Letter to Jimmy

4. the destruction of idols: from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Native Son

In 1948 your friends George Salamos and Hasa Benveniste, also living in France, prepare to launch the journal Zero and call upon you to submit an article. The directors of Zero do not suspect that the text you will submit will ring in the era of hostilities between you and Wright.

The title itself has an agenda: “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (translated into French as “Une opposition complice”).⁴⁴ The article is simultaneously published in the Partisan Review.

The article begins by attacking works of fiction of the time, which, in your opinion, favor moral stories over art. In the “protest novel,” as you call it, the author is indignant and cries out against what is supposed to be an abomination: slavery, racism, and general injustice. You think that this outrage is insincere, nothing more than a showing off of emotions. And it is a known fact that good literature cannot be created on good intentions alone. A very famous novel will serve as your primary target: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In your childhood, you read this book several times. It moved you, touched you.

First published in 1851, the novel takes place in antebellum America. Mr. Selby, a prosperous plantation owner somewhere in Kentucky, prides himself in treating his slaves with a certain degree of charity. Alas, drowning in debt, Mr. and Mrs. Selby must resign themselves to selling two of their slaves: Tom, the “good” old slave, and a child, Harry. Upon meeting Uncle Tom, the young Evangeline St. Clare is touched by the goodness of this man of color, and begs her father to buy him. Is this the end of the tender-hearted slave’s peregrinations? Already weary, he must endure another separation. The novel follows his odyssey with a blend of emotion, sentimentality, and, above all, a clear conscience.

You no longer look at this book in the same light as you did in your childhood. From this point on you consider it to be a “very bad novel,” which you criticize for its “dishonesty,” “sentimentality,” and its “inability to feel.”⁴⁵ Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in your opinion the crown jewel of protest novels, nevertheless inspired other noteworthy writers, especially several of your African-American colleagues, as Amanda Claybaugh confirms: “. . many African-American authors from the first part of the 20th century were tempted, at a certain point in their career, to rewrite Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”⁴⁶

On the list of these epigones, parodists, and imitators, some of whom have more talent than others, is Richard Wright, who publishes Uncle Tom’s Children in 1938. Later, in 1973, there is Amiri Baraka with Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Alternate Ending. Closer to our era, Amanda Claybaugh also mentions Beloved, Toni Morrison’s novel, published in 1987. Faced with this flood of protest novels born under the influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, your judgment is harsh: “It is indeed considered the sign of a frivolity so intense as to approach decadence to suggest that these books are both badly written and wildly improbable. One is told to put first things first, the good of society coming before niceties of style of characterization. [. .] [Protest novels] are fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental; in exactly the same sense that such movies as The Best Years of Our Lives or the works of Mr. James M. Cain are fantasies.”⁴⁷

As Benoît Depardieu judiciously points out, “While African-American writers in days past had emphasized the social origins of black paranoia, such as Richard Wright drawing inspiration from the Chicago school, Baldwin tackles its psychological roots, holding blacks responsible in some part for their own paranoia.”⁴⁸

•••

By leading a crusade against protest novels, you earn your admission into the literary arena and create a reputation for yourself of being a Young Turk.

It must be remembered that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, marketed as one of the first works of anti-slavery fiction, sold more than 300,000 copies in less than two years. The work becomes the only American novel to sell more than a million copies, following closely behind sales of the Bible. Amanda Claybaugh underlines what a great feat this is; at the time, novels were something akin to “public property”: passed from one hand to the next, borrowed from traveling libraries, read out loud to the whole family, meaning that for each copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, there were at least five readers. .⁴⁹

What sparks the success of this novel? It arrives without a doubt at the right moment, at a time when an ever-growing feeling of guilt was clouding the collective memory of white Americans. Beecher Stowe had moreover written her novel in reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, declaring the return of all runaway slaves. The reception of the book is such that its characters become representatives of a part of the nation that considers itself open, enamored with liberty. At last, the reassuring, redemptive conversation that condemns and criticizes an entire system is in the open. Even better, these attacks and charges against the slavery of blacks come from a white woman, she herself a descendant of slave-owners. Based on this, the hasty conclusion is drawn that Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired the anti-slavery movement, a notion reinforced when President Abraham Lincoln, who had just signed the Emancipation Proclamation, invites this illustrious writer to the White House. .⁵⁰

Uncle Tom, the good Negro, enters into the imagination of American society: advertisers latch on. The book is not only a best seller in the United States; its effect reaches international heights, too. In France, for example, George Sand takes up her pen in 1852 to commend the talent of her American female colleague: “The life and death of a child, the life and death of a negro, herein lies the entire book. This negro and this child are two saints from heaven. The friendship that draws them together, the respect these two perfect beings express for one another; it is pure love that fuels the passion of this tragedy. I know not what genius other than saintliness could have imbued this affection and this situation with so sustained or so potent a charm. [. .] Honor and respect to you, Mrs. Stowe. One day or another, your reward already written in the heavens will also be of this world.”

George Sand may be conscious of the novel’s weaknesses, also noted by certain critics, but she is moved by the “long dialogues, the carefully studied portraits” of this book that “mothers, young children and servants can read and understand, and that men, even the highly-placed, cannot disdain.” Her generosity is in the end one of a fully satisfied reader: “If the best praise we can offer a writer is to love her, the most honest we can be with a book is to love its defects. [. .] These defects only exist in relation to artistic conventions that have never been absolute.”

Taking the opposite approach to George Sand, you highlight the fact that these so-called protest novels deprive themselves of the demands of truth, and drown the very essence of the novel in a sanctimonious discourse: “Finally, the aim of the protest novel becomes something very closely resembling the zeal of those alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover the nakedness of the natives, to hurry them into the pallid arms of Jesus and thence to slavery. The aim has now become to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe.”⁵¹

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a “convenient” work for everyone, although its very creation should awaken the collective consciousness and should not sacrifice historical reality for emotion. The characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin wear masks which, when removed, expose the greatest deception. Uncle Tom, for example, represents the stereotype of the black man inherited from the American imagination: he is illiterate, has nappy hair, and his “phenomenal hardiness” always allows him to endure the vicissitudes of the life of a captive, and, in the end, to “triumph” over them. With regard to the other slaves — George, his wife Eliza and their son — the author cannot escape from platitudes. The son resembles down to the last detail the stereotype of a shoeshine boy. Eliza, for her part, is lighter-skinned. While George is darker-skinned, he nevertheless does not have especially “negroid features,” which allows him to pass. When he “escapes from his master’s house disguised as a Spanish gentleman, he can walk through town without arousing anything other than admiration.”⁵²

The academic Amanda Claybaugh, who seems to want to give this classic its due justice, regrets that the work has been wrongly condemned. To those who criticize its racism and sentimentality, Claybaugh would have them remember that Beecher Stowe was the first American to imagine the black slave as a Christ figure. .⁵³

•••

Harsher still are the criticisms you launch against Wright’s Native Son at the end of “Everyone’s Protest Novel,” and, later, in another article entitled “Many Thousands Gone,”⁵⁴ which would appear in the Partisan Review in 1951.

With pencil in hand, reading your work closely, Wright is convinced that you are trying by any means necessary to destroy his work, especially when you place Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Native Son on the same plane. You criticize his character Bigger Thomas for harboring a blind hatred that drives him to rape, an obsessive fear that leads to murder: “Below the surface of this novel there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy. Bigger is Uncle Tom’s descendent, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses.”⁵⁵

But what distances you from Wright even further is his view of black American society. You consider the characters of Native Son to be far removed from the truth of daily life; since they are untethered from reality, they are also separated from the common and painful life of the black American. For you, the setting and dialogues ring false: “It is remarkable that, though we follow him step by step from the tenement room to the death cell, we know as little about him when this journey is ended as we did when it began; and, what is more remarkable, we know almost as little about the social dynamic which we are to believe created him. Despite the details of slum life which we are given, I doubt anyone who has thought about it, disengaging himself from sentimentality, can accept this most essential premise of the novel for a moment.”⁵⁶

As a result, the judgment you later render on the novel as a whole in “Many Thousands Gone” condemns in veiled terms the author’s will to gloss over the most essential point: “What this means for the novel is that a necessary dimension has been cut away; this dimension being the relationship that Negroes bear to one another, the depth of involvement and unspoken recognition of shared experience which creates a way of life. What the novel reflects — and at no point interprets — is the isolation of the Negro within his own group and the resulting fury of impatient scorn. It is this which creates its climate of anarchy and unmotivated and un-apprehended disaster. .”⁵⁷

•••

Shortly after the publication of “Everybody’s Protest Novel” in the journal Zero, you go to Brasserie Lipp, in Paris — Chester Himes is there — and you don’t expect to find Wright. But you do find him there, appearing very grim. He rebukes you for your attitude. He accuses you of betraying him, and, by extension, of contributing not only to the destruction of his position as an established author, but also to the annihilation of African-American literature by stripping it of what it inherently possessed: protest.

An argument breaks out between the teacher and the pupil. Wright, who had taken care to place his copy of the journal Zero on the table, pursues:

“All literature is protest!”

The pupil has been set free:

“All literature may be protest. . ‘but not all protest is literature.’”⁵⁸

You will later give an account of this scuffle in “Alas, Poor Richard,” one of the essays in your collection entitled Nobody Knows My Name. Your conflict had also been widely publicized by critics and academics alike, who heightened it to the level of one of the great literary rivalries in the American literary world.

By reiterating your criticisms of Wright’s work in your piece “Many Thousands Gone” in 1951, two years after your attack against him in Zero, you confirm in some people’s minds the notion that you are doggedly fighting your mentor. The article is perceived as the final signature on the divorce papers. This time the text is longer, more detailed, and in it you dissect Native Son, elaborating again on the notion of the protest novel, to better tear it apart. Wright is presented as the spokesman for the “new black man,” who would have the weighty task of engaging himself in the social struggle after “swallowing Marx whole,” and becoming convinced that the goals of blacks and those of the proletariat were one and the same. However this mission seems difficult to undertake since, as you point out, writers “are not congressmen.” The text displays astounding skill, since in it you assume, like a character in a novel, the role of a white man who evokes then defends the status of the black American, from outside of his own community.

Reading “Many Thousands Gone,” it is clear that you not only insist on this difference of literary opinion, but that you identify yourself by it.

•••

The heart of the problem, however, lay elsewhere. The pupil had acquired his independence and now demands the right to think differently from his mentor. He does not try to hide this desire: “. . I wanted Richard to see me, not as the youth I had been when he met me, but as a man. I wanted to feel that he had accepted me, had accepted my right to my own vision, my right, as his equal, to disagree with him.”⁵⁹

To Wright’s fury, you try to temper the injustice, the wave of criticism crashing down on him. Confronted by those who believe he is cut off from reality, who reproach him for conjuring up a Mississippi and a Chicago that blacks had never experienced, for knowing nothing about jazz, to say nothing of the Africans who call into question how “African” he really is, your criticism brings things back to some kind of order, explains things, and possibly even contextualizes these ambiguous and shadowy subjects. Some of Wright’s opponents went too far — much too far — such as the African who, while listening to the author speak, shouted, “I believe he thinks he’s white!”

You conclude, in response:

“I did not think I had been away too long: but I could not fail to begin, however unwillingly, to wonder about the uses and hazards of expatriation. I did not think I was white, either, or I did not think I thought so. But the Africans might think I did, and who could blame them? In their eyes, and in terms of my history, I could scarcely be considered the purest or most dependable of black men.”⁶⁰

It would be inaccurate to say that you did not display a desire to have a frank discussion with your former mentor — a discussion that would open the path toward reconciliation. But it was too late; he had passed away.

•••

Beyond the controversy, reduced more often than not to a mere rivalry between two prominent writers, the writer’s status is at the heart of these two critical texts. Would it not be better to retain this from the dispute, and this alone? Langston Hughes, who reviewed Notes of a Native Son in the pages of the New York Times, compares the essayist and the novelist: “I much prefer ‘Notes of a Native Son’ to his novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. . In his essays, words and material suit each other. The thought becomes poetry, and the poetry illuminates the thought.”⁶¹

One might ask how these subtle analyses on writing, the perception of history, or on the condition of blacks and the related themes that you develop in “Everybody’s Protest Novel”—along with that of sexuality, themes that would become recurrent in your work over time — how all of that was relegated to the background behind your conflict with Wright. James Campbell is correct in affirming that “Everybody’s Protest Novel” is “a piece of remarkable literature” that confirms the maturity of your style.⁶²

•••

The protest in question, the one you rally against, is in some ways reminiscent of the literary production from black, French-speaking Africa in the colonial and post-colonial periods. Several of these books — not necessarily written by Africans, but also by western writers discovering the “tropics”—fall back on some of the same sentimentality that can be found in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

At the very least they resemble each other in their desire to speak out against colonial atrocities or the treatment of blacks under colonial rule. In this case it is not the writer’s implication “in the tropics” that is at stake, but rather his vision of his own society. The emotion the author infuses into his work more or less ruins any chance of achieving the objectivity and distance necessary for real intellectual work.

However there still exists this other danger, specific to the black writer: he is expected to put the “black issue” at the center of his work, expected to crowd his pages with characters of color, to adopt a confrontational tone, with the white man as his sole target. These unspoken watchwords are used to prompt African authors — especially the acolytes of negritude — to praise black civilization through frenzied incantations, or to rebel at the eleventh hour against the colonizers, or imperialism in general. And so this literature appears to be a vast campaign against the colonial system, counterbalanced by praise of African roots. But this criticism of the colonial system always results in predictable fiction: a backdrop of cities divided between whites and natives, and a message of bitter condemnation of Christianity and western civilization. Europeans, only, are responsible for Africa’s sorrows.

Guinean novelist Camara Laye, for example, gets caught in the crosshairs of the self-righteous who saw his portrait of a “different Africa,” a happier, more intimate, more personal Africa, such as the one that emerges in his masterpiece, African Child,⁶³ as a mark of carelessness and irresponsibility at a time when the known enemy was the colonial system. Countless authors would go down the anti-colonial path, as illustrated in the first works of Cameroonian Eza Boto, better known by the name Mongo Beti.⁶⁴ This man, like you, Jimmy, lived for a long time in France. He was known for his rebel spirit, his intellectual courage, and his willfulness. He believed that a writer should stand up, place blame where it is due and roar in the face of current events, and should not adopt “the sterile attitude of a spectator,” to borrow from Aimé Césaire.⁶⁵ Considering it inconceivable to write during the colonial period about a young, African man, happy amongst his loved ones, he openly attacks his colleague Camara Laye with the following words: “Laye stubbornly closes his eyes to the most critical realities in his novel African Child. Did this Guinean not see anything other than a peaceful, beautiful, maternal Africa? Is it possible that Laye was not witness a single time to any atrocity of the French colonial administration?”⁶⁶

•••

I hold in high esteem the independence of the writer, Jimmy, and am weary of “herd-mentality literature.” A writer should always share his own vision of the human condition, even if it runs counter to commonly held, moralizing beliefs.

A variety of African literature known as “child soldier” literature — or as “Rwandan genocide” literature, when it was created more in protest than in an effort to truly understand the tragedies — convinced me definitively that we were not yet free of the vortex of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and that the sentimentality and moralizing current that runs through some of these works does harm to African literature. If we are not careful, an African author will be able to do nothing but await the next disaster on his continent before starting a book in which he will spend more time denouncing than writing.

People will loudly remind me of our duty to be politically engaged, to tell the tale of Africa’s woes, to publicly accuse those who drag the continent downward. But what is the value of political engagement if it leads to the destruction of the individual? Many hide behind this mask in order to teach us lessons, to impose upon us a vision of the world where there would be the true children of Africa on one side, and, on the other, the ingrates — meaning the latter are considered Europe’s lackeys. By nature I distrust those who brandish banners; they are the same people who clamor for “authenticity,” the very thing that submerged the African continent in tragedy.

In the introduction to her anthology of works from black Africa, the academic Lilyan Kesteloot pointed out “it is in fact preferable to confine oneself to the little world of me than to make a great deal about negro unanimity without believing in it. . The issue of political engagement is decided in the conscience of each individual, and is not an aesthetic criteria. .”⁶⁷

Protest, if we broaden its meaning to include political engagement, should transform the outcry, the emotion and the exacerbation, into a timeless, creative act. In this very way, Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land will never age a single day. Conversely, I have only to open certain works from the negritude era to notice that they have not withstood the test of time. And if their wrinkles are deep, it is because their authors forgot that protest for protest’s sake will never be a creative act, but only a short-lived bleating. Protest — oh, pardon me, political engagement — must simultaneously gather strength from personal experience and communal destiny. Art cannot escape from being bound by violence. And this is the bond, Jimmy, that extends from the beginnings of your work to the end, as the Cameroonian Simon Njami would illustrate in a biography he would dedicate to you.⁶⁸