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Robert Hayden, the poet who would not be canceled

In The Dispatch this morning, I take a look at the career of one of my favorite poets, Robert Hayden, who was denounced as an “Uncle Tom” in 1966 because he refused to write sloppy, race-baiting poetry. Excerpt:

The demand that he surrender his individuality also gave rise to one of his most intriguing poems, “The Diver,” which appeared the same year as the Fisk conference. In it, Hayden reflected on his ascent from the ghetto and the temptations and threats that had influenced his literary and religious life. The poem is narrated by a survivor of nitrogen narcosis, an intoxicating condition that causes scuba divers to experience tunnel vision and hallucinations. He describes how he visited a sunken ship, where he was surrounded by “snappers” and “gold groupers” before entering a shipwreck. There he witnessed

the sad slow 
dance of gilded 
chairs, the ectoplasmic 
swirl of garments…
[the] livid gesturings,
eldritch hide and
seek of laughing faces.

He briefly fantasized about “fling[ing] aside / [his] mask” in order to “yield to rapturous / whisperings,” but knowing this would be suicidal, he instead 

strove against the 
cancelling arms that
suddenly surrounded
me,

and, escaping the seductive scene, “swam from / the ship somehow, / somehow began the / measured rise.”

“The Diver” lends itself to many interpretations, but among them is certainly his resistance to the pressure (apt word!) to conform to the political demands of the age—demands that would obliterate his hard-won artistic skill—even when radicals, as we say nowadays, threatened to “cancel” him.

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Zora Neale Hurston versus the "Race Man"

The new issue of National Review includes my review of the new collection of Zora Neale Hurston's essays, entitled You Don't Know Us Negroes. Excerpt:

[Hurston's] popularity creates a conundrum for some literary gatekeepers, who have dealt with her politically inconvenient views by downplaying the fact that she was an anti-communist, an anti–New Dealer, and even an anti-desegregationist.

In 2020, Genevieve West edited an anthology of Hurston’s short stories, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, for which West wrote a long introduction that struggled to fit Hurston into the critical-studies mold. Hurston “subversively critiques the politics of race and gender,” she claimed; one fictional character “resists traditional gender roles”; another seeks to “reclaim her agency” after “construct[ing] herself as an object of the male gaze” — et cetera, et cetera. But the nonfiction articles that West and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have gathered in this new collection make clear that such jargon comes nowhere near describing a writer who, above all else, thought for herself.

Hurston’s doubts about the leftist politics of her contemporaries were rooted in the individualism she learned from her mother, who inculcated Booker T. Washington’s gospel of self-reliance in her children. Hurston was therefore startled, when she moved to Harlem in the Twenties, to discover the contempt with which that doctrine was viewed by the cadre of poets, playwrights, and novelists who followed Du Bois in thinking that black authors should devote themselves to overthrowing capitalism and writing what they proudly called “race propaganda.”

Hurston refused to comply. She thought communism offered nothing to black Americans; the party was just using them “as the mud-sills of the proposed American peasant party,” as she wrote in a 1951 essay, and to instruct aspiring black writers to devote themselves to agitprop would strangle their creativity.

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New book cover

Going over the page proofs of my new book, Some Notes on the Silence, to be published this spring. Here's the cover: