The writer is very sick, so very sick that he is rarely able to get out of bed. He is so sick that he is not sure he will be in the audience Monday night at Steppenwolf Theatre to see and hear a dramatic and musical interpretation of his first novel, which he wrote in 1973 when he was full of life and very big literary dreams. He is so sick that he does not even want to talk about being sick, lest that make him, as one friend says, “admit that he is in a staring contest with his own mortality.”
But he is still writing, because that is what a writer does, especially one who has been as determined to tussle with words as has Leon Forrest.
“I am finishing a collection of novellas,” says Forrest. His manner, as always, is pleasant, but his voice is rough and ragged. “It is what I have always done. My task is to create characters who are memorable.”
He could have been one of them.
A child of segregated Chicago, he grew up around 38th Street and South Park Way (now Martin Luther King Drive). His father, another Leon, was a dining-car waiter on the Super Chief, that glamorous Chicago-to-Los Angeles train.
Forrest’s father had a profound influence on him. In his ambitious, demanding and highly praised 1992 novel, “Divine Days,” the writer created a dining-car waiter character in homage to his father: ” `I wait on ’em with top draw dignity, Cap, but ain’t about to toady to no white-livered Mister Charlies,’ he’d say, in a voice one might employ in reading the Preamble to the Constitution.”
The father wanted the son to be a doctor, but Leon was drawn to words. He was elected president of the creative writing club at Hyde Park High School and then went on to Wilson Junior College (now Kennedy-King College) and Roosevelt University.
He was drafted into the Army and served two years, returning to Chicago to tend bar at the New 408 Club, owned by his mother, Adeline, on East 79th Street. He also took English literature classes at the University of Chicago, and began writing articles for neighborhood newspapers. He eventually landed a job at the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, where he would become its last non-Muslim editor.
That is where Catherine Slade first met him. Slade, who is now an actress /director and Columbia College professor, created Monday’s event at Steppenwolf; she will perform in it as well. She met Forrest in the late 1960s, when she, too, worked at Muhammad Speaks.
“There was this shy little man,” she says. “A wonderful and quiet man, with a fine smile and twinkling eyes. We all knew that he was writing a novel and he would slip parts of it to me to read.”
That novel, There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden, was published in 1973. It set the tone for all his work: stylistically experimental, filled with complex symbolism, puns, folklore, street jive, references to classic and ordinary literature–and big themes. Slade was “confounded by the poetry but found magic in the language, the combination of words.” Saul Bellow, three years away from winning the Nobel Prize for literature, labeled Forrest “a fiery writer, an original.”
That same year Forrest left the newspaper to accept a teaching position with the newly established black studies program at Northwestern University. That is where he has remained, now a professor of English and African-American Studies, a department he chaired from 1985-1994. He has enjoyed the academic life, designing such courses as “Black Presence in Faulkner” and giving lectures on such authors as Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison and Dostoevski.
University life also afforded him the time to write novels: “The Bloodworth Orphans” was published in 1977 and “Two Wings To Veil My Face” in 1984.
As is often the case with fiction that makes demands on its readers, Forrest’s novels never sold in great numbers, but gathered accolades and prizes in piles: the DuSable Museum Certificate of Merit and Achievement for Fiction, the Carl Sandburg Award, the Friends of Literature Prize and the Society of Midland Authors Award for Fiction. Mayor Harold Washington declared April 14, 1985, to be Leon Forrest Day.
Forrest loved to stroll N.U.’s leafy campus. And it was in an Evanston park that he began to spend afternoons recording memories into a tape recorder. That started in 1985 and would form the foundation for “Divine Days,” a novel of such heft and breadth that it frightened away most commercial publishers.
“Divine Days,” all 1,138 pages of it, was published by the small Another Chicago Press in 1992. Reviewing the book for the Tribune, critic Joseph Coates wrote, “The book at hand–both hands actually, because it has heft as well as the ambitions, and some of the accomplishments, of a classic–is the fourth and probably capstone novel by a Chicago writer of immense talent. . . . In this book the black South Side attains an immortality as palpable as the Irish-immigrant version in James T. Farrell.”
The critic Henry Louis Gates dug farther back into literary history for comparison: “Simply put, Leon Forrest’s massive masterpiece is the `War and Peace’ of the African-American novel.”
Set during one week in 1996, “Divine Days” charts the life of Army veteran and would-be playwright Joubert Jones as he takes a kaleidoscopic trip through the South Side. The first printing of 1,500 copies sold out and a new edition was published by W.W. Norton in 1993.
Forrest called the book “my attempt to write the great American novel. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to mount anything in its league again.”
In 1994 he published a well-received collection of essays, “Relocations of the Spirit” (Asphodel Press/Moyer Bell), on such people as Michael Jordan and Billie Holiday.
Slade calls Forrest “a potent reading experience. He takes immense risks, digging so deeply into the subconscious mind that reading him is like taking a dive into oneself.”
Monday night’s event at Steppenwolf is part of the second season of the theater’s Traffic series, an inter-arts performance series that once a month or so showcases local and national artists in single-evening solo and group performances–music, performance, dance, poetry, spoken word and theater.
Slade will read from “There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden,” accompanied by pianist/saxophonist Ari Brown and sax great Henry Threadgill. There also will be original compositions by flutist and whistler Joel Brandon and music from Bill Close on long bow and Steve Barsotti on invented instruments.
“The Traffic series is the perfect venue to popularize a creative genius like Leon,” says Slade.
Forrest is flattered by the attention: “It is wonderful to have my fiction find another outlet, but I am mostly humbled–intrigued and humbled. The combination of words and music has always been essential in my life and my work.”
Earlier this year, he was honored at a testimonial at the Art Institute. He had just turned 60 and was well enough to attend the event and read a poem he had written inspired by a Richard Hunt sculpture.
Slade, who was there that January night, reading some of Forrest’s work, says, “It was a grand night. Leon is such a gracious man. He is a gentleman and a scholar of the highest plateau. Many people are gifted, but Leon is a genius, a genius filled with humility, a sweetness and a spiritual essence.”
He is also a determined man, which gives his many friends and admirers hope that he will beat the cancer that plagues him, win “the staring contest with his own mortality.”
Some years ago, discussing his fiction with a reporter, Forrest summarized his philosophy.
“Go for broke,” he said.
Asked recently if he still felt that way, he paused for some time, a jazz recording playing in the background.
“More than ever, I believe that to be true,” he said. “I am a fighter. To write you have to have an enormous amount of ego, but you also have to be able to withstand the cruel blows this world can throw at you.”
