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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm
Linda Wertheimer.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: And I'm Robert Siegel.
Almost everywhere you look these days, you'll find writer Albert Murray. Excerpts of his writing appear in the recently published "Norton Anthology of African-American Literature." You'll often hear Murray's name in connection with Jazz at Lincoln Center. He's on the board of directors. And his very handsome, laughing face appears alongside of those of Mike Wallace, Helen Thomas and Allen Ginsburg on the cover of a recent "New York Times" magazine about older Americans.
Albert Murray is 80 years old and, despite health problems that
require him to walk extremely slowly with the help of a four-footed
metal cane, he is constantly on the road giving readings of his
fiction. Two new books came out last year, and in May he'll be
inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
NPR's Dean Olsher has this profile.
DEAN OLSHER, NPR REPORTER: Albert Murray's apartment right in the middle of Harlem is perfectly situated for an observer of the human condition. One of the reasons he moved here in the early 1960s is that he can look out from the picture window in his living room and see practically the whole city.
ALFRED MURRAY, AUTHOR: Before they put that building on 125th Street, you could sit there, turn off the lights and look right at the Empire State Building.
OLSHER: Murray says the view from his apartment is like looking out from a tree through a spy glass, an image he likes so much, he called one of his books, "The Spy Glass Tree."
MURRAY: You walk out on the terrace, you can see a corner of the George Washington Bridge, you see CCNY on the hill, you see part of Columbia Law School. You look downtown, you see the midtown skyline. If you look east, you can see part of the Tri-Borough Bridge. OLSHER: Albert Murray moved to New York after a career as an Air Force officer, which came after studies at the Tuskegee Institute, which followed a boyhood near Mobile, Alabama.
In 1970, he published his first book, "The OmniAmericans." He was 54 years old. Ten other books have followed. Most recently, Murray has been refining his ideas about what he calls "the blues aesthetic." Murray sees the blues as a survival technique, an improvisatory affirmation in the face of uncertainty. It's a way of stylizing the hardship and futility of life and transforming it into beautiful art. It's the difference, he says, between the blues as music and the blues as such.
MURRAY: The blues as such is a thing of despondency, despair, a sense of defeat, a sense of, you know, oppression. See, that's just not a political situation; that's life. Let's go over to the planetarium and look at this stuff and say, you know, earth is not even big enough to be up there. That's pretty depressing stuff.
LAUGHTER
So all you can do is do something that's going to be nice. You don't know how many bars you have, but however many of them you can make swing, the better off you are. That's about it.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP OF MUSIC OF DUKE ELLINGTON)
OLSHER: Murray defines the blues aesthetic in his essays, and he tries to capture it in his fiction. His novels are an attempt at a literary equivalent of the music of Duke Ellington, what Murray calls "Manhattan metropolitan onomatopoeia.
But Albert Murray's literary Harlem, like the jazz and blues that were cultivated there, has a distinctly Southern accent, especially when trains are involved. At the beginning of his book, "South to a Very Old Place," Murray writes about New York subways, but the rural freight trains of his boyhood are never far away.
MURRAY: You can take the A train uptown from 42nd Street in midtown Manhattan and be there in less than 10 minutes. There is a stop at 59th Street beneath the traffic circle which commemorates Christopher Columbus, who once set out for destinations East on a compass bearing West. But after that, as often as not, there are only six more express minutes to go.
Then you're pulling into the IND station at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, and you're that many more miles north from Mobile, Alabama. But you're also, for better or worse, back among home folks, no matter what part of the old country you come from.
Such is the fundamental interrelationship of recollection and make-believe with all journeys and locations that anywhere people do certain things in a certain way can be home. The way certain very special uptown Manhattan people talk and the way some of them walk, for instance, makes them home folks. So whoever says you can't go home again when you're off for so many intents and purposes, back whenever or wherever, somebody or something makes you feel that way.
OLSHER: In his books, Albert Murray develops a handful of ideas much the way a jazz musician will play the same tune again and again, in a slightly different way each time. All of his books in one way or another deal with the blues idiom as well as the idea of the hero. Last year, he published the latest in a series of novels about a hero named Scooter, whose life Murray traces from the rural South into adulthood as a jazz musician.
But of all the books Albert Murray has written, he's likely to be remembered most for his first one, a collection of essays called "The OmniAmericans." In it he attacked what he saw as some of the fundamental flaws in the sociology of black people, what he called, in his memorable phrase...
MURRAY: The folklore of white supremacy, the fakelore of black pathology.
OLSHER: The folklore of white supremacy, the fakelore of black pathology.
Even today, in the middle of crime-ridden Harlem, his voice competing with the sound of guard dogs barking in a vacant lot across the street, Murray dispels the idea that the condition of inner-city blacks has anything to do with pathology. Pointing his finger at the window, "It's entropy," he says, "and our social science frame of mind has given us unrealistic expectations about being able to do anything about it."
That kind of thinking pervades "The OmniAmericans," which came out at a time when black nationalists called for separatism from whites and a rejection of white-imposed culture. Murray argued for integration. At the same time, he alienated some of the very icons of integration who might have been his allies.
Murray attacked the theoretical underpinnings of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's case in the Supreme Court decision that integrated public schools. The case drew on a study by the noted psychologist Kenneth Clark, which showed black children preferred white dolls. Murray found Clark's sociology vile because it viewed blacks as weak people, crippled by racism.
JAMES ALAN MCPHERSON (ph), TEACHER, IOWA WRITERS WORKSHOP: It was a highly influential book for a lot of us.
OLSHER: James Allan McPherson teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
MCPHERSON: At the very time that we were being defined as victims and as some wardens of the state, here was a black man saying we're more than that; we are co-creators of the culture, and it's about time we started affirming who we are in the broadest possible sense.
OLSHER: Murray did even more than just affirm who black people are. He went on to argue that black culture contributed one of the essential ingredients to American culture as a whole. What gives American culture its very American-ness, he said, was the blues idiom.
In a way, Murray was arguing that black Americans were the most American of all. Like his apartment, situated in the center of black Harlem from which he can view the rest of the city, Murray uses the blues idiom as a frame for his thoughts about all of Western civilization.
Murray's idea was radical, although it's interesting that he's often called a conservative writer. Some call him a radical conservative. Literary scholar Jocelyn Chadwick Joshua (ph) says one reason is that he always seemed out of synch with his contemporaries. For example, he never had use for the idea of what came to be known in the Twenties and Thirties as the "new Negro."
JOCELYN CHADWICK JOSHUA, LITERARY SCHOLAR: One who doesn't need the uncles and the aunties anymore. We are in a new day, we are a new person, and we are now really emancipated.
The other side, represented by people like Albert, we are here because of the uncles and the aunties. We're stepping on their shoulders, on their backs. We are their legacy.
OLSHER: Albert Murray's intellectual legacy is even broader than that. For Murray, the notion of black literature makes no sense if it's ripped from the context of all American literature.
MURRAY: I'm not trying to be a black writer. I'm trying to be the American writer, trying to make all of the stuff in the United States together -- Whitman, you know, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, all of that.
OLSHER: And books by those writers, as well as Thomas Mann and Charles Dickens and all of the so-called Great Books of the Western canon, stuff the shelves that take up an entire wall, all the way from the dining room through the living room of Murray's apartment.
His commitment to the European tradition flies in the face of more fashionable ideas about Afro-centrism. For that reason, writer David Bradley has viewed Albert Murray as a lone voice in the wilderness ever since "The OmniAmericans" came out nearly three decades ago.
DAVID BRADLEY, WRITER: This was a time when people were feeling their way: what did it mean to be a black person? What were we going to call ourselves? And this was when black and Afro-American, that whole thing, was going on. What did it mean to be an American at that time?
And Albert Murray's position was that we are Americans and that looking to Africa was -- was, not counterproductive necessarily, but, you know, it was something that you had to do with your eyes wide open. And this was a time when looking at Africa, you did it through rose-colored glasses.
MURRAY: Bradley told "The New Yorker" that very early on, Murray was saying stuff that could get him killed, partly because when it came to unleashing his invective, Albert Murray was an equal opportunity critic.
BRADLEY: He would aim it at black people as well as white people. He just didn't have any patience for fuzzy thinking.
OLSHER: Maybe it's for that reason that many of Murray's colleagues declined to be interviewed for this report, some politely, others not. His take-no-prisoners rhetorical style has earned him enemies, and he makes fun of them in conversation, flashing his big, handsome grin that Tony Sherman (ph) wrote, "turns a listener into a co-conspirator in whatever iconoclasm he is hatching at the moment."
Murray professes to be less interested in pointing out the shortcomings of other people's fuzzy thinking. These days, he's interested in aesthetics.
MURRAY: I don't feel like arguing with people. I'd rather be creative than go on kicking ass cause most people who have read this stuff, they rate me as an ass-kicker second to none. Put sociology away; now let's get some metaphors.
OLSHER: Albert Murray published two books last year: his third Scooter novel and a collection of essays on aesthetics. He's working on publishing letters from his longtime close friend Ralph Ellison, who died three years ago. The thought of showing off the correspondence gets him so excited that he gets up from his chair, a difficult thing for him to do. And once he's done with the Ellison material, he goes on to letters he's saved from other colleagues. He's proudest of one from Walker Percy.
It is at this point when his smile is the most electric, and out of nowhere he marvels at how lucky he was to be a late bloomer because he got started too late to be a has-been.
I'm Dean Olsher.
