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Among the many brilliant black essayists now at work, Stanley Crouch is one of the most unpredictable, one of the most reliably outspoken, and one of the most wide-ranging. Crouch's third collection of essays, Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives, 1995-1997 (Pantheon Books, 321 pp.; $25), is characteristically eclectic, encompassing subjects as various as Duke Ellington (Crouch commands an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz), William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Richard Wright, John Ford, World War II, the death of Ron Brown, the O. J. Simpson trial, and "Our American Condition." At a time when many reports from black Americans are grim indeed, Crouch holds fast to his "tragic optimism." He ends the introduction to this new collection with a single line, all caps: "VICTORY IS ASSURED."
Michael Cromartie met with Crouch in Washington, D.C., where he was in the midst of a book tour. Interviewing this man is rather like attempting conversation with a freight train. Questions are merely points of departure for dazzling improvisations, uncontainable in these pages. To get the full flavor of Stanley Crouch, hasten to your favorite bookstore or dial up your Internet provider.
The New Yorker magazine describes you as being "an independent thinker unconstrained by any affiliation with any camp, creed, or organization." To what would you attribute this independent streak?
I would attribute it to the fact that I want to be able to use anything of value from whomever or wherever it comes. I don't care whether it's from a religious person or from a nonbeliever, whether it's from someone on the Left or somebody on the Right, someone in the middle or someone who swings back and forth. I don't particularly care, because I think that a country as complex as ours with a population of more than 250 million cannot be concerned with category at the expense of the quality of the idea. I'm interested in getting the best that we can get.
What has it been like to be an independent thinker? I guess you get shot at from both sides, don't you?
I'm a battler. When people ask me how I got like this, I can say, "Well I bought High Noon." I was about seven when it came out, and it had a very deep impact on me, that all these nice people are not going to step up and do what they should do. You could, therefore, run. Your friends are telling you to run, your wife is telling you to run. Or you could stand up and fight.
Now, there's no guarantee that it's going to come out like High Noon. You may go down in the dust. But I would rather go down in the dust and know that I had tried to stand up for something worth fighting for.
We need to recognize our human commonality within the extraordinary variety of America. We need to celebrate the ability of the American people to stand up and reject the worst aspects of the nation's past and the worst aspects of its present. We have done this many times. I'd rather go down fighting for that than run into some huddle of people who share the cowardice that allows evil, totalitarianism, and simplemindedness to hold sway.
What I'm looking for is what I've recently come to call an "unsentimental patriotism." It is a patriotism that recognizes that we've had these grand combinations throughout American history—that people have seen beyond surfaces, beyond religions, beyond political parties, beyond class. Those white people who were rejecting the sale of slaves at ports in the seventeenth century had no idea that there would someday be the most cataclysmic war fought on American soil over that issue. But they did know that slavery was wrong, and they acted on that conviction.
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