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newspaper clipping handwritten in top margin with arrow pointing to the author, Lawrence Lipton This asshole is a boor and a bum. Ever hear of Division St. Dostoevsky? ?J..? Conroy? Some arthurs project!! pro underlined
Page 18 Living Arts, April 26, 1968 Los Angeles Free Press
RICHARD WRIGHT The Biography of a major figure in American Literature By Constance Webb G. P. Putnam's Sons. $8.95 photograph: man's head Richard Wright, during his "hungry days in Chicago" just after his arrival there in 1927. photograph of man's head with lines drawn in pen beside it In September, 1933, Wright was elected executive secretary of the John Reed Club in Chicago. photograph of two men and a woman; comment written in pen above the picture and with an arrow pointing to one of the menSome Arthur! George Padmore, the "father of African emancipation," and his wife, Dorothy, during one of their visits to the Wrights. photograph of man walking; caption cut off at end of page
Richard Wright: The Agony of Integration LAWRENCE LIPTON
It was a raw, Windy City fall day in Depression Chicago, 1931. Richard Wright, who had been coming regularly to Wednesday night writers' workshop meetings at my 737 Rush Street house on the Near North Side, was not among those present that evening. He had been absent for three weeks running. It occurred to some of us that he might be ill, or lack the carfare to make the trip from the South Side. Two of us decided to pay him a visit the following day. Then it turned out that none of us knew where Richard was living. We had been his friends for a year or two and none of us knew where he lived! He must have been asked at one time or another, but it dawned on us now that he had never answered that question, had evaded it in one way or another. We had a vague idea where it was, but nobody could remember ever having been given an address. From his occasional references in conversation and a few allusions in stories he had read aloud in the workshop, we pieced together some notion of the neighborhood and decided to go there and somehow trace his whereabouts. There was a chill intermittent rain when we set out about noon the next day in a cranky old jalopy we managed to rustle up for the trip. After two or three hours of enquiries in neighboring grocery stores, drugstores, restaurants--no one seemed too eager to divulge such information to a carful of white men, who might be debt collectors for all they knew--we managed to pinpoint a street and find some kids who were willing to lead us to the house. I left the other fellow in the car with the driver and went in alone. There was the smell of poverty and decay in the hall. A child answered my knock, and a woman came forward -- Richard's mother. I told her I was here with some friends of Dick's, and was he at home? You could see fear in her eyes. She hesitated to answer. I told her we were members of a writers' group Dick belonged to, he hadn't attended for some time, and we were worried that he might be sick. Silently, uncertainly, she pointed to what looked like a bedroom door. I knocked and, when there was no answer, I called out to him, telling him the purpose of our visit. Still no answer. Puzzled, I was preparing to leave when the door burst open and Dick was out like a shot, making for the front door and calling back after him, "Let's go, let's go." I hurried out after him, running a block before I caught up with him and brought him back to where the car was parked. We were both breathless. He got into the car, and only then was I able to explain why we had come looking for him. He was plainly hostile, sullen, resentful, close to tears, but we managed to talk him into stopping at a fish house for a chat. He accepted our explanation but was still reserved: no, he hadn't been ill, he was out of work and didn't have the carfare, he was busy looking for a job. All with a mixture of pride and humiliation. It was clear he resented our intrusion and, having seen his home, I could understand why he ha never told us his address. He was ashamed of the squalor, the ugliness, the poverty. It was an incident familiar to me from my own childhood, the reluctance of my Jewish schoolmates to invite gentile schoolmates home to meet their greenhorn parents in the equally squalid ghetto flat of the immigrant Jewish ghetto. Then as now, poverty had the same humiliating stench, the smell that money -- greed -- landlord neglect makes. Only the food smells distinguished a Negro ghetto from a Jewish ghetto or an Italian or Polish ghetto, and in some neighborhoods it was a pungent bouquet of some or all page cut off below this point It was three weeks before we saw Richard again at our Wednesday night workshope. [sic] He never alluded to the incident again and we never mentioned it, although the theme of traumatic shame suffered by the Negro in the Black ghetto in his contacts with white friends cropped up again and again in the stories he read aloud in the workshop. It was to be a recurrent leitmotif in his life and writings for three decades, until his death in 1960. He referred to it often enough, but because it was accompanied by an overcompensatory defiance (and, by turns, angry silence) it did not look like fear to any but his most intimate friends. Even after the publication of "Native Son," when his yearly income was over $30,000, he was still expounding "his favorite thesis," to quote Constance Webb: "Fear is the most dominant emotion in Negro life....We're scared all the time." Horace Cayton and Elmer Carter, on that occasion, knew (says Constance Webb) "that it was rare for Negroes to admit the simple fact, 'the fact that we are scared all the time of white people.' " That was when the three of them went to a famous seafood restaurant in Brooklyn and the waiter momentarily set down some dirty dishes on their table because his hands were full, Carter, with Wright's encouragement, pushed the dishes onto the floor with a crash. "Tell me how you felt, Carte," Richard persisted. "Just hate before I pushed them," Carter explained, in a low, tense whisper. "And after?" "Pain in my legs, nausea, fear, tension, but I'm all right," Carter told him. "I wonder how many white people realize how common such feelings are among Negroes. How many understand how they make us feel and live?" Richard pondered. Wright's widely-publicized break with the Communist Party is still relevant enough to merit the attention Webb gives it in the book, in view of similar confrontations today between writers and Party policies in the Soviet Union and other communist countries. There has never been a time since Gorki, Mayakowski and Pasternak when it cased to be relevant. When the honeymoon between the writers, artists and the [[lines are drawn on both sides of the rest of this sentence] fraternally aligned but predominantly non-communist-member John Reed Club was over (the Party peremptorily dissolved the Club), Wright allowed himself to be seduced in the Party as an Organizer. All it did was sharpen Richard's awareness of the meaning of Party discipline. lines are drawn on both sides of this paragraph through the words"to Party policy I was among those fellow writers of the writers' workshop and others who urged him not to subordinate his artistic integrity to Party policy, but I think we were not surprised when he chose to ignore our warnings. Eighteen years later, in "The God That Failed," a collection of essays by ex-communists and ex-fellow travelers, Wright explained the special attraction which the Party and the Communist movement had for him, a Negro writer, as distinguished from white writers: "It was not the economics of Communism, nor the great power of trade unions, nor the excitement of underground politics that claimed me; my attention was caught by the similarity of the experiences of workers in other lands, by the possibility of uniting scattered but kindred peoples into a whole. It seemed to me that, here at last, in the realm of revolutionary expression, Negro experience could find a home, a functioning value and role. Out of the magazines I read came a passionate call for the experiences of the disinherited, and there was none of the lame lispings of the missionary in it. It did not say: 'Be like us and we will like you, maybe.' It said: 'If you possess enough courage to speak out what page is cut off here