Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Colson Whitehead Reads from Sag Harbor

Anyhow Dave thank you all for coming out. Thank you Harvard bookstore for having me. My freshman dorm was across the street and Pennypacker. And if you told me in 87 that 23 years later I would lose my virginity. And then a week later we had the Harvard bookstore. I wouldn't believe it. So Sag Harbor was a different book for me and it brought me it. A new readership so I thought I might sort of reintroduce myself to you guys on the talk about how I got started writing my journey to this place if you will where I'm coming and where I'm going coming from where I'm going. I hope you find parts of it and retaining and edifying. So start to beginning. I was born a poor black child. I remember the days sitting on the porch with my family singing in the dance and down in Mississippi.

Or maybe that was someone else. I was born and raised in Manhattan. I was a bit of a shut in. I would have preferred to have been a sickly child if I didn't work out that way. I was like you when you read a review of a biography of like Joyce or Bakhit or something and it says they were a sickly child and forced to retreat into a world of imagination. It sounds so wonderful. Instead I just didn't feel like going outside. Other kids left their houses did sports played in the great outdoors. I like to stay inside watching the twilight zone and the outer limits of comic books and science fiction and I adored Stephen King. It's when I was eight or nine it seemed like writing complex Spider-Man or the X-Men would be the perfect job. If you're a writer you could work from home. You have to wear clothes or talk to other people and you can just make up stuff all day. So until I got to college and started reading different kinds of fiction more contemporary stuff I wanted to write the black shining or

the black Salem's Lot. Basically if you put took a Stephen King title and put the black in front of it that's what I wanted to do. But eventually freshman year I started hitting the high brow stuff and I like the equivalency I saw between the science fiction and horror that I loved and magic realism in Garcia Marquez or the absurdity of Birkbeck it the mythical landscapes of Borges Fey played with the fantastic as much as any genre writer and I think it helps that I always found Beckett to be a high form of realism. A guy is buried up to his neck in the sand and can't move his leg you can't scratch. That sounds like Monday morning to me and my house and I consider myself a writer. But I didn't actually write anything I wore black and I smoke cigarettes but didn't actually sit down and write. I finally wrote to five page epics that I used to audition for the writing class at Harvard and I was turned down both times. Which was a good lesson in how no one cares about your work.

But I graduated and I lucked out in getting a job at The Village Voice in New York and the voice has changed over the years but one thing remains the same is that whenever you worked at The Voice was a tape day and when you left that's when it went downhill. So so if you were there in the 50s with Norman Mailer and starting it up that was great and then when you left or went downhill if you were there in late 70s to writing about the rise of CB jeebies and disco It was great and then you left and went downhill. So I was there from 91 to 96 and it was great. And it's a shame what sort of happened to it since then. But I was very glad to get a job in the book section of The Voice Literary Supplement. And I was the assistant it was my job to open the 40 books a day we got in and that was my introduction to the capriciousness publishing. We got 40 books a day and we reviewed 40 a month. And you never knew which books we had reviewed and which ones would go to the strand

strands a bookstore in New York and every month the editor of books section would call many from the Strand and he'd have some of his guys. Take all of you copies and it was until she sort of laughed that he realized she was making $10000 off the books by selling that stuff. So it was depressing to see this unfold. But the thing about being in the voice is that once you're there you could like nag people to get work so after six months I felt emboldened enough to go up to the TV editor. He was sort of an easy mark and he gave me an assignments. It was to write a piece. I think a piece about the season the series ending episodes of who's the boss and growing pains. I guess no one else wanted to do it. I feel looking back that I wrote the definitive piece on the demise of growing pains and who's the boss.

And then that led to. Book reviews and film reviews and eventually I started feeling confident enough to start writing fiction and from opening these 40 books a day. I don't want to do the cliched a first novel thing of having and autobiographical first novel so I thought I would psych out the publishing industry by writing a novel about the failed career of Gary Coleman ask child star obviously a year ahead of its time. And I was very excited I got an agent and then we started hearing back from people and I was surprised that the story about the failed career of Gary Coleman S child star would fail to find its place in the markets. I've gone to great efforts to make it realistic. He was on the show. The character was on a show called Move in adopted by a white family and in the 70s sitcoms are all about the apostrophe like what's happenin.

Different strokes so I figured I'd done a good job. And so I was rejections and and I started to have a lot of bizarre thoughts frankly. When I first became aware of Top 40 radio it was during the late 70s so that meant a lot of disco. The Bee Gee's Diana Ross Donna Summer and for years I try to understand what the song MacArthur Park was about. I grew up on the Donna Summer version but perhaps some of you are partial to the Richard Harris version with his brogue. I don't know. So the song poses an enigma who left the cake out in the rain and why. It was a birthday party an anniversary some childhood feud to finally come to a head. It wasn't till I started getting all these rejection letters. As I sat around in my underwear watching Jerry Springer with the shades drawn surrounded by Budweiser cans I finally got what the song is about.

MacArthur Park is an investigation of the artist's journey. I've gone to a lot of trouble gathering ingredients and when I was done. Someone left the cake out in the rain. All the sweet green I seen was flowing down. I didn't think that I could take it because it took so long to bake it and I would never ever ever have that recipe again. Cannot Publishing Group. Why did you leave my cake out in the rain. Hope in Mifflin Publishing Group Why did you leave my cake out in the rain. Atlas vanity publishing of Secaucus New Jersey. Why did you not even return my phone calls I was so weird. So I started thinking maybe I wasn't cut out for this writing thing and I thought about what else I could too. My parents were of that generation that if you were an able bodied black person it was your duty to

make something of yourself uplift the race become a lawyer a doctor an accountant. Those professions were not my alley so I tried to figure out what else I might be able to do. And here I call your attention to my slender delicate fingers and thin feminine wrists. I bring them up not out of shame but point out I'm not cut out for certain kinds of work. Far from feeling shame in fact I'm quite delighted with myself these days because we stand in an important moment in our history. When a skinny black man with slender fingers and thin feminine wrists has actually become president. So if there's ever time to be a skinny black man within 10 unrests This is surely our moments. But back to my hands These are hands that say pianist hand model surgeon. Well these professions I might be suited for could I play the piano. Well I'll tell you a little story. The first thing I bought when I got decent paycheck was an ergonomic chair. I slouch I can't type

I hunt and pack. And when I was writing the intuitionist I had to pop Advil all day because my neck was all messed up from being hunched over. How could I sit at a piano bench without armrests. No lumbar supports. I could not be a pianist. Paper being a hand model must seem like the life you get free watches free hand cream travel a lot meet interesting people in the international jet set but a very conservative upbringing. How can I indulge in the model lifestyle I've had all these stories about Kate Moss. This was the 90s. So that was out. And finally surgeon I was all set to go to med school just head on down there and sign up whatever you do. And then I heard about how long operations are you to stand on your feet for like 10 15 20 hours straight. What if you have to go to the bathroom I kept thinking about that. What if you had to go the bathroom. The reason I got into the writing business was so that I could sit on my ass all day. So I try to think about it scientifically. The average book of literary fiction

sells 5000 copies. If you're lucky. Now assume that everyone loves this book doesn't just strode in the trash in disgust. And in addition next 10 other people read it who also love it. Then let's say this book has 50000 readers 50000 people who like it. Well there are 4.5 billion people in the world. You've made an impact in the lives of point 0 0 0 0 0 1 percent of the population. You're not even a natural to catch the attention of an elephant. You're a microbe in the butt of a gnat that's trying to catch the attention of an elephant and I know there are some starting out writers in the room so I just pulled the 5000 number out of the air. I was trying to google it before I got here but didn't work out. I know I'm not supposed to use Google as much as I do. I'm supposed to go to library and Google's digitizing all the books in the Library of Congress and one day we're going to stop reading books on paper but I can't help it because I want Google for everything. I want to google super ego.

Like when I'm not drinking and I'm like maybe I'll have one more beer. Google super ego will go. Did you mean go home right now. Or I'm sitting around on a Sunday and I'm like Look there's a 10 hour Project Runway marathon on Bravo. I think I'll watch it. The Google super ego will go. Did you mean read a book and tell your family how much you love them. It's a totally killer app. But where was the population of Earth it's very intimidating. Well what about life on other planets. You might now naturally ask yourself perhaps there is life on other planets and they have a taste for language poetry Creative Nonfiction coming of age stories. Well I hate to burst your bubble but scientists say that the nearest planets outside our solar system is 10 and a half light years away which is pretty far. And the chance of one of our Earth scientists coming up with a faster than light drive in our lifetime is quite slim. Estimates about the possibility of life on other planets vary.

Some say that only one in 100 million planets is capable of supporting life. And what's the chance they would like your crap anyway. They could be all about the haiku up there. So you're out of luck. And I got very depressed thinking about this and I thought maybe it's out of my hands maybe I had no choice. A friend of mine is a real jerk. He has some fine qualifying qualities but there's no escaping he's a real jerk sometimes and for years I've wondered how he came to be such a jerk. And it occurred to me one day evolution for generations jerks have been breeding with other jerks to produce more jerks who would invade with other jerks who have litters of jerks and turn. They must have started thousands of years ago when some Neanderthal jerk got together with another Neanderthal jerk from the next cave over they met while fighting over a piece of meat and just clicked start talking about the weather. Luck love the thunder god is quite angry today don't you think.

Yes I agree and I was like that. Pure chemistry and they took it from there. And they had a kid and their jerk kid got together with another day and I thought your kid or Neanderthal of similar type a moron or a douche and they had and they the kid was half jerk half douche and so on for millenia. More or less breeding and concentrating unpleasant qualities hurting all that negative DNA together. And so my friend was born. So I think it's the same with writers. The artistic temperament must go back just as far. There isn't a and Athol who paused in the pause while beating the skull of a Neanderthal for the next cave over and he thought himself hunting and gathering gathering and hunting. Is that all there is to this miserable life. And he became the first Neanderthal existentialist. And he found a Neanderthal lady of melancholy temperament and and a thorough female who liked to draw non representation of doodles on the cave wall. And she was the first abstract artist and that upset the more traditional

cave painters who were all realists really into their stick figures and such but you have to follow your muse even if you're in a undertone. And they had a kid who didn't like to hunt or gather but tell stories all day. And he found a suitable mate and so on throughout the centuries spawning movie already kids and still say in the sixteen hundreds One villager says to another Hey did you see that new puppet show last night. And the artistic villager says no I don't watch puppet shows. I don't even have a puppet show set. I only listen to NPR and so on to the present day that are to stick the artistic DNA surviving and getting together. And as I sat in my dirty studio apartment watching Jerry Springer in Dade indeed relating all too deeply to Jerry Springer I realized that I was the recipient of all that. Sit on your ass muse about crap all day DNA and it didn't matter that no one liked you I was doing. I had no choice. And I got back to work and it went

better. The next time. So to be from Sag Harbor. Takes place in 1085 in the general state is that there's some guys from teenagers from New York City and they go out to Sag Harbor a small resort town and one island in the summer. This year they're in high school and their parents work in the city and we can on the weekends so they're left to their own devices. Not too much trouble. I don't want to do the thing where you have a coming of age and I wanted to pump up all this fake action melodrama like there's a giant shark in the water where they get chased by the KKK or there's two guys on a branch and one guy falls and dies another guy has to come to a separate piece about it. Whatever whatever the book's called. So if you read reviews of the book you know that nothing really happens. I don't want to run the risk of making it exciting or

interesting. So I left a lot of stuff out. I'm going to be from a chapter in sort of the the most action packed scene happens in chapter eight when he gets his braces off. And I sort of build up to that slowly through the whole book. But the second most suspenseful scene is this one when he's getting a haircut. It was the first time someone else had cut my hair. Since I could remember me and Reggie had a ritual when our hair got you crazy we asked our Father to give us a haircut and he put us off saying he was too busy or had a long day to practice. And over the next few weeks for months we'd ask again spacing out our requests so as not to nag like an old woman. And then eventually one evening he'd come home tipsy after a meeting and break out his scissors. Black barbers the world over they use electric clippers these are modern times in many

sectors technological advances are welcomed and embraced. My father however loved his special pair of old school Barber scissors and we love them too because the sound of the long thin blades sniping against each other was the sound of his undivided attention. As I sat in the chair in a bathroom holding the tele tight around my bony shoulders and staring into the black and white subway tile he trimmed incher and grumbling about the light tilting my head to and fro with a firm push of his index and middle fingers. He drew up tops with a pick and squinted and clipped I murmured the prime directive to myself. Don't move your head. Do not move your head even though it never worked. I moved. He always told me I moved no matter how much I concentrated no matter how many oaths and pledges I devised between haircuts as if a new arrangement of words might make things turn out differently next time. At some point he'd say you moved your head. Now I got even it out and I cursed myself as he cut and cut

and my fro grew shorter and shorter and shorter. But when he was done it was perfect. Like when he grew up you had to admit that despite everything he was a master griller it was one of those things he did well. You can say anything against it it was a cornerstone of our reality. He gave us miniature versions of his own haircut the same way he given himself since high school when he took over duties from his father. The haircuts remained perfect for a whole hours Don't be thrown off by the fact that no camera ever recorded them. The spell broke when you took a shower or slept on them. Whereupon all those talks and pats and prodding were undone in our super crowns became utterly mis shaped and disordered the underlying principles revealed as counterfeit. What occurred in my scalp could not be called a style in any sense of the word. And they got wilder the longer it got. It was a weird black anybody testing the edges of itself throwing out nappy pseudo pods here and suddenly there an unpredictable new direction every day.

I swear it lived and I've come to believe over time that it's ever shifting lumps and tendrils were a doomed attempt at communication with the humans. The tragedy of the day after haircuts and all the days after the months passed until we had to admit to ourselves that the world hated us and the process started anew. Needless to say I had no idea how fucked up the haircuts were at the time. To us they were normal. Just how things were done in our house. Raise your hand if you can relate. My delusions and that spring when I was cleaning out my desk during one of my periodic purges of murdering my 20 sided die possessed the curious will returning the pester and trouble me even though I've thrown it out a hundred times the specter of Dungeons and Dragons games past. This time I threw it out the window. I found it under the radiator a week later and that's the magic realism part of the book. But I stashed dog eared copies of famous monsters in a box at the back of a closet

and hid all of all the comic books I've bought since the last purge. In case a girl materialized in my room due to a transporter malfunction I was in a good mood or something feeling optimistic like someone had chuckled at a joke I'd made in history or biology and it had gone to my head. I came across a packet of fifth grade class pictures under Mike's copy of Swamp Thing number 35. It is the nettlesome quality of elementary school pictures. To reveal the true nature of our childhoods Nothing is how we remember it and all the necessary alterations we've made in order to survive with semi-functioning psyches are exposed. Best to leave them alone. Looking back I think I have what is best described as a pre lapse Arion fondness for fifth grade. It's lack of complication. No more Miss Frederick's the social studies teacher whose cruel smile that haunted me for years and it was actually the default setting in my nightmares. Whenever I needed an evil authority figure I

had a melancholy face now that I've really examined it. She seemed a bit too skinny almost ill and I got to thinking about what her house looked like picturing the shadows in the kitchenette where she prepared her lonely meals. Two scoops of cottage cheese and a big Aletha wilted iceberg lettuce and aside a misery she never appeared in my dreams again. Scanning the rest of the photograph it was clear that none of us teacher and pupil of alike had remained untouched by that horrible epidemic making the rounds back of an seventies fashion. The manic stripes and prints of the shirts and skirts and pants a kind of rash on our flesh that only a new decade could cure. Then there were the kids themselves no one looked like they were supposed to. These changeling creatures surrounded me in polyester touching my elbows. Strangers I traced a finger along their faces like a movie amnesiac. That must be my best friend his name is Andy and that's the smart girl who sat in front of me all year.

She'd frankfurters out of a bionic woman thermos filled with hot oily water. Then it was my own face my face was not the one I remembered showing to the world were my eyes so dark those days. There was something amiss with my mouth always my mouth even before I got braces my lips are chapped sure but the shabbiness seem to have extended its territory so that a huge white halo encircled my mouth like I was leaving ashes for breakfast lunch and dinner. And then there was that thing on top. That really fucked up haircut. I recovered from the class picture pretty quickly. It wasn't that bad seeing the white letters identifying my home room the construction paper map of France. We toiled over that spring. I felt a nice warm tingle of nostalgia. The killer was the four panes of wallet sized photos beneath the class picture. It was just me there. They should have stopped me. They should have stopped me in

any number of checkpoints. As I tried to leave our apartment here a close relative would have been key. The doorman could have taken me aside. We got along him and me trading Hades with enthusiasm or so I thought. But he said nothing. Certainly the bus driver the fact defacto deputy of the body politic could have forbid me entry ripping my bus pass in half and tossing it to the dirty black treads. The security guard outside school should have beat me with his flashlight and surely my homeroom teacher Mr Barrett should have shoved her big wooden desk up against the classroom door. Back brace or no back brace. All of them should have said WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH YOUR HAIR. Obviously it's been months since my last trim instead of a haircut. The photographer captured some primordial process unfolding the universe tugged and pressed on my hair with invisible fingers. The way it had pulled up mountains to the sky and

gouged the deepest ocean chasms were the only living beings are pale boneless things rooting around in everlasting gloom. What else is there to say but that in my vicinity larger forces were at work. The ancient underpinnings of the third law of thermodynamics says that as temperature approaches absolute zero the entropy of a system approaches a constant arising Noons Third Law of Motion holds that for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. The entity on my head was proof of another fundamental long fucked up Afro tends towards complete fucked upness at an exponential rate over time as expressed by the equation. A n. Equals f times t and equals AF Times t were a n as absolute happiness. F is fucked up in S and T is

time. The pain of photos was uncut of course. Who would want a picture of that in their wallets. Poisoning their money. Thank you. The weird thing that brought me to the book John Henry days. Well you know I went to school in the early days of multicultural education. And one day in fourth grade my teacher wheeled in a projector and showed us a cartoon about John Henry and John Henry focal hero. Still driving man. And you know there were a lot of black superheroes that I knew of. And so the story always stayed with me when I trace the intuitionist. That book was so controlled protagonist is very repressed and the language is very tight so I'm going to sort of cut loose. As an antidote to that book so I want a lot different characters crazy American chorus different time periods and just have fun in a way that I could have a certain kind of fun with the intuitionist

and then I did research that you know the book evolved and different characters became more or less important in the book sort of considering other subjects. Sag Harbor eventually got to that one. New York I got that one. So there's always a few things hanging around. I might get to might not get the others. Only time will tell. How do I decide to make the protagonist of the intuitionist a woman that I had had a protagonist I was a woman before the novel I was sort of joking about in my intro was a first person narrator and in my journalism I had this sort of persona of the hip cynical critic making fun of crap thing. And I knew how to do that I didn't have to do a third person narrator. I didn't know how to hand on a book that had a female protagonist before so early on I decided.

Project you know when you write a book about elevator inspectors you don't really expect that this will get published or people like it. Every day you write elevator you know 30 times you like it. So it seem I would learn something about writing by doing that and maybe two or three books down the line I'd have you know I put out I'd write something down. Someone want to put out. So it's a challenge to see if I could do it. And also I just finally I guess I always get mad when people are like how do you do this female protagonists like you're a man. Well if you have like if you call a plumber and you fix your toilet you know like how do you fix the toilet. You know it's my job to do these things or else I'm a bad writer. And if you don't call it a toilet you're a bad plumber. So. So hopefully it did work. That's what I wanted to do. My dad like wrote poetry. And he has like. Well you know.

Atlas family publishing Secaucus New Jersey. So but yeah. It was you know when I went to school over there you know my parents my mate you know economics knows I want to write you know Mama I want to become English major. I was useless but actually turned out to be very helpful. So you know I mean in terms of like the environ my house and like our appetites the big movie Hard movie side by watching family the advent of the Betamax was a big important moment in our house. So we bonded over like pop culture with real affection it was a sort of family rituals in terms of immediate family and the creative life the communal aspects of watching say George Carlin or Richard Pryor and 78 You know we got cable really

early events talking to each other. And so we bonded over stuff like that. And we had a real sort of appreciation of the absurdity of life and I think that Fed. Into my work. The novel that is on a sort of half done I guess in my early days I used to like when I was about John Henry you know how to read the word. But now I like older and slower so I don't jinx it but for me like the first there is always a hard part in figuring out how well the narrator sounds like setting the stage. And and that was really hard and I got out of that and at that stage and I was sort of everything's in motion I'll describe like what the room looks like our share of Joe you know came from a small town of blah blah they all that sort of stuff you have to do to create the world so that stuff is done in our brain just like moving around hanging out each other so I like to be done January-February and something that I do weird.

Fascist work schedule won't actually work and hopefully that would work. You know it was from the right I mean I do you know some of my big idols I've seen the Ford George Carlin Richard Pryor and the way they can veer from a personal or scary anecdote into something that's in February's and go back and forth and keep you sort of keeps you know keep you know keep you off balance. I sort of enjoy and I like making jokes in my books. Some books I can make more jokes others not so the intuitionist Laila may not a very funny person. There's some deadpan humor in there but not a sort of broad stuff that is a tax and in Sag Harbor so it was fun to have a you know narrative I was first person and the way it looks at the world the cock eyed enough that I could get a lot of jokes in there in terms of social media. I outsourced my Twitter feed to this old white guy in New Jersey and he actually does it. So I'll tell him that

you your friend likes him well you know thing about you know knapsacks on the novels had to take a long time. So the statement was about a joke at the very end of the book. And so I tried to outline you know as much as I can before I start writing. I'm like our here's a joke here is the payoff in the last chapter or so it's been like to me it was like. I like to get the joke. And with that you know I establish the coward and the in chapter 2 and the whole cursing charge how they curse and then reinforce that you know maybe again in chapter 4 and Chapter 6 and then the final cursing sequence and you know I have the last page. Like after three years I find like now the job is done. Like I spent you know three years trying to punch line here it's in here it is I'm actually glad so.

The previous person want to know if I had fun writing it yeah I mean it's tacky but I laugh my own jokes and it keeps me going. And then you know very nice when it actually comes out and other people can laugh or groan at your silly or funny jokes. Well I know. Then you thought about the future of publishing as a writer you know it's always like to be a writer. No one cares about your crap. It's painful at the words down and that was true. You know 2000 years ago it was true 10 years ago it's all because it's always gone be true be true. In terms of what format will read books in on. I don't know. I think you know people will find out the death a short story the death of this time by market forces. You know there isn't a place to publish short fiction anymore. But as any poet start write stop writing and people stop writing novels just because the apparatus changes so it's harder to get published. Now as

a first wire that was 10 years ago. It was hard 40 years ago. So you know all that sort of. Electronic stuff doesn't make it easier or harder to get the words on the page which is what I sort of do. So I guess that would be my answer. Not so much. I mean. You know I think it's a vast countercultural energy and it is attacking a power structure or racist codes and so for me it's all the same thing when you're attacking the establishment in the way that these guys are doing in the 70s. It's all one one thing I. I am trying to explore certain abstract concepts and you know over the course of the book I'm discovering something about how the world works by making these characters interact in different ways. So you know the humor

humor you know can be a form of revolution. I don't think it necessarily is and welcome into it as it gets complicated into business. But you know time to Carlin and Pryor or say Beckett You know people who are just like incredibly funny and incredibly despairing from Send the sentence you know I love that. And and and when I am organizing my books I am thinking about OK we're going to do this sort of how do you part. What kind of jokes will make that. The depressing parts more harsh or light in it and what I want to do from chapter chapter from you know if I have a job before the big argument doesn't lessen or increase the intensity of the emotion in that scene. So that sort of back and forth trying to guide guide the reader to do different you know states in the book you know I you know I try to be very conscious of. I didn't get to and I say going commando style. I guess my idea is that once I was done with Harvard I was like No more school

and just the way we are the way I think I thought I'd be either applied to a program and start a novel nine months already to start tomorrow. Now I'm teaching you know now it's great to have 10 people after you just have that. It's great to have meet people who are actually doing it. So you know it's possible. Hopefully it's a program that's great fact and you actually do learn something but you know it can be great two years of not going to debt for something as silly as like writing. Yeah. Thank you.