634
PARTISAN REVIEW
This was scarcely the point Wright wanted
to
make.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher reviewed the book in the February 1945
Book-of-the-Month Club News.
P..ichard Wright, she asserted, was "one of
the most accomplished and gifted of our younger American authors." It
was, she thought, lamentable that Wright felt caution toward
all
whites–
many of whom were "trying to open the door of decent opportuni ty to
colored people." In particufar, she praised the book's concl usion:
In the last pages he sweeps his readers out from the concrete and def–
inite, with their crushing weight of literal fact, into a spacious realm
of thought, poetry, beauty, and understanding...
.
He quiets his deeply
troubled spirit-ours with his-by
drawing a long breath under the open
sky of the universal. [Italics mine.]
The new ending soothed the reader's "deeply troubled spirit." That
was the crux of it. Dorothy Canfield Fisher had once again made Richard
Wright's narrative more palatable to white readers. The issue remains
highly ambivalent. Canfield Fisher adamantly believed that she was helping
Richard Wright write a more balanced book. Whether she thought
through the implications of this is not clear. Most people would agree
wi th her that the removal of the Chicago section made
Black Boy
a better
"work of art." Almost certainly, the abridged version has been more wide–
ly read and better appreciated than the complete narrative would have
been, with its flatly narrated account of Communist Party machinations in
Chicago. Packaged as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection (with a brief
introduction, again, by Canfield Fisher) , Wright's autobiographical narra–
tive had the stamp of respectability from the literary establishment, along
with unprecedented sales for a black writer-twice as many as
Native Son.
But for these gains, Wright must sometimes have felt he had sold his
soul. His message had been softened. His marching, fighting words had
been smothered, silenced. Across his two most famous narratives the shad–
ow of a white woman had fallen.
