Bigger Than Big

“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” by Richard Wright, 1940

This is an obscure lecture on a work of proletarian literature written by Wright, a former Communist Party member.  It is about his most famous book Native Son and its chief protagonist Bigger Thomas.  Native Son was recently redone and modernized as a Netflix film, though the film lacks the power of the original book and also changes the original text.  Native Son is the story of a dark-skinned 20-year old on Chicago’s Southside in the 1930s.  It was one of the first books to lay out the effects of urban racism and poverty and their consequences on darker-skinned people, especially boys.

This lecture starts by explaining it will not deal with the psychological input the author might have had on the book.  Wright says he modeled Bigger after four different kinds of kids he met in the south – all misfits or rebels of one kind or another.  1., a bully, 2., a scammer who hated white people, 3.,a thug and eventual criminal and 4., an unemployed man who hated Jim Crow and was eventually institutionalized.  As Wright thought about it and worked with lighter-skinned writers, he realized that the ‘Bigger’ type was not just limited to African-Americans but included some European-Americans, Russians and even Lenin.  All suffered from a certain kind of extreme alienation from the societies they lived in and who felt apart from them.

Wright’s chief fear was that his honest but negative portrayal of what institutional racism does to young men might further confirm the ideas of the racists.  Why not create an ‘uplifted Negro,’ the middle-class ‘blacks’ asked, the same question even his Communist Party comrades asked.  Wright later left the CP after their attempts to control his writing and failure to work against racism during WWII.  (This story is revealed in a later book American Hunger where he is accused of Trotskyism by the CP.  Among other things, like breaking with 'socialist realism' as the only way to write he had become friends with C.L.R. James of the SWP.)  As he humorously remarks, he had written an earlier book called Uncle Tom’s Children that “even banker’s daughters could weep over and feel good about.”  He wasn’t going to do that again, so he created Bigger, an anti-hero of sorts.

Wright reveals that a rape case in Chicago described in the Chicago Tribune formed a template for much of the Bigger story. Rape in those days was an excuse for the cops to round-up any vulnerable dark-skinned kid and rope him into the crime, according to Wright. The ‘Biggers’ were their target. Unlike the South, Chicago was a monstrous town that accelerated any rebellion like kindling on a low fire.  Native Son is set in urban Chicago in all its crowded, crooked, classist glory, not in the South.

Richard Wright in plaid

Wright calls writing ‘significant living’ – a form of consciousness combining politics, science, experience, memory and imagination.  The first draft was done in 4 months, running above 500 pages, starting with the second scene, as Wright dumped the first.  He used stream-of-consciousness, interior monologue, a dream state, then matter-of-fact depictions in his text.  Wright thinks that all serious fiction is “character-destiny” so Native Son became Bigger’s story alone.  Unlike some of his contemporaries, Wright considered the story of African-Americans to be horrible enough to fuel any amount of literature.  Wright ends by saying “If Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror.  Horror would invent him.”  And that horror is racist capitalism.

The speech is published in Early Works, a compendium which includes Lawd Today!, Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son, along with an excellent chronology of Wright’s difficult life.  Wright grew up in a sharecropper family just east of Natchez, MS and moved frequently in the South, then to Chicago and New York  He lived with relatives and worked at every dirty or odd job imaginable, eventually getting hired at the post office for awhile.  In the process he discovered the New Masses, the CP's literature journal, after which he slowly became a full-time writer.

Other prior reviews on anti-racism, Chicago or proletarian literature, use blog search box upper left: “Black Radical,” “Living and Dying on the Factory Floor,” “Are Prison’s Obsolete?” “Prison Strike,” “The New Jim Crow,” “Slavery by Another Name,” and “The  Bomb,” “The Rise and Fall of the Dill Pickle Club,” and “Polar Star,” ‘Red Baker,” “Factory Days,” “American Rust,” “Post Office,” “The Football Factory.”

Thanks and a tip of the black beret to Barry L.!

Red Frog

December 26, 2019