Words of a Native Son

I'm Involved in something rather dangerous; I think it's always dangerous for a writer to talk about his work. I don't mean to be coy or modest; I simply mean that there is so much about his work that he doesn't really understand and can't understand--because it comes out of certain depths concerning which, no matter what we think we know these days, we know very, very little. It comes out of the same depths that love comes or murder or disaster. It comes out of things which are almost impossible to articulate. That's the writer's effort. Every writer knows that he may work 24 hours a day, and for several years; without that he wouldn't be a writer; but without something that happens out of that effort, some freedom which arrives from way down in the depths, something which touches the page and brings the scene alive, he wouldn't be a writer.

It's dangerous in another way to talk about my work, because I'm a novelist and as I'm writing this I'm publicly involved in a Broadway play, and the record of novelists who have managed to write plays is so extremely discouraging that I won't even go into it. But for some reason I know I had to do the play. I have written one play before. I have had to re-examine that experience lately because it turned out to be important in a way that I didn't realize at the time. I wrote the play after I finished my first novel, when I knew I had to write something, but I knew I couldn't write another novel right away. I thought I would try a play. It took about three years to do and we produced it at Howard University. I was very casual about it. I went down to Howard about a week before we were supposed to open, saw the play, and almost died. It was the first time I realized that speeches don't necessarily work in the theater. I was suddenly bombarded with my own literature, an unbearable experience. I had to begin cutting because I realized that the actors could do many things in silence or could make one word, one gesture, count more than two or three pages of talk. I began to suspect, and this is what I'm struggling with now, that the two disciplines--the discipline of writing a novel and the discipline of writing a play--are so extremely different that it would have been luckier for me, in terms of the play, if I had been a violinist or a guitar player or a rock-'n'-roll singer or a plumber. My chances of writing a play would have been better if I had been in any of those professions.

Here's what I'm trying to get at when I refer to the two disciplines. Every artist is involved with one single effort, really, which is somehow to dig down to where reality is. We live, especially in this age and in this country and at this time, in a civilization which supposes that reality is something you can touch, that reality is tangible. The aspirations of the American people, as far as one can read the current evidence, depend very heavily on this concrete, tangible, pragmatic point of view. But every artist and, in fact, every person knows, deeper than conscious knowledge or speech can go, that beyond every reality there is another one which controls it. Behind my writing table, which is a tangible thing, there is a passion which created the table. Behind the electric light you might be reading by now, there was the passion of a man who once stole the fire in order to bring us this light. The things that people really do and really mean and really feel are almost impossible for them to describe, but these are the very things which are most important about them: These things control them and (continued on page 168)Native Son(continued from page 120) that is where reality is. What one tries to do in a novel is to show this reality.

Such effort would not be important if life were not important. But life is important, vastly more so than art; but without the passion of art, that portion of life we call civilization is in great danger when it begins, as we have, to neglect or to despise its artists. Artists are the only people in a society who can tell that society the truth about itself. When I was working on Another Country, which was the hardest thing I had done until that time, I had several problems in trying to get across, in trying to convey, what I felt was happening to us in this country. Not that this is unusual: In a sense, every work of art, if I may use that phrase, is a kind of metaphor for what the artist takes to be our condition. My principal problem, at least by hindsight, was how to handle my heroine, Ida, who in effect dictated a great deal of the book to me. And the first thing that I had to realize was that she, operating in New York as she did, as Negro girls do, was an object of wonder and even some despair--and some distrust--to all the people around her, including people who were very fond of her--Vivaldo, her lover, and their friends. I had somehow to make the reader see what was happening to this girl. I knew that a girl like Ida would not be able to say it for herself, but I also knew that no reader will believe you if you simply tell him what you want him to know. You must make him see it for himself. He must somehow be trapped into the reality you want him to submit to and you must achieve a kind of rigorous discipline in order to walk the reader to the guillotine without his knowing it.

Now, in order to get what I wanted I had to invent Rufus, Ida's brother, who had not been present at the original conception. Rufus was the only way that I could make the reader see what had happened to Ida and what was controlling her in all her relationships, why she was so difficult, why she was so uncertain, why she suffered so; and of course the reason she was suffering was because of what had happened to her brother, because her brother was dead. She was not about to forgive anybody for it. And this rage was about to destroy her. In order to get this across, I had to put great lights around Ida and keep the reader at a certain distance from her. I had to let him see what Vivaldo thought, what Cass thought, what Eric thought, but what Ida thought had to remain for all of them the mystery which it is in life, and had to be, therefore, a kind of mystery for the reader, too, who had to be fascinated by her and wonder about her and care about her and try to figure out what was driving her to where she was so clearly going. And I think that in some ways, Ida, finally, when she does talk to her lover, says things which she would not have been able to say in any other way or under any other pressure, and I had somehow to get her to that pressure. In a novel you can suggest a great deal. You must suggest a great deal. There is something in a novel which we'll have to refer to here as the setting. The setting is the climate. For example, it is unimportant in a novel to describe the room. It is unimportant in a novel to describe the characters. It doesn't really matter whether they have blue eyes or brown hair or whatever. You have to make the reader see them with just enough detail not to blot the picture out. Try to sketch the character in, let the reader do the rest. That's not as lazy or irresponsible as it may sound. I mean that the character's reality has to come from something deeper than his physical attributes and therefore the setting in which he operates has to come from something deeper than that, too. The New York of Another Country never really existed except in Another Country. The bar in which Cass and Vivaldo have their crucial scene when Cass tells him about her husband is one of a million cocktail bars; all that is described in that scene, I think, is some peanuts on the table. And you can do that in a novel because the reader has been in a bar like that and the reader has been in New York streets; there are some nerves you must press which will operate to make him see what you want him to see, and this, in a way, is the setting.

But you cannot do that in a play. Everything in a play has to be terribly concrete, terribly visible. The church in which I was born operates in one way in Go Tell It on the Mountain, mainly as a presence, I think, as a weight, as a kind of affliction for all those people who are in it, who are in fact trapped in it and don't know how to get out. But in my play there is another church. And I suddenly saw it. I don't know if I can make this clear to you. On a back road in Mississippi or Louisiana or some place in the deep South, we were wandering around talking to various people, and there was a small church sitting by itself. I was very oppressed that day by things we'd seen and I was very aware that I was in the deep South and had been very close to my father's birthplace. It suddenly struck me that this church must have been very much like the church in which my father preached before he came North. I looked into the window and suddenly saw my set. It was a country church. I saw that if I could select the details which would be most meaningful for what I was trying to do, then in a sense, that part of my problem was solved. And I saw something else. I always have some idea of where I want to go. I even sometimes have my last chapter or my last line, a kind of very rough and untrustworthy map. But I don't know quite how I'm going to get there. In the working out of a novel, you work it out in terms of dialog and conflicts, and again, this is power of suggestion, this is hitting on the readers' nerves--nerves which we all have in common. In a play, you're doing the same thing. But you're doing it in such a different way that, for example, a white woman in my play, who is a somewhat older woman, married to a murderer, which is part of what the play is about, has to be revealed in very different ways. And I began to see her by watching certain people, by watching for her, watching for my character, which is what you start doing, really, once this character has captured your attention. You look at everybody around you in another way. You suddenly are looking for some revelatory and liberating detail. And if you're working on a play--I don't know if I'm making this clear--you suddenly watch people in a very physical way. You watch the way they light their cigarettes, you watch the way they cross a room, you observe, for the first time, whether or not this person is bowlegged and you begin to think that you can tell by the way a person combs his or her hair, by the beat of a pause, by the things they do or do not say, what is going on inside them. You're watching for the ways in which people reveal themselves in their day-to-day life. What Freud called--I think I'm right about this--the psychopathology of everyday life. So that as I began watching for my woman in the South, I began to see her too. I have a very good actress friend. I began to watch her, as if she were going to play the part. How would she walk into the door with groceries, and how would she look at their child; how would she look at her husband whom she loves, whom she understands, whom she knows to be a murderer? How would she do it? And I began to see that there would be very small things she would do and very peculiar things that she would say to reveal her torment. I began to see that this is what we all do, all of the time, all of us, including you and me. That whatever is really driving us is what can never, never, never be hidden and is there to see if one wants to see it. The trouble is, of course, that most of us are afraid of that level of reality. It seems to threaten us, because we think we can be safe. And this brings me to something much deeper; for when you've gotten this far, you see something which every writer is really seeing over and over and over again, at pressures of varying intensity. And he is really telling the same story over and over and over again, trying different ways to tell it and trying to get more and more and more of it out. As I write this, I am trying to tell it in a play set in the deep South.

But one afternoon in Harlem I understood (concluded on page 241)Native Son(continued from page 168) something more about my story and about myself. My brother and some other people and my nephew were on the block where I grew up. It hasn't changed much in these last 38 years of progress. And we also visited a funeral parlor nearby. A boy had died, a boy of 27 who had been on the needle and who was a friend of my nephew's. I don't know why this struck me so much today, but it did. Perhaps because my nephew was there--I don't know. We walked to the block where we grew up. There's a railing on that block, an iron railing with spikes. It's green now, but when I was a child, it was black. And at one point in my childhood--I must have been very, very young--I watched a drunken man falling down, being teased by children, falling next to that railing. I remember the way his blood looked against the black, and for some reason I've never forgotten that man. Today I began to see why. There's a dead boy in my play, it really pivots on a dead boy. The whole action of the play is involved with an effort to discover how this death came about and who really, apart from the man who physically did the deed, was responsible for it. The action of the play involves the terrible discovery that no one was innocent of it, neither black nor white: All had a hand in it, as we all do. But this boy is all the ruined children that I have watched all my life being destroyed on streets up and down this nation, being destroyed as we sit here, and being destroyed in silence. This boy is, somehow, my subject, my torment, too. And I think he must also be yours. I've begun to be obsessed more and more by a line that comes from William Blake. It says, "A dog starved at his master's gate/Predicts the ruin of the State."

The story that I hope to live long enough to tell, to get it out somehow whole and entire, has to do with the terrible, terrible damage we are doing to all our children. Because what is happening on the streets of Harlem to black boys and girls is also happening on all American streets to everybody. It's a terrible delusion to think that any part of this republic can be safe as long as 20,000,000 members of it are as menaced as they are. The reality I am trying to get at is that the humanity of this submerged population is equal to the humanity of anyone else, equal to yours, equal to that of your child. I know when I walk into a Harlem funeral parlor and see a dead boy lying there, I know, no matter what the social scientists say, or the liberals say, that it is extremely unlikely that he would be in his grave so soon if he were not black. That is a terrible thing to have to say. But, if it is so, then the people who are responsible for this are in a terrible condition. Please take note, I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn't do it, and I didn't do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason: As long as my children face the future that they face, and come to the ruin that they come to, your children are very greatly in danger, too. They are endangered above all by the moral apathy which pretends it isn't happening. This does something terrible to us. Anyone who is trying to be conscious must begin to be conscious of that apathy and must begin to dismiss the vocabulary which we've used so long to cover it up, to lie about the way things are. We must make the great effort to realize that there is no such thing as a Negro problem--but simply a menaced boy. If we could do this, we could save this country, we could save the world. Anyway, that dead boy is my subject and my responsibility. And yours.