Reserve Text: from Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
Chapter 11: Richard Wright and the Critique of Class Theory
Marxist Theory and the Black Radical IntellectualIn one sense the first systemization of Black radical historiography was constructed by figures such as G.W. Williams, J. J. Thomas, DuBois, James and Padmore for precisely the complex reasons suggested by James when he wrote on revolutionary leaders: they had directly profited from the 'cultural advantages' of the system upon which they mounted their ideographic attack. As the heirs of Black petit bourgeoisies, they enjoyed in the order of things the intellectual beneficence of the ruling order from which they posited their critique. A less obvious process fueled their rebellion. Ambitious and accomplished in the very skills which were understood to qualify them for leading roles in bourgeois society which 'naturally' demarcated extraordinary individuals (dominators) from the ordinary populace -- their loyalties to the existing order were contingent only on its consistency. Inevitably, when racial order subverted their experience of the 'universals' of Western civilization, they were confronted with but two alternatives: to bitterly endure the cynically-indulged illusion or to attempt its realization. Obviously when these figures chose the latter it was not a choice characteristic of their class.
Still subject to what James had described as the inherent 'political vices' associated with their social origins, their seduction by those aspects of Marxism which were owed to the sources of its genesis is understandable. Marxism's intellectual power and pedigree, its promise of a hidden truth, its open opposition to an insidious social order, its alternative mapping of the historical origins of the ruling classes, which they had come to despise, and its identification with the underclasses, made it an almost irresistible companion. Moreover, Marxists were under no obligation to minimize what the total thrust of bourgeois thought was orchestrated to deny: that the 'natural social order' tended towards instability and chaos. On the contrary, Marxian logic composed an historical order from the anarchic, wrenching social forces within the capitalist world system. Marxism was (and remains) a superior grammar for synthesizing the degradation of labour with the growing destabilization of capitalist production and accelerating technological development; tire increasing resort to state coercion mediated by bureaucratic rationalism; and the strangulation of whole regions (most of them formerly colonies) through[417]
pricing mechanisms, market manipulation, monopolization of advanced technology, the international organization of production, international banking, military assistance, and the stultifying dependencies of monocultural economies. Marxism, too, implied that it was the particular privilege of the revolutionary intellectual to comprehend this deeper, extra-existential order. And in the generation of these Black intellectuals, with apparent finality Marxism was confirmed in its historical authority by the Russian Revolution.
This last identification, though, was to prove to be an ambiguous one. In the minds of Black intellectuals, within a quarter of a century, the significance of the Third International had substantially degenerated. For some, like Padmore, and later Cox, international Communism (Stalinism) was simply another deceitful Western invention; for others like James it was its own perversion; finally, for those who were to share DuBois' experience, it seemed merely a convenient means of protest. However, detached from the Communist movement, Marxist theory could retain important capacities. Notwithstanding its reductionist weaknesses, there was in Marxism a critical discourse to which no bourgeois ideology adequately responded. Capitalism's global regularities of war, expanding poverty and exploitation, the concentration of wealth and the extension of repression persisted. Bourgeois thinkers displaced these endemic phenomena with the notion of termed, resolvable dysfunctions. Marxists correctly declared they were no such things.There was, however, much more to these radical Black intellectuals than their class origins and the contradictions they experienced consequent to the racial castes of Western civilization. More profoundly than 'scientific' Marxism could suggest, they were an element of a historically emergent social force, the Black radical movement. And though intellectually disciplined in such ways as to oppose its conscious realization, their ideological nurturing as Blacks prepared them for its eventual recognition. It is possible to see, even in such Westernized intellects as James and DuBois, that the historical force of the Black movement was the more powerful influence. Even their discovery of Western radicalism proved to be insufficient. As we have seen, it became necessary to both of them to attempt to bring Marxist theory to bear on an historical phenomenon for which its analytical vocabulary was inadequate. From the moments of these efforts, neither DuBois nor James, nor Padmore nor Cox could sustain a commitment to orthodox Marxism.
But there were also others in whose work a similar concentration could be discerned; others emergent from Black societies and in search of an articulated opposition to Western racism and bourgeois society. One of these, Richard Wright, is of particular interest. Unlike those upon whom we have already focused, Wright was not of the petit bourgeoisie. His roots were in the Black peasantry of the American South. His encounter with Marxism and the Communist movement was largely unmediated by the cultural misdirections which accompanied the intellectual awakenings of middle-class Black men and women. His childhood and adolescence in Mississippi, subject to the most direct exposure to racist brutality and brutalization, provided him little appreciation for or expectations of bourgeois society and its culture. (1) He came
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to Marxism for reasons which were fundamentally different from those of our previous subjects. And when he withdrew, he was different too. His insights into his experience of the Communist movement and into Marxist thought suggest an alternative penetration into the relationship between European radical thought and the historical configurations of the Black movement.
The ambiguity surrounding Wright is, in part, a consequence of his own intellectual odyssey. More precisely it is a consequence of his public honesty about the voyage. It was a journey which took him from Marxism, and through Existentialism, and finally to Black nationalism - a journey which could be retraced biographically from his membership in the American Communist Party in the early 1930's to his death in France in 1960. But another and equally important source for the undefined character of Wright's legacy is the several and remarkably extensive campaigns of vilification launched against him by the American Left, the American liberal intelligentsia and American bureaucrats. These ranged from the literary attacks on Wright by writers such as James Baldwin(2) to the political assaults of figures like James Ford (3),a Ben Burns(4), then editor of Ebony, the deliberately distorted reports in Time magazine on Wright and others,(5) the machinations of the Central Intelligence Agency,(6) and threats from once-powerful, but now almost forgotten anti-communists like David Schine.(7) It appears to be a fair statement that though these distinct and, in some instances, opposing political factions had rather different interests in the destruction of Wright's influence on American politics and literature, they did concur on the desirability of the suppression of his work and Ideas.(8)
In any case, the result was the same: Wright's self-imposed geographical exile was transformed into an intellectual and political isolation. Moreover, some of these same forces sought further retribution from Wright by filling his life in Europe and Great Britain with harassments of both petty and terrifying dimensions.(9) It was intended that Wright realize the full consequence of critisizing American domestic racial policies and attacking American foreign policy in the Third World.
Yet despite his detractors and their sponsors, despite the established and powerful political and cultural authorities of American society, some of Wright's work and ideas survived. The re-emergence of Wright's importance in American thought may appear at first ironical. So many of his critics are now rather thin shadows in history. But, more accurately, it is the result of the social and historical contradictions of American capitalism and its particular social order.
In the midst of the black consciousness and nationalist movements of the 1960's, the seemingly irresistible dictates of the market compelled the republishing of The Outsider (1965), Native Son (1966), Black Boy (1966), Light Men (1969) and later, American Hunger (1977).(10) They were works which spoke to a generation which Wright did not live to see but had anticipated. Significant, too, was the emergence of younger and equally militant Black writers and playwrights (among them John A. Williams, Leroi Jones, Ed Bullins, Melvin Van Peebles and lshmael Reed). Much of their work would
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have fallen quite easily into what one American critic, Robert Bone, had called 'the Wright School' ('For the Wright School, literature is an emotional catharsis a means of dispelling the inner tensions of race. Their novels often amount to a prolonged cry of anguish and despair. Too close to their material, feeling it too intensely, these novelists lack a sense of form and of thematic line.'), (11) except for the fact that Bone had already announced the death of that school 20 years earlier: 'By the late 1940's the vein of literary material unearthed by Richard Wright had been all but worked out. The market for protest had become saturated'. (12) It does appear that Bone was a bit premature.
More remarkable, however, than the sheer survival of Wright's work, is the theoretical and analytical power of his ideas. This achievement of Wright's, with the stimulus of historical materialism and psychoanalysis, fell much closer to an emergent European literature (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Koestler, Lukacs, Marcuse, Kolakowski) in the post Second World War period khan to any American fashion. Like many European Left intellectuals, Wright was moving beyond classical Marxism and the Marxism inspired by Lenin in order to come to terms with a world constituted of material and spiritual forces historically unique. Wright's reach, consequently, can be said to be much longer than that implied by the terms employed by many of his American critics. He was never merely a 'racial novelist', a 'protest writer', or a 'literary rebel'.(13) Indeed, much of his work was a direct confrontation with the leading ideas and ideational systems of contemporary Western political and social thought. His arena was the totality of Western civilisation and its constitutive elements: industrialization, urbanization, alienation, class, racism, exploitation and the hegemony of bourgeois ideology. His work thus constituted an inquiry.
Wright's persistence in his investigation of Western society was an important factor contributing to the achievement of a certain consistency in his work. As artist, as essayist, as critic, as political activist, it is clear that he arranged and rearranged many times the elements making up the phenomenological display of Western development. He knew the names of Western experience but was less certain of what he knew of their nature and their systemic and historical relationships. There were questions to which he still had to find answers: was the working class a social reality? Could class consciousness supersede racism as an ideology? Was the Party the vanguard of the proletariat? Was Marxism more than a critique of capitalism? These were some of the issues to which Wright had not found satisfactory answers in organized and organizational politics. Ultimately, it would be because of his particular skill for transforming theoretical abstractions and constructs into recognisably human experience that it became possible for him to make those distinctions between dogma and reality so important to his development.
Theoretically and ideologically, Wright came to terms with Western
thought and life through Black nationalism. However, the basis for his critique of Western society was his experience of tile historical formation of Black peoples in Africa and the diaspora, from the Gold Coast to the Mississippi[420]
Delta.(14) Psychically and intellectually he was drawn to attend those same forces which produced the critical inspections of W.E.B. DuBois, George Padmore and C.L.R. James. As Michael Fabre puts it:
Wright's originality, then, is that he completely understood and often reiterated... that the situation of the Black in the twentieth century, and in particular during the crucial period from the Depression to the advent of Black Power, was exceptional. These years saw the awakening of the Third World and with it the enormous mutation of our civilisation. 'The liberation of the colored peoples of the world is the most important event of our century,' is a refrain that runs throughout Wright's work. The same message, delivered half a century before by W.E.B. DuBois, did not have the same existentialist dimension. (15)
Wright had not created these forces which were transforming Western society, but it was his intention to give these events a meaning independent of those interpretations bounded by the interests of Western civilization as articulated by its intellectuals and ideologues.
Still there are some who have argued that Wright fulfilled little of his promise. Harold Cruse, among them, has written that Wright 'was so ideologically blinded by the smog of Jewish-Marxist nationalism that he was unable to see his own clearly'; that Wright had not understood 'that the classics of Marx and Engels were written not for the proletariat but for the intelligentsia',(16) and, finally, that 'He could not gather into himself all the ingredients of nationalism; to create values and mould concepts by which his race was to "struggle, live and die".(17)
Here, then, are two of the several interpretations which attach to Wright's significance. The first places him within a tradition of radical Black thinkers. The second expels him from that same legacy. In the following pages we shall examine which of these two summaries of Wright's work is more appropriate.
The Novel as Politics
Richard Wright was by his work primarily a novelist. But as a novelist involved in social action, his novels were more than a complaint against or an observation of the human condition. Wright intended that his writing engage and confront a political reality of movement. He was a novelist who recognized that a part of his task was to come to terms with the character of social change and the agencies that emerged as attempts to direct that change. His early development consciously reflected this concern, beginning with his 1937 essay, 'Blueprint for Negro Writing'. In this essay we see the first suggestions of a critical independence of thought in Wright.
Perspective... is that fixed point in intellectual space where a writer stands to view the struggles, hopes, and sufferings of his people ...
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Of all the problems faced by writers who as a whole have never allied themselves with world movements, perspective is the most difficult of achievement. (18)
Wright was quite openly declaring that he meant his work to reflect a committed intellect, one informed by a political intention and the process of historical movement. He was also dedicating himself to the task which would occupy him for the remaining 23 years of his life: the location of his 'perspective' in the complex of struggles for liberation in the Third World. As we shall see, what Wright ultimately discovered was a psychological and intellectual locus unlike anything his experience of Western radicalism and activism could encompass. Fortunately, a great part of his preparation for that discovery can be found in his novels.
When we consider Richard Wright's fictional and explicitly political work, three novels (Native Son, The Outsider and 'Island of Hallucination' this latter eventually published under the title American Hunger) and one collection of short stories (Uncle Tom's Children) stand out, Together, these works both chronicle and interpret Wright's experiences with American communism and political action. They also constitute studies of Marxism as a theory of history and social revolution, of the social and psychological development of the American working class, and of the historical and ideological development of American Blacks. Serious attention to these works should not be deflected by the form through which Wright sought to articulate his ideas. Indeed, it must be recognized that his works are uniquely suited to their tasks. Using this form, Wright could reconstruct and weight the extraordinary complexities and subtleties of radical politics as he and others had experienced it. His characters could live with and struggle through crises he had encountered. They could 'test' the meanings and significances he had given to those experiences. His novels were consequently much more authentic documents than the conventional forms of history, biography and political tract for they were constructed from lives with which he was intimate. In these novels, Wright could achieve his intention of weaving living consciousness into the impress of social theory and ideology.(19)Wright had joined the American communist movement in the early 1930's. This was a period which coincided with an intensification of the Party's work among Blacks following the Sixth Congress of the Comintern's 'resolution on the Negro Question' in 1928 and tile beginnings of the Scottsboro trials in 1931. Wright left the Party a decade later. During those years he worked in the movement in the various capacities of organiser, member of a Black Party cell in Chicago, officer in the John Reed Clubs and writer for the communist press. At first, his work for the Party was to take place primarily in Chicago; later he was transferred to Harlem.(20) It was, of course, during this time that his writing was most directly influenced by the Party. He proved to be very good at it. By 1937, the year he had published 'Blueprint...', he had become, in Daniel Aaron's words, 'the Party's most illustrious proletarian author'.(21)
Wright took this responsibility as a proletarian writer quite seriously. He[422]
was committed to the task of expressing working-class thought, consciousness and experience. One recollection of this period is his first impression of the Party: 'The Communists, I felt, had oversimplified the experience of those whom they sought to lead... they had missed the meaning of the lives of the masses... .'(22) Wright meant to put this right, the proletariat had to be allowed its own voice. It was just as clear to him that he carried a particular, racial responsibility towards the Black working classes:
The Negro writer who seeks to function within his race as a purposeful agent has a serious responsibility... a deep, informed, and complex consciousness is necessary; a consciousness which draws for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people, and moulds this lore with the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today . . . the Negro writer... is being called upon to do no less than create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die.
. . . because his writing possesses the potential cunning to steal into the inmost recesses of the human heart, because he can create myths and symbols that inspire a faith in life....(23)As a Black writer, Wright was presuming that the intelligenstia had the obligation to construct the ideological and symbolic means through which an emerging Black movement would be formed. Still, the work of this intetligentsia had to be grounded in the culture of their people.
Working with these conceptions, Wright was clearly reflecting an earlier Marxian tradition, one in which Lenin had transformed a 'renegade' petit bourgeoisie into a revolutionary vanguard.(24) (Wright appears to have always opposed the Stalinist anti-intellectualism which marked the communist movement domestically and internationally in the 1930's.) But Wright was also mindful of a second and separate tradition which had emerged among blacks in the US during the late 18th and mid 19th Centuries. At these historical moments from among the ranks of free Blacks, there had emerged an intellectually, economically and politically elite class which had assumed leadership on behalf of the largely enslaved Black masses. This nucleus later contributed significantly to the formation of the Black middle class. The ethos of this class and its socio-historical traditions had been given its most enduring name by W.E.B. DuBois: the talented tenth.(25) Wright was thus suffusing two distinct and opposing traditions. But more importantly, even here, while he was ostensibly addressing Black intellectuals, he was also going about the work of recreating his world in his own ideological terms.
Wright's Social Theory
Wright, in having constructed the character of Bigger Thomas in Native Son, has been attributed with a variety of achievements, intents and concerns. Addison Gayle, echoing many of his critical predecessors, argues that Wright
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created the archetypal stereotype of the Black man, thus releasing American consciousness from that particular beast of burden.(26) Elsewhere one finds written to destroy. Bigger is Uncle Tom's descendant, flesh of his flesh, exactly opposite a portrait' ;(27) as a study in the psychology of the outcast;(28) and as a statement of the human predicament.(29) In other words, Wright's ranging between a racially specific protest to a universal declaration. It might be useful, however, to add another and quite different dimension to Native Son --a dimension found in Wright's own consciousness of the work.
In 1944, upon his formal declaration of leave from the American
Communist Party (the break occurred in 1942), Wright made a number of his other concerns quite clear. Some of them had to do with the reasons he first became a part of American radicalism.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 experience of workers in other lands, by the possibility of uniting scattered but kindred people into a whole... here at last, in the realm of revolutionary expression, Negro experience could find a home, a functioning value and role. (30)
Marxist propaganda suggested to him that Blacks need not be alone in their struggle for liberation and dignity, The spectre era world proletariat, united and strong, Black and white fascinated Wright.
Before that evening of his intellectual conversion he had looked upon the Party as a white man's organization and therefore something to be distrusted, especially in its pretensions concerning Blacks. More important, until that moment he had dismissed as a personal fantasy, as a painful, frustrating dream, the organization of the poor and oppressed. Again, on that same evening --his first visit to a John Reed Club --Wright commented, 'l was meeting men and women whom I should know for decades to come, who were to form the first sustained friendships in my life.'(31) He had discovered not merely an important, historical vista but someone with whom to share it. Still, beyond the social vision of Marxism and the fraternity of American Communism, Wright's decision to become a part of this movement was motivated by one other element: the opportunity to transform himself from 'passive' victim to active advocate.
Here, then, was something that I could do, reveal, say. The Communists, I felt, had oversimplified the experience of those whom they sought to lead, In their efforts to recruit masses, they had missed the meaning of the lives of the masses, had conceived of people in too abstract a manner. I would try to put some of that meaning back, I would tell Communists how common people fell, and [would tell common people of the self-[424]
sacrifice of the Communists who strove for unity among them.(32)
Wright perceived his task as providing to the movement a language and images which would give meaning to the abstracted proletariat of Party ideology. This complex of motives - vision, fraternity and task - might seem sufficient to explain to the readers of Uncle Tom's Children, Lawd Today and Native Son, Wright's sociological and political preoccupations in his early works. Yet Wright, as we shall see, was to have a very different experience which provided other and very different themes for the last of these three works.
Wright had entered the Party naive of its history, its factionalism and its purgative vocabulary.(33) As we have seen, he had not been convinced earlier of the sincerity of American Communists. This is somewhat surprising given the enormous vitality of the Party's 'Negro work' at the time, work which included the defence of the Scottsboro boys; the confrontation with conservative Black organizations; the organizing of Unemployed Councils and Tenant Leagues; the development of the Black Belt Thesis on self-determination and the organizing of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and, on the international level, the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers.(34) Though he was then a hospital worker, he had identified himself as a writer, and as a writer, he was categorized by those in the Party's ranks as an 'intellectual'. This meant that Wright was to be subjected to the diffidence shown to intellectuals, but, more significantly among his Black comrades, that he was also to be held in suspicion for 'petit bourgeois tendencies' i.e., selfish interests and worse: Trotskyism. The result was inevitable:
Successive disillusionments had transformed his original enthusiastic and total dedication into wariness. His individualism was against him; he was at the mercy of leaders like Oliver Law and Harry Haywood, ostracized from unit 205 by certain black comrades and even denigrated...(35)
Invited to the Party trial of another Black Party member (one upon whose early experience in the South Wright had based his short story, 'Big Boy Leaves Home'), Wright realized that the trial was also meant for someone else:
The blindness of their limited lives-- lives truncated and impoverished by the oppression they had suffered long before they had ever heard of Communism made them think that I was with their enemies. American life had so corrupted their consciousness that they were unable to recognize their friends when they saw them. I know that if they had held state power I should have been declared guilty of treason . . .(36)
He recognized among his Black co-workers an anger dammed up to the level of destruction of self. It was not an ideology which lay at the base of their
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need to physically violate errant comrades. Their dogmatism was an enveloping shield against ego-cide. Their conformity was a symptom of their desperate and collective need for each other. Wright would write later: 'They're blind... Their enemies have blinded them with too much oppression.' (37)
This, then, is the crisis which informed the development of Bigger Thomas. Native Son was the result of Wright's resolve to have his say, his revision of American Marxism as it emerged from the lives and practices of American Communists:
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo; and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.(38)
In Native Son, Wright sought to display a more authentic, more historical, more precise image of the proletariat to which the Party had committed itself, he had begun this task in Lawd Today and it came to fruition in the form of Bigger Thomas. Wright, hesitant at wrestling with Marxism on theoretical terms, pursued his critique of American Left ideology in his own terms: the novel. Bigger Thomas' lack of class consciousness more precisely the odyssey of his development of consciousness - is deliberate and purposive. This was not simply a literary device, but a means of coming to grips with the abstraction and romanticization of the proletariat which had infected Western Communist ideology.
At the time of Wright's sojourn in the Party (1934-42), the primary focus of the movement in Western Europe and the United States was the defeat of fascism. II was a fundamental tenet of Party work that fascism was an instrument of the ruling class designed to meet the crisis of world capitalism embodied in the Depression. As such, fascism as an ideology was presumed to be alien to the working class. Earl Browder, as general secretary of the American Communist Party, had made this position abundantly clear in reports, speeches and articles during the late 1930's.(39) As the official voice of the American Party Browder had argued that the struggle of the movement was preeminently a political one:
What is the message that this powerful voice of the Communist Party is giving to America? First of all, it is the message of the need for the great mass of the people, the workers and farmers, to organize for their own protection.(40)
Browder's strategy was a simple one: '1tle growth of the Communist Party is the greatest guarantee against reaction and fascism'.(41)Browder's leadership had positioned the Party in support of the New Deal and Roosevelt's administration under the presumption that American workers were not ready to confront the issue of socialism.(42) In effect, the Party pursued the contradictory aims of reform and revolution. This was in part a
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consequence, as Wilhelm Reich had pointed out with respect to the communist movement during the Weimar Republic, of failing to distinguish between the abstraction of class consciousness and its specific, historical form. (43) Just as critically, however, the Party was committed by the instructions of the Comintern to a united front with its class enemies.
For Wright the question of the consciousness of workers and consequently that of political organization was more complex. It involved--as he was to write in defence of Native Son - 'the dark and hidden places of the human personality.'(44) In the essay, 'How "Bigger" Was Born', Wright had been more explicit:
the civilization which had given birth to Bigger contained no spiritual sustenance, had created no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance and faith, had sensitized him and had left him stranded, a free agent to roam the streets of our cities, a hot and whirling vortex of undisciplined and unchannelized impulses.
... l was fascinated by the similarity of the emotional tensions of Bigger in America and Bigger in Nazi Germany and Bigger in Old Russia. All Bigger Thomases, white and black, felt tense, afraid, nervous, hysterical, and restless... certain modern experiences were creating types of personalities whose existence ignored racial and national lines of demarcation....(45)Wright was attempting to come to terms with the psychological consequence of an historical condition of which the leadership in the Communist movement was only vaguely aware. Wright was insisting on the necessity for understanding the working class in their own terms. He was concerned with the ability of proletarian masses to reproduce themselves spiritually and culturally. If they could no longer recreate the social ideologies which had sustained them, it would not be possible for them to fulfil the historical role that Marxian theory assigned them, Moreover, the fragmentation of personality, social relations and ideology that Wright observed and recreated was so total that its political and historical implications seriously challenged the presumptions of the Communist movement:
I felt that Bigger, an American product, a native son of this land, carried within him the potentialities of either Communism or Fascism... Whether he'll follow some gaudy, hysterical leader who'll promise rashly to fill the void in him, or whether he'll come to an understanding with the millions of his kindred fellow workers under trade-unions or revolutionary guidance depends upon the future drift of events ha America. But . . . Bigger Thomas, conditioned as his organism is, will not become an ardent, or even a luke-warm, supporter of the status quo.(46)
He realized that no political movement which, for ideological reasons, presumed the progressive character of the working class would succeed.
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Wright's novel, subsequently, was a refutation of radical dogma from the vantage point of Black experience. He sought first to recreate that experience, and in so doing to force a confrontation between it and socialist ideology. Bigger Thomas' character was specific to the historical experience of Blacks in the United States, but his nature was proletarian, that is world-historical. When Wright gave the consciousness of Bigger Thomas a nationalist character, he was addressing himself to both those aspects of his creation. He wrote that he was 'confronted with that part of him that was dual in aspect ... a part of all Negroes and all whites'.(47) If the American revolutionary movement could not come to terms with the appeals of fascism, then it could not begin to understand the immediate nature of the working class. (48) He agreed with Marx that capitalism as a form of organization led to the destruction of social consciousness rounded on non-capitalist social orders. He did not accept, however, the notion that this process led to a new ideological synthesis, The truer result, the observed result, was 'a world that existed on a plane of animal sensation alone'. (49) The Nazi movement succeeded because it offered in the stead of an existential terror, a new, unambiguous social order, 'the implicit, almost unconscious, or preconscious assumptions and ideals upon which whole nations and races act and live'. (50)
Yet Wright's analysis did not end there. He had something more to say
about the nature of revolutionary action. His analysis both underscored the absolute character of revolutionary commitment and also spoke to Marxian class analysis.I remember reading a passage in a book dealing with old Russia which
said: 'We must be ready to make endless sacrifices if we are to be able
to overthrow the Czar'. ... Actions and feelings of men ten thousand
miles from home helped me to understand the moods and impulses of
those walking the streets of Chicago and Dixie. (51)Wright recognized in his Bigger Thomases the desperation which was the precondition for the making of total and violent revolutionary commitments. He understood those commitments to be less ones of choice than of compulsion. The more total the degradation of the human being, the more total the reaction -'the need for a whole life and acted out of that need'. (52)
He also refused to dismiss the Bigger Thomases as lumpen-proletariat or to distinguish them from the proletariat. In Native Son he actually anticipated a thesis on violence and the lumpen-proletariat which would become better known later through the work of Frantz Fanon. For Wright, the violence of the lumpen-proletariat was not only an objective force of revolution; violence could not be separated out from the formation of consciousness.
'l didn't want to kill' Bigger shouted. 'But what I killed for, I am.' (53)
What, precisely, the Bigger Thomases would kill for, Wright could not answer. Ire had stated his thesis and it was now left to the 'future drift of events' to make that determination, i.e., the capacity of the American radical move-
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ment to develop a critical political theory. This, of course, was not to be the case. (54)
Wright had emerged from the Depression with a clear and powerful image of American society and world history. With the writing of Uncle Tom's Children and Native Son he had extracted from the misery of poverty and imminent social collapse an understanding of a systemic integration in which racism was a secondary, residual phenomenon. He had no reason to doubt that the disintegration of the capitalist world was really a promise of liberation - a promise which enveloped the whole of humanity. Yet he possessed few illusions about this process of disintegration. He knew, in social terms, even in human terms, that the immediate costs would be unparalleled violence, brutality and vengeance. At first he hoped that this historical transformation would be surgical in its order. He believed in a conscious, deliberate and magnanimous workers' movement. By the time he was writing Native Son, however, this ordered revolution had been replaced by a chaos consisting of the collective action of a brutalized human force. The destruction of capitalism would come at the hands of the brute social force it had itself created. Still, Wright saw this brutalized mass as the promise of the future. Unlike Marx, Wright anticipated barbarism and socialism.
Blacks as the Negation of Capitalism
For Wright, it was not sufficient for black liberation that his people come to terms with the critique of capitalist society. He had observed: 'Marxism is but the starting point. No theory of life can take the place of life.' (55) As a critique of capitalist society, Marxism was necessary, of course, but it was ultimately an internal critique. The epistemological nature of historical materialism took bourgeois society on its own terms, i.e., presuming the primacy of economic forces and structures. (56) As such, the historical development from feudalism of the bourgeoisie as a class served as a logical model for the emergence of the proletariat as a negation of capitalist society. (57) Wright appeared quite early to have understood this thesis as a fundamental error in Marxist thought. Even as early as 1937, he had begun to argue that it was necessary that Blacks transform the Marxist critique into an expression of their own emergence as a negation of Western capitalism.
Though immersed in the American radical movement with its Eurocentric ideology, it/lad not taken Wright very long to reach the conclusion that the historic development of Black people in the United States constituted the most total contradiction to Western capitalist society:
The workers of a minority people, chafing under exploitation, forge
organisational forms of struggle ... Lacking the handicaps of false
ambition and property, they have access to a wide social vision and a
deep social consciousness,.. Their organizations show greater
strength, adaptability, and efficiency than any other group or class in
society. (58)[429]
Wright assumed that the alienation of Black workers from American society was more total than that experienced by the 'white' working classes formed in Europe and America. This, indeed, was the more profound significance of Black nationalism, and one with which the Black intellectual had to come to terms:
... the emotional expression of group-feeling which puzzles so many whites and leads them to deplore what they call 'black chauvinism' is not a morbidly inherent trait of the Negro, but rather the reflex expression of a life whose roots are imbedded deeply in Southern soil. Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives... they must accept the concept of nationalism because, in order to transcend it, they must possess and understand it. And a nationalist spirit in Negro writing means a nationalism carrying the highest possible pitch of social consciousness. It means a nationalism that know its origins, its limitations, that is aware of the dangers of its position, that knows its ultimate aims are unrealisable within the framework of capitalist America; a nationalism whose reason for being lies in the simple fact of self-possession and in the consciousness of the interdependence of people in modern society. (59)
Wright's argument and its language strongly suggest the elements within the Party with which he was in ideological conflict. In using the phrase 'black chauvinism' - its second element being a term used most frequently within the Party as a more objective interpretation for what was commonly referred to as nationalism - Wright designated his first target: white Marxian ideologues. His second target, deracinated Black intellectuals, were addressed as the recipients of a new history. They had to be made to realist that Black nationalism was an initial and historically logical stage of a more profoundly universal consciousness.
Wright was arguing that American Blacks had been recreated from their African origins by an oppressive system of capitalist exploitation which had al one and the same time integrated them into the emergent organization of industrial production while suspending them from the full impact of bourgeois ideology. Perhaps Wright put Ibis most succinctly several years later in The Outsider when Ely Houston, one of Wright's two spokesmen in the novel, observed:
The way Negroes were transported to this country and sold into slavery, then stripped of their tribal culture and held in bondage; and then allowed so teasingly and over so long a period of time, to be sucked into our way of life is something which resembles the rise of all men ...
They are outsiders and... They are going to be self-conscious;
they are going to be gifted with a double vision, for, being Negroes, they are going to be both inside and outside of our culture at the same time . . . Negroes will develop unique and specially defined psychological
[430]types. They will become psychological men, like the Jews... They will not only be Americans or Negroes; they will be centers of knowing, so to speak.. , The political, social, and psychological consequences of this will be enormous... (60)
Wright believed that racism, the very character of the system by which black workers had been exploited, had mediated their internalization of the ruling ideas of American society. He went on to assert that, unlike the dominant sectors of European and Euro-American proletariats, the Black proletariat historically from the legal and political disciplines of slavery to its peculiar condition as free wage labour - had developed a psychic and cultural identity independent from bourgeois ideology. This construction of Wright's pushed the insights of DuBois (61) and others far beyond the critique of Black-White labour solidarity. What Wright was suggesting went even beyond the most extreme position in the 1930's of American radicals that Blacks were the vanguard of the American working class. (62)
Wright was asserting that the Black revolutionary movement, in the process of transcending a chauvinistic nationalism, was emerging as an historical force which would challenge the very foundation of Western civilisation:
Reduced to its simplest terms, theme for Negro writers will rise from understanding the meaning of their being transplanted from a 'savage' to a 'civilized' culture in implications. It means that Negro writers must have in their consciousness the fore-shortened picture of the whole, nourishing culture from which they were torn in Africa, and of the long, complex (and for the most part, unconscious) straggle to regain in some
form and under alien conditions of life a whole culture again. (63)
For Wright, it was at precisely this point, in the culture's ideational, conceptual and ideological extension, that the writer and other intellectuals are required. In the construction of myths and symbols emergent from the experience of Black people, the responsibility of the intellectuals was 'to create values by which [their] race is to struggle, live and die'. This is precisely the task Wright was assuming sixteen years later in The Outsider.
The Outsider as a Critique of Christianity and Marxism
The Outsider was completed several years after Wright had left the American Communist movement. It was received, however, as a further elaboration of Wright's reason for his action. (64) Yet the novel's treatment of the Party was less in the tradition of Chester Himes' vitriolic Lonely Crusade or Ralph Ellison's satiric The Invisible Man than in that of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.(65) Though Wright did develop in The Outsider a critique of the American Left's race politics and of Stalinism, his intent was much broader, his object much more far ranging.
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The novel is a parable. It is a moral, philosophic and political exercise. Like the myth in phatic groups, the purpose is to demonstrate the terrible consequence to the human spirit as well as to social organization of a total exorcizing of social ideology. In white Man Listen, Wright would declare:
I maintain that the ultimate effect of white Europe upon Asia and Africa was to cast millions into a kind of spiritual void; I maintain that it suffused their lives with a sense of meaninglessness. I argue that it was not merely physical suffering or economic deprivation that has set over a billion and a half colored people in violent political motion ...... The dynamic concept of the void that must be filled, a void created by a thoughtless and brutal impact of the West upon a billion and a half people, is more powerful than the concept of class conflict, and more universal. (66)
Without myths, that is without meaning, consciousness is set adrift into
terror. The desperation which is the condition of this degree of alienation (or Max Scheler's ressentiment, or Husserl's 'crisis') (67) inevitably requires violence. Violence is the final, the last possible form that social action may assume.Moreover, Wright was demonstrating both the necessity and inevitability of ideology and its arbitrariness. No matter what meanings ideologies systematize, they are always subject to the abuses of power. When ideology is used for the purpose of domination, it must be opposed, not by a counter-ideology but by the negation of ideology: theory; In short, he was making the case for the necessity for a critical commitment, the sort of commitment which achieves its purpose by extraction from the historical legacy: the culture of a people. Such a commitment is made possible only through a consciousness capable of recreating meaning.
In The Outsider, Wright sought to subvert the two ideological and philosophic traditions at the heart of modern Western culture. Firstly, he ridiculed the Judeo-Christian tradition by creating a protagonist whose very name is contradiction: Cross Damon the demon Christ. Cross Damon has escaped Judeo-Christian morality through the recognition of its operative psychic force: a destructive, debilitating dread guilt. Just as Marx earlier had recognized that religion (that is Judaism) 'is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions'.(68) Wright had perceived the truer historical significance of Christianity among Blacks as not an instrument of domination but as a philosophic adaptation to oppression.
Moreover, he understood the resignation of Black Christianity as only one clement in the culture of Blacks. In Black music, another more strident voice existed opposing that guilt:... this music was the rhythmic flauntings of guilty feelings, the
syncopated outpourings of frightened joy existing in guises forbidden[432]
and despised by others .... Negroes had been made to live in but not of the land of their birth ... the injunctions of an alien Christianity and the strictures of white laws had evoked in them the very longings and desires that that religion and law had been designed to stifle ... blue-jazz was a rebel art blooming seditiously under the condemnations of a Protestant ethic.... Blue-jazz was the scornful gesture of men turned ecstatic in their state of rejection ... the recreations of the innocently criminal ... (69)
The forces of science and technology and the processes of the proletarianization of Black workers were orchestrating the supercession of black Christian resignation by this second, derisively angry, consciousness.
Yet Wright was also critical of Marxism, the second and more modern radical Western tradition. It, too, was profoundly limited theoretically, and subject to the abuses of narrow political interests. Marxism had ultimately failed to come to terms with nationalism, with consciousness, with racism, with Western civilization, with industrialzation and with the history of Blacks. Wright had already demonstrated some of its limitations in Native Son. Daniel Aaron, commenting on Bigger Thomas; communist lawyer, had observed, 'Even Boris Max never really understands Bigger, and is frightened by Bigger's vision of himself.' (70) Wright made this same point even more tellingly in The Outsider. Wright maintained that the purposes of Marxism as employed in American Communism were less analytical than political. The result was neither theory nor praxis but the achievement of power. Ironically, in the second novel, it was the character of Hilton, also a Party functionary, who spoke for Wright. Hilton, driven to candour by desperation, betrays the crude agreement upon which Party support of Black liberation depended: manipulation. Wright (Cross) then reflects to himself:
Did the average white American suspect that men like Hilton existed, men who could easily rise above the racial hatred of the mob and cynically make use of the defensive attitudes instilled in Negroes as weapons in their own bitter struggle for power? (71)
But Wright would instruct us never to expect to hear such revelations as Hilton's. He had heard them as a part of his experience, an experience which he would subject to the Marxian critique which was now also a part of his way of grapping with reality.
Marxism as an ideology and theory of history, Wright argued, was a product of a petit bourgeoisie, in particular, the intellectuals:
You must assume that I know what this is all about. Don't tell me about the nobility of labor, the glorious future. You don't believe in that. That's for others, and you damn well know it ... You Jealous Rebels are intellectuals who know your history and you are anxious not to make the mistakes of your predecessors in rebellious undertakings. (72)
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He was no longer convinced t list Marxism as a theory, as a t theory of history or social revolution, was correct but he did understand its seductiveness. He would write in 1960: 'Marxist ideology in particular is but a transitory make-shift pending a more accurate diagnosis.... Communism may be but a painful compromise containing a definition of man by sheer default.'(73) He suspected that Marxism, alike with Christianity as an ideology, masked the complexities of history and social experience. Its truer function was the social and intellectual cohesion of the petit bourgeoisie - a class very different from the proletariat:
... one minority section of the white society in or under which he lives will offer the educated elite of Asia and Africa or black America an interpretation of the world which impels to action, thereby assuaging his feeling~ of inferiority. Nine times out of ten it can be easily pointed out that the ideology offered has no relation to the plight of the educated black, brown, or yellow elite.... But that ideology does solve something ...... it enabled the Negro or Asian or African to meet revolutionary fragments of the hostile race on a plane of equality.(74)
Still, in this his most devastating criticism of Communism, Wright was relying on a notion of class struggle:
These men who rise to challenge the rulers are jealous men. They feel that they are just as good as the men who rule; indeed, they suspect that they are better. They see the countless mistakes that are being made by the men who rule and they think that they could do a more honest, a much cleaner job, a more efficient job.(75)
Such was Wright's thesis on the development of Marxism as a class-specific ideology. And in some ways, he was echoing Marx's own but more mystical explanation of Marxism:
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hand... so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.(76)
By tile early 1950's, Wright had come to his similar conclusion one which we have seen he retained for the rest of his life but with a different meaning: Marxist theory was an expression of petit bourgeois consciousness and its
[434]
critique of bourgeois society and capitalism was most fundamentally addressed to that class' suffocation by the authority of the bourgeois ruling class.
Yet the opposition of Marxist theory to capitalist society was useful to Wright, theoretically. Indeed, the historical and revolutionary role which Wright assigned to Blacks had at its base a materialist dialectic, As previously indicated, Wright recognised Black nationalism as a product, in part, of both the objective necessities of capitalist development and accumulation, and its system of exploitation. As he turned toward the ideology of Black nationalism, he sought to comprehend its emergence in the contradictions of day-to-day experience:. . . every day in this land some white man is cussing out some defenseless Negro, But that white bastard is too stupid to realise that his actions are being duplicated a million times in a million other spots by other whites who feel hatred for Negroes just like he does, He's too blind to see that this daily wave of a million tiny assaults builds up a vast reservoir of resentment in Negroes.(77)
Thus Wright echoed another powerful contribution to the development of Marxism: Hegel's The Cunning of Reason.
But where Wright differed most with others who could employ a Marxist approach was in his characterization of the historical forces of ideology. Ideology was the special political instrument of the petit bourgeoisie. Wright was arguing that the renegades of this class which had served historically to produce the dominant ideas of the bourgeoisie, had themselves become contemptuous of the ruling class. The Jealous Rebels had declared, as Marx himself had written: 'the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over- riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent'.(78)
In his criticisms of Marxism, then, Wright was not entirely rejecting it but was attempting to locate it, to provide a sense of the boundaries of its authority. As a theory of society, he found it dissatisfying, indeed, reductionist. By itself it was insufficiently prescient of the several levels of collective consciousness. As an ideology, he recognized that it had never transcended its origins. It remained an ideology for the working classes rather than an ideology of the working classes. However, as a method of social analysis he found it compelling. He had not abandoned the conception of the relations of production as a basis for the critique of capitalist society nor the importance of the class relations of production, Still, the critique of capitalism was only the beginning of the struggle for liberation.
It is from this critical perspective that Wright joins with one of the few Black women he has sympathetically drawn, Sarah Hunter. When she cajoles her husband, Bob, the frightened and Party-subservient Black organizer, she is speaking for Wright:
'everywhere I've looked... I've seen nothing but white folks kicking niggers who are kneeling down'. 'I want to be one of them who tells the others to obey, see? Read your Marx and organize.'(79)
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From his experience in the American Party, and from his reading of Marx, Wright had come to the conclusion that no people's liberation is the result of their abject surrender of critical judgment. Certainly it was not the prerogative of Black intellectuals to surrender the cultural heritage of their people: the emergent revolutionary consciousness of Black nationalism.
Very little remains then of the Wright which Harold Cruse presents to us. Perhaps, like Baldwin, Cruse had also felt the need 'to kill the father'. Doubtless, too, the explanation for Cruse's error is much more complex. But irrespective of the origins of Cruse's portrait of Wright, a closer reading of the central works written by Wright over a span of more than two decades reveals a most powerful and self-possessed Black thinker. Wright struggled towards a synthesis of Marxism and Black nationalist thought to match those of his colleagues, George Padmore and C.L.R. James. And together, their several works along with those of DuBois are an extraordinary legacy to Blacks in the Western hemisphere and elsewhere. In them, one can discover an independent and richly suggestive critique of the modern world a critique whose voice is the most authentic sounding of the brutal depths of Western civilization and its history. There lies, in those works, the beginnings of Black revolutionary theory. '... at the moment when a people begin to realize a meaning in their suffering, the civilization that engenders that suffering is doomed.' (80)
Notes
1. The social and literary critiques of H,L. Mencken and the radical novels of Sinelair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser were Wright's formative introduction to American thought. See Michael Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, William Morrow, New York, 1973, pp.67-9. He had, however, an earlier instruction which Addison Gayle recapitulates: 'He discovered that the actions of whites were often precipitous; altercations with them might occur spontaneously, for seemingly illogical reasons or none at all. Among his earliest jobs was one as a porter in a clothing store owned by two white men, father and son. Both sported reputations for maltreatment of blacks. He witnessed several beatings and slappings of blacks who fell behind in their payments. One of the most despicable concerned a black woman. Unable to pay her bill, she was dragged into the store by the two men and herded toward the back room, where she was pummeled and kicked. Afterward, in a state of semiconsciousness, she was shoved out into the street. A white policeman appeared as if on call, stared contemptuously at the dazed woman, then arrested her for drunkenness. The two men washed their hands, gazed benevolently at Wright,' Gayle, Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son, Anchor Press, Garden City, 1980, p,35, Among numerous instances like this, two others are enlightening:
'He did not take white threats about murder lightly. The example of Bob, brother of one of his classmates, was too recent. Bob, who worked in a hotel frequented by white prostitutes, was rumored to have been involved with one of them Some white folks warned him to end the relationship, for whatever reason, he did not do so and was lynched, When his classmate had rendered the episode to him, Wright had been moved by his friend's grief; but he had felt, too, something of the anxiety and Fear that the act of murder produced in the entire black community, Such actions
[436]
were designed to control behavior and to stem the desire for rebellion among blacks.' ibid., p,36. Earlier, white terror had struck much closer. Wright's mother had taken her two sons to live with her sister Margaret and her husband, Silas. One night Silas did not return: 'The atmosphere in the house was one of silent, desperate waiting. Food was kept hot on the stove. Each sound inside and outside tile house rang with deafening clarity. The two sisters took turns peering into the early mist. Sometime later, they were called to attention by a knock on the door. It was not Silas' knock. It was the knock of the dreaded messenger, one of the unsung blacks who historically, sometimes in the dark of the night or the early morning, surreptitiously delivered messages of disaster. This one was short, precise: Hoskins had been killed by white men. His family was to stay away from town, There were to be no final rites.' ibid., p.17. Experiences such as these, coupled with his father's abandonment of his family, his mother's breakdown and paralysis, his short but nightmarish stay in an orphanage, had predictable results on Wright's personality. But most can be directly and not too indirectly traced to their bases in American social history, particularly where Black labour had been employed. It is hardly to the point, as in the instance of Martin Kilson's pseudo-psychological and reductionist treatment of Wright, to frame them in terms of 'marginality'. Cf, Kilson, 'Politics & Identity Among Black Intellectuals', Dissent, Summer 1981, pp. 339-49.2. See James Baldwin, 'The Exile' and ' Alas, poor Richard. in Nobody Knows My Name , Dial, New York, 1961; and also Ellen Wright's accounts of Baldwin and Wright in Faith Berry, 'Portrait of a Man as Outsider', Negro Digest, December 1968, pp 27-37.
3. See James Ford, 'The Case of Richard Wright', Daily Worker, 5 September 1944.
4. See Ben Burns, 'They're Not Uncle Tom's Children', The Reporter, 14, 8, March
5. See 'Amid the Alien Corn', unidentified author, Time, 17 November 1938, p.28; see also Gayle's speculations, op. cit., p.287.
6. Gayle, who has had access to heavily censored documents from the American State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, reports that the CIA was 'monitoring' talks by Wright as early as April 1951 (op. cit, pp. 219-21); that Wright's 'leadership of the France-American Fellowship angered agents of the military, the FBI, the CIA, and the State Department' (p.221); that within the Black expatriate group, made up of 'writers, artists, students, essayists, composers, musicians, and representatives of various governmental agencies such as UNESCO and the United States Information Service... there were those, a growing number, who served as agents or informers for the CIA, the FBI, and the American Embassy' (p.207); and that the agencies' files indicated an increasing traffic of correspondence, reports, and surveillance on Wright from 1956 until his death in 1960, (pp.262-3; 277-86) Wright, himself dealt with the CIA's activities in the American Black movement and in the expatriate community in France in two works; his unpublished manuscript, 'Island of Hallucination', (later published under the title American Hunger, and his speech to students and members of the American Church in Paris (8 November 1960), entitled ~The Situation of the Black Artist and Intellectual in the United States'. Wright's comments in the speech have been summarized by Fabre, op.cit., p. 518. For more on Wright and the CIA see Constance Webb, Richard Wright, Putnam, New York, 1968, pp.375-7, 396; and Faith Berry, op.cit, Paul Robeson, among others, was undergoing similar treatment by American agencies at this rime. See Philip S. Foner, (ed.), Paul Robeson Speaks, Brunner/Mazel, New York, 1978: '... beyond revoking Robeson's passport and forbidding him to leave the continental United States from 1950 to 1957, officials of the United States government also sought to influence public opinion against Robeson; to discourage another government "from honoring Robeson as a great humanitarian and activist for human rights"; to prevent Robeson's employment abroad in a non-political area; and to undermine his political impact by issuing anti- Robeson news releases, and using or soliciting statements of other black leaders to discredit him.' (p.4)
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7. See Hoyt Fuller's interview with Chester Himes in Black World, 21,March1972, p.93; Webb, op.cit., pp.312 and 417; and Gayle, op.cit., pp. 235-6. Schine was an investigator on the staff of Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. Like Roy Cohn, Schine seems to have been one of several links between McCarthy and the 'elites' whose support gave McCarthy power. Cf. Michael P. Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, 1967, p.250.
8. Richard and Ellen Wright had few illusions concerning their enemies, but conclusive evidence was not easily obtained. See Berry, op. cit., pp.34ff, Some of Wright's acquaintances were sceptical about a 'campaign' against Wright but others found it quite reasonable to assume one was in place, see Ollie Harrington, 'The Mysterious Death of Richard Wright', Daily World, 17 December 1977. Gayle's review of 'sanitized' files of the American intelligence agencies brings the pattern much closer to the surface, Still there are the worrying problems of missing documents and heavily censored ones: 'In fact, the number of censored documents during these last, most troublesome years of Wright's life make it difficult to know just what areas of his life or activities were targeted.' Gayle, op.cit., pp. 290-1.
9. Fabre published the following letter from Wright to Margit de Sabloniere on 3it March 1960: 'You must not worry about my being in danger... l am not exactly unknown here and I have personal friends in the de Gaulle cabinet itself. Of course, I don't want anything to happen to me, but if it does, my friends will know exactly where it comes from. If I tell you these things, it is to let you know what happens, So far as the Americans are concerned. I'm worse than a Communist, for my work falls like a shadow across their policy in Asia and Africa, That's file problem; they've asked me time and again to work for them: but I'd die first..,. But they try to divert me with all kinds of foolish tricks.' Fabre, op.cit., p.509. The files that Gayle has seen confirm Wright's assertions, even beyond Fabre's expectations: 'Although he exaggerated the extent and intent of some attacks, I believe that many were expressly designed to make him lose his sense of reality. Whether caused by personal jealousy, political intrigue or racial malevolence, the desire to harm Wright was indisputable.' ibid., pp,524-5. Seven years Inlet, Gayle was more equivocal: 'The temptation to draw conclusions in line with those who believe that the FBI and the CIA were already involved in Wright's sudden death are great. To do so, however, based upon the facts of the documents, would be wrong. I did not find, nor did I expect to find, evidence to support this assertion, held by a great many of the writer's friends. What I found was a pattern of harassment by agencies of the United States Government, resembling at times a personal vendetta more so than an intelligence-gathering investigation.' (my emphasis) Gayle, op. cit., p.xv. Gayle, however, believes that there is something amiss in the documents: 'The role of the State Department, however, is another matter, for it was here flint the seeming vendetta occurred. The only document that supposedly originated with rite State Department casts Wright in an unfavorable position. Documents filtered through the State Department to the FBI show an inordinate amount of activity on the part of the Foreign Service during the last months of Wright's life. Most of the documents are heavily deleted, so their content is difficult lo comprehend clearly.
Whether there is any connection between this activity and Wright's death may be known only if the deleted sections of the documents are released'. Ibid. In addition, of course, as John Stockwell, a former CIA operative has shown, the State Department by the early 1970's at least had developed communications procedures concerning covert operations which denied access to even its own communicators, See Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, Futura Publications, London, 1979, p.93.
10. American Hunger (Harper & Row, New York, 1977) is the title Wright originally suggested (among others) for Ida unpublished manuscript, 'Island of Hallucination'. Fabre, op.cit., p.616 n.1 9, 'the material published under the former title is in large measure tire parts of Black Boy (Hatper, New York, 1945) which Harper expunged from its 1945 edition. Darryl Pinckney would appear to be wrong when he suggests in his review of American Hunger that Wright himself was responsible for the deletion
[438]
30. Crossman, op. cit., p.106.
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September, 1935, p,951.
40. Earl Browder, 'The l 8th Anniversary of the Founding of the Communist Party', in The People', Front, op. cit., p.271.
42. Browder, 'Revolutionary Background of the United States Constitution',Ibid, p. 266; and 'Twenty Years of Soviet Power', ibid., p.346.
43. See Wilhelm Reich's 'What is Class Consciousness?' in Sex-Pol: Essays 1929-1934, Lee Baxandall, (ed.), Vintage Books, New York, 1972.
44. Wright to Michael Gold, reported in Fabre, op.cit.,p.185. <p>
45. Wright, 'How "Bigger" Was Born', introduction to Native Son, Harper, New York, 1966, p.xix.
48. In April1940, Wright had written to Gold: 'if l should follow Ben Davis's advice and write of Negroes through the lens of how the Party views them in terms of political theory, I'd abandon the Bigger Thomases. I'd be tacitly admitting that they ate lost to us, that fascism will triumph because it alone can enlist the allegiance of those millions whom capitalism has crushed and maimed.' Fabre, op.cit., pp.185-6.
53. Wright, Native Son, op. cit., pp.391 2.
54. See Fabre, op. cit.,pp.184-7 for a summary of the reactions of Party leaders to Native Son.
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abolish the tyranny of the Party. And in adopting Existentialism, he is not consciousness.' Singh, 'Marxism in Richard Wright's Fiction', Indian Journal of American Studies, 4, 1 and 2, June/December 1974, pp.33-4. This is decidedly not the position taken by other writers who came out from the Communist movement as John Diggins sees them; Diggins, 'Buckley's Comrades: the Ex-Communist as Conservative', Dissent, Fall 1975, pp.370-81.74 Wright, White Man Listen!, op. cit., pp.19-20.
75. Wright, The Outsider, op. cit., p.334
76. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Tucker, op. cit., p.343.
77. Wright, The Outsider, op. cit., p.227.
78. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, op.cit.,p.345.
79. Wright, The Outsider, op.cit., pp.176-7.
80. Wright, 'Blueprint ...', op.cit., p.57.
