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Understanding John Edgar Wideman
D. Quentin Miller, Linda Wagner-Martin
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Understanding John Edgar Wideman
D. Quentin Miller, Linda Wagner-Martin
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A complete overview of an innovative and analytical author who rose from poverty
Among the many gifted African American authors who emerged in the 1970s and 80s, John Edgar Wideman is one of the most challenging and innovative. His analytical mind can turn almost any topic into an intellectual adventure, whether it is playground basketball, the blues, the prison experience, father-son relationships, or the stories he lived or heard growing up in the impoverished section of Pittsburgh known as Homewood. In Understanding John Edgar Wideman, D. Quentin Miller offers a comprehensive overview of Wideman's writings, which range from the critically acclaimed books of the Homewood Trilogy to lesser known writings such as the early novels A Glance Away and The Lynchers. Notably Miller includes the first scholarly analysis of Writing to Save a Life, Wideman's recently published meditation on the military trial and execution of the father of civil rights martyr Emmett Till.
In his fiction, nonfiction, and works that artfully combine both forms, Wideman has employed a multilayered and often difficult writing style in order to explore a wide range of topics. Miller tackles such topics as African American folk history, the intersection of personal and public history, the confluence of oral and written traditions, and the quest for meaning in nihilistic urban settings where black families struggle against crime, poverty, and despair. Miller also shows how Wideman's singular personal history is interwoven into his writings. His impressive accomplishments, including an Ivy League education and numerous literary honors, have come alongside family tragedies. By the time his sixth novel was published, both his brother and son were serving life sentences for murder, a source of anguish that he wrestled with in Brothers and Keepers and Fatheralong.
Wideman writes with such authority on so many subjects that readers frequently have no idea what to expect with a new publication. Understanding John Edgar Wideman is thus a necessary guide to a prolific, varied, and essential oeuvre.
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CHAPTER 1
Understanding John Edgar Wideman
The point isnât replicating some other writer. The point is expressing myself, being myself.
Wideman, Godâs Gym, 173
I demand that readers meet me halfway, that they participate and think and open themselves up to confronting some stuff that maybe they havenât thought about before, some feelings theyâre not willing to own up to. To that extent the very nature of what I do means if Iâm not upsetting somebody, not getting under their skin in some way, what Iâm doing is probably not working.
TuSmith, Conversations with John Edgar Wideman, 144
These two epigraphs capture something of the defiance, confidence, and challenges of John Edgar Widemanâs work. Wideman is a tough writer in every sense of the word: a man who has been hardened by the circumstances of his life, who writes about difficult subjects in a difficult style, and who is not afraid to examine wounds or even to dig deeper into wounds to analyze their causes and effects. His works resist categorization, and he does not fit neatly with the other African American writers who flourished in the postâBlack Arts Movement era of the 1970s and 1980s. Toni Morrison might provide the closest comparison: both authors are concerned with black history (and both have a particular fascination with the murder of Emmett Till), both write about family, both are comfortable moving between esoteric allusions and black vernacular speech (âthe academy and the street,â1 in Widemanâs words), and both confront trauma and damage as they produce works that cannot be fully understood or appreciated in a single reading. And yet the comparison does not hold up for long. Morrison tends to focus on female characters, while Widemanâs universe is predominately masculine. Morrisonâs works are rarely autobiographical, whereas Widemanâs often are. As Keith Byerman has argued, âUnlike Morrison, Wideman offers little optimism,â at least in the first half of his career.2 Finally, Morrisonâs works have been widely read and lauded, culminating in her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Although Wideman has been recognized with a MacArthur Grant and a handful of prominent literary prizes, literary history has not been as kind to him, and he has certainly not enjoyed the widespread readership that Morrison has.
Regarded as a quirky genius following the publication of his first three novels in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Wideman deliberately retrenched and reemerged in the 1980s to great acclaim with three works of fiction together known as the Homewood Trilogy (1981â83), his memoir Brothers and Keepers (1984), and a flurry of other books. This blistering output of impressive work continued into the 1990s. Since then, his writing has slowed considerably, and his works published in the last decade have not enjoyed anything like the attention his earlier ones received, particularly those from the 1980s. True to the statements that serve as the epigraphs above, though, he has never been a writer who sought mainstream fame or who pandered to readers who were not willing to do the hard work of engaging with the layers of his work. His oeuvre represents the relentless struggle to understand and communicate a difficult, complex vision. Readers who approach him casually are likely to be confused. Readers who dedicate themselves to his work are likely to be rewarded (if also exhausted) intellectually, aesthetically, and emotionally.
Life and Career
Wideman was born on June 14, 1941, in Washington, D.C. His mother, Bette French, and his father, Edgar Wideman, figure prominently in his fiction and nonfiction. It could even be argued that a primary tension in Widemanâs work is an attempt to resolve the aspects of his parentsâ personalities that trace back through their lineage: his motherâs unstinting religious faith and perseverance versus his fatherâs distant stoicism. His first name is an homage to his grandfather John French, a nearly mythical figure in his work, who exuded life and energy until his ignoble death in a bathroom. In Widemanâs story âBackseat,â meditating on the nature of names, he writes, âWhen I published my first novel, I wanted my fatherâs name to be part of the record so I was John Edgar Wideman on the cover. Now the three names of my entitles sound pretentious to me, stiff and old-fashioned. Iâd prefer to be just plain John Wideman, but canât shake the Edgarâ (All Stories 42). Metaphorically, Wideman cannot shake his family, or his fate, or his connection to his father, who is rendered as a distant figure, a bully, and an isolated old man at various places in his work.
Wideman was the oldest of five siblings raised in the Homewood and Shadyside neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. Shadyside was a white-dominated neighborhood, and although moving there afforded him certain opportunities through access to better schools, the family had to move back to Homewood because of financial struggles. Homewood was in a period of decline, and like his neighborhood, Widemanâs family deteriorated over time. In a late story about his mother, âWeight,â he describes how she persevered âin spite of a son in prison for life, twin girls born dead, a mind-blown son who roams the streets with everything he owns in a shopping cart, a strung-out daughter with a crack baby, a good daughter who miscarried the only child her dry womb ever produced, in spite of me and the rest of my limp-along, near-to-normal siblings and their childrenâmy nephews doping and gangbanging, nieces unwed, underage, dropping babies as regularly as the seasonsâ (Godâs Gym 2). The dire circumstances of his family unfolded gradually over the course of his life. Widemanâs upbringing did not forecast the remarkable (and perhaps exaggerated) family dysfunction detailed here. His Homewood years were not rosy, but they did not resemble this kind of devastation. Many of his renditions of his early family life describe a matriarchy in which his mother, grandmother, and aunts largely raised him while his father worked a series of jobs to support the family. Wideman had to take his masculine cues from his peers, particularly on urban basketball courts, which became a recurrent setting his work, especially in the latter half of his oeuvre.
Recognized for his intellect from an early age, Wideman was awarded a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where he played basketball and studied the largely white literary canon, particularly the European modernists such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, who influenced his early novels. His years at an Ivy League school were intellectually stimulating and foundational, but they also intensified feelings of racial alienation that deeply scarred him. In Brothers and Keepers he recalls one particular incident when a âsmartass, whole-lot-hipper-than-youâ3 white student challenged his taste in music, claiming, of all things, that he did not understand the blues. This challenge provoked in Wideman a complex mix of anger and self-consciousness about his status as a black man trying to succeed in a largely white world. He sometimes came to view his college experience as flight rather than journey, or as a ticket out of Homewood rather than the keys to a kingdom. His higher education continued with a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he wrote his thesis on an eighteenth-century precursor of the postmodern novel, Laurence Sterneâs Tristram Shandy. He returned to the University of Pennsylvania as the first tenured black professor of English. A watershed moment occurred when a group of black students approached him in 1968 and asked him to teach a course in black literature. He turned them down, claiming he did not know enough about that literary tradition to teach it. This conversation brought him up short and caused him to retreat for nearly a decade while he read black literature intensely and turned for source material to the neighborhood in Pittsburgh where he grew upâHomewoodâto listen to family stories and retell them as closely as possible to the way they were communicated to him. Although his later works do not replicate the techniques he used in the Homewood Trilogy, this period left an indelible mark on his work, not only in its emphasis on authentic voices but also on the attention he pays to the workings of stories.
In 1973, following his time as a professor at Penn, Wideman traveled with his wife, Judy, and their two sons to Laramie, Wyoming, where he accepted a position at the university there. It was during this period that he returned to Homewood in his imagination, but Homewood also came to him, quite literally, in a way that would forever change the trajectory of his work. On November 15, 1975, his brother Robby was involved in a botched robbery in Pittsburgh that resulted in a senseless murder. Robby and his coconspirators went on the lam and ended up at Johnâs house in Wyoming. They were caught and arrested soon afterward, and Robby was sentenced to life in prison. Widemanâs attempts to connect with his incarcerated brother and to argue for his release provided the raw material for a good deal of his fiction and nonfiction.
In the mid-1980s Wideman returned to the East Coast, specifically to the University of Massachusetts, where he taught from 1986 to 2004. It was during this time that another murder altered the trajectory of his career. In 1986 his son Jacob, then sixteen, suffered what might be considered a psychotic break and acted on a dark fantasy he had been harboring throughout his troubled youth: during a summer camp in Arizona, he murdered his roommate and was arrested after a weak attempt at flight. Widemanâs willingness to go deep into his brotherâs experience in prison is balanced by his reluctance to explore his sonâs. The incident and all that surrounds it is clearly too painful for Wideman to write about except in limited or indirect ways. Tellingly, in a 1997 interview in response to a question about how he exposes his personal life in his work, he said, âIâm spilling precisely the amount that I want to spill. Itâs always revealing and concealing. If I show you my bleeding hand, it may be because I donât want you to see my bleeding foot.â4 The relationship between fathers and sons is another recurrent touchstone in his work, and the traumatic disruption of his own efforts to be a good father has intensified this motif considerably.
It is clear that this event also put a irremediable strain on his marriage. In 2000 Wideman and his wife, Judy, divorced after thirty-five years of marriage. In addition to Jacob, the couple raised two other childrenâDaniel, a writer and editor at Lulu Books, a small press that published Widemanâs most recent story collection (Briefs, 2010), and Jamila, who was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated (March 17, 1997) as a standout basketball player at Stanford (she went on to star in the WNBA). His late writings, notably The Island: Martinique, discuss his relationship with Catherine Nedonchelle, a French writer whom he married in 2004. Since retiring from Brown University in 2014, Wideman has largely retreated from the public eye.
In contrast with his prolific output in the 1980s and 1990s, Wideman has produced very little in recent years. After a six-year hiatus he recently published Writing to Save A Life (2016) about the father of Emmett Till. His most recent novel, Fanon (2008), reveals his weariness with his writing career in no uncertain terms, and his most recent story collection, Briefs (2010), is a collection of flash fiction, a stripped-down form that marks a clear departure from the longform memoirs and novels from his most successful period. In his recent work he reveals his frustration with the way his culture has devolved, with the way his family has disintegrated, and with the reception of serious literary authors in a world increasingly given over to the sound bites of superficial media.
It is possible that Wideman has other tricks up his sleeve in the twilight of his career. He is known, after all, for publishing his best-known works (the Homewood Trilogy and Brothers and Keepers) after a seven-year disappearing act. Still, his recent works have revealed a weariness that would not have been imaginable when he was at the apex of his career, publishing prolifically, winning awards, and teaching. He was ubiquitous in the early 1990s, writing in a prominent magazine about the Rodney King riots, receiving his second PEN/Faulkner award in 1993 as well as a MacArthur âGenius Grant,â editing the Best American Short Stories in 1996, and publishing groundbreaking meditations on the intersection of race and incarceration. The moment is perhaps right for Wideman to be reassessed and rediscovered, given the complexity of our current period of racial unrest. He will be most useful not as a goldmine of slogans or proclamations but as an earnest artist who stared hard at a long history of personal and collective suffering and did not flinch.
Reception
Tracie Church Guzzio, one of the prominent critics of Widemanâs work, has pointed to âa paucity of scholarship on Widemanâ5 in her 2011 study. Indeed, the critical monographs on Widemanâs contemporary Toni Morrison number in the hundreds, while there are currently fewer than ten critical books on Wideman, as well as a couple dozen important articles and a 1998 collection of interviews. The Wideman author society has endeavored to keep scholarship on Wideman alive at the annual American Literature Association convention, but attendance at their panels has dwindled in recent years. Widemanâs diminished output and public withdrawal has probably contributed to the problem, coupled with the fact that one of his most recent books (Briefs) was put out by a small publisher, having considerably little commercial potential. This fate would have been difficult to predict in the 1980s and 1990s when Wideman was producing a steady flow of critically acclaimed work. There was an entire conference dedicated to his writings at the University of Virginia in 2000. The rich, dense nature of his writing, the intensity of his subject matter, and the force of his intellect position him for a strong revival in upcoming years, much as his literary forefather James Baldwinâwho had faded into obscurity in the years before his death in 1987 despite having been the most prominent black author of the early 1960sâhas enjoyed a spectacular critical revival in the twenty-first century.
Baldwinâs and Widemanâs careers are parallel in a number of ways. Intellectuals known for leaving the shabby neighborhoods of their youth for periods of expatriation (notably in Europe), both have suffered because they occasionally countered assumptions about what black writers should write about. Baldwinâs second novel, Giovanniâs Room (1956), about white bisexual characters trying to come to terms with their identity in Paris, raised more than a few eyebrows, especially after his first two books had spoken about race in more expected ways. Widemanâs first two novels focus nearly as much on the dilemmas of aging, alcoholic white men as they focus on the alienated young black men who encounter them. Both authors exhibit artistic and intellectual skills that could be described as intimidating. Both were occasionally accused of being out of touch with the world they wrote about because of their tendency to spend time in exile. And in interviews and their writings, both have come across as being indifferent to the opinions of their detractors or their dwindling readership, following the empowering message of Langston Hughes in his famous 1926 essay âThe Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,â which concludes with the conviction that black artists have to be true to their own vision rather than to try to please audiences, whether they are black or white.
The imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal wrote of Wideman as a representative of his generation for whom the integration of white and black America âbecame a virtual recipe for estrangement.â6 James Coleman, in the first book-length study on Wideman, spoke of a âprogressionâ from âhis depiction of the black intellectualâs isolation from the black communityâ to âthe black intellectual in a meaningful relationship with the black community.â7 Although it might have been easy to affirm this assessment in the late 1980s when Colemanâs study was published, largely as an endorsement of the Homewood Trilogy, it would be much harder to accept it now. Widemanâs work does not conform easily to a simple formula like âprogression,â and if anything, his recent works such as Fanon reveal an artist whose feelings of alienation are at least as strong as they had been in his early works. The interviews collected in Bonnie TuSmithâs 1998 collection present some tension around assumptions about what black writers should or must write about. Wideman comes across as wary of such questions and reluctant to get trapped into the rhetoric of race, a concept he evaluates in a sophisticated way in Fatheralong and elsewhere.
Colemanâs work provided a stepping stone for some critics who followed (notably Dorothea Mbalia in her 1995 study) and a roadblock for others. Colemanâs tendency to divide Widemanâs works into those that fail or succeed according to the way they embrace or eschew the notion of black community provides one legitimate inroad into the complexity of the arc of Widemanâs career but also tends to constrain readings of Widemanâs work that are more nuanced. The works associated with Homewood are outnumbered by the rest of Widemanâs oeuvre, but the Homewood books are often held up as the pinnacle of his achievement while the others are devalued. Recent critics have had to work hard to move past the assumptions of Colemanâs study in order to develop new interpretations of Widemanâs work and/or to delve deepe...