Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964.

Emily Bernard, ed. Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964. New York: Knopf, 2001. 356 pp. $30.00.

On 16 August 1943, Carl Van Vechten began a letter to Langston Hughes, "What letters you write! Maybe I do too. Sometimes I wonder if OUR letters won't be the pride of the Collection"--i.e., Van Vechten's James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of American Negro Arts and Letters at Yale. Later, on 4 September 1952, Van Vechten assessed Hughes's letters to him thus: "warm (showing how colored and white get along on occasion), intimate, full of references to every living thing, and a mine of information about Negro habits and doings, full of enclosures, rich in folklore, and fabulous in friendship."

Emily Bernard has determined the letters indeed do have great intrinsic value and therefore has selected from among them and edited them in Remember Me to Harlem, which both Hughes and Van Vechten scholars will treasure. Certainly those interested in Hughes cannot afford to omit this work from their obligatory reading lists.

Bernard's selection conveys a sense of these two men's daily lives over nearly forty years, as well as their historic milieu during these decades, 1925-1964. We read about Van Vechten arranging for the publication of The Weary Blues. Then he asks Hughes about the Blues and receives in reply such insights as this: "One can feel the cold northern snows, the memory of the melancholy mists of the Louisiana lowlands, the shack that is home, the worthless lovers with hands full of gimme, mouths full of much oblige, the eternal unsatisfied longings." Thereafter we eavesdrop as they gossip; we observe how their politics both coincide and differ; we watch Hughes scrounge loans and, occasionally, repay them; and we follow the unfolding conflict between Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston over who wrote Mule Bone. Van Vechten offers advice to Hughes, and the latter reciprocates. The older man often provides perceptive comments on Hughes's Writing--including both praise and rebuke-- and Hughes responds graciously and diplomati cally, but sometimes (e.g., on his "revolutionary" poems) holds his ground, unwilling to change his opinion. Although he remains courteous, Hughes does not take the deferential tone with which he addresses his patron Mrs. Charlotte Osgood Mason.

Not surprisingly these two famously witty men pepper their correspondence with humor, such as Hughes's long story epitomizing Hollywood extravagance: Without the screenwriters' knowledge, a film producer puts "the leading man on a white horse... Thirty seconds of film, $25.00 for the rental of a horse to make the shot. Eight people and three secretaries engaged a full hour in an executive story conference on the point of the horse--when three horses could have been bought, fed and ridden throughout three pictures on the salary expenditures used up by talking about the horse!" And both correspondents indulge in fanciful closings, such as Hughes's "Twenty-nine cameras with shutters faster than the Berry Brothers' feet, and a dozen dark-rooms darker than the Bledsoe to you, Yeah, Man!" or "6 boxes with sliding panels and hidden keys to you." Van Vechten creates still more elaborate sign-offs: "67 Harlem hoofers in red pants doing the Lindy Hop with razors between their teeth to you" or "116 green giraffes with b right yellow spots and a couple blue Harlem gangsters with ruby suspenders and purple socks to you," to which he appends "I sent you some stallions--14, I think, yesterday." Other closings which the friends employ, however, convey sincere compliments or serious sentiments, such as the one in which Hughes supplies Bernard with her title when he ends his 15 May 1925 letter from Washington, "Remember me to Harlem."

Bernard notes that Van Vechten was gay and Hughes is widely thought to have been gay, though closeted. She briefly considers that similarity, first saying the white author's homosexuality prompted disdain from many members of the race whose artistic accomplishments he championed, extolled, and preserved. She believes his sexual orientation, as much as his race, made him "suspect" to some African Americans. Bernard explains the two men were not lovers and notes they altogether avoid discussing attraction to men in their correspondence. Yet she quotes what Van Vechten wrote on 4 June 1925: "There are so man things that one can't talk about in a letter."

Readers will find in that same missive Van Vechten invites Hughes to stay with him for a couple of days because "a long conversation would be advantageous to both of us." Bernard does not comment on this or on most of the passing remarks which gay readers might regard as insider references, such as the 17 May 1925 closing "Lilacs and pansies to you! Carlo" or the latter part of Hughes's 8 August 1960 closing "Call Boards and Call Boys to you." Such readers might also notice that Bernard does not mention in her note on him the leading role Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld played in the gay rights movement in prewar Germany.

The two friends shared other characteristics. Some writers trounced both men for depicting lower-class black manners and mores. Both Hughes and Van Vechten rejected restrictions which would limit them to supposedly respectable subject matter, instead championing artistic freedom. Each chose an unfortunate title for a book, Hughes in selecting Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) and Van Vechten in ironically calling his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven. And of course they bonded initially because they so loved African-American literature, music, and visual arts. Toward the volume's conclusion, we even find that Hughes seems to regard his friend as black, when he telegraphs Van Vechten, "I see in the press that you and I are to represent the race in the National Institute of Arts and Letters."

Bernard's selections appear in as near Chronological order as possible; she has shrewdly approximated the sequences for undated correspondence. She provides valuable textual exegesis which sometimes goes on longer than the material it annotates. Readers not intimately familiar with the people the friends mention will appreciate both those notes and the "Dramatis Personae" of major figures which precedes the letters. She demonstrates she nearly always has done her homework, unearthing, for instance, that Nancy Boyd is an Edna St. Vincent Millay pseudonym, a fact Hughes scholars might not know. Atypically, she appears to have relied on Rampersad's biography for a smattering of reviews of Hughes's books instead of checking my Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews, and hence she generalizes inaccurately--regarding Montage of a Dream Deferred, for instance--about whether reviewers praised or panned his books. Nevertheless, merely by publishing these fascinating letters, Bernard has contributed greatly to schol arship concerning both Hughes and Van Vechten, and the scholarly apparatus and the illuminating introduction make the book even more valuable, indeed indispensable.