The Yeast of Chaos: An Interview with Leon Forrest

Abstract

Leon Forrest, a lifelong Chicagoan, studied at the University of Chicago from 1958 to 1960 and again from 1963 to 1964. He is a novelist and a playwright who has also worked as a journalist and an editor and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and elsewhere. Forrest is now chair of the African-American Studies Department at Northwestern University. His novels include There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden (Random House, 1973), The Bloodworth Orphans (Random, 1977), Two Wings to Veil My Face (Random, 1983), and Divine Days (Another Chicago Press, 1992). I interviewed Forrest about his education, including his years in Hyde Park at the University of Chicago. I've edited the interview to read as a first-person essay. For a writer, the ideal artistic community is made up of musicians, painters, a few writers - and a lot of people interested in the arts in a general way. I was drawn to the University of Chicago because I thought I would find that community there. I lived in a building at 61st and Dorchester, right across from the university. Musicians and painters and writers lived in it with me. It was owned by an elderly Jewish woman who had been a Communist, though not a card-carrying one. She had all these wonderful records of Paul Robeson's. In the building there were a lot of political people and people of different races - Africans, Indians. I was hanging out, hanging around, meeting a wonderful group of people. At the same time, I was trying to write. I was also working for a community newspaper and later for the Muslim paper Muhammad Speaks. I was teaching a creative writing class at Kennedy-King Junior College one day a week. I was taking classes at the University of Chicago. That was a time of great chaos in my life, because I was trying to find my way as a writer. I had a lot of energy. I heard all those different voices and saw all those different lives and they all were struggling to achieve themselves. My problem was to make something out of this. Chaos is very important to a writer - all of this life bubbling around, and you trying to get in there and take what you need from the material and then transform it into something. You have to take what you can, then ultimately drift away from it in order to shape what you need. But initially there must be chaos, so that you can place your stamp on it. You must be attracted to it and not let it destroy you. And that's really a fight. In a lot of cases, chaos destroys writers, either through the destructive nature of the writer, or through addiction to the scene itself - the frantic people who take over your life and waste you, or alcohol, or drugs, or just you, running the streets to your detriment and ultimately becoming more of a talker than a writer, a priest of the bars. The things that I loved in life and wanted to convert and transform into literature were themselves filled with the yeast of chaos. I might have been destroyed by the chaos I was so drawn to that I couldn't get a hold on it. And I couldn't get a hold on my own sort of discipline, either. There was a tension between discipline and chaos. My battles were between the flesh and the spirit; they were about the question of race, about the question of how to write out of a sensibility of oppressed people, about the fact that so many heroes of that drama were people filled with rage and chaos who eventually lost their lives in the struggle. And my battle was intensified by the fact that, in wanting to become a writer, I was joining a minority within a minority. Models were few, Ellison being one. In the Irish and the Jewish cultures, a writer, an intellectual, was admired. In the black culture, no. This contributed to my chaos. I couldn't seem to finish anything. I couldn't finish school, I couldn't finish anything. It was awful. I had to develop a certain sturdiness, and it was touch and go whether I ever would. I ended up at the University of Chicago because of an ambition I had, fostered in me by my parents and by my teachers in grade school and in high school. …