Getting Richard right

RICHARD WRIGHT: HE LIFE AND TIMES By Hazel Rowley(Henry Holt, $35) It is easy at this distant remove, to forget the genius of Black self-invention. In these days of multiplatinum selling musicians and Pulitzer prize-winning authors, we scarcely recognize the immense artistic will it took for that first generation of "Black and unknown bards" to create themselves and lay the broad foundation for Black art and literature in America. In the abject depths of the early 20th century, it required Herculean effort to be simply Black and literate; to be a Black literati was a superlative accomplishment. Robert Park, the renowned sociologist and ghostwriter to Booker T. Washington, was supremely conscious of this fact. Upon first making the acquaintance of Richard Wright (1908-- 1960), the scholar asked bluntly, "How in hell did you happen?"

Hazel Rowley's new biography, Richard Wright: The Life and Times, is an excellent chronicle of how the first major African American novelist "happened." Fortified by meticulous research and clear, lucid prose, the volume is a detailed and compelling reconstruction of Wright's life from the backwater shanties of Mississippi, where he was born, to the bohemian streets of Paris, where he died a half-century later.

Born in 1908 to Nathan and Ella Wright - both of whose parents had been slaves - his childhood was a metaphor for the trials of Black people in the nadir of post-Reconstruction America. Inheriting the poverty that was the lot of Black Mississippi, Nathan Wright struggled vainly to improve his family's fortunes. When Richard was 5 years old, Nathan simply gave up and abandoned the family. After his exit, poverty forced Ella Wright to relinquish custody of Richard and his younger brother, Leon, to a state home. When Ella suffered an incapacitating stroke at age 35, the family moved in with Wright's maternal grandmother, an ascetic Christian who believed novels were the work of the devil.

By any measure, Wright was an incorrigible young man. In that era in Mississippi, he was the kind of youth that seemed to have a rope with his name on it waiting for him. He refused even the pretense of religion, drew a knife on a relative attempting to discipline him and nursed a simmering resentment for the white supremacist "customs" of his home state. His saving grace was the written word.

Wright's first exposure to secular literature came from a border in his grandmother's home. The young woman gave him access to novels that immediately captivated the adolescent Wright (his grandmother sent the young woman packing for committing such a grave offense). Nevertheless, Wright's incessant "scribbling" and voracious reading became defining characteristics, venues into which he could channel his rebellious energy.

It was not until years later, after the family had joined the mass of Mississippi Negroes making the migration to Chicago, that Wright found a consistent outlet for his literary aspirations. The John Reed club was the first literary forum for Wright - and, importantly, the avenue through which he became exposed to the radical politics that would be central to his life, both artistically and socially, for the next decade.

Named after the American journalist who traveled revolutionary Russia, the clubs were a virtual training ground for Communist aesthetes. It was in the John Reed workshops that Wright began working on a series of short stories that would comprise his first collection, Uncle Tom's Children (1938).

It was in the interracial Communist circles of Chicago that Wright began dating white women. As a young man in Mississippi, Wright had known Black men who were castrated and murdered for the most innocuous exchanges with white women; among the Communists, interracial relationships were not only tolerated, but encouraged.

Moreover, as Rowley establishes, Wright's relationship to Black women was complex and multilayered. His published fiction displays a deep ambivalence toward Black females, yet Wright spent years laboring on a manuscript that would detail the particular horrors visited upon "the women of the race." Wright proposed to two Black women before his first marriage to Dhimah Rose Meidman, a Jewish dancer. The union was a disaster (her son uncharitably described her as a "sophisticated airhead") and dissolved within six months.

In the wake of his failed marriage, Wright turned his attentions to his first novel. Native Son was written during Wright's daily sojourns to Brooklyn's Fort Greene Park. In creating Bigger Thomas, Wright had violated every sacred literary creed of the preceding generation of African American writers. The arts and letters were, the theory held, a medium to present the best visage of the race possible; they were expected to function as a type of aesthetic public relations project. To many, Black and white, Bigger was an urban nightmare; he was the personification of the worst stereotypes of the race. But to others, he was an unprecedented indictment of American racism and a threat issued in bold print.

After the novel's publication, the author found himself pilloried and praised, condemned and congratulated. In either case, he had transcended poverty, obscurity and his grandmother's myopic religious vision to, almost literally, create himself as an acclaimed, financially mobile man of letters. Shortly after the publication of Native Son, he married Ellen Poplowitz, a Jewish Communist and organizer from Brooklyn.

The combination of Wright's literary success and his suspicion that the Communist Party (CP) was not sincerely committed to "the Negro cause" brought long-simmering tensions with his comrades in the CP to a head. Wright, in Rowley's rendering, had always been viewed with suspicion by the CP cadres; his intellect and polished enunciation made him less than an "authentic Negro" by their standards. By 1944, he had rejected Communism and begun an intellectual quest of sorts that would eventually lead him to the existentialist ideas of his later years. Rowley deftly chronicles Wright's travels through Spain and Africa (which resulted in two of his lesser known, but thoroughly important books, Black Power in 1954 and Pagan Spain in 1957) and does an admirable job of detailing the impact Wright had on an entire generation of writers, Black and white, notably Nelson Algren, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin.

Wright spent his final years as an expatriate in Paris. Alienated from his wife as a result of his prolific adultery and distanced from his daughters by his incessant travel, the later Wright is a semi-tragic character in the ongoing epic of his own life. To combat the onset of depression, he began practicing the Japanese poetic form called Haiku (he wrote 4,000 of them). His death, at age 52, inspired persistent, if unprovable, rumors that he had been "done in," a victim of a Cold War imperative to neutralize critics of the West. From the dirt poverty of Mississippi, he had published 14 books (another six were published posthumously) and etched his name into the canon of American writers. As this volume definitively establishes, Richard Wright was far from a simple man - and as a biographer, Rowley is fully up to the task of rendering her subject in his full complexity.

William Jelani Cobb is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Rutgers University and editor of The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader (Palgrave Press), forthcoming in 2002.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Nov/Dec 2001
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