New Releases: The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright
For those who are reading this newsletter for the first time: this is an edition of New Releases, the titular series of my newsletter. In a New Releases column, I review a recently published book first written 50 or more years ago. These newly published books can be re-issues of out-of-print or hard-to-get old books, classics with new introductions/annotations, new translations of old foreign-language books, or (as in the case of today’s column) a book written long ago but only published now.
My other series for this newsletter are Outside the Scopes (light essays on various matters, literary and otherwise) and Lillah Jedmoon’s Gelastic Zibaldone (a humorous commonplace book).
Also, I’d like to make an addendum to my last review, the one of Rakes of the Old Court: at the end of my review, I said I looked forward to a future English-language translation of the novel in a different style. What I neglected to mention was that there had in fact been an earlier English-language translation of the novel, titled Gallants of the Old Court. It came out in 2011; the translator was Christian Baciu and the publisher was Editura Paideia. This translation was listed in the notes to Sean Cotter’s translation (Cotter also made reference to “an extended English fragment by Alistair Ian Blyth” - a fragment which, as far as I know, has not been published). The oversight is entirely mine.
By Richard Wright, Afterword by Malcolm Wright.
240 Pages. Library of America. $22.95.
I.
It is a shame this novel was not published when it was first written seventy years ago. A shame because generations of readers have lost out on what could have been a life-changing book, a book that would surely have had an intoxicating influence upon generations of artists between Wright’s time and our own. Then again, The Man Who Lived Underground creates such an indelible impression on the reader that it is difficult to believe it was not available in its complete form until now.
Native Son, the novel that made Richard Wright famous and a bestselling author, was and is one of the most intense novels ever written - one which took the bare facts of urban poverty and racism of its time and pushed it to an extreme. The Man Who Lived Underground is similarly interested in the extremes of human experience, but whereas the former novel seems inextricable from its historical moment, the latter is by far the more universal work.
Native Son and The Man Who Lived Underground share a distinguishing plot element: a black man in 1940s Chicago on the run after being wanted for a terrible crime. But it would be a mistake to say that The Man Who Lived Underground is an extension or rehashing of the earlier novel. In fact, the novel that The Man Who Lived Underground hews closest to is Robinson Crusoe. Both are stories of men who are cast out from civilization and have to remake their world anew. And how Fred Daniels, the protagonist of The Man Who Lived Underground, remakes his world is quite remarkable indeed.
Fred Daniels, a menial laborer in the home of a wealthy white family, is introduced satisfactorily counting the money he receives at the end of a work week. He has a pregnant wife, and his reputation in his society is secured by his friendship with a local pastor. But by the third page he’s in the back of a police car - soon he is accused of murders he didn’t commit, and tortured in an interrogation room until, without being aware of what he is doing, he signs a confession. Before he can be sent to jail, he escapes. On the streets of Chicago desperately looking for a way to escape from his nightmare, he goes through an open manhole and enters the sewer system.
Underground, he manages to tunnel through a dirt passageway, and he is able to surreptitiously sneak into nearby buildings and spy on people surreptitiously. He is able to steal items - money, a radio, a gun - and in one memorable incident, he is even able to frame an insurance clerk for theft by taking money from a safe. The life he creates under Chicago seems more comfortable, freer, than the one he must have lived on street level - and more than that, his new environment provides him with a level of insight into human affairs that he had not previously grasped.
Wright’s prose elides easy description. It is visceral, physical in a way few books are. In the scene of police torture that begins the novel, the body, and how it can be abused and damaged, is described in the most precise detail. At one point, after some vicious blows, a cop offer Fred Daniels a glass of water:
He filled his dry mouth with cold water and was in the act of swallowing when he saw a white fist sweeping toward him; it struck him squarely in the stomach at the very moment he had swallowed the water and his diaphragm heaved involuntarily and the water shot upward through his chest and gushed forth at his nostrils, leaving streaks of pain in its wake.
When Daniels keels over in pain, the cop who hit him receives congratulations from a fellow officer: “I heard the water squish!”
The specificity with which Daniels’ body receives violence at the hands of the police echoes battle scenes of The Iliad. Once Daniels enters into the underground world, another ancient Greek author is more explicitly evoked. In one of his ventures to the above-ground world, Daniels comes across a movie theatre. Seeing an audience in a darkened room staring at a lighted screen, he observes, “These people were laughing at their lives, at the animated shadows of themselves. Why did they not rise up and go out into the sunlight and do some deed that would make them live?” (Was Wright the first author to connect Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to the movie theatre?)
Notice that, unlike Plato, Daniels sees the process of going into the sunlight as culminating not in knowledge but in a deed. Much of mid-century existentialist thought had not been fully articulated in 1941 when Wright wrote the novel (and Wright’s own relationship with existentialism was complex), yet The Man Who Lived Underground seems to fit strikingly well with the conventions of existentialist literature that were later to be worked out among the Parisian literati. In his underground life, Daniels is able to create an authentic existence for himself and observe the world without the social fetters that had so distorted his view previously. When Daniels finds something useful, pleasurable, or interesting in his journeys underground, he typically responds with a single word of affirmation: “yes” or “yeah.”
Wright did not need French theory to produce this novel. As his commentary on his own work reveals, he had a source of inspiration from his own childhood.
II.
Even after the commercial success of Native Son, Wright’s publisher declined The Man Who Lived Underground. A heavily altered and reduced version was published in two short story anthologies in the 1940s, and then again in a collection of Wright’s work that came out after his death; this Library of America version is the first time the entire novel has been available to the public, and it comes with an explanatory essay “Memories of My Grandmother” It is not clear what Wright intended for this essay, and it has never been published in any format until now.1 This is unfortunate, for “Memories of My Grandmother” is a masterpiece, perhaps even more so than The Man Who Lived Underground.
Wright uses “Memories of My Grandmother” to explain the genesis of The Man Who Lived Underground, and the influence he identifies is a counter-intuitive one. Though the novel takes a bitter, even nihilistic attitude towards Christianity - at one point, Daniels hears a church choir and thinks that the “people were pleading guilty, wallowing sensually in their despair” - Wright was in fact lead to this story by his upbringing under his deeply religious grandmother
As a Seventh-day Adventist, Wright’s grandmother had a faith “so uncompromising and fanatic, that it could not manifest itself continuously in daily life” and so she experienced “spasmodic eruptions of religion, trying desperately by faith to tie all these many earthly - and, to her, meaningless - items together into one meaningful and ultimate whole.” The meaninglessness of his grandmother’s world was compounded by living as a black woman in a racist society - that is, a society fundamentally not built for her, with so much unavailable to her.
If he had written a novel directly about this kind of religiosity, Wright asserts, the stereotypes surrounding black religion of the time would have prevented his message from coming across; instead, he had to represent his grandmother’s religion through metaphor, and the metaphor he found was the premise behind The Man Who Lived Underground. Fred Daniels’ attempt to find meaning in the glimpses of the aboveground world and the items he takes from it was then Wright’s way of communicating what he felt his grandmother’s life must have been like. For both his grandmother and Fred Daniels, the objects and situations they encounter are not meant for their lives, and they can “either ignore them altogether or impose upon them a meaning alien to them.”
Wright does not end there. His reflections on his grandmother’s religion lead him to fascinating insights on African-American folk music, intellectual trends of his day, the work of Gertrude Stein, and his own childhood. It is one of the best American essays I have ever read, and after reading it, I was left wondering if we must all go underground before we can see sunlight.
The notes in this edition reference another novel Wright could not get issued, “the still-unpublished Black Hope.” We can all hope that one day this novel too will be resurrected.