Native Son - Richard Wright [6]
Virtually from the day of its publication, the artistry of Native Son has been questioned and found wanting. Citing a category of writing identified by R. P. Blackmur, one scholar-critic called the novel (the words are Blackmur’s) “one of those books in which everything is undertaken with seriousness except the writing.” This is a common accusation against naturalist writers, as well as the literature of social protest in general; Dreiser, for one, comes quickly to mind. Certainly, Wright took chances in the course of writing this novel. At one point, for example, in defiance of artistic common sense, he crowds into Bigger’s cell almost every principal character in his story (three members of Bigger’s family, three of his friends, his lawyer Max, his prosecutor, the Daltons, Jan Erlone, and a minister). Wright conceded the improbability of such a scene but gave as his reason for keeping it the fact that “I wanted those people in that cell to elicit a certain important emotional response from Bigger…. What I wanted that scene to say to the reader was more important than its surface reality of implausibility.”
The long speeches in summation by the state’s attorney and the defense lawyer also seem to some readers to be an unnecessary challenge to their powers of attention and to underscore Wright’s didactic purposes in Native Son. Wright knew the risk, but hoped that his readers would pay attention to the arguments; they were both pieces of verisimilitude that replicated the activity of a murder trial and, at the same time, indispensable extended statements of rival intellectual positions on the matter of race in America. In a way, these lectures prove Wright’s artistic power, since Native Son is already unforgettable long before they are delivered; and these speeches do not detract from the power of the last scene, and especially the last page, of the novel. With some justification, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who in her introduction to the first edition of Native Son compared the novel to Dostoevsky’s “revelation of human misery in wrongdoing,” declared that there is “no one single effect in [Dostoevsky] finer” than this last page, in which Bigger “is born at last into humanity and makes his first simple, normal human response to a fellowman.”
Set to be published in 1939 by Harper’s (which had brought out Uncle Tom’s Children in 1938), Native Son was selected by the influential Book-of-the-Month Club and issued as a main selection in 1940 (after Wright made revisions demanded by the club). That year, it sold some 250,000 copies, no doubt mainly to members of the club. However, sales of the book fell off sharply, according to at least one report, once prospective buyers understood that Native Son was not an entertaining detective story, as some had supposed, but a serious, even harrowing, text. The reviews, generally favorable, certainly remarked on the violence and gloom of the novel. Blacks were on the whole pleased by Wright’s success, although some had doubts about the wisdom of offering Bigger Thomas as an example of African American character to the white world. Alain Locke, a highly respected commentator on black American art and culture, noted that it had taken “artistic courage and integrity of the first order” for Wright to have ignored “both the squeamishness of the Negro minority and the deprecating bias of the prejudiced majority.”
Native Son made Wright easily the most respected black writer in America, and the most prosperous by far. In 1941, a stage production of the novel, directed by Orson Welles, only enhanced Wright’s fame. (A motion picture of the novel, photographed mainly in Argentina, with Wright himself cast as Bigger Thomas, was finished in 1950; however, it enjoyed little success, especially after censors in the United States ordered deep cuts.) In 1945, his autobiography, Black Boy, was also a bestseller; but Native Son remained the cornerstone of his success. In 1948, his reputation suffered undoubtedly from the adverse criticism of James Baldwin, who essentially launched his own career that year with an essay,