The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African-American Poetry, 1930-1946. - Review - book review

African American Review, Spring, 2001 by William J. Maxwell

James Edward Smethurst. The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African-American Poetry, 1930-1946. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 288 pp. $45.00.

A pop quiz: What was "the first anthology of African-American writing to include vernacular literature under the rubrics of 'spirituals,' 'blues' and 'labor songs'"? The final (and correct) answer: 1929's An Anthology of American Negro Literature, edited by then-Communist Party ally V. F. Calverton. By the close of James Edward Smethurst's learned, important study The New Red Negro, Calverton's novel fusion of Old Left and black vernacular categories looks both less surprising and more significant than it does in the form of this plain factoid. Smethurst's case for the linked reddening and "vemacularizing" of New Negro verse from the Depression through the Second World War is unpretentiously expressed and thoroughly immersed in a relatively unstudied stretch of African American poetic history. All modesty and meticulous research aside, however, this case is also calculated to reorient what has often been the central question in black literary studies: namely, the proper relation between forms and "folks," hig h and vernacular voices within the African American text, and the status of the latter as arbiters of black expressive authenticity.

With careful detail as well as creative derring-do, The New Red Negro suggests that the authority of this persistent vernacular question is owed to the African American poetics that stemmed from the Communist Left. While well aware of "vernacular 'low-rate' representations" in the lyrics of the Harlem Renaissance, Smethurst notes that "the use of...vernacular language, forms, and subjects relatively unmediated by the distancing frames of primitivism and uplift [only] became commonplace in the 1930s and 1940s." The most dynamic force behind this vernacular influx was not "the rise of...the 'Wright School"' and similarly enshrined period markers, but "the yoking of cultural nationalism, integrationism, and internationalism" proposed by the Communist Party in its Black Belt Nation Thesis, which held "that African Americans had a distinct national culture that was rooted among the black farmers ... [of] the South." Through Smethurst's eyes, at least two prominent theses of African American literary history thus appear to be mistaken. It is the direct recreation of folk voices in the verse of the '30s and '40s, not the comparatively finicky vernacularism of the Renaissance '20s, that had the greatest enduring influence on poets and critics; and it is the Communist sympathy of Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and their Depression cohort, not some inherently anti-Communist strain of folk ideology, that nursed the devotion to vernacular sounds and stanzas. In Smethurst's quietly sweeping revision, the '30s and '40s qualify as the real incubator of a distinctly modern, distinctly black-pitched verse, and the Communist Party stands as a mother of poetic invention.

Smethurst is careful to explain, however, that the Party was the odd parent chosen by its children. Bypassing the myth of Communist regulation of black Left writing, he maintains that "the approach of the [Party] to the 'national question' provided a paradigm that African-American writers found congenial." Black poets discovered an echo and a rousing explanation in the Party's romance with Southern black "peasant" and Northern black popular cultures--not marching orders or a post-Renaissance outpost of white patronage. As a result, their Communist affiliations showed themselves above all in intimate delineations of "the people" and their talk. Avoiding that wrinkle on base-superstructure logic that sees radical ideology dictating literary content, Smethurst accordingly rejects extended analyses of "paraphrasable ideological message[s]," concentrating instead on "the formal influence of [Communist] ideology and institutions on the period's poetry." His Marxian criticism of a Marxian literature focuses on form al properties such as trope, rhyme, and diction, accepting the poetic equivalent of Fredric Jameson's challenge to test the claims of historical materialism on the level of the sentence.

Smethurst's clarifying first chapter, a reconstruction of the many stages and avenues within the relationship between Communism and African American intellectuals, is thus followed by six chapters of close reading, the book's true nucleus of intellectual energy. The first two of these explore the '30s poetry of Hughes and Brown, respectively, here highlighted for their lofty place in present-day canons and for their divergent strategies of documenting and speaking the popular. "Hughes creates an urban, internationalist, and popular-culture aesthetic," judges Smethurst, "while Brown's is essentially rural, local, and folkloric." Chapter four assesses the less-known '30s verse of Lucy Mae Turner, Ida Gerding Athens, Frank Marshall Davis, Waring Cuney, Richard Wright, and Countee Cullen, sorting individual stances in relation to both the Hughes-Brown rift and the position of the narratorial consciousness toward the popular voice. The remaining chapters trace "the rise of 'neomodernist' styles" during the late ' 30s and early '40s, styles returning to the knotty vocabularies of High Modernism that nonetheless disclose unexpected "continuity with the work of the 'red decade.' "Like the prior chapters on Hughes and Brown, those on Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks in the '40s locate the shaping polarization within a poetic moment: this time, the clash between Brooks's wry, self-ironizing "high neomodernism" and Hughes's "popular neomodernism," more confident about speaking as the people without being spoken by the worst in popular culture. Chapter seven complements the omnibus nature of chapter four, treating Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden, Melvin Tolson, and Owen Dodson with a mind to the Brooks-Hughes split, and offering some of the sharpest discussions currently available on each.