A Richard Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary, 1933-1982 by Keneth Kinnamon (review)

116Reviews Roth) and a handful of previously published pieces in Harold Bloom's 1986 Chelsea House collection have been instrumental in our seeing Roth as more than a hyphenated writer. Reading Philip Roth will continue that laudable growth. What is often missing in the secondary literature, this newest volume included, is the sense of Roth as the most resonant of our contemporary writers. To trace his connections with Kafka or to insist on the shaping presence of James is both logical and revealing, but it barely suggests the temperament and mind behind the rich texture of Roth's prose. This verbal disposition encodes literary and philosophical traditions cheek by jowl with low and hifalutin culture with such abandon that taste becomes an irrelevant standard, irrelevant because all these transactions of the self with the other are subsumed in psychological assertions that become their own authority. What saves Roth from an encompassing egoism is an encompassing irony. In his diaries Joe Orton recorded his exasperation with Swift, whose savage bluntnesses he understood but whose intricate ironies escaped a sensibility so caught up in rage that they communicated only a Swift as self-censoring talent trapped, like Orton's, in an obsolete class-bound society. For Saul Bellow, the contemporary most like Roth, the command of irony as both mode and therapy is less firm than Roth's, an uneven control that commonly leaves Bellow exposed as a preaching Dean, a cranky displaced Swift. As Milan Kundera suggests in the Milhauer and Watson volume, Roth's muse-like irony appears in a wide range of registers—"discreet," "enigmatic," "diabolical" are some of Kundera's descriptions—and, though perhaps "infinitely ungraspable" (p. 164), that irony has never forsaken Roth. At its typical, it mediates between the debased complacencies of the lives we all lead and the obsessed fantasies, the exploitive alternatives, of lives that only occasionally erase the boundaries between imagination and enactment. In the editors' informative interview with the author that precedes the essays, Roth professes to be undisturbed by the tribe of misreaders that his works tended to attract in the first twenty years of his career. Freud, he says, was "the all-time influential misreader of imaginative literature" (p. 2). In his own slip-of-the-tongue (or because of a nodding copy-editor), Roth in passing alludes to his pornographer hero as the "publisher of Lickety Spit" (p. 10); in Zuckerman Bound its title is Lickety-Split. Nathan Zuckerman would have liked his creator's kinkier substitute. Indiana UniversityJames H. Justus Kinnamon, Keneth. A Richard Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years ofCriticism and Commentary, 1933-1982. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1988. 983 pp. Cloth: $85.00. This work, by a foremost Richard Wright scholar, is a monumental secondary bibliography of over 13,000 annotated items published between 1933 and 1982. No other bibliography of an American author surpasses this one in its scope and treatment. The great majority of the entries were published in the United States while a considerable percentage ofthem appeared abroad in such languages as French, German, Japanese, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finish, Hungarian, Yugoslavian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Indonesian. Kinnamon's search for items seems to have covered almost every country. Such an effort indicates not only that Wright's reputation has acquired truly global dimensions, but that his writing has appealed to readers throughout the world. Kinnamon's arrangement also indicates that Wright's international appeal commenced after World War II with French critics, who were fascinated with Wright's sociological but Studies in American Fiction117 at the same time psychological and imaginative approach to racial issues. The response of West Germans and Scandinavians came later, and Japanese commentary, perhaps because of the war, appeared still later. In the late 1950s, responding to the prevailing political climate in Japan, a group of leftist critics formed an association of Negro studies and began issuing a journal called Negro Studies (renamed Black Studies since 1983). This group subscribed to the theory that Wright's early work, which reflects his Communist involvement, was far more successful than his later work, a product of his interest in existentialism. Furthermore, Wright's tragic death in France in...