Letter to Jimmy (6 page)

The academic Amanda Claybaugh, who seems to want to give this classic its due justice, regrets that the work has been wrongly condemned. To those who criticize its racism and sentimentality, Claybaugh would have them remember that Beecher Stowe was the first American to imagine the black slave as a Christ figure . . .
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Harsher still are the criticisms you launch against Wright's
Native Son
at the end of “Everyone's Protest Novel,” and, later, in another article entitled “Many Thousands Gone,”
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which would appear in the
Partisan Review
in 1951.

With pencil in hand, reading your work closely, Wright is convinced that you are trying by any means
necessary to destroy his work, especially when you place
Uncle Tom's Cabin
and
Native Son
on the same plane. You criticize his character Bigger Thomas for harboring a blind hatred that drives him to rape, an obsessive fear that leads to murder: “Below the surface of this novel there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy. Bigger is Uncle Tom's descendent, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses.”
⁵⁵

But what distances you from Wright even further is his view of black American society. You consider the characters of
Native Son
to be far removed from the truth of daily life; since they are untethered from reality, they are also separated from the common and painful life of the black American. For you, the setting and dialogues ring false: “It is remarkable that, though we follow him step by step from the tenement room to the death cell, we know as little about him when this journey is ended as we did when it began; and, what is more remarkable, we know almost as little about the social dynamic which we are to believe created him. Despite the details of slum life which we are given, I doubt anyone who has thought about it, disengaging himself from sentimentality, can
accept this most essential premise of the novel for a moment.”
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As a result, the judgment you later render on the novel as a whole in “Many Thousands Gone” condemns in veiled terms the author's will to gloss over the most essential point: “What this means for the novel is that a necessary dimension has been cut away; this dimension being the relationship that Negroes bear to one another, the depth of involvement and unspoken recognition of shared experience which creates a way of life. What the novel reflects—and at no point interprets—is the isolation of the Negro within his own group and the resulting fury of impatient scorn. It is this which creates its climate of anarchy and unmotivated and un-apprehended disaster . . .”
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Shortly after the publication of “Everybody's Protest Novel” in the journal
Zero,
you go to Brasserie Lipp, in Paris—Chester Himes is there—and you don't expect to find Wright. But you do find him there, appearing very grim. He rebukes you for your attitude. He accuses you of betraying him, and, by extension, of contributing not only to the destruction of his position as an established author, but also to the annihilation of African-American literature by stripping it of what it inherently possessed: protest.

An argument breaks out between the teacher and the pupil. Wright, who had taken care to place his copy of the journal
Zero
on the table, pursues:

“All literature is protest!”

The pupil has been set free:

“All literature may be protest . . . ‘but not all protest is literature.'”
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You will later give an account of this scuffle in “Alas, Poor Richard,” one of the essays in your collection entitled
Nobody Knows My Name.
Your conflict had also been widely publicized by critics and academics alike, who heightened it to the level of one of the great literary rivalries in the American literary world.

By reiterating your criticisms of Wright's work in your piece “Many Thousands Gone” in 1951, two years after your attack against him in
Zero
, you confirm in some people's minds the notion that you are doggedly fighting your mentor. The article is perceived as the final signature on the divorce papers. This time the text is longer, more detailed, and in it you dissect
Native Son,
elaborating again on the notion of the protest novel, to better tear it apart. Wright is presented as the spokesman for the “new black man,” who would have the weighty task of engaging himself in the social struggle after “swallowing Marx whole,” and becoming convinced that the goals of blacks and those of the proletariat were one and the same. However this mission seems difficult to undertake since,
as you point out, writers “are not congressmen.” The text displays astounding skill, since in it you assume, like a character in a novel, the role of a white man who evokes then defends the status of the black American, from outside of his own community.

Reading “Many Thousands Gone,” it is clear that you not only insist on this difference of literary opinion, but that you identify yourself by it.

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The heart of the problem, however, lay elsewhere. The pupil had acquired his independence and now demands the right to think differently from his mentor. He does not try to hide this desire: “. . . I wanted Richard to see me, not as the youth I had been when he met me, but as a man. I wanted to feel that he had accepted me, had accepted my right to my own vision, my right, as his equal, to disagree with him.”
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To Wright's fury, you try to temper the injustice, the wave of criticism crashing down on him. Confronted by those who believe he is cut off from reality, who reproach him for conjuring up a Mississippi and a Chicago that blacks had never experienced, for knowing nothing about jazz, to say nothing of the Africans who call into question how “African” he really is, your criticism brings things back to some kind of order, explains things, and possibly
even contextualizes these ambiguous and shadowy subjects. Some of Wright's opponents went too far—much too far—such as the African who, while listening to the author speak, shouted, “I believe he thinks he's white!”

You conclude, in response:

“I did
not
think I had been away too long: but I could not fail to begin, however unwillingly, to wonder about the uses and hazards of expatriation. I did not think I was white, either, or I did not
think
I thought so. But the Africans might think I did, and who could blame them? In their eyes, and in terms of my history, I could scarcely be considered the purest or most dependable of black men.”
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It would be inaccurate to say that you did not display a desire to have a frank discussion with your former mentor—a discussion that would open the path toward reconciliation. But it was too late; he had passed away.

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Beyond the controversy, reduced more often than not to a mere rivalry between two prominent writers, the writer's status is at the heart of these two critical texts. Would it not be better to retain this from the dispute, and this alone? Langston Hughes, who reviewed
Notes of a Native Son
in the pages of the
New York Times,
compares the essayist and the novelist: “I much prefer
‘Notes of a Native Son' to his novel,
Go Tell It on the Mountain
. . . In his essays, words and material suit each other. The thought becomes poetry, and the poetry illuminates the thought.”
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One might ask how these subtle analyses on writing, the perception of history, or on the condition of blacks and the related themes that you develop in “Everybody's Protest Novel”—along with that of sexuality, themes that would become recurrent in your work over time—how all of that was relegated to the background behind your conflict with Wright. James Campbell is correct in affirming that “Everybody's Protest Novel” is “a piece of remarkable literature” that confirms the maturity of your style.
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The protest in question, the one you rally against, is in some ways reminiscent of the literary production from black, French-speaking Africa in the colonial and post-colonial periods. Several of these books—not necessarily written by Africans, but also by western writers discovering the “tropics”—fall back on some of the same sentimentality that can be found in
Uncle Tom's Cabin
.

At the very least they resemble each other in their desire to speak out against colonial atrocities or the treatment of blacks under colonial rule. In this case it is not
the writer's implication “in the tropics” that is at stake, but rather his vision of his own society. The emotion the author infuses into his work more or less ruins any chance of achieving the objectivity and distance necessary for real intellectual work.

However there still exists this other danger, specific to the black writer: he is expected to put the “black issue” at the center of his work, expected to crowd his pages with characters of color, to adopt a confrontational tone, with the white man as his sole target. These unspoken watchwords are used to prompt African authors—especially the acolytes of negritude—to praise black civilization through frenzied incantations, or to rebel at the eleventh hour against the colonizers, or imperialism in general. And so this literature appears to be a vast campaign against the colonial system, counterbalanced by praise of African roots. But this criticism of the colonial system always results in predictable fiction: a backdrop of cities divided between whites and natives, and a message of bitter condemnation of Christianity and western civilization. Europeans, only, are responsible for Africa's sorrows.

Guinean novelist Camara Laye, for example, gets caught in the crosshairs of the self-righteous who saw his portrait of a “different Africa,” a happier, more intimate, more personal Africa, such as the one that emerges in his masterpiece,
African Child,
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as a mark of carelessness and
irresponsibility at a time when the known enemy was the colonial system. Countless authors would go down the anti-colonial path, as illustrated in the first works of Cameroonian Eza Boto, better known by the name Mongo Beti.
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This man, like you, Jimmy, lived for a long time in France. He was known for his rebel spirit, his intellectual courage, and his willfulness. He believed that a writer should stand up, place blame where it is due and roar in the face of current events, and should not adopt “the sterile attitude of a spectator,” to borrow from Aimé Césaire.
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Considering it inconceivable to write during the colonial period about a young, African man, happy amongst his loved ones, he openly attacks his colleague Camara Laye with the following words: “Laye stubbornly closes his eyes to the most critical realities in his novel
African Child
. Did this Guinean not see anything other than a peaceful, beautiful, maternal Africa? Is it possible that Laye was not witness a single time to any atrocity of the French colonial administration?”
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I hold in high esteem the independence of the writer, Jimmy, and am weary of “herd-mentality literature.” A writer should always share his own vision of the human condition, even if it runs counter to commonly held, moralizing beliefs.

A variety of African literature known as “child soldier” literature—or as “Rwandan genocide” literature, when it was created more in protest than in an effort to truly understand the tragedies—convinced me definitively that we were not yet free of the vortex of
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
and that the sentimentality and moralizing current that runs through some of these works does harm to African literature. If we are not careful, an African author will be able to do nothing but await the next disaster on his continent before starting a book in which he will spend more time denouncing than writing.

People will loudly remind me of our duty to be politically engaged, to tell the tale of Africa's woes, to publicly accuse those who drag the continent downward. But what is the value of political engagement if it leads to the destruction of the individual? Many hide behind this mask in order to teach us lessons, to impose upon us a vision of the world where there would be the true children of Africa on one side, and, on the other, the ingrates—meaning the latter are considered Europe's lackeys. By nature I distrust those who brandish banners; they are the same people who clamor for “authenticity,” the very thing that submerged the African continent in tragedy.

In the introduction to her anthology of works from black Africa, the academic Lilyan Kesteloot pointed out “it is in fact preferable to confine oneself to the little
world of
me
than to make a great deal about negro unanimity without believing in it . . . The issue of political engagement is decided in the conscience of each individual, and is not an aesthetic criteria . . .”
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