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Overview
Some essays explore the challenges of being an African American writer in the United States, broadly addressing aesthetic and racial prejudice in American publishing and literature and its changing face over the decades. Others are more specific and personal, recounting how the authors came to be a reader and writer in a culture that did not always encourage them to do so. Some are more general and focus on practice and craft, while still other essays offer detailed behind-the-scenes accounts of how famous novels, such as Native Son, Invisible Man, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and The Color Purple, came to life. Ranging from the Harlem Renaissance, through the Civil Rights movement, and into the twenty-first century, this anthology explores what it has meant to be an African American novelist over the past hundred years.
Found within are essays by twenty-one African American novelists, including Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, National Book Award-winners Ralph Ellison and Charles Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winners Alice Walker and James Alan McPherson, and well-known canonical writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Margaret Walker. Dreaming Out Loud seeks to inspire writers and readers alike, while offering a fascinating and important portrait of novelists at work in their own words.
CONTRIBUTORS
James Baldwin, Arna Bontemps, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Gaines, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Charles Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Gayl Jones, Terry McMillan, James Alan McPherson, Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, Ishmael Reed, Martha Southgate, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, John Edgar Wideman, Richard Wright
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609383367 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Dreaming Out Loud
African American Novelists at Work
By Horace A. Porter
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2015 Horace A. PorterAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-336-7
CHAPTER 1
James Baldwin
(1924–1987)
WHEN TIME MAGAZINE put James Baldwin's dark, brooding face on its cover in 1963, he had already published three novels — Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni's Room (1956), and the controversial best seller Another Country (1962). However, it was his best-selling essay The Fire Next Time (1963) that landed him on the magazine's cover. Baldwin wrote the essay on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The same year, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which Baldwin attended.
James Arthur Baldwin was born in New York City and grew up in Harlem. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School. Although he did not attend college, he started writing seriously while still in high school. In 1948, he published "The Harlem Ghetto," his first essay, in Commentary magazine. He returns to similar themes in The Fire Next Time, his prophetic analysis of the pent-up resentment and rage that many African Americans felt in the face of ongoing racial discrimination. Their collective sense of oppression, among other things, led to riots in major cities, including Los Angeles and Detroit. In earlier essay collections — Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961) — Baldwin speaks eloquently about the plight of African Americans.
Some critics consider Baldwin one of the best essayists of the twentieth century. However, Baldwin was also dedicated to writing novels. He wrote with a framed portrait of Henry James, his idol, near his desk. After the commercial success and critical acclaim of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin published a collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man (1965), and three more novels — Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979). In his stories and novels, central themes about the roles and obligations of artists and writers reassert themselves — whether involving characters like Peter, a young actor, in "Previous Condition," his first published short story; an actual writer, like Leo Proudhammer, in Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone; or Arthur Montana, the famous singer, in his final novel, Just Above My Head.
Baldwin published twenty books — including a screenplay, a children's book, and one short volume of poems — during his lifetime. Most of his books were written while he lived abroad. In 1948, after Baldwin left New York City for Paris, he effectively became an expatriate. He lived in Paris, Switzerland, Istanbul, and eventually purchased a home in St. Paul de Vence, France. He died there in 1987. "Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare" (1964) is taken from The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2010), edited and with an introduction by Randall Kenan. In this essay, Baldwin reflects on the significance of Shakespeare in his writing career.
Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare (1964)
Every writer in the English language, I should imagine, has at some point hated Shakespeare, has turned away from that monstrous achievement with a kind of sick envy. In my most anti-English days I condemned him as a chauvinist ("this England" indeed!) and because I felt it so bitterly anomalous that a black man should be forced to deal with the English language at all — should be forced to assault the English language in order to be able to speak — I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression.
Again, in the way that some Jews bitterly and mistakenly resent Shylock, I was dubious about Othello (what did he see in Desdemona?) and bitter about Caliban. His great vast gallery of people, whose reality was as contradictory as it was unanswerable, unspeakably oppressed me. I was resenting, of course, the assault on my simplicity; and, in another way, I was a victim of that loveless education which causes so many schoolboys to detest Shakespeare. But I feared him, too, feared him because, in his hands, the English language became the mightiest of instruments. No one would ever write that way again. No one would ever be able to match, much less surpass, him.
Well, I was young and missed the point entirely, was unable to go behind the words and, as it were, the diction, to what the poet was saying. I still remember my shock when I finally heard these lines from the murder scene in Julius Caesar. The assassins are washing their hands in Caesar's blood. Cassius says:
Stop then, and wash. — How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!
What I suddenly heard, for the first time, was manifold. It was the voice of lonely, dedicated, deluded Cassius, whose life had never been real for me before — I suddenly seemed to know what this moment meant to him. But beneath and beyond that voice I also heard a note yet more rigorous and impersonal — and contemporary: that "lofty scene," in all its blood and necessary folly, its blind and necessary pain, was thrown into a perspective which has never left my mind. Just so, indeed, is the heedless State overthrown by men, who, in order to overthrow it, have had to achieve a desperate single-mindedness. And this single-mindedness, which we think of (why?) as ennobling, also operates, and much more surely, to distort and diminish a man — to distort and diminish us all, even, or perhaps especially, those whose needs and whose energy made the overthrow of the State inevitable, necessary, and just.
And the terrible thing about this play, for me — it is not necessarily my favorite play, whatever that means, but it is the play which I first, so to speak, discovered — is the tension it relentlessly sustains between individual ambition, self-conscious, deluded, idealistic, or corrupt, and the blind, mindless passion which drives the individual no less than it drives the mob. "I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet ... I am not Cinna the conspirator" — that cry rings in my ears. And the mob's response: "Tear him for his bad verses!" And yet — though one howled with Cinna and felt his terrible rise, at the hands of his countrymen, to death, it was impossible to hate the mob. Or, worse than impossible, useless; for here we were, at once howling and being torn to pieces, the only receptacles of evil and the only receptacles of nobility to be found in all the universe. But the play does not even suggest that we have the perception to know evil from good or that such a distinction can ever be clear: "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones ..."
Once one has begun to suspect this much about the world — once one has begun to suspect, that is, that one is not, and never will be, innocent, for the reason that no one is — some of the self-protective veils between oneself and reality begin to fall away. It is probably of some significance, though we cannot pursue it here, that my first real apprehension of Shakespeare came when I was living in France, and thinking and speaking in French. The necessity of mastering a foreign language forced me into a new relationship to my own. (It was also in France, therefore, that I began to read the Bible again.)
My quarrel with the English language has been that the language reflected none of my experience. But now I began to see the matter in quite another way. If the language was not my own, it might be the fault of the language; but it might also be my fault. Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.
In support of this possibility, I had two mighty witnesses: my black ancestors, who evolved the sorrow songs, the blues, and jazz, and created an entirely new idiom in an overwhelmingly hostile place; and Shakespeare, who was the last bawdy writer in the English language. What I began to see — especially since, as I say, as I was living and speaking in French — is that it is experience which shapes a language; and it is language which controls an experience. The structure of the French language told me something of the French experience, and also something of the French expectations — which were certainly not the American expectations, since the French daily and hourly said things which the Americans could not say at all. (Not even in French.) Similarly, the language with which I had grown up had certainly not been the King's English. An immense experience had forged this language; it had been (and remains) one of the tools of a people's survival, and it revealed expectations which no white American could easily entertain. The authority of this language was in its candor, its irony, its density, and its beat: this was the authority of the language which produced me, and it was also the authority of Shakespeare.
Again, I was listening very hard to jazz and hoping, one day, to translate it into language, and Shakespeare's bawdiness became very important to me, since bawdiness was one of the elements of jazz and revealed a tremendous, loving, and realistic respect for the body, and that ineffable force which the body contains, which Americans have mostly lost, which I had experienced only among Negroes, and of which I had been taught to be ashamed.
My relationship, then, to the language of Shakespeare revealed itself as nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past. Under this light, this revelation, both myself and my past began slowly to open, perhaps the way a flower opens at morning, but more probably the way an atrophied muscle begins to function, or frozen fingers to thaw.
The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it. I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw: his public streets and his private streets, which are always so mysteriously and inexorably connected; but he trusted that connection. And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and will again) the lot of an American writer — to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who have eyes to see and see not — I am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them.
That is why he is called a poet. And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people — all people! — who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there.
CHAPTER 2Arna Bontemps
(1902–1973)
ARNA WENDELL BONTEMPS grew up in a strict Seventh Day Adventist household in Los Angeles, California. He attended Pacific Union College and graduated in 1923. He became a prolific writer and editor. He wrote poetry, plays, and essays and collaborated with Langston Hughes, his close friend, on several books for children. He edited several anthologies, such as The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949 (1949). He earned a degree in library science from the University of Chicago in 1943 and served as Fisk University's head librarian for over a decade. Bontemps was one of the writers living and working in Harlem during the 1920s. He maintains that the harsh reality of the stock market crash in 1929 effectively brought the Harlem Renaissance to an end.
Bontemps' literary dedication and professionalism is thoroughly documented in over forty years of his correspondence with Langston Hughes. Their letters include an ongoing discussion of their individual books and those they co-authored. They knew and discussed most prominent African Americans — including entertainers, politicians, and athletes. They made literary and personal assessments of other writers, including Robert Lowell, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. They wrote candidly to each other about African American writers as they started out and broke into print. Bontemps was a perceptive literary critic. The comments he made to Hughes about Ralph Ellison, especially the novelist's slow tempo of writing, turned out to be prophetic. In 1950, two years before the publication of Invisible Man, Bontemps wrote Hughes, "The difference between your situation and Ralph's is that Ralph is evidently making this one novel his life's work. That's one way to follow a literary career, but it requires a special kind of mentality. When one is producing such a book, the idea is not to finish it until one is tired of living. You, on the other hand, have formed the habit of finishing projects and that is what keeps you going."
Bontemps published three novels: God Sends Sunday (1931), Black Thunder (1936), and Drums at Dusk (1939). The Old South: A Summer Tragedy and Other Stories of the Thirties (1973) was published posthumously. Bontemps' introduction to Black Thunder included here captures the writer's principled dedication and desperate gamble to complete his second novel as the world seems to conspire against him, preventing him from feeding his growing family and cultivating his literary talent.
Introduction to Black Thunder (1968)
Time is not a river. Time is a pendulum. The thought occurred to me first in Watts in 1934. After three horrifying years of preparation in a throbbing region of the deep south, I had settled there to write my second novel, away from it all.
At the age of thirty, or thereabouts, I had lived long enough to become aware of intricate patterns of recurrence, in my own experience and in the history I had been exploring with almost frightening attention. I suspect I was preoccupied with those patterns when, early in Black Thunder, I tried to make something of the old majordomo's mounting the dark steps of the Sheppard mansion near Richmond to wind the clock.
The element of time was crucial to Gabriel's attempt, in historical fact as in Black Thunder, and the hero of that action knew well the absolute necessity of a favorable conjunction. When this did not occur, he realized that the outcome was no longer in his own hands. Perhaps it was in the stars, he reasoned.
If time is the pendulum I imagined, the snuffing of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s career may yet appear as a kind of repetition of Gabriel's shattered dream during the election year of 1800. At least the occurrence of the former as this is written serves to recall for me the tumult in my own thoughts when I began to read extensively about slave insurrections and to see in them a possible metaphor of turbulence to come.
Not having space for my typewriter, I wrote the book in longhand on the top of a folded-down sewing machine in the extra bedroom of my parents' house at 10310 Wiegand Avenue where my wife and I and our children (three at that time) were temporarily and uncomfortably quartered. A Japanese truck farmer's asparagus field was just outside our back door. From a window on the front, above the sewing machine, I could look across 103rd Street at the buildings and grounds of Jordan High School, a name I did not hear again until I came across it in some of the news accounts reporting the holocaust that swept Watts a quarter of a century later. In the vacant lot across from us on Wiegand a friendly Mexican neighbor grazed his milk goat. We could smell eucalyptus trees when my writing window was open and when we walked outside, and nearly always the air was like transparent gold in those days. I could have loved the place under different circumstances, but as matters stood there was no way to disguise the fact that our luck had run out.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dreaming Out Loud by Horace A. Porter. Copyright © 2015 Horace A. Porter. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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