(Above: Countee Cullen photographed by Carl Van Vechten in Central Park. 1941. The National Portrait Gallery. Washington, D.C.)
In 1931, during another spring here in London, Duke Ellington published his first article, “The Duke Steps Out,” in the British journal Rhythm. “The music of my race is something more than the ‘American idiom,’” he wrote. “It is the result of our transplantation to American soil, and was our reaction in the plantation days to the tyranny we endured. What we could not say openly we expressed in music, and what we know as ‘jazz’ is something more than just dance music.” He went on to reference the Harlem Renaissance: “In Harlem we have what is practically our own city; we have our own newspapers and social services, and although not segregated, we have almost achieved our own civilization. The history of my people is one of great achievements over fearful odds; it is a history of a people hindered, handicapped and often sorely oppressed, and what is being done by Countee Cullen and others in literature is overdue in our music.”
And yet, Cullen himself in a review he wrote in Dark Tower in 1926 of Langston Hughes’s first collection of poems, The Weary Blues, suggested that Hughes might consider turning away from being a “racial artist” and jettisoning jazz rhythms from his work. Indeed, Cullen early in his career cited John Keats as more of an influence on his own poetry than any other Black poet of the day. An African American raised within the confines of the world of the Harlem elite and then culturally fostered and educated with the elite white worlds of New York University and Harvard, Cullen often suffered from the emotional strain it took to straddle the different worlds in which he felt at home so that none of them finally did and the strain gave way to his being a stranger, even to himself. In many ways he wore out his welcome. After a blaze of a start to his life - he was a shining star of the Harlem Renaissance and traveled to Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship to write poetry after his marriage to W.E.B. DuBois’s daughter, Yolande - he was to die of uremic poisoning at the age of 42.
The DuBois/Cullen nuptials in Harlem in 1928 were treated as if a a royal wedding were taking place since the father-of-the-bride was considered the leader of intellectual African American life and had sanctioned the marriage as a kind of mentorship that sanctified Cullen not only as his son-in-law but also as his intellectual heir. Three thousand people turned out for the ceremony and even more lined the streets outside the church. Langston Hughes was one of the groomsmen. Heterosexuality however was never quite Cullen’s home either and it is seriously thought that he and his Best Man that day, Harold Jackman, another dashing figure of the Harlem Renaissance, were lovers. Cullen and his wife were divorced within two years.
(Above: Yolande DeBois and her bridal attendants. It was reported at the time she had 16 bridesmaids. There are 16 women wearing headdresses and two without them. So perhaps the two without them are relatives or had other distinctions.)
(Above: Harold Jackman. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.)
Below is a link to Cullen’s bio at Poetryfoundation.org, which refers to him as a “genteel protest poet” but becomes rather genteel itself as it treads too carefully about his having been gay and resorts to academic twaddle, which sounds like a parody dance to which Duke Ellington could have delivered a rhythmic twist all his own: Do-do-da-do the Academic Twaddle!
The bio begins: “Countee Cullen is one of the most representative voices of the Harlem Renaissance. His life story is essentially a tale of youthful exuberance and talent of a star that flashed across the African American firmament and then sank toward the horizon. When his paternal grandmother and guardian died in 1918, the 15-year-old Countee LeRoy Porter was taken into the home of the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, Harlem’s largest congregation. There the young Countee entered the approximate center of black politics and culture in the United States and acquired both the name and awareness of the influential clergyman who was later elected president of the Harlem chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).”
A long and detailed critical biography of the poet follows, but offers this as its only hints of his homosexuality: “In general, Cullen’s love poetry is clearly characterized not only by misgivings about women but also by a distrust of the emotion of heterosexual love. His poems ‘Medusa’ and ‘The Cat,’ both contained in The Medea, and Some Poems, illustrate this vision of male-female relationships. In Cullen’s version of the ancient myth, it is not the hideousness of Medusa that blinds the men who gaze upon her, but rather her beauty. So great is the destructive power of the attractive female that the narrator in ‘The Cat’ imagines in the animal ‘A woman with thine eyes, satanic beast / Profound and cold as scythes to mow me down’ Male lovers, on the other hand are often portrayed as sickly with apprehension that a relationship is about to be ended either by a fickle partner or by death. In ‘If Love Be Staunch,’ for example, the speaker warns that love lasts no longer than ‘water stays in a sieve’ and in ‘The Love Tree’ Cullen portrays love as a crucifixion whereby future lovers may realize that ‘Twas break of heart that made the love tree grow.’”
Matty has already told me this morning that she will have a lot to say about “The Cat” poem on Tuesday in the next FINN & MATTY column. But I have read that paragraph a couple of times and still can’t decide if the “male lovers” reference is to those who love females in his poems or it is referring to the male lovers in his own life. But then I decided that was its genteel point: ambiguity.
So let us leave it there since Cullen’s life was so maddeningly, purposefully and even tragically ambiguous. I guess his legacy might as well be, too. Maybe it is just that - the ambiguity about him - that has always fascinated me as a literary and cultural figure.
Here is the link to the complete bio at Poetryfoundation.org:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/countee-cullen
To the Swimmer
Now as I watch you, strong of arm and endurance, battling and struggling
With the waves that rush against you, ever with invincible strength returning
Into my heart, grown each day more tranquil and peaceful, comes a fierce longing
Of mind and soul that will not be appeased until, like you, I breast yon deep and boundless expanse of blue.
With an outward stroke of power intense your mighty arm goes forth,
Cleaving its way through waters that rise and roll, ever a ceaseless vigil keeping
Over the treasures beneath.
My heart goes out to you of dauntless courage and spirit indomitable,
And though my lips would speak, my spirit forbids me to ask,
“Is your heart as true as your arm?”