Stanley and Helen Oakley Dance, Vista CA 8/16/82

 To meet two of Ellington's closest confidantes, Stanley and Helen Dance,  I traveled two hours from LA to their home in Vista, California just west of San Diego.  It was my enormous good fortune to speak with both of them at once; I had expected to see Stanley only, but it was Helen who sparked most of our conversation, for nearly an entire afternoon.  She had been, from the mid-1930s, legendary as a writer, concert organizer, and producer.  Stanley, of course, was perhaps the person closest to Duke Ellington, aside from. his own family, for the last fifteen years of Duke's life.  He was also the person who helped pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines resume his career in the 1960s.

From this point, it is best to let Stanley and Helen Dance tell their own stories.

STANLEY DANCE:  (on his problems selling his most recent book)  I'd written another biography of a Black musician, and I thought that would be easy to sell.

I've had a difficult time, too.  I just had to decide to do it.  If it sells, that's fine, but I can't be going into this thing just for the money.

SD:  People think you make a lot of money at this.  You'll probably get a $5,000 advance, and that's about it.  The main thing is to find an audience, but the trouble is the young people in New York don't know anything about jazz, except for the guy at Oxford University Press.

Sheldon Meyer?  They sat on my manuscript for almost a year and then sent it back.  It was the manuscript I wrote as a master's thesis a year ago, because it didn't have as much as they'd like about Ellington's music.  That's a dilemma, because I'm not a musicologist; if I were, I'd probably do something like Gunther Schuller.  His second installment [The Swing Era] is due any time now.

SD:  He works sixteen to eighteen hours a day, so he has little time to write books.

It's thirteen or fourteen years overdue as it is.  But what can you say about Ellington's music without taking it bar by bar?

SD:  There is quite a bit to be said, apart from analysis.  When you get into analysis of the music, you're going to a different audience.  The average person who wants a biography does not want too much analysis where you've got to have musical illustrations.  That's a book really for musicians.  At the same time, you've got to show knowledge of what is important, what is the best of it.  You' ve got to develop a personal, fairly critical attitude.

To my mind, anything he does is of interest, because you know the man is kind of a genius.  You could look at something that you don't like and ask, "Why did he do this?  Why didn't he do that?"  I have a preference for what I call the hard core of his music.  The extended works and so forth were created for white people in particular.  They don''t mean much to me.  His true genius lay with the band pieces, which were superior to anything anybody else did.  The suites were marvelous, because when you call something a suite, immediately white people think, "Aha!  This is a serious piece of music."  But suites are supposed to have a common. theme.  Most of these were a series of different dances, but all of a sudden twelve or ten or eight pieces.  They could have been 78-r.p.m. records; they were separate compositions, really.  There were exceptions, like the New Orleans Suite or The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse.

Did Duke feel the same way?

SD:  Duke was a person who understood the nature of the business and the audience.  He was a very shrewd man.  He did many things because he knew what would get some good press reaction.  He knew what his audiences wanted, too.  The big thing I think everybody should stress is that he said over and over again that he needed a band to play his music, and the secret of hearing his music was keeping the band alive.  That fact determined many of the things he did.

His compromises were not on his best level; he did play rock tunes, he did compromise only occasionally, but it was purely a matter of dollars.  That Mary Poppins thing:  we all thought it would turn out horribly, but musically, it came out well.  There's lots of excellent music on it. n I didn't particularly like that Bal Masque record.  That was done for the same reason:  survival, to keep the band running.

I was talking to Irving Mills yesterday.  He stressed that very much:  keeping the band together, keeping the same personnel.  He takes a lot of personal credit for that, the rules he laid down for the band.  It's difficult for me to say how powerful a force he was, compared to Duke.  But I get the impression that Mills pretty much ran the thing while he was in command.

SD:  Mills came into the picture about, what, 1928?

Nineteen twenty-seven, the Cotton Club.

SD:  At that time, a Black Bandleader had to have a white backer.  There's no question that, within that realm, Mills was divine.  He was gifted, and he had far more foresight than most of them.  He was extremely valuable to Ellington.  When you come up to the first long work, "Creole Rhapsody," he had the idea for that title.  "Rhapsody" sounds important.  That was Mills's idea.  I give Mills a lot of credit.  People say that Mills cheated Duke; well, I don't know.  Duke refers to him in Music Is My Mistress, that in the early days, he was indebted to Mills.

Irving Mills with Duke

Mills said he felt slighted by Ellington's reference to him, but I don't understand why.

SD:  He called me several times.  He was terrified that it would be much worse than it was.

There's nothing derogatory  in there at all.  What did he expect?

SD:  He may have thought he deserved more credit.

What did Lawrence [Brown] say about Billy Strayhorn?

He called him a genius.  As a matter of fact, he didn't consider Ellington "in the same Auditiorium" as Billy Strayhorn.

SD:  This is where you have to be careful.  You've got to make your own judgment.  The point is that before Billy came and after he had died Duke still produced things, and after Billy died he seemed to be writing more than before.  I always think Billy was a crutch that Duke didn't really need.  He was a great talent, and he contributed a lot, but whether Duke leaned on him more than he needed, I don't know.

Another thing:  there are a lot of arrangements written by people like Dick Vance.  They're not important, but a good portion of the book did come from outside sources.  That record Columbia's just put out, The Girls Suite, some is obviously Duke and some are probably Billy's work.  I do know, for instance, that Suite Thursday, when that was written I was in Boston making records with Harry Carney.  I was there a week or ten days, and Duke was writing this down every day and taking it down to rehearsal in the afternoon and alter it.  By the time they got to Monterey, they premiered it, and then the record was made.  It was basically what I'd heard in Boston, and Billy Strayhorn wasn't even there.

I'm troubled by my conversation with Lawrence Brown.  In The World of Duke Ellington, he mentioned that he was unhappy when he left the band.

SD:  Lawrence has a reason for bitterness that has nothing to do with music.  He was always a very sad person, a misanthrope really, as likable as he is.

He was married to Fredi Washington.  Was he still married to her at the time of her death?

SD:  Fredi?  She's still living.  She went to Duke's funeral.  She lived in Stoughton, Connecticut.

I can't discount a man who played with Duke for over thirty years.  Essentially, what he said was that Duke was gifted with a fine memory and that everything he wrote was stolen from his sidemen, a riff here and a riff there, combined into something new.

SD:  In the early days, you can see that was the case. The names that appear as joint composers:  there comes a time when it disappears altogether.  After Strayhorn gets in, you very seldom get author's credit given to someone else.  Have you talked with Louis Bellson at all?

I just missed him a year ago, but he comes through Chicago regularly.

SD:  I often meet musicians, just like yourself.  Of course, Cootie is still alive, but he won't talk unless you pay him $500.

I had a talk with him, but I didn't interview him on tape.  We had some coffee together.

SD:  One of the things that's happened is archives.  The Smithsonian people would pay $2,000.  Older musicians now want to be paid to do it.

You can't blame them.

SD:  No, you can't, especially when they've more or less left the business.  When they were active, they would like to be interviewed by DownBeat.  It was valuable publicity, but once they've retired, you can understand why they'd want some money.

Speaking of reticence, Duke is not even approached by anyone around him.  In the foreword to The World of Duke Ellington he makes the cryptic remark that Helen and Stanley Dance would not reveal more than they ought.  Was he thinking about his personal life?

SD:  No.  It just meant that he trusted us.  He knew we wouldn't anyway.

When I moved to this country about thirty years ago, he offered me a job.  I didn't want to work for him.  I knew a good deal about Ellington.  I was interested rather as you are.  I loved and was intrigued by him and his music.  I was very friendly with Johnny Hodges and Paul Gonsalves, and people like that.

That meant the world to me.  I'd do a lot of things for Duke, taking pieces from newspapers and so forth.  I kept his scrapbooks; I got on top of that, and it wasn't too bad.  I reckon the last fifteen years of his career, I did things for him.  I was useful to him.  There was never any feedback:  he asked me, and I said "yes."

I went on tour with him to South America, and we had a tremendous time.  I remember Russia:  I didn't want to go to Russia, because I was still aa British citizen.  When we were there, the diplomatic service were gathered on us.   And I was there on a British passport; I didn't know whether they would put me in jail while Duke had gone off.

There was another controversy at that time, about a film.  Somebody wanted to make a documentary about the Russian tour.

SD:  Yes, there was something going on.  The best pictures were taken by Time-Life.

You said you didn't make the Near East tour.

SD:  No, I didn't.  I wish I could remember the reason.  Ellington describes it in his book.  I put some of that together. 

Ray Nance was deported during that tour, wasn't he?

SD:  There was some trouble.  He was a junkie.

Would you mind talking about yourself?  Were you born in London?

SD:  That's the last place in the world I would want to be born!  That and New York.

You're not a big-city person.

SD:  I was from a little town in Essex, Braintree.  It was in the country.  

Were you raised to go into a particular profession?

SD:  My father was a businessman; he was like the mayor of this town.  He was quite brilliant.  His main business was a local import tobacco company.

When I was fourteen, I was sent to the local high school, but I was separated and sent to boarding school.  That quickly makes you take a little trouble with your work.  It was there that I got interested in jazz, because there were three or four boys whose parents were big shots, directors of what is now the EMI Colombian label for Okeh Records.  When they sent their kids to school, they knew all kinds of popular music.  The average kid would take one or two records for a thirteen-week term.  These kids came back with all the records.

The result was that I grew sick to death of songs like "When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin' Along," that sort of song.  Gradually, they had a pile of records they didn't want to play, because they got sick of them.

Were any of them by American bands?

SD:  Yes.  There were a lot of American records.  But then I heard Jelly Roll  Morton and his Red Hot Peppers, and Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti.  Nobody really cared for these records; they sounded weird to them.

Louis 

But some of us were intrigued.  We had a boy who had very thick lips:  we called him "Thick Lips Tom."  So every time he came into our room, we'd play "Thick Lips Blues" just to irritate him.

Gradually, we started to like these records, so by trial and error we began to listen to Lou.is Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton.  In 1932, some of us saw Louis Armstrong in London.

Was he at the Palladium?

SD:  No, I think it was at the Hogan Empire, which was a similar place.  Duke did his premiere at the Palladium.

That would have been the world's premiere vaudeville house.

SD:  Yes, it was that for a long time, even up until World War Two.

Duke was impressive at the Palladium.  I guess they played about forty minutes.  Ivie Anderson sang "Stormy Weather."  By that time there were two magazines really devoted to jazz.  There was one called Rhythm and the other Audio.  These were written mainly for semi-pros, that guy who plays on a bandstand two nights a week.  There may have been some really devoted to professional musicians, but generally speaking, these were the two.  Anyway, these semi-pros supported the magazines, and there was discontent at the Palladium, because the public wanted one thing and these semi-pros quite another.  So there was a special concert at the Trocadero for musicians.  They had the first half planned for commercial music and the second for musicians.   

Anyhow, it was the biggest movie house in Europe.  It was a huge place.  That was the first true jazz concert in Europe.

In '37 I got acquainted with Helen for the first time.  I met her in a studio; I think she was recording for Bluebird.  Then we went to the Cotton Club.

At the time, you'd never met Ellington in person.  I don't imagine you were invited to any of the fancy parties!

SD:  None of them.

I was going to ask you about something by a Cambridge student named Russell Woodward.  At the time of Duke's visit, he accompanied him and wrote a series of twelve essays, most of them devoted to the band, its sidemen and style.  The manuscript was at the Chicago Historical Society, in the files of the Associated Negro Press.  They printed some of it.  It made for interesting reading, the impression Ellington made on English audiences.

SD:  I remember the name.  I think Sinclair Charles sent s copy to me.  I didn't think it was publishable; I don't think it is today.  Have you read the one R. D. Darrell wrote in Disques?

I've been unable to find it.

SD:  It's worth quoting, because people don't realize what the first sixth months of Down Beat meant.  There was very little intelligent criticism.  I used to read Orchestra World.  It was useful:  it told you who the bands played and where they were playing.  They even had record reviews, but there was no conception of what was good.  In England during the period I'm talking about, there was a guy called Edgar Jackson, who was a sort of doyen of jazz musicians.

I always thought it was Spike Hughes.

SD:  Spike was later.  Spike was very good, but Edgar Jackson for years had been writing stuff      about Bubber Miley's solos being "negroid" and crude.  Those were actually the adjectives he used.  A lot of English viewpoint was dictated by white musicians:  Paul Whiteman, Red Nichols, and many more.  Really, they liked Red Nichols!  It wasn't until Spike Hughes began to write that we got any first-class criticism.  Then John Hammond began to write.

When did Leonard Feather begin his career? 

SD:  Leonard Feather started out about 1933 or ’34; he was very white in his opinions.  Panassier began to write in France, and that was good, because his columns were mostly about Black bands.

At any rate, you made a visit here.

SD:  I came here in 1937.  Duke was playing at the downtown Cotton Club.

Wasn’t that the year of “Caravan”?

SD:  I think they recorded “Caravan” in ’36.

Tell me about the show.

SD:  All I remember is Duke and a few others onstage, and that when the band began, Ivie Anderson appeared six times.  I really don’t remember much about the show; there were a lot of dancers and singers.  This is something I’m intending to do something about, because everybody likes the big albums.

You mean like Carnegie Hall?

SD:  But this isn’t it.  Duke led his band for fifty years.  Then people say the band was sloppy.  Well, of course it was sloppy when they were playing a dance in Oshkosh or somewhere.    

Those were the nights when very often extraordinary things happened, because somebody isn’t on the stage, and somebody else takes his solo, and he might come up with something that Duke hears.

There have been a countless number of private recordings made, and they are extraordinary.

SD:  They are the bread and butter of musicians.  That’s where they’re most at ease and natural, and more or less enjoying themselves.  That’s what people always talk about:  the road and so forth.

At what point did you meet Ellington?

SD:  In 1937.  I’d gotten an introduction by way of my wife.  There was a magazine in France called Jazz Hot ; I worked for it and so did she.

While you were writing, how did you make a living?

SD:  In my father’s business.  You might have thought I had gone away to Africa or something!  Then I went to New York along with Helen.

She was working for Irving Mills at the time.

SD:  She was doing publicity, but primarily she was making all those small-group records for
Variety.  I was going to come back the following year, but I was in the Royal Observatory, which was trying to be air defense.  That was the year of Munich and we were kind of frozen, but I did go over to Paris when Duke was there in 1939.

I read it was done in a bomb-proof shelter.

SD:  The Palais de Beaux Arts [in Lille? The Paris venue was the Salle Pleyel.]  It was a big place, but I don’t suppose it was bomb-proof.  It might have been at the beginning of the war, but certainly not by the end.  It was a big place.  It couldn’t have been bomb-proof.

I was going back to New York, but the venue cancelled.  Then he came back in 1948.

   

 

They couldn’t play in England because of the musicians’ union.

SD:  That was because the American union wouldn’t allow British bands.  Americans always make it sound as though the British union was bad, but actually it was the fault of the Americans.

At any rate, I remember that in 1939, Rex Stewart made the record in France.  They couldn’t find a drummer that morning.  Barney [Bigard] wanted me to play drums, but all they had was a military side-drum with one stick and one brush.

You were familiar enough at that time to travel with the band?

SD:  It was a big place, but I don’t suppose it was bomb-proof.  It might have been at the beginning of the war, but certainly not by the end.  It was a big place.  It couldn’t have been bomb-proof.  I was going back to New York, but the venue cancelled.  Then Ellington came back in 1948.

They couldn’t play in England because of the musicians’ union.

SD:  That was because the American union wouldn’t allow British bands.  Americans always made it sound as though the British union was bad, but actually it was the fault of the American union.

What I remember is that in 1939 Rex Stewart made that record for Swing in France.  They couldn’t find a drummer that morning.  Barney [Bigard] wanted me to play drums, but all they had was a military side-drum with one stick and one wire brush.

You were that well-acquainted that they would let you sit in?

SD:  Yes.  By this time i was getting to know them fairly well.  We would all hang out in the daytime.

Didn't they meet Django Reinhardt at about this time?

SD:  Django was on that date.  The studio was a place with a sliding door, like a garage.  They were halfway through this take, and there I was, banging away on this tin drum...

I came over here in 1946; I'd been in the service from 1939 to 1945. .  I met Helen and visited her sister in Toronto.  I went back and forth to England a couple of times.  Helen and I were married inn 1948.

At that time, were you still living in Essex?

SD:  [30 seconds inaudible]  You could go  in Duke’s dressing room and find ties that were all bright colors and garish, trying to find something conservative.  Actually, I picked out two.  He said, “Don’t you like more exotic ties?”  “Not where I live,” I answered.

It was around this time you developed a friendship.

SD:  I was able to have him in my house.  He went to Helen’s house; she and her brother used to play cards with him.  When was it he played at Leeds?

1958.

SD:  By this time, we had got to know Gerald Lascelles, who was a jazz fan.  [to Helen:]  What was the name of Gerald Lascelles’s brother?

HD:  The Earl of Harewood.

SD:  The other partner was an opera fan.  They were going to put on a festival at Leeds,,, but that got a very rough answer from Norman Granz.  So Gerald asked us if we could have a meeting with Duke to explain.  Duke asked, “Are you coming?”  So we came.  Helen knows more, because she did publicity.

But starting in 1959, I was nearly always around Duke.

How long did you live together in England before coming here?

SD:  Twelve years, I think.

[At this point, the three of us moved to the kitchenette for lunch.  Off the record, Helen told me directly that Fredi Washington married Lawrence Brown to get to Duke.]

When Duke travelled to England with only Ray Nance and Kay Davis, did he have a complement of local musicians?

SD:  The Melvin Mitchell Trio.

[The conversation changed to a discussion of a tape we both had of a seminar with Gunther Schuller in Chicago.]

SD:  That’s like the Duke Ellington Dance Society.  They talk and cackle all the way through the music.  I thought he [Schuller] made a good point, though, when he said Ellington’s music won’t survive by records alone.  I think that’s quite true.  People of our generation, of course, want the real thing.  We don’t really like recreations.

I can’t imagine a substitute for Ellington.

SD:  Well, other saxophonists can play like Johnny Hodges.  But it’s not quite the same.

I don’t know how long Ellington’s music will last.  It could be in another thirty or forty years, nobody, except historians, will know his name.

SD:  Some of the songs will carry on.

HD:  Thirty or forty years on, people still talk about the Original Dixie Jass Band, and they’re bit really not worth the interest of posterity.  I imagine Duke’s name will last as long, because he was an innovator.

I read an article by Duke where he claimed that posterity is like a roulette wheel.

SD:  Everybody talks as though jazz will go on forever.  I never have thought that.  It will be played more ore less like Dixieland is today.  They’ll still know  how to do it.  It will be like the Viennese waltz period.

I don’t imagine anything will last forever, not Beethoven, not Shakespeare.

[We return to the living room.]

SD:  I hope you’ll keep that Fredi Washington stuff confidential.

I’m not really interested in that stuff.  I thought Don George’s book [Sweet   Man] was atrocious.  No one I’ve talked to who has any knowledge of Ellington at all had anything kind to say about this book.

SD:  It would have been very interesting if he’d said something about writing lyrics for Duke.  He hardly mentioned that.

Just a little bit about “I’m Beginning to See the Light.”

SD:  I always thought he was quite a good lyricist, really.  A lot of people put him down.  They were quite pretty.

DISC 2:

Please take me from Toronto to Chicago.

HD:  I first heard Duke in Detroit.  Then, when I was in Chicago, there weren't many people doing research on him.  He seemed to be interested in what I was writing.

Were you working for Mills at that time?

HD:  No.  I owed my recommendation to Mills from Duke.  That was one thing about Duke:  he always had an eye out for talent.  I don't necessarily mean in my case, but he could read things in people and was always charitable, very generous.  He always brought out the best in everyone, and not just in the band.  He was a very inspiring person; I remember his saying to Irving Mills, "You've got to hire this girl."  Of course, Irving was used to following Duke's tips, because they were always pretty good.  I was writing for DownBeat, but I was also freelancing for the Chicago

Herald-Examiner.

You weren't faced with the problem of making a living then?

HD:  I was, in the sense I'd left home, and I was completely wrapped up in the kind of jazz that I liked.  That's why I left home.

What was the turning point that pushed you in that direction?

HD:  From the very beginning, when I was very small, living in a family that didn't know anything about music.  There were these downtown record stores where you could cjhoose what to hear.  When I was eight years old, I would hear things I liked that everybody else thought was terrible.  I was allowed to make only one choice.  What I asked for was Louis (to SD), not Johnny Dodds, but Jimmy Noone?

SD:  Living in Toronto, Helen also heard radio broadcasts from Chicago a lot, including Earl Hines.

HD:  You could catch Hines at the Grand Terrace or Claude Hopkins from New York.  By the time I was fourteen or fifteen, the only way I could find out anything was to go to parties; my sister and I were debutantes, so we would hear society bands, which were awful.  But every once in a while, there would be an instrumentalist from Canada who would play outstanding solos, so I could talk to musicians of this kind, learn about the instruments, so that when I heard Benny Goodman, I knew that was a clarinet.  In a little while, I established the facts for myself.  I was seventeen, and I was determined that was going to be my life.  There wasn't anything in Canada, so I made my way to Detroit and then to Chicago.  I just thought thee world of Coleman Hawkins and McKinney's Cotton Pickers, so I went to the Graystone Ballroom.  I was bitterly disappointed, because this was the biggest moment of my life at that point, but there was no Hawk.  He'd just gone to England, and I was heartbroken.

Lester Young had replaced him.

HD:  Yes, but Lester was very unhappy, and didn't belong there.  I was glad to hear the other musicians, but no Hawk.  I don't think Benny Carter was in the band then.  Anyway, I made my way to Chicago, where the musicians were always playing.  But nobody knew who they were or where to find them, so it was hard to make a living.  I met  Jess Stacy, Bud Freeman, George Wettling, Davey Tough; they were all good musicians, what I was looking for; they were all playing, but they were scuffling.  Glenn [Burris] had just started passing out a music street on the street, on Randolph Street, just around the corner from the musicians' union.  It was just two sheets of paper, four sides, passed out to the musicians on the street.  I said, "Glenn, why don't you get to work and put stuff in about these musicians?"

What was he concentrating on?

HD:  He was just saying that Ted Weems was playing at the Blackhawk, things like that.  It was just a little trade sheet for musicians.

SD:  No criticism whatsoever.

Wasn't it lurid in its early years?

HD:  Not yet.  Carl Conns brought that about.  Glenn was very nice and said to me, "Do you want to write in it?"  This was my ideal.  I loved music, so whatever I could do to enhance it and make it more available would be good for the musicians.  So this is what I did, and it got to people like Squirrell Ashcroft.

Tell me about Squirrell Ashcroft.  He was from one of the Ivy League schools, wasn't he?

HD:  Yes, Princeton.  He was a very nice guy, and so were the others in the Chicago Rhythm Club from Princeton.  They were all very nice people.  They came from wealthy families, and their names were well-known.  And I knew people in Toronto, so we had something in common.  They were genuine fans, but not in the same way I was.  They weren't exactly Dixieland fans.

SD:  It was that white Chicago jazz.

HD:  He did tend toward Jimmy McPartland and that sort of thing.  They were out for the music.

SD:  The Austin High Gang.  Frank Teschemacher, Joe Sullivan, they were all involved with it.  That was really their main thing, don't you think?  Judging from what they continued to hear, year after year.

HD:  Maybe by contrast, it was a little more Dixieland than it seemed at the time.  They liked Benny [Goodman], too.

SD:  Bix people.

HD:  That's right.  Anyway, I could see that Squirrell and company would be very useful in establishing a trend of popularity.  Benny had just had the "Let's Dance" program from New York City, broadcast coast to coast.  It was the first time anything was available:  real music out of a band, not a small group.  You could hear Bunny Berrigan, Hymie Schertzer; all of the musicians in that band were good, to the extent that they tried to make it, cross-country.

The music business then was very precarious; no one had done that.  You had to play waltzes and hot tunes of the day and not make too much row.  Benny was trying to see if he could be "Benny Goodman."  Even the office, MCA, was trying to see if he could be Benny Goodman.  They didn't realize they were gambling on something; they just thought he was like everybody else.

But the business was very precarious.  They fell flat over and over, they were booed when they came out.  We thought, if they don't have a hit and make it, that was the end of it all.  Then people like Jess Stacy would say, "This has never been done before.  It's hopeless."  We decided we had to make a big hit in Chicago.

  

SD:  This is before they had the big hit at Palomar [in Los Angeles].

HD:  We didn't know it, but they'd had a big hit at the Palomar.

So everything seemed to change suddenly?

HD:  It depends.  Those broadcasts had been caught on the West Coast.  They didn't know it, but they had a following.

When they came to Chicago, I built it up in the Herald-Examiner on the society page, as well as the music page.  I said to the Rhythm Club, "Now you've got a role to play.  Make a big success of whatever we do, and everybody will follow suit, and we'll be a big success in Chicago."

But then I had to contend with Benny Goodman, and he was a character, very hard-headed.  Of course, it was all new to him.  We went into the Congress Hotel, the Joseph Urban Room.  I think there had been food poisoning there.  Anyhow, it had a bad reputation.  Kaufman, the owner, was naturally very pleased to have anyone help the hotel.

No one had ever given a concert.  I said to Benny, "Let's give a concert."  Well, nobody had ever given a concert.  That was a new concept here.  They'd given them over in England.

What was the Urban Room?  A supper club?

HD:  Yes, it was a ballroom for dinner and dance.  Benny thought the idea was ridiculous.  I said to him, "Make it a benefit."  There was no money, because I didn't want Benny to charge money, anyway.  I asked, "If the union allows it, will you do it?"  I'd already fixed things up with the union, the same way I did with Kaufman.

The Rhythm Club had never done anything where they sold lots of tickets.

Was John Hammond involved in this?

HD:  No, but Hammond was very much involved with Benny Goodman.

With that as an opener, and it was coming up on Easter Sunday.  I said to Benny, "Let's get Teddy [Wilson]."  Teddy, Benny, and Gene Krupa had just started the trio.  The records were wonderful, but you couldn't get away from Black and white together onstage.  I said, "If Kaufman agrees, would you put it on as an intermission act?"  I thought if we make it extra special, it would do something for the concert.

I sent Teddy the fare, and he came out.  That's exactly what we did, and it was sensational.  Benny saw that, musically, there was never anything better.  Then I organized a party at my apartment for Duke and Benny, who had never met.  We brought Benny down to hear Duke.  

What year was that?

HD:  That was in 1936, wasn't it, Stan?  It was an Easter concert.

SD:  It must have been '35.

HD:  Then we organized a concert for Fletcher Hendersson.  We'd do a concert every month, including Duke.  When Kaufman booked Duke Ellington into the room, it was a huge success, wonderful.

Was that in May of '36?

HD:  I imagine.  Have you got the dates on that?

Had you become acquainted with Ellington before this?

HD:  Yes.  I met Duke while he was playing a theater in Detroit; I can't remember the name of the theater.  He was terribly nice.  That began our friendship.  This is incidental, but when he played Toronto, I had an older brother up there who also liked the music very much.  Between Duke and his then-wife Mildred Dixon, they'd come out to play bridge, and it became a friendship.  Wasn't that around the time the Rhythm Club gave him an award?

Who made the presentation?  Barry Ulanov wrote that there was a lot of trouble finding someone to make the presentation; a lot of jazzmen around town refused to do it, presumably because of race.

HD:  Well, Barry must have got it all from me, because he wasn't there.  I introduced him to Duke in New York.  Duke didn't like his book at all, because he didn't authorize it.   

M.  Helen meets DE at theater in New York:  "That began our friendship."Mildred 

Dixon was then Duke's companion.  Helen first introduced him to Barry Ulanov; "Life Goes to a Party" magazine article with photos of party at HD's home.  ("Africa in Tails" article in Time?).  DE, Artie Shaw, Chick Webb playing:  (HD is in the audience; SD? graphic) 

N.  BG trio appearance at Chicago's Congress Hotel

Easter concert, 1936? recruited Teddy Wilson to join BG and Gene Krupa;  Helen later arranged Fletcher Henderson and DE appearances at the same venue.  party at her apartment where DE first met BG.

O.  Working for Irving Mills in New York.  HD edits "Melody News" along continuing writing for DownBeat.  Mills's new record labels: DE&HO records on Master and Variety, the budget line upon which HD produced sessions for Ellington unit small combos.  "Irving Mills was quite a genius in his own way."  As far as his sharing writing credits with DE,"Duke was a realist."

Rift between DE and John Hammond:  "You don't run Duke.  Duke owed nothing to John Hammond."

"Life Goes to a Party":  Chick Webb, Artie Shaw, and DE.  Helen Oakley stands at DE's left.  Also present were Hot Lips Page,  Frankie Newton, photographed at Helen's apartment.

SD:  Marshall Stearnes and John Hammond gave speeches, indicating the participation of the United Hot Clubs of America.

"Life Goes to a Party":  Chick Webb, Artie Shaw, and DE.  Helen Oakley stands at DE's left.

A.  Supervising recording sessions for Mills:

HD was tasked with putting recording groups together for the new Variety label, much as SD arranged sessions for British Decca in later years.

HD:  You're up against it, in a way.  Now they ask, 'What can you do?'  Making records is not that easy, not for any of the groups. Where you know you've got something is a group that has been working together.  Now you know, like the small-band Basie records.  You have no worries there, but when you start working from scratch, with these and those ones, it's great for a jam session.  But when you put it on a record, you can't be sure that something's going to live.  But if you get it, that's great, because you can see what you have to do to further that.

Irving Mills knew a multitude of songwriters and publishers in New York, and he would sometimes insert a singer or hire a songwriter who would come up with doggy tunes for recording sessions, and she would be stuck with that.

HD:  "You would be stuck with doggy tunes, especially in jazz, where a singer has to sing lyrics to a doggy tune.  I had certain singers, like the Palmer Brothers, who sounded like the Mills Brothers, or Hot Lips Page to throw the song at, and they'd say, 'Okay.'  And then they'd sing it their way and it comes out jazz.  Of course, it had nothing to do with what the publisher thought he was going to hear.

"The men I liked most in the band were Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Harry Carney, and Tricky Sam, as musicians and also as people.  This is what you want to hear.  Any time you hear any one of those musicians, with the rest back there, it gels.  That's it. "

HD:  "It was a transition period, really.  When you take a talent that's aware of everything that is inside him, that has to expand and move forward.  Things that he knows about, but you and I don't know about.  We don't know what's driving him, but he does.  But when he does something [new] the public and fans are all going to hold him down.  We're all going to say to him, 'Oh no, that's not what you were meant for.  We're close to you r own talent.  Listen to us.  We'll tell you where to go and what to do."

*I mention Irving Mills's DownBeat article in 1952:  "I Split With Duke When Music Started Side-tracking"

"There he was, picking up on what the critics had said.  On the whole, Irving was one who didn't.  Irving wasn't in the picture in those days, but if Duke had said to Irving, 'I want to do a Sacred Concert,' Irving would have said, 'Do a Sacred Concert.'  Everybody else would say 'Don't.'  Irving would have said 'Do it.  Let's see what happens.

"Actually, several months went by, and I was champing at the bit.  The whole idea was to do Johnny and Cootie, and Johnny and Cootie together.  But he would put it off, and do what was possible before coming to the big stars.  And by the time he came to things like "Jeep's Blues," everybody in Harlem knew it.  It was booming out of the juke boxes.  Everywhere you moved there was a big haze of Johnny Hodges.  It was really wonderful.  And, of course, Cootie.  It was the making of those things that was absolutely marvelous.  

SD:  "That's an interesting point.  There were none under Lawrence's name.

Yes, there was one:  Lawrence Brown on "Yearning for Love."  It was written for Lawrence but not issued under his name.

SD:  At that time, there were only four:  Rex, Barney Cootie, and Johnny.  

But not Harry. 

Harry wasn't really a soloist.

HD:  That's what I mean.  Duke could really see the nuances, and that's why people idolized him. Carney was a marvelous musician, even though he couldn't play like he couldn't play like Cootie or Johnny.  But he didn't even know it, because of the way Duke handled it.  Everybody got so much to play, and Carney got so much to play.  It was just an education, with Duke at the piano.  The guys didn't have the faintest idea of what they were.  It was beautiful, I can remember.  It was just an education.  Duke was at the keyboard, but nobody else had the faintest idea of what they were going to do.

And then the big band things.  Duke would just come in; it was cold.  All this marvelous mu8sic would come out of him.  They were knit together like a fountain at the keyboard and all these little fountains around him.  He just took all those beautiful threads.  At first the guys might be worried, but in time they were not, because Duke was always able to create parts for them.

You saw him as a galvanizing force?

HD:  You couldn't have known.  He was absolutely unique.  You may get a Lawrence Brown not to cooperate, but that was a personal thing.  But Duke was just so sky-high above.  It was extraordinary; he just had them in his pocket.  It didn't how difficult the guys were.  Duke's musicianship would just put everyone in awe of him.

SD:  He started with musicians who didn't seem to fit the band.  He had Tizol.  And then later you take somebody like al Sears.  He replaced Ben Webster, but Duke brought out his talent.

H.D.  He really reached his maturity then.  In a sense, Duke was part of each one of them.  He wrote parts for them that brought out things they didn't know they had.  Ben used to fight his instrument. He hadn't found himself technically.  He was a very temperamental guy, A brilliant emotional guy.

And Duke never said anything to anybody.  They found themselves with him.  They fought now and then, but whatever they were trying to do, Duke knows it even if they don't know themselves.  From the piano he pushes them right into that thing they were trying to arrive at.

The period you're describing sounds like a happy time for them.  But later on, was there more conflict in the band?

SD:  Not as much as you might think.  When I moved here there were factions within the band.  Johnny and Barney were not talking, but that didn't mean anything.

HD:  Everybody in the band knew that it was like belonging to a very unique club.  They were honored to be in it.

SD:  I couldn't talk about a period other than the last fifteen years.  The band inevitably declined.  There were so many departures.  But generally speaking, it was a happy band.

HD:  I'd like to get back to that experience of the small groups, just to show you how it did happen.  It happened on a bigger scale with the big band:  there was nothing ever written for that either.  Duke would come in, and they didn't know what kind of number.  Duke might have heard Johnny do something the night before.  It might have been only two bars, but it was probably four.  He would start up the tempo at the keyboard, and everybody's listening.  Then Cootie would noodle or do something.  Everybody was waiting to see where Duke was going.  He'd say, "Hey Rab,  remember?"  And then Johnny would start blowing.  Now everybody knew what was going to happen.  He'd picked out a little pearl, something that Johnny does, and he's going to give it a setting.  They're all going to make it.

That's extraordinary.

HD:  If anybody wondered where they were going, he'd stay on the piano.  It's being put together, the first chorus.  After that they decide whether Johnny or Cootie should take the second chorus, or whether they should split it.  And that was that.

And the next one would be totally different.  He'd start way down in the bass, and then he'd say, "Put it in the gutter."  And then the third one, maybe it's going to be soulful.  He'd say, "Carney, I want a bottom."  And before you know it, you've got four wonderful records.

SD:  Later on, he would give a title to a song.  When we were doing a radio program and needed a theme, he called to Johnny and said, "Bring that thing up here."  We said, "What will we call it?"  He said, "Layin' On Mellow."  People were always fussing about those titles.  It was just a blues, and it didn't have an ending because it didn't need one.  Duke was always very casual about that.

HD:  Duke had a great joie de vivre with everybody.  When he'd hear someone come in with a bass, he'd work that loeft hand on the piano.  I'd be up in the control room, and he'd look at me and say, "She left her mad money behind, and here she is, stomping home [stomps her feet].  What was that?  

SD:  Something "Gal Blues."

HD:  That's how it always was.

Who would finally title it?  Mills himself?

SD:  In those days, that kind of copyright was done efficiently, but afterwards, when he made records for himself-- not Columbia or anybody else-- he'd just put them in what he called his "stockpile" and the title would get garbled up.  That's why some of them were titled twice.  For Piano in the Foreground he went off to Europe.  They called and said they didn't have any titles.  Ruth called in me and Mercer, and we put titles on them.  When Duke came back, he started yelling, "What the hell are these stupid titles?"

HD:  But if you read perceptively the book Stanley did with Mercer, you want to see Duke in his true dimensions and not interpret things that would be perceived by ordinary people, you'd see he was filled with admiration.

Duke stirred people up all the time, just for the fun of it and to see what would come of it.  Not to create mischief, not just ordinary things like ordinary people do.  In a variety of situations see what will come of it, and then he said, "I got what I need."

SD:  Mercer said that he liked to manipulate people, and that was true.  He made a game of it, very likely creative from his point of view and yours.  You could do something you didn't know you could do.

HD:  People say, "Oh, he liked to manipulate people, dear, dear, dear."  You never knew what was going on with Ellington.  It's an enchanting, engrossing world, so you mustn't look at it like it was ordinary things.  This was no ordinary person.

I don't know if either of you is in a position to know, but my impression of his later years is that he felt like his life was a fairy tale, that God had given him a mission, and he was the king of the court.  Do you think I'm off the mark on that?

SD:  You have to see the hedonistic side of Duke's life and also a melancholy side.  He had days of just sitting around.  He wasn't gay and cheerful all the time.

HD:  I think what he says is quite true.  Certainly, he did think he was gifted by God, that he had a destiny. And he fulfilled his destiny.   He felt that God hadn't put any limits on him and he had a mission to do everything he could, go as far as he could.  As such, there was a court around him.  He not only thought it, he lived it.

Did he feel alienated from the world around him?  I'm thinking of the student protests that I came up with.  Of course, he wouldn't have anything to do with Black nationalism or anything like that.  He was not in the world at that time.  He was a kind of anachronism.

HD:  No.  What you have to realize is that he had very strong racial feelings.  I know more about that than Stanley does, because I came up with him long before the student protests.  We knew all about it.  Duke, like everybody else, was subjected to all kinds of humiliation.

SD:  Not when he got that degree from Yale.  The speech was all very funny.  So, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Mood Indigo….”

You mean somebody introducing him.,

SD:  They were patronizing.

The White House was patronizing, too.

SD:  But everybody was thinking what a great honor this was for a Black jazz band.

HD:  If you look carefully into Mercer’s book, you’ll see.  When you say that Duke was an anachronism, not part of this world, it’s not true.  He knew everything that was going on in the world; it was a part of Duke Ellington.  Malcolm X, everybody was close to Duke:  they understood Duke knew the role that he could play.  From  Jump for Joy, which preceded all of that, the Deep South Suite, everything he ever did, I believe.

I understand that, but I mean what an irony it was that he be identified with Richard Nixon, and in the public mind he always will be.

HD:  When he had his 70^th birthday, the President just happened to be Richard Nixon.  Prior to that, he’d been to the White House many times.

SD:  It had nothing to do with who the President was.  It was the fact that it was the President of the United States, no matter if it was Nixon or Ford or anyone.

*

HD:  Well, people would look at it, as you say, as if he were associated with Nixon.  It just so happened that on his 70th birthday, they had to find a way to honor him.

I mean, from Nixon's point of view, it was just such a transparent attempt to woo Black support, and he fell right in with that never touched the ground.

HD:  He put Nixon in his place, too, at the dinner.

SD:  Duke didn't resist it, not because of Nixon, but because nobody was aware of the extent of Nixon's iniquity at that time.  Ultimately, Duke felt it was the President of the United States, not because he wanted to appear in support of the Republican Party.

HD:  Duke's reply to Nixon's speech was very good, very eloquent, from the hear t.  Nixon had read a speech that I suppose someone had written for him, and Duke said this was the true American Dream.  Ellington's father had buttled at the White House.  Duke got up and said, "How I today I in this building might not be as great as you think, because of the gifts God gave me and the place He put me in life.  However, nothing much could happen to me in comparison with having the mother and the father that I had.  My  feet never touched the ground, I was brought up with such love and devotion."

SD:  He said, "There is no place I would rather be, except in my mother's arms."

HD:  That was typical Nixon.

SD:  No, that's not fair, because you know what happened afterwards.

HD:  I always hated him.

SD:  Yes, but Nixon that night made a good emcee.

I saw him from a different point of view myself, because he was a racist and a war-maker, well before Watergate.  For young people like myself, it didn't do Ellington any good to see Nixon embrace him. 

HD:  Who but Ellington would give the President of the United States four kisses and say "One for each cheek!"

Parting advice; Ruth Ellington Boatwright= a socialite, others claim to be closer to DE than they really were.   Jump for Joy:  I see it as a turning point in DE's life, but SD doesn't find it so important; HD calls SD "Stanny" on her way out.

Richard Wright's Chicago.

I found that to tell the truth is the hardest thing on earth, harder than fighting in a war, harder than taking part in a revolution.

Richard Wright, "The Birth of Black Boy"

He went for truth first to the respectable and the articulate, but their answers were false.  So he went where Dostoevski, Dreiser, Darrow and Farrell had gone for the truth-- to the born to be doomed.

Nelson Algren

Richard Wright was nineteen when he arrived in Chicago in 1927.  the cycle of jim-crowism, grinding poverty, uprooted family relationships, and his denial of a meaningful formal education formed the core of Wright's personality.  In his autobiography, and in nearly everything else he wrote, the images from Wright's youth in Mississippi, Arkansas, and finally Memphis comprise the irreducible core of his literary output as well, his maelstrom of fear, anger, and alienation and the birth of his impulse to write.  Black Boy itself seems to grow naturally out of the African American idiom, comprising not only folk materials but, significantly, the panoramic heritage of written African American narrative, from which archive Wright freely borrowed, transformed by the lens of his own persona, and brought forward flaring into mid-century America.

If the South stamped Wright as a human personality. Chicago represented the brick-and-steel foundry that forged the writer.  This second phase of his life include the years between 1927, when Wright first arrived in Chicago, and May,1936, when he made his way to Harlem.  This nine-year segment should be distinguished from his career in New York.

Bone (1570 agrees:  Native Son "links the Negro novel to a major tendency in modern art."

An American Tragedy

Black Boy:  literary autobiography, conscious reconstruction of Wright's life.

"Blueprint" (44):  Marxist analysis "restores to the writer his lost heritage, that is, his role as a creator of the world in which he lives and as a creator of himself."

CHICAGO CHRONOLOGY:

The case for terming Wright.  Southern school of slave narrative (Frederick Douglass), transformed by the modern school of Dreiser, Mencken.  Roots in African American narrative traditions and folklore.

II.  D. Aaron (37):  "two lives simultaneously":   psychology thesis; (38) impact of the Depression on the South Side community; Blyden Jackson (297ff)  Richard Wright existed for years as one of them.  Yes and no.

1927:  arrival, first jobs

1928:  temporary post office appointment

1929:  Depression jobs:  porter, bill collector, dishwasher, hospital orderly, post office temp, counsellor

1930:

1931:  "Superstition"

1932:  John Reed Club

"Blueprint" (44):  Marxist analysis "restores to the writer his lost heritage, that is, his role as a creator of the world in which he lives and as a creator of himself."  (43) new role of Negro writer:  "to do no less than create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die."

The manuscript of Black Boy was sold in late 1944 in New York.  It became a BOMC selection in May,1945.

Black Boy retells Richard's education as a writer in a series of epiphanies, which occurred at significant intervals of his youth.  In the narrative they are linked together in an ascending arc which reaches its zenith aboard a train out of Memphis and into the unknown North and beyond.

(The author authenticates by his own success:  Fabre AH, 139)

With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, both visible and invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.

Black Boy (285)

Stepto (Douglass, Ex-Colored Man):  typology of African American narrative, 19th-early 20th century.  Certain peculiarities of Richard Wright's narratives, especially autobiographical, New York departs sharply.

The Chicago period witnessed a continuing narrative of ascent, while the dominant tone of Wright's New York output would contrast sharply, substituting symbols of enigma and despair for his earlier tropes of liberation.  Richard Wright was brought to New York riding the coattails of his first national recognition and success; his eventual self-exile from America, a casting out from Eden, as it were, became his dominant theme.  The Edenic symbology of Frederick Douglass in the land of freedom was thus carried forward by Wright, specifically in his Chicago period, but was subsequently repudiated in the visions of hell characteristic of the new turn his life took during the war years.

Black Boy is by far the better-known portion of Wright's autobiographical writing; American Hunger remains relatively obscure.  The first builds to a satisfying, if premature, climax, which was far more acceptable to his liberal, largely white audience.  (credit Favre:  1. typology, 2. BB's editorial history, 3.  AH editorial history, 4.  AH typology)

Wright's narrative of his youth, written in 1944 at the wane of his New York period, ends more by fiat of Harper & Row, his publishers, than by the author's vision of himself charting a new cosmology.  Indeed, that turn was the antithesis of the work's sequel chapters, which were at the time sacrificed to meet the requirements of the Book of the Month Club.  Most of the portion deleted from Black Boy found its way into contemporary anthologies and magazine articles (e.g. "Early Days in Chicago,"* in Cross-Section, 1945) and I tried to Be a "Communist" (Atlantic Monthly, August-September,1944).

*His first article was republished posthumously in Eight Men, Cleveland, 1961, as "The Man Who Went to Chicago."  The second appeared in The God That Failed.

Fabre afterword on AH:  originally intended for edition containing both sections of the narrative. (subtitles, 143.)

Consider:  RW blast at CP-- he completed the book late in 1942-- in the context of the wartime alliance.

Collected into book form in 1977 and reproduced almost entirely from their wartime originals, the concluding six chapters of Wright's autobiographical narrative are dominated by the image of an isolated man in a dingy apartment on the South Side of Chicago, at a loss as to whether his words will ever find an echo from the void outside.  This voice is not that of the Richard Wright of Chicago; it is more the foretelling of Wright's wanderings in and about the exile that concluded his life.  With Black Boy and American Hunger, then, we are afforded the advantage of seeing the mainsprings of Wright's personality from the perspective of further experience.  Yet the reader should be mindful, particularly in American Hunger, to distinguish the voice of two narrators:  that of the militant writer battling for space to create in Chicago from that of the disillusioned celebrity about to embark to the other end of the earth.

As Black Boy provides the key to Wright's most vivid short stories and much of his best poetry, so American Hunger unlocks the imagery and syntax of his first two novels, the posthumously published Lawd Today from his South Side years and Native Son (1940), the book that brought him international recognition.

Upon arriving in Chicago with his aunt late in 1927, the youthful Richard was gifted with an extraordinary insight into his own experience, a sensibility which simultaneously attracted him to and set him apart from those whose lives impinged upon his daily existence.  His first experiences in Chicago were episodes of culture shock suffered in isolation.  The self-conscious Southern black boy, having learned in the South how to hide his rage behind a mask of humility, began to grope his way forward, looking for signposts in "an unreal city whose mythical houses were built of slabs of black coal wreathed in palls of gray smoke, houses whose foundations were sinking slowly into the dank prairie.

(AH, 1)

Prufrock?  "Unreal city..."

Unreality, invisibility, instability-- black wreathed in gray-- now are the imagery and tone  of the youth's first steps in Chicago.  Wright here assumes the role of the alert, fearful observer, invisible within his various observation posts (a posture common to many of his fictional characters to come, most notably Bigger Thomas).  On the streetcar from the train depot, Richard takes an empty seat beside a white man, to him an unimaginable act:

I sat down beside the man and looked straight ahead of me.  After a moment I stole a glance at the white man out of the corners of my eyes; he was still staring out the window, his mind fastened upon some inward thought.  I did not exist for him; I was as far from his mind as the stone buildings that swept past in the street. (2)

The narrator's physical hunger, his regular companion in the remembrance of his past, will here, by degrees, become an intellectual and spiritual hunger as well.  At the beginning, among his relatives and neighbors, he is "baffled."

Everything seemed makeshift, temporary.  I caught an abiding sense of insecurity in the personalities of the people around me...  Whenever my eye turned they saw stricken, frightened black faces trying vainly to cope with a civilization that they did not understand.  I had fled one insecurity and had embraced another. (3)

His first priority, though, is to find a job, which in the writer's terms means the opportunity to observe and understand the shifting boundaries between the Black and white worlds.  A streetcar brings Richard to Mr. Hoffman and his wife, owners of a Jewish delicatessen (who perhaps prefigure Blum's delicatessen, the target of  Bigger's gang in Native Son).  The thick Yiddish accent of Mrs. Hoffman provides the first occasion of the narrator's frustrating predicament of "reading" in the North, of finding a "language" to connect and root himself to his new place and time.  

Caught in a lie by his sympathetic employers, Richard reacts with anger, shame, and flight.  In the first of several digressions spread through the text of American Hunger, the 1944 narrator's voice intrudes to explain how utterly he had misread the Hoffman episode:

I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one...  I had not yet learned anything that would have helped me to thread my way through these perplexing relations.  Accepting my environment at its face value, trapped by my own emotions, I kept asking myself what had black people done to bring this crazy world upon them?

(The fact of the separation of white and black was clear to me: it was its effect upon the personalities of people that stumped and dismayed me.  I didd not feel that I was a threat to anybody; yet, as soon as I had grown old enough to think I had learned that my entire personality, my aspirations had long ago been discounted: that, in a measure, the very meaning of the words I spoke could not be fully understood.

(And when I contemplated the area of No Man's Land into which the Negro mind in America had been shunted, I wondered if there had ever existed in all human history a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination.  In order to escape the racial attack that went to the roots of my life, I would have gladly accepted any way of life but the one in which I found myself.

 Bewildered, like Bigger, at the discovery of individual personalities behind the world of "white faces," Wright began his observation by learning to distinguish the trivial from the taboo, and hence to determine the degree of space he was permitted as an observer.  His next job, as a dishwasher at a cafe on Fullerton Avenue, placed him into an unintended and horrifying moment of physical contact with a white waitress, who pressed against him while pouring a cup of coffee.

... I was aware that she was a white girl and that her body was pressed closely against mine, an incident that had never happened before to me in my life, an incident charged with the memory of dread.  But she was not conscious of my blackness or of what her actions would have meant in the South. (11)

Here, too, Richard learns a new measurement of his "distance" from the white world, a sense of superiority over the passionless, superficial "lusting after trash" that pervaded its culture.  Overhearing the conversation of the white girls on the job, he silently speculated upon "their tawdry dreams, their simple hopes, their home lives, their fear of feeling anything deeply."  Realizing the full extent of his "invisibility" to such people leads the narrator to an unconscious probing what was to become the terrain of his mature writing:

It was in the psychological distance that separated the races that the deepest meaning of the problem of the Negro lay for me.  For these poor ignorant white girls to have understood my life would have meant nothing short of  a vast revolution in theirs.  And I was convinced that what they needed to make them complete and grown-up in their living was the inclusion in their personalities of a knowledge of lives such as I lived and suffered containedly. (13)

 Margaret Walker on Wright's artistic portrayal of women, sexual hangups (1988 only)

The significance of this episode cuts yet deeper into the development of the young observer.  Carrying forward from Black Boy the trope of his intellectual estrangement from his environment, the North Side cafe period includes the first of Wright's "caught reading incidents, of the antagonism evoked in others by his secret intellectual life.  The scene is repeated in confrontations with his aunt ("Boy, are you reading for law?"), his mothers and his comrades in the Communist Party.  To avoid questioning by his coworkers, Wright takes the precaution of keeping his books and magazines wrapped in newspaper, much as his protagonist Bigger must hide his own seething personality and awakes from the nightmare of finding in his hands his own bloody head wrapped in newspaper.  In this early stage of his observation of whites, Wright is not able to solve the moral dilemma posed when he discovers Tillie, the cook, spitting into the food on the stove,  An intermediary, a girl who is the only other Black employee, takes on for Richard the risk of informing the boss.  He has not yet discovered his voice; he is not yet ready to relinquish his posture as observer.

Revise:  This posture carries over to the Black world, among the" stricken, frightened black faces" of his own kin.  Between the emotions of pride and self-hatred, with which he identified himself and all other Negroes, and surrounded by the symbols and jingles of the American" good life," Wright sensed the first awakening of a new consciousness of Blackness, one engendered specifically by his Chicago experience.  Early on, he muses

I was going through a second childhood; a new sense of the limit of the possible was being born in me.  What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true?  I could think of nothing.  And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness that my mind began to dwell, that constant sense of wanting without having, of being hated without reason.  A dim notion of what life meant to a Negro in America was coming to consciousness in me, not in terms of external events, lynchings, Jim Crowism, and the endless brutalities, but in terms of crossed-up feeling, of psychic pain. (7)

Wright's observation of the Black world is here more indirect:  he begins to view it through the lens of  social science and modern literature, which he devoured in quantity-- Gertrude Stein, Stephen Crane, Dostoevski, Proust-- much to the consternation of his family.  In Memphis his reading had been divided between escapist pulp fiction and the attractive irreverence of Mencken.

Although he probably exaggerated the degree to which it set him apart from a "normal" social life, Wright's reading list in Chicago was extensive and purposeful, and the hours he spent alone with books became the center of his life.  At the same time, he became increasingly aware of his psychological distance from other Black people.  The vague ambition that carried him out of Memphis to be a writer began slowly to grow out of his new understanding of these psychological distances, a sense of his mission as a writer.  With regard to the Black world, he envisioned

a life in which there was a conscious oneness of feeling with others, in which the basic emotions of life were shared, in which common memory formed a common past, in which collective hope reflected a national future.  But I knew that no such thing was possible in my environment.  The only ways in which I felt that my feelings could go outward without fear of rude rebuff or searing reprisal was in writing or reading, and to me they were ways of living. (20-21)

 In June,1928, Wright received a temporary civil service appointment as a postal clerk, a circumstance which allowed him five hours a day writing, as a Works Progress Administration job would a few years later.  Of the childhood attempts mentioned in Black Boy-- at the age of twelve he had composed a narrative about the suicide of an Indian maiden, and the following year he had published, in  a Black paper in Mississippi, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre"*-- neither expressed the direction which he wanted to travel as an author.  His first stabs at writing in Chicago, too, were tentative and imitative of the new models brought by his reading.  "The soft, melting hunk of butter trickled in gold down the stringy grooves of the split yam," he would write.

 *The Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre," according to Addison Gayle (32-3), was "a potpourri of personal experiences."  It introduced for the first time the character of a bully, James "Biggy" Thomas.

My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for.  If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative.  (22)

 The loss of his post office job a few months later caused a rapid deterioration of Richard's living arrangements, and his household atmosphere "became tense, ugly, petty, bickering."  The family of four took up new quarters in "a tiny, dingy, two-room den...  The place was alive with vermin, and the smell of cooking hung in the air day and night." (23)  (One can see clearly here the interior life of the Thomas family in Native Son.

Unable, because of his slight weight, to receive a permanent civil service appointment, Wright obtained through his cousin a job as a collection agent for one of the many burial insurance companies on the South Side.  The "new kind of education" he received involved not only the distasteful corruption of the job itself, but also the interiors of the homes of uncounted hundreds of Black Chicagoans.

His attention was engaged to a far greater degree by the remnants of the Garvey movement in Chicago, whose "totally racialistic outlook... endowed them with a dignity that I had never seen before in Negroes (28).  Though Wright considered the Garveyites naive, he was impressed by the passion with which they spoke of "building their own country, of someday living within the boundaries of a culture of their own making (29).

During a short stint as a Republican ward healer, Wright recorded his observation of the thoroughly corrupt world of Negro politics behind the curtain of a polling booth, scribbling across the face of each fraudulently collected ballot, "I Protest This Fraud."  One senses the connection between  his writing, though anonymous, and his hunger to act within the historical world.

Wright's self-protective "cynicism" was beginning to yield to a sense of commitment.  His initiation to the "real world," the economic and political facts of life, takes form amidst news headlines of the stock market crash and dialogue with his coworkers about police crackdowns, Red picket lines, and the disappearance of jobs.  Forced into a series of menial jobs provided by the local relief agency, Wright began the reintegration of his personality under the pressure of harsh economic necessity:

The day I begged bread from the city officials was the day that showed me I was not alone in my loneliness, society had cast millions of others with me...

I was slowly beginning to comprehend the meaning of my environment; a sense of direction was beginning to emerge from the conditions of my life.  I began to feel something more powerful than I could express (44-5).

Chapter 3 of American Hunger, the conclusion of "The Man Who Went to Chicago" section, introduces (via one of the oldest African American folk forms) this new emotional plateau.  As one of four Black workers in a laboratory for animal experiments at Michael Reese Hospital, Wright exploits the rigid separation of the Black workers and the white hospital staff, indeed the color symbology of the white-tiled hospital itself, as the world's indifferent response to the desire he once held of a career in medicine.  The Black workers, when off-duty as orderlies, were confined to the hospital's underground corridors, which the narrator transforms into the "underground" metaphor that was to appear in "The Man Who Lived Underground" in 1944, and which Ralph Ellison was to explore to great effect in Invisible Man.  The climactic event here is a knife fight in the animal lab between two of Richard's older coworkers, whose mutual hatred has grown out of the feelings of helplessness and frustration engendered by their social status as pariahs.  The melee is a scene of complete chaos, accompanied by a chorus of squeals from the caged animals, with Wright (along with the devocalized dogs upon which he had assisted in various laboratory procedures) gazing in mute horror.  A few minutes later, their passion spent, the four Black workers survey the damage to the room and face the fact that their jobs are on the line.

Much as Bigger Thomas was to galvanize himself after breaking the ultimate racial taboo, the four workers find a makeshift solution to the impossible task of putting the animals back into their proper cages and setting the laboratory in order before the white folks discover what has happened.  along with them, in a modern rendition of the old "Massa John" tales, Wright travels the distance between observation and action.  In the hours and days that follow, the rash act of violence remains undetected by the white world above ground.

The hospital kept us four Negroes, as though we were close kin to the animals we tended, huddled together down in the underground corridors of the hospital-- just as America had kept us locked in the dark underworld of American life for three hundred years-- and we had made our own code of ethics, values, loyalty (59).

Section:  RW's literary development; on Gertrude Stein, et al.; Margaret Walker's take on RW's reading; Proust:  AH (19) Stein, Three Lives; Crane, The Red Badge of Courage; Dostoyevski, The Possessed; details in Fabre

Wright's second published story appeared in the spring of 1931 in the pages of Abbott's Monthly, a Chicago magazine for Blacks.  As literature, "Superstition" was, in the opinion of Kenneth Kinnamon, "an unqualified failure," an unsuccessful attempt at standard romantic magazine fiction.  Of significance to Wright's future development, it did, however, hint at his feelings of estrangement from the "primitive folk," as he portrayed Southern Negroes, and aimed at the creation of an atmosphere of terror, for which he emulated the language of Poe (Kinnamon 48).

Does RW himself mention Poe? 

 Proust's A Remembrance of Things Past awed the young writer and inspired him to dream of re-creating "the vast, delicate, intricate and psychological structure of the Frenchman's epic" within his own environment (24).

Yale (58) includes RW's lecture notes on his preparatory readding in Chicago:  "In Chicago I left off writing and began reading....  Anderson/ Dreiser/ Dostoevsky/ Turgeneff/ Chekhov/ Joyce/ Conrad...  Experiments in words:  Stein, experiments in scenes:  James, experiments in moods:  Conrad...  yet I had nothing to say.  Self-discovery, readding of non-fiction...  then attempts at longer pieces of writing."

Wright's 1945 review of Gertude Stein's Wars I Have Seen (75-6):  "Why do I, a Negro, read the allegedly unreadable books of Stein?"

Wright's acquaintance with local Black literary types (when?  which?) in a discussion group proved unproductive.  Wright recognized in them "the full-fledged Negro Puritan introvert-- the emotionally sick."  The group in question remains vague, possibly a one-shot experience for Wright.  He couldn't be thinking of the South Side Writers Group, from early 1936, with Margaret Walker, et al.

Curiously, Algren (1977) describes Wright himself with the term "Puritan to the core":  no drinking, gambling, his aloof attitude.

Wrap, 1927-1931:

"My attitude of watchful wonder had usurped all other feelings, had become the meaning of my life," he wrote (24).  The period spent observing whites, then, served as a prelude for his immersion in the Black world, the next step forward in his Chicago development.  He worked at the creation of new Black archetypes from his understanding of mental illness, "the tragic toll that the urban environment exacted of the black peasant" (26).

II. DESCENT OF A NATIVE SON

In retrospect, Richard Wright's association with the Communist Party seems natural, almost foreordained.  His first impression of Communists, however, was ambiguous, if not altogether negative.

(AH 81):  Stalin, the National and Colonial Question)

The Black Communists he had encountered in soapbox orations on street corners and in Washington Park failed to elicit his admiration. "Eschewing the traditional gestures of the Negro preacher-- as though they did not possess the strength to develop their own style of Communist preaching," these Black Communists seemed pathetic in their attempt to imitate what they perceived to be the mannerisms of Lenin." (page?)  Predicting, in the manner of the Comintern's "Third Period" sectarianism, the imminent collapse of capitalism, these South Side speakers seemed unable to reach beyond the lexicon of Stalinist jargon to enter into a meaningful discussion of issues with their Black audience, particularly with Wright, whom they immediately identified as an "intellectual."  Moreover, they appeared to take pride in their psychological distance from the black masses, mocking religion openly to the expression of shock and embarrassed laughter by their audience.  "They were acting like irresponsible children," Wright observed:

[They] did not know the complex nature of Negro life, did not know how great was the task to which they had set themselves.  They had rejected the state of things as they were, and that seemed to me to be the first step to embracing a creative attitude toward life... But these men had rejected what was before their eyes without quite knowing what they had rejected and why.

... I felt certain that the Negro could never solve his problem until the deeper problem of American civilization had been faced and solved.  And because the Negro was the most cast-out of all the outcast people of America, I felt that no other group in America could tackle this problem of what American lives meant so well as the Negro could.

... it seemed to me that for the Negro to try to save himself he would have to forget himself and try to save a confused, materialistic nation from its own drift toward self-destruction.  Could the Negro accomplish this miracle?  Could he take up his bed and walk? (40-41)

While the post office job lasted, some of his white coworkers had impressed him with their theoretical knowledge of politics and economics.

Conroy:  Wright joins the JRC Midwest convention in early 1932.  Conroy, of Moberly MO, was the editor of The Anvil.  He met Wright at the 1934 JRC Midwest convention.  (Writers and artists hitchhiking, etc., (p. 34) Wright's early talent, recommendation by post office worker; early CP interference; Wright's persona:  "he sat alone..."

D. Aaron, pp. 39-42

Algren, 1977:  p. 1:  "I never called him Richard"; p. 8: white kids on the South Side, "neckbones"; p. 10:  "I remember sitting with Dick..."

AH, p.20:  " I still had no friends."

 Wright's road to the Communist Party was therefore an indirect one, and he entered upon it primarily to fulfill his needs as a writer.  Idle one Saturday night in 1933, out of curiosity he accepted the invitation of a white friend to visit the Loop headquarters of a left-wing literary organization "in the capacity of an amused spectator."  He mounted a dark stairway to stand before a door lettered The Chicago John Reed Club (the stairway motif is echoes extensively in Lawd Today and Native Son) where he was met by a white man named Grimm in a strange room decorated in "vivid colors depicting colossal figures of workers carrying streaming banners."  Grimm filled Wright's arms with back issues of The Masses and invited him to participate in an editorial meeting of the Club's publication, Left Front:

He took me to an office and introduced me to a Jewish boy who was to become on of the nation's leading painters, to a chap who was to become one of the eminent composers or his day, to a writer who was to create some of the best novels of his generation, to a young Jewish boy who was destined to film the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia.  I was meeting men and women whom I would know for decades to come, who were to form the first sustained relationships in my life. (62)

Staying up in his room all night to read the magazines, Wright was amazed to find in their pages "that there did exist in this world an organized search for the truth of the lives of the oppressed and isolated. The revolutionary words leaped from the printed page and struck me with tremendous force."  The seeds of his literary aim to unite his vision with the ongoing process of society at that moment began to take root, only to lead him to another dilemma when his mother discovered the magazines the next morning.  Unable to understand the meaning of a "lurid May Day cartoon" of a worker carrying a red banner, Wright's mother left him unable to answer her simple challenge, and he began to perceive that, just as the soapbox orators he had observed could not communicate with their Negro audience, the Communist movement "had a program, had an ideal, but they had not yet found a language" (65)

Here, then was something that I could do, reveal, say.  The Communists, I felt, had oversimplified the experience of those whom they sought to lead.  In their effort to recruit masses, they had missed the meaning of the lives of the masses, had conceived of people in too abstract a manner.  I would make voyages, discoveries, explorations with words and try to put some of that meaning back.  I would address my words to two groups:  I would tell Communists how common people felt, and I would tell  common people of the self-sacrifice of Communists who strove for unity among them.

1933:  Wright lecture in September:  "The Literature of the Negro;" John Reed Club at 312 State St.

Almost immediately, however, the narrative is again subsumed by the pall of moral ambiguity with which it began.  Its remainder, following Wright's unprincipled recruitment into the Party a few months later, is a web of cross-purposes marked by episodes of deceit and the re-emergence of the fear motif after this brief hiatus of personal and social integration, as his career as a writer began in earnest in the pages of Left Front, New Masses, and International Literature.  Upon the platform erected for him by the Communist Party, he proceeded to develop the complex   imagery and personal stamp that would distinguish his greatest work.

1934:

a.  Left Front 1 (Jan-Feb) Wright's first published poetry; soon elected to editorial staff, joining Algren, et al.

b.  "Rest for the Weary," "A Red Love Note"

c.   Yale (59) four Richard Wright wallet cards

d.  unpublished poem, "O Gathered Faces!  O Sea of Sorrowful Faces"

e.  spring:  lecture in Indianapolis, "Revolutionary Negro Poetry"

f.  fall:  second national John Reed Club convention, Chicago

g.  November:  Wright lecture, "Langston Hughes," JRC Indianapolis

h.  Horace Cayton, U of C connection (see D. Aaron, Wright's introduction to Drake and Cayton; VHC mss:  "Bibliography of the Negro in Chicago"; n.d. typescript, "Big Boy Leaves Home"

i.  League of American Writers, 1934:  D. Aaron

REVISE

The apprentice labor of Wright's Communist phase began appearing in print in 1934 and 1935, beginning with more-or-less standard "agitprop" material, such as "I Am a Redd Slogan" (International Literature #4, April 1935), a fairly close imitation of "socialist realist" verse being churned out by the yard elsewhere during this period.  Even here, however, we discover some of the root motifs of Wright's finest work, including the dominant framing images do fire and water, developing through a series of subsidiary images which are punctuated in rapid-fire machine gun effect by Red slogans (again, the screaming headlines device used here and elsewhere among Wright's agitprop poetry, would become important ingredients of future novels).

The new red color on Wright's palette is picked up in "Red Leaves of Red Books" (New Masses, April 30, 1935) in a more deliberate attempt at color imagery:

Turn

Red leaves of red books

Turn

In white palms and black palms

Turn

Slowly in the mute hours of the night

 This hands motif. along with color imagery, is achieved with greater success when it is linked to African American folk materials in "I Have Seen Black Hands (New Masses, June 26, 1934).  The "black hands" thread becomes a metaphor for the Black man's journey through life, building image upon image in a progression from infancy through childhood, school, delinquency, war, labor, prison, and finally lynching (probably Wright's first attempt to recreate the scene so central to the bulk of his mature work), and the whole aims at a unification of Black and white hands in struggle against their common oppressor.

The best of Wright's early poetry, however, leads in another direction, that of a more purely folk expression.  "Ah Feels It in Mah Bones" (International Literature #4, April 1935), for example, uses dialect to good effect and, more interestingly, hinges upon his implied rendition of Negro preaching in a sort of B'rer Rabbit parable of style and with.  The revolutionary message of the poem is leavened with folk imagery and humor, as in the final stanza:

Naw, Sir!  Ah ain't a-worryin' no mo' about mah brownskin gal

Done laid my razor dowwn an' told mah spotted boys good-bye!

(An' even mah good-luck piece don't seem to work so well.)

Ah'm's ready-- mah sail's set for whatever wind's in the sky!

An' brother, there's something a-comin'--

Ah feels it in mah bones!

(Note the trope from Frederick Douglass)

Wright's humor is again the keynote of "Hearst Headline Blues" (New Masses, May 12, 1936), wherein the seriousness of the screaming headlines motif is offset by the clever irony of rhythm and rhyme:

"Charge Reds Foment Revolution"

 "Lynch Negro Who Wouldn't Say 'Mister'"

 "Mayor Proposes Tax Solution"

"Weeps When He Learns He Married His Sister"

"Between the World and Me" (Partisan Review, "Between the World and Me (Partisan Review, July-August,1935), probably Wright's best realized attempt at verse and certainly his best-known, introduces a new subtlety in his approach to a scene of violent lynching.   Here the color imagery is completely and unobtrusively absorbed into the description random observation by the narrator of miscellaneous debris left behind after the murder of a Black man, which the narrator's eyes transform into the ritual paraphernalia of the scene of violence that took place the past night.   Here, too, Wright demonstrates for the first time his mastery of a double point of view, beginning with the chilling calm of the daylight scene before the narrator's own eyes and concluding with his imaginative view through "the eye sockets of a stony skull" that had witnessed the indescribable horror of the night before.

1935:  In January Wright calls for an American Writers Congress; letter to CDN, 1/26

New Masses, "Spread Your Sunrise"

May:  Negro Writers Conference, NYC; as delegate, Wright suffers rough treatment (cite AH) summer:  form League of American Writers; praise for Wright's poetry in the left press

Illinois Federal Writers Project

 

December:  Yale:  "Almos' a Man" scribbled at meetings on verso sides of leaflets.

 

late in the year, Wright wins essay contest sponsored by New Talent magazine

 

December 31:  Writers' Group lecture-recitation

 

In the end, however, the synthesis at which Wright aimed, of putting the flesh of Black reality on the bones of Marxist theory, was not to be satisfied through the medium of verse, for he intended to probe much deeper into the Black psyche than this sort of poetry permitted.  In American Hunger this stage of his life was dominated by the moral   ambiguity born of mutual distrust between Wright and his comrades, particularly his Black comrades, who reacted to Wright, "the intellectual," with a series of postures ranging from ridicule to threats of violence.  At this    point, too, the narrator's voice of experience begins to dominate, even to overwhelm, the time and space of the narrative, producing the impression of a disunified, split voice in tandem with the emotional disintegration that claims the narrator at its end.

 

Evaluate the loss of Wright as a modern poet.  future Haiku.  poetic quality of his prose; Margaret Walker, p.66.

Wright's first public reportage:  1935 'JOE Louis Uncovers Dynamite" in New Masses

1936:

a.  unpublished "Repeating a Modest Proposal" for June Race magazine

b.  Langston Hughes letter to Wright, July (Yale, 59) "I read your piece..."

c.  unpublished Wright preface to Uncle Tom's Children  "I am not responsible (Yale, 61)

d.  November:  Story rejects "Almos' a Man"

e.  Wright writes "Down by the Riverside," "Song," "Fire and Cloud" (Yale, 61)

f.  March:  Wright organizing National Negro Congress chapter in Urbana

g.  American Negro Press reports Wright revising a novel

h.  "Big Boy Leaves Home" published, late 1936

1937:

a.  December:  UTC wins WPA contest, $500 award

b.  August:  "Silt" published, New Masses

c.  late 1937:  New Challenge (NYC)

d.  "Ethics of Living Jim Crow," American Stuff, attacked by right-wing press v. WPA

e.  George C. Hall Library Notes:  Wright in New Caravan

f.  Wright's "warning" to Second American Writers Conference, in re "labor work"

g.  UTC attracts favorable notices from Wilfred Bain, Steven Arthur B. Spingarn, George S. Schuyler, Alain Locke

h.  May 28:  Wright leaves Chicago for NYC

i.  UTC published in 1938

Put the following against the psychological theses advanced by D. Aaron and Margaret Walker:

Wright never really understood the context of his dilemma, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist Comintern, twisting and turning its way through the "Third Period" and the "People's Front," piling defeat upon defeat in China, Germany, and Spain, and beyond through the Stalin-Hitler nonaggression pact and the German invasion of the Soviet Union.  During the same period, the American Communist movement consequently took wide zigzags on the "Negro Question" that, for reasons ascribed at the time by Wright to the immaturity of the American character, sacrificed organizations, publications, and young writers such as himself to whatever new political current was in the wind from the Kremlin.  Indeed, the nature of Wright's relationship to the Communist Party in time became a more-or-less direct exchange of Wright's growing fame as a writer for the left-wing audience the Party's publications could guarantee him.

Wright's personal crisis reflected Black America's leadership dilemma.

South Side Writers Group, 1936:  See M. Walker

National Negro Congress was founded February,1936

In his earlier days as a Communist, Wright's response to the hostility of his comrades was to try to prove his worth to the cause by means of his art.  Along with his verse, he conceived the grand plan of a series of biographical sketches of Black Communists, who, like himself , had fled the violence and degradation of the South and found a new reason for living in the North.  While this project never reached fruition, succumbing to the paranoid suspicions of his comrades, the genesis of Wright's fine Chicago short stories can be traced to the series of interviews he undertook on behalf of his initial idea.  "Big Boy Leaves Home," first published in the anthology The New Caravan in 1936, grew out of the story of Ross, one of Wright's subjects (who significantly becomes Wright's proxy in his early Party trial as "class traitor" later on in the present narrative.  The unmistakable symbology of the trial scene (118ff) recalling vividly that in the "Fate" section of Native Son, brings together all of the narrative's submerged ambiguities and enshrines them in the irony of an all-Negro lynching ritual, with Ross cast as the willing participant.

James W. Ford, Harry Haywood, William Patterson, Been Davis

George Breitman:  more to the quarrel than Wright admits

Ross's real name?  Addison Gayle?

Margaret Walker commentary on Wright's early prose pieces:

(1971 pp) 49ff:  Wright's literary idols; 53:  on Proust; South Side Writers Group; New Challenge; 55:  Wright's squalid apartment (January,1937); stealing library books episode; recreation of the Negro in Wright's fiction; 60:  Wright's persona.

At the time this story was written, and the following four, which went on to comprise Wright's first published book, Uncle Tom's Children, the author was living at 3743 Indiana Avenue and sharing his manuscripts with other Black writers at the Abraham Lincoln Center on Oakwood Boulevard.

"Tarbaby's Dawn": (list variants) Yale list 322-page typescript, b an early working draft.  Walker observes portions used in other Wright novels far into the future.

SECTION:  Lawd Today, Yale has over 119 pp., titled "Cesspool," ca. 1936.

SECTION:  Uncle Tom's Children

It comes as no surprise, then, that "Big Boy Leaves Home" takes as its point of departure the mythic quality of African American tradition, rather than the formulaic conventions of "Red" socialist realism.  Here again Wright makes use of the subjective/ objective double point of view in his narration.  He shows himself a master of modern literature's stream-of-consciousness technique and exhibits a flawless control of voice.  The fire/water imagery from his early verse emerges as a potent emotional force, countering and overtaking the pastoral strain of the South with which the tale begins.  All manner of folk expression, from "playing the dozens" to the image of the northbound train, is manifest here, not as a pleasant topic for observation or "rational" discourse, but as literary bullets reminiscent of the effect Wright was trying to achieve in his agitprop verse.  If ever a Marxist writer discovered the "unity of theory and practice," Wright found it in the short fiction of his Chicago years.

In their collected form, one story follows another in a deliberate pattern suggesting the gropings of Black America on its road to liberation.  In "Down by the Riverside," the Big Boy protagonist becomes Mann, saddled with crushing family responsibilities and surrounded by a flood which drowns his familiar world in its deluge of invisibility and moral uncertainty.  While Big Boy's response to white violence is to remain hidden and seize the opportunity to escape, Mann remains to face his fate, heroically and unintentionally meeting his doom as the passage of time cuts off his chance to flee.

Time, in the shape of a clock employed by a white salesman in his seduction of a Black farmer's wife, forms an important motif in the following story, "Long Black Song."  The story's protagonist, her husband Silas, seen exclusively from the woman's point of view, realizes with anguish the futility of his life and resolves to die meaninglessly at the hands of white men, rather than forsake his dignity.

Walker:  Wright's misogyny.  Wright and women, Black and white.  1940, DhimaMeadman.  1941, Ellen Poplar (NYC Jewish woman); 1942, b. Julia

report Wright briefly engaged to N princess early on in NYC?

In "Fire and Cloud," the protagonist Dan Taylor (at last, the character is called by his full name) solves his   individual dilemma as a Black minister in a time of community crisis by a turn to collectove action with his people.

Here and in "Bright and Morning Star," which appeared in the second, expanded edition of Uncle Tom's Children, Communists appear to introduce the solution of mass action; significantly. they are not very convincing as characters.

Native Son, "Fate"

As Aaron observes, one of the most significant features of American Hunger is that it misleads us into thinking Wright left the CP in 1937.

Margaret Walker (1971) pp. 51-2:  Wright's Marxist reading

The question of Wright's ideology, in fact, is interesting and instructive.  In American Hunger his Marxism is chiefly revealed in lengthy digressions that reflect more his disillusionment with the Communist Party than his political acumen.

Nevertheless, at their most refined, Wright's discourses on his own aims and the territory open to African American, his trenchant critiques of both the shallow "Marxism" espoused in Party circles and the straggling remnants of the Harlem movement, bear a careful re-reading today, nearly a century later.

SECTION:  ESSAYS

"The Ethics of Living Jim Crow"

"Blueprint for Negro Writing," (New Challenge, Fall, 1937), one of the last pieces he wrote in Chicago, represents probably his most mature consideration of the subject; at the same time, the essay reveals Wright's inability to reconcile what he perceived to be the extremes of Marxism and Black nationalism.

pp. 40 on tackling nationalism v. Marxism conundrum; D. Aaron, pp. 43-6, M. Walker (1971), pp. 56ff; Wright's correspondence with Walker and visits to Chicago (hung out also with Conroy and Algren); Walker on the Nixon "Brick Slayer," as a source for Native Son, p. 63.

By the time he left Chicago for New York, literary fame, and economic self-sufficiency, there is no doubt that this reconciliation between Black and Red had become his main concern.  The much-discussed but little understood conclusion to Native Son leaves no doubt that the book was written for the audience of the Communist Party members as a last-ditch attempt to make them understand the depth of suffering endured by the Black man in America.  The anomaly of Wright's position in the Communist Party is not explained by glib pronouncements that he was "not a politician," or, still worse, by calling him a naive dupe.

Walker suggests a mother/ son replication, deep misogyny, a factor.  Summation of Wright's philosophy of evil human nature, persona, and evaluation, 663ff.

Blyden Jackson (300) "Gilbert and Sullivan derangement of the CP?

No member of the American Communist movement was more aware than he of the difference between Marxism, always in the making, and the grotesque, static caricature the Communist Party made of it.  Wright remained in the ranks of the Party because he had little choice.  Other than leaving America (which he eventually did, in 1945) where was he to go?  One feels the weight of Wright's dilemma in the valediction bestowed on the eve of his departure, in the pages of American Hunger:

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity.  It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.  Am I damning my native land?  No; for I, too, share these faults of character!  And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs (AH, 13-14)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aaron, Daniel.  "Richard Wright and the Communist Party," in Ray, David and R. M.

Farnsworth, eds., Richard Wright, Ann Arbor:  U of Michigan Press, 1973, pp. 35-46. 

Alexander, Margaret Walker.  Richard Wright:  Daemonic Genius, New York:  Warner Books, 

1988.

Algren, Nelson.  ------.  "He Never Thanked Us for the Neckbones."  May 22, 1977, sec. 7, pp. 1, 8.

--------.  "Remembering Richard Wright," Nation, Jan. 28, 1961, p.85.

Bone, Robert A.  The Negro Novel in America, New Haven:  Yale, 1958.

Conroy, Jack.  Contribution to New Letters 38 (winter 1971), pp. 33-36.

--------.  "From Richard Wright, a Powerful Sequel," Chicago Daily News Panorama, May 21-22, 

1977, pp. 6, 10.

Crossman, Richard, ed. The God That Failed, New York:  Harper, 1963.

Fabre, Michel.  "The Richard Wright Archive:  The Catalogue of an Exhibition," Yale University 

Library Gazette 53 (Oct. 1978), pp. 57-78.

Gayle, Addison.  Richard Wright:  Ordeal of a Native Son, Garden City NY:  Anchor/ Doubleday, 

1980.

Jackson, Blyden.  "Richard Wright:  Black Boy from the Black Belt and Urban Ghettos," CLA 

Journal 12 (June 1969), pp. 282-309.

Kinnamon, Keneth.  The Emergence of Richard Wright, Urbana IL:  U of Illinois Press, 1972.

Stepto, Robert.  From Behind the Veil, Urbana IL:  U of Illinois Press, 1979.

Wright, Richard.   "Ah Feels It in My Bones," International Literature #4, April 1935, p. 80.

----------.  American Hunger, New York:  Harper, 1977.

----------.  "Between the World and Me," Partisan Review, July-August, 1935, p. 18.

 ---------.  "Bright and Morning Star," New Masses, May 10,1938.

----------.  "Blueprint for Negro Writing," in Ellen and Michael Fabre, eds.,  The Richard Wright Reader, New York:  Harper, 1978, pp. 36-49.

----------.  Eight Men, Cleveland:  World, 1961.

----------.  "Hearst Headline Blues," New Masses, May 12, 1936, p. 14.

----------.  "I Am a Red Slogan," International Literature #4, April 1935, p. 35.

----------.  "I Have Seen Black Hands," New Masses, June 26, 1934, p.16.

 ----------.  "I Tried to Be a Communist," Atlantic Monthly, August 1944.

----------.  "Introduction" to Drake, St. Clair and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis, New York:  Harcourt, 1945, pp. xvii-xxxiv.

----------.  Lawd Today, New York:  Walker, 1963.  Excerpted in Wright, Ellen and Michael Fabre, eds., The Richard Wright Reader, New York:  Harper, 1978, pp. 346-415,

----------.  Native Son, New York:  Harper, 1940.

----------.  "Red Leaves of Red Books," New Masses, April 30, 1935, p. 6.

----------.  Twelve Million Black Voices, New York:  Viking, 1941.

----------.  Uncle Tom's Children, New York:  Harper, 1938.

----------.  "Wars I Have Seen," review.  Wright, Ellen and Michael Fabre, eds., The Richard Wright Reader, New York:  Harper, 1978, pp. 74-78.

 

 

 

 

 

  

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