Elsewhere, but always subsumed within more general issues, I have argued for paying more attention to the Gothicism in the writings of James Kirke Paulding, whose literary career spanned the first half of the nineteenth century. He is one of those American writers who, like murder, will out, despite more neglect than his accomplishments deserve. By 1830 - to cite but one example of Paulding‘s significance - when Hawthorne and Poe were still apprentices in the craft of short fiction, a span of years had passed during which Paulding‘s productions in this genre clearly justified such labels as ‘the Paulding decade of the short story’ (Amos L. Herold‘s designation). Harold E. Hall, moreover, ranks ‘Cobus Yerks and ‘The Dumb Girl’, two Paulding tales from this period, among the finest early nineteenth-century American short stories. Although personal and career necessities often drew him away from literary pursuits, Paulding should by no means be ignored; his name keeps surfacing, particularly when the topic is literary nationalism, as Benjamin T. Spencer, John Seelye, Michael John McDonough, and I have already indicated. Paulding is also remembered as a pioneer in presenting frontier life in fiction and for his early essays in what we now term Southwestern Humor.1
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This is the first English language publication of an interview with James Baldwin (1924–87) conducted by Nazar Büyüm in 1969, Istanbul, Turkey. Deemed too long for conventional publication at the time, the interview re-emerged last year and reveals Baldwin’s attitudes about his literary antecedents and influences such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen; his views concerning the “roles” and “duties” of a writer; his assessment of his critics; his analysis of the power and message of the Nation of Islam; his lament about the corpses that are much of the history and fact of American life; an honest examination of the relationship of poor whites to American blacks; an interrogation of the “sickness” that characterizes Americans’ commitment to the fiction and mythology of “race,” as well as the perils and seductive nature of American power.
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Interviewing can be a vampiric act especially when it involves leeching from its subject the fluidic exchange which exists between life and art. The vampire novelist Anne Rice had agreed to let me interview her at Waterstones Bookshop in Bristol, England, on 26 January 1993 about the fourth book in her Vampire Chronicles, The Tale of the Body Thief (1992). In the interview she describes the novel as dealing with the differences between art and life and mortality and immortality. Specifically, the story examines the paradox of choosing to be Undead for the sake of life, and the way in which art opens up a locus for a redemption that is outside of life. In my view, the text is as much about the process of interviewing as about authorship. A more obvious example is Rice‘s well-known novel Interview with the Vampire (1976) in which the hapless interviewer eventually enters into the very narrative he is recording by becoming another Ricean revenant.