"Beyond the Hard Work and Discipline": An Interview with Leon Forrest
- “Beyond the Hard Work and Discipline” An Interview With Leon Forrest
This interview was conducted by telephone on Wednesday, February 5, 1997, between Charlottesville, Virginia, and Evanston, Illinois.
In the opening to your nonfiction prose piece in Swing Low: Black Men Writing (ed. Rebecca Carroll), you make the following statement: “Beyond the hard work and discipline, no one knows what makes the magic of writing.” “Magic,” “hardwork” and “discipline”—these words keep echoing in my head. Will you say more about magic, hardwork and discipline as they relate to the craft of writing?
Well, I had originally wanted to be a poet. It seems to me that it’s in the poetry of language, what we call the prose style, and also finding the poetry of an individual character in his or her personality that brings on this sense of uniqueness. And I suppose that in the subterranean regions of my own psyche, let’s say, I’ve wanted to create a poem on each page of my prose, and if I can do that then I’m close to this magic. The magic is the ability to transform the reader’s imagination into something other and strange as he or she is confronting my text. How often that works? I don’t know. It probably doesn’t work nearly as much as I’d like it to, but the books that I read, the novels that I most admire, are novels in which there is a high degree of poetic sensibility that is part of the magic of making the text something else, something enduring—something possessing within it a constant resonance every time you return to the novel. You might read a great novel like The Sound and the Fury or Invisible Man every three or four years, but each time there is something marvelous and new and magical about it.
What do you mean when you say “the poetic” in reference to prose fiction? I have my own ideas of what poetic prose is—that is, lyrical phrasings, musicality, etc. Of course, I am not saying all; there is much more. I am certain you meant much more.
Well, yes. But you’re saying a lot. I agree that that’s the first condition of it. Then that lyricism—that’s a good word for it really—is emotional. That’s the first thing. It must be that. And then spiritual and, finally, very intellectual. Well, we’re attracted to it because of the emotional ring of beauty and also the fire of it. So that’s another condition I would say, a certain fire to it. And I seem to be most attracted to the novelists who are poets. I hadn’t thought about that until recently. Thomas Hardy, [End Page 342] the great English writer, was the first novelist I read seriously, and I still read him. He certainly was poet of the novel. And I would say Faulkner and certainly Ellison. There’s a high degree of this in Toni Morrison. I was just mentioning it about John Edgar Wideman. And I don’t know Spanish at all, but I certainly get the sense of this great poetic power to transform in Gabriel García Márquez—another writer who has influenced me a lot. So I’m drawn to this. Now the problem though, going from poet to novelist, is that I had to say, well finally, that I am a novelist; I am interested in character and so on, so that’s where I have to plum the depths of human personality. But even there the lyricism, the particular lyricism of a character, is important to me. Lyricism can refer to an attribute of someone’s character and the way they voice things, the way they articulate their problems or their strengths in a most succinct way.
I was teaching Song of Solomon the other day, and I was talking about a particular character in the novel—the character Ruth, who is very objectionable in a lot of ways, and yet Morrison has this capacity to reach into the pits...
