The New York Times delves deep into its archives for reciprocated reviews from Langston Hughes and James Baldwin – Hughes on Baldwin’s collection Notes of a Native Son in 1956 and Baldwin on Selected Poems of Langston Hughes in 1959.
The Times is of course quick to point out that writers are no longer, for obvious reasons, allowed to review each other, but this was it seems once an accepted practice. Who knows how much of Baldwin’s response to Langston Hughes’ collection – no artist wants to be told of their wasted gifts, and in the opening sentence! – was influenced by the latter’s review of his work a few years prior, in which, whilst admiring of the young Baldwin’s talents and the provocations of his arguments, bemoans the lack of emotion and artistic imperative. Hughes ends by stating that Baldwin’s points of view are too often attenuated by the tension he creates between an “American” society and a separate “Afro-American” identity, and only when he “fuses” these into a coherent entity, would he be able “…[to write] about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity that should influence for the better…”.
Perhaps, here we have more than anything else a generational conflict (Hughes was born in 1901 and Baldwin in 1924), about what exactly a “Negro” writer should and could be during those pivotal years at the dawn of the civil rights movement, and where the balance is to be laid between art and the often harsh circumstances of reality. Langston Hughes rejected the too virulent anger he discerned in the younger generation and remained committed to the integrative possibilities of art, but for Baldwin that is is not enough and concludes his review piece by saying, and with dismay, that Hughes is : “…not the first American negro to find the war between his social and artistic responsibilities all but irreconcilable.”