Langston and Carlo - A Cross-Racial Friendship

In 1924, Carl Van Vechten, a white writer, music critic, and promoter of African American cultural art forms, met Langston Hughes at a Harlem party. "Kingston" he called him in the journal he kept at the time, but when he met Langston a second time as the winner of the first poetry contest sponsored by a Black magazine, Langston’s recital of “The Weary Blues” knocked him off his feet. Then and there he committed to getting Langston's first book of poems accepted by his own publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf. Van Vechten, 45, famous and well connected, published articles about his discoveries of life in Harlem in Vanity Fair. Hughes, 23, was still unknown and living with his mother in Washington, DC. 

Hughes was very beautiful, and Van Vechten, actively bisexual. There was cause to suspect that Van Vechten's interest in the young poet was not entirely literary, but the older white man played it cool. As good as his word, Van Vechten got The Weary Blues published in 1925 and wrote the forward -- a mixed blessing as Van Vechten's framing revealed a patronising stance and a tired --but common--belief in the salutary primitivism of Black culture. "You are my good angel!" Langston enthused, and although there was undoubtedly some sycophancy in his sentiments in the beginning, a genuine friendship developed between them.

In fact, Langston saved Van Vechten's ass when the latter published his sensational novel, Nigger Heaven, in 1926. Feeling himself at that point to be a privileged commentator, Van Vechten arrogated the insider's use of the explosive term to insure its highest degree of visibility. (It worked but not always to his benefit.) In the same spirit, he casually lifted some blues lyrics quoted in the manuscript without attribution or permission, but a threatened lawsuit put him in a panic. He turned to Langston who was in his first year as a student at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Langston jumped on a train and replaced the borrowed lyrics with originals in a night-long session at Van Vechten's apartment.

Although the novel became the biggest best-seller of Van Vechten's career (amongst white folks), it caused an uproar in Harlem. Langston defended Van Vechten in print, arguing that the novel was "neither praise nor condemnation," but a portrayal of "life as it is." Langston's defense of the novel put him in a tricky position as the book's sensational title and white-authored voyeurism ignited anger among Black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois who described it in his review as "a blow in the face."

Still, there was a deep commonality of appreciation that Langston and Van Vechten shared regarding the valorization of popular Black culture -- blues, jazz, speakeasies – and a disdain for the middle class pieties of taste and morality embraced by the  Talented Tenth. "You and I are the only colored people," Van Vechten wrote to Langston, "who really love niggers." Langston never upbraided Van Vechten for the effrontery of the "joke" and perhaps took it in stride as a condition of their friendship. We'll never know.

Over the next 40 years, the two friends exchanged 1500 letters, letters filled with gossip, in-jokes, aesthetic judgements, and an evident mutual affection. (However they didn’t touch on queer topics nor evince any queer sensibility, a sensibility on full display in the scabrous scrapbooks that Van Vechten willed to Yale’s Beinecke library collection under a 25-year-seal of secrecy.) As Langston’s star rose, Van Vechten’s sank, but he had a personal fortune to cushion his disappointment of being culturally sidelined and forgotten.

However one may judge Van Vechten’s role as cultural impresario of the Harlem Renaissance and mediator between the races, the genuine affection he roused in some of his Black friends went beyond fetishism or exploitation. Langston was no fool, and the friendship between the dandified magpie and the African American 25 years his junior was one of equals – a difficult feat to bring off between two people of such different class backgrounds and races to this day.