The Paris Review - Fall 2016

wrote a long essay on James Baldwin, forty pages, for an English magazine,
and after they read it they came to me and said, Can’t you soften this? So the
idea here is in order to get a mainstream publisher, you have to soften it to
appeal to the sort of people they think buy books. The Complete Muhammad
Ali was a book I was supposed to publish with Crown. The acquiring editor
left the company and then they wanted me to make it into part memoir,
part biography. When they finally abandoned the project, I could make the
book into the improvisational, nonlinear work I wanted it to be. And it
was published in Montreal by Baraka Books. So was another book of mine,
Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers.
And also, Going Too Far. I called it Going Too Far because one critic who was
a contributor to The Root said I’d gone too far with my novel Juice! I said,
You don’t know how far I’ve gone. I’ve gone all the way to Montreal. So I’m
part of a tradition.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel like you see your influence in younger writers, even from your
exiled position?
REED
I see in the Times they mention me in connection with different writers. But
they won’t review my books. I’m mentioned in connection with Paul Beatty,
and Colson Whitehead has also cited me as one of his influences, or he said
he couldn’t get away from my influence. I think if I’ve been influential it’s
because I took the novel off in a different direction. One of the big influences
on me for my first novel was Charles Wright’s The Wig. Bob Kaufman’s
mock histories influenced Yellow Back. They always say Ellison was an influence,
but I didn’t read Ellison until I started teaching black literature at UC
Berkeley, in 1968. But Charles Wright was the one who influenced all of us
down here in New York in the sixties. The surrealist takes, the jump cuts and
all that. The characters. I was able to write an introduction to The Wig, the
new edition, before he died.
INTERVIEWER
But your work is in public spaces, you’ve toured the world, been anthologized.
Do you think you’ve gone from an insurgent to being almost an institution?
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