Hurston, Wright, McCullers, and Literary History

Hurston, Wright, McCullers, and Literary History

            Mentioning Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright in the same sentence is an invitation to engage heated disagreements, and these are based most frequently on one's passionate ideological commitments. Some Hurston scholars delight in accusing  Wright of being a misogynist, an unredeemed sexist, and a dupe of Marxist thought for what he said or did not say in his review of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.   They minimize exploring Wright's early stances in judging literature. For them, it is of little importance to assess Wright's framing of his thoughts through the lens of "Blueprint for Negro Writing," the manifesto which guided his critical creativity from 1937 to 1960.  Equally important, perhaps, is viewing his critical stances from the angles of American literary politics to temper distortions. Accounting for Wright's insights and blind spots is an obligation for Wright scholars and literary historians who want to present a judicious portrait of Wright's mind and the minds of African American writers who are forthcoming about their political views.

              It is relatively clear that such iconic figures as Hurston, Wright, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois are "objects" emotion-raising political debate about accommodationists and rebels. Literary matters are not immune to the  kinds of disputation to be found in political discourses..  The necessity of explaining over and over that Wright, Hurston, Washington and DuBois are not enemies in an unbroken circle is a response to covert dynamics in American publishing, to a contrived wedge used at project the semblance of discord  various times between selected African American writers; the wedge creates a climate of control in marketing works and literary reputations..  It is far weightier than trash talk about the New Orleans Saints and the Philadelphia Eagles, because deliberations about representative figures are more life-invested than noisy arguments about sports.  What is common, however,  to both kinds of discourse is divisiveness.

            The divisive action is formulaic.  Select two figures   ---   Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.; extract diametrically opposed quotations from each; magnify and distort the differences and then claim that the difference is symbolic of some more or less permanent flaw in the collective consciousness of a people. The gesture, replete with ideological baggage, is one of bad sociology, bad psychology, and bad history.  If we incorporate the gesture in our writing of literary history, we become complicit in undermining the very collective memory we pretend we are building.  We certainly do not have much  control over the  ultimate effects of  critical language.  For that reason we must be cautious in how we use it in the manufacturing of values and  history.

            What is to be explained insofar as making a narrative (a history) about African American writing is concerned initially appears to be fairly simple. The task of placing Zora Neale Hurston in conversation as it were with Richard Wright centers both of them in the contexts of the Great Depression. Wright published “Between Laughter and Tears,” a combined review of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Waters Turpin’s These Low Grounds in the October 5, 1937 issue of New Masses. Wright’s evaluation of both novels was less-than favorable.  Apparently, Turpin did not respond to Wright in print, but Hurston had a fine opportunity to repay Wright in kind when she reviewed Uncle Tom’s Children   in “Stories of Conflict.” Her comments on Wright's stories in the April 2, 1938 issue of Saturday Review of Literature  were  less-than-favorable. Once we go beyond the simple fact that the reviews were published, explanation becomes complicated.

            Wright had been critical of Hurston’s sentimentality, her exploration of the human heart at the expense of ignoring any impact that de facto and de jure segregation, systemic racism, might have had on the characters that peopled her novel.  Hurston in turn was critical of Wright’s preoccupation with race hatred, his exploitation of “the wish-fulfillment theme,” and his apparent fidelity, as she informed her audience, to “the picture of the South that the communists have been passing around of late.”  Hurston was not sympathetic to the restrictions of thought implicit in Marxism American style.  Wright had no patience with her “facile sensuality” that could be a portal to the realm of minstrelsy.  The difference that emerges is grounded in opposing ideas about the function of literature or writing in life and the role of the writer.  On the surface one finds a similar aesthetic  difference in the writing of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, but neither of those American writers had to be anxious about the gaze and subsequent articulation of the racial Other.  Hurston and Wright, on the other hand, had genuine reasons for concern about the effects of writing upon the minds of racially embattled readers.  As we move forward in plotting a history in which call and response may be a central ingredient, we engage motives and intentions and the wonderful messiness we are seeking to tame.

            Wright and Hurston were very careful to deflect attention from personality to writing.  In our interpretation of the reviews, it is crucial to note the judgments the two writers make about technical skill.

“Miss Hurston can write,” Richard Wright admitted.  He found, however, that her dialogue “manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their simplicity but that’s as far as it goes.” Hurston did not catch the “complex simplicity” that Wright had promoted earlier in 1937 in “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” That is to say, she succeeded in simplicity but missed “all the complexity, the strangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over the most sordid existence….”[Blueprint, section  6: Social Consciousness and Responsibility]  At second glance, it is not Hurston’s romanticism or love of her people  that Wright is criticizing. He condemns  her failure to link folklore with “the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today.” [section 6]

Hurston complimented Wright by suggesting that “[s]ome of his sentences have the shocking-power of a forty-four,” a feature that confirmed for her that Wright “knows his way around among words.”  Nevertheless, she found his representation of dialect to be “a puzzling thing.”  How did he arrive at it?  “Certainly,” she proposed, “he does not write by ear unless he is tone-deaf.  But aside from the broken speech of his characters, the book contains some beautiful writing.” What was not beautiful was Wright’s male-dominated subject matter.   “This is a book about hatreds.  "Mr. Wright,” according to Hurston, “serves notice by his title that he speaks of people in revolt, and his stories are so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live.  Not one act of understanding and sympathy comes to pass in the entire work.” She noted later in the review that “Long Black Song” [Hurston did not refer to the story by title] had “lavish killing” and perhaps enough of it “to satisfy all male black readers.” It seems that Hurston's beliefs about the function of art did not accommodate  single-minded emphasis on the violence in black Southern life  publicized in such black newspapers as the Chicago Defender.  What was excessive for Hurston was normal for Wright.. Their Eyes Were Watching God  serves as a testament that violence and hatred in fiction should be tempered by civility, love, compassion. Uncle Tom's Children offers counter-testimony that  confronting lurid violence and hatred is a writer's burden.

 It is reasonable to assume that the compliments are gestures of respect , applause for technical accomplishment.   The respect is balanced by recognition of shortcomings regarding Hurston’s  description of people’s mental habits (in spaces that do not acknowledge fully the viciousness of the racial contract in the United States)   and Wright’s description of how people sound, his inadequate depiction of variation in dialects.

  Hurston’s response came approximately six months after Wright’s call. It is the recognition of balance or harmony  between the two reviews that is important in our analysis as we map ideological African American  spaces.  .

            It is a vanished temporal space that the literary historian seeks to reconstruct. That job depends on socially constructing what we imagine to have been reality for Hurston and Wright and their readers, and the least controversial comment we can make is that the two of them were contributors to a discourse that is literary, social, and political.  They were writers writing about writing.

 But to or for whom were Hurston and Wright sending forth  judgments?  The messages in this instance were directed toward the readers of New Masses and Saturday Review of Literature, magazines that had different objectives. We do not have in-depth  information about the actual composition of those readerships, but we can  speculate that Wright addressed people who were sympathetic to proletarian and/or communist views; Hurston addressed readers who thought of themselves as “cultured” and perhaps not very much charmed by social facts   We should avoid using the familiar liberal/conservative dichotomy, because it is misleading. It seems better to speculate that Hurston and Wright intended to influence thinking about what kind of African American (Negro in the 1930s) fiction ought to be promoted.  This “fact” precludes hasty conclusions about the differences the writers were presenting.  and about their motivations.  It cautions us to try as best we can to make our historical narrative subtle and nuanced (and we might even strive for honesty) as we deal with what we think are the referents in and outside their texts.

Comparing  the reviews by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright does not give us a template for comparing their fiction and non-fiction.  It helps us, however, to think more seriously about productive angles in literary history, about the possibility that twentieth-century writers such as Hurston and Wright teach us about the endless motions of the conservative and the subversive.  The real work of making a narrative would involve more ingredients ----a sense of how the reception of books was affected by the latter stages of the  Great Depression , Wright’s immersion in the radical moment of 1937-38 and Hurston’s creative transcendence of that moment, Wright’s conserving the radical tradition of black nationalism and Hurston’s subverting the idea that a black writer had to be radical in just one way, faithful to a single “ISM” in order to be responsible.  Wright and Hurston teach us how literature is always trying to correct the partial blindness in our grasp of our lives in a society.  Yes, literature can be a monument to individual and collective creativity.  It is also an intervention that we allow to entertain us or to instruct us, and intervenes best when we think of the author’s work as writing not capital (L) literature.

Thus, pitting Hurston against Wright, or pitting the whole tradition of male writing against the whole tradition of female writing, helps us to achieve a strong sense of difference in values and ideologies that are in need of contexts that are often not obvious.  I think I am saying that our analysis is partisan not disinterested and dispassionate.  The subjectivity involved in writing the literary history is not afraid to articulate its presence, because no historian of anything is possessed of omniscience.

In dealing with Wright's subjectivity, we learn much about the expanse of his political" interests by inspecting his August 5, 1940 review "Inner Landscape"  in the New Republic of Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.  Made confident by the groundbreaking success of Native Son, Wright could assess the achievement of McCullers' first novel by displacing Marxist correctness with his own feelings about how race-marked humanism might function in literature .in the modernist tradition of Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway..  Wright suggested that McCullers' depiction of "loneliness, death, accident, insanity, fear, mob violence. and terror " was uniquely individual. It  possessed o a "quality of despair….more natural and authentic that that of Faulkner."  Her writing "makes Hemingway's terse prose seem warm and partisan by comparison."  Wright chose his words carefully to highlight his feelings about how the best of Southern white writing should give "the violent colors of life…a sheen of weird tenderness."  Wright upped the stake by proclaiming he did not know what McCullers' novel was about.  Here is one key instance of the surprise that characterizes the working of Wright's critical imagination.  Wright did know what McCullers' novel was about, and he demonstrates as much in his economic tracing of the novel's plot, precise depiction of characters, and evocation of "astonishing humanity."

Wright's pretense of ignorance is a cover for his regard for the psychoanalytic profundity of McCullers' vision, as he commends the novel for what three years earlier he claimed was missing in Their Eyes Were Watching God ----“all the complexity, the strangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over the most sordid existence."  The word "sheen" is telling, because Wright had strategically erased sheen from the text of Native Son.  It can be argued that rather than contradicting himself, Wright is reinforcing the idea that the value of literature is embodied less in the saying than in "the angle of vision from which life is seen and how "obscure, oblique and elusive emotions" are accentuated.  Wright's enthusiastic appreciation of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is predicated on his consistent distrust of sentimentality and efforts in his fiction to forge challenging angles of vision.

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