The C.L.R. James Institute: "What Next for Richard Wright?" by Constance Webb

The C.L.R. James Institute

What Next for Richard Wright?

By CONSTANCE WEBB

All of the works of Richard Wright, from his first short story to his last book, represent logical stages in the development of a problem. This problem is his search for freedom for the Negro people.

In Uncle Tom's Children, story by story, he examines and rejects a particular form of Negro struggle. Simple flight — Big Boy Leaves Home; complete subservience — Down By the Riverside; withdrawal and hard work — Long Black Song; and mere empirical unity between the poor whites and Negroes — Fire and Cloud; all end in death or failure. By the last story, Bright and Morning Star, Wright's heroes are members of the Communist Party. This is the logical, almost mathematical, progression of Uncle Tom's Children. There is no possibility of any solution to the degradation of the Negro people except by the overthrow of the existing society.

But within this solution, Communism through the Communist Party, there now appears a conflict, a conflict between the instinctive revolutionism of the Negro people and the Communist Party as Wright sees it. In Bright and Morning Star, the Communists, Negro and white, are heroic figures. Sue, the Negro mother, has rejected her life-long beliefs, and accepted the Communist doctrines of her son. But in the crisis of her life, she turns away from Communism to her Negro experience to find the deep resources of power, defiance and endurance which lift her above the Communists, heroic as they are. This is henceforth the central theme of Wright's work. Bourgeois society being utterly rejected, the deep revolutionism of the Negroes must find a place in the Communist Party.

In Native Son, that conflict is raging. In Part I, a Negro boy lives a sub-human life. Through an accidental murder he blossoms into full consciousness as a personality. He is at once free of the society in which he lives. He now can analyze the relationship between the Negro and the white world. He can probe into his own personality reactions and those of the people around him. For the first time in his life he lives as a whole human being. In his struggle he discovers that he has energy, initiative, strategy and capacity for action on the grand scale. Thus, Bigger becomes a human being only by the most violent defiance of not only the legal, but the social and moral concepts of the society which oppresses him. The boldness of the conception, the power and the subtlety, the concreteness and the symbolism with which it is worked out, make

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Native Son, up to the end of Part II, one of the great achievements of modern fiction.

The murder is for the hero unconscious but for Wright a very conscious and revolutionary act. But in his attempt to define this new conception of himself, and the ideas awakened in him by the murder and its consequences, Bigger finds himself in violent conflict with the Communist Party.

Bigger is defended by Max, a Communist lawyer. The theme of his defence is the guilt of the nation. Let us understand the Negro and "recognize human life draped in a form and guise alien to ours. Their feeling of guilt [the mob] is as deep as that of the boy who sits here on trial today. Fear and hate and guilt are the key-notes of this drama!" This Communist sounds exactly like Gunnar Myrdal. The Negro people are lost and "glide through our complex civilization like wailing ghosts; . . . " But Bigger is not lost. He has found himself.

The conflict reaches a frenzied climax when Max in conversation with Bigger in his cell asks the same questions as those asked by the state prosecutor. Why did he kill Mary? Did he rape her? Did he feel more attraction for her than for women of his own race? Why did he hate her? Bigger should have been sympathetic. Why didn't he tell Mrs. Dalton he was in her daughter's room? What did he want out of life? Did he want to be happy? Why didn't he go to the leaders of his race and tell them how he felt about things? The gulf between Bigger's conception and the questions asked by Max is unbridgeable.

Wright recognizes that Max is terrified at the revolutionary violence of the Negro people as typified by Bigger's act and by Bigger's justification of the act. Bigger is not saying, nor is Wright trying to say, that all Negroes must individually murder people who individually represent oppression. What Wright is striving for is the understanding of the social significance of the act and the recognition as a social fact of what it has meant to Bigger.

Wright had had no difficulties in making Bigger reject bourgeois society. But he cannot fit the ideas of Bigger into the ideas of the Communist Party. Wright is torn, but he holds tightly to Bigger, revolutionary symbol of the Negro people. "But what I killed for, I am!" "Max groped for his hat like a blind man; . . . He felt for the door, keeping his face averted." Bigger, "smiled a faint, wry, bitter smile."

Wright's next book, Black Boy, is a reaffirmation of his ideas about Sue and Bigger, a summation of the past and a definitive break with the Communist Party. The book, as published, describes a continuous conflict between black and white and between Negro and Negro. We begin to see that the conflict between Wright as a highly developed Negro and other Negroes is an intensified expression of the conflict between highly

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developed, able whites and other whites. Wright carries to an extreme pitch the separation of the intellectual Negro seeking the full expression of his personality. He wants a world which will release the creative powers, and democratic desires of modern man and allow a full expansion of human personality. He wants all people and, therefore, above all the Negro people to share in a common life, not in a regimented sense but in a free interchange of ideas and experience. He has a passionate longing to belong, to be identified with the world at large; he wants the "deep satisfaction of doing a good job in common with others." Wright as an excluded Negro feels keenly, and expresses with astonishing power, the need of modern man for a democratic, creative and cooperative life. For the same reason all through his work there is an aching loneliness. Although the book is strictly autobiographical, the deep penetration into the needs of the individual personality results in a work that is universal.

It is in the unpublished chapters of Black Boy, partially published in the Atlantic Monthly under the title "I Tried to be a Communist," that Wright's crisis is seen most clearly. In the Communist Party he thought he had found the place where the Negro could fight for freedom. He found the collective life for which he had been looking in an immediate kinship with other members and in world-embracing ideas. The ideas of Marxism stimulated and opened new areas for his writing. But the party cannot accept Wright's ideas about the Negro people any more than Max can accept the new consciousness of Bigger. Wright finds the party's persecution of an opponent to be more subtle, more advanced and refined, and more merciless than the white persecution of Negroes in the South. From the beginning he has rejected bourgeois society. With his rejection of the Communist Party, the alternative, he is faced with a new problem. Where to look now?

Wright has always had a deep interest in the varied manifestations of the oppressed, circumscribed modern personality. When he breaks from the party this interest begins to assume a new importance. Like the French Existentialists he writes of dread, nausea, tension and pain. The Existentialists explain Wright, and Wright explains the Existentialists. Both are intellectuals craving a community life, but unable to find it in contemporary society or in the Communist Party which claims to offer an alternative. Wright's sense of affinity with the Existentialists shows how enveloping and wide-spread are the feelings they express. But Wright is saved by the problem which has been with him from the beginning — freedom for the Negro people. He cannot lose himself by blaming the individual for the problems of society. When America sunders fifteen millions of Negroes from the nation he cannot say with the Existentialists that modern society is sick because man is sundered from man. But if his deep convictions about the Negro people remain, Wright's experience

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with the Communist Party makes him see individuals with the mind of an intellectual. He looks for intellectual comprehension as a sign preliminary to revolutionary change. He did not learn from the party nor from life to see the individual, black and white, as representative of great social forces in motion.

In all his writing Wright shows that he has no conception of organized labor. He has never been involved in the union movement. The eruption of the C.I.0. came in 1936-37. When he lived in Chicago in 1932, the labor movement, as it is known today, reaching into every section of society, did not exist. His jobs were solitary, unconnected with large groups of workers. He worked as a house-servant, a dishwasher, errand boy, a postal clerk, a janitor, so that any tendency toward individual thinking was reinforced by his type of work. In the South he had a social base because he was forced into an identity with the Negro masses by the totality of Southern domination. Wright's strength and his weakness are products of the period in which he came to maturity.

Such is the social content of Wright's work. But although dominated by the question of Negro freedom, Wright is an artist and not a sociologist. The proof of this is the intimate relation between his style and his social ideas. One needs only to see where the style wavers to recognize that he is in difficulties with his social conceptions. This is very important for the understanding of Wright. Here in the very structure of his work he shows himself modern and contemporary in the serious sense of those words. Personality, social problems and art are fused.

The two sections when Wright is at his best deal with flight. Big Boy Leaves Home is deceptively simple. It is quietly swift and vigorous. It has the narrative drive of a murder thriller but Wright's underlying conception — that this is the daily environment of the Southern Negro — lifts it to the realm of tragedy. Doom hangs over all from the first line to the last. This is one of the great short stories of our time.

In Bright and Morning Star, when Sue fights from her own basis, when she defies the white mob, when Wright describes the torture of her son, and finally, her death, the writing is compelling. One feels alone with her, "buried in the depths of her star, swallowed in its peace and strength; and not feeling her flesh growing cold, cold as the rain that fell from the invisible sky upon the doomed living and the dead that never dies." But when Wright poses Sue's convictions against those of the Communist Party the style declines. The sentence structure becomes involved. There is a loss of characterization and Sue thinks in abstractions. " . . . She had in her heart the whole meaning of her life; her entire personality was poised on the brink of a total act."

In Native Son there is a great advance in style. Section I, Fear, reflects the groping uncertainty of Bigger, the idea that he is not alive until

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after the murder. His anger and pain are on the surface. Wright establishes a lifeless Bigger, a man in the world but not part of the world. When he leaves the Dalton home after the murder, Bigger is alive and acutely aware of the shape and coldness of the snow.

Section II continues the rise in pace and intensity. Wright submerges himself so that there is nothing between Bigger and the reader. All that appears is what Bigger sees and feels. The fight on the roof has a tom-tom rhythm. The steady reverberation incorporates the reader directly into the conflict. And from the tense, vivid concentration on the immediate, Wright leaps periodically into universal images. "Then like a shooting star streaking across a black sky, the fearful thought came to him that maybe his fingers were frozen so stiff that he could not pull the trigger." At his capture Bigger is still heroic. He is behind his mental curtain defying the avenging society.

In Section III as long as Bigger is active — going from the jail to the scene of the crime and from the cell to the courtroom — the writing stays at a high level. But, again, when Wright tries to clarify the relationship between Bigger and Max, the writing disintegrates. Wright begins a stream-of-consciousness thinking which is the imposition of an intellect beyond that of the character established. Bigger is no longer simple and strong. He weeps, despairs and sounds like an idealist. He feels on the verge of action and commitment and has an organic wish to cease to be. He wants to die within an idea and see himself in relation to other men and the earth on which he stands. Rhythms break and end several times in each paragraph. When Wright interprets Bigger's emotions a false poeticism appears. The images do not pour forth from great emotion but from a desire to excite the reader: "Another impulse rose in him, born of desperate need, and his mind clothed it in an image of a strong blinding sun sending hot rays down and he was standing in the midst of a vast crowd of men, white men and black men and all men, and the sun's rays melted away the many differences, the colors, the clothes, and drew what was common and good upward toward the sun . . . "

Black Boy does not reach the heights of Native Son but as a whole it is a more even work with passages of great lyric beauty. Wright narrates his own life showing a remarkable ability to isolate the different stages of his growth. His paragraphs, linking Bigger to the Negro people, now link the child Wright to the experiences and lives of all Negroes. His defiance against the Southern system seems the defiance of one man. But the force and power of the writing come from this steady connection with the mass. In the last pages appear an uncertainty and loneliness — almost a tragic cry — but is balanced by the vigor with which he attacks the South.

The partly published chapters disintegrate, matching the total disinte-

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gration of his social hopes. The writing has lost its sense of tragedy. It is subjective and moves aimlessly because it lacks a strong coordinating central thread. There is no rhythmic flow throughout. Some sections contain a movement within themselves but are unconnected with the main body of the work. There is a moral tone. For the first time he is proving that Negroes are oppressed. There are constant expressions of hopelessness which are bitter, and at times even petulant. When describing a communal life the power and beauty return. But covering all is a feeling of defeat and disillusionment with the white world and the Negro people. He repeats the last page of Black Boy but on a lower level. In Black Boy he was going North to fight for a solution. Now he "has no vaulting dream of achieving a vast unity." Humanity will have to learn "by marching down history's bloody road."

What next for Wright? His battles with the Negro-hating South, American bourgeois society and the Communist Party, which would have shattered most men have developed and steeled his talent. But his art needs the stimulus and environment of a social conception adequate to his passion for Negro freedom, his passion for universality in the modern individual. If Wright finds such a conception then Big Boy Leaves Home and Native Son will have been merely preparations.

SOURCE: Webb, Constance. "What Next for Richard Wright?", Phylon [the Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture], Second Quarter, 1949, pp. 161-166.

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Uploaded 28 January 2002