Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930s

8. The View from the Broom Closet of the Regency Hyatt: Richard Wright as a southern writer

CHAPTER 8 JACK B. MOORE The View from the Broom Closet of the Regency Hyatt: RICHARD WRIGHT AS A SOUTHERN WRITER In his entertaining, illuminating, and authoritative essay, "The View from the Regency Hyatt," my former mentor and the distinguished southern literary historian C. Hugh Holman corrects those critics whose cultural blinders permit them to see only one main strand in southern literature and who treat that strand as though it were some primary fiber binding together the remarkable fabric of southern writing. 1 Holman surveys and briefly describes the various partial, "absolutist" views in turn and mentions a few writers who best or most popularly embody the particular kind of literature that presumably dominates the southern literary terrain. His point is that though each cadre of interpreters posits a single, "monolithic" South that southern literature is most typically or essentially about, no agreement exists among critics recognizing which one of these Souths is preeminent. Some see only the "aristocratic South of broad lawns and happy banjo-strumming Negroes," the South of Thomas Nelson Page and Margaret Mitchell. Others have eyes only for the South of "apocalyptic vision" dreamed first by abolitionist societies and not too long ago by Robert Penn Warren in Band of Angels. "There is a South of industrialization , liberalism, and the middleclass democratic virtues . . . announced by Henry Grady of Atlanta and documented by Howard Odum and his cohorts . . . a South that is a degenerate, poverty-stricken world . . . the South of Mark Twain's river towns. . . . And there is also a South which is a lost paradise of order and stability, of honor and a religious view of man ... the South of the Vanderbilt Agrarians." There is further a South rendered with joy through a "highly sophisticated and self-conscious literary technique" by Joyceans whom Holman admires; but as a pluralist himself, in this excellent essay he counterbalances the Joyceans with a group of less esoterically inclined social criticsT . S. Stribling, Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery O'Connor. Richard Wright as a Southern Writer 127 Holman's essay is significant, I feel, not only because it provides such a witty, solid, and magisterial overview of southern literature but because in discussing some of the figures who dot the literary landscape of the South he mentions not one black writer. He clearly states the centrality of the black experience in the South, its cruelty, and the ways several white writers have to their credit treated it, but he refers to no black writers at all. I relate this omission not to berate Holman-who is perhaps the most perceptive of literary critics of the South, and who is furthermore a sensitive analyst of southern social conditions-but to note the typical invisibility of black writers in literary explorations of the region where black inhabitants have been politically and socially of extreme importance. One often finds in discussions of the southern literary heritage or of the southern culture, especially in the older, mellower reports of traditions such as southern hospitality and patrician rhetorical styles, strangely Nixonian gaps in the cultural record, caused by the assumption that southern traditions are white traditions. What southern blacks have accomplished has been cropped from the white picture, just as what might have been, say, their critique of southern hospitality has been rarely considered. The black writer I wish to discuss in terms of his contribution to southern literature is Richard Wright, because I feel he wrote during the thirties fiction of high quality about the South and because much of the fiction he wrote during this period was set down when he was a Communist or Marxist and therefore offers a doubly special perspective on the South. I do not claim that my study presents the official black Marxist view of the South. Analysis of other black Marxist perceptions might very well yield other results, but I do suspect that my findings may suggest some modifications in standard views toward aspects of southern culture. For example, again using Holman's essay as a handy and quite orthodox source, I find that Henry Grady of Atlanta supposedly represented in his day "industrialization , liberalism, and all the middle-class democratic virtues. " Yet W. E. B. Du Bois, another black Marxist who lived several decades in Grady's Atlanta, characterized Grady as at heart a conspiratorially reactionary oligarch, a fascist, and a racist. 2 But it is with Wright's vision and artistic techniques that I will concern myself. I would like to start my...