Home Is Where the Heart Is

...If the pathos of man is that he yearns to be whole, hungers for fulfillment and strives for a sense of community with others, it is the particular tragedy of the Negro in America that success (even as an artist) does not gratify the yearning, great fame does not feed the hunger and the wealth of Croesus does not abate the struggle to be free, whole and naturally absorbed in the cultural oneness of his native land...

...He had ambitions to become a critic of jazz...

...The limitations of mood, the restricted inventiveness and the congeneric characterizations which defined his earlier work became more evident as they became less projective of the small, new realities and the big, new Weltansicht of the only place and people that could ever be Wright's home...

...He saw the mise en scène, but did not wholly comprehend it, nor did he have the writer's sense of being in it...

...Except in intimate privacy, at rare ease with his friends when he was often gay and bright-faced as a child, he indulged no knack for mockery, especially if it was turned against himself, no eye for fun, no ear or tongue for jests...

...There are various ways to escape...

...But in a more important sense it was not...

...But no matter how it is done, escape is a compulsive act of self-abnegation, and the moment the Negro writer begins to do it he begins to flag as a creative artist...

...When Wright wrote this, he had lived in France for nine years...

...It is simply not true...

...Insofar as he used this knowledge to appeal to the cognitive side of man's being, as he did in Twelve Million Black Voices, certain sections of White Man, Listen...

...He turns precious and "arty...

...He went to Africa...

...It is the America that only Negroes know: a ghetto of the soul, a boundary of the mind, a· confine of the heart...

...He could not...

...He cannot escape the supra-consciousness of what living in America has made him...

...he glorified it with his artist's skill for appealing to the connotative and affective side of man's being...

...What drew his attention was "the undeniable and uncanny psychological affinities that they [Spanish Protestants] held in common with American Negroes...

...He did everything but the one thing that would make the living, anguished substance of his best books flow again...

...The rootlessness, which he once boasted did not perturb him, made him restless...

...He did not go home...

...Saunders Redding, Johnson Professor of Literature at Hampton Institute, is author of The Lonesome Road...

...But now he is at rest, and he has earned it...

...It is not the America of the moving pictures, nor of Thomas Wolfe, John P. Marquand and John O'Hara's novels, nor of the histories of Allan Nevins and C. J. H. Hayes...

...Wright had forgotten the tough American idiom...

...But The Long Dream is less than a shadow of the realities of the decade past and the one just begun...

...France was for him what it had been for loyce: a friendly lodging and a refuge, a comfortable convenience, a place to hang his hat—but not a home...

...Some pretend there is no such America...

...He adapted things from the French language...

...Angry scorn, alternating with bleak despair, was no longer enough...

...His heart's home and his mind's tether was in America...

...passion chills...

...His passions were not there...

...has earned, too, the right to be judged by his best...

...Violence and brutal physical degradation were still a part of the new reality, but no longer all...

...to those "who seek desperately for a home for their hearts...

...He went to England on what he hoped would be more than just a visit...

...Wright the novelist was not at home in France...

...He is always apart...

...honesty deserts him...

...So he seeks a country where he will not be alone...

...In Spain, Wright was nearer home...

...Other Negro writers have done so, and some are still doing it...

...He did not have the ironic cast of mind and heart...

...I wish the answer were as simple, as readily explicable and as concrete as it is true...

...And it was not unusual that Wright should seek escape from it and try to reject it...

...But all such countries are "alien," and only America is home...

...He helped some French Africans, largely Senegalese, organize the international Society of African Culture, but soon broke with the Senegalese and all their works...

...Fishbelly Tucker in Wright's latest novel, The Long Dream, is Big Boy of one of the earliest stories, and Big Boy grew up to be Bigger Thomas in Native Son...

...and in various essays, he followed in the tradition of more provincial Negro writers, whose effort was to destroy the prevailing racial stereotypes...

...and in the ninth year, thinking that the "ancestral home of millions of American Negroes," Africa's Gold Coast, would be less alien, he went there...

...The fact of separation from the culture of his native land," Wright wrote a few years back, "has sunk into the Negro's heart...

...Home Is Where the Heart Is By Saunders Redding The dedication of Richard Wright's posthumous book, Eight Men (World, 224 pp., $3.95), to three French friends "whose kindness has made me feel at home in an alien land" is an irony the more poignant because Wright did not intend it...

...The Negro loves his land, but that land rejects him...

...It is no wonder, then, that the best stories in Eight Men were written before 1946...

...It is a cruel, forced alienation from the community of man, a crime against the natural self...

...At home and rootless: could both things be true...

...Cowardice, self-abasement and unmitigated suffering now fail to highlight the drama and the big dramatic scenes...

...It cripples what one is born to be—equi-souled with other men...

...The dedication of Eight Men was gravely meant as an expression of gratitude, and in this sense it was true...

...Why try to escape...

...And perhaps in a subliminal, uneasy way he knew this...

...There he "felt most keenly the needless, unnatural, and utterly barbarous nature of the psychological suffering [because] I am an American Negro with a background of psychological suffering...

...If Wright was at home in the "alien land" where he lived for nearly 15 years, how could he have written, near the close of those years, "I am a rootless man...

...He never absorbed, nor ever was absorbed in, the strange environment, the Gallic atmosphere...

...Broadly defined, that best was in the moral stance from which he never wavered, and in his courage and enduring power as a writer...

...One tries because the supra-consciousness of being Negro in America is a perversion of being a man, of being human...

...they were involved elsewhere...

...Finally, there is the dedication of White Man, Listen...

...But the Gold Coast was not home, either: The book he wrote about it is a long statement of that fact...

...America has not yet changed to the extent that a Negro writer can deny, effectively suppress or truly escape what Wright himself defined as the "inevitable race consciousness which three hundred years of Jim Crow living has burned into the Negro's heart...

...He wrote radio scripts...

...The one thing French that caught him was existentialism (Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir), but this held him only long enough for him to write his one unqualifiedly bad novel...

...He had been gone from home too long...

...He was no actor, but he went to Argentina and played the lead in the moving picture version of Native Son...

...This is an honorable tradition, and Wright, too, learned from the philosopher-psychologists (especially William James), the sociologists and social activists...

...He spread himself thin...

...But Wright was no one's disciple...

...He could not settle down to the writing of novels, which, when he was at his best, was the thing he could do superbly...

...But," he added, "I am neither psychologically distraught nor in any wise particularly perturbed because of it...

...Countee Cullen and William Braithwaite, both poets, turned to fantasy...

...dedication wilts...

...And even The Outsider was an American novel—that is, it was a novel about an American Negro—and in its dedication the word "alien" crops up again: "For Rachel, my daughter who was born on alien soil...

...Some, like Jean Toomer, fair enough to pass, go into the white race...

...In public—and his books were public—he took the world and all men as he took himself, with deadly seriousness...

...It is bitter food, and so his books are bitter...

...And, for those who knew Dick Wright as a friend, it was in his kindness as a man...

...He can try, as Wright tried, and, failing of Wright's reserve of strength, the effort will reduce him to fatuity or to shadow, while the accomplishment—improbable—would kill him altogether...

...Wright never wrote about France...

...No modern writer of comparable great gifts and reputation has been so mistaken in his judgment of himself, nor understood and valued the sources of his spirit so little...

...he went to Indonesia for the Afro-Asian Conference, and wrote a book about that too...

...He quickened the tradition with his own passionate vitality...

...But Wright's art suffered of late...

...he went to Spain...

...but it sustained his great honesty and integrity as a writer...

...I know America"—these are Wright's words—"I know what a great nation and people America could be, but it won't be until there is only one American, regardless of his color " This is the knowledge his creative passions fed on...

...Without exception, directly or by implication, his published works refute him...

...He is, God help him, always alone...

...It is honest, but only to the memory of things past, to passions spent, to moods gone vapid, and sometimes expressed in vaporous language: "He peered out of his window and saw vast, wheeling populations of ruled stars swarming in the convened congresses of the skies anchored amidst nations of space and he prayed wordlessly that a bright, bursting tyrant of living sun would soon lay down its golden laws to loosen the locked regions of his heart and cast the shadow of his dream athwart the stretches of time...

...Some—William Demby, William Gardner Smith, Chester Himes and James Baldwin—like Wright, expatriate themselves in Italy, Switzerland, Spain or France...

...He transmuted what he learned into the art of Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son and Black Boy—art that was, as Dorothy Canfield Fisher said, "honest, dreadful, heartbreaking...