I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.
When you are in your twenties you just think the races are what matter the most. When you are in your forties you really appreciate what you do every day.
My style was established in the Forties and Fifties, then got dragged through the decades and picked up a couple more things on the way.
My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner.
In my grandfather's day, there was a different perspective on war and men that went into war; it was such a patriotic act to fight for your country in the Forties.
It was not until I was in my forties, in the fifth decade of my life, that the sense of place, the spirit of place, became of paramount importance to me. It was then that I began my travels, that I discovered, through photography, the quality of light, and that I gradually became able to paint the mood of place.
My mom got pregnant when she was 15. She dropped out of high school. She died in her forties, but before she died, she went back and finished high school.
And, well of course, Count Basie, and I think all of the black bands of the late thirties and early forties, bands with real players. They had an influence on everybody, not just drummers.
I was adopted without the benefit of papers. They used to hide adoption in the forties; I don't know why. Perhaps it was shameful. I could have been kidnapped - there are all kinds of crazy things that people have done - but I got over dealing with that a long time ago.
When I was in my early forties, I slept with a loaded gun under my bed. I'd become severely depressed in my thirties, and for almost a decade I spiraled down into paranoia, rage, self-loathing, and thoughts of suicide.
