The academic Amanda Claybaugh, who seems to want to give this classic its due justice, regrets that the work has been wrongly condemned. To those who criticize its racism and sentimentality, Claybaugh would have them remember that Beecher Stowe was the first American to imagine the black slave as a Christ figure. .53
•••
Harsher still are the criticisms you launch against Wright’s Native Son at the end of “Everyone’s Protest Novel,” and, later, in another article entitled “Many Thousands Gone,”54 which would appear in the Partisan Review in 1951.
With pencil in hand, reading your work closely, Wright is convinced that you are trying by any means necessary to destroy his work, especially when you place Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Native Son on the same plane. You criticize his character Bigger Thomas for harboring a blind hatred that drives him to rape, an obsessive fear that leads to murder: “Below the surface of this novel there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy. Bigger is Uncle Tom’s descendent, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses.”55
But what distances you from Wright even further is his view of black American society. You consider the characters of Native Son to be far removed from the truth of daily life; since they are untethered from reality, they are also separated from the common and painful life of the black American. For you, the setting and dialogues ring false: “It is remarkable that, though we follow him step by step from the tenement room to the death cell, we know as little about him when this journey is ended as we did when it began; and, what is more remarkable, we know almost as little about the social dynamic which we are to believe created him. Despite the details of slum life which we are given, I doubt anyone who has thought about it, disengaging himself from sentimentality, can accept this most essential premise of the novel for a moment.”56
As a result, the judgment you later render on the novel as a whole in “Many Thousands Gone” condemns in veiled terms the author’s will to gloss over the most essential point: “What this means for the novel is that a necessary dimension has been cut away; this dimension being the relationship that Negroes bear to one another, the depth of involvement and unspoken recognition of shared experience which creates a way of life. What the novel reflects — and at no point interprets — is the isolation of the Negro within his own group and the resulting fury of impatient scorn. It is this which creates its climate of anarchy and unmotivated and un-apprehended disaster. .”57
•••
Shortly after the publication of “Everybody’s Protest Novel” in the journal Zero, you go to Brasserie Lipp, in Paris — Chester Himes is there — and you don’t expect to find Wright. But you do find him there, appearing very grim. He rebukes you for your attitude. He accuses you of betraying him, and, by extension, of contributing not only to the destruction of his position as an established author, but also to the annihilation of African-American literature by stripping it of what it inherently possessed: protest.
An argument breaks out between the teacher and the pupil. Wright, who had taken care to place his copy of the journal Zero on the table, pursues:
“All literature is protest!”
The pupil has been set free:
“All literature may be protest. . ‘but not all protest is literature.’”58
You will later give an account of this scuffle in “Alas, Poor Richard,” one of the essays in your collection entitled Nobody Knows My Name. Your conflict had also been widely publicized by critics and academics alike, who heightened it to the level of one of the great literary rivalries in the American literary world.
By reiterating your criticisms of Wright’s work in your piece “Many Thousands Gone” in 1951, two years after your attack against him in Zero, you confirm in some people’s minds the notion that you are doggedly fighting your mentor. The article is perceived as the final signature on the divorce papers. This time the text is longer, more detailed, and in it you dissect Native Son, elaborating again on the notion of the protest novel, to better tear it apart. Wright is presented as the spokesman for the “new black man,” who would have the weighty task of engaging himself in the social struggle after “swallowing Marx whole,” and becoming convinced that the goals of blacks and those of the proletariat were one and the same. However this mission seems difficult to undertake since, as you point out, writers “are not congressmen.” The text displays astounding skill, since in it you assume, like a character in a novel, the role of a white man who evokes then defends the status of the black American, from outside of his own community.
Reading “Many Thousands Gone,” it is clear that you not only insist on this difference of literary opinion, but that you identify yourself by it.
•••
The heart of the problem, however, lay elsewhere. The pupil had acquired his independence and now demands the right to think differently from his mentor. He does not try to hide this desire: “. . I wanted Richard to see me, not as the youth I had been when he met me, but as a man. I wanted to feel that he had accepted me, had accepted my right to my own vision, my right, as his equal, to disagree with him.”59
To Wright’s fury, you try to temper the injustice, the wave of criticism crashing down on him. Confronted by those who believe he is cut off from reality, who reproach him for conjuring up a Mississippi and a Chicago that blacks had never experienced, for knowing nothing about jazz, to say nothing of the Africans who call into question how “African” he really is, your criticism brings things back to some kind of order, explains things, and possibly even contextualizes these ambiguous and shadowy subjects. Some of Wright’s opponents went too far — much too far — such as the African who, while listening to the author speak, shouted, “I believe he thinks he’s white!”
You conclude, in response:
“I did not think I had been away too long: but I could not fail to begin, however unwillingly, to wonder about the uses and hazards of expatriation. I did not think I was white, either, or I did not think I thought so. But the Africans might think I did, and who could blame them? In their eyes, and in terms of my history, I could scarcely be considered the purest or most dependable of black men.”60
It would be inaccurate to say that you did not display a desire to have a frank discussion with your former mentor — a discussion that would open the path toward reconciliation. But it was too late; he had passed away.
•••
Beyond the controversy, reduced more often than not to a mere rivalry between two prominent writers, the writer’s status is at the heart of these two critical texts. Would it not be better to retain this from the dispute, and this alone? Langston Hughes, who reviewed Notes of a Native Son in the pages of the New York Times, compares the essayist and the novelist: “I much prefer ‘Notes of a Native Son’ to his novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. . In his essays, words and material suit each other. The thought becomes poetry, and the poetry illuminates the thought.”61