Twentieth Century Literature
Summer 2014

These are heady days for Langston Hughes scholarship. In 1959, James Baldwin opened his review of Hughes’s Selected Poems with the slam that “Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed by his genuine gifts — and depressed that he has done so little with them.” Ten years later and Lindsay Patterson, in the New York Times, referred to Hughes as the most critically abused poet in America. Both would be surprised by the cottage industry in Hughes scholarship that has emerged over the past fifteen years; a wealth of primary and secondary material has substantially changed the critical conversation about his range of interests and his importance to modern — and modernist — American literary history. The most important contribution to this resurgence is the sixteen-volume edition of his collected works issued by the University of Missouri Press, which makes much of his output readily accessible for the first time — including in the critically neglected areas of his journalism and essay writing, his translations, his children’s fiction, and his drama. Three new volumes of his correspondence have recently been published, providing his exchanges with his mother, with Carl Van Vechten, and with the South African anti-apartheid magazine Drum. Attention to Hughes’s radical verse and plays from the 1930s, material which was long treated as an embarrassing aberration from the poet’s lifelong commitment to African American folk culture, has now moved to center stage in his critical reception, as scholars such as James Smethurst, Anthony Dawahare, William J. Maxwell, Kate Baldwin, Cary Nelson, and David Chioni Moore have positioned Hughes as a major figure in complex international and interracial circuits of experimental, proletarian writing. And critics such as Brent Hayes Edwards and Vera Kutzinski have begun to pay serious attention to Hughes’s work both as a translator and in translation. Kutzinski’s recent The Worlds of Langston Hughes makes a strong case that Hughes’s status as the most famous US poet of the twentieth century in Latin America needs more critical notice, and posits Hughes as a key proponent of a “fringe modernism” which flourished in “spaces worldwide in which we find avant-garde literary practices typically excluded from modernist studies for being too ‘transparent,’ too ‘realistic,’ too ‘ethnic,’ or too ‘political’ — or simply for using languages other than English” (8). Hughes, for so long faulted for being — like his most famous fictional character — “Simple,” has in recent years come to seem anything but.

David Chinitz’s Which Sin to Bear? is as much a meditation on this altered critical terrain as it is a consideration of two of the most persistent issues in Hughes’s reception — the racial authenticity of his vernacular writing, and the ethics of his political transition from communist fellow- traveler in the 1930s to co-operative witness at Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953. In addressing the former, Chinitz — like most recent scholars — is more interested in how (and why) criteria of racial authenticity are formulated than in how well or poorly a writer conforms to them. And Hughes emerges here as the defining figure in establishing racial “authenticity” as a “supreme criterion of African American literature” (12), a criterion which would be endorsed in the Black Arts era and again in the vernacular-centered black literary criticism of the 1980s epitomized by the scholarship of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston Baker. The signal exhibit in Hughes’s establishment of that criterion is his most famous essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”; rooting the culture of authentic blackness in the black working class, this essay also influentially faulted an emergent urban black middle class for its racial self-loathing and its aping of white aesthetic standards.

Hughes as the writer who enshrined black working-class culture as the lodestone of African American literary authenticity is a familiar story, but one that Chinitz here opens out in absorbing directions. The first explores Hughes’s anxiety over his liminal relationship to the “authentic blackness” he longed to write about: he was born into a family with strong traditions of race leadership that stressed its elevation from a black working class; he was educated at good public schools, and went to college at Columbia and Lincoln; and he was a light-skinned poet facing a culture which had little conception of the organic intellectual. Such liminality also gave ammunition to the criticism Hughes faced from the outset of his career — that his own peripheral relationship to “authentic blackness” informed a sensationalizing, exploitative approach to working-class black culture that pandered to white appetites for the exotic. Chinitz traces a number of resultant authenticating strategies in Hughes’s biography — his immersion in manual jobs (often by choice rather than necessity); his rejection of the Ivy League to enroll at Lincoln; his diasporic travels and enthusiastic immersion in worldwide black folk vernacular cultures, especially in the Caribbean; and most significantly, his attempts to “master the South” (31), which in the 1920s was firmly established as the location of what was most authentically black. When Zora Neale Hurston wrote to Hughes from an ethnographic field trip to the South that his blues poems were “a great success with the rural, uneducated folk to whom she recited them” (some even calling it “de party book”), she knew it was exactly what Hughes needed to hear (35, 36).

Hughes emerges in Chinitz’s study, therefore, as a man who understood and could manipulate the discursive features of authenticity, yet remained anxiously in thrall to its romantic appeal. Chinitz is keen to excavate the ideological and cultural labor that Hughes invested in producing his own biographical authenticity, but is also highly adept at revealing how Hughes developed the aesthetic effects of authenticity in some of his most celebrated early poetry. By the late 1920s Hughes rarely used the lyric “I,” for example, turning instead to the deployment of multiple personas who could speak in the authentic accents that he was both drawn to and estranged from. Personas were the cornerstone of his breakthrough collection Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), now best known for its suite of blues poems, and subsequently became a cornerstone of his poetry. These blues poems, which have always anchored Hughes’s reputation as an authentic poet of black culture, sought the delicate balance of capturing the tenor of blues lyrics without literally transcribing them, as “to ‘write blues’ is a paradoxical task” (67). Chinitz identifies a number of strategies typifying Hughes’s paradoxical rendering of oral culture into text, strategies which retained some elements of blues song while shaping others to the demands of written verse. These included his deployment of emotional inconsistency and a lack of closure in the blues lyrics; his tendency to use drab or homely diction; the use of typography to indicate changes of tempo and voice; the signifying possibilities of the line breaks inherent in his innovation of the six-line blues stanza; and the manner in which he torqued traditional musical elements into new poetic meanings.

These poems, Chinitz claims, changed the stakes for the aesthetics of black authenticity; and if, by the 1940s, Hughes’s anxieties about his own authenticity had receded, this was partly a result of how successfully his work had broadened the definitions of what constituted authentic black cultural production. Most importantly, Hughes had expanded the category of the authentic to include black urban culture, which before his work had been generally regarded as over-commercialized or racially diluted in contrast to the gold standard of authenticity represented by rural, southern, folk culture. Hughes pioneered the association of black authenticity with the dynamism of urban experience, embracing the culture of those who via the Great Migration had transformationally transported southern African American folk culture into the black enclaves of Northern cities. In making this case, Chinitz largely absolves Hughes from exacerbating the problems of an aesthetics of authenticity — its tendency to reify race, justify African American marginality, or exclude swathes of black cultural production (especially by the middle class) from canonical consideration. Instead, Chinitz positions Hughes as a signal historical source of racial categorizations that foster identity and community, yet retain the potential to be inclusive and porous; his writing continues to be “a credible and passionately conceived model for the dynamic and tolerant racial paradigm whose necessity is in our own day more evident than ever” (66).

The second, and stronger, half of Chinitz’s monograph pivots away from the most praised element of Hughes’s career towards the most contentious: the ethics of the numerous compromises Hughes made in order to maintain his unprecedented forty-five-year-long professional career as a black writer. The most dramatic of those compromises occurred in the red-baiting 1950s, when Hughes became “a master of that unglamorous art” (89) by excising Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois from his children’s books Famous Negro Music Makers and Famous American Negroes under pressure from his publishers. He also endorsed, in his public testimony before McCarthy’s subcommittee, the removal of some of his books from the shelves of the International Information Administration’s overseas libraries. Chinitz sifts carefully through the numerous moments Hughes reflected on compromise in his autobiographies, fiction, and poetry for insight into how the notoriously non-confessional writer felt about these moments of reversal — and finds a record of tortured ambiguity, particularly when mediated through Hughes’s career-long consideration of that arch-compromiser Booker T. Washington.

Chinitz also produces an engrossing account of Hughes’s testimony to McCarthy’s senate subcommittee in 1953, particularly the transcript of a closed, “executive session” only declassified in 2003 (and which is helpfully reprinted in full in Which Sin to Bear?, along with a transcript of the better-known public testimony). Rather than the relatively cordial tone of the public session — which closed with McCarthy infamously winking at what was long taken to be a disappointingly compliant Hughes — the closed session transcript reveals a much more rebarbative and antagonistic encounter. Hughes lectured the subcommittee on how his experience as a black man in America had shaped his politics; he was threatened with prosecution for perjury; Roy Cohn chided him for being evasive and unresponsive; and he defended the presence of his pro-communist works in IIA libraries as an excellent example of how the US Constitution valued freedom of speech. This transcript — and its detailed contextualization, including the fact of an unminuted meeting between Hughes and Senator McCarthy which occurred between the executive and the public sessions — is an important challenge to a well-established “rise and fall” narrative of Hughes’s ethical probity, even as Chinitz remains disappointed that no criticisms of the Senator’s goals and methods appeared in either of Hughes’s testimonies.

These considerations frame one of Chinitz’s most interventionist moves, which is to prioritize Hughes’s political affinities to liberal Progressivism — partly as a “corrective” ( 7) to recent scholarship claiming him as a lifelong (albeit sometimes closeted) leftist radical. Establishing Hughes’s political center of gravity is obviously crucial in arbitrating the ethical question of whether Hughes “[sold] out the Revolution to save his career,” which (baldly stated) is the judgment of major biographers including Arnold Rampersad and Faith Berry (97). Rather than third-period internationalism, Chinitz finds that Popular Front left-liberalism — with its hospitability to patriotism, anti-fascist unity, and cultural nationalism — was a discourse much more suited to Hughes’s lifelong political inclinations. Accordingly, “if Hughes’s turn around 1940 to the liberal discourse of the NAACP and the Common Council was not a straightforward and sudden political conversion, neither, then, was it a betrayal of deeply held convictions for a convenient but alien faith” (104). And Chinitz’s prioritization of Hughes’s liberalism over his radicalism also presses the claim for liberalism’s political efficacy in the twentieth-century antiracist struggle: Robeson’s uncompromising stance might have been more ethically righteous, he suggests, but Hughes was probably more effective in assisting the struggle for civil rights.

Nonetheless, Chinitz is too meticulous to read Hughes’s post-thirties politics as anything but cautious about liberalism’s ability to combat racial and class inequity in the US, or to whitewash the poet’s continuing idealization of the Soviet Union throughout the postwar period. Hughes was always aware of the limits of left-liberalism, an awareness well exemplified by his popular Simple stories — which dramatize Hughes’s internal dilemmas with liberalism by staging frequent deflations of the idealistic, patriotic, left-liberal narrator by the caustic, ever-grounded Simple. Even so, centering Hughes within the equivocations and hypocrisies of liberalism will doubtless prove the most contentious part of Which Sin to Bear?; for some it will seem to bracket the 1930s, and thereby downgrade the importance of the revolutionary and internationalist Hughes, in the same fashion that prompted left-revisionist and transnational scholarship on Hughes in the first place. Locating Hughes’s dilemmas over compromise within the midcentury political climate also overlooks intriguing earlier political compromises, particularly Hughes’s removal or alteration of sections of his 1930 novel Not Without Laughter that struck his patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, as racial or class-conscious “propaganda” (alterations that included substantial changes to the novel’s ending). Nonetheless, few will contest Chinitz’s assertions that the declassified executive session testimony is essential material in any ethical evaluation of Hughes’s relationship to the left, or that the problematic of liberalism remained a defining political issue for most of Hughes’s career.

Chinitz’s final chapter explores the fascinating premise that Hughes’s personal feelings about the ethics of compromise were mediated through his shifting and conflicted presentations of Booker T. Washington. These presentations ran the gamut: Hughes was more hostile early and late in his career, producing sharp criticism of Washington and his acolytes in his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, his radical poem “Open Letter to the South” (1932), and in an introduction to an edition of Up from Slavery in 1965. Yet Washington was a useful figure for Hughes when “a roster of ‘greats’ [was] needed to make a point about African American achievement” (147); after WWII Hughes often used such catalogues in service of what he termed (in an important 1941 essay) “the Need for Heroes.” He even produced a play commissioned by CBS and the Tuskegee institute in 1940, Booker T. Washington in Atlanta, which although set during Washington’s time at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition simply left out the details of the speech that made him (in)famous for its claim that African Americans should compromise on civil rights in return for interracial harmony and material progress. The complexity of Hughes’s reflections on Washington emerge most clearly from Chinitz’s discussion of two unpublished poems, “Atlanta 1906” and “Booker T” (1949), poems which were stapled together in Hughes’s archive and reflect dramatically contrasting visions of the Tuskegee founder. While the former links Washington’s 1895 speech to the brutal Atlanta race riot of 1906, the speaker of the latter imagines accusations that he has himself become a “Booker T,” accusations ostensibly made by a disappointed member of the American left. This latter remarkably confessional poem presents Hughes wondering “whether he had ‘compromised,’ whether that might be ‘good’ or whether it had started him down a slippery slope of unwisdom, whether his motives had been the right ones, whether he was now therefore a Booker T. and whether, if so, that made him contemptible” (165).

The two subjects of Which Sin to Bear? — authenticity and compromise — can often seem disconnected, but Chinitz closes the book by suggesting that Hughes’s accommodating and catholic view of black authenticity indicates that “his drive to include derives not only from an innate generosity but from the conflicting facts, varied experiences, divided impulses, and thorny compromises of his own life” (177). Fittingly, Chinitz’s study produces many of the things it professes to admire in Hughes: a distrust of absolutist answers, a refusal to offer categorical ethical judgment on those crafting public careers in historical moments of political extremity, and a tendency to regard inconsistency or equivocation as markers less of confusion than of a keenly attuned ethical personality confronting nearly intractable dilemmas. Gracefully written, and offering the rewards of both critical acumen and archival insight, Which Sin to Bear? is a gratifying addition to the renaissance in Hughes scholarship.

Mark Whalan
University of Oregon