A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile

A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile

James Alan McPherson (2000, Touchstone)

       The essays of James Alan McPherson (1943-2016) that are collected here were written near the end of his distinguished career as a fiction writer, essayist, and teacher. They offer glimpses of his life as a student, a father, and an observer of American culture and history. His range is impressive, not to say intimidating: he's also capable of reckoning with what ancient Rome, Shakespeare, and modern Japan might have to say to us.

      The exile of the subtitle refers to the fact that, beginning in 1981, he made his home in Iowa City, where he taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; that's a long way from his childhood: "I lived in a lower-class black community in Savannah, Georgia, attended segregated public schools, and knew no white people socially. I can't remember thinking of this last fact as a disadvantage, but I do know that early on I was being conditioned to believe that I was not supposed to know any white people on social terms." As fate would have it, he became a reader, and then a student at Morris Brown College in Atlanta. At Harvard Law School, he studied fiction writing on the side, and followed up with an MFA from the Iowa workshop, having already been published by the Atlantic Monthly.

      Iowa may be one of the whitest places there is; what McPherson liked about it was that it was self-consciously a place with customs and rituals, a sense of the Done Thing. He went so far as to pose as a sports fan, in concert with the prevailing ethos. "...I was sure to find all the butchers watching a game on television. They had already assumed that I was an athlete because all the black males they noticed were athletes. I did not disappoint them." But of course, there's much more going on with him than that. It's just that you can't get close enough to people to figure out their real stories without making some gesture of community.

       McPherson's own community included Ralph Ellison, whom he appreciates here both as a hero and as a friend, in an essay responding to the publication of Ellison's Juneteenth. Ellison, McPherson says, brought to the modernist project a blues sensibility, capable of mingling the inescapable strife of daily life with a streak of humor, and of personal style. After all, among the ancient Greeks, "life was tragic, full of agon. But to them it was also comic. And the two dramatic categories were linked."

       They're linked in Huckleberry Finn, certainly. In an essay occasioned by the restoration of some passages of the book that had been cut, McPherson observes that Mark Twain "was writing about the possibility of friendships across racial lines, at a time when such emotional connections were considered radical. He was writing about the struggles of the human heart confined to the structure of white supremacy...yet Twain, like Stephen Crane after him, still wrestled with the possibilities of heroic action within the confines of a corrupt uncaring culture."

       Such matters are in McPherson's purview as well, particularly when he reads Othello in the shadow of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, which were recent history at the time. The outlines of our life today were clear to him already: "Prosperity has been polarized, with great wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The institution of the nation-state is rapidly being replaced by global corporate ties under invisible managements. The middle class is frightened. The poor no longer exist as human beings. Europe is becoming one federated nation, while the demographics of the United States are changing relentlessly. Information is everywhere, but there is less and less of it with any substance."

      That's the world we still live in, and we can't say nobody saw it coming.

 

Emailed as  Any Good Books, March 1, 2021