The mysterious death of Richard Wright; suspicious events raise questions about last days of novelist

WEDNESDAY morning, December 1, 1960, I was preparing breakfast and listening to the news when Wright's face flashed on the television screen and the news was announced: Richard Wright, noted American writer, died last night in Paris from a heart attack. He was fifty two years old.

I sat down and trembled with shock. I felt as if a relative had passed away. I could not believe he had had a heart attack.. . . There was no history of heart disease in his family, and he had never had even a slight attack. Something had to contribute to a sudden cardiac arrest.

In her letter to [author Michel Fabre], Dorothy Padmore wrote of her wariness of the Russian doctor treating Wright, and of her alarm at not only the number of drugs Wright was taking, but also at his appearance and condition which she said "bore many resemblances to that of my husband in the last weeks of his life. I was hesitant about criticizing both his doctor's personality and his treatment, and feel that I made a great mistake in not doing so. But Richard seemed to have a relationship with him that struck me as rather peculiar. My own thoughts about the doctor, which I did not express to Richard, were that I found it difficult to understand how he had the means to follow the special medical research he was apparently interested in without taking many patients. It was difficult to reconcile the spacious accommodation he lived in on a fashionable boulevard with his Russian origin and a certain absence of necessity to work at his living."

She felt that "the doctor had attached himself specially to Richard." It was six years later, in 1966, before I had any inkling that Wright's death might not have been a natural one. I was in Nashville at Fisk University attending a writers' conference, at the invitation of john 0. Killens, who had organized the conference, when I heard a conversation speculating on Wright's death. I interrupted to ask, "What is this I hear that Wright may have been murdered?" One of my conferees turned and said to me, "Oh, you know that woman killed him."

"What woman?" I asked.

"That woman," was all he would say.

The seeds of suspicion were planted in my mind at that time, but I didn't know anything about a woman with a motive for murder. I still don't.

In 1968, when Constance Webb's biography of Richard Wright appeared, I read in disbelief her description of the medicine Wright was taking during his last illness: how raw he was inside. Must be the massive doses of sulfa, emetine, arsenic, 3,000,000 units of penicillin, and all the bismuth. But he was cured of the amoebas he had picked up somewhere in Spain, Africa or Indonesia." Arsenic? Sulfa and penicillin, plus bismuth and emetine? God knows that was strong medicine. Although arsenic is given in small doses for a brief period of time in the treatment of amoebic dysentery, it is not prescribed over a long period because it cannot be excreted in body waste and, therefore, builds up in the system and affects the vital organs.

Friends who knew Wright when he was taking this medicine made two observations: One, Wright joked about modern medicine. Yes," he said, I am taking arsenic that is a known rat poison, but is also used as a cure in such tropical diseases as amoebic infestation. Modern medicine is very strange." Two, the medicine was so strong that patients were ordered to stay in bed while taking it until the attack was over. But Wright was impatient. He didn't like being in bed and wouldn't stay there, which is why the medicine worked on him adversely.

In the summer of 1968, 1 was at the University of Wisconsin ... to talk about my novel, jubilee. There I met Abraham Chapman and his wife, Belle .. old friends of Wright and his wife... When I said I could not understand why Mrs. Wright had remained in England after her husband was refused a permanent visa, Chapman said: "But the marriage was over, Margaret. Two years before Dick died, that marriage was over." Indeed, that would account for Ellen's absence from Paris at the time of her husband's death.

Between 1968 and 1973, David Bakish came to see me while he was doing research on his Wright book. I showed him letters I had received from Wright many years earlier, and Bakish shared with me information he had gotten during his visit to Paris. He... said he found evidence and heard from more than one source that Wright had a mistress in Paris, and he assumed this was. the reason Ellen was not very cooperative.

In 1967, john A. Williams published a novel - a roman a clef entitled The Man Who Cried I Am, based on Wright's Paris days and his supposed murder by CIA agents. Saunders Redding assured me that murder was very unlikely. "Why would they have cause?" he said. "I don't think Wright was that important to them." More than ten years passed after john A. Williams's book appeared before I had new information that gave credence to his suspicions ....

I learned some revealing information about Wright's marital difficulties when I read letters to Margrit de Sablomere found in the Schomburg Collection and talked to jean Hutson. In a letter to jean Hutson, de Sablomere says both Fabre and Webb tampered with these documents and altered the letters by deleting dates and salutations and making copies ...