The Art of Fiction No. 239

Charles Johnson’s historical slave narrative, Middle Passage, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in 1990, defies genre. Framed in part as a nautical epic with echoes of Conrad and Melville, there is also a Swiftian current running through it, with variations on the Sinbad stories and Vedic myths. Such transgressions of form suffuse Johnson’s fiction. His four novels and three story collections incorporate fairy tale, parable, conversion narrative, picaresque, bildungsroman, and more. Johnson’s balance of playfulness and philosophical rigor also energizes his screenplays for television and film, two collections of humor writing, and several volumes of essays on Buddhism and craft , including Turning the Wheel (2007), Taming the Ox (2014), and The Way of the Writer (2016).

In life, as in his writing, Johnson does not limit himself to a single mode of approach. Born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1948, he was raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church; his youthful experiments with meditation led to a lifetime engagement with Buddhism and other Eastern traditions, including the study of Sanskrit and martial arts. He earned a B.S. in journalism and an M.A. in philosophy from Southern Illinois University and received a doctorate in philosophy and phenomenology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1976, Johnson was offered a position as assistant professor at the University of Washington, in Seattle, where he remained until 2009, retiring as the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professor. He has also had successful careers as a journalist and an illustrator.

In July 2016, Johnson and I spent two long afternoons together in the offices of the English department at the University of Washington. Our first conversation took place the day after an African American man opened fire on a group of police officers in Dallas, killing five and wounding nine. Johnson views race, like the distinction between forms, as an illusion, but with far greater consequences. “That young man was living out a narrative,” he said. “He was living out a story, an interpretation of blacks and whites in America, today and in the past, going back to slavery. And he got caught up in an illusion filled with hate.” Johnson was thorough, if professorial, in his consideration of craft, but it was in our discussion of the dharma, and meditation in particular, that he grew most animated. He was always eager to return the conversation to examples of lived experience, especially where it involved the joys and complexities of family life or the clash of cultures. “We can talk abstractly, we can talk sociologically and philosophically,” he told me, “but this is ground zero. This is the way we’re living.”

INTERVIEWER

Of all your creative endeavors, which would you consider your first love?

JOHNSON

Well, art—drawing—preceded everything. From when I was a kid in the fifties, that was my passion, still is to a certain extent. By age fourteen or so, I told my dad I had figured out what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be an artist, a cartoonist and illustrator.

INTERVIEWER

How did that go over?

JOHNSON

My dad didn’t know any artists, so he was very concerned about my future. He said, Chuck, they don’t let black people do that. And that was pretty devastating for me because if I couldn’t draw, I didn’t want to live. But I saw an ad in Writer’s Digest for cartooning classes with Lawrence Lariar and I wrote him a letter, just out of the clear blue. My dad says they don’t let black people do this. Do you agree with that? I didn’t expect to hear back, but a week later I got a fiery letter in which Lariar said, Your father’s wrong, and you can do whatever you want, you just need a good teacher. I wrote back to Lariar and asked him to be my teacher. But of course, he didn’t believe in free lunches, so he said, You have to pay for my course. It was a two-year course, what today we’d probably call distance learning, and my dad paid for it.

INTERVIEWER

Were you always a reader?

JOHNSON

My family has always valued education and skill acquisition, so I was a pretty avid in my mother’s collection, I thought, Am I supposed to read this? My teachers never mentioned it. Is it contraband? What is it? All of that was marginalized or erased from the public-school curriculum.