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The Creation of Identity in the Radicial Plays of Langston Hughes

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The Creation of Identity in the Radicial Plays of Langston Hughes BLACK OR RED?: THE CREATION OF IDENTITY IN THE RADICIAL PLAYS OF LANGSTON HUGHES A dissertation submitted by Catherine Ann Peckinpaugh Vrtis In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Drama TUFTS UNIVERISITY May, 2017 ADVISOR: Downing Cless © 2017, Catherine Vrtis i ABSTRACT Langston Hughes, despite his reputation as the measure of an “authentic” black identity in art, was self-consciously performative in his creation of self through his writing. While this is hidden in most of his work due to his mastery of the tropes of “writing race,” the constructed nature of his public personae is revealed through his profound shift of artistic position, from primarily racially focused to primarily class oriented and Communist aligned, during the decade of the 1930s. As demonstrated by his radical works, Hughes’ professional identities were shaped by competing needs: to represent his sincere political beliefs and to answer the desires of his audiences. As he supported himself exclusively through his writing, Hughes could not risk alienating his publishers, but he was also not willing to support any ideology for profit. His radical plays, more so than his other Red writing, track Hughes’ negotiation of this tension during his Communist years. Hughes already had sympathies with the Communist cause when he broke with his patron, Charlotte Mason, at the beginning of the Great Depression, and instability of the period only deepened his radicalism. Freed from her expectations and in need of an audience, Hughes sharply shifted his public and artistic persona, downplaying his “Negro Poet Laureate” identity to promote his new Red one. His first radical drama, Scottsboro Limited, reveals his ambivalence to this abrupt change of persona, even as it announces the change. After his year in the USSR Hughes shifted to strictly orthodox Soviet forms for Harvest and Angelo Herndon Jones, but he then abandoned these models when he could not find an audience for the work. Finally, in his work for the Harlem Suitcase Theatre, Hughes successfully synthesized his Communist playwriting with his earlier, ii racially focused and blues and jazz inspired poetry, creating something personally fulfilling and financially successful, before abandoning his radical persona at the outset of World War II and adopting new ones to fit the changing world. As a result, these works – historically undervalued by scholars – become the key to new understanding of Hughes’ entire oeuvre. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the time and support of various people who have helped me along the way. First, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Downing Cless, who has provided guidance and encouragement at every step of the process. My thanks as well to the members of my defense committee, Dr. Noe Montez and Dr. Heather Nathans from the Tufts Department of Drama and Distinguished Professor Dr. Steven Tracy from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Next, I would like to acknowledge the extraordinary staff of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, which houses the Langston Hughes Papers. Much of my research was conducted at that site, and would have been far more difficult without the generous assistance of those who work there. My family and friends have been unfailing in their support of my work, and endlessly patient with my tendency to turn all conversations back to Hughes. I would particularly like to recognize my mother, Judy Peckinpaugh, who has acted as alpha reader and copyeditor for my writing from the beginning of elementary school through this final chapter of my education, and my husband, Brian Vrtis, who has always inspired me and always believed in me. Thank you all. Finally, thank you to Langston Hughes, for the work that prompted this dissertation. It has been an honor. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Left Turn at Scottsboro 19 Chapter 2: Proletarian Plays for a Proletarian Audience 68 Chapter 3: Spreading the Good Word 101 Chapter 4: Against the Fascists 140 Conclusion 204 Bibliography 215 v INTRODUCTION Langston Hughes is best known as a poet, and one who wrote with a strongly racially conscious voice from the Afro-American perspective, leading to his commonly used but unofficial title, the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race.”1 However, this image of the writer, while not inaccurate, is severely limited, and, as a result, badly misrepresents his range as an artist. In addition to poetry, Hughes wrote short and long fiction, two autobiographies, essays, newspaper articles, and even stories for children, as well as dramatic, comedic, and musical works for the stage. Though his theatrical works made up a relatively small portion of Hughes’ total output, his lifelong devotion to the theater – an interest he shared with his beloved but deeply negligent mother – gave those works an outsized significance in his own view of his extensive and varied oeuvre. His authorial perspective naturally shifted over the course of his long career, but there is only one period when his primary identification as a writer turns away from race. That was during the 1930s, when Hughes repositioned himself as a writer of class issues from the proletarian perspective. This jarring change in Hughes’ authorial perspective revealed what his mastery of the tropes of “authentic blackness” had previously hidden: that his approach to his writing and to his public identity as an artist was performative, and those performances were self-consciously crafted. He developed his personae, as artist and political activist, in response to the forces of the market, to ensure that he always had spaces to publish and audiences willing to pay for his work. However, this calculation is not evidence that his 1 Larry Scanlon, “Poets Laureate and the Language of Slaves: Petrarch, Chaucer, and Langston Hughes,” in The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, edited by Fiona Summerset and Nicolas Watson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 228. 1 positions were insincere; even as he adapted to the needs and interests of the various cohorts whose approval (and financial support) he courted, Hughes remained within the bounds of the identities he sincerely felt and the causes he truly supported. All of these varying identities, however, can be broadly divided into two major groups, best described as the “black Hughes” and the “Red Hughes.” He did not see these two fundamental identifications as irreconcilable, and both shape his career even when the other is dominant. However, Hughes’ audiences were not always so accepting, and the resulting tension forced him to present only one as his “real” identity at a time. For the vast majority of his career, the facet of his identity he presented as primary was racial, and the combination of his deep love for Afro-American culture and his exceptional knowledge thereof allowed him to obfuscate his active work of crafting and refining this performance of self. During the Great Depression, however, this alignment reversed, and the proletarian Hughes took ascendance. It is through abrupt and profound change, inexplicable within a model of Hughes’ writing that understands his racial identity as always primary, that his performative work becomes visible. Furthermore, during this period Hughes was focused on building his reputation as a playwright, and his output of dramatic works was substantial. While not as well known as his poetry, his dramas are particularly revelatory in considering how Hughes crafted and revised his public selves, both professional and personal. Two major factors contribute to this. First, he already had an established reputation as a poet, and that reputation would shape the audience understanding of any new works. However, he had no such reputation as a dramatist – Mulatto was written in 1930 but would not premiere until 1935 – providing an opportunity to remake himself, minimally hindered by his 2 existing standing as a Harlem Renaissance poet. Furthermore, he shared with his mother, a failed actress herself, a devotion to the theater that bound his plays tightly to his personal understanding of himself, making the playhouse a natural space for Hughes to reveal his new self, and its major variations, to his audiences. As a result, Hughes’ Red period, instead of being an insignificant detour away from his “true” self, contains the key to understanding his performative approach to all of his public identities, and his radical drama is the map to his self-conscious development of those personae. Hughes’ active Communist period spans the majority of the Great Depression, from after his 1930 split with patron Charlotte Mason until the summer of 1939 and the outbreak of World War II, though his sympathy with the radical cause started before this time and remained long afterwards. Until recently his work from this period has been neglected by researchers, for two reasons. First, Hughes went to considerable effort to obfuscate the depth of his connection with the Communists, to protect himself from Cold War era anti-Red bias. Second, the award-winning Hughes biographer and scholar Arnold Rampersad, in his field-defining two-volume biography of the writer, dismissed Hughes work from this period as an aberration, arguing that he only wrote for the radical left out of economic desperation, and that, ironically, by doing so he abandoned his “integrity as an artist” in favor of profit.2 This understanding of Hughes’ motives resulted in initial neglect of his Red period writing, but as other scholars have revisited this material and declassified government records revealing the depth of the FBI and Congressional anti-Communists’ obsession with this work, particularly the infamous 2 Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 1: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing America, 2nd ed.
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