Suptionpremises

Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964. Ed. Emily Bernard. New York: Knopf, 2001. Pp. xxxix + 356. $30.00 (cloth); $15.00 (paper).

Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s. Petrine Archer-Straw. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Pp. 200 + 123 illustrations. $24.95 (paper).

If the appearance of the word negrophilia makes your flesh creep (and I positively break into bumps at the sight of it), perhaps it is only doing the job its author wants it to do, calling out racism where it finds it. In the title of Petrine Archer-Straw's book, and throughout her study, its job is to expose the racism of those few white intellectuals in the 1920s who brought African art and African American jazz to the attention of other Europeans and Americans. Black people's anger at white people's exploitation of their cultures is certainly justifiable. But such a serious subject deserves serious research and well-considered arguments. This book, however, simply rekindles the flames of early twentieth-century racial sensationalism without providing a compelling or consistent analysis.

In her edition of some of the letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, Emily Bernard also treats New York photographer and dance critic Van Vechten's period negrophilia as if it were the plague and not a lively form of cross-cultural "drag." She is so busy placating the Hughes literary estate by asserting that there was nothing sexual going on between the two men that she misses the whole point of their epistolary relationship. Given the over-the-top nature of the salutatory gestures of the letters, the reader marvels at the way they each bear gifts of verbal excess and extravagance—"116 Harlem Blackbirds with fallen arches & ivory teeth to you," and "four pounds of tiger teeth to you," sending each other imaginary gifts of white dogwood and fresh Easter eggs, tulips and hyacinths, pine needles and snow (82, 176). When Hughes was very busy with left-wing politics, of which Van Vechten heartily disapproved, he sometimes abandoned the game and signed off "sincerely," whereupon Van Vechten reminded him sharply that according to the rules of their charade, sincerity is only for dealing with the butcher. They wrote to each other as writer and patron, of course, and later Hughes's fame meant that Van Vechten asked him for introductions to blacks he wanted to photograph. They were widely separated by politics, as Van Vechten made clear in his disapproval of Hughes's left-wing work. And that is one reason why they saved their letters—for men like themselves to read in the future, to savor the many ways in which the poet and the photographer crossed social barriers. The letters were a space in which they could wear their imaginary long velvet gloves as they entertained each other with choice morsels of gossip. Bernard's editorial eye misses both men's enjoyment of their roles as social hostesses. She is shaky on many of her facts as well, listing Nancy Cunard's Negro (1934) as a poetry anthology. One does not trust her choice of letters from the thousands written, and longs for more.

When Bernard declares unconditionally that "Anyone looking to this book for confirmation that Hughes was gay will be disappointed," the reader is struck by her immense powers of denial, matched by a certain touching naiveté (xxiii). Because her subjects do not name their lovers or describe their sex acts, they had no sex and lovers . . . ? (Fill in the blank with your own gesture of disbelief.) They shared a love for language and they shower each other with words of praise and love and encouragement and gossip and dish and jokes. They tease and laugh and flirt outrageously—on the page. In their letters Van Vechten and Hughes let down their masculine guard and write as two divas dissecting their culture and its celebrities. They are so cross- dressed, epistolarily speaking, of course, that...