B 0 0 K S
407
accounts for the appalling naivete of such writers as Zora Neale Hurston,
Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. In Richard Wright
the~e
has
been from the first the problem of hi s double duty as a creative artist
and spokesman for America's twelve million Negroes. The fact that he,
more than any other artist of his race, has been able to combine both
obligations is proof of his power and singularity. And yet even Richard
Wright suffers from the omnipresent censor, the endless need to explain
and to underline truths already implicit in his subjects.
In
Native Son
the artist-spokesman predicament was most acute.
With a daring that brought the book widespread attention, Wright
created Bigger Thomas, a personality of almost legendary vigor. Where
the sympathetic white writers felt compelled to deal only with lovable,
suffering Negroes, Richard Wright tackled the problem of a full human
being subject to fantastic terrors and desires. Every literary justification
for Bigger Thomas' actions was implicit in all we knew of his tempera–
ment, his fatal conditioning, his ability to respond. But at the end of
the book Wright began to hear voices: the voice of both black and white
America, suggesting all might be misunderstood. As a result we had
the degeneration of the artist into the pamphleteer who forced himself
to deny his gifts in order to meet the demands of the most uncompre–
hending. His novellas, also, are reduced by the injection of the final
Forward, March! theme. Richard Wright's early work was truly a prey
to official, unimaginative Communist Party politics-and, of course, to
the American distrust of the Negro.
In
Black Boy
the early crudities have been conquered to a large
extent. We have a picture of Wright himself that can hardly fail to send
a
~budder
of horror over those who feel that the Negro must be pre–
sented as a mere doll with a capacity for suffering. In some ways it is
a catalogue of all the neurotic compulsions the human being can endure.
We have, among other things, pyromania, childhood drunkenness, anal
eroticism, somnambulism and several incidents that threaten to end in
family killings. This book, like most of Wright's work, is written with a
courageous and stubborn kind of integrity.
(It
goes without saying that
power and skill do not necessarily make a book a best-seller. A psychol–
ogist, interested in the subtleties of race relations, might find in the
popularity of this "meanest" of the Negro writers some interesting ma–
terial on the American psyche.)
To be sure there are unsuccessful aspects of
Black Boy:
mainly the
use of stereotyped, pseudo-poetry to tie up his destitute, tragic child–
hood with the broader benevolences of the nature world in which it
took place. On the whole, however,
Black Boy
is an admirable and inter–
esting achievement which in dispensing with facile and superfluous inter–
pretation shows Richard Wright has come to a genuine belief in litera–
ture. One can be deeply thankful that he has survived
The DailY. Worker.
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
