Langston Hughes: I Wonder As I Wander. Collected Works, Vol. 14. Edited with an Introduction by Joseph McLaren. Columbia and London: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2003. 426 pp.
The bulk of this second volume of Hughes’ autobiography covers the relatively brief period from 1931-1933, yet is significantly longer than The Big Sea, which dealt with the first 28 years of his life. He begins with his visits to Haiti and Cuba, but the centerpiece concerns his sojourn in the Soviet Union. Heeding the advice of Lincoln Steffens, who had already been there, he left San Francisco for New York and sailed across the Atlantic well supplied with soap and toilet paper. At age 30, he was one of the older members of a group of black Americans, most of them recent college graduates, who had signed up to make a movie and spend an exciting summer abroad. (Another member of this group was Loren Miller, whose Wikipedia biography describes his distinguished career as a judge in California but neglects to mention his youthful participation in this project.)
(The film team aboard the Europa; Langston Hughes is probably third from right in middle row. Directly behind him is Lloyd Patterson, one of the three who decided to remain in the Soviet Union. RT, the channel formerly known as Russia Today, broadcast a program about American Negroes in the USSR which included an interview with Patterson’s son, who showed a copy of this picture. The son returned to the US after the collapse of the Soviet Union and was interviewed in a DC nursing home.)
What they knew about the USSR came mostly from John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, which described a land where racial prejudice was taboo. So it should come as no surprise that when they crossed the border, some of them lifted Soviet soil to their lips and kissed it. Initial impressions of Moscow were also favorable. “Of all the big cities in the world where I’ve been, the Muscovites seemed to me to be the politest of peoples to strangers…. On a crowded bus, nine times out of ten, some Russian would say, ‘Negrochanski tovarish – Negro comrade – take my seat!’ … Ordinary citizens seemed to feel that they were all official hosts of Moscow.” (pg. 99)
Hughes had been hired to write dialogue for a projected film “Black and White.” The treatment, written by “a famous Russian writer who had never been to America,” proved to be a hodgepodge so ludicrous and improbable that it was beyond revision. Set in Birmingham, Alabama, its plot involved a trade-union version of the Civil War, with white Northern workers rushing to aid exploited Southern blacks. The director was to be Karl Junghans, who at the time spoke neither English nor Russian well, had never been to America, and was selected for this movie because he had “successfully directed a recent African travelogue.” (pg. 104) Incidentally, the editorial apparatus of this volume contents itself as a rule with explaining the obvious and easily ascertainable and so identifies neither him nor many of the expats Hughes met in Moscow. As it turns out, Junghans went on to have a singular career – after the failure of this project, he resumed working in Nazi Germany, only to end his days in California as a supporter of governor Reagan.
Despite all the difficulties, for as long as Hughes and the other American visitors stayed, they were well treated. Sergei Eisenstein threw a party in their honor, and they were invited to appear on Moscow radio. Emma E. Harris, affectionately known as “the Mammy of Moscow,” escorted them around town; almost four decades earlier, she had arrived one day “from Dixie” and ended up staying “long enough to know how to find almost anything.” (pp. 107-09) Much more information about her can be found in Hughes’ Essays on Art, Race, Politics and World Affairs.
The honored guests were stunned when they discovered that their project had been abandoned by reading an announcement to that effect in the International Herald Tribune. Distorted accounts then began appearing in the Western press. “It was the first time I realized that a big-name correspondent would deliberately lie to conform to an editorial policy. We were neither stranded, unpaid, nor destitute.” (pg. 119)
A few of the would-be filmmakers stayed on in the USSR, but Hughes, like most of the others, elected to return to the USA. None of them, however, would end up sharing his circuitous route home. He and a few others first decided to visit Central Asia, far from the usual tourist destinations. While round after round of unrelenting hospitality left them weary, the tour organization was downright shambolic. The low point came after all his friends – “or rather former friends” – refused to join him on an excursion to Ashkhabad, and instead simply dropped him off in the middle of the Turkmenian desert.
Hughes struggled on alone for a time, eventually finding a place to stay. Things began to look up when there came a knock on his door one evening. His unexpected visitor turned out to be Arthur Koestler, at that time working as a journalist. Complaints about filthy conditions are universal in foreign accounts of Soviet life in the 1930s, but the fastidious Koestler – with his “German sense of sanitation” – was more repelled than most. (pg. 134) Hughes characterizes him as being one of those – like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison – who are predisposed to hypochondria. At the same time, he admired him for his dogged note-taking, even in extreme situations.
(Langston Hughes, left, and Arthur Koestler, right, visiting a collective farm growing cotton in Turkmenistan)
Together, this odd couple attended one of the first Soviet show trials. Though the lead defendant made a rather unsympathetic impression and the trial struck Hughes as boring, Koestler as always made copious notations. Thus we witness the first tentative steps that would eventually lead to Darkness at Noon. Though Hughes gives no indication of believing that the accused were guilty of anything, he also does not appear to have engaged in any soul-searching over their fate. Later, sitting in on another trial, he says merely that he found it “interesting” for its “perplexing pattern of self-confession.” (pg. 225) He generally takes the line that yes, the trials were bad, but look at the improved literacy rate. “Moscow dental customs, the unveiling of the harem women in Turkestan, and the disappearance of the color line throughout Soviet Asia are the three achievements I remember best of the whole USSR.” (pg. 233) Moreover, the harshest critics that he encountered were invariably white visitors. He implies that if they had been black, they might have been more sympathetic; by the same token, he concedes that he might have been more critical if he himself had been white.
(“With the American writer Langston Hughes in Tashkent, 1933,” from Steppe Magazine)
In Tashkent, Hughes became so ill he would have died if he had not been treated by a Russian doctor “of the old school, educated in Berlin,” plus “a little old Russian lady” who nursed him back to health; “since she did not like to be called tovarish (no comrade, she), we always called her grasdani, citizen.” He compares her to the “gentler aristocrats of the South,” a real lady who turned up her nose at the uncouth, uneducated Soviets who, never having seen a flush toilet before, used it to dispose of their empty tin cans, with predictable consequences for the plumbing. (pp. 161-62)
One highlight is his description of a nighttime visit to two Tartar girls in the company of an amorous Tadjik soldier, who paired off with the more attractive of them, leaving Hughes alone with the other. Conversation was difficult, as they had no language in common. She only responded to him when he ignored her, pushing him away or jumping out of the room’s single bed whenever he tried to touch her. Not accustomed to such “violent modesty,” he eventually gave up. (pg. 177) Only the next day was it explained to him that the local custom expected that the woman would resist and the man persist.
In general, since he was only passing through and did not have to live there, he could see things from a more tolerant point of view. He concluded that on the whole the revolution had made conditions better for the working class and the peasants: They now had schools, lived without debt, and women were no longer bought and sold. Still, shivering one day on a packed railway platform in the middle of a blizzard, he reached a firm conclusion. “If I ever get back to Tashkent after this, I will go right straight – by plane, if possible – home to the U.S.A. Never another foot of travel in the USSR!” Later he speaks of his “dire disillusionment with the Soviets and all their works.” (pp. 191, 217)
Hughes’ misadventures continued on his return to Moscow (where his editor proved to be none other than the versatile agitator Karl Radek, about whom more can be read in Alfred Döblin’s novel A People Betrayed, reviewed elsewhere at this site). The Russian royalties Hughes earned were quite generous, but gathering all the signatures needed to collect them proved a bureaucratic nightmare. His problems were compounded when, being a rather feckless sort, he neglected to renew his visa and passport before their expiration.
When his exit visa finally did arrive, he decided to take the Trans-Siberian Express all the way across the USSR to China. This required the assistance of Intourist, which comes in for some scathing criticism for the haughtiness of its bureaucrats, “whom I hope have all since been purged.” He adds, “Old residents of the American colony in Moscow said they thought Intourist must be entirely composed of saboteurs placed there by counter-revolutionists especially to wreck whatever good will travelers might have acquired toward the Soviet Union.” (pp. 222-223)
Since he had been both to the USSR and China, Hughes was interrogated – politely – when he arrived in Tokyo. It soon became clear that the Japanese had compiled a complete dossier on his activities; one wonders what has become of it. The session ended with him being declared persona non grata and, after a search of his hotel room, being escorted out of the country.
As in The Big Sea, the final chapters feature lists of celebrities he met, some of them – Jimmy Cagney, Diego Rivera, Katherine Hepburn – rather surprising. Here we learn additional information about his father, whom we remember from volume one living in his self-imposed Mexican exile. Easily the most memorable part, though, describes his experience as a correspondent in Spain during the Civil War. He went there with the intention of interviewing the Moors fighting for Franco. He ended up admiring the spirit of the Madrileños, who did not let the explosion of shells around them interfere with their enjoyment of life. He also provides background information on a Hemingway story (“The Butterfly and the Tank,” left unidentified by the editor), though his only comment is to note rather blandly that he found it “interesting” to observe what Hemingway did to real people in his fiction.
Among Hughes’ recurring themes:
- the hungry person’s obsession with all matters culinary, ranging from the importance of precisely noting mealtimes to the best way to cook a cat;
- though seemingly never quite ready to leave on any of his long journeys, somehow he always managed to reach the boat or train in the nick of time;
- and though he often mentions the pictures he took, unfortunately no selection of them is included.
Following the dictum that an autobiography should end with the first real step forward, the volume concludes with his career dreams at last beginning to come true; “that is what I want to be, a writer, recording what I see, commenting upon it, and distilling from my own emotions a personal interpretation.” (pg. 383)
Update
From Dwight Garner’s review of Hughes’ Selected Letters: “His thumbnail portraits of famous others tend to be wan. Hughes spent time with Hemingway in Spain in the late 1930s, for example, and all he could muster is that he ‘liked him.’ In a 1941 letter he reports ‘a very pleasant visit yesterday from Henry Miller.’ This book can be like getting postcards from your aunt who knits.” NY Times, Feb. 3, 2015.
Related topics – see the entries on Hughes The Big Sea and on Du Bois in Germany, 1892-94, elsewhere at this blog.
© Hamilton Beck
hamiltonbeck 