520
PARTISAN REVIEW
Wright's, one nevertheless senses once again the shade of Henry James
hovering near the young writer. And when Wright continues, "I tried
to write so that, in the same instant of time, the objective and subjective
aspects of Bigger's life would be caught in a focus of prose. And always
I tried to
render, depict,
not merely to tell, the story," it is easy to
imagine that Joseph Conrad has taken up his post along with James be–
hind this man who is writing his way into their midst. Finally, in his ac–
count of what writing was for him, Wright says that in
Native
5011,
"I
wrote with the conviction in mind
(I
don't know if this is right or
wrong; I only know that I'm temperamentally inclined to feel this way)
that the main burden of all serious fiction consists almost wholly of
character-destiny and the items, social, political, and personal, of that
character-destiny. "
Alter that phrase "all serious fiction" to read "all serious fiction , in–
cluding autobiography" (or, better, the reverse: "all serious autobiogra–
phy, including fiction,") and you have a nicely turned formula that will
do very well as an expression of the meaning of Wright's life and his ca–
reer. When, in the final section of
Native
5011,
Bigger is in jail for the
murder of Mary Dalton and Bessie Mears, we are told that he "knew as
he stood there that he could never tell why he had killed. It was not
that he did not really want to tell, but the telling of it would have in–
volved an explanation of his entire life." It is an explanation of Bigger's
entire life, an account of his "some one myth," that Bigger cannot him–
self formulate but that Wright would give us in the fiction of
Native
Son.
Even as he gives us Bigger's story and myth, Wright is working
through his own myth. Richard Wright's character-destiny surrounds and
gives birth to the character-destiny of Bigger Thomas, for Wright was
forever writing the story of himself as a writer even as he wrote the sto–
ries of his various protagonists.
Black Boy
(without
Al'nerican HUllger
in parentheses now, for a rea–
son
to
be explained in a moment) is the kernel, the core of Wright's
myth and his writing of it; the book is, as
J.
H. Newman said of his own
Apologia
and as many other writers would say of their autobiographies,
the key to everything else Wright produced. The story of
Black Boy,
however, is not complemented by "The Horror and the Glory," which
in the Library of America is presented as the conclusion of
Black Bo),
(American Hunger),
or at least not by that alone. In composite,
efJerything
Richard Wright wrote from
Lawd Today!
and
Uncle Tom's Childrell,
Native Son
and
The Outsider,
to
The Long Dream
and
Eight Mell
makes
up the end of the story. When I say "everything" I mean specifically to
