Richard Wright and James Baldwin were drawn together as satellites of an American literary world contracted by prejudice. But besides differences of heritage and age—one a son of Mississippi, then Chicago; the other of Harlem, a generation behind—they were separated by a formal disagreement about life on the page. Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” first published in 1949 (later collected in “Notes of a Native Son”) made their aesthetic rift public, iconic. Baldwin wrote that Wright’s “Native Son,” not unlike its foremother, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” is undermined by its “virtuous rage,” and its protagonist, Bigger Thomas, “controlled, defined by his hatred and his fear.” Among certain jaded readers of the Negro canon (myself included), cultural memory has favored the younger writer’s discernment; his distaste for “Native Son” lingers. Yet the novel remains the work of Wright’s that occludes all others.
Even Baldwin admitted, eventually, that Wright possessed other registers. A year after Wright’s sudden death, in 1960, at the age of fifty-two, a posthumous collection of his fiction, “Eight Men,” was published. Writing on that volume in the essay “Alas, Poor Richard,” Baldwin confessed to “feeling that Wright, as he died, was acquiring a new tone, and a less uncertain esthetic distance, and a new depth.” One of the collected works that gave him this impression was “The Man Who Lived Underground,” a short story that followed a framed man named Fred Daniels on a journey through the dank underworld of an unnamed city’s sewage system, from which he gets glimpses of the world above. Baldwin wrote that the story exemplified Wright’s “ability to convey inward states by means of externals,” with its “series of brief, sharply cut-off tableaus, seen through chinks and cracks and keyholes.”
Wright originally wrote “The Man Who Lived Underground” as a novel, which has just been published, for the first time, by the Library of America, in collaboration with Wright’s eldest daughter, Julia. Wright wrote the manuscript in the fall of 1941, only a year after “Native Son,” partially expurgated at the request of the Book-of-the-Month Club, became a commercial sensation. Just a hundred and fifty-nine pages long, “The Man Who Lived Underground” begins with Daniels being detained and beaten by the police, for a crime no one genuinely believes he committed. He escapes custody and flees underground in a fugitive narrative inspired, in part, by a crime story published the same year, in the magazine True Detective. Wright’s publisher, Harper & Brothers, rejected the book. It was trimmed and published as a short story, in 1944, without, among other significant chunks of writing, the first section to explain what motivated Daniels’s descent.
Publicity for posthumously published works often elides the pragmatic decision-making that brings languishing drafts to the fore. Publishers spin tales of yellowed parchment and unbound pages stowed in a crawl space for decades until some enterprising fellow stumbles upon them and—why, look at that!—recognizes them as an intact masterwork. “The Man Who Lived Underground” was not quite “unearthed,” as has been reported in much of the coverage so far. Scholars have known and written of the novel-length typescripts since the seventies, when Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired Wright’s papers from his widow, Ellen. In a recent piece in the Times, the Library of America’s editorial director, John Kulka, and others suggest that the unabridged “Man Who Lived Underground” may have remained unpublished because its scenes of police violence were considered too explosive at the time they were written (though Kulka told me, by phone, that it’s possible the slight, surreal story simply wasn’t the follow-up that Harper & Brothers had in mind for its celebrity race author).
In 2021, the restored novel tickles audiences’ appetite for that which feels both timely and, at the same time, transhistorical. Reviewing the book for Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee noted that the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd came on the same day as “The Man Who Lived Underground” ’s release. The news “makes a columnist’s work much easier,” McLemee wrote, as though merely noting the topical connection would substitute for the mechanics of reading.
Those familiar with the short-story version of “The Man Who Lived Underground” will find elongated paragraphs and drippier, unclipped scenery in the section of the book that concerns Daniels’s subterranean journey. Despite his perilous circumstances, Daniels makes an unharried escape from the world above. His initial encounter with the manhole that will transport him is glancing, childlike, like Alice with her looking glass. It is raining on the evening in question, and the flow of water in the streets has jostled the manhole’s cover, “a crescent that gaped in the pavement like a black slip of moon.” Daniels smokes his first of many cigarettes “chain-fashion” in a strange vestibule. “He wished he were a tiny insect that could crawl into one of those crevices in the brick wall; he would be safe then.” He hears the “thirsty scream” of a siren somewhere in the distance. What finally urges him down is a fearful hallucination that he’s been discovered—“he saw the car bearing swiftly down upon him.” He regains his senses and takes the plunge, down and down “into the rustling, watery blackness,” where he finds cold and slime, vermin and gray water—but also singing, cinema, fruit, and fine jewelry.
It would be folly to try to map this section of the novel, spatially or racially. Kept from the sight of all but those who work with it, the vast maze of urban plumbing unfurls a path for Daniels and Daniels alone. He wanders far and not far at all: “It was as though he had traveled a million miles away from the life of the world.” Cut off from daylight, “it seemed that the only sense he had of time was when a match flared and the burning flame measured time by its fleeting duration,” Wright writes. It is not that space and time and race do not matter in “The Man Who Lived Underground,” but the calculus gets weird down there in the dark. The events that pulled Daniels down—a Black man meeting white cops—depart his mind almost as quickly as his nose grows accustomed to the “fresh rot” of man’s organic waste.
Yet when Daniels stumbles upon what becomes a home base of sorts, a cavern of confounding dimensions, he is able, through a crack in the brick walls, to hear the sounds of a Black church choir singing, “down in one of them sunken basements.” Peering in at the congregants, Daniels is overcome by an ineffable feeling, which sounds something like racial affinity: “black men and women, dressed in black robes, singing, holding tattered song books in their black palms.” But another part of him recognizes that sense of membership as a fiction:
One of my colleagues at Northwestern University, Marquis Bey, has written about the fertile imaginative material that underground spaces have provided African-American literature, from Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” to neo-slave narratives such as Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad.” “More than a site of secrecy or dormancy,” the underground is “also a liminal, mezzanine space of generative disruption,” Bey writes. But where Ellison’s “thinker-tinker” communes from his basement lair with predecessors such as Henry Ford and Benjamin Franklin, Daniels’s journey torques Dostoyevsky, of whom both Wright and Ellison were fond. As Daniels spends more time in the underground, he loses track of modernity’s other weighted symbols. Stolen money disintegrates into “shimmering silver and copper.” Guilt detaches from the judicial system, and from racial difference, and mushrooms into something more existential.
Daniels’s journey calls to my mind “How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness,” a study by the art historian Darby English that begins with a consideration of David Hammons’s installation “Concerto in Black and Blue,” from 2002. The work, which invited viewers to wander through empty darkened galleries, “accounts for blackness only insofar as it is relationally defined and erratically constituted,” English writes, rather than intoning the static symbolism of what’s called “black experience.”
It’s for these reasons that the restored first portion of “The Man Who Lived Underground” is also the least compelling. The novel begins with Daniels leaving the residence of his employers, the Wootens, and counting his pay. He’s heading home to his pregnant wife. But, unbeknownst to him, the Wootens’ neighbors have been murdered. He is picked up by a trio of cops—Lawson, Johnson, and Murphy—who beat him into a daze. They extract from Daniels a number of things—blood, sweat, saliva—including his signature on a confession. The scenes depict the sort of slurried violence for which Wright is known, with the reader caught among the blows as if seated between Daniels’s very eyes.
The details are brutal and, for some, perhaps, “unbearable,” as one editor who read the original manuscript wrote in the margins. And yet the effect of these scenes is to clean up some of the mystery that “The Man Who Lived Underground” possesses in its shortened form. The surrealism of Daniels’s time below is tamed by his preceding experience of law and injustice. In marketing the book’s theme of police violence, the shepherds of the new Library of America edition may be inadvertently reinforcing an old dynamic between readers and Wright, which is a version of the dynamic that plagues readers and Black writers more broadly—namely, that any interest in style is eclipsed by a preoccupation with gritty truth-telling. This is true of those who raise their noses at “Native Son” as well as those who flock to it for lessons. We may have taken “Everybody’s Protest Novel” too much to heart, finding another form of diminished complexity in defining Wright as the didact of race. Wright, in a letter to his agent sent with his draft of “The Man Who Lived Underground,” wrote that the novel marked the first time he had “tried to go beyond stories in black and white.”
Importantly, the Library of America’s “The Man Who Lived Underground” includes another previously unpublished Wright work, an essay called “Memories of My Grandmother.” In it, Wright explains that what he was trying to capture, in “The Man Who Lived Underground,” was a mode of living that he’d observed in his mother’s mother, Margaret Bolton Wilson. A devout Seventh-day Adventist, Wilson considered Earth only an intermediary, even if, possessing a body, she could not cast earthly concerns aside. Her exacting maternalism drove the young Wright away from Black religiosity (and, eventually, from home), as he would depict in detail in his memoir “Black Boy.” Yet in “Memories of My Grandmother,” the author is as entranced as repelled by the ways of the woman who helped raise him. He senses that she genuinely existed “in this world but not of this world,” with
As more of the world impressed itself upon Wright, he noticed elements of his grandmother’s “ ‘abstract’ living” in unexpected places—not in the body-quaking drama of the church but in the “strangely familiar” philosophy of Mark Twain, the cadence of Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” the phantom materialism of H. G. Wells’s “The Invisible Man” on film, as well as in Freud, Dalí, and the blues artists he is sure Granny would have “detested.” Abstract living is the way of Fred Daniels, too, as he assembles the winking symbols of his subterranean environment into a new order that both feeds upon and exorcises the world above. The man down there, and the woman who unknowingly begat him, cannot be reduced to the usual words—“Black,” “religious,” “unfree.” They and others like them require the capaciousness of a novel and the vastness of the underground.
