Now that Wright’s books can be read in the sequence in which they were written, we can see more clearly the dominance that this belief came to have in Wright’s thinking. It didn’t replace his interest in the subject of race; it subsumed it. Wright intended
Black Boy
, for example, to have two parts—the first about his life in the South and the second about his experiences with the Communist Party. But the Book-of-the-Month Club refused to publish the second part. Wright was convinced that the Communists were behind the refusal (and it is hard to find another reason for it), but he agreed to the cut, and
Black Boy
became an indictment of Southern racism (and a best-seller). Wright managed to publish segments of the suppressed half of the book in various places during his lifetime—the most widely read excerpt is undoubtedly the one that appeared in Richard Crossman’s postwar anthology
The God That Failed
(1950). When the autobiography is read as it was intended to be read, though, it is no longer a book about Jim Crow. It is a book about oppression in general, seen through three examples: the racism of Southern whites, the religious intolerance of Southern blacks, and the totalitarianism of the Communist Party.
The idea that there are no “better” forms of human community but only different kinds of domination—that, in the metaphor of
Native Son’s
famous opening scene, Bigger must kill the rat that has
invaded his apartment not because Biggers are better than rats, but because if Bigger does not kill the rat, the rat will kill Bigger—is what gives The Outsider, the novel Wright published in 1953, its distinctly obsessive quality.
The outsider
is a black man, Cross Damon, who is presented with a chance to escape from an increasingly grim set of personal troubles when the subway train he is riding in crashes and one of the bodies is identified mistakenly as his. Cross has been, we learn, an avid reader of the existentialist philosophers, and he decides to assume a new identity and to see what it would be like to live in a world without moral meaning—to live “beyond good and evil.” He quickly discovers that perfect moral freedom means the freedom to kill anyone whose existence he finds an inconvenience, and he murders four people and causes the suicide of a fifth before he is himself assassinated. (Wright was always drawn to composing lurid descriptions of physical violence. There are beatings and killings in nearly all his stories; his first published work, written when he was a schoolboy and now lost, was a short story called “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre.”)
The influence of Camus’s
The Stranger
is easy to see, but Wright’s book is even more explicitly a
roman à
thèse.
Two of Cross’s victims are Communists; a third is a fascist. Cross kills them, it is explained, because he recognizes in Communists and fascists the same capacity for murder and the same contempt for morality he has discovered in himself. The point (which Wright finds a number of occasions for Cross to spell out) is that Communism and fascism are particularly naked and cynical examples of the will to power. They accommodate two elemental desires: the desire of the strong to be masters and the desire of the weak to be slaves. Once, as Cross sees it, myths, religions, and the hard shell of social custom prevented people from acting on those desires directly; in the twentieth century, those restraining cultural influences have been stripped away, and in their absence totalitarian systems have emerged. Communism and fascism are, at bottom, identical expressions of the modern condition. And is racism as well? Race is only a minor theme in
The Outsider,
but there is no evidence in the book that Wright regards racism as a peculiar case, and
The Outsider
reads, without strain, as an extension of the idea he was developing
at the end of
Native Son
—that racial oppression is just another example of the pleasure the hammer takes in hitting the nail.
It’s not completely clear how we’re meant to understand this analysis. Is the point supposed to be that twentieth-century society is unique? Or only that it is uniquely barefaced? If it’s the latter—if the idea is that
all
societies are enactments of the impulses to dominate and to submit, but that some have disguised their brutality more cleverly than others—we have reached a dead end: every effort to conceive of a better way of life simply reduces to some new hammer bashing away at some new nail. But if it’s the former—if Wright’s idea is that modern industrial society, with its contempt for life’s traditional consolations, is a terrible mistake—then racism is really an example that contradicts the thesis. For the South in which slavery flourished was not an industrial economy; it was an agricultural one, with a social system about two steps up the ladder from feudalism. That civilization was destroyed by the Civil War, but the racism survived, in the form that Wright himself described so unsparingly in the first part of
Black Boy
and in the essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” (1937): as part of a deeply ingrained pattern of custom and belief. To the extent that the forces of modernity are bent on wiping out tradition and superstition, institutionalized racism is (like fascism) not their product, as Wright seems to be insisting, but a resistant cultural strain, an anachronism.
The evil of modern society isn’t that it creates racism, but that it creates conditions in which people who don’t suffer from injustice seem incapable of caring very much about people who do. Wright knew this from his own experience. There is a passage in the restored half of
Black Boy
which is as fine as anything he wrote about race in America, and which has an exactness and a poignancy often missing from his fiction. Shortly after he arrived in Chicago, Wright went to work as a dishwasher in a café.
One summer morning a white girl came late to work and rushed into the pantry where I was busy. She went into the women’s room and changed her clothes; I heard the door open and a second later I was surprised to hear her voice:
“Richard, quick! Tie my apron!”
She was standing with her back to me and the strings of her apron dangled loose. There was a moment of indecision on my part, then I took the two loose strings and carried them around her body and brought them again to her back and tied them in a clumsy knot.
“Thanks a million,” she said grasping my hand for a split second, and was gone.
I continued my work, filled with all the possible meanings that that tiny, simple, human event could have meant to any Negro in the South where I had spent most of my hungry days.
I did not feel any admiration for the girls [who worked in the café], nor any hate. My attitude was one of abiding and friendly wonder. For the most part I was silent with them, though I knew that I had a firmer grasp of life than most of them. As I worked I listened to their talk and perceived its puzzled, wandering, superficial fumbling with the problems and facts of life. There were many things they wondered about that I could have explained to them, but I never dared … .
(I know that not race alone, not color alone, but the daily values that give meaning to life stood between me and those white girls with whom I worked. Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others’ hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.)
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This feels much closer to the reality of human interaction than the simplified Nietzscheanism of
The Outsider.
But, having rejected first the religious culture in which he was brought up, then the American political culture that permitted his oppression, then communism, and, finally (as Cross’s death symbolizes), the existential Marxism he encountered in postwar France, Wright seems, by 1953, to have found himself in a place beyond solutions. He was not driven there by an idiosyncratic logic, though; he was just following the path he had first chosen. Wright’s experience, that of a Southern
black man who became one of the best-known writers of his time, was unusual; his intellectual journey was not. The attraction of communism in the 1930s, the bitter split with the Party in the 1940s, the malaise resulting from “the failure of ideology” and from the emergence, after the war, of an American triumphalism—it’s a familiar narrative. Wright’s role as a writer was to take one of the literary forms most closely associated with that narrative, the naturalist novel, and to add race to its list of subject matter. What Upton Sinclair did for industrialism in
The Jungle
, what John Dos Passos did for materialism in U.S.A., what Sinclair Lewis did for conformism in
Main Street and Babbitt,
Wright did for racism in
Native Son:
he made it part of the naturalist novel’s critique of life in the capitalist era. And his strengths and weaknesses as a writer are, by and large, the strengths and weaknesses of the tradition in which he worked. He changed the way Americans thought about race, but he did not invent, because he did not need to invent, a new form to do it.
This helps to explain the Nietzschean element in
Native Son
and the nihilism of
The Outsider:
they are the characteristic symptoms of the exhaustion of the naturalist style. The young Norman Mailer, for example, used Dos Passos and James T. Farrell as his literary models in writing
The Naked and the Dead,
but added a dash of Nietzsche to the mixture, and then produced, in the early 1950s—like Wright, and with comparable results—a cloudy parable of ideological dead-endism,
Barbary Shore.
Wright’s most famous protégés, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, both eventually dissociated their work (Ellison more delicately than Baldwin) from his. They felt that Wright’s books lacked a feeling for the richness of the culture of African-Americans—that those books were written as though black Americans were a people without resources. Someone reading
Native Son,
Baldwin complained, would think that “in Negro life there exists no tradition, no field of manners, no possibility of ritual or intercourse”
14
by which black Americans could sustain themselves in a hostile world. But that is what Wright did think. He believed that racism had succeeded in stripping black Americans of a genuine culture. There were, in his
view, only two ways in which black Americans could respond actively to their condition: one was to adopt a theology of acceptance sustained by religious faith—a solution Wright had resisted violently as a boy—and the other was to become Biggers (or Crosses), and live outside the law until they were trapped and crushed. Otherwise, there was only the “cesspool” of daily life described in
Lawd Today!—
a perpetual cycle of demeaning drudgery and cheap thrills. It’s not hard to understand why writers like Ellison and Baldwin resisted this vision of black experience, but it is a vision true to Wright’s own particular history of deprivation. Ellison, by contrast, grew up in Oklahoma, a state that has no history of black slavery (though it certainly has a history of segregation), and he attended Tuskegee Institute, where he was introduced to, among other works, T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land,
a poem whose influence on his novel
Invisible Man
is palpable—as is the influence of jazz and of the Southern black vernacular. Ellison had a different culture, in other words, because he had a different experience.
For culture is not something that just comes with one’s race or gender. Culture comes
only
through experience; there isn’t any other way to acquire it. And in the end everyone’s culture is different, because everyone’s experience is different. Some people are at home with the culture they encounter, as Ellison seems to have been. Some people borrow or adopt their culture, as Eliot did when he transformed himself into a British Anglo-Catholic. A few, extraordinary people have to steal it. Wright was living in Memphis when his serious immersion in literature began, but he could not get books from the public library. So he persuaded a sympathetic white man to lend him his library card, and he forged a note for himself to present to the librarian: “Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken?”
15
He had discovered, on his own, a literary tradition in which no one had invited him to participate—from which, in fact, the world had conspired to exclude him. He saw in that tradition a way to express his own experience, his own sense of things, and through heroic persistence he made that experience part of the culture of other people.