The Essential Clarence Major

Prose and Poetry

Clarence Major

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781469656007, 9781469658780
• eBook ISBN: 9781469656014
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Clarence Major is one of America’s literary masters. He has published numerous books, from novels to poetry and short story collections. Among his many accolades, he was a finalist for the National Book Award and a Fulbright scholar and received the PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award. His work has been featured in many literary journals, newspapers, and magazines, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Ploughshares.

Whether you’ve known Major’s work for decades or are new to his singular style, The Essential Clarence Major offers a thrilling overview of an exceptional career, from his early groundbreaking fiction to his most recent poems. Included here are excerpts from Major’s best novels, a selection of his finest short stories and poetry, more than a dozen thought-provoking essays, a taste of his autobiography. Award-winning playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Kia Corthron introduces the collection, artfully illuminating Major’s importance as one of the foremost and original voices in contemporary American literature.

PART ONE

NOVEL EXCERPTS

From

Reflex and Bone Structure

I saw some of the work the cops did. One used a flat device to take the fingerprints. Since rigor mortis hadn’t yet set in, the spoonlike object wasn’t necessary. I helped them. Canada helped too. Everybody in the neighborhood pitched in and gave a hand. They all got their fingerprints taken. Though no one had counted on that. The cops had fingerprint cards they carried in a plastic briefcase along with one of those syringes for injecting silicone beneath the skin. This way prints could be taken effectively. The cops were all over the place looking in crevices. They looked beneath the bed and in the empty closets. They had some desensitizing fluid they didn’t use.

These policemen were real. They were very funny. Canada was once a cop, but I don’t think he was ever as funny as these. One had a Polaroid MP-3 camera for copy work — the kind that gives an instant negative. He also carried in his pocket a bottle of ultraviolet ink. Another one wore gloves and picked his teeth with a toothpick. Still a third moved around the place with a scalpel scraping up the blood. Dry spots. One was working on the edge of the window with a hacksaw. Why, I don’t know. Another held test tubes for the one scraping up blood spots. One was sprinkling powder around the devastated area of the suitcase — rather, what was left of the suitcase. They’d already marked off what was left of the area with a piece of chalk.

But I didn’t hang around. …

I am in a foreign country in a tiny fishing village. A procession of natives, dressed in black, are following four pallbearers, also in black, carrying a coffin. They are moaning, climbing a hill, and the orange sun is going down behind them. I must have seen this somewhere. Cora is in the coffin. I step closer to make sure it’s Cora. It is. She sits up, suddenly. The pallbearers drop their palls and run. The whole procession scatters.

The playbill in hand: It is damp from perspiration. Cora learns her lines well. Good evening, folks. We are in the Concept West Village Theatre on Grove Street near Sheridan Square. In a few moments you will hear Dale’s best strongest voice open the performance.

I am backstage. From where I am standing, I see the shabby glow of a red outline. It is Dale’s body. Cora isn’t in sight, but she knows her part. And she certainly isn’t far away. I feel focused as rigidly as one crazed in a trance.

Cora suddenly appears. She is wearing a Fouke-dyed black fur seal coat with side buttons and great deep pockets. Beneath, there is nothing else. Every step she takes exposes her. But she doesn’t seem to care.

I simply refuse to go into details. Fragments can be all we have to make the whole. An archaeologist might, of course, look for different clues. Somebody now taps me on the shoulder. The person is a nervous man I have never seen before.

“Don’t worry. It will go fine.”

“Yeah.”

He scratches his keen black nose. He suddenly jerks his arm to see the face of his watch. It gives me a funny feeling. …

People are served Ritz crackers and Wispride cheese: blue and gold and greenish pink he-gods and she-gods with black wine glasses.

Cora caught the twinkle in some strange man’s eye. I traced a line on the ledge and turned fully to the night, looking over the East River toward Brooklyn.

Outside the window I saw a man’s childish grin. What was it about him that attracted Cora. The psychedelic lights continued to dance against moving faces.

From the turntable the Jimi Hendrix Experience jumps through the room with the force of Goya dancers. …

Cora is trying to get a part in a play — any play. She stands in line waiting, for a chance to try out for Peer Gynt. Nothing happens. She’s standing in another line, waiting to try out for Darkness at Noon; and she’s in another line for Little Caesar. It suddenly occurs to her that Little Caesar will be a film and she has had no film experience. Her heart beats faster. She leaves and finds another line: this one, for a 1956production of Middle of the Night, at the Shubert Theatre, in New Haven.

Cora has gone away again. She’s driving a rented car around a small bay in a foreign country. The sun is going down. It’s raining — just a sprinkle. She drives through the mountains where she picks up a hitchhiker. “Oni’s my name.” Along the same road, another one. She calls herself “Cathy.” And a third: “Eunice.” A fourth, “Anita.” Huge wind currents, slamming down from the mountains, nearly push the car off the road into the dale. …

I receive a picture post card. It’s from Cora. She’s on a beach somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. There’s a man with her. They’re holding hands and walking along barefoot. The sand is wet and warm. In about twenty minutes they will be in a cottage arranging roses in a vase. After that they will take a Boeing 707 to Victoria, British Columbia, and check into a large room at The Empress where they will stay for five days, sleeping in separate beds. I receive another card. The picture on it shows Cora wearing a delicate taffeta iris-colored dress and smiling. The background is yellow. I draw a blank when I try to remember who the man was. …

I’m a detective trying to solve a murder; no, not a murder, it’s a life. Who hired me? I can’t face the question.

I’m tailing Cora and Canada and Dale. The three of them are riding together in a gasoline-powered 1885 Benz, ten miles per hour. Canada is driving, I’m walking. It takes them ninety years to reach the theater. The show has closed. The building is no longer there. The Village has changed. …

Canada and I leave town. It’s not easy. In Maryland, we get work operating a crane on a construction site, lifting a hundred and forty tons of mashed potatoes from a vacant lot to another vacant lot. Pay: fifty cents and a fish sandwich. For spending change, we stick up a mail train, swooping with seven million, which lasts us a few days. We live it up in Winnemucca, Nevada; dance with buck-eyed Indians in Pierce, Idaho; do the fox-trot with hippies in Eugene, Oregon; backtracking, we hide out in Swiftbird, South Dakota, where a fella with alert gentle eyes and red hair, helps us invent new identities. With our new cards, we return east, dressed as limbo dancers, with the false endorsement of Teresa Marquis of the Island of St. Lucia, we get work at the Palace Theatre and Carnegie Hall. We’re a smash success. Our manager, a bird-watcher from Dwaarkill, New York, books us for a tour of Italy, but by now we’re exhausted. We separate. …

Canada plays tricks on Cora and she adjusts to his tricks. The action is no big thing. She is soft texture and quivering flesh, and she is a person too. But Canada has trouble. Sometimes it is troublesome for him to see this. He sees the television screen, but he cannot always see the street below their window; or see how Cora opens or the furniture they got from the flea market or see himself reflected in the bathroom mirror. But he means well and often he means to be very good.

He glides his tongue along the edges of Cora’s hairline. And I watch from the far side of the dim room. The soft splash of wet vehicles going by outside.

“The living tissue,” Cora says.

“Are you pregnant?”

“No, Canada. I’m desperate. I feel tense and desperate.” She turns away toward the wall.

I walk closer to see better and the afternoon sunlight touches my face, causing me to retreat.

I hide in the kitchen but do not look at the rubber plants. In here there is no sunlight. But I hear the French horns again and children outside screaming.

In the front Canada and Cora are laughing together. I feel they are probably laughing at me.

I open the silverware drawer again, just to make sure the loaded pistol is still there. Canada might have taken it away, for security — which he shall never have. But it is still in its place in the drawer.

I hate to say each thing has its place but that is the way this house is run. Cora runs this house and she is quite regular. She regulates everything her own way. But I’ve gotten used to it and it doesn’t bother me so much anymore. …

I’m at the outpost. The nearest seaport is a hundred miles downstream. I’m waiting for Cora’s next move.

Canada comes from the woods into the clearing. He’s wearing overalls, and he’s carrying a shotgun. He squints watching me closely. His mouth opens but he says nothing.

I make up a name. “I’m Dick James.” I think fast. “My boat sprung a leak.” I think even faster. “It floated off downstream.”

Cora likes to be alone. She shoots live movies, makes up mysteries and melodramas, and does frame-by-frame animations of her own visions. She’s alone in her apartment looking in the mirror. Boris Karloff looks back at her. She smiles at him. Behind her, Peter Lorre murmurs something about being cautious. A tree frog is sitting on her dresser. Cora does a turnabout and sees Charlie Chaplin and W. C. Fields standing in the doorway. …

I tend to see very little of the surface: Cora’s face, for example. Another example: my own face. With Cora one should be more literal. After all she is very physical. She was a very physical person. Cora was the opposite of me. She took people and things at face value. She took people at their word. I hardly know how to take people. I spend too much time sunk deep in my own wanderings far down below the surface, dreaming up problems for myself. Where I don’t have them, I invent them; and at least I tell myself it is what sustains me. What wakes me up? The challenge of each day … Canada is a problem. I mean I have to deal with all kinds of things: people and situations. How will Canada adjust to Cora’s death? Who cares about Dale’s absence? If no one, why no one? Who was he, where’d he come from? What did Cora see in him, vice versa?

And my being alone so much reinforces the tendency to skin-dive beneath the surface, not that I find solutions. I should ideally strike a balance between the surface and the lower depths. I can do the low stuff very effectively. I need practice on the surface where Cora, Canada, and Dale hang out. …

The windows rattle because the season is changing. Leaves have dropped from trees and people are wrapping themselves beneath huge coats. We begin with the body and end with the body. Anything else is theory. Soon I doubt if I’ll be able to still visualize her face. …

I want to stop dwelling on her and get myself together. She believed in me, I think. She believed in herself too. Which was probably why she was able to believe in me. But I don’t know why she did. I never did anything profound to deserve her trust. I just promised myself to stop thinking about her. But she possessed such an amazing capacity to show affection — even through her dreamy and often even dreary cynicism. Yet I can’t knock her too much. It destroys me. …

I’m driving an early-American mail coach along a long dirt road. Six Iceland ponies are straining to pull me and the load of special deliveries. They’re all from Canada. Many of them are addressed to Cora, a few to Dale. I stop in front of the Brooklyn Museum to ask the guard how to get to Manhattan. He takes me on a tour of the museum, showing me various abstract paintings. “These things are about themselves. Look at the paint. By the way, did you put a dime in the parking meter?”

The time Canada brought his fist down on the table and shook everything off, I tried to pretend I wasn’t sitting there. I didn’t want to understand his anger. Nor could I safely acknowledge it. Cora turned from the kitchen sink to see what was going on. Through his dark glasses he looked at her with disgust. He’d spilled ale on his yellow ochre shirt.

“Bring me the pistol.”

Cora opened the silverware drawer and brought the gun to her man. He took it and smiled cynically.

She returned to the dishes in the sink and Canada checked the weapon; then aimed it at me. He held it like that. And I tried not to show fear.

“Light a cigarette for me.”

From the pack of Viceroys on the table I took a cigarette, lit it, and handed it to him, cautiously. I squeezed my mind off from thought.

Then from the sink, Cora said, “Canada!”

But he didn’t answer.

Again, she said, “Canada.” And not waiting for him to reply she continued, “Come unscrew the top of this jar, please!”

From the corners of my eyes I could see her looking at us. I still refused to let my mind work, let alone speak. I felt a word from me at that moment might have been terrible.

“Canada!” Cora shouted.

Finally, he stood up and left the gun lying on the table. While he was at the sink beside Cora fumbling with the jar, I took a close look at the gun. I put on my glasses and leaned halfway across the table. It was not a gun. I was stunned. No, I was only half surprised. The object was clearly a fancy can-opener. Well, I felt better about Canada. We were still friends after all — if we ever were. He was only playing a game? …

I’ve presently reduced myself to Canada. I’m Canada. Cora and I are picnicking in a dale near Dingmans Falls in the Poconos. We have ham wine cheese nuts. We run out of wine. I fly to California for more. When I return Cora’s gone. A note pinned to the picnic basket says: “If you love me come and get me. I’m at Turntable Junction in Jersey with Dale.”

A huge balloon is floating overhead. Cora is up there waving to me. I’m swimming in the swimming pool of a motel in Los Angeles. This morning a picture postcard came from Canada. It shows him defusing a bomb. The New York Police Department will soon give him an award.

Cora is coming down slowly.

I’m now high diving.

Dale is shooting Canada from a cannon up to meet Cora.

Organisms live blankly together. But as I say I can’t tell you whether or not Dale has meaning. You know he won’t focus properly. To know anything specific about his whereabouts is even less likely. Nowadays no one has this particular sort of skill anyway. Take machines: though they break down, they tend to be more precise. Yet the data they offer on Dale (things like social security number, driver’s license number, telephone number, or apartment number) are, except in the small way, useless. …

I’ve decided to try to make peace with Dale. I rent a car. It’s summer and I want to take my three friends on a trip. Cora sits beside me. I’m driving. Dale and Canada are in the back. We move north on 95, through White Plains, on up through Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In New Hampshire we visit a forest full of yellow and pink flowers. We drink tons of spring water and fall asleep in the bottom of a very dry riverbed.

When I wake I am alone. …

Someone is trying desperately to open the door to the apartment. The wiggling key makes a hell of a noise. Meanwhile I am watching Cora dance. From the mirror, Cora is watching herself, step by ballet step. My stomach aches and my heart swells. Something spectacular is about to happen — though there is evidence. But you know how you know without clues. Are we really clandestine? Why do I feel guilty? I’m innocent. Cora is guilty. Why should I think of hiding in the closet? What sort of tradition is that? What deep fear is this at the root of jealousy?

The person outside continues to turn the key. Cora dances close to the mirror and, without losing rhythm, she kisses her own lips on the mirror.

“Why is it you never give me anything? I like gifts!”

“Rejuvenation.”

The noise of the key continues. I feel hungry and thirsty.

“I’ve got your rejuvenation. I want a gift.”

“I give you relaxation.”

“You give me menopause.”

“I give you tissues.”

“You give me your face.”

“I give you balance.”

“You give me tales.”

“I give you muscle.”

“You give me sleep.”

“I give you sperm.”

“The truth is, dear friend, you give me a pain in the age.”

“Cora, I give you my vitamins and my growth.”

“You give me Canada. He’s all.”

“Not true. I give you energy.”

“I suppose you give me life too.”

“I give you life.”

“Enzymes.”

“Cora, I give you gifts. I gave you a sense of history and art and literature. I gave you man in space.”

“You gave me hunger and a male sex organ.”

“Taste buds and nerve endings.”

“Sure. And they’re pointless.”

Now at last the door opens. And since no one is there, I understand even less.

We’re all saints in the desert buried alive up to our necks. We’re praying. Canada, Dale, Cora and I have changed radical...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Kia Corthron
• Part One: Novel Excerpts
• Part Two: Short Stories
• Part Three: Essays
• Part Four: Memoir
• Part Five: Poems
• Acknowledgments
• Credits