J. Saunders Redding lecture, "The Black Writer in America," at the University of Iowa, August 1970

Speaker 1: The following is a lecture by Saunders Redding, delivered at the 1970 Institute of Afro-American Culture, held on the campus of the University of Iowa. The institute held August 9th through the 21st, focused on the Culture of Black America, commonly referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. In this recording, Saunders Redding, Professor of English at Cornell University, speaks on the Black Writer in America. Introducing Mr. Redding to the conference is Charles T. Davis, Professor of English and Director of the Committee on Afro-American Studies at the University of Iowa. Charles T. Davi...: In our profession, there is the hour which is always known as the dead hour, and that's the one usually that comes immediately after lunch. But obviously, there is no excuse for you this time, because we have with us Mr. Redding. That is a most exciting event. Charles T. Davi...: It's difficult for me to talk with any objectivity about Mr. Redding. As you know, introductions can... There are many ways of introducing people, and introductions can follow, I know two or three ways. I can always remember, at the University of Chicago, a man who was known for his introductions, and this was the late Morton Zabel. Charles T. Davi...: Morton Zabel was compulsive. He could leave nothing out, and so his introductions were always at least 20 minutes long. He would proceed to cite every word that the distinguishing visitor had written. And there you would sit, waiting for him to get through, and he wouldn't stop until he'd cited them all. That's one way to do it. Charles T. Davi...: And another kind of introduction of course is the kind of impressionistic one, which simply says, I met Mr. so-and-so in the lavatory room of Pennsylvania Station or something of that kind. And presumably this has a certain kind of relevance. I'm tempted to do both, you should know. Charles T. Davi...: I'm reluctant to do the second, because Mr. Redding knows too much about me, and been so close to my family all of these years, so that I tend to think of him as extended family. I can joke about him much the way I joke about my uncle, about whom I've already joked. Charles T. Davi...: He is a distinguished writer, and the thing that I must say about his writing is that it's so varied. It seems to me that we've had only very few writers, Black writers, who've been able to do the many kinds of things that Mr. Redding has done, Du Bois is one. Charles T. Davi...: Without citing works and playing the part of Morton Zabel, it seems to me that the first bit of illuminating criticism on Black poetry was written by someone as Redding, to make the poet Black. In the very difficult field of... And it's harder to find, because it's extremely important in American literature. In that field would fall such works as Lincoln Steffens' great work, of a kind of personalized approach to culture, personalized approach to history. He's made a very distinguished contribution. Charles T. Davi...: And more than that, it seems to me that he is able as a visitor in foreign countries, and we have one country in common, that is India, been able to come back and make very illuminating comments about extraordinarily complicated, difficult country like India. In short, a splendid scholar and writer, a fine teacher. Charles T. Davi...: He taught for years. I seem to remember too much as I think about it, what was the name of that school in North Caroline where you've taught... Elizabeth City. That's right. That was a very long time ago. And then Hampton and then Brown University, then George Washington University. He's lectured I'm sure at all of the great universities in the East Coast at least. Charles T. Davi...: He shares I suspect, the kind of provincialism I share, that there seems to be some kind of blockage on the Alleghenies, but I'm coming to Iowa. Blockage on the Alleghenies and nothing beyond there, except Indians and things of that kind. Charles T. Davi...: But he's taught at these various places, and he was for a number of years, a director at that very important program in Washington, that made possible so many of the studies that we've seen carried on today, about the Black community, by serving as the director of a fund at the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington. He's returning to, and I'm very glad to see that he is, to the academic world. Charles T. Davi...: He's fated, obviously, to be one of those distinguished academic writers like Robert Penn Warren, and others who've done so much to enrich the academic community. It's important to have the sense of the creative in an academic community of that time, enriched by people like Mr. Redding, who very clearly has come, obviously to enrich this session here. Charles T. Davi...: I'm delighted to introduce J. Saunders Redding. [crosstalk] stealing from you already. J. Saunders Red...: Thank you, Professor Davis. I should like to begin this overview, which incidentally starts earlier than the Renaissance, and goes beyond it, with a statement which I would like to set forth in three concepts. The first of these is that writing by Black Americans is American writing, in fact, and that it cannot be loped off from the main body of American literary expression, without doing grave harm to both Black and white American writing, as a corpus of American experience. And doesn't end as instruments of historical and social diagnosis. J. Saunders Red...: The second is, that until relatively recent times, writing by Americans, white and Black, has had little to do with pure literature, that is to say with aesthetics, either as philosophy or practice. American writing appeals as much to the cognitive as to the connotative and defective side of man's being. A remark that I made some 30 years ago and had no reason to change since. J. Saunders Red...: And number three, there is nevertheless an aesthetic yeast in American writing in the corpus created by both Black and white, that often raises it above the emotional and content level of the propagandistic and the tractarian. J. Saunders Red...: The moment I chose to do this overview, I realized that I was in two difficulties. The first difficulty, that of trying to treat adequately in a few hundred words, a subject that might exhaust a book. And second, a difficulty, which more judicious men have avoided for years, a moot and muted but far from academic question rose to plague me. What is a Black American or Negro? Perhaps more pertinently, what is a Black author? J. Saunders Red...: To the second question, what is a Black author, there are no specific answers, probably because given the popular definition which accrues to Negro, it had occurred to very few people, that such a fellow as is described in many books, could himself write a book. When I address the query to myself, I had to scratch for an answer. What is a Black author? J. Saunders Red...: Certainly, if he is a native of North America, his work proves that he is not merely a dark skinned fellow who writes. He is not a white man with a heavy coating of tan. The imponderability that attaches to the deeply troubling and obtrusive question of race has its influence here. J. Saunders Red...: Today, no one who studies even superficially the history of the Black man in America can fail to see the uncommon relationship of his letters to that history. Nor can one fail to remark, that literary expression for the Black man has not been and is not wholly now an art, in the sense that the poetry and prose of another people say the Irish, is art. J. Saunders Red...: Almost from the very beginning, the literature of the Black man has been literature either of purpose or necessity. And it is because of this that it appeals as much to the cognitive, as to the connotative and effective side of man's being. In general, the Black man has not been an artist dwelling in an ivory tower. Some have been, but most have not. He rarely thought of himself, and now rarely thinks of himself as a literary artist, and I emphasize the word at all. J. Saunders Red...: In general, those who work in prose and some who work in poetry, do not think of themselves as creators at all. They work in what they call the stuff of life. They tell it like it is, they go where it's at. But they require that the stuff of life be living flesh, before they come to it. J. Saunders Red...: Some have been very quick to defend their work by telling you that they had written nothing but facts, the truth, and that therefore, they must be believed. They insist on the factual element and the element of truth. And by this, they do not mean the element of probability. J. Saunders Red...: In general, the Black author of a quarter of a century ago, certainly, not only accepted the old cliche that truth is stranger than fiction, but he misunderstood it and acted upon this misunderstanding. He therefore, often fell short of the one quality that makes the result of literary endeavor worthwhile. The one thing that raises it to the level of conscious art. He fell short in the quality of synthesis. He has failed to synthesize or he failed 50 years ago to synthesize and transmute the stuff of life, which is base metal, into acceptable truth, which is pure gold. The detached mind, the impersonal but absorptive heart, which are the agents of this transmutation, failed the Negro writer of 50 years ago. J. Saunders Red...: This is why in general, I think it can be said that the Black author did better with biographical, historical material than with creative material. This is why up from slavery, along this way, what the Negro thinks, a long way from home, from slavery to freedom and the big sea are worth certainly as much as one way to heaven. There is confusion and alien land. J. Saunders Red...: Thus it is that a Joshua Henry Jones, a Sutton Griggs and the Du Bois who wrote Quest to the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess, and countless other Black writers published and unpublished, in actual fact, were not literary artists in the usual sense of the term. Griggs, one of the most interesting and one of the most representative writers of the period I am referring to, frequently made his position crystal clear. J. Saunders Red...: He was fond of prefacing his novels with explanatory essays. And in one such titled, A Review of the Anti-Negro Crusade of Mr. Thomas Dixon, Jr., prefacing the novel The Hindered Hand, he not only set forth his own purpose, but the purpose of Dixon's vicious, The Leopard's Spots as well. J. Saunders Red...: He said that Dixon's purpose was, quote, "To thoroughly discredit the Negros, to stir up the base of passions of man against them and to send them forth with a load of obliquely and the withering scorn of their fellows the world over, sufficient to appall a nation of angels." End of quotation. J. Saunders Red...: Griggs, using what he calls the facts of life, what he called the facts of life, of course, had as his purpose the correction of this impression. In general, the Black author of 50 years ago, seemed to scorn the learning of those techniques that are the necessary implements of high literary endeavor. J. Saunders Red...: If you talked to the writer of the pre-World War period of craft, he would have thought you were getting snooty on him. And even some of the younger and relatively successful ones would have told you gleefully, that the literary salons where Negro artists gathered in a kind of ebony tower were devoted to nothing of greater importance than discussions of the latest scandal, and the horse that won the last race at Pimlico. J. Saunders Red...: Far from professing an interest in craft, a great many, and perhaps the majority of Black writers prided themselves on their freshness and primitivism. And primitivism, it seems to me, is a negation of craft in any art. But if this sounds as if the Black writer was childish and undisciplined, it is well to remember that his seeming audacious infantilism had been imposed largely from without. J. Saunders Red...: By persons like the wealthy New York patron who withdrew her support of a promising young writer, when she discovered that the book he was then writing was not to be all simple, declarative sentences, about a laughably extroverted and adorably irresponsible colored people. Let us remember too, that Rudolph Fisher, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay were fine craftsman indeed. So much for the negative side. J. Saunders Red...: In positive terms, the author, the Black author of the 1920s and '30 was almost painfully sincere, morally and emotionally sincere and grave. The sense of humor which is supposed to be one of the Black man's chief racial characteristics was with rare exceptions, almost entirely missing in his writing. J. Saunders Red...: Only Rudolph Fisher and George Schuyler were funny and amusing to read. But even theirs was humor of a special sort. A kind of coterie playfulness, in which only the initiated can find amusement. J. Saunders Red...: Who but one familiar with the complexity of being Black in America could find anything truly funny in the electric machine of Schuyler's Black No More, a machine that turned Black men to white, even to the texture of the hair at $100,000 a turn? Prices to be reduced when the demand grows. J. Saunders Red...: Black writers had satire aplenty. In poetry, it was one of their greatest gifts. It was sometimes gentle and kindly meant, as in Cullen's she even thinks that up in heaven her class lies late and snores, while poor Black cherubs rise at 7:00 to do celestial chores. J. Saunders Red...: Or sometimes it pierced like a dagger and lacerated like a bull whip, as in Hughes', "My old man's a white old man and my old ma is Black. If ever I cursed my white old man, I take my curses back. If ever I cursed my Black old ma and wished she were in hell, I'm sorry for that evil wish and now I wish her well. My old man died in a fine big house. My ma died in a shack. I wonder where I'm going to die, being neither white nor Black." J. Saunders Red...: There was then satire, but wedded to it was a sense of message. In prose, if a story failed to carry a message in unmistakable terms, they would generally have none of it. And even somewhat later, Richard Wright, superb craftsman that he was, must write an extra 10,000 words in Native Son, to clinch the assurance that the story of Bigger Thomas plain as it was in its own terms, carried its proper message. J. Saunders Red...: The message was the thing, the expression sometimes doctrinal and final, of an idea, a theory or a social rule. And almost invariably as was perhaps right and necessary, if it was important, the message was addressed to a wide audience. J. Saunders Red...: Charles Chestnutt must say in his first novel, for instance, the House Behind the Cedars, that quote, "It is surely worthwhile to try some other weapon than scorn and hard words upon a people of our common race, the human race, for we are all children of a common father, forget it as we may. And each one of us is in some measure his brother's keeper." J. Saunders Red...: Thus, James Weldon Johnson must preach in his Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, that differences in pigmentation make no differences in the souls of men. Thus, Langston Hughes, thinking primarily of a Black audience, reminded it that a precocious Black youngster is to be encouraged, because quote, "All of us niggers are too far back in this white man's country to let any brains go to waste. He's got to be able to help the Black race, you hear me? Help the whole race." J. Saunders Red...: And thus Walter White at the end of his novel, Flight, had his questing heroine think, quote, "Whatever other faults they might possess, her own Negro people had not been deadened and dehumanized by bitter hatred of their fellow men. The venom of oppression practiced upon others weaker than themselves had not entered their souls." Close quotation. J. Saunders Red...: The message was there then, and its general purport was plain. Plainer, of course, in nonfiction than in fiction. The very titles of nonfiction works betray them. Bursting Bonds, The Negro, Too, in American History, In spite of Handicaps, The Black Man in the White Man's World. J. Saunders Red...: Negro authors of 45, 50 years ago, felt that the message was a necessary moral instrument for pricking the conscience of what sometimes seemed an almost conscienceless white America. They used it as an instrument by means of which to arouse a sense of honor, justice and right on behalf of the Black man. Their use of it was on the whole, skillful, social minded and in every way commendable. It was, they seemed to think, the proper way to win friends and influence people. It was hardly the way to find commercial publishers. J. Saunders Red...: A careful checking of a bibliography of Black writing reveals four general facts, each of which seems to have significance. First, prior to 1865, of every 10 books said to have been written by Blacks, only three carry the imprint of commercial publishers. The other seven were printed either privately or at the expense of some anti-slavery group and offered for sale from door to door and meetings of anti-slavery societies. J. Saunders Red...: Two, between 1865 and 1905, our bibliography reveals publication of several works, such as those of Frederick Douglass, Charles Chestnutt and Paul Dunbar by commercial publishers. But it also reveals an increasing number of publications issued in such strange places as Raleigh, North Carolina, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Naperville, Illinois, and Sparta, Georgia. J. Saunders Red...: Many of these books bearing the notation, printed or published by the author. They were therefore vanity publications. Of some 60 titles examined from this period, 42 including the first two of Dunbar's were printed at the author's expense. From 1905, this is the third fact, from 1905 to the First World War, the publication of books by Negros was largely confined to Boston companies, like Small, Maynard; H.B. Turner; Houghton Mifflin and to some others like Cornhill; Lee; Brimmer and Stratford. Companies, which almost invariably in the case of Black works, demanded that the expense of publication be underwritten by the author and his friends. The books were subscription books. J. Saunders Red...: In this same period, 1905 to the First World War, we find some very queer imprints appearing, such as the Nixon-Jones Printing Co., St. Louis; [Trachtenberg] Printing Co., New York; the Metaphysical Publishing Company, New York; the Association Press, New York, which incidentally is still in existence. The American Black Negro Academy, Washington DC; and the Peterson Linotyping Company, Chicago. J. Saunders Red...: Four. Since the First World War, most of the books by Blacks had been issued through regular houses in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago. But the books by Blacks published since the First World War, are or were until 1960, less than one half the total number published during the equal period of time from 1890 to 1915. J. Saunders Red...: Do these facts speak for themselves? Perhaps not. But if I may be permitted to speak for them, they seem to say first that until comparatively recently, Blacks have had few relations with publishers. J. Saunders Red...: In the days down to 1918 or thereabouts, publishers simply had nothing to do with Black works, unless they were specially sponsored by some powerful white patrons. William Dean Howells, for instance, who sponsored the work of Dunbar. Walter Hines Page who sponsored the work of Charles Chestnutt, and Richard Watson Gilder who sponsored the early work of James Weldon Johnson. J. Saunders Red...: And an examination of the early works of these three men reveals another curious fact. In the days when they had sponsors, the work of none of them had any quality that stamped it as the work of a Black man. Illuminating this whole matter is something Chestnutt had to say in Breaking into Print, a compendium of the publishing experiences of many American writers. J. Saunders Red...: Following the rejection of his first novel, Chestnutt says his publisher suggested that quote, "Perhaps a collection of the stories, which had been appearing in the Atlantic Monthly, might be undertaken by the firm with a better prospect of success. I was in the hands of my friends," Chestnutt goes on, "And I submitted the collection." J. Saunders Red...: "After some omissions and additions, all at the advice of Mr. Page, the book was accepted and announced." And more pertinently, still, he goes on to say, "At that time," this is a quotation, "A literary work by an American of acknowledged color was a doubtful experiment, both for the writer and the publisher, entirely apart from its intrinsic merit." J. Saunders Red...: "My race," he concludes, "Was never mentioned by the publishers in announcing or advertising the book." And this, because Mr. Page considered that it would be harmful to the book's success. J. Saunders Red...: The publisher is the public's representative. He is this if he is to survive at all, in spite of himself. Here and there, now and then, some publisher may be rich enough or careless enough of the public to defy the public's taste or to make an effort to change it. But by and large, published books are considered saleable books. They are commercial ventures. J. Saunders Red...: It is the publisher who must gauge the reading taste of the public and respond sensitively to it. And it is through him that the public, the reading public exerts a powerful influence on the kinds and the materials of literature. Through the exertion of this control, the reading public has had a tremendous effect upon books by and about Blacks in the period under discussion. J. Saunders Red...: Following the Civil War, the basic belief in the Black man's inferiority grew very concrete. It had once been vague, attaching to imponderable qualities and quantities. The Black man was insensitive. The Black man had no soul. It was all comfortably metaphysical, even if it was documented in such practical terms, as to lead to the legal definition of the Black man as five-eighths of a man. J. Saunders Red...: By this time though, a wholly new problem was beginning to face the Black author. That problem was the one of writing for two audiences, a white one and a Black one. James Weldon Johnson called this the Negro author's dilemma. J. Saunders Red...: In Dunbar's day, there was no Negro book buying public but Negros were beginning to read books and especially books about themselves. Being intelligent and educated and by the very nature of things, sensitive, they could not find themselves mirrored in these books. The exaggerations which they found offended them. They resented dialect which they did not speak. They resented the picture of the Black man as a funny man. They resented the expression and the implication of racial inferiority. J. Saunders Red...: The burden of this resentment since, having no power as supporters of literature, they could not get it the white men who were the principal offenders, fell upon the authors of their own race. Dunbar, for instance, was all but ostracized by the Black society of Washington where he lived for a while. Langston Hughes would not read his folk and racial rhythm pieces to Black audiences. And after the publication of Richard Wright's Native Son and later Black Boy, the Black press and platform were storming with denunciations of the author as a producer of his race. J. Saunders Red...: The problem posed by writing for two audiences was almost insuperable. Indeed, the barriers to honest work in writing for either one or the other were high. Influencing the Black author who wrote for a Black audience, as many of them did in newspapers and magazines, was the clamor to glorify the race, to increase the race's pride in itself, to speak only of its good qualities, its praiseworthy acts. And this influence, I should say, within certain limits was legitimate. J. Saunders Red...: Some time back, Harry A. Overstreet, writing in the Saturday Review of Literature put it this way, quote, "The Black writer of fiction was inevitably a spokesman for his people. He was not free to write what he pleased. Such freedom was reserved for the whites. It was a little moment if a white novelist depicted white characters who were wholly despicable. Every white reader knew that such characters were in a minority, and that the white race as a whole would go on quite safely in spite of them." J. Saunders Red...: "Not so if the Black writer depicted Blacks who were despicable. The white reader would be likely to shake his head and say, "Nigger blood, bad business." The Black writer their forehead, a double obligation to truth and to the effect upon his readers of the particular truth he selected. He did not take the position that since all that is human was his novelist province, he had a perfect right to describe scoundrel Negros if he so preferred. He did so at peril to his people." J. Saunders Red...: "For every scoundrel Negro he described, got magnified out of all proportion into a person supposedly typical of all Negros. And it was this depiction, even in entire honesty and truth of the whole broad field of Black life, that the Black author's colored audience took offense at." J. Saunders Red...: "If the Black author wrote primarily for a white audience, then he was up against the old barrier. He was up against many long standing artistic conceptions about the Negro, against numerous conventions and traditions that were more or less binding, against a whole set of stereotypes, which were not easily destroyed." J. Saunders Red...: White America had some firm opinion as to what the Black man was, and therefore, some pretty well fixed ideas as to what should be written about him and how. It is I suspect or it was certainly, in many cases, an atrophying dilemma. Occasionally, a Black author extricated himself by saying in effect, the devil were the white audience. But he did this at a great risk of publishing the book himself and pedaling it from door to door. J. Saunders Red...: Moreover, those who willfully, with purpose of forethought relegate the white audience to the nether world, are usually preachers instead of writers. Others have emerged from the dilemma by saying the devil were the Black audience, and had thereby given themselves the freedom, a rather specious and spurious kind of freedom, I should say, to produce the empty, banal and pseudo exotic trite that is sometimes mistaken as the core of Black life in America. One refers of course to several. J. Saunders Red...: But there's a third means of escape from the dilemma. I should like to suggest it here, for Black writers of integrity, present day Black writers are turning towards it more and more. They're after making a common audience out of white and Black America, in spite of their protestations to the contrary. They believe this can be done or they wouldn't try it. They're after writing American books for an American audience. J. Saunders Red...: Richard Wright, for instance, earlier, made his Bigger Thomas, quote, "A symbolic figure of American life. A figure who was not Black all the time nor white all the time. A figure that would hold within him the prophecy of the American future." J. Saunders Red...: Standing on this foundation, working in the material he knows best, telling it like it is, the Black author seeks to make his appeal to the whole American audience. He must do this if he is to remain true to his best creative instincts. He must do this if he is to survive as an artist. And America, the white and the Black part of it, seem now to be granting him the freedom for it. J. Saunders Red...: For it is only in freedom that the creative man can grow. It is only when this freedom has been long established that he begins to produce his best work. That's it. Speaker 1: That was Saunders Redding, Professor of English at Cornell University with a lecture on the Black Writer in America. This presentation was delivered at the 1970 Institute of Afro-American Culture, held on the campus of the University of Iowa, August 9th through the 21st, and was recorded by the Broadcasting Service of the University of Iowa.