Hilton Als
Appearances
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
on Pryor, but I didn't know anything about the world of show business, you know, in California at that particular time and the years before. So I got to meet wonderful, great producers like Marvin Wirth, and I learned a lot about the emotional ramifications and political ramifications of being a black star in the 70s and 80s.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
how alone he was and how at certain times he had exploited his own talent to maintain star status or whatever. But ultimately, he always came back home to the truth. And he always came back home to the beauty, really, and the undeniable kind of purity of being a truth teller.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
He was ill, but again, it was sort of like he was famous, right? I was always trying to find ways Tanya to... take fame apart, let's put it that way. And one way that I could take the fame apart was to say, Richard has spoken quite a bit about his life. Let's hear others speak about Richard's life, including myself. If I needed to speak to Pryor, there was his work.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
You know, there were his stand-up routines. There were scripts he had written. There were any number of artifacts he had left behind when he was functioning and speaking. So I didn't want Richard Pryor interfering with my writing. I wanted Richard Pryor to exist through me, through my writing. I mean, I call myself a Stanislavski writer because I...
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
in order to write about a person, I feel that I have to become them to understand their voice and their rhythms and their interiority. Once that experience is over, I have to not be friends with the subject.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
That's a very good way of putting it, yes. You have to fall in love. You have to be interested because you're spending a lot of time and many months with someone generally. And then you have to walk away as if you don't know them. Flaubert, I think it was, who said that before you begin to write, you have to dry your tears and silence your laughter. And you do.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
You have to kind of walk away from the experience with that feeling of support for the project, but not individual responsibility for the subject.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
I think in this moment we have very few artists who are willing to go to the mat and to express interiority. We have a lot of wonderful actors out there, but very few of them are willing to show us themselves, the truth of that life that goes into creativity. There are very few people who are willing to risk self-exposure
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
They can play a character, but the self-exposure that goes into making acting art is not on as much as it should be. And I think that one of the reasons I wanted to write about Richard's only directorial effort, JoJo Dancer, for the Criterion Collection was to remind people of what it takes to make work. And I'm not talking about simply entertainment. I'm talking about work.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
what it takes to bare your soul in order to have the resonance of a Richard Pryor or the resonance of a Montgomery Clift or the resonance of a Candy Alexander. You know, these are great performers who have given everything to not the performance but to inhabiting and being.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
To know yourself is the first step really in entering some, I'm talking about nonfiction journalistic writing, that you're walking into a place knowing enough about yourself to go back to your original question, to be silent and to absorb what this human being is saying about what they've gone through, the life that they've experienced. how much and how little love they've had in the world.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Or don't want to agree on a shared reality, right? I think you're being kind. Tanya, it's just a very emotionally and spiritually upsetting time because language is being used to not even wound but to annihilate people. I've been thinking about this a lot too, Tanya. I'm with you on this. And I think that the thing is –
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
So the experience of Prince, writing about Prince, for instance, I entered his dressing room, and we started chatting. And I didn't know that he had other journalists lined up to talk to. And then he asked me to come back. And then It was kind of—he was trying to connect with me. Now, this would not have happened if I had come in there, barreled in there with 20 questions.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Well, can you say, blah, blah, blah, when you did this? I just sat down, and I listened, and I watched. And the big trick— and it wasn't a trick at all, was to be silent until he wanted to engage. So I was silent when other musicians came in to, you know, there was a wonderful moment with Maceo, wanted to play something for him, and it was a lot of activity. He's the director, right?
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
He's the star. So he has to take care of a lot of things before a show. And I was able to sit in silence. And he heard the silence. And in hearing the silence, he was able to speak to me.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
But I did not know how much blackmail approval meant to him. That when Maceo walked into the room or Larry Graham walked into the room, he was like a kid.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Well, Tanya, you're so sweet. It would be immodest to say, but yes. I felt that in retrospect. I didn't know what the feeling was at first. Because he offered me some water. He didn't look at me. He did some things in the room. And in allowing him to just walk around the space and do what he needed to do, that he started to look at me. And then when Maceo came in, I saw him light up.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
And then when Larry Graham later was there, I saw him light up. And then I understood that I had stayed there. And been allowed to stay. And it was very interesting. I had left the backstage area. And I was leaving the show. And this woman was running after me saying, Mr. and Mr. She couldn't remember my name. And I turned. And she worked for Prince. And she said, oh, I'm so glad I found you.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Prince would have killed me if I didn't find you. And then I remembered. How he had been with Maceo.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Oh, it was in St. Louis, I believe. And he was backstage and he was getting his makeup redone. And when I put my head in the room, he said, hey, would you like to join us for. And it was Larry Graham and his wife and Prince. And they were it was a Jehovah's Witness meeting that they were having. And then we got in the bus and we went to the bar where there was an after party. And I was amazed.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
And then he wanted me to work with him on a book, his memoir. And that I couldn't do because I was really commissioned to write an article about Prince. I wasn't assigned to write a book. And I wouldn't have been able to keep my job. and write a book. Do you see what I mean?
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Meaning that he was asking me to work with him, which meant that I couldn't write the essay because it would be then to a conflict of interest. And so I chose to do my job. And it was also a personal choice. I knew how powerful he was. And I was afraid, to some degree, that I wouldn't get out of Minneapolis. I wanted to be a writer. I didn't want to work for Prince.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
I wanted to spend time with him and watch all of that stuff, but I didn't want to work for him.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Well, I wanted her to have more... of everything for herself. I think she was a brilliant mother. And that job means that you take a backseat to your children, right? But I think also I wanted her to have the experience of, you know, making art and travel and all those things. I don't think you can love anybody really without wanting them to have more of what they should have.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
happening is that the sort of collective reality has been mangled to such a degree that the destroyers of language don't understand the ramifications. They understand it in terms of winning, right? But they don't understand the emotional and spiritual ramifications of lying.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
And I just wanted her to have more of what she should have had.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Her family was from Barbados. So she's first generation.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Yeah. Yes, she did. Isn't it so wild to think about how brutal and brutalizing this country is toward poor people, women, women of color? All of those factors contribute to such early deaths. It's really profound. It's her and James Baldwin at 64 and Zora Neale Hurston at 60-whatever and... We lose Richard Wright at 51. We lose so many people.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
We lose their voices because of the ways in which the pressure and the schism of being a black American has such a huge effect on the body. And it's something that I want to write more about, actually.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Well, I used to do this thing, Tanya, when I was little, like I would read about someone and I would want to dress like them. So Horace Greeley I loved and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. And my mother, on Sundays, I would read aloud at the table to her. And she never criticized or batted an eye. She just listened. And that face is something that I carry in my heart as a teacher.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
That one of the more extraordinary things that we can do in this world is to listen to another human being. I don't think that there's any... greater respect, and that includes listening to the silence when they need it. The thing that we can offer is the respect of hearing what another person has to say. And so my work as a professor is listening to the ways in which we live together.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
What is this experience like for you? And that's really what you're teaching, quote unquote, is how do I sit in a room with other people and hear them? So that's one of her profound gifts. Another profound gift is to to imagine this person's life, you know, what's happening to them, et cetera, but also imagine their possibility. Imagine the ways in which they will grow and flourish if you listen.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
So she made me a constructive listener. And in constructive listening, that means, you know, if Tanya expressed an interest in art in this particular show, oh, I'm going to send Tanya a book about ex-artists. That's constructive listening, is that you order the book or you go to the bookstore or you offer to be a companion in a museum or whatever to have these experiences.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
where a person feels, oh, wow, actually resonates what I'm saying, that my dreams can be made manifest in the company of this person who heard what I said.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
If you lie to me and I'm a trusting person, and if you're lying to me and I'm trusting the lies, imagine what people who really believe in these people feel.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Oh, wow, that's a really great question. I didn't read my father as a protector. I read him as a threat. And when you read your father as a threat and not a protector, you're very suspicious of power. You're suspicious of the ways in which power is being used, wielded, etc. I didn't feel that because he was my father...
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
that he had a de facto authority in the way that hold up the father as the authoritarian in the family. It made me question, because of his handling of the men and me and my brother, it made me question what gave him the right to treat us in the particular way. If he was exercising or felt he had the right to do something, I would question it.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
and I resented having to accept it because he was my father. I would accept it 20,000 times more readily from my mother because she was... involved with me. She didn't perceive me as a threat. In fact, she was very protective of us. But my father, in perceiving us as a threat, didn't allow himself to love us and to cherish us as well as he should have. He couldn't do it.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
So in that kind of emotional... Chaos, what I took away from it was, oh, because he's my father doesn't mean he's an authority, and I'm also questioning male authority. Because someone is the father doesn't necessarily mean to me that they're the authority on the family or whatever. When I see a father who is caretaking and protective of a child...
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
then I believe them, and I don't really question them. But when I see that they're just using the role of the authoritarian figure, then I don't like being around that.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
It's changing, though. It's changing. I'm becoming much more open to men. What has changed in you? Yeah, exactly. I think an acceptance of women. The father I had and that that's what he did and that's what happened. And I can't change it. But I can work with it better now than I used to be able to.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
So because of my mother's being so central to me and my sister's, et cetera, you know, I was always drawn to women not as an antidote but as a kind of higher consciousness to maleness. Yes. Thank you.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
That's a great question. I've been thinking about this quite a bit in terms of what I've been writing recently. I've certain aspects of the friendship, I talk about silence and how part of what was so gorgeous about this relationship was that we didn't have to speak to each other, that we saw in the other's eyes what was happening. That's a degree of intimacy that is very rare.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
And I'm very interested in how to articulate that rarity I don't want to disturb it with words. I want to describe. I want to be able to articulate what this feeling is. And so working with silence for those months during the show and since then, I've understood that Marianne Moore, what she said about the deepest feeling showing itself in silence, not in silence but restraint. How do we say...
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
I love you with a glance. All of those questions to me are significant questions to ask the self constantly because we live in a world where we don't actually have that much silence left.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Well, I think the sheer fact of writing, you can't be with other people, yes? And you can't really sort of be... in a room where there's noise or people chatting or talking. I think that one of the things that I try to do very much is to wake up as early as I can to hear what they used to call morning song, birds or weather, to hear something that is not based on human activity.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
but the activity of the natural world. That really helps me to absorb silence, to live more present, I think, than chatter allows. Chatter, talk, all of that stuff is fairly distracting from this idea that I'm trying to tease out in my writing, which is the value of silence.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Oh, that's a great question. I am... I have a wonderful editor at The New Yorker, Deborah Treisman, and she wrote me an email. We were just chatting and she said something in an email that was so profound. She said that there is little distance between you and what's on the page. And I took that as the greatest compliment ever. It is.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
I think what she meant was that you're telling the emotional truth as much as you can, always. And I think I was so knocked out by the comment because the effort of writing... The effort of curation is not an effort. It's a joy because it's about self-expression.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
And I don't know who I would be if I wasn't given the opportunity to express intellectually, emotionally, spiritually those aspects of myself that I feel should live outside of myself. And so as a kid, I was very fortunate in that I had a great mother who prized art making, who prized self-expression. And when I started writing, I was very, very young.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
I was eight, yes. I would give her what I was writing, and she would write her comments about on the story, whatever it was and leave it for me on the table. She was your first editor. She was my first great editor. And that gave me the license to express, to know that words mattered and that they had an effect on a reader. They had an effect on my mother.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
And by giving me that permission, my mother also gave me permission to really think because you can't write without thinking. And in thinking, I began then to look at the world. So that's my value as a human is this gift that my mother gave me, which is self-expression having great meaning for people, self-expression having a way of creating a kind of adhesion in a fractured world.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Actually, you know, it's funny. I was thinking about this recently. I was talking to my class about this because I was showing them some Dion Arbus photographs. And they're largely unknown people. And she would say that she didn't like photographing the famous because generally they had a set face. They knew how to use the camera, work with the camera.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Yeah, she was looking for a greater degree of vulnerability. A lot of the people that you've mentioned, some of them were dead, some of them were not what people call relevant. I was interested in most of those people because they had a history, but their history had been obscured in a funny way by their fame. And I wanted to go backwards.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
And I wanted to excavate who they were from the fame, if that makes any sense. I wanted to save them from their public face. And I wanted to see their private face. So when I wrote about Missy Elliott, she wasn't famous. Then many, many people I wrote about at the beginning of their career because... I was interested in their evolution. I wasn't interested in their fame.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Thank you, Tonya. The subject of blackness has taken a strange and unsatisfying journey through American thought. First, because blackness has always had to explain itself to a largely white audience in order to be heard. and second, because it has generally been assumed to have only one story to tell, a story of oppression that plays on liberal guilt.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
The writers behind the collective modern urtexts of blackness, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, all performed some variation on the theme, angry but distanced, their rage blanketed by charm, they lived and wrote to be liked. Ultimately, whether they wanted to or not, they in some way embodied the readers who appreciated them most, white liberals.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Richard Pryor was the first Black American spoken word artist to avoid this. Although he reprised the history of Black American comedy, picking what he wanted from the work of great storytellers like Burt Williams, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, Nipsey Rutzell, LaWanda Page, and Flip Wilson, he also pushed everything one step further.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Instead of adapting to the white perspective, he forced white audiences to follow him into his own experience. Pryor didn't manipulate his audience's white guilt or their black moral outrage. If he played the race card, it was only to show how funny he looked when he tried to shuffle the deck.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
And as he made blackness an acknowledged part of the American atmosphere, he also brought the issue of interracial love into the country's discourse. In a culture whose successful male Negro authors wrote about interracial sex with a combination of reverence and disgust,
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Breyer's gleeful f*** it attitude had an effect on the general population which Wright's Native Sons or Baldwin's Another Country had not had. His best work showed us that black men like him and the white women they loved were united in their disenfranchisement. In his life and on stage, he performed the great, largely unspoken story of America.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
Well, I'm going to go back a little bit, Tanya, and tell you how the project came about. This is 1998 or so. And I went to David Remnick, who is the editor of The New Yorker, and said I wanted to write about Richard Pryor, but I didn't want to interview him. He was... alive still. He had multiple sclerosis and he was living with his wife, Jennifer.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
And I said, I want to write a profile about someone who was not in the profile speaking to me. I want to create this person out of people who had experience with him or so on. And David agreed. So I began really with what you see in the piece, which is about Duke and Opal, which is a brilliant television piece written by Jane Wagner, starring her wife, Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
And that's the first piece. time that I ever saw miscegenation on screen, as it were, not as a taboo, but as a human experience. And so that's how it began. I began by interviewing Lily and Jane, who are wonderful women. And I took it from there. I would just, you know, they recommended I speak to ex-person.
Fresh Air
Writer, Critic & Curator Hilton Als Looks For The Silences
A producer who had worked with Lily, who had worked with Pryor, suggested I speak to the director of one of the films. It was a great experience for me because I just, it's the kind of thing that I love to do in reporting, which is to not know anything and everything at the same time. So of course I'd read everything