Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964 [Hardcover]

Langston Hughes (Author), Carl Van Vechten (Author), Emily Bernard (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 13, 2001

These engaging and wonderfully alive letters paint an intimate portrait of two of the most important and influential figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Carl Van Vechten--older, established, and white--was at first a mentor to the younger, gifted, and black Langston Hughes. But the relationship quickly grew into a great friendship--and for nearly four decades the two men wrote to each other expressively and constantly.

They discussed literature and publishing. They exchanged favorite blues lyrics ("So now I know what Bessie Smith really meant by 'Thirty days in jail / With ma back turned to de wall,'" Hughes wrote Van Vechten after a stay in a Cleveland jail on trumped-up charges). They traded stories about the hottest parties and the wildest speakeasies. They argued politics. They gossiped about the people they knew in common--James Baldwin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, H. L. Mencken. They wrote from near (of racism in Scottsboro) and far (of dancing in Cuba and trekking across the Soviet Union), and always with playfulness and mutual affection.

Today Van Vechten is a controversial figure; some consider him exploitative, at best peripheral to the Harlem Renaissance--or, indeed, as the author of the novel Nigger Heaven, a blemish upon it, and upon Hughes by association. The letters tell a different, more subtle and complex story: Van Vechten did, in fact, help Hughes (and many other young black writers) to get published; Hughes in turn appreciated what Van Vechten was trying to do in Nigger Heaven and defended him, fiercely. For all their differences, Hughes and Van Vechten remained staunchly loyal to each other throughout their lives.

A correspondence of great cultural significance, judiciously gathered together here for the first time and annotated by the insightful young scholar Emily Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem shows us an unlikely friendship, one that is essential to our understanding of literature and race relations in twentieth-century America.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When their correspondence began in 1925, Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) was the nation's leading Caucasian enthusiast for African American culture, and Langston Hughes (1902-67) was a struggling poet who lived with his mother in Washington, D.C., and plaintively closed one letter, "Remember me to Harlem." Over the four-decade-long friendship that's captured engagingly in these warm, funny letters, Hughes would become more famous, and Van Vechten less so, but their mutual affection and respect only would deepen. Editor Emily Bernard, a professor at Smith College, sensibly decided to include only a fraction of the letters that the pair exchanged, but to print those in their entirety, so that readers might get a vivid sense of each man's personality. Van Vechten is lighthearted, flirtatious, gossipy, effusive in his appreciation for Hughes' writing, and frank when he finds it not to his taste. Despite his unflinching commitment to civil rights, he's considerably less political than Hughes, whose equally witty correspondence has an underlying seriousness that's commensurate with a personal history that's far more turbulent and painful than that of his affluent friend. They share a dislike for "uplift-the-race" sanctimoniousness and a zest for African American folk culture; their letters are rife with references to the music of Bessie Smith and other great blues singers, as well as to the many Harlem Renaissance artists who were their personal acquaintances. The correspondence also provides a sustained chronicle of the working writer's life: they swap news of assignments and story ideas; Van Vechten generously makes his book-publishing and magazine contacts available to Hughes; and the poet loyally defends his friend's controversial novel, Nigger Heaven, against its numerous detractors. Helpfully, everyone is identified in Bernard's copious footnotes, which make this a handy reference work, as well as a delightful record of an extraordinary relationship between two uniquely gifted figures in American letters. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

As the Harlem Renaissance unfolded in the 1920s, few were closer to its hub than the black poet and playwright Langston Hughes and his white friend and mentor, the writer, photographer and patron of the arts Carl Van Vechten. They met in 1924, as Hughes was first exploding into literary celebrity, and quickly became friends and correspondents; between them, they knew everyone of note among Harlem's cultural figures. Marked by a shared irreverence and taste for the good life, their correspondence offers snapshots of vastly different worlds. Hughes comes across as a true adventurer, finding poetry in the world's byways and forgotten corners; Van Vechten is the quintessential bon vivant, whose refinements emanated from the comfort of his own home. The letters offer heartrending insights into the two men's contributions to a variety of political firestorms over four decadesAthe trial of the Scottsboro boys, Van Vechten's publication of his controversial Nigger Heaven, Hughes's branding as a Communist. Bernard's painstakingly assembled edition provides comprehensive background notes and a complete guide to the procession of famous and obscure personages appearing in the letters, as well as a graceful introduction briefly sketching the correspondents' lives and the arc of the Harlem Renaissance. Readers' interest may flag in the later letters, which occasionally devolve into lists of names and accounts of professional obligations; Bernard also says nothing about Hughes's final years after Van Vechten's death in 1964. However, these are minor shortcomings in an otherwise engaging volume, which effectively captures the rare world of two men whose friendship was emblematic of the complex racial entente offered by that extraordinary moment in history. This will be required reading for anyone interested in the Harlem Renaissance, and in black literature and the world of American letters generally; a reading tour by the editor will help bring it to wide attention. (Jan.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (February 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679451137
• ISBN-13: 978-0679451136
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,654,325 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Harlem Renaissance Icons!, July 28, 2005

By 

T. Kelley (houston, texas United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten (Paperback)

Emily Bernard's REMEMBER ME TO HARLEM has to main goals. One, Bernard attempts with success to show the cordial communication between two leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance inner circle, Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten. Two, Bernard hopes to reveal a friendship uncommon for the day and time it flourished, the friendship between a black man and a white man during a major period of segregation and inequality between the black and white Americans. Of course, all this is done through the letters of Hughes and Van Vechten.

Bernard does an excellent job at showing the relationship between these two icons of the Harlem Renaissance. Initially, their friendship starts off as sort of a patron, Vechten, helping to support a struggling artist, Hughes. As revealed in these compiled letters, this working relationship evolves into a friendship where Hughes often defends Vechten agianst distractors who view him as an exploiter and currupter of certain members of the Reaissance literatti (e.g. Hughes himself). Through Hughes, Vechten is shown morphing from an attitude of ignorance and paternal racist assumptions about the primitivism of blacks to one of "some" understanding but definite admiration for the black community. The two men were friends, but it must be stressed they were not best friends. Hughes best friend/almost brother was Arna Bontemps. I stress this difference because the tone of the letters differ when Hughes is writing to Vechten and Bontemps. Therefore, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND the purchasing of the letters between Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps edited by Charles H. Nichols were Hughes is much less reserved than he is in his letters to Van Vechten on certain matters intimate to two men dealing with trials, tribulations, and triumphs of being black during the early and mid 20th century.

A characteristic of the letters is the sign off. Vechten had a habit of grandiose and flowery sign offs in his letters to Hughes. He chastised Hughes for his cordial but distant ending of his letters with "Sincerely." In letters to Van Vechten only, Hughes eventually adopted the grandiose sign off in his letters but with a difference. Hughes was a socially consicious man and early civil rights activist and this is reflected in some of the ways he ended his letters to Vechten where the two men initially engaged in gossip about friends like Bessie Smith, DuBois, Ethel Waters, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and so on and the goings on in their lives to the mundane aspects of business. Sadly, after Vechten writes to Hughes that he compiling Renaissance works for the beginning of the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale, the letters between the two men, Hughes especially conscious of posterity, become almost tedious.

The wealth of the Bernard's compilation of the letters is in the notes following each letter where she provides bits of information about a person mentioned in the letter or current
event of that day. This is were her book shines its brightest. The notes mentions one of Van Vechten's lovers, a white man. In mentioning Mangus Hirschfeld, Bernard fails to indicate Hirschfeld was gay and leading proponent of gay rights that was widely known in the 20's. Pay special attention to the footnote from the letter dated 12/20/40 concerning the Amsterdam News pick of eligible bachelors, one or two men besides Hughes is gay
and paper makes a coy remark about Hughes "thin cloud of mystery," a reference to the "open secret" of his being gay.

Also, Bernard and reviews of the book have noted that you will not find any overt references to Hughes being gay unless you are willing to read between the lines of the letters and "notes". Well, the evidence is there if you know what to look for. But, you must be acquainted with Arnold Rampersad's excellent and thoroughly meticulous and accurate two biographies of which Bernard is indebted and that of Faith Berry and even the letters between Hughes and Bontemps. Van Vechten sends Hughes a photograph of two very handsome black sailors with interesting text about one of them. Other black men featured in the book, not all, are more associated with Hughes and his "preference" for black men than Van Vechten who one professional reviewer incorrectly said were Vechten's lovers.

Ms. Bernard's book provides an interesting window on two figures important to literaturein the U.S.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, April 29, 2001

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964 (Hardcover)

Bernard gathers and edits the letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, written between 1925-64, presenting a notable work of Hughes' mentor and the friendship which evolved between the two men. From discussions of literature and the publishing world to politics and gossip, these letters hold important keys to the personalities and concerns of two great men of the Harlem Renaissance.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful & Insightful, February 6, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964 (Hardcover)

What a great book. It is amazing how much correspondence reveals about people. This book was so interesting. It truly covers decades of Black artisitic history.