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

Speaker 1: The following is a lecture by Daniel Aaron, recorded at the Third Annual Institute for Afro-American Culture on July 28, 1971. Introducing Mr. Aaron is Charles T. Davis, Chairman of the Committee on Afro-American Studies at the University of Iowa, and co-director of the Institute. Charles T. Davi...: When I look at Daniel Aaron's record, I have the sense of reading a summary of the very best things that have occurred to the American academic world for over two decades. I say best because some terrible things have happened during that period in terms of the constriction of attitudes, the restriction of fields, the narrowing of interests. Mr. Aaron has worked with great success in American literature and in American history, and I'm not simply pouring on lavish praise when I say that I think that no man since Perry Miller has mastered so well the delicate and significant relationship between the two disciplines. Charles T. Davi...: Now, many of you know him for two books, Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives, and Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. Those of you who are historians, and there are a number, will recall The United States: The History of a Republic, which was done with the late Richard Hofstadter and William Miller, and The American Republic, done with those two eminent historians too. And the literary people here will remember his additions of Emerson's writings, of a set of essays of Paul Elmer More, of Robert Herrick's The Memoirs of an American Citizen, and his introduction to the work of a colleague of many years, the distinguished literary critic Newton Arvin. Charles T. Davi...: Professor Aaron has a Bachelor's from Michigan and a Doctorate from Harvard, and he's one of my few friends who has attained a Doctorate of Letters, given to him by Union College. I always thought when people begin to collect that kind of thing, one became an institution, but this is not true, obviously, of Dan Aaron. He's had a Guggenheim Fellowship, served as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies, the think tank in Palo Alto, a Fellow of the Huntington Library and Art Gallery. He's been a lector of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, the seminar which was for many years so closely associated with F.O. Matthiessen, and at the University of Helsinki, University of Uppsala, University of Warsaw, University of Krakow. He was indeed a visiting professor at the University of Sussex in 1968, '69, and I've ignored, I'm sure, some things, such as the excursion to Caracas that occurred at some point along the way. Charles T. Davi...: Behind all of this travel, there has been a stability of a remarkable kind in this academic world of musical chairs. He's been at Smith College, and it amazed me when I discovered how long it has been, forgive me, Dan, since 1939, where he is now the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English and Director of the American Studies program. Next year he will go to his alma mater, one of the two, Harvard, as a visiting professor. Harvard indeed has been wooing him for years, and one wonders actually if he will be eventually seduced. I myself came to Daniel Aaron originally in reading his work on the 1930s. It served indeed as my introduction. He seemed somehow peculiarly attuned to the work which is done in crucial periods in American history, critical times, and it seems to me no accident that he is doing, at the present time, a work which sounds, as he talked to John Gerwin, to me at lunch, fascinating. A work on the belles-lettres written during the Civil War, or his immediate consequence of the Civil War. It's a great pleasure indeed to introduce the very distinguished colleague Daniel Aaron. Daniel Aaron: Thank you, Charlie. I think at this stage of the game, at this stage of the conference, none of you needs to be told that Richard Wright is all of a piece, that you can't talk about any aspect of Richard Wright without talking about all of them. Yesterday, Robert Washington discussed Wright's Chicago, and last night Donald Gibson talked about, among other things, the political implications of Richard Wright's fiction. Well, this afternoon, I'm going to talk particularly about Richard Wright and the Communist Party, a subject that the previous two speakers have already touched on, and very interestingly. But like them, I want to say something also about Richard Wright's Chicago, and also about Richard Wright's Marxism. So you might say that my talk this afternoon, which I've been sort of rearranging as I listened to my colleagues, will be a sort of a continuation, or at least an amplification of what's already been said. Daniel Aaron: Well, what made Richard Wright a communist? I'm going to begin somewhat obliquely, with a book review. I'm going to begin with literature, because I think that Richard Wright was, first of all, a writer. A seeker. I think that literature was his vehicle for discovering the world outside him, and also of discovering himself, which finally, I suppose, was the most important thing. I also think, if I can say this just at the beginning, that communism itself was really secondary. It was an avenue, or it is one of the avenues, in the direction of a territory that had been taboo, excluded, from the young Richard Wright. So I'll start with a review that appeared in H.L. Mencken's Smart Set in 1920. I'm not quite sure about the date, but I think it's roughly that. Daniel Aaron: He was reviewing what he called a bad novel by Mary White Ovington, The Shadow, the novel was called, and in it, he observed that Black America had confined itself pretty much to polemics and lyrical verse. And then after reviewing the improbable plot of this novel, and after commenting how much more successful he thought Black music was than Black literature, he advised Ms. Ovington, and I quote him now, "To forget her race prejudices and her infantile fables long enough to get a true, and an unemotional, and a typical picture of her people on paper, and then she would not only achieve a respectable work of art, but she would serve the cause that she ardently believed in." Daniel Aaron: Much to my embarrassment, and I hope to H.L. Mencken's, if his ghost is present today, I discovered from Professor Davis that Mary White Ovington wasn't a Black writer at all, she was a white writer. So then I think that obviates something of his criticism, but it has nothing to do with what I'm going to read to you, which was a remarkable statement, a kind of laying on of hands without really realizing what he was doing. And I like in this quotation, which I think I've never seen mentioned or quoted elsewhere, what would be comparable, let's say, to Emerson's prediction of Whitman, the kind of poet that American needs, in his essay The Transcendentalist, not knowing that that writer was very, very much on the horizon, and was shortly to come forth. And this is what he said. Daniel Aaron: "The Black man, I suppose, has a fairly good working understanding of the white man. He has many opportunities to observe and note down, and my experience of him convinces me that he is a shrewd observer, that few white men ever fool him. But the white man, even in the South, knows next to nothing of the inner life of the Negro. The more magnificently he generalizes, the more his ignorance is displayed. What the average Southerner believes about the Negros who surround him is chiefly nonsense. His view of them is moral and indignant, or worse still, sentimental and idiotic. The great movements and aspirations that stir them are quite beyond his comprehension. In many cases, he does not even hear them. Daniel Aaron: "The thing we need is a realistic picture of this inner life of the Negro by one who sees the race from within, a self-portrait as vivid and accurate as Dostoevsky's portrait of the Russian, or Thackeray's of the Englishman. The action should be kept within the normal range of the Negro experience. It should extend over a long enough range of years to show some development in character and circumstances. It should be presented against a background made vivid by innumerable small details. The Negro author who makes such a book will dignify American literature and accomplish more for his race than a thousand propagandists and theorists. He will force the understanding that now seems so hopeless. He will blow up nine-tenths of the current poppycock." Daniel Aaron: H.L. Mencken warned, however, that this literary redeemer would have to take care to follow the right models, not the wrong ones. And he said, "The place to learn how to write novels is in the harsh but distinguished seminary kept by Professor Dr. Dreiser." Well, as you all know, about a dozen years later, a young Black man, who ultimately would come across the name of H.L. Mencken in a Memphis newspaper would do just what Mencken thought ought to be done. Mencken, as you know, was subject to editorial attacks in all of the Southern newspapers at that time. He had probably insulted the South more vehemently and flagrantly and colorfully than any other American writer. Daniel Aaron: Wright, remember, had problem of getting into the library, how he would do it, and you know the story about his fellow worker, this Catholic, that he grudgingly got to give him his card and he was able to get Mencken. And reading Mencken was a revelation to him, because here was a rambunctious man who was striking out at everything that was sacred in American life, political, social, and religious. He was, as Richard Wright says, "Fighting with words, using words as weapons, using them as one would a club." Interestingly, I emphasize that club because the image that the Communists use has a certain similarity to this, art is a weapon. This was the thesis of the party in the 1930s, and of course, I think Mencken had performed a function for white radicals, as I think he did for Richard Wright. Daniel Aaron: He also provided another service for Wright that was tremendously important to him. That is he instructed on what writers he should read, and it was through Mencken that Wright came across the names of Anatole France, and Conrad, and Addison, and Dostoevsky, and Mark Twain, and Poe, and Sinclair Lewis. Above all, Dreiser. And this was tremendously important for him. Naturalism was tremendously important for Wright because naturalism was the way of exposing, putting a searchlight on the world that had hitherto been dark before him. He opened up the possibilities of really making the world become real to him. So this explains a remark that he made later, "All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism, of the modern novel. I could not read enough of them." Daniel Aaron: It was a revelation to him that other men all over the world were engaged in fighting the same evils as he was, that he wasn't being queer in wanting to rebel. Above all, that he wasn't alone. And I think this had a great deal, the reading, the discovery of Mencken, to becoming a writer. His education, of course, was just beginning, and it was his discovery of the realists through Mencken that, I think, pointed in the direction of communism. And then you know the story of coming to Chicago that has already been discussed at sufficient length yesterday afternoon, so I don't want to simply go over the ground of Mr. Washington. But I think that perhaps one or two things I would like to say, simply to adumbrate what has been said already. Daniel Aaron: This coming to Chicago was a tremendously exciting experience for him. It was rather like some of Dreiser's own heroes and heroines coming to the big city, the young man from the provinces, and Wright has described his astonishment and excitement at Chicago, the fact that one could get on a streetcar and people didn't strike him or move away when he sat down next to them, that sort of thing. The number of the... It wasn't an Arabian Nights as it was to Clyde Griffiths, but it was a very exciting place for him, and it took a little time before he realized that the Black men and women who came up from the South were simply exchanging masters, that instead of the lords of the land, they were the bosses of the buildings. Daniel Aaron: I know that Chicago that Wright came to, because I had come to Chicago a few years before from Los Angeles, and I lived in that area that Wright described. I've ridden on the L and seen these unspeakable slums that you see on the South Side, and the larger mansions on Grand Boulevard that Mr. Washington referred to. I've known something about that district, the Studs Lonigan district, I call it, along Prairie Avenue, the gangs of whites and the race riots, the small little race riots that were occurring in Washington Park even at that time. This is all described very eloquently in Wright's How Bigger Was Born, and you do get the sense of the fabulous city even with all of its dreariness. Daniel Aaron: White men, he said, wondered why Southerners who, after all, while they were living badly in the South, nevertheless weren't frozen to death, and they wondered why Black people should come from the South to the North. And Wright, you remember, likened this migration to the white man's breaking out of a slumberous futile world, that was his phrase, to take the risks of a phrase that William James coined. And I think it's rather pertinent to keep it in mind, because I think it suggests to the awakening of Bigger Thomas from his own kind of slumberous world, futile world, if you will, of the peasant, the Black peasant in the South. Daniel Aaron: He called it an unguaranteed existence. This is what Richard Wright came, he discovered, why he came and what he found, and in leaving the South, he was acting under the same impulses that had motivated white Western activists who had also left the known for the unknown. Well, he discovered that the Negro shared the hopes, as well as the corruptions, as well as the psychological maladies of the white people, but at the same time, there did exist a saving remnant of passion for freedom. That was worth a good deal to Richard Wright with his secret ambitions, and it seemed that he was living two lives simultaneously, one literary and intellectual, and the other social. Daniel Aaron: It was in this flat running with cockroaches that he read Dostoevsky, and Stephen Crane, and Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, a book that made a big impression on him, especially that chapter on Melanctha, you remember. And then he saw what good many other young left writers, young proletarian writers, was discovering not simply in Chicago, but in cities all over the United States, that there were no jobs, that they were denied an education, and yet they were getting the kind of an education, doing the same kinds of occupations or employments that Richard Wright did. Richard Wright was a porter, and a bill collector, and a dishwasher, and a hospital orderly, and a counselor for boys' camps, a post office worker. Daniel Aaron: Well, you could duplicate this pattern, this literary pattern, if you'd got any of The New Left little magazines that were being published in the early '30s where they would have sort of resumes of the writers who appeared in them, and you would discover that none of them went to college, but they had gone through all kinds of jobs, not holding them very long because it was extremely difficult to hold jobs. And he listened very attentively, as proletarian writers were supposed to do, to the talk on the streets, the behavior of people at rent parties, the expressions of the faces of the unemployed, the conduct of the men and women who stood up to the evictions, against the evictions of the police, and he came across many young men like Bigger Thomas. Daniel Aaron: In Black Metropolis, the book that Mr. Washington alluded to yesterday, there's some very fascinating examples of other young men who came up like Richard Wright from the South, even from Mississippi. I feel that... Well, I must tell you about... I can't read it to you, but I'll refer to the page. It's on page 681 of Black Metropolis. It's fascinating, because here's a portrait of someone born in 1904 on a farm in Mississippi who comes up, who gets an education, who becomes a minister, who finally marries, who gets a little property, going through exactly the same... The same background, but moving off in quite a different direction and becoming a member of the Black bourgeoisie. If there were time, I'd like to read it to you. Maybe we could look at it afterwards, if there's discussion, but I think I'm going to be too long as it is. Any rate, keep that in mind. Daniel Aaron: Well, I also was going to talk a little bit about the development, his own consciousness, of changing as he lived in this environment, and his lucky meeting with the Worths, and above all, with Horace Cayton. Mr. Washington mentioned Horace Cayton, other people have. I don't know whether this book has been discussed at the conference so far, but here was another Black intellectual... Well, not another, because Richard Wright wasn't quite yet an intellectual when he arrived, but who was a Black intellectual who had come to the Black Metropolis, only not from the South via the Northwest, and it was to become one of Richard Wrights' very close friends. Daniel Aaron: And for those of you who are interested, and I don't know whether this has been discussed yet, I think that his book, his autobiography The Long Old Road was published in 1963, has two chapters particularly that I would recommend that you read along with your other reading, because it provides more of the background for Wright. To Be In Chicago in the '30s is one of the chapters, and Back in the Black Metropolis, Race Leader, Race Man is the other chapter. Daniel Aaron: Well, he talks about meeting Wright and how amazed Wright was at the complexity of the enormous collection of the sociologists at the University of Chicago, and he describes, as Mr. Washington described yesterday, how the sociology, in effect, gave some design, some shape to this great mass effect of the Black Metropolis, and you can see the influence of this on the introduction that Richard Wright wrote to Black Metropolis, and you can see that in his own way, he was doing rather something similar to what the authors of Black Metropolis were doing. He was doing much more, of course, and I don't believe Mr. Washington implied that he wouldn't have written his books without the assistance of the Chicago School, because as we know, that there were other goads to his imagination. Daniel Aaron: But then I come to the subject that hasn't been touched on quite so much, and is really the subject of my talk, I suppose, and that is his connection with the actual Communists or would-be Communists in the early '30s. You all know, because he writes about it at length in his autobiographical writings about the party, that in 1932, he became involved with the John Reed Club, which was an organization that sponsored by the party, first in 1929, to coordinate the activities of the radical artists and writers. Wright had seen these Communists haranguing crowds in Washington Park, but you'll remember the story of being invited up to the office, and being treated by people that he was very suspicious of at first as a person rather than simply as a Black man, meeting writers and artists who were not important at all at that time, but who were to become very significant figures. Daniel Aaron: Nelson Algren in literature would be one, Ben Shahn in art, Jackson Pollock, and others. Many of his fellow radicals of the John Reed Club were simply young people looking for cultural stimulation as Wright was. This was, of course, before the party began to manipulate the John Reed Clubs as deliberately as it was to do a few years later, and it was in this general sympathetic environment that young Richard Wright began to experiment with words, as he said, and gradually to find his own voice amidst the rhetoric and the cliches of the revolution. Daniel Aaron: And at this point, let me say something more about the John Reed Clubs, or to break away now from Wright's autobiographical account of the John Reed Clubs in Chicago and his subsequent dealings with the substitute of the John Reed Clubs, the League of American Writers that was formed in 1935 after the liquidation of the John Reed Clubs. I think essentially that his account of this experience is reliable. It only suffers from certain revealing omissions. But first of all, in case those of you are not familiar with the John Reed Clubs, let me just say one or two things more about the origin. You know who John Reed was. He was a radical journalist who... Originally a contributor to the masses, this was before we entered World War I, he became a radical journalist after his career at Harvard, he was a friend of... Protégé of Lincoln Steffens, he turned Bolshevik, he died in Russia of typhus, he was buried in the Kremlin, and he became an early party saint. Daniel Aaron: The first John Reed Club was the New York John Reed Club, formed, as I told you, in 1929, and it was described at that time in the New Masses as a small group of writers, artists, sculptors, musicians, and dancers of revolutionary tendencies. The inspiration for the ideology and the program of the club came probably from the USSR, where writers already, as you know, were leagued with the proletariat, and were organized to describe the world of the proletariat, to describe their world, to create a corp of writers who would have an intimate knowledge of the various industries and occupations in the Soviet Union, and who would somehow make poetry of tractors. This was the beginning of the cult of the proletariat. I don't want to go into this now, maybe there's a discussion, because there's a certain relation that will bear to Richard Wright later on. Daniel Aaron: The first National Conference of the John Reed Clubs was held in Chicago in May 29th, 1932. And I have in my possession the original minutes, unpublished minutes, of the John Reed Clubs, the ones that Wright referred to. And knowing Wright's recollections of the internal schisms and the factional and fractional fights within the Chicago John Reed Clubs, it's possible, I think, to read between the lines of what Wright himself said and compare it with what evidence we have. The temporary chairman of the John Reed Club Conference in '32 was the same Jan Wittenber that Richard Wright used as the prototype for Jan Erlone in Native Son, and of course it was through him that Wright had joined the Chicago John Reed Club in January 1932. Daniel Aaron: Wittenber, as you know, was a member of the artist's fraction of the CP, and he sided with those John Reed Club members who wanted to trust all of politics to the party, or as he put it, "To make for a complete and unconditional desire to plead a humble apprenticeship to the broad masses of the workers who followed the militant leadership of the Communist Party." He described the activities of the John Reed Club. I'd like to take a little time just to read, this is in sort of the notes taken down at the meeting, to show the kinds of things that other members of the John Reed Club, and presumably Richard Wright himself, were engaged in in that year. Daniel Aaron: "We of the John Reed Club of Chicago have continually followed organizational approaches and have directed all our energies toward this end with a full realization that the role of the artist and intellectual is not one of political leadership, and consequently, when we accept political leadership of the Communist Party, it implies our being involved in the mistakes it may make. We must be willing to share in the experience of these mistakes. Our second proletarian exhibit was held six months later." Something skipped here. "Outside artists were invited. Our stationary with the hammer and sickle and the proletarian arts did not frighten them. The response was fine. Three unattached artists of note served on the jury with three Reed artists. The jury decisions were educational to both. Daniel Aaron: "We have laid the basis through cooperation with a Young Workers dramatic group for the Blue Blouses, a Young Workers group agitprop plays. At one time we were connected with three groups, did timely services in dramatics and so forth. We have furnished them with directors, writers, materials. For the first time, the John Reed Club participated in National Youth Day, and went in a body to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to which various fractions contributed to a program." Presumably Wright, you see, might have done all these things. "We established the first Workers Cultural Federation in America. That is one point strongly in favor of the New Masses. They did give us credit for taking the initiative, in spite of the fact that they had a delegate to the Kharkov Conference who has instructed them to begin work on a federation. Daniel Aaron: "We organized a film and photo league that was later absorbed into the WIRR," which I don't know what that is, "Because of convenience. We conducted a series of lectures, one on Marxian economics, followed by a Marxist, Leninist, or world outlook by [Bechtold] of the Communist Party. Also, lectures by the writers' group on art and literature. We held for the first time a John Reed Memorial, which was very successful in filling the People's Auditorium, capacity 800. We have cooperated with St. Louis and also Detroit John Reed Clubs, and we have gone out of our way to cooperate with all the other John Reed Clubs in the vicinity. We have been only too willing to lend them any material that they could draw upon for us. Daniel Aaron: "Last July we held meetings on the campus of leading colleges, calling on the students to come out August 1st, Anti-Imperial War Day, followed by a mass meeting, distributing thousands of leaflets of our own. This laid the ideological substance for a student's league that came later, and so forth." Well, I think this gives you some notion of the... Well, there's something rather poignant about this, isn't it, of this kind of fearsome activity that they were engaged in, the sense of something purposeful being done, the sense of excitement that they were helping to change the world. Daniel Aaron: You'll notice, however, that in this summary that I've just read, there's no reference to reaching out for the Negro masses. Nothing about bringing in young proletarian writers. The 1932 conference boiled down to such questions as the proper approach to intellectuals, especially the fellow traveling kind. How can we get John Dos Passos and Edmund Wilson in? They are coming, but we've got to work on them. That sort of thing. There were the discussions of the dangers of left sectarianism, as against a too latitudinarian approach to writers and politics. Daniel Aaron: And most interesting, and I think most portentous, the minutes indicate implicitly, if not explicitly, that individualists in the local clubs were already becoming distrustful of the central party and the New York writers in particular, the high-powered intellectuals from the East who were already dominating the conference, so that I would say that even in 1932, there are indications that the CP was running the show, and clearly, the New York contingent wanted to exclude uninfluential boys, as Mike Gold called them, and constitute the John Reed Clubs under their auspices, drag in the big names, and make an important force. Daniel Aaron: Now, as far as the relation of the CP and the Negro is concerned, more broadly now, again, I don't think that we have to go too thoroughly into this. It's a very complex subject. There have been a number of books written on it, and too complicated to enter in this afternoon. The party historians themselves, I think, have been rather vague about the origins of party policy. It's enough to say here that until the late '20s, the Negro question was regarded primarily as an economic one. That is to say, there were very little difference made between... None really, between the exploited masses, Black or white. It wasn't until Stalin, as you know, initiated the principle that the American Blacks constituted a particular nation, that the solution to the question of self-determinism was worked out, and the party line shifted. Daniel Aaron: Between 1928 and 1939, there was the period of self-determinism. Then between... 1934, rather. Between 1934 and 1939, the popular front period, they played down Negro self-determinism, then after 1931, when they were backing the Nazi-Soviet Pact, then they were for self-determinism, and then after the flip, after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, back again. They were supporting the government and quieting down any kind of propaganda for Negro self-determinism. Actually, there was very little influence on the majority of American Blacks by the party. I think that probably when Richard Wright joined the party, there were barely more than a thousand Blacks in the United States who were members of the party, when the party was probably about 16,000. Daniel Aaron: Then there were a couple of shifts that I do want to talk about, but let me postpone that. Let me say it's just something about the... Well, first of all, I'll read to you, in brief, I can't read all of it to you, a working out of the new party line on Negro self-determinism in The Communist, which is the Communist Party's theoretical magazine, in 1928. First of all, this article read, and this was the party policy, "We must consider the compact Negro farming masses of the Black Belt as the potential basis for a national liberation movement of the Negros, and as the basis for the realization of the right of self-determinism of the Negro state." Daniel Aaron: They pointed out that although thousands and thousands of Blacks had come North, still the majority were in the South. This could be the beginning of a farmers' movement led, probably, regretfully at the time, by the petty bourgeoisie Black elements, who were the only ones who, presumably, could organize the Black masses, and that the Communist Party must come out openly and unreservedly for the right of national self-determination for the Negros, but at the same time the Communist Party must state sharply that the realization of this self-determination cannot be secured under the present relations of power under capitalism. Daniel Aaron: National self-determination for the Negro is a bourgeoisie Democratic demand, but it could be realized only in the course of proletarian revolution. The abolition of the half-futile, half-slave remnants of the South will be only a byproduct of the general proletarian revolution. It would be a major mistake to believe that there can be any other revolution in imperialist America, in the country of the most powerful, most centralized, concentrated industry in the proletarian revolution. Daniel Aaron: In other words, a warning to Black intellectuals and radicals not to expect any kind of special nationalist movement without the mighty Communist Party. In other words, some Black Communists who considered the notion of a separate Black state within the United States highly unrealistic, as well of smacking as a kind of red Jim Crowism, but all the party people agreed that the party had failed to reach the Black proletariat, and that the Negro artists were partly to blame. One political leader put it in an article in 1928, "There is little in recent Negro poetry that would lead one to believe that the poets are conscious of the existence of the Negro masses. There is no challenge in their poetry, no revolt. They do not echo the lamentations of the down-trodden masses. Millions of Blacks are suffering from poverty and cruelty, and the Black poets shut their eyes. There is not a race more desperate in the country than the Black race, and Negro poets play with pale emotions." Daniel Aaron: And then this same author went on to say that the Negro poets, and he would have included, I think, most of the Negro writers, actually, were simply petty bourgeois opportunists, or they were Black decadents, or they were cowards. And it was this feeling that lay behind the party's attempt to recruit Black writers who would express this Marxist militancy that was so much in need, and to give the lie to those who played the role of... And these were some of the phrases, Meek Moses, Black Hamlet, and so forth, and who shunned protest, who refused to confront the revolutionary traditions of the Negro people. Daniel Aaron: So in 1932 and '33, when Richard Wright was working with the John Reed Clubs in Chicago, the party recognized him as the kind of potential revolutionary who was untainted by the bourgeois ideology. After all, he was a proletarian, he had come from the South uneducated, and so forth. Here was somebody who could eradicate, they felt, the distorted stereotypes of the Negro people that were so prevalent in American literature and American drama, and would be able to write about the struggle of the masses. You remember at this time that Black intellectuals like Walter White or W.E.B. Du Bois were regarded by the party simply as treacherous betrayers, and writers like Richard Wright were represented to the party the kind of person that would lead the Black people's fight against the foes of culture and progress. Daniel Aaron: Now, I've indicated, and others have, that Wright was very receptive to this appeal in 1932 with good reasons. He saw the Communists were fighting for Negro rights, and were carrying on this fight not only against organizations that were consciously restrictive, but they were also making an effort to root out white chauvinism in their own ranks. They pushed Blacks into party work. Remember that Wright was elected president of the John Reed Club when he didn't know why. They nominated Negros for office. They dramatized the Black man's problem. They took the lead, as we talked about yesterday, in the Scottsboro case, and I think it's only fair to say too that this was not simply sheer opportunism. Many, especially among the lower ranks, lower echelons of the party, risked social ostracism. Many of them risked even physical violence on the behalf of Black people, and I think it would be fair to say that no political party since the abolitionists had challenged American racial hypocrisy so zealously. Daniel Aaron: Wright's explanation of why he left the party is highly critical, as you know. But at the same time, I think it makes rather clear why the party had held such a hold on him when he joined it, and why he remained a radical even after he abandoned it in the early '40s. He says, and this is probably true, although how conscious of it it's hard to say, that as early as 1932 he felt that the party had oversimplified the Black experience. That they were making comments and generalizations about the lives of people that they didn't really know anything about, but they had a program, they had an ideal. And he, Richard Wright, this was his function as he saw it in 1932, would tell the Communists how the common people felt. He would tell, also, the common people, the Black masses, of the self-sacrifices that the Communists were making on their behalf. Daniel Aaron: Well, I don't know anyone who has ever commented on Wright's notions about the Black Republic that Stalin had advocated setting up at this time. You recall in the last scene of the Native Son, the trial scene, he gives a speech to the Jewish lawyer, Mr. Max. He's making a plea for American Negros, and he says, "They are not simply 12 million people. In reality, they constitute a separate nation stunted, stripped, and held captive within a nation." Daniel Aaron: Is this Richard Wright? This a question that Don was talking about last night. It's hard to know when he's speaking, in every case, for a character or where he's holding himself back. He had written at length about his resentment toward the party, but these are all, remember, retrospective comments, and he did, remember, remain in the party long after most of his literary friends had left it, even though, as he told us, his readers, that he chafed under the party directives. That was the burden of his article I Tried To Be A Communist. Daniel Aaron: But in this piece and in The God That Failed, Wright drew a picture, you remember, of a manipulating, opportunistic, sectarian-ridden Communist leadership whose ultimate purpose in bringing in intellectuals and writers was simply to turn them into instruments of propaganda, to make them the weapons, so to speak. He joined the party, he tells us, when the party was still suspicious of intellectuals, on the look for all kinds of heresies and deviations, and Wright, almost from the beginning, began to challenge the line that the party was taking. Daniel Aaron: He opposed the liquidation of the John Reed Clubs in 1935 for a more controllable literary organization, the League of American Writers. The John Reed Clubs had become almost quasi-autonomous. The Communist leadership felt that the John Reed Clubs were too susceptible to dangerous elements, and if they left these magazines open, then any time Tom, Dick, and Harry, any left-wing deviationist might be able to write for it and run counter to the party line. Daniel Aaron: But in 1937, Richard Wright was certainly their most illustrious writer. The party was proud of him, but they tried to control him by using him, taking him away from what he wanted to do most, to write, and giving him all kinds of jobs. Still, if Wright, as he said in 1944, had become disenchanted with Communists, and not their cause but with the party, by 1937, he still continued to serve the party faithfully, even after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and earlier, before that, he was writing articles. One that has often been mentioned since I've been here, the Blueprint for Negro Writing, which really served their purposes admirably, because in that article you recall he called upon Black writers to stop distrusting themselves, and white writers to do the same, for that matter. Daniel Aaron: There had to be unity, that to preserve this unity one had to arrive at a thorough integration of the American scene, that the novelist had to understand the meaning and structure of modern society. That without this Marxian theory which enabled them to do precisely this, the Negro writer would be at a disadvantage, and once the Negro writer grasped the Marxian vision, the Black writer, Wright said, was granted a sense of dignity which no other vision could give him. Ultimately, he said, "It restores to the writer his lost heritage, that is his role as a creator of the world in which he lives, and as a creator of himself." I emphasize that last phrase because it has already, doesn't it, a subversive ring. Daniel Aaron: Now, these were all very fine words, so far as the party theorists were concerned, and they were willing to praise the author of Uncle Tom's Children, and finally even, his masterpiece Native Son, although, as you know, some party critics were by no means unanimous in their opinions of that novel. When Wright wrote those words that I just emphasized a second ago in 1937, that Marxism aided the writer to create the world in which he lives, that it restored his role as a creator of himself, it seems to me that he was already treading on very dangerous ground. Perhaps at that time, he still thought the party might be pleased with this formulation. But I think it's conceivable, even then, that he already suspected... This is just a hunch, that the party might not accept his rather subjective notions about his world and the deliverance of his private self. I think those quotations in Miss Webb's book on Wright, where she lists excerpts from a talk that he gave in a Midwest conference in 1937 or 1936 called Personalism, that you begin to see there too certain heretical notions creeping in. Daniel Aaron: I think there's no question about it that the party would have preferred Wright to supplement his scenes of Negro exploitation with prophecies of white, Black proletarian solidarity. There was a play, a very popular play, that Paul Peters and George Sklar wrote called Stevedore, which you can read in some of the collections of left drama, and it's really an embattled group of Black longshoremen down in New Orleans. And at the end, the white workers come and join the fight, and the Black proletarian and the white proletarian, these kind of massive figures that you saw in the New Masses cartoons standing arm-in-arm, you see fighting the oppressors. That's what the party wanted. They wanted the Black hero to look very much like that muscular superman in the Gropper cartoons in the New Masses. Daniel Aaron: Now, the very notion that the legitimate hatred of the Black man for capitalist exploitation might exist side by side with hatred for whites of all political creeds, this never occurred to them, or the fact that they too might be the carriers of a racist virus. Some of the Communist intellectuals did concede that there was white chauvinism within the ranks, but they never explored it very deeply. Now it's my guess that in the middle or late '30s, Wright himself was living a kind of double intellectual life. One half of him was the Black Marxist, that is the contributor of useful articles and poems and stories to the party press, a very likely, a true believer in the party's fight against the enemies at home and abroad, and the other side was the writer trying to explain and define the meaning of being Black in white American. Trying to discover his own identity, trying, in effect, to create himself. Daniel Aaron: Now the party attacked Wright after he left the movement, and they accused him of refashioning the truths of his own life in a distorted and destructive image. They said that Richard Wright was one person in 1934, but he was not the same Richard Wright as he was in 1944. He was writing falsely, they said, when he wrote I Tried To Be A Communist. Well, I don't think Wright was lying. I think Wright did try to be a Communist. But the hidden, and perhaps repressed opposition to the party came out, I think, almost unconsciously in Native Son, if not before. We had a discussion a little bit last night about that, in that story A Bright and Morning Star, I think there's an indication of it there, certainly in those comments on personalism that he wrote in 1936. Daniel Aaron: Well, when he wrote this novel Native Son, it was an instant success, had worldwide coverage. The fact that its author was a bonafide Communist meant that party critics, almost of necessity, had to praise it. They needed books of this kind. For the party, Native Son, with the possible exception of The Grapes of Wrath, was the most important fictional work of the decade. But even the Communists couldn't claim that Native Son was flawless from an ideological point of view, and it's extraordinarily interesting to go through the files of the New Masses and see this kind of gingerly criticism that is made by critics Black and white. Officially, the party rejoiced with the Negro people in hailing the magnificent artistry of Native Son, but there were little, few shortcomings. What were they? Daniel Aaron: One critic ,"Regretted," I quote now, "The absence of characters who would balance the picture by showing Negros whose rebellion against oppression is expressed in constructive mass action rather than in individual violence." Another thought that the trial scene was too long, and not really necessary, for it was only a sort of a rhetorical statement of what had already taken place. I think that might be legitimately... It's something we could discuss. But the same critic added, rather lately, I think, and cautiously, that it was true that Native Son was not an all-inclusive picture of Negro life in America. Other critics, however, took a more serious view of Wright's shortcomings from an ideological point of view, and I'd like just to say one or two more words about that and then I'll be finished. Daniel Aaron: You might say that this critique against Wright's ideology came down to the following set of objections. The artist, the CP line ran, must not simply assume that his task is done after he has taken his material from the physical world, because the subject matter is not axiomatically a true picture of reality. We're getting close to what was then called socialist realism. Is Bigger Thomas representative of his people? Wright says that he was, but this, said the Communist critic, is aesthetically false, and politically confused. Confused was a favorite word. Comrade, you're confused. That can mean all kinds of things. In Native Son, Bigger is a frustrated, antisocial individual who commits anarchic acts of violence in his blind rebellion against capitalist society. It is politically slanderous to contend that Bigger Thomas is the symbol of the Negro people. Consequently, it is aesthetic falsity to select a character who is atypical, and to make him the protagonist of a novel that deals with bitter persecution and exploitation of a minority people in a bourgeois society. Daniel Aaron: Or again, it was charged that Richard Wright makes the Communists insensitive fools, like Jan and Mary, even Boris Max, remember, never really understands Bigger and is frightened by Bigger's vision of himself. In fact, they said, the critics, that, "Not a single white character has any idea at all of what is going on in Bigger Thomas' mind." They could have added that no Black character does in the novel, either. They didn't, but it's interesting that they should have said white character. Bigger dies defeated by society, and in socialist realism, that shouldn't be. There has to be, always, in socialist realism, a sunrise or a dawn at the end. Things may look bad now, but look ahead, comrades. Daniel Aaron: Even sympathizers of the oppressed Black people who could appreciate how victimized they are by capitalism, the critic went on to say, even these readers aren't prepared to accept Wright's justification of Bigger's behavior, a repellent, mystical confession of creation. This is the way they summarized Bigger. And if readers in the movement aren't persuaded by this, this writer went on, and gave himself away in the process, what will bourgeois subscribers to the Book of the Month Club think? Now, for such ideologues, you see, it did no good to point out that Richard Wright wasn't interested in that larger Communist reality. He wasn't interested, either, in soothing the feelings of the Book of the Month Club readers. Daniel Aaron: He had urged Black writers as a young instructor at Howard University, pointed out at the time to write about what they knew about and nothing else, and his subject in Native Son was the Bigger Thomas' of America. He was writing about a boy who had to hate in order to remain human, but of course, these psychological or existential considerations didn't cut any ice with the party. The party was quite right, given its ideas, given its ideology, to see something subversive and dangerous in Native Son. Daniel Aaron: Well, there's a great deal that I was going to quote, and perhaps in the discussion I can relate it back to some of these to give you some of the local color and read to you from some of the juicier quotations that I have here, but this is as far as I want to take in my own talk now, Wright's progress, this afternoon. I should simply like to conclude by saying that by 1940, Wright had ended his literary apprenticeship as a writer, but that he had not yet succeeded, and I don't think he ever really did succeed, in reconciling either in his work or in his mind the streams of influence that accounted for Native Son, and I mean by that Marxist universalism and Black nationalism. Daniel Aaron: He paid lip service to Marxist universalism. No, I take that back. I think it's stronger than that. He believed in it. He acted in it. That's what drew him, the opportunity to enter a community. That Marxist universalism actually seemed to fulfill the prophecy that American democracy, which professed to do this, denied and disallowed. Marxism, to him, as it did to many radicals, Black and white, offered this opportunity. He did this, though, intellectually, I think. He felt Black nationalism. That was something deeper. And I think he was speaking from his heart when he said that, "The Negro writer is called upon to do no less than create values by which his race has to struggle, live, and die."