How did Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston become friends? For Longreads, Yuval Taylor tells the story of a fortuitous road trip, on which Hurston drove Hughes from Mobile to Tuskegee in her Nash coupe. “The road trip provided the perfect opportunity for Zora and Langston to compare notes from their Southern travels, exchange ideas, and explore, along the back roads, the characteristics of African American culture that informed their greatest work,” writes Taylor. “They had both kept meticulous records of songs, sayings, turns of phrase; they related their impressions of conjure wisdom, including the names of potions and powders; they delighted in the cultural riches of their Southern black brethren.” And thus, one of the great literary friendships was born.
On the Road with Hurston and Hughes
We’re Going with “Greatest”
“The actress and author of a new children’s book, The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit, has contemplated throwing the writer Michel Houellebecq across a room.” Great NYT subhead or greatest NYT subhead?
The Road to Progress
Over at Full Stop, Sean Minogue argues that social media can have a positive influence on a writer’s creative development. He mentions Twitter extraordinaire Teju Cole, who thinks his involvement in online discussions “comes from the non-American part of me which is saying that novelists in every other country, with the exception of the American or the Anglo-American sphere, actually consider it part of their work to engage.” Pair with our piece on the best of literary Twitter.
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Dark and Tough
Last year, Laura van den Berg came out with a new book, The Isle of Youth, which Nathan Huffstutter reviewed for The Millions. On the Guernica blog, Dwyer Murphy interviews van den Berg, who talks about jacket photos, her first collection and whether a writer from Florida is part of the Southern tradition. (You could also read van den Berg’s Year in Reading entry.)
Your a Real Jerk
“It’s somewhat surprising that typos and grammatical errors hold this much power given the speed and frequency of written communication that characterizes the digital age. Despite our ‘sent from my iPhone’ disclaimers, it appears we should still be diligent about avoiding written mistakes. Especially if were writing to a conscientious introvert whose not very agreeable. Their the wrst.” On proving something that we all suspected to be true: less agreeable people care the most about grammar.
Bulletproof
“When a female politician’s worst crime is to be unlikeable and uncompassionate, how much rationality and coldness is acceptable for women intellectuals and artists? Just how tough is tough enough?”
Both Hughes and Hurston traded shamelessly in the popular Negro-denigrating stereotypes of the era, a cynical practise that resulted in the fact that they were promoted by the condescending white literary establishment then… and still are now.
As I commented on a story by Hughes first published by Esquire, in 1936, and re-published, uncritically (with relish, even) in 2019:
“The main characters in this story are low-grade morons. Does that make them ‘authentic’? Reminding me of the famous set piece in Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in which two very Black gentleman have an argument about whether the Esso (brand name filling station) dinosaur logo is an actual living thing (kept out behind the filling station) and from ‘Egypt’. Ho ho, ha ha (those quaint Negroes)… but who cares? Hurston is an icon. Hughes is an icon. Did either produce hilarious literary vignettes of moronic Whites? I somehow doubt it, as each knew which side of the day-old toast the dirty butter (or pomade) was on. Who was in charge of the Literary Filter that this, and so many other Jim Crow Fantasias, pumped through at such volume that it all filled the trough of the ‘canon’ of Black Lit? Imagine ‘Beloved Classics of Jewish Lit’ commissioned, edited, published in Germany and taught in German Universities the same year this story was published (1936). Such a canon couldn’t be any more grotesque.
“Sure, I know, Hughes and Hurston and every other member of the Black Kapo Class very famously advertised their ‘love of the Negro Race’ and worked to ‘uplift’ same. But those public sentiments merely satisfied the conditions of their Kapo contracts with the Dominant Culture; they were terribly divided people (I think I just heard Michael Jackson grab his crotch).”
Well, again, there were always very few routes, to mainstream acceptance, open to Artists of (too much) Color, which didn’t involve wearing a conceptual banana-skirt… I get that. But where did all the self-aware push-back, from Black critics of the ’60s and ’70s, go? Kicked back out to the edge of the plantation during the ’80s?