I went to a Percival Everett talk
“I’m basically a philosopher, and I say that in every disparaging way you can imagine.”
I wore a silk shirt that I could never wear while handling filthy used books at Bart’s and drove an hour to Santa Barbara to go to a Percival Everett talk without having read any of his thirty books.
On the drive up, I remembered selling a stack of every Everett book we had in the shop to an enthusiastic and trusting reader this spring. She was a speech pathologist who read exclusively black literature. She called it her re-education after a lifetime reading white authors in school.
We spent more than half an hour together– talking about the book club of black women she was missing after moving away from Texas, about my confidence that she could creat that again, and about Everett’s recent rise in readership.
That she had never heard of Everett excited her and I admired that. I was excited to discover Everett myself. I wore the silk because it felt like an occasion.
Everett has had a big year– his 2001 novel Erasure, a satire of the racialization of writers, was adapted by Cord Jefferson into the film American Fiction, winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Now, Everett’s James has become one of the biggest novels of the year centering Jim’s side of the story of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Everett has oft said that this novel comes out of no dissatisfaction with Twain, but rather in conversation with him. To enter James’ world, he read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn fifteen times in a row. When he finished the last page, he’d turn back to the first.
Settling into my seat at the event, I looked around Campbell Hall and estimated there were three hundred of us there. When Everett began to speak, I sat up straighter at the sound of his deep voice.
He began by talking about being wrong. Decades ago, at a speaking engagement in the South, he commented on the “symbol of exclusion” hanging in the room that led to that institution’s removal of the Confederate Flag. The white Santa Barbara audience started clapping. “I was wrong,” Everett continuted, “When I’m in a place that was a minefield, the one thing I like to see is a plaque.”
He told the story of his agent forwarding a glowing review for his second novel, Walk Me to the Distance, that ended with this line. “Because there is no mention of race in this novel, by the way, the writer is black.”
A decade later, at a party in New York he was chatting with an editor who mentioned that she had read his proposal (1996’s Frenzy, a retelling of the Dionysus myth) but passed on acquiring it.
She asked “What does Dionysus have to do with black people?”
Percival Everett, a raspy-voiced smartass, added, “She would have not asked Updike what Dionysus has to do with uptight wasps.”
Listen to him tell these stories in this video below
As he said in his 2017 Art of Fiction with the Paris Review, “...the unfortunate marginalization of American writers who happen to be black by calling them “black writers,” which tacitly acknowledges the existence of something else that would be mainstream, and so ghettoizes the work immediately.”
When that enthusiastic reader asked for Black fiction, there wasn’t a shelf I could show her. I walked around gathering handfuls of books from different sections. This is an ongoing conversation amongst booksellers, whether to ghettoize writing on shelves or to intersperse it. I feel if there’s something you’d like to find, ask a bookseller. Those exchanges can be the best part of visiting a bookstore.
Percival Everett’s favorite books:
If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
When asked about being called America’s literary philosopher king in the New Yorker, Everett demurred…
“I’m just an old cowboy and that’s all. I read books and go to work. It’s nice to have more readers.”
Everett had a ranch and trained horses for fifteen years. “It was my honor to have an animal allow me to ride it. Even more so with mules because they think about it.”
Before he was a writer, he was a painter. He studied philosophy at the University of Miami. “I’m basically a philosopher, and I say that in every disparaging way you can imagine.”
“I start a book thinking I know about something, by the end, I find out I’m wrong. After thirty books I know less than most people.”
About James Everett says, “I thought I’d be giving him agency. I was wrong. Jim had agency. He didn’t have a method of expressing that agency.” In this novel, Jim is a reader of Voltaire and Locke.
“I hope I’ve made it quite clear that he is as capable of a philosopher as they are if for no other reason than he has experienced what they have not,” said Everett.
A regular customer at the bookstore said he didn’t like the book because he took issue with the premise that an enslaved person could read, let alone read philosophy. I think that’s a tremendously shallow response to fiction and told him that I didn’t think that was the point.
“A work of art is not complete until an audience comes to it. The meaning you make is as valid as the meaning that anyone else makes and more valid than mine.”
This novel brings me to a river running wide and deep like the Mississippi. As much as James is about language and the violence of our young country, it is also teeming with masculine care. “Jim is the only positive male role model in Huck’s life and there is love between them,” says Everett.
I hold onto the scenes between Huck and Jim near the edge of the river, setting fishing lines. I am struck by the ways they see each other. “I was proud of the way he used all the strength in his small body to paddle against the strong current.”
Last month, James won the Kirkus Prize for fiction. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and it was a finalist for the National Book Award. Steven Spielberg is adapting it for film and Taika Waititi may direct. I hope to see a gifted young actor as Huck to bring forth the tenderness and emotional risk between him and Jim. (See Louise Mauroy-Panzani as Cleo in Àma Gloria)
“I make novels. I don’t have any idea what they mean. I don't want to know what they mean. I forget almost immediately after writing.”
The next novel from Everett will be musical. He’s been reading twentieth century music theory for two years.
At the end of his talk, Everett spoke of his agent from twenty-five years ago who gave him this permission to be an artist on his own terms.
She said “Percival you’re never going to make me any money so you might as well write what you want to write.”
He wished she could be here to see this.