Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground

A Review of Richard Wright’s

The Man Who Lived Underground 

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Fall 2021

The Man Who Lived Underground
Richard Wright
Library of America (22.95)

After publishing his 1940 novel Native Son, Richard Wright became a literary superstar who had the freedom to pursue any inspiration he chose. Those disparate inspirations included a photo-documentary, an uncompleted novel about black domestic workers, and a surreal experimental novel called The Man Who Lived Underground, which was rejected by his publishers and which has only now appeared in its complete form.

Exploring the bizarre adventures of a black man who descends into the sewers to escape the police after he’s wrongly accused of murder, The Man Who Lived Underground is like nothing else Wright had written by then, following a dreamlike logic that reads far more like German Expressionism than like the Urban Realism of Native Son. Short excerpts of the novel appeared in 1942, and among its fans was Ralph Ellison, who ran with many of its concepts and approaches in his 1952 masterpiece Invisible Man. Disappointed by the novel’s rejection, Wright honed it into a much more effective short story that appeared in a journal in 1944, and then much later in his posthumous story collection Eight Men.

In addition to the full novel, the present volume contains the remarkable essay “Memories of my Grandmother,” in which Wright explicates what he was trying to do in The Man Who Lived Underground, while also pointing forward to his genre-defining memoir, Black Boy, which clearly grew out of this underground seam of exploration. Wright’s essay opens with this astonishing claim:

 

I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration, or executed any piece of writing in a deeper feeling of imaginative freedom, or expressed myself in a way that flowed more naturally from my own personal background, reading, experiences, and feelings than The Man Who Lived Underground.

  

This statement seems undeniably true, but that doesn’t mean that the novel works as an organic whole or that it accomplishes what Wright intended.

Richard Wright

The first section of The Man Who Lived Underground reads like hard-boiled detective pulp, appearing to the reader to be mostly realistic and believable, with a brutal focus on the protagonist Fred Daniels’s shocking mistreatment by the police, who extract a false confession from him. After a weirdly unconvincing series of events, Fred escapes into the sewers, where he almost immediately attains a detached, transcendent viewpoint on the world and its woes. Fans of Native Son’s crystalline naturalism would have been terribly put off to see Wright’s progressions not making seamless sense—and not because of Fred’s trippy mental evolutions, which are quite intriguing, but because the novel’s wild arcs don’t encompass a foundation to support themselves.

Tunnelling through the sewers, Fred somehow scrapes his way into basement after basement, observing and judging the world’s unfortunate souls while somehow never being heard or seen. He witnesses a church choir and pities their obsequious self-denigrations; he shakes his head at a theater full of moviegoers, who he feels are just living a ghost-life and laughing at themselves; he easily finds all the tools and sustenance he needs to survive underground; and he cracks safes and breaks into jewelry shops to liberate untold riches, which in his newly alienated state he sees as entirely without intrinsic meaning or value. He plasters his cave with hundred-dollar bills, and he mashes the jewels into the ground to look like stars in the firmament, and eventually he begins to feel that he must reemerge into the world with a message for humanity—and to assume the mantle of guilt.

A drawing by Franz Kafka

Wright’s grandson Malcolm Wright contributes an afterword to this volume, making a convincing argument that the novel is an inverse take on Plato’s cave allegory, but the most immediate and obvious literary influences at play here are certainly Kafka and Dostoyevsky. The unjustly accused man (The Trial) digs into the earth to escape his persecutors (“The Burrow”) and then goes through a series of inner transformations that work in counterpoint to his physical degeneration and lead to a bizarrely Christ-like apotheosis (“The Metamorphosis”). In the later short-story version Wright goes so far as to have Fred navigate his way with fingers that “toyed in space, like the antennae of an insect.” Likewise, the hated man who lives beneath the world (Notes from Underground) grows to accept and cherish his guilt and yearns to pay the consequences (Crime and Punishment). It’s a startling literary landscape for the author of Native Son to explore, and it would have drastically altered his own landscape—and that of his contemporaries—had he been able to make it work on the scale he envisioned.

From the Invisible Man films

Without Wright’s accompanying essay, many of the novel’s aims fail to land, in part because the writing is neither realistic enough nor daringly magical enough to hold it all together. This is terrain that requires an Ellison, who somehow divined the Invisible Man theme from it and took it to another literary universe. In the essay Wright discusses the Invisible Man films as a key influence on creating a character who exists completely apart from humanity and who observes and judges it in secret. But the word “invisible” appears nowhere in the novel itself. Perhaps Wright let Ellison read the essay, which has only become publicly available in this volume, or perhaps Ellison was just a magician. Either way, The Man Who Lived Underground serves as a fascinating bridge between drastically different literary sensibilities and has now revised the trajectory of American Modernism.

 

—David Wiley