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

Part of my life, Dick, has been a lacerating experience and I have my share of bitterness, but I have learned to keep the bitterness submerged so that my vision might be kept clear; so that those passions which could so easily be criminal might be socially useful. I know those emotions which tear the insides to be free and memories which must be kept underground, caged by rigid discipline lest they destroy, but which yet are precious to me because they are mine and I am proud of that which is myself.... You write of the numbness which our experience has produced in most of us, and I must say that while I was never completely numbed myself, I have had to rigidly control my thawing, allowing the liquid emotion to escape drop by drop through the trap doors of the things I write, lest I lose control; lest I be rendered incapable of warming our frozen brothers -- which all good writing must do. (Wright Papers) (5)

At this point, Ellison makes no mention of the Communist Party, choosing to focus on the Negro experience, and the promise of Negro writing. His disillusionment with the Party and his growing interest in concentrating almost solely on the Negro in America both seem to mirror Wright's own leanings at this time. Coupled with Wright's letter to Mike Gold, this letter from Ellison helps to distinguish Wright's shifting emphasis from the Party to the Negro experience and great Negro writing. Fittingly, Ellison declares in this letter: "... I am sure now more than ever: that you and I are brothers."

By the mid-'40s, Wright himself espouses this philosophy of Negro writing first, Marxism (notably not Communism) second. In a missive to Joe C. Brown, dated June 4, 1945, Wright no longer tries to recruit Brown into the ranks of the Communists. Instead, he speaks of the future and his imminent obsession: "There is a great novel yet to be written about the Negro in the South; just a simple, straight, easy, great novel, telling how they live and how they die, what they see and how they feel each day; what they do in the winter, spring, summer, and fall. Just a novel telling of the quiet ritual of their lives. Such a book is really needed" (Knipp 13). Meanwhile, in his own personal journal, on March 8, he speaks of the same theme. Wright harps on the fact that American readers and intellectuals cannot see his "vision" in a global, near universal, context, one that he claims French refugees see quite clearly. He believes that too many American readers simply view his work in moral terms, just as the Dalton family does in Native Son. They simply ask, "What can we do?" and blindly attempt to throw money at the problem. To Wright, a more meaningful reception of his work would require readers' acknowledgment that his fiction truly represents meaningful, modern living, reflective of the true human condition. The Communists advocated against Wright's vehemence and preoccupation about the struggle of the Negro, and constantly called for his couching the struggle more in terms of a class conflict than a racial one. At another point in the March journal entry mentioned above, he plainly states that he had created his own sense of time, one out of step with the Party's notion of time and possible revolution. Even those who no longer stepped in time with the "mainstream" Communists could not escape Wright's angry swath. On April 6, he notes that the Trotskyite paper The Militant offered a favorable review of Black Boy. Yet, Wright had not provided a complete economic analysis of the Negro. (6) It is at this point that the autho r begins to make his turn away from even Marxist ideology, enticed by the lure of existentialism.