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PARTISAN REVIEW
Mears in
Native Son:
they are there simply to be killed by Bigger
Thomas; or consider the
girl
named Bess in
Black Boy
who exists, in the
mind of the protagonist, the young Richard Wright, as a trap that
threatens to keep him in the South, unable to realize his destiny as a
writer.
It
is not in
Native
5011
alone that dramatic scenes are so compellingly
realized:
Black Boy
too is made up of just such scenes, from the opening
where the young Richard sets fire to his house and his mother beats him
almost to death ("But for a long time I was chastened whenever I rc–
membered that my mother had come close to killing me"); to the scene
when he kills the kittcn by hanging it and is forced by his mother to go
out in the dark, take the kitten down and bury it; or the scene of terror
on the Mississippi River with his Uncle Hoskins who threatens to drive
the buggy right into the water; or the scene of his forced "salvation" in
church. No one commanded the sheer power of narrative more effec–
tively that Richard Wright, and the intentional symbolism and philo–
sophical speculation of his later work in particular pales into insignifi–
cance beside his ability to hold the reader with a story, his story. To tell
that story, Wright had mastered the lesson first encountered in Mencken:
"Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as
a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be
weapons? Well, yes, for here they were" - and here they are, in Richard
Wright.
Now we come to what I take to be the central issue posed by this
edition of Richard Wright, namely the versions of the different texts
chosen by Arnold Rampersad. We are told on the book jacket copy,
"Native Son
and
Black Boy
are classics of twentieth-century American lit–
erature - and yet the novel and memoir known to millions of readers
are in fact revised and abbreviated versions of the books Richard Wright
wrote. This two-volume Library of America edition presents for the first
time Wright's major works in the form he intended them to be read ."
There are a breathtaking number of questions begged in these two sen–
tences, chief among them these: How do we know the form in which
Wright intended the books to be read?
If
we do know this intention,
then when was it settled upon? When did Wright intend this form, and
did his intention ever change? (For, of course, books go through drafts
and revisions and an author can be said to intend
it
to be read in one
form at one time and in another form at another time.) And, perhaps
most crucially, is this question of the form in which the author intended
the books to be read the only - or even the ultimate - question we
have to ask of the form and the structure of a book?
