Richard Wright Loved, Lost, Hated, Missed : DAEMONIC GENIUS <i> by Margaret Walker (Warner Books: $22; 428 pp.) </i>

“The further we stand in aesthetic distance from Richard Wright, the greater his intellectual achievement appears,” writes novelist Margaret Walker in “Daemonic Genius,” a “psychohistory” that breaks her 21-year self-imposed silence about an Afro-American author so central to 20th-Century literature that, “he marks a clear line of demarcation in black fiction writing. Everything before and after Wright is different, to say nothing of his intellectual honesty and his failure to beg the question of our humanity.”

As literary biographies go, Walker’s new book, two decades in the making, is a curious mixture of delightful remembrance and disappointing critical analysis. In her preface, she confesses that, “The executor of the Wright Estate, Mrs. Ellen Wright . . . did not grant me permission to quote many materials that would further illuminate discussions in this book.”

Thus, “This is not an authorized biography.” Yet it is one Walker felt compelled to write to correct earlier, “inadequate” biographies by Constance Webb and Sorbonne critic Michel Fabre who fail to combine “intrinsic analysis of the genre” Wright explored with “extrinsic analysis of the author’s life and background.” To this, she argues, we must add, “African heritage and the psychosociological and economic factors of American black life--chiefly slavery and segregation--must be taken into account.”

Sadly, the result of this well-intended critical synthesis is a portrait of Wright that borders at times on character assassination, is repetitive, flawed by occasionally cliched prose, and provides little information not previously covered by Webb, Robert Bone, and Fabre. Sadder still, her brief discussion of each novel and nonfictional work leads too often to the reduction of Wright’s diversified oeuvre to psychological and sociological “complexes” Walker summarizes, mechanically, for us in the following, Freudian way:

“His first unsuccessful relationship was with his mother. He felt that she did not love him and, like his father, had rejected him. He felt she also wanted to abandon his children and that she was especially cruel to him when she beat him and failed to give him food to eat. His grandmother’s religion and resulting fanatic behavior were mixed in with this, plus the sexual mores of the South that forbade a black man to look at a white female . . . . Everyone did not react in the same way as Wright, but given all the negative components of his childhood and youth, he could not in any way fail to be aberrant himself.”

“Daemonic Genius” is devoted less to new insights into the created world of Richard Wright than to psychoanalyzing his “Faustian” personality, the disintegration of his friendships in America and abroad, and the “twisted torch” of three ideas long cited by scholars as central to his vision--black nationalism, Marxist internationalism, and existentialism. Walker is particularly annoyed that, “There is not one whole black woman in Wright’s fiction whom he feels deserves respect.”

Here, she echoes many black feminist critics on the murdered, abused one-dimensional black women in Native Son, “Big Boy Leaves Home,” and “The Outsider.” “Wright’s hatred of black women was complicated,” she writes, “by inferiority feelings and self-hatred. He believed that black women were easy prey to white men, not loyal to their black men, and capable only of a blind animal sexuality. In his subconscious mind all black women were whores, bitches or . . . and deserved to be treated as such.”

But intertwined with this scathing account of Wright’s misogyny and Anglophilia is the fascinating three-year, historic friendship they shared. Their mutual admiration began in 1936 when both worked on the Chicago Writers’ Project for the WPA (she was 20, he was 27), and ended in 1939 in New York during a conference when, according to Walker, Wright’s white Communist friends told lies to him about her. Wright’s chilly response: “This thing has gone on for three years. The relationship between us is at an end.”

As Walker describes the racial wounds received in Mississippi that fuel Wright’s fiction, she reveals much about how she, an award-winning poet and author of “Jubilee” (1966), a classic in Afro-American literature, was devastated by his rejection. Also revealed is how she lived in the shadow of his global success, was mistakenly taken as his inspiration for the character Bessie in “Native Son,” and was seldom believed when she insisted they had never been lovers (“There never was any question of marriage or intimate physical relationship between us--not so much as a good-night kiss, never, not ever”).

These rumors especially stung because they trivialized her contribution to his most famous novel; Walker details how she provided him with crucial research he requested: Chicago newspaper clippings about criminal Robert Nixon, who Wright used as his model for Bigger Thomas.

For all these flaws, Walker’s long-awaited discussion of her relationship with Wright, one encouraged by friends, succeeds best as a personal, polemical essay in the grand tradition of writers writing about writing e.g., D. H. Lawrence on Poe, John Gardner on William Gass, or even Sartre on Wright in “What Is Literature?”

Her chapter, “The WPA: A Stairway to the Stars,” provides an illuminating look at the profound role played by the Federal Writers’ Project by a black author who was there, and how--as in every period of literary history--many writers of canonical works (Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Wright, Ralph Ellison, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, and Walker herself) socially and intellectually influenced each other, shared books, money, and living spaces, started their own publications and, filled with the political idealism of an earlier time, seemed prophetically aware of the effect they were to have on world literature.

Equally valuable is Walker’s extensive bibliography, and her treatment of Wright’s little-known 24-hour discussion in Paris with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when, according to Frederic Wertham, “two men, both Negroes, had a marathon talk about violence” in 1959 before King left for his pilgrimage to the tomb of Mahatma Gandhi.

Walker carefully sorts out their different philosophical stances and highlights King’s indebtedness to Gandhi’s theory of ahimsa (harmlessness to all creatures) that help us in talking about the metaphysical, cross-cultural roots of King’s nonviolent civil disobedience. She also presents, albeit superficially, Wright’s intellectual breadth, which in Chicago and New York spanned Marx, Freud, Einstein, and in his Paris years revealed “interest in Haiku and Japan (that) may have been the beginning of an interest in Eastern philosophy and religion.”

Walker reports that in 1969, Saul Maloff, a Newsweek reviewer, wrote of Webb’s book, “Richard Wright: A Biography,” that, “because we need desperately to recover his life for our imagination and sense of where we are and how we got there, this study will have to serve until the one we should have been waiting for comes along.” Ironically, his judgment fits “Daemonic Genius,” if it is viewed as the definitive portrait of Wright; but as literary commentary and reminiscence, it’s a book that fans of Wright and Walker will read hungrily, as I did, in a single, spellbound sitting.