J. D. Salinger: Franny and Zooey

Franny and Zooey is a novel by J. D. Salinger,  who is most famous for his earlier work, called The Catcher in the Rye.  It consists of two parts, Franny and Zooey;  each was originally published separately in The New Yorker in the late 1950s, but they were always intended as one novel, as they were published in 1961.

The novel's most attractive quality is its humorous tone: self-conscious, over-sophisticated, and supercilious. On the very first page, Salinger describes the voices of a group of college boys at a railway station, waiting for their dates to arrive for a big week-end, as "collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue…" How well I remember boys like that!

The set-up has multiple layers of artifice, as though the narrator were hiding his true meaning, and his true personality. The narrator, Buddy, presents himself as an unqualified teacher of literature in a small girls' college in the ski country of New England, who is also trying to build a career as a writer of fiction. Buddy claims he got the story from the main characters themselves—Franny and Zooey and their mother Bessie—in long, detailed conversations and letters.

Dialog dominates the narrative to such an extent that it would be easy to stage the scenes as a play. The number of locations is minimal and there is very little action. Franny has scenes in a railway station, taxi, and restaurant, but Zooey mainly takes place in a bathroom—while Zooey is sitting in the tub, hidden behind a shower curtain— and a few other locations around the house. The action is so static that it would be easy to transform the novel into a series of radio plays.

We first meet Franny in a letter she has written to her boyfriend Lane. She is painfully self-conscious, apologizing in advance for her scattered thinking and bad spelling, as English majors are wont to do. After Franny arrives for the week-end, the pair have lunch at a fancy restaurant. Lane is also self-conscious, in a self-important way, wanting to look right and act right, and to have everything go right, according to his conventional pre-conceptions. Franny and Lane long to be in love with each other, but each criticizes the other constantly, and their hypocrisy breaks through appearances in comical ways. Describing Franny's internal life, Salinger says, "Sometimes it was hell to conceal her impatience over the male of the species' general ineptness, and Lane's in particular."

Franny veers back and forth between playing her role of giddy, gushing college girl and expressing her true feelings of doubt and disgust. For instance, she forces herself to listen to Lane's discourse with a "special semblance of absorption," and then totally condemns his speaking style and his self-presentation. She feels completely detached from Lane, but she covers it with an affectionate gesture.

Franny is suffering from total disillusionment with social conventions and conformity, with phoniness and self-promotion. Her way of life—majoring in English and acting in summer stock—seems embarrassingly ego-driven. She finds herself drawn to mysticism and prayer—in particular the so-called Jesus prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner." The conflict between her desire to conform and her spiritual inclinations finally causes Franny to faint in the midst of lunch with Lane. This gives her an escape, and an excuse to go home and languish on the couch, where Zooey starts.

Buddy interrupts his story at this point to give us the basics of Franny's improbable family background. Her parents, Bessie and Les, had been a popular vaudeville act, and all seven of their children had been youthful brainiacs, who performed on a radio quiz show for kids. To make it weirder, the two oldest boys indoctrinated their younger siblings in spirituality in general and Buddhism in particular from the beginning.

We first meet Zooey in that most intimate of activities, the long hot bath. His expectation of privacy, is frustrated by the entrance of his mother, Bessie. The fact that Bessie intrudes on his privacy tells us a lot about her character, and the fact that he lets her, with grudging good humor, tells us a lot about their relationship. Bessie is a genuine comic character, appearing in a hair net and a kimono whose pockets are so overloaded with paraphernalia that she "clinks faintly when she walks." She is worried about Franny's depression and wants Zooey to get her to snap out of it.

Zooey is a hidden character. When he finally emerges from behind the shower curtain, he quickly hides his face by lathering for a shave. When he tries to help Franny recover, he spends most of the time lying on the floor with his face hidden from her. When that doesn't work, he talks to Franny over the phone, pretending to be their brother, Buddy, who purports to be the author of this story.  Zooey's personality is a contradiction in terms. He is extraordinarily handsome; he has astounding recall of everything he reads; his voice is naturally sonorous. In fact, he has quite naturally become a sought-after television actor, with additional roles on stage or in some independent film. The unexpected contradiction is that he has been fighting a private war against narcissism since he was seven or eight years old; he tries not to look at himself in mirrors, the way Narcissus of myth doted on his own image reflected in a pool. Zooey has already been through the sort of spiritual crisis Franny is experiencing, and he has been re-reading a letter that Buddy wrote to him at the time, looking for inspiration to share with Franny.

In Franny and Zooey, Salinger sought to express a spiritual synthesis of the highest order. He considered how a naturally creative performer can escape their ego and live consistently with their spiritual beliefs. His solution is both amusing and liberating.

Jack Kerouac: "On the Road"

What I like about Jack Kerouac's classic novel On the Road is the poetic visions that Sal has. The narrator, Sal Paradise, is a seeker who thinks he'll find the truth by traveling rough around America. Like a prophet of old, he is seeking ultimate knowledge by living in self-imposed poverty and mingling with the most downtrodden and lowly folk, people he calls "beat." In this way, he has inspiring visions of the unity of humankind and expresses them in colorful and moving language.

Sal is a graduate student and budding novelist who periodically feels a need to take a break from academia and conformity in order to experience life more intensely; he craves a life of mythic proportions. As his guide, he chooses a "wild child" type character named Dean Moriarty who was born "on the road" and more or less raised by criminals. In other words, he is totally amoral, irresponsible, and self-indulgent. This allows the flame of pure enthusiasm and intelligence to blaze forth brilliantly. Sal is bewitched by Dean and periodically risks everything to travel with him; at the same time, the novelist in Sal recognizes good material for a story.

I like Dean because I too was once entranced by a wild and crazy character who lured me into doing wild and crazy things for the sake of kicks. With her also, I sank to some low points of recklessness and poverty.

I like Dean because he is attentive to his senses and wants to "dig" everything—to see and hear every detail of a new experience, and to feel it in the depths of his soul.

Dean is a pure hedonist, like Bacchus in Roman mythology, freely indulging in sex and booze. He has wives, or ex-wives, on both coasts, and children, too. Part of him longs for the luxuries of family life, but that part is frequently overcome by a mania that drives him to travel from coast to coast by any means available.

Dean Moriarty is famously based on a real person named Neal Cassady, who was a prominent figure in both the Beat generation and the Hippie era, but Dean is bigger than Neal; he is a character of mythic proportions, "a western Kinsman of the sun." He is a figure of folk tales, like Paul Bunyan. Where Paul Bunyan had prodigious feats, like carving the Grand Canyon with his ax, Dean performs fantastic feats of driving and parking in scene after scene.

I like Dean because he is obsessed with verbalizing every nuance of his experience. In several scenes he is shown baring his soul, or trying to, through outpourings of words, whether or not he understands them. And I like Saul because he is obsessed with listening, with absorbing this avalanche of thoughts and impressions. Ultimately, it is Dean's impassioned verbiage that fascinates Sal; he wants to give his own language a similar freedom and intensity, and he achieves that in passage after passage.

I like the musical theme in On the Road. In their travels, Sal and Dean constantly seek out jazz, bebop, and blues, and Sal makes a conscientious effort not only to describe individual performances, but to summarize the entire history of these musical styles. Beyond that, he tries to write passages that invoke inspired instrumental solos. I believe he even tried to imitate a musical form called a rhapsody, in which a set of themes is worked into a rapturous outpouring of melodic sounds. While I was reading this novel, I happened to hear Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which is a compendium of American musical themes from marching bands to movie sound tracks, whipped into a satisfying lather of sound, and the similarity in purpose between Gershwin and Kerouac became apparent to me.

I can relate to the theme of traveling because, although I wasn't "born on the road" like Dean, when I was 2 1/2 my father was drafted, and my mother and I followed by car as the army transferred him from base to base for a year or more before sending him to Japan. We traveled on the cheap and picked up hitch-hikers for help with driving and gas money. From the snows of South Dakota to the heat of south Texas we traveled to be with my dad.

Moreover, as an adult I have visited nearly every major city in America, and innumerable smaller towns. Of course, I was middle-aged and well-funded, I was traveling with my husband, and we generally held fast to orderly plans,  but there was still room for over-indulgence and risk-taking, and we had our ecstatic moments.

It's appropriate that Dean eventually burns out, like a dying star, losing his way and even his capacity to talk. Likewise, it's appropriate that Sal finds a good woman, escapes the tormenting fascination of aimless wandering, and writes the novel of his dreams.

The Late Monet: Always Innovating

"The Late Monet" was a very important, and very large, exhibit at the de Young Museum that finished its run on May 27. The strongest impression I got from the show was that far from being a placid old man sentimentalizing his garden in his dotage, Monet was a relentless experimenter and tireless innovator throughout his career.

Monet was 32 years old in 1876—and already and accomplished realist—when he painted Impression, Sunrise, which is the source for the name Impressionism, a movement that lasted only about 10 years, but had an enduring impact on painting and painters. Instead of carefully delineating forms, Monet vaguely indicated boats and water with broad, casual brushstrokes. His main concerns were the light and color in the scene.

Claude Monet, 1840-1926
Impression, Sunrise, 1873
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
WikiArt

For the next 10 years, Impressionism was all the rage in Paris, with many excellent painters being preoccupied with the effects of light and color, and the use of a variety of brushstrokes.

After traveling widely in search of subjects, in the 1880s Monet settled down with his family in a rural town not far from Paris called Giverny. There he turned much of his creativity toward landscaping, and created a large garden that became the only subject of his work.

"The Late Monet" presented works from around 1900, when Monet was 60; most of the works were from 1913 to 1926, Monet's final period. He died at the age of 86.

Monet's most famous subject is the water lily pond he created on his property, a subject he painted obsessively. The most amazing result is how different each is from the other. That is partly because Monet was observing the pond in different seasons and at different times of day. But the main difference is in the brushstrokes and the level of detail; every work is a painterly experiment.

Water Lilies, Reflections of Tall Grasses, ca. 1897
Private Collection
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

Water Lilies, 1906
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

Which of the vague forms represent real plants, and which patches of color are reflections of the sky? 

Water Lilies, 1914-1915
Portland Art Museum, Oregon
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

Some of the lily pads in this painting are barely indicated by one or two crude brushstrokes in an oval form. An unrecognizable yellow bloom is merely indicated by a few streaky brushstrokes. Or are those yellow strokes reflections of a plant hanging overhead? Some of the blue vertical strokes represent the plants growing beneath the surface, but other blue patches seem to be reflections of the sky. Monet merged different aspects of the scene into one flat, and highly decorative pattern.

Water Lilies, ca. 1914-1917
Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

Monet suggested the distance between one clump of lilies and another merely by lightening his colors and making his forms even more vague in the distance. Is that patch of sky in the upper section real or reflected?

Water Lilies, 1915-1917
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

Unless the light is just right, the large violet patch on the lower right of this canvas looks unfinished and muddy. When you look at it directly, the downward streaking brushstrokes seem to indicate the scene beneath the water, but the beautifully modulated color suggests reflections of the sky.

Does this painting show the light of late afternoon? Do the downward streaks and bluish colors suggest a melancholy mood?

Water Lilies, 1915-1917
Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

This bright color combination and balanced composition is immediately attractive, but very vague. Painting reflections gave Monet an excuse to be vague and formless. Color and light were his abiding concerns.

Water Lilies, ca. 1916-1919
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

We accept this as a lily pond, but why? The lily pads are pinkish, and the blooms are like roses. All the loose brushstrokes around them are vague; only the variation in color gives the picture a sense of spatial depth, and suggests a shady dell beneath overhanging trees.

Water Lilies, 1916-1919
Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

This painting is so abstract and dark that the viewer might not recognize it as waterlilies in a pond. What are those white streaks? Are they underwater plants or reflections of something overhead? What are those purple splotches? Are you sure this is Monet?

Water-Lily Pond, 1917-1919
Private Collection
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

Water Lilies (Agapanthus), ca. 1915-1926
Saint Louis Museum of Art
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

With its soft and appealing blend of colors and its almost total lack of definition, this work seems to express a state of heavenly grace or pure bliss. 

During the same time period as the water lily paintings, Monet depicted a variety of other plants in his garden. But he wasn't interested in botanical exactness. Each work has painterly concerns.

Day Lilies, 1914-1917
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

The painterly concern in this work is those long green brushstrokes, arching so convincingly like the leaves of a day lily. The delicate red and purple flowers emerge energetically from the plant. The gorgeous pink and blue background is not tied to any reality.

Irises, ca. 1914-1917
National Galley, London
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

The dominant painterly value here is the bold, almost geometric composition. The subject also gave Monet a chance to work with long brushstrokes, each one so plant-like. The composition is flattened, as though this were a detail of a much larger overhead view.

Yellow Irises, 1917-1919
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

Those joyous upswinging green strokes rushing toward a bright and buoyant sky express the luxuriant growth of springtime. This is sort of a worm's eye view, which makes it seem fresh and bold.

Another frequent subject of Monet's was a Japanese-style arching footbridge. It was Monet's private touch to shelter the bridge with a wisteria arbor.

Monet, right in his garden at Giverny, 1922
Wikipedia

Here's a photo of Monet on his bridge late in life. With plantings along the railing and an arbor overhead, the bridge doesn't look very Japanese any more.

The Japanese Footbridge
Giverny.com

Here's a modern photo of the bridge, with arbor above and weeping willows behind.

The Japanese Footbridge, 1899
National Gallery, Washington D.C.
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

Just before the turn of the century, Monet did a depiction of the footbridge that is fairly realistic. The forms are definite, the color is springtime fresh, and the depth of space is rendered convincingly. But the dark horizontal green bands—are they underwater views or reflections of the surrounding plants? Monet loved his tricks of perception.

The Japanese Bridge, 1919
Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

In this version from twenty years later, Monet gave the barest hint of the forms of the bridge and the plants and the water. He reduced the scene to an essay of greens, coming ever closer to nature's own elusive green. It seems to express the abundant growth of springtime.

The Japanese Bridge, 1918-1924
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

Later in the year, maybe early summer, the wisteria arbor comes into bloom, and the garden becomes a riot of color. This is one of many paintings by Monet that seems too red and contrasty. This coloration is generally seen as a "fault" and explained by the fact that he had cataracts at the time he painted it. However, it is also significant that European painting had already completed the period of Fauvism, when everyone was experimenting with the use of color to express feelings and emotions. The brushstrokes are also wild and crazy, each one distinct against the background. This painting seems to express the intense heat and humidity of the garden in high summer weather, and to express it better than "realistic" forms and colors. The careless scribbles, streaks and jabs of color also seem to express anger, perhaps because his vision was letting him down.

The Japanese Bridge, ca. 1923-1925
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

The intense reds and yellows bursting from dark shadows immediately suggest anger, as do the smudged and layered brushstrokes. But the colors also relate to autumn when most of the leaves in his beloved garden turned vivid colors, just before withering. The painting also contains a painterly trick of perception. If you look at this painting carelessly or from the wrong direction, it appears to be random, messy and flat; but if you get just the right angle, the image conveys amazing depth. The longer you look at it, the more "realistic" it seems.

Another frequent subject for Monet was the rose arbor in his garden. 

Flowering Arches, Giverny, 1913
Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

This version of the rose arbor is very descriptive. There is a clear division between the land and the pond, and between the sky and the reflections of the sky. In addition to the rose arbor, the painting gives us recognizable water lilies and iris. The painting is so pretty in its coloration and symmetrical in its composition that it is almost like a commercial product.

Path under the Rose Arches, Giverny, 1920-1922
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

Less than ten years later, Monet took a more modern approach to the rose arbor. Instead of looking at it placidly from a distance, he got right under the flowering vines. His coloration is again the tones of autumn and anger. Not only is his vision failing, but his garden is going dormant in the autumn weather. In a trick of perception, from certain angles this painting is just messy and arbitrary like the overdone crayon drawing of an angry child, but from the right angle you get an impression of tremendous depth, looking down the arbor with the path rising to meet the horizon at the end of the tunnel. The forms don't seem to matter as much as the pattern of shadows and brights that creates the feeling of a mysterious tunnel.

After his cataracts were surgically removed, Monet returned to a more normal and harmonious palette. Instead of being angry scribbles, his brushstrokes became more descriptive and true to nature.

During the First World War, Monet painted a series of images of a weeping willow tree. It has been suggested that the willow's drooping foliage represents fallen soldiers.This subject also gave the painter a different kind of problem in light and shadow, and represents his passion for painterly experimentation as much as his wartime sadness.

Weeping Willow, 1918
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

The willow tree is on the left of the canvas, with a murky recess on the right. Judging by the contrast between brights and darks, it appears to represent the late afternoon of a sunny day in the summer.

Weeping Willow, 1918-1919
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Photo by Jan Looper Smith, 2019

This autumnal view of the weeping willow is expanded to reveal shadowy recesses on either side of the brightly lighted trunk.

Some of Monet's late works are shocking and even repellant at first glance; but as you dwell on them, you begin to understand the painterly experimentation that motivated them. Even when they weren't popular, Monet's late works influenced several generations of painters to follow, and therefore the works of his old age still seem quite edgy and modern. 

'Wise Blood' by Flannery O'Connor

Wise Blood was the first novel by Flannery O’Connor, who is generally known for her short fiction; it was first published in 1952, though it was based on short stories that had already been published in magazines. It was challenging for me because none of the characters seem likable or even rational, and their actions seem arbitrary and mysterious. O’Connor was a Southern woman and an ardent Catholic, as well as a lupus sufferer, who died at the age of 39. All these factors figure in this story. 

The main theme is redemption through acceptance of Christ. The protagonist, Haze Motes, was raised in a Christian home and his grandfather was an inspired preacher. Motes had also intended to be a preacher until he was drafted. In the service, he became totally disillusioned with religion, enough that when he gets back to the states, he decides to found a church without Christ, and to preach the falsity of religion. He lives largely in his mind, often unable to see or hear anything beyond what is going on in his head, or in his soul. 

Haze Motes attracts one follower, even before he declares himself an anti-Christ preacher, an 18-year-old boy named Enoch Emory, who also lives in a world of his own imagining, based on his religious upbringing. He is crazy with loneliness, and would follow just about anyone who gave him a pat on the head, but Haze rejects him, mainly because he can’t really see outside himself. 

Haze is inspired by a beggar named Asa Hawks who pretends to be a blind, unemployed preacher. He claims that he blinded himself for Jesus. Haze takes him seriously at first, but is later disillusioned. 

Soon after Haze starts preaching the Church without Christ, a con man named Hoover Shoats tries to latch onto him, and to make a profit from his fervor. When Haze rejects him, Shoats hires a beggar to imitate him, dressing him in the same way, and coaching him to act in a similar manner.

The tone of the novel is Southern Gothic Humor. The idea is that the events in the plot are so horrible that they make you laugh, but they are played out in the generally benighted and backward culture of the south: religion is ubiquitous, and generally phony;  police violence is routine, not just against black people but anyone they deal with; women are a little more in touch with reality, but they are ugly and gross, both in body and in spirit.

The story is loaded with religious symbolism and circular plot moves, as if for the amusement of graduate students in literature. Psychological 'truth' is irrelevant; Haze and Enoch behave in ways that symbolize certain ideas.

Though the novel is about redemption, reading it would not reinforce anyone's faith, nor would it cause anyone to seek salvation. Although the author, Flannery O'Connor, was herself a devout Catholic, but she had so much detachment that she could make an extended joke about the idea of salvation.

'Catcher in the Rye' by J. D. Salinger

The very popular novel Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger, seemed insignificant to me because the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is a first-class jerk. Holden Caulfield is an over-privileged, over-entitled, over-sophisticated adolescent who has just failed out of his elite prep school. He has a nervous breakdown, and eventually gets sent to a fancy rest home where he spins out the story of what he was thinking about when he hit bottom.

I think the thing that appeals to readers is his disenchantment. In the manner of a supercilious jerk, he sees the phoniness of everything. He sees that no one is quite what they claim to be. He sees that purity and idealism are impossible in the practical world; everyone espouses principles that they can't follow.

It is notable that a number of assassins and mass murderers have referred to Catcher in the Rye in explaining their motivation. This point was charmingly explained by the young trickster in a great old movie called Six Degrees of Separation. It was his surprisingly literary monologue that motivated me to re-read Catcher, which I had first read long ago. Like Holden, these killers and would-be killers were totally disenchanted with life, and obsessed with phoniness and pretension.

There's no arguing with Holden. Any teenager emerging from the protected dream of childhood, can see that nothing is what it seems to be. The briefest of looks at the political news or advertising or entertainment shows us that people are constantly trying to sell falsehoods and illusions. One of the major problems of growing up, at any age, is accepting this painful realization.

To quote an old song, "When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies..." Total despair may cause a person to become a killer or to commit suicide, or to have a breakdown like Holden. Holden gets the opportunity to spell out his feelings, and after he gets through the negativity he finds love for his faulty world. As the song continues "...don't you want somebody to love, don't you need somebody to love." So a seemingly insignificant story about a jerk freaking out, actually treats one of life's major problems: transcending disillusionment through love.

'Black Boy' by Richard Wright

Black Boy was an instant best-seller when it was published in 1945, and has remained one of the best-selling books by the pioneering African-American writer, Richard Wright, who lived from 1908 until 1960. It is classed as an autobiography but it reads more like a novel. Wright was already famous as a writer of stories and essays, and his first novel, Native Son, had been an immediate best seller when it was published in 1941.

Notably, the version of Black Boy that became the best-seller is not the book we read today. Wright composed the book in two parts. Part One, called "Southern Night," covers his youth in the South, and Part Two, called "The Horror and the Glory" and only half as long, covers his young adulthood in Chicago. Wright's major point is that life in the South did not prepare him for life in the North; he had to go through a second childhood to learn the ways of the city.

The two parts are very different. The first part strives for mythic status; Richard presents himself as a stand-in for every poor black boy in the South who wanted to be respected as an individual. The second part is increasingly specific to his own life and loses its mythic status, as Richard tries to understand and justify his actions in Chicago. Because of this, his publisher persuaded him to release the first part on its own in 1945. This is justifiable on the grounds that it is a coherent and complete work of art, but for Richard it meant that his story was brutally truncated. In the 1990s, Wright's original work was published whole as he had intended, and that is the version people read nowadays.

The book's full title is Black Boy (American Hunger), and in it Wright depicts spiritual and emotional hunger as well as the constant physical hunger of his youth. One of his major points is that racial discrimination deprives African-Americans of opportunities for self-realization and self-respect. He asserts that racism limits the emotional and cultural development of black people, so they have no idea of their own worth. Fortunately there has been enough progress toward equality that Wright's depiction of racism in the South in the first half of the 20th century seems dated now, but in its time, it was incendiary because it was shocking to see a secret aspect of American society depicted so vividly.

Racism is not the book's only subject. The boy Richard was permanently scarred by a peculiarly nightmarish childhood that deprived him of any form of worth. He defined the problem as one of racial discrimination, but I think his warped family situation made him dwell on this issue.

As a child, Richard is almost completely deprived of love and support. His closest relationship is with his mother, who routinely slaps him for asking too many questions or bringing up forbidden subjects. After she suffers a series of paralyzing strokes, the best she can do is to nag him weakly to do his best in school. As she becomes more helpless, he loses his sense of connection with her. Richard's father abandons the family when Richard is 6, leaving them in abject poverty. His mother's family takes them in, but they treat Richard like a little heathen.

The most excruciating part of his situation concerns religion. Richard's grandparents and an aunt who lives with them are ardent 7th-Day Adventists who insist on a host of forbidding rules and are determined that Richard join their sect. As a boy who had experienced little in life beyond hunger and disrespect, Richard can't accept any religious belief. Long passages are devoted to the Adventists' efforts to recruit him, and the thoughts he has about spiritual beliefs as a child. In fact, one of his earliest experiences of self-realization is his unwillingness to accept their beliefs, and his inability to pretend that he does in order to fit in. This condemns him to total rejection by his mother's family. After his mother converts to Methodism, she too tries to save his soul, and resorts to emotional pressure to get him to be baptized, but he soon returns to bitter skepticism.

Richard's family sees him as a wayward boy whose actions are always bad, and you can see their point. At the age of 4, he burns the house down. Soon after, he kills a kitten. At age 6, he becomes an alcoholic.  He learns to talk dirty before he learns to read. He taunts the Jewish store owner with the same kind of prejudice he is subjected to. He is paralyzed by shyness in school. He unwittingly sells racist tracts. He refuses to be punished for things he didn't do, and uses a knife or straight razors to protect himself from his abusive relatives. When he graduates from 8th grade, he insists on giving the Valedictorian speech that he wrote himself rather than the one the principal wrote for him. As he grows older, he wants to read novels and write stories, the work of the devil in his families' view. He wants to work on Saturdays, a holy day for the Adventists. After he gets old enough to work full time, he finds he will never be able to save enough money to escape North, so he resorts to participating in a scam for extra money, and finally engages in theft to get a stake. Wright presents all these incidents in novelistic detail, including his thoughts and feelings at the time.

His extreme poverty forced Richard to seek work at a very young age, and this is when he begins to encounter racial prejudice. Wright catalogs every sort of racial indignity that a boy could experience in the heart of the South, and he analyzes just how these experiences affected his development. White people expect black people to be totally and smilingly subservient, like slaves. No matter how hard Richard tries to conform, he seems uppity to the whites, who frequently bully him into leaving his job.

Wright's childhood was so deprived— emotionally, spiritually, and economically—that his pursuit of knowledge and self-realization seems miraculous, totally inexplicable. He becomes an ardent reader despite the disapproval of his family and the scarcity of reading materials. His formal education is patchy due to poverty, but he is passionate about seeking knowledge, and adventure as well, through reading. Where did he get that passion? Where did he get the massive intelligence to digest all that material? Wright shows very few positive influences on his life.

Not surprisingly, Wright's adult life in Chicago is considerably more complicated than his childhood in the South. No longer can he encapsulate his experience into a string of deftly drawn episodes; various aspects of his life overlap and intersect, and learning takes place over longer arcs. On the plus side, there is less public racial discrimination; he can sit anywhere on public transportation, and he doesn't have to defer to white folks. But racial prejudices remain at a deeper level. This is true for Richard as well, who notices that even when white people try to treat him respectfully, he still assumes they are the same as white people in the South. His personality is so hardened that it is hard for him to form relationships.

Career-wise, Wright does rather well, though he never acknowledges this. He starts out as an errand boy and dishwasher, but he soon passes the exam for postal clerk. Meanwhile he reads all the important novels of his day and tons of sociology and psychology. During the Depression he becomes an agent for insurance and burial societies, discouraging work that nevertheless gives him access to the lives of a wide variety of poor black people. When that job dries up, a relief organization assigns him to be an orderly in a medical research institute. Finally he gets a job with the South Side Boys' Club that he finds deeply engrossing. Later he is assigned to do publicity for the Federal Negro Theater, which is a writing job, at least; when that fails, he is assigned to do publicity for a white experimental theatrical company.

What really muddies his narrative is his relationship with the Communist party. Richard finally meets some people with similar social and philosophical views, and through them he gets drawn into the John Reed Club, a group of artists and writers which was associated with the Communist party. At first the theory of Communism, and its version of history, enthrall Wright, but he realizes the idealistic Communist activists are deeply ignorant of the life of ordinary black people. He is suspicious of them, but he is drawn in when they offer to publish some of his stories. From this point, his memoir becomes a messy recital of political manipulation, group rivalries, and Communist tactics as he is unexpectedly propelled into a leadership position in Chicago's Communist party and just as unexpectedly demoted and reviled, as the international party becomes more rigid. After two chapters of ups and downs in the party, his relationship is finally ended definitively, and he concludes the book in a state of deep disillusionment, though nevertheless determined to continue writing.

In addition to racism, Wright struggles with rampant anti-intellectualism. His ardent and wide-ranging self-education plays a painfully ambivalent role in his life. On the positive side, reading is his only escape from his frustrating life; on the other, it automatically makes him unusual and suspect, not only among his family, but also his friends. As an adult, he talks like a person with a college education. This is an advantage in building his career, but it makes him suspect among other Negro members of the Communist party, who are mostly unlettered new arrivals to the North, because it identifies him with their white oppressors.

The first time I read this book, I was disdainful of the long passages of explanation and analysis, considering them to be artless. But the second time, the composition sounded seamless, and I realized that the development of the author's understanding of life is an important part of the story. Wright desperately wanted to understand himself and to make himself understood, and his voice rings with probing sincerity in every word. Many critics believe Wright helped change racial relationships in America.

Miguel Machuca: Drawing Light from Darkness

Miguel Machuca is a local artist. Although he was born in Guadalajara, he came to this country with his family at the age of 10. Now around 40, he has been an established artist in San Jose for several years, as well as working in programs for autistic and at-risk youth. 

He is currently having a show at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara called "Drawing Light from Darkness." It lasts until October 21, 2018. Check it out.

Human Nature, 2014

Machuca's work comes from a spiritual point of view. It combines universal and personal symbols to express the unity of life. Here we see animal organs, leaves, an embracing horn, a penetrating eye, and a brick wall that transforms into a universal web—all heading toward the infinite.

Fire within You, 2015

Machuca has developed a unique technique for applying charcoal to a white painted panel. He draws each form in silhouette, then uses an electrical eraser to model the silhouette by exposing the white underpainting as highlights. He literally draws the light out of darkness. Likewise, meditation—here represented by positions of the hands—reveals an individual's inner light.

Sister Whisper, 2016

Sister Deception, 2016

Sister Whisper and Sister Deception are a pair of imaginary figures representing choices. Sister Whisper  enchains her pathetic follower with dreams of death. Sister Deception inspires the wretch to take action and start building. Together, they are called Orchestrated Religion, Part 2.     

Orchestrated Religion, Part 1, 2016

Orchestrated Religion, Part 1 rises above the dichotomy presented by the two Sisters. It asserts strength, confidence and wholeness, with a combination of symbols both familiar and strange.

Manifest Your Destiny, 2016

Machuca uses his impressive draughtsmanship to render visions and symbols as though they were real. Here we have vision and power in the eyes and hands, with destiny represented by constellations, a wheel, and an embracing horn. 

7th Sense, 2018

A skull penetrated by spikes, an array of trophy horns, connecting to nopales cactus, a chest with a radiant lock in the center, a hand with a hole, a hand with a spike through it, an array of flowers with eyes in the centers, each eye penetrated by a spike—it's a puzzle that will keep the imagination bouncing around for a long time. I'd say it's about death and life being part of the same process.

Embrace Reality, 2018

This painful and frightening image has to do with accepting the need to work on one's self, as with the spike, in order to make an impact on the world, as with the hammer. The draughtsmanship is very skillful and evocative.

Human Body Evolving Rose, 2018

Starting at the bottom, we see the mystical number 3, a key, a strong triangle that firmly supports ribs and organs, a rose, a wheel that evolves into a halo, two symmetrical roses, and on top, a happy parrot. This is about the stages of development in the journey toward beauty and truth.

Full Consciousness in the Divine, 2018

A caterpillar is like a fetus because it is about to burst into life. These two are embraced by lovely leaves growing from the fertile earth. The plant wears a crown of planets, connecting the natural world and human life and with the universe at large.

All these artworks have many more symbols and interpretations than I have indicated. Because of their multilayered symbolism and their evocative draughtsmanship, these works stand on their own, without any biographical back story. However, once you read the Artist's Statement, also mounted on the gallery wall, the works take on an even larger significance.  

• "This work is about my journey, before and after my experience with cancer. In January 2015, I was diagnosed with stage 4 Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cancer, and with only a small percentage of survival. Although, this was not the spark for this show, I started on my body of work from a spiritual point of view and while I was working with the Triton Museum towards a solo exhibition, cancer made its appearance in my life, and I was hospitalized. Everything stopped until I was either better or dead. Through the days, I worked on a collection of ideas, drawings and sketches that could describe the internal bliss of a perpetual cycle of fear and doubt. My art saved my life. I caught myself in and out of a state of consciousness."

Machuca felt that having the goal of creating his first solo museum show gave him the motivation to generate personal strength to overcome cancer. The Triton Museum, and in particular its Deputy Director Preston Metcalf, deserves applause for recognizing Machuca's talent early in his career, and for encouraging him during his treatment and recovery. It's a great story.

To October 21