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American Man: the Ambitious Searches of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway/ Michael Kwame Forbes University of Massachusetts Amherst

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American Man: the Ambitious Searches of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway/ Michael Kwame Forbes University of Massachusetts Amherst University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 1-1-2007 American man: the ambitious searches of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway/ Michael Kwame Forbes University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1 Recommended Citation Forbes, Michael Kwame, "American man: the ambitious searches of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway/" (2007). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 922. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/922 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. University of Massachusetts Amherst I B R A R Y Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 https://archive.org/details/americanmanambitOOforb This is an authorized facsimile, made from the microfilm master copy of the original dissertation or master thesis published by UMI. The bibliographic information for this thesis is contained in UMFs Dissertation Abstracts database, the only central source for accessing almost every doctoral dissertation accepted in North America since 1861. From:Pro6vuest COMPANY 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1346 USA 800.521.0600 734.761.4700 web www.il.proquest.com Printed in 2007 by digital xerographic process on acid-free paper AMERICAN MAN: THE AMBITIOUS SEARCHES OF RICHARD WRIGHT AND ERNEST HEMINGWAY A Dissertation presented by MICHAEL KWAME FORBES Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2007 Afro-American Studies UMI Number: 3275780 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI UMI Microform 3275780 Copyright 2007 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 © Copyright by Michael K. Forbes 2007 All Rights Reserved AMERICAN MAN: THE AMBITIOUS SEARCHES OF RICHARD WRIGHT AND ERNEST HEMINGWAY A Dissertation presented By MICHAEL KWAME FORBES Approved as to style and content by: Michael Thelwell, Chair Esther Terry, Member Steven C. Tracy, Member Jules Chametzky, Member Esther Terry, Department Chair Afro-American Studies American Man: The Ambitious Searches of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway A Dissertation presented By Michael Kwame Forbes Approved as to style and content by: Michael Thelwell, Chair 7 Esther Terry, Member ^ Sfeven C. Tracy, Member Jules Chametzky, Merrier Esther Terry, Department Chair Afro-American Studies DEDICATION In honor of my mother and father ABSTRACT AMERICAN MAN: THE AMBITIOUS SEARCHES OF RICHARD WRIGHT AND ERNEST HEMINGWAY MAY 2007 MICHAEL KWAME FORBES, B.A., EASTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Michael Thelwell This dissertation is a comparative examination of how certain works by Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wright jointly address themes concerning manhood, violence, and alienation. The dissertation considers how each American writer's treatment of common themes is effected by race and the social climates they come out of: the American Midwest during and after the World War I era and the American South after The Great Depression. An important dimension of this study is how each man traveled to identical geographical settings-Spain, Africa, and France and responded to globally significant events taking place there such as The Spanish Civil War and independence coming to Anglo- Africa after World War II. The shared subject here is the affects of modernity on traditional culture. Their debut collection of short stories in the mid 20' s to late 30's on through to their nonfiction journals on Anglo- Africa in the early 1950's shows a developing struggle, in each writer, with detached individualism and offering political analysis and commentary. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I LITERARY ROOTS, BEGINNINGS, AND INFLUENCES 7 II. THE OUTSIDER AND FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS: EXISTENTIALISM, INDIVIDUALISM, TOLITARIANISM AND FREEDOM 48 III. SPAIN: TRADITION VERSUS MODERNITY 97 IV HOMECOMING. AFRICA ON THE EVE OF INDEPENDENCE 129 CONCLUSION 182 BIBILIOGRAPHY 191 INTRODUCTION The relationship of a black boy to a white boy is a very complex thing.. .The things that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence. It was this commodity precisely which I had to get rid of at once, literally, on the pain of death... to become a Negro man, let alone a Negro artist, one had to make oneself up as one went along. The world had prepared no place for you, and if the world had its way. no place would ever exist. Now, this is true for everyone, but, in the case of a Negro, this truth is absolutely naked; if he deludes himself about it he will die. This is not the way this truth presents itself to white men. who believe the world is theirs and who albeit unconsciously, expect the world to help them in the achievement of their identity. Rut the world does not do this-for anyone... And, therefore, the anguish that can overtake a white man in the middle of his life, when he must make the almost inconceivable effort to divest himself of everything he has ever expected, or believed, when he must take himself apart and put himself back together again... This cannot yet happen to any Negro of Nonnan 's age, for the reason that his delusions and defenses are absolutely impenetrable by this time, or he has failed to survive " them. "I want to know how power works, Norman once said to me, "how it really works in " detail. Well, I know how power works, it has worked on me and if I didn V know how power works, I would be dead. And it goes without saying, perhaps, that I have siniply never been able to afford myself any illusions concerning the manipulation of that power. James Baldwin on Norman Mailer " "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy This dissertation is inspired by and is an attempt to examine the central ideas in the Baldwin passage quoted above as they inform and find expression in some major works written by Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway a generation earlier. The complexity of the relationship (between a "black boy" and a "white boy") to which Baldwin refers is, of course, racially/culturally determined: i.e. The extent to which pressures and considerations of race, class, and the effects of racism in and on American culture, determine fundamental differences in the quality of experience, perception, assumptions, and responses in the general psychology and indeed world view of Americans who are Black as opposed to Americans who are white. 1 When, as was the case with James Baldwin and Norman Mailer and before them Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway, the white and black boys happen also to be major American novelists then their racially determined conditioning, fundamental values, and responses to the world assume important literary dimensions and consequences. Once, in the 1940's, as a consequence of a private correspondence with William Faulkner on artistic responsibility in the depiction of social (read racial) realities in their native Mississippi, Richard Wright famously declared "literature is a struggle over the 1 nature of reality." The essay "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy" presents a debate between Baldwin and Mailer on the ways in which race informs an artist's 2 perceptions of "reality" as represented in American literature. When the Baldwin essay appeared in 1961 Baldwin and Mailer were prominent American novelists and influential public intellectuals. This was a time when the changing dynamics of race were dominating America's domestic politics and social discourse as never before. This shift in the racial politics of the nation in 1961 allowed for a public expression of a "struggle over the nature of reality" between these two preeminent black and white American writers. Intriguingly, a generation earlier, certain important works of two leading American writers of their day, Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway, had displayed very similar and significant divergences in the treatment of common subjects. What is Keneth Kinnamon, Conversations with Richard Wright, ed. Michel Fabre (Jackson University Press of Mississippi, 1993), p. 10. " James Baldwin "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy, Norman Mailer" Esquire, May 1961, p. 104. 2 interesting, instructive but not at all incomprehensible, is that despite truly remarkable similarities-theme, geography, literary preoccupations, political concerns and, of course genre-in the work of both writers, the two men apparently never had occasion to engage each other publicly on these issues in the way that Baldwin and Mailer would come to do 1 in the sixties.' Not surprising because the prevailing class and cultural biases of the literary intelligentsia of the times (the 1 940-50' s) precluded-indeed could not have conceived-of any such public discourse (even if between such significant figures in American literature) across the divide of race, class, and culture. More telling, and perhaps for the same reasons, is that despite the remarkable range of similar intellectual interests displayed in the works of both men, no critic or scholar has essayed to undertake what would seem to be an obvious and potentially revealing comparative study.
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