A lively but neglected writer who showed what once faced a little black boy in a big white world
James Campbell
By the time he sailed to France from New York in 1947, Richard Wright was a star, fixed in the literary firmament. Two of his books – Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) – had risen high in the US best-seller lists, and were being translated into European languages. In Paris, Wright was aggrandized by the reigning intelligentsia: he and his wife became friendly with Simone de Beauvoir (Ellen Wright would later act as Beauvoir’s agent), and to a lesser extent with the non-English-speaking Sartre and other members of the Temps Modernes circle. Boris Vian borrowed the grisly mechanism of Native Son – black boy kills white girl, then kills another girl – for his scandalous novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, which he published under the pen name “Vernon Sullivan”, who was allegedly a black American. The success of his books, and a shrewd property investment in Greenwich Village, had made Wright prosperous. A photograph of the early 1950s shows the family at the table in their well-appointed flat in rue Monsieur le Prince, being attended by a uniformed maid. Except for one brief visit during the making of a film of Native Son, in which the forty-one-year-old Wright took the role of his teenage anti-hero Bigger Thomas, he never returned to the United States. Wright was a true “black first”: a cosmopolitan writer and intellectual with popular appeal.
As soon as the lights went down on the welcoming party, the star began its decline – gradual at first but by 1958 so steep that Wright would lament to his loyal agent Paul Reynolds about his newly completed novel Island of Hallucination: “If it is not a success, I must think seriously of abandoning writing for a time. One has to be realistic”. He died of a heart attack in the Eugène Gibez clinic in Paris in November 1960, aged fifty-two. Island of Hallucination was never published.
To mark his centenary year, HarperCollins are reissuing several of Wright’s books, including an omnibus under the suggestive title Black Power.
It contains two of the three travel books he wrote in the mid-1950s, Black Power and The Color Curtain (the other was Pagan Spain), and a group of lectures brought together as White Man, Listen! (1957). The publishers are also issuing A Father’s Law, a novel begun in the final weeks of Wright’s life but not finished. Hazel Rowley’s well-researched biography, which came out in 2004, appears in paperback for the first time.
The Wright family suffered the pressure of exile straight away. He found it hard to write – the gap between Native Son and his second novel, The Outsider, was to be thirteen years – and had difficulty acquiring a usable amount of French; meanwhile, his younger daughter refused to communicate with her parents in English. Wright’s communist past – he joined the Party in 1934 and left in 1942 – remained alive in the minds of US government authorities, and he was to have passport problems all through his residence in France. Reports made by Embassy staff to the FBI suggest that on at least one occasion he volunteered confidential information about black intellectuals when the process of passport renewal was at a delicate stage. The Wrights’ marriage started to fray the moment they set foot on French soil, and Rowley gives unappetizing details of several affairs, none of which made him happy. In the world’s eyes, the Wrights were sticking together, but by the time of his death, Ellen was living in London while he remained in a one-bedroom apartment in Paris, having offloaded his other property, including a Normandy farmhouse. The snapshot of the family at dinner in rue Monsieur le Prince was out of date the instant it was taken.
The hazards of expatriation were compounded by a more common nuisance: the arrival of the next, noisy generation of writers. History shelves Wright alongside the authors of the 1930s and 40s: John Steinbeck, with whom he competed at the top of the charts in 1940 (Native Son chasing The Grapes of Wrath), John Dos Passos, whose newsreel technique he stole for his nonetheless original novel Lawd Today! (1935; published posthumously in 1963), James T. Farrell and others of the socially conscious fraternity. By the time Wright got round to publishing his second novel, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy, not to mention Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, had formed a new chorus, moving to a post-war rhythm, singing songs to which the older Wright did not know the words. Ellison’s Invisible Man, six years in the making, was welcomed by Wright, a friend of the author, but he might have frowned in private when Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1952, while he struggled to import existentialism to Chicago’s South Side, in the shape of The Outsider. In New York, Wright had generously recommended Baldwin for a fellowship, which the apprentice put to use by following his master to Paris, where he then wrote a pair of essays in which he turned and bit him. (In an unpublished essay, Wright quotes Baldwin, whom he repeatedly calls “Balwin”, shouting at him during a quarrel at Les Deux Magots, “I’m going to destroy you”.) Five years on from his arrival, when he had been greeted as the very model of the man who has “chosen” freedom, in the topical Left Bank sense, Wright had drifted away from the Boulevard Saint-Germain circle and regrouped with a black American crowd – the novelists Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, Richard Gibson, the artist Oliver Harrington – at the Café de Tournon, in the shade of the Luxembourg Gardens. At first content in his union with Paris – it felt as if a corpse had slipped off his back, he told Ebony magazine – Wright discovered that his subject matter had secretly divorced him. Near the end of his life, he proposed to write a series of novels, including one about the Aztec emperor Montezuma, another about a white American woman “with sexual problems”, and others, all to be linked by passages of free verse.
Critics have wondered what to do about Wright ever since his death, when Baldwin published a devastating memorial article under the title “Alas, Poor Richard”, one of the most influential obituaries in post-war literary history. The pertinent passage concerns Wright’s ignorance of the civil rights movement, which had gained momentum over the course of the 1950s. The “young Negroes” who crossed the ocean and beat a path to his door, Baldwin wrote, “discovered that Richard did not really know much about the present dimensions and complexity of the Negro problem” in the United States, “and, profoundly, did not want to know”. More than four decades on from that, Wright’s reputation remains largely the product of two books written before he reached the age of forty (three, if you include the short stories contained in Uncle Tom’s Children, 1938), in which he drew unique pictures of black life during the segregation era: in the Deep South, where his “days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of terror, tension and anxiety”; and later in the Chicago slums. (Wright moved north with his mother and aunt in the late 1920s.) Between 1953 and 1960, he published roughly a book a year, and wrote a good deal more besides, but little of it was welcomed by the literary press or the reading public, or by his agent and editor, in the way of Native Son and Black Boy.
Wright’s broadbrush storytelling technique just about keeps the reader turning the pages, but any one of half a dozen Patricia Highsmith novels of the 1950s offers a deeper, more skilful, more literary, examination of suppressed guilt in the US suburbs – with the significant difference that Ruddy, keeper of the law, and Tommy, who has stepped outside it, are black. Wright desperately wanted this difference not to be significant, not even to be a difference. He had written a novel with only white characters (Savage Holiday), which was a flop; he had written about the primitivism of Spain, on Gertrude Stein’s urging; he tried his hand at haiku, with some success –
Just enough of rain
To bring the smell of silk
From the umbrellas
– and he went to the place where the slave prisons stood, and advised the survivors’ descendants to become more like the conquerors (he also boldly exposed the contemporary continuation of slavery among Gold Coast tribes).
Wright grasped ideas quickly, especially political ideas, and had a talent for glimpsing changes of emphasis before they became apparent to other observers. His literary technique was developed from a desire to transmit hurt pride and spiritual bruising straight on to the page, but sentence by sentence the style is often crude, the naivety of the dialogue dependent on the stress of exclamation marks. A Father’s Law opens with a device that will be familiar to readers of Native Son:
Well done, Officer, he mumbled in his sleep as the officer now did a left-face turn, again flinging out his flashing white-gloved hand and sounding his whistle: Whreeeeeiiiiiee . . . .
“Ruddy!”
“Hunh!”
“Ruddy! Wake up!”
Wrrrriiiiiieeeee . . .
“Hunh? Hunh?”
“Ruddy, it’s the telephone, darling!”
As the range of even his posthumous publications show, Wright was a versatile, lively writer. But his greatest gift, strong enough to keep his name alive for another hundred years, was for communicating the force of hazard that once faced a little black boy in a big white world. “This was the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from which I fled.”
Richard Wright
BLACK POWER
Three books from exile: Black Power; The Color Curtain; and White Man, Listen!
812pp. Harper Perennial. $18.95.
978 0 06 144945 1
A FATHER’S LAW
268pp. Harper Perennial. $14.95.
978 0 06 134916 4
Hazel Rowley
RICHARD WRIGHT
The life and times
626pp. University of Chicago Press. Paperback, $22.50; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £11.50.
978 0 226 73038 7
James Campbell’s new book, Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers and writers in the dark, contains an essay on Richard Wright’s unpublished novel, Island of Hallucination.
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