Caine's Blog: 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.