A Chance Meeting, page 29
Yours with pomegranates, sequins
gold dust, and melon seed
from here on in unto the end,
Langston
P.S. And I guess you know Knopf is going to publish my SELECTED POEMS and I guess you know who I would want to do the Foreword or Introduction—most much want if such should be my honor.
Van Vechten said the honor was his, and Hughes replied that he hoped it would happen, “since you did it of my first, and this’ll probably be my last—so we would have come full circle together, poetically speaking!” In the end, Hughes’s editor advised against it. In the early 1960s, people found unsavory the decadence of the twenties and thirties with which Van Vechten had been so associated, and the lingering feeling of racism that clung to Nigger Heaven made it impossible for him to introduce Hughes. The poet, careful of his friend’s feelings, tactfully wrote to Van Vechten that there was to be no preface at all. Van Vechten was sorry, but, he wrote to Hughes, perhaps it was just as well. He always had a dozen projects—Hughes marveled at how much he could get done in a day. By 1963, disposing of his thousands of letters, programs, recordings, and photographs had become a full-time job. Van Vechten found that, along with being a dance critic, a music critic, a novelist, and a photographer, he had been, perhaps most deeply of all, an archivist. He had collected three generations. He established the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale, pleased for the university to have the manuscript of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and W. E. B. Du Bois’s senior thesis with annotations by William James. At Fisk, Van Vechten set up the George Gershwin Memorial Collection of Music and Musicians and he persuaded Georgia O’Keeffe to give Fisk a large collection of Stieglitz photographs.
Hughes and Van Vechten joked back and forth in their letters about whether they ought to include certain choice bits, given that the letters were soon to be archived. Hughes wrote from California, “I was just about to tell you about a wonderful fight that took place in Togo’s Pool Room in Monterey the other day but you know the Race would come out here and cut me if they knew I was relaying such news to posterity via the Yale Library. So now how can I tell you?” Van Vechten sometimes sent Hughes’s letters on to Yale the day after he received them. The consciousness of other readers changed the tone of the friendship a little. They took a bit more care with the letters, but they enjoyed that, and even if once in a while Hughes resented being collected, he, too, recognized the value of a good historical record, and he was glad to indulge Carl.
•
On February 16, 1963, Langston Hughes took the train down from Harlem to pick up Carl Van Vechten at 146 Central Park West. He went up for a minute and said good afternoon to Fania. Perhaps he told them how wonderful the champagne had been, not having seen them since their usual bottle had arrived for his birthday—Fania and Carl were very good about remembering. Then Hughes and Van Vechten went down to the street, got into a cab, and were driven across town to Avedon’s studio.
In the cab, perhaps Van Vechten mentioned to Hughes that he had seen a play he thought Zora Neale Hurston would have loved; he made this comment now and again in his letters to Hughes. Hurston was still very present for Van Vechten and he felt pained whenever he thought of her in Florida dying alone. Van Vechten was pretty sure that when Hurston had died, in January of 1960, it had been at just the wrong time for her reputation. Even now, three years later, Van Vechten could feel a returning excitement about Black writers and the general sense that race relations were again a matter of national conversation, though perhaps he also noticed that for the moment much more attention was being paid to men than to women.
In 1963, Richard Avedon turned forty, the age, he later said, that he had been growing into all his life and would remain to himself as he got older. He had started inviting people whom he admired to come be photographed. As he was beginning to feel that every decent citizen ought to pay attention to the civil rights movement, he made a point of asking Langston Hughes. In 1963, Hughes was at the height of his renown. His selected poems had been published to wide acclaim, with the exception of James Baldwin’s review, in 1959. He had been awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1960, had just finished writing a history of the NAACP, and had recently made a trip to Uganda and Ghana. He had been invited to the Kennedy White House on several occasions; Marianne Moore’s seventy-fifth birthday dinner would have been incomplete without him. His friendships with the next generation of writers and poets, with Gwendolyn Brooks and Wole Soyinka, made him happy. And he was invigorated by the returning energy of protest. In the summer of 1963, he would publish “Go slow.”
Go slow, they say—
While the bite
Of the dog is fast.
Go slow, I hear—
While they tell me
You can’t eat here!
Avedon probably invited Hughes first; he was aware of the friendship, but Van Vechten was less well known than he had been. Perhaps Hughes realized that there was no professional photograph of the two of them together, and Van Vechten was to turn eighty-three later that year. Certainly, it was evident that Avedon was the portrait photographer of his generation. Hughes and Van Vechten had practiced ears for that sort of thing—you heard a man’s name or a woman’s often enough, spoken in a particular way, and you knew just what kind of career he or she was going to have.
Avedon was glad to see them. He helped them with their coats, and they chatted for a minute. Carl Van Vechten, still loyal to decoration in a time when the reigning aesthetic was spare, had had the impish idea of wearing his three-leaf-clover suspenders that day. Avedon might have thought to himself that it was good they had come now—Carl Van Vechten was getting old. Avedon was fascinated by age. He photographed his own father, Jacob Israel Avedon, quite often; some years later, one of his most famous series of portraits was that of his father in the last years of his life. Avedon was interested in wrinkles, puffy eyes, jowly cheeks, bristly hair, and old skin.
Of late, Avedon had been leaving behind his obsession with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in exchange for Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. When Waiting for Godot had been up on Broadway, Avedon had gone to see it every night, and twenty years later he had made a portrait of two images of Beckett looking up and down, to try to get something of that quality of being outside of time. Around the time Van Vechten and Hughes were in his studio, Avedon had begun talking about having a party every year and watching how people arranged themselves at it. He said he thought it would be revealing to see “who stood next to Lillian Hellman one year and was out the next.” The photographs he planned to take of these gatherings were to be in homage to the party at the end of Remembrance of Things Past. Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, who had stood together in so many crowds and had watched so many people have their moment and pass from view, who could have told almost the whole story of their friendship in gatherings of one kind or another, would have understood Avedon’s interest in all there was to be learned at a party.
Perhaps Avedon suggested that Van Vechten sit down and that Hughes lean in from behind him. When he saw the blank look on Van Vechten’s face, he repeated himself more loudly—Van Vechten was now so deaf that he sat only in the front row when he went to the theater. Van Vechten’s cadaverous face became the focus of the photograph; Hughes, leaning in, still looked vital and energetic. Then Avedon thought they might sit next to each other on a bench. Avedon and Van Vechten draped Van Vechten’s right arm across Hughes’s shoulders. The arm was very thin; Avedon could feel the bones through the flesh. Hughes sat straight and a little solid. Perhaps Avedon was moved by the gesture with which Carl Van Vechten held his friend: one arm across his shoulders, the other ancient hand tenderly taking his arm, something proud and delicate and clinging about the gesture—and something unsettling, as if Van Vechten depended a little too much on Hughes.
Avedon thought their faces were not terribly revealing—Van Vechten kept his mouth closed to hide his buckteeth, and Hughes’s famous impassivity didn’t make for much variety of expression. Later, going back over the shoot, Avedon held up the contact sheets with the images of the two men sitting together and the more dramatic ones of Hughes leaning over Van Vechten’s shoulder. “You see,” he said to a visitor, “what different stories two photographs of the same people can tell?”
Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten by Richard Avedon, 1963.
Avedon thanked them warmly for coming, and he went down to the street with them. They stood on the sidewalk together for a moment, no one saying but all three knowing that cabs were less likely to stop since one of their number was Black. Avedon stood in the street with his arm up, eventually a cab slowed, and Avedon and Hughes helped Van Vechten into the car. With a final courtesy, Avedon closed the door behind Hughes, and, for a moment, he watched the taxi driving away. He walked back up to his studio.
•
A few months later, when Van Vechten’s birthday had come around, Langston Hughes sent a telegram, “With happiest memories of all the years of our friendship with admiration and affection and one dozen dancing hippopotami. Langston.” When Van Vechten wrote to thank him the next day, he said he had celebrated like a boy of sixteen, “ending up in the arms of Tallulah [Bankhead] and Mabel [Mercer]!” At the very end of the following year, 1964, Van Vechten died, in his sleep.
When he thought of Van Vechten, Hughes would occasionally go down to the basement. He had almost finished sorting the letters and photographs. Every time the van from Yale showed up to collect another set of boxes, Hughes felt a twinge of his own mortality. He packed them up, though. Van Vechten would have wanted him to. Sometimes, Hughes sat in bed late at night, his light still on, and looked at a few letters that he held on to. Early ones and one of the last, still vigorous and generous, kept just for the dear signature, the “Carlo!” at the end.
33. RICHARD AVEDON AND JAMES BALDWIN
RICHARD Avedon ran down the staircase onto the tarmac in San Juan, collected his bag, and headed for the hotel where James Baldwin was staying. It was June of 1963, and it had been hard to get Baldwin to find time to work on their project. In January, The Fire Next Time, in which Baldwin considered his experience of the Black church and the Nation of Islam, became a bestseller, and Baldwin had been on every television talk show in America. In May, Baldwin’s face was on the cover of Time, the interview with him following a lead article on violence in Birmingham, Alabama. On May 24, he’d organized a meeting of Black leaders—Lorraine Hansberry, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Kenneth Clark, Clarence Jones, Baldwin’s brother David, and Jerome Smith, a twenty-five-year-old who had been badly beaten on the Mother’s Day freedom ride. They had then gone to suggest to Attorney General Robert Kennedy that the Kennedy administration ought to take a moral stand against segregation. John Kennedy finally made a speech to that effect on June 11. The next day, in Mississippi, Medgar Evers, the state’s chief NAACP officer, then investigating a racially motivated murder, was killed. Avedon had raised the idea of a collaboration with Baldwin before this season of intensified violence and celebrity, and Baldwin had expressed interest, but it wasn’t until Avedon said that he was willing to come to Puerto Rico, where Baldwin was going on vacation, that Baldwin finally began to pay attention.
If he arrived in the late afternoon, Avedon probably found Baldwin and his sometime lover Lucien Happersberger at the hotel bar. Happersberger was from Switzerland and had first met Baldwin in Paris. Though he married three times, Happersberger remained a close companion of Baldwin for many decades. The three of them sat and drank and talked about what was happening in the south. The murder of Evers was constantly on Baldwin’s mind, and he was worried about Martin Luther King and whether nonviolence would in the end succeed. Through the winter of 1963 King had been organizing against segregation in Birmingham—2,500 Black people, including many children, had been arrested and nine of ten Black families had stopped patronizing white businesses there. This was progress, but of a troubled and painful kind. Someone ordered another round. It felt a little strange to sit in a bar in Puerto Rico and have a drink and watch the sun go down.
In the morning, the late morning, they began to work on the book in earnest. Avedon had from the first thought that they would approach the work from independent angles and was glad that Baldwin agreed. They decided that Baldwin would write an essay, and Avedon would go out and shoot some new photographs, and then they would see what they had. This wasn’t the first time Avedon and Baldwin had worked together—at DeWitt Clinton High there had been The Magpie, and after they graduated it had been Baldwin’s idea to do a book of Avedon’s photographs and Baldwin’s writing that they were going to call Harlem Doorways. Around that time, 1945 or so, Avedon had taken a number of photographs of Baldwin, one of which he later included in his book The Sixties; he enjoyed pointing out that he’d known Baldwin long before Baldwin was a famous novelist and civil rights figure.
In high school, they’d been fairly close; Baldwin had been, as was true in his relationships with many of his white friends, a symbol for Avedon. Once they had gone home together after school, to the Avedons’ apartment on East Eighty-fifth Street, and the doorman had refused to take Baldwin up in the elevator, sending the boys to the stairs. Telling the story later, Avedon explained, “I was so ashamed. We got up to the apartment and I told my mother what had happened. My mother was a delicate woman and small. She walked out to the hall, and she pushed the button to call the elevator man and when the door opened, she punched him.” His mother told the man that in future he would bring all her son’s friends up. But, through the whole scene, “Baldwin? Impassive.”
Perhaps this incident was paired in Baldwin’s mind with the time he had brought a Jewish friend home to Harlem and been hit by his father. Avedon went to Baldwin’s house, too, in 1946, after Baldwin’s father had died. Avedon took a set of pictures of Baldwin and his sister, sitting at the kitchen table in their mother’s apartment. Avedon kept track of people’s sisters. When he visited Baldwin’s family, Avedon was just starting to take the fashion photographs that would make his name, though it wasn’t until much later that he realized that he always chose brunette models “with fine noses, long throats, oval faces. They were all memories of my sister.”
James Baldwin by Richard Avedon, 1945.
His photographs of Baldwin and of his own sister were on Avedon’s mind in 1963—his sister’s health was precarious, and the country was coming apart. He asked Baldwin if they could do a book together. Baldwin said first Avedon would have to go to a Black bar, to have the experience of being the only white person in the room. Just around that time, as Avedon later remembered it, Ingrid Bergman had been photographed in Italy in a shearling coat, and Avedon had gone out and bought a shearling coat, which at that point no one had, and worn it to a party, and “there was Jimmy, in a shearling coat.” And so the two of them went up to Harlem after the party, wearing their brand-new shearling coats, and went to a bar, “not a regular Harlem bar where white people sometimes went, but a very down bar.” Avedon was certainly the only white person there, and “at that time, that meant something.”
•
In Puerto Rico, there were moments when the collaboration was easy. Just like the old Magpie days, Avedon later said, sitting around and talking. Baldwin sometimes did imitations. They talked of “despair, dishonesty, the things that keep people from knowing each other.” Sometimes Baldwin was angry. He would suddenly transform into the representative of his race and say bitter things like, “I’ve hoed a lot of cotton. You wouldn’t have had this country if it hadn’t been for me.” Happersberger carried no American guilt with him and was gentle and persuasive with Baldwin, but still it took a while to bring Baldwin back. Sitting in the hotel in San Juan, Avedon and Baldwin divided the book into three sections: the America that refuses to see; insanity; and redemption. Avedon felt that redemption was hardly justified by the political climate, but “Jimmy insisted; he said, ‘You have to give them that.’”
After Avedon left Puerto Rico, he arranged through a southern friend, Marguerite Lamkin, to go south and take photographs of George Wallace and Leander Perez and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Avedon, Lamkin, and an assistant were all staying in a motel in Louisiana when the phone rang late one night and a voice on the other end said, “We know where you are, nigger lover, and we’re coming for you.” It was Lamkin’s idea to hide in the East Louisiana State Mental Hospital, where they were planning to photograph anyway. The images that resulted from their ten-day stay were quite different from Avedon’s other portraits. The people had, unusually, settings, which made the photographs seem humane and more documentary than the later photographs of napalm victims and highway drifters whom Avedon shot in bare existential settings.
Baldwin, meanwhile, was not writing at all, and Avedon was getting frustrated. He followed Baldwin to Finland—he felt he was trailing him around the world—and there, finally, Baldwin wrote the text. Baldwin needed talk and drink to start writing, and he needed company all the time. Avedon was struggling to hold on to his sense of his old friend, who seemed to be in an argument with someone every night. Baldwin was worried that none of his white friends was really his friend, and, as one civil rights leader after another was assassinated, he was more and more afraid for his life.
•
When Nothing Personal came out in 1964, the critics were angry, and reviews were scathing. The book, at first torn apart for being both too liberal and too conservative, came with time to be understood not primarily as the political treatise people had expected but, contrary to its title, as something very personal, a study of faces. Avedon’s photographs were of couples at their weddings, William Casby, who had been born in slavery, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the small son of Martin Luther King, Marilyn Monroe, Eisenhower, Arthur Miller, Malcolm X, the patients in the mental hospital. Baldwin had written of the humiliating arrest that he and Happersberger had suffered in New York City for no clear reason except that they had been on the sidewalk together; of the death of President Kennedy; and, indirectly, of the death, never mentioned but felt throughout, of Medgar Evers. He wrote of the impoverishment of the American soul; complacency in the face of moral defeat; the hope for a time when “human life is more important than real estate”; and the possibility of redemption through love. The book, a conversation paced by Avedon and Baldwin together, began to draw to its end with a photograph of a light woman holding a dark child as they stood together in the sea. Next to this were Baldwin’s words:
