(James) Langston Hughes | Biography

France held a special value for Langston Hughes even before he first visited Paris. "I will never forget the thrill of first understanding the French of de Maupassant," he writes in The Big Sea (1940). "I think it was de Maupassant who made me really want to be a writer and write stories about Negroes, so true that people in far away lands would read them--even after I was dead." Perhaps drawn by this spiritual bond, Hughes saw Paris as "a dream come true" when he first visited the city, and later he made it a personal symbol of civilization triumphant over the barbarous forces of fascism.

Following a decision to break with "everything unpleasant and miserable" out of his past, Hughes at twenty-one took a job as mess boy on an Africa-bound merchant ship, beginning a life of travel that would last until World War II ended his global experiences. Following six months along the coast of West Africa, he signed for a voyage to Holland, where, promptly on arrival in Rotterdam, he jumped ship and took the train to Paris. Arriving with seven dollars in his pocket in February 1924, Hughes began an exciting five-month stay among the black American exiles of Montmartre. This first visit, treated at some length in The Big Sea, essentially establishes Hughes's relationship to Paris; he would return to Paris briefly in 1937 and 1938 on his way to and from Spain to cover the Civil War for the Baltimore Afro-American and a second time in 1938 with Theodore Dreiser to represent the United States at the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture.

Alone and almost broke, Hughes quickly learned that Paris offered little to an indigent black American in need of work. While jazz musicians and tap dancers might find employment in the Montmartre clubs, a poet had to scrape for a meager existence. Initially his salvation came through sharing the hardships with a stranded Russian ballerina who hustled drinks while Hughes sought work, but eventually a series of menial jobs as doorman, dishwasher, and waiter kept him going. A job at Le Grand Duc, a popular black nightclub, gave Hughes glimpses of the haut monde who supported Montmartre's night life, but more importantly it brought him into close contact with the black musicians and entertainers who gathered after hours for early morning jam sessions. While absorbing the richness of black culture in exile, he was amused to observe the absurdity of the American color bar as exposed by the club's singer, Florence Embry, who delighted in snubbing tourists "who wanted nothing in the world so much as to have her sit down with them." Among the many great black entertainers Hughes met at Le Grand Duc was Florence Embry's replacement, Bricktop, who would take advantage of the atmosphere Paris offered blacks to rise in ten years from a penniless unknown to "the toast of Montmartre with dukes and princes at her table." Among the other patrons at Le Grand Duc was publisher and poet Nancy Cunard, who later included a number of Hughes's poems in her Negro Anthology (1934), a collection of literature, history, anthropology, and sociology by and about blacks. Although Hughes says in I Wonder As I Wander (1956), his second volume of memoirs, that he did not meet Cunard until he returned to Paris in 1937, the two began corresponding earlier.

To some extent, Hughes's Paris life was "right out of a book," as he describes it, "living in a garret, writing poems, and having champagne for breakfast." In the spring he fell in love with a beautiful English-African girl and shared with her the full romance of the city. Dr. Alain Locke sought out Hughes in Paris to solicit the poems that eventually would be included in the landmark anthology The New Negro (1925). Through Locke Hughes met art collector Paul Guillaume and was able to visit his magnificent collection of African art. Since Hughes's poetry is closely related to the rhythms of black music, meeting and hearing "the cream of the Negro musicians then in France, like Cricket Smith on the trumpet, Louis Jones on the violin, Palmer Jones at the piano, Frank Withers on the clarinet, and Buddy Gilmore at the drums" was a unique opportunity for the young poet.

But for all those happy memories of Paris, the champagne was left over, the girl's father broke up the romance, and the garret was more sordid than romantic. The Big Sea offers a unique picture of Paris in the twenties from one who, however briefly, shared the vibrant spirit of black Montmartre. Hughes's own struggle for existence, portraits of such characters as the one-eyed chef of Le Grand Duc, a wonderful sketch of a royal free-for-all in the club, and numerous glimpses of Paris low life combine to give these chapters of The Big Sea something of the flavor of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

Hughes left Paris in July 1924, traveled in Italy, and eventually signed on an American ship to work in return for his passage home. In 1937 Hughes passed through Paris again as he traveled to and from Spain to cover the Civil War there for a Baltimore newspaper. After a happy summer visit that year, on his way to Spain, he returned briefly at Christmas on his way home to find the city depressed by the mood of impending war. In his final description of Paris before World War II, Hughes seems subconsciously to return to the passage in de Maupassant which first inspired him to write. In that passage, "the soft snow was falling" through one of de Maupassant's stories which Hughes labored to understand. "Then all of a sudden one night the beauty and the meaning of the words in which he made the snow fall, came to me," Hughes says, and inspired his own literary ambitions. On this last visit to a Paris now shadowed by impending tragedy, Hughes writes,

Slowly I walked through the lightly falling snow that had begun to sift down over the Paris rooftops in scattered indecisive flakes. The streets were very lonely as I passed the Galleries Lafayette and the Gare Saint Lazare and turned up the slight incline leading to Montmartre. Even the little clubs and bars along the way were quiet. Where could everybody be, I wondered. How still it was in this old, old city of Paris in the first hour of the New Year.

He goes on to wonder if, after Ethiopia and Spain, Hitler and Mussolini would "turn their planes on the rest of us? Would civilization be destroyed? Would the world really end"" In this final passage Paris becomes for Hughes a symbol of hope as "in the snowy night in the shadows of the old houses of Montmartre" he repeats to himself, "my world won't end." For Hughes there would always be a Paris, and the qualities of life and civilization represented by the city would survive even Europe's blackest hour.