A treasure trove of papers signed yours truly, Lang

By Renee Tawa

Dec. 4, 2002 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

For 30 years, Altadena resident Edward Miller, a 57-year-old retired court reporter, had tucked away his late father’s files on a family friend, papers that included handwritten notes signed “Lang.” Finally, at the suggestion of his wife, Miller pulled the old briefcase full of files from the closet and took it to the Huntington Library in San Marino.

Sue Hodson, curator of literary manuscripts, took one look and got goose bumps. The Millers had a small but rich cache of letters, manuscripts and other material by Langston Hughes, one of the 20th century’s most beloved and important African American voices.

At a time of resurging interest in the poet and writer, who died in 1967, the Huntington recently acquired the “phenomenal little collection” from the Millers for an undisclosed price, Hodson said.

The 40-piece collection includes Hughes’ pocket diary from an overseas trip in 1932 and a two-page undated poem, written in pencil on frayed newsprint with marked-out corrections. (When Hodson first saw the Millers’ material, she politely offered the couple acid-free archival folders.)

The size of the Huntington cache pales in comparison to the Hughes archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which has 14,000 folders of material, the largest trove of the poet’s memorabilia anywhere. But Hughes scholars, none of whom had known about the Millers’ collection or examined it, noted that even small collections can yield a gem, such as a revealing letter or draft of a manuscript.

“Any acquisition like that is significant,” said Arnold Rampersad, author of the definitive two-volume biography “The Life of Langston Hughes” (Oxford University Press; 1986, 1988).

Any opportunity to review previously unknown or lost material by major writers -- and the tantalizing prospect of turning up an important letter or diary entry -- sends ripples of excitement through the literary world. The most spectacular discoveries can lead to novels or other works by long-deceased writers.

Last year, for example, UC Berkeley researchers edited a new edition of the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (University of California Press), relying partly on the long-missing first half of Mark Twain’s handwritten manuscript, which was found in the attic of a Hollywood librarian in 1990. The new edition compares Twain’s drafts, notebooks and final copy to show how the characters and narrative evolved.

And Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, discovered a batch of unpublished stories in the late writer’s apartment that were published in a 1996 collection, “Flying Home and Other Stories” (Vintage).

Until Hughes experts review the Huntington’s cache, it’s hard to say how significant the material is, though Hodson said it “contains very important literary and biographical material for Hughes.” Independent literary appraiser Robert Allen, who reviewed the Huntington’s acquisition, called the Hughes papers “an exciting and historically telling archive” and said the 1932 pocket diary was “the crowning piece.... This small but substance-heavy notebook, hitherto unknown to scholars and students, epitomized Langston Hughes’ vivid passion for social justice.”

Experts said they are excited simply by the prospect of analyzing fresh material that, they say, could inspire a new generation of scholars to study the poet. Scholars are interested particularly in material from the 1930s, a decade in Hughes’ life that is relatively undocumented, and his ties to California intellectuals, including Edward Miller’s prominent father, former Los Angeles Municipal Court Judge Loren Miller, who was the poet’s West Coast attorney and agent.

The bulk of the Huntington’s material is from 1932 to 1934, a time when Hughes, who already was leaning to the left, became even more politically charged. “That period for me, the 1930s, are some of the more interesting years for what Hughes was doing,” said Christopher C. De Santis, an associate professor at Illinois State University and author of “The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 10: Fight for Freedom and Other Writings on Civil Rights” (University of Missouri Press, 2001). “He wrote so much during the 1930s that was extremely passionate and extremely committed to the working classes.”

During that period, Hughes traveled to several countries, including the Soviet Union, where he was accompanied by Loren Miller and other African Americans. His travel inspired some of his most radical writing, leading, in 1953, to his appearance before Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s subcommittee on political subversives, when he was forced to defend his politics.

Rampersad, a Stanford University professor, had not known of the existence of the handwritten diary that Hughes kept while traveling in China and Japan in his early 30s. In the diary, Hughes recorded the same details of child labor conditions in Shanghai that he wrote of in the second volume of his autobiography, “I Wonder as I Wander,” published in 1956. “That’s an [academic] article right there,” Rampersad said of the diary. “Something like that is very valuable.”

Hughes’ down-to-earth writing style was not always appreciated by literary critics of the day. But he still is known for poems such as “Mother to Son,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and other works that are lyrical and accessible, infused with the voice and rhythm of jazz. His fans range from rappers to readers of the Academy of American Poets’ Web site who, in 2001, voted him America’s favorite poet.

This year, Hughes has been feted in centennial celebrations nationwide, marking his birth in 1902. In February, the U.S. Postal Service issued a Langston Hughes stamp and, in 2001, the University of Missouri Press began publishing 17 volumes of his collected works, including novels, short stories, essays and plays on politics, social justice and African American culture.

Edward Miller’s family knew the private side of Hughes, who in the ‘20s emerged as a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance’s flourishing artistic scene. In the early ‘30s, Hughes, who lived on and off in San Francisco and Carmel, occasionally visited Southern California. On those trips, he would drop by to see Edward Miller’s parents in Silver Lake, at their two-story stucco house that was surrounded by pomegranate, plum and avocado trees.

Before he became a judge, Loren Miller was an attorney who took on major civil rights cases, filing briefs, for instance, in the Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation case alongside his friend, Thurgood Marshall.

Edward Miller, a small boy at the time of Hughes’ visits, doesn’t recall much about the poet. But his 70-year-old cousin, attorney Halvor Thomas Miller Jr., remembers having to stand in front of Hughes and recite the writer’s poetry. “He was kind of a soft person, very pleasant, thoughtful ... happy,” Halvor Miller said.

Hughes often brought along signed copies of his books, the sort of memento that Edward Miller expected to find in his parents’ belongings after the deaths of his father in 1967 and his mother three years later. But when Miller sifted through his father’s files, he got a surprise. He had no idea that his father had so many files on Hughes.

For years, he and his wife, Angela Miller, stored the papers, showing the collection to few people outside the family. Occasionally, their two children, Brandon, 15, and Noelle, 13, would bring Hughes’ letters to school for book reports.

About two years ago, after Edward became concerned about the condition of the Hughes papers, Angela began contacting institutions to see if there would be interest in acquiring the cache. The Millers wanted to keep the collection together and on the West Coast, where their family and their descendants could get to the papers easily.

“There’s no doubt we know how amazing the material was and is,” said Angela, 47, a special education assistant. “This is a good time to put it where people can see it.”

After the Millers met with Hodson, they worked with a literary appraiser she recommended to organize and catalog the papers. By the time they got back to Hodson, her budget had been frozen in the aftermath of Sept. 11, and the deal stalled until this summer, when the acquisition was finalized.

Edward Miller said it wasn’t hard to pass the cache on to a place like the Huntington. “Actually, it was kind of a load off my shoulders to have it in an institution where it would be well preserved and taken care of, and the paper wouldn’t break down and fall apart,” he said.

Still, Miller had been touched when he discovered the correspondence between Hughes and his father, letters that revealed the depth of their friendship. “I was kind of thrilled,” he said. “It made it very personal.”

In March 1933, for instance, Hughes, who never married, wrote to Loren Miller from Moscow after hearing of his engagement. (Edward Miller’s mother, Juanita Miller, later was director of state social welfare for Los Angeles County.) The note is typed with dark letters, made with firm keystrokes: “Dear Loren, You lucky guy -- marrying a grand girl like Juanita ... Jesus, I’m glad.... Getting married to someone you love ought to be a much better thing than writing novels or seeing the world -- or making revolutions.... And write me about your house.... Is it an apartment or bungalow or what? And is there a backyard and a porch swing? And what’s the street like? Palm trees or elms?”

At the Huntington, the Hughes collection is expected to have huge public appeal, Hodson noted. Four items are on display in the library’s main exhibition hall through Jan. 1, including a couple of letters from Hughes to Loren Miller. (Yale’s Beinecke library has 10 letters from Miller to Hughes, but no copies of any letters Hughes wrote to his Los Angeles friend, according to the collection’s archivist, Tim Young.)

In one of the letters on display, dated Aug. 21, 1930, Hughes thanked Miller for praising his just-published first novel, “Not Without Laughter,” and expressed his frustration with racial stereotypes: “Dear Loren, Thanks for your swell letter about the book. There are a lot of things wrong with it but I learned a great deal writing it, so maybe the next one will be better. I hope so.... I wish I, or somebody, could write a novel in which each character wouldn’t be taken as a ‘type-class’ character; that there’d be some way of keeping them from being considered as representatives of the whole race or any one section of the race. For Christ’s sake, can’t Negroes, even in books, be just individuals -- if they want to be?”

University of Georgia English professor R. Baxter Miller -- no relation to the Millers in Altadena -- said he is interested in exploring Hughes’ ties to African American intellectuals in the Berkeley area and Los Angeles. Hughes’ adult life in areas including Harlem and Chicago has been well explored, but little has been written about his time in California, said professor Miller, executive editor of an academic journal, the Langston Hughes Review. A book on “Langston Hughes and California doesn’t exist in print,” he said. “That’s something that’s major and unexplored and worth coming out there to take a look.”

The cache also includes two letters from Si-lan “Sylvia” Chen Leyda, who, according to the second volume of Hughes’ autobiography, “I Wonder as I Wander,” was “the girl I was in love with that winter” he spent in Moscow in 1932-33. After his death, though, rumors persisted that Hughes was gay. In his biography, Rampersad wrote: “I have concluded that he might have been asexual -- but I also think that we will probably never know the truth.”

Also of possible interest is the two-page poem, “Wise Men,” written in Hughes’ hand and attributed to “Kid Turner,” a name that is not immediately identifiable and doesn’t turn up in the Beinecke library files. The poem, which is a rallying cry of sorts to the young, does not appear in definitive works such as “The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes” (Knopf, 1994), edited by Rampersad. (The volume, which gathers all 868 of Hughes’ published poems, includes a piece called “Wise Men” that is completely different from the one in the Huntington’s collection.)

Rampersad said he did not recognize the handwritten poem when he read the opening lines. The poem includes a correction in Hughes’ hand, substituting the word “servants” for “negroes,” seeming to give it a more political tone.

The Huntington also considers the Hughes material to be a major addition to its expanding collection of papers by 20th century African American arts figures -- particularly those with local ties -- including the papers of local playwright Velina Hasu Houston and photographs and other memorabilia from the First Negro Classic Ballet, which was founded in Los Angeles in 1946.

Langston Hughes’ ‘Kid Turner’ poem

The Huntington Library in San Marino recently acquired a small cache of Langston Hughes material that includes manuscripts, a pocket diary and personal letters, mostly dating between 1932 and 1934.

Among the writings in the collection is a two-page poem called “Wise Men,” which is written in Hughes’ hand but attributed to a Kid Turner. Scholars could not immediately explain who Turner was or why Hughes attributed the poem to him. (The poem is not the same as another published Hughes poem also called “Wise Men.”) An excerpt:

... Come on, you young, make

your banners fly!

Shake your fists at a pious sky.

Shout your slogans into

the sun!

Make your strength like a

gattling gun.

Chasing your enemies to their

holes

crowded with other leading

meek souls

who sell out all that a man