Native Doesn't Live Here

THE OUTSIDER (405 pp.)--Richard Wright--Harper ($3.95).

When Novelist Richard Wright was a teen-ager in the South, he once forged a note and handed it to the local librarian: "Please let this nigger boy have the following books." Among the books he wanted was Dostoevsky's Poor People. From his own bitter experience of life, young Wright already knew just about all there was to know about poor people; he was looking for other kinds of enlightenment--eye-openers for young writers. In Dostoevsky he found his eye-opener, and in world Communism his herald. Less than 20 years later, Moscow's critics were comparing Mississippi's Richard Wright to his Russian model.

It was Native Son that prompted the comparison, a powerful, brutal reminder of black resentment and confusion in a white man's capitalistic world. It made Wright at 31 a world-famed author and the literary darling of the Communists. His new novel, The Outsider, will hardly add to his reputation on either front.

The Outsider of the novel is Cross Damon, a Chicago Negro mail carrier (Wright was once a post-office clerk in Chicago). Cross, a discontented man with a vast appetite for sex and drink, is married, but separated from his wife Gladys and their three children. His newest sweetheart is pregnant, under the age of consent, and threatening him with jail if he doesn't divorce his wife and marry her. His wife Gladys feels well rid of Cross but won't divorce him. His dilemma is solved by a subway accident. Cross heads for New York.

In Harlem, Cross gets tangled up with the Communist Party, but sees through it almost at once. In quick succession he kills two top Communists as well as his landlord. The wife of one of the Communists, a white woman, becomes his mistress, but commits suicide when Cross is exposed as a murderer.

Novelist Wright, now disillusioned with his Communist friends, writes from the thesis that Cross Damon, weakling and murderer, is the victim of a world bereft of values and decency, haunted by fear and peopled by despairing creatures who have quit on life. Damon, he says, could be any man, black or white, not just a pushed-around Negro. Moreover, Wright argues, the whole world, including the U.S., is getting worse and is in for a totalitarian age. The Soviet Union--though he now rejects it--is not much worse than any place else. As a novelist, Wright has resorted to so much ludicrous coincidence, unlikely conversation and soapbox bombast that his story becomes a bore.

While Wright sits out the threat of totalitarianism in Paris, an abler U. S. Negro novelist sees the problem of his race differently. Says Ralph (Invisible Man) Ellison: "After all, my people have been here for a long time ... It is a big wonderful country, and you can't just turn away from it because some people decide it isn't your country."

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