with bulging portfolios arguing, explaining, giving orders as they hurried anxiously along, surrounded by friends and lieutenants. Men literally out of themselves, living prodigies of sleeplessness and work--men unshaven, filthy, with burning eyes who drive upon their fixed purpose full speed on engines of exaltation.”
Lenin: “A short, stocky figure, with a big head set down on his shoulders, wide generous mouth, and heavy chin....Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been. A strange, popular leader--a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colorless, humorless, uncompromising and detached.”
Yet Lenin, Trotsky and the others appear here more as political stick figures, uttering pronouncements and advancing lines of argument, than as fully drawn personalities. The events Reed reported from Russia were, after all, primarily political--debates, proclamations, party caucuses, negotiations. And like politics in more staid settings, the tugging back and forth for Russia's destiny often grew tedious.
Reed makes little effort to spare us the dreary details. Two early chapters supply historical grounding. And a prefatory “Notes and Explanations” section guides us through the committees, councils, unions, and cooperatives that was Russia in 1917; the conscientious reader finds himself repeatedly flipping back to learn that the Vikzhel was the influential railway workers' union, or that the Maximalists were an offshoot of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
None of this, let it be said, is artfully handled. A more sophisticated narrative might have let Reed introduce names and groups only as needed, and to better sift the wheat of historical significance from the chaff of only transiently relevant detail.
Of course, this is journalism, not history. We hear the Duma in debate, read the latest poster from the Committee for Salvation, stand midst the tumultuous crowds in the Petrograd Soviet as Lenin lambastes the Mensheviks. Ten Days may be all it could be, and even all its author intended. Yet the best part of a century after the event, readers may want something more, may miss precisely the kind of insight that only history, and the distance of years, can grant.
Native Son
____________
By Richard Wright
First published in 1940
It’s hard to imagine a less-appealing character than Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old black ne’er-do-well from the Chicago slums who murders the daughter of his high-minded white employer, decapitates her and stuffs her body into a coal furnace. Later, he literally beats the brains out of his girlfriend with a brick and throws her down the air shaft of an abandoned building in which he is hiding from police.
Bigger is the creation of Richard Wright, a novelist hailed as “the most impressive literary talent yet produced by Negro America,” born on a Mississippi plantation in 1901. “The day Native Son appeared,” wrote critic Irving Howe, “American culture was changed forever.” Wright dares to deliver his powerful social message not through a warm, sympathetic victim of injustic, but a “victim” who, by every outward sign, is a brutal killer bereft of human feeling. Understand even Bigger Thomas as the harvest of pervasive racial oppression Wright so much as says, and the black condition in America generally can likewise be understood.
Native Son is not stylistically elegant. Like its central character, it is brutal, nervous and crude. Some of its scenes verge on melodrama, and its concluding pages, where a brilliant left-wing lawyer makes Bigger’s case before the jury, reads less like novel than social polemic. But the book’s overall effect is so shattering, its point of view so relentlessly etched into the reader’s consciousness, that it leaves its mark as indelibly today as when it was written almost 60 years ago.
As the nearly 50 translations and foreign editions appearing in the wake of its first printing testify, its
Lenin: “A short, stocky figure, with a big head set down on his shoulders, wide generous mouth, and heavy chin....Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been. A strange, popular leader--a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colorless, humorless, uncompromising and detached.”
Yet Lenin, Trotsky and the others appear here more as political stick figures, uttering pronouncements and advancing lines of argument, than as fully drawn personalities. The events Reed reported from Russia were, after all, primarily political--debates, proclamations, party caucuses, negotiations. And like politics in more staid settings, the tugging back and forth for Russia's destiny often grew tedious.
Reed makes little effort to spare us the dreary details. Two early chapters supply historical grounding. And a prefatory “Notes and Explanations” section guides us through the committees, councils, unions, and cooperatives that was Russia in 1917; the conscientious reader finds himself repeatedly flipping back to learn that the Vikzhel was the influential railway workers' union, or that the Maximalists were an offshoot of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
None of this, let it be said, is artfully handled. A more sophisticated narrative might have let Reed introduce names and groups only as needed, and to better sift the wheat of historical significance from the chaff of only transiently relevant detail.
Of course, this is journalism, not history. We hear the Duma in debate, read the latest poster from the Committee for Salvation, stand midst the tumultuous crowds in the Petrograd Soviet as Lenin lambastes the Mensheviks. Ten Days may be all it could be, and even all its author intended. Yet the best part of a century after the event, readers may want something more, may miss precisely the kind of insight that only history, and the distance of years, can grant.
Native Son
____________
By Richard Wright
First published in 1940
It’s hard to imagine a less-appealing character than Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old black ne’er-do-well from the Chicago slums who murders the daughter of his high-minded white employer, decapitates her and stuffs her body into a coal furnace. Later, he literally beats the brains out of his girlfriend with a brick and throws her down the air shaft of an abandoned building in which he is hiding from police.
Bigger is the creation of Richard Wright, a novelist hailed as “the most impressive literary talent yet produced by Negro America,” born on a Mississippi plantation in 1901. “The day Native Son appeared,” wrote critic Irving Howe, “American culture was changed forever.” Wright dares to deliver his powerful social message not through a warm, sympathetic victim of injustic, but a “victim” who, by every outward sign, is a brutal killer bereft of human feeling. Understand even Bigger Thomas as the harvest of pervasive racial oppression Wright so much as says, and the black condition in America generally can likewise be understood.
Native Son is not stylistically elegant. Like its central character, it is brutal, nervous and crude. Some of its scenes verge on melodrama, and its concluding pages, where a brilliant left-wing lawyer makes Bigger’s case before the jury, reads less like novel than social polemic. But the book’s overall effect is so shattering, its point of view so relentlessly etched into the reader’s consciousness, that it leaves its mark as indelibly today as when it was written almost 60 years ago.
As the nearly 50 translations and foreign editions appearing in the wake of its first printing testify, its
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