Call-and-response: tracing the ideological shifts of Richard Wright through his correspondence with friends and fellow literati

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Matthew M. Briones

On February 12, 1945, at precisely 3:20 p.m., noted African American intellectual and writer Richard Wright sat down at his desk in New York City and, true to his disciplined regimen, wrote the following in his personal journal:

Why can't I just sit like other people? What is gnawing at my gizzard? Why am I always seeking out new people, new ideas, new points of view? Why can't I rest? God knows that I am a hot and bothered man. Is it because I'm in such a contradictory circumstance, a plantation Negro living in New York, a peasant who is an artist of sorts, a Negro married to a white girl, a Communist who cannot stand being a member of the Communist groups, a writer who does not and cannot and will not write as other writers write? (qtd. in Rowley 320)

In one concise excerpt, Wright emotionally and critically raises a fistful of the major themes of his lifetime's writing: existentialism, the Southern migration and Northern urbanization of mid-century blacks, the hope and failure of Communism, class struggle, black men and white women, and the force of writing itself. At the same time, he reveals his deeply self-critical and persecutory nature, attempting to face the recurring questions that would haunt him throughout his lifetime. Reputed to be a man who, like many of his fictitious characters, appreciates rootlessness and exile, Wright in this entry demonstrates his restlessness, explicitly addressing his need constantly to question not only himself but also the world around him. He brings to light his paradoxical, contradictory nature, the unconventional man in an environment shrouded in convention. He essentially admits to living a life of "double-consciousness," a notion made popular by one of his most outspoken and famous critics, W. E. B. Du Bois. Not only is Wright an African American trying to live as an American in White America, but he is also a "plantation Negro living in New York," "a Negro married to a white girl." Unlike the "other people" who complacently sit, Wright throughout his life does not feel so much uncomfortable in his "skin" as in his "shoes": Wherever his feet have taken him -- from Natchez, Mississippi, to Chicago, to New York City, and even to Paris -- Richard Wright invariably feels "the outsider." This journal and numerous letters to and from friends reveal Wright's his true self, one less publicized and less documented, even by his handful of biographers. The documents chart Wright's consistent disillusionment with the Communist Party and his ongoing quest to write or to aid in writing the great American novel.

Judging from the thickness of his two personal, year-long journals from 1945 and 1947, one may conclude that Wright was a meticulous journal keeper. More than 200 delicate, typewritten pages, double-sided and single-spaced, reveal Wright's musings and journeys, both literal and figurative, in these two years. The year 1945 marked the publication of his autobiography Black Boy, an edition for which Wright actually expurgated sections of his Chicago years and his Communist involvement (per the suggestion of his editor and his agent), whereas 1947 was the year in which Wright decided that he and his family would permanently move to Europe, after a formal invitation by the French government for a visit in 1946. Housed at the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, these journals represent only two of the thousands of items kept by Richard Wright and organized posthumously by his wife Ellen and his biographer Michel Fabre. From this collection, Wright appears to be not only a meticulous journal keeper, but a conscientious letter writer, as well. Wright preserved virtually all of his correspondence from friends, business associates, heads of state, entertainers, and intellectuals. Even odd pieces of paper found their way into the collection, noting how much money he spent from day to day -- another piece of evidence suggesting Wright's exacting and painstaking nature. Wright's journals -- which include three to four entries per day, marked off by times of the day -- uncover a deeply personal side of Richard Wright, a side of his life understandably kept guarded and hidden from the public until his death in 1960 (and more accurately until the purchase of his papers by Yale in 1976). Letters from close friends such as sociologist Horace Cayton and author Chester Himes, and especially novelist Ralph Ellison, reveal Wright's more immediate and personal reactions to the world around him.

Particularly in the context of his membership in the Communist Party (which he joined in 1933), Wright displays his private but deeply critical -- almost strident -- take on Communism in America, whereas his public disavowal of the Party was relatively quiet. Wright's biographers and history's reading of Wright come up short on this issue in Wright's life, while his letters tend to reveal more. For example, Constance Webb, wife of Wright's friend C. L. R. James, fails to mention Wright's split with the Party in any explicit terms in her 1968 biography of him. Even Michel Fabre, in his reliable 1973 biography, tends to downplay Wright's private frustration with and bitterness over the Party. Fabre focuses more on the public Wright, noting that, "when [Wright's] friend Horace Cayton disclosed that the Communists would withhold their support from any attempt to combat government discrimination in the courts, Wright withdrew from the Party without a scandal" (Quest 229). Later, Fabre admits that Wright's "stateme nts on this subject are... contradictory" but only offers Wright's letter to Edward Aswell in 1955 as the most accurate (private) proof of Wright's break with the Party in 1942: