From pre-Civil War Georgia to the Draft Riots of New York, Jeffrey Reynard Allen offered a fascinating glimpse of his current novel-in-progress during his Wednesday evening Russell House reading. Allen also spoke candidly of the creative possibilities within historical fiction, as well as ways to overcome the inevitable challenges caused by a lack of source material.
A willingness to play with time schemes was also present in Allen’s as yet unreleased and unfinished novel, “Song of the Shank,” from which he read four selections. No selections were read from “Rails under My Back,” Allen’s previous novel, which followed five generations of two African American families throughout the 20th century, while jumping backwards and forwards in time.
“His writing is about the sensation of being in constant motion, back and forth from past and present,” said Matthew Sharpe, English professor. “It turns your brain into a big waiting area for characters to arrive and then leave, to come and go. Even if in any given scene two characters are sitting still, they are still traveling through time via storytelling.”
The story told in Allen’s current work proved that truth is indeed stranger sometimes than fiction. The novel’s protagonist, “Blind Tom” Grey Wiggins, was a blind autistic slave who was also a genius at the piano, often credited as being the highest paid pianist in the 19th century. One of the few black classical musicians of the time, he could count the likes of Mark Twain, James Buchanan, Willa Cather, and Ulysses S. Grant as among his admiring fans.
“What struck me when I first ran across this guy were descriptions of his concerts,” Allen said of Wiggins. “He’d do bits of classical repertoire, then popular songs, then he’d invite people from the audience to come on up and play original compositions, which he would then play back with variations. Sometimes he would play three songs at once, in three different keys.”
Allen admitted that there was an inherent challenge in rendering music into words, let alone capturing the rich dynamic between listener and performer during concerts.
“I was really thinking this guy was like a 19th century Jimi Hendrix,” Allen said. “I try to write about the music by showing how the listeners project their own motives and desires onto Tom.”
The musicality of Allen’s lyrical prose demonstrated why, along with an addiction to large casts of characters, his work is often called Faulknerian. All of the selections chosen for the reading represented the subjective perspective of an important character from Blind Tom’s life. The selections also mirrored key events in American history.
The gritty prologue, told from the perspective of the protagonist’s father, addressed the fall-out from the Civil War with descriptions of collective grave digging. A subsequent passage evoked a pre-war Georgia plantation from the mother’s point of view. Finally, the reading concluded with a passage depicting the bloodiness of the New York Draft riots, as observed by the wife of Blind Tom’s manager.
It was this final scene that played mostly loosely with historical facts; Allen admitted that there was not much evidence that Tom had witnessed the riots, let alone lived in New York at the beginning of his career. The lack of source material had truly presented a challenge far beyond the description of concert scenes.
“He never told his own story, which makes it difficult to construct a character when you don’t see his point of view of himself,” Allen said. “But as a novelist, it presents an interesting situation because you get to use your imagination.”
Allen listed his source material as primarily neurological medical texts discussing Blind Tom’s autism, as well as original concert reviews by Mark Twain and others. Novels from the 19th century provided a resource for the book’s dialogue, although Allen admitted he added more cursing to his own work. He also revealed the original source for his idea, proving that even the germs for historical novels are found in the most unexpected ways.
“I first read about Blind Tom in an Oliver Sacks book, where he talks about Blind Tom for four to five pages at the beginning of a chapter, as an example of a classic savant,” Allen said. “In a way, it was a story that found me. I wasn’t looking for it. I kind of wish it hadn’t, for all the trouble it’s caused me. But I guess that’s the way novels are.”
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