BROTHERWISE REWIND: Richard Wright Interview in Paris, France 1955

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#23, MARCH-MAY/2017

L’Express - Why do you write?

Richard Wright - Writing is my way of being a free man, of expressing my relationship to the world and to the society in which I live. My relation to the society of the Western world is dubious because of my color and race. My writing therefore is charged with the burden of my concern about my relation to that society. The accident of race and color has placed me on both sides: the Western World and its enemies. If my writing has any aim, it is to try to reveal that which is human on both sides, to affirm the essential unity of man on earth.

LE - Which books have influenced you most?

RW - The books that have influenced me would make a long list. I’ll be selective. Foremost among all the writers who have influenced me in my attitude toward the psychological state of modern man is Dostoevsky. Proust’s work has painted for me what I feel to be the end of the bourgeois class of Western Europe. Gorky represents to me a writer and artist whose courage and humanity towered above politics. Of American writers, Theodore Dreiser first revealed to me the nature of American life, and for that service, I place him at the pinnacle of American literature.

LE - Who are your favorite contemporary writers?

RW - I don’t do much reading in contemporary novels. I find myself drawn more toward historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. For the past few years most of my reading has been the works of Freud, Malinowski, Theodor Reik, Nietzsche, etc. Most contemporary novels are too “cute” for me.

LE - Is the writer an intellectual?

RW - The writer is an intellectual in spite of himself. He may pretend that he simply creates, but, in writing, he handles the basic assumptions of men, and, in doing so, he feelingly selects facts and experiences for presentation. One might say, then, that the writer’s intellectualism is indirect, but it is there all the same.

LE - Do you write for a fixed audience?

RW - No, I do not write for a fixed audience. I write and trust what I’ve said may strike a responsive chord in someone else. During my career as a writer, my so-called public has changed several times. I’ve found that my audience changes with my own changing outlook. I do not seek for an audience; I let the audience follow me, if it is interested.

LE - Do you think that a writer should subsist from his writings?

RW - A writer either lives in his works or he is not writer. Of all the arts in the world, literature is the most exacting and the most revealing. Writing is a way of living. Hence, if he can put himself totally in his writings, he will find that he can live from them, perhaps.

LE - Do you believe in defending ideas in your writing?

RW - Yes, I defend ideas in my writing to the degree that I defend man’s right to live. Those ideas which I feel are harmful to man, I fight and seek to destroy. Those ideas which I find life-furthering, I seek to defend and extol. From the position where I stand as a Negro writer, such questions are not abstract. Those ideas in people’s minds that are against granting a fuller life to people of color, I fight. Those ideas I find in the world which urge toward a bountiful sharing of life, I defend.

LE - To what degree are you interested in politics?

RW - In spite of myself, I’m passionately interested in politics. But I curse the day when I first heard the word “politics.” My racial identity places me at the focal point of world politics. Merely to read my morning’s newspaper is to encounter political ideas debating the destiny of the colored majority of mankind. Politics are policies, devised by the leadership for vast masses of people; these policies are for defense, attack, or the subjugation of others. Hence though I’d like to forget politics, I can’t, for I find too many hostile policies subtly directed towards the subjugation of peoples and races and nations.

LE - To you, what is the historical date most charged with significance?

RW - The 1905 victory of the Japanese over Russia. That date marked the beginning of the termination of the Godlike role which the Western white man had been playing to mankind. That date marked the beginning of the de-Occidentalization of the world.

LE - Are your favorite heroes in real life in literature?

RW - I have no political heroes in life; all politicians, to me, are misfortunes. My heroes are medical and scientific ones: Einstein, Pasteur, etc. In literature some of my heroes are: Rashkolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; the I of Proust’s A Remembrance of Things Past; K of Kafka’s The Trial; Melanctha of Getrude Stein’s Three Lives; and Nietzsche in his own Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

LE - Do you believe in the future of man?

RW - I don’t feel that the future is as black as some think and surely not as bright as others paint it. Man, I fear, will continue to stumble along in the future more or less as he did in the past, paying terribly for each step forward he makes. The future for me holds neither Hell nor Heaven, just the same struggling and fumbling that man has always done. Man is the most stubborn and habit-forming of all the animals; once an idea gets in his head, only death can take it out. Hence, man will make progress in the future just as painfully and slowly as he made progress in the past.

originally published in L’Express October 18th 1955. Excerpted from Conversations with Richard Wright, edited by Keneth Kinnamon and Michael Fabre, (University Press of Mississippi, 1993) pp.163-165.