August 25, 1940

A Negro Intellectual Tells His Life Story

By KATHERINE WOODS

THE BIG SEA By Langston Hughes

It is fifteen years since Vachel Lindsay brought a new item of literary interest to the public in the discovery of a poet who was a colored bus boy in a Washington hotel. Or had he been, some asked each other, an elevator operator? As a matter of fact, he had been a great many things, in twenty-three years of a remarkably eventful history. And neither then nor in these years since, as Langston Hughes has continued to produce sensitive and thoughtful work in prose and verse, has the full course of his extraordinary career been generally guessed. Now that it is here before us, the noteworthy quality of the poet's latest book passes well beyond its content of remarkable situation and incident. Langston Hughes's autobiography is the product and portrait of a very unusual spirit, in its narrative of crowded happenings and contrasts and the envisioning of a strange and significant time.

"The Big Sea" is the story of a Negro who began life as the child of a poor family in the Midwest in the first decade of this century, and who after that was a successful business man's son and also a teacher of English in Mexico, a night-club cook and waiter in Paris, a mess boy on freighters halfway around the world, a starving beachcomber in Genoa, a laundry hand in Washington, a student at Columbia and Lincoln Universities, and at once a participant in and a clear-eyed observer of Harlem's "Black Renaissance." The book can be followed through with fascination as a success story and chronicle of adventure, full of living individuals and colorful scenes. It can be remembered more thoughtfully as a personal re-creation of Negro life from pre-war days, through war and post-war conditions and fevers, against backgrounds of contrast both in place and time. But its profound quality and lasting worth are to be found in the fact that from first to last, through all these and other experiences and observations, it remains both sensitive and poised, candid and reticent, realistic and unembittered. "Life is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pull." It is a poet who is the fisher, and the poet's miracle of combining subjectivity with detachment is in the gathering of the nets.

When Langston Hughes made himself known to Vachel Lindsay at the Wardman Park Hotel he was poor and unhappy and almost hopeless of completing his college education, but he was by no means unlearned; his life had certainly not been tethered to monotony; he was not wholly obscure. He had been writing poetry since he left grammar school (the beginning is an amusing little tale); Carl Sandburg became his literary idol when he was in high school in Cleveland, and for four years his poems had been appearing in the Negro magazine Crisis. He was reading French before he was 17, and he wanted to write about his own people, and make them live, in stories as realistic as Maupassant's. He knew a good deal of Spanish and German, too, before he was 20, and he had had a year at Columbia. "Books happened to me," he says; and from childhood he read voraciously. Then at 21 he had a sharp reaction: he was going to see life, on his own; when he got a menial job on the freighter bound for Afric! a he took his books to the ship and threw them into the sea; he wanted to throw his memories out, too.

But the memories clung. And although the experiences in Paris and New York will probably catch a more general attention, some of the best writing and the most lasting interest of this autobiography are in the personal record of childhood and early youth. They were just a poor Negro family in Lawrence, Kansas, so harried by dread of "the mortgage man" that they didn't always have enough to eat. But there were memories of John Brown's raid and grandfather with a passion for freedom and justice; there was an uncle who had been United States Minister to Haiti and dean of the first Law School at Howard University; Langston's mother drifted into domestic service (there were so few opportunities for a Negro girl), but she had gone to college, and at first she was a stenographer; and existence at home was dominated y a real personality in the grandmother, whose blood was partly Negro, partly French and partly Cherokee Indian. The boy's father, however, had left them and gone to Mex! ico, where a Negro had as much chance as any one to make good in business; when Langston joined him, at seventeen, he was the first person the boy had ever known who cared about money for is own sake. Langston was wretched in Mexico. He hated his father. He fell ill from sheer revulsion and misery. But in wretchedness he began to write his best poems: "my best poems were all written when I felt the worst."

These chapters tell the story of a sensitive youth, and tell it memorably. The episode of the child's pseudoconversion is a little masterpiece of poignant simplicity, far removed from the bitterness or the flippancy with which the same kind of story has sometimes been treated, in other memoirs. There is a passionate sincerity here which expresses itself in unstrained directness. Whether scenes and incidents are beautiful or ugly they are set down in quiet candor, without exhibitionism or apology; and only when one looks back does one realize how much reserve there is also, and how much one has read, even in this straightforwardness, by a glimpse here and there, a curtain drawn for a moment, a suggestion.

After Mexico, and Columbia, and a Winter of reading and writing on an old hulk in the Hudson, the book's "adventure" begins: the African voyage, and then Paris ·

Paris in the February cold, and a Negro boy arriving with $7 to find the fulfillment of a dream. He found it, even when he was all but starving; and when he got a job in the kitchen of a famous night club he had a grand time. This was the period of the transatlantic pleasure-seekers, rushing with full purses to Montmartre; and the singer Florence from Harlem could attract hordes of rich American patrons by a simple technique of insulting them. Such bizarre people, such fantastic episodes (and a charming, sad little idyll, too), such fights! And then Italy, to become the center of attention in a kindly village that had never seen a Negro, to go through the museums of Venice with the scholar Alain Locke, to set out to visit Claude McKay at Toulon ö and to wake up at Genoa penniless, purse and passport stolen on the train. So the interlude of beachcombing with companion similar straits, and at last a "workaway" passage home and a new period of contrast and adventure.

Among the intellectuals of his own race Langston Hughes had some reputation as a writer now, and he got $20 from Crisis for an article just as he arrived in America ("so I went to see Jeanne Eagels in 'Rain' and then 'What Price Glory' before I went home"). But in Washington, where his mother was then living, it was not easy for a Negro to find good work; the well-to-do colored people were themselves snobbish beyond belief; the laundry was disgusting; the hotel job was better (he liked to work among things to eat), but he was trying to save enough to go back to college, and he was discouraged and lonely. He used to find a refuge in the poor Negro quarter, where the people were simple and courageous; and he would try, he says, to write as they sang. Some of his best-known poems are in this book.

And after he had been "discovered" there was a university scholarship, and friendliness that conquered his shyness, and plenty of intellectual companionship, and a period of strange opulence. He was sensible enough to know that New York's craze for everything Negro wouldn't last. But he was in the midst of that "Renaissance" which ranged from genuine Negro thought and activity at one extreme to the fads of white tourism to Harlem at the other; and his comprehensive picture is studded with individual portrait sketches and informed with lively thought.

In 1931 after winning several other honors, Langston Hughes received the Harmon award of $400. He had never in his life had so much money of his own. But he made up his mind now to support himself by writing. And his book ends there. Literature, too, was a big sea where one put down one's nets and pulled. "I'm still pulling," he says.

The reference to literature strikes the right note for the autobiography's climax. Engrossing as the book is in event and illuminating as commentary, "The Big Sea" is essentially an individual evocation of life, in sentiment response and penetrating clarity; and it is as literature, thus, that it is to be read, in all its vivid complexity of situation and simplicity of phrase.

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