing away of a personal nature.” Rampersad links this reticence, let’s call it, to a sort of racial code, “a gamble” by Hughes to please white publishers while speaking to black readers who held a decoder ring. Particularly when dealing with issues of his white patron (whom he had a terrible break with) or his sexuality (conveniently left undefined or defined as “unattached” by most biographers), Hughes is less than forward—we learn little of his Eastern European female roommate or, more to the point, his days on board (& below deck) on a merchant marine vessel.

  For me, Hughes’s reserve is less the smiling face of the slave but rather an elaborate, elegant technique found in Hughes’s poetry & in much great art. To read The Big Sea is to learn dissembling as an art form—not as pop escapism, but as a populist escape hatch—a refusal to give in, to give out and especially to give away anything. To read the poetry or The Big Sea for traces of Hughes’s life is to deny the dogged unautobiographical nature of his work. As he himself wrote about his second book of poems: “I felt it was a better book than my first, because it was more impersonal, more about other people than myself, and because it made use of the Negro folk-song forms, and included poems about work and the problems of finding work, that are always so pressing with the Negro people.”

  While certainly class dominates here, I want to highlight Hughes’s first reason for Fine Clothes’ success: “It was more impersonal.” In our current confessional climate where the memoir meets the talk show—of which, if I had to, I would choose the latter—it may be hard to read the impersonal as desirable, or even achievable. But if we let go our preconceptions about poetry being “personal,” we can see Hughes championing a poetry for all people that is not private—a verse that is truly “free,” and open to the public. There is an anonymity to his poetry, or rather, a pseudonymity, that may startle us. “I have known rivers:/ Ancient, dusky rivers.” Yet, if we look at his fellow modernists—the “extinguishing of personality” attempted by Eliot, or even Williams’s lexicon of “thing-ness”—Hughes stands not alone but out, creating something new, vernacular, blues-based, as American as lynching & apple pie.

  This merging of the American promise & its pratfalls—a fragmented violence in one hand, a homemade wholeness & even wholesomeness in the other—Hughes negotiates most of his life. Just as his grandmother’s first husband who fought alongside John Brown for Bleeding Kansas, Hughes adds his voice to our many Americas. Examining his long career from the 1920s & the Harlem Renaissance to his death in 1967 during the Black Arts Movement, we discover many different Hugheses as well. Socialist, student, reporter, world traveler, novelist, sailor, dramatist, busboy, dishwasher, poet. The Langston Hughes Reader (1958) contains multitudes—poems, plays, blues, translations, autobiographies (plural), songs and, my favorite, “pageant.” This short history of black people in the western world—straightforward, celebratory, funny, serious—takes in all the ways Hughes saw we are. Only Hughes of his modernist contemporaries—excepting perhaps Williams—would attempt such broad American history.

  Odd then, or perhaps fitting, that Hughes would come under fire from the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. His more overt political poems, especially of the 1930s when he went to & wrote about the Spanish Civil War and Russia, came back to haunt him—in particular “Goodbye Christ,” which raises Marxism & not the cross. For decades the religious right dogged Hughes, even though the poem had been published privately in the 1930s. And before the committee, Hughes recanted, and avoided the blacklist.

  In contrast to Paul Robeson’s stand-off with the HUAC & subsequent troubles, Hughes’s giving in seemed like a betrayal. Hughes would go on to repress most of the work from this period, excising if not excusing it—to our great loss. Even if he was not blacklisted, black bars cover a great amount of what we think we know about Hughes. Hughes’s poetics of refusal becomes a bit more understandable in this context—not just as the black tradition of signifying, whether talking trash or telling it slant, well described by Henry Louis Gates—but as the kind of talk Othello used to win Desdemona’s father after he’d won her.

  Such cagey talk did not serve him well in the straight-talking Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. We were impatient, sick of rhetoric—action was called for—as Amiri Baraka (né Jones) wrote, “We want ‘poems that kill.’” This metaphoric murder, part of what the critic William Harris calls the “Jazz Aesthetic,” involved offing the literary fathers, just as Baraka would say John Coltrane “murdered the popular song.” Hughes took plenty of hits, yet few—even Baraka himself, who dissed Hughes in public (though later retracted)—had read deeply enough to know of Hughes’s radical work.

  But one wonders, even with the excised 1930s, what had they read? Hughes had been speaking in a black idiom from The Weary Blues to his book-length Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), and even his last big work, 1964’s Ask Your Mama. Somebody should have—she could have told ’em Hughes was getting down all along. Caught between the Devil & the deep blue sea, like Louis Armstrong, Hughes represented an earlier, seemingly bygone era—and though both artists responded to & even cleared space for radical changes such as be-bop, both did so in such a way as to make their virtuosity simple. Deceptive.

  What gets lost in most critiques is the depth of emotion Hughes expresses, despite or precisely because of the “impersonal” quality he possesses. He paints a community, a “Lenox Avenue Mural,” not a self-portrait. Even more why The Big Sea, a book which changed my life, looms large on the Hughes horizon. For, like any picaresque tale—and this is largely how he constructs his life—Hughes’s autobiography reveals as much by its gaps, by its discrete molecular leaps, by what he refuses to say.

  Take The Big Sea’s opening paragraph when Hughes throws his books in the sea, as dramatic an opening of a writing life as any:

  It was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart when I threw the books into the water. I leaned over the rail of the S.S. Malone and threw the books as far as I could out into the sea—all the books I had had at Columbia, and all the books I had lately bought to read.

  By this Hughes achieves a sort of wry anti-ars poetica, a refusal of the “inkellectual.” In refusing book learnin’ he accepts something else: people. For

  … it wasn’t only the books that I wanted to throw away, but everything unpleasant and miserable out of my past: the memory of my father, the poverty and uncertainties of my mother’s life, the stupidities of color-prejudice, black in a white world, the fear of not finding a job, the bewilderment of no one to talk to about things that trouble you, the feeling of always being controlled by others—by parents, by employers, by some outer necessity not your own. All those things I wanted to throw away. To be free of. To escape from. I wanted to be a man on my own, control my own life, and go my own way. I was twenty-one. So I threw the books in the sea.

  Here we see Hughes’s emotion, in a confession, or at least a protest. Black, Africa-bound and twenty-one, Hughes does not burn books that offend, but drowns books to defend. While participating in the African-American tradition of negation as affirmation (“Bad Is Good,” one chapter is titled), more significantly—and to my mind, the reason such a powerful statement has gotten overlooked—his jettisoning the books flies into the headwind of current African-American criticism such as Gates’s, which emphasizes literacy.

  By this I certainly do not
mean to say literacy has not factored into black lives, and naturally, books; or that Hughes, the prolific author, advocated any sort of illiteracy. On the contrary, Hughes, in his poetry & in this and other symbolic acts in The Big Sea embodies & embraces what I call aliteracy. By aliteracy I mean a trickster-style technique that questions not just Western dichotomies (bad/good, black/white) but provides a system beyond which one can be defined, even by writing, or by literacy or ill-.

  In other words, Hughes prefers the ability to read situations & power structures, over books—what Houston Baker describes, in speaking of Caliban in The Tempest, as “supraliteracy.” For Hughes, aliteracy approaches more what we say when we say “she read him,” as in figgered him for a fool. What Baker does not figure is the way in which Prospero’s rejection of his books, thrown similarly into the sea, recognizes shifting societal orders and their relation to the word. Or that often literate & literary authors, whether Prospero as character or Hughes as writer, may abandon their words, in order to gain a new world. Or that, if we take Auden—who himself poeticized “impersonality,” arguably for similar political/sexual reasons—& his “parable” of the poet existing in a dialogue between creative, beautiful Ariel and what Seamus Heaney calls “the countervailing presence of Prospero, whose covenant is with ‘truth’ rather than ‘beauty,’” Hughes sides with Caliban, reserving the right to curse, to cannibalize, to talk out both sides of his neck. To leave such a truth/beauty dialogue altogether.

  How significant, then, that Hughes, perched on a voyage back to Africa, old world, motherland, throws his books into the sea! In a reversal of the middle passage, Hughes creates a rite of passage, turning around the paradigm of the slave stolen from Africa & taught (or, more likely, forbidden) to read English. He also turns inside out the idea of the ignorant, illiterate black who don’t know no better, massa—a figure which, despite their best intentions, African-American critics seem to reinscribe when they write of literacy & the history of (white) authentication of black authors. Hughes rejects it all, booklearnin’ both black & white. Often I wish I could do the same.