518
PARTISAN REVIEW
Richard Wright in the Library of America
RICHARD WRIGHT: EARLY WORKS and RICHARD WRIGHT:
LATER WORKS. Edited by Arnold R arnpersad . Library of America.
$35.00 each.
I halle oJten had the Janey that there is some one nryth Jor ellery nran, which
if
we but knew it , would make us understand all he did and thought.
- W. B. Yeats
In a crucial passage near the end of the book that we have hereto–
fore known under the title
Black Boy
(with "A Record of Childhood
and Youth" as subtitle), Richard Wright tells of the astonishment and
excitement with which, at the age of eighteen or nineteen, he read some
of the savage, mocking essays in H.
L.
Mencken's
Prej~ldices
and
A Book oj
Prefaces:
I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sen–
tences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that?
I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen....
What was this? I stood up, trying to realize what reality lay behind
the meaning of the words ... Yes, this man was fighting, fighting
with words . He was using words as weapons, llsing them as one
would use a club. Could words be weapons? Well, yes, for here they
were. Then, maybe, perhaps, I could use them as a weapon.
Wright goes on to wonder, of this brave new world he has come
upon, "Who were these men about whom Mencken was talking so pas–
sionately? Who was Anatole France? Joseph Conrad? ... Turgenev,
Huneker, Nietzsche, and scores of others? Were these men real? Did they
exist or had they existed? And how did one pronounce their names?"
Among the twenty-five or so names of European writers that fill out the
ellipses between Conrad and Turgenev in Wright's musings (Dostoevsky,
Flaubert, Tolstoy, Ibsen, etc.) there is a sprinkling of American ones in–
cluding Sinclair Lewis, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris,
Edgar Allan Poe, and Theodore Dreiser. This little scene of startled
awakening occurs in a rented room in Memphis,
anno
1927, as Wright,
recently escaped from Mississippi and on his way eventually
to
Chicago,
New York, and Paris, warms h is dinner - a can of pork and beans - in
the sink under the hot water tap.
