The February Newsletter
This month -- in honor of Black History Month -- we have a mystery to solve involving at least three books and possibly more. First of all, why are we just now -- in 2022 -- able to buy Richard Wright's novel The Man Who Lived Underground, a book he first drafted 80 years ago, in 1942? Second, does it bear any relationship to another famed "underground" novel, the pre-revolutionary Notes from Underground, published by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1864? And third, why does the hero's plight in Wright's book sound so much like that of the underground hero of Ralph Ellison's immortal novel, Invisible Man, published in 1953?
The person who reads all three will immediately note that, in the opening pages of Invisible Man, Ellison's Af-Am hero is bumped into by a white man who claims not to see him. In the opening of Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky's hero purposely collides with an army officer who later claims to have no memory of the incident. In Wright's novel, which was, in 1942, rejected by Harper's, the hero escapes in the midst of a police beating to the Chicago sewers and quite literally lives underground throughout the book.
In Ellison's novel, the hero escapes from a mob in the midst of a Harlem riot by falling into an open manhole and begins a new life underground, with his previous above-ground life recounted entirely in flashbacks. There are many mysteries here. Did Richard Wright know that Ralph Ellison was working, in the late 40s and early 50s, on an "underground" novel parallel to his own? Wright mentored Ellison but, by 1940, they were no longer a team and Ellison was not showing Wright any of his work. Ellison also would have known of Wright's fascination with the horror films from Universal Pictures based on H.G. Wells' 1897 novel, The Invisible Man.
Also, why would Harper's reject the book? The readers' notes only say that the police-brutality scenes are "unbearable."
Naturally, the recommendation this month is, read Invisible Man. It's a precursor to the Beat movement and the rise of the Post-Modernism of the 60s and 70s. The book is post-modern because the hero keeps asking a single question throughout: why can nobody see the reality that is before them? And specifically, why can nobody see him for the man he is?
By the novel's midpoint, he begins to discover an ability to stand slightly outside of reality and view those around him without motive or preconception -- which gives him his first real glimpse of what freedom might actually be.
Second, read Beloved by Toni Morrison. This title turns up on banned books lists, though nothing about it is morally offensive. It's about the situation slavery created that subjected African Americans to centuries of hysteria and despair, finally driving many to desperately violent actions in order to fight back.
The story's hero is Sethe, a woman who flees slavery with her children, and crosses a river into a free state. Then, when her slave-master, Schoolteacher, appears to take her and her children back across the river, she kills one child and gravely wounds another before he gives it up and goes away. Morrison allows us to meet Schoolteacher, but is not all that interested in developing him as a round character. What she cares about is what Sethe is going to do with this fact she must live with every day, that she committed infanticide.
Morrison confessed some confusion about why she wrote it, saying that she wasn't clear about the book's purpose, but she was definitely certain that such books need to exist.
Finally, read The Sellout by Paul Beatty. Ellison's Invisible Man and this one belong together and can almost be said to riff off of each other. It's as though Beatty is as aware of this as anyone, so he tries to cram every event and issue related to Black and White conflicts over the past 70 years or so into the story. The hero is telling the story, in part, to help with his grieving as he attempts to process his father's murder by police during a routine traffic stop. Again, there should be more books like this one, if only for the fact that these incidents keep happening. There are too many people of color, like the narrator, whose lives have been derailed by bad policing.
In both books, the surroundings are shape-shifty and hostile. The heroes sense they are being conned by the white race and some of the black one too, but everyone else insists that they are the actual problem. It isn't possible to write such books using modernist craft techniques, so Ellison and Beatty don't bother. These are post-modern stories in which it isn't possible to portray reality as it is because it's a special reality accessible only to people of color. So Beatty simply shows us America as it seems to the hero. He admits a series of emotional problems and one of the worst is his struggle to connect with other black people. He is haunted by phantom guilt for something he hasn't done, but is worried that he has.
But if you read this book and not Invisible Man, it is merely unsettling. It's when you pair them -- with the heroes of both books suffering the same alienation but 70 years apart -- that our failure to progress becomes truly obvious.
And a wonderful and highly relevant film for this month is Round Midnight, about a fictional jazz saxophonist, played by Dexter Gordon, who is living the Parisian ex-patriate lifestyle that attracted so many oppressed black artists to France in the 1940s and 50s, including Richard Wright.
For any new readers: My new novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.