Richard Wright, community, and the French connection

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1995 by Eugene E. Miller

Wright thus at one time seems to have thought that in the literary form he proposed in "Personalism" and detected in Bloch's novel he had also a model for the relationship between the individual and society, that the "community" that is the literary work he sought to create might also be a metaphor for social community. Image is to unity as individual is to society; unity of novel derives organically from separate images, as society derives organically from the individuals that physically constitute it. In "Personalism" and later in unpublished letters to Ed Aswell, his editor at Harper Brothers, and to his agent, Paul Reynolds (summarized in Fabre 427-28 and Miller 218-20) concerning his projected multivolume work "Celebration of Life," he very easily slides from discussing social conditions to writing about literary form. The title "Personalism" suggests that he had in mind Whitman's Democratic Vistas, where Whitman, who had inspired a number of French writers associated with Bloch and Barbusse (including Jules Romains, whose theory of Unanimism inspired his Men of Good Will, the first volume of which Wright knew in the early 1930s, according to Fabre's unrivaled knowledge of Wright's reading), romantically envisions a society developing best from the interiority of individual subjects.

Barbusse, born in 1873, a veteran of World War I, wounded and decorated, became ardently anti-war. He became a best-selling novelist in 1918 with Under Fire, depicting battlefield horrors. His 1908 novel, The Inferno, then also took off. Light, a war novel coupled more strongly with a social vision, was also a good seller, in 1919. In 1923 he joined the newly formed French Communist Party; he wrote for the Party's newspaper L'Humanite and edited his own, Monde. Like Wright, he was, however, increasingly at odds with important wings of the Party, and never subscribed to "proletarian culture" or to party-line subordination of art and literature to politics. His vision was more concerned with achieving a peaceful world, and with the need therefore to overhaul society into a brotherhood of equality and justice in order to achieve this lasting peace.

His books were seen by his contemporaries as best-sellers not only for their social views, not only because they enabled a reader "to feel other men's grievances and wrongs more keenly than his own." They also had a "tragic realism that impresses an image on the reader's brain," images that were sons of Zola - "Zola's faults . . . Zola's filth, his sexual obsession . . . anarchism . . . abuse of horror in the evocation of physical torture" (Duclaux 169) - not the kind of flaws likely to cut into sales (although overrated in light of today's sensibilities). With these general social, political, and literary qualities, the appeal of Barbusse's works to Wright can be seen.

We know, again thanks to Fabre, that Wright read Under Fire in 1933, when he very likely met Barbusse, who came to Chicago that fall to speak to a gathering of anti-war, anti-fascist groups. Other evidence in Wright's work suggests strongly that he also read The Inferno and Light. The evidence pointing to his knowledge of Light especially shows us how complexly his imagination worked with these novels.