the times | Monday July 20 2020 1GT 9
arts
simply pandered to prejudice by
weaving his narrative around a central
figure who is a crude racial stereotype?
Some of Wright’s contemporaries
complained that the book contained
not a single positive black role model.
With more feminist critics entering
the fray since then, the criticism has
grown sharper. The writer Ayana
Mathis summed up the prosecution
in an article in The New York Times.
“Bigger Thomas is a rapist and a
murderer motivated only by fear, hate
and a slew of animal impulses,” she
declared. “He is the black ape gone
berserk that reigned supreme in the
white racial imagination.”
For a more nuanced view I turn
to John McWhorter, the Columbia
academic and political commentator
and a signatory of the recent open
letter on “cancel culture”. “I would
say that its relevance for today,” he
says, “is that Wright’s depiction of
Bigger as utterly controlled by his
circumstances, such that we were
asked to pardon his actions, lives
on in the tacit sense among,
not only many black people but
fellow travellers, that black
people’s actions must always be
viewed — as we are to put it —
‘through a prism’, which is code
for that we must understand
black actions, black statements
and disparities in performance
between black and white people as
the product of white supremacy.
“In its time, Native Son was seen
by many — including black people
— as too mechanistic. However,
we look back and think that the
implacability of racism at the time
made Wright’s depiction make aRichard Wright, the
author of Native Son,
in 1957migration to the big cities of the north.
He came of age during the Great
Depression, scraping a living on
New Deal projects in Chicago while
learning his craft as a writer. Like so
many other artists of his generation,
he signed up to the Communist Party,
but eventually broke with the Stalinist
apparatchiks. Years later he wrote
about his experience in The God that
Failed. Today, at a time when the Black
Lives Matter movement seems to be
shifting from focusing on police
misconduct to regurgitating glib
anti-capitalist slogans, Wright has
lessons to teach about how dogma can
become a spiritual trap.
He had published a well-received
collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s
Children, in 1938, but it was Native
Son, with its combination of social
realism and violence, that took
America by storm. Its central
character, Bigger Thomas, is an
aimless youth who leads a life
of petty crime. When he gets a
job as a chauffeur with a well-
to-do white liberal family it
seems that his fortunes have
taken a turn for the better.
Yet a chain of incidents
leads to him accidentally
smothering his employer’s
flirtatious daughter. After going
on the run, Bigger rapes and
murders his girlfriend and is put
on trial for his life. The novel ends
with him facing the death penalty.
The mixture of race, politics, sex
and unabashed melodrama have
stirred debate ever since. Was
Wright boldly exposing the reality
of America’s racial caste system, or
had he, as some of his critics argued,The book that changed my life
The Times theatre
critic Clive Davis
says if you read
one book about the
black experience,
make it this one
T
hirty years ago, when
I made a BBC Radio 4
documentary on the
50th anniversary of
Native Son, I was struck
by how Richard Wright
seemed to have fallen
out of fashion. Today,
with Black Lives Matter so current,
I’m surprised to see him missing from
many of the heaps of books by black
authors in bookshop windows.
Wright’s name may not be as
familiar to modern readers as that of
Toni Morrison or James Baldwin —
the man who was once regarded as his
protégé — but Wright can claim the
credit for transforming the status of
black American writers. Arguments
over his best-known book still simmer.
When Native Son was published in
1940, the story of a poor, uneducated
Chicago youth who goes on the run
after inadvertently killing an affluent,
liberal, white woman, became a media
sensation. More than 200,000 copies
were sold in the first three weeks, and
the young Orson Welles went on to
direct a Broadway adaptation. Wright,
the son of a Mississippi sharecropper,
instantly became an American VIP.
Some dubbed him the “sepia
Steinbeck”. For all his prominence,
though, he still had to contend with
racial prejudice. Marrying a white
woman brought difficulties, even in
Greenwich Village. At the height of
his fame, not long after publishing his
masterpiece, his autobiography, Black
Boy, Wright left America for good,
building a new life in postwar Paris.
Befriended by Camus, Sartre and
Simone de Beauvoir, he enjoyed his
status as one of the city’s most famous
expats. James Campbell’s book on the
City of Light’s literary scene, Paris
Interzone, describes how, even before
settling in his adopted land, Wright
struck up a correspondence with
Gertrude Stein, giving her advice on
how to ask black Americans about the
new style of jazz that was all the rage:
“Just say, ‘Hello, boys. I don’t dig this
jive. What’s it all about?’ ”
Like the generation of American jazz
musicians who had settled in the city,
he revelled in the opportunity to live
as he wished. Yet there was a price
to be paid for that freedom: being
separated from the country that, for
good or ill, had shaped him. By the
time he died of a heart attack in 1960,
aged just 52, Wright seemed to have
become the epitome of the novelist
severed from his creative roots.
In some ways Wright’s story is a
classic tale of an individual triumphing
against the odds. Raised in poverty in
the Deep South (his father walked out
on the family when Richard was five),
he was part of the wave of greatcertain sense, and almost wonder at
the optimism of, especially, black
critics who didn’t like seeing Bigger
fashioned as a kind of automaton. But
today, when racism is so much less
oppressive than it was then, we are
taught to embrace this same kind of
Manichaean pessimism when viewing
the actions of today’s Biggers.”
Perhaps it is the very definition of a
genuine work of literature that it can
provoke so many differing responses.
Native Son is certainly not flawless. Yet
there’s no denying the pace and power
of Wright’s narrative. Besides, any
doubts about Wright’s talents were
laid to rest by the success of Black Boy.
His career, though, is also a lesson
in the risks entailed in becoming thespokesman for an entire minority
group. After he embarked on his new
life in France, Wright seemed weighed
down by the twin burdens of being
black America’s conscience and
observing events in his home country
from thousands of miles away. By the
mid-Fifties he was playing second
fiddle to Baldwin and another of his
old friends, Ralph Ellison, the author
of the timeless Invisible Man.
Wright and Baldwin — who had
also made Paris his home — fell
out over an essay by Baldwin that
belittled the older man’s achievements.
The 1950s were not kind to Wright.
By the time of his death his recent
books were attracting less attention.
Worst of all, he also found himself
being spurned by many of the black
American expat writers who had
once looked up to him. High-handed
and remote, as they saw it, he had
become yesterday’s man. Baldwin
left a poignant vignette in his essay
Alas, Poor Richard, published soon
after his erstwhile mentor’s death:
“There was a noticeable chill in
the love affair which had been going
on between Richard and the French
intellectuals... By this time he had
managed to estrange himself from
almost all the younger American
Negro writers in Paris. They were
often to be found in the same café,
Richard compulsively playing
the pinball machine, while they,
spitefully and deliberately, refused
to acknowledge his presence. Gone
were the days when he had only
to enter a café to be greeted with
the equivalent of ‘cher maître’
(‘Hey, Richard, how you making it,
my man? Sit down and tell me
something.’), to be seated at a table,
while all the bright faces turned
toward him.”
Yet if the years in Paris ended in
despair, Wright had already left
behind at least two books that still
speak to us. And there is much to
savour even in his lesser-known work,
such as Lawd Today, an early novel
that was published after his death.
He deserves his place in the sun.GETTY IMAGES; CHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMESAt the height of
his fame, Wright
left America for a
new life in Paris
f
Clive Davis