BookMuse Interview with Walter Mosley

In July 2001 Walter Mosley, author of Fearless Jones, was interviewed by Gail David-Tellis. Look for Gail's Muse Notes on Fearless Jones, featured in BookMuse beginning August 6th.

Thank you for talking to me. I have some questions and some are kind of longwinded, so feel free to do with them whatever you wish. OK?

Ohkeydokey!

Paris Minton's determination to open a bookstore in Watts in FJ is the most obvious and recent example of how much you endorse reading in your books. Who is your favorite writer? What writers are you currently reading?

I don't know. The idea of having a favorite writer. . . The problem with having a favorite writer, is if he or she wrote a book you didn't like, what would you do?

But not that book. Steinbeck has written books that I like, but some of them are unreadable. I love A Hundred Years of Solitude but I can't read everything that Marquez wrote, not by any stretch of the imagination. Same thing's true of Melville, James Joyce. The Stranger by Albert Camus is a wonderful novel. Man's Fate by Malraux, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston; Simple Stories by Langston Hughes. I really like Colson Whitehead the novelist, I've read a lot of sci fi, a lot of literary fiction. Lately I've been reading Robertson Davies. There's something brilliant about some of his writing. The Fifth Business, the first book. He's really in the head of that kid as he grows up.

They happen, but I suppose there are other moments that happen that I come back and take them out because they interfere with the plot. So they're not planned, but everything in the novel is planned ultimately. You may not plan it before you write it, but after you write it, they have to fit.

So you go back and pull things. How did you plot Fearless Jones? Was it outlined or did it happen spontaneously--or both?

I rewrote it. The first time it didn't work. Writing is rewriting. I had two or three extra characters that were unnecessary. I don't outline at all. I just start writing. Write, write, write.

Yeah, yeah. Any good book works on a lot of different levels and each level should work on its own right. On the level of a mystery or a crime novel, I think FJ works. I mean, at the level of mystery, I could change the character's name to Joe. It would still work--on that level. Same with the Socrates stories.

Then it doesn't matter if the reader recognizes their historical significance?

Yeah, though the names have ramifications when read at another level, having echoes of myth and legend, but the point is that each level should work in its own right. . . . It's like reading Huckleberry Finn. HF is a boy's book but it's also a deep indictment of American racism. But you don't have to read that in the book and I think that's good.

So by writing a book at more than one level, you can attract a variety of readers--which (as one of the country's most popular writers) you clearly do.

Yeah, that's the other thing about working in a genre, you can do a lot of different things and certainly I do in the book but people often find deeper meanings in my books that I didn't even know were there.

As in my review of FJ, where I take that Paris-Troy pattern and push it as far as I can? I'm outraged at the New York Times critic who completely missed that.

And everything else. He didn't want me to be writing anything. The review said I shouldn't write books, if you read it the way it was written, but that happens sometimes. People don't like you for whatever reason. I don't like to get bad reviews, but you go out there with your work, you can't expect everyone to be thinking the way you're thinking.You know, they have their own reasons. They think they're important. You have to accept it.

Well, Socrates doesn't talk about popular political heroes and he's the only one who COULD mention MLK because of the books' contemporary setting. It's a little too early for 50's characters to be talking about him. You know MLK was doing his work in the 50s but most blacks didn't know that much about him. Another thing, Paris doesn't actually compare Manly to Garvey.

No he doesn't, just mentions Garvey in the context of Manly's work.

He does. He says he's upset with Manly. Manly represents a person like Paris but who has attained the dream of political autonomy. So Israel has this political autonomy that Garvey wanted but failed to get. So that's what it was about, like I don't want to hear my dreams come true in another man's life. So he was actually jealous of Manly. But no it's not like he's seeking racial separation. What he's seeking is political parity, equality.

The idea of community is such a dominant theme in your books. It's something I really responded to--and I think most readers do.

Well, the idea of community. Paris liked his community, but he was a very different kind of person because a lot of people didn't like the community. The idea of community and racial separation are WAY different things. The problem with the question is that he's in the community so therefore does he believe in racial separation? Well, no. There is the black community and the purpose of writing about the black community is that this is something that's not written about. You talk about black people struggling against white people and you talk about black people struggling against slavery, you have the history of racism. And this is all true but this is kind of an external view of the black community. An internal view of the black community is the community itself. How much you love that community. You love the food, you love the way of talking, you love the history, you know all these things that nobody else knows. Who else knows that there were whole black communities with blacksmiths and carpenters and milkmen and butchers and everybody in the community was black and all had jobs and professions which later on disappeared. You could hire a carpenter but couldn't be a carpenter. That's what happened ultimately. That's what that's about. Not about trying to separate out or say this is better, but say it was better when I was able to do something. And here I'm trying to do something and people are burning down my store and beating me up and mistreating me and police come in and say who the hell are you to start a business in the way I remember it. And in the world I envision, everybody should be able to do it.

No, but they might not do the same thing. The police might not have stopped in a black man's business to ask that question. Police have seen enough individual black businesses start up that they don't really have the time to stop and harass Paris.

Well, it might not happen today. In the Socrates stories, where I'm writing about today, you have a whole other series of issues, some of which have to do with race and racism. Some of which have to do with issues that have been foisted on the black community by a long history of racism. So in the end of Walkin the Dog, you have a policeman who's beating people, raping people, killing people and he represents the way the worst of the police look now to the black community.

He's still there. He's an isolated incident, but he hasn't been taken care of. If this had happened in Beverly Hills, the guy would be out immediately. But the notion is that there's a certain amount of corruption and when Socrates wants to make noise about it, he's the person who gets in trouble, It's hard for me to say, I wrote Fearless for the time it was, 50's LA, though I think America is still a deeply racist nation. How has America changed? Well we've got more people of color and poor people on death row than we ever have. Too many people in prison, 17 million people going in and out of prison.

Yet, in FJ, the justice system in part is treated with a kind of irony that makes it funny rather than enraging. I mean, Paris spends 6 weeks in the can because the law thinks someone paid him to set fire to his business for the insurance, but Paris has no insurance and the Public Defender assigned to him doesn't read up enough about the case to even know this.

Therefore, Easy Rawlins is drama verging on tragedy, FJ is drama verging on comedy. I think a lot of people read FJ and really empathize with Paris and the kind of quixotic nature of the law. Some readers will say I felt removed but I've talked to a lot of readers who said God I really felt for poor Paris when this thing happened. Also, there's so much more of an internal dialogue going on--when Paris sees Fearless in jail and realizes that Fearless is more free in jail than he is outside it. . . notions of who you are on the inside which this book is very much about.

Charlotte's not ugly. She's got a scar. Didn't you notice those big beautiful lips? Sol and Fanny did have a marriage that worked and in the Easy books, there's O'Dell and you know that Mouse and Etta are always going to be together, no matter how separate their lives, no matter what.

Socrates was working toward a relationship, certainly. In America half of marriages "work." In the black community, there are even more pressures that pull people apart--economic pressures, pressures imposed by the white community.

??? Fearless is the Messenger of the Divine. He always was the title. It was a confusing title, so I changed it. It's not really so different.

I don't see why it would be confusing. You've got a book called Moby Dick and you have Ishmael narrating.

The book is about the story, the book is always the story, so if you buy the story it's okay. If after reading it, you said I didn't know whether it was about Fearless or Paris, then that's a problem. It's about an adventure that Paris and Fearless had which is clear, so it's not problematic. They're friends and they can really only do good work together so who is more important, well. . . .

But one grows, really learns. Fearless is perfect, beginning to end, but Paris learns about himself when he's about to murder Theodore Wally.

Yeah, I guess. But did he learn something or did we? There he is with his gun thinking here I am in trouble. Most people would think, I have a gun in my hand. I'm fine. I'm not sure this is a new element in his life. Here he is, he's got a gun [and is thinking,] I really wish I didn't. (sigh) It's an interesting thing. I would argue that Fearless does learn things, though on his level. The things he learns we think are silly. Like he says, I didn't know women could use sex like a weapon. God, everybody knows that and certainly he gets into trouble that he can't get out of by himself. And so he needs Paris. But neither has the same level of character development that Easy Rawlins has. Neither one of them [Paris or Fearless] asks very deep internal questions. Terrible things happen in the book. But in the end Fearless has money: he buys himself a car and his mother and sister a house, and when Paris gets out of jail he gives him enough money to start another store. And it's a lot of money! But because neither Fearless nor Paris asks very deep internal questions, they can have a happy ending.

I don't know about that, but thanks for saying that. I like them as characters. Fearless, Paris, and I like the kinds of intelligence that they have. I've been writing about Easy lately--a series of six short stories about Easy looking for Mouse.

Everyone I know is convinced that Mouse died at the end of A Little Yellow Dog. Are you telling me he's still around?

In these stories in which Easy is looking for Mouse, no one knows if he's dead or alive, but in the last story . . . you'll have to read them to find out.

They could. That's for sure.

Not exactly. Two women who rob an armored car company.

Yes, it's written. We're looking for a director.

I like them. Devil in a Blue Dress is a wonderful movie. I loved Always Outnumbered. I don't compare books and movies. They're different. Always Outnumbered was very strong. It was doing things that had never been done before. It was about black people coping with racist America and I feel the same thing about Devil in a Blue Dress.

Did you do the screenplays? In your books, I love your dialogue, the way you write people is so rich and so funny, and they talk so right. On the screen, it doesn't always register for me.

I did not write the adaptation for Devil, but I did for Always Outnumbered.

I write in the morning when I wake up. Never more than three hours. Three hours a day 365 days a year adds up to a lot of stuff.

You're productive; you've produced so much material of such high quality in such a short time. I think you're a real national treasure.

Tell that to George W.

Which character is Dickens talking about?

That's the only novel written about a writer writing that I really liked.

I'm writing a biography of Dickens' wife. (further discussion about Dickens)

Well, I don't think like that, my favorite character. I really like writing about a lot of different characters and they all mean a lot to me--Paris and Fearless, Socrates, Easy & Mouse--even Chance in Blue Light. I don't think of them as separate.

I hope we'll talk again. Good luck with your biography.