Wright Notes

7/30/2019 Wright Notes

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Well, this is what happened to Richard Wright. This is pretty much exactly what happened to

Richard Wright in 1944. So he had publishedNative Son in 1940 to great acclaim, a very

successful novel. In 1944, he completedBlack Boy, then calledAmerican Hunger, and he hadplaced it with Harper and Brothers Publishing Company in New York, and they were very happy

with it. It had a first part called Southern Night and a second part called The Horror and the

Glory. Southern Night was about his experience growing up in Mississippi. So he was born in1908 in Mississippi, and in 1927--I think its '27; let me get my date right--in 1927 he moved toChicago, moved north. And in the 1940s he moved to Paris, and he died there in 1960. So his

was a progression out of a very poor, Southern childhood, from a black family led by a single

mother, to the circles in which Gertrude Stein moved in Paris. So this is a long trajectory.

Well,Black Boy,orAmerican Hunger,as it was then called, covered the part in Mississippi, and

then the beginnings of his life in Chicago. Now the part about his life in Chicago was the part

that was finally cut from the novel--Im going to keep doing this, call it the novel versus theautobiography, and Ill explain why I make that mistake a little later--it was cut from the

autobiography. Now he had this in page proofs with Harper and Brothers, and Harper and

Brothers sent the page proofs out to various writers for blurbs and also sent it to the Book of theMonth Club Editorial Board. The Book of the Month Club was a mail-order book club that

started in 1926, and it became an incredibly powerful engine for selling books, just as Oprahs

Book Club is today. In 1926, it had about 4700 members. Just three years later it had 110,000

members: 110,000 subscribers in 1929. By the '40s and '50s, it was incredibly powerful. So whatwe have is this marketing juggernaut getting interested in Wrights autobiography. So they take

it up, and the board decides that they only like the Southern Night part. They dont want any of

the part of the story of his life in Chicago, and thats what he finally agrees to.

[Handout]

My idea is this. You ask a question all of your many readers have asked themselves about you

with an eagerness full of anxious hope. What was it that always made me feel that way? What

was it that made me conscious of possibilities? From where had I caught a sense of freedom?

And if youve read the ending in the notes, youll remember those passages where he asks that

question. And his answer in that published version is, From books. But this is what she is

thinking:

This is quite striking. Imagine that you are Richard Wright, and youve grown up with the life

that he describes in this book. Now youve read some of it. And youre being asked to suggest in

the closing pages of the autobiography--which is closing where you did not want it to close, inthe middle of your book, not at the end of your book--youre being asked to essentially thank the

good, liberal white people who have been working on behalf of the end of racial discrimination.

Well, Wright finds this an extremely difficult request to respond to. And you can track it here in

his response. Im going to read from here so I can actually see it. Your more general-- He says,

Okay. Ill respond to those sentence-level things.


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And I take that to be the paragraph where he talks about what fiction has done for him

specifically. Canfield Fisher is not satisfied with this. She comes back at the problem. This is at

the bottom of the letter:

Now keep in mind this is 1944. This is the summer of 1944. America is just joining the war

effort in Europe. This is a fight against fascism. Thats the way that it was presented to theAmerican public: a fight against Nazi Germany. And in later letters in this series between her

and Richard, and also in the review (the little sort of summary that she wrote up for the Book of

the Month Club newsletter), she invokes the Nazis specifically as a comparison to the kind of

oppression that Richard was trying to escape in the South. So this is caught up in a moment of

patriotism where American freedom is being held up very much as the ideal, that thing that we

fight for when we go to Europe to fight. And so to have Richard present this picture of America

that doesnt ring the changes of that patriotism comes to be a problem in her mind. Now

whenBlack Boy was published there was a war bond advertisement on the back cover of the

book. It really was just, even as a physical object, all bound up with the politics of its moment.

[Genre]

I think we can make the mistake, thinking about autobiography, that its somehow not literary.

But in fact its very literary, andpart of what makes it literary is the fact that you have to choose

what scenes go into that narrative. You cant just write every single thing that happened in your

life. You have to choose. Well, critics took it fairly straightforwardly as the account of a life and

in that sense, taking it that way, some of them were a little disappointed with what they held in

their hands. For one thing, it seemed exaggerated to some people. So the first scene, as we willdiscover inBlack Boy, is when Richard, young Richard--I think he was 6--burns down the family

house playing with matches underneath the curtains, and his mother finds him where he has

hidden under the burning house and flogs him until he is unconscious, and hes sick for a good,

long time after that. Okay. Critics were like I dont think so. That doesnt seem right. A mother

flog[ging] her son until hes unconscious didnt seem too credible. As time went on there were

other kinds of complaints, these about accuracy. So, for instance, his mother in the book is

represented as being uneducated. Well, in fact she was a schoolteacher. Now there is a difference

between scholars on how long she was a schoolteacher. Some say she was a sort of long-term

successful schoolteacher. Others said, Well, she only taught school for a couple of months. So

this was not--didnt seem to be--accurate.

Then there was another scene in the autobiography, where Richard, who is the valedictorian of

his high school class, writes his valedictory speech, gives it as required to the principal

beforehand, the principal demands certain kinds of changes, and Richard refuses. Well,

apparently Richard in real life did not refuse to make those changes. And imagine, in a book that

then undergoes this publishing history that I have described, this is kind of a symbolic scene.


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This is a scene of whether you as a writer compromise yourself in the face of authority that

resists what you want to say. So in the book its a very important scene. Its the moment when

Richard really finds his voice and it gives him the strength eventually to leave the South. But in

real life apparently he did cave.

Then there came to be questions about whether the scenes, the stories in the book, actually did

happen to him. So there is this story about his Uncle Hoskins who takes his horse and cart with

Richard in the back and drives it into the middle of the Mississippi River as a kind of practical

joke on Richard. Well, apparently this is not something that happened to Richard Wright. This is

something that happened to Ralph Ellison. Where these stories come from began to be a

problem. So what is autobiography? What is this genre that Wright is working with? It raised

these kinds of questions on the one hand. But then there was another kind of question, and that

was coming from the other side. This is what William Faulkner wrote to Wright upon

readingBlack Boy. He said:

The good, lasting stuff comes out of ones individual imagination, and sensitivity to, and

comprehension of, the sufferings of Everyman--Any Man--not out of the memory of ones own

grief. I hope you will keep on saying it, but I hope you will say it as an artist, as inNative Son.

So Faulkners objection is on the other side. Its not fictional enough. To write about your life

and to pretend that youre communicating the memory of what happened to you--your grief, your

private grief--doesnt contain that universalizing move that fiction, by its very essence, contains.

And you see that (you can remember back to that conception of literature we see in the

advertisement forUlysses) its about everyman, that greatness in literature comes from its ability

to speak to some archetypal Everyman, Any Man, and Faulkner capitalizes those words in his

letter as if they really are types.

Well, Wright himself described that difficulty of writing his autobiography, and these are the

terms he used:

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. If you try it, you will find that at times sweat will break upon

you. You will find that, even if you succeed in discounting the attitudes of others to you and yourlife, you must wrestle with yourself most of all, fight with yourself, for there will surge up in you

a strong desire to alter facts, to dress up your feelings. Youll find that there are many things you

dont want to admit about yourself and others. As your record shapes itself an awed wonder

haunts you, and yet there is no more exciting an adventure than trying to be honest in this way.The clean, strong feeling that sweeps you when youve done it makes you know that.

And even though in that little passage he suggests that its a struggle to be truthful, a struggle to

be accurate, a struggle not to dress up your feelings with some sort of embellishment, he at other

times says that, well, some of the stories did come from other people, some of the stories he

included did come from other peoples experiences, not from his own life, and that this is

allowed and allowable because what he aimed to do was produce a generic life of a black boy


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living in the South. And from the titles we know he considered for this book, none of them make

that claim The Life of Richard Wright. None of them say that. Its alwaysBlack

Boy, American Hunger. These are not person- specific. These implicitly make a claim to the

generality--at the national scale, or in the racial sense--the representativeness of this life. And,

indeed, what more powerful testimony to the power of narration is there, the power of a story, to

say that you heard a story and it became as if part of your experience, that you heard Ralph

Ellison tell that story, and somehow you began to live it yourself?

First Scene,

I was lost in a fog of fear. A doctor was called--I was afterwards told--and he ordered that I be

kept abed, that I be kept quiet, that my very life depended upon it. My body seemed on fire and I

could not sleep. Packs of ice were put on my forehead to keep down the fever. Whenever I triedto sleep I would see huge, wobbly, white bags, like the full udders of cows, suspended from the

ceiling above me. Later, as I grew worse, I could see the bags in the daytime with my eyes open

and I was gripped by the fear that they were going to fall and drench me with some horribleliquid. Day and night I begged my mother and father to take the bags away, pointing to them,

shaking with terror because no one saw them but me. Exhaustion would make me drift toward

sleep and then I would scream until I was wide awake again. I was afraid to sleep. Time finallybore me away from the dangerous bags and I got well. But for a long time I was chastened

whenever I remembered that my mother had come close to killing me.

followed by catalogues:

Each event spoke with a cryptic tone, and the moments of living slowly revealed their coded

meanings. There was the wonder I felt when I saw a brace of mountainlike, spotted, black-and-

white horses clopping down a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay. There was the delightI caught in seeing long straight rows of red and green vegetables stretching away in the sun to the

bright horizon. There was the faint, cool kiss of sensuality when dew came to my cheeks and

shins as I ran down the wet green garden paths in the early morning. There was the vague senseof the infinite as I looked down upon the yellow, dreaming waters of the Mississippi from the

verdant bluffs of Natchez.

Agency/Powerlesness

The sense of powerlessness, the most profound sense of powerlessness, suggested already by the

first episode where his mother almost takes back the life she gave him, is rooted in the family.And we get such a dramatic vision of that in the next episode that follows, the episode of the

kitten. So for those of you who havent read, Richards father works nights and sleeps during the

day, and during the day the children therefore have to be very quiet. There is a cat outside the

apartment building that starts to meow and the boys are interested in it. The father yells at them,

says, Make that cat shut up, and they cant. He says, Make it shut up. I dont care. Kill it if

you have to. Kill that cat. Richard at this point already hates his father. His fatherwill abandon


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the family quite soon after this episode. For Richard, he is mostly this kind of presence: a

cavailing, angry, abusive presence. His resentment over his powerlessness within the family

seethes in this moment, and he thinks of a way to get back at his father. Ill take his words

literally; I will kill the cat, he thinks, and so he does. He hangs the cat. Richards mother finds

out when his brother tells on him, and the father cannot punish him. He has taken the fathers

words literally when they were not meant literally, but in doing so--in relying on his fathers

words, in a sense, to protect him, even as he subverts them--he escapes the punishment that

would otherwise so naturally and habitually follow.

So Richards first exertion of agency in this book is through the agency of words, in this case in

asserting an interpretation of the words at odds with their intended meaning. Its as if Richard

takes those words, and he makes them his own, takes them from his father and gains a different

kind of strength from them, a strength he can then use to get back at his father. This is the first

instance in which Richard will do what he later describes Mencken doing, using words as

weapons. His discovery of Mencken using words as weapons in a political sense is a very

powerful moment for him in his intellectual development. In this case its a much more visceral

kind of development. Its the understanding that he can make things happen in the world; he can

defend himself against his fathers punishment through the use of words. But I want to note that

his mother takes a different approach. If his father resigns himself to Richards subterfuge, his

mother does not, and this is on page 12. He says:

So there is this sense in which the story of a developing writer is the story of someone learning--

even before they learn how to control language fully--that language has these capacities. Well,

there is another element, though, to the kind of language that Richard is describing learning, and

that is the racial element. He is learning a racialized language. And here I want to look at page--

lets see--page 79, actually first on 47, just in passing quickly. You know what? Im looking at

my watch. We dont have time. Well go straight to 79. On page 79 we get an account of a

conversation between Richard and his friends and its annotated with interpretative asides. So

Im going to start in the middle of this:

The crowd laughs long and loud. [This is in the middle of the page.] Man, them white folksoughta catch you and send you to a zoo and keep you for the next war! Throwing the subject in

to a wider field. Then when that fighting starts, they oughta feed you on buttermilk and black-

eyed peas and let you break wind! The subject is accepted and extended. Youd win the war

with a new kind of poison gas! A shouted climax. There is high laughter that simmers downslowly. Maybe poison gas is something good to have. The subject of white folks is

associationally swept into the orbit of talk. Yeah, if they have a race riot round here, Im gonna

kill all the white folks with my poison. Bitter pride. Gleeful laughter. Then silence, each waitingfor the other to contribute something. Them white folks sure scared of us, though. Sober

statement of an old problem.

What we see here is a doubled voice. This is a moment when the narrative voice begins to split in

a very conscious way. So what you have is the account of Richard and his friends talking in the


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past, and you have the present narrators parsing of how this language relates to topics that

impinge upon their very context, the racial realities of the South. So what you see here is a

narrator who has learned to do that parsing. Some of these terms that he uses are literary--climax,

the creation of suspense--so hes tracking this as if it were the development of a narrative. But

hes also suggesting how humor is used to broach topics that are impossible to talk about in more

direct ways, or that feel dangerous to these boys to approach in more direct ways.

But there is a second kind of development, and this gets to that second childhood he invokes that

happens to him when he goes to Chicago. There is a social analysis that he begins to be able to

advance partly due to his reading in Marxism, in sociology. Wright was very interested in the

sociology of the 1930s and 40s. He read a lot in that vein. He was very interested in economics,

and he wanted to understand how the social structures of capitalism and the economic structures

of capitalism impinged upon the way personalities were formed. And thats why hes interested

in the emotions of these waitresses. And in fact the question of emotion bears directly on his

sense of what books are for. There is a remarkable moment on page 280 where he talks about his

aspiration as a writer. And this is remarkable for how different it is from someone like Nabokov

or John Barth or many of our other writers on the syllabus:

If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and beconscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative. I

strove to master words, to make them disappear, to make them important by making them new,

to make them melt into a rising spiral of emotional stimuli, each greater than the other, each

feeding and reinforcing the other, and all ending in an emotional climax that would drench thereader with the sense of a new world. That was the single aim of my living.

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