R. D. Charques's review of Native Son appeared in the TLS of April 27, 1940.

Native Son is strong meat and not for the squeamish. The story of a negro boy in Chicago who commits two senseless and gruesome murders and is trapped and sentenced to death, it is done with telling melodramatic power; its thrills and horrors are as flesh-creeping or hair-raising as any reader not specially addicted to the morbid could desire. There is more than Grand-Guignol sensationalism in the story, however. Essentially, indeed, it is an imaginative study of the inferiority psychosis of the negro in the United States, and as such carries a load of passionate feeling where problems of colour and colour prejudice are concerned. Too great a load, one is tempted to say, since the author brings into the story much that is irrelevant or confusing. The insistent emotional pressure of his rationalization of negro disabilities is such, in fact, as to make him flounder at times between the conventions of a shocker, a sociological treatise and a Dostoevskian fabrication on the subject of the soul.

The murderer is Bigger Thomas, a boy of twenty, who is debased and brutalized in a nerve-ridden fashion and is obviously on the way to becoming what is called a criminal type. He is introduced in the act of killing a rat in the overcrowded tenement room the family occupy in the South Side of the city, the principal negro quarter. After that he plans to rob a small store in the neighbourhood, wrecks the plan in a sudden storm of nerves and reluctantly accepts a relief job as chauffeur to a rich family named Dalton, who are noted for their benefactions to negro causes and charities. Straightway Bigger is entangled in a web of innocent deceit and stupidity from which he tries to extricate himself by half-crazed violence. The spoilt daughter of the house, a fluffy, aspiring little Communist, bewilders and humiliates him by a pretty show of egalitarian airs; after a drunken revel in comradeship, in unreasoning terror he smothers her with a pillow, then casts her dissevered body into the house furnace, then concocts an artless appearance of kidnapping and demands ransom money, then flees when human bones are discovered among the ashes raked from the furnace and the murder hunt begins. Almost of necessity, for he is by nature or second nature a killer, he is driven on to the even more revolting murder of his negro mistress, the pitiful drudge Bessie, before the chase ends, to the accompaniment of revolver shots, the bursting of tear-gasshells and the maddened shouts of the crowd, on the roof-tops of the city.

Suspense and horror are well maintained. The hideous details of each crime are set down with harsh accuracy, almost with the lingering and unemotional particularity of a police report. At the same time the author also tries to work up a rather spurious effect of the macabre through a little Gothic byplay with a blind woman in flowing white robes, an accusing white cat and so on. Failings of this sort, however, are redeemed by the overwhelming sincerity with which the social and moral implications of Bigger’s guilt are brought home. He is lawless and criminal; he is also what the denials and oppressions of colour prejudice in a land dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have made him. You are not asked so much to feel sorry for Bigger as to understand the workings in him of hate and fear so deeply ingrained by the passage of centuries as to be integral to his personality. In the words of his defending counsel, the almost too comprehending Max, at the trial, “every thought he thinks is potential murder”. And, indeed, the picture drawn here of the hysteria of the white mob confronted with the nascent violence of the negro consciousness, of mob terror that triumphs in floggings and lynchings, of the sadistic zest in avenging negro crime, above all where a sex motive is suspected, is of a kind to make Bigger’s impulses never less than intelligible.

Despite their moral implications for American society as a whole, the elaboration of the Communist thesis on the question of colour is, in an imaginative sense, an irrelevance. It does not touch the heart of the argument. Bigger, when all is said, is not merely a negro racial type but also a pattern of the lawless social misfit everywhere. No doubt it is a mark of integrity in the author that be should choose for hero so degenerate, so unsympathetic a victim of environmental disharmony. All the more reason, then, that he should have refrained from discovering in Bigger at all but the last moment a martyred spirit, a cross between Raskolnikov and Stavrogin, whose impulse to murder is a high affirmation of negro soul.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now