Langston Hughes - Life and Times with Alice Walker

[Music] well he was born James Langston Hughes February 1st 1902 in Joplin Missouri and he wasn't there very long went on to Lawrence Kansas which is where he spent a lot of his boyhood most of his boyhood one of the things that attracted me to Langston was the difficulty he had as a child because his parents were divorced and because their marriage had been a really rocky one he was tossed about from one parent to the other from Cleveland to Mexico he also spent a lot of time in Lawrence Kansas uncle could you tell us something about he likes it uses early life what was his life like as a child Langston lost his father to all intensive purposes when he was quite young his father left the family being unable to make a living as an attorney which is what he wanted to be unable to practice law because of the color of his skin he went off first to Cuba and then to Mexico so Langston really didn't know his father except really as a kind of absence in his life which was very hurtful the other connection I felt reading him was that he had to have spent a lot of time alone recuperating from some of the stresses of being in this particular family he connected with nature in fact I recently was there and saw the river that runs through Lawrence that I understood that Langston had loved and has been a good deal of time looking at and feeling so I think that actually he was supported by nature when he could not feel supported by his parents he grew up mainly with his grandmother Mary Langston his mother's mother in Lawrence Kansas and that I think is where his consciousness so to speak was formed but I loved about the story of Langston his grandmother is that she reminded him that his ancestors had fought against being enslaved that they had not accepted it and that his direct ancestor his grandfather Sheridan Leary had really fought with with John Brown against the institution of slavery Langston was definitely from a distinguished family his grandmother's his mother's mother's first husband had died at Harpers Ferry fighting in John Brown's band and her second husband was also a prominent abolitionist and his brother this is Charles Langston Langston's grandfather Charles Langston's brother was perhaps one of the three best known African Americans of the 19th century a congressman from Virginia and also an ambassador to Haiti and the Dominican Republic and so on so he had this extremely distinguished background Langston Hughes did accept that he his family was poor by the time he was growing up they were almost destitute at times and this had a profound effect upon his his a sense of who he was I understand his grandmother died when he was about 12 13 years old yes nextons grandmother died in his very early teens when he was 13 or there abouts and that too affected him I think quite strongly because although she was often silent and perhaps not forthcoming in her love for him as she was still an important guiding figure and it was then at that point that I think he spent several months with there but the reeds who had a profound effect I think his sense of his identity the reeds did not have children they were a different kind of people altogether she was prominent in the local church he did not go to church but he enjoyed life and they had a good time together the reeds showered love affection encouragement on young Langston and he absolutely basked and it he really needed it keep reading books why do you think religion was so important to anti read and I think that even when I was growing up in in a similar little town who actually got a little town but way out in the country people really wanted us to be saved it was important it's very important to religious communities especially black Southern Christian ones that the children be quote saved and so she was doing it because she loved him and because she wanted him to feel in himself some kind of protection some kind of supernatural protection because the life of a black child Dennis now was in jeopardy with every breath so she felt that if you had Jesus to protect you then you you were saved her religion I think was a much more fundamentalist kind of religion a much more ecstatic kind of religion and I think it impressed him tremendously the cry is the the the the singing the promise of a kind of immediacy in the intervention of God this he didn't have in his in his I think in his mother's religion so he found it I think very very compelling was Langston damaged by this church experience uh I I don't think he was damaged I think it was a Great Awakening it was an awakening to the fact that other people think of your salvation quite differently from the way you think of your salvation we do know that that Langston had a severe view of religion he admired the place of religion and recognized the place of religion in the black world in the black community he admired the faith of the older black women or men but for he himself was not a believer and and he was also very angry about religious hypocrisy his salvation he was saved he was saved from that kind of delusion that there is in fact of Jesus who's going to come to the bench take you by that because it's all literal you know it's when I went to the Soviet Union I had just gotten out of my freshman year at school and I had been told so many times that there was an Iron Curtain you know that I and to me it was completely literal and so when I actually got to the water between the Soviet Union and Finland and the train stopped I went out to see the Iron Curtain and what an awakening what an awakening I said you know this is a delusion you know this is a lie there is no Iron Curtain here and to top it off all of the Russian soldiers who came out to search the train or whatever we're very kind they were much better than the police I had left in Georgia where was Jesus where was he was this fight I was supposed to see what was I supposed to do pretend like Wesley how did like Stan feel about Jesus fairly him we don't know for an absolute fact that this happened exactly the way it happened in Langston's life but it is a powerful scene and it meant a great deal to Hughes and he embedded it in his autobiography early on so that we could get a sense of some important things about him I think he wanted to make a statement about his father his parents because they're sort of absent from the scene with the reeds being present it's a tribute to aunty Reed really in many respects and to uncle Reed but of course it is above all a picture of a boy in a state of desolation the chapter called salvation in the big sea is often identified as a very piece of good writing that the prose was especially well conceived could you talk about that he was a style in the autobiography I think it's to offer us a succession of vignettes little tales and this one I think is a beautifully rounded little tale I think it deals as he was so often does it deals with something that's profound something that's extraordinarily sad but it is treated in a light-hearted way and that was the essence of Hughes I mean if he connects that aspect of his aesthetic to the blues the blues is about sad events but when their son he says people laugh and both of them this is the singing or the playing and the laughter amount to a real victory over the sadness so that's part of the structuring of the story what I love to point out to people too is the absolute beauty of Hughes's prose in its simplicity it is I think the most fundamentally American kind prose you can you can get there's no pretense whatsoever no use of high-latitude phrases no turns and twists of expressions no cuteness no smartness it is direct it is clear pellucid honest and therefore maybe it's too much of a compliment but I think it's very American then in the sense of Whitman and Hemingway also having the same desire to write a kind of clear prose that they believe is on european and is peculiarly American do you think you could address how did he become a writer what was that a choice easily made or difficult for him well he himself in in the big sea used as it talks about reading the French writer Guy de Maupassant in French and struggling with it as a schoolboy and then one day he is reading de Maupassant it is snowing in the text and then it begins to snow outside his window and suddenly he was be able to understand the French and enter into the beauty of the writing and he says that there and then he decided that he would become a writer like de Maupassant because he recognized the sort of power of writing to to preserve an age and to speak for a situation and have sometimes to speak for people and he said it there then he decided that he would be a writer and write about African Americans stories that people would ruin poems that people remember generations hence books were around him all the time he talks about the library loving the library in Topeka and also in Lawrence so I think it wasn't a far stretch for him to to become a writer Hughes did not want to use words as weapons and he also while he was a radical at certain points in his life he he believed in art and that was his identity Raley's public identity from beginning to end an artist the Harlem Renaissance is something that I think people are very interested in what it was could you talk about that a little bit as I understand the Harlem Renaissance it was a time when African American writers and artists and musicians flourished and not only that Haarlem itself was wonderful it's hard to believe you know that Harlem was this driving safe beautiful actively engaged community of very lively happy people for the most part and so of course art flourished there because there was so much life in 1926 Hughes published an essay called the Negro artist on the racial mountain you know in the very prestigious Nation magazine and it that stands as a kind of manifesto for the Harlem Renaissance it emphasized is one that the younger writers had a sense of themselves a sense of identity that was distinct from the older writers the old african-american writers the younger writers believed in I would say two things above oil as far as Hughes was concerned they believed in racial identification to some extent and they also believed in freedom freedom from worrying about what what middle-class people thought about their work or white people thought of their work or religious people thought of their work so there was this emphasis on race and on freedom and Hughes stressed both I think that's why so much art came out of that period people black people were having their first taste of any kind of freedom and autonomy in the country like sinews more than articulated the needs of African American people as an artist he did more than that he showed them what they looked like while they were articulating their needs and concerns and he showed them you know what was not such a good face to present and what was a very good face you know and he showed that you know that poem by Countee Cullen about how African Americans are often required to have two faces we were the house and I think Langston's work showed them what it meant to try to keep the mask off you know because if you have two faces what is often a mask and so his work he worked very hard to say to black people you don't have to wear the mask at all just the way you are is just fine and that's a lovely thing especially in those times in that sense he was an artist of the highest caliber in a way what it is that I respect so much about his work as his devotion he had enough faith in himself I mean I think he knew that some of his poetry was kind of not so terrific but what he really believed in was leaving this body of work that would actually say to people many years later you know a century or two later this was a particular community they struggled on to you know to have a good life in the middle of some incredible repression and and this is the beauty and this is the humor and this is the joy and this is this is what they created you can find that you if you read all of his work like Zara Neale Hurston you can find a complete community and that is very unusual he's had a tremendous sense of devotion to the word a sense of duty as an artist obligation to his craft obligation to his audience it's something it's one of the most spectacular stories really in African American and perhaps even in American literature he was the first African American to live by his or her writings and and and he did so sometimes at enormous personal cost to himself but he kept going because he believed that any kind of delusion of his of his energies away from writing would it would not would not be true to you know to his sense of duty I understand that likes to wrote most often when he was the most unhappy that it came out of his own happiness well it was a famous British and he was Shelley who said sweetest songs those which tell of satis thought so I think the idea is out there all this that there is this association between sadness and creativity between pain and creativity I think for writers stress can be a great friend and sadness can be a very very great friend it's because when you are sad you go to deeper parts of yourself enter into hidden chambers and Langston had many of those and I think because his childhood was so fractured because his father basically rejected him and because his mother never understood really that he was a writer but any wrote books but he didn't have much money and she was always you know very much in need Hughes is a difficult person to talk about in this way because he put such an emphasis on laughter on smiling through but he does tell us at a certain point that that he could write poetry when he was sad he was not able to write poetry when he was happy this could be true or could be sometimes true of him I don't know but he had sufficient sadness in his life and I think he was often misunderstood I think when he went off into politics for instance and especially he was very much in favor of communism as he experienced it in the Soviet Union well that didn't play well here even though anyone looking at his background could clearly understand why if he went to a country where they treated him like a human being you know he would be injected the important thing for him always was to triumph over that sadness he used it to create he used his sense of social oppression and deprivation to create a certain kind of poetry he was the kind of cosmic sense of existential sense of pain but she also had had nothing to do with race or politics in a way to create another kind of poetry but as I keep saying you know the end with use always is to affirm the human and that's what his if work does above all and I think I understand that he helped other writers on the way up and brought them into the fold of african-american literature is very concerned about about that yes as soon as Hughes was able to be of any assistance to two younger writers he certainly did his best to encourage them I mean if one looks at the career of a great poet such as brendlin Brooks you find him helping her in in her teens and maintaining this connection with her for the rest of his life or Margaret Walker who in 1942 on the Yale younger poets prize Hughes knew her too as a teenager set aside time to work with her encouraged her when I went to visit Mike sinews in Harlem and it was a very different Harlem though he continued to love it I think just the same which again is that devotion that he had he was living in a townhouse it seemed to be a townhouse that he shared with friends or relatives and I didn't know and his own space seemed very modest and all I remember really is that when he asked me which of his books I liked very honestly I said I haven't read a single one and he never missed a beat he just reached behind him as if he'd done this many times to a cabinet and then turned around and took out copies of you know everything he'd written put them in my arms and I thought there not many people with that kind of grace you know once you tell them that you haven't read anything you don't know anything who are they you know why am I here you know but he was very graceful and I really appreciate it I was really young and he could have said things that were very hurtful but he didn't he was he was wonderful here we are in a new century 21st century Langston has become so popular he's on a postage due what do you think that tells us about his place in african-american literature and the American literature as a whole in today's world I think he has a lot to say to Americans and to other peoples for that matter about about life and about poetry about art whether or not he will continue to be his work will continue to be respected as always depends on the people who would by him and by his work his literature of course is priceless you know that's a given you may not like this or you like that or you know pick and choose because there's so much of a he he worked in many genres everyone's eventual success Fame is dependent on teachers and parents passing on the word to younger people that here is a body of work that is worth looking at so but at the moment I teachers I think a very fond of Langston Hughes his poetry communicates very well to younger people very young people there's a great body of work that he left behind there's something to please if not everyone well many people so I think that that but his work is likely to endure insofar as we could look ahead thank you dr. Ram % for spending your time with us and taking a moment to share likes did use life and what you know about him thank you so much you're very welcome when you really look at his life there's also an ascetic side which which meant that no matter what was happening he was trying to explore the meaning of life in this country and for African Americans in particular but not just them alone you know in particular but not for them alone thank you so much Alice Walker for spending this time with us here today and we're very appreciative of your thoughts about Langston Hughes and a little bit of the meaning behind his life I loved Langston and it's my pleasure [Music] you

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Length: 25min 10sec (1510 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2017