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| The dust jacket of David Chinitz’s Which Sin to Bear? Authenticity and Compromise in Langston Hughes shows a portrait of Hughes’s profile facing right, layered over a copy of the same portrait flipped, looking left. With the hair of one profile casting a shadow on the other’s cheek, both faces fragmented by their intersection, the graphic gives us a Hughes at once purposeful and uncertain—a visionary looking deep into the future, yet unwilling to turn from the past. The cover nicely illustrates Chinitz’s argument. With an eye for nuance, Chinitz reads the seemingly competing political positions taken up by Hughes over the course of his life and in his poetry not as a series of incommensurable contradictions, but as stages in an ethics of compromise. Though Chinitz claims in his introduction that his intentions are “neither biographical nor psychological, but literary-critical and cultural,” the strength of the book has much to do with how it handles biography. Which Sin to Bear? steers clear of reading Hughes’s work for what it might say about his private life, without requiring the author to vanish in the process. The book is as much a tribute to the poet’s legacy as it is a study of the ethics and evolving politics of his prolific writing career. Chinitz divides the book into six chapters, the first three exploring the concept of racial authenticity in Hughes’s writing, the last three focusing more on the concept of compromise. Among these, Chinitz makes his greatest contribution to Hughes scholarship in Chapter Five, which offers the first published analysis of Hughes’s executive-session testimony before Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Hughes received a subpoena from the committee on March 21, 1953, requiring him to appear in Washington just two days later. Hughes’s testimony, delivered on March 24, remained classified for fifty years. Biographers and scholars writing before 2003 about the investigation relied primarily on a public, televised hearing conducted on March 26 and the subsequent conclusion by the committee that Hughes was not a serious threat. The narrative scholars assembled from this evidence, reflected principally in the biographies of Faith Berry and Arnold Rampersad, has Hughes sacrificing a certain level of integrity in order to foreclose further suspicion about his political allegiances. While Hughes did indeed deny that he had ever been “a believer in communism or a Communist party member” (qtd. in Chinitz 115), the newly released documents show an artist very much in charge of his answers. “There was a great deal of dodging and weaving,” Chinitz writes, “but no surrender” (130). As the investigation settled upon poems expressing communist sentiments, Hughes used a sophisticated aesthetic vocabulary to deflect their readings at every turn. The intricacies of the rhetorical performance add a significant new dimension to how we understand Hughes’s reaction while under fire. McCarthy did not actually attend the session himself. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois chaired the hearing, while McCarthy’s chief counsel Roy Cohn led the interrogation. The full transcript of Hughes’s private Senate testimony, as well as a transcript of his public testimony, are reproduced in the book’s two appendices—surely a gift to scholars of all stripes. As Cohn narrows in on Hughes’ work, the transcript shows Cohn and Hughes battling over how poetry should be read. Cohn asks Hughes about Scottsboro Limited, for instance, a one-act verse play in which “RED VOICES” incite the audience to revolution, all shouting together, “Rise, workers, and fight!” (qtd. 117). Hughes replies that he had been “writing in characters.” Cohn continues with pointed questions about “Ballads of Lenin,” “Goodbye, Christ,” and statements published in the Chicago Defender and Daily Worker. Hughes shrewdly swerves around them all. In attending to these moments of heated debate, Chinitz treats the dialogue with admirable |
dexterity, accounting for the brilliance of Hughes’s rhetoric without neglecting the questionable ethics of his equivocations. Chinitz spends a significant portion of the chapter analyzing the subcomittee’s discussion of Hughes’s poem “When a Man Sees Red”—in particular, the lines, “Good morning, Revolution. You are the very best friend I ever had. We are going to pal around together from now on,” and “Put one more ‘S’ in the USA to make it Soviet. The USA when we take control will be the USSA then” (qtd. in Chinitz 120). After Hughes confirms that the lines are his, Cohn asks, “Were you kidding when you wrote those things? What did you mean by those?” As Chinitz demonstrates, Hughes’s response is nothing short of virtuosic. The poet asks whether the committee will permit him to offer a “full interpretation.” When they agree, Hughes launches into what Chinitz describes as “paragraph after paragraph of eloquent extemporaneous autobiography, detailing movingly his experiences as a black child in a white town, a white school, a white society” (121). When Cohn interrupts early on, asking Hughes if they can “concede very fully that you encounter oppression” so to get onto the “purpose” at hand, Hughes reminds him, “Sir, you said you would permit me to give a full explanation” (120, 1). While Chinitz later describes the monologue that ensues as “filibustering,” “basically an evasion, even if a forgivable one” (126), the passage stands out in Hughes’s testimony as a very forceful hermeneutical performance. As the committee insists repeatedly on reading his poems symptomatically, Hughes appears to decide that if what they want is an account of his personal history, a deeply interpretive history is exactly what he will give them. The chapter devoted to Hughes’s executive-session testimony serves the book’s primary goal of exploring how the poet developed what Chinitz calls the “unglamorous art” of compromise (89). If the strength of Which Sin to Bear? is located here, in the book’s balanced approach to discrepancies in Hughes’s politics, the one weakness of the book may be that the stakes of practicing an ethics of compromise remain fairly under-theorized. In his introduction, Chinitz gives brief insight into where his own politics reside. “Although knowledge of his sometime radical politics is necessary to a full understanding of Hughes,” Chinitz writes, “we should not lose sight of the fact that Hughes, for most of his life, was one of the twentieth century’s great spokesmen for American progressivism. I do not share the regret of some of my fellow Hughes scholars that this is so” (7). In framing the book, the passage seems to disclose its author’s affinity for a less categorically leftist Hughes. By the end of the book, however, this investment fades from view. Chinitz writes in the closing paragraphs, “I am not trying to stake an exclusive claim” (178). With a resistance to judgment resonant with the book’s emphasis on compromise, Chinitz continues, “Where he stumbled, I think we are not called upon either to condemn or to absolve him, but—to borrow a phrase from T.S. Eliot—we are ‘called upon more and more to understand’ him” (178). The book thus ends with a turn to the value of biographical inquiry for its own sake, “understanding” being an end in itself. In its careful fidelity to Hughes, his poetry, and his politics, Which Sin to Bear? is, for the most part, a successful book. If the consequence of this fidelity is that the brief glance we get into Chinitz’s investments disappears early on, we are, at least, left with a work of literary criticism where the poet and his poetry are allowed to speak for themselves, at a safe distance from the machinations of the scholar. The result is a piece of scholarship devoted to Hughes’s writings, his legacy, and the evolution of a political hermeneutics occasioned by extraordinary historical forces. Ultimately, the hybrid object of analysis is the life of the artist itself, a unifying strand marked by the consistency of its incongruity. Don James McLaughlin | |||