As a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, Hilton Als's essays and profiles of figures like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Richard Pryor have redefined cultural criticism, blending autobiography with literary and social commentary. Als is also a curator. His latest gallery exhibition is The Writing's on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts, at the Hill Art Foundation in New York. The exhibit brings together the works of 32 artists across a range of media to examine how artists embrace silence. The show asked a powerful question: What do words — and their absence — look like? The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer spoke with Tonya Mosley. Also, Ken Tucker reviews new music from Lucy Dacus and Jeffrey Lewis.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is Hilton Als and what contributions has he made to cultural criticism?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And my guest today, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als, has spent decades examining how we create meaning through words, images, and the spaces in between.
As a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, his essays and profiles on figures like Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Richard Pryor have redefined cultural criticism, blending autobiography with literary and social commentary. In addition to being a writer, Al's is also a curator.
Chapter 2: What is 'The Writing's on the Wall' exhibition about?
Recently, he explored language in a new gallery exhibition, The Writings on the Wall, Language and Silence in the Visual Arts, at the Hill Art Foundation in New York. The exhibit brings together the works of 32 artists across a range of media to examine how artists embrace silence. The show asks a powerful question. What do words in their absence look like?
Hilton Owls has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for over 30 years. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his work as a theater critic, and he's the author of several books, including The Women, White Girls, and My Pinup, a genre-bending memoir essay that examines the music, persona, and cultural impact of Prince.
He's curated several art installations, including a show on the late Joan Didion. Hilton Owls, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor.
Your exhibit made me think about something that writer Samuel Delaney said.
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Chapter 3: How does Hilton Als perceive the role of silence in art and writing?
Wonderful writer.
Yes, and I've been thinking about this for the last few weeks, honestly. But he has this theory that imagination is the only shared reality and that creativity is how we manifest that shared reality. And I couldn't help but think about the limitations of language at this particular time when we can't even seem to agree on a shared reality. And I was just wondering, is that something?
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 –
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.
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.
How does silence, in particular, the things that are unsaid, unspoken, but are very important to the narrative, how does that show up in your writing?
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.
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Chapter 4: What is Hilton Als's daily routine for cultivating silence and creativity?
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...
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.
Is there silence in your life? I mean, I'm thinking about what it takes for you to come to these ideas. What is your day-to-day like? Do you carve out time for silence?
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.
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.
One of the other topics that you write about in your essay that accompanies this particular exhibit is this idea of connoisseurship. Who gets to be an expert in evaluating what's actually beautiful, what is good? And I was thinking about how... You kind of have ultimate power within the spaces you occupy.
Having the powers of critique and curation, I mean, I think one of my producers said, like, it's almost like the opposite of imposter syndrome. Did you always possess that sense of taste, of knowing what is good?
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.
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Chapter 5: How does Hilton Als approach the concept of taste and connoisseurship?
I mean, say more on what she meant by that.
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.
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.
Eight years old?
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.
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.
This is so fascinating to me because your writing is so expansive. You surprise me. You surprise the reader, not really with the choices on who you spend time on and write about, but how you write about them. People like Joan Didion, Eminem, Prince. I think I heard you say that you primarily are interested in subjects that don't, quote, have their face yet. What do you mean by that?
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.
They knew their angles.
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Chapter 6: Why does Hilton Als focus on subjects without 'a public face'?
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.
One person that you've written quite extensively about is Richard Pryor. Uh-huh. I'm fascinated that you write about him not because, I mean, it's obvious that he was one of the most talented comedians of our time, but you write about him in such an expansive way through time. I mean, you've gone back to him many, many times.
I'd like for you to read an excerpt from your collection of essays that was also included in your collection of essays, White Girls, which came out in 2013. And in this excerpt, it's actually called A Prior Love.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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Chapter 7: What makes Richard Pryor a unique subject for Hilton Als?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Can you clarify why you didn't want to talk with Pryor? Was it because he was so sick at that time?
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.
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Chapter 8: How does Hilton Als approach writing about famous figures like Richard Pryor?
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...
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.
You have to fall in love with them. At first. But then you have to interrogate that love.
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.
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.
Our guest today is Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
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In reading your writing about Richard Pryor, I mean, it's definitely like you are really trying to get at the core of why he was able to do what he did, be a truth teller. But are there elements of Pryor that you're still working out through your writing? I saw you just wrote a piece about his movie Jojo Dancer from the 80s just a few months ago. Yes.
And of course, I love reading about it, but I also think like, what is it about this moment that you feel it's important to work these elements of Richard Pryor out in your writing? Yeah.
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