Stephen Gray
NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER by Langston Hughes (Scribners, R44,95)
WITH his Collected Poems in two volumes recently published in the United States, the work of Langston Hughes (1902-67) is set for a revival. The exhaustive biography of him by Arnold Rampersad is in paperback as well, spurring reprints of Hughes’s work, most of which has never really gone out of print, anyway. Let’s say re-wrapping for a fresh generation was needed.
Among these is a new selection of his newspaper columns for the black-owned Chicago Defender, packaged as The Return of Simple. These concern the immortal barfly and loose-mouthed raconteur whom Hughes used as a spokesman from the 1940s on.
His less sportive, densely moving retort to the McCarthy anti-communist purges of the 1950s, I Wonder as I Wander, has also been re-issued. This is his passionate record of the Depression years, when one negro intellectual attempted to find a discrimination-free life in the Soviets. He returned to his race-ridden homeland and the grind of penmanship in the cause of black creativity.
His precocious debut had been made as the poet of that cluster of black writers and artists constituting the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. His The Weary Blues was its signature. His The Big Sea of 1940 was the autobiography chronicling that New York swing into fashion of the black arts. His plays have always been obtainable.
Now, for the first time in South Africa, his 1930 novel, Not Without Laughter, is on sale in paperback. Perhaps unsure of Hughes’s status these days, this parcel is ticketed with recommendations by current celebrity names like Maya Angelou.
But despite the razzmatazz, Hughes’s marvellous work stands up for itself. Without his genius, names like Rampersad and Angelou would not be where they are now, either. While they are his promoters, Hughes was the motor itself.
In Not Without Laughter he found how to make the lives of black folks not only comprehensible, but appealing to the very world from which they were excluded: to put it bluntly, readers. Literacy runs through this family saga like a golden thread, all the brilliant, stagey sassy-talk of the oral tradition somehow never being able fully to compensate for those failed spelling-bees.
The story of Kansas-born Sandy, pushed by his Baptist granny, is Hughes’s own, after all. The letter represents escape from the limits of poverty. In American literature surely Hughes struck the archetype. A thousand works have flowed from there.
But none of the above may convince us that Not Without Laughter is really worth recovering. To be sure, those adjectives for adverbs (“talking kind”), double negatives and skewed verbs (“He ain’t never send me nothin'”) come to grate. When one gets to the likes of “Ain’t you seed what de devil’s done done on earth …” perhaps the spade act has gone too far. But a key moment for Sandy is finding a redneck dialect turn in blackface about Sambo and Rastus just too distasteful.
The novel ends in Chicago, where Sandy is courted by a sissy. He runs away. Rather awkward with his own sexuality, Hughes just lets him run on – for life. In later works Hughes would face the music more, taking on his times as no one else could. He became irreplaceable.