The Unfinished Quest ofRICHARD WRIGHT

Michel Fabre

Translated from the French

by Isabel Barzun

\''"". Second Edition '1

" *"/

University ol' Illinois press

Urbanu und Chi<'ago

Richard Wright. photo by Harriet Crowder

Illini Books edition, 1993

O 1993 by Michel FabreOriginally published 1973 W William Morrow and Company, Inc.Manufactured in the United States of America12345CP54321

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote the following:

From Black Bay by Richard Wright. Copyright 1937, 1942, 1944, 1945 by Richard Wright.

Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Jonathan Cape

From American Hungerby Richard Wright. Copyright 19,14 by Richard Wright, renewed

1977 W Ellen Wright. Repiinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers

From White Man, Listen! Black Power, and The God that Failed by Richard Wright'

Copyright 1992 by Ellen Wright. Reprinted by permission of Mrs' Wright

From letters of Paul R. Reynolds, reprinted by permission of Ruth W. Reynolds

From previously unpublished material by Richard Wright. Copyrighl. 1992 by Ellen Wright.

Publishcd by permission of Mrs. Wright

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fabre, Michel.The unfinished quest of Richard Wright / Michel Fabre : translated

from the French by Isabel Barzun. -2nd ed', Illini Books ed.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-252-01985-7 (cl. : acid-free paper)

ISBN 0-252-06264-7 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

l. Wright, Richard, 1908- 1960-Biography. 2. Afro-American

authors-2othcentury-BiograPhy. I. fitle.PS3545.R81526513 1993

813'.52-dc20I81 92-t4493

CIP

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Tlvelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Ttventy

Chapter Ttventy-One

Contents

vii

xxi

xxix

I

3l

60

73

95

il8140

156

t69

188

207

247

278

302

336

382

407

426

447

461

488

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliographical Essay

lndex

521

533

625

633

Preface to theSecond Edition

I srARrED work. on a literary biography of Richard Wrightshortly after his death in 1960. It *u,

"o*pi"ted in French in 196g

as a Ph.D. dissertation and published in Engli sh as The unfinishedQuest of Richard wright in the united states in 1973, at a time whenBlack studies had become a regitimate academic subject there. Thatsame year I was invited to participate in a seminar on Third worldLiteratures at the university of Missouri, Kansas city. *rriie r haahitherto studied American and African-American curiure, discover-ing the visions and originality of such writers as wilson Harris,Chinua Achebe, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Ezekiel tvtpfranrcte,Paule Marshall, and others who ail attended soon red me inL a ronginvolvement with post-coloniar literatures in English. since then Ihave written on areas ranging from canada to Trinidad, from Nigeriato Australia, and on authors including Margaret Laurence, wore soy-inka, Samuel Selvon, and David lreland, birt because of *y p.ruiou,specialization I have found it impossibre to forsake my earfierinvorve_ments with African-American studies and Richard Wright.

when, on the initiative of professor charles T. Davisl the BeineckeLibrary at Yale university acquired the documents which I had sorteda few years earrier in Mrs. wright's Latin Quarter apartment, I wascalled upon to help with the cataroguing. This resulted in the r9g2publication of Richard Wight, a fiimary Bibliography, prepared incollaboration with professor Davis. coming uJ.r, ir,r'guri.y, orAmerican Hunger (the second half of Wrightis biography, i,f,i.f, fruOhitherto appeared in fragments only), I was arso instrumentar in itspublrcation by Harper and Row in tgll. with Eilen wright t co-eoiteoly Richard wright Reader in 197g. In l9g5 the univJrsity eress ofMississippi irublished my collected critical essays under the title Theworld of Richard wright. In 1990 it brought out Richard wright,sBooks and writers, an annotated catarog of his ribrary horJings, with asubstantial collection of his judgments about the works and authorswhom he h4d read. over th" f"u.r, I have also collaborated with

viii Preface to the Second Edition

Keneth Kinnamon on a project which became A Richard Wright Bib-liography; Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary, 1933-1982. InApril 1990 I helped Jack Moore guest edit a special Wright issue ofMississippi Quarterly. My study of African-American writers inFrance from 1840 to 1980 (published as I-a Rive Noire in Paris andas From Harlem to Paris in the United States), included a chapter onWright in Paris.

Clearly, although my preoccupations encompassed many non-American and other African-American writers and issues, my inter-est in Wright never really abated. With time, thanks in part to theresearch of other scholars and the insights provided by new criticaltheories, I probably gained a better appreciation of his work, bpt Ifeel that I hardly have a better knowledge of his life. Rather, I haveforgotten facts which were familiar to me in the 1960s. Yet my ac-tual, or intellectual, frequentation of the American scene and ofWright's contemporaries or literary followers has certainly broughtme a more balanced appreciation of his place in his times and ours.

After William Morrow allowed The Unfinished Quest of RichardWright to go out of print in 1985, I thought of revising it, incorporat-ing into it not only new findings of my own but those of other re-searchers that complemented and corrected my efforts. Not until theUniversity of Illinois Press considered printing a new edition, how-ever, did I thoroughly re-read that book. Upon going through it againand after reviewing Richard Wright; Daemonic Genius (1988) byMargaret Walker, I came to the conclusion that my biography couldbe reprinted with few changes and minor corrections in the text andwith the addition of this preface and a bibliographical essay at theend of this volume in which I detail several studies which add infor-mation and offer some correctives to The Unfinished Quest. But Ihave become more aware that my limitations-or what RichardWright himself called "apropos prepossessions" in his foreword toBlack Power-reflect certain choices, intellectual and otherwise,which I am unwilling or unable to revise.

I have sometimes been asked whether my views on Wright havechanged during all those years. For one thing, I have become moreconvinced that the line is thin indeed between fact and fiction; thathistory and biography which I considered objective re-creations aremostly constructions that bear the stamp of individual vision. Al-though certain hard facts are incontrovertible, I have become morepersuaded of the relativity inherent in achieving a picture of people

Preface to the Second Edition i"x

and events, not to speak of the relativity of the ideological and/or

emotional construct called truth.In his Leadership, l,ove and Aggression (New York: Harcourt,

Brace, Jovanovitch, 1983), a psychoanalytical study of the motivation

of leading personalities like Frederick Douglass, W. E' B. Du Bois,

Richard Wright, and Martin Luther King, Jr', Allison Davis's "scien-

tific" preconceptions as a psychologist lead him to explain Wright's

career in terms of revenge and compensation and to read his literary

achievements as expressions of anxiety and hatred, whereas I had

concentrated on Wright's intellectual growth and positive contribu-

tions to our age. It is certainly accurate to say, as novelist AlainRobbe-Grillet once put it, that "writing is the projection of phantasms

on a page." And Arnold Rampersad's use of the psychoanalytical

approach in his biography of Langston Hughes is a model of the

genre. Yet something in me resists the idea of depicting anybody's

achievements primarily as the result of anxiety, anger, and frustration.

My belief in the potential equality of individuals also probably dis-

courages me from reading Wright's intellectual development and liter-

ary achievement as results of the so-called confused plight of the black

American male who, psychologists and sociologists have long in-

sisted, is supposed to bear the marks of racial oppression forever in

his mind. In other words, I was, and still am, more interested in

Wright as a herald and shaper of our times than as a victim and

prisoner of his past-hence a possibly too triumphant tone in my

evocation of him which, I readily admit, may keep the difficulties and

failures in his existence in the background.

Also, my limited knowledge of the American literary world and of

the black ideological scene probably led me to focus too exclusively

on Wright. Even though I did not think that his behavior or his posi-

tions were wholly admirable, by not contrasting them enough with

those of his contemporaries, I may have created the impression that I

accepted them. I never contemplated getting inside his skin, but I may

have stood too close to him. Thus, in describing his relationship with

other writers, I may have granted Wright's opinions a privileged sta-

tus. In my 1983 essay "From Native Son to Invisible Man" (included

in Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, edited by Kimberly

Benston), I therefore stressed Ellison's role in introducing wright to

French existentialism. In a comparable way, I would certainly con-

sider James Baldwin's opposition to Wright with more detachment

today, placing it in the long-range perspective of literary history rather

x preface to the Second Edition

than insisting on the temperamental antagonism between the two men.Finally, now standing at a further remove from Wright, whose worksonce were my first initiation to the contradictions of the Americanscene, I would probably be more critical of certain attitudes and limi-tations of his, although there is no doubt that, today as twenty yearsago, I find his achievements important and admirable.

When re-reading The Unfinished Quest I was somewhat struck bythe fact that it is primarily an intellectual biography. The amount ofspace granted to projects which Wright never completed, to novelswhich have remained unpublished, to enthusiasms which he couldnever realize may well contribute to overemphasizing his intellectualquest and assiduous work as a writer to the detriment of other aspectsof his everyday existence. Except when writing about his childhoodand youth, I did not devote consistent attention to his emotional life.

I recently had an occasion to discuss his role as a father with hisdaughter Julia, and I was struck by the important part his familyplayed in his life, even though his main concern remained with booksand ideas, with meeting people with whom to exchange views, withposing disquieting questions for which he could not always provideanswers. I was struck by the consideration he had shown his daughtersand by the feeling of security he had instilled into his wife, if only byteaching her to place disturbing events in perspective. It seems that hisown anxieties-the questions and fears he used to mull over secretlyor which surfaced in his letters to Margrit de Sablonibre and in hisconversations with friends in the late fifties-were curbed and hushedin his caring for others. There was indeed in him a good deal ofabruptness, but also more graciousness than I had earlier suspected.

Speaking of Wright's emotional life, I have been told, more fre-quently as time elapsed, about his interest in women as well as inideas. In The Unfinished Quest I have shown, although not in detail,that in Chicago and New York he had engaged in a number of affairs,at times passionate but mostly sexual, before his first marriage, whichlasted only about one year. Although less important to him than crea-tive literature and intellectual pursuit, the company of women pro-vided release and the thrill of feeling more alive. He never stoppedbeing interested in them and had emotional links outside of his mar-riages. However, among the affairs he reportedly had, only two seemto be important.

In 1949 and 1950, during the filming of Native Jon in BuenosAires, where actresses, black and white, were only too ready to make

Preface to the Second Edition xi

themselves available, he is reported to have fallen in love with a light-skinned African-American member of the cast. I have not really at-

tempted to document this relationship. According to Gisele Freund,

who described that person as a light-skinned married woman fromHaiti, Wright would have gone so far as ask her to divorce her hus-

band, which she refused to do.' According to an interview quoted by

Deidre Blair in her biography of Simone de Beauvoir, Ellen Wright

confided at the time to De Beauvoir that she was despondent about her

relationship with Richard, and her existentialist friend construed this

as a typical burden of interracial marriages.2

But Wright's marriage survived. Ollie Harrington, for instance, re-

assured Langston Hughes, who spoke of rumors hinting that Wrightwas divorcing: "Dick is very happy and works with tremendous en-

ergy. They recently bought a house in Normandy," he wrote on April15, 1957. Likewise, Chester Himes, who had returned to Paris fromthe United States, wrote to Carl Van Vechten: "The story about Dick

and Ellen Wright being separated is fantasy, I saw them yesterday and

they are well and getting along fine" (April 23, 1957).

As Wright made clear in his yet unpublished novel "Island of Hal-

lucinations" and as other black Americans, notably William Gardner

Smith, Ollie Harrington, and Chester Himes have reported, it was

routine entertainment for many ofthe brothers to sleep with white fans

and admirers, mostly English-speaking girls and French students.

Smith and Harrington enjoyed reputations as seducers, the latter inflamboyant fashion, the former as a charmer full of consideration. It isnoteworthy that among this circle Wright never earned the reputation

of a philande-rer; on the contrary he was generally considered rather

too straight-somewhat bourgeois and even puritanical't

Again, in 1959 and 1960, when Ellen was living in London where

Julia was studying, it was reported that the Wrights were on the verge

of separating.n Assuredly, there had been tensions in the family for

some time. However, Ellen Wright has always given circumstantial

explanations for her remaining in London, disclaiming that a marriage

break-up was the reason for her departure to England; and it is proven

that Wright had tried to settle there but had been refused an immigrant

visa by the British officials. According to Gisele Freund, Richard had

promised Ellen that he would never divorce her' Celia Hornung has

stated that he would not have done so, if only because he did not want

it to be said that a black and white marriage did not work' Judging

from Wright's reactions whenever he was pushed to a decision, it

xtt preface to the Second Editionappears that he considered it his privilege to have extra-marital affairsbut needed even more to feel anchoredln the security of his family.

From mid-June until December 1959, when shi returned fromAustralia, and from February 1960 until his death, wright was in-volved in a (according to her) "bitter/sweet and often close relation-ship" with celia Hornung, a German Jew fifteen years younger whomhe originally met in London where he had gon" to itnish-The out-siden she shared literary interests with him and she wrote poetry. Herpiece, "Richard wright: l90g-1960," pubrished in Two cr'ries (Sum-mer 196l) gives some idea of her regard for him as welr as of her ownwriting abilities:

strapped to this knowingthat there is no returningto the marvelous probingbeside him and through himis the driftwood of lovingis the always of losing

where his beautiful angerripped rhe tissue of feelingclawed the flimsy of learninginto whirlpools of warninghe grew liquid with doinghe knew nothing of dying

earth black as his thinkingcannot keep him from living:astride words ripe with caringonce as every beginninghe was great as his meaninghe was taller than we.

wright did not have with her the same kind of politicar complicityas with Margrit de sablonidre, his Dutch "sister.,i But he had a deepaffection for her and respected her, describing her as "a strange andwonderful woman." she was sophisticated, conversant with thi parisbohemian scene in the rate fifties and with the goings in the caf6Tournon, where American expatriates congregated.

The question remains, what impact did such involvements withother women and a temporary separition from Elren have on wright's

Preface to the Second Edition xiii

writing career? The fact that Ellen stayed much in London during twoyears certainly made his everyday life in Paris less easy, as he was

accustomed to depending upon her as a secretary and for many things

at home. Her absence may have increased his anxiety when he was ill.According to Celia Hornung, he also welcomed the lack of tensions

resulting from this separation, as Ellen's visits to Paris and domestic

battles sometimes left him upset. I am inclined to believe that the way

in which he had accustomed himself as a child to cultivate egotism

and steel himself against too much emotional involvement played a

lasting role in his life. He could live alone and fend for himself more

readily than, for instance, Chester Himes, who was little able to writein solitude and depended on female companions. Celia Hornung was

of the opinion that, apart from the megalomania that afflicts all writ-ers, Wright was battered and anguished and needed to turn inward, to

concentrate on himself toward the end of his life. This is consistent

with his writing haiku poems then. A man apart, he also appeared to

almost enjoy his loneliness, even his rootlessness, he told several ac-

quaintances around that time.s

What points in The Unfinished Quest wottld I like to correct? One

of these consists in my not having explored fully enough the literaryrelationship between Wright and the South African novelist Peter

Abrahams. Their exchange of letters began in 1947 , when Ed Aswell,Wright's editor at Harper's, asked him to write a blurb fot The Path ofThunder, and it lasted for months, although they only met a couple oftimes. This provided Wright with an inside feeling of what cultural

colonization in Africa had been; it also revealed to him some of the

ways conducive to de-colonization, challenging his belief that Africahad to resort to the weapons of the West to liberate herself.

Four persons have complained about misrepresentations in the ear-

lier edition of my book. Sociologist St. Clair Drake took exception to

my writing that "although Cayton had apparently done most of the

work on the book lBlack Metropolisl Drake's name came first" (p.

269). Drake felt it looked as though I had stated that Cayton had done

most of the work for Black Metropolis while this was only Cayton's

claim, itself reported by Wright who took it at face value in his 1945

journal.u I stand corrected.Margaret Walker has expressed discontent-in A Poetic Equation

(1974) and in an interview included in Black Women Writers at Work

(edited by Claudia Thte, 1983)-at the way I have spoken of her liter-

ary debt to Wright. Writing that he had initiated her "to literature"

xiv Preface to the Second Edition

was indeed inaccurate: he only introduced her to "meaningful writ-ing," as she herself acknowledged in a 1939 letter to him.

Another point concerns pages 461-63 of the autobiography and the

corresponding notes on page 613. It can be summed up briefly here.

The "Letters to the Editor" section ofLP magazine for October 1957

printed a rebuttal, signed by Ollie Harrington, to an article, "Hopeful

Plan for Algeria," which had appeared in the September 30, 1957,

issue of Lrfe. The letter concluded: "Any American who thinks that

France, of her own will, will grant Algeria, if not independence, at

least some liberal status . . . is mad." Similar letters to the editor also

appeared in the London Obsemer. However, Harrington had sent none

of these. When this news leaked out, it created great disturbance in

the black expatriate group as it was clear that someone was trying toimplicate Harrington, exposing him to the risk of being expelled fromFrance.

When I conducted research in the 1960s, all sources unequivocally

described Gibson as the villain, and when the matter was investigated

by the French police, he did sign a confession to his having forged the

letters. I was not able to contact Gibson himself until the late 1970s

(when LeRoy Hodges, whose dissertation on William Gardner Smith Iwas supervising, found his address in London). Gibson claims that

William Gardner Smith's pro-Algerian sympathies played some part

in their concocting the scheme, although Smith was never mentioned

in Gibson's written confession at the time. The other people in-volved were convinced that Gibson was working as an agent for the

FBI or CIA, but he claims he was cleared from such charges brought

against him.'Lastly, Ben Burns wrote to me on November 25, 1980: "I have

reread your passages on page 449 which intimate that somehow I was

part of some kind of reactionary conspiracy to discredit Wright. . . .

It very well may be, as you state, that Dick felt this . . . but that is not

the way the text is written. Never in my Reporter afticle did I state that

Wright's article was 'subversive.' . . . In the article I stated that John

H. Johnson described the article as verging on the 'subversive.'

Wright in his letter to Reynolds mistakenly blamed me for the use ofthe term. . . . Suffice it to conclude by stating once again that, while Idiffered with Dick on some of his more extreme viewpoints, we were

on the same side politically far more than opposites."

Last but not least, I have been asked repeatedly whether I had

discovered further indications allorving me to conclude that Wright had

Preface to the Second Edition -rl

been assassinated by order of the CIA. Rumors about his having been

poisoned started shortly after his funeral; many versions of Wright's

possible assassination irave been peddled since' It ha-s been said that

ire had been poisoned by a female guest who cooked for him during a

dinner pany in his apartment or that, while at the clinique Eugene

Gibez for a checkup, ie had been administered an injection of poison

by a mysterious female visitor. [,ast year I was told that, at a party in

an artistt studio twenty years ago a Southerner called George had

related that a drunken CIA agent had boasted he had smothered

Wright with a pillow on his hospital bed' I have not-been able to track

dow-n euen the artist in this retributive revision of the bedroom scene

in Native Son.

I can only repeat that Dr. Vladimir Schwartzman told me in 196l'

He had seni Wright to the clinic for a checkup because he had the flu

and did not feel;ll. Wright had been cured (by him) of amoebas a

couple of years before without having undergone an emetine treatment

for i. Around 1957 Wright (claiming that some members of his fam-

ily had a heart conditionl had requested a heart checkup which had

fioved satisfactory. Schwartzman had never entertained any suspi-

cions about Wrigirt's death, as he believed an infarctus to be fatal

*h"n o""u..ing a-t such un early age' The doctor provided exactly the

same informati-on when David Bakish interviewed him in 1968'

I have not undertaken new research about this and my feelings

remain the same. ln my opinion the CIA would not have shrunk from

suppressing a dangerous opponent to their policies' -but

among

*.igttt't ii"otoglcal and political activities at the time I could find

nothing likely t; lead the CIA to consider him dangerous and subver-

sive eiough to warrant assassination The disclosure of the (admit-

LOiV tr"un"ify censored) FBI dossier about wright does not suggest that

he was under longer or more special surveillance than James Baldwin

or Chester Himes.In "Black Boys and the FBI" (Times Literary Supplement' Novem-

ber 30, 1990, pp. IZSO-St), James Campbell even argues.that Wright

collaborated to-some degree with the U'S' government in 1956 be-

cause an FBI document mentions that, on his own initiative' Wright

contacted the embassy to express concern over the leftist tendencies of

the executive committee of the Soci6t6 Africaine de Culture' then

engaged in the preparation of the first Black writers conference But

"uJnlf tn" FBI informer is correct, one can hardly speak of collabora-

tion; oth", sources reveal that Wright was only one among many who

rvt preface to the Second Editionthought that the presence of the Communist W. E. B. Du Bois at themeeting would be a mistake. And several French_speaking organizersalso- feared, with good reasons, that the French Comriuni'st partywould try to capitalize on a cultural conference convened in a spirit ofnon-exclusion on political grounds. In fact, Wright only asked thecultural services at the embassy to suggest names of moderate dele-gates, and he had previously established a list that included ChesterHimes, Ralph Ellison, and William Gardner Smith. If Wrilht did notcollaborate with U.S. officials, he did little to attract thJir ire, al-though his presence and that of other black Americans in paris wasinterpreted as an anti-racist and un-American statement.

It is certain that for several years Wright himself kept hinting ofsinister moves by FBI or CIA agents among Black expatriates in kristo such a degree that Himes and Harrington, his closest friends, feltthat the man whom Himes would joking-iy call ..the healthiesi hypo_chondriac in history" was also Uecoming paranoid, they reiused totake his fears seriously, however,

"u"n *h"n they foundiut that his

apartment had indeed been bugged. He would aiso call them beforegolng to the American Hospilal for his semi_annual checkup, claimingthat.nothing would happen to him there at least. Consequ"ntty, *f,"nhe died in another clinic, where he had been sent fo; a

"t L"tup,

Harrington's suspicions were aroused. He was spending the weekendat the Moulin d'Ande in Normandy when Wrijht lefifor the ctinicand has been reponed by different persons as saying that Wright hadsenl-him a telegram asking him to contact him (eithir..on M-onday,,as Harrington told David Bakish on July 23, 196g, or .,immediatelv,,as reported in the December l]., lg77, iss[le of l orld magazine) butthat he had arrived too late. It was also said that Wright"hal askedHarrington to have his feces (other versions say his

"urine, or his

vomit) analyzed.Harrington was most certainly at the origin of these rumors that

circulated in the black American colony in-paris wten, onty u fe*days after Wright's cremation, it was said at the Caf6 Tournon rhat hemight have been poisoned by the CIA. However, the artilie wnichHarrington wr91e for Ebony magazine shortly aftei wright,s Oeattr, inconsultation with Ellen Wright and with the help of Clesrer Himes,dld not mention foul play. Why. then? For one thing, Harrington hadnot been in Paris when Wright died on November 2gl 1960, at"l I p.rra.Chester Himes had not been there either, and, he declared in hisautobiography, My Life of Absurdity, he left paris too early to hear

Preface to the Second Edition xvtt

about assassination rumors. Celia Hornung has stated that Wright had

brooded about the possibility that he might be assassinated for some

time (this also appears in his last letters to De Sablonibre, which are

quoted at length in The Unfinished Quest) and that several people

knew about this, which led some of their acquaintances to wonder

why there had been no autopsy. Ellen Wright has always maintained

that there was no autopsy because she did not suspect foul play; also

that Richard had not told to her that he feared for his life. This can be

explained, I feel, by his desire not to have his wife worry unduly and

also because he tended to put things more dramatically with friends

than with the woman who shared his life on a regular basis According

to Ellen Wright, Ollie Harrington only told her of his suspicions on

the evening after the cremation; had she been told before, she would

not have hesitated to request an autopsy. Why, then, didn't Harrington

speak out earlier? Hornung has suggested that fear may have pre-

vented him from mentioning his misgivings in the Ebony anicle while

he talked more freely at the Caf6 Tournon before leaving Paris for a

visit to East Berlin shortly after.s

Julia Wright's forthcoming book may shed additional light on the

end of the novelist's career. A personal memoir, it will also be an

assessment of the last years of his life. It should greatly contribute to

communicating a sense of Wright's personality and to restoring the

day-to-day dimension of the writer as a family man. This is something

which I did not try, not having known Wright personally and feeling

that it was not for me to attempt it.

NOTES

I . I thank David Bakish for generously letting me use the transcripti of thc

interviews he made in 1968 and 1969, when he conducted research for his

study of Richard Wright. They include a July 1968 exchange with Gisile

Freund, who photographed the filming of Native Son in Argentina The in-

formation on the "light-skinned Haitian lady" comes from her' In reccnt

conversations with me Ellen Wright declared that she only knew about onc

affair of her husband, with a black American member of the cast'

2. Bair writes that Wright's marriage grew increasingly troubled in thc

early 1950s and that Ellen came to depend on Simone de Beauvoir as "a

trusied sounding board for her marital affairs. . Beauvoir politicizcd

Wright's marital situation by saying, 'lt is funny ho\tr all thosc cx-

Communists [Arthur Koestler, lgnazio Silone] made wrccks of their mar-

xviii Preface to the Second Edition

riages"' (Simone de Beauvoir [New York: Simon & Schuster, 19901, p.389). When I interviewed De Beauvoir myself, I did not ask her any precisequestion about Wrightt intimate life and she did not allude to this.

3. According to Celia Hornung, jealousy was a reason for Wright's dislikeof William Gardner Smith-a less important writer than he yet one verysuccessful with women. But did not Wright have just the opposite attitudetowards Ollie Harrington, a notorious seducer whom he considered as a closefriend, not a rival?

A couple of reports differ with this staid view of Wright. A female Englishfriend of Lesley Himes whom he had invited for the weekend reported that hetook a group of prostitutes to his country house at Ailly; she found thisexceedingly bizarre. The occasion, however, seems to correspond to the timewhen Wright was working on a sequel to The Long Dream, whose protago-nist was an American Black who procured prostitutes for American NATOsoldiers. That year Wright alluded in two interviews to his doing research onprostitution just as Zola had done before writing his nwel Nana. Both OllieHarrington and Leroy Haynes told David Bakish in July 1968 of Wrightassociating with prostitutes for research purposes; he was interested in theirmotivation. Likewise, Celia Hornung reponed that Wright drove down to iheSouth of Spain in the company of a Barcelona prostitute; he mentions her inPagan Spain, because of her correspondence with a few American GIs.

4. Wright had a ground-floor studio on rue Rdgis and a young Japanesegirlfriend, Mary Ok€, would cook for him there some time before he died.Mary Ok6 stayed in t €sley kckard's apartment for a while around that time(Lesley Himes, interview with author, March 10, 1990).

5. According to Michel Terrier, Wright spoke about his rootlessness inpositive terms with several French students after a lecture in 1959, evenconsidering it as a real asset.

6. St. Clair Drake wrote me on December 20, l9?7: "Both your volumeand Constance Webb's refer to a meeting at Wright's house in which I amreputed to have taken an exheme economic interpretation of race relations. Icannot quarrel with what is printed because you are working with Dick'sjournals as a source. . . . Both he and Cayton were playing the amateurpsychiatrist and his remarks . . . can only b€ understood in terms of his owntendency to think of me as a 'Stalinist.' I did not take the position he attrib-uted to me.

"Another statement hovr'ever, does me a grave injustice. This is the state-ment that Horace Cayton did most of the writing of Black Metropolis, butthat Dick thought the fact should be concealed from Harcoun and my nameshould be pushed to the front. Horace insisted that I be placed in the senioreditor position over the advice of S. Lloyd Warner on the grounds that I haddone most of the actual writing although he had planned the research and, ofcourse, read and criticized what I had written."

Preface to the Second Edition xlx

7. Richard Gibson to Michel Fabre, November 18, 1987. Harrington has

always insisted that Gibson wanted to get him expelled from France aftertheir quarrel when Gibson had refused to vacate the apartment on rue de

Seine which Harrington had let him have for three months while he was inSweden. ln a June 26, 1977, letter to LeRoy Hodges, Gibson stated that thewhole thing had been the result of a scheme he and Smith had concocted: he

had acquired pro-Algerian sympathies because, being lighrskinned, he was

often mistaken for a North African by the French police and treated accord-

ingly; he claimed Smith had joined him in doing something to help the

Algerians by denouncing French colonialism in EnglishJanguage publica-tions. Signing the names of others would serve as a protection, and if ques-(ioned by French authorities each in turn could deny having written the letter.

Smith was supposed to get the approval of other black Americans and repon-edly suggested that the first letter be sent in the name of Harrington. Consid-ering that Smith may have provided the French police with proof that Gibsonwas the forger, Smith's motives for betraying someone whom he was friendlywith remain unexplained. He did not wish to discuss what he considered "anugly occurrence" when I interviewed him in February 1969.

8. It has been suggested that Harrington was fleeing, seeking refuge

among the Communists. However, in a telephone conversalion in the mid-1960s he told me that he had been invited to East Germany then was com-pelled to prolong his stay because of an international political confrontation.

On December l'l, 1977, lVorld magazine published an exclusive story,"Was Wright Assassinated?" quoting Harrington at length. This interview by

Terry Cannon mentioned Harrington receiving a telegram which read:

"Ollie, please, come see me as soon as you get this," reportedly sent bywright the day before he died. ln the same issue, under the title "The Myste-rious Death of Richard wright," Harrington himself mostly dealt with the

publication of American Hunger, which he construed as a plot to discreditCommunism against the will of Wright sixteen years after his death. Havingbeen instrumental in this publication, I know for certain that Harrington'spro-Communist bias led him astray. Also, when Harrington recalled that"one morning in 1956 Dick Wright telephoned [him] to lunch at his flat on

rue Rdgis" (page M 5) and told him that he was going to refuse re-publicalionof his "anti-communist" essay by Richard Crossman (which he did), Har-rington made a strange mistake, since Wright did not reside on rue Rdgis

until two years later, which leads me to question whether he really wrote thepiece in World. Besides, in this article Harrington only repeated his suspi'cions about the FBI and CIA, and wright's paranoid fear of them. He dis-closed no evidence.