The Roots and Fruits of American Art & Culture
Two weeks ago, we published the first of several excerpts of an interview I conducted with Albert Murray in 1996. The interview was originally published in the volume you see above. What follows is the continuation of the conversation.
Greg Thomas: Could you go a little deeper into the concepts of folk art, popular art, and fine art?
Albert Murray: The three levels of sophistication or technical mastery involved in the processing of raw experience into aesthetic statement. That’s a whole encyclopedia right there. Art is a means by which raw experience is stylized— goes through a process by which we mean stylized— into aesthetic statement. The style is the statement. In order to know what the statement is, you have to know what is involved in the processing. Involved in that would be degrees of the control of the medium that you’re working in.
Some guy comes up with a poem— but they don’t know grammar, they can’t pronounce the words, they don’t know syntax— that’s going to be folk level, man. A good example would be, somebody says [sings in blues cadence]: You be my baby, and I’ll be your man. Not “If you will be my baby.” That’s folk level, we can tell. It’s pronounced on a folk level. It can be very moving, very authentic— but it’s limited. It’s an acquired taste for a more sophisticated person, like a cruder recipe.
Now, you get a guy saying [singing]: Is you is or is you ain’t my baby? [1944 Louis Jordan song] That’s bad grammar, but it’s pop. You know that’s not folk. The guy’s kidding. “Are you or aren’t you my baby?” That won’t work. He wants to be very close to the earth. [singing] Is you is or is you ain’t my baby? The way you acting lately makes me doubt you is still my baby, baby. The way you say “baby,” that’s some country shit. But you could do that in a fifteen-dollar or twenty-five-dollar cover charge place. These other guys out there strumming, that’s another thing, they got a tin cup in the town square on Friday afternoon.
Now, the ultimate extension, elaboration, and refinement would be: [hums Ellington’s “Rocks in My Bed”] That’s the blues on another level. Technically more refined. More complex, more difficult to play. More complete control over the means of expression.
GT: Some of what Rourke was counterstating was some of Eliot’s elitist conceptions or I guess maybe the stereotype of Matthew Arnold’s conception of culture. They also had a conception of, say, “fine art.” But it seems to me that Constance Rourke was trying to privilege and focus on the folk form and the popular form.
AM: It’s a dynamic that you want to get that adds up to Constance Rourke. What she discovered, as I understand it, was a principle for the definition of culture that was derived from the German philosopher Herder. It gave her insight into the fact that cultures develop. They come from the ground up, not from on-high down. Most people were lamenting that there was no high culture. You forget, these were barbarians— Europe in the Dark Ages. When you come out of that, they’ve got an art form. They’ve got the gothic cathedrals, they’ve got these goddamn vitraux, the stained-glass windows. They’ve got scholarship, although it’s on sacred texts and so forth. Then, when they get to the Renaissance period, they rediscover Rome and Greece.
Then they have a broader context of what they’re doing. These guys had been all the way from savagery all the way up to Praxiteles to the Parthenon to Sophocles and Euripides and Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle— all these refinements. Then you had all these extensions of that because the Romans could reach over there and get it. The Greeks were still around, for them. Any great Roman family had a Greek master. And they went around acting like Greeks. Just like classy Americans acted British and would speak with a slightly British accent, like that Boston thing. Well, that’s the way that I understand it— that educated Romans spoke like Greeks.
Which makes all the sense in the world, doesn’t it? One is able to look at it this way because of the dynamic that Constance Rourke revealed. Extension, elaboration, and refinement— it’s not just bootlegging something in.
GT: Process, continuum.
AM: You can see it in Mark Twain! He’s a half-assed newspaperman, he writes about what he knows about, he’s writing a fairly simple report, but the storytelling thing takes over at a certain point— and he’s into art! He made the steps. You can see it. Whitman!—you’ve gotta make it out of this and it’s gotta be like this. So when you’ve got Moby-Dick—there ain’t nothing over there like that. It’s a novel, it’s not The Iliad and The Odyssey. It’s something else. It’s a big, thick American book about process. When I was in high school there was nothing like football movies, nothing like college movies. This sweatshirt comes from the 1930s, man! You find that very pragmatic level of how things are done at a given point. Life on the Mississippi— how it is to be a riverboat captain. The romance of it. It’s a very practical thing. What’s a riverboat captain? But it’s transmuted into poetry. What the hell do you get in the first 150 pages of [Murray’s third novel] The Seven League Boots? Life on the Mississippi! What you’d call the Life on the Mississippi dimension. Nothing can be more American than “How do they do what they do?”
GT: Would you say you have a cinematic conception at all?
AM: Why not? What else are you gonna have? You’re not gonna read as many books as you look at movies or television. I was learning it as they were learning it. You’ve got all these things that would make a twentieth-century American sensibility, all these devices and techniques of communication. Since your medium is prose— it is language, not pictures— then you assimilate that. You can make the language do things that pictures can’t do. “Deljean McCray, who was as cinnamon-bark brown as was the cinnamon-brown bark she was forever chewing and smelling like.” You can’t do that on film, except you could have her say it. But it wouldn’t be the narrator saying it.
GT: Where does John A. Kouwenhoven fit? Because John A. Kouwenhoven is after Constance Rourke. Would you say he’s a further extension and elaboration?
AM: He zoomed in on what was American about American culture. Nothing is more informative than the story of the George Washington Bridge. The key thing—this would be the more direct answer—Kouwenhoven focused very directly on the interaction of the learned tradition, or the imported methodologies and approaches with the native, vernacular, or homespun methods of doing things— and American culture emerged from that, in a context made for the perpetual experimentation on the frontier and in an atmosphere of free enterprise— or experimental attitude— that’s the same thing. It’s a very pragmatic thing. This goes with this, this goes with that. When they got to the I beam, they were gone. You’re not gonna get a skyscraper until you get the I beam. They realized they were back to frame buildings again. But, they could make it a hundred stories! Because the frame is holding up the building, not the masonry walls. You see what I mean? They said shit, we can make this shit out of glass!
It’s pretty light going up there. What brought the primitive bridge back—you know, the real primitive bridge with vines and ropes and shit? The steel cable! You can’t be more primitive than that. So you have these two uprights and the steel cable going through— this is the George Washington Bridge! They had discovered this with the Brooklyn Bridge, but they got all this gunk around it. “Gotta look like a bridge used to look in Europe.” Then you get over here, and they ran out of money. They said we already got it, man. All you need are the uprights. That’s a pretty thing! Look at that! That’s like inventing streamlining. That’s one of the key things of Kouwenhoven. He mentioned that in a letter to me. You know about me and him? You’ve heard of that?
GT: Could you tell me?
AM: [reads from March 28, 1984, letter from Kouwenhoven] “Dear Mr. Murray, a young admirer of yours— a writer (and sometime jazz pianist) named Tom Piazza (believe it or not)— brought me a copy of The Omni- Americans in the Vintage edition a couple of months ago. How I missed it in 1970, when I was still active, I can’t imagine. But better now than never. It’s a beautiful job: clear, wise, and forceful. (I wished I had had ‘Getting It Together’ under my belt in my last years of teaching—1970– 75; it would have helped bring some courage to a head that was getting ready to quit.)
“And of course, I am rewarded by your reference to my books. Thanks for what you say on page 185 especially. Few of the people who comment on my work seem to have any idea that it is the interaction of the vernacular with the cultivated tradition that in my view matters.”
GT: Just to ask you about Ellison for a moment— the second novel— what he shared of it with you, would you say that it went beyond Invisible Man in achievement?
In the final excerpt, Murray responds to my question above and shares his thoughts on the work of Leon Forrest, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, and, finally, explains what he means by the phrase mythosphere.