"An All-Purpose, All-American Literary Intellectual": An Interview with Albert Murray
- “An All-Purpose, All-American Literary Intellectual” An Interview with Albert Murray
This interview was conducted by telephone on January 28, 1997, between Charlottesville, Virginia, and New York City.
I want to start at the very beginning: Nokomis, Alabama. What does that little Alabama town have to do with you now—Albert Murray, novelist, essayist, educator? Actually, I should also include Mobile. These places and the experiences you had there, one could argue, went into the making of you as person and as writer.
Well, I was born in Nokomis, Alabama. But I know nothing about it, because my parents moved to Mobile shortly after I was born. The people who became my parents—who received me from my mother—moved to Mobile. This was during the build up for the World War in Europe. So this must have been about 1917 when they moved. I was born in 1916. I grew up on the outskirts of Mobile, in a place called Magazine Point, which I fictionalized as Gasoline Point. What this place has to do with my writing should be obvious in Train Whistle Guitar. I don’t think I could explain it any better than it is depicted in the novel—except, of course, for the specific technical things about writing. But there is the consciousness about place and learning, and then there is the whole business of what to do about them in terms of creating a literary text. It’s all related. And I take it with me everywhere I go—whatever I remember from there. If you look at my fiction—there are three novels so far, and I’m working on a fourth—you’ll always find flashbacks to Scooter’s earliest consciousness. And Scooter is a fictional representation of my consciousness. He is not, of course, a documentary image of me; rather he is a literary device for dealing with my consciousness.
Your Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) experience was obviously very important to your consciousness too.
Well, that’s just a matter of refinement; that’s just college—I mean you go to high school and then to college, a higher level of abstraction, a higher level of intellectual insight. Then, too, in college there are more facilities to deal with and broader contacts; there you deal with more of the world. That’s why the second book in the series is called The Spyglass Tree, which means that it’s an extension of the [End Page 399] chinaberry tree in the front yard of the house in Gasoline Point. And Miss Lexine Metcalf’s classroom, with its bulletin board and its maps and so forth of the world, serves to expand Scooter’s consciousness beyond what he could see from his favorite place in the chinaberry tree. So when he’s in college and he thinks of his room, his dormitory room, it’s like a medieval castle, like a garret in Paris, or all the places where you go to look out, to learn, to expand your consciousness of the world. And it always goes back to this earlier thing. As a writer, you’re trying to put together what is called a bildungsroman—that is, an education story, a coming of age story, a story about how a person’s consciousness develops. That’s what it’s all about, and those various contexts are extensions of the original contexts. You see what I mean. Scooter doesn’t stay on the ground in Gasoline Point: he gets up in this tree and looks out over an expanse of the land; he expands his awareness of what’s around him. When he goes to school, he encounters maps and globes and sand tables and other languages and geography. Scooter is very much interested in all of these, especially geography. As a writer, then, you try to find poetic images for the expansion of consciousness and the deepening and enrichment of insight. You have to have something concrete, because you deal with these big abstract questions in terms of idiomatic particulars (that is, concrete details) that you actually experience. These things...
