Monday, Feb. 5, 1962
University Daily Kansan
Page 3
A Look at Richard Wright and His Work
{Excerpted from the article "Home Is Where the Heart Is" by Saunders Redding in the Dec. 11, 1961. New Leader, Magazine.)
The dedication of Richard Wright's posthumous book. "Eight Men" (World, 224 pp., $3.95), to three French friends "whose kindness has made me feel at home in an alien land" is an irony the more poignant because Wright did not intend it.
Wright the novelist was not at home in France. He never absorbed, nor ever was absorbed in, the strange environment, the Gallic atmosphere. He saw the mise en scene, but did not wholly comprehend it, nor did he have the writer's sense of being in it. France was for him what it had been for Joyce: a friendly lodging and a refuge, a comfortable convenience, a place to hang his hat — but not a home.
Wright never wrote about France. He could not. His passions were not there; they were involved elsewhere.
HIS HEART'S HOME and his mind's tether was in America. It it not the America of the moving pictures, nor of Thomas Wolfe, John P Marquand and John O'Hara's novels, nor of the histories of Allen Nevins and C. J. H. Hayes. It is the America that only Negroes know: a ghetto of the soul, a boundary of the mind, a confine of the heart. And it was not unusual that Wright should seek escape from it and try to reject it. Other Negro writers have done so, and some are still doing it.
There are various ways to escape. Some pretend there is no such America. Some, like Jean Toomer, fair enough to pass, go into the white race. Countee Cullen and William Braithwaite, both poets, turned to fantasy. Some—William Derby, William Gardner Smith, Chester Himes and James Baldwin—like Wright, expatriate themselves in Italy, Switzerland, Spain or France. But no matter how it is done, escape is a compulsive act of self-abnegation, and the moment the Negro
writer begins to do it he begins to flag as a creative artist. He turns precious and "arty"; honesty deserts him; dedication wilts; passion chills.
America has not yet changed to the extent that a Negro writer can deny, effectively suppress or truly escape what Wright himself defined as the "inevitable race consciousness which three hundred years of Jim Crow living has burned into the Negro's heart." He cannot escape the supra-consciousness of what living in America has made him. He can try, as Wright tried, and, failing of Wright's reserve of strength, the effort will reduce him to fatality or to shadow, while the accomplishment — improbable — would kill him altogether.
Why try to escape? I wish the answer were as simple, as readily explicable and as concrete as it is true. One tries because the suprconsciousness of being Negro in America is a perversion of being a man, of being human. It cripples what one is born to be—equisouled with other men. It is a cruel, forced alienation from the community of man, a crime against the natural self.
If the pathos of man is that he yearns to be whole, hungers for fulfillment and strives for a sense of community with others, it is the particular tragedy of the Negro in America that success (even as an artist) does not gratify the yearning, great fame does not feed the hunger and the wealth of Croesus does not abate the struggle to be free, whole and naturally absorbed in the cultural oneness of his native land. "The fact of separation from the culture of his native land." Wright wrote a few years back, "has...sunk into the Negro's heart." The Negro loves his land, but that land rejects him." He is always apart. He is, God help him, always alone. So he seeks a country where he will not be alone. But all such countries are "alen" and only America is home. "I know America"—these are Wright's words—"I know what a great nation and people America
Worth Repeating
... The trick is not simply to match the college and the student a dull, gray, compatible marriage. There is a lot to be said for conflict, polarity, opposition. Out of rugged encounter comes intellectual and moral muscle. A certain kind of rural boy or girl may well profit from a sophisticated urban college. And a New York City provincial can achieve undreamed of breakthroughs by living in a small town or rural school.-David Boroff
The non-conformist sees what is right and has the courage to speak up. Then he must realize he has to take the consequences. Edwin Wilson
The toughest day in our lives comes when we leave the womb of family, friends and school and venture forth to live alone. The brave ones never turn back.—Thomas Fox
could be, but it won't be until there is only one American, regardless of his color..."
THIS IS THE knowledge his creative passions fed on. It is bitter food, and so his books are bitter; but it sustained his great honesty and integrity as a writer. Insofar as he used this knowledge to appeal to the cognitive side of man's being, as he did in "Twelve Million Black Voices," certain sections of "White Man, Listen!" and in various essays, he followed in the tradition of more provincial Negro writers, whose effort was to destroy the prevailing racial stereotypes...
Violence and brutal physical degradation were still a part of the new reality, but no longer all. Cowardice, self-abasement and unmitigated suffering now fail to highlight the drama and the big dramatic scenes.
living sun would soon lay down its golden laws to loosen the locked regions of his heart and cast the shadow of his dream athwart the stretches of time."
IT IS NO WONDER, then, that the best stories in "Eight Men" were written before 1946. Fishbelly Tucker in Wright's latest novel, "The Long Dream," is Big Boy of one of the earliest stories, and Big Boy grew up to be Bigger Thomas in "Native Son." But "The Long Dream" is less than a shadow of the realities of the decade past and the one just begun. It is simply not true. It is honest, but only to the memory of things past, to passions spent, to moods gone vapid, and sometimes expressed in vaporous language:
"He peered out of his window and saw vast, wheeling populations of ruled stars swarming in the convened congresses of the skies anchored amidst nations of space and he prayed wordlessly that a bright, bursting tyrant of
Wright had forgotten the tough American idiom. He had been gone from home too long. And perhaps in a subliminal, uneasy way he knew this. The rootlessness, which he once boasted did not perturb him, made him restless. He spared himself thin. He could not settle down to the writing of novels, which, when he was at his best, was the thing he could do superbly. ...He did everything but the one thing that would make the living, anguished substance of his best books flow again. He did not go home.
But Wright's art suffered of late. The limitations of mood, the restricted inventiveness and the congeneric characterizations which defined his earlier work became more evident as they became less projective of the small, new realities and the big, new Weltansicht of the only place and people that could ever be Wright's home. Angry scorn, alternating with bleak despair, was no longer enough.
But now he is at rest, and he has earned it; has earned, too, the right to be judged by his best. Broadly defined, that best was in the moral stance from which he never wavered, and in his courage and enduring power as a writer. And, for those who knew Dick Wright as a friend, it was in his kindness as a man.