Black Cat and White Cat:
Chicago Public Library, where they were readily available.
Richard Wright’s Debt to Edgar Allan Poe
Michel Fabre
Universiti. de Paris
In enumerating such requirements for literary success as
“the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful
coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into
the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange
and the mystical,”’ Edgar Allan Poe certainly spoke from
experience. That is. he sought those literary qualities
with avidity, for he felt that to really be appreciated,
one must be read. And read he was, not only by his
contemporaries but also by twentieth-century readers lured
by similar fascinations-and especially by a young black
American writer named Richard Wright. Tales of horror
and imagination were the favorite reading d Richard
Wright, who had his first significant literary experience
when a fearless teenager told him the tale of Bluebeard
in the household of his book-hating Seventh Day Ad-
ventist grandmother. This gruesome story was the first
experience in his life that elicited from him a total emo-
tional response? It certainly paved the way for his in-
ordinate love of melodrama, murder stories and ghastly
settings.
Among the books and magazines he read in his youth,
Wright lists not only Zane Grey’s Riders of the P w p l e
Sage, but also Flynn’s Detective Weekly and Argosy All-
Story Magazine. One of his favorite tales is that of “a
renowned scientist who had rigged up a mystery room
made of metal in the basement of his palatial home.
Prompted by some obscure motive, he would lure his
victims into his room and then throw an electric switch.
Slowly, with heart-racking agony, the air would be sucked
from the metal rcmm and his victims would die, turning
red, blue, then black.” He comments: “This was what I
wanted, tales like this. I had not read enough to have
developed any taste of reading” (Black Boy, pp. 34-35),
Although he later developed a taste for the realistic
fiction of Dreiser and Sherwocd Anderson, Wright never
forgot this version of “The Pit and the Pendulum” or
“The Cask of Amontillado,” brought up to date to fore-
shadow the horrors of the gas chamber. The first story
which Wright recalls writing at the age of twelve was
indebted to the dual influence of frontier romanticism
and of the frail heroines of Edgar Allan Poe.
More significant is the presence of Poe’s main works
among the scanty hundred volumes Wright possessed
before becoming the author of Native Son. Of the col-
lection, Volume IV of the Complete Works, published
by Harpers at the beginning of the century, comprised
Poe’s criticism. A secondhand copy of Poems a.nd Tales,
printed in 1924 for the University Publishing Company,
included “To Helen,” “Annabel Lee,” “Ulalume,” ‘ T h e
Bells,” “The Raven,” “Eldorado,” “Coliseum,” “The Fall
of the House of Usher,” “Descent into the Maelstrom,”
“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,”
“Ligeia,” and “The Gold-Bug.’’ It is very likely that
Wright, having discovered and enjoyed Poe to the point
of buying these books, did his best to secure the rest of
his works in the George Cleveland Hall Branch of the
At a later date, he also bought Volume I11 of the 1876
Middleton Edition of Poe’s works. W e may therefore
assume that he was more conversant with Poe’s fiction
and aesthetic theolries than the average student would
have been.
An early debt to Poe’s technique as a story teller is
to be found in Wright’s first preserved story. Written
in 1930, its title is, significantly, “Superstition,” and the
caption reads: “Each year the family held a reunion-
each year death claimed its toll-was it superstition-or
was it fate?”3 At the end of a leisurely dinner with two
friends, when the conversation turned to subjects of a
weird and mysterious nature, the first-person narrator re-
lates “a baffling incident that defied explanation” (p. 4 5 ) .
The experience is simple: having to spend the night in
a small Southern town, the young man has to stay with
the Lancaster family, which takes guests, because all the
hotels are full. The younger daughter, Lillian, has no
m n e r expressed her fear of the superstition which entails
death to a member of a household at a family reunion
when her brothers arrive for an unexpected Christmas
visit. She dies in the night of acute pneumonia. When
chance brings the visitor back to Koogan a year later,
curiosity prompts him to stay with the Lancasters again,
and, this time, Mrs. Lancaster dies of a heart attack after
the ominous fall of Lillian’s portrait from above the
mantlepiece and a second unexpected visit of the two
brothers.
Wright owes much to Poe’s technique of describing
the setting in order to suggest an eerie, dreary atmosphere.
The beginning of “Superstition,” with “houses standing
out like gaunt sores against the bleak sky, . . . the inces-
sant rain, the cold and penetrating damp, the overhanging
gloom . . . in the far distance the mournful whistle of
a departing train, the faint and musical tinkle of a cow-
bell, a solitary dog, the monotonous beat of rain” (pp.45-
4 6 ) , seems a clumsy attempt at recreating the opening
note of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The Usher
family and their mansion are analogous-crumbling from
within, stained with time; so do the Lancaster parents
and their wooden house, used u p as they are, decline to-
gether. Mrs. Lancaster is “exceptionally frail, so frail that
she seemed to cling to life by bare effort . . . her eyes
entirely lifeless, so sunken were they” (p. 4 6 ) . Her
husband is “a bent and aged man, somewhat older than
she, dressed in a loose-fitting black suit, and whose head
was wrapped in a black silk skull cap” (p. 4 6 ) . Although
cozy, the room, “with an abnormally high ceiling across
which flitted fantastic shadows from a blazing log fire,
seemed heir to a blanket of decay and melancholy” (p. 4 6 ) .
As for Lillian, she seems a sepia Ligeia, a beautiful,
yet disembodied, consumptive beauty. “Her narrow face,
pale and emaciated, attracted me. Her hair was brushed
backward and revealed a broad, bulging forehead, below
which, shining in contrast to her pallid features, were a
pair of dark, sunken eyes. The most unusual thing about
her was a timid and perpetual smile, a smile that seemed
melancholy and slightly cynical. A peculiar air of resig-
nation pervaded her whole being” (p. 4 7 ) . Lillian is
the victim, marked for sacrifice by an unseen hand.
More interesting is Wright’s use of Poe’s habit of
17
blending the uncanny and the natural by postulating
hidden but rational laws governing the action, as is par-
ticularly apparent in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
In “Superstition,” the reader is left with a dual explana-
tion: Lillian and her mother die for natural reasons (of
pneumonia and a heart attack), but the coincidence, in
place and in time, equally vindicates the supernatural
explanation expressed by the popular saying about family
reunions. The mystery here is related to chance, but
mostly to a strange correspondence between externals and
psychology where the “objective correlative” takes on an
active role. The arresting attributes of both works are
the creation of the atmosphere and the disruption of
mental states, the early work of Wright being clumsier
in that respect. In realizing that a situation replete with
horror is more catching by being vague, Wright tries to
make fear more terrible through ambiguity. “At that mo-
ment the coming tragedy cast its shadow, and that shadow,
like all the shadows that attend human events, was unseen
by human eyes. The causes in our lives that later develop
into glaring effects are so minute, originate in such com-
monplace incidents that we pass them casually, unthink-
ing, only to look back and marvel” (p. 6 4 ) . Here the
moralist breaks the dramatic suspense by his intrusion.
Elsewhere, the same effect is more appropriately achieved
to bring the reader back to the teller of the tale in his
Chicago setting: “I shall never, as long as I breathe, forget
that silence. In that silence, there was revealed, hideously
and repellently, the stark nakedness of the fearful hearts
of a primitive folk-fearful hearts bowing abjectly to the
terror of an unknown created by their own imaginations.
. . . The very contents of their inmost hearts were laid
bare in that one moment: the unreasoning fear of death”
(p. 73 ) . Having pretended to share the characters’ fears
and feelings, the narrator now steps aside and poses as a
rationalist.
Despite their differences, Wright owes his nineteenth-
century master more than he admits; they are more akin
than one thinks. Both share similar experiences; their
imagination has measured the limits of terror in real
earnest because a hostile world has assaulted their souls
and left them shaken; both, feeling cut off from the
average man by their talent, resist authority and will
concede to the superiority of no one but themselves.
Art, based on first-hand data and autobiography, is for
them a means of escape and self-realization. They share
the same liking for psychiatric case histories, where they
find valuable source material; the grim existential import-
ance of terror, death, depression, or in Poe’s case, dis-
solution of personality, compels them to treat these sub-
jects other than as merely g a d material for a horror
story in the Gothic or the melodramatic tradition. Wright‘s
fascination for the roots of religious belief and for the
unexplainable motives of human behavior brings him
the closer to Poe’s sounding of the malevolent powers of
man’s soul. Both authors deal in delusions, dread, and
dreams, their work a tissue of nightmares in which sym-
bolism takes over naturalism, although Wright concen-
trates more upon factual truth and Poe more on the
fantasies of a cerebral logician. Their dreaming is a form
af social criticism and. clearly, a way to escape from the
shocks and vulgarities of life, be it a world of brutal
racial discrimination or one of debts, social snubs, and
18
petty intrigues.
Among the few American writers to whom Wright
occasionally alluded, Poe’s name is ranked with Haw-
thorne, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Twain,
Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson as literary
artists who made major attempts to deal with their times.
Around 1937, Wright judges that Poe “hid in the shadows
of a dream world, a region almost akin to the Heaven
of the s~irrealists,”~while Melville dramatized his conflict
with society in pessimistic, emotional terms. Three years
later, he thinks again of Poe, this time as the representa-
tive of horror: “We have only a money-grubbing civili-
zation but we do have in the Negro the embodiment of
a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of
even a James; and we have in the oppression of the
Negro a shadow athwart our national life dense and heavy
enough to satisfy even the gloomy broodings of a Haw-
thorne. And if Poe were alive, he would not have to
invent horror; horror would invent him.”5
The last quotation could be drawn directly from the
plea pronounced by Max, the Communist lawyer who
tries in vain to rescue Bigger Thomas before a self-
righteous court in Native Son. It makes use of a too
obvious Gothic imagery which immediately recalls Poesque
metaphors and scenes.6 Likewise, the comparisons of vacant
houses with skulls, “empty buildings with black windows
like blind eyes, buildings like skeletons standing with
snow on their bones” (p. 147), or “tall, snow-covered
buildings whose many windows gaped blackly, like the
eye-sockets of empty skulls” (p. 196) are reminiscent of
the luminous, red-lit windows of “The Haunted Palace.”
An autodidact, Wright certainly first learnt from Poe words
like “pallid,” “sunken,” or, in a more obvious case, “ob-
long.’’ For Wright, “oblong” inevitably alludes to a coffin
and to death, as in “The Oblong Box.” The word recurs
with that connotation throughout his fiction, but particu-
larly in Native Son: “the oblong black belt” (p. 266)
on the Chicago map hems the fugitive like a cell and the
“oblong, sheet-covered table” ( p. 280) on which Bessie’s
corpse is brought to the tribunal recalls the oblong,
empty mound of coals left by Mary’s burnt body.
Still more striking is the use of “The Black Cat” in
Wright’s Native Son. It would be too easy to speak of
a mere literary finding. As we learn from Black Boy,
his autobiography, Wright recorded two important trau-
matic events of his early youth: the time when he set
fire to his grandmother’s house, starting with the white
curtains, and his hanging of a kitten with a string, appar-
ently as a gesture of resentment against his father. Both
episodes brought a strong sense of guilt to the four- or
five-year-old boy. This personal psychological background
may have increased the impression that Poe’s tale (in
which the hero hangs the cat to the limb of a tree, and
in which he finds the curtains of his bed in flame) made
upon Wright’s sensibilities. For him, the tale was linked
with personal guilt, and he had no trouble recreating, half-
unconsciously, a situation in which the fire, the cat, and
the obsessive guilt are linked. These influences crystallized
in the basement scene of Native Son, when the white
cat of Mrs. Dalton looks at Mary’s murderer, and upon
another occasion, jumps upon his shoulders at the very
moment when Bigger fears being discovered by the re-
porters. Mrs. Dalton, blind as she is and dressed in
flowing white robes, already seems like a ghost (cf. p.
40) ; her cat is the embodiment of her intuitive knowledge
of the situation; it is the eye af justice looking at Bigger.
Its eyes, at first “large placid eyes” (p. 4 1 ) , turn into
“two green pools-pools of accusation and guilt-staring
at him from a white blur that sat perched upon the edge
of the trunk” (p. 78).
Bigger’s reaction is typical of Poe’s murderer: “It was
the white cat and its round green eyes gazed past him
at the white face hanging limply from the fiery furnace
door. God! He closed his mouth and swallowed. Should
he catch the cat and put it into the furnace too? He
made a move. The cat stood up; its white fur bristled;
its back arched. He tried to grab it and it bounded past
him with a long wail of fear” (p. 79). This symbolically
white (the colors are inverted) cat plays the part of the
tell-tale heart in a scene destined to show the murderer’s
fright. To create suspense, Wright makes use of the
literary culture of his reader: when the cat leaps upon
Bigger’s shoulder at the moment when the host of news-
papermen are searching intently for clues, Bigger feels
rhat “the cat had given him away, had pointed him out
as the murderer of Mary. He tried to lift the cat down,
but the claws clutched the coat. The silver lightning
flashed in his eyes and he knew that the men had taken
pictures of him with the cat poised upon his shoulder”
(p. 171).
Here the situation and the symbolical use of the cat
are unmistakably Poesque. But the central episode of
the novel-once the reader can step back from the
psychological suspense and the social protest-is one long,
melodramatic murder story, from the unreal bower of
the rich heiress’s bedroom with its flowing drapes, blurred
outlines, and the ghost-like appearance of the blind mother
at the door, to the fiery atmosphere of the basement where
Bigger performs his gory task. Equally fantastic is the
icy blizzard of the Chicago night, from mouldy room
to empty, crumbling house, in a world of angry rats,
cockroaches, clinging cobwebs, and blood trickling from
Bessie’s crushed head in the room “filled with quiet and
cold and death and blood and the deep moan of the night
wind” ( p. 202 ) .
In later novels, the influence of horror tales, of the
dime novel-all more or less indebted to P o e - o n Wright’s
fiction dwindled greatly. The Outsider, Savag,e Holiday,
and The Long Dream evince a definite appeal for violence,
murder, and b l d . The treatment, however, is more psy-
choanalytical and far less macabre. What Wright may
have learnt from Poe was that his own liking for the
type of abnormality which is precisely at the border be-
tween insanity and the normality of the “average man”-
a liking he shared with Dostoevsky, among others--could
be used in literature in a way which went further than
simply getting the reader involved, a way that forced him
to accept abnormality as normal.
NOTES
1 “Letter to Thomas White” in Letfers of Edgar Allan Poe, ed.
John Ward Ostrom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1948).
pp. 57-58.
2“The tale made the world around me throb, live. As she spoke,
reality changed, the look of things around me altered, and the
world became peopled with magical presences. . . . I hungered
for the sharp, frightening, breath-taking, almost painful excite-
ment that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon as
I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and
read them to feed that thirst for violence that was in me, for
intrigue, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders.” Black
BOJ~( N e w York: Harpers, 1 9 4 5 ) , pp. 34-35.
3 “Superstition,” Abbott’s Monthly Magazine (April 1931), p. 46.
All page references are to this edition. I am indebted to the
editors of PN for pointing out that Dan McCall in The Example
of Richard Wright (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World,
1969), pp. 70-71, has also briefly touched on Wright’s debt to
Poe in “Superstition” and Native Son; my own-more detailed-
conclusions were arrived at before I had read his study. Keneth
Kinnamon, to whose thesis, “The Emergence of Richard Wright,”
McCall failed to acknowledge his debts, first wrote about that
point in 1966.
4 “Personalism,” unpublished article, circa 1937, p. 1. Quoted
with the permission of Mrs. Ellen Wright.
5 “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” in Natioe Son (New York: Harpers,
1940), p. 1. All page references are to this edition.
6 “ W e have thought to thrust a corpse from before our eyes . . . .
The corpse is not dead! It still lives! It has made itself a home
in the wild forests of our great cities, amid the rank and choking
vegetation of slums! It has forgotten our language! In order to
live it has sharpened its claws!” (Native Son, p. 3 3 1 ) .
MARGINALIA
This column is devoted to brief notes, comments, queries. W e
wish to provide here an outlet for such items as source notes
which do not require the extended argument and proof that custo-
marily attends them, and for items of very special or peculiar
interest which otherwise might not appear. Contributions to
this column should be one paragraph in form, not to exceed in
length a page and a half of typescript, with all bibliographical
citations enclosed in brackets.
The “Moral” of “Ligeia” Reconsidered
In a note titled “The Moral Mr. Poe” [PN, 1 ( 1 9 6 8 ) , 23-24],
Jay L. Halio calls attention to the moral undercurrent of several
of POP’Sstories, especially those on “will” and especially “Ligeia.”
Ligeia’s striving for eternal life through the power of her own
will Halio calls “impious” and thus the “horror” of her rein-
carnation “is the moral.” I should like here to suggest another
possibility for the “moral” undercurrent of the story. When
Ligeia is resurrected, allegorically God and the universe are
reunited. As Richard Wilbur remarks, “The universe, as Poe
conceived it, is a poetic or artistic creation, a ‘plot of God.’
It has come about through God’s breaking up of His original
unity, and His self-radiation into space; it is presently at the
point of maximum diffusion, and will soon begin to contract
toward a final reassembly in-and as-God.” Moreover, the
recreation or reunification of God must be imaginative: “In
short,” writes Wilbur, “the duty of God’s creatures is to think
God together again” [“Edgar Allan Poe,” in Major Writers of
America, ed. Perry Miller (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1966), p. 181). This reunification is exactly the process
of “Ligeia.” The attributes of Ligeia are those of a supernatural,
godlike creature. The narrator cannot remember Ligeia’s surname.
Neither can he find the words “to portray the majesty, the quiet
ease, of her demeanor . . . .” Her beauty is unequalled: “an airy
and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies.”
Her eyes possess “the beauty of being either above or apart
from the earth.” They are “divine orbs.” The narrator comments
that in “mere sounds we intrench our ignorance of so much
of the spiritual.” After he has devoted himself to the “scrutiny
of Ligeia‘s eyes,” her beauty passes “into {his] spirit, there
dwelling as in a shrine.” Further, she has “gigantic” and
“astounding” knowledge in “moral, physical, and mathematical
19