Recalling Life of Richard Wright : Walker Biography Draws on Friendship Broken in Youth

This is the Mississippi of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, of Margaret Walker and Richard Wright.

Here for nearly two decades Walker, now 73, has been wrestling with a biography of Wright, whose “Native Son” and “Black Boy,” published in the 1940s, were the nation’s first best-selling novels by a black writer and landmarks in the literature of social protest.

“Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius” was published in mid-November, nearly a generation after people began telling Walker an interpretive study of Wright was her responsibility. After all, they said, she was one of the few surviving writers who knew him during the formative years of the 1930s.

“Nobody believes me when I say I didn’t plan to write this book, I didn’t want to write this book. I found myself forced to write this book,” Walker says.

Poverty the Starting Point

Hours before a celebration of her book began--a salute by city and state officials, scholars of Wright and Walker, and friends from Jackson State University where she taught for 30 years--Walker was in her kitchen, spiritedly buttering up a turkey and mixing plum pudding, and discussing various roadblocks to the book’s completion and how they had been surmounted.

First, she had to find a perspective different from that of Wright’s previous biographers. She found it here, 80 miles from Wright’s birthplace in painful poverty on a plantation outside Natchez, Miss. It was the trauma of his early life, Walker writes, that led her to describe him as “demonic.”

“This anger or rage drove him to create and to achieve,” she writes. “The wellsprings of his creativity were deep welters and dark pools of realistic and neurotic anger, which he sublimated into imaginative writing. His tortured consciousness bespoke an even more tumultuous unconscious, out of which his demonic genius spoke.”

She found herself repeatedly distracted from her work on Wright, however, by outside events. One was the enormous success of Alex Haley’s “Roots,” which Walker claims was partially plagiarized from her 1966 novel, “Jubilee.” She sued Haley for damages, but without success.

Then, when the Wright book was first announced in a publishing trade magazine, a long legal debate ensued with the writer’s widow, Ellen, who attempted to prevent Walker from quoting any of Wright’s letters and journals until the widow herself had reviewed Walker’s manuscript.

So far, that effort has failed, but there were other hurdles. Her editor changed publishing houses three times. Her husband of 37 years died of cancer. She herself has chronic problems with diabetes.

But perhaps the most difficult part of the task was sorting out just how she felt about Wright nearly 50 years after their friendship ended. One day, she says, he just refused to see her.

“The ending of that relationship was very painful and very harsh. I suffered for many years wondering why the man acted the way he did. I had no intention of writing” about the relationship or the man, who for so many people is an icon, Walker says.

But the more people urged her, the more she thought she could contribute a valuable perspective. “I had his letters, I had kept journals and I had taught his work for 35 years,” Walker says.

Perspective Questioned

Over the years, some have said that Walker, then 21, was in love with Wright, then 28, and that her biography of the man she pictures as seriously flawed is the work of a scorned woman.

What Walker describes in her kitchen-table interview and in her Wright biography is an intense literary friendship. The relationship with Wright “was never a romance,” she said. “If I wished it to be, it never was. How could you be in love with a man you never kissed? . . . It was a marriage of minds and minds only.”

Bound by a shared love of literature and the common experiences of race, Walker and Wright couldn’t have been more different. She was the daughter of a Methodist minister in Birmingham, raised at a series of small, black colleges where her mother and father taught.

She had just finished Northwestern University and already had her first poem published when she met Wright, whose formal schooling had ended with high school, whose father had deserted his family and whose early lessons were the ones of hunger and poverty.

In 1927, Wright had moved to Chicago from Memphis, held a series of odd jobs, and by 1933 was a member of a prominent Chicago literary club. He had also started his 12-year membership in the Communist Party. His first published works were poems that appeared in leftist magazines in 1934.

WPA Co-Workers

The man of hard times and the lady of the campuses met in 1936, both by this time working for divisions of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. Both were strong-willed and creative, living through exciting times for politics and literature.

They helped each other with their work, talked about writers living and dead. “One day,” she writes, “as Wright and I walked together to the elevated station, he turned to me and said, ‘Margaret, if a voice speaks within you, you can live.’ And the voice spoke. A demonic spirit within him found literary expression. . . . It was this world within that made him accustomed to solitude, made people unnecessary and family and friends expendable. His inner world was neither mystical nor hedonist but deeply contemplative and rational.”

When Wright moved to New York in 1937 to be the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker, the pair corresponded. In those letters, Walker says, Wright asked for newspaper clippings about the case of Robert Nixon, a killer and rapist, on whose life he would later model that of Bigger, the protagonist of “Native Son.”

“I feel I had a part in the conception, organization and realization of Wright’s most successful long work of fiction,” Walker writes.

Wright’s gratitude was expressed in a letter, which Walker cites: “I feel guilty as all hell for not writing to you, in as much as you had done more than anyone I know to help me with my book. . . . Each and every time I sat down to write I wondered what I could say to let you know how deeply grateful I felt.”

Rift in Friendship

But he was never at ease with her comfortable background, she writes, and once told her: “I know where you come from. I have seen through those lighted windows in those houses where people like you live.”

Now, opening up the telegrams congratulating her on the book, Walker says, “I learned a lot from Wright and he got a lot from me.”

But the end of their friendship was unexpected and shocking to Walker. In an incident engineered by an acquaintance, Walker arrived at an apartment and Wright wouldn’t see her. Whether or not she knows the reason, she won’t discuss it.

The incident remains so painful to her that Walker used the excerpt from her journal of the time to describe it for the book instead of recasting it with the benefit of 50 years of hindsight.

“It wouldn’t be as powerful and as honest as it is” any other way, she says. “That is how the 23-year-old girl was thinking.”

Later Contact

Afterward she heard twice from Wright. E. Franklin Frazier, the noted sociologist, invited her on behalf of Wright to attend a writer’s conference in Paris in 1956. She declined, primarily because of cost, but also, she says, because “I didn’t think Wright and I had anything much more in common. The friendship was over. I had not yet published ‘Jubilee.’ I wasn’t anxious to get out and mingle and say I was a writer.”

The next year, she received a letter from Wright asking permission to use her poem “For My People” in a book. She didn’t answer. “I knew that was just an excuse to send me a little note, let me know that he was thinking about me and he wished me well. That’s all that was for. And he didn’t expect me to answer.”

From 1937 to 1947, Wright lived in New York, where in 1940 “Native Son” was published. It became a Book of the Month Club selection that for the first time opened up modern writing by blacks to a mass, national audience.

In 1945, “Black Boy,” another best seller, was published. In the late 1940s, Wright moved to France, where he lived in self-imposed exile until his death at age 52 in November, 1960. His later works were not critical successes and he spent much of the last two years writing record reviews and album notes.

Lingering Shade

For years, Walker had a dream about Wright. “I would see Wright laughing and talking and he would be skipping along on the grass,” she says, smiling at the thought, an expression that lights up her long face. “I finished the book and exorcised my own demon. When he was dead, I realized something that (writer James) Baldwin had said was true: ‘The son can’t come up as long as the father is there.’ . . . The day Wright died I felt absolutely I had been unchained. . . .”

In 1942, Walker received the Yale Younger Poet Award for “For My People,” and in 1966 she published “Jubilee,” the story of her maternal great-grandmother, which has sold more than 1 million copies.

Part of the reason for writing the Wright book, Walker says, was not only to share her memoirs and criticism but to set the record straight.

One Wright biographer, she says, has claimed that Wright “introduced” Walker to literature. “When I first saw Richard Wright, I had majored in literature” at college, she says. “It wasn’t likely he introduced me.”

The same writer, she says, mentions five black women, including Walker, as girlfriends of Wright’s. “That was ludicrous. I knew all the women and none of those women were girlfriends,” she says.

Racial Ambivalence

In fact, Walker says, Wright’s personal turmoil about race was such that he once told her he disliked all black women. Both times he married it was to white women. His dilemma became Walker’s burden. “At first I had great conflict. How do you write about a man who was a great writer but an awful person, who was filled with self-hate and wished he had never been born black,” Walker says.

Walker has written a portrait of a man haunted by anger, ambivalence, alienation and aberration; a portrait layered over with a dizzy spectrum of interpretations, from the influence of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Soren Kierkegaard, Albert Einstein and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Yet her story of his life itself is straightforward, at times even dry. Wright’s great achievement in his novels, she writes, “is his application of modern psychology and philosophy to black and white racial patterns and human personality, particularly the inner turmoil of black personality, and to the black male, who is seen as an outcast, criminal, or marginal man. . . . Violence in the form of rape and murder appears in all his fiction, but this is more than the strength and source of his power and passion; it is also the problem of resolution, which is seen as always moving into the death decision.”

Though she had first discussed doing the book in 1969, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the research in the early 1970s, and signed the first contract in 1974, she didn’t start the actual writing until 1979.

She finished the first draft in October, 1980, two weeks before her husband, Firnist James Alexander Sr., died.

Opposition from Widow

By 1985, Walker says, “I had spent 15 years of my life with this book and never expected it to see the light of day,” in part because of the objections of Wright’s widow. “I didn’t know how you could do a biography without using the man’s words.” Ellen Wright, Walker says, wanted a “watered-down, inferior” story.

“I don’t feel like throwing my creativity and scholarly work like pearls before swine to be destroyed. . . . The emotional factors are still there. And there is unfounded jealousy, sexual and racial. She thinks I am a jilted girlfriend of Wright’s, that he was going to marry me and I wanted to marry him.

“She feels this way toward any black woman who had a speaking acquaintance with her husband. . . . I don’t know what he told her, I don’t know what he bragged to her. But she hates my guts.”

(Ellen Wright lives in Paris, but Jonathan W. Lubell, her attorney in New York, said her objections to Walker’s book “don’t have anything to do with Margaret Walker . . . but . . . with her appropriating (Richard) Wright’s creativity for her own use.”)

What prepared Walker for her battle with Ellen Wright was her suit against Alex Haley. “Now Lord I know why . . . I had to go through all that stuff. . . . I had to know everything about copyright infringement, fair use.”

Action Dropped

In January, 1988, lawyers for Ellen Wright said they would seek a temporary restraining order against the publication, but it didn’t happen. The first printing was a conservative 15,000 copies by Warner Books-Amistad Press.

Finally, moving away from the kitchen, Walker talks about exchanging fruitcake recipes with Eudora Welty and about other book projects in the works.

Then she returns to Wright. If he were writing today, Walker feels, he would be a strategist in the battle against racism. “I think he would tell us the struggle is not over. That is what I believe his real mission was, fighting these battles with words. His words were his weapons.”