Necessary Distance
Essays and Criticism
Reviews

MAJOR'S LEAGUE BY GREG TATE
An Interview With a Literary Innovator

Here is such a thing as an exemplary literary life. Clarence Major, groundbreaking novelist, poet, professor, and peripatetic, has already lived it to workmanlike excess. Among his more than 20 books are nine novels, nine volumes of poetry, two fiction anthologies, and a dictionary of African American slang. His novels, particularly All-Night Visitors, No, Reflex and Bone Structure, Emergency Exit, and My Amputations, have made him the premier purveyor of experimental writing in the African American novelists camp, mostly because he plays fast and loose with the verities of the trade‹memory, identity, lush language, acidic wit, conversational non sequiturs‹like ain't nobody's biz if he do. Thulani Davis, Jessica Hagedorn, and Ntozake Shange would all cop to taking cops; Ishmael Reed just might be his only long-running peer.

A painter as well as a National Book Award nominated poet, Major brings his plasticity and pictorial sensitivity into his narratives. In Reflex, where sex, revolution, and pop culture converse and convulse in a surreal post-'70s haze, he makes grand, sometimes grotesque imagistic leaps, fracturing the identity of his characters. In No, Major adroitly collapses sexual awakening and cosmological consciousness in the psyche of a young boy growing up in the Crayola-tinged South. In My Amputations, he turns the paranoid spy thriller on its head.

His new book, Necessary Distance: Essays and Criticism (Coffee House Press, 239 pp., $15.95 paper), is a collection of essays, criticism, and lectures, less mind-bending than his fiction, but valuable for the insights it provides into his working-class Chicago upbringing and his love affair with the worlds of ideas and painting. The anecdotes drawn from his stumbling, naive steps toward literary community and comprehension are acutely moving. The reviews portion of the collection offers appreciations of writers as diverse as Donald Barthelme, Claude McKay, Carlos Fuentes, Joyce Carol Oates, and John O'Hara. Criticism is not among Major's strongest suits, but his travel writing on trips to Paris and Yugoslavia gives him ample room to put his astute novelist's powers of observation to winsome use.

When I spoke with Major by phone he sounded as warm and encouraging as he had a quarter century ago when I attended his creative writing class at Howard University. Now a professor of English at the University of California at Davis, Major offers that African American fiction has a strong experimental bent which precedes him by several decades.

"You can go back to people like Charles Chestnutt and Jean Toomer and find things that are formally adventurous," he bantered from his house on a quiet Sunday. "LeRoi Jones‹not Amiri Baraka‹was doing groundbreaking things with his first novel. There are also the plays of Adrienne Kennedy to consider. Even Ellison, if you think about the moment when Invisible Man appeared, that really is a very experimental novel and I think he thought of it that way. Paule Marshall's first collection of short stories in the '50s was very experimental too. Actually, the word I'd prefer to use would be 'innovative' rather than 'experimental.' Experimental somehow sounds like it's unfinished."

Self-interrogation is the über-theme of the African American novel, just as self-invention is in its white American counterpart. Major's prose and poetry‹particularly My Amputation and Surfaces and Masks‹revel in the expansion of self possible for black Americans once they leave the country. In "A Paris Fantasy Transformed," one of the new collection's deft, detailed autobiographical essays, Major writes "paradoxically, Paris gave me my national identity, although I hadn't gone looking for that part of myself."

He explained, "I first came across that thought in Jimmy Baldwin long before I went to Paris, but I didn't know what it meant on a gut level until I was there and saw how I was received and perceived by the French."

In the essay, Major notes that though there was undeniably racism in Paris it was not directed at him but Algerians. "As soon as the French discovered I was not an African or Arab from one of their former colonies, I was treated well. This was an ironic and ambiguous position to be in. All my life, in my own country, I had seen Americans treat Africans and Arabs‹people they had no historical ties to‹with the same kind of dubious respect. The point is, in Paris‹as pathetic as it sounds‹I felt American for the first time."

Like their author, Major's characters often take the road less traveled into the black subconscious. Major's tendency to subject black figures to surrealist treatment was not always by design.

"In my own writing the emphasis on self consciousness was a gradual thing that I learned by writing my first novels. The notion that identity is a fluid thing is, I think, the great American theme. It started in the 19th century with people like Melville. You can even see that in American writers who may not seem so conscious of it, like Hemingway. Toni Morrison looked at that very closely in Playing in the Dark."

Carnal knowledge spills from every other page of Major's early work, which still reads as bolder and more unblinking than anything of recent vintage by African Americans. Major's recombinations of metaphysics and sex were interpreted as bearing a strong Henry Miller influence when they were first published. He doesn't contradict this view, but advises we recognize which Miller was influential on him. "I didn't read his erotic novels until much later because they weren't available when I was coming up. The books by Miller that I read were the nonfiction ones like The Cosmological Eye, Colossus of Maroussi, and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Miller was a writer who was not a part of the establishment and really talked about America as it was without, as Bob Dylan would say, pussyfooting around. He was an outsider taking a hard look at America without being mean spirited."

Because he's a writer whose work seems to have found as much of an embrace outside of the African American community of readers as within, Major seemed a good person to ask whether writing by African Americans was still perceived as black first and writing second.

"That whole focus on sociology and pathology I thought was finished. That was certainly something Jimmy Baldwin was trying to put to rest in the '50s with his essay 'Everybody's Protest Novel.' There are all kinds of books that show that the African American experience is not monolithic‹the schlocky romance stuff and the detective novels are not all bad. What has gone on in the last 20 years is far more astonishing, rich, and diverse than anything that happened in the Harlem Renaissance. I'm not knocking it, but it doesn't compare at all in terms of subject matter, voice, and style." To underscore this, we need only refer to the range reflected by such luminaries as Thulani Davis, Danzy Senna, Colson Whitehead, Walter Mosley, Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones, Jeffery Renard Allen, Samuel Delany, Suzan-Lori Parks, August Wilson, Edwidge Danticat, Omar Tyree, and E. Lynn Harris.

Reflex and Bone Structure is my favorite among Major's novels for its adroit blend of hard-boiled sentences and schizophrenic, artsy-militant characters who are like me and my peeps. "I was living in New York when I wrote that book and I consider it to have a New York nervous system," Major said of its genesis. "I would get up every morning and try to write these little episodes, and things that were going on out the window or the radio all fed into the nervous system of that novel. But I want you to know that I never reread any of my novels and I'm leery of looking back on something I was doing then and imposing on it something that isn't true. I'm not quite sure I'm telling you the truth, I just want you to know."

Never expect a straight answer from a dealer in metafiction. Don't sleep on this Major dude either, no matter how much you may have to spend online to acquire the out-of-print No, Emergency Exit, and My Amputations.

Greg Tate is editing the anthology Everything but the Burden: Or How Black Folk Became Fetish Objects and completing Midnight Lightning: Race, Sex, Technology and Jimi Hendrix.

Also Available:
Surfaces and Masks