Clarence Major

Major, Clarence (b. 1936), poet, novelist, short fiction writer, visual artist, essayist, lexicographer, editor, and anthologist. Although known best for his metafictional novels, Clarence Major has long demonstrated his versatility in both the artistic forms he uses and the subject matter he selects. He tests boundaries, asserting and enacting the freedom of the artist to explore the full range of human experience. One source of his versatility is his early exposure to both the North and the South. Though born in Atlanta, he moved at the age of ten to Chicago with his mother after his parents were divorced. He maintained his southern connection through summer visits with his relatives. A key Chicago experience for him was exposure to modern art, especially the Impressionists. He studied briefly at the Chicago Art Institute when he was seventeen. Although he decided to focus his artistic efforts primarily on writing, he has made use of his painting and photography in his fiction, especially Reflex and Bone Structure (1975) and Emergency Exit (1979).

Much of his work, especially the fiction, has been experimental in that it has broken down conventional assumptions about character, plot, and narrative voice. The texts tend to be fragmentary rather than unified in structure; likewise, their principal theme is the impossibility of a coherent identity in contemporary society. This pattern holds in the two novels mentioned above, as well as All-Night Visitors (1969), No (1973), My Amputations (1986), and some of the stories in Fun and Games (1988). In these works, he joins Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Ishmael Reed in challenging the view that fiction either reflects or constructs a meaningful reality. Literature is, in effect, a set of verbal tricks and needs its artificiality to be acknowledged.

But like Reed, Major also sees cultural significance in metafictional storytelling. His fragmented characters exist in a world in which they are rootless and often paranoid, in quest of a meaning that forever eludes them. In two novels that are more “realistic,” he examines the same issue. Such Was the Season (1987) uses a southern folklike narrative voice that echoes Ernest J. Gaines's Jane Pittman and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day in its down-home wisdom as well as its position as a moral center by which to judge others. But Major complicates the narrative by having Annie Eliza draw much of her knowledge not from traditional black experience but from television talk shows and soap operas.

Similarly, Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar (1988) tells the experiences of a Zuni woman who has been forced out of the tribe because she has worked as a prostitute and because she questions the traditional ways. She makes her living as an itinerant folksinger whose songs become her means of trying to claim an identity for herself as a Zuni. The novel is narrated by a man who is himself Hopi-Navajo and thus outside of her experience as well as uncertain about his own identity.

The subject matter of Painted Turtle suggests the multicultural nature of Major's work. One of the early influences on his writing was the work of French artists such as Raymond Radiguet and Arthur Rimbaud, and his interest in white European and American literature is reflected in many allusions in both his fiction and poetry. The importance of the Western tradition is clear in a book of poetry, Surfaces and Masks (1988), which is entirely about the experiences of Americans in Venice, with literary references to Disraeli, Dickens, Shelley, and Thomas Mann. His exploration of Native American issues is continued in a collection of poems entitled Some Observations of a Stranger at Zuni in the Latter Part of the Century (1989).

The range of forms and subjects reflects Major's commitment to artistic freedom made explicit in his essays and interviews, many of which are collected in The Dark and Feeling (1974). He insists that it is the quality of the work rather than its ideology that determines its importance. Even in his 1967 manifesto, “Black Criteria,” which calls for greater use of African American materials and a rejection of much of Western tradition, he still concludes that the integrity of the artistic vision is the essential criterion. His work as editor and lexicographer has demonstrated his commitment to language and to literary freedom. His Dictionary of Afro-American Slang (1970), expanded and updated in Juba to Jive (1994), provides a major resource for discussions of African American language use. His two anthologies, The New Black Poetry (1969) and Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories (1993), offer a wide range of literary expression within the African American tradition. He is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

Bibliography

• Black American Literature Forum, special issue, 13 (Summer 1979).
• Larry D. Bradfield, “Beyond Mimetic Exhaustion: The Reflex and Bone Structure Experiment,” in Black American Literature Forum 17 (Fall 1983): 120–123.
• Jerome Klinkowitz, “The Self-Apparent Word: Clarence Major's Innovative Fiction,” in Black American Prose Theory, eds. Joe Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot, 1984, pp. 199–214.
• Keith Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction, 1986.
• Charles Johnson, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970, 1990. African American Review, special issue, 28 (Spring 1994)

Keith E. Byerman

writer; painter; lexicographer

Personal Information

Born December 31, 1936, in Atlanta, GA; son of Clarence (a restaurant manager) and Inez Huff (a store clerk) Major; married Joyce Sparrow, 1958, divorced 1964; remarried.
Education: James Nelson Raymond Fellowship, Art Institute of Chicago, 1953; SUNY at Albany, BS; Union Graduate School, Ohio, PhD, 1978.

Career

Writer; U.S. Air Force, 1955-57; steelworker, Omaha, NE, 1957-58; Coercion Review, editor and publisher, 1958-61; New Lincoln School, New York City, faculty, 1967-68; Macomb Junior High School, New York City, faculty, 1968; Brooklyn College, lecturer, 1969-early 1970s; Sarah Lawrence College, lecturer, 1972-75; Howard University, assistant professor, 1975-76; University of Washington, assistant professor, 1976-77; University of Colorado, associate professor of English, 1977-81, professor, 1981-89; University of California at Davis, 1989--.

Life's Work

In his introduction to the 1994 Clarence Major special issue of African American Review, Bernard Bell described Major as a "poet, novelist, essayist, editor, anthologist, lexicographer, and painter." Bell continued by calling Major "one of our most compelling, challenging, multitalented, and prolific contemporary American artists of African descent." With almost 30 authored and/or edited books to his credit, Major is identified with what Jerome Klinkowitz, in the same issue of African American Review, calls a "disruptively experimental style" of fiction "distinguished by it polemical opposition to the established principles of literary form."

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1936, Major moved to Chicago with his mother and sister after his parents divorced. In his autobiographical sketch titled "Necessary Distance: Afterthoughts on Becoming a Writer," Major wrote of his early awareness of his two "inseparable" artistic impulses: writing and painting. In about the fifth grade, he explained, a classmate gave him a copy of Kay Boyle's translation of Raymond Radiguet's Devil in the Flesh. Major begin to read it because as "adult fiction" it was supposed to have some "good parts," but he described how he quickly discovered that the "good part was the writing itself." More importantly, he discovered that because "writing had a life of its own!" he had fallen in love with the life of writing.

After this discovery, Major began a process of self-education that included reading authors as diverse as Arthur Rimbaud, J. D. Salinger, Richard Wright, e. e. cummings, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Joseph Conrad. Of his early reading experiences, Major said that he "had to go through hundreds [of books] before hitting on the special ones, the ones with the power to shape or reshape perception, to deepen vision, to give me the means to understand myself and other things to drive away fears and doubts." He also explained how he drew from the "texture" and "patterns" of myths and dreams as "model[s] for the imaginative leaps" he desired for his poetry and fiction.

Major's literary creations, however, were as much influenced by the visual arts as they were by literature. In "Necessary Distance," he explained his "first passion was for painted pictures," not books. Major said, "Before my first clear memories, I was drawing and painting, while the writing started at a time within memory." When he was 12 years old, Major began taking art lessons from Gus Nall in Chicago. After winning some prizes for his art, he said that his confidence in self-expression grew from his visual expression and then "carried over into the writing."

Also in the early 1950s, Major began to attend art exhibits at the Art Institute of Chicago and was particularly inspired and "profoundly moved" by the works of Vincent van Gogh. In van Gogh, Major found "an important model" for his "rebellion": van Gogh was "one who broke the rules and transcended." Other artistic "catalysts" for Major were Paul Cezanne, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, and Edward Hopper, although Major pointed out that he was "troubled from the beginning [of his self-education] by the absence of Afro-American painters, novelists, poets." He was around 17, he says, when he discovered "the reason they were absent: The system had hidden them.... [Black artists were] made officially nonexistent."

In 1954 Major published his first work, a 12-page pamphlet of poetry called The Fires That Burn in Heaven. Major later described this pamphlet as containing "very, very bad poetry." During his two years in the U.S. Air Force, 1955 to 1957, Major became more confident as a writer as he continued to write poetry and short fiction. When he was discharged from the Air Force, Major returned to Chicago after a brief stay in Omaha, Nebraska. In 1958 he edited and published the Coercion Review and began to be in contact with such noted poets as William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Creeley. In 1964 he divorced his first wife and returned to Omaha. The following year Coercion Press published several hundred mimeographed editions of Love Poems of a Black Man and in 1966, Human Juices.

Also in 1966 Major moved to the Lower East Side of New York City and began his teaching career as a writing instructor at the New Lincoln School, Macomb Junior High School, and Brooklyn College. At Lincoln and Macomb he collected and edited student writings into the anthologies Writers Workshop Anthology and Man Is a Child. Major described teaching as his way "of being involved in a useful way in the world" and during his career he has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Howard University, the University of Washington, the University of Colorado, and the University of California at Davis.

But the late 1960s also launched his writing career with three major works: the poetry collection Swallow the Lake, Major's first novel, All-Night Visitors, and the black poetry anthology New Black Poetry. All-Night Visitors was published in 1969, by Maurice Giordias's Olympia Press, the same press that had daringly published the controversial Henry Miller, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, and Chester Himes. Although Olympia Press altered Major's original manuscript to emphasize the sexual dimension of the novel, reviews of the novel were mainly favorable and most readers found the novel "compelling," although many were disturbed by the sexual emphasis of Vietnam vet Eli Bolton's journey toward maturity and self-understanding. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing for the New York Times, found the "elaborate sexual passages" to be "integral to his hero's search for autonomy." Welburn warned that the sex scenes, which resemble those of John Cleland and Marquis DeSade, may offend readers, including many "soul sisters." But Welburn concluded that Major captured a reality at the heart of the black community--"Soul Brother Eli Bolton represents the living problem of apathy."

Despite the fact that "sex is his only meaningful outlet," Welburn saw Bolton's "libidinous urge" moving him in a "worthwhile direction" toward "social [community] responsibility." Major continued to probe some of the themes of All-Night Visitor in later novels, particularly the psycho-sexual dimension of the search for identity in a random, prejudiced, and frenzied universe.

In addition to the publication of his first novel, 1969 found Major's energies focused on poetry. First, Major was responsible for editing the Summer-Fall 1969 issue of the Journal of Black Poetry, a periodical for which he had been associate editor since 1967. 1969 also marked the publication of Major's anthology The New Black Poetry, a collection of poems by 76 African American poets, including Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Ishmael Reed, Bob Kaufman, and Al Young.

Swallow the Lake, published in 1970 by Wesleyan University Press, contains many of the poems from Major's two earlier collections of poetry. It was widely reviewed and critics noted its stylistic experiments and broad range of themes: male-female relationships, the Vietnam War, race, music, alienation, and philosophy. Although Frank MacShane, writing for Poetry magazine, criticized Swallow the Lake as "fail[ed]" experimentation, he also called it an "interesting" book that doesn't succumb to "simple formulae."

During the early 1970s Major published four more collections of poetry: Private Line and Symptoms and Madness in 1971, The Cotton Club in 1972, and The Syncopated Cakewalk in 1974. While Major's poetry dealt with various contemporary issues, including the nature and purpose of art and aesthetics, the recurring themes of these collections are gender relationships and the oppressive nature of United States society. Many scholars cited similarities in poetic style among Major and other contemporary black poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Michael Harper. In reviewing The Cotton Club, for example, Eugene Redmond described Major as being in the "forefront of experimental poetry and prose."

Redmond found Swallow the Lake and Symptoms and Madness much better writing than The Cotton Club, whose poems he called "narrative tours of Harlem and urban black America, primarily during the first two or three decades of the Twentieth Century." But in the poems contained in The Cotton Club, Redmond discovered a "Gwendolyn Brooks-like economy" and a language that is "reminiscent of the 'listings' of Michael S. Harper." Although Redmond praised The Cotton Club for its effort to "preserve and present a black past" using traditional themes of "the mulatto, violence against blacks, the creation and development of jazz and blues," he concluded his review by saying, "Major has written well in the past and, being young, will write well again ... he has not yet worked out the most effective way to present his ideas."

The Syncopated Cakewalk, published in 1974, received more positive reviews. Fanny Howe, for example, praised Major's "facility with language" and applauded his poetry in general for using "class, race, and economics" as "tools" in the "construction of good art." She described The Syncopated Cakewalk in particular as an "intricate dance step": "The timing is slower [than previous collections], history closer; the poems sound wonderful aloud.... A tone of sadness and a renunciation of a harsher view pervade this collection." Two poems from this collection were particularly noteworthy: "Funeral " received a Pushcart Prize in 1976, and "American Setup" was one of the poems that Major read at a poetry reading in Connecticut in 1972 that sparked a controversy in local papers over the presumed pornographic contents of Major's poetry.

Major's assessment of the Connecticut pornography controversy appeared as an essay titled "On Censorship: An Open Letter to June Jordan," which appeared in the July-August 1973 issue of American Poetry Review. The essay was so positively received that the Review asked Major to write a regular column for the periodical. Major's "open letters" ran in the Review from 1973 until 1976 and included critical pieces on contemporary authors such as Ralph Ellison. A collection of his essays was published by Third World Press in 1974 titled The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work. A few of his American Poetry Review columns were reprinted in this text along with essays on aesthetics, interviews with Major, and sketches and reviews of contemporary black writers.

While Major has been recognized as a major poet and essayist, he is most acclaimed for the seven novels he published between 1969 and 1988. During the 1970s, No., Reflex and Bone Structure, and Emergency Exit received mixed reviews. Jerome Klinkowitz defined these novels' innovative narrative styles as "experimental techniques to push fiction beyond a mechanical self-reflexiveness into true literary self-apparency."

In No. Major again employed the narrative as journey structure that characterized All-Night Visitors. This time he used the experiences of a young boy growing up in a racially hostile South, illustrating, as Jim Walker explained in an essay in Black Creation, the way violence "shapes" the "lives and attitudes" of southern black people. Yet, as Walker went on to explain, "The most striking aspect of No. is Major's prose," particularly the use of italics to mark the narrative shifts between fantasy and reality, between Moses Westby as narrator and as protagonist.

In 1975, Major's Reflex and Bone Structure was published by the newly formed Fiction Collection that Major himself helped to found in an attempt to provide authors with a publishing alternative free from interference from censoring editors. In his The Life of Fiction, Jerome Klinkowitz placed Major's fiction squarely in Ronald Sukenick's summary of the Collective's manifesto: "It [the writing of the Collective's authors] communicates the sense of an exploration to discover new forms that better suit the individual artist."

Although Reflex drew on narrative conventions from the detective genre, as Jerome Klinkowitz stated in Studies in Black American Literature, this is "more than a conventional detective novel, for every element of its composition--character, theme, action, and event--expresses the self-apparent nature of its making.... The final truth is less important than the process of getting to it in its full implications."

Emergency Exit was the second of Major's novels to be published by the Fiction Collective in 1979. The self-reflexiveness of Reflex continued in Emergency Exit. As Klinkowitz reported in Studies in Black American Literature, "The plot itself is emphasized as artifice at every turn." The plot is woven around events in a fictional town that has imposed a "threshold law" prohibiting women from freely crossing thresholds; instead, because thresholds are biologically and metaphorically the doorways of life, women must be carried across the doorways in life.

But throughout the narrative, Major's overriding concern was to remind the readers of the non-referential quality of words. Major said in an interview with John O'Brien, "You begin with words and you end with words. The content exists in our minds." With this novel, Major also experienced a breakthrough in his visual art, and 26 black and white reproductions of his paintings are included in the novel. Lisa Roney, in the 1994 special issue of African American Review described these as "extensions of the narrative action, additions to the text," not as "illustrations."

In addition to his maturation into an American writer to be taken seriously, the late 1970s brought about other achievements for Major. After a ten-year series of often low-paying and junior-level teaching positions in the New York City and Washington, DC areas, in 1977, Major accepted a faculty position as an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado and began earnestly pursuing a Ph.D. from Union Graduate School in Ohio. In 1981 he was promoted to full professor of English, and in 1989, he became a professor of English at the University of California at Davis. In 1994, Major told People magazine, "I had no intention of becoming an academic, but I was good at it and so I stayed with it."

From 1980 to 1985, Major and his third wife, Pamela Ritter, traveled throughout the United States and Europe, a tour that included Major's Fulbright award at the University of Nice. During these five years, Major wrote and painted extensively. Lisa Roney pointed out, "If Emergency Exit is where Clarence Major declares himself a painter in the most visual way, My Amputations [published in 1986] is where he develops into an obsession the reflections of it in the text."

Using his own travels as the biographical background for Mason Ellis's lecture tour through Europe, Major expanded his earlier concern with "questions of identity," focusing particularly on the question of what constitutes meaning for the black visual artist. Roney concluded, however, Major offers no easy answers. Mason's "'homecoming' has not been what he hoped for in the back of his mind; it does not offer a full-blown, fully his artistic tradition to take the place of the European one, and the character, like the author, must continue to juggle the disparate elements of the Western and the African."

Major's other novels of the 1980s, Such Was the Season and Painted Turtle, continued to referentially reflect on both narrative and visual painting conventions. Major used a female narrator for the first time in Such Was the Season to study, according to Jerome Klinkowitz in the 1994 special issue of African American Review, "language rather than social action." He saw the novel's emphasis not on "event" but on the way events can be woven into a narrative with which the narrator "feels comfortable."

The same focus on language, Klinkowitz found, was also present in Painted Turtle: Woman With Guitar, a novel that deals with Native American culture. Painted Turtle's poetry is interwoven through the plot to continually foreground the way that words "do not so much reflect a world as build one." As Major told John O'Brien, the novel is a "linguistic invention" that "takes on its own reality and is really independent of anything outside itself.... The content exists in our minds. I don't think that it has to be a reflection of anything. It is a reality that has been created inside of a book. It's put together and exists finally in your mind."

In his The Life of Fiction, Jerome Klinkowitz defined Clarence Major as a writer who has "defied the white-imposed 'traditions' of black literature to develop a brilliant lyricism in new forms of fiction; but his art inevitably turns back to the basic social and personal concerns which must remain at the heart of any literary experience." Recognized as one of the most prolific black writers of contemporary life, Clarence Major was the subject of a 1979 special issue of Black American Literature Forum and a 1994 special issue of African American Review. In a telephone interview with Lisa Roney, Major said, "For the last ten years, I have been feeling extremely good about the work I'm doing, both as a painter and a writer."

Awards

National Council on the Arts Award, Association of University Presses, 1970; Pushcart Prize for "Funeral," a poem, 1976; Fulbright-Hays Inter-University Exchange Award, Franco-American Commission for Educational Exchange, University of Nice, 1981-83; Western States Book Award for My Amputations, a novel, 1986.

Works

Writings

• Selected Writing Poetry The Fires That Burn in Heaven, Chicago, 1954.
• Love Poems of a Black Man, Coercion P, 1965.
• Human Juices, Coercion P, 1966.
• Swallow the Lake, Wesleyan UP, 1970.
• Private Line, Paul Breman, 1971.
• Symptoms and Madness, Corinth, 1971.
• The Cotton Club: New Poems, Broadside, 1972.
• The Syncopated Cakewalk, Balenmir House, 1974.
• The Other Side of the Wall, 1982.
• Inside Diameter: The France Poems, Permanent, 1985.
• Surfaces and Masks: A Poem, Coffee House, 1988.
• Some Observations Of a Stranger at Zuni in the Latter Part of the Century, Sun and Moon, 1989.
• Parking Lots: A Poem, Perishable, 1992.
• Fiction All Night Visitors, Olympia, 1969.
• No., Emerson Hall, 1973.
• Reflex and Bone Structure, Fiction Collective, 1975.
• Emergency Exit, Fiction Collective, 1979.
• My Amputations: A Novel, Fiction Collective, 1986.
• Such Was the Season: A Novel, Mercury House, 1987.
• Painted Turtle: Woman With Guitar, Sun and Moon, 1988.
• Fun and Games: Short Fictions, Holy Cow!, 1990.

• (Editor) Writers Workshop Anthology, Harlem Education Project/New Lincoln School, 1967.
• (Editor) Man Is Like a Child: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Students, Macomb Junior High School, 1968.
• (Editor) The New Black Poetry, International, 1969.
• Dictionary of Afro-American Slang, International, 1970; reissued as Black Slang: A Dictionary of Afro-American Talk, Routledge, 1971.
• The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work, Third World, 1974.
• "Necessary Distance: Afterthoughts on Becoming a Writer," Black American Literature Forum 23.2 (Summer 1989): 197-212; reprinted in African American Review 28.1 (Spring 1994): 37-47.
• (Editor) Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories, HarperCollins, 1993.
• Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, Viking Penguin, 1994.
• Major wrote a regular column for American Poetry Review from 1973-76; he was a contributor and guest editor for Journal of Black Poetry in the late 1960s and a guest editor for American Book Review in the late 1970s; Major has written essays for Essence magazine and Walt Shepperd's Nickel Review.

Further Reading

Books

• Bell, Bernard, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
• Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, volume 6, Gale, 1988.
• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, volume 25, Gale, 1989.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, volume 48, Gale, 1988.
• Klinkowitz, Jerome, The Life of Fiction, University of Illinois Press, 1977.
• O'Brien, John, Interviews With Black Writers, Liveright, 1973.
• Weixlmann, Joe, "Clarence Major," volume 33, "Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955," Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, 1984.
• Weixlmann, Joe, and Chester J. Fontenot, editors, Studies in Black American Literature: Black American Prose Theory, Penkevill Publishing Company, 1984.

• African American Review, Spring 1994, Clarence Major Issue.
• Black American Literature Forum, 12 (1978), pp. 32-7; Summer 1979, Clarence Major Issue; Fall 1983, pp. 120-23; Summer 1989, pp. 197-212.
• Booklist, December 1, 1992, p. 649; February 15, 1993, p. 1053; March 1, 1994, p. 1291.
• Library Journal, January 1989, p. 89; January 1990, p. 149; December 1992, p. 190; January 1994, p. 108.
• MELUS, Winter 1989, pp. 133-35; Winter 1991, pp. 57-79.
• New York Times Book Review, September 28, 1986, p. 30; December 13, 1987, p. 19; July 31, 1988, p. 9; October 30, 1988, p. 37; May 21, 1989, p. 18; May 20, 1990, p. 30.
• Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 3:2 (1975), pp. 153-72.
• People, February 7, 1994, pp. 93-4.
• Publishers Weekly, July 4, 1986, p. 55; July 31, 1987, pp. 67-8; July 8, 1988, p. 41; November 24, 1989, p. 60; March 9, 1990, p. 60; December 28, 1992, p. 63; November 1, 1993, p. 50.

— Mary Katherine Wainwright