rejuvenation through joy: langston hughes, primitivism, and jazz · 2018-11-03 · 62 rejuvenation...

Rejuvenation through Joy:Langston Hughes,Primitivism, and JazzDavid Chinitz

It is not easy to identify in any simple way either "goodguys" or"bad guys" in the history of Western primitivism.

Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects,Modern Lives

The nature of Langston Hughes's engagement with theprimitivism of the 1920s has been obscured from the beginningby a succession of myths. The oldest, propagated by hostile re-viewers, has it that Hughes, led astray by his friend and editorCarl Van Vechten, was positively carried away with primitivistardor to the great detriment of his art.1 The second myth, circu-lated by Hughes himself in order to counteract the first, tells usthat Hughes was never seriously involved with primitivism, whichhe recognized all along for the fad that it was.2 The third myth,a later critical compromise, contends that after indulging for afew poems and a story or two, Hughes saw through the primitiv-ist hoopla and simply repudiated all its tenets.3

The truth is more tangled than any of these stories acknowl-edges. Like T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and other white modern-ists, Hughes reacted as both artist and social critic to the primi-tivist ferment of the early twentieth century. Hughes's positionwas of course complicated by his racial identity, which made himan object and not merely an observer of primitivist representa-tions. The complex and often conflicted results are manifest inmuch of his early work. In this essay I explore Hughes's relationto the primitive as it evolved, gradually and arduously, over aperiod of approximately twelve years from the early 1920s to themid-1930s. In extricating himself from the primitivist movement,Hughes struggled to disengage ideas long fused in primitivistdiscourse, attempting to rescue elements of primitivism that he

American Literary History 61

continued to find meaningful—especially those pertaining toAfrican-American jazz.

1

The primitivism that confronted Hughes was somewhat re-moved from the anthropological and ethnological developmentsthat inspired his white modernist counterparts; it postdated theprimitivist artistic innovations of cubism, Le Sucre de printemps(1913), and The Waste Land (1922). What Hughes faced wasrather the popularization of these intellectual currents. By theearly 1920s, when the primitive had been avant garde for a de-cade, it had also caught the attention of a much larger public.Those who, like Alain Locke, seriously valued African sculptureand other aspects of "primitive culture" found their ideas evermore commonly reduced to a core of enthusiastic platitudesand stereotypes.

In the US of the 1920s, the "vogue of the Negro" reachedpossibly even more voguish heights than in a Europe captivatedby Josephine Baker and negrophilie. In Europe black culture wasan exotic import; in America it was domestic and increasinglymass-produced. If postwar disillusionment judged the majorityculture mannered, neurotic, and repressive, Americans had aneasily accessible alternative. The need for such an Other pro-duced a discourse in which black Americans figured as barelycivilized exiles from the jungle, with—so the cliches ran—tom-toms beating in their blood and dark laughter in their souls. TheAfrican American became a model of "natural" human behaviorto contrast with the falsified, constrained and impotent modesof the "civilized."

Far from being immune to the lure of this discourse, for thebetter part of the 1920s Hughes asserted an open pride in thesupposed primitive qualities of his race, the atavistic legacy ofthe African motherland. Unlike most of those who romanticizedAfrica, Hughes had at least some firsthand experience of the con-tinent; yet he processed what he saw there in images conditionedby European primitivism, rendering "[the land] wild and lovely,the people dark and beautiful, the palm trees tall, the sun bright,and the rivers deep" (Big Sea 11). His short story "Luani of theJungle," in attempting to glorify aboriginal African vigor asagainst European anemia, shows how predictable and unextraor-dinary even Hughes's primitivism could be. To discover in thedescendants of idealized Africans the same qualities of innate

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health, spontaneity, and naturalness requires no great leap; onehas only to identify the African American as a displaced primi-tive, as Hughes does repeatedly in his first book, The WearyBlues:

They drove me out of the forest.They took me away from the jungles.I lost my trees.I lost my silver moons.

Now they've caged meIn the circus of civilization. (100)

Hughes depicts black atavism vividly and often gracefully, yet ina way that is entirely consistent with the popular iconography ofthe time. His African Americans retain "among the skyscrapers"the primal fears and instincts of their ancestors "among thepalms in Africa" (101). The scion of Africa is still more than halfprimitive: "All the tom-toms of the jungles beat in my blood, /And all the wild hot moons of the jungles shine in my soul" (102).

For white Americans, access to these tom-toms often camein the form of jazz, an African-American cultural product widelymisread as a simple transplantation of savage ritual music. Ac-cording to the prevailing discourse, jazz in its original settingboth expressed and incited the savagery of its creators. As oneoutspoken opponent explained to her readers, "Jazz originallywas the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating thehalf-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds" of "brutality and sen-suality" (Faulkner 16). There was no reason to assume that whiteAmericans were immune to the effects of jazz; in fact a numberof scientists, social scientists, and psychologists held the con-trary. An article called "Why 'Jazz' Sends Us Back to the Jungle,"for example, cited ethnologist Walter Kingsley as endorsing theview that "one touch of 'Jazz' makes savages of us all" by re-awakening even "in the most sophisticated audience instinctsthat are deep-seated in most of us." This argument was a favoritewith those who believed that the spread of jazz threatened todestroy Western civilization entirely. For those who espoused it,this prediction was borne out in the character of jazz dances,with their relatively free movement and indecorous contact be-tween partners.

Of course the transformative potential of jazz could besingled out for approbation as well as for condemnation. If jazzliberated repressed instincts, then perhaps it could reenergize an


exhausted and jaded civilization. This view, championed by VanVechten and other devotees, helped to market jazz and all things"Negro" to the white American public. The accessibility of theprimitive in the form of jazz encouraged the practice of slum-ming, in which whites would patronize black jazz cabarets tosoak up the primitive atmosphere—and often to engage in somemildly primitive antics of their own. Uninhibited abandon waseasier to achieve amidst crowds of dancing savages energized byprimitive rhythms, and such a construction of African Ameri-cans and their music made it possible for disaffected whites tojoin in (Ogren 164). Others who were less bold or merely curiouscame just to observe the primitives at play. Located in jazz, theprimitive became "a tonic and a release" for whites who foundtheir own culture comparatively bloodless (Huggins 89). Jazz fe-ver and the primitivist euphoria supported each other through-out the 1920s in their mutual rise to celebrity.

The association of jazz with the primitive was reinforced bythe many jazz musicians who understood that one vogue pro-moted another—witness song titles like "Futuristic Jungleism"(Mills Blue Rhythm Band) and "Jungle Jamboree" (Fats Wallerand Andy Razaf). Duke Ellington had probably the greatest suc-cess of all in using primitivism to sell music, through spectacularjazz-accompanied jungle floor shows at the Cotton Club. ThatAfrican-American writers should also have been pulled—somemore, some less eagerly—into the jazz-primitivist discourse wasinevitable. Claude McKay's controversial Home to Harlem (1928)was most famously immersed in the primitivity of the jazz scene.Zora Neale Hurston, too, invoked atavistic imagery in assertingthat the music of a black jazz band brought out the savage inher: "I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shakemy assegai above my head. . . . I am in the jungle and living inthe jungle way" (154). The primitive element in jazz is a centralfeature of Hughes's poems as well between 1922 and '26.

The jazz cabaret in Hughes is carnivalesque, its atmospherethick with constitutionally prohibited alcohol, frankly sexualdancing (with sex itself not too far in the background), interra-cial fraternization, and of course the insinuations of jazz itself.Jazz conveys the liberating potential of the primitive to the worldat large:

White girls' eyesCall gay black boys.Black boys' lipsGrin jungle joys. (Weary 32)


Hughes read jazz, likethe primitive itself, as anattractive and necessarycorrective to prevailingAmerican values.

In Hughes's "Nude Young Dancer," a performer strips herself ofall the accoutrements of civilization, behavioral as well as sar-torial:

What jungle tree have you slept under,Night-dark girl of the swaying hips?What star-white moon has been your mother?To what clean boy have you offered your lips? {Weary 33)

Under the influence of jazz, listeners too shed artificial skins touncover their primitive selves.

If jazz was perceived by its opponents not merely as a musicbut as a subversive force, Hughes and other supporters defendedjazz not by disputing but by reaffirming that view. Hughes readjazz, like the primitive itself, as an attractive and necessary cor-rective to prevailing American values: "[J]azz to me is one of theinherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt againstweariness in a white world, the world of subway trains, and work,work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swal-lowed in a smile" ("Negro Artist" 4). Hughes readily acceptedthat jazz was a savage music, and this assumption strengthenedhis attachment to primitivist concepts. As Steven Tracy pointsout, Hughes was never particularly well informed about the rela-tionship between African and African-American music (67); hewas satisfied to assume that blues and jazz were essentially primi-tive so long as traditional hierarchies could be inverted and theprimitivity of African-American music be seen as a positive dis-tinction.

Supporting this inversion of values was a tempting but dan-gerous move. On the one hand, primitivism was empowering: itmade the African American suddenly an object of admiration.The characteristics of "exuberance, spontaneity, irresponsibil-ity . . . and sexual freedom" long attributed to the race by de-meaning stereotypes were now the very qualities sought after bywhites in rebellion against conventional values (Huggins 156—57). On the other hand, the price of this newfound respect wasthe perpetuation of the old stereotypes. Atavistic conceptions as-sume and imply an inherent disparity between whites and blacks,dooming the latter to an irrevocable, if supposedly enviable, Oth-erness. For precisely this reason, most of the older generation ofblack writers, critics, and race leaders relentlessly opposed theprimitivist representation of the African American. And thus theassociation of jazz with the primitive made a socially unsavorymusic still more objectionable. Conceding the barbarity and un-


respectability of the music, the black leadership generally choseto argue that jazz belonged only to the marginal "ugly side" ofthe African-American people (Ikonne 12).

Many of the talented younger black artists, by contrast,gravitated unapologetically towards primitivism as an affirmativeracial discourse. For the "New Negroes," the primitivist ardor forwhat seemed distinctive and valuable in the African-Americancharacter constituted an auspicious new trend in white thinking.Primitivism also reinforced the importance of the black Ameri-can's African roots, an appealing emphasis for a generationdeeply influenced by Marcus Garvey. Moreover, the primitivewas still avant garde as well as popular, and its artistic avatars(cubism, jazz, etc.) remained abhorrent to the pillars of society—a definite attraction for a group of young creators determined tomodernize the black artistic scene.

Finally, primitivism generated a market environment inwhich, for virtually the first time, African-American art couldthrive. Primitivism helped make the Harlem Renaissance pos-sible by developing a receptive audience and by encouraging pa-tronage (Moses 40). At the same time, of course, it provided apotentially disastrous formula for earning white approval and therewards of fame and fortune that went with it (Singh 36). It isnot surprising that the younger writers, including Hughes, wereregularly charged with pandering to the white primitivist appe-tite. For the most part these accusations were groundless, for theNew Negroes' engagement with primitivism was if anythingsomewhat idealistic rather than mercenary. But as LangstonHughes came to see, it is not always easy to tell the difference.

The first two myths concerning Hughes and primitivism arenow easily disposed of. To begin with, Hughes did not merelydabble in primitivism; for several years it represented an im-portant influence on his art and his thought. And since Hughes'sjazz atavism preceded even Van Vechten's, the suggestion of someearly critics that his white friend dragged Hughes into the primi-tivist vortex is unfounded.4 At the same time, primitivism wasnot necessarily detrimental to Hughes's art. Some of his mosteffective and interesting poems of the early to mid twenties—poems like "Jazzonia" (25), "Negro Dancers" (26), "The Catand the Saxophone" (27), "Lenox Avenue: Midnight" (39), and"Afraid" (101), collected in The Weary Blues—develop out of thejazz-primitivist mode.


In any event, most of the contemporary critical fire directedat Hughes's primitivism came in reaction not to The Weary Blues,which might arguably have merited the charge, but to his nextcollection, Fine Clothes to the Jew. In Fine Clothes to the Jew, abook shot through with the spirit, language, and form of theblues, Hughes fulfills the agenda defined in his seminal essay ofthe same period, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,"with a naturalistic account of lower-class African-American life.The realism of Fine Clothes to the Jew makes the atavism of TheWeary Blues seem almost quaint by comparison. Like the blues,the poetry of Fine Clothes to the Jew deals mostly with whatHughes calls "low-down folks" ("Negro Artist" 2)—abandonedlovers, the unemployed, "bad men" (21), battered women, andalcoholics. The romanticized primitives of The Weary Blues areentirely absent. What is striking about the contemporary re-sponse to Fine Clothes to the Jew, though, is that critics seem tohave been unable to perceive the distinction. The association ofthe African American with the primitive was so ingrained by1927 that the working-class personae of Fine Clothes to the Jewwere apparently indistinguishable from the primitives of its pre-decessor.

In one supportive review, for example, Lewis Alexanderclaimed that "Fine Clothes reveals . . . that Mr. Hughes under-stands completely the lives of the more primitive types of Ne-gro"; similarly, Julia Peterkin credited Hughes with renderingsensitively "the emotions of primitive types of American Ne-groes" (Mullen 7-8, 55). This extremely loose conception of theprimitive worked less in Hughes's favor with the many African-American critics who considered Fine Clothes to the Jew thor-oughly vulgar, a sensational portrayal of the sordid side ofAfrican-American life designed to appeal to voyeuristic whitereaders. Anything unwholesome, however much a reality in thelives of millions of black Americans, was to be considered exotic,and any attempt to write about it was, ipso facto, exploitative.

The proletarian realism of Fine Clothes to the Jew emergesfrom Hughes's increasingly conscious relationship to the blackurban masses. His impressionistic earner approach had exot-icized the city "folk" as passionate latter-day savages; his newstrategy focuses instead on their response to the adversity theyface in daily life. But this is not to say that the people Hughessketches in Fine Clothes to the Jew have not been romanticizedin another way: "They live on Seventh Street in Washington orState Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whetherthey are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang!into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little


today, rest a little tomorrow. . . . They furnish a wealth of color-ful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold theirown individuality in the face of American standardizations"("Negro Artist" 2). Even without atavism, Hughes's black work-ing class are "natural" types, uncorrupted by the dehumanizingand falsifying forces of industrial capitalism. They may not beprimitives per se, but they are still a race apart; their differencesfrom the "civilized" Westerner remain essential. The progressionfrom Hughes's cabaret poems to the blues poems of Fine Clothesto the Jew did not, then, mark a sudden about-face in the poet'ssensibility. The naturalistic depiction of "ordinary" black life-styles constituted a new emphasis, but otherwise continued theproject intended by the primitivistic depiction of Harlem nightlife—the project of portraying African-American life in all itsdifference from white American life.

Although Hughes, like his critics, found the change in hisrepresentation of the African-American populace natural andcontinuous, it does mark the beginning of a significant ideologi-cal shift. Yet he had not thus far renounced primitivism on prin-ciple; on the contrary, even as he composed the poems that wouldmake up Fine Clothes to the Jew, he was publishing his jazz caba-ret poems in various journals and defending the quintessentialwork of pop primitivism, Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven (1926).Primitivism had not lost its value for Hughes, though he himselfwas shifting away from it.

Having more or less exorcised black atavism by the end ofthe decade, Hughes now worked to identify and to isolate thegrains of truth that had attracted him to the primitivist move-ment in the first place. The legacy of 1920s primitivist discourse,which left Africa, the African American, and jazz all but definedin terms of the primitive, made this process of refinement andredefinition an arduous one.

Hughes's struggle with these concepts may be usefullyframed as part of a broader contest over the representation ofthe African American in art—a manifestation of the "classic dia-lectic of difference" defined by Anthony Appiah: "[O]n the onehand, a simple claim to equality, a denial of substantial differ-ence; on the other, a claim to a special message," a celebrationof difference (25). From the inception of his career, Hughes hadto negotiate between these alternatives, gradually to formulate asynthesis between the poles of sameness and radical difference.

Hughes's 1931 novel, Not Without Laughter, endeavors, per-haps prematurely, to reach such a synthesis. In place of the ata-vism of The Weary Blues and the urban turmoil of Fine Clothesto the Jew, the novel offers a kind of pastoral, implicitly celebrat-

Having more or lessexorcised black atavismby the end of the decade,Hughes now worked toidentify and to isolate thegrains of truth that hadattracted him to theprimitivist movement inthe first place.


ing the freedom, vitality, and cultural richness of rural African-American folk life. The conservatism and piety of the folk areexemplified in characters like Annjee and Hager, while the irre-sponsible Jimboy and the lively Harriett embody the culture'smusicality and free spiritedness. Predominantly, as Donald C.Dickinson points out, Not Without Laughter is a "quietly assimi-lationist" work, illustrating "that Negro life is neither sordid,spectacular or in most ways different from the life of any otherpeople" (55). Yet Jimboy and Harriett, while hardly primitives,are also meant to exemplify talents and qualities specific to theirrace. Hughes is striving to reconcile Appiah's poles: the denialand the assertion of difference.

This attempt at reconciliation shapes most of all the endingof the novel. Harriett, who ran away earlier in the book, finallyresurfaces as a successful performer, making a career of herunique racial spirit by imparting it, through song and dance, toher audiences. Drawing on the rich folk culture she has inheritedfrom Jimboy, Harriett (now billed as "The Princess of the Blues")has achieved prosperity—a prosperity that will allow her nephewSandy, Jimboy's son, to continue his education and "amount tosomething" (321). Harriett and Sandy embody Hughes's hopefor the African-American future: equality and integration with-out loss of racial identity. In fact, their ability to infiltrate theAmerican mainstream actually depends on the "special mes-sage"—in this case, the power of African-American art formslike blues and jazz—that Appiah identifies with the celebrationof difference.

Many critics have found this happy ending too easy. YetNot Without Laughter is also far from Hughes's last word on thissubject; indeed, he is wrestling with the same issues twenty andmore years later, with music still the pivotal element—the power-ful yet dangerous key to a prospective racial success story.5 Blackmusic opens avenues to acceptance, empowerment, and enrich-ment; but these, in turn, threaten a dilution, and eventuallythe effacement, of blackness. Hughes's separatist aesthetic runscounter to his basically integrationist politics, an oppositionwhich constantly challenges him to envision a satisfactory long-term resolution.

Primitivism, at any rate, fetched African Americans creditat far too high a price. While it proffered a kind of respect, thisrespect made real acceptance and integration finally less ratherthan more achievable. Hughes found himself in a middle posi-tion, trying* to affirm in effect that African Americans weredifferent, but not that different. His work is informed, as ArnoldRampersad has written, "by the notion that stereotypes are most


often based on some underlying if distorted truth" (326). Hughesalways sought to preserve those underlying truths, undoing theirdistortion as best he could.

In the case of primitivist stereotypes, Hughes's stance con-tinued to evolve long after he wrote his last atavistic poems. Onlygradually could he untangle sameness and difference, atavismand cultural heritage, jungles and jazz, to arrive at a more refinedposition than 1920s categories permitted. By 1930 and Not With-out Laughter, Hughes knew that an unpretentious lifestyle rootedin folk origins did not depend on some primitive black essence;still, he could not resist describing Harriett's stage act in atavisticterms: "Suddenly the footlights were lowered and the spotlightflared, steadied itself at the right of the stage, and waited. Then,stepping out from among the blue curtains, Harriett entered in adress of glowing orange, flame-like against the ebony of her skin,barbaric, yet beautiful as a jungle princess. She swayed towardsthe footlights, while Billy teased the keys of the piano into a hesi-tating delicate jazz" (317). Hughes still had not dissociated thepower of African-American music from that of the primitive. Infact his rejection of primitivism was never a complete repudia-tion, for even as he left the primitivist movement behind Hughesstrove to conserve what had attracted him to it and to distinguishthat from what he was rejecting. This effort is intriguingly fore-grounded in one of the best—and least discussed—stories fromhis 1934 collection, The Ways of White Folks.

By the mid-1930s, far from having ushered in the end ofracism, the cult of primitivism and the "vogue of the Negro"were for all intents finished. Hughes had outlasted his own pe-riod of primitivist ardor and had by now distanced himself stillfurther through his increasingly radical politics. In "Rejuvena-tion through Joy"—one of his longest stories and the only oneto be considered for a Hollywood film (Rampersad 285, 308)—Hughes lampooned the primitivist cult in all its self-indulgenceand absurdity. But beyond its cutting and often funny satire, thestory also confronts two more complex problems. First, it seeksto identify the truths that inhered in the primitivist celebrationof African-American culture. In particular, Hughes continues tobelieve, at times almost mystically, that jazz expresses and ad-dresses a realm of the human psyche that Western civilizationhas suppressed; that the African American retains easier andmore immediate access to this spirit; and that implicit within jazz


is an alternative mode of being. The ending of the story toucheson a second and more painful issue: black complicity, includingHughes's own, in 1920s primitivist excesses.

"Rejuvenation through Joy" describes the rise and fall ofthe colony founded by the handsome and charismatic EugeneLesche, who prescribes primitivism as a cure for the civilized en-nui of his wealthy patrons. "Joy," Lesche's byword, is to be at-tained through music and motion, which survive in their primalforms today only in "the Negro." The Colony of Joy, presidedover by Lesche and managed by his sidekick, Sol, enlists a Har-lem band to supply the "primitive jazz" that together with somesimple swaying exercises based loosely on jazz dance is to restoreclients to psychical health. After scoring a great initial success,the colony begins to disintegrate over competition for Lesche'sattention among its mainly female residents; finally it collapseswhen a melee touched off by the band incites the jealous patronsto violence and mayhem.

There is never a question but that Lesche's motives are pe-cuniary, his ideas reductive, and his language overblown; it is alsoclear that he does not fully understand the doctrine he preaches.The ludicrous side of Lesche's methods is obvious in, for ex-ample, the colony's re-Christening of all its inhabitants: "Leschewas called the New Leader. The Negro bandmaster was knownas Happy Man. The dancers were called the Primitives. Thedrummer was ritualized as Earth-Drummer. And the devoteeswere called New Men, New Women" (89). The band leader'sname had been Happy Lane to begin with; apparently even thatwas not cloying enough for Lesche's purposes.6 And the biblicalecho in "New Men, New Women" among so much else that ispurportedly pagan serves to underscore the catch-as-catch-canquality of Lesche's secondhand rhetoric. Hughes's narrative ac-quires an increasingly acerbic tone by ironically adopting theseterms rather than overtly deriding them.

Lesche is thoroughly indifferent to the merit of his ideas,which are for him only a means to entrepreneurial ends. Yetwhen we see (in flashback) Lesche first hit upon the idea that willmake him rich, Hughes uses Sol's response to acknowledge hisown mixed reaction to the scheme: '"Looks like to me,' saidLesche, 'a sure way to make money would be, combine a jazzband and a soul colony, and let it roll from there—black rhythmand happy souls.' 'I see,' said Sol. 'That's not as silly as itsounds'" (77). Similarly, when Sol remarks, "It's unbelievablehow many people with money are unhappy," Lesche answers,with equal accuracy, "It's unbelievable how they need what wegot" (73). Even while he decries its misuse, Hughes hints that


Lesche's creed, and especially his theory of the life-giving powersof jazz, is indeed "not as silly as it sounds." When Sol asserts thathe and Lesche "want to show 'em how much light there is indarkness" (83), he means only that they will portray the primitiv-ity of "Negro" life as the key to happiness. But unknowingly, Solis also defining Hughes's project in "Rejuvenation through Joy":to reveal the virtues obscured by the confusions and falsehoodsof popular primitivism. Hughes, too, wants to show us the lightin this darkness.

Lesche's conception of African-American life and culture isa jumble of primitivist stock ideas: "[H]e said, in substance, thatNegroes were the happiest people on earth. He said that theyalone really knew the secret of rhythms and of movements. . . .Move to music, he said. . . . [T]o music as modern as today, yetold as life, music that the primitive Negroes brought with theirdrums from Africa to America—that music, my friends, knownto the vulgar as jazz, but which is so much more than jazz thatwe know not how to appreciate it" (70). Typically, Lesche doesnot distinguish between African Americans and Africans, norbetween the reality of Africa and its idealized projections. "Seehow the Negroes live," he tells his followers, "dark as the earth,the primitive earth, swaying like trees, rooted in the deepestsource of life" (84). Primitives, he claims, "never sit in chairs,"where the hips and "life-center" are immobilized: "Look at theNegroes! They know how to move from the feet up, from thehead down. Their centers live. They walk, they stand, they danceto their drum beats, their earth rhythms. They squat, they kneel,they lie—but they never, in their natural states, never sit in chairs.They do not mood and brood. No! They live through motion,through movement, through music, through joy!" (69). Adheringto this dubious sociology, Lesche furnishes his colony not withchairs but with backless African stools, and Sol remarks thathe has hired a top-notch decorator "to do it over primitive—modernistic" (72). As usual, a mote of insight emanates fromSol's confusion.

To complete their plan of "combining] a jazz band and asoul colony" (77), Lesche and Sol hire a talented group of blackmusicians from Harlem's Moon Club: "Happy Lane's Africanband, two tap dancers, and a real blues singer were contractedto spread joy, and act as the primordial pulse beat of the house.In other words, they were to furnish the primitive" (73). Theirony of hiring a blues singer to "spread joy" is lost on the twoschemers, who are determined only to provide, as Sol puts it,"music, the best music, jazz, real primitive jazz out of Africa (youknow, Harlem)" (81). Ever concerned that the primitive be kept


in control, however, Sol instructs the musicians "to be ladies andgentlemen (I know you are), to play with abandon, to give 'emall you got, but don't treat this like a rough house, nor like theMoon Club either" (81). Although the narrative remains focusedon the white characters, Hughes gives the musicians just enoughroom to make clear that they are aware of being patronized andare not happy about it. The members of the band are not takenin for an instant by what impresses the rich and the educated.

Lesche's devotees have run the gamut of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century alternatives to Western rationalism,from hermeticism to psychoanalysis to Eastern religion and fi-nally to pop primitivism. "Almost all of them," the narrative in-forms us, "had belonged to cults before—cults that had neversatisfied" (86). Lesche's therapeutic blend of jazz and the primi-tive is so much in step with its time that its novelty seems inex-plicable to them: "How did it happen that nobody before hadever offered them Rejuvenation through Joy? Why, that was whatthey had been looking for all these years! And who wouldhave thought it might come through the amusing and delightfulrhythms of Negroes?" (87). The concept of the "noble savage"had been absorbed long ago by popular philosophy; cynicismtoward civilization was voiced incessantly in the postwar period;stereotypes of African Americans as uncorrupted human "natu-rals" were ubiquitous; and the frenetic carpe diem ethos of thejazz age, to whatever extent a reality, was widely heralded anddenounced. At the convergence of these ideas stood popularprimitivism and the "vogue of the Negro." Add to them the vari-ous theories about jazz and "jazz emotions" then in circulation,and the wonder is really that Hughes (never mind Lesche) hadto invent the Colony of Joy.7

A more significant surprise is that despite its quackery,Lesche's method does get results. Most of the "New Men" and"New Women" are quite satisfied with his treatment. Says one,"the rhythms have worked wonders" (86); for the rest "the house[is] full of life and soul" (88). In time they do experience gains inconfidence and a loss of inhibitions (89-90). These successes areonly partly attributable to Lesche's personal magnetism or to thecredulity of the "New Ones." For at bottom, Langston Hughesdid believe jazz to possess transformative powers, was convincedthat rhythm carried transcendental energies, and did feel thatAfrican-American culture had special qualities of spontaneity,vitality and naturalness—not, by 1934, to be equated with primi-tivity—from which other races could benefit; The Ways of WhiteFolks makes this last point over and over. Like other primitivists,including the early Hughes, Lesche has diluted these truths with


quantities of nonsense, but enough good remains in his programto make it actually work.

In his 1954 First Book of Rhythms, we find Hughes, writingin propria persona, repeating parts of Lesche's lessons almostverbatim to children. More than once he stresses, for example,that "the most beautiful rhythms seem always to be moving up-ward . . . because the sun is above, and the growing things thatstart in the earth grow upward toward it" (18-19). This echoesLesche's first lecture: "Splendid . . . beautiful and splendid!That's what life is, a movement up! . . . We need to live up, pointourselves at the sun, sway in the wind of our rhythms, walk toan inner and outer music" (68). The association of rhythm withthe sun, which hovers around Lesche through the entire story,seems to be one that Hughes himself accepted readily enough topass it on to his young readers. This mystical view of rhythm iselaborated by Lesche, who exhorts his followers to recover theirnatural selves by moving "to the gaily primitive rhythms of thefirst man." This recovery is to be accomplished "not by turningback time, but merely by living to the true rhythm of our ownage," which may be discovered in jazz (70). Hughes, who hadonce asserted that "The rhythm of life / Is a jazz rhythm" (Weary39), explains to the impressionable that "All the rhythms of lifein some way are related" and that "Nature is rhythm" (First Book18, 42). And however Lesche travesties it, his thesis—that therecovery of rhythm is crucial to spiritual health—is supportedby Hughes's own assertions that success in any endeavor, whetherathletic, culinary, or even political, depends on rhythm.8 Heretoo, Hughes did not think Lesche's ideas as silly as they sounded.

"Joy," Lesche's keyword, is also a favorite with Hughes, wholikewise associates it with African-American life. This associa-tion carries over from the primitivist context of "To MidnightNan at Leroy's" ("Jungle lover. . . . I And the moon was joy"[Weary 30]) to the proletarianism of "The Negro Artist and theRacial Mountain" ("Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy")—for aswe have seen, it took Hughes some time to separate these con-cepts. The word reappears in Hughes's later poetry ("Juice Joint:Northern City" [1949], "Death in Harlem" [1935]), where it con-tinues to represent the exhilaration and unrepressed freedom headmires in African-American culture. In identifying "joy" as themissing element in the lives of his clients, and in tapping African-American music as a source of this treasure, Lesche is again ontarget.

In another, more literary sense, Lesche is no ordinary char-latan. As Hughes's recurrent allusions make clear, Lesche isa false sun god, a modern Phaeton who preaches sun worship


and then hubristically takes the god's place: "Every morning, en-semble, they lifted up their hands to the sun when the earth-drums rang out—and the sun was Lesche, standing right there"(89). The first thing we learn of Lesche's origins is that he hadworked his way across the country driving a chariot in a circus.He outdid Helios by riding "twice daily" (73). His progress car-ried him—naturally—from east to west until, finally abandoninghis chariot in Los Angeles, he acquired an inseparable compan-ion named Sol.9 The end of his story comically recapitulates thedestruction of Phaeton by Zeus's thunderbolt when he loses con-trol of the chariot of the sun and scorches the earth. In the finalcatastrophe, Lesche disappears when a shot intended for himfires "upward toward the ceiling and crash[es] through the glassof the sun court, showering slivers on everybody" (94). Lesche'spretensions may be false, but they are high; his theories are amockery, but a mockery of something important. The sun, asThe First Book of Rhythms explains, is the source of ascendingrhythms, and "the rhythms of the joyful spirit are rising ones"(26). If joy, rhythm, and the sun are all conceptually linked forHughes, then one can at least say of Lesche that he usurps theright throne.

Two minor episodes in Hughes's autobiography The BigSea—one in which a pupil of Hughes's falls in love with him(67-69), another in which a jealous German brewery master triesto shoot Hughes for his alleged dalliance with a young girl (74—77)—may have inspired some of Lesche's adventures. Still moreremarkable, however, is Lesche's resemblance to another HarlemRenaissance writer: Jean Toomer. Physically, Lesche and Toomerare virtual twins—both tall and lean, with bodies conditionedby long hours devoted to physical training. Like Lesche, Toomerwas considered "handsome beyond words"; like Toomer, Lescheis endowed with "a deep smooth voice" (66-67).I0 Hughes attri-butes Toomer's success as a Gurdjieffian guru, like Lesche's asthe apostle of joy and jazz, to his personal beauty: "They likedhim downtown because he was better-looking than Krishna-murti" (Big Sea 242). In his philandering Lesche is also modeledon Toomer, whose many lovers included Edna St. Vincent Millay,Margaret Naumburg (the wife of novelist Waldo Frank, his bestfriend), and the wealthy Mabel Dodge (Lewis 71-73). As a fol-lower of Gurdjieff, Toomer preached "a regimen of 'inner exer-cises' and 'sacred gymnastics'" (Lewis 72), very likely the sourceof Lesche's "slow, slightly grotesque, center-swaying exercises"(88). And as Rampersad points out, even Lesche's first name,Eugene, seems to have been derived from Toomer's (285).

The kinship between Lesche and Toomer reveals something


of Hughes's mixed feelings towards the latter, it also sheds lighton the final twist that wrenches "Rejuvenation through Joy" toits ironic close. This comes in a brief denouement following thefracas that wipes out Lesche's colony: "The newspapers laughedabout it for weeks, published pictures and names of the wealthyinmates; the columnists wisecracked. It was all very terrible! Asa final touch, one of the tabloids claimed to have discovered thatthe great Lesche was a Negro—passing for white!" (95). One'sfirst impulse is perhaps to dismiss this as a fabrication, the caus-tic last dig from a tabloid sneering at high society and its foibles.But looking back through the story, one finds that Hughes hasactually left the question uneasily open. We know nothing ofLesche's past beyond the circus. His color is never specified,though his black hair is mentioned twice. Beyond that, there'snot much to go on except for the resemblance to Toomer—andToomer, significantly, was a light-skinned "racial chameleon"who was never quite sure where he belonged (Lewis 66). AfterToomer wrote Cane, his dedication to Gurdjieff took him pro-gressively farther from the African-American community; even-tually he married a white woman and insisted on being consid-ered, as Hughes puts it, "no more colored than white" (Big Sea242). Hughes discusses Toomer's racial conversion in a tone ofscrupulously inscrutable detachment. He obviously regrets that"the poet who, a few years before, was 'caroling softly souls ofslavery' now refused to permit his poems to appear in an anthol-ogy of Negro verse," and he seems to resent Toomer's efforts toproselytize Harlemites who could ill afford the luxury of mysti-cism (241-42). But adding that Toomer had simply decided,"after Paris and Gurdjieff, to be merely American," Hughesavers, with an uncertain level of irony, that "one can't blame himfor that" and concludes by asking enigmatically, "Why shouldMr. Toomer live in Harlem if he doesn't care to? Democracy isdemocracy, isn't it?" (242-43). Complicating the picture still fur-ther is Hughes's awareness of his own racial indeterminacy as theproduct of European, African-American, and Native Americanancestors. Though American mores defined him as black, he dis-covered to his surprise and disappointment that Africans consid-ered him white (Big Sea 11, 102-03, 118). In this respect, too,the relations among Toomer, Hughes, and Lesche are fraughtwith tension and ambiguity.

With the concluding exclamation point of "Rejuvenationthrough Joy"—"passing for white!"—Hughes directs his sar-casm not, like the tabloid's, at the possibility but at the supposi-tion of impossibility. There is no reason to believe that Leschemight not be passing. Certainly his exploitation of primitivist ste-


reotypes indicates nothing to the contrary. In fact, the finaldoubt about Lesche's color packs a disturbing message fromHughes to his own race: that under the spell of primitivism it hasbeen all too difficult to tell the victim of harmful stereotypesfrom the purveyor. Too many African-American cultural lead-ers—even the jazz genius Duke Ellington, even the genteel poetCountee Cullen, even Hughes himself—had contributed to theprimitivist fraud, guilty in some cases of passively acceptingprimitivist discourse, in others of actively promoting it, at what-ever cost in long-term social consequences. Lesche is neither aMcKay nor a Van Vechten, neither a black primitivist nor awhite. He is an archetype, equivocal of race.

"Rejuvenation through Joy" is not merely a satire on theperpetrators of popular primitivism and their dupes. By 1934 ithardly mattered who was to blame; the damage was done, andthe African American, represented in Hughes's story by a giftedband exploitatively billed as "The Primitives," continued to sufferfor it. Hughes's anger, barely submerged beneath the story's goodhumor, flares over the reductive mischaracterizations of blackculture, the commercialism, the sham sociology and the down-right silliness of the primitivist fad and its concomitants, the"vogue of the Negro" and the debate over jazz. His anger isfueled by a frustrated sense that important particles of truth hadbeen obscured by all the smoke and incense. For these weretruths in which Hughes placed a great deal of personal faith andon which hung much of his hope for the future of his people.

Notes

1. J. A. Rogers, for instance, accused Hughes of "attempt(ing] to exploit thejazzy, degenerate, infantile and silly vogue" of primitivism (Mullen 47—48). Ben-jamin Brawley and Allison Davis each echoed this charge while specifically de-crying the corrupting influence of Van Vechten, as did a still harsher anony-mous reviewer in the Chicago Whip (Rampersad 140-41, 165; Davis 268-69).Hughes himself responds to these reactions in The Big Sea 271-72. See alsoMullen 7-9 and Barksdale 24-27.

2. See The Big Sea 325, which should be read in conjunction with similarcommon sense denials (e.g., 228). Some recent critics have followed Hughes'slead in claiming that he "never used 'primitive' or African characteristics toexplain American Negroes" (Huggins 164) or that he "did not try to develop a'primitive' vision of modern life" (Ogren 128).

3. Donald C. Dickinson, for example, states baldly that "In 1930 [Hughes]renounced the whole body of primitivism" (30). Jean Wagner and David Lev-ering Lewis similarly downplay the ultimate importance of African rpmanti-


cism in Hughes's work while admitting its influence on his earliest poems(Wagner 454; Lewis 83-84).

4. The Weary Blues was in fact substantially complete by the time the twomen met (Rampersad 108-10, 165).

5. This theme is developed extensively, for example, in Montage of a DreamDeferred (1951) and Ask Your Mama (1961).

6. Hughes appears to have adapted the name of Arthur "Happy" Rhone, atwhose club he first met Van Vechten (Kellner 198).

7. Hughes did draw on the real-life career of the "Great Om" and his West-chester religious colony (Rampersad 284-85); however, the idea of basing atherapy on jazz and popularized primitivism was his own.

8. See First Book 39-40 and Rhythms of the World

9. Hughes also has Lesche and Sol play repeatedly on "body" and "soul" (77,78, 80).

10. On "roomer's appearance, voice, and physique see Lewis 62-66.

Works Cited

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. "The Negro Artist and theDavis, Allison. "Our Negro Intellec- Racial Mountain." Nation 23 Junetuals." Crisis Aug. 1928:268-69. 1926: 692-94. Rpt. in Langston

Hughes Review 4.1 (1985): 1-4.Dickinson, Donald C. A Bio-Bibliog-raphy of Langston Hughes, 1902-1967. . Not Without Laughter. 1930.Hamden: Archon, 1972. New York Knopf, 1963.

Faulkner, Anne Shaw. "Does Jazz Put . The Rhythms of the Worldthe Sin in Syncopation?" Ladies' Folkways, FC7340, 1955.Home Journal Aug. 1921: 16+.

. "Rejuvenation through Joy."Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Re- The Ways of White Folks. 1934. Newnaissance. London: Oxford UP, 1971. York: Vintage, 1971. 66-95.

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Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It FeelsTo Be Colored Me." / Love MyselfWhen I Am Laughing, and Then AgainWhen I Am Looking Mean and Im-

pressive: A Zora Neale HurstonReader. Ed. Alice Walker. New York:Feminist, 1979. 152-55.

Ikonne, Chidi. From DuBois to VanVechten: The Early New Negro Litera-ture, 1903-1926. Contributions inAfro-American and African Studies60. Westport: Greenwood, 1981.

Kellner, Bruce. Carl Van Vechten andthe Irreverent Decades. Norman: U ofOklahoma P, 1968.

Lewis, David Levering. When HarlemWas in Vogue. New York: Knopf,1981.

Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. "MoreStately Mansions: New Negro Move-ments and Langston Hughes' Liter-ary Theory." Langston Hughes Review4.1 (1985): 40-46.

Mullen, Edward 1, ed. Critical Essayson Langston Hughes. Boston: HalL1986.

Ogren, Kathy J. The Jazz Revohition:Twenties America and the Meaning ofJazz. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Lang-ston Hughes, Volume 1:1902-1941:1,Too, Sing America. New York: OxfordUP, 1986.

Singh, Amritjit. "Black-White Symbi-osis: Another Look at the LiteraryHistory of the 1920s." The Harlem Re-naissance Re-Examined Ed. Victor A.Kramer. New York: AMS, 1987.31-42.

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Tracy, Steven C. Langston Hughes andthe Blues. Urbana: U of Illinois P,1988.

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"Why 'Jazz' Sends Us Back to theJungle." Current Opinion Sept. 1918:165.

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