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     Chrishayden "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Chrishayden Post Number: 7281 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A |
Somewhere it says in the Bible that the Devil is the Prince of this world. I was reading Ricahr Wright's "Eight Men" which is not good as "Uncle Tom's Children"--living high on the hog in Paris wrecked Wright's powers--he hated America and needed it (a local writer once said St. Louis gave him just the proper amount of agony he needed to write. I like that) James Baldwin knew enough to travel back and forth between France and here--recharge his batteries in the Belly of the Beat. But I digress. It is a fact that Wright wouldn't have made it big as he did without the support of the Communist Party--of which he was a member. It came back to bite him in the ass--he resigned and cut himself off. The Party considered him a traitor and some have hinted darkly that they knocked him off. Which brings me to this query. If it meant success, would you do such a deal , which is a deal with the devil? I mean, Wright had to know what he was getting into. The CPUSA, in the days that Stalin was top dog, was no sewing circle. He was naive to think they would allow him the freedom to do whatever he wanted or that he could influence them in anway. Butthere was probably no other way he would have become a best selling author. Would you make a deal with people like them (organized crime, The Republican Party, Black religious extremists, etc) in order to become a star? | ||
| Thumper Veteran Poster Username: Thumper Post Number: 588 Registered: 01-2004 Rating: N/A |
Hello, I don't know Chris, I think Richard Wright's biggest problem was Richard Wright. I believe his ego is what got the better of him. He believed his own hype. He attained everything that he said he was angry about: He married a white woman; had financial stability-somewhat after the publication of Native Son; he lived in a place where his skin color "didn't matter". He was the living embodiment of the old saying, be careful what you wish for-you might get it. Well, he got it and his writing suffered because of it. I don't believe that Richard Wright liked himself or black America. I think we all deal with the devil to a certain degree. How many of us, in our everyday lives, "go along to get along"? | ||
| Steve_s Veteran Poster Username: Steve_s Post Number: 369 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: |
Respectfully, because I haven't read any of Richard Wright's later work, although I have recently read the biography by Hazel Rowley, I tend to look at this situation more forgivingly, as it seems reminiscent of the allegations against Ralph Ellison. Briefly, I just read Haruki Murakami's new memoir about running, which appeals to me mostly because I've been getting back into running after about 5 years (I've run 150 or more road races, including 5 NYC Marathons, 2002 being the most recent) and I'm roughly the same age as him. So in all the discussion about stamina, endurance, and their inevitable decrease due to aging, he also makes a few comparison to writing novels and how the novelist deals with declining creative energy. (Sorry for not explaining this well) He gives the example of a handful of great writers who are able to sustain an incredibly high level of creativity from the beginning to the end of their careers. Then he uses the example of another great novelist whose writing started to go downhill at the age of thirty three, and finally, he names a few famous composers who went out in a blaze of glory even younger. Others either give up writing altogether or commit suicide. He considers novel writing to be a toxic activity or an unhealthy type of work and he gives the analogy of a poisonous fish that's considered a delicacy in Japan. The most delicious part is located nearest the poison.* Without having the book to refer to, I'll just say that he believes in certain ways of building up the immune system (so to speak) in order to avoid literary burnout. I don't know if that's what happened to Ralph Ellison, but respectfully, some of the explanations I've read, like the ones in the Ellison biography, seem like they might be African American culture-specific neuroses. *Joyce Carole Oates, by coincidence, has also written about running and the trangressive nature of art and how writing can invoke pain and painful memoires and even punishement. I don't know if that's related to what Murakami is getting at, but the political nature of Wright's protest fiction might have taken a physical and/or psychic toll on him, I don't know, but I can't blame either him or Ellison for what might have been the natural course of their careers; they both produced works that are greater than what most creative people achieve. Here's Oates: My earliest outdoor memories have to do with the special solitude of running or hiking in our pear and apple orchards, through fields of wind-rustling corn towering over my head, along farmers' lanes and on bluffs above the Tonawanda Creek. Through childhood I hiked, roamed, tirelessly explored the countryside: neighboring farms, a treasure trove of old barns, abandoned houses and forbidden properties of all kinds, some of them presumably dangerous, like cisterns and wells covered with loose boards. These activities are intimately bound up with storytelling, for always there's a ghost-self, a "fictitious" self, in such settings. For this reason I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. (I never saw a "No Trespassing" sign that wasn't a summons to my rebellious blood. Such signs, dutifully posted on trees and fence railings, might as well cry, "Come Right In!") To write is to invade another's space, if only to memorialize it. To write is to invite angry censure from those who don't write, or who don't write in quite the way you do, for whom you may seem a threat. Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment. If writing involves punishment, at least for some of us, the act of running even in adulthood can evoke painful memories of having been, long ago, as children, chased by tormentors. (Is there any adult who hasn't such memories? Are there any adult women who have not been, in one way or another, sexually molested or threatened?) That adrenaline rush, like an injection to the heart! http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/071999oates-writing.html And finally, Ellen Wright (born Freda Poplowitz) and Wright's first wife, Dhimah Meidman, were both Russian Jews (Ralph Ellison had a one-night stand with a leftist novelist who grew up on a Hopi Indian reservation and then married a famous Oscar-winning Chinese-American cinetographer, so her whole Gestalt did not really seem that "white.") Although I don't remember exactly, did Dhimah become disillusioned with the Soviet Union while on a dance tour there, before marrying Wright? In Ellen's defense, she must have really loved him in order to move to a country that had just sent so many of her people to the concentration camps and where food was now most likely scarce. thanks. | ||
| Steve_s Veteran Poster Username: Steve_s Post Number: 370 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A |
Hard to know what to make of this topic. Richard Wright was hardly the first intellectual or even the most famous novelist to renounce Communism and I'm not aware of any of murderous retribution against any of the others, however, I don't claim to know much about Richard Wright. Howard Fast - who who wrote a novel about a Roman slave revolt called "Spartacus" which was made into a Hollywood movie starring Kirk Douglas - left the Communist Party and was denounced by it as a traitor and an opportunist. Their condemnation of Fast apparently carried the absurd implication that because he no longer believed in Stalin, he was no longer a good writer. Those Commies really know how to hurt a guy! Although as I said, I don't know a lot about Wright, I do know that he contributed to a book called "The God That Failed," a collection of essays by internationally known writers of the time, including Stephen Spender, André Gide, and Italian political philosopher Ignazio Silone, explaining why they quit the Communist Party. Another contributor was the American political commentator Louis Fischer, and the co-originator of the project was Hungarian novelist Arthur Koestler (author of the powerful "Darkness at Noon," who apparently also had some connections with British intelligence operations). He had unsuccessfully tried to get Malraux and Camus. The appeal of Communism was the search for a better, more equitable society, and so in having these important thinkers describe, without the usual rhetoric, their disillusionment as an agonizing journey, the book made an impact. If I'm not mistaken, the Richard Wright essay is entitled "I Tried to Be a Communist." There were political machinations behind the book of which Spender was apparently unaware (slightly reminiscent of the situation with the jazz ambassadors), however, it was explicitly conceived as anti-Communist propaganda by the British and American intelligence agencies. This is according John Sutherland's biography of Stephen Spender. So I suppose it's possible that Wright's contribution to this essay collection created some resentment, but among whom? Black American communists in Paris? Otherwise, why would Wright be any particular threat to Communism when compared to, say, Koestler, who was politically connected and more outspoken? There was an Italian labor organizer in New York during the early part of the century who published articles and newspapers in an attempt to educate immigrants and all workers to fight for better working conditions. He made a lot of enemies because he was an anarchist, an anti-Communist, and a foe of big business and the mob. He also had very few allies, and so he was murdered in broad daylight at Fifth Avenue and Fifteenth Street in 1943. I doubt that the Communists made Richard Wright famous, and they certainly didn't make him a novelist. |
