CHARLES JOHNSON ON BIOGRAPHY AND BRIGHT MOMENTS

In coming, nothing is gained; in going, nothing is lost. Those are words I have heard at Zen memorial services...life and death are events in time with no self attached to them." Posted by Barbara O'Brien on About.com Guide, May 2, 2011.

 

 

 

E. Ethelbert Miller asks "Is anyone working on a biography about you?" I'm happy to say, "No." And I hope no one ever wastes their precious time doing that.

  

I've always enjoyed reading biographies of fiction writers, because I've learned much from them. But I see my own life as quiet, disciplined, boring---and that's exactly way I want to keep it. I've always preferred to restrict Drama to the pages of my stories and keep it out of my everyday existence; and I do love and identify with the way some people call our president "No Drama Obama."  

 

In my teens when I first studied Taoism, I was powerfully impressed by the image in that philosophy of passing through life and "leaving no footprints." We find a similar idea in Buddhism---Shakyamuni was never himself depicted visually during the early days of Buddhism, but instead was simply represented by his footsteps on the Path (or the Way, as a Taoist would say), or so I've read. In other words, we're all just pilgrims passing through this plane. Basically, my life has always been devoted to work and family. That's not the stuff that makes for an exciting, page-turning reading experience.

 

 

However, if someone did squander their time on earth writing a biography of me, and wanted to know what the "defining" moments of my life were, I'd have to say there were a few. One was when I sold my first six illustrations for the catalog of a Magic Product Company in Chicago when I was 17-years-old, and finally got paid for doing art. (I still have one of the dollars from that assignment framed under glass and on my study wall; there were many times when I was broke and hungry and tempted to spend it, but I'm glad I didn't.) 

 

 

There is also what I consider to be my "rite-of-passage" as a young man on the night of my first rank test at Chi Tao Chuan of the Monastery in 1967 when I earned a double-promotion, primarily for my sparring. (Our teacher felt my instinctive fighting style resembled Pau Kua.) I spent a month every night in the basement of my dorm drilling the moves I knew I we would be tested on, for example throwing 45 punches to the front, back and side in 10 seconds---the guys in the dorm used to time me with a stopwatch when I demonstrated that. And it seemed we sparred forever on the night we were tested---one against one, and three against one---all of us pushed to exhaustion. Then beyond exhaustion. I thought I'd be killed in that very rough kwoon in the days before safety rules and regulations existed widely in American martial art schools. (Knockouts were common; one student killed a man on the streets of Chicago after only two weeks of studying there, which is why I decided that was the place for me.) I didn't care about pain because I wanted to study this. And that was the night I learned to "let go" the fear of death or injury---or the fear of anything else in this world. 

 

 

Two other milestones would be the night I met my wife on a hot summer evening in 1968 and a voice in my head said, "This is It, you don't have to look anymore," then the day of our marriage two years later. I count the days our children were born as two "peak experiences." 

 

 

Also the day the president of SUNY-Stony Brook handed me my Ph.D. in Philosophy, the attaining of which had been my dream since I was 18-years-old. And finally, of course, there was the night I received the National Book Award in 1990 for Middle Passage, and had the opportunity to read a tribute to Ralph Ellison, who was at the ceremony with his wife Fanny.

 

  

You don't need a biography for those peak moments; you can do them all in one essay or a short story.

THE UNPUBLISHED WORK OF CHARLES JOHNSON

Occasionally, I'm asked about the six unpublished novels I wrote between 1970 and 1972 before Faith and the Good Thing. I should use this opportunity to clarify some things about them that have raised questions in the minds of some readers, students, and literary scholars.

I came to novel-writing with a background in journalism (my bachelor's degree) and writing for newspapers in Chicago and southern Illinois. Creating copy quickly is something every journalist learns to do, and he (or she) has no problem with filing 3 or 4 stories a week. That was the training I brought to novel-writing. I knew I could write 10 pages a day, 5 days a week (taking a break on weekends to relax, do research and/or rewrite), and thereby produce a 300-page manuscript in six weeks My master's thesis, for example, was written over five days, 10 pages a day; and, later in life, I typically held myself to a 5-page-a-day schedule when writing screen-and-teleplays.

The first of those six unpublished novels had the working title, The Last Liberation, and it was an exploration of Eastern philosophy set in a Chicago kung-fu school like Chi Tao Chuan of the Monastery, the kwoon I trained at in 1967 during the Chicago "Dojo Wars" when I was 19-years-old. The second book was an early version of Middle Passage, i.e., written as the log kept by a white captain on a slave ship (The research for that was done during a black history course I took as an undergraduate). The third novel was a black, family drama. The fourth, fifth and sixth novels were a 959-page trilogy (I was shooting for 1,000-pages but ended it early so my wife and I could spend some quality time together) about the childhood, young manhood, and middle-age of a black musician. He was a pianist. I took lessons on the piano around that time with a black friend who was a musician and in the Music Department at Southern Illinois University; for years we always had a piano in our home in Seattle, first so I could sometimes practice, then for my kids when they had music lessons.

All these early books were written quickly, and before I learned the proper approach for revising literary fiction. (By the way, these E-Channel Posts are, I should note, as close as I ever get to releasing first-draft material, so please be forgiving, especially for the occasional typos Ethelbert and I miss.) Yet, there is a story I can tell about Book Four in this series of what I call "apprentice novels" that might be worth sharing.

Book Four, about the childhood of a musician, was accepted in early 1973 for publication by a new, start-up publishing company in New York when I was only a couple of chapters into writing Faith and the Good Thing. I was faced with a dilemma. Every young writer wants to be published. But what one first publishes is important for one's "career" (Yes, I just used that word even though I dislike it.) There was no certainty I would publish Faith when it was done (or even if I could finish it), but here with one of the earlier manuscripts was a "bird in the hand," so to speak. The publishers liked it because, as they said, it reminded them of the writing of James Baldwin. I felt torn, for with Faith I'd found for the first time the beginnings of my own voice and vision, as well as a way to deploy large amounts of philosophy in a work of fiction. With that still in-progress work, I'd moved far beyond the earlier six novels.

John Gardner was looking over my shoulder during the nine months (October, 1972 through June, 1973) I wrote  Faith (He was the only creative writing teacher I had since Marie Claire Davis when I was a junior in high school), so I asked him, "What do you think I should do?"

His answer was wise: "If you think that later you're going to have to climb over the earlier book, don't publish it."

I say his answer was wise because a debut novel tends to define a young writer. Reviewers look at it, and think, "OK, this shows us what he can do and can't do. Here are his strengths and limitations and, rightly or wrongly, they tell us what to expect from him in the future." It's important, I believe, for a literary writer's first book to be what I call a "performance novel," a demonstration of all the skill and craft he (or she) has learned up to the time of the book's composition. Furthermore, James Baldwin had his own particular vision of life; in 1973 I was developing my individual  and literary sense of the world, with its own vocabulary and grammar. I had no interest in being judged imitative. So, after taking the deepest of breaths, I wrote to the publisher and withdrew that fourth novel (yes, that was painful to do), gambling that Faith would turn out well, which I suppose it did because 37 years later it is still in print.

The world will never see those first six novels I wrote in two years. That's why I call them "apprentice novels"---they were, in my view, simply preparations for the work that would come later.

CHARLES JOHNSON ON FAMILY WISDOM AND WORK

 When I was growing up in the racially segregated 1950s, there was a very common saying among black Americans that I heard over and over again. The saying was this: "A black person will have to work twice as hard as a white person to get half as far."

I remember that when I first heard this from family members, it struck me as being unfair. But then I thought, "Who says life has to be fair?" So I did the math. If I had to work twice as hard to get half as far as my white contemporaries, then I'd have to work four times as hard to break even with them, and six times as hard to truly excel. That meant no days off. No vacations. No partying. Those were luxuries the people of an embattled, oppressed race could not afford. (I recall my late chairman of English at UW, Robert Heilman, once saying to me, "You're always relaxed but you never really relax." I had to laugh because he was right and had figured me out.)

Being a product of the 1950s, I took this "law" of black American life during the era of segregation to heart. (I recall reading an interview with Condoleezza Rice where she said she heard the exact same words from her family members.)  So it had been, I knew, for all the black people I admired like Du Bois, the Tuskegee Airmen, and all my black predecessors in this country. So why should it be any different for me? The harshness of the black reality that gave rise to that formula softened in the 1960s, especially when policies supporting affirmation action were in place, but by that time the racial "law" that applied to being black in Jim Crow America had sunk into my DNA.

 It became part of my make-up because I had great examples of hard-working black men in my life, starting with my father who at one point in the 1960s held down three jobs to support my mother and me---a day job doing construction, an evening job as a night watchman for the City of Evanston, and on the weekends he helped an elderly white couple do repairs on their home. Watching him work this way for our family, seeing his frugality, religious piety, and the simplicity of his pleasures as well as his good spirit as he labored, I just understood that I would always have to multi-task; to embrace the meaning of sacrifice; to work in two or three artistic and/or academic disciplines; and to hold down daily more than one job during my lifetime---and all that without complaint or whining, as he did.  He was a proud man, was my father. And he took pride in his work more than anything else. (Later, I would see that formulation for his life in Sartre's phrase "Existence precedes essence" and the Buddhist concept of karma.) When I was growing up, he wasn't my "role model." He was my hero. Both my wife and I were struck by how much he was like the character played by Morgan Freeman in the film, Driving Miss Daisy. All during my adult life until his death at 81 seven years ago, I thanked him for teaching me "how" to work, and for making me see that a man defines himself, first and foremost, through his deeds.

I remember when Dad and I were working together on something or doing any chore---like unloading items from a truck, for example---and we'd come to the last item that required our labor and sweat. A big smile would come across my father's face when he saw this final item; he'd take his cigar out of his mouth, and he'd say, "That's the one I was looking for."

That's how I feel when I reach the last page of anything I write. Or finish the ink-work on a drawing. Or the last move in a martial form. Or the last bench-press I have to push into the air. Or the last class I taught in a career of 33 years in higher education, with my father's voice whispering up through my memory: That's the one I was looking for.

CHARLES JOHNSON: STAGE AND SCREEN

Over the years some of my stories have been staged, filmed, and adapted for radio. Let me work slowly through some of these things as I look over my curriculum vitae. 

 

The novel Faith and the Good Thing was adapted as a play by Keli Garrett and staged by City Lit Theater and Chicago Theater Company at Bailiwick Arts Center (March 16--April 20, 1995) and Chicago Theater Company (April 21--May 28, 1995). That play received nominations in five categories for the first annual Black Theater Alliance Awards and won the first two: Best Actress (Lydia Gartin), Best Supporting Actress (Lisa Biggs), with nominations for Best Supporting Actor, Best Lighting Design, and Best Play.

 

Among my short stories, "Menagerie" was performed as a play (five amateur performances) at the Ruth Taylor Theater at Trinity University in 1991, directed by Shobie Partos. It was also presented on "Short Subjects" by Symphony Space on National Public Radio, read by Gloria Foster (June 3, 1995) and included in Volume 9 of "Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story," a two-cassette audio tape sold by Symphony Space. My story "A Soldier for the Crown" was also included in 2004 in "Selected Shorts: Handsome and Lonesome," read by Ruben Santiago-Hudson. "Cultural Relativity" was made into a short, funny film entitled "In His Kiss" by David S. DeCrane and shown at the Newport Beach Film Festival on April 17, 2004.

 

 

The story "China" was adapted by film-maker Jeffrey Wray as a one-hour drama that aired on PBS. Wray wrote a fine screenplay for this, but I found his casting and directing to be disappointing so I don't talk much about this adaptation.

 

 

Regarding Dreamer, I've been approached by actor Jon Voight (he wanted to be involved but not to act because he didn't see a role for himself in it) and folks at a New York film company about filming that novel but, as with many Hollywood conversations, the right deal package didn't materialize.

 

 

In the early '90s I sat for four days in a Seattle studio recording the first 3-hour audio-cassette for Middle Passage (Penguin/Highbridge); the most recent recorded book version is narrated by Dion Graham (Griot Audio).

 

 

As for Hollywood, Middle Passage has been optioned three times. First by Tri-Star, then Interscope. On those occasions, first Warrington, then Reginald Hudlin were attached to the projects, and I wrote two screenplay adaptations for those studios. Tri-Star didn't work out for us because their executives wanted to remove the Allmuseri god from the novel, which Warrington and I refused to do. The screenplay for Interscope was the best since we added a whole new act in which we see the sailors on the Republic---but not Rutherford Calhoun---raid the village of the Allmuseri and, after a breathtaking battle, leave their ancestral home in smoldering ruins, then lead the survivors away (along with Rutherford)  in chains. That is not in the novel. The third option was at Warner Brothers, where John Singleton wanted to direct it. Some years ago, he called me out of the clear blue to tell me he'd "finally" found his choice among actors to play the important role of Capt. Ebenzer Falcon, Peter Dinklage.

 

 

I think maybe one day Middle Passage will be filmed, perhaps during my lifetime or after my life is over. It's now 21 years old, in its 20th printing from Scribner, and is taught widely at colleges and universities each year. But Hollywood has never filmed a black epic (As one of my UW colleagues once put it, Middle Passage begins as a picaresque, becomes an epic, and ends as a romance.) And bear in mind this would be a very expensive movie to make well, at least $100 million (and that's a 1990s estimate made before foreign financing became so important for American movies). At that cost, a studio puts itself at risk for that year. And this story presents two, difficult production challenges. First, it's a period drama, which means all costumes, props, etc., must be circa the mid-1800s. (Think of how painstakingly James Cameron worked to get that accurate, right down to the silverware in Titanic.) Secondly, as a sea adventure story, it has to be shot on the water, and we know how difficult the elements can be to work with during a shoot. I would not want to see it done badly (or cheaply) as a film.

 

 

 

However, as we know, once an author signs away his film rights, he has no control whatsoever over how his story will be interpreted or how the film will turn out---it helps if the author does the screenplay and/or serves in some capacity as a "producer," but even that sort of participation is no guarantee he'll be pleased with the final product, for in so many cases the story may be basically seen by a studio as a vehicle for its star or someone the studio executives want to do business with (Remember Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and how Ken Kesey had his named removed from that film?) No one ever sets out to make a bad movie, but it's rare when all the aspects of film-making involved---the right casting, a director with a literary sensibility like Stanley Kubrick, a well-written screenplay, good editing, and funding---come together in a perfect combination to create an outstanding film. To be honest, I think it's something of a miracle when that does happen.

 

CHARLES JOHNSON TALKS ABOUT LIBRARIES

I’ve enjoyed a life-long love affair with libraries all over the world. In fact, it sometimes seems to me that I've lived most of my life in the stacks. For example, as a kid I hauled home armfuls of books on drawing and the history of illustration from the Evanston Public Library. I began writing my first novel, Faith and the Good Thing, in 1972. For that novel I read 80 books on magic and folklore---all of them came, of course, from the library of the college I was attending. The next novel, Oxherding Tale, I began in 1975 when I was working on my doctorate in philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After I finished teaching and taking my own classes, I went to the library and speed-read every book on American slavery that they had on their shelves. 

 

 

 

When I wrote Middle Passage, I once again turned to the library in order to immerse myself for six years in the literature of the sea, nautical dictionaries, and even esoteric studies of Cockney slang, which helped me to individuate the language of the sailors on the 19th century slave ship I was writing about. And even before I wrote the first sentence for my last novel, Dreamer, I spent two years at libraries researching the history of the Civil Rights Movement, biographies of Martin Luther King Jr., and critical examinations of his speeches, his sermons, and his intellectual development.  

 

 

I mention these examples because my process as a writer has always demanded massive research before and during the creation of a novel or a non-fictional book, and that would have been impossible without the institutions that preserve human culture, thought, and experience in written form.

 

 

 

During the last 30 years I’ve had the pleasure of visiting one of the oldest libraries in Europe, one located in the little Portuguese town of Coimbra, in a small building with no windows so that sunlight would not damage the rows of manuscripts that dated back well before the Middle Ages. In northern Thailand, I walked shoeless through Theravada Buddhist libraries that preserved classic works of Buddhism on palm-leaf scrolls that were at least a millennium-old. And closer to home, in the special collections section of the library at Indiana University, I had the unusual experience of holding in my hands a Buddhist scroll written on parchment. That day, in that library, I had to wear plastic gloves because the ink used a thousand years ago on that scroll had been mixed with poison. The purpose of that was to kill anyone who did not belong to the monastic hierarchy, and to keep spiritual knowledge and wisdom in the hands of a few.

 

 

 

Until the modern era, it was not unusual for people in the East and the West to withhold knowledge from the common man. This was especially true in the United States after slave rebellions like that of Nat Turner and the Stono Rebellion. Black people were whipped if they tried to learn how to read. Whites feared that if slaves could read, they were more likely to come across abolitionist material and rebel. They would read, reflect, and question their situation. So slaves had to be kept illiterate.

 

 

In 1832, Alabama enacted a law that fined anyone between $250 and $500 if they tried to educate a slave. In North Carolina in 1835, the public education of black Americans was prohibited. Whites in the slave-holding South also feared black people who could write and therefore communicate with each other. One law in South Carolina said this: “Be it therefore Enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That all and every Person and Persons whatsoever, who shall hereafter teach or cause any slave to be taught to write, or shall use or employ any slave as a Scribe in any Manner of Writing whatsoever, hereafter taught to write, every such offense forfeit the sum of One Hundred Pounds current money.”

 

 

 

So I think there is an intimate relationship between literacy and democracy. Between democracy and the free public library especially, which is one of the finest achievements of this country. Like any American, I complain on April 15. But some things are so essential for a nation to call itself civilized---like libraries---that they require a community's collective support through a contribution from each of us (i.e., taxes). The return on that investment, in both principle and practice (as that relates to a nation's level of literacy), is too great to be measured.

 

 

THE ART OF BOOK REVIEWING

  

 

Between 1977 and 2008, I published over 50 book reviews in The Los Angeles Times (Carolyn See and I were two of a handful of reviewers their editor convinced to do a book review every month starting in 1989); The New York Times Book Review; Washington Post Book World; The Chicago Tribune; Common Knowledge; The London Times; The Wall Street Journal; The American Book Review; The Seattle Weekly; Pacific Northwest; Tricycle: The Buddhist Review;Shambhala Sun; and Buddhadharma.

 I reviewed the work of many authors, among them Richard Wright, Raymond Roussel, Thomas McGuane, Cormac McCarthy, William Trevor, Barry Lopez, Toby Olson, Caryl Phillips, Chinua Achebe, Margaret Walker, Larry Neal, Wole Soyinka, Richard Rive, Stanley Crouch, Reginald McKnight, Shelby Steele, John Edgar Wideman, Gordon Parks, James H. Cone, Ben Okri, Kwame Anthony Appiah, John Updike, Gerald Early, Paul Theroux, Jerry Gafio Watts, Nelson George, Richard Ford, Dinesh D'Souza, Jim Crace, Albert Murray, Madison Smartt Bell, Jan Willis, and Angel Kyoto Williams.

 I decided that after over 50 reviews, I could let reviewing become one of the things I'd done enough of and could finally "let go." But why did I begin reviewing in the first place? The short answer is that I was eager to review books because some of the reviews of my first novel Faith and The Good Thing were shoddy, shallow and profoundly disappointing to me when I was a young man; a few reviewers made, in my opinion, all the mistakes that a critical reader should not make. Also, I began reviewing because I felt a serious writer has an obligation to respond to and be engaged with other contemporary authors during the moment they share in literary history.

 

 

Traditionally, and not that long ago, book reviewing was a literary art form in itself. (And not, as my daughter once said when she was a kid, "You're doing another book report, Dad?") Far from being like a high school "book report," a well-done book review can be a thing of beauty as memorable as the book under review---and in some cases more engaging and memorable than the book being discussed. In the case of a writer like, say, John Gardner, his reviews in The New York Times Book Review in the 1970s were often insightful "position papers" on some aspect of aesthetics inspired by whatever book he was discussing.

 

 

But I was not interested in my reviews being position papers. I preferred to restrict my taking of intellectual and artistic positions to my philosophical essays. Instead, and in a phenomenological spirit, the first thing I always did when approaching a book I had to review was "bracket" or set aside my own partisan, aesthetic positions, my personal feelings, and my notions of what a story or novel should be. (That was something I hoped each text I reviewed would teach me anew.) In other words, the first step was to get "me" out of the way. I sought to experience the work from within and in its own terms, and to let the text guide the aesthetic and cultural questions I would raise. I found that it was important to give readers as concise and accurate a summary of the book as possible, but in the case of a work of fiction never to reveal too much, because that would spoil the sense of surprise and discovery for them if they bought the book. 

 

 

And, most important of all, I found it helpful to quote liberally and (when possible) at length from the book. Why? Well, because that way a reader could directly experience the work without me, the reviewer, as a middle term mediating (or standing in the way) of readers encountering the author's own thoughts and prose style. Personally, I might not like a particular book, and sometimes a reviewer is tempted to just throw up his hands and repeat the line attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like." But generosity in giving quotations gives the reader a taste of the work's flavor, and lets him (or her) make up their own mind---they might just decide that they disagree with my judgment, if it was negative, and that this is a book they would find interesting.

 

 

 In a word, I always tried to review the work of others with the kind of mindfulness, sympathy, compassion and care that I hoped reviewers would bring to my own literary creations.

 

 

 

THE BIG MAC: The MacArthur Awards

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it. 

          Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The first and perhaps most important thing to say about the MacArthur fellowships, which some have called a "mini-Nobel," is that not every one who receives this yearly recognition is a genius. Administrators at the Foundation will be quick to tell you that, and rightly so.

Starting in the 1980s, and long before I received my MacArthur in 1998, the Foundation sent me the nominating statements for other writers and asked me to evaluate their work, partly because I worked in the same field as those nominees, and partly because with Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 I established some credentials as a literary critic. I gave them reports on several writers, black and white, and nominated one recipient, a man who is distinguished for his work with at-risk black youth and ex-convicts.

The money given to MacArthur fellows is, of course, a blessing. But no one gets rich from it, nor is it the intention of the Foundation to make anyone rich---only to provide them with the freedom to continue their work. What's nice is that fellows don't have to continue the same work that brought them the award. They can pursue any new path dictated by their intellects and imagination. It's likely many do exactly that because MacArthur fellows, as a group, don't follow the herd or fashionable trends. Rather, they tend to be people who innovate---often for many years in obscurity---and strike out in new directions.

So, as I said, the money was fine, but far more interesting to me---and something almost everyone ignores during the excitement when the awards are announced---is the specific, unique reason why someone receives this award. If anyone cares to know, the answer is on each individual fellow's citation. Mine reads, "Charles Johnson is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, cartoonist, and screenwriter. His works address fundamental philosophical questions and transcend the boundaries of class, ethnicity, and culture that separate us."

 More rewarding than the five years of financial support was (for me) the recognition of the essence of my oeuvre up to the year 1998. When they called to tell me I'd received a MacArthur (they prefer the Call to other ways of first communicating with you), I was informed that it took their judges a full year to read all my work.   

In regard to how I feel about receiving a fellowship often called the "genius grant," I have to say that I'm not bothered by that at all. All (false) modesty aside, I've been called a genius all my life. First, and quite predictably by my mother (who was clearly biased). Then by Howard Long, founder of the Journalism School at Southern Illinois University, who  in 1977 when he presented me with something called a Delta Award sponsored by Friends of Morris Library ("For significant contribution to intellectual commerce of our time") said that, "I've only known two geniuses in my life and both of them were cartoonists." And, lastly, by John Gardner in one of his newspaper interviews in (I think) the early 1980s.

To my eye, genius is much more commonly distributed among members of our species than we sometimes think. It takes many forms, but perhaps all of them have one thing in common that philosopher William James identified when he said, "The essence of genius is knowing what to overlook." And I would add that Thomas Edison famously said that "Genius is one-percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." 

THOMAS EDISON

I believe I can testify to the "perspiration" part of that statement.