Quote of the Day (Richard Wright, on ‘Lack of Self-Realization’)

“Remember that men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread! And they can murder for it, too! Did we not build a nation, did we not wage war and conquer in the name of a dream to realize our personalities and to make those realized personalities secure!”—African-American novelist Richard Wright (1908-1960), Native Son (1940)

Flashback, May 1925: Future Novelist Richard Wright in Clash Over Graduation

Being named valedictorian should have been cause for celebration for 17-year-old Richard Wright in May 1925. Instead, the insistence of his principal at Smith Robertson Junior High School in Jackson, Miss., that the youth put aside his own speech for one prepared by the school administrator triggered a threat to withdraw his diploma.

“Listen, boy, you’re going to speak to both white and colored people that night,” he was told. “What can you think of saying to them? You have no experience.”

But, in an early sign of the future novelist’s determination, Wright refused to yield.

The pressure campaign began a career in which the future African-American novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist found himself in lonely opposition to white racists, religious zealots, union busters, communists, American publishers, and the U.S. State Department for what he regarded as their infringement on his freedom of thought.

What made this situation—recounted in Wright’s searing 1945 bestselling memoir, Black Boy—so painful was that the principal was a fellow African-American. It wouldn’t be the last time that he would be disappointed in members of his own race—nor the last time that he would irritate them with his independence.

Just to survive to this point in his life was a miracle. The grandchild of slaves, he was also the son of an illiterate sharecropper who deserted the family when Richard was five. The following year, Richard could commonly be found drunk, in taverns.

A stroke left his mother virtually crippled and Richard in the case of his grandmother, a strict Seventh-Day Adventist who forbade him reading anything that didn’t accord with the gospels. And, still as a preteen, he accidentally set fire to and destroying her home.

In 1921, Wright had started fifth grade in another school two years behind his age group. Spurred by a hunger for food and learning, he prevailed upon his grandmother to let him take jobs after school, which allowed him to purchase books for classes as well as food. Until he could save enough money for a bicycle, he had to walk several miles a day to and from school.

Everywhere he looked, Wright could find little to savor in a Deep South deformed by Jim Crow legislation, leaving whites cruel or indifferent and blacks despairing of a better life in the face of broken families, illiteracy, poverty, ill health, and underpinning it all, disenfranchisement. He was coming, at a young age, what his fiction would continually address: “What quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity?”

The one refuge he could find in all of this was reading, an activity that fed his dream of writing novels in the North:

“Where had I got this notion of doing something in the future, of going away from home and accomplishing something that would be recognized by others? I had, of course, read my Horatio Alger stories, my pulp stories, and I knew my Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford series from cover to cover, though I had sense enough not to hope to get rich; even to my naive imagination that possibility was too remote. I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.”

A short story published with his name (but without payment) in a Jackson black weekly, the Southern Register, heightened his aspirations even as they increased his frustration with a sociopolitical order that hindered his dreams “that the state had said were wrong, that the schools had said were taboo.”

Seen in this light, the principal’s draft of the valedictory address posed a special dilemma for Wright: “I wanted to graduate, but I did not want to make a public speech that was not my own,” he noted.

In quick succession the principal bullied, baited, wheedled, and tempted the young man he called “a young, hot fool,” all to no avail. Attempts by Wright’s brother Leon and friends met with no better success. At last the principal relented, and Wright delivered the speech he had written—one, he admitted, not as simple and clear as the principal’s, but expressing his thoughts.

The teenager blushed, stammered and looked abashed as he addressed the audience. When the ceremony was over, he ignored the outstretched hands of well-wishers and walked home, confirmed in his thinking that, no matter how long it took—and comparatively, that turned out to be a short time—there was fundamentally nothing keeping him in Jackson.

What lay beyond Jackson? Wright didn’t know, but he was determined to find out. That fall he dropped out of Lanier High School and left Jackson, never to live there again. He took jobs in Memphis and Chicago before joining a group of Communist intellectuals in the latter city (an affiliation he would break in short order, angered by their crushing of member dissent).

By the late 1930s, Wright was gaining critical attention, but it was Native Son (1940) that finally announced him as a force in American letters. Five years later, Black Boy reached number one on the bestseller list.

Increasingly frustrated with American limits on his personal freedom, Wright emigrated to France, where he died in 1960. More than six decades after his death, the voice of protest in his mature work rings with all the clarity and urgency he was not yet able to master as an uncertain but ultimately brave teen facing an authority figure.

This Day in Literary History (Edward Aswell, Book Editor and Book Character, Dies)

November 5, 1958—Edward Aswell, who performed major editorial surgery on works by Thomas Wolfe and Richard Wright, died at age 58.

Readers removed from the era of Aswell’s most intensive editing activity, from the mid-1930s to his death, might know him another context—as a very thinly veiled portrait in the opening chapter of William Styron’s 1979 masterpiece, Sophie’s Choice, when the writer’s stand-in as a raw Southern man in the Big Apple, Stingo, slaves away in a publishing house. (I first became aware of this by watching, around the time of the book’s publication, Dick Cavett’s PBS interview with Styron, when the novelist cheerfully admitted that he had attacked Aswell to the hilt. Had the editor been alive at this point, Styron might have been sued for libel.)

Stingo’s boss at McGraw-Hill publishing house is the kind of pompous jerk who makes hell for any English major so dedicated to Art, Culture and Literature (in other words, every man and woman, Jack and Jill of them) that he or she is ready to accept the most menial job in return for the “psychic income” of being in a meaningful job. The young man already senses that he’s living on borrowed time, so to speak, at the famous publishing house for having turned down Kon-Tiki, but he knows it for sure after an encounter with the new editor in chief.

This new boss, Stingo notes, had been brought in “to give to the place some much-needed tone”—undoubtedly the same reason why the real-life Edward Aswell was lured away from Harper & Brothers.

Styron anticipated a strategy used by Woody Allen’s TV producer-character in Hannah and Her Sisters to say exactly who someone is without actually saying it. An official from a TV network’s department of standards and practices upbraids him for his sketch related to child molestation. Allen’s Mickey can’t see the reason why: “We don’t name names! We say The Pope.”

Similarly, Stingo’s boss, we learn, was “chiefly known in the publishing business for his association with Thomas Wolfe, having become Wolfe’s editor after he left Scribner and Maxwell’s Perkins.” Lest we still be in doubt about who this could be, Stingo drops this hint: his new boss was someone “whom I secretly called the Weasel—a near-anagram of his actual surname.”

And Styron’s not through. In a hilarious confrontation, Stingo’s fellow-southerner takes the young man to task for not wearing a hat to work and for reading The New York Post. Weasel, we learn, was “a balding, unprepossessing little man in his late forties…cold, remote, humorless, with the swollen ego and unapproachable manner of a man who had fatuously overvalued his own accomplishments.”

Far be it from me to take issue with Styron, a writer so masterful that I am not even worthy to get within 10 feet of his typewriter. Still, this must be said: as a southerner, Aswell appears to have gotten along reasonably well with Richard Wright for the latter’s depiction of his region’s racism.

Still, let’s see if we can get beyond Styron’s memorable hit job and consider some of the decisions that affected the commercial prospects of the titles he edited. Let’s start with Richard Wright.

Editorial decisions made by Aswell, made for sales purposes, softened the impact of works still potentially incendiary for how they treated ideology, class and sex. Wright had made a reference in Native Son to Bigger Thomas’ “polishing my nightstick” (hint: the Seinfeldian equivalent of being “master of one’s domain”).The Book of the Month Club would accept the novel if Thomas would delete that. The author did.

A few years later, something even more occurred with the publication of Black Boy. The original manuscript, titled American Hunger, featured a long second section that explored Wright’s disillusionment with the Communist Party. Again, the Book of the Month Club wanted this dropped. Again, Thomas acceded.

It would be nearly another fifty years before the Library of America restored these cuts in its editions of Wright's work. The original editions were especially egregious in the case of American Hunger, which made it a fundamentally different book.

The problem with Wolfe—like everything else with that young giant—was a hundred times worse for Aswell. Wolfe had come to Harper & Brothers lured by Aswell’s offer and a chance to escape the long shadow of his first editor, Maxwell Perkins. The author eventually dropped a batch of materials he was recycling from Perkins, set off on a trip to the West—then died!

I don’t know if Aswell was inclined to imbibe the moonshine whiskey produced in abundance in his native Tennessee, but the sight of Wolfe’s manuscript —now without its author to consult—would have provided an entirely reasonable opportunity to start.

Aswell had bundled Wolfe’s leviathan of a manuscript when he received it. Presumably, whenever he felt the need to lug it around the office or take it home, he used a wheelbarrow to avoid getting a hernia.

This manuscript was so large—10 times the average novel—that Aswell was convinced deletions were in order. Technically, he was bound by the contract Wolfe signed, which required the author’s consent to any of these changes.

The way he got out of it was this: another clause stipulated that Wolfe had to submit a manuscript not to exceed 750,000 words. That gave Aswell authority to delete 250,000 words—which he did by combining scenes and characters and even adding his own interpolated sentences. He managed to carve out from all of this The Web and the Rock, You Can’t Go Home Again, and The Hills Beyond.

Aswell’s heavy editing have left Wolfe and Wright scholars divided over how necessary the cuts were. The debate will go on for quite a while, I’m sure.

Quote of the Day (Richard Wright, on the Communist Party)

"It was not courage that made me oppose the (Communist) party. I simply did not know any better. It was inconceivable to me, though bred in the lap of Southern hate, that a man could not have his say. I had spent a third of my life traveling from the place of my birth to the North just to talk freely, to escape the pressure of fear. And now I was facing fear again, though I had no notion that I was slowly adding fagots to a flame that would soon blaze over my head with all the violence of the assault I had sustained when I had naively thought I could learn the optical trade in Mississippi."—African-American fiction writer and memoirist Richard Wright (1908-1960), Black Boy (American Hunger) (1944)

(This past September 4 marked the centennial of the birth of African-American novelist-memoirist Wright. I don't know how I overlooked it, nor, even more surprisingly, why major media—including newspapers, libraries and bookstores—did. His 1953 novel, The Outsider, might stand as a useful label for his entire life—the agony that blew him around the world like a leaf, searching vainly for a place where he could reconcile race, personal aspiration, intellectual openness, and security.

For more than 60 years, many, of not most, of the students assigned Wright's 1945 memoir Black Boy have been under the impression that it was the story as he intended to write it. They do not know that they have been reading only half of what he intended. In 1977, Harper and Row came out with the missing second half of the book, American Hunger. Finally, in 1991, in its edition of Wright's works, the Library of America put the two halves together, and it's this version that I've been marveling at for the last several days.

The memoir begins with four-year-old Wright accidentally burning his family's home in Natchez, Miss., and for the rest of the book Wright found himself singed by the world.

It was Wright's tragedy to be piercingly honest, at times agonizingly doubtful about his ability, and, in the end, deeply alienated from virtually every environment in which he found himself. He even started off with the odds against him, on a plantation in Natchez, Miss.—in the heart of the sharecropper system that was reducing the African-American population to a stage not very well advanced beyond the stage they had escaped.

In his great elegy "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," W.H. Auden addressed the great (by then deceased) poet with, "Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry." In Wright's case, mad, racist America hurt him into Communism. The results were not as happy as in Yeats' case.

The attempt to "learn the optical trade" that Wright briefly mentions in the passage above was disrupted by two co-workers when they realized he intended to better himself. Their harassment ended with Wright looking elsewhere.

Eventually, Wright found himself part of the John Reed Communist Party chapter in Chicago. In the end, he tired of mysterious party hacks who appeared out of nowhere to enforce intellectual conformity. It was this half of the manuscript of American Hunger, describing his savage disillusionment with Communism (including a climactic public assault by two white Communists at a party, with two black Communists looking on without lifting a hand) that Wright agreed to delete in order to make it more acceptable to the Book of the Month Club.

The amputation of this second half of the memoir led Wright to complain in his journal about Communist political pressure on the Book-of-the-Month Club. Indeed, his case seems more than a little reminiscent of how T.S. Eliot, in his editorial capacity at Faber & Faber, came to reject George Orwell's Animal Farm. Both editorial decisions were made in 1944, before the onset of the Cold War, when the U.S.S.R. was still the indispensable ally of the Americans and the British against Nazi Germany.

Much of this section of the memoir appeared in an essay Wright had published in The Atlantic Monthly called "I Tried To Be a Communist." In 1950, Wright, along with Alfred Koestler, Andre Gide, Stephen Spender, and other left-wing intellectuals, contributed to an anthology called The God That Failed, about their breaks with Communism.

Wright's memoir ends with him sitting at his typewriter, alone, unsure what will happen as he flings his words out into the world. That sense of isolation informed the rest of his life. He could not become a Communist, but he withdrew from organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom that he suspected were CIA-funded. He moved to France, hoping to find acceptance there as an African-American, but came to feel increasing misgivings about that nation's treatment of its Algerian colony. He died in 1960, worn out from a lifetime of contention, paying the price for his independent streak.

His ideological trajectory illustrates bloggers' simultaneous craving for community and need for the independence that ensures their work will have lasting value. The latter will often only come through the alienation that left Wright hungry for company and acceptance.)