Nancy Bunge, ed. Conversations with Clarence Major.

Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2002. 193 pp. $46.00 cloth/$18.00 paper.

In his talks with college students during the 1970s--particularly with white, middle-class students from nonurban areas of the Middle West--Clarence Major would warn them of how writing by African Americans had often been accepted into America's literary canon for well intentioned but essentially wrong reasons. Yes, these sincere young readers knew about Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. But wasn't that all they knew? Could it be that their culture was letting them experience just one black writer at a time? And didn't it seem like any African American who wrote a book was regarded, however sympathetically, as an "anthropological curiosity"--oh, how he must have suffered!

In working the campuses so effectively thirty years ago, Major succeeded in knocking down these stereotypes and many others, including those of a single "black aesthetic" and a monological approach to subject and form. Over these same three decades he built up his own canon of literary work that has qualified him as one of the most important writers of our era. Which leads any good interviewer to a key question: Now that the author has it made, with many of the causes he fought for won, is there less to fuel his imagination and more to make him comfortable with the status quo?

"You're describing something that most writers don't want to admit (or talk about at all!)," Clarence Major tells Larry McCaffery in the best of many good interviews appearing in editor Nancy Bunge's collection, "but that affects almost any artist who does a significant amount of early work living on the margins, somehow, of success." Yes, he continues, there are emotional energies and personal empathies that ebb away, a loss of contact "with situations and people you don't encounter later on," and a definite mellowing of "attitude." But all this doesn't make it any easier to write, or to be read in a fair manner. "You wind up being put on the defensive when 'The Good Life' finally appears one day, miraculously as it seems after everything that's come before," Major explains. "It's as if the audience is pissed off because now they're not going to be given their vicarious share of pain and anger and humiliation any more."

Conversations with Clarence Major gathers twenty-one interviews with the author, including one conducted by his harshest critic, himself. Beginning in 1969 and running through 2001, they track Major's career in a helpfully intimate way, showing him develop from a patient but still angry young man through various stages of experiment and innovation to the quietly secure (yet strongly committed) eminence he enjoys today. As engaged with literary issues as he has been, there is not room for everything--several missing conversations are referred to in other pieces. But more than enough representative dialogues are included to provide an accurate picture of his career, one that has been subjected to self-study at each key point.

In 1978, for example, Major takes special care to indicate exactly where in the innovative fiction movement he belongs, and why. "Just as Ishmael Reed and George Schuyler have more in common with writers such as William Burroughs and Kurt Vonnegut than with realistic black writers such as Ernest J. Gaines and James Baldwin," he tells Doug Boiling, "my own efforts should be looked at alongside the works of George Chambers, Jonathan Baumbach, and Russell Banks. To further illustrate the point: some other writers who fit the category are Ronald Sukenick, Steve Katz, Charles Wright, and Walter Abish." Note the precision of his choices: not Barth, Pynchon, Hawkes, or Gass, whom many critics still fail to distinguish from the Sukenick-Katz group, but rather Chambers and Abish, two writers yet to be noticed by all but the most discerning scholars. As for what some commentators suspected was a shift to realism, Major explains it in 1986 as "a transition" during which he wants "to try some experiments, perhaps be less ambiguous," something now possible because of "an understanding I've gravitated toward. The complexity of my early poetry and fiction is a result of my own struggle mentally--my own inability to articulate a whole network of feelings." To Larry McCaffery and Jerzy Kutnik in 1992 he can demonstrate the nonrealistic elements in his presumably realistic novel Such Was the Season, but also admit that having "worked through all those reflexive concepts in my books" over the past fifteen years, "I simply don't need to do that again."

Instead, Conversations with Clarence Major makes it clear that this latest development in the author's career is consistent with his general commitment to language and self. "If language didn't change, it would die," Major says in 1994. "It has to constantly change and evolve even if we're speaking at a small, secret level. It has to grow. Words are like organic things, they don't just go on. Some are reborn in different form." As words serve as our representation of things, our relation to these things changes, too, and rarely in a one-to-one "realistic" way. Those who think writers work with such narrow correspondences should consider how Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar developed from Major's fascination with the film actress Dorothy Dandridge and a fifteenth-century visit made by a black man to a Zuni tribe in the American Southwest. "Inspired by two very different African Americans," he tells Charles H. Rowell in 1997, "in the finished product there wasn't a single African American in the novel. I just have a lot of curiosity about cultures."

Jerome Klinkowitz

University of Northern Iowa