Roses Supposes

Richard Wright read in the Memphis newspaper that H.L. Mencken was hated and a fool. He wanted to know who else was hated by the white South other than African Americans. So he borrows the library card of a white coworker (because he is barred from the library) and goes to the library. Here is the extent of the story told in most web Wright bios:

As Wright reveals in his autobiography Black Boy, he borrowed the library card of an Irish co-worker and forged notes to the librarian so he could read: “Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken?”

He wrote it that way so the librarian would think the white man had written the note. So it is a story about oppression and about getting around the oppression. But what they never talk about is what happens when he reads the story (other than it influenced him). Here is what he reveals:

248: “Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking authority. What was this? I stood up, trying to realize what reality lay behind the meaning of the words…Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons? Well, yes, for here they were. Then, maybe, perhaps, I could use them as a weapon? No. It frightened me. I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.”

249: “I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.”

250: “The plots and stories in the novels did nto interest me so much as the point of view revealed. I gave myself over to each novel without reserve, without trying to critize it; it was enough for me to see and feel something different. And for me, everything was something different. Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. But I could not conquer my sense of guilt, my feeling that the white men around me knew that I was changing, that I had begun to regard them differently.”

“It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them.”

I started The Native Son a year and a half ago and still haven’t finished.  Now I’m writing something about Richard Wright and needing to return to what I know (which is mostly pre-diss knowledge, so it’s stretching my brain a bit). I’ve been re-reading his autobiography.

I’m not sure why I didn’t finish the novel. Certainly there’s an element of things coming up and getting in the way, but there was also something else. I think I found a bit of an answer in this parenthetical remark, after stories of hunger, beating and fear (and we’ve only gotten to 6 years old):

(After I had outlived the shocks of childhood, after the habit of reflection had been born in me, I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair. After I had learned other ways of life I used to brood upon the conscious irony of those who felt that Negroes led so passional an existence! I saw that what had been taken for our emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, fears, our frenzy under pressure.

(Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won struggled, and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another.)

I’m all for complex novels, and indeed often get frustrated with genre fiction because it so often conforms to certain plot points and certain character shapes. But there’s something about this vision of the world, which I realized immediately after reading the above does suffuse The Native Son–that just did not compel me to finish. It will be interesting to write this biography of Wright and reconsider my perceptions.