Richard Wright's Lawd Today! And the political uses of modernism

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Brannon Costello

Readers have long considered Lawd Today!, Richard Wright's first written and last published novel, an anomaly--when they have considered it at all. The novel, which Wright began perhaps as early as 1933 and which he continued to compose and revise until 1937, (1) simply seems inconsistent with our image of what a Wright text of the 1930s, a decade which saw the publication of Wright's radical poetry and the short-story collection Uncle Tom's Children, should do or be. Set in Chicago during the Great Depression, Lawd Today! features petit bourgeois postal worker Jake Jackson as its protagonist. Jake, a drunken, abusive lout who spends his days lusting after prostitutes and beating his wife, never achieves any real revolutionary awakening, and indeed continues to endorse capitalism and the American success myth and to condemn "'Commoonists"' despite his own debtridden and fundamentally unsuccessful life. When the small publishing house Walker and Company released the novel posthumously in 1963, critics greeted it with a mixture of confusion, qualified praise, and disgust. Indeed, Nick Aaron Ford, the novel's most vociferous early critic, found this "dull, unimaginative novel" so impossible to reconcile with his vision of Wright that he wrote, "It is difficult to believe that Lawd Today was written by Richard Wright.... It is doubtful that the mature Wright ever would have agreed to its publication" (368). Although Ford may have articulated the most extreme critique of the novel, he was by no means completely out of step with his fellow reviewers. Granville Hicks' unenthusiastic comment that "it is less powerful than either Native Son or Black Boy, but it has its own kind of interest" (363) typifies the lukewarm response that continues to guide critical discussion--or the lack thereof--of the novel today, with a few notable exceptions. (2) Yoshinobu Hakutani, a more recent Wright critic, claims that few readers can "deny that Lawd Today lacks the tension of Native Son." Although he admires certain satiric elements o f the novel, he takes it to task primarily for its failings as a work of naturalistic protest fiction, a la Native Son: "On the one hand, [Wright] has accumulated documentary detail characteristic of a naturalistic style. But his manner is flawed because his selected scenes are imparted with gratuitous metaphors and images" (222).

The stylistic "flaw" that Hakutani identifies here--the preponderance of "metaphors and images"--speaks to another difficulty critics have had in reconciling Lawd Today! to the traditional view of Wright, and indeed of literature in general, in the 1930s. The novel seems influenced less by the naturalism or social realism that we typically associate with Wright and more by modernist aesthetic and thematic concerns. Wright, however, was an active member of the Communist Party throughout the 1930s, (3) and he served as head of the Chicago branch of the literary John Reed Club, published pieces in Party-sponsored and Party-friendly magazines like New Masses and Partisan Review, and rose to prominence as a poet, short story writer, literary critic, and journalist. Since official Communist Party doctrine treated modernism as irredeemably bourgeois and counterrevolutionary, goes the conventional argument, its stable of critics would doubtlessly have roundly condemned Wright's novel. Indeed, Granville Hicks asserts that the novel "would have been disturbing to most orthodox Communists in the Thirties" (364), and Edward Margolies claims that "even a cursory glance at its contents will reveal what the party would have found objectionable" (91).

True, Lawd Today! has little to do, on the surface, with socialist realism, the literary mode ostensibly endorsed by the Communist Party. Mike Gold, one of the Party's most famous aesthetic theorists, lobbied for a "proletarian literature [that] will reflect the struggle of the workers in their fight for the world. It portrays the life of the workers . with a clear revolutionary point" (205-06). Gold draws a sharp distinction between proletarian writers and the "bourgeois writers" who "tell us about their spiritual drunkards and super-refined Parisian emigres; or about their spiritual marriages and divorces" (206). While modernist art deals with "precious silly little agonies," proletarian novels offer a vision of "not pessimism, but revolutionary elan" (206-07). Gold, certainly, would have disliked Lawd Today!'s similarities to James Joyce's Ulysses: The novel takes place in the course of one day, and, as Eugene Miller argues, Jake's "quotidian routine is parasyntactically laminated over Lincoln's birthday r adio speeches and other media pronouncements"; his "activities...are patently and ironically rendered more meaningless by playing the myth over them," much as Leopold Bloom's life is rendered more meaningless in Ulysses through ironic contrast with patterns from classical mythology (59). Craig Werner also argues that the novel "is a conscious rewriting of Ulysses. Filled with direct allusions to Joyce and Eliot, the novel emphasizes a mythic parallel and multiple styles" (190). Moreover, the incorporation of newspaper headlines, popular songs, and radio broadcasts also recalls Joyce. Gold would surely have turned up his nose at the epigraph from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land that begins the novel's third section, "Rats' Alley," and Don Graham has gone so far as to argue that Eliot's archetypal modernist poem and Lawd Today! share the theme of "spiritual death and the possibility of rebirth" (329), although he finds this theme unrelated to the novel's socio-political concerns. (4) lake and his fellow postal work ers even have a conversation about Gertrude Stein. As Margolies observes, Jake suffers from "spiritual poverty" -- a fundamentally modernist dilemma -- in addition to the usual economic poverty. Wright's text, then, has little in common with Daniel Aaron's description of the Party ideal: "Black proletarian and white proletarian, two massive figures. . . standing arm in arm" (44). The Communist Party, Margolies claims, "would have disapproved" (93).