Langston Hughes and Noel Sullivan came from drastically different worlds but were brought together by fate and the extraordinary power of idealism and human sympathy. They first met late in 1932, when Hughes arrived in San Francisco near the end of an arduous cross-country reading tour that he had put together to fund his writing career and bring “poetry to the people.” Friends had told him about a wealthy white liberal San Franciscan, a classical singer of local note, and a devout Roman Catholic with a special interest in black Americans and their struggle for social justice. Sullivan owned a mansion on fashionable Hyde Street, employing a largely African American staff. Although Hughes’ visit lasted only a few days, he made an indelible impression on Sullivan. Sullivan had met many black leaders, but “never has anyone of them inspired in me the unqualified regard and admiration that I feel for you. Indeed, had I been told ten days ago that your integrity (and by that word I think I mean more than is implied in its customary usage) existed anywhere—I should have been skeptical. . .. The contact with you has extended immeasurably for me a sense of tenderness toward everyone.”
By the time they met, Hughes had published one novel and two books of verse that had made him greatly admired in some circles but also increasingly controversial. Although his sensitive evocations of African American life had led some to call him “The Poet Laureate of the Negro Race,” his choice of the lowly Blues as the primary source of his inspiration led to sharp criticism by some middle-class blacks. However, the main cause of criticism of Hughes was the radical socialist perspective that burned in his work almost from the start, intensely provoked by the Great Depression. That perspective dominated his verse in the year following his first meeting with Noel Sullivan when Hughes found himself living in the Soviet Union. One poem in particular, “Goodbye Christ,” which expressed Hughes’ hostility to religious charlatanism, would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Although Sullivan could not have liked “Goodbye Christ,” he remained loyal and generous to Hughes. When Hughes returned in near-poverty from the Soviet Union in 1934, Sullivan gave him free use of a cottage he owned in Carmel-by-the-Sea, down the coast from San Francisco. There Hughes composed one of his best books, a collection of charged short stories called The Ways of White Folks. He dedicated the work to Sullivan. That Carmel year ended with Hughes practically chased out of town, as part of a surge in right-wing activity in California. Later in the decade, when supporters of the right ruined the launching of his autobiography The Big Sea (1940) and threatened Hughes as never before, Sullivan gave him sanctuary at Hollow Hills Farm in Carmel Valley, to which he had relocated from San Francisco. Sullivan’s loyalty to Hughes was capped when he built a cottage for
Hughes at the Farm, where the poet could come and go as he liked. When Hughes suffered probably the greatest public humiliation of his career, an appearance in March 1953 before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations. The purpose was to grill him about his leftist, possibly Communist affiliations. Hughes survived the ordeal and again headed to Hollow Hills Farm for rest and recovery.
“To say what your friendship has meant to me,” he once wrote to Sullivan, “would take more pages than I have ever written in any of my books.” Sullivan’s loyalty and generosity to him “make me believe in you like the early Christians must have believed in that rock on which . . . the church was founded.” His admiration was certainly reciprocated. When Sullivan died in September 1956 from a heart attack, Hughes was broke and could not travel from New York for the funeral. However, he wrote to a Carmel friend, “We who had the good fortune to share his friendship knew that he lived so beautifully he had no fear of going. I wish I were there to sorrow with those close to him in Carmel.” In his will, Sullivan left Hughes the sum of $2,000.