Whiff of "The Problem"

RICHARD WRIGHT by Consfance Webb. 443 pages. Putnam. $8.95.

At the shank of the 1944 Christmas season, three Negroes walked into one of Brooklyn's "better" restaurants. They were Horace Cayton, sociologist and grandson of Hiram R. Revels, the U.S.'s first Negro Senator; Elmer Carter, a Harvard-educated writer, and social scientist; and Novelist Richard Wright, already famous as author of Uncle Tom's Children (1938) and Native Son (1941).

As patrons gawked, Wright ordered martinis, leaned toward his friends and said, "Fear is the most dominant emotion in Negro life." A few minutes later, a waiter set a tray of dirty dishes on their table. Carter sent them crashing to the floor. "Tell me what you felt," Wright demanded quickly. "Just hate before I pushed them," replied Carter. "And after?" asked Wright. "Pain in my legs, nausea, fear, tension . . ."

Buried Guilts. That incident provides one of the more dramatic moments in an otherwise overprotective biography of a man who was widely regarded as the. world's leading Negro writer before his death in 1960 at the age of 52. It is difficult to overestimate the impact of Native Son, the story of Bigger Thomas, a Negro youth who responds to the psychological pressures of racialism by killing two women. In that best-selling novel, Wright plowed up buried fears and guilts and gave millions of white Americans their first raw whiff of "The Problem."

It was a job for which Richard Wright was well qualified. He spent his first 19 years learning his place in Mississippi and Tennessee. For a boy with brains, talent and a white-hot ambition to be a writer, the inevitable conflicts were excruciating. Miss Webb, who was one of Wright's close white friends, gets most of them down, but she can scarcely improve on Wright's own well-known Black Boy (1945), a relentless autobiographical rendering of poverty, starvation, humiliation and yearning.

Biographer Webb, a former advertising copywriter and actress, is on fresher ground when she chronicles his years in the North. Much of the material is drawn from the last third of the Black Boy manuscript, which did not appear in the finished book. In Chicago, Wright worked at odd menial jobs and encountered the same fears and prejudices he had left at home. He worked nights as a postal clerk and spent his days reading and "filling endless pages with stream-of-consciousness Negro dialect, trying to depict the dwellers of the black belt as he felt and saw them."

But his first semblance of security vanished in November 1929: the stock market crashed, curtailing the volume of mail and ending his job.

Card Carrier. As the Depression deepened, so did Wright's belief that radical politics held the only promise for social and racial justice. In 1932, he joined the Chicago John Reed Club and, says Miss Webb, "committed himself wholeheartedly--morally, intellectually and artistically--in the fullest gesture of his life." Miss Webb is hesitant to say outright that Wright was cynically used by the American Communist Party to rally Negro support. Yet she makes it quite clear that, although Wright carried a party card, he was too preoccupied with his problems as an artist and his own writing career ever to be an all-out comrade.

Wright was an existentialist before he ever heard the term. Ideas such as those dramatized in Native Son and in his novel The Outsider (1953) saved him from the turgid currents of 1930s' naturalism and protest literature, and set him in the mainstream of contem porary literature. Comments Biographer Webb: "He was examining through Bigger the ultimate nature of man, using him as a kind of anti-hero through which to express the result of centuries of oppression and the type of violent action by which freedom would come." Few men have perceived so clearly what is now called the new militancy. Indeed, as far back as 1954, after discarding such titles as Ancestral Home? and The White Man's Grave for his book on African nationalism, Wright decided on Black Power. In the book, which dealt with Ghana and Kwame Nkrumah's struggle to build a black nation, Wright asserted that once Black Africa awakened, nothing could put it back to sleep.

Expatriate. In dealing with Wright's private life, the biography is extensive but guarded. Both of Wright's wives were white. The first marriage, which ended in divorce, was to Rose Dhima

Meadman, a ballet dancer. The second, in 1941, was to Ellen Poplar, who is the mother of his two daughters. He spent most of the last 14 years of his life in Paris as a sort of elder states man among expatriate American writers. There, moving easily through the French intellectual community, he became a good friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Wright also attracted such young American writers as James Baldwin. Oddly, however, Baldwin appears nowhere in the book. Miss Webb says only that "external forces" and "action by other people" prevented inclusion of an entire chapter she had written about Baldwin.

In Nobody Knows My Name, subtitled More Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin acknowledged his debt to Wright, and then ran him into the ground. Baldwin implied that Wright had cut himself off from his roots and was no longer in touch with black sentiments, that he praised the French for racial tolerance and at the same time closed his eyes to discrimination against Algerians. Perhaps most cutting of all was Baldwin's statement that an African once came away from a conversation with Wright with the comment: "I believe he thinks he's white."

How Wright might have countered that remark is likely to remain a mystery --at least until his sympathetic biographer carries out her plan to publish the Baldwin chapter as an essay.

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