The Unfinished Quest of

RICHARD WRIGHT
Michel Fabre
Translated from the French
by Isabel Barzun

''"". Second Edition

" *"/

University ol' Illinois press

Urbanu und Chi<'ago

Richard Wright. photo by Harriet Crowder

'1

Contents

Illini Books edition, 1993

O 1993 by Michel Fabre

Preface to the Second Edition

vii

Preface to the First Edition

xxi

Introduction

xxix

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Originally published 1973 W William Morrow and Company, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

3l

Chapter Three

60

12345CP54321

Chapter Four

73

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Chapter Five

95

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote the following:

Chapter Six

il8

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

Chapter Seven

140

Chapter Eight

156

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

Chapter Nine

t69

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

Chapter Ten

188

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

Chapter Eleven

207

From previously unpublished material by Richard Wright. Copyrighl. 1992 by Ellen Wright.
Publishcd by permission of Mrs. Wright

Chapter Tlvelve

247

Chapter Thirteen

278

Chapter Fourteen

302

Chapter Fifteen

336

Chapter Sixteen

382

Chapter Seventeen

407

Chapter Eighteen

426

Chapter Nineteen

447

Chapter Ttventy

461

Chapter Ttventy-One

488

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fabre, Michel.
The unfinished quest of Richard Wright / Michel Fabre : translated
ed', Illini Books ed.
from the French by Isabel Barzun.

p.

-2nd

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-dc20
I81

92-t4493
CIP

Conclusion
Notes

Bibliographical Essay
lndex

521
533
625

633

Preface to the
Second Edition
I srARrED work. on a literary biography of Richard Wright
shortly after his death in 1960. It *u,
in French in 196g
"o*pi"ted
as a Ph.D. dissertation and published in
Engli sh as The unfinished
Quest of Richard wright in the united states in 1973, at a time when
Black studies had become a regitimate academic
subject there. That
same year I was invited to participate in a seminar
on Third world
Literatures at the university of Missouri, Kansas
city. *rriie r haa
hitherto studied American and African-American
curiure, discovering 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 rong

involvement with post-coloniar literatures in

English. since then I
have written on areas ranging from canada
to Trinidad, from Nigeria
to Australia, and on authors including Margaret
Laurence, wore soyinka, 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 Beinecke
Library at Yale university acquired the documents which
I had sorted
a few years earrier in Mrs. wright's Latin
apartment,
Quarter
I was
called upon to help with the cataroguing. This resulted
in the r9g2
publication of Richard Wight, a fiimary
Bibliography, prepared in
collaboration with professor Davis. coming
uJ.r, ir,r'guri.y, or
American Hunger (the second half of Wrightis
biography, i,f,i.f, fruO
hitherto appeared in fragments only), I was arso
instrumentar in its
publrcation by Harper and Row in tgll. with
Eilen wright t co-eoiteo
ly Richard wright Reader in 197g. In l9g5 the univJrsity eress of
Mississippi irublished my collected critical essays
under the title The
world of Richard wright. In 1990 it brought
out Richard wright,s
Books and writers, an annotated catarog of
his ribrary horJings, with a
substantial collection of his judgments about
the works and authors
whom 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. In

1990 I helped Jack Moore guest edit a special Wright issue of
Mississippi Quarterly. My study of African-American writers in
France from 1840 to 1980 (published as I-a Rive Noire in Paris and
as From Harlem to Paris in the United States), included a chapter on
Wright in Paris.
Clearly, although my preoccupations encompassed many nonAmerican and other African-American writers and issues, my interest in Wright never really abated. With time, thanks in part to the
research of other scholars and the insights provided by new critical
theories, I probably gained a better appreciation of his work, bpt I
feel that I hardly have a better knowledge of his life. Rather, I have
forgotten facts which were familiar to me in the 1960s. Yet my actual, or intellectual, frequentation of the American scene and of
Wright's contemporaries or literary followers has certainly brought
me a more balanced appreciation of his place in his times and ours.
After William Morrow allowed The Unfinished Quest of Richard
Wright to go out of print in 1985, I thought of revising it, incorporating into it not only new findings of my own but those of other researchers that complemented and corrected my efforts. Not until the
University of Illinois Press considered printing a new edition, however, did I thoroughly re-read that book. Upon going through it again
and after reviewing Richard Wright; Daemonic Genius (1988) by
Margaret Walker, I came to the conclusion that my biography could
be reprinted with few changes and minor corrections in the text and
with the addition of this preface and a bibliographical essay at the
end of this volume in which I detail several studies which add information and offer some correctives to The Unfinished Quest. But I
have become more aware that my limitations-or what Richard
Wright himself called "apropos prepossessions" in his foreword to
Black 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 have
changed during all those years. For one thing, I have become more
convinced that the line is thin indeed between fact and fiction; that
history and biography which I considered objective re-creations are
mostly constructions that bear the stamp of individual vision. Although certain hard facts are incontrovertible, I have become more
persuaded of the relativity inherent in achieving a picture of people

April

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 "scientific" 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 contributions to our age. It is certainly accurate to say, as novelist Alain
Robbe-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 discourages me from reading Wright's intellectual development and literary achievement as results of the so-called confused plight of the black
American male who, psychologists and sociologists have long insisted, 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 positions 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 status. 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 consider James Baldwin's opposition to Wright with more detachment
today, placing it in the long-range perspective of literary history rather

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 works

once were my first initiation to the contradictions of the American
scene, I would probably be more critical of certain attitudes and limitations of his, although there is no doubt that, today as twenty years
ago, I find his achievements important and admirable.
When re-reading The Unfinished Quest I was somewhat struck by
the fact that it is primarily an intellectual biography. The amount of
space granted to projects which Wright never completed, to novels
which have remained unpublished, to enthusiasms which he could
never realize may well contribute to overemphasizing his intellectual
quest and assiduous work as a writer to the detriment of other aspects
of his everyday existence. Except when writing about his childhood
and youth, I did not devote consistent attention to his emotional life.
I recently had an occasion to discuss his role as a father with his

I was struck by the important part his family

life, even though his main concern remained with books
and ideas, with meeting people with whom to exchange views, with
posing disquieting questions for which he could not always provide
answers. I was struck by the consideration he had shown his daughters
and by the feeling of security he had instilled into his wife, if only by
teaching her to place disturbing events in perspective. It seems that his
own anxieties-the questions and fears he used to mull over secretly
or which surfaced in his letters to Margrit de Sablonibre and in his
conversations with friends in the late fifties-were curbed and hushed
in his caring for others. There was indeed in him a good deal of
abruptness, but also more graciousness than I had earlier suspected.
Speaking of Wright's emotional life, I have been told, more frequently as time elapsed, about his interest in women as well as in
ideas. 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, which
lasted only about one year. Although less important to him than creative literature and intellectual pursuit, the company of women provided release and the thrill of feeling more alive. He never stopped
being interested in them and had emotional links outside of his marriages. However, among the affairs he reportedly had, only two seem
daughter Julia, and
played in his

to be important.
In 1949 and 1950, during the filming of Native Jon in Buenos
Aires, 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 lightskinned African-American member of the cast. I have not really attempted to document this relationship. According to Gisele Freund,

who described that person as a light-skinned married woman from

Haiti, Wright would have gone so far as ask her to divorce her husband, 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, reassured Langston Hughes, who spoke of rumors hinting that Wright
was divorcing: "Dick is very happy and works with tremendous energy. They recently bought a house in Normandy," he wrote on April
15, 1957. Likewise, Chester Himes, who had returned to Paris from
the 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 Hallucinations" 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 in
flamboyant fashion, the former as a charmer full of consideration. It is
noteworthy 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 Edition

appears that he considered it his privilege to have extra-marital

affairs
but needed even more to feel anchoredln the security

of his family.
From mid-June until December 1959, when shi returned
from
Australia, and from February 1960 until his death, wright was
involved in a (according to her) "bitter/sweet and often
close relationship" with celia Hornung, a German Jew fifteen years younger
whom
he originally met in London where he had gon" to itnish-The
outsiden she shared literary interests with him and she wrote poetry.
Her
piece, "Richard wright: l90g-1960," pubrished in Two
cr'ries (Summer 196l) gives some idea of her regard for him as welr as of her
own
writing abilities:
strapped to this knowing
that there is no returning
to the marvelous probing
beside him and through him
is the driftwood of loving
is the always of losing

where his beautiful anger

ripped rhe tissue of feeling
clawed the flimsy of learning
into whirlpools of warning
he grew liquid with doing
he knew nothing of dying
earth black as his thinking
cannot keep him from living:
astride words ripe with caring
once as every beginning
he was great as his meaning
he was taller than we.

wright did not have with her the same kind of politicar complicity
Margrit de sablonidre, his Dutch "sister.,i But he had a deep
affection for her and respected her, describing her as "a
strange and
wonderful woman." she was sophisticated, conversant with
thi paris
bohemian scene in the rate fifties and with the goings in
the caf6
Tournon, where American expatriates congregated.
The question remains, what impact did such involvements with
other women and a temporary separition from Elren have
on wright's
as with

Preface to the Second

Edition

xiii

writing career? The fact that Ellen stayed much in London during two
years 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 write
in solitude and depended on female companions. Celia Hornung was
of the opinion that, apart from the megalomania that afflicts all writers, 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 acquaintances 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 literary
relationship 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 of
Thunder, and it lasted for months, although they only met a couple of
times. 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 Africa
had to resort to the weapons of the West to liberate herself.
Four persons have complained about misrepresentations in the earlier 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 literary 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 writing," 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 to
implicate Harrington, exposing him to the risk of being expelled from
France.

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 I
was 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

When

in Gibson's written confession at the time. The other people involved 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 of
the term. . . . Suffice it to conclude by stating once again that, while I
differed 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

CIA. Rumors about his having been

funeral; many versions of Wright's
his
after
poisoned started shortly
peddled
since' It ha-s been said that
possible assassination irave been
cooked for him during a
guest
who
ire had been poisoned by a female
dinner pany in his apartment or that, while at the clinique Eugene
poison
Gibez for a checkup, ie had been administered an injection of
party in
by a mysterious female visitor. [,ast year I was told that, at a
had
George
called
Southerner
a
an artistt studio twenty years ago
smothered
had
he
related that a drunken CIA agent had boasted
track
Wright with a pillow on his hospital bed' I have not-been able to
bedroom scene
dow-n euen the artist in this retributive revision of the
in Native Son.
I can only repeat that Dr. Vladimir Schwartzman told me in 196l'
the flu
He had seni Wright to the clinic for a checkup because he had
a
(by
amoebas
him) of
and did not feel;ll. Wright had been cured
treatment
couple of years before without having undergone an emetine
his famof
members
some
(claiming
that
for i. Around 1957 Wright
had
which
checkup
a
heart
ily had a heart conditionl had requested
suspiany
never entertained
fioved satisfactory. Schwartzman had
an infarctus to be fatal
believed
he
as
death,
cions about Wrigirt's
*h"n o""u..ing a-t such un early age' The doctor provided exactly the
1968'
same informati-on when David Bakish interviewed him in
feelings
my
I have not undertaken new research about this and
from
remain the same. ln my opinion the CIA would not have shrunk
among
suppressing a dangerous opponent to their policies' -but
find
could
I
time
the
at
political
activities
*.igttt't ii"otoglcal and
subverand
dangerous
him
nothing likely t; lead the CIA to consider
(admitsive eiough to warrant assassination The disclosure of the
that
LOiV tr"un"ify censored) FBI dossier about wright does not suggest
Baldwin
he was under longer or more special surveillance than James
or Chester Himes.
In "Black Boys and the FBI" (Times Literary Supplement' NovemWright
ber 30, 1990, pp. IZSO-St), James Campbell even argues.that
be1956
in
government
U'S'
collaborated to-some degree with the
Wright
initiative'
his
own
cause an FBI document mentions that, on
of
contacted the embassy to express concern over the leftist tendencies
then
the executive committee of the Soci6t6 Africaine de Culture'
But
engaged in the preparation of the first Black writers conference
of
collaboraspeak
hardly
can
tn" FBI informer is correct, one
who
"uJnlf
sources reveal that Wright was only one among many
oth",
tion;

been assassinated by order of the

rvt

preface to the Second Edition

thought that the presence of the Communist W. E. B.

Du Bois at the
meeting would be a mistake. And several French_speaking
organizers

with good reasons, that the French Comriuni'st party

would try to capitalize on a cultural conference convened
in a spirit of
non-exclusion on political grounds. In fact, Wright
only asked the
cultural services at the embassy to suggest names of
moderate delegates, and he had previously established a list
that included Chester
Himes, Ralph Ellison, and William Gardner Smith.
If Wrilht did not
collaborate with U.S. officials, he did little to attract
thJir ire, although his presence and that of other black Americans
in paris was
also- feared,

interpreted as an anti-racist and un-American statement.

It is certain that for several years Wright himself kept hinting of
sinister moves by FBI or CIA agents among Black
expatriates in kris
to such a degree that Himes and Harrington, his closest
friends,

felt
that the man whom Himes would joking-iy call ..the
healthiesi hypo_
chondriac in history" was also Uecoming paranoid,
they reiused to
take his fears seriously, however,
*h"n they foundiut that his
"u"n
apartment had indeed been bugged.
He would aiso call them before
golng to the American Hospilal for his semi_annual
checkup, claiming
that.nothing would happen to him there at least. Consequ"ntty,
*f,"n
he died in another clinic, where he had been sent fo;
a L"tup,
Harrington's suspicions were aroused. He was spending
the "t
weekend
at the Moulin d'Ande in Normandy when Wrijht lefifor
the ctinic
and has been reponed by different persons as saying
that Wright had
senl-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) but
that he had arrived too late. It was also said that Wright"hal
asked
Harrington 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 he
might have been poisoned by the CIA. However, the
artilie wnich
Harrington wr91e for Ebony magazine shortly aftei wright,s
Oeattr, in
consultation with Ellen Wright and with the help
of Clesrer Himes,
dld not mention foul play. Why. then? For one thing,
Harrington had
not 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 his
autobiography, 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 prevented 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 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 information 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 cxCommunists [Arthur Koestler, lgnazio Silone] made wrccks of their marI.

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 precise
question about Wrightt intimate life and she did not allude to this.
3. According to Celia Hornung, jealousy was a reason for Wright's dislike
of William Gardner Smith-a less important writer than he yet one very
successful with women. But did not Wright have just the opposite attitude
towards Ollie Harrington, a notorious seducer whom he considered as a close
friend, not a rival?
A couple of reports differ with this staid view of Wright. A female English
friend of Lesley Himes whom he had invited for the weekend reported that he
took a group of prostitutes to his country house at Ailly; she found this
exceedingly bizarre. The occasion, however, seems to correspond to the time
when Wright was working on a sequel to The Long Dream, whose protagonist was an American Black who procured prostitutes for American NATO
soldiers. That year Wright alluded in two interviews to his doing research on
prostitution just as Zola had done before writing his nwel Nana. Both Ollie
Harrington and Leroy Haynes told David Bakish in July 1968 of Wright
associating with prostitutes for research purposes; he was interested in their
motivation. Likewise, Celia Hornung reponed that Wright drove down to ihe
South of Spain in the company of a Barcelona prostitute; he mentions her in
Pagan Spain, because of her correspondence with a few American GIs.
4. Wright had a ground-floor studio on rue Rdgis and a young Japanese
girlfriend, 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 in
positive terms with several French students after a lecture in 1959, even
considering it as a real asset.
6. St. Clair Drake wrote me on December 20, l9?7: "Both your volume
and Constance Webb's refer to a meeting at Wright's house in which I am
reputed to have taken an exheme economic interpretation of race relations. I
cannot quarrel with what is printed because you are working with Dick's
journals as a source. . . . Both he and Cayton were playing the amateur
psychiatrist and his remarks . . . can only b understood in terms of his own
tendency to think of me as a 'Stalinist.' I did not take the position he attributed to me.

"Another statement hovr'ever, does me a grave injustice. This is the statement that Horace Cayton did most of the writing of Black Metropolis, but
that Dick thought the fact should be concealed from Harcoun and my name
should be pushed to the front. Horace insisted that I be placed in the senior
editor position over the advice of S. Lloyd Warner on the grounds that I had
done most of the actual writing although he had planned the research and, of
course, 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 after
their 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 in
Sweden. ln a June 26, 1977, letter to LeRoy Hodges, Gibson stated that the
whole 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 accordingly; he claimed Smith had joined him in doing something to help the
Algerians by denouncing French colonialism in EnglishJanguage publications. 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 reponedly suggested that the first letter be sent in the name of Harrington. Considering that Smith may have provided the French police with proof that Gibson
was the forger, Smith's motives for betraying someone whom he was friendly
with remain unexplained. He did not wish to discuss what he considered "an
ugly 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 mid1960s he told me that he had been invited to East Germany then was compelled 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 by
wright the day before he died. ln the same issue, under the title "The Mysterious Death of Richard wright," Harrington himself mostly dealt with the
publication of American Hunger, which he construed as a plot to discredit
Communism against the will of Wright sixteen years after his death. Having
been instrumental in this publication, I know for certain that Harrington's
pro-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-publicalion

of his "anti-communist" essay by Richard Crossman (which he did), Harrington 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 the
piece 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 disclosed no evidence.