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PARTISAN REVIEW
appear minor and insignificant, but the overall effect was subtly different.
(Only since 1991, when the Library of America published the text that was
originally sent to the Book-of-the-Month Club in galley form, have we
been able to read the narrative as Wright intended it.)
As Book-of-the-Month for March 1940,
Native Son
appeared to have
the best start in life it could possibly hope for. In the first few weeks, it sold
faster than any book Harper
&
Brothers had published in the last twenty
years: close to 215,000 copies within three weeks-an astounding figure
for a first novel. Renowned playwrights and theatre producers scrambled
for the stage rights, and Hollywood put in a bid for the movie rights (with
an all-white cast!). With trumpets and heraldry,
Native Son
was hailed as
the book of the month, the book of the year, the book of the times.
Negative criticism, every bit as passionate as the praise, came later.
Richard Wright's main champion in that period of dazzling triumph
seemed to be Dorothy Canfield Fisher. She was a formidable figure.
Eleanor Roosevelt considered her one of the ten most influential women
in the United States. Robert Frost called her "the great lady of Vermont."
A well-known Quaker liberal, Canfield wrote popular novels. She was also
a member (a dominant member, by all accounts) of the Book-of-the–
Month selection committee.
Canfield Fisher wrote an introduction to the first edition of
Native
Son.
She alluded to the Dostoyevskian depths of human experience
plumbed by the novel. She added: "I do not at all mean to imply that
Native
Son
as literature is comparable to the masterpieces of Dostoevsky."
She declared: "The author shows genuine literary skill." But her
starchy introduction made it clear that the value of Wright's novel was as
a sociological case study. The situation of Bigger Thomas-and Negro
youths generally-was similar, she said, to that of rats in scientific experi–
ments set up to produce psychopathic behavior.
"Native Son
is the first
report in fiction we have had from those...whose behavior-patterns give
evidence of the same bewildered, senseless tangle of abnormal nerve–
reactions."
It
was unfortunate to reduce a powerful work of fiction to a sociolog–
ical report. Nevertheless, Canfield Fisher was a worthy name and Wright's
publishers thought it "a very good send-off for
Native Son."
Wright him–
self thanked "Miss Fisher" in a tone that for him was decidedly lukewarm:
"I feel that you did present the material in the book in a light that would
make it understood by the American reading public." Was there a touch of
irony in his phrasing? Generally, writers aspire to communicate with the
reading public without mediation. And Canfield Fisher had already done
her best to mediate between Wright and the reading public. She would do
so again, far more radically, with
Black Boy
in 1945. Canfield Fisher, more
