The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History

Tolson, Hughes, Baraka

K. Schultz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137082428
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

Analyzing the poets Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka, this study charts the Afro-Modernist epic. Within the context of Classical epic traditions, early 20th-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa, Schultz reveals diasporic consciousness in the representation of African American identities.

CHAPTER 1

Modern, Modernist, Afro-Modernist: Melvin B. Tolson in the 1930s and 1940s

Afro-Modernist Chronologies

Critical reengagement with Melvin B. Tolson’s writing from the 1930s and 1940s makes clear that his later Afro-Modernist epics, Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) and Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator (1965), are not merely anomalies out of sync with the developments of modernism, nor even distanced from African American schools of writing. Rather, Tolson’s engagement with the contemporary poetic practices of his time results in a traceable trajectory from modern free verse, influenced by Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg; to experimental modernist practice in the 1940s, drawing from T. S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s methods; and finally to the development of Afro-Modernist innovation in Libretto and Harlem Gallery, as he realizes his own vision for the Afro-Modernist epic. As he becomes more fluent in his own particular modernist practice, Tolson’s task of decolonizing what Aldon Nielsen describes as “the colonized master text of modernism,” (244) results in a “rearticulation of modernism [that] led him eventually to assert African progenitors in the realm of technique” (247). Tolson’s Afro-Modernism is marked by a diasporic worldview in which multiple lineages, including those from Africa, Europe, and Asia, are incorporated into his work.¹ This diasporic imagination, which is inherently transnational, is present in the Afro-Modernist epics of Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka as well. Each of these poets turned to the epic form to include large swaths of diasporic history in their retellings of African American genealogies.

Tolson was prolific in several genres. His first completed poetry collection is A Gallery of Harlem Portraits. While he wrote these poems during the 1930s and 1940s, the book was not published until 1979—well after Tolson’s death. These poems are virtually unknown today. In addition to A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, Tolson’s early works include his master’s thesis The Harlem Group of Negro Writers (filed 1940, published 2001); his newspaper column “Caviar and Cabbage” that ran in the African American newspaper The Washington Tribune from October 8, 1937, to June 24, 1944; and a poetry collection, Rendezvous with America, published in 1944. His later works are the book-length Afro-Modernist epics mentioned above: Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) and Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator (1965). To reconsider Tolson’s affiliations and chronologies, and thus to better comprehend his Afro-Modernist texts from the 1950s and 1960s, it is helpful to understand the trajectory preceding his important long poems. Therefore, this chapter focuses on Tolson’s thesis, The Harlem Group of Negro Writers, and his first two poetry collections: A Gallery of Harlem Portraits and Rendezvous with America.

Examination of Tolson’s early work provides a new lens for understanding and placing Tolson in literary chronologies. In A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, Tolson utilizes a modern free verse line. In the 1940s, however, in Rendezvous with America, Tolson moves toward modernist method. Clearly his work from the 1940s serves as a bridge to his later Afro-Modernist epics, as I will illustrate. Although this early work is deserving of close attention, the foundational stages of Tolson’s development as a poet have been obscured for several reasons, including Tolson’s publishing history; periods of scholarly disinterest, neglect, even outright hostility toward Tolson’s work; and little recent attention to Tolson’s work prior to the 1950s.

Ironically, when Michael Bérubé published his major work on Tolson, Marginal Forces / Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (1992), Portraits was the only collection of Tolson’s still in print. Yet, in staging the reemergence of Tolson into modern literary criticism, Bérubé’s work focuses on unpacking the complexities of Tolson’s last work Harlem Gallery—the full title of which is Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator²—and its relationship to modernist studies. Nielsen’s essay from the same year accomplishes a similar task for Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia. Bérubé, whose book mentions Portraits almost exclusively in footnotes, seems, in part, to have drawn his assessment of that earlier work from Tolson himself who claims at one point to have stashed the manuscript of A Gallery of Harlem Portraits in a trunk for 20 years.³ Bérubé also asserts that Tolson “brackets off” Portraits as “premodernist” in his representation of it in later works (109). In addition, Raymond Nelson’s important edited volume that helped to create a new generation of Tolson readers, “Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson (1999), contains, as Nelson explains, only “the three books [Tolson] published in his lifetime” and does not make mention of Portraits at all (xxvii).

The obscurity of this work has been compounded by critical controversies about Tolson that have erupted from time to time, creating noticeable moments of neglect. In brief, one of the most important controversies that informed the development of (or perhaps more accurately, the lack of development of) Tolson scholarship, which other scholars have documented, emerged from the prefaces Allen Tate and Karl Shapiro wrote for Libretto for the Republic of Liberia and Harlem Gallery, respectively. Briefly, Tate’s preface to the Libretto for the Republic of Liberia states that Tolson “assimilated completely the full poetic language of his time, and by implication, the language of the Anglo-American tradition” while Shapiro countered with the assertion in the introduction to Harlem Gallery Book I: The Curator that “Tolson writes and thinks in Negro” (13). Shapiro also famously declared that Tolson had “outpounded Pound,” exacerbating the argument that Tolson was doing nothing more than copying white modernists. Nielsen writes: “Just as it has proved nearly impossible to speak of Tolson’s late books without speaking of their prefaces, few have found it possible to speak of the development of Tolson’s style without expressing suspicion, sometimes severe, about its origins and its racial politics (242).” ⁴ Moreover, the assessments of Tolson resulting from these arguments led some scholars to dismiss him completely, leaving the early work untouched.

Furthermore, Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s now classic account, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987), written in response to earlier critical assessments of the Harlem Renaissance’s “failure,” explicitly rejects any connection between the Harlem Renaissance and Anglo-American or European modernism. Significantly, Baker’s book opens with an account of an argument with a “brilliant young black man” who was “adamant in his claim that only Melvin Tolson among the vast panoply of Afro-American writers had become a successfully ‘modern’ writer” (xiii). Baker goes on to assert that the man’s assessment of Tolson’s success was based on the fact that “only Tolson, in his view, sounded like Eliot, or Joyce, or Pound, or . . .” (xiii). Baker uses his own assessment of Tolson’s likeness to “Eliot, or Joyce, or Pound, or . . .” as evidence of Tolson’s failure, of his misguided attempts to copy white modernists. Though Baker’s move to list white modernists as if they are interchangeable is of course polemical, he falls into the same mode as the critics he calls to task for employing a unitary definition of modernism that excludes African American writers. In excluding Tolson, he reinforces a “whites only” modernism: Tolson, as a black man, can only ever be derivative in this definition, a failed modernist, because a black man cannot and should not sound like “Eliot, or Joyce, or Pound, or . . .”

Because Tolson does not fit neatly into the way scholars have schematized twentieth-century African American writing, he is sometimes referred to as a “post-Renaissance” poet, as critics seek to position him in relation to existing signposts. Tolson lived far from major urban centers and admittedly arrived on the scene, both poetically and geographically, somewhat late for the Harlem Renaissance. He spent most of his career teaching at historically black colleges Wiley College in Texas and Langston College in Oklahoma. An important influence on his writing occurred in 1931–1932 when he enrolled in Columbia University’s master’s degree program in comparative literature on a Rockefeller Fellowship, during which time he immersed himself in the artistic life of Harlem. Tolson’s year in New York had a long-lasting effect on his career as a poet. He visited the city many times, with Harlem assuming mythic proportions both in his life and in his imagination.

Therefore, although Tolson was not a part of the Renaissance, he was highly aware of the writers associated with this movement as his M.A. thesis, The Harlem Group of Negro Writers, demonstrates. His study, which includes individual chapters on Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson, amongst others, also draws from Alain Locke’s positions on the New Negro. Tolson states that his goals for the thesis are threefold:

First, to give the social background of the Harlem Renaissance and the various forces that scholars say operated in the black metropolis to bring about the artistic and literary development of “The New Negro”; second, to emphasize the lives and works of the leading contemporary Negro essayists, short story writers, novelists, and poets in the light of modern criticism; and third, to interpret the attitude and stylistic methods discovered in the Harlem Renaissance. (35)

Although he was one of the first African Americans to conduct a study of the Harlem Renaissance, mention of Tolson’s critical work is absent from subsequent major studies because his M.A. thesis went unpublished for more than 60 years.⁵

Although some periodizations of twentieth-century American literature still consider African American literature as a separate category distinct from other aesthetic and historical configurations, in the conclusion to his thesis, Tolson provides an alternative analysis:

The literature that came out of the Harlem Renaissance, which has been the focal point of this thesis, affected and was affected by the larger culture of the new literature that began with the publication of the first issue of Poetry by Harriet Monroe in 1912. Many thought that the Harlem Renaissance was just a fad. In this they were mistaken. It has been followed by a proletarian literature of Negro life, wider in scope, deeper in significance, and better in stylistic methods. (135)

Long before contemporary literary critics began to reconsider modernist chronologies, Tolson’s theory, which positions the Harlem Renaissance between modernist and proletariat affiliations, recognized that Harlem Renaissance writers are central to the development of American modernism, while also pointing out the presence of cross-racial affiliations among American modernists.

Displaying a specific understanding of the place of the Harlem Renaissance within the broader ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1 Modern, Modernist, Afro-Modernist: Melvin B. Tolson in the 1930s and 1940s
• Chapter 2 A Poem for the Futurafrique: Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia
• Chapter 3 “In the Modern Vein”: Tolson’s Harlem Gallery
• Chapter 4 Bound By Law—Langston Hughes in/and the 1950s
• Chapter 5 Toward An Afro-Modernist Future: Langston’s Hughes’s ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ
• Chapter 6 Amiri Baraka’s Wise Why’s Y’s: Lineages of the Afro-Modernist Epic
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index