I Wonder as I Wander Read online

  Hughes is by no means completely candid or detailed about his politics. He makes no mention of hard-hitting essays dispatched from Cuba and Haiti to the radical magazine New Masses in 1931. He cites not a line of the powerful, almost incendiary poems he wrote in the Soviet Union. Much of his time in the fall of 1933 in Carmel was devoted, in addition to his writing, to the activities of the local branch of the John Reed Club, the arts and literary organization founded by the Communist Party in the early years of the decade. (John Reed wrote Ten Days That Shook the World.) But although Hughes was a principal figure in the Carmel club, and organized an auction (the actor James Cagney served as auctioneer) for the Scottsboro Boys, under sentence of death for the alleged rape of two white women, virtually nothing of this appears in I Wonder as I Wander. Hughes does not mention the fact that hostility to the John Reed Club, in addition to local anti-socialist feeling connected with the dockworkers’ strike along the U.S. Pacific Coast in 1934, forced him to flee Carmel for his own safety at one point in 1934. He took this action after being personally attacked in a local newspaper, and hearing that a local right-wing vigilante group was planning to seize him.

  On the appearance of I Wonder as I Wander, one friend from that time in Carmel was shocked by the exclusions—“but you are a wise person,” she offered, “and I am not.” Indeed, Hughes was ceaselessly called upon to be a “wise” person, ever vigilant as he negotiated the space between the political right and the left, between the white race and the black, between the middle class who bought and read books and the poorer classes he deeply respected and wanted to reach, between the desire to speak his mind boldly and the restraint that his tenuous position demanded if he was to survive as a writer. The same is true when Hughes dwells on more personal involvements, such as his troubles with the producer of his play Mulatto, who seemed determined to humiliate the playwright and deny him any money for his efforts. Hughes provides enough detail so that we can understand his sense of betrayal and hurt; but humor is an integral part of the story, including humor at his own expense.

  To some observers, this approach amounted to an evasion of what they saw as the intellectual’s primary responsibility to analyze, historicize, categorize, and—where necessary—condemn. One reviewer, J. Saunders Redding, himself a gifted black academic and writer, jibed that Langston Hughes apparently had done “more wandering than wondering” in his travels. This was itself only a reprise of the charge of intellectual and emotional shallowness that Hughes had heard often in his career. As if to heighten this debate and bring it to the fore, at the center of I Wonder as I Wander is the contrast, staged by Hughes, between himself and Arthur Koestler, who had been a good friend in Central Asia. “Always, if he had any notes I wanted,” Hughes recalled, “Koestler would share them with me—which saved me a great deal of work.”

  Although the two young men got along well, they were different in temperament, Hughes points out. Koestler was full of sadness, which he allowed everyone to see. On a number of matters, including hygiene, Koestler was highly fastidious, where Hughes was tolerant and even lax. Koestler was deadly serious about everything, and especially about politics; Hughes was quick to see a joke. “I have known a great many writers in my time,” Hughes wrote, “and some of them were very much like Koestler—always something not quite right in the world around them. Even on the brightest days, no matter where they are … Yet I have always been drawn to such personalities because I often feel very sad inside myself, too, though not inclined to show it.”

  However, the crucial contrast in I Wonder as I Wander is their different reactions to the trial of Atta Kurdov, a Turkmenian, on the charge of having committed crimes against the Soviet state. The trial, which was in fact a show trial, one of the first of many that would make a mockery of justice in the Soviet Union, deeply disturbed Koestler, who was a member of the party. Here, Hughes judged, began his friend’s disaffection with Communism, which would culminate in his landmark anti-Communist book, Darkness at Noon. Hughes’s reaction to the trial is different: “I said, ‘Atta Kurdov looks guilty to me, of what I don’t know, but he just looks like a rogue.’ But Koestler did not think much of my reasoning and said so quite seriously. I knew mine was not proper reasoning either and had nothing to do with due process of law. But when I saw that it upset him [Koestler], I repeated that night just for fun, ‘Well, anyhow Atta Kurdov does look like a rascal.’”

  This is, at the very least, an odd response. Koestler, for one, understood that it was also not the sum of Hughes’s reaction to the trial, that life had made him chronically mask and in other ways conceal his feelings even as he seemed, at the same time, to be the most open of men. Of Hughes, Koestler remembered that “behind the warm smile of his dark eyes there was a grave dignity, and a polite reserve which communicated itself at once. He was very likeable and easy to get on with, but at the same time one felt an impenetrable, elusive remoteness which warded off all undue familiarity.”

  Certainly there are distinct limits to Hughes’s revelation of the most personal aspects of his life, including his love affairs or his sexual habits. In part, this reticence may be traced to the discreetness of an earlier age; but much of it had to do with that “impenetrable, elusive remoteness” that Koestler detected. Laughter and good cheer, occasional self-satire and the occasional casual mention of women friends and even a brothel or two in Hughes’s autobiographies can sometimes hide the fact that his private life is, by and large, closed to the reader. One learns of a few flirtations and involvements in Haiti and the Soviet Union, in Cleveland and in Spain. But amusement usually dispels romance, and we are given few clues as to why Hughes never married or never publicly associated himself with a lover.

  In spite of echoes among some other reviewers of J. Saunders Redding’s accusation of relative shallowness, I Wonder as I Wander was generally well received when it appeared in 1956. Leftist reviewers, ironically, responded very well to the work. They tended to understand, perhaps more readily than conservative readers, the extent to which the good humor at the heart of the book served to humanize the Soviet Union and socialist politics there and elsewhere at a time when Senator McCarthy and others had worked hard to demonize the nation and its sympathizers. The U.S.S.R. emerges in the autobiography as a young nation with many problems but also as a functioning place, and with a population which is no more and no less human than anywhere else in the world.

  In response to this display of humanity, the Communist Daily Worker praised Hughes’s book as “not only a readable tale of one man’s journeyings” but also “a reminder of both what America had gained from great talents like his own and lost in others crushed beneath the weight of racism.” Autobiographies must exude a special human spirit, concentrated in the individual at the center of the particular story, if they are to be truly distinguished. Hughes’s book exhibits such a striking spirit. Writing with the benefit of hindsight in the 1950s about New Year’s Day, 1938, he staged an ending to his book that manages to blend his concealed sense of evil and tragedy in the world with his indomitable determination not only to survive evil and tragedy but to do so with humor, dignity, and an ironic grace.

  Where would I be when the next New Year came, I wondered? By then, would there be war—a major war? Would Mussolini and Hitler have finished their practice in Ethiopia and Spain to turn their planes on the rest of us? Would civilization be destroyed? Would the world end?

  “Not my world,” I said to myself. “My world will not end.”

  But worlds—entire nations and civilizations—do end. In the snowy night in the shadows of the old houses of Montmartre, I repeated to myself, “My world won’t end.”

  But how could I be so sure? I don’t know.

  For a moment I wondered.

  ARNOLD RAMPERSAD

  Princeton University, June 1992

  I am debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians; both to the wise and to the unwise. Romans 1:14

  1

  IN SEARCH OF SUN

  LESS THAN LYRIC

  WHEN I was twenty-seven the stock-market crash came. When I was twenty-eight, my personal crash came. Then I guess I woke up. So, when I was almost thirty, I began to make my living from writing. This is the story of a Negro who wanted to make his living from poems and stories.

  For ten years I had been a writer of sorts, but a writer who wrote mostly because, when I felt bad, writing kept me from feeling worse; it put my inner emotions into exterior form, and gave me an outlet for words that never came in conversation.

  Now I found myself in the midst of a depression. I had just lost my patron. Scholarships, fellowships and literary prizes became scarce. I had already gotten several awards that were not to be had a second time. Jobs were very hard to find. The WPA had not yet come into being. If I were to live and write, at all, since I did not know how to do anything else, I had to make a living from writing itself. So, of necessity, I began to turn poetry into bread.

  But this earning of bread did not come about in easy direct steps. First, it was Mary McLeod Bethune who suggested to me that I travel through the South reading my poems. And my conversations with Mary McLeod Bethune came about because I went to Haiti.

  I went to Haiti to get away from my troubles. I had intended to go from Cleveland, where I spent Christmas with my mother, to Key West by bus, thence to Cuba and Haiti. But in Cleveland, I met at Karamu House a fellow named Zell Ingram who was going to the Cleveland School of Art, but who did not like it, so he wanted to quit classes and travel. He borrowed his mother’s car; she gave him three hundred dollars, and we set out. I had three hundred dollars left from the Harmon Award granted me for my novel, Not Without Laughter, having given my mother one hundred of the four-hundred-dollar grant. On a morning in March, Zell and I
began our journey to the South.

  As soon as I got rid of the last dollar of the money left from my estranged patron’s allowances, I felt immensely better. My stomach, that for weeks had turned over and over since my relations with the kind and elderly lady on Park Avenue had ended so abruptly, now stopped turning over altogether.

  I came out of college in 1929, the year of the Stock Market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. I had written my first novel, Not Without Laughter, as a student on the campus of Lincoln University. I had had a scholarship to college. After graduation a monthly sum from my patron enabled me to live comfortably in suburban New Jersey, an hour from Manhattan, revising my novel at leisure. Propelled by the backwash of the “Harlem Renaissance” of the early ‘twenties, I had been drifting along pleasantly on the delightful rewards of my poems which seemed to please the fancy of kindhearted New York ladies with money to help young writers. The magazines used very few stories with Negro themes, since Negro themes were considered exotic, in a class with Chinese or East Indian features. Editorial offices then never hired Negro writers to read manuscripts or employed them to work on their staffs. Almost all the young white writers I’d known in New York in the ‘twenties had gotten good jobs with publishers or magazines as a result of their creative work. White friends of mine in Manhattan, whose first novels had received reviews nowhere nearly so good as my own, had been called to Hollywood, or were doing scripts for the radio. Poets whose poetry sold hardly at all had been offered jobs on smart New York magazines. But they were white. I was colored. So in Haiti I began to puzzzle out how I, a Negro, could make a living in America from writing.

  There was one other dilemma-how to make a living from the kind of writing I wanted to do. I did not want to write for the pulps, or turn out fake “true” stories to sell under anonymous names as Wallace Thurman did. I did not want to bat out slick non-Negro short stories in competition with a thousand other commercial writers trying to make The Saturday Evening Post. I wanted to write seriously and as well as I knew how about the Negro people, and make that kind of writing earn for me a living.

  I thought, with the four hundred dollars my novel had given me, I had better go sit in the sun awhile and think, having just been through a tense and disheartening winter after a series of misunderstandings with the kind lady who had been my patron. She wanted me to be more African than Harlem—primitive in the simple, intuitive and noble sense of the word. I couldn’t be, having grown up in Kansas City, Chicago and Cleveland. So that winter had left me ill in my soul. I could not put my mind on writing for months. But write I had to—or starve—so I went to sit in the sun and gather my wits.

  In Cleveland that winter it had been cold and damp, and it looked as though spring had no intention of coming. I knew it would be warm in Haiti. When Zell and I reached North Carolina, we were already out of the snow belt. And, speeding down the Florida coast, we met the sun, friendly and warm.

  We stopped at Daytona Beach to visit Bethune-Cookman College of which that most distinguished of Negro women, Mary McLeod Bethune, was president. We reached Daytona about eight o’clock in the evening. It took us some time to find the campus. When we did, we stopped before the first building where we saw lights burning. It was warm, so the doors and windows were all open. We heard a group of girls singing in a second-floor room. Zell went upstairs to inquire the way to Mrs. Bethune’s home. As a teacher answered his knock on the classroom door, I heard the singing stop. Then I heard a woman’s voice exclaim, “No more class tonight, girls—the poet, Langston Hughes, is here!”

  I was struck dumb with shyness. I had no idea my name would be known in Florida—other than to Mrs. Bethune herself whom I had once met at Columbia University. Some of the students came running down the stairs, followed by the teacher, and I was greeted with open arms. We were shown to Mrs. Bethune’s house across the campus where she welcomed us graciously, although she was not forewarned of our visit. Food was prepared and a guest room put at our disposal. But before I went to bed I sat for a long time on the front porch talking to Mrs. Bethune, motherly and kind and wise as she was toward me, a very puzzled young man.

  The next day I read some of my poems to the English classes on her campus. That was the beginning of my learning how to make a living from writing—for it was Mrs. Bethune who said to me the night before, “Why don’t you tour the South reading your poems? Thousands of Negro students would be proud and inspired by seeing you and hearing you. You are young, but you have already made a name for yourself in literary circles, and you can help black students to feel that a Negro youth can amount to something in this world in spite of our problems.”

  I kept thinking about what Mrs. Bethune said as I drove southward down the long straight Florida road toward Miami.

  HAVANA NIGHTS

  IN Miami, Zell and I put the Ford in a garage. We went by rail to Key West, thence by boat to Cuba. It was suppertime when we got to El Moro with Havana rising white and Moorish-like out of the sea in the twilight. The evening was warm and the avenues were alive with people, among them many jet-black Negroes in white attire. Traffic filled the narrow streets, auto horns blew, cars’ bells clanged, and from the wineshops and fruit-juice stands radios throbbed with drumbeats and the wavelike sounds of maracas rustling endless rumbas. Life seemed fluid, intense, and warm in the busy streets of Havana.

  Our hotel was patronized mostly by Cubans from the provinces, with huge families. Its inner balconies around an open courtyard were loud with the staccato chatter of stout mamas and vivacious children. Its restaurant on the first floor—with the entire front wall open to the street—was as noisy as only a Cuban restaurant can be, for, added to all the street noises, were the cries of waiters and the laughter of guests, the clatter of knives and forks, and the clinking of glasses at the bar.

  I liked this hotel because, since tourists never came there, the prices were on the Cuban scale and low. None of the rooms had any windows, but they had enormous double doors opening onto the tiled balconies above the courtyard. Nobody troubled to give anyone a key. The management simply took for granted all the guests were honest.

  I went the next day to look up José Antonio Fernandez de Castro to whom, on a previous trip to Cuba, I had been given a letter of introduction by Miguel Covarrubias. José Antonio was a human dynamo who at once set things in motion. A friend of many American artists and writers, he drank with, wined and dined them all; fished with Hemingway; and loved to go to Marianao—the then nontourist amusement center. He knew all the taxicab drivers in town—with whom he had accounts—and was, in general, about the best person in Cuba to know, if you’d never been there before.

  José Antonio was a newspaperman on the Diario De La Marina. He later became an editor of Orbe, Cuba’s weekly pictorial magazine. Then he went into the diplomatic service to become the first secretary of the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, and from there to Europe. Painters, writers, newsboys, poets, fighters, politicians and rumba dancers were all José’s friends. And, best of all for me, he knew the Negro musicians at Marianao, those fabulous drum beaters who use their bare hands to beat out rhythm, those clave knockers and maraca shakers who somehow have saved—out of all the centuries of slavery and all the miles and miles from Guinea—the heartbeat and songbeat of Africa. This ancient heartbeat they pour out into the Cuban night from a little row of café hovels at Marianao. Or else they flood with song those smoky low-roofed dance halls where the poor of Havana go for entertainment after dark.