Richard Wright, community, and the French connection

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

In an unpublished lecture, "On Literature," discussing shortcomings of proletarian literature, Wright turned his attention to ways the writer can imaginatively project himself into his story so that its meaning is living, not merely journalistically reported. To achieve this life, he advocates re-emphasis on character, focusing on images of people rather than on their environment (he had "plunged into life" surrounding his characters in the posthumous Lawd Today, without success when he first tried to publish it). But he also refers to Hemingway's To Have and Have Not as an example of another method:

When the life of Harry Morgan was over, and when . . . one thought the novel was over, Hemingway wrote on, began to tell the reader what he really wanted to say. The novel broke in two; Hemingway's technique carried him the old road [of character foregrounding], but when he wanted to write the meaning of the worker's life, he threw it overboard and began to talk. . . . The final section of TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT contain[s] some of the finest imaginative writing . . . but it was not done in terms of character and action. (JWJ Wright Misc. 507)

While clearly apropos of Max in Native Son, this is a puzzling analysis of To Have and Have Not. That novel does not break in two. Harry Morgan does not die until the last few pages, and when point of view shifts from him after his mortal wounding, it shifts to other characters. Any point Hemingway may have wanted to make about proletarian issues is embedded (as Wright called for in "Personalism") in images of other characters and their actions.

Wright misremembered here. Rather than Hemingway's novel, he had Barbusse's Light in mind. Light, told from the consciousness of a white-collar worker, has its narrator, who thoroughly accepts the socio-economic status quo, go off to World War I, where he is exposed to the social questionings of other, more clearly proletarian types. He is wounded, and Chapter XVI, about midway through the novel, begins with "I am dead." But the narrator proceeds to have an extended hallucinatory vision that itself gives way to passages such as this:

Men have gone towards each other because of that ray of light which each contains: and light resembles light. It reveals that the isolated man, too free in the open expanses, is doomed to adversity as if he were a captive, in spite of appearances; and that men must come together that they may be stronger, that they may be more peaceful, and even that they may be able to live. (186)

Such sentiments, and even the style, are clearly "out of character," and obviously Barbusse is speaking his ideas in his own lyric voice, interjected clearly but poetically in visionary rhetoric.

Also aiding Wright's misremembrance is that in Light, as in Hemingway's novel, the chief female character is blonde and named Marie. Most of all, Barbusse's novel, near its ending, contains this passage:

There is nothing between the paradise dreamed of and the paradise lost. There is nothing, since we always want what we have not got. . . . The two most violent and abiding feelings, hope and regret, both lean upon nothing. To ask, to ask, to have not! Humanity is exactly the same thing as poverty. (301-02)