Richard Pryor: A fiction

Richard PryorA fiction Hilton Als (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Richard Pryor, pictured here in 1973, and the reporter met only once: on the page. [End Page 6] As it happens, richard pryor and the reporter met only once: on the page. When, in the spring of 1998, the reporter began collecting information about the comedian for his article—which ran in a national magazine the following winter—by conducting various interviews, listening to Pryor's old routines on audiotape or CD, scanning critical studies and biographies for details about the star's personal life and business dealings, and so on, it gradually became clear to him that if the finished piece was to reflect anything of the numerous turns Richard Pryor's mind had taken over the course of his life and career, the reporter's writing would have to be as nonlinear as one of Pryor's better monologues: a joke with no end, with a number of punch lines, and not a little political content. [End Page 7] But that piece was not to be. The reporter was lousy with responsibility. He reasoned that since he had pitched one assignment—to write a credible portrait of the by then almost entirely silent, reclusive artist—he could not hand in something else. And yet, as the reporter gathered more and more facts about Richard Pryor, they seemed to add up to less and less on the page. For after many years of reporting what this or that maker of modern culture—such as it was—had done and how they had done it, the reporter felt he could no longer do this: arrange quotes in a manner meant to satisfy a magazine or newspaper's idea of the truth, which he had always considered specious anyway. Nor did the reporter feel he could continue doing this: interviewing makers of modern culture—such as they were—as if he cared, or as if they made a difference to his way of thinking. At one point, the reporter had cared. Years passed, and then he did not. In between, the reporter lost sight of the kind of writing he wanted to accomplish when he first started out: fact that had the penumbra of fiction. But there was no home for such writing once the reporter started publishing in the early nineteen-nineties. Even the "alternative" newspapers and magazines he wrote for wanted fact upon fact, as if no one believed the world they lived in. Several years before meeting Richard Pryor on the page, the reporter had tried—as an alternative to journalism—to write a novel. But he found the form as limiting as fact: there was no truth in it. It had always been that way: when the reporter read fiction, he wanted the novel under review to include the truth of the world. And when he read fact, he wished the writer had imbued it with something of the truth of their imagination. What the reporter did not know how to do: create an admixture of fact and fiction in an extended work that defied both genres. Then he began to think about Richard Pryor, who, in his work, had done nothing but. The reporter knew of no greater modern practitioner or melder of journalistic ethos and the morality inherent in fiction than Richard Pryor. The comedian's work and life were rife with such issues. "Tell me the truth so I can look at these lies," one made-up [End Page 8] Richard Pryor character said to another through the real Richard Pryor, once. In monologue after monologue, using a variety of different-sounding voices, Richard Pryor portrayed characters that represented the truth of the world, or the truth of the world as his characters saw it. He was everything: a junkie talking to a straight black man who will not help him. A white woman talking to her black lover. His heart talking to himself. His own Daddy talking to a younger and no less sad and horny Richard Pryor. A German shepherd. He had also played a monkey, the monkey's dick, and a white movie executive. Once he...