"As True and Direct as a Birth or Death Certificate": Richard Wright on Jim Thompson's Now and on Earth

Abstract

Richard Wright scholars are indebted to his bibliographers, Charles T. Davis, Michel Fabre, Keneth Kinnamon, and John M. Reilly, who have meticulously catalogued the prodigious body of work by and about one of the twentieth-century's most important writers. Davis and Fabre's Richard Wright: A Primary Bibliography, for example, not only lists the manifold states of the author's major works, but also includes miscellaneous items such as record album liner notes and dust-jacket comments or blurbs.(1) One blurb that has gone unrecorded, however, is one that Wright wrote for Jim Thompson's first novel, Now and on Earth, published by Modern Age Books in 1942.(2) Of Now and on Earth, a grim, naturalistic study of an aircraft plant worker and his family relations, Wright wrote: Here is a document as true and direct as a birth or death certificate. Over and above being well-written, it is an accurate picture of what happens to men and women in our time. A brief consideration of the novel and some parallels in the authors' lives and careers will help elucidate Wright's admiration for Thompson's work. Thompson's reputation as the author of more than twenty-five crime novels, all but the first three published as paperback originals, has risen steadily since his death in 1977. While all of his books were out of print when he died, nearly all have been reissued since, with several adapted as major motion pictures.(3) But in the early 1940s Thompson was a struggling writer whose publications were mostly limited to pulp magazines. Having endured a long string of unsatisfying jobs, including a stint as an aircraft plant laborer in San Diego, Thompson travelled to New York in 1941 intent on publishing a novel. Above all else, he wished to prove himself a success to his family and earn enough money to pay his father's way out of a convalescent home. In what biographer Michael J. McCauley refers to as Thompson's autobiographical tall-tale, Roughneck (1954), the author recalls the circumstances of the publication of his first novel.(4) According to Thompson, he persuaded Modern Age to advance him enough money to buy writing supplies and rent a cheap hotel room. proceeded to write Now and on Earth in one alcohol-dazed creative burst of less than a month. Modern Age, which published inexpensive original and reprint editions of works by Erskine Caldwell, Andre Gide, William Saroyan, and Ignazio Silone among others, then forwarded the manuscript to Wright and novelist Louis Bromfield for evaluation. In Roughneck, Thompson describes his subsequent meeting with the publisher: walked me into his office, his arm around my shoulders. Got some good reports from Louis and Dick. They're going to fix us up with blurbs to put on the cover.... ... The receptionist was standing in the doorway. She murmured an apology, held out a yellow Western Union envelope. This came in yesterday, Mr. Thompson. tried to reach you by phone, but-- It must be from my mother, said. I wasn't sure how long I'd be at that rooming house, so told her to--to-- ripped the envelope open. stared down at the message. Blindly. Stricken motionless. Bad news? The publisher's hushed voice. My father, said. He died two days ago.(5) Although the novelist's account is suspect in some details, Now and on Earth was indeed published just months after the death of his father and did carry Wright's and Bromfield's comments on the jacket.(6) Thompson's autobiographical novel focuses on Jim Dillon, a self-described hack writer and aircraft flunkey of San Diego, California.(7) Dillon, a one-time Writers' Project director suffering from writer's block, finds work in the aircraft plant stultifying. At home, his father is gravely ill and his relationship with his wife and children is strained to breaking point. …