Archives: Charles Johnson reviews Richard Wright

Charles Johnson reviewed Richard Wright’s American Hunger in the inaugural issue of the American Book Review, Volume 1 , No. 1, December 1977.

We still ask all the wrong questions about Richard Wright. Interest in his fictions, essays, and autobiographical Black Boy declines (all black writing does) when black people are not trashing property or promising violence. Seventeen years after Wright’s death, we congratulate ourselves smugly, as Jimmy Carter does, about the “New South,” shelve Eight Men and The Outsider, and forget that the dreamlike deformations of the black world in Wright’s fictions still await us when we round the corner in Soweto, Detroit, or Chicago. Legislation seldom changes the world as it is lived, the Lebenswelt, what William James called “the world of the street.” The truly great artist—an archaeologist of consciousness—begins there, tracking down how we feel in our bodies. He works from subjectivity outward for a fresh encounter with the world and, if his voice and vision are authentic—true to himself and Being—he revitalizes our perceptions and values. With the publication of American Hunger, Wright’s continuation of his unhappy odyssey from Mississippi to Chicago—cut from Black Boy in 1945, published only in part, complete here for the first time-we can say up front that Wright for all his critics and those who admire him for all the wrong reasons, is such a writer.

At his best, Wright is the dramatist of black consciousness struggling with the ontological burden of giving birth to meaning—wrenching an objective (or intersubjective) truth from subjective life—in the black world. This is precisely the dilemma of Bigger Thomas and Cross Damon when they confront a southside brutalized into ambiguity. The same problem of interpretation—ways of seeing and values-is at the heart of Wright’s early life in Chicago, his struggle to become a writer, and conflict over means to a common end with the Communist Party in American Hunger.

Young Wright in 1927 is the boy that po1ices his behavior in public, afraid he will violate, even up North, Jim Crow law. He is the boy who cannot relax, whose questions about the chaos of black life become, finally, not only a critique of capital and race but metaphysical probes into the sensual and vegetative errors of Western civilization; who, at rent parties, throws down home-brewed beer, veils his feelings, and projects the appearance—the deceit—of agreeing with others when, in fact, he is wondering, “What had black people done to bring this crazy world upon them?” Working as a dishwasher in a North Side cafe, peering up from the American Mercury he hides behind a newspaper (Negroes who read are a novelty in the 1920’s), he watches white waitresses whose “lust for trash” is paralleled by similarly truncated drives for alcohol, cheap thrills, and consumer goods in the black community. Without friends, except for a few cynical wags at the post office, withdrawn, Wright sees as perhaps no writer before him-and certainly few writers since-that if black life (itself a metaphor, a violated microcosm, of America) can be brought from concealedness into clarity, re-envisioned by a (black) subjectivity sensitive to the corruption of national consciousness, it will create a humanizing vision for the country as a whole. In other words, the Negroan organic part of the nation but excluded from it-is privy, paradoxically, to unique perceptions valuable, even crucial, for fully understanding the lived world. He writes: “It seemed to me that for the Negro to try to save himself, he would have to forget himself and try to save a confused, materialistic nation from its own drift to self-destruction.” Thinking beyond the immediacy of his personal rejection, he looks at these waitresses and decides that, “…what they needed to make them complete and grown-up in their living was the inclusion in their personalities of a knowledge of lives such as I lived and suffered containedly.”

Throughout his portrayal of these “hungry days” in Chicago-days, really, of spiritual starvation-Wright falls into pages of parenthetical reflection on race and being which a disoriented Mississippi boy could perhaps feel but never coax so clearly into cognition; but the intrusion of the older, deeply moral Wright is intended, after all, to unequivocably fix the ethical drama-the quest for a world in which he can believe-for us. His aunt finds fault with his reading and accuses him of wasting electricity, but the first glimmerings of this world Wright wants are there-in Stein’s Three Lives, Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Proust’s A Remembrance of Things Past, Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. He toys, finally, with language, Negro dialect and stream-of-consciousness, but fails to break free in this early stage of development from the trap of subjectivism. Yes, the cogito anchors all experience, but its goal ultimately is emerging from the singularity and privacy of the ego (as so few of our so-called experimental writers realize) into utterance that is intersubjective—a disclosure of the world’s lived structures. “I strove to master words,” he writes, “to make them melt into a rising spiral of emotional stimuli, each greater than the other, each feeding and reinforcing the other, and all ending in an emotional climax that would drench the reader with a sense of a new world.”

As he grapples with words (the struggle with words—social beings shared across caste, class, and color boundaries—itself enlarges his experience, draws the self outward to others), as he pursues that strangely blunt, detotalized prose which will become his style and embody a now cliched version of the black world parroted today by less inventive writers (no color, smell, or taste, no depth or three-dimensionality to characters, nothing for the reader’s senses to perceptually take up in imagination; no music allowed in the sentences themselves), Wright holds down a series of jobs so depressing he can only offer them as faintly humorous anecdotes here: lying to his gentle Jewish employers because their honesty confuses him; reporting, later, on a white cook who spits into cafe food as she prepares it; and, finally, working as an orderly in a medical institute, where his black co-workers Brand and Cooke upset cages of cancerous rats, diabetic dogs, and Aschheim-Zondek rabbits during a fight.

“Whether we kept our jobs or not depended upon how shrewdly we could cover up all evidence of the fight. It was pure guesswork, but we knew that certain rats or mice went into certain cages, but we did not know what rat or mouse went into what cage …. The white doctors had made sure that we would not know. They had never taken the time to answer a single question; though we worked in the institute, we were as remote from the meaning of the experiments as if we lived on the moon. The doctors had laughed at what they felt was our childlike interest in the fate of the animals.” But sort them they do, with “the fate of the entire medical institute … in our ignorant, black hands,” and no one, incredibly, is the wiser.

The sort of attraction that draws radical politicians and poets nervously together a belief by both that they are midwives to a new moral sensibility—pushes Wright toward the Chicago John Reed Club. Earlier, Depression-era Communists aping Lenin and Stalin in Washington Park, “rolling their ‘r’s’ in continental style, pronouncing ‘party’ as ‘parrrtee,’ ” convinced him that these people had misunderstood everything: “Communism,” he writes, “instead of making them leap forward with fire in their hearts to become masters of ideas and life, had frozen them at an even lower level of ignorance that· had been theirs before they met Communism.” At first only a black observer, Wright is soon elected executive secretary for this factionalized group of “revolutionary artists.” Before long he is researching the life of a black Communist named Ross, and battling for the club’s survival under pressure because, “I had lived so utterly isolated a life that the club filled for me a need that could not be imagined by the white members who were becoming disgusted with it.” His position is interpretative; he will be the bridge between American blacks and an abstract Marxist vision modeled too closely—blindly—on the Bolshevik Revolution. “The Communists, I felt, had oversimplified the experience of those whom they sought to lead … I would address my words to two groups: I would tell Communists how common people felt, and I would tell common people of the self-sacrifice of Communists who strove for unity among them.”

Wright is branded a Trotskyite, an “intellectual” suspicious because he “talks like a book” and reads bourgeoise literature, and because he associates with Ross who is finally condemned as a nationalist. Young Wright recycles his notes on Ross into fiction later collected in Uncle Tom’s Children; he throws himself into work at the South Sic!e Boys’ Club and Federal Negro Theatre, and feels in his increasing conflict with the Communists, “an emotional isolation that I had not known in the depths of the hate-ridden South.” He finds hypocrisy, dogmatism, and a crushing conformity among the Communists-a suspicion of the free life of the spirit: the kind of Lenin-Stalin-Mao mind-domination that betrays, say, the earlier, more expansive Marx of the Paris Manuscripts. Wright, however, never doubts Marxism’s goal of a society without class, co!or, caste, or sexual distinctions. “I was for these people. Being a Negro, I could not help it.’ They did not hate Negroes. They had no racial prejudices … ” Although he catalogues the Communists’ attempts to tum him into a pamphleteer, to obliterate once and for all his individuality, he remains faithful, if not to them, at least to what they believe. “God,” he groans at one point, “I love these people, but I’m glad they’re not in power, or they’d shoot me.” His problem, that of individual freedom and a vision shared with others, has no solution at this stage. “Politics was not my game; the human heart was my game; but it was only in the realm of politics that I could see the depths of the human heart.” The free reign of the ego under capital inevitably ends in decadence, triviality, cheap sensationalism—in our 1970’s vanities, Star Wars fantasies of technological virility, and childish hedonism; but the extinction of the ego by external force, even for the best reasons, is clearly fascism. There can be, for Wright who “wanted to be a Communist, but my kind of Communist,” only the contrite sinner’s conclusion that, “I’ll be for them, even though they are not for me.”

It is not a happy progress that Wright presents here. We hear his troubling voice, his indictments, as if from a distance made doubly terrible because to the very degree that we forget Wright’s “unfinished quest,” as Michel Fabre called it, we lose sight of the real object of his writing: man’s emergence from thinghood. Despite its flaws of composition and often flagging dramatic focus, American Hunger makes us remember one of our most important writer’s ambition first with others, then at the lonely writing desk—to raise America in general and the black world in particular from the moral wreckage of materialism and vulgarity. It throws new light on that project and, as Fabre writes in the book’s “Afterword,” endows the man and his work with greater dimension. And, finally, it creates a kind of amaneusis for those who still believe—as Wright believed—that the first step in treating social corruption is the treatment of the corruption of consciousness.