Any list of African American writers with a deep and resourceful connection to France would immediately include James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes. But that list would not be complete, at least significantly in terms of post-World War II writers, without the inclusion of William Gardner Smith.
Smith’s immersion in France may have been of an even greater degree than the others cited here since he was an editor, journalist and novelist whose writings delved into the politics and culture of France, and particularly the dynamic turbulence in the late ’60s. But it’s his link to the social protest novel that emerged in the late ’40s and early ’50s that has secured what little prestige he has in the African American literary canon.
Depending on the source, Smith was born in 1926 or 1927, but certainly in Philadelphia, Pa. He discovered at a very early age “that he had a flair for writing,” according to noted critic Bernard Bell. “He became a local reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier when he was eighteen and finished his first novel two years later.”
The principal at Benjamin Franklin High School was instrumental in getting him the job at the Courier, and he later graduated with honors, the second highest student in his class. In 1946, he was drafted into the Army and stationed in Germany as a clerk-typist. This experience provided the inspiration for his first novel, “Last of the Conquerors,” published in 1948 when he was 21.
Emma Waters Dawson, writing in the “Oxford Companion to African American Literature,” describes “Last of the Conquerors” as a novel about a young man who is disillusioned and disenfranchised by society who “is seduced by the ideals of communism and a liaison with a young German woman. He becomes an expatriate only to encounter the bigotry of German soldiers who go to great lengths to protect their women from eager young American Black soldiers. The actions in the novel echo Smith’s own evolution as artist and philosopher, for Smith soon realizes that pandering to white audiences would not eradicate racist perceptions and stereotypes.”
By 1951, Smith is back in Europe, after a brief stay and study at Temple University. He had also married his childhood sweetheart and begun working on his second novel “Anger at Innocence” (1950). Upon arriving in Paris, he and his wife moved into a small hotel room at $1.60 a night and became members of a growing colony of African American writers, artists, and musicians. “He took a job at Agence France-Presse (A.F.P.) profiled [Richard] Wright for Ebony and became a drinking companion of [Chester] Himes and the great cartoonist Ollie Harrington at the Café de Tournon, a haunt for Black writers and artists near the Luxembourg Gardens,” Adam Shatz wrote in The New Yorker.
From his location in Europe Smith’s journalism appeared in a number of publications, including his articles on travels to Africa. In fact, he would eventually spend an extended period of residence in Ghana.
Smith’s third book was “South Street” (1954) and is widely deemed as a pacesetter in African Americans protest novels. It was basically about a Black American radical who has returned to the states from a stay in Africa. But the reviews were lukewarm, and he felt that he’d “come to a dead end” and no longer wanted to follow “the road of protest.” He took a long hiatus from fiction, divorced, and met the woman who became his second wife, Solange Royez, a schoolteacher from the French Alps whose mother had fled Nazi Germany as a child. Marrying a French woman reinforced his self-perception as an exile. So did the scrutiny of the U.S. government, which, in 1956, shortly after he made a visit to East Berlin, declined to renew his passport. “For more than a year he lived in Paris as a ‘stateless’ person,” Shatz noted.
Among the highlights of “The Stone Face” (1963) is Smith’s account of the Paris massacre of 1961. He provides “a wrenching account of a police massacre of Algerian protesters that took place on October 17, 1961—the only one that exists in the fiction of the period. (The first French novel to broach the topic, Didier Daeninckx’s “Meurtres pour mémoire (Murder in memoriam)” was published in 1984.) Gardner Smith’s French publisher told him it was ‘very courageous to have written the book, but we can’t publish it in France.’ “Unlike his other books, ‘The Stone Face,’ his only novel set in Paris, has never been translated into French,” Adam Shatz wrote in The New Yorker in Aug. 2019.
Like one of his characters from “The Stone Street,” Smith leaves his job at A.F.P. and while residing in Ghana befriends Shirley Graham Du Bois, W.E.B.’s widow, and begins assisting her in launching the first television station in the country. This was in 1964 where he and his wife and their daughter were given a big house near the sea, courtesy of Kwame Nkrumah’s government. The marriage, like his days in Ghana, were limited, and by 1969 he was single and ready for a third marriage, this time to an Indian with whom he had a daughter in 1971.
Two years later he was diagnosed with cancer and died on Nov. 5, 1974 in Paris. He was only 47.