PARTISAN
REVIEW
379
Wright, it remained the burden of James Baldwin's early essays as
they began to appear in the late forties. Irving Howe has written that
"the day
Native Son
appeared American culture was changed for–
ever. . . . [IJt made imposSible a repetition of the old lies....
Richard Wright's novel brought out into the open, as no one ever had
before, the hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may
yet destroy our culture."
Well, American culture
is
an elephantine thing, hard to change
with a novel. But the consciousness of blacks themselves was indeed
altered, and surely no black writer could ever tell himself the old
lies. Whatever the later attacks on Wright,
his
work became an
effective North Star of Negro writing, which helped his successors to
find their own directions. Attacked, abandoned as a literary example
by Baldwin and Ellison, whose early work he had typically encour–
aged, he has become, after long 'eclipse and a decade after his death,
the favored ancestor of a great many new black writers who reject
his
successors and feel much akin to
his
militant spirit. Parricide,
after all,
is
one o'f the quicker methods of succession, and nothing
can more conveniently legitimate the bloody deed than an appeal
to the authority of the grandfather, himself the previous victim.
Thus, the rapid evolution of black awareness these past decades has
repeatedly crystallized in moments of sharp generational conflict
which, to a curious outsider, cast much light on the origins of the
present phase of black writing and black culture.
Despite the inevitable metaphor of parricide, it would be super–
ficial to think that Baldwin alone killed Richard Wright until the
angry sixties came along to resurrect him. In some sense Wright's
kind of novel was already dying or dead by the time he came to it.
In
Black Boy
Wright describes the impact of reading Dreiser for the
first time: "I was ·overwhelmed.... It would have been impossible
for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for
it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped
me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel." How quaint
the last phrase must have seemed in the late forties and fifties, when
the modern novel meant the modernist novel; when everyone knew
without reading him that Dreiser was crude and vulgar compared
to Henry James ; when, increasingly, . the· only modern American
