ed_grover's Full Review: Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten - Remember Me...
This is the first of two book reviews that I think are more appropriate for the Black History Month Write-Off than the erotic novels of James Earl Hardy were. I was, however, pleased to find out that Brendan2 was hosting the event this year. Congratulations to her for picking up the baton. I hope these efforts inspire some members to read the other entries and to join in on this effort; February is a short month and times a' wastin'.
In Remember Me To Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925 – 1964 edited by Emily Bernard, we find out that Carl Van Vechten (who was white) met the 24 year-old Langston Hughes (who was black) at a benefit party in Harlem in 1924. Carl was then forty-five.
Langston Hughes became famous through his own talents and the promotion of Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten, who was once considered famous for his writing in The New York Herald Tribune, Vanity Fair, Crisis and Theater magazines became Langston Hughes's mentor. He is also remembered for fanciful his novels and his black and white photographs (1932 through 1962) of African Americans who were outstanding in literary and artistic fields. They will be covered in my next review, Generations in Black and White: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten, a collection that is also in the James Weldon Johnson collection at Yale.
Carlo, as Carl Van Vechten was know to his many friends, was a pack rat who never threw anything away. Subsequently we have this glorious collection of letters, cards and telegrams stored at Yale University. This book contains only a fraction of the 1,500 letters, cards and telegrams exchanged by these two men. The collection was donated to the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of American Negro Arts and Letters at Yale University and spans 40 years until Van Vechten's death in 1964.
After a wonderful introduction and a note on the text of this collection of letters, the editor, Emily Bernard, gives us a Dramatis Personae in which we find a short paragraph about everyone (black and white) that these two men knew in common. The reader will find mention of every important person of the times; there are singers, sculptors, artists, educators, librarians and, of course, writers and poets all mixed in with the black and white intellectuals.
Some time after Van Vechten settled in New York City at the turn of the last century, he became involved in an artistic movement that was called the "Harlem Renaissance." I soon found out that some black scholars are now preferring to call it The New Negro Movement. Some of them also think Van Vechten was profiting unfairly by his work and was at best on the edge of the movement.
Carl Van Vechten became interested in black culture at a time when African-Americans were banished from the American culture. It seems to me that he felt obligated to go against the grain and support black art. I found out that his parents nurtured his interest in the African American culture. His father was the cofounder of the Piney Woods School, a primary and secondary school for African American children in rural Mississippi. After his father's death Carl devoted significant amounts of his own time and money to supporting and advancing his cause.
Through his writings in mainstream white publications and his own personal efforts he helped get black writers published, black artists to be seen and black music to be heard. He did all of this without any kind of phony tolerance. and that's what makes him interesting as a supporter of black creativity. It was Van Vechten who helped Gertrude Stein get black opera Four Saints In Three Acts produced. It was Van Vechten who helped find the black dancers and singers, and it was Van Vechten who helped find the artists that made a success of the opera by a white Jewish woman.
In Bernard's introduction we find out about their meeting and the fact that Langston Hughes had just returned from a ten-month stay in Europe where he made his way through Paris and Italy (sometimes working as a dishwasher) and writing poetry. He dazzled the literati of Harlem with his writing and now they all wanted to meet him; he was equally dazzled by Harlem on his first visit and retained a fondness for the place.
Van Vechten helped Langston Hughes and many other young black writers get published. The letters between them at the beginning of the book are more than a bit interesting as they exchange novels, poems and bits of news. Van Vechten gets a collection of Langston's poems to be read by the new publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf. They published the collection as The Weary Blues in 1926. Van Vechten became a proud mentor and Hughes an ecstatic and grateful friend.
The correspondence between these two men is rather amazing when you think about the times they were written in. Bernard says, "It was nearly illegal for blacks and whites to have anything save the most impersonal kinds of relationships." The mingling of the races was all but forbidden in the 1920s through the 1950s. White people could entertain black people in their own homes, but blacks and whites couldn't even mingle socially. She adds, "There may have been a few places in Harlem that accepted black and white patrons, but as soon as whites began to populate these spots heavily, blacks were barred from their premises, or assigned to segregated seating,"
There are photographic reproductions of hand written and typed letters, telegrams and cards on the end papers of the book. The editor talks about the difference in writing materials; Van Vechten always wrote on heavy, cream-colored stationary and cards. Hughes, on the other hand was living in Washington DC, just beginning his career and wrote on what was at hand.
Bernard points out the way these two men "signed-off" on their letters and other correspondence. Van Vechten was upset with Hughes because he kept signing his letters with a very formal Sincerely. That really bothered him when he would get these kind of flat sign-offs. He told Langston that people were "only sincere with their butchers" and this whole thing started what became an almost fanciful kind of poetry on Van Vechten's part and more of a social commentary on Langston's part.
Van Vechten used whimsical phrases like: "With156 yellow warblers bearing pink and blue candy hearts in their beaks", or "`With 17 royal purple dachshunds, housebroken, with polished silver legs " to close his letters . . . and, as always, there was that signature: Carlo at the end. Bernard says Van Vechten's closings were like "little poems . . . he really loved language and he loved to create pictures with [it]."
Hughes quickly caught on and as his sign-offs began to be more and more inventive with phrases like "743 blue hummingbirds w/spurs to you!" and "10 little colored hound dogs to you!" edging out words like "sincerely" and "affectionately." However, Hughes didn't have the same kind of interest in the flighty banter that CVV used. Hughes wrote more elaborate closings related to social conditions that were happening at the time. At one point in the early '50s Langston signed his letter, "Cool dreams to you in this Sputnik world."
As you read these letters and the way they're signed, you can can get some idea of the things they couldn't say to each other in letters. One revealing sign-off is from a 1960 letter from Hughes to Van Vechten. It reads, "Call Boards and Call Boys to you." Now everyone knows that Carl Van Vechten was as gay as a goose. He kept scrapbooks full of erotica and pictures, and we can be sure he made use of a callboy now and then, but this isn't what this book of letter is about. It's about understanding the creative process as well as the relationship these two men had with the arts. These letters help to establish a link between two cultures.
Today Van Vechten is a somewhat controversial figure in the black creative community. Van Vechten is frowned upon by many for using the "N" word in his novel Nīgger Heaven. Earlier, he got English writer, Ronald Firbank, into the same pickle by renaming his 1924 novel "Sorrow in Sunlight" Prancing Nīgger when it was published in America. Firbank wrote a story about an imaginary Cuban family . . . “a little bit like a Gaugin painting, primitive and extremely gay!” Firbank wrote about a tropical island he never visited; Van Vechten wrote about a world he knew, the middle-classes of Harlem, but he created a scandal by using a "forbidden" word in the title of his book.
Van Vechten was called an "honorary Negro" by Zora Neale Hurston and other blacks for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. He seemed to have the idea that he had the right to use the word just as many blacks used it then and still do today. He even wrote a footnote in the first appearance of the word in the book saying it was not appropriate for white people to use it. Bernard says he was niave and arrogant in believing that evenm he, a white man could use this epithet.
I personally think he was trying to echo Firbank's book and thought he was doing something mightily clever and that he was educating people, but enough of that topic, I won't even go there except to say that the "Heaven" he wrote about was the upper balcony of movie theaters.
Van Vechten's father and Langston Hughes advised him against using the word in his title; they felt it was an unfortunate choice. Whatever discomfort Langston Hughes might have felt, it didn't interfere with his support. He appreciated what Van Vechten was trying to do with his novel about middle-class Harlem.
Hughes even came to the rescue and helped CVV write lyrics for a song in Nīgger Heaven after he was sued by ASCAP for not getting permission to quote the lyrics to a popular song called "Shake That Thing." Langston defended him against all comers and became guilty by association. These two men remained loyal to each other throughout their lives. The book had many black defenders who thought the book couldn't have been as bad as it was painted by people like W.E.B. Du Bois.
I've had a fascination with all things Carl Van Vechten since I was a young gay male growing up and coming out in the Midwest. The older gay men I met socially in Wisconsin either knew him personally or knew of his writing; I was handed books and told to read them. Everyone was interested in Jazz and the creative side of the African American culture. My first art teacher had a black lover and was a friend of Billie Holiday. We would all go to Milwaukee's "inner city" en masse to hear her when she was in town; later, she and her friends would appear at someone's home for a party. This 20-year old kid just sat there with his mouth open.
I heard about black artists like Romare Bearden, but I knew nothing of the Harlem Renaissance until I grew up and moved to New York where I heard more about Carl Van Vechten and his particular interests (sexual and otherwise). I found more books he had written at the library and read them. I met people who knew him, which was a pleasure I never had.
After his death he was somewhat ignored, but after a successful biography and now this book, he is becoming more appreciated again. These two men wrote some fascinating letters over a forty-year period that bring to life the people and places of an era. By people and places, I mean the mostly black artists and entertainers who were coming to the forefront in Harlem and the white people who helped to promote and published their works.
I find that reading biographies, memoirs and collections of letters gives me an insight into the hearts and souls of the people who wrote them. These two men documented their thoughts, gossiped about people they knew and dished the nightlife in Harlem. Bernard tells us they discussed everything but sex. She thought that was strange as "sexual energy and performance were so much a part of what the 20s was all about and what brought the white sophisticates to Harlem."
Emily Bernard talks about Van Vechten's homosexuality and actually names some of his lovers (black men, all). She tells us that if we're looking for anything about Hughes and his sexuality we will be disappointed; he was famously secretive about his private life.
I found that this volume of letters offered me an insight into the relationship between these two men and gave me references to some of the African-American superstars of the early part of the last century. This book of correspondence paints a portrait of an age and is nicely explained by Bernard, who is an assistant professor of African American studies at Smith College. She gives us some insight into the interest these two very creative men had in the advancement of black culture.
This is a very readable book that's illustrated sporadically with photographs Van Vechten took of nearly everyone that's mentioned in the book. It's a fine tribute to Black History Month. (A Borzoi Book, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, ISBN: 0-679-45113-7).
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