Bigger and Pinkie

Yesterday, I wrote reflections on Richard Wright’s Native Son.  Last night I read Wright’s essay, “How ‘Bigger’ was Born.”  The essay was included in the Library of America volume, which is one more reason you should always read Library of America volumes.  Another reason the Library of America is better:  the notes at end explain that the version of the novel I just read was the original manuscript—the published volume was sanitized a bit so the Book-of-the-Month Club would issue it.  The end notes have the passages as they were modified for the Book-of-the-Month club.  No doubt about it; the novel as originally written is stronger.

So, some further thoughts:

1. Wright goes to great lengths to explain that Bigger is real.  He has known many Biggers in his life.  Wright’s insistence here is much like Dickens’ insistence in his preface to Oliver Twist that he characters therein are real.  Dickens puts it in all-caps (“IT IS TRUE”); Wright doesn’t.  But, both essays have the same stamp-your-foot-when-you-say-that tone.  I get why Dickens wants to insist that his characters are real, that there really are prostitutes like Nancy.  But, Wright’s insistence was surprising—of course there are men like Bigger.  Obviously, in 1940 this wasn't obvious to everyone.

2. Wright makes the same comparison between Bigger and himself that I made yesterday.  In reflecting on his fear that the Communist party might condemn the book because of its “individualist and dangerous element,” Wright realizes, “I felt that a right more immediately deeper than that of politics or race was at stake; that is, a human right, the right of a man to think and feel honestly.”  Wright has a difficult time in this essay escaping the expectation on his race and his politics.  Wright: “the moral—or what I felt was the moral—horror of Negro life in the United States.”  Oh, Richard Wright, wherever you are—your moral is so much more transcendent than you even imagined.

3. Wright notes that the novel was shaped by the many other novelists he read, but he doesn’t tell which novelists.  It would have been interesting to know whom he had been reading.  Maybe he says in his autobiography.  But, there is no doubt what I suspect.  There was one book whose echoes I heard straight through Native Son; indeed, it strikes me that these two books would be a fascinating comparison.  Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock is eerily similar to Native Son. Pinkie and Bigger could be brothers, but one is a black kid in the slums of Chicago and one is a white kid in the slums of Brighton. 

4. Native Son also reminded me of An American Tragedy but that may be just because I recently read Dreiser’s novel.  Even still, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Wright liked Dreiser’s novels. 

5. The endnotes in this volume about it publication history are a stark reminder of the extraordinary change in the moral landscape of art.  The scene which the Book-of-the-Month Club needed changed was shockingly tame compared to what the Book-of-the-Month Club routinely sells today.  Bigger and his friend masturbate in a movie theater.  It’s less than a page.  Compared to the several pages of gratuitous sex in any modern novel, one wonders what happened since 1940.  It’s even more surprising when you think that something like Sister Ray was still shocking in the 1968.

6. Wright was walking a fine line in crafting this novel.  On the one side, there was the fear of alienating whites who wanted to be sympathetic to the situation in which blacks were living, but would be shocked by the portrait of something less than the Model Citizen.  On that same side, there were all the upwardly mobile blacks who would be quite upset at a portrayal of someone who was not the best role model or example of upward-mobility.  On the other side, though, there was the actual plight of a large number of Americans, native sons of the land.  The line—how to portray the reality of the situation without alienating the very people who most needed to be shown that line.  This is, see above, exactly the same line Dickens had to walk.  Wright succeeded as well as Dickens.

7. On my reading list is now Black Boy.  Also the Library of America edition, by the way—here again, the Library of America is the first publisher of the work as originally intended.

8.  Sometimes I wonder why England doesn’t have a Library of England.  English literature also has a few books of note, which would benefit from the same editorial and publishing care which the Library of America is lavishing on American literature.