Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius by Margaret Walker

Somebody has to write a good biography of Richard Wright, begins the author. He had a fascinating life: growing up dirt poor and the wrong colour in fraught racist Mississippi of the nineteen tens and twenties; building his reputation as a writer and social critic with books such as Native Son and Uncle Tom's Children; exiling himself and his family in France, while travelling to Africa, Asia and Latin America as an acclaimed thinker and writer about race, capitalism and opression.

Wright spends his last couple of years a very sick man, separated from his family, convinced he was being hounded by several governments secury agencies. Correctly so, it turned out. His death of a heart attack is shrouded in mystery, with Walker making a argument for the possibility of politiv=cally driven foul play on an international level:

"Padmore, Wright, and Fanon died in the consecutive years 1959, 1960, and 1961, each under mysterious circumstances. Each died unexpectedly in a foreign hospital of natural causes, and each was under international police surveillance. All of these men, along with a fourth friend, C.L.R. James, were the authors of books which together formed the rudiments of revolutionary black national theory. All the leaders of liberation movements throughout the African diaspora turned to these four men for support."

Yes, indeed, somebody really oughtta write a really whiz-bang biography of Richard Wright, 'cause this wasn't it. To be fair, Margaret Walker subtitles this work "a portrait of the man, a critical look at his work" So I can't complain if I find the juicy biography bits only roughly sketched in, and the critique of his ouevre not in my line of interest. But I do object to the university-essay quality that pops up in various chapters. Walker is an established author in her own right, she doesn't need to start with a thesis sentence, attempt to prove her case, and wind up in summation with the same dang point. Not too relaxed. My favourite chapter was "Native Son", in which Walker uses her original troubled diary entry of a visit with Wright in New York City in 1939, which marked the end of their friendship just as Wright's star was rising. It's an immediate, complex jumble of he said/she said. And as the incident unfolds, it becomes clear to the reader what is going on, even while the young and naive diary-writer remains in the dark. Very cool.

Maybe more time needs to pass before a detailed, full-flung biography can be written, I wish that more details about his early life could be unearthed, but they are possibly gone forever. As for the rest, maybe more people need to pass away before information gets out. For example, whatever the British government had in Wright's file has been, according to Margaret Walker, "locked away for one hundred years".

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