Passing the Three Gates: Interviews with Charles Johnson

Reflections on Film, Philosophy, and Fiction: An Interview with Charles Johnson (1978)

REFLECTIONS ON FILM, PHILOSOPHY, AND FICTION An Interview with Charles Johnson KEN MCCULLOUGH Ch a r l i e S m i t h a n d the FritterTree is a film written by novelist Charles Johnson and conceived by producer David Loxton of WNET-TV and director Fred Barzyk of WGBH-TV. The film is a dramatization of the life of Charlie Smith, who, at the age of 135, is the oldest person in the United States. The film will be aired as part of the VISIONS series in the fall of 1978. McCullough and Johnson met during the filming of Charlie Smith. This interview was conducted recently in Boston, where both were participating in editing the rough cut of the film. MCCULLOUGH: Charles, when you started out, you were working in a primarily visual medium, cartooning, and then 3 Reprinted from Callaloo 4 (October 1978), by permission of Charles Johnson. you went to the study of philosophy, which seems to be at the other end of the spectrum in terms of verbosity, then you moved into novels with a heavy philosophical emphasis. Now you’re once again involved in a medium which is primarily visual, or at least a lot less literary than the other things you’ve written, and it’s also a collaborative medium. First of all, how did this process evolve for you? And, secondly, what was the adjustment to screenwriting like for you? JOHNSON: When I was really young, I wanted to be a painter, but where I lived in Illinois, there was no one who could teach me painting. I managed to link up in 1963 with a polymathic artist in New York who wrote mystery novels, was a cartoonist, and had a broad artistic background. His name is Lawrence Lariar, and he’s now retired. Whatever native talent I had as a painter Lariar subverted, happily, to comic art, which is what I did from the age of seventeen, when I first started publishing , until I was about twenty two, tired of it, and married. Along the way, since I wasn’t thinking of anything other than visual expression, I published two collections of drawings, political satire, and about a thousand individual drawings in various periodicals, and did a television series when I was twentyone and in college, which was called Charlie’s Pad—a very, very early “how-to-draw” show for educational television. But working with images in such a limited way was frustrating. The expressions I wanted as I got older were impossible. Somewhere along the line I discovered I could do philosophy better than anything else—I flunked just about everything else because I was bored, so I did philosophy throughout graduate school and developed a style of thinking that I couldn’t explore expansively in the form of comic art. This led me to the novel, which was rough going originally: I wrote six apprentice novels. I published nothing until I had the opportunity to study with a really good teacher, John Gardner. At that time I wanted to explore philosophical fiction; I wanted somehow to merge, in my own work, the black experience and about two thousand years’ worth of KEN MCCULLOUGH 4 philosophical reflection. That’s still the way I work right now, on the eighth and ninth novels—all of them are philosophical experiments. The switch from literary art to film was a bit awkward, even though it circles back again to the visual medium and earlier television work. Because, as you say, it’s a group project. When you write a novel, you are director, producer, costume designer, actor, make-up man, all that at once. But now it’s all divided up, you have to make compromises, which I think is good. Every writer, in principle, should be able to write in as many forms as possible. Finally, all these forms of expression are unified in a personality, in the artist himself, because some things he can get to only through images, and some things he can get to only through imaginative uses of language, and some things he can get to only through conceptual approaches, or analysis. For me, then, each is a different order of expression and all are on a parity. It shouldn’t, for the writer, be much trouble to switch— it’s just a slightly different cognitive style for each, variations on creative...