When his philosophical slave narrative "Middle Passage" was honored with the 1990 National Book Award for fiction, Charles Johnson became the first African-American man to win that award since Ralph Ellison received it in 1953. Since the '60s, the literary giant has published acclaimed novels, short stories, cartoons and works of criticism. Johnson, 54, recently spoke with Alexs D. Pate, 52, who came to prominence in the mid-'90s with the novel "Finding Makeba," about the rich tradition of black literature.
Pate: The world isn't as receptive as it once was to the work we're doing, work that isn't obviously commercial. There was this great surge of black readership [over the past 30 years], and yet the numbers of those striving to take us someplace new seem to be declining.
Johnson: Yes, well, I think this is one of our jobs as educators as well as being writers. We have to remind people how high the bar was set by our predecessors: Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer. Because the general reading audience is not familiar with those works. But they advanced our national literature and set a standard by which we have to judge ourselves.
Pate: Right. There was a purpose there.
Johnson: Exactly. There was a purpose in the sense of capturing the black experience, and at the same time artistically and intellectually going to places that had not been gone to before. [That changed with] the publishing industry becoming increasingly influenced by Hollywood and television. You know the National Book Awards ceremony, which I've been to a couple of times — I've been a judge twice and the last time, I chaired the fiction committee, it's almost like the Academy Awards. [Laughs.] You know it's tuxedo and black tie. It wasn't like that 30 years ago or when it began in 1950. There's been a blurring of the line between really intellectually engaging fiction that you can come back to again and again. And books that are written for a quick read.
Pate: Right. And the other thing is that writers began to make money. [Laughs.]
Johnson: [Laughs.] Yeah!
Pate: And publishers and editors rewarded the writers who made money.
Johnson: Yeah, well, you know there was a writer back in the '80s who said something I remember. She said, "Well, the question now isn't whether to sell out, the question is how?" [Laughs.] "Just tell me how!"
Pate: [Laughs.]
Johnson: It began in the late '70s, early '80s. You began to see works that were increasingly simple. Books that I would call middlebrow fiction began to win major prizes in the '80s and '90s. And that sort of shifted things because back in the '70s you had writers who were really, really ambitious. Thomas Pynchon, and [Saul] Bellow was at his peak at that time; that's when he got a Nobel. You had my teacher, John Gardner. We don't see writers who are technicians of form and language in the way that we used to.
Pate: And it's funny because I came up reading those writers, reading you, reading Ellison, reading Wright, and in my way it is the craft and the idea of being technically competent and being intellectually developed enough to do the job of being the author that I strive to be.
Johnson: Yeah.
Pate: You know, I remember touring early, when I first published "Finding Makeba," and as I was walking down the halls, the president of the company runs down and says, "You know, I just want to thank you for being one of our literary writers." And I really felt like I had been stained at that moment. What that means is, "We don't really expect you to sell any books."
Johnson: [Laughs.] People forget that all great art entertains. Shakespeare entertained.
Pate: Right.
Johnson: There is not a lack of entertainment in the great writers who come down to us, from the last 2,000 years in the West, and 5,000 years in the Eastern tradition. But works that only entertain, that don't challenge us, that don't change or sharpen our perception of the world, I put them to one side. Real art does those things.
Pate: Yeah, I take one of the quotes from your teacher, from your mentor, John Gardner: "Art leads, it doesn't follow."
Johnson: Exactly.
Pate: When I was growing up, my mother fed me books like candy. She'd literally open the door, shovel books in and close the door. So I had Langston Hughes' poetry as a young kid. You get caught up in these stories, like Edward in [Pate's book] "West of Rehoboth," and you can't be satisfied anymore with just thinking that the world you saw was the world that existed. Not only the outside world, but the interior world. What I do can't be determined by the desires of my readership. It is the outcome of a deep reflection, a meditation on culture, on life as we know it now, our society, and then an attempt to take us somewhere.
Johnson: That's why I find your work so exciting. You understand what the standards are. For example, we really have only one novel exploring the life of Martin Luther King Jr. [Johnson's own "Dreamer"]. This was one of the most important citizens of the 20th century, the nation's philosopher and moral voice, yet no writer had ever dramatized his life. Those are the kinds of questions a literary writer will ask: What hasn't been done that needs to be done?
Pate: That's why I focus on the interior lives of black men. While African- American men are almost de rigueur iconography, we don't know anything about them! We don't know the mind-set of the absentee father. We don't know the mind-set of Colin Powell. We only have symbols.
Johnson: I was originally a cartoonist. I spent seven years of my life as a professional cartoonist. And one day a novel occurred to me and wouldn't leave me alone. It was like nothing I had ever seen or read. So I had to write it. And because my background is philosophy, when I showed up as a writer, my particular intention was to expand and deepen what we call American philosophical fiction. So every book and novel that I do, I hope, adds to that particular project. When I prepare myself to write, one of the things I do is I'm very conscious of the language, from line to line and sentence to sentence. When I read a book, I want everything in it. I'm that selfish as a reader. I want the kind of humor that you get in Dickens. I want the beauty of the language that you get in the Juno Barnes, for example. In other words, I want it all. And you only get that through revision.
Pate: I was gonna say — and time. Because even though I have four or five novels to my credit, I still feel very, very inadequate, like I'm still growing.
Johnson: When I first started writing, I wrote six novels in two years. I wrote 10 pages a day. One every academic quarter. And the writers I was influenced by — John A. Williams, James Baldwin — were very naturalistic writers. And I found the naturalistic novel fairly easy to write. But it wasn't until the seventh novel, "Faith and the Good Thing," that I realized, as much as I admire Baldwin and Wright, their vision is not mine. Their aesthetic vision is not mine. I can write naturalism, but I'm much more interested in something that transcends naturalism. I had to find my voice and vision. And I think each and every writer has to do that. So what happened was, after writing those books very quickly, "Faith and the Good Thing" took nine months. And I thought that was a very long period of time. [Laughs.] "Oxherding Tale" took five years. "Middle Passage" took six years. Because I realized after my first published novel how much was at stake. Every time I write a book, I try to convince myself, this is my last word and testament in literature. I may get hit by a car. I may die when I turn this in. This is the last thing my children are going to hear me say about the world. So there's a lot at stake. I have to write every book as if it's my last, and that means I forget every other book I wrote before. I'm not gonna repeat that performance. This is now my immediate interpretation of the world bringing as much technique as I can bring, and bringing new research and new discovery.
Pate: And where I'm at, I'm just beginning to feel that way. Like when I go to work, that this has to be all of that.
Johnson: When I began to write, it was primarily because of two reasons. One, I couldn't express certain things through visual images. They had to be expressed through language. And two, I didn't see the kind of books that I wanted to read. I didn't see a rousing sea adventure story. You know, like "Middle Passage." I didn't see a story with a black woman as a philosophical protagonist, which is what I tried to do in "Faith and the Good Thing." I learned to write as a journalist. In other words, to write quickly when I had to. To write for deadlines. To write for a wide audience. All of that is taught by journalism.
Pate: And to absorb a lot of information quickly.
Johnson: But it wasn't satisfying to me. Because again, it wasn't literary. Well, it was a story that occurred to me based on experiences that I had when I was 19, at a martial arts school in Chicago. And it was a really rough school. [Laughs.] This was before they even had safety standards. And it left a deep impression on me because it was also a very Buddhist school, and I am a Buddhist. And I kept thinking about the school when I left it and went into another school, which was karate. This was kung fu. It wouldn't leave me alone. I had to write that story about a young black man's passage through a martial arts system that also opened him up to Eastern philosophy. I never published that martial art novel. But that was the story that wouldn't leave me alone. So once I started writing, before I finished that book, I had an idea for another book. And before I finished the second book, I had an idea for a third book. I'd try to go to sleep at night, and I'd hear a line of dialogue. Or I'd see an image and I just had to write this thing out.
Pate: You become completely haunted by the story. I was thinking about my first novel, "Losing Absalom." My dad died of brain cancer. And uh, I came home and I remember, well after I got home, I realized that I would never see my father again. And I mean I knew physically that he was dead. But I mean there were no representations of this man. And so that haunted me. I wanted to bring my father into history. Which is what we can do, and we choose to do.
Johnson: To make him visible.
Pate: When I got to "Losing Absalom," I think about the fact that my father worked two jobs, believed in the American Dream, cared about his wife and children. And I wanted the world to know that such a man existed, in the face of the horrible news that goes on every day.
Johnson: Alexs, that's why I spent so much time in "Dreamer" talking about the black people that grew up in my hometown. They have never been portrayed in literature. Just the kind of people you're talking about like your dad. But you know, just to pass one thing on, you're talking about what wouldn't leave you alone. John Gardner once put it this way: He said a novel should be a vivid and continuous dream. First, it's a dream in the writer's mind. Then it becomes a dream in the reader's mind. And it lives there forever.
Pate: I totally agree. It's only the real life that interrupts. And there are times — also thinking about "Losing Absalom" — somebody picked me up one night, I was in the middle of the novel, and I went out to a club, and I'm watching people dance, and I just broke into tears. And I realized that someone had just died in my book and I hadn't properly mourned. And I had to go home. So there's a way in which in the middle of all this, the book and the people in the book, are more real than the people you know.
Johnson: Yes! Absolutely.
Pate: And the preparation that we have to do in order to be there for our readers, to provide them with a significant enough wall to bounce their reflections off of, is significant.
Johnson: That's the difference between pulp fiction and literary art. Art is the exploratory process of truth, within the process of writing itself.
