John Edgar Wideman is a man who disdains labels, who refuses to allow either his life or art to be boxed in or dismissed by descriptive terms like “black writer.” The problem, he says, “is that it can be a kind of back-handed compliment. Are you being ghettoized at the same time as you are being praised?”

His writing, too, refuses to be pigeonholed. He has written one work of nonfiction, Brothers and Keepers, which was nominated for the National Book Award; three novels, including the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Sent for You Yesterday; and two collections of stories. In addition, he is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he has taught for the past three years.

But Wideman the writer/professor is inextricable from Wideman the man dogged by tragic past, which is ever present in his work. In Brothers and Keepers, Hiding Place and Damballah especially, he has tried to better understand the twists of fate that have made him what he is, while his brother, Robby, is serving a lifetime prison sentence.

On this beautiful fall afternoon, we have come to Wideman's newly built house on the outskirts of Amherst not to dwell on the “time capsules of his past” but to speak of his life as a writer and the publication of his book Fever [Fever: Twelve Stories] (Holt), a breathtaking collection of 12 stories written primarily over the past few years.

A tall, handsome man in his late 40s, Wideman retains the physique of the basketball star he once was. (During his undergraduate days at the University of Pennsylvania, he not only played all-Ivy basketball but also ran track.) The basketball hoop is still very much with him; materially, at the edge of the driveway of his home in western Massachusetts; metaphysically, in his stories, which frequently feature a hoop and the male camaraderie associated with team sports.

We sit in Wideman's book-lined study overlooking the woods as he talks about Fever, which he regards as “his first collection per se.” For him, the earlier Damballah—reissued by Vintage last fall along with the other two volumes in the Homewood trilogy, Sent for You Yesterday and Hiding Place—is closer to a novel with its discernible beginning, middle and end.

“These stories are more miscellaneous,” he explains. “The key story, the pivotal story, is ‘Fever.’ I see the others as refractions of the material gathered there. All the stories are about a kind of illness or trouble in the air. People aren't talking to one another or are having a difficult time talking to one another. There's misunderstanding, not only on an individual level but on a cultural level. These stories are also about ways of combating that malaise through love, through talk, through rituals that families create.”

The malaise of which Wideman speaks cuts backwards and forwards into the past, into the present, because of the very ambiguity of time, of history, of fact. (“I never know if I'm writing fiction or nonfiction,” he remarks several times throughout the interview when speaking of his stories and books.) And that very ambiguity accounts for much of the bite in “Fever,” which serves as a bridge to his forthcoming novel, Philadelphia Fire, due out from Holt in the fall of 1990.

On one hand the plague described in “Fever” is a historical fact of colonial Philadelphia; on the other hand it provides a powerful fictional prelude to the MOVE bombing that destroyed an entire city block in 1985.

That the story should float so freely from one period to another is, for Wideman, what makes it work: “It shouldn't be tied to any historical period, because it starts in this very room. I was looking out there, out this window, when I saw the snow, and that's where the story starts.”

It is no coincidence, then, that this and other stories in the collection achieve a certain timelessness. “Stories are a way of keeping people alive,” says the author, “not only the ones who tell the story, but the ones who lived before. You talk about authors being immortal, but there's not only the story, there are the people inside the story who are kept alive.”

Wideman thrives on the potential for experimentation in storytelling. “How does one person tell a story that is quite meaningful to that person but is really someone else's story? What does it mean for people to carry around stories in their heads, little time capsules from the past? Yet if I'm telling it to you, it's present.”

Elsewhere, in Brothers and Keepers, he writes about the pointlessness of telling stories in strict chronological sequence, as “one thing happening first and opening the way for another and another. … You never know exactly when something begins. The more you delve and backtrack and think, the clearer it becomes that nothing has a discrete, independent history; people and events take shape not in orderly, chronological sequence but in relation to other forces and events, tangled skeins of necessity and interdependence and chance that after all could have produced only one result: what is.”

As the interview goes on it becomes obvious that time, like race, is one of the many barriers that Wideman seeks to overcome with his art. “Stories break down our ordinary ways of conceptualizing reality. Because when we talk about what's alive and what's dead, what's past and what's future, male/female, all these dichotomies that we need in order to talk, they're not really very accurate or descriptive.

“On one level of language we do that kind of crude conceptualizing, labeling, and it's necessary. But language can break down these categories, free us. So that we suddenly realize that past and future are not different. That living and dead are kind of arbitrary categories.” Switching gears, he adds with a smile, “Why can't a blind man play basketball?” referring to the central image of “Doc's Story,” the first offering in Fever.

With this deceptively simple query, he opens a Pandora's box of questions about some of our most basic assumptions about what people can and cannot be, do or say. Wideman himself has consciously attempted to break stereotypes. “If somebody told me I couldn't do something, that was often a good reason to go ahead and try to do it. And I got satisfaction out of that. On the other hand, as I get older I think I do things less because I'm oriented toward the outside, toward what somebody's thinking, than because I have some inner drive. But it often works out to the same kind of iconoclasm. Because if my goals are unusual and I accomplish them, then they'll be noticeable and will have the same effect as consciously trying to break a mold.”

It's only natural that Wideman challenges the boundaries of writing. In “Fever” the narration passes back and forth from white to black, male to female, young to old. The rhythms beneath the prose also evoke a sense of flexibility, infused with lyrical sounds ranging from gospel singing to Rachmaninoff.

His home is filled with music as well as books. For him, “music breaks down the racial criteria by which we judge so much that goes on in our culture.”

Wideman's prose seems to sing with cadences, too, especially those more typically found in oral storytelling traditions, a fact that he explains by describing his writing process. First come the many hours of thinking. (“I give myself space to imagine. I work really hard to get childlike, to get innocent.”) Next he writes everything out longhand with his trusty Bic pen, then reads it aloud to Judy, his wife of 24 years, who not only types his work (the computer is kept in her study upstairs) but acts as his editor. “There's almost an umbilical relationship between Judy and me. She's always typed what I write and put it in an objective form. I'm very dependent on her willingness to go through that process with me. It's a real luxury to have that kind of closeness.”

But a literary confidante is not his only luxury. Some would say that his career has been charmed. Unlike most would-be authors, he earned the attention of a distinguished editor, Hiram Haydn, before he even penned the first word of his first book. This happened in 1963, when he and another college graduate on the West Coast became the first blacks in 50 years to be awarded Rhodes scholarships. In newspaper interviews, Wideman was asked what he wanted to do with his life and responded: to be a writer.

Haydn's son spotted one of those news stories and said to his father, who was then editor of the American Scholar and an editor at Random House, “‘You always say that you want to help young writers. Why don't you help him?’ So he sent me a letter,” Wideman recalls, “The first time I had 30 pages, I sent something off to him.” From those pages came Wideman's first book, A Glance Away, which was published in 1967, when he was just 26 years old. Hurry Home and The Lynchers followed soon afterward.

Wideman believes that such fortune is unlikely to strike today. “Now it's real tough to get published and to publish well. We're in a superstar syndrome just like in the movies. A book is either a big book or no book at all.”

In Wideman's case it took an eight-year hiatus and the release of Brothers and Keepers (his first book with Holt) for him to achieve the type of media attention that sells books in a big way. Although that book was featured on 60 Minutes, the three novels that he wrote in the early 1980s following Robby's arrest, and which later became the Homewood trilogy, were published to little fanfare. To some extent, the disappointing reception might be attributed, he believes, to the tendency of nonfiction to outsell fiction. More importantly, however, Wideman attempted to put some publishing stereotypes to rest by insisting that Avon issue the three novels as paperback originals.

“I realize that they were set in Homewood [a black ghetto of Pittsburgh, which remains his spiritual home] and that they are about black families—books nobody I knew could afford to buy. So I thought, why not go paperback? Paperback because it's cheaper, and because I had experienced the pointlessness of doing hardback novels without huge advances and just a few small printings in the beginning. Those just disappear.”

Looking back, Wideman acknowledges his naïveté, yet he is also proud that those books were among the first, possibly the first, paperback fiction originals to be reviewed extensively in the New York Times. The author has nothing but praise for his agent, Andrew Wylie, who numbers Beckett and Rushdie among his clients, and who has helped steer Wideman's career over the past 10 years. Wideman considers him an editor in the Maxwell Perkins tradition, and applauds his determination to get “decent money for good writing … not just a polite smile.”

Nonetheless, as a writer, Wideman is not content with what he perceives as business as usual. “Each book is treated as a commodity. This is particularly a problem for minority writers.” He would like to see a new approach to book marketing that would look at who in the black community buys books, rather than ignoring that audience because conventional wisdom dictates that black people don't buy books.

But despite the statistics and the odds against minority writers—or perhaps because of them—Wideman, a man who likes to compete, has managed to make his writing stand out by turning the tragic and joyful sides of life into enduring works of art.