Enigmatic Lives

...His beautiful wife modeled for the figure on the Liberty dime, and he was devoted to his daughter...

...The poems he wrote originated such expressions as "black like me," "a raisin in the sun," even "black and beautiful, " and their becoming titles or catchphrases attests to his continuing influence...

...Wallace Stevens, a Biography: The Early Years, 1879-1923 (Morrow, 573 pp., $21.95) takes the poet through his Pennsylvania, Calvinist childhood, his education at Harvard, marriage, the outset of his legal practice, and his abortive attempts as an avant-garde playwright, up to the publication of his initial book of verse, Harmonium...

...Hughes hated his father and adored his mother, a hard-luck dreamer who was also wont to desert him in vain pursuit of better jobs and men...

...Hughes had his weaknesses as a poet, and his biographer does not scruple to bare them...

...This Stevens spent his private moments working at his poetry...

...Itis admirable, even lovable, that this ambitious poet wanted to be known—as did Shakespeare—for his work alone...

...One suspects that somewhere Stevens is laughing up his sleeve at each new attempt to expose his inner self...

...He felt the only hope for blacks was to emigrate to countries where they could live like whites...

...Having at last tracked them down, he exploded: " Just like niggers, always moving...

...Let it be the dream it used to be...

...Mason became Hughes' "godmother" for a few years, buying his clothes, paying him a monthly stipend and financing expensive trips, as she did for several black writers...

...She sets out to prove that, notwithstanding their anüconfessional form, the poems really do encode Stevens' life—that they resonate as if they were symbols in a dream...

...Yet Hughes was the pioneer who made Wright and others possible...

...Critics have habitually lost themselves in his serious side, ignoring or owlishly overexplaining the poet who gave his works such frivolous titles as "No Possom, No Sop, No Täters," or "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage...

...Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free...

...he became my other self...

...And her dogged research does pay off in the discovery of many surprising connections, but it would take a subtler critic to make the most of them...

...The poet was stunned...

...Yet foolish as the execution is, Richardson's thesis is not without value...

...Later that evening, the famous Illinois poet announced that he had "discovered" a talented Negro colleague...

...Legend has it that as a young busboy at a Washington D.C...

...At times he prostituted his talent to write ideological doggerel...

...Every recorded incident from Stevens' childhood is similarly magnified and examined for hidden links with his poems...

...No doubt it was these past failures that convinced Joan Richardson to divide her study into two volumes...

...By the early 1920s he was recognized as a major literary figure...

...His vulnerability is illustrated by an episode involving Charlotte Mason, one of a number of wealthy whites who acted as patrons for promising Negro artists during the Harlem Renaissance...

...Rampersad claims that he repressed his anger, ignoring discrimination whenever he encountered it (a view that has been challenged by Gwendolyn Brooks, who knew Hughes personally...

...The way she talked to Langsten," her secretary remembered, "is the way a woman talks when she's keeping a pimp...

...He rarely dared show his friends the poor Negro district where his family lived, though, and during adolescence he knew almost no girls of his own race...

...The black poet nonetheless developed a similar elusiveness about his private thoughts and feelings...

...As a young man Wallace was a member of Walter Arensberg's salon where he imbibed the artistic credo of Marcel Duchamp, with its intent to startle and its irreverence for conventional insights...

...We sense that his life and poetry fit together...

...His immensely readable book allows many of the ups and downs of Hughes' existence to speak for themselves—with eloquence...

...In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes wrote that one of the first lessons he learned was "the uselessness of crying about anything...

...As a writer Stevens attained the same kind of quiet, impressive success he achieved in business...

...The experience with Mrs...

...Personality must be kept secret...

...Later, my fiction shifted abruptly as I read carefully through his published letters and saw him as a victim of others, of circumstances...

...His ironic humor becomes merely an excuse for discussing the use of comedy to mask cruelty (although none of the wit seems particularly cutting or mean...

...though after being immersed in Stevens' 'fluent mundo' for so long I have questioned whether I could or can properly call my consciousness my own.' I am afraid that passage indicates what can be expected from the following 550 pages and notes: Richardson's overinvolvement with her subject, resulting in a wash of subjective opinions, a good deal of psychobabble, and portentous overreading of events...

...More important, he was unable to accommodate the familiar black emotions of self-loathing and love-hate toward whites, captured so well by Richard Wright...

...The career of Langsten Hughes was the antithesis of Stevens'—checkered and dramatic...

...Hughes was roiled by inner conflicts that, as Rampersad shows, stemmed from his upbringing...

...Peter Brazeau's oral biography, compiled from reminiscences, laid greater stress on the drunk who got floored by Hemingway than the visionary who wrote "The Auroras of Autumn...

...On a rare visit stateside, Jim Hughes had trouble obtaining the new address of his wife and son...

...Pity poor Stevens' flippant description of a visit to a New York barber who used violet water, making the poet compare himself to an "embalmed sweet...

...Richardson sets her tone all too clearly in her Introduction: "At first it was an idealized life I conjured up for this figure who at different stages took on for me the roles of father, teacher, lover...

...At college, he wrote in his journal, "Harvard feeds subjectivity, encourages an all consuming flame + that, in my mind, is an evil in so impersonal a world...

...As an exceptionally bright child, Hughes was allowed to attend white schools in the Midwest...

...Eventually, he became a well-to-do rancher in Mexico, a country relatively free of racial prejudice...

...my vision became adjusted to what I hope now is seeing things as they were...

...The other side of Stevens, though, reveled in Cubist paintings and the music of Erik Satie...

...America never was America to me...

...Before he was five, his father abandoned the family and left the United States...

...Despite the apparent dichotomy between his career and his avocation, there is nothing schizophrenic about Stevens...

...Rampersad demonstrates that Hughes, whose work had already appeared widely in magazines, staged the whole incident, with Lindsay as his dupe, to attract attention to his first collection of verse, soon to be published by Knopf...

...What discrepancy there is lies in the minds of critics and biographers who have not, as yet, managed to contain his vastness on one canvas...

...Like his earlier patron, the party abandoned him when he most needed support...

...He liked vacationing in Key West, and often got drunk with the boys...

...Arnold Rampersad, whose The Life of LangstonHughes, Volumel, 1902-1941 (Oxford,448pp., $22.95) bears the subtitle I, Too, Sing America, is a less obtrusive biographer than Richardson...

...He worked hard and became a successful lawyer for a Hartford insurance company, a job he apparently enjoyed...

...Gradually, as though working through what in psychoanalytic terms are called transference and countertransference...

...He proved an excellent student, became the star of the literary papers, and was seemingly popular with classmates...

...He had naively assumed he was a protégé, not a servant...

...hotel Hughes slipped a sheaf of poems under the visiting Vachel Lindsay's napkin...

...Because Hughes failed to produce the kind of work she expected, Mason allowed another of her favorites to poison her mind against him...

...Mason did not save Hughes from being used in a similar fashion by the Communist Party, which sent him on a tour of the Soviet Union and persuaded him to write propaganda (leading some blacks to dub him "a Communist Uncle Tom...

...Indeed, one part of his personality embodied the American dream...

...In fact, Hughes learned early to manipulate those who might be useful to him, but he also retained a childlike "anxiety to please, a constant need for approval and reinforcement...

...This volume of Rampersad's biography ends with the poet totally disillusioned, at low ebb—ill with venereal disease, penniless, evicted from his apartment...

...He does not conform to any of the stereotypes frequently associated with poets: He could not be called delightfully eccentric or unworldly, and was neither bohemian nor a self-destructive madman...

...The biographer expatiates on this evidence of "guilt and morbidity" for paragraphs...

...He was thus an outsider in two worlds...

...Maddening as it is, however, to have to minelayers of convoluted prose, pop history and muddled ideas in search of the precious nuggets, until amore detached biographer comes along readers who love Stevens will have to steel themselves—and pray, too, that Richardson's second volume, portraying the mature businessman as well as the esthete, is better realized...

...Then still later, he became victimizer, cold and uncaring of the feelings of those around him, attentive only to what could not speak...

...Rampersad's next volume will doubtless clarify further the role of this seminal poet...

...You come to feel that had Langsten Hughes not lived, Richard Wright might have invented him to demonstrate the ambivalence of Negro life in this country...

...Certainly he kept rage out of his poetry, though bitterness crept in: Let America be America again...

...A mixture of philosophical discourse, sensuous imagery and lyrical feeling, it is—like the author himself—peculiarly evasive about personal matters...