By the time he sailed to France from New York in 1947, Richard Wright was a star, fixed in the literary firmament. Two of his books – Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) – had risen high in the US best-seller lists, and were being translated into European languages. In Paris, Wright was aggrandized by the reigning intelligentsia: he and his wife became friendly with Simone de Beauvoir (Ellen Wright would later act as Beauvoir’s agent), and to a lesser extent with the non-English-speaking Sartre and other members of the Temps Modernes circle. Boris Vian borrowed the grisly mechanism of Native Son – black boy kills white girl, then kills another girl – for his scandalous novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, which he published under the pen name “Vernon Sullivan”, who was allegedly a black American. The success of his books, and a shrewd property investment in Greenwich Village, had made Wright prosperous. A photograph of the early 1950s shows the family at the table in their well-appointed flat in rue Monsieur le Prince, being attended by a uniformed maid. Except for one brief visit during the making of a film of Native Son, in which the forty-one-year-old Wright took the role of his teenage anti-hero Bigger Thomas, he never returned to the United States. Wright was a true “black first”: a cosmopolitan writer and intellectual with popular appeal.

As soon as the lights went down on the welcoming party, the star began its decline – gradual at first but by 1958 so steep that Wright would lament to his loyal agent Paul Reynolds about his newly completed novel Island of Hallucination: “If it is not a success, I must think seriously of abandoning writing for a time. One has to be realistic”. He died of a heart attack in the Eugène Gibez clinic in Paris in November 1960, aged fifty-two. Island of Hallucination was never published.

To mark his centenary year, HarperCollins are reissuing several of Wright’s books, including an omnibus under the suggestive title Black Power. It contains two of the three travel books he wrote in the mid-1950s, Black Power and The Color Curtain (the other was Pagan Spain), and a group of lectures brought together as White Man, Listen! (1957). The publishers are also issuing A Father’s Law, a novel begun in the final weeks of Wright’s life but not finished. Hazel Rowley’s well-researched biography, which came out in 2004, appears in paperback for the first time.

The Wright family suffered the pressure of exile straight away. He found it hard to write – the gap between Native Son and his second novel, The Outsider, was to be thirteen years – and had difficulty acquiring a usable amount of French; meanwhile, his younger daughter refused to communicate with her parents in English. Wright’s communist past – he joined the Party in 1934 and left in 1942 – remained alive in the minds of US government authorities, and he was to have passport problems all through his residence in France. Reports made by Embassy staff to the FBI suggest that on at least one occasion he volunteered confidential information about black intellectuals when the process of passport renewal was at a delicate stage. The Wrights’ marriage started to fray the moment they set foot on French soil, and Rowley gives unappetizing details of several affairs, none of which made him happy. In the world’s eyes, the Wrights were sticking together, but by the time of his death, Ellen was living in London while he remained in a one-bedroom apartment in Paris, having offloaded his other property, including a Normandy farmhouse. The snapshot of the family at dinner in rue Monsieur le Prince was out of date the instant it was taken.

The hazards of expatriation were compounded by a more common nuisance: the arrival of the next, noisy generation of writers. History shelves Wright alongside the authors of the 1930s and 40s: John Steinbeck, with whom he competed at the top of the charts in 1940 (Native Son chasing The Grapes of Wrath), John Dos Passos, whose newsreel technique he stole for his nonetheless original novel Lawd Today! (1935; published posthumously in 1963), James T. Farrell and others of the socially conscious fraternity. By the time Wright got round to publishing his second novel, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy, not to mention Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, had formed a new chorus, moving to a post-war rhythm, singing songs to which the older Wright did not know the words. Ellison’s Invisible Man, six years in the making, was welcomed by Wright, a friend of the author, but he might have frowned in private when Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1952, while he struggled to import existentialism to Chicago’s South Side, in the shape of The Outsider. In New York, Wright had generously recommended Baldwin for a fellowship, which the apprentice put to use by following his master to Paris, where he then wrote a pair of essays in which he turned and bit him. (In an unpublished essay, Wright quotes Baldwin, whom he repeatedly calls “Balwin”, shouting at him during a quarrel at Les Deux Magots, “I’m going to destroy you”.) Five years on from his arrival, when he had been greeted as the very model of the man who has “chosen” freedom, in the topical Left Bank sense, Wright had drifted away from the Boulevard Saint-Germain circle and regrouped with a black American crowd – the novelists Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, Richard Gibson, the artist Oliver Harrington – at the Café de Tournon, in the shade of the Luxembourg Gardens. At first content in his union with Paris – it felt as if a corpse had slipped off his back, he told Ebony magazine – Wright discovered that his subject matter had secretly divorced him. Near the end of his life, he proposed to write a series of novels, including one about the Aztec emperor Montezuma, another about a white American woman “with sexual problems”, and others, all to be linked by passages of free verse.

Critics have wondered what to do about Wright ever since his death, when Baldwin published a devastating memorial article under the title “Alas, Poor Richard”, one of the most influential obituaries in post-war literary history. The pertinent passage concerns Wright’s ignorance of the civil rights movement, which had gained momentum over the course of the 1950s. The “young Negroes” who crossed the ocean and beat a path to his door, Baldwin wrote, “discovered that Richard did not really know much about the present dimensions and complexity of the Negro problem” in the United States, “and, profoundly, did not want to know”. More than four decades on from that, Wright’s reputation remains largely the product of two books written before he reached the age of forty (three, if you include the short stories contained in Uncle Tom’s Children, 1938), in which he drew unique pictures of black life during the segregation era: in the Deep South, where his “days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of terror, tension and anxiety”; and later in the Chicago slums. (Wright moved north with his mother and aunt in the late 1920s.) Between 1953 and 1960, he published roughly a book a year, and wrote a good deal more besides, but little of it was welcomed by the literary press or the reading public, or by his agent and editor, in the way of Native Son and Black Boy.

A variety of motives has been put forward to explain the neglect – the inevitable imputation of racism, the suggestion of a too-shocking subject matter, the glimpse of a conspirator at every neighbouring café table – but the likeliest explanation is the usual mundane one. Wright was never much of a stylist, and when his subject matter ceases to be topical, there are few reasons for the disinterested reader to open his books. In her mostly judicious account of Wright’s valiant progress, Rowley attempts to persuade us that the method of travel books such as Black Power, about a journey to the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1953, and The Color Curtain, about the 1955 Bandung Conference held in Indonesia by leaders of non-aligned Third World countries, was “decades ahead of its time”, weaving together “both subjective and objective material”. But even if the reader is willing to overlook the travel books of Graham Greene, Peter Fleming, the early Patrick Leigh Fermor, Norman Lewis and others, Wright’s facile, notetaking method and the long-winded conversations in which interviewer frequently upstages interviewee, are apt to become wearying:

“What kind of business are you in?”
“Timber.”
“What’s your attitude toward [African] self-government?”
“It’s all right, but – ” He belched. “Look, what’s the use of making trouble always? We’re progressing fast . . . .”
“What do you call fast?”
“Now don’t take that attitude – !”
“What attitude? I’ve only asked you a simple question.”

The cover of the Black Power omnibus sports a chic photograph of a bare-chested young man with eyes closed and clenched fist raised. But Wright’s concept of black power bears no relation to the term as popularized a generation later by Stokely Carmichael. In 1967, Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton published a book called Black Power which fails to mention Wright. Carmichael’s idea involved a recuperation of African consciousness in the mind of the modern African American, a strategy that led to black pride and has filtered down in unsophisticated form to today’s “respect”. In the mid-1950s, as Baldwin observed, Wright was scarcely concerned with the American “Negro problem”, but was preoccupied with postcolonial African development. His notion of black power meant jettisoning tribal heritage, together with the religious superstitions and hierarchical structures that supported it, and falling into line with the industrialized Western world. If the price was military dictatorship – let it happen. Black Power ends with an extraordinary address to Kwame Nkrumah, then the Prime Minister (later the President) of independent Ghana, calling for Africans to be “made to walk, forced draft, into the twentieth century! The direction of their lives, the duties they must perform to overcome the stagnancy of tribalism . . . all of this must be placed under firm social discipline!”. In case the PM should miss the point, Wright shifted to upper case to stress the nature of the “black power” he had in mind: “AFRICAN LIFE MUST BE MILITARIZED!”.

Like its predecessor, The Color Curtain: A report on the Bandung Conference is made up of sketches and interviews, this time centred on the political future of free Asian and African nations, as debated at the conference. Funding for Wright’s trip was provided by the Congress for Cultural Freedom – later exposed as being sponsored by the CIA – and early portions of the book were published in the Congress’s house journals, Encounter and its French equivalent, Preuves. Wright could hardly have guessed that the American government was subsidizing his literary output – for years, he had been telling everyone that it was trying to silence him. The conclusion of The Color Curtain stands as an appendix to that of Black Power: Wright urged the “one and one-half billion people living on 12,606,938 square miles of the earth’s surface” to shake themselves (or be shaken) out of their “traditional and customary attitudes” before the Communists got there and did the job first, to the accompaniment of “limitless murder and terror”.

Where Wright was ahead of his time was in his apprehension of a shift from the conventional politics of Left and Right to a form of postcolonial nationalism in which race – or “colour” – would be influential. Richard Gibson, who sat at the same café tables, remembers Wright entering the Tournon on his return from a trip abroad and announcing: “It’s no longer Left or Right. From now on, it’s black or white!”.

A Father’s Law is the sixth posthumous publication by Wright. The others are: Eight Men (short stories), Lawd Today!, American Hunger (memoir), Rite of Passage (novel), and Haiku: This other world (poetry). Island of Hallucination, in which he attempted to dramatize the Left Bank scene – “La Rive noire”, in the late Michel Fabre’s phrase – with characters based on Baldwin, Gibson, Harrington and others, remains unpublished. Then there are the letters, collected and brought to a publishable state by Fabre some thirty years ago, only to be withheld following a change of mind by his widow (Ellen Wright died in 2004).

As his elder daughter Julia admits in her idiosyncratic introduction, A Father’s Law is “faulty, sketchy, sometimes repetitive”. Drafted in six weeks in the second half of 1960, it is Wright’s late attempt to produce a novel of ideas: What is “the law”? Why do people kill? What is guilt? Why do some suffer it and not others? We meet the main character, Ruddy Tucker, on the morning of his promotion to the job of Chief of Police, with responsibility for the affluent Chicago suburb of Brentwood. The district is being targeted by a serial killer, apparently acting without motive. Ruddy’s teenage son Tommy, a bright boy headed for university, knows a disturbing amount about the murders . . .

Wright’s broadbrush storytelling technique just about keeps the reader turning the pages, but any one of half a dozen Patricia Highsmith novels of the 1950s offers a deeper, more skilful, more literary, examination of suppressed guilt in the US suburbs – with the significant difference that Ruddy, keeper of the law, and Tommy, who has stepped outside it, are black. Wright desperately wanted this difference not to be significant, not even to be a difference. He had written a novel with only white characters (Savage Holiday), which was a flop; he had written about the primitivism of Spain, on Gertrude Stein’s urging; he tried his hand at haiku, with some success –

Just enough of rain
To bring the smell of silk
From the umbrellas

– and he went to the place where the slave prisons stood, and advised the survivors’ descendants to become more like the conquerors (he also boldly exposed the contemporary continuation of slavery among Gold Coast tribes).

Wright grasped ideas quickly, especially political ideas, and had a talent for glimpsing changes of emphasis before they became apparent to other observers. His literary technique was developed from a desire to transmit hurt pride and spiritual bruising straight on to the page, but sentence by sentence the style is often crude, the naivety of the dialogue dependent on the stress of exclamation marks. A Father’s Law opens with a device that will be familiar to readers of Native Son:

Well done, Officer, he mumbled in his sleep as the officer now did a left-face turn, again flinging out his flashing white-gloved hand and sounding his whistle: Whreeeeeiiiiiee . . . .
“Ruddy!”
“Hunh!”
“Ruddy! Wake up!”
Wrrrriiiiiieeeee . . .
“Hunh? Hunh?”
“Ruddy, it’s the telephone, darling!”

As the range of even his posthumous publications show, Wright was a versatile, lively writer. But his greatest gift, strong enough to keep his name alive for another hundred years, was for communicating the force of hazard that once faced a little black boy in a big white world. “This was the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from which I fled.”

Richard Wright
BLACK POWER
Three books from exile: Black Power; The Color Curtain; and White Man, Listen!
812pp. Harper Perennial. $18.95.
978 0 06 144945 1

A FATHER’S LAW
268pp. Harper Perennial. $14.95.
978 0 06 134916 4

Hazel Rowley
RICHARD WRIGHT
The life and times
626pp. University of Chicago Press. Paperback, $22.50; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £11.50.
978 0 226 73038 7

James Campbell’s new book, Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers and writers in the dark, contains an essay on Richard Wright's unpublished novel, Island of Hallucination.

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