Dorcas Speer Interviews Author Ralph Ellison (WOI News Clip 452)

Bravo some author of Invisible Man participated in focus and Mr. Austin you have a few years you have gotten some important awards which I could verbalize but let me ask you this which one of the various awards perhaps has been most satisfying for you as a writer well because it came still early I guess the National Book Award it was quite a shock to find this being given you it and it made me feel that that all of the time some period of seven years of which I was writing the book was well spent and and and something else to that there was a a generosity of attitude on the part of people in publishing who gave the awards and that they were not going to put me in a and a second-class position because of my race but they were interested in my ability to write this was a very very important thing to discover when I was when I just published my first book now did this make a major difference as far as your real dedication to continue your writing would you have considered not writing without some of these encouragement oh no right you don't write for prizes you-you-you write because this is the way you are most alive the way you feel that you can be most effective and confronting life and society and yourself even so that there there the cream that comes but you I'm not knocking it I'm very proud of it indeed you know today the National Book Award is a cash sum four thousand dollars in my day it was a gold medal and I'm very proud of it at the battle because once in a while now I can make a thousand dollars but I can't pick up another one of those well they they work and some were not one very widely syndicated literary columnist described my book as a literature race rock there were a few others who were short-sighted and and and there are descriptions of the book but what can you do you I don't fault them but they didn't quite understand what was going on sometimes it the fact that my racial identity was more important than what I was writing about are how how I managed to write it but generally they the reviews were perceptive and incidentally some of the most perceptive reviews that I received were written by women and there were women writing for papers in the south and they were white well I don't account for it except there's no no way of deciding where intelligence is going to show up in the United States and we do know that we've been teaching literature in our colleges and writing and courses and criticism and so the people go wherever they came from they go wherever they can get jobs and so you must always be alert and always be at your best because you don't know was giving you the eye well my book of essays shadow anak there's a book of criticism for the most part they are mainly cultural criticism concerned with various books jazz various intellectual problems I don't call myself a critic but I do function critically I do have some familiarity with the game and I think criticism for writers so-called creative writers there's one part of the creative process you you project and then you look at what you've projected you you see whether it's working you identify what where it's going it's a two-way process but I prefer I just to try to write my own stuff and leave the criticism to other people yes various things I'm working on a book of essays and literary subjects American culture one essay on the American language and so on some music essays on music and on certain figures and jazz and I have another small book that I'm putting together and this will not be as a collection of essays I hope but a little book on the aesthetics of jazz I mean of the Blues which will get into jazz and I'm writing a novel do you switch off from time to time on this which one of these things you concentrate on or do you give energies in a given period of time director one thing well I try to get most of my images to the novel but from time to time I'm called upon to do certain essays and I write those essays they that represents a certain interruption of the fiction but they will go into a into the book of essays and it's just you have to to keep one section of your mind a little bit separate from the other but also realize that it's much more important to write a piece of fiction than to write a piece of criticism that is from me what well because I can reach more people by projecting actions and characters and telling a story it has a way intuitive to more people than dry intellectual analysis of some particular aspect of culture and personality now you indicated with the writing of Invisible Man that you had to then at one point pare down about 200 pages you know I think it's a problem I'll face with with this novel and not because I don't have a certain discipline but because the imagination sometimes takes off it takes off just like say a jazz musician who is on a flight of improvisation so I let I let it go as where it wants to go and then I pare it down it's better to have it all down than to missed an opportunity of writing yourself into something startling and and interesting that's right and could cut your heart out to cut out those words and we will look forward to your example for you note I look we'll just have to wait for that and thank you thank you