Black, Male and American
REDDING, SAUNDERS
Black, Male and American RICHARD WRIGHT: A BIOGRAPHY By Constance Webb Putnam's. 433 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by SAUNDERS REDDING Author, "On Being Negro in America" There are only a few people...
...Nevertheless, Richard Wright makes fascinating reading...
...Paris was for him "truly a gentle city, with gentle manners," though he never learned French...
...She visited places Wright had known and lived in...
...For Wright's work, then —though he denied it—France was a bad scene...
...he fooled around with haiku, jazz (he had no ear for music really), African nationalism, and even moving pictures, going to Argentina to make and star in a movie version of Native Son that proved to be a dismal flop...
...Yet it was in France, though Miss Webb does not say it, that Wright lost his genius...
...This is partly because one is soon caught up in excited company with Miss Webb as she pursues her elusive quarry through the crowded, twisting corridors of his life and stops at last before the mystery of the locked door of Wright's psyche, his —one says it with misgiving—soul...
...The best of the bad books he wrote in France was Black Power, which could have been a good travel book, but turned out to be a labored effort at pragmatic political philosophy he did not fully comprehend...
...The Outsider and The Long Dream are scarcely worth mentioning, and Miss Webb is defensive about them...
...Reviewed by SAUNDERS REDDING Author, "On Being Negro in America" There are only a few people who understand the art of biographical writing, and after reading Constance Webb's Richard Wright, one is not certain that she is among them...
...She had access to his files: memoranda, notes for story ideas, letters, unfinished and discarded manuscripts, everything (for Wright apparently never threw anything away...
...The result is a book so packed with detail (some of it irrelevant or too vague to be meaningful) that the truth is vaguely glimpsed, not seen, as one glimpses a furtive animal scurrying through thick brush...
...a string of low-paying menial jobs...
...In Pagan Spain there is much of the same involvement with concepts he could not handle...
...She made accurate records and consulted them with meticulous care when she sat down to write...
...Who was the Richard Wright who was born in Natchez, lived in Jackson, was transported to Elaine, Arkansas, stayed briefly in Memphis, longer in Chicago and New York, and died quite unexpectedly in Paris in 1960...
...it also led, incidentally, to two women, Dhima Meadman and Ellen Poplar (read "Poplovicz"), both white...
...Finally, the narrative balances the artistic impulse to create with perception and critical insight...
...Who was Richard Wright...
...Well, he was one of the important writers of his time...
...It is a factual history of an era and, understood in the context of Wright's life, the facts are pregnant with meaning...
...an experience of physical wretchedness so persistently and powerfully imposed as to crush hope and threaten sanity...
...a subsequent stealthy self-teaching (for niggers were not supposed to know too much...
...From France he could look back with unaverted gaze upon a country he despised...
...It was Wright's American-ness, too—his love of the ideals of freedom and equality—that dictated his move to Paris, where he claimed, but failed to prove, he had found his home and a "safe harbor" for his soul...
...He was too free of his blackness, too equal...
...in the final analysis it is peevish, naive, and tractarian...
...He wrote some very bad books—something Miss Webb does not admit either...
...Despite its weaknesses, one finishes Richard Wright with the feeling that it is a good and compelling book...
...He was by then the respected author of Uncle Tom's Children, and he was shortly to be the affluent author of Native Son, a book as completely and exclusively American in its tone, its drama, its personae, and its theme as the Stars and Stripes...
...What followed from his blackness was a formal education that ended with the ninth grade...
...The fact that he was black led?a little hesitantly at first—to Communism and the timid revival of hope...
...If his social significance now seems somewhat diminished, during the years of his success it was so great that it obscured his literary significance...
...She held taped interviews with many of Wright's acquaintances, friends, and relatives...
...Miss Webb did all the preparatory things she was supposed to do and that her devotion to facts dictated...
...Which is not to say that Richard Wright is a bad book—only that it is not a good biography, if the point of a biography is to reveal the truth of the life of its subject...
...Miss Webb's respect for her subject also results in her avoiding the sensationalism a less dedicated biographer might have indulged in...
...For his soul it was home...
...Well, he was black, male, American, and these attributes combined to determine who and what he was for more than 40 of his 52 years...
Vol. 51 • August 1968 • No. 16
