The Calf That Outlived The Oak

It is sad to see Alexander Solzhenitsyn depart and worth casting an eye once more over this 20^th-century writer of incomparably heroic stature.

Solzhenitsyn was both a great Russian novelist ― though no Tolstoy, Dostoevsky or Pasternak ― and more than this. Like Avvakum trekking the shores of Lake Baikal, he retained the mission of the prophet-purist and perhaps saw himself as a religious leader. Art and prophecy jostle in Russian literature. In the course of his fully-televised global re-emigration into the ferment of post-communist Russia (from Vermont via Vladivostok), he may have been disappointed to find Boris Yeltsin bobbing like a ping-pong ball on the fountain; but from my brief and indirect contacts with the distraught Mrs Yeltsin, I can only feel thankful that Solzhenitsyn was spared such undignified upheaval and consternation.

Solzhenitsyn, 1976 (NYT)

Given the ability of the KGB to reach out and murder Bulgarian dissidents (Markov) and Russian former agents (Litvinenko) on the streets of London, and contrive the murder even of a pope on the streets of Rome (John Paul II), it had been no fantasy that inspired Solzhenitsyn to create a fortress in Vermont from which he rarely emerged.

So what more was he? A historian and documentarist. A writer with the impudence to think that, as a calf tethered to a stout oak tree, he should at least keep butting away. How could he have known he would one day ultimately succeed, an individual who, more than any other, brought about the collapse (“through its own inner contradictions”) of an evil empire.[1]

It is remarkable to think that in 1951, in his luminously original and prescient The Captive Mind, Čzesław Miłosz should still have seemed to think that Marxist ideologists were immensely cunning, resourceful and intellectually triumphant, perhaps like Vatican theologians (though he does not say this). Yet in fact Marxist ideology was never like this. It was a self-justifying smokescreen behind which thieves and gangsters could go about their accustomed business robbing and killing the innocent.

Bear in mind, indeed, that the finest philosophical minds in Europe had identified the intellectual flaws in both Marxism and Freudianism by, roughly, the end of the First World War.[2] This, though (I digress for a moment), is an example of the wide and ever-widening gap between the elite and the mass of those left behind, many of whom will never catch up. (One has to remember that in the West half, and in the rest of the world perhaps three quarters, of the population has an IQ of 100 or below.) This is the problem I call the Tail of the Comet, symbolised today by the intellectual distance between the Large Hadron Collider and the increasingly headscarfed and monolithic streets of Cairo, Istanbul and Alexandria, formerly culturally diverse cities like Beirut. Perhaps the tragedy of September 11^th 2001 best captures this gulf of centuries. It is a hallmark of the uneducated mind that it takes symbols literally.

Lenin, who invented the Gulag, understood perfectly the dis-equation between strength and weakness, a feature of Russian backwardness in Tsarist and Leninist times alike, then as now. Russia is a vast world with nonexistent or crumbling borders across which its forces flutter like chickens. The only border it understands is the Ice Sea.

Intriguingly, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich was not even original when it finally saw the light of day in 1962, in the shortlived Krushchev thaw after the death of Stalin.[3] Even before Solzhenitsyn had been arrested for a commonsensical remark in a letter to a friend seen by censors, Russians who had been unable to pronounce the name of a Pole captured in 1940, Gustav Herling, thought he must be a nephew of Hermann Göering and processed him into the Gulag. He survived two years by a chain of miracles to produce A World Apart in 1951. This remarkable documentary account retains, if possible, still more of the immediate vividness and knife-like moral edge of daily camp life. Ivan Denisovich, after all, has a good day. There is less optimism in Herling and he never returned to this theme.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

There is little fine writing in Solzhenitsyn, though his analytic aim ― for instance in August 1914 and Lenin in Zurich was acute: a historian’s instinct. Most impressive are his networking efforts in relation to fellow zeks (convicts) whose testimony seemed to him to teeter on the verge of extinction. Compensatingly he therefore spared no effort to gather, through meetings and correspondence, every scrap of first-hand witness account he could lay his hands on and incorporate it all in the three mighty volumes of The Gulag Archipelago (I still haven’t read the third). No longer could a trivialising Sartre argue against the eyewitness testimony of the trickle of survivors arriving in post-war Paris, thus seriously compromising his relationship with Camus.[4]

Nothing could have done more to shake the oak tree and root world opinion in a more realistic view of the workers’ socialist paradise. Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev swayed in the upper reaches of the oak tree in thermals long before activated by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Martin Turner

18-Sep-2008

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[1] If this epithet should be questioned, consider the following: “After reading Rayfield’s book, no one will doubt that the Chekist-dominated USSR was one vast, sadistic frenzy of criminality.” Simon Sebag Montefiore, in review of Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and His Hangmen. Telegraph Online 14-Mar-2004.

[2] For a readable account, see: Popper, K.R. Unended Quest: an intellectual autobiography. Glasgow: Collins (Flamingo), 1986. Nothing however was available to prevent Karl Marx from building on the foundations of the crab-like Hegelian dialectic ― Hegel’s deterministic philosophy of history ― after they had already been decisively exploded by Kierkegaard. And Marxist-Leninist and Freudian ideas have progressed blissfully ever since in western academic departments of literature and history.

[3] The subsequent film, starring Tom Courtenay, was banned from public viewing in Finland in 1970.

[4] Sartre actually became a perfectly orthodox Marxist at the end of his life.

 

Was Bigger Thomas a psychopath?

For some reason, I had completely missed out on Native Son[1] in the past, in spite of courses on modern American Literature, and was astounded within 10 pages to encounter intensity which immediately ranks this novel in a class with only one other, Dostoevsky’s Crime And Punishment. Indeed my estimation of American literature as a whole, quietly sagging for some time now, has received a rocket boost.

 

Within the same 10 pages one comes rapidly to realise that the author is writing extremely carefully; one sits up and pays equally close attention. By careful writing, I do not mean anything stylistic but, on the contrary, an extremely close observation of events unfolding in relation to character and decision. The little room in which Bigger kills the rat and which he shares with an affectionate family contains a gun concealed under his mattress. He is reluctant to attend a job interview later that day, in spite of the crunching poverty that surrounds him each time he awakes.

 

He goes out into the south side Chicago streets, but Wright, like Jane Austen, is not really interested in describing things that are not germane to his immediate purpose ― what bonnet somebody is wearing, the shimmer of neon or street lights after rain. He makes for the pool hall, first bumping into a friend whom, within hours, he is tormenting viciously to the point where the day’s planned robbery (against a white shop owner, and therefore a development fearful to them both) has to be forgotten.

 

Instead, the boys head for the cinema where they jack off and subsequently move seats (“I don’t know where to put my feet”). At the time this does not seem to be linked to the fortuitous fashion news reporting of an heiress and her Communist boyfriend, both of whom Bigger is shortly to meet. But this episode, suppressed at first publication, is later emphasised at the trial.

 

To read this book is to become a visitor from the future. The degree of functional separation (the degree of legal separation remains hazy) between black and white is astonishing to modern eyes in an era of ostentatious political equality and correctness; it helps me to appreciate how fragile things perhaps still are.

 

In particular the issue of rape seems to be biologically central to the Ku Klux Klan-inspired segregation of the races even in petty matters. It seems to be possible to be arrested for having a untied shoelace and be charged with rape. Bigger has no track record of any sexual offences at all, only one rap for petty crime (tyre theft) and we know from the narrative, with its careful precision, that Mary, the heiress, is carried to her bedroom by the not very bright and distinctly unfeeling Bigger because she is incapable of getting out of the car and walking. In spite of some transient background arousal ― the common texture of life ― nothing approaching rape is considered or even possible, because at this point the blind mother walks in, alarming Bigger who inadvertently smothers Mary with “a corner of the pillow”.

 

Likewise, when fleeing with the reluctant and disheartened Bessie, he makes love to her in a disused house before clubbing her almost to death with a brick to her head. This, too, is not rape but unfortunately the probable pattern of their relations over several years (unfeeling use, rather than the brick). In spite of feminist ranklings, I find the sketches of the only three women in the book tender and sympathetic. Bessie is possibly the most attractive character in the book and the one closest to Bigger. She certainly finds her tongue:

 

I ain’t had no happiness … All you ever did since we’ve been knowing each other was to get me drunk so that you could have me. That was all! I see it now. (pp. 180, 230).

 

Given that the ultimate challenge against Bigger is of murder and rape, it seems incomprehensible that a plea of guilty is put forward by his lawyer, Mr Boris Max, the second important figure in the book and source of the “existentialism” which in mercifully non-Sartrean fashion enables Bigger to glimpse some sort of redemption in the fork between life and death:

 

Max had been able to see the man in him … he felt ground beneath his feet … yet Max had given him the faith that at bottom all men lived as he live and felt as he felt. (pp. 360, 402)

 

Both the closing speeches by the opposing lawyers are a little too long for the balance of this book, though an editor need not have shortened them by very much. Max’s speech launches dangerously beyond the comprehension of judge and jury alike, occasionally rhapsodic (Wright’s poetry had all been political): even the more analytic and sociological sections seem admirably prophetic for the author and miserably irrelevant for the defence. Such a defence needed to be far more factual but even central facts are dismissed in cavalier fashion:

 

Let us not concern ourselves with that part of Bigger Thomas’ confession that says he murdered accidentally, that he did not rape the girl. It really does not matter.

 

But it really does matter. The prosecution speech on the other hand strays scarcely beyond abuse (“lizard … ape … moron”).

 

I believe that the magnitude of Native Son is diminished slightly by reading Wright’s account of how he came to write it. It is clear he is obsessed with the sole character of Bigger. No one else in the story really moves. Mr and Mrs Dalton, supposed to be there as token capitalists, actually come across as decent ordinary people, perhaps token liberals but no worse for that. Like the police, Bigger’s friends and the skies that rain racism, they do not move in their tableau. Perhaps the only alternative scramble of mobility is the press pack who, at one point, get welcomed into the Daltons’ kitchen. They subsequently file extremely accurate reports, again strange to today’s reader. WB Yeats had a head full of fairytales; Robert Graves of moonshine; we learn to disregard the dubious soil from which poetry blooms. But Wright’s obsession with Bigger does spill into the book.

 

Wright’s self-criticism extends to the scene where everybody of any significance in the story seems to gather in Bigger’s capacious prison cell. This seems to Wright implausible fictionally but meaningful to him as author. I find it, on the contrary, most moving, though difficult for all concerned, to have Bigger’s intimate relationships with his immediate family and their pastor, awkward and stunted though they are, exposed to this audience; for instance, Bigger’s remarks to his young sister about her “sewing school”.

 

The question remains to what extent was Bigger some sort of congenital psychopath. How would he fare on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist? He certainly is unfeeling, in spite of Wright’s hectic efforts to document the “fear and shame” that eloquently dominate the first third of the book. He shows very little in the way of guilt or remorse for what he has done ― just as he shows remarkably little in the way of anticipation of the consequences. Wright is unsparing in his accurate portrayal of what, to my alas professionally experienced eye, is exactly the behaviour of youngsters taking the track of crime and heading for prison.[2]

 

It is all too easy for us to say, as Wright comes to do, that much of this applies to the black and white races alike, but if you’re black, blackness does not go away as an issue and cannot be set aside ever. Bigger is full of racial mutterings, however, but plainly criminal intent. Only later would this come to be seen in terms of political analysis, and then only briefly in the sociological 60s. Today we think much more in terms of genome ― for criminality, personality and intelligence.

 

I prefer to think of Bigger as an individual or a least a person struggling towards individuality. I do not see him as repellent but as someone whom a little listening would open up, as indeed proves to be the case when the lawyer Max does just that with his haphazard questions. If Bigger’s unfeelingness and incapacity for remorse argue for psychopathy, then against this hypothesis ― in addition to the general prohibition on treating literature as raw material for psychological analysis! ― must be accounted the fact that he never seems to lie. He conceals but he does not lie. Perhaps Wright is pouring some of his own authorial truthfulness into this character. He certainly is candid in his later demand (in How “Bigger” was Born) for an “honest reader” (p. 460).

 

But let us end where we began. Native Son deserves to be ranked as a masterpiece of world literature and a shining jewel in the crown of American literature which it greatly enhances. It is difficult not to be impressed by Wright’s scientific literacy (this is the 1930s) and his intelligence is hard to overstate. His analyses of universal popular experiences (Germany, Russia) and his prophecy of the social tensions which would erupt politically in the USA in Black Power and large-scale race riots 30-40 years later are impressive. In spite of a chaotic childhood, he seems never to have put a foot wrong (he wooed two women and married the wrong one first). Wright was a brave, brave man who never seemed to stand still. Even at the end of his life he managed to write 8000 haikus.[3] He went everywhere, met everyone, encouraged innumerable younger writers, and like Josephine Baker settled in Paris out of reach of the House Un-American Activities Committee. I am happy to think that in his own lifetime Wright was accorded some of the acclaim that matters most ― the recognition of his fellow artists, writers and intellectuals.

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[1] Richard Wright, Native Son, Harper, 1940; restored text published by Library of America. New York: HarperCollins (Perennial Classics), 1993; includes Notes, Chronology of Wright’s life and How “Bigger” was Born (Wright, 1940). All page references are to this edition.

[2] The average IQ of individuals convicted of offences against the person is 80 (bottom ninth centile).

[3] I hope they’re no good. 8,000 excellent haikus would be altogether overwhelming.