Native Son (60 page)

As I wrote I followed, almost unconsciously, many principles of the novel which my reading of the novels of other writers had made me feel were necessary for the building of a well-constructed book. For the most part the novel is rendered in the present; I wanted the reader to feel that Bigger’s story was happening
now
, like a play upon the stage or a movie unfolding upon the screen. Action follows action, as in a prize fight. Wherever possible, I told of Bigger’s life in close-up, slow-motion, giving the feel of the grain in the passing of time. I had long had the feeling that this was the best way to “enclose” the reader’s mind in a new world, to blot out all reality except that which I was giving him.

Then again, as much as I could, I restricted the novel to what Bigger saw and felt, to the limits of his feeling and thoughts, even when I was conveying
more
than that to the reader. I had the notion that such a manner of rendering made for a sharper effect, a more pointed sense of the character, his peculiar type of being and consciousness. Throughout there is but one point of view: Bigger’s. This, too, I felt, made for a richer illusion of reality.

I kept out of the story as much as possible, for I wanted the reader to feel that there was nothing between him and Bigger; that the story was a special
première
given in his own private theater.

I kept the scenes long, made as much happen within a short space of time as possible; all of which, I felt, made for greater density and richness of effect.

In a like manner I tried to keep a unified sense of background throughout the story; the background would change, of course, but I tried to keep before the eyes of the reader at all times the forces and elements against which Bigger was striving.

And, because I had limited myself to rendering only what
Bigger saw and felt, I gave no more reality to the other characters than that which Bigger himself saw.

This, honestly, is all I can account for in the book. If I attempted to account for scenes and characters, to tell why certain scenes were written in certain ways, I’d be stretching facts in order to be pleasantly intelligible. All else in the book came from my feelings reacting upon the material, and any honest reader knows as much about the rest of what is in the book as I do; that is, if, as he reads, he is willing to let his emotions and imagination become as influenced by the materials as I did. As I wrote, for some reason or other, one image, symbol, character, scene, mood, feeling evoked its opposite, its parallel, its complementary, and its ironic counterpart. Why? I don’t know. My emotions and imagination just like to work that way. One can account for just so much of life, and then no more. At least, not yet.

With the first draft down, I found that I could not end the book satisfactorily. In the first draft I had Bigger going smack to the electric chair; but I felt that two murders were enough for one novel. I cut the final scene and went back to worry about the beginning. I had no luck. The book was one-half finished, with the opening and closing scenes unwritten. Then, one night, in desperation—I hope that I’m not disclosing the hidden secrets of my craft!—I sneaked out and got a bottle. With the help of it, I began to remember many things which I could not remember before. One of them was that Chicago was overrun with rats. I recalled that I’d seen many rats on the streets, that I’d heard and read of Negro children being bitten by rats in their beds. At first I rejected the idea of Bigger battling a rat in his room; I was afraid that the rat would “hog” the scene. But the rat would not leave me; he presented himself in many attractive guises. So, cautioning myself to allow the rat scene to disclose
only
Bigger, his family, their little room, and their relationships, I let the rat walk in, and he did his stuff.

Many of the scenes were torn out as I reworked the book. The mere rereading of what I’d written made me think of the possibility of developing themes which had been only hinted at in the first
draft. For example, the entire guilt theme that runs through
Native Son
was woven in
after
the first draft was written.

At last I found out how to end the book; I ended it just as I had begun it, showing Bigger living dangerously, taking his life into his hands, accepting what life had made him. The lawyer, Max, was placed in Bigger’s cell at the end of the novel to register the moral—or what
I
felt was the moral—horror of Negro life in the United States.

The writing of
Native Son
was to me an exciting, enthralling, and even a romantic experience. With what I’ve learned in the writing of this book, with all of its blemishes, imperfections, with all of its unrealized potentialities, I am launching out upon another novel, this time about the status of women in modern American society. This book, too, goes back to my childhood just as Bigger went, for, while I was storing away impressions of Bigger, I was storing away impressions of many other things that made me think and wonder. Some experience will ignite somewhere deep down in me the smoldering embers of new fires and I’ll be off again to write yet another novel. It is good to live when one feels that such as that will happen to one. Life becomes sufficient unto life; the rewards of living are found in living.

I don’t know if
Native Son
is a good book or a bad book. And I don’t know if the book I’m working on now will be a good book or a bad book. And I really don’t care. The mere writing of it will be more fun and a deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody.

I feel that I’m lucky to be alive to write novels today, when the whole world is caught in the pangs of war and change. Early American writers, Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne, complained bitterly about the bleakness and flatness of the American scene. But I think that if they were alive, they’d feel at home in modern America. True, we have no great church in America; our national traditions are still of such a sort that we are not wont to brag of them; and we have no army that’s above the level of mercenary fighters; we have no group acceptable to the whole of our country upholding certain humane values; we have no rich sym
bols, no colorful rituals. We have only a money-grubbing, industrial civilization. But we do have in the Negro the embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of even a James; and we have in the oppression of the Negro a shadow athwart out national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even the gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne. And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.

R
ICHARD
W
RIGHT
.
N
EW
Y
ORK
, M
ARCH
7, 1940.

This volume presents two works by Richard Wright: a novel
, Native Son,
and
an essay on its writing. The text of
Native Son
is from the completed page proofs, and the text of the essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” is from its first pamphlet publication. This text of
Native Son
is the last version of the text that Wright prepared without external intervention. A great deal of material pertaining to the publication of these works, including typescripts, page proofs, and correspondence between Wright and his publishers, is contained in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Other significant materials are held in the Fales Collection of the New York University Library and the Firestone Library at Princeton University.

Wright sent an outline for
Native Son
to Harper and Brothers in February 1938, and delivered the final typescript to Aswell at Harper in June 1939. This copy was prepared by a typist working with Wright from a corrected second draft that included typed changes inserted with paste. This typescript, showing a copy-editor’s markings, is now at the Beinecke Library. The markings generally have to do with capitalization, hyphenation, typographical errors, and changing numerals to words. There are also a few cases where conjunctions have been added or deleted.

Two sets of page proofs for
Native Son
are known to exist. The first set, in the Fales Collection at New York University, contains markings in various hands, including Wright’s. Apparently this set was corrected by the Harper and Brothers editors and reviewed and approved by Wright. The second, and later, set (Beinecke Library, Zan W936 94C na) shows the earlier corrections now set in type. It is a bound set of page proofs that Harper
and Brothers sent to the Book-of-the-Month Club in August 1939. The bound set was originally intended as a reviewer’s copy for the previously announced fall publication, but the interest expressed by the Book-of-the-Month Club caused the publication date to be delayed from month to month while the book club deliberated.

On August 22, 1939, Aswell wrote to Wright: “And incidentally the Book Club wants to know whether, if they do choose
Native Son
, you would be willing to make some changes in that scene early in the book where Bigger and his friends are sitting in the moving picture theatre. I think you will recognize the scene I mean and will understand why the Book Club finds it objectionable. They are not a particularly squeamish crowd, but that scene, after all, is a bit on the raw side. I daresay you could revise it in a way to suggest what happens rather than to tell it explicitly.”

This scene, as contained in the typescripts, the Fales Collection proofs, and the bound set of proofs, was drastically altered for the published text. Wright rewrote the entire scene, making only passing reference to a newsreel and describing at length a feature film,
The Gay Woman
. In so doing, he eliminated all mention of Mary Dalton (who is featured in the newsreel in the original scene) and all references to masturbation. This change also required him to revise other passages further on, including the prosecutor’s speech at Bigger’s trial. Other changes were also requested: toning down explicit sexual language, altering details of plot, and shortening the speeches of Bigger’s lawyer and the district attorney. A few paragraphs were added, and some changes may have been made to avoid resetting long stretches of type. On September 28, 1939, Aswell wrote to Wright: “I have looked over your revisions, and they seem to me to take care of everything essential. I want, however, to look them over once more just to make sure that we haven’t missed anything. As for the question of Bigger’s articulateness at the end, it is my recollection that only one person questioned this, and that most of them had not noticed it in reading the book and did not attach great importance to it when it was pointed out. My hunch is to let it stand as you have it. There is no news as yet, but there may be shortly.” Later, on January 11, 1940, Aswell wrote in a letter to Wright, “We’ve had a cable from London that Gollancz will bring out an English edition. In this connection, you will be interested to know that Gollancz turned it down flatly when they reviewed the first uncorrected proofs. After you made the changes for the Book Club, we sent Gollancz a revised set, and this apparently made them change their minds and they accepted it.”

By January 1940, the Book-of-the-Month Club had decided to accept
the novel. The changes requested by the book club had previously been incorporated into a new set of proofs, which Wright reviewed in November 1939.
Native Son
, with an introduction by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, was published on March 1, 1940, by Harper and Brothers and was a dual-selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. All subsequent editions used this revised text. In July 1940, Wright sent Aswell a list of three corrections to be made in later printings. These were not incorporated into the plates until late 1941 or early 1942. All have to do with Chicago geography: “Adams Street” becomes “Seventh Street” at 65:4 in this volume; “northward” becomes “westward” at 173:16; and “HALSTEAD” (a street name) becomes “HALSTED” at 255:33.

Because major alterations were made in
Native Son
as a consequence of the book club’s intervention in the publication process, the text of
Native Son
presented in this volume is that of the bound page proofs, which were sent to Book-of-the-Month Club in August 1939, and which are now held at the Beinecke Library (Zan W936 94C na) at Yale University. The three corrections Wright sent to Aswell in 1940 have been incorporated into the text. All changes in wording that Wright made between August 1939 and the publication of the first edition in 1940 are presented in the notes.

“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” was delivered as a lecture on March 12, 1940, at Columbia University and was delivered again a few weeks later at the Schomberg Library in Harlem. Most of the text appeared in the
Saturday Review of Literature
for June 1, 1940, and a more condensed version was published in
Negro Digest
in the fall of 1940. The first complete printed text was published by Harper and Brothers as a separate 39-page pamphlet in August 1940. Harper and Brothers had intended to use the essay as an introduction to a special “Author’s Edition” of
Native Son
, but when sales slowed, they put off the special edition and issued the essay in pamphlet form. Harper and Brothers added the essay to later printings of
Native Son
in early 1942, using the same plates as the pamphlet. This volume prints the text of “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” from the 1940 pamphlet published by Harper and Brothers.

This volume presents the texts of the original editions or typescripts chosen for inclusion; it does not attempt to reproduce features of the typographic design, such as the display capitalization of chapter openings. The texts are reproduced without change, except for the correction of typographical errors (and the inclusion of the three corrections requested by Wright in
Native Son
). Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization often are
expressive features and they are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular. The following is a list of the typographical errors corrected, cited by page and line number: 20.6, note….; 56.30, drive car; 74.14, by and by; 103.29, mucles; 163.22, is?; 216.18, W—what’s; 233.16, anounce; 261.28, oughn’t’ve; 423.24–25, capitol; 464.7, damned; 509.3, saw; 525.32, Bigger?; 538.22, complimentary.