High Cotton

"Again, I never want to snatch from a writer who has written a novel the right to claim that form. In both these cases – and also with Woolf – I am claiming simultaneity. So, High Cotton does work, with its own deliberately eccentric structure, as a Bildungsroman: the young man coming of age, finding himself, declaring himself, moving out of and resisting the world that he is supposed to not only know but accept . “The novel has very deliberate fractures because he, the narrator, keeps intervening and cutting into – staging guerrilla raids on – the narrative” But it keeps breaking out of that through, for example, the figure of the grandfather who represents a whole world – not the whole world – but the very particular world of the black south and the black bourgeoisie. Certainly, this goes back to the 19th century, but the grandfather’s consciousness goes back earlier than that, even. The grandfather carries an entire history; he wants to be that history; he wants to be a kind of omniscient narrator as well as the dominant character in the legacy of black history and he wants to impose that legacy on his grandson. So much of the book involves this pull that we talked about at the beginning – this push/pull and the strategies and almost guerrilla warfare as the young man is saying let me escape you, let me find my own language, let me mock you. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One of the reasons that the novel has very deliberate fractures is because he, the narrator, keeps intervening and cutting into – again, staging guerrilla raids on – the narrative that the old people, the old country folks, including his parents, want to impose and live by and accept. So, he’s always veering off. In that way, you see a connection to Elizabeth Hardwick. He’s also veering off into the unexpected detail and the detail is often the obsession, the involvement, the excitement about some person or some cultural phenomenon that the world of the black bourgeoisie, or the world of the white bourgeoisie, would not want, or expect, him to claim. It allowed him to be free of the reader’s assumptions, which always affect the writer, about what is fictionalized and what is not. With any memoir, the reader is always there, questioning and watching, and the writer is always responding to that in one way another, even if by pre-emptive strike. It can be a very interesting thing to work with, but it is always there, and once you have entered the ‘house of fiction’ as E M Forster called it, you have thrown off those responsibilities and bounds. So, I think he had a lot of delicious room and he used it beautifully."