Angularity: An Interview with Leon Forrest.

Leon Forrest was the author of four novels that effectively created an oral history of his mythical territory of Forrest County, which strongly resembles Chicago. In the first three works - There Is A Tree More Ancient Than Eden (1973), The Bloodworth Orphans (1977), and Two Wings to Veil My Face (1984) - he explored the spiritual core of African American experience through the blending of mythic, biblical, folk, and Shakespearean discourses. His last novel, Divine Days (1992), was consciously modeled on James Joyce's Ulysses in terms of its ambition to articulate the essence of a culture in a massive work designed, as Forrest phrases it in this interview, to be the "Great World Novel." He also published a collection of essays, Relocations of the Spirit, in 1994. This interview was conducted in Chicago in 1995, roughly two years before Leon Forrest died of prostate cancer on November 6, 1997.

Byerman: Since we're in Chicago, I'd like to focus for a moment on the importance of the city to your work. Especially with Divine Days, and to some extent your other works, the setting is very specific. Could it be set someplace else?

Forrest: I don't know, because Chicago is the city that captures this kind of rowdy spirit that, it seems to me, has been missing so much from African American letters. This blend of the sacred and the profane seems to me to be so much a part of the Northern experience, particularly a city like Chicago with its great possibilities of going for broke. It's a hustler's town. You can make a comeback after falling, and people will let you up. It's not bound up by class differences in the black community the way other cities are. The idea of open-ended possibility in Chicago of the black community is really, to some degree, true of the muscularity of Chicago in a general way; in other literatures, it's mellow. Because of that, my fiction seems to me to be set uniquely in a kind of Chicago, though I always call it Forrest County work. The specific things - barbershops, bars, and churches - you can find those anyplace, but I hope they would have a certain Chicago character to them.

Byerman: One of the things you mention in Relocations of the Spirit is the range of writers who have come from Chicago, who are associated with Chicago - Lorraine Hansberry, Robert Hayden, Cyrus Colter, Gwendolyn Brooks. Do you think there's something that these writers have in common that has to do with the city?

Forrest: First of all, Hayden didn't come from Chicago - I just mention Hayden as a favorite writer - and Hansberry was a little too neat for the ethos of Chicago. Brooks is an outsider, and Colter is a transplanted guy from Indiana. It's really Bellow who is close to the outlandishness of Chicago, the sense of the hustler's town, the role of certain kinds of tricksters, the great humor of it. I think I'm more in that kind of tradition, much more than I would be to the tradition of another transplant, Richard Wright. (Laughter.)

Byerman: I want to ask you about the idea of the voices in Divine Days. One of the things that struck me in reading through the book is that, while the characters are very different and their stories are very different, their voices seem to have a lot in common; that is, there seems to be this piling on of language and the playing with language (all the puns and other types of word play). Many of the significant voices in the text have this in common. Is there some sense in which they're all simply your voice?

Forrest: Oh, no, not at all. I mean, I hope that each has his/her own coinage, but I obviously am attracted to certain kinds of characters who evolve in my artistic imagination who are great talkers, and there is a kind of tradition of an orchestrated oral tradition, in which you start off with A, move to C, move to E, and then come back and pick up B and D. That has to do with the way jazz moves, and the folk sermon and just general storytelling. But having said that, that would be part of the ethos of the race as I was seeing it, projecting. The voices - in terms of their dictions, the tonalities, the specifics of the kinds of stories they tell - are very different. For instance, a character like Gracie the barmaid is telling this long story about her son who was killed in Korea and who was, strangely and perhaps even intriguingly, bisexual. That's quite different than a character like Reverend Rupert, who talks about the meaning of the spiritual moment and takes it to the mountain tops. Both are great talkers, I guess, but very different.

Byerman: So you would see these characters as, in some sense, jazz instruments or jazz voices, each interacting with the others but having its own tonality?

Forrest: Jazz is the one art form that we all know so well. Often the great instrumentalist or ensemble creations are orchestrated just as sermons are orchestrated; they start off with one thing, and you constantly expand and improvise. My characters do the same thing. But it seems to me that what you're talking about is a major kind of outline or feature of the ethos of African American oral tradition and, again, it is highlighted in jazz. I find it going on in characters who are very different from each other. Obviously that would be the role for the scholar to find out: Why that is or why that isn't true, or how universal it is.

Byerman: One of the questions I want to get to eventually is the question of history and why one looks back at the story. First, do you think that such variety of voices and such creativity in voices - because I think that's part of what I'm getting at, this play with language and so forth - continues to exist today? That is, you set the story in 1966 in barbershops and bars, spaces that permit such expression. Do you think that it continues to exist as part of an ethos today?

Forrest: It would take a cultural anthropologist, I suppose, to get to the precision of that. I would say it does exist; at least its layers continue. For instance, there's the whole tradition that I'm not really up on of rap talk and rap music; there would be the whole influence of the drug culture; there would be greater emphasis now on a political language; there would be the influence of keen interest in Africa - all of these things are added to it. Meanwhile, the old base is still there. All the things that are part of signifying, dozens playing, tall tales, blues. I don't probably do enough in the novel on the whole impact of the urban blues and the commercialization of it in the community. So I would say that, if anything, the layers of the talk continue to expand, some things less important than others, but the old layers are still there with the new ones as well.

Byerman: Does this notion of the layers have something to do with a term that you use frequently in Relocations and elsewhere - the notion of angularity - because it's clear that you don't mean simply something like point of view. What does that term mean, and how does it apply to your work?

Forrest: Well, it's the way things have a spiraling kind of effect. I say orchestrated, but things will move in a variety of directions, and then often times, when the best speakers find a wholeness... I'm very much interested in that because I always am very fearful of any kind of formula in writing. The fact that one person develops a kind of talk in one way, and then another in another way, orchestrates an angular involvement in talk and speech patterns - that is very important to me. So that might well be the effect, for instance, with Rupert, who is a minister; he's still very close to a kind of orchestrated, church-based formula that affects him even when he's talking in a secular way. Now someone like Gracie the barmaid, who's talking about her son, she's not limited by that; she can bring anything, any kind of diction in and use any kind of structure in her talk. Rupert is so bound by the church that, when the two of them are in dialogue, another kind of angularity happens that's open-ended too. He's from the medley of preachers and so is always trying to get back to certain things. So, again, you have a mix here. Now, the other thing that connects the two is this mix of the sacred and the secular or the sacred and the outrageous always coming together.

Byerman: Can the sacred be outrageous?

Forrest: Oh, yes indeed. It always is at base. There is this one Bible story, a lot of preachers pick up on it, and that's the story of Josea and Gorma. This man marries a woman who is reported to be a prostitute, and it becomes a metaphor, in the prophetic tradition, of God's willingness to forgive, because Josea was willing to forgive Gorma, who was in a life of prostitution. The idea was that the Israelites along the way had picked up all of these profane ways and had prostituted themselves to the traditions and so on of the people who had surrounded them - Arabs, the Egyptians, and so on - and God was willing to forgive them. But at the base of this is the story of a man who's been cuckolded. So, you're taking this on a serious leap of faith: Josea was made a fool of, you know, and he forgave his wife. How many times does she have to be caught with somebody? So a lot of the stories that we've come to think of as holy stories in the Bible and other places really have a comical base to them. That's what I'm always looking for, and to some degree that humanizes me.

But I was going to go back a bit to your other question, because maybe the comparison would be the relationship of Invisible Man to Divine Days, in terms of another book that's full of talk and voices and so on, and then to see that I'm in that tradition and then to see how I've expanded that tradition with more voices. And that would be the difference of about fifteen years or twenty years of setting. So, again, my point would be that this stuff expands. In Song of Solomon you get a muted sense of the expansion in the scene in the barbershop that's so wonderful in there. There's only about ten pages, but I could never do it in ten pages; I'd have to have thirty.

Byerman: Okay. That leads to the question of why Divine Days in its published form has to be 1135 pages long, and in its manuscript form has to be 1829 pages long. Why did it require so much space to tell the story?

Forrest: Well, because it's so Divine. (Laughter.) I don't know. We don't think of tightness when we think of the great major novels, and that's obviously what I was after. How well I succeeded is another question. But no one called Joyce in to ask why didn't he cut Ulysses down to 750 pages or so, why didn't he cut it to 300.

Byerman: But Divine Days is longer than that, half again as long. It's three times as long as a Faulkner novel.

Forrest: Yeah, sure. That's pretty good. Well, those are just people that you've got to beat, so you've got to see if you can box them in the long-distance run. I was very much after the fact that so and so had written a novel of this length, and I'd need something much larger, much grander, more voices to get up on the shelf and compete with these people. I come from a tradition that the writer should really think about writing the Great American Novel, so I said, well, I better write the Great World Novel.

Byerman: Then you do have the sense of seeing those writers as, in some sense, benchmarks.

Forrest: Benchmarks and active competitors. They're dead, but the books are just as alive as they can be to me. The other thing is that I thought I needed this kind of length for sustained character development, which nobody does anymore. I won't call any names, but even the writers that we like most... there's rarely any kind of really sustained character development over a long period of time, going back in time and forward and seeing these characters cast in different waters - temptation, honor, wonder, and all that. I felt that it certainly would take that kind of length to do it, but I didn't have any problem with it. And, then, I was having so much fun with the novel. It's not like when you're a kid and you have a ring that you're shooting marbles in, and it's a small ring, you know. I said, "Hell, this ring, the whole block belongs to me, and these marbles, and let's see what happens. Ideas are coming up and jokes, and this and that, put this in and, oh, don't forget this." Or someone would tell me something and I would be actively working to transform it.

You know, interestingly enough, none of the reviewers complained about the length; they all mentioned it, but none complained about it. I have a sense that more people have probably gotten deeper into this novel than any of my other novels, and the other novels are much shorter.

Byerman: One model that occurs to me that you haven't mentioned in terms of openness and vastness is Thomas Wolfe, and I'm wondering if he is part of the background here in any sense?

Forrest: I was never a very big Wolfe fan for some reason or other. I was much more with Faulkner and the Russian writers. I've thought more and more about the Russian writers in the last ten years or so because it seems to me that you can get this expansiveness of a broad range of culture there, many layers of it, the conflict of it, the grandness of it, and the great tribulation of life, and that's a big important ingredient to me - and the humor that you see with Ellison, that was a big influence. So, you know, I actively sought ways in which I am connected with these writers and then how I might try to see what I could do on their turf.

Byerman: Do you see this work as going beyond those writers then?

Forrest: Well, that would be for someone else to say; that I don't know. Someone had mentioned about this being an African American War and Peace and I said, well, the only connection that I have on that level to Tolstoy is the fact that we share the same first name. Well, almost. Anyway, these are the people that I was actively inspired by and actively thinking about how I might compete with, the great ones, of course.

Byerman: The other connection with Wolfe, in some ways, is the apparent autobiographical element in the text. That is, Jubert in some ways seems like a young Leon Forrest - in the army, working in a bar, doing local journalism, and so forth. In what sense and in what ways is this autobiographical, or is this just a starting point?

Forrest: It's just a starting point. But I'll use anything if I can make it work. A lot of things have happened to me that I can't use because I can't get the distance from them or the passion into them. The bar seemed the perfect place. I had worked in bars for years. But the people in the novel are only faintly based on people I knew. I stayed away from the bar scene perhaps for twenty years before I tried to write about it. I sat in the park one summer and just started taping memories, different memories of bar scenes that I had had. And things were just springing up that I thought I'd forgotten about. Then I would sit down at the typewriter and work from that tape. Being away that long I had forgotten enough to provide a springboard to improvise. So sure, I'll use anything I can, but soon enough, of course, the many characters I'm dealing with have to have their own lives and integrity, and that's where I've got to give over to them my imagination to evolve that.

Byerman: How do you see Divine Da?s as relating to the earlier novels? The first three novels work as a kind of trilogy. How do you see this book, set in the same place more or less, with some of the same characters, as relating to those earlier books?

Forrest: The setting goes back and forth in the South and North, and that's certainly true in the first three novels. Hopefully there is a leap in my own artistic growth, and Divine Days has a lot of comedy and humor of all kinds that is not pervasive in the first three novels. Also there is this kind of sustained development of several major characters that you don't have much of in the first three novels. The first three novels had a fundamental religious base to them, and the seriousness of the religious and spiritual question in my work may well be the reason that I've had such problems developing sustained critical attention. These issues are there in Divine Days for sure, even in the title, though it is also comical, but there are also a lot of other things going on there.

Byerman: As a reader of your own work, with the perspective of four novels, do you see yourself in some sense as a religious writer in that spiritual issues are at the center of what you talk about?

Forrest: Yeah, because I don't want to contradict myself. Ford, you know, is sort of a profane character who manipulates a religion ultimately. Of the other two main characters, Sugar Groove is apparently taking a kind of spiritual turning the last years of his life, and then Imani, Jubert's girlfriend, has all kinds of spiritual quandaries about her relationship to Africa and her relationship to her past and family, and these are spiritual issues from in her psyche. But in Divine Days there's also, more than in any of the other novels, the idea of the comedy of faith. You get some of that in Finnegans Wake and elsewhere in Joyce, and many other writers play with that. At base, even the most religious questions have a kind of humorousness or even comical undergirding.

Byerman: Ford in this novel seems to be played in part for comic purposes. In the earlier work, he was a kind of trickster figure, among other things. The angle I want to take is why you would give him a name that would read so easily as W. D. Fard, of Black Muslim tradition.

Forrest: There's the actual closeness in both stories, both the story that we know of Fard and my Ford, to manipulation and mystery - the intrigue and perhaps even a sense of the closeness that so many religious figures have to the magician and to the trickster. They look alike, for instance, and so on. But that's why, of course, the Muslims always play around with the idea that Fard was really God incarnate. So then I take Ford (and the tradition) a step further and have him a hermaphrodite who keeps coming back again and again. Of course, we only see manifestations of his maleness. He's a stud. He's wearing all these different masks, and actually what we have left of Fard is a series of masks of interpretations. So, that's a base - Prophet Divine, Prophet Jones, Daddy Grace - a kind of history of the world, a trickster, some African tricksters. All of this and more constitute the stock that went into the material of Ford.

Byerman: A question about one of the essays in Relocations, specifically the one on Elijah Mohammed: One of the things that struck me was precisely that you chose Elijah rather than Malcolm X, who everybody is writing about. What is it about Elijah Mohammed that caught your attention?

Forrest: Well, first of all, I knew him, and I didn't know Malcolm. Second, as you're indicating, so much is written about Malcolm, so why do another one? And then it seemed to me, as I guess I indicated in the essay, that in this country there's a tendency to look more to Kennedy than to Johnson, and a lot of times these characters who are less known publicly and seem even to be secretive are really quite fascinating on a one-to-one basis and in small groups. That was certainly true with the perception I had of Elijah, and of course he was at the real fundamental base of the movement, not Malcolm. I thought that, in writing about him, I would approach it with a kind of comic base, so that there was a certain kind of humor there, you know, because that's been missing in these deliberations. As I was telling my wife one night after I had gone over there - and I quote this in the book - he said, "Oh, Napoleon meets Napoleon." (Laughter.) I wish people who were seriously involved in biographies would look to some of these things because it would be wonderful if we knew much more about Mayor Daly #1, or Richard J., who, for all intents and purposes, was not much of a talker, yet this guy knew more about power and could manipulate power and knew an awful lot more about human nature than any of these highly articulate people. So Elijah would be in that tradition.

Byerman: One of my reads of what's going on in Relocations is that you discuss a number of people who could be seen as reinventing something. Was Elijah Mohammed in some sense that kind of person, one who takes something that is out there and remakes it?

Forrest: He epitomized it. I don't know if I quote this in the book but I was telling a grandson of his about There Is A Tree, and he said, "Well, that's an intriguing title. Tell the old man that and he'll pick it up." (Laughter.) And it makes sense: He was an artist; he'd steal anything and make it into something else. A better answer is what Jubert does with this whole thing of improvisation: He goes on the other side of the bar and starts taking these spare parts that nobody wants and puts them together like an automobile maker in Detroit. All that is invention, the inventive person in the African American context and maybe in others as well. The Bop musicians, for instance, were so damned sour on current music that they wanted to try something new. It wasn't just to play a music that the white folks couldn't copy; it was a kind of cockiness of the artistic personality. I don't like this old stuff that's gone before. Well, Elijah did that, too. He picked up a little of this and a little of that, and soon enough he had a mythology. As I mention, blacks need their own mythology to challenge the white man's mythology. Christianity, as a white man's religion-Dr. King took it and made it a black religion. But all of this is part of reinvention, and bringing in some Islam, and the other thing that is a part of the innovative personality. It's very interesting how Elijah's movement was really very old-fashioned, respectful, very Southern, gracious toward women, chauvinistic, too, of course: taking care of your own property and standing up for what you are, and the way they dress, particularly the women; even taking something like the damned bow tie and making it into some kind of statement. Isn't this the messenger that delivers the message? (Laughter.) All of that is going into this cauldron, you know. And he shaped it. Some of it he understood - a lot of it he probably didn't. Malcolm never did any of that.

Byerman: One of the things that struck me about your essay is that, in some sense, Elijah becomes more central than Malcolm. Malcolm may have been able to articulate things much more dynamically, but Elijah was the one back there doing all the work.

Forrest: Well, that's like Paul; he was a much more dynamic speaker than Jesus. He extended the faith. There is a lot of that idea of the triad of leadership. Again, Ellison is helpful here: You've got the Founder and Bledsoe, and then you've got Homer Barbee. Barbee is the great explainer of the myth. It is often times the person who comes after what the founder has crafted who can be an even greater spokesman. He's been converted to it, and in some ways he may even love it more. He's more invested in it. By the time you've got the whole thing crafted, you begin to see some of the traps in it.

Byerman: Is there some way in which Relocations is - given this discussion - a way for you to create a tradition for yourself?

Forrest: I think that's a very thoughtful question. It may well be a little like how we've come to use Shadow and Act as an undergirding for Invisible Man. I wish I could say that about Baldwin's brilliant essays, but in his fiction that isn't true. I hear echoes in the two, and certainly the sensitive critic can hear more in the two works. I wish I had written in fiction the equivalent of my essay on Billie Holiday.

Byerman: Is there a fictional Billie Holiday in there somewhere?

Forrest: I don't think so, but she represents a kind of reverential base, source material that is there in many ways.

Byerman: What struck me about Relocations is that we have a long essay on Elijah and then at the end this long essay on Billie Holiday, and much of the language that you use in them is very similar. This whole notion of reinvention, of angularity even, comes across in the two discussions. Both persons seem to take a humble role (or attitude) for this great thing that they have become a part of. It struck me that in fact they have this sort of workmanlike role of taking material that is out there and reinventing it and reshaping it into something. And what turns out is something quite impressive, quite powerful. It seems that part of what you're doing is saying that's your background - you listen to them and you learn from them.

Forrest: Yeah. I guess you could say that. Just as Elijah took all these broken down parts of human beings that had been shattered by the world, discarded by whites and blacks, and made them into something - this shiny car - Billie took the men who discarded her and remade them. That was her art.

Byerman: She remade the cliched songs.

Forrest: That's right. Holiday, and many other persons I was fascinated with as a young person - Dylan Thomas and Charlie Parker, for instance - were chaotic across the board. But on stage they somehow or other were able to make something that is so transcendent and so wonderful and tremendous; they were in a lot of control. Yet they were controlled by the forces that would destroy them in their offstage lives. The other thing is that they were such enormously needy people. That was not true of Elijah.

Byerman: Is that a model of the artist for you - taking these bits and pieces that others might disregard and shaping them into something?

Forrest: That's right. And it's particularly true of things the white world has discarded and the black world has discarded or underplayed. I'm still forcing the idea or pushing the idea of the importance of religious or spiritual experiences. And I'm about the only black writer who is still doing it. Baldwin did it for awhile and got tired of it. It is at the very nerve of the ethos.

Byerman: Back to this idea of reinvention - is there no true originality, just the remaking of things?

Forrest: Well, it's a blend. I'm talking about the Renaissance, the music of Ellington or Billie - all of these things are a blend. The more layered they are, the greater the possibility for a projection that's closer to what we are and who we are as people. One of the sad things that has happened to blacks in the ghetto, particularly the younger people, is that they have cut themselves off from this idea of invention. They've sort of retreated into the haunts of inwardness or parochialism, and that's not the way to go. That's certainly not the way for an oppressed people to free themselves. You constantly need to make contacts with whatever it is that's perceived as the classical mode, whether it's in business or anything else. Engage it, first of all, and then refine it and change it in terms of your own needs. This is something we've known for a long time, but we have kind of cut ourselves off from it. The artists and the people that we respect most in the black community represent exactly what I'm talking about. They're willing to engage the broadest spectrum of our cultures and then combine it with what we have to make the new. If rap is ever going to go anyplace - and I'm not knocking rap, it may well go-but if it's ever going to do more than be a narcissistic expression, then it's going to have to do something like that. It's going to have to redefine itself, grow, expand, engage other worlds to have a definitive stamp on our conscious.

Byerman: Do you think that this notion of reinvention is, in some way, a kind of essence of African American culture? Is it what the culture means in some sense?

Forrest: Sure. What I'm talking about too is this will for improvisation and almost fitful effort. You never get a preacher preaching the same story of Job the same way on a particular Sunday over a career of say forty years in the pulpit. You deal with the chaos of life by using the imagination and taking old forms, like the story of lob, and reapplying them to the agony and wonder of the day-in and day-out, year-in and year-out, generation-in and generation-out, and so on, story. And you never back off from any of that. I come up with something that's very specific about something that happens to blacks and then see how that connects up with what's been called a kind of classical experience of that in other literatures, other worlds, and then I draw the two together. That's part of how art is made.

Byerman: In your case, and perhaps more generally among African American writers, there's a strong emphasis on history and memory. Part of what I hear you saying is these are the materials we work with to create new works. Why set a novel in 1966, as opposed to 1996, and address the immediate questions?

Forrest: I wanted to capture a time in which the ethos of the characters and the ethos of the black community are coming through a period of transition. We really had come to believe that the Civil Rights Movement was about at an end around 1966, and so this is kind of coming between these two. Here's the Black Power period and, of course, that's a big quandary, and so Jubert is interested in it. He's very fascinated by the Movement - on the one hand by King - and yet he doesn't like the violence of the new groups because he feels that he knows enough about violence from the South to shun that. Some of the arguments in the bar have to do with this. He is in the scene in the bar when the Muslim comes in, and there is a big argument between them about this little boy, the kid in the shop, this drug addict. All these issues are around this issue of war and peace and around aggression and violence, I guess you could say. These are the issues that run at the heart of a novel. 1966 represents an era, a time, but it's also useful to think about the way these issues are dealt with in the book and of our situation today.

Byerman: Does the past then give us some perspective on the present?

Forrest: I hope so. There's another past of Jubert, and there's the past of Sugargroove and his past with his father. And so there are at least three, and perhaps more, ways of plunging into the immediate past and then the deeper past to make sense of patterns where they are.

Byerman: What does the pattern amount to, do you think?

Forrest: I guess the pattern would be how to find sources of invention to work through, to transcend the chaos and also to devise ways in which you constantly are finding some angle of vision, finding within yourself some spiraling power to make your life richer and more human. One of the problems with someone like Imani, for instance, is that she is trapped in the past and can't seem to get beyond it. She's right to tell Jubert about the importance of the past, but she is so locked into it, whereas some of the other characters like Sugargroove, who is interested in the past, don't know how to define it. Of course, Ford manipulates the past more than anyone else. So the thing would be to be wary of people who are constantly talking about what they've learned from the past, the ones who are going to absorb us in that because they, often times, are making profit off of it and aren't showing us the way to a future.

Byerman: Do you think that searching for those patterns might inform us about the present? Is that a special function for black artists today, or is that more general?

Forrest: Yes, but it's a temptation for the writer to speak in too closely shaped didactic terms about this. This must be designed by the writer himself/herself, and it is clear to me that you must get lost in this material to find your way out, to some degree. Certain writers like to make a pattern and say we need to do this or that. I don't want to preach sermons. I would rather show characters and then, out of that, let the reader decide to "look at the blind alley this guy is going down." It suggests a way of constant improvisation, constantly trying to make new. That seems to me to be a healthy thing, a wonderful thing. When we do it, we do two things. One is to hold on fiercely to the anguish and grief of our heritage. That is something that we owe ourselves and the nation. The other thing is to see constantly how we can find ways of invention to deal with this anguish. But that's what the great sermons do... "You were Job, and now let's see how you can get out of your predicament."

Byerman: Let's move a little bit beyond your own work to some observations about what's going on with African American writers generally. First of all, do you see any patterns among the writers now, or is everybody sort of doing his or her own thing?

Forrest: Well, first of all you have about a half a dozen writers, male or female, who would be in their 50s through mid-60s who've established a good group of novels. These would be Gaines, Wideman, Morrison, and perhaps myself, and others. The point would be that we haven't had this before because, you know, it was only toward the end of Baldwin's life that he had a body of novels, and they are very uneven. We've had the one novelist all right, with perhaps six novels, but this is kind of unusual that you have so many writers, six or more... and we'll go on. Now the question will be how far we can go on beyond what we've done. And that will be the test of how sustained the quality of African American letters will be going into the new century. We're all at a kind of middle-level development. And maybe a little bit beyond that.

So the question would be, "What greatness is there for any of us?" We will see what we will see. August Wilson would be in this group as well. And then you have some very interesting poets like Michael Harper and Rita Dove, for instance, so it's really quite an impressive group. And, as I said, many are young enough to write what will be great works. African American letters at this point is the most exciting branch of American literature.

Byerman: One of the things that seems to be happening is that a number of writers of the generation that you're talking about have also been producing nonfictional works. There's Charles Johnson, you, Morrison, Gayl Jones (who is a little bit younger but nonetheless certainly a part). Ishmael Reed has been writing nonfiction all along. What is the compulsion do you think to write nonfiction as well as fiction?

Forrest: Ellison got very much intrigued by this. As much as Baldwin wanted to write a great novel, ultimately it was the essays that made his reputation. I think what drives the black writer is the fact of the immediacy of issues that so beleaguer us in fiction. This is true for those of us in it for the long haul; to deal with more abiding issues of life and death and racial crisis, we have to address these contemporary issues. We're also constantly asked, you know, "What about this? What about the O.J. trial?" All these things come up constantly in society, life, and there is also a need to do something about that. Now there is also another kind of essay that many of the black writers are involved in, and that is the kind of essay that I hear you talking about when you ask what undergirds my work. There is a feeling for many of us writers that deconstructionists and the rest of them have missed the boat. We know something about society and culture and literature even though most of us don't have Ph.D.s and many of us don't have degrees at all. That's being

avoided and not addressed by the people who are teaching literature, by the cultural theorists and others, and so that inspires another sort of essay. Then the other thing is all of us are back in the university now. So we've been taken over by this stuff; we teach all the time and want to show we know our stuff there as well. So, all of these things are a part of the drive.

Byerman: There seems to be some sense in which the writers have insights that we can trust, that aren't necessarily there even among the people who are observers of African American culture. I'm thinking of people like Cornel West and bell hooks. And there's some way in which, you know, even as good as their observations can be, there is a kind of perception that you have or Morrison has or Ellison has that seems to go beyond what it is that they are doing.

Forrest: And our drive is to say, "Yeah, but don't see this as something natural, you know, like they do with black athletes." Well, that's where we then try to get heavy, and that's where we get into problems, too. There's a tradition of this in this country with Henry James, and Baldwin had read a lot of James and so had Ellison, and these are our two greatest black essayists in a way, I think. So, there is a tradition for that - of letters.

Byerman: What observations would you be interested in making about literary theory - that is, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and also the discussions that have been going on about multiculturalism? You express a view that deconstructionism somehow misses the boat, but would you say that more generally about theoretical approaches to black literature, the kinds of things that Gates and Baker and a number of other people are doing? How do you, as a writer as well as a teacher of literature, deal with these things, and how relevant do you see them as being?

Forrest: I read some of it, but I stay away from a lot of them because I think they can be very damaging to me as a creative writer, because the gauge is formulaic. I ultimately must, as an artist and novelist, not belong to anybody but the source material that's available to me when I'm trying to create. I must not belong to Europe, though I'm deeply influenced by Europe. I must not belong to Africa. I don't belong to the New Orleans creoles. I don't belong to the South Side. I don't belong to the woman's movement. I certainly don't belong to the Black Aesthetic. Yet, to some degree, I must deal with all of that. The way I deal with it best is to learn it. Anything else is reductionist.

Byerman: Is the artist finally then a kind of lonely individual?

Forrest: Sure, but that goes with the territory. That's what I bought into when I decided to go into this operating room. You can get so much more done in the novel and the literature when you're not staking out, "Well now, this is the audience, and I want to address this. I'm talking to women now."

Byerman: Do you see yourself as having a particular audience; that is, when you sit down to write, who do you expect to read what you're writing?

Forrest: This may sound naive, but what I'm really dreaming for would be a group of serious African American readers; that would be my ideal audience. The other audience would be anyone who is interested in serious literature. I guess, in another way, I'm not all that obsessed with audience. Maybe that's why I don't sell anything. I kind of take the materials available to me and make something of them in a magical way with language and character transformation and so on. In other words, it's different from the performer who knows, "Now I may be very caught up in certain eccentricities or something, but I've got to get out there and entertain an audience tonight." A writer is working alone with his materials, hopefully finding things that will engage an audience, of course, but more than that, since fiction separates me from the playwright, who is not alone.

Byerman: I wanted to ask you about the whole idea of creative writing and creative writing classes. What value or purpose do you see in them? Can one become a good writer by taking creative writing classes?

Forrest: Not too many - a few, and with very good teachers. And those teachers don't necessarily have to be writers at all but people who are very sensitive to literary nuance and are willing to suggest ways in which the young writer can expand his talent and where he can go, people he can talk to, books he can read. But the main thing is that young writers become too dependent on creative writing, and it becomes another crutch. And, ultimately, of course, all crutches must be taken from you.

Byerman: You're on your own and out there by yourself. First of all, what has been your experience at Northwestern, a university that is considered to be, in many ways, an elite institution where you have a relatively privileged group of students? What is it like being an African American in such an institution?

Forrest: It's very lonely. My friend Allison Davis, to some degree, prepared me for that because he was a friend for a little over eighteen years, and I used to see him at the University of Chicago and so on. Your friends are few. Well, to put it another way, for any academic most of your colleagues are out of places in your specific area, and you're not going to get a lot of colleagues who see the need for a very progressive, even radical agenda that is going to transform this society to be a help to my people and to the poor and so on. They all have their own disagreements with other blacks. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that you're the artist in the university, you know, probably don't hold formal degrees, and you're looked upon as probably a quaint, interesting outsider. It adds to the sense of being a minority within a minority within a minority. I would say, in the long run, maybe sometime early next century, you will see black writers finding other ways to make a living other than the university. Don't forget that I was thirty-six when I came to Northwestern, so I had another life. And I think it's very dangerous for people going from M.F.A. programs to teach because they haven't lived and experienced, and they talk the same kind of babble, team-speak, and they all sound alike. The creation of literature is always about risk taking.

Byerman: One of the things that isn't very specific in your work is your own political views. That is, those are not really identifiable in terms of the work that you do. Toni Morrison has, for example, made an effort to identify herself with certain issues, primarily outside of her fiction. What's the place of politics in your world view, and in your personal experience? Do you see yourself as a political person in any sense?

Forrest: Well, I'm a Chicagoan, and therefore by definition I'm a Democrat. I suppose the thing I liked in Mayor Washington was that you had Democrats, radicals, leftovers from the Civil Rights Movement, leftovers from the nationalist period supporting him. I would call myself a kind of "race" man. I always want to see how we can come up with techniques to help survive and flourish in the society. So, if you're a socialist or you're an NAACP man, well that's all right too. We can work together because we try to see what we can do in the world today. And that's the thing that sort of bothers me, too; the Afrocentric movement has no place for expansion. I think that I am a political man, but I do not necessarily use the idiom. I don't have an overriding identification with politics and ideology of Africa. I have great identification with hard-struck humanity. I see a situation that is not particularly giving us any direction about what we must do. I would say that the way we can help Africa, as we have seen, would really be through the rise of a sophisticated black middle class that has the time and interest, perhaps in African art, to have a relationship with Africa that perhaps the Jews have with Israel. They're clear, the Jews, of their connections with Israel.

Byerman: The question is which Africa?

Forrest: That's exactly right. I have to always kind of pull back. Of course, there is political mayhem in Divine Days with some of these tricksters who are manipulating African art, too.

Byerman: Now for the question that always ends an interview: What are you working on?

Forrest: Well, I'm working on two things. One is a novel that would be composed of about five or six novellas. It's pretty experimental. It picks up some things on Jubert and some old things and, then, some very new things. I'm also working, and I may well have it in a few years, on another collection of essays. One thing about the essay that I did mention is that it allows you to take the spirals of ideas and then convert them into the essay form that you perhaps, at one time, thought might be good in a novel - an anecdote that didn't seem to go anywhere - and, of course, Naylor and Baldwin were very helpful with this, using anecdotes in essays. Those are the two things.

Byerman: Thank you for a great afternoon.

Keith Byerman is Professor of English at Indiana State University and Associate Editor of African American Review. His most recent book is The Short Fiction of John Edgar Wideman.