Rejuvenation through Joy: Langston Hughes, Primitivism, and Jazz

Abstract

The nature of Langston Hughes's engagement with the primitivism of the 1920s has been obscured from the beginning by a succession of myths. The oldest, propagated by hostile reviewers, has it that Hughes, led astray by his friend and editor Carl Van Vechten, was positively carried away with primitivist ardor to the great detriment of his art.1 The second myth, circulated by Hughes himself in order to counteract the first, tells us that Hughes was never seriously involved with primitivism, which he recognized all along for the fad that it was.2 The third myth, a later critical compromise, contends that after indulging for a few poems and a story or two, Hughes saw through the primitivist hoopla and simply repudiated all its tenets.3 The truth is more tangled than any of these stories acknowledges. Like T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and other white modernists, Hughes reacted as both artist and social critic to the primitivist ferment of the early twentieth century. Hughes's position was of course complicated by his racial identity, which made him an object and not merely an observer of primitivist representations. The complex and often conflicted results are manifest in much of his early work. In this essay I explore Hughes's relation to the primitive as it evolved, gradually and arduously, over a period of approximately twelve years from the early 1920s to the mid1930s. In extricating himself from the primitivist movement, Hughes struggled to disengage ideas long fused in primitivist discourse, attempting to rescue elements of primitivism that he