BOOKS
believe, that the emotions of homosexual love are essentially like those
of heterosexual love; and this-given the reality, as distinct from the
pretense, of modern attitudes toward this matter-seems a notable
achievement.
Miss Murdoch ought to write herself a simple story about the
ravages of love, not in an eccentric community but in a triangle–
any triangle.
No great critical powers are needed to detect the faults of Richard
Wright's new novel
The Long Dream.
The writing is crude; symbolic
effects are sometimes telegraphed or needlessly explained; an effort to
infuse Freudian depth through italicized dream reveries proves embar–
rassing; the main incidents are melodramatic; and Wright's conception
of life in Mississippi takes no account of recent changes. For
him
the
Deep South is, and perhaps must always
be,
a plaCe! of terror.
The Long Dream
seems calculated to invite stock responses from
reviewers, perhaps because it can so easily be taken for a stock novel.
Some will use it to preach sermons on the death of naturalism. Others
will say, as one enlightened Negro writer already has in the
New York
Times,
that Wright, long exiled in Paris, has lost touch with the realities
of the South. And there will surely be a review by a particularly bright
fellow that will demonstrate Wright to be the victim of an obsession
with violence, which he projects upon a stereotyped vision of the
South....
So let me offer a bit of testimony. I found
The' Long Dream
fre–
quently exciting and occasionally moving, a book not to be judged by
impersonal standards, for it is an outcry of pain, much more so than
Native Son
or
Black Boy.
Perhaps for the first time and perhaps just
because conditions in the South are beginning to change, Wright has
really let go with all of his feelings: with all the moral bitterness, sexual
shame and pride behind the bitterness, rage and fear.
The reality pressing upon this novel is a nightmare of remem–
brance. When a liberal journalist writes that despite the prevalence of
bias there has been an improvement in the South, that sort of judicious
estimate constitutes discourse among the whites and, perhaps, a small
minority of Negroes. But what has it to do with the way Negroes feel?
A'bout this we know very little and would
be
well advised not to
nourish preconceptions, for it may well be that their feelings are finally
closer to Wright's rasping outcry than to the modulated tones of some
younger Negro writers. Even after living in Paris for many years, Wright
must know more about the experience of Mississippi Negroes, their
secret inner heart-view, than most other people, black or white. At the
