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AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE IN THE 1940S
Facing the
Abyss GEORGE HUTCHINSON
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202 | A Rising Wind In 1949, Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps published the anthology The Poetry of the Negro, made up of three sections, “Negro Poets of the U.S.A.,” “Tributary Poems by Non-Negroes,” and “The Caribbean.” This last section made no distinction between the work of white and black poets, and with regard to the anthology’s title, the editors explained that it referred more “to a theme and a point of view than to the racial identity of some of its contributors.”17 Many of the poems in the “Caribbean” section are unconcerned with racial subjects.18 In contrast, when Bontemps brought out a new edition of the book in 1970, he radically revised the contents to make it more racially focused according to American racial definitions. The decade of the 1940s saw a flood of fiction and poetry by both blacks and whites dealing with African American life and white racism, carrying on themes from the 1930s but more widely ranging and psychological in approach. Alain Locke wrote in 1939: “Today’s literature and art, an art of searching social documentation and criticism, thus becomes a consistent development and matured expression of the trends that were seen and analyzed in 1925.”19 Locke, who had been comprehensively reviewing the “literature of the Negro” since the mid-1920s, had never considered the “Negro renaissance” a purely black enterprise, for he was interested both in the development of black authors and the transformative influence of black culture on American culture and world civilization generally.20 After some disillusionment in the early 1930s with what today is usually called the “Harlem Renaissance,” in the late 1930s and 1940s he was more prone to note continuities and to judge the early phase of the “long” New Negro movement positively. The same was true of Langston Hughes, who wrote for Phylon in 1950: By focusing attention on Negro writers and on literature about Negroes,
the Negro Renaissance provided a springboard for young Negro writers and for those who wanted to write about Negroes. . . . It can hardly be disputed that the “Renaissance” did a great deal to make possible a public willing to accept Negro problems and Negro art.
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A Rising Wind | 203 The field of magazine writing, in particular, had “opened up considerably” for black writers, and “in many major magazines articles and stories which take something other than the Octavus Roy Cohen line now appear frequently.”21 In fact, echoes of the Negro Renaissance pervade the 1940s, and younger authors like Chester Himes attested to its importance to them. The 1940s witnessed a major expansion of literature by African Americans, including books that won major honors or were bestsellers. Richard Wright, as Sterling Brown pointed out in 1942, was the first black author to make a living off of writing alone. Native Son and Black Boy were both Book-of-the-Month Club selections. Ann Petry won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for fiction to complete The Street, at 1.5 million copies the first bestseller by a black woman. Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen (1949) won a Pulitzer Prize. Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow was so popular that Blyden Jackson hailed “a great moment in American publishing for Negroes. It is likewise, one can say in all sincerity, an event in the fulfillment of American democracy.”22 Wright’s Black Boy, even in its reduced state after Wright cut the second part of the story (about one-third of the original American Hunger), remained incendiary enough to provoke Senator Theodore Bilbo to rail in Congress: “It should be removed from the book stores; its sales should be stopped.” Calling it “a damnable lie from beginning to end,” he claimed the book aimed to plant the seeds of hate in every Negro in America against the white men of the South or against the white race anywhere, for that matter. That is the purpose. Its purpose is to plant the seeds of devilment and
trouble-breeding in the days to come in the mind and heart of every
American Negro. Read the book if you do not believe what I am telling you. It is the dirtiest, filthiest, lousiest, most obscene piece of writing that I have ever seen in print.23
That it had been chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club made it all the more dangerous to the American public.
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204 | A Rising Wind White authors’ responses to black authors’ works demonstrate the changing professional position and influence of African American writers. Startling new presentations of racial identity by white authors both new and old—most tellingly Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Howard Fast, along with work by the likes of Bucklin Moon as author and anthologist—radically redescribed the “Negro Problem.” “Is there really a Negro problem,” Bucklin Moon asked in the introduction to A Primer for White Folks, “or is it, as Lillian Smith recently suggested . . . actually a white problem?”24 Smith’s essay for the book, “Addressed to White Liberals,” demands that white Americans look in a new direction for the source of our troubles. We have looked at
the “Negro problem” long enough. Now the time has come for us to right-about-face and study the problem of the white man. . . . The white man himself is one of the world’s most urgent problems today; not the Negro, not other colored races.25
White Southern writers were particularly sensitive to the resemblance of the racial dictatorship of the region to fascist thought and practice. W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South (1941) compared white Southern ideology to the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler.26 The publication of Richard Wright’s Native Son, with its choice by the Book-of-the- Month Club, was one of the most consequential events in the history of American book publishing. “The day Native Son appeared,” wrote the critic Irving Howe, American culture was changed forever. No matter how much qualify-
ing the book might later need, it made impossible a repetition of the old lies. . . . Speaking from the black wrath of retribution, Wright insisted that history can be a punishment. He told us the one thing even the
most liberal whites preferred not to hear: that Negroes were far from
patient or forgiving, that they were scarred by fear, that they hated every moment of their suppression even when seeming most acquiescent, and
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A Rising Wind | 205 that often enough they hated us, the decent and cultivated white men who from complicity or neglect shared in the responsibility for their plight.27
Native Son, while fully expressing the nationalist aspirations of the black working class, was fundamentally integrationist. Hugh Gloster situated the novel in relationship to black-authored novels on non-Negro themes, quoting Wright’s own statement that Bigger “was not always black”: “More than anything else, as a writer, I was fascinated by the similarity of the emotional tensions of Bigger in America and Bigger in Nazi Germany and Bigger in old Russia. All Bigger Thomases, white and black, felt tense, afraid, nervous, hysterical, and restless.” Gloster stressed the fact that “Wright’s sympathies are comprehensive enough to include all exploited people; and Native Son illustrates, perhaps more effectively than any other novel by an American Negro, that it is possible to attack racial oppression and at the same time provide truthful implications for all mankind.”28 At one point Bigger dreams of a movement led by a Negro Mussolini or Hitler, binding black people together into a powerful force, like the Japanese then conquering China. Yet ultimately Wright rejects this solution to Bigger’s isolation, which stems from the way the white/black boundary dominates his relationship to his own feelings and all his human relationships, isolating him not only from others but from himself and his environment. Bigger’s feelings of alienation, which helped make Native Son so compatible with French existentialism, are inseparable from the enclosure of race and are only overcome when Bigger and Jan Erlone come to see each other, in an intimate encounter recognizing each other’s entrapment in identities that they cannot escape. Jan tells Bigger that as he sat in jail for a crime he did not commit, put there because of Bigger’s testimony, and grieving for Mary Dalton, “I thought of all the black men who’ve been killed, the black men who had to grieve when their people were snatched from them in slavery and since slavery. I thought that if they could stand it, then I ought to. . . . I said, ‘I’m going to help that guy, if he lets me.’ ”29 Jan Erlone sees his own
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206 | A Rising Wind suffering as ultimately deriving from the crimes of white supremacy. The effect on Bigger Thomas is transformative: Suddenly, this white man had come up to him, flung aside the curtain
and walked into the room of his life. Jan had spoken a declaration of
friendship that would make other white men hate him: a particle of white rock had detached itself from that looming mountain of white hate and had rolled down the slope, stopping still at his feet. The word had
become flesh. For the first time in his life a white man became a human being to him; and the reality of Jan’s humanity came in a stab of remorse: he had killed what this man loved and had hurt him. He saw Jan
as though someone had performed an operation upon his eyes, or as though someone had snatched a deforming mask from Jan’s face.30
Here begins Bigger’s growth in consciousness about the meaning of his experience in the context of humanity as a whole. Jan remains important for Bigger to the end. When Bigger says, “It’s over for me,” Jan asks, “Don’t you believe in yourself?” When Bigger says, “Naw,” Jan responds, “You believed enough to kill. You thought you were settling something, or you wouldn’t have killed.” Bigger thinks, “Did this man believe in him that much?”31 Whereas Boris Max, Bigger’s lawyer, delivers a brilliant courtroom speech on the history of white supremacy and capitalism as the contexts in which Bigger was made into who he was, he remains blind to Bigger’s human need for meaning and his individual agency. Waiting on death row for his execution, Bigger (echoing Jan’s earlier comments) shouts to Max: “What I killed for must’ve been good!” Bigger’s voice was full of frenzied anguish. . . . “When a man kills, it’s for something. . . . I didn’t
know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em. . . . It’s the truth, Mr. Max. I can say it now, ’cause I’m go-
ing to die. I know what I’m saying real good and I know how it sounds. But I’m all right.”32
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A Rising Wind | 207 They say goodbye to each other as “Max groped for his hat like a blind man.” As Max walks away, Bigger calls after him: “Mr. Max!”
Max paused, but did not look.
“Tell. . . . Tell Mister. . . . Tell Jan hello. . . .”33
That dropping of the “Mister” signifies the uniqueness of his bond with Jan Erlone. Jan alone, Wright later said, really understood Bigger. Wright’s next major project, Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), would be a collaboration with the white, Jewish photographer Edwin Rosskam, in which Wright wrote that the ties binding black and white Americans together are deeper than those that separate us. The common road of hope which
we all have traveled has brought us into a stronger kinship than any
words, laws, or legal claims. Look at us and know us and you will know
yourselves, for we are you, looking back at you from the dark mirror of our lives.34
In the climactic sentence of “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), one of James Baldwin’s most famous essays, he concludes, Bigger’s tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those
brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth. But our humanity is our
burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it. The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his
beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.35
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208 | A Rising Wind This can best be called a strong misreading. It is obtuse to the very burden of Native Son. Baldwin’s differences from Wright lie not in his attitudes toward the relationship between blackness and humanity but in his aesthetic sensibilities and different views of the functions literature can serve. For Wright had been drawn to the art of fiction by those who used literature as a weapon, Baldwin by the likes of Henry James. As Baldwin later admitted of “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” his critique was less about Wright than an attempt to work some issues out in his own mind. Baldwin’s voice and emphases emerged in the reviews he wrote for The Nation, New Leader, Commentary, and Partisan Review in the late 1940s, in tune with attitudes often exemplified in those journals and partly in response to Wright’s imposing example. Throughout the decade black critics had been decrying the “curse of propaganda” in fiction by Negroes. Baldwin—younger, more schooled in the fiction of Henry James and admiring of “high modernism” than most of them—ratcheted that critique up to a new and more furious level. In fiction he liked subtlety, psychological complexity, nuance; his own criticism, however, tended toward Olympian judgments, rhetorical extremes: “Perhaps the measure of the really stupendous inadequacy of the five novels under consideration,” begins a review for Commentary in 1948, “is the fact that, of them all, the most impressive and the most valid is Millen Brand’s quite unremarkable Albert Sears.”36 Chester Himes “seems capable of some of the worst writing on this side of the Atlantic.”37 Twenty-four years old and having scarcely published anything so far, Baldwin excoriates the “debasement of literary standards” in America, due in part to the wide gulf between the “personal or creative individual and that vast culture of the masses” that the writer cannot ignore.38 To such conditions he attributes the ubiquity of the protest novel, his prime target in the years when his career began taking shape. Baldwin’s use of “we” can be as slippery (and prolific) as that of Lionel Trilling, whose essays in the same journals were earning him a central role in American literary culture. In The New Leader, critiquing Himes’s Lonely Crusade, Baldwin concludes that in literature of the Negro even Bigger Thomas “is becoming irrelevant,” for the black man is as
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A Rising Wind | 209 many-faceted “as we ourselves are, as individual, with our ambivalences and insecurities, our struggles to be loved. He is now an American and we cannot change that; it is our attitudes which must change both towards ourselves and him.”39 Who is this “we”? Readers of journals like The New Leader? White Americans? Educated Americans in general? Baldwin moved to Europe in 1948 on a Rosenwald Fellowship because he “wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience [as a Negro] could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them.” In search of such connections, he discovered himself to be “as American as any Texas G.I. And I found my experience was shared by every American writer I knew in Paris.”40 As if in acknowledgment of his debt to Wright, the book in which he later reprinted “Everybody’s Protest Novel” as the opening salvo bore the title Notes of a Native Son. Wright’s novel had an enormous impact on William Faulkner. It is impossible to read Go Down, Moses—especially the final story of the same title—hard upon Native Son and not feel the effect of that book. Samuel Beauchamp (Mollie’s grandson) is a Bigger Thomas figure of the zoot-suit generation. Faulkner wrote Wright about Black Boy in the fall of 1945: I have just read Black Boy. It needed to be said, and you said it well . . . as well as it could have been said in this form. Because I think you said it
much better in Native Son. I hope you will keep on saying it, but I hope you will say it as an artist, as in Native Son. I think you will agree that
the good lasting stuff comes out of one individual’s imagination and sensitivity to and comprehension of the suffering of Everyman, Anyman, not out of the memory of his own grief.41
In a 1957 lecture, Sterling A. Brown noticed the shift in Faulkner’s novels of the forties, particularly in the treatment of Lucas Beauchamp, through whom Faulkner struggles to get at the interiority of a black character in a way he had never previously done.42 White Southerners’ denial of kinship across racial lines particularly drew Faulkner’s attention