Passing the Three Gates: Interviews with Charles Johnson

A Man of His Word (1998)

A MAN OF HIS WORD BETH GRUBB Ch a r l e s J o h n s o n , ’71, MA ’73, never gets writer’s block. Not when facing a trainload of material for a novel that took seventeen years to research. Not when pumping out a dozen short stories in one month to meet a tight book deadline. And especially not when traipsing through the mountains of Thailand in search of spiritual experiences. All of which might partially explain why Johnson is so prolific. Since 1970 he has published four novels; a book of short stories; scores of book reviews, introductions and literary criticism ; twenty scripts for television and film; a volume of essays he co-edited; and a collection of short stories for a book on slavery—not to mention two volumes of cartoons and more than one thousand published drawings. 206 Reprinted from Southern Alumni 61 (Fall 1998), with permission. Johnson’s shelves are heavy with marks of his fame: a National Book Award (1990) for his third novel, Middle Passage ; a Writer’s Guild Award for his work on the PBS drama Booker; and a so-called genius grant worth $305,000 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (awarded earlier this year). Want more evidence of Johnson’s success? His answering machine identifies various agents to call for speaking engagements , literary matters, or screen writing. A collector might pay more than $200 for an unsigned first-edition copy of his debut novel, Faith and the Good Thing. Microsoft sent him on a tenday adventure to anywhere he wanted (he chose Thailand), so he could write about his experience. His name pops up whenever the words “black” and “writer” are used in the same sentence. At age fifty, Johnson is a major talent: popular in bookstores, respected in literary circles and successful at his craft. He is an ambidextrous wordsmith, deeply in love with words. “The English language is so rich,” Johnson says. “It has more words than any other language—more than two million. That is the writer’s tool, our most basic, fundamental tool.” The man is a walking thesaurus. His writing is sprinkled with words such as ensorcel (which means “to hypnotize or mesmerize ”), orlop (an archaic sailing term describing the lowest deck of a ship), and samu (a Japanese word meaning “monastic labor”). Readers of his work are advised to keep their dictionaries handy. Johnson actually once read, and apparently absorbed,Webster ’s New TwentiethCentury Dictionary—a notion he borrowed from former SIU professor John Gardner and from Malcolm X, who reportedly read the dictionary in prison. “That’s something every writer needs to do at some point in his or her life,” Johnson says. “You discover that there is a word for every thing, every tangible object, every intangible object, every thought, every feeling. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, ‘The word is the skin of a thought.’” A Man of His Word (1998) 207 Students in Johnson’s creative writing classes at the University of Washington, where he is the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professor of English, are asked to learn five new words every class day. When they bring especially evocative words to the class’s attention, Johnson rewards them with a prize—an issue of the Writers’ Guild magazine. This love for the singular building blocks of language began early in Johnson’s life. Always a copious reader, he remembers carefully choosing paperbacks from the neighborhood newsstand on Saturday afternoons and devouring two or three a week. The small faculty office where Johnson conducts business on the University of Washington campus in Seattle holds little interest for visitors: just a university-issue desk, an extra chair, a funky lamp sporting a hand-painted figure of Martin Luther King, and hundreds of books stacked in descending order of circumstance, like sediment in a cross-section of earth. One stratum contains first-edition novels he has judged for the Pulitzer Prize (twice) and the National Book Award, among other contests. Another tier reveals “important fiction” he refers to in his classes; philosophy tomes are squeezed in between layers for later reference. Recurring topics run in marbleized streaks: Martin Luther King, nineteenth-century sailing ships, slavery, Buddhism, martial arts, drawing. “These are just the ones that don’t fit in my house and garage,” Johnson explains, with a self-amused chuckle. On...