Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley's Papers

Abstract

4 CLA JOURNAL Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley’s Papers Agnieszka Tuszynska In May 1947, a new novel of urban naturalism, Knock on Any Door, appeared in the bookstores and book stands across Chicago and the nation and was soon off to a smashing success. The name of the author, Willard Motley (19091965 ), rang few bells, but that fact did not prevent sales from soaring, with 300,000 hard-cover copies selling in the year of the publication alone (Klinkowitz xviii). Many critics responded enthusiastically to the story of a sweet Italian American altar boy who transforms into a thief and eventually a killer under the pressure of poverty and violence in Chicago’s slums. Despite a few critical voices, most reviewers—including those writing for the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine—lauded the novel for its psychological realism and social commentary (Fleming 59-60). Critics compared it to works by Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, and James T. Farrell, and were joined in singing Motley’s praises by Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote, “Reading this book made me walk around my neighborhood with a more curious eye, and it made me wonder just what I would find if I‘knocked on any door”(Roosevelt). The novel’s success led to a film version starring Humphrey Bogart in 1949 and put the name of Willard Motley in the literary spotlight for the next couple of years. All the hype Knock on Any Door generated may seem odd to many an enthusiast of American literature who likely never heard of Motley. In fact, the author of Knock fell into obscurity just a few short years after the novel’s publication and was only temporarily and posthumously resurrected by a few academics who were the first to study his papers in the late seventies. 1 I argue that the reason for this lack of recognition lies in Motley’s status as an African American author who became defined early on as a “raceless” writer. 2 Knock, which was Motley’s first novel, places him in the ranks of other black writers, including Frank Yerby, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston, who penned novels featuring nonblack protagonists and centering on non-black experience.As Gene Andrew Jarrett has argued in Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (2007), such writers “play truant” from the school of literary racial realism that demanded that “black authors . . . write authentic literature” that portrays “the 1 The year 2019 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Northern Illinois Press University’s publication of its edition of the book, which was also the last. 2 The term “raceless” as it was originally applied to Motley by early reviewers and critics, and as it is consequently used in this essay, refers specifically to the supposed lack of focus on black experience in Motley’s writing. CLA JOURNAL 5 Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley’s Papers black race in accurate or truthful ways” (1). To an extent, Jarrett’s study of such black literary “truancy” finds an ancestor in Claudia Tate’s reading of African American novels that resist what she calls “racial protocols” in her 1998 book, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. Such protocols “demanded that a black text explicitly represent their lived experiences with racial oppression” (Tate 3). While Tate’s focus lies in novels that evade this racial “formula” (5) by either centering white characters or conflicts hinging on something other than racial oppression, she points out that these texts are considered marginal as opposed to “consistently venerated” works that offer “the typical racial story” (10). Jarrett makes a similar observation when he writes that black writers’ challenge to “the essentialist paradigms of ethnic authenticity . . . is marginality or exclusion in the academic and cultural marketplace” (5). Motley’s illustrative case seems to have been additionally exacerbated in that respect by the fact that he had no significant capital as an “authentically” black writer or a “race writer” before the publication of Knock. Hence, the supposed “racelessness” of his debut novel defined him and resulted in the absence...