Remembering McPherson

Abstract

Remembering McPherson John McCluskey Jr. (bio) I met James Alan McPherson only three or four times in person. Each was for the better part of a day or evening. Each was memorable. We were introduced in the late spring of 1968 by Alan Lebowitz, at the time a lecturer in English at Harvard University. As an undergraduate, I had studied under Mr. Lebowitz in an intermediate level fiction writing class; he was encouraging and kind enough to urge me to seek out an advanced writing class. Jim was finishing his degree at the law school and seeking mentoring in fiction writing. He had enrolled in an advanced writing course under Lebowitz during the fall semester, 1967. After the introductions outside a classroom, Jim promptly invited me to join him and a friend, Devorah, at his apartment on Plympton Street. Jim lived over the Grolier Book Store, to my reckoning one of the oldest exclusively poetry bookstores on the planet. Jim also served as the janitor for the building. He read aloud to us the better part of a short story to be named “Why I Like Country Music,” which would appear years later as the first piece in his second collection, Elbow Room. After he read there was a silence. Though I had laughed or chuckled throughout the excerpt and regarded those as welcomed responses, Jim seemed to want a bit more. So we talked briefly about voice consistency and narrative rhythm. I thought these worked well in the draft and had little to contribute critically. To my relief we then drifted to sharing growing up stories in the neighborhoods of Savannah, Georgia (his stomping grounds) and Middletown, Ohio (my hometown). Before leaving, I clearly recall a brief conversation on music, specifically Miles Davis’s album Quiet Nights. We listened to “Corcovado” several times and Jim was haunted by an overwhelming loneliness issuing from Davis’s muted trumpet solos against the backdrop of the Gil Evans orchestra. I half-heartedly agreed to the sense of plaintiveness in that setting of ballads against an orchestral setting. I related that there was more variation of moods when Davis was backed by the classic group of “Cannonball” Adderly, John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and “Philly Joe” Jones. We ended the evening on a good blues note, discussing favorite music of the moment. I would leave Cambridge in a couple days and attempt an interview with Ralph Ellison in New York. I promised Jim to keep him posted if that encounter did take place. As it turned out I was able to meet with Mr. Ellison for an hour or so in his Riverside Drive apartment. Ellison was generous with his time, mostly setting me at ease. Jim had been eager for the details of the conversation, as I recall. What was Ellison like in person? What were his writing habits? What was he working on now? What were his political views? (He was shorter than expected. Our heroes generally are. Don’t mess with his morning writing routine. He distrusted the reach—real or imagined—to Africa . . .) Jim wondered about [End Page 738] Ellison’s availability as a mentor of sorts to us. I conceded that I had nothing proudly in progress with which to re-approach him. Jim persisted well beyond our conversation. Two years later he gifted us all with the affecting essay, “Indivisible Man” (in collaboration with Ellison), which eventually appeared in the December 1970 issue of Atlantic Monthly. Within three months I returned to Massachusetts to take a summer teaching job. In that time the world had shifted. President Johnson had announced that he would not seek the Democratic Party nomination for a full term as President. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated and rebellions had erupted in the streets. Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. It was a period poet Robert Hayden termed the “mourning time.” I met with Jim again and we talked of those dramatic and tragic events. During that second meeting in late spring, we talked again about Ralph Ellison and his influence on our thinking on craft and culture. With Christmas greetings and short notes in between, we were together in Washington...