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THE CONSUMMATE SHORT-STORY WRITER Grace Paley once said that, more often than not, the only thing coming with publication is silence. She, no doubt, meant that even glowing reviews from mainstream arbiters of culture, such as the New York Times, did not guarantee a substantial number of readers who would buy the book. This was my experience when my first novel, Tragic Magic, was published by Random House in the fall of 1978 and received enthusiastic reviews, particularly in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, but did not translate into sales. However, I felt enormously fortunate to have been one of the numerous African American writers that Toni Morrison guided to publication in the 1970s, during her many years as a senior editor at Random House.
I’ve thought a great deal about Paley’s comment regarding the deafening “silence” that often greets publication since McSweeney’s contacted me regarding their desire to republish my first novel. But what I’d like to revisit is not the silence in the aftermath of publication, but the presence of sounds, spoken and instrumental, that informed and continue to animate my experience of writing fiction.
The sounds of my mother and father’s voices, the conversations overheard among aunts and uncles, the gossip between my sister and her girlfriends, and the lively barbershop talk are imprinted on nearly every page of Tragic Magic. There was also rhythm and blues and jazz that was baked into my nervous system.
I was reminded of this when rereading the opening of Tragic Magic: “A Few Words Before the Get Go.” The narrator identifies with the improvisational approach of jazz musicians and decides to tell his story by “…play(ing) against the melody, behind and ahead of the beat, to bend, diminish, and flatten notes, and slip in and out of any exact notation of what and how I should play.” The narrator mentions Ella Fitzgerald as an influence, who was “…one of the foremost practitioners of the form of talking shit known as scatting. With the air as her scratch pad she has scribbled much syllabic salad into song.” The protagonist also makes reference to his aunt (based on one of my own) who, when arguing with her husband, used a difficult-to-decipher slang called “Tut” and inserted it into her opposition to him. And in keeping with the transgressive lingo of “Tut,” the narrator, at the end of the introduction, says, “Like all of the rest before me I seem doomed to dissonance and thoughts like highwater pants that are too far from where they’re supposed to be.”
Ironically, I wrote all this after the novel was completed, which could not have been written while I was discovering what I was writing and how it would sound. I was then persuaded to move it to the beginning, since the narrator could only have acquired this greater clarity about his journey once he’d finished telling his story.
The relationship between the inventiveness of Black idiomatic speech and the improvisational impetus of American jazz are the voices in Tragic Magic that recount the story of a young Black man coming to terms with definitions of masculinity that have shaped him and persist even after two years in prison for refusing to serve in the armed forces during the war in Vietnam. Although the experiences of the protagonist, Melvin Ellington, mirrored many of my own, I had (to paraphrase artist Ben Shahn) to find a form that would shape my subject matter. And while I possessed some fragments of the story I thought I wanted to tell, I found myself following the approach of jazz great Miles Davis (on his legendary 1959 record Kind of Blue) and groundbreaking comedian Richard Pryor, who took a not fully worked out composition or stand-up performance, and riffed on some of their ideas to see where they would lead them.
During the writing of Tragic Magic and anything I’ve written subsequently, I am never without the rejuvenating sounds embodied in the human voice and their equivalent in music. Like any serious writer, I want to be read. But the silence in response to the publication of my novel was, for the most part, out of my control. What I could control, and ultimately of more value to me, are the voices telling me stories that, like Toni Morrison, I want to read. And like her, I continue to try to write them.
—WESLEY BROWN