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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 It was a belief and a hope that was destined to lead to heartbreak. Among Negro members of the party, he was openly laughed at as an "intellectual." "I'm not an intellectual," he protested. "I sweep the streets for a living." The "living" was thirteen dollars a week. He was on relief and had been assigned to sweep the streets -- "made work," "leaf-raking," "Boondoggling" were some of the current epithets for such jobs. For a talented young black man in search of education and recognition in a white world, there was little to choose between ridicule from his own people and patronizing condescension from white people--most of whom, with the exception of his fellow writers in places like the Writers' Workshop, were inheritors of the long anti-intellectual history of the U.S. As for Communist functionaries, white and black alike, they were out to USE him. I gathered from conversations with Richard at the time that he resented being used, but it was better to be used by a cause he believed in than to be insulted and ignored by a society that had no use for him at all. News of Nazi anti-Jewish progoms [sic] was coming out of Germany, and there were signs of similar reactionary violence in the German-American Bund and renewed Ku Klux Klan activity. He had been warned: "You can't resign from the Party. People would think something was wrong with our organization if you resigned." Anyway, "regardless of tactics, what is there to GO BACK to?" was the question he was asking himself at the time. paragraph marked by lines drawn in ink beside it Witnessing the "trial" of a Trotskyite and word that a campaign was being launched to rid the Party of "Negro Trotskyite elements" -- and being among those who were secretly trying to influence members to leave the party -- brought him closer to resignation. He saw the accused Trotskyite "confess," and he read about similar "confessions" at the Moscow trials. Of his accused comrade, he reasoned that "the vision of a communal world had sunk down into his soul and it would never leave him until life left him," and he applied the same reason to the Moscow trials. It also accounts for his reluctance to resign from the Party. Besides, when he finally left Chicago and went to New York, in 1937, he was immediately taken in hand by Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., and assigned a desk in the Harlem Bureau of the "Daily Worker." A publication to be called "New Challenge" was planned, and Richard would be appointed to edit it. For openers, he was to write two to five thousand words on a revolutionary history of Negro literature and its prospects for the future. He wrote a 20 page draft, "Blueprint for Negro Literature," arguing that the Negro was a victim of economic exploitation and not racial prejudice, and envisioning a Negro Republic in the South, which was not identical with the Party's slogan, "self-determination for the Black Belt." It was an all-out position of black nationalism, whereas the Party position was "Black and white unite and fight"--that is, against capitalism. At the same time he was holding down a job with the Writers' Project of the WPA. He was called on to play a prominent role in the Congress of the League of American Writers, along with the leading left wing writers of the country, and heard Earl Browder say that writers had no right "to go freelancing in the field of sharpest political struggles without accountability to anyone" -- meaning party functionaries, of course. "Richard knew," Constance Webb tells us, "that one of his comrades, Joseph Freeman, a staunch Communist had been forced by the Party to page is cut off here
appeared and received good notices in both the Party and regular press, Freeman was called before Browder and informed the "Testament" had been condemned in Moscow--he had referred to Trotsky as a man instead of referring to him correctly as a class enemy and murderous Fascist. Browder instructed Freeman to kill the book, and he cancelled all orders from bookshops and called off a scheduled lecture tour. And Mike Gold called Leo Cherne a traitor for writing "The Rest of Your Life." The Party attempted to stop the book's sales through a slander campaign. When his own novel, "Native Son," had been published, Richard had been threatened with expulsion by the Party--even though Browder had said: "I see nothing wrong with ("Native Son")."
My own correspondence of the time with Joseph Freeman is now, along with hundreds of my letters and papers, in the Special Collections archives of the UCLA library and not at hand for quotation here; but I recall that he was trying to make political and psychological sense out of his troubles with the Party, obviously in an effort to keep his years of work in the Party from becoming a haunting nightmare memory for the rest of his life.
When I saw Freeman in New York some years later, we walked together for some blocks down Broadway; his talk about the subject had taken on the character of gallows humor which tended to trail off into hopeless confusion and painful silences. My lasting impression of him is that of a man who has been through a horror he can only half believe and prefers not to be reminded of it. Freeman had grown prematurely old and spent, and when I heard of his death not long after I had the chilling impression that, like Hamlet at the last, he was self-murdered more than slain.
Visiting with Wright in Brooklyn shortly after their first child, Julia, was born to his Jewish wife, Ellen, we talked about an article he had published, his first public statement in depth about his break with the Communist Party. Despite his great care to make it sound like a lover's quarrel, rather than an acrimonious divorce, he was the target of brickbats from BOTH sides of the political arena. The worst of it was, he found himself being embraced unwillingly by strange bedfellows. Not until he went to live in France, in 1946, did he find true understanding of his delicately balanced political position.
Nothing was ever easy for Richard, nothing was ever simple. He was suspicious of simple answers, simple questions. It is in the nature of enforced interculturation. In the black American's case, it is more like acculturation, or cultural genocide. Any choice such a marginal man can make is of necessity an existential choice, as Sartre perceived.
The same hard-to-explain complexities and delicately-hung choices characterized his personal as well as his political life. We went out for an evening in Harlem, to dinner, to the Cotton Club, and every minute of the time was filled with crises, large and small, all of them fraught with unpredictable alternatives--the lot of all black and white intermarriage at that time, all adding up to the unrelenting agony of integration, especially when it takes place on the mattress level. One hovers perpetually between ecstasy and disaster.
Richard's state of mind at the time may be inferred from a piece of prose he was working on, "The Man Who Lived Underground." A black man has managed to escape from the police station where he had been tortured into confessing to a murder he did not commit, takes refuge in a sewer, finds a dry, unused, forgotten cave from which it is page is cut off here