Daniel Aaron lecture, "Richard Wright and the Communist Party: Arrival and Departure part two," at the University of Iowa, July 28, 1971

Daniel Aaron: I'm sure there are questions? [inaudible] Speaker 2: This involves... Well, one of the very last things you said [inaudible], I was talking with a number of people in the center. It's very common on modern [inaudible]. In fact, up until the time of this very conference, I did the very same thing. But I wonder if it isn't worthwhile to make a distinction between consciousness of being Black and [inaudible], and Black Nationalism. Whether this poem begins talking about the opposition between Black Nationalism and assimilation. But I wonder if it is worthwhile to distinguish, say, something like the [inaudible] feelings that Wright expresses in Native Son from, say, the Garvey movement. I wonder if they... It's a [inaudible] Daniel Aaron: There is an interesting comment about Garveyism in the position that's taken by the party, and I didn't read it but I think it's germane to your question because I think this must have been in his mind all the time. After all, he talks about meeting Garveyites and talking. In fact, they hoped that Wright would become one of them. I think that Ralph Ellison must have had the same kind of experience too, and been enormously attracted by it and yet it was taboo by the party. This is precisely the kind of thing they were discouraging and why they tried to distinguish between what they would call Black chauvinism and the true message, which they wanted their Black members to believe in. Daniel Aaron: He says, "The fact that the..." This is the policy statement. "The fact that the most important mass movement of this kind, the Garvey movement, was a sort of Negro Zionism," that's the way they described it, "and had such reactionary, extremely harmful slogans as 'leaving the United States and back to Africa', should not blind us to the revolutionary possibilities of the Negro National Liberation Movements of the Future, and so forth." Daniel Aaron: Well, now to come back to your point, Don. You think that this was something that lingered in Wright's mind, that this was a problem that he continually had to face? Speaker 2: No, no. I was... No, I was thinking of the... I'm essentially bringing up the question of terminology which is... Daniel Aaron: I see. Speaker 2: ... quite wide, very wide [inaudible]. I think you'll find it practically everywhere. Daniel Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Speaker 2: And I was wondering if it might be that you require [inaudible] defined or [crosstalk]- Daniel Aaron: Between... Speaker 2: Between Black Nationalism as an organized effort for certain goals and a feeling that Black people are likely to have, individually, not with organization, about oppression, about being Black. You see the... I'm sure that when most of us here refer to Bigger Thomas' Black Nationalism, I'm sure that we all know what you mean. I think those are the terms we've all been using, but I wonder if it would be worthwhile to call that something else. Speaker 4: Yes, yes, I think that you... When you talk about Black Nationalism I think it's important to distinguish, I think, between a political Nationalism and a cultural Black Nationalism, which pushes the Nationalism of Doctor Woods. Although there is a political Black Nationalism as well. And I think also that even within the confines of political Black Nationalists there are numerous varieties of political Black Nationalism, I would say, a strong pan-African type of consciousness. Or there could be something performing more closely to the kind of patterns set up by the Republic of New Africa, or the Stalinist proposal for a Black Belt. Daniel Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Speaker 4: Well, you talk about the cultural Nationalisms and even... I wonder if both, by using Black Nationalism, even with the sense of cultural Nationalism, and applying it to Wright, wasn't somewhat confused. Daniel Aaron: I see. Speaker 4: Because it seems that there is a strong cultural Nationalism in certain writers who tend to be assimilationists or integrationists, for example, Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes, both whom seem to have integrationist biases, especially Langston Hughes, I think, in his essay The New Negro, certainly does. But- Daniel Aaron: Don't you think Richard Wright had that too? Speaker 4: I think so, too. I think in the case of Wright, though, that the key issue here is personalism and universalism. He strives for universality, a term which I really wonder if it ought to be applied so much to Black literature as it is. But it seems that in the case of Wright, at least he was very much [inaudible] universality, and was not a cultural Nationalist. Daniel Aaron: Yes, I suppose that word Nationalist is terribly one to get hung up on, yes? Speaker 5: Well, I just wanted to say that I have not been able to see, Nationalism, Black Nationalism, either cultural or political Nationalism, in the early writers. I haven't seen it in the [inaudible]. What I'm seeing is a sense of obligation in the consciousness of the characters. So it's not that confident, cohesive force that Nationalism has to be at [inaudible] Nationalism [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Yeah, Black Nationalists cannot think of themselves in relation to white society, "I'm an outsider." A Black Nationalist must think of himself as an insider. He is inside [inaudible] the Black consciousness and it's the whites who are the outsiders. Daniel Aaron: Yeah. Well, I think that there's a difference, isn't there, between Wright writing statements, political statements, in the 1930's, and what was simply coming out, [inaudible] out of his stories. You have the... you might say that the difference between the words and the music. The music is coming out of himself. This is the personalism and this is his own private anguish and frustrations that come out, but he's making rather explicit, rather formalistic pronouncements that will suit the party. But at the same time, I don't think it's that close either. I think that there's a kind of a blending of the two. But I think you're quite right in saying that the use of Black Nationalism, particularly as I used it today, is rather muddy. And I think it has to be very carefully distinguished. absolutely. Yes. Speaker 6: I think actually, the key to Wright's kind of Nationalism goes back to folk tradition, and that he states that in a certain kind of way in group print from Negro writers. Daniel Aaron: Yeah. Speaker 6: In other words, there's a privacy of the Black experience in folk tradition, which really gives a kind of an intellectual ground for Wright. But it seemed as soon as you get it into heavyweight terms, then a false [crosstalk] begins to appear. Speaker 6: For example, he was saying that the folk literature itself was axiomatic, you might say, of a Nationalistic basis, but ultimately he felt he had transcended with the [inaudible] terms. So that it seems to me that one of the things we often neglect in the Black literature is the folk literature, which often does one hell of a lot of [inaudible] of situations, and it has to, in order to define, it has to define from the position of a people. And so that Wright is ever so often, with his source in Mississippi, seems to be pushed back to that aloneness of Blackness. He even tried to be a communist. Or [inaudible] the fact that, here are all these Black boys who are on the way to prison and all kinds of destinies and nobody really knows anything about it. Speaker 6: So there's just simply a whole lot in the folk tradition, not necessarily which would lead to a political country, but that was mined out of a consciousness separate experience in one kind of way, just in coping with slavery and coping with the Southern experience which has to say, "We are a people," in a certain kind of sense. And [inaudible] Wright, well, he approved the folk tradition, but not in a specific way. He was always tremendously conscious of the folk sources [inaudible]. Daniel Aaron: But you wouldn't call that cultural Nationalism? Speaker 6: I don't want any heavyweight terms. Daniel Aaron: I see. Speaker 6: As soon as that gets into it, it seems to me that there's some kind of falsity arise. Daniel Aaron: Yeah. Speaker 6: Because then when you say cultural Nationalism, you begin to talk, it seems to me, about a very specific direction where it's often, Black folk tradition is partly survival-oriented, and partly looking forward to a dream of somehow, "Ethiopia will raise up its hands". Daniel Aaron: You know, I'd like to, at this time, just to interrupt this. One of the things that's interesting to me... I mean there's a great deal about Richard Wright that I just don't know about. I am interested in the relation of the literary history of the period and the Communist Party, and then so far as Wright participated in that, and the general background of it. And it's interesting to see what white writers, people who had members of the John Reed Club, were saying at the same time that Wright was. The kind of writing that the party was publishing in the New Masses about rising Black aspirations. And Mike Gold, who is a very celebrated figure in communist literary circles, a man of great gusto, a kind of a bohemian and an anarchist, even while he was a member of the party, describes the meeting, Communist meeting, in Chicago and he talks about the appearance of Black representatives. Daniel Aaron: I'd like just to read a couple of paragraphs from that and then read Richard Wright himself, writing in the same magazine. Look at the language of the two, see the kind of thing that he was doing for the party. What do you make of it? Here is a typical passage from Mike Gold. Daniel Aaron: "Ford, not Henry," one of the delegates shouts, makes his acceptance speech. This is James Ford that Robert Washington was talking about yesterday. He is tall, grave, careful. Strangely the faint aura of a college petent hangs about him, yet his life contains enough of the Negro tragedy to make him symbolic as a candidate. For one of his early memories is of the lynching of his grandfather in Georgia. The old man was a track walker, too outspoken. He made enemies among the straw bosses. One day a gang of them grabbed him from the side of his little grandson. It was Holiday. And they beat up the old man, then threw him to a fire of burning crossties. Daniel Aaron: Young Ford worked as a Blacksmith and machinist in a blast furnace beside his father. He painfully forced his way through high school, then entered Fisk, then volunteered for the war. In France, he organized protests against the Jim Crow'ing of Black fighters for a world made safe for... When he came back, he went to the labor movement, was a delegate to the Chicago Federation of Labor. Blacklisted, starved out for his militancy, he eventually turned communist. Bitter heroic years, a living argument for revolt, but his speech contained none of this material. It abounded in too many cliches. Most of the speeches of the leaders suffered from the same thesis obsession that makes most communist literature in this country impossible for workers to read. Daniel Aaron: It was left to the rank and file to reveal the heart of this movement. "I love the Communist Party," said Mrs. Laura Osby, a gaunt stockyards worker, in a green shirtwaist, "because under its banner we are not fighting for a lousy 15 dollars a week but for equal rights. This is the comrade party. The others are the boss parties. We Negroes love the communist party. "An old Negro from Louisiana, big, powerful and toothless, looked through his eyeglasses and stammered, "I ain't never talked to such a big congregation but if I don't know how to speak, I have the spirit anyway. I'm with the great comrade party. For this cause I'll eat corn husks and sleep in the cold fields. The news is flashing east and west, north and south, and the common people is rushing under the wings of this comrade party. The white workers will protect me, and I will protect them, and together we'll make a new party. Godspeed to this big comrade party." Daniel Aaron: Dozens of other Negroes spoke. It was the first communist convention at which I had heard or seen so many Negroes. It is a mistake to think this leftward movement among them is pure emotionalism, though they have good cause to be emotional, and no great movement grows without tapping some profound emotional need of the masses. There are twelve million Negroes in America, and until they wake politically, there can be no progress here. They are awaking, as most liberal and conservative Negro newspapers admit, in the direction of communism. At this convention, they first made themselves felt, and the occasion was historic." Daniel Aaron: This is the language, although a little franker. Mike Gold's unusual criticizing of a party functionary like James Ford. But this is the image of, I think, of the Black proletarian that was being used. This was socialist realism, if you will, although based on real people who had real expressions. Then, in the same... No, two, four years later... Has this piece of Richard Wright been collected? Two Million Black Voices? No? Two Million Black Voices. This was before Twelve Million Black Voices. This is his New Masses report of a meeting of the... What is the name of this organization? It was called by A. Phillip Randolph. Not The Sleeping Porters, but it was a group of... Oh, it's the National Negro Congress. Daniel Aaron: And here, it seems to me that the writing has all the kind of communist rhetoric and it doesn't sound like Richard Wright at all. It seems to me it could have been turned out by any kind of hack. Mike Gold might have written it, or any number of other people might have written it. Now this is the kind of stuff that he was asked to do. I have a feeling this must have killed him to write this kind of assignment, and I think this may have been one of the reasons, although I've never heard it expressed anywhere, that just fed him up to here. And ultimately why he left the party, simply because the party wouldn't let him be a writer. I think that that could be emphasized more than we've done. Yeah. Speaker 6: Well, you reminded me, when you went to Michael Gold... I don't remember myself whether he wrote Jews Without Money- Daniel Aaron: He did, yeah. Speaker 6: ... prior to writing the kind of things- Daniel Aaron: Yes, he did. Speaker 6: He did. Daniel Aaron: Yes. Speaker 6: Oh, yeah. Because it seems to me that in Jews Without Money, he was doing... It's a very interesting book. But from a communist point of view, it seems to me that it would be a very sentimental book, and I remember one discussion of it... I think it was V.F. Calverton was sort of moderating and saying, "You can't really have a complete communist consciousness until there's a higher consciousness in people." But Jews Without Money, in a certain kind of way it seems to me, at the time it was less a posit than almost anything that Wright wrote. Daniel Aaron: It was less... Speaker 6: Less a posit. To the communist movement, that is. You get a picture of- Daniel Aaron: Well, at the end, the only thing in Jews Without Money that, if you simply took off the last chapter it wouldn't be communist at all. Speaker 6: Yeah. This is what... Daniel Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. But I think that they were dragooning him into reporting readings, and then having hosannahs at the end and saying, "The great change is coming." I won't bother to read it. But it's very much in the spirit of Gold. Speaker 6: I remember only one review like that, like the one you're talking about, Ellison's, which reviews one book on the workers. And he criticizes it thus, "It portrays a splintering of the folk consciousness, but it does not show the recreation of the consciousness on the investor level." Which I'm sure, the communists got a laugh. Daniel Aaron: Yeah. Speaker 7: And I'd like to invite a little more speculation on this point, because, when you think of Wright's departure from the party, it's not a departure which is characterized, it seems to me, by any necessity on his part to deny his communist education. In this sense, it's very different from [inaudible]. Very different from Arthur Koestler. Very different from other intellectuals who have have doctrinal reasons for denying the party. It seems to me that you come close to it by saying that he couldn't function as a writer. It's also possible that in the 1940's... And perhaps you might react to that, in the flip-flops which you have indicated here. This taps the... This seems to be the common sense of any man, or at any type of objectivity, it seems to me, in the party at this time. And one would suspect that there are ties, the vestigial racial connections that we have variously called a kind of embryonic Nationalism, if you will, that there is the vague sense of betrayal that he obviously carried with him, too. Again, it seems to me this is... We don't really know and Wright doesn't really tell us. Daniel Aaron: I think I do know and I'd like to talk to that. Is your question baring on that, or did you want to [inaudible] some together? Speaker 8: I don't remember exactly where it came from, but I found in the biography [inaudible] that he was very disillusioned by the Communist Party. And he didn't feel as if [crosstalk]. Daniel Aaron: Though if you take that book, The God That Failed, and you read the other confessions in that book, you can see that Wright stands out, apart from all of them. His experience with the Communist Party doesn't begin to touch a figure like Lewis Fisher or Steven... Well, it's not Spender, so much, but Arthur Koestler and, of course, many other American communist writers who were really in the party. People like Joe Freeman, for whom the party was everything. The party was family, the party was their associates. They didn't associate with anybody but the party. They didn't unbend with anybody but the party. The party was their life. He tells about the experience of this man who's right out of the party, how they break him down. Daniel Aaron: Now, there was a real convert. I mean, a man for whose life was the party. Wright never felt that way about it at all. That's why I think you would have to see that why, at the beginning of my remarks this afternoon, why I played down, I think, the importance of the party member as against the writer. Wright was shocked, as many other Black Americans were shocked, by the cynicism of the party simply overriding legitimate objectives that the party ordinarily was dedicated to stand up for, simply for expediency. And the continual shifts might hurt some people intellectually, but for Black people, for Black proletarians that ostensibly they were defending, it was a matter of life and death. And yet the party behaved this way. And therefore, it seems to be he responds not so much as someone disenchanted with Marxism, as an outraged Black man. Speaker 9: And [inaudible] in The Outsider exactly was [inaudible]. Daniel Aaron: Yes? Speaker 10: I wonder if you'd speculate on a different aspect, or maybe it's the same aspect, and that is the religious quality of the party. It seems to me, in that essay, I Tried to Be a Communist, Wright comes to that situation with a... running out of [inaudible] or the [inaudible] with a curious ambivalence. On the one hand, he's fascinated by the power of this experience, beginning with the worldwide situation, all over the universe, and then narrowing down to this one man, the fact that they were so affected that they had broken this man and he did not offer a defense. At the same time, seeing that this is really quite horrifying, it's debilitating and so on. And especially that the... Perhaps there is an awareness on Wright's part, this is why I say it's in the area of assimilation, of something religious here. Speaker 10: Again, I come back to that story that Wright [inaudible], that here is a woman who is trying to take a previous religious experience. And what she's, it seems to me, searching for in the communist experience, is not intellect, it's not a way of ordering the world as a Marxist might. But it would be a new vision that had an emotional intensity, and again, it strikes me that he echoes that vein in White Man, Listen! He talks about the emotional power of a vision. And by the time he gets to White Man, Listen!, he's willing to say that the particular vision is really rather irrelevant for third world people. The fact is, at a time... You know, does that make sense? Daniel Aaron: I think it makes complete sense. I've always taken that line myself. And of course, at the time it would have been regarded as the utmost heresy. And one thing, of course, that the party insisted that it was, had nothing to do with mysticism, is that religion was the opiate of the people and all that sort of thing. That they were hard-boiled, rational people. They were following a dialectic. Actually, as you look at the history of communists, any communists, a real, bonafide dedicated communist, you can work out the religious [inaudible] right down to the analogy, right down from the beginning to the end. There's no question about it. It had its- Speaker 10: You think he felt that [crosstalk]? Daniel Aaron: I think that Wright, later, looking back on this, and I think it's always important, as I said, to see that he is writing about his experiences retrospectively so he already has a kind of detachment about this, so he can sit aside and watch this man going through all of these motions. What Wright felt at the time is hard to say, but I would suspect that Wright himself had never had that kind of religious commitment. He was never one of the elect. He had never experienced irresistible grace. And I think that what he recognized... he talked... Two things. We have that story that you mentioned and, of course, his mother's comment. And this was true I think of the overwhelming majority of the Black people in Chicago who had the greatest suspicion on religious grounds for communist atheism, for example. And of course, their religion and Christianity was tremendously powerful. Daniel Aaron: Now, I don't think of Wright himself as being a Christian in that sense. In fact, I don't even know how much religious education he received, or how deeply it was at any time he ever had stood up and given testimony or anything of that kind. I don't recall anybody writing about Wright who actually described his early religious experiences. But I think he was acute enough and perceptive enough to see that Christianity, and kind of Christian pietism, would act as a counteracting force. And I suspect in that story, he saw it as a counter-force. Speaker 10: I wonder then, perhaps ironically, he was repulsed by the fact that hearsay political doctrine, that was trying to cast itself as a political doctrine, and he looks around himself and he finds a religious intensity among the people. And he certainly rejected his religion before, and I wonder if, again, he sees the benefit of a movement that can capture people's minds and forged him into a [inaudible]. Daniel Aaron: The way Mike Gold said in that passage that I quoted. Yeah. Speaker 10: At the same time, there is this sense of a mystical, even in biographies looking back on, there's a sense that this religious testimony, in a sense, that you read out of the Mike Gold. The fellow who stands up and starts saying that the Comrade Party, this is a testifying, too. I wonder if he kind of... Daniel Aaron: Well, I wondered when to speculate, you see. What we do know about it, what I feel that I know about it, I think he would be quite capable of doing I because there was something very sardonic and almost sly in his comments about human behavior. And he had a kind of a hawk eye. He was an observer. And I think it's quite likely that he did. I think that he was... My point is, and I think this is what Don's point too, it's hard to know sometimes when he is writing quite deliberately and when it comes out unconsciously. Of course, sometimes it slips out. Sometimes, you have a feeling that he's deliberately bearding the party, just wondering what they're going to do if he comes out and says this. But it's hard to say, and we would have to have him here and ask him. And maybe he wouldn't even know himself, if he had to think back at that time. Yeah. Speaker 11: At the risk of being slightly redundant, I was talking about both of those passages [inaudible] because of the fact that they also have that Nationalistic impulse. In the case of [inaudible], her detection of the informer is a kind of a confused instinct which her sons have transcended through the integrationist idea of the Communist Party. And in the case of the young men that he's writing about, Wright is very emotionally concerned that we are two Black men and we can't really understand each other [inaudible]. Daniel Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Speaker 11: Seems like what we keep coming up against in both cinema and the lectures is that you got a series of unresolved tensions [inaudible] as he was saying, that sometimes come out. So that some things are going to come out unconsciously at a certain point. And you can't always define what is conscious and what is unconscious. Daniel Aaron: Yeah. Speaker 11: And [inaudible] was a Nationalistic impulse, in a sense. I know white folks, and she turns out to be right [inaudible]. Daniel Aaron: That's right. Yes. Speaker 12: Yeah, I'd like to go back to one of the statements you made about [inaudible] about Wright and his wholehearted attachment and belief in Marxist Universalism. Daniel Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Speaker 12: Yesterday, Mr. Washington put it aptly. He said that whenever Wright came into contact with intellectual esteems, he kept them in alignment with his own experience. Daniel Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Speaker 12: I wonder, if we are the ones who are having the problem, resolving these tensions between what we say he did consciously and unconsciously. And I'm wondering if it's possible that Wright had no problem, in his way. Daniel Aaron: Well, it seems to me that anybody who is chafing, in the party, as he was, he would almost have to have it. I mean, how... I mean, this is sort of a schizophrenic life. You have to toe the mark. You're called on, you're given assignments. After all, he did. He tells us that he wanted to go back and write but, no, he was told that he couldn't. That this was a time of crisis and everybody had to come around and do his job, and he did it. And he did it, he says, with great reluctance. But he did it. And so that, it seems to me that it's fair to deduce that there was a real tension in his mind at this time. Speaker 12: You see, what I get to there is the fact that if he's being accurate in I Tried to Be a Communist, he never attempted to give the party, the leadership, the idea that he was wholeheartedly with them. He told them, "No, I don't want to do it. But if I have to, maybe I will, as long as you agree to give the leadership of the committee over to someone else after I'm done with it." And to me, this would reserve on his part a certain psychological independence. That if they want to rule over him, well, he'll let them rule over him. But he's going spring right back up. He's not laying down, he's not giving up, I don't know if you catch my- Daniel Aaron: I see your point and I think he probably did maintain a psychological independence. But at the same time, I think he sort of chafed and resented it. Speaker 13: The evidence, of course, would be in the works, which we don't have obviously, the works presented as examples of resolution. So that the... [inaudible] Speaker 14: [inaudible] just a question of [inaudible]. Did the communist party, any time, [inaudible] Daniel Aaron: I don't know, but that would be an interesting question. Uh, I suppose when he went down and talked to the Black proletarians in the south side, after all they were old Garveyites down there, and he may have had the same problem that the invisible man did. I don't know. He never mentions, in his accounts of the party, this problem. So your guess is as good as mine. I would suspect that he probably did. And there must have been... I don't know. I really feel silly even making comments because I'm so ignorant of this, really. But, I should think that there was always something attractive about Garveyism to... It would be attractive to people like Wright and to people at that time. I suppose even now. It was made fun of at the time, and of course there were all kinds of attacks against Garvey for reasons that you know, but there's something rather admirable about him. And I think that this must have come through but I just don't have any evidence for it. Yeah? Speaker 14: I'm just thinking about the comments that the [inaudible]. After he left the party, he was lost. Would that be... And I was wondering what you would make of that, really, in light of [inaudible] Ellison [inaudible] Wright. He was independent, [inaudible]. Daniel Aaron: But Ellison said that Wright told him that after he left the party, he was lost. Speaker 14: Yeah. Daniel Aaron: Well- Speaker 15: [inaudible] Daniel Aaron: Nowhere to go. Well, this is.... You see, I think that he did have somewhere to go as he showed. And I think in some ways, we were talking about this last night, over beer, that there was a difference, I think, between when the white writers broke. When Malcolm Colly and Granville Hicks and Joe Freeman and all those people, they had somehow to go back and fit into that society in some way. For a few months or maybe a year, they maintained their position in a sort of limbo. Neither in, nor out, neither supporting their society or against it. But then they finally became unconscious apologists for it, or at least they had to accommodate themselves to it. But that wasn't... That alternative, or that... This was not necessarily for a Black writer because he had plenty to object. There was no reason for an ex-Black communist to feel lost because he no longer approved of Russian totalitarianism or white capitalism. He had plenty. He could be a revolutionary. And I think that, in effect, Wright did remain a revolutionary the way very few white ex-Communists did. So I think that there was an alternative. Daniel Aaron: Going back, I would think, perhaps, after you've associated with communists for a long time, when you're kicked out of the society, I suppose, there's a moment when you don't know where you're going to go. He had other problems though, to think about. Where he was going to live and all that kind of thing. And it didn't take him very long. I certainly... When I met him, he didn't seem to have any problems that way at all. And didn't seem to have shown any of the stereotypes and the wounds of other ex-communists that I knew. None at all. Yeah. Speaker 16: I think that there's a kind of difficulty that keeps... I seem reflective and questions keep arising. It seems to me that if [inaudible] were [inaudible] aware of the fact, but none of this is consistent. And all of it... It's not at all unusual to hold to the [inaudible]. And I think that we recognize or have sketches of him [inaudible] but at the same time, I think we must also recognize that he was... To have spent that many years doing the kind of thing that you point out, must have taken indeed, a good deal, a very deep commitment. But perhaps the nature of his [crosstalk] pointed out, [crosstalk] other people, but I think we have to keep in mind, there is a skepticism, sure, but it's sort of like a religious person might [crosstalk]- Speaker 17: [inaudible] not to the [inaudible] one feels, or one leaves one university to go to another. No recruiting allowed. Daniel Aaron: There's a passage that I'm trying to find, if I could put my finger on it that was in Black Metropolis. I think that... What the hell did I do with it. Well, I can't... I've got the exact page and I... [inaudible] if I can put my finger on it. It's a passage in which they talk about the... Oh yes, here it is. He's talking about... These are just not non-communist Blacks who are supporting the party in the 1930s. And they were attracted by it because... And I'll just read this paragraph. Let's see. Daniel Aaron: "But most of them were attracted to the communists primarily because the reds fought for Negroes as Negroes. Thousands of Negro preachers and doctors and lawyers as well as quiet housewives gave their money and verbal support to the struggle for freeing the Scottsboro boys and for releasing Angelo Hernden. Hundreds, too, voted for Foster and Ford, Browder and Ford. For what other parties since reconstruction days had ever run a Negro for Vice President of the United States? And who would ever put Negroes in a position where they led white men as well as Black? Every time a Black communist appeared on the platform or his picture appeared in a newspaper, Negroes were proud. And no stories of atheist egrets or alien communists could nullify the fact that here were people who accepted Negroes as complete equals, and asked other white men to do so. Some of the preachers opposed the reds publicly, but remarked privately, "If the reds can feed the people, let them." Politicians dutifully denounced them, but privately admired their spunk. A few Negroes sincerely hated them. Daniel Aaron: The reds won the admiration of the Negro masses by default. They were the only white people who seemed to really care what happened to the Negro, yet few Negro sympathizers were without reservations. Some thought communists were using Negroes. Others felt if they ever gained power, they'll be just like other crackers. Many regarded the interracial picnics and dances as bait, but Negroes are realists. They take friends and allies where they find them. That is, they accept the indictment of communism, but not the cure of communism." Daniel Aaron: Well now, Wright was much more intellectual, of course, and you couldn't compare him with this, but maybe there was something pragmatic about the Communist Party, too. Insofar as the communist party helped him as a writer, helped him to discover the world and to discover himself, and insofar as it opened up channels so that he could really do something and feel constructive, the party was okay. What he'd finally said to his wife one day in 1944, "What the hell are we doing in the party?" and got out. This isn't the anguished cry of somebody who is struggling with his soul and saying, "Oh, I've got to make the choice or..." all the rest of it. Speaker 18: You have to remember when it was. It was 19... Daniel Aaron: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that... Maybe his response isn't all that strange. Yeah. Speaker 19: Yeah, can I go back to what you said about consistency and then go back about evidence in the works. I find that the lack of consistency within artistic works is about as great as the lack of consistency in a human being himself. For example, once we separate ourselves quite a bit from Wright's day, Chapman's play Bussy D'Ambois. Chapman, of course, was as convinced Christian as you can find, and yet, at the same time he harbored great respect for classical notions. Now, in this particular play, and it's relevant for this reason, it's much in the vein of Wright's Native Son and his other works, to excoriate the ills and corruptions in a society, with service to a particular ideal as foreign. Speaker 19: Now certainly, Bussy D'Ambois, as he is lowered to his grave amidst the triumph of battle, being shot down and everything else, certainly, Chapman doesn't resolve anything at the end of the play. The world is still as cold as it ever was. The superman has been overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers and everything else. And yet, I've never heard anyone complain about the fact that Bussy failed to resolve the tension between his own... respect [inaudible]. And I could go on from there down to Wright's time and come up with the same kind of evidence. It's actually the same question. Why do we judge Wright differently than what I see present in everybody else? Daniel Aaron: Well, I think... This is a very complicated question that you're raising, but I would say that the artist has to do [inaudible] the famous, oft-quoted passage about Fitzgerald, that he has to entertain two separate ideas in his mind at the same time, and still be able to function. The trouble with people who are not artists, and I'm dignifying them now, is that they are not able to do this. They get confused, and one blends with the other. They remain unresolved and frustrated. Chapman can do it. Dostoevsky can write about fiends and yet identify with them, make them believable, even give them a certain kind of sympathy. Doesn't sell them out, in effect. And I think this is what a good artist does. Daniel Aaron: Now, I think... I was mentioning last night that, say Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent, hates the anarchists so much that he just spills bile all over them and shakes his fist at them and is trembling as he writes about them. Now, I think this is the failure of an artist, and I think if Wright fails on occasion... I don't say that he does. Perhaps, in The Outsider, I don't know. Then he could be criticized on literary grounds. And it seems to me though, that a successful work of art does precisely as you describe. If it doesn't, then it suffers as a work of art. And I think that what we're saying in effect is that, every artist has, finally, to maintain a certain imaginative distance from his subject. And if he is in command of this and in control of it, and we certainly insist on control and design in a novel or any work of art, then it works. And if it doesn't, the novel can become tangled and confused and finally fail. And I think that all writers are in control sometimes, and not in control at others. Yeah. New Speaker: There's that one... I think perhaps we've [inaudible]. Are there any final questions, statements, announcements? [crosstalk] Obviously, this time is the ultimate blessing. Thank you again.