Richard Wright is Our Companion

153 REVIEWS poverty would be a theory (or anti-theory) that foreclosed these possibilities. Lee Sterrenbero RICHARD WRIGHT IS OUR COMPANION Addison Gayle, Richard Wright: Ordeal ofa Native Son. Garden City: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1980. xvi,342pp. $14.95. As Richard Wright's life came to a sudden end — 'heart attack' in Paris, 1960 — my intellectual journey was just starting out. In my early years of searching the American literature for exemplary stories, Wright's Native Son had a whale of an impact. I didn't know quite why. Its hero, Bigger Thomas, was a black kid in Chicago, an outsider, taken in by political progressives, who turned around and committed a crime ofsome inexplicable sort of passion against one of the few whites who came close to assisting him. But this novel, together with Wright's fictional account of growing up black in the South, Black Boy, provided some of my obUque education — the kind you couldn't get in even a decent university in those days ofEisenhower, DuUes and The American Century* of Luce/LIFE. I have now read Addison Gayle's Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native.Son, and I understand better why this near-white, vehement black author was so important for me, quite in addition to his enormous imaginative power in establishing fictions truer than the newspapers of his day. For Wright was, as a black man perforce and then as a communist by effort of election, an outsider all unconscious who then took possession of his character and made of it, insofar as the time permitted, an act of insurgence and social transformation , which, whatever the results, preserved the integrity of his self-sense. I have put that in an archaic, rather twisted fashion. It's what comes to hand as one reflects upon preserving individuality against the media and pressures of consumer capitalist society. I find in Wright these fifty-odd years after his own youthful gropings, the premonitionofmy such gropings of thirty years ago. Wright, uncertain of how to express or conceptualize, or even to feel, his apartness from the racist, conformist America of the 1920*s, found H. L. Mencken derided and denounced in a Memphis newspaper. This is how blacks were ridiculed; so Wright, knowing nothing else of Mencken, was seized by the need to read Mencken. But this was no easy thing for a black man in Memphis — it would be more than thrity years before his race could draw books from a real library in that capital of the Southland. So, Wright gained the furtive cooperation of a kindly Irishman, borrowed his library card, made up a note to the librarian requesting that the "nigger boy" begiven "some books by Mencken" — and rushed home to devour the source of resistance. Through Mencken's Prefaces, Wright found his way to Dreiser and a host of other clarifiers ofAmerican experience. Wright needed Mencken to understand he could be an individual against the mob mind; and to adopt a superior cast of eye upon the caste system which held his economic person in thrall. Mencken lent Wright the strength to become himself, and not what anyone — his religious family, the viciously idiotic white lower classes — dictated he should be. Later, making it to Chicago, Wright found in the writers' group attracted through the John Reed Club to the communist critique and action program, his first friends, a peer group of whites and blacks who did not condescend. Communist response to the irrationalities of American society gave, in the first instance, a fine group of men and women the ability, as a cohesive subculture, the chance to be new, to be rational, to be effective. For me, it was Ibsen not Mencken; and the New Left (before it had that name), not Communism. But the names do not matter, the trajectory of perception and experience, dimly felt through Native Son, in Gayle's fine biography comes clear. I recommend this book to all who want to know how it was with Wright. Gayle writes concisely, with a fine sense for the developmental Une, yet with sufficient detail to bring alive the South, Chicago, 154 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW Paris, and the man/writer...