Genius and Daemonic Genius:
Crafting a Biography of Richard Wright
Crafting a biography of Richard
Wright places special demands on a biographer.
Wright was a genius, a man who embodied profound intelligence and
creative vision, but Mississippi in the early twentieth century wasn’t the
place for nurturing his kind of genius.
Gertrude Stein seems to have appreciated the irony that blooms when a
native daughter and a native son share the status of exile. There was something surpassing mere hyperbole
when, after reading Black Boy, Stein
wrote to Wright: “Dear Richard, It is
obvious that you and I are the only two geniuses of this era.” (Constance Webb,
Richard Wright 248) Stein’s words
constitute a sophisticated joke, because genius manifests itself in many forms
which cannot be reduced to comedy (Stein’s maximum playfulness) and tragedy
(Wright’s maximum seriousness). Margaret
Walker, the native daughter who did not choose exile, anatomized the facets of
genius in how she wrote about the dreams
she and Wright dared to come true.
All of Wright’s major biographers
-- Constance Webb, Michel Fabre, Addison Gayle, Margaret Walker, and Hazel
Rowley --have had to deal with his
genius, with what his writings published and unpublished suggest can be said
about the evolving of his innate brilliance and consciousness. Herself a genius, Walker brought first-hand
experience and knowledge of language, psychology, and environments to the job
of crafting Richard Wright: Daemonic
Genius: A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work (New York:
Warner, 1988). The keywords in the title of the biography are not arbitrary.
There are as many ways of writing
biography as there are lives to be written about. The approach Margaret Walker used in her
critical study opened Wright’s life, work, and ideas for reflection and
reconsideration. To the extent that
writing is an act of opening and discovering, Walker also opened herself. Some of Richard Wright’s most orthodox
critics are unnerved by Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. They are ill-equipped to grasp or decidedly
hostile to the symbiosis Walker made of biographical portrait and
autobiographical confession. Even in
today’s world where everything and anything is permitted, some people cannot
endure the awesome fire of genius that smolders in the biography that Walker
built. To play a riff on one of the most enigmatic sentences in Native Son ---“What I killed for I am.”,
one might say that what Walker wrote for she was. We shall return to this point
shortly in a brief remark about the awesome qualities of daemonic genius.
Walker was aware, as she told us in
the biography’s preface, that Wright’s “intellectual development and his Weltanschauung, or worldview, place him
in the forefront of twentieth-century life and culture….” The biography sought to break ground in this
area. Walker was also aware that
Wright’s primary conception of the world began in Mississippi. It is difficult to understand Richard Wright
unless one understands the crucial role of his earliest environment in shaping
his life and his thinking about the function of writing in the world. The primal role of the South is implicit in
Walker’s assertion that the threefold purpose of the biography is “to define
Richard Wright, to analyze and assess his work, and to show the correlation
between the man and his work.” “Wright
is too important,” she added, “to be lost in the confusion of race and politics
and racist literary history and criticism so evident in the twentieth century.” Walker subjected herself to the stern
discipline of making an innovative critical biography. Such a book has to be devastatingly honest
about the psychology of the subject and all the forces that went into making
the subject who he was, including the force of his own creations. Although historically determined gender
differences must be accounted for, what was true about Wright as the subject
was true about Walker as the biographer.
Walker blended artistry and
relevant data into a very readable book.
The biography is the kind of text in which one genius portrays another
genius by using creative scholarship.
When one reads Richard Wright:
Daemonic Genius from dedication and epigram all the way through to Walker’s
keynote speech for the International Symposium on Richard Wright (University of
Mississippi, November 22, 1985), one more deeply appreciates how “the real
significance of Richard Wright is in the world of his ideas placed in the
context of his times, and his human condition” ( Daemonic Genius 404).
Walker divided Wright’s life span
into five phases: the Southern years (1908-1927); the Chicago years
(1927-1937); the New York years (1937-1947), the Paris years (1947-1957), and
the final years (1957-1960). In
accounting for what Wright thought, felt, suffered, and wrote about during
those fifty-two years, Walker provided a quite challenging discussion of the
essentials in what Michel Fabre called Wright’s
“unfinished quest.” The quest was
necessitated by Wright’s compulsive intelligence and his anger in the face of
the world’s absurd injustices. As Walker
brought her own brand of psychoanalysis to the task of writing, she explored
Wright’s psychosexual spectrum and unmasked, in a small degree, her own
psychosexuality. She imitated in
biography what a physicist would do in making a spectrographic analysis; she
exposed the quality and quantity of parts. If the portrait of Wright that
emerges from the biography is not pretty, it is at least a genuine depiction of
what Walker saw of Wright’s life in her own mind.
Walker’s study of Wright rests on
an elaborate premise about what is to be accounted for in biography. The
beginning is Wright’s suffering “the psychic wound of racism, that irrational
world of race prejudice and class bigotry, of religious fanaticism and sexual
confusion, inversion and revulsion….This neurotic anger and fear grew in Wright
from a pit to a peak of rage, but it was part of his unconscious, which he
could never understand though he constantly sought to express it. Out of these two angers a daemonic genius of great
creative strength and power was born, his tremendous creative drive to write
and to express himself, his daemonic demi-urges, his deepest and most suffering
self”(Daemonic Genius 43-44).
Like earlier studies of Wright,
Walker’s biography drew attention to his anger, ambivalence, and alienation, to
his complex personality. She provided grounds , which are still powerful, for
continuing inquiry about his aesthetics,
his relationship to Marxism, Pan-Africanism, and existential philosophy; for
continuing inquiry about Wright’s ability to synthesize the great ideas of the
twentieth century in his writing and to have an uncanny vision of what human
beings are giving birth to in the twenty-first century. Daemonic
Genius is truly a foundational work.
Walker had a special advantage over
other Wright scholars. She was one of
his contemporaries and knew him during some of his most formative years. Second, she grew up in the South and knew from
experience the impact of its sociopolitical climate on the sensitive
intelligence of the artist. She wrote
about Wright with incontrovertible authority, and her writing was fueled by her
own daemonic genius.
Walker did provide a clear
blueprint for the crafting of Wright’s biography in her keynote address for the
1985 International Wright Symposium, but in a 1982 interview with Claudia Tate,
Walker made some decidedly Margaret Walker statements about genius. These are exceptionally important, because
Tate caught Walker in unguarded moments.
Walker got some ideas about Wright’s
anger from Allison Davis in 1971 as he
“talked about the neurotic anger that Wright
could neither understand nor control. He
said nobody can tell what the wellsprings of any man’s creativity are. You can only guess. The more I thought about it, being a creative
person myself, the more I understood.
That’s why I selected the title, The Daemonic Genius of Richard Wright. There are different kinds of geniuses:
demonic, intuitive, brooding, and orphic.
Perhaps Faulkner had all four.
Wright was definitely demonic.
It’s more than an idea of devils. It’s the idea of creativity coming out
of anger, madness, out of frustration, rage. Creativity comes out of the
madness that borders on lunacy and genius” (Conversations
with Margaret Walker 65)
Earlier in this interview, Walker
said something that psychoanalysis would allow us to connect with a seven page,
single-spaced letter she wrote to Richard Wright on Wednesday, June 7, 1939
(Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale, JWJ MSS 3, Box 107, Folder
1667). Walker said to Tate in 1982:
“I felt Wright wanted me to write
his biography because nobody is going to be more sympathetic and understanding
than I. I was in love with him, and he knew it.
He could not marry me. I was not
what he could marry. That’s the whole
truth of that. You can’t say he didn’t
love me: I know he did.” (Conversations 62).
In 1939, Walker’s love of talking
let words fly from her mouth that deeply wounded Wright and led him to
terminate their warm and sympathetic friendship. Walker’s June 7th letter to Wright
was a poignant apology as well as an explanatory defense of her integrity. Walker sang a sorrow song when she wrote that
she had to believe in Wright in order to believe in herself. The letter has many
clues about just what kind of love compelled Walker to craft a biography which
casts much light on Wright’s genius.
If Richard Wright created out of
anger, Margaret Walker created out of frustration. If his genius was daemonic, hers was brooding
and orphic. The four kinds of genius
Walker mentioned to Tate and several kinds she didn’t catalogue are embedded in
Walker’s crafting of Richard Wright:
Daemonic Genius. The biography is a labor of critical
love. In the book we find an
intellectual unification of biography and autobiography. Walker’s writing of Wright’s biography is an
exploration of literary history; Wright’s biography is a discovery moment for
reflection on Walker’s unfinished autobiography.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
February 24, 2015
