If you ever meet Gerald Early, you may recognize him from a Ken Burns special or two. He’s been a guest on six of Burns’s documentaries, discussing boxing, baseball, jazz, and more. Early is the quintessential cultural critic: all things interest him, everything matters, and each thing interweaves and comments on the next. He has written about boxing and baseball, but also beauty pageants, mystery novels, crime novels, classic novels, movies, music, and more. High culture, low culture, sports and leisure, politics and religion—if it touches on American culture, it shows up in his work. In 1994, he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture. His other honors include a Whiting Award and a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. These days, his essays pour forth in the pages of The Common Reader, a journal of essays he edits and directs. From month to month, you can find him exploring ideas, testing theories, and, above all, discovering common ties of humanity through every aspect of culture. A lifelong member of the Episcopalian Church, he is a professor of English and African American studies at Washington University, and one of the first faculty fellows of the Carver Project, a nonprofit focused on connecting university, church, and society. He was interviewed by Abram Van Engen.
Image: I wonder if we could begin with your own beginning as a writer. How did you get started?
Gerald Early: In 1969 I was living with my sister in San Francisco after I graduated from high school. My sister had been in an organization called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, and she had gotten married, and then the marriage broke up. So she went to San Francisco and was attending San Francisco State College as an English major. I went out there to live with her, and that’s where it started.
Image: From what I’ve read, you’re skipping one important part—the part where you drop out of college.
GE: That’s true. When I got out of high school, I was admitted to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I was there for just two weeks when I said, “Man, I don’t like this place. I don’t like Yellow Springs. I’m in the middle of nowhere.” I had to get out of there, but I didn’t want to go back home because my mom would kill me for leaving school. So I got in touch with my sister, and she told me to come see her in San Francisco.
In San Francisco I got an education. In high school I was a pretty indifferent student, and my sister decided to embark on the project of civilizing me, giving me culture or something. She took me to her classes, and I started reading the books she had in her house. I read Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Great Gatsby and novels by Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. I discovered that I kind of liked it.
But the thing that really got me interested was a book of essays called Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. I found it extraordinary. I said to myself, “I would like to do what this guy is doing.” I never felt that way about novels. It was all about the essay for me. So I started messing around with the form.
Then when I went to college, I got into writing for my school newspaper, and they made me a columnist. It turns out I was a very controversial person. I wrote things that upset a lot of people, I think sometimes on purpose. But for me it was just practicing. It was just form. The more I practiced the essay, the more I liked it. And I just knew I wanted to write essays, all kinds of essays. The only problem was trying to figure out how to make a living doing that.
Image: So, you began as a kind of autodidact, reading whatever your sister had around.
GE: Yeah, but it was also the environment, because my sister was hanging around a lot of people who had been in the civil rights movement, people who were ex-SNCC, or in the Nation of Islam or Black Panthers, things like that—all these people who weren’t too much older than I was. It was exhilarating. I was seventeen years old. I said, “Man, I hope I never get any older than seventeen.” That year was great. It was pivotal in my becoming a writer.
Image: There’s one other book you took up at the time that really shaped you. In an essay from just a year or two ago, you talk about how important it was to read Walden that year. You say: “I think Walden profited me more than any other book I had read in my young life because of the time, the place, the circumstances, and my particular need for what I thought and hoped that it said.” What did you think and hope it said?
GE: When I first read Walden, I just found it amazing, because it was about an experience I really didn’t know about at all. I wasn’t particularly interested in nature. I was a very urban person. And I didn’t know anything about transcendentalism or Unitarianism or Emerson. But I discovered that I didn’t need to know anything about that stuff for this book to affect me. I just liked the way it was written. I liked his attitude. I thought there was a certain amount of snark in the book, and I liked that.
Thoreau seemed to be looking at life and trying to understand it on its own terms, without imposing himself on it. That really affected me. It was that style, his approach, his snark, his search in the prose for a certain kind of clarity. I thought to myself, “I would like to be able to achieve that kind of clarity in writing.”
There was one other thing too: Thoreau struck me as quite religious in his own way, but it was religion without preaching. It was more like instructing, inviting. I liked that. He had a very teacherly way about what he was doing that was enriching for me. I think that’s why I was so moved by the book—because he was such a great teacher.
Image: I teach pieces of Walden every year, and I’ve found the book to be an interesting barometer on American culture. You can track generational shifts by what they think of Thoreau. You read him in San Francisco in 1969, and Walden was huge then.
GE: Yeah, it was huge.
Image: These days, when I try to teach Walden, most students say, “This guy needs to get a job.”
GE: Oh, that’s too bad. It was big in my day. Walden was the book.
Image: A lot of people trace the essay as an art form back to Montaigne in the 1500s. His book is called Essais, and of course, in French, that just means “attempts.” How would you define the artistry of the essay as a form?
GE: What I like about the essay is that it’s very elastic. You can do any number of things with it. You can write a personal essay, or something that’s very journalistic or academic. During the course of my career, I’ve kind of done all those things. Sometimes I’ve tried to do them in one essay, and that doesn’t always work. But I don’t lack ambition.
I think of each essay as constructing a voice around a subject. First you have to find a subject that you can write about and others want to hear about. But the voice you find is what binds you to a reader. Every time I write an essay, I have to find a voice to convey the subject. And if I do it right, I should be able to interest you in what I’m writing about.
It doesn’t always work. Essays are trying. And I don’t worry too much about whether an essay works well. You do the best you can, but there’s always the next essay.
Image: Keep moving.
GE: Right, I’ll try again. And I don’t even worry about whether I’m being consistent in my point of view if I’m writing on the same subject a lot.
Image: In Tuxedo Junction, one of your first books, you wrote: “Essays are finally prose, the common language, stating with clarity and consciousness the startlingly human triumph of forthright conviction without story as its aim.” If there’s a common theme in your essays, it’s that you often seem startled by that triumph of conviction. Rather than waging war for a particular belief or position, you’re more interested in the convictions themselves and why people hold them.
GE: I guess what interests me about people is not whether the convictions they hold are good or bad necessarily, but why they hold them, and what it means to them that they hold these convictions so closely. I remember a young Black student who had read a couple of essays of mine came up to me and said, “Your essays make me feel uneasy.” I said, “Why is that?” He said, “Because you make being Black this probing sort of thing, and I don’t like that.” I said, “I guess you can’t please everybody, but that’s what I’m trying to get at.” And he said, “That’s not what I need right now.”
I respected him for saying that, and for understanding what I was trying to do, even though he didn’t like it. I was impressed with that. He was a very attentive reader. I appreciated his attention.
Image: We’ve been talking about the art of the essay, but in poking around I found a book of poems you wrote as well. Gerald, I had no idea.
GE: Those poems are not for real! I don’t consider myself a poet. They weren’t meant to be poems, just sketches. I said, I want to write essays, and I can’t keep up with the subjects I want to write about. So a poem is going to be a kind of shorthand. Then I’m going to get back to it and make an essay out of it. Poetry, for me, was practice.
Image: You describe yourself as a critic, a word that has a lot of meaning for you. In The Culture of Bruising, you explain that you “want to be a critic in the truest and most old-fashioned sense of that term.” What is that sense?
GE: To be able to look at something—an event, the world around you, people, music, movies, literature, whatever—and apply as much intelligence as you can in describing it and offering it to people honestly. The most important thing is to be honest. That always impressed me about Baldwin. He left that with me. When I was a teenager and read Notes of a Native Son, where he ends his autobiographical notes section with this sentence—“I want to be a good man and an honest writer”—I said, “Oh, that’s me, man.” That became my motto.
That’s what I think a true critic is about. That honesty. I came to English literature because I liked that act of criticism. It’s an art, but it’s also an instinct. It’s something people have and do naturally, but it’s also something to practice, to train and hone. I thought it was vital in understanding the world. It’s part of what makes us human, to generate criticism.
In grad school we were still reading American Renaissance by F.O. Matthiessen and Natural Supernaturalism by M.H. Abrams and those books nobody reads anymore. I liked Leslie Fiedler and the kind of thing he did, and Ralph Ellison’s essays in Shadow and Act. I said, “Okay, I want to be a literary critic like that.”
But then I discovered that in African and African American studies I had to learn how to talk about Black culture more widely than just in literature. So I started to take the practice of criticism that I had learned in English to all kinds of subjects.
Image: You say in one of your essays that your mother was very proud of you for becoming a professor, but she never introduced you as a professor of African American studies. She introduced you instead as a professor of English, which you also were. Why?
GE: My mother felt that my going into African American studies was a bit of a cop-out. It never impressed her as much. I think she felt, “Of course they let a Black person write about Black people.” I don’t want you to get me wrong: It wasn’t that my mother didn’t like Black people or African American studies. She was not wishy-washy about racial issues. She was, in many respects, very militant, but she came up at a time when pushing against something was important. It was all about breaking down barriers. And I think she felt that my being in Black studies was not the way to push things forward.
Image: You don’t identify as a conservative, but you teach a class at WashU on Black conservative traditions, and through that work you recently found yourself at a Black conservative conference having lunch and dinner with Clarence Thomas. You now have four or five recent essays about Black conservatives in America. I wonder what drives that interest. And what is it you want people to know about that tradition?
GE: First of all, that course is in the African and African American studies department. That matters. I went to Shanti Parikh, the chair, and said, “I want to teach this course on Black conservatism. If you don’t think this is good for the department, I won’t do it in this department. But I’m interested in looking at various kinds of Black people, and I think it would be an important class to do in African and African American studies.” And she said, “No problem.”
I had been thinking about it for a long time, and to me there were a couple of things. One was that students hear so much about Black Marxism in our department. I’ve taught a lot of Black Marxist books and heard a lot of Black Marxist speakers, and I understand that there is an ideological undergirding of Marxism to African American studies. I have no problem with that. I get it, I know why it’s there and why it’s important. But I wanted the students to hear something else too. I think it can be helpful to read some people who have an entirely different view. Not to read it to be converted—if I was teaching a course on Marxism, or Christianity, or anything else, the point wouldn’t be to convert my students. But just to read it and make of it whatever they want. I wanted them to hear some other kinds of ways Black people thought.
The Black conservatives I meet are always shocked when I say I’m in a Black studies program, because they can’t believe anyone in a Black studies program would be interested in them. And they’re even more shocked when I tell them I’m teaching a course about Black conservatives. And then they ask, “Is it in the Black studies department?” I say, “Yeah, it’s in the Black studies department.”
And that’s the second thing: I wanted to include them. I wanted to understand them. I was like an anthropologist, in a way. I wanted to find out what being a Black conservative is about, why they think the way they think and how it feels. Here is a group of Black people who are sometimes ostracized by other Black people because of their political views. I wanted to know what it was like, not just what or how they thought, as Black people, but also how they thought about themselves in relation to other African Americans.
Image: What comes through in these essays is your ability to listen, to represent well the thoughts and positions of others. Would your subjects recognize themselves in the way that you talk about them?
GE: Yes, that’s what it means to be an honest writer. That’s one thing it has to include.
Image: One thing that came out of your discussions with Black conservatives was this idea of two different biblical models within Black communities—Moses as the obvious figure and Joseph as an important alternative. Could you explain how they’re used in Black cultural circles?
GE: Moses was, of course, the great liberator. When people think about Martin Luther King, he’s the Moses of his people, the liberator who stood up against Pharaoh, or southern segregationists who were passing as Pharaoh. Joseph was something else. He was the guy who was sold into slavery by his brothers and wound up rising in Egypt to become a significant figure who saved Pharaoh during the famine. He saved Egypt. And he stayed there.
Now, Albert Murray, a leading Black intellectual, argued strenuously for Joseph as a model for Black people: Black people have come to this country like Joseph. We have risen up in this country, and in some ways for it. We have affected the country. As opposed to looking to Moses, who left for the promised land, Murray wanted us to look to Joseph, who stayed and became part of the fabric of the country.
Image: I wonder if we could talk about your own experience with religion. How did your religious background shape you?
GE: I grew up as a high-church Episcopalian, and that made me an outlier where I grew up. It was very strange. I grew up in a neighborhood in Philadelphia that was Italian Catholic on one side and working-class Black people on the other. All my working-class Black friends were either Methodist or Baptist, and they didn’t even know what an Episcopalian was. “What’s an Episcopalian?” It was hard for me to tell them, being a little kid. “I don’t know. It’s a church.” And when the Italian kids would see me coming home with my altar-boy stuff, cassock and everything, they would say, “Oh, you must be Catholic.” I said, “No, I’m not a Catholic, I’m Episcopalian.” They didn’t know what that was either. They said, “But you got this Catholic stuff?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m an altar boy.” They said, “You’re an altar boy? You must be a Catholic.” I said, “No, I’m not a Catholic!”
The church I grew up in was a small, poor, all-Black church, mostly West Indian. These people were super-duper Anglican, more Anglican than anything you can imagine. My church deeply affected me. I loved that church. It was a major thing in my life.
At the same time, I felt that my church was missing from all the talk about “the Black church experience,” because when people talk about that, they usually mean Methodist or Baptist, and gospel choirs. I didn’t hear a note of gospel music. There wasn’t any call-and-response stuff or “Hey, can I get an amen?” Yet my church was a very Black church. I always felt that people who had my experience got cut out a little bit.
Image: You have been a church member all your life?
GE: Yes.
Image: Can you explain ways your faith has affected what you write about or the way you write about it?
GE: I hope I’m coming to everything I do with some kind of a Christian perspective or understanding, even if it isn’t very pronounced. This is part of what it means to me to be an honest writer. But it’s more than honesty. It also means not being afraid to write something that might not be liked by a lot of people. I’ve felt a lot of fear in my life, and I think Christianity can be an answer to that. Fear really debilitates people. So I try to go to anything I’m writing and dispel that, put the fear away in myself and others. And the hope is that anything I’m writing will bring people a little closer to some others who they thought they had nothing in common with. That’s a modest goal, I think, but it comes from faith.
Image: One of the things I hear in your answer is something I often talk about with some Christian grad students I mentor. We talk about how to engage in the work we’ve been given to do, really invest in it and care about it, and at the same time hold it loosely. Ultimately, we are not this or that achievement: we are, each of us, a child of God.
GE: Yes. And I think the writing can convey that. I hope that the best essays I’ve written—and I think the one on Black conservatives is a pretty decent one—convey that idea about being a child of God. I remember one class discussion about Donald Trump where the students were all talking about how much they hated him. And I said, “Yeah, I understand your dislike. But just remember, God loves him too. I know you may find that hard to believe. God may have some issues with him. There may be a few things he would really like to talk to Mr. Trump about. But God loves Donald Trump too.”
Image: In Tuxedo Junction, in your essay about the beauty pageant, you write about American understandings of evil. You say, “It is, of course, a peculiarly American optimism that evil is nothing more than a series of bad habits that can, through an exercise of self-control, be broken, or at least made less compulsively excessive.” It’s a moment that feels religiously inflected.
GE: Yes. This is a very wrong idea of evil. Americans are very optimistic about a lot of things, and correcting evil is one of them. In some respects, I admire that optimism. But I also feel there are limits, and we have to understand that certain things really are evil. It’s hard for people to face that, or recognize what’s inside them, inside us. It can’t always just be corrected. I think that’s part of the tragedy of being human, that we have to face evil in a way that’s very, very difficult—that can’t just be fixed.
One aspect of original sin I always liked was that it made us all equal, because we all are infected with it. When I learned about that as a kid, it made me feel closer to other people. I said, “Oh, this is something we have. We’re all flawed together.” To me, that was kind of nice, actually.
Sin is an old-fashioned term. I know nobody uses it anymore, but to me it does a lot of work. Sin describes certain things well, in a way nothing else does. I know if I said “sin” to my kids, they would say, “Oh, Dad, you’re so nineteenth century.” But sin is a useful word.
Image: In that same essay, you talk about the nature of ambition, especially American ambition: “In this culture, desperation and ambition have become indistinguishable,” you write. “We have debased the idea of ambition as the longing for recognition, not significant accomplishment.” I wonder if you could unpack that a little.
GE: So many things in America get tied up with fame, with being noticed in some way or other, and people lose sight of what they are being noticed for—as if it doesn’t matter, so long as they are noticed. With social media, I think what I wrote about in 1989 has been exacerbated. A lot of what’s on social media feels to me like desperation—the need for attention for the sake of attention, not for anything achieved. I think America can be a very desperate place, because there is so much pressure about succeeding, about wanting to be noticed. I’m an old-fashioned person, so I would like to see people wanting to be known for having accomplished something, as opposed to just putting yourself out there.
But the Miss America contest—there’s something else there too. About me. You know, I thought the Miss America contest was a superficial thing. But a part of that was just being snobbish. Ida, my wife, was very much a Miss America fan, and she told me I didn’t appreciate what I was watching. That was an early lesson for me. And over the years as I thought about that, I came to think she was right. It’s part of what shaped me as a writer—to know cultures on their own terms. To find the common ground.
Image: What do you think is the place of the essay in a culture of shortened attention spans?
GE: Essays aren’t going anywhere. They are very elastic. They can take any size, any style. You can make them shorter or longer as you wish. I’m not that good at it, but you should be able to write an essay of two hundred words that works for people. A world of short attention spans just makes the job more interesting, more challenging. It is my job as a writer to focus your mind. If I write well enough, I can get you to concentrate on something. You’re not going to change anything by wishing we were back in the nineteenth century reading Russian novels and stuff like that. You’ve got to take up the challenge. How do I draw your attention to this subject so you can see why it matters? And what voice, what style, keeps you reading?
Image: In Tuxedo Junction you write, “The thematic relatedness of all my essays lies in the insistent strain of speaking about African American culture within the wider context of American intellectual and highbrow culture and American popular culture.” It’s all interwoven, and the way to understand one part of culture is to see it in the context of the rest.
GE: Absolutely. It comes together. It’s the way one thing affects others, for sure, but it’s also the sense of things held in common. More than we realize. That’s faith maybe. What I was mentioning earlier about drawing closer together and finding that common ground—that needs an honest writer too.
Abram Van Engen is the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and chair of the English department at Washington University in St. Louis. He is cohost of the podcast Poetry for All and recently published Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church (Eerdmans).
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash
