Since discovering the books of Richard Wright when I was a teenager hanging out at Hamilton Grange Library in New York City, I’ve been an admirer of his writing style, dapper suit wearing style and expat lifestyle as a Black writer dwelling in Paris after World War II. Wright’s celebrated career began with the short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children in 1938, but his literary reputation skyrocketed with the publication of his first novel Native Son. Published in 1940, the tale of Bigger Thomas and his murderous ways was partially influenced by newspaper clippings about accused killer and rapist Robert Nixon, who was placed on death row in Chicago and was executed in the electric chair at the Cook County Jail 1938.
The book made Wright into a literary sensation. In photographs he always looked so distinguished, but memories of childhood hunger, pain and brutality were always in his mind. “My takeaway from Wright’s corpus of literary genius is that writing can be a two way mirror for the writer, his audience, and society as a whole,” New Jack City/Sugar Hill screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper says. “Wright’s work in the midst of Jim Crow was a ray of black light in the cacophony of white noise. His writing illuminated what white American didn’t or most likely, chose not to see.”
Wright was the first Negro author accepted by the Book of the Month Club, a major feat in that era that promised more money for the young scribe. When his friend, poet Langston Hughes, heard of the book club’s involvement, he said Wright would be “bathed in a shower of gold.” Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad wrote that the poet thought Wright was “both charming and highly talented,” though others thought him self-serving and egotistical. That same year production began on a Native Son play brought to the stage by producers John Houseman and Orson Welles, who directed the adaption that starred Canada Lee. Since then the book has also been adapted to the screen several times including a HBO movie that aired in January, 2019.
In the almost eighty years since it was published, the book has remained in print and has long been a part of a well-rounded literary foundation. Native Son has inspired legions of young “Negro” writers including James Baldwin—who later tried to destroy Wright’s and the book’s reputation with his 1948 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel”—Julian Mayfield and Ralph Ellison. Years later some of my favorite writers including Nelson George, Edward P. Jones and Barry Michael Cooper would also cite Wright as an inspiration.
Cooper, a Harlem native who began his career as an influential music critic and journalist at The Village Voice and Spin, began reading Wright at the Schomberg Library when he was a teen. “Uncle Tom’s Children and Black Boy affected me, because Wright’s words made me feel something,” he says. “It was visceral. I wanted my writing to have that same kind of emotional and visceral impact, too. I still marvel over the artistry and intensity of Native Son, but my favorite is The Outsider.”
While Wright was known as a “serious” author whose books on race, class and violence were published in hardcover editions, in his heart the Mississippi native was a hardboiled pulp writer who had no problem crafting criminal minded protagonists for the paperback market. A favorite Wright novel since I discovered it twenty-four years ago is the little-known Savage Holiday.
Utilizing a New York City locale, the psychological noir’s lead protagonist was based on the “extreme ambivalence toward women” diagnosed in two-time murderer Clinton Brewer. The slim book was quite different from any other of Wright’s published material with its urban existentialism that reminded me of more of his friend Albert Camus (The Stranger) than his friend Jean-Paul Sartre.
Savage Holiday was Wright’s singular novel that featured a majority white cast and took place on the moneyed streets of Upper East Side Manhattan. The book was conceived in November, 1952 when, according to biographer Hazel Rowley, Wright was suffering from a high fever. The following month, on Christmas Day, Wright began the actual writing, finished a 60,000-word first draft in January and a final rewrite on Easter (April 5th) Sunday, 1953.
Wright’s powerful literary agent Paul Reynolds Jr. thought the book was too dated and discouraged his author from submitting it. Later, the manuscript was rejected by Wright’s primary publisher Harper & Brothers and World Publishing Company also declined. Though no one expressed it outright, I believe the negative response was made because the primarily Caucasian characters signaled that Wright was drifting away from the ghetto where he could be contained to examine life beyond the boundaries of Blackness the gatekeepers were used to.
Savage Holiday wasn’t a book on “the race problem” in the way the writer usually communicated his ideas. Wright was more interested in being innovative and growing as a writer, rather than creating a repeat performance of Native Son or Black Boy.
“As I told you, this (book) deals with just folks, white folks,” Wright wrote to Reynolds, in a letter that anticipated his publisher’s negative reaction. “Don’t know if Harper will like my switching or not…people might read it with more a desire to try to find fault than just to be moved or interested in the story.”
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In Savage Holiday, which was Wright’s third novel, he delved deep into the fall of doomed insurance executive Erskine Fowler, a morose character whose self-pitting persona reminded me of the losers that populate David Goodis’s dark world. Fowler’s pampered life spiraled out of control the night of his retirement party as he began to access the nothingness of his life.
“In this novel I have attempted to deal with what I consider the most important problem white people have, their moral dilemma,” Wright said in a 1956 radio interview. “This is why I have chosen this white New Yorker as a protagonist.” In that same interview Wright expounded on the meaning behind the lead character’s name. “Fowler brings to one’s mind of being ‘foul,’ of defiling, of not behaving according to the social rules.”
Fowler was thrust into a “lost weekend” scenario that became a bleak psychodrama. While re-reading I found the Hitchcock soundtracks of Bernard Herrmann, Franz Waxman and Miklós Rózsa to be the perfect soundtrack. The novel was eventually bought by Avon Books for two thousand dollars. Although being picked-up by the same publisher that brought the world Seven Slayers by Paul Cain and I Married a Dead Man by William Irish aka Cornell Woolrich might have embarrassed other top-tier writers, Wright wasn’t afraid of being labeled “pulp.”
In a way he was simply returning to his roots and the type of texts he’d once read when he was a teenager. In his autobiography Black Boy (1945) Wright wrote of his youthful reading material that included, “…tattered, second hand copies of Flynn’s Detective Weekly or Argosy All-Story magazine.” As a poor youngster, Richard Wright’s family moved constantly throughout the south in search of work which left him without much in terms of formal education. Leaving school in ninth grade to make money for the family, he carried within him the stories he heard or read years before that “blazed” his imagination and transformed him in an avid reader.
Further along in Black Boy, he recalled a colored teacher boarding with his grandmother telling him stories about wife killer Bluebeard. “As she spoke, reality changed, the look of things altered and the world became peopled with magical presences. My sense of life deepened and the feel of things was different somehow. The sensations the story aroused in me were never to leave me.”
As a boy reader, Wright split his textual pleasures between classics he borrowed from library and pulp magazines he found in various places. However, even at the library, where he forged notes from a fake white man giving him permission to withdraw books, Wright was a fan of the cold-blooded fictions of Edgar Allan Poe and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Unbeknownst to his family, the teenager was also sharpening his storytelling skills and writing his own fictions.
When he was only 15, Wright published his first story “Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre” in the spring of 1924 in the Jackson Southern Register. In Richard Wright: The Life and Times by Hazel Rowley, the Brit-biographer wrote that the story was, “modeled on the melodramatic pulp fiction he liked to read, it was about a villainous fellow who was trying to rob a poor widow of her home.”
In 1927, when he was nineteen, he and his family migrated to Chicago with countless other southerners in search of more jobs, better education and supposedly less racism. “I dreamed of going north and writing books, novels,” Wright wrote in Black Boy. “The North symbolized to me all that I had felt and seen; it had no relation to what actually existed.” Not surprisingly, the less racism part was a lie, but at least the city of Capone didn’t have Jim Crow laws, nor were there regular (legal) KKK lynchings.
Wright worked a series of jobs that included a post office gig, insurance salesman and ditch digger, but it was in Chicago where he began to grow as a writer, as well as politically. He joined the Communist Party, palled around with future author Nelson Algren and, in 1937, departed for New York City. Living in Harlem, Brooklyn and Greenwich Village, he stayed for nine years. It was in that city where he completed his seminal early works.
Wright’s first three books, as Chester Himes recalled in a 1970 interview, “…opened up certain fields in the publishing industry for the black writer, more so than anything that had happened. The Black (Harlem) Renaissance was an inward movement; it encouraged people who were familiar with it, who knew about it and were in contact with it, but the legend of Richard Wright reached people all over.”
In 1946 after being invited by the French government to visit Paris, Wright fell in love with the real freedom he felt in France and, soon after, relocated with his family that included wife Ellen and daughter Julia. His youngest daughter Rachel was born later that year.
Having gotten his first apartment in rue Monsieur Le Prince with the assistance of Gertrude Stein, he later moved with his family to rue Regis. His friend and drinking buddy Ollie Harrington, who along with James Baldwin, William Gardner Smith and Chester Himes was part of Wright’s exiled lit clique. Harrington, himself a brilliant cartoonist, described Wright’s abode as having “an arched doorway that led to a cluttered study where there were many books in the floor to ceiling shelves as well as a manuscript-buried oaken desk-table,” where Wright worked. With coffee and cigarettes by his side, Wright spent at least five hours a day amid “a tiny island in the sea of manuscripts” either reading or hunched over an Underwood typewriter typing his latest novel, essay, magazine article or short story.
“From this battered, battle-scarred machine poured forth the millions of words,” Harrington wrote, “words written in anger and outrage; words of shocking violence, terror and an echo of ominous laughter. This is the machine which spat out the words which caused critics the world over to use terms like outrageous, insolent, preposterous, naïve, magnificent, stupid and brilliant, arrogant and humble.”
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It was on that typewriter that Wright wrote the underrated Savage Holiday, which was originally titled Monument to Memory and, later, The Wish and the Dream. The final title Savage Holiday came out of the predicament of the rich, religious and self-righteous executive Erskine Fowler. When forced to retire from Longevity Insurance after thirty-years of loyal service, he doesn’t view it as a new freedom, but as a jail sentence. The book opened at Fowler’s farewell party where the forty-three year sat listening to flattering speeches about his decades of service while simultaneously recalling a brutal meeting he had with his bosses a few days before.
“You’re through, Fowler; hear?” his superior Rick screamed at him. “You’re out of date, behind the times; get it? We want live wires with gray matter upstairs; see?” To make matters worse, he discovered that the boss’s Harvard educated son would soon be taking his place. While the corporate cutthroats gave Fowler stocks and a healthy pension, they stripped him of the one thing that mattered in his life.
Without family, real friends or hobbies, Fowler has no idea what he’s going to do with the rest of his days. “Having lived solely for work all his life, he must now adjust to his holiday,” critic Gerald Early wrote in the afterword essay published in the 1994 reissue published by the University Press of Mississippi, “an idea that discomforts him greatly.”
It was that edition that first attracted me when I saw it on the shelf at Coliseum Books. It has a red, black and blue cover art by Patti Henson, a stark woodcut illustration of a black suited/red tie wearing man with a pained face and a hand on his heart as he ran into the New York night. Behind him ominous multi-windowed buildings looked like haunted houses. Fowler was one of the “masters of the universe” until it was snatched away during the Saturday night soirée, and he soon began to come undone as he mumbled to himself before bolting into the humid summer night.
Returning to his Upper East Side high-rise building the Elmira, where he lived on the tenth-floor, “he entered the bedroom that had never been dishonored by the presence of a stray woman of pleasure.” Judging by that last sentence, it’s not surprising to learn Fowler has intense sexual hang-ups that became even clearer when he began fantasizing about the next door neighbor Mrs. Blake, a shapely war widow whose five-year old son Tony he often bought toys and ice cream. Sometimes he acted as a surrogate father to the boy.
The “whore” mother, who worked at a nightclub and often brought home strange men, was named Mabel. Over the course of the narrative it’s revealed that she isn’t exactly mama of the year, and her son had seen her having sex. Confused, the boy equated making love with fighting and began to fear everything in the world including his toys.
Not surprisingly, Fowler also had issues with his own loose mother, who had little time for him when he was a boy. Fowler too was often left alone and his mother might’ve been a hooker. It wasn’t until he began working at Longevity when he was a teen that he felt that he belonged somewhere, that he was part of a real family. Still, though he rose through the ranks from the lower level to the executive washroom, he wasn’t well liked, let alone loved.
With thoughts of loose Mabel, his absent mother and recent miseries, Fowler fell into a nightmare where he was stranded on a path overgrown with “tall black weeds” that led him into “a strange, deep, dark forest with stalwart trees ranging on all sides of him.” Hours later, he was awakened to the bang bang bang of Tony beating his drum on the building balcony next door to his apartment.
Lying still, Fowler contemplated how he’d twice offered to take Tony to church with him, but each time Mabel had had “too much nightclubbing, too much whiskey and God knows what else” to get the boy dressed. Like many Christians, Fowler was quite judgmental, but blind to his own faults and sinful behavior. While in the beginning of the book I felt sorry for him suffering at the retirement party, by midpoint his classist, racist, sexist and extreme religious views became clearer and crazier.
Nonetheless, before Fowler even got dressed for Sunday service, his whole world turned topsy turvy when he stepped naked into the hallway to get his newspaper and the door was blown shut by a breeze from the window. Suddenly Fowler was locked-out, nude in the hallway. Like a rat in a maze, he was scared as he ran from one dead-end to another, moving from the elevator to staircase to the baloney where little Tony was rocking on his toy horse. On the terrace, Fowler ran into the railing and loosened it in the process.
Seconds later, scared by the sight of his naked neighbor, the boy toppled over a rail. Tony literally fell to the ground with a “distant, definite, soft, crushing, yet pulpy: PLOP!” A few paragraphs later, Wright wrote, “To hear that awful sound, a sound that would reverberate down all along the long corridors of his years in this world, a sound that would follow him, like a taunting echo, even unto his grave…” became deeper, darker and more macabre.
After years of Fowler bringing hope and security to others through his role at Longevity Insurance, now he has brought death and misery. Perhaps more disturbing was when, hours later, Fowler began courting Tony’s mother Mabel in an effort to distract from his role in the boy’s death. Yet, instead of being a comforting presence to a woman who just lost her child, he becomes a disruptive force. Coming on strong, his feelings were a continuous seesaw between guilt and arrogance, desire and distain.
The themes and narrative textures of Savage Holiday were inspired by various sources including existentialism, cinema, Sigmund Freud and Dark Legend: A Study In Murder by Fredric Wertham, founder of the first mental health facility in Harlem the Lafargue Clinic. Wright and Wertham, who would become infamous for his 1954 comic book killing text Seduction of the Innocent, became good friends in the early 1940s.
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When published in 1954, Savage Holiday was ignored by the literary community in America, where there wasn’t a single review written. Years later his old friend, Native Son researcher and biographer Margaret Walker, herself the best-selling author of the historical novel Jubilee, wrote in Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius, “In my opinion perhaps it would have been better for Richard Wright if Savage Holiday had never been published…(it) decimates his stature.”
The novel was praised by the French, but American critics seemed dismayed that Wright took pride in crossing genre lines.The novel was praised by the French, but American critics seemed dismayed that Wright took pride in crossing genre lines. Even today, as Ian McEwan showed in his recent “don’t call me a science fiction writer” outburst concerning his book Machines Like Me, literary writers often see themselves as inhabiting a different world than the supposed genre hacks. For every Colson Whitehead and Jonathan Lethem slipping between lit/non-lit worlds, there are more serious writer types who think differently.
Wright’s friend Chester Himes, another literary novelist who became a genre writer with the publication of his Harlem crime novel A Rage in Harlem aka For the Love of Imabelle in 1957, described Savage Holiday as, “An extraordinary book that Dick wrote simply because the idea of a psychotic hero interested him. Dick never wrote for anyone but himself, and he created characters out of his own emotion, uninfluenced by anyone else. The plot, as I understand it, was based on an actual event.” That “actual event” referred to was the Clinton Brewer murder case, a story that Richard Wright was directly connected, too.
Brewer was in prison in 1940 when he sent Wright a fan letter. He was 36-years-old and had been locked-up for twenty years. While Wright received many jailhouse posts from prisoners who identified with Bigger Thomas, there was something smart and special about Brewer’s correspondence that encouraged the writer to visit him at New Jersey State Prison at Trenton.
Behind bars Brewer had studied music and became a jazz musician. According to the paper Race and Affect in Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday by Temple University professor Dorothy Stringer: “He (Brewer) had been given a long sentence at the age of seventeen for murdering his much older, white wife, Helen Schenk Brewer, but while serving his sentence he studied music independently, and began composing jazz. Wright…brought the latter’s work ‘Stampede in G Minor’ to Count Basie, who recorded it to moderate success.” With the support of Wright, Basie, and the music producer John Hammond, Brewer unexpectedly won parole and was released on July 8, 1941. “I have no hesitation in predicting a splendid future for him,” Hammond told reporters.
Wright biographer Michel Fabre noted in The Unfinished Quest Of Richard Wright(1973) that the author was convinced that Brewer “had established through his art an organic social relationship to the world, making a second offence highly unlikely.” Having been promised a steady gig as an arranger for Basie’s band, Brewer had a certain future in the world of jazz, but soon after his release he murdered another woman. Her name was Wilhelmina Washington, a Harlem resident and mother of two teenage boys. He stabbed her to death when she refused to marry him and stashed her body in a closet.
Although Wright was supposedly shaken, he continued to assist Brewer even after the latter pled guilty.Although Wright was supposedly shaken, he continued to assist Brewer even after the latter pled guilty. He recalled Fredric Wertham’s case study Dark Legend, which detailed the story of Italian immigrant named Gino who killed his promiscuous mother to protect the honor of his dead daddy. Wright saw a connection with Brewer, and asked Wertham to interview his friend.
“Wertham examined Brewer,” Gabriel Mendes wrote in a 2014 essay in Transition. “In a later sentencing hearing Wertham testified that Brewer exhibited a psychotic obsession with control over women and, thus, was not in his right mind. His testimony saved Brewer from the electric chair. Thirteen years later, when Richard Wright sat down in his Parisian study to type on that Underwood, he thought about his crazy killer friend, and quickly created a book that was weird and wonderful and quite mad.
Although Savage Holiday could’ve used bit of trimming of its textual fat, it’s lack of editorial perfection doesn’t take away from Wright’s bug-fucked brilliance. He dedicated the book to Clinton Brewer. Despite the eventual product being ignored by critics for decades, Richard Wright was quite proud of the work he put into this forgotten, out-of-print novel. In the era of Mad Men (after re-reading the book this year, Fowler reminded me of the falling suicide man in the opening credits), Savage Holiday works perfectly as a concrete and glass urbanite novel unafraid to be psychosexual, wicked and, most of all, pulp.
