Langston Hughes and the South African Drum Generation: The Correspondence PDF
Preview Langston Hughes and the South African Drum Generation: The Correspondence
Langston Hughes and the South African Drum Generation Langston Hughes and the South Drum African Generation The Correspondence Edited by Shane Graham and John Walters Introduction by Shane Graham LANGSTON HUGHES AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN DRUM GENERATION Copyright © Shane Graham and John Walters, 2010. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-10293-4 All rights reserved. Cover Image: Letter from Ezekiel Mphahlele to Langston Hughes, June 24, 1961. Published with permission of the Professor Ezekiel Mphahlele Trust. Image courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-28749-9 ISBN 978-0-230-10986-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230109865 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hughes, Langston, 1902–1967. Langston Hughes and the South African Drum generation : the correspondence / edited by Shane Graham and John Walters. p. cm. 1. Hughes, Langston, 1902–1967—Correspondence. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Correspondence. 3. African American authors— Correspondence. 4. Authors, South African—20th century—Correspondence. 5. Drum (Johannesburg, South Africa) I. Graham, Shane. II. Walters, John. III. Title. PS3515.U274Z597 2010 818(cid:2).5209—dc22 2009047761 [B] A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 C O N T E N T S Acknowledgments vii Introduction Shane Graham 1 Letters, 1953–1954 25 Letters, 1955–1959 61 Letters, 1960–1961 103 Letters, 1962 137 Letters, 1963–1967 161 Index 191 A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S A New Faculty Research Grant from the Utah State University Vice President for Research Office provided material support, and enabled me to travel to the archives in New Haven and initiate our investiga- tion into the correspondence between Hughes and the South African writers. A one-semester research leave courtesy of the USU English Department also enabled me to research and write the introduction. I am grateful for both opportunities. Thanks to the staff at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University for their invaluable assistance in finding and microfilming the original documents. Many thanks are due as well to the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown, South Africa, and especially to Crystal Warren, senior researcher for NELM. Without the representation of Neil Salkind at the Salkind Literary Agency/Studio B Productions, this project might never have seen the light of day. He has my gratitude. Katie Fredrickson acted as undergraduate research assistant during the later stages of preparing the manuscript; I am very thankful for her hard work and diligence. Craig Tenney at Harold Ober Associates, Inc., was enormously help- ful and generous with his time. At this point I owe Rita Barnard more favors than I am able to count, but I am thankful for them all. I am grateful to David Watson for his acting as sounding board and providing keen insights in the early stages of this project. viii Acknowledgments And for the woman who knows I always save the best for last: Thanks to Christie for all of her patience, advice, and love. * * * The letters that appear in this volume are published courtesy of the authors or their literary estates. Credit is specifically due as follows: • Letters by Peter Clarke published with his permission. • Letters by Langston Hughes printed by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc. Copyright © 2010 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. • Letters by Todd Matshikiza published with permission of Esme Matshikiza (wife of the late Todd Matshikiza and copyright holder). • Letters by Ezekiel Mphahlele published with permission of the Professor Ezekiel Mphahlele Trust. • Letters by Richard Rive published with permission of his estate. Shane Graham Introduction Shane Graham The letters in this volume are a treasure trove of literary and historical materials. They document an important but until now mostly over- looked exchange during the middle of the twentieth century between representatives of two cultures separated by the Atlantic Ocean. When the correspondence began, in 1953, Langston Hughes was a giant of American literature: One of the central figures of the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920s, he is best remembered today for his poetry, but he also left his mark on the novel, the short story, the autobio- graphical memoir, the stage play, the opera, and the newspaper column. He was essentially the first African-American writer to make a living (albeit a precarious one) entirely through his writing and the lecture circuit. He had traveled all over the world, and by encouraging the many young writers he encountered in those travels, he helped usher in the national literatures of Cuba and Haiti. Though he never traveled to South Africa, Hughes nevertheless helped to accomplish the same thing there through his involvement with Johannesburg-based Drum magazine. While he was judging a short story contest for the magazine, he made contact with Peter Abrahams, a mixed-race or “coloured” writer from Johannesburg who had already won international acclaim for his novels and his autobiography Tell Freedom. The other writers with whom Hughes struck up a long-distance friendship were largely unknown outside the readership of Drum magazine. But over the next decade, this cohort of artists would come to be recognized as the first great move- ment of black writers and artists in English in South Africa’s history: Peter Clarke from Cape Town penned a few short stories and poems, 2 Langston Hughes and the Drum Generation but eventually turned his attentions to the visual arts and became one of South Africa’s best-known and most sought-after painters and printmakers. Richard Rive—a high school teacher from Cape Town—would become one of the country’s most celebrated writers of short stories and novels. Three other South African artists with whom Hughes corre- sponded were central to what has become known as the “Sophiatown Renaissance.” Sophiatown was a black suburb of Johannesburg, often compared to Harlem, and celebrated and demonized in equal measure. Of the writers who made Sophiatown their intellectual home, Ezekiel Mphahlele had the longest and most successful career, with his auto- biography, Down Second Avenue, his novels such as The Wanderers, and his nonfiction prose such as The African Image recognized as seminal texts of African literature. Bloke Modisane, the South African writer who seemingly formed the closest friendship with Langston Hughes, drew considerable attention in 1963 for his autobiography, Blame Me on History; although he never published another full-length work, he did become known for his work in theater, film, and radio. Todd Matshikiza was a musician and a much-loved jazz columnist for Drum, and wrote the score for the highly successful stage musical King Kong. The letters to and from these men give us teasing but provocative glimpses into the personalities of the various writers—Hughes at the end of his life, the South Africans mostly at the beginnings of their careers. The letters show us compelling insights into a period of dra- matic social and historical changes in both the United States and South Africa: a time when the United States was moving fitfully and unpre- dictably into the era of civil rights, while apartheid was growing more repressive and restrictive in South Africa. The correspondence shows us a thriving cultural and intellectual exchange across continents in an era when many might assume that the world was more compartmen- talized and isolated than in our own time of globalization. Finally, the letters provide a “missing link” that illuminates the careers of one of America’s greatest writers and several of South Africa’s seminal artists from the mid-twentieth century. Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. He spent much of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, living with his grandmother, but spent part of his grammar school years in Lincoln, Illinois, and attended high Introduction 3 school in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1919 he made a trip to Mexico to live with his father in Toluca; the stay was short-lived and ill-fated in terms of the father–son relationship, but it was on the train ride to Mexico that he penned his first mature poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which remains one of his best-known works. In 1921–1922, Hughes attended Columbia University in New York. He managed to earn decent grades, but found himself alien- ated by the racism he encountered there, and far more captivated by neighboring Harlem than by his studies. This was at a time when hundreds of thousands of blacks were migrating from the rural South to the industrial, urban North in search of economic opportunity; in New York, many of these black migrants settled in Harlem, and made it into a vibrant community teeming with cultural activity. Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican Black Nationalist leader, had established the U.S. branch of his Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem in 1917, and soon after began publishing the hugely popular and influential weekly newspaper The Negro World. Jazz was becom- ing popular nationwide, and whites flocked to Harlem for the speak- easies and jazz clubs. Hughes moved to New York just as this “Black Renaissance” was beginning to take shape, as he describes in his first autobiography: It was a period when local and visiting royalty were not at all uncommon in Harlem . . . . It was a period when Charleston preachers opened up shouting churches as sideshows for white tourists . . . . It was a period when every season there was at least one hit play on Broadway acted by a Negro cast. And when books by Negro authors were being published with much greater fre- quency and much more publicity than ever before or since in his- tory . . . . It was the period when the Negro was in vogue.1 Hughes had already begun to publish his poems in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Crisis magazine; he soon found himself at the center of what Alain Locke would call “the New Negro Movement,” along with James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston, to name only a few of the prominent black writers loosely based in Harlem during this period. 1 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea [1940]. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes Volume 13. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002, pp. 177–178.
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