Conversations with John Edgar Wideman.

Rushdy, Ashraf H. A.

Bonnie TuSmith, ed. Conversations with John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998. 224 pp. $17.00.

There are two places in this collection of interviews at which John Edgar Wideman defines what he means by career. In the first, he says that a writer's career, the evolution of a "vision," involves an endless process of "self-echoing and recapitulation." In the second, he comments that his own career has been about finding a "means to live in a world and finding that art is a crucial tool for negotiating that life." This well-edited volume is a truly welcome addition to the impressive corpus of texts that makes up Wideman's "career," and it will prove indispensable for those of us interested in seeing how Wideman himself has thought about the visionary series of novels, short stories, and nonfictional meditations that have helped him negotiate his life and the nation's.

The volume covers almost thirty-five years, beginning with a piece Gene Shalit wrote in 1963 and concluding with the editor's engaging conversation with Professor Wideman in Amherst in 1997. There are, however, significant silences during this thirty-five-year period--the second interview is from 1972, the third from 1983. These gaps are important because they evidence the slow emergence of Wideman's reputation as a writer of considerable power and also the rhythms of his own development as a writer.

Wideman's career has usually been cast into the following pattern. He began as a writer influenced by the lyricism of white modernists, especially T. S. Eliot, then developed into a writer concerned with themes of African American community and family. There is some truth to this portrait, but there is also a great deal of deceptive half-truth to it, and this collection of interviews helps us to develop a more nuanced and comprehensive narrative of the imperatives, events, and intellectual shifts that have directed Wideman's choices as a writer. He tells us how he was affected by the social and political developments of the late sixties and how he was exposed to and influenced by African American writers like Ellison, Wright, and Toomer when he inaugurated the first Black Studies courses at the University of Pennsylvania. But we also get glimpses of how events in his personal life were operative in that turning from one approach and subject to another. He tells us how the return home to attend his grandmothe r's funeral was a transformative moment in his writing life. Sitting around with the family after the funeral, listening to the stories his great-aunts were telling about his grandmother, Wideman felt the power of a different kind of narrative technique and learned the necessity of dealing with his sense of loss by developing a new literary voice that respected and tried to emulate that communal and oral storytelling spirit at the wake. Not only are these anecdotes about the personal motives behind the intellectual transformations moving in themselves, but they also enrich our appreciation of the complexity of this complex author.

And the complexity does not end there, for Wideman goes on to complicate the very assumptions underlying the idea of a "shift" from one intellectual position to another. He points out the fact that his work has consistently been influenced by the eighteenth-century English novelists he studied at Oxford, and that he has always written out of that tension between a formal literary training he was "acculturated into" and the familial and cultural lore he inhabited. Indeed, he goes on to challenge the facile idea that there are such things as distinctly white or black influences by disposing of the idea that there are white writers whose language and ways of viewing the world are somehow not deeply imbricated in a world culture drawing on the productions and beliefs and styles of people of African descent. For a Faulkner, a Joyce, and an Eliot, there was never a time when, as he puts it, "the black influences were ... not there."

In addition to providing crucial information about the evolution of his career, Wideman proves to be a wonderfully gifted reader of his own works, which cannot be said of every novelist. Wideman consistently demonstrates his ability perspicaciously to elaborate on a given scene, theme, or aspect of his novels or short stories. For instance, he provides an insightful reading of the play of paintings and myths in Hurry Home, a book he elsewhere reads as a narrative about mastering one's own culture. He makes brilliant remarks about Fever as a coherent volume of short stories collectively addressing what he calls the "unnameable uneasiness" that pervades a society and civilization that emerged from corrupt beginnings. He gives us an original reading of Reuben as an allegory employing Egyptian mythology and Christian imagery. And he gives us a way of reading The Cattle Killing as a story about the love and enduring sustenance that come from both storytelling and African spirituality.

In any interview with an author, we expect to find interesting and useful information about the conditions in which she or he conceived and wrote a particular work. Here, too, the volume is rewarding, as Wideman describes the technical features of how he writes (by longhand on yellow pads), how he was first published (the role Hiram Haydn had in his career), and how he advises his own students to write. More to the purpose, of course, are Wideman's reflections on the social and historical forces at play during any given period of composition. Throughout these interviews, his most compelling explorations cover the period when he wrote The Lynchers (1973), a book which he literally discusses cover to cover, talking at one point about the function of the prefatory quotations with which he opens the book and at another about the picture of the author on the back cover. For those familiar with the contours of Wideman's career, the focus on The Lynchers should come as no surprise, since it is the novel that marks the most significant shift from his earlier to his later works. For that reason, we can be thankful that he offers extended meditations on what background reading informed the novel and what emotional impetus drove him to write it. The information Wideman gives us about this novel, which he describes as ultimately a "critique of self-reliance," should pave the way to new readings of this work that broods insightfully on the nature of violence, destruction, ritual, and guilt.

Wideman has described the life of a writer as one of being confessional and yet hiding, of a dialectic between desiring exposure and reticence. A few of the interviewers comment on how in their interviews Wideman is likewise fully guarded at one moment and brightly open the next. There are two interviews in this collection that stand out in particular because of the way the interviewer and the subject become dramatically engaged in this dynamic. Patricia Smith's interview is powerful because she most fully delineates how Wideman "beckons and forbids," while Arnold Sabatelli's interview is rewarding because the former student's visit to his former professor's home and class tells us so much about Wideman as a teacher and mentor.

What finally makes this collection a significant event is the presence in it of Wideman's powerful and contemplative mind looking with a tragic-comic sensibility on a world in which the only constants are longing and loss. Yet, as he does in his novels, he does not simply mourn or solely portray the anguish of grief. He talks, as he writes, about the salvation that comes from drawing on family and generational history, on the strength that comes from occupying a cultural space, no matter how uneasily, and the grace that comes from celebrating unsuspected sources of eloquence. Even as he does so, Wideman constantly eschews the simple. The truth, he says, will sometimes set you free, but it will also sometimes kill you. Not all dreams are good dreams, not all dreamers good people. And writing, no matter how much a way of healing and coping, is also not finally a way of containing or controlling the daily and particular pains of loss. "It's one thing to write a book," he notes, "and it's another to live your li fe." This, coming from a grandson who started writing a short story when his grandmother became ill, who published it as a "kind of a dirge" when she passed, like so much else in this volume, is a hard-earned wisdom that those of us who try to make sense of the world through words would do well to make our own.