Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File by John Edgar Wideman (review)

In his most recent work, Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File, John Edgar Wideman tackles the deeply unsettling story of the father of Emmett Till as part of his ongoing struggle with the relationship between African American fathers and sons, men and women, innocence and guilt, history and myth, art and propaganda, and, above all, being and nothingness. Now seventy-five, Wideman presents the structuring consciousness of an aging writer, mulling over an inchoate work on Louis Till while walking his “older man’s walk” along the seashore of Brittany, France, aware that his once finely tuned, athlete’s body experiences its “deepest, purest pleasures” in “a state of rest with no desire to move” (157). He is living on borrowed time (having surpassed his biblically allotted three score and ten), communing with the ghosts of fiction’s and history’s past, and still grappling with the same “brutal, ugly shit” (103) that has agitated his career for nearly five decades.

In Writing to Save a Life, readers won’t find an easy, plot-driven novel, a chronologically coherent history, a neat explanation of events, or simple moral vindication of the acts of Emmett Till’s father, Louis Till. An American soldier during World War II, Till was executed by the military for war crimes: the murder of an Italian woman and the rape of two others in Civitavecchia, Italy in 1945. “No doubt about it, “the writer cryptically observes. “Some brutal, ugly shit went down in Civitavecchia” (103). This not only includes the original crimes, but the deeply disturbing actions of kangaroo military courts that could so cavalierly and inexorably repeat the injustices of Southern lynch law through the radically disproportionate execution of African American soldiers. So, the text pits its own capturing of the story—its own aesthetic organization—against that of the suspect and deadly power of the official narrative represented by Till’s legal military file, which was once leaked in the 1950s as a way to smear the son and justify his brutal lynching. The writer figure requests and receives a copy of this file in the mail. The deliberate, overt and fetishistic structure of the file overwhelms him. He describes it as “a hodgepodge of this and that, making sense sometimes, sometimes not. . . . Power importantly clearing its throat, Hrrrrhumph, as it delivers the last word on Louis Till” (97). Writing to Save a Life counters this aesthetic organization of power—a devastating archive—through its own aesthetic organization. Wideman describes this organization as “an amalgam of research, memoir, and imagination” on the book’s copyright page.

As a self-conscious “amalgam,” Writing to Save a Life unveils the influence on its form and function of the pâte de verre art objects made by the writer figure’s French friend, Antoine, who owns the quaint cottage in Brittany that sets much of his ruminations about Till. This artwork—“Transparent cubes, globes, chunks of glass with all sorts of unpredictable things displayed inside” (174)—doubles that of objects crafted by the actual French plastic artist Antoine Leperlier. The writer figure gazes at them as he struggles to breach the barrier between the ephemeral, representational decadence of writing and the concrete functionality of plastic art. Stalled in his work, he covets Antoine’s success. “Heart too full of things I wasn’t prepared to deal with, including ungenerous envy of any art’s success while my Louis Till project falters” (176).

For readers of Wideman’s work, the French objects conjure a familiar magic that bridges the divide of time and space that the writer seeks to defy and capture in his emergent work on Till. “I’d always been intrigued by my friend’s work,” the writer admits, “its roots in ancient Egypt, necromancy, alchemy, and family tradition. The best of the new pieces continued an investigation of time. . . . Lives encased in glass doomed to repeat and suffer history. Bearing witness again...