The double vision of Clarence Major, painter and writer.

If double consciousness is a factor in the fiction of African Americans, then it makes sense that it would be all the more so in their practice of the visual arts. While the writing of African Americans is "difficult, working in English, a language with a white |personality'" (Major, Dark and Feeling 26), at least African traditions of storytelling survived in the slave colonies and evolved into the strong, rich African-American modes of vernacular speech, tales, and lyrics. Unfortunately, this was not time to the same extent for African traditions of visual expression. Although some examples of African-influenced carvings, pottery, basketry, and ironwork are extant from the period, "the surviving visual art tradition was |generic, simple, and (almost completely) restricted to areas of dense and recent contact with tropical Africa'" (Robert Farris Thompson, qtd. in Fine 17).

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s provided a modem alternative for those seeking a uniquely African-American perspective in all the arts, but was primarily a literary and musical phenomenon. It produced muralist Aaron Douglas, and the thirties and forties introduced now well-known painters such as Jacob Lawrence, the brothers Beauford and Joseph Delaney, Archibald Motley, Lois Mailou Jones, and Hale Woodruff, but their works were not widely exhibited until years later. So, when a young African American of the 1940s and '50s, being educated in the Eurocentric tradition, found himself interested in fine, color, composition, texture, light, and the allure of gessoed canvas and creamy paper, sable brushes and viscid paints, he had few directions in which to grow other than along the trellis of Western art.

Clarence Major was gifted, as his early experiences with both words and paints make clear, and he was endowed with a drive to become an artist. But his consciousness was split by the nature of being an American of African descent, in an ambivalent political relationship to the Western cultural heritage that he was beginning to love, especially as a painter. Based on my experience of Major's paintings and his fiction (Emergency Exit, My Amputations, Such Was the Season, and Fun & Games), it is apparent that his career as a writer is due, at least in part, to this early splitting of consciousness in the area of his first passion, painting. For years Major deferred, almost even denied, his passion for painting a passion whose nature - more obviously Eurocentric and less practical than that of his writing - threatened to alienate him from his African-American community ("Necessary Distance" 202-05). In a sense, he went underground with his painting and got into the habit of seeing through his writing, which was easier to conceal. The painting however, remained a motivating force in his literary work. Major's questions about his own identity as an African American and his relationship to the African-American community seem to have led him to become a man of double vision, searching for a colorful but color-blind existence, both through the visual image and the written word.

Major remembers "being the kind of kid that just gravitated toward visual expression," and he says that painting came "more naturally" to him than writing. He still recalls being entranced by a kindergarten assignment to draw a "big, red apple," which he took home and proudly showed to his mother (Major, telephone interview). By the time Major was twelve, his paintings were spilling out of his bedroom into the family's hall. He won "many prizes" in school art contests. One of these awards, granted when he was in high school, provided a scholarship to a program for school-age children at the Art Institute of Chicago, and he stayed with these lessons until he left home to join the Air Force (Major, "Licking Stamps" 177-79).

It was a formative period for Major, not strictly because of the scholarship program, but because he also met some regular college- and graduate-level Art Institute faculty and students who encouraged him and provided an even greater level of awareness on his part. One of these, graduate student Gus Nall gave Major private lessons, which he still values today, even though he says that at that time he was "still trying to paint just like van Gogh" (telephone interview), whose large exhibit at the Art Institute in the early 1950s had greatly impressed him.

Major found himself answering the "perennial challenge to Afro-American artists"; that is, "how to be at once Black and artist, Afro-American and American, Afrocentric and idiosyncratic" (Yearwood 138). At first, it didn't even occur to him to search for an identity as an African-American artist; he considered himself, insofar as he did so at all as part of the mainstream and worried because he "didn't want to be an Abstract Expressionist" or to work in other "popular modes" (telephone interview). But he had an awareness that, on the South Side of Chicago, "no self-respecting grown man spent ten years painting pictures he couldn't sell" ("Necessary Distance" 204), and during the late sixties he under-stood that a large part of the problem was the result of racism. He has said for the record that the "black poet ... must chop away at the white criterion and destroy its hold on his black mind because seeing the world through white eyes from a black soul causes death" (Dark and Feeling 147). During this period he moved away from painting but was soon engaged in it again, and was highly influenced by discussions such as the one he had with painter Jacob Lawrence for The Black Scholar in 1977. Lawrence pointed out the "definite style and tradition" visible in "Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and African art," which he said, he couldn't see in African-American art:

... we have an sorts of backgrounds and training.... We are in a Western culture.... Few of us have bad an African experience.... To try to work like the African, the black American artist becomes pseudo something. (17-18)

By the seventies similar ideas were already gelling for Major in the literary vein, as he garnered a reputation for his experimental works of fiction - All-Night Visitors (1969), NO (1973), and Reflex and Bone Structure (1975)-which move "beyond racial and political consciousness to a preoccupation with exploring the boundaries of language and imaginative consciousness" (Bell 316). These novels, having more in common with Euro-American and European postmodern concerns than the works of most other African-American writers, had little appeal to most African-American readers (Bell 319-20). By the mid-seventies, Major had joined the moody white Fiction Collective, which would public his next three novels.

It was during the seventies that Major broke through what he felt were constraints constantly being thrown in front of him by external sources, in both his literary and visual arts endeavors. At one point he had spoken disparagingly of his painting, indicating that he "had neither the conceptual nor the rendering skills possessed by many others at the Institute" (Weixlmann 33) - even though he always continued to draw. "I wasn't having luck or success then," Major recalls, "and I wondered all the time about what I was doing" (telephone interview). Ironically, he says, he didn't feel good about his writing at the time either because the two are interrelated and "both tend to go well at the same time." His visual work, however, has always remained subsumed in his literary reputation in spite of the fact that a large part of his verbal search involves the extremely problematic identity of an African American whose painterly vision is akin to European traditions.

In 1979, with the publication of Emergency Exit, Major declared his double identity as a visual artist and writer by including twenty-six black-and-white reproductions of his own paintings in the novel. The paintings, he has emphasized, do not function as illustrations - they do not depict particular scenes or even characters in the text - but as extensions of the narrative action, additions to the text.

"I didn't paint them with the intention of putting them in the novel," Major explains, "although I was working on them at the same time." Early in the process of writing the novel he thought of including the paintings because they seemed to fit well with the open-ended, fragmentary nature of the prose. "The novel itself is composed like a group of paintings," Major says, "and the paintings and prose just seemed to begin speaking to each other (telephone interview). The short fragments in which the novel is written, and which include a variety of written forms - including names from a telephone book, quotations from dictionaries and other sources, newspaper-like narrow columns, numbered lists of questions, and a bird shape formed out of words - were conducive to further variation. Along with the labor of cutting one-third of the original text, Major meticulously selected locations for the paintings.

While Major acknowledges that some of the combinations are more effective than others, the juxtapositions of text and painting in Emergency Exit are for the most part strangely moving. The vigorous brushwork, tormented shapes, and highly contrasted values lend to the abstracted figures and landscapes the same jagged energy found in the prose, the same tense questioning of the relationships between people. Faceless male and female figures pose in a stand-off, their bodies estranged and hostile, providing a disturbing tangibility to the dialogue that precedes the painting: "I'm sick of this! I want a divorce!'" (153). "The African in search of the mysterious substance called Black Humor" has difficulty finding it, but he leads us to a painting in which two dark, lyrical figures dance in a giddy, every-which-way gesture that seems to ensure their survival, like the trickster rabbit taught in Black Literature classes" (190). An inverted male figure with a leering pale face hangs suspended above the bottom edge of the canvas, while another male figure, with a darker face, turns away from the picture plane, hands behind his back in what seems an embarrassed wish for escape cape. Once again the figures are alienated, disconnected - this time by the racial misunderstanding that is reflected in passages on either side of the painting (116).

But there are figures in the novel that do connect-sometimes gently, sometimes violently, sometimes a little bit of both. In the painting on page 87, for instance, what seems to be a group of four people huddle together in the center of the canvas in a desperate circle of swirling, heavy paint. It is sandwiched between the program for the "THE ANNUAL DOOR AND THRESHOLD CONFERENCE ... on the Problem of Emergencies," which looks to be pretty absurd, and a section of brief vignettes whose threatening elements disturb the other wise ordinary scenes of saunas, shopping malls, family hiking trips, the beach, and so forth. The painting shares with the text the sensation that the "trumpets of doom are heard constantly down the hall" and the "clouds move swiftly overhead" (90). Inwardly, we huddle with the group in tile painting.

Even in the text of Emergency Exit, Major links his quest for identity and community with his combined calling as writer and painter. Not only does he frequently mention painters like van Gogh and Goya and develop characters who draw and paint, the narrator connects them in the text itself, in some places with direct statements like "This person that is me is reaching out in contradictions. I want to paint my way out of this. Write my way out" (7). At other times, the reference is more oblique, as when Al is offended at the idea of the wealthy and relatively pale African-American Ingram family cavorting around then goes on:

Africa might be a place you could dig after all even after Tarzan and white lies. Little white lies. Hello white lies. White lies uneasily on the canvas. (18)

In the preceding passage, Major uses one of his classic moves: He invests color with an unusal (and changing) life and presence. "I sleep and wake in the blackness ..." (15), he says, and the blackness becomes simultaneously the narrator's own skin, the the night, the grimness of twentieth-century existence, and the many forms of the color itself in the form of pigment. This effect is not limited to black and white. In Emergency Exit, colors appear and reappear in shifting multiple layers of meaning. The light changes in a room, creating a blend of pastel colors (80), and the grass on the hillsides is" sometimes burned red brown black" (109). In addition,

This thing that moves beneath the surface changes color - once when it got stuck between two rocks the water all around it turned red, a fantastic red you have never seen. It amazes me.(71)

In other words, colors in Clarence Major's text change and blend, and indicate what is perhaps a natural combination of color obsessions in one who is made constantly aware by both his African-American roots and his training as a visual artist.

What, the book asks, constitutes color? What happens if you reproduce colorful paintings in black-and-white? Where and for whom is blackness defined - on the surface of the skin or in culture? In Emergency Exit, these questions seem to me as important, if not as obvious, as the post-modern fragmentation and polyvocalism, and attention to them results in the heightening of powerful racial themes. In a crucial scene, when Al has been shot at by a white man, he says to Julie:

You can't believe it because you're too white yourself. And the minute he said it he knew it was the beginning of their separation. (120)

The division between colors - and cultures - has suddenly become painfully distinct.

Shortly after the publication of Emergency Exit, Major met and married Pamela Ritter, and from 1980 to 1985 the two of them sailed through a stream of cities, states, and countries, living in Boulder, Amherst, Nice, San Diego, Venice, and Paris. Major also traveled extensively in Europe, Africa, and the American South and Southwest, but in spite of the hectic pace his new marriage and his overseas experiences satisfied and steadied him. In just over a year in Nice (1981-82), Major started and virtually completed My Amputations, even though the frenetic schedule of Mason Ellis's lecture tour grew directly out of Major's own experiences in Europe. Major and character Ellis both hearken back to an earlier expatriate:

I ... left America because I lost faith in her and in her power to redeem and save our fives. Tormented racially as I was, in search of sanity, I went to Ghana.... I was in what might be called therapeutic exile, looking for new insight, a new definition of emotional freedom.... a new psychology and sense of history. (Leslie Lacy, qtd. in Gay and Baker 61)

Indeed, it was an extremely productive and liberating time for Major: Between the far of 1981 and his return to the United States in the fall of 1984, he wrote three novels, two volumes of poetry, and painted more than fifty watercolors in 1984 alone. But the sense of history Mason Ellis sought in My Amputations was more pervasive, more complex than average.

If Emergency Exit is where Clarence Major declares himself a painter in the most visual way, My Amputations is where he develops into an obsession the reflections of it in the text. This novel, wrapped up like the previous one in questions of identity, goes beyond mentioning a few painters to parade a panoply of painterly, sculptural and architectural referents across its pages (see Klawans). In My Amputations the concern with conflicting identities reaches an apex. The rivalries of writer vs. painter, street guy vs. respectable professor, polite academician vs. radical artist, African-American vs. white American values, and African vs. European artistic traditions clamor and overlap in a hissing and twisted form. In Majors own words, albeit taken from another context, the storyline is like "a Francis Bacon figure in a bleak landscape: half-formed, trapped - deformed" (203). The meaning of being an African-American artist is at the heart of sorting it all out.

Major's texts and paintings begin to sort these issues out along parallel tracks. During the early seventies, Major had painted mostly figurative abstractions. Like the ones that appeared in Emergency Exit, they were characterized by angular shapes, sweeping gestures, and swirling or slashing brushstrokes. The colors were somber and highly contrasted - a range of browns, pale beiges and lurid ochres, blood reds, blacks, and the occasional muddy blue or turquoise. Human faces were obscured in a variety of ways. Some, as in Party (1973), were masked, others, as in Crowd (1974) and Twelve Thirty (1973), were simply faceless, no matter what their color, and the paintings always depicted multi-hued groups. Love at First Sight (1976) depicts two figures, one clearly "black" and the other "white," reaching toward each other in a ghostly, unfulfilled embrace.

Later in the seventies, Major experimented with further obliteration of the figures in his paintings. With paintings like Love at First Sight and My Office (1976), his compositions were already becoming destabilized, off-center, and askew from the edges of the field. But Major continued to push at the edges of his vision. Works like Reorganization (1978) and a series of tempera-on-paper Franz Kline-like studies maintained Major's somber palette, while the brushstrokes let loose in a frenzy of angry, confused energy.

By the early eighties, this style was evolving, just as Major's prose style was. Perhaps partly because of his mobility during these years, Major painted off and on, and he began working more often in quick-drying pigments like acrylic and watercolor on paper, which were easier to store and transport than canvas and stretchers. He also began more frequently to do more naturalistic work, notably delicate plant studies and watercolor landscapes (the latter especially during his travels in Italy in 1984). Eight Children (1985) has a luminous, Piranesi-like feel: Soft light floods the children, harmoniously small in the foreground of a wide horizontal span and solidly upright on the background of cool, tranquil watercolor washes. Still, half the children contrast their dark lines against a pale watery background, while the others appear starkly white against the dark green tones of shore. It becomes obvious that human color is a matter of light and context.

Major by no means gave up his vigorous brushwork - a 1984 series of acrylic-on-paper works, for instance, hearkens to his earlier figural abstractions with its saturated colors, heavy black slashes, and sometimes faceless figures. These paintings, of groups of figures wearing turbans, odd hats, and tunics and riding horses, carrying swords, and so forth, were perhaps inspired by the travels during which Major encountered such a wide array of cultures. Unlike the serene landscapes and still lifes of this period these human abstractions contain the same quick sense of motion and turbulence of Major's earlier work. But the figures are frontal stable, and seen from eye level (the same is true for the more "realistic" Mirror, which graces the cover of My Amputations - see Klawans). In some of these paintings the figures even have rudimentary faces, as though the blurring element of Major's double vision might be clearing. In Five Figures, while one face is completely obliterated by a heavy black diagonal another shows simple eyes and nose or mouth. Seven Figures depicts what appears as some kind of dance or ritual greeting, four of the group creating a pattern of curves with their arms raised in the air. The faces here are slightly grotesque and mask-like, painted as they are in thick white on top of black outlines, but they have clearly identifiable eyes, noses, and mouths. It is as though Major sees in a variety of cultures similar questions about community and how that is and is not determined by surface-level qualities like habits of dress and masks of skin.

Once a reader gets the hang of it, My Amputations provides much more narrative coherence than Emergency Exit, and also brings the question of painterly identity more directly into the text. The first part of the novel, up to the point when Mason departs for his European tour, seems concerned mostly with sexual identity and the conflict between ghetto values and artistic ambition, although one recalcitrant African-American American student introduces early on the question "How come your muse had an Irish name and not an African?" (63)

But looking to Africa doesn't provide satisfactory answers for Mason. While riding in the taxi from National Airport to College Park, Maryland, for a lecture, Mason "imagined he was in Africa, in a big industry city: the faces along the sidewalks and at intersections. . . were saffron nutmeg black ivory with an occasionally pink or ivory white" (57), a longing description that could be of one of Major's early figure paintings like Crowd, in which skin colors vary and merge. When he actually gets there, however, Mason finds that the "Ivory Coast was a shock: As he was driven into the city Mason felt as though he was in some modern European metropolis: massive traffic jams, sky-wrapers, the whole bit" (190). The locales, the cultural connections, the emotions invert themselves, just as the locus of Mason's (and, by association, Major's) sense of identity shifts between the Eurocentric and the Afrocentric.

Mason's tour overseas, from page 80 on, is a series of interrogations of artistic and cultural artifacts, and indeed of the people of the cultures encountered. But the emphasis here is heavily on what these cultures offer Mason as an artist: Even though his character pores as a well-known author, it is with the great works of visual art that he is most concerned. He walks "peacefully under the shelter" of trees in Cezanne's garden (90), finds the people in Germany "as stunned and stiff as figures in an Ernst Fritsch or a Cesar Klein" (110), and watches the horses in Italy as they "side-stepped the fire with the heavy grace of Degas ballet dancers dislocated in Bartolomeo's Assumption of the Virgin" (134). In Athens he spends a long morning at the National Museum, querying the ancient statues of Hygieia, Kikon, Aphrodite, and even Blackface Hermes, but gets little yield. He almost weeps at the sight of a portrait with "lovely African lust linger[ing] beneath its intentions" (135), but with his Irish-named muse, Celt, Mason doesn't fit in once he gets to Africa; it is not home for him, and his main referents while there remain Matisse, Glackens, Pollock, de Kooning, and his own Celt, "bright as a Veronese Venus" (187). Mason, who is welcomed "home" in Ghana, doesn't even recognize the "strange red fruit" that is offered to him there (182). He finds in Africa no more or fewer resonances than in Europe, with the paintings in the Louvre, the room where van Gogh died, the beach at Nice at which "Mason forgets he's a foreigner in the mix of multi-colored bodies" (100). His "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, Uke the author, must continue to juggle the disparate elements of the Western and the African.

This lack of purity, or a single way of looking at things - in culture, color, intention, and morality - emerges as one of the themes of much of Major's work, both visual and verbal, and is strongly present in My Amputations:

He got up, went to the typewriter, sat, but only gazed out the window:sky full of goldfish No, look again: the building across the street. No, I tell you it's a red sunset. (55)

The view, like the content of the imagination, is difficult to pin down, to be certain about. Unlike much postmodern literature, however, My Amputations doesn't seem to assert that there is no reality, but that one must constantly seek it amid aU the illusion and deception. Setting out on the European tour, Mason examines his face in the hotel room mirror:

He hadn't yet focused on his own reflection but was trying to make out the background.... Was this Africa with its delightful myths and rites.... He was coming to...[his] imageslowly. Calmly. Mirror mirror... There was so much chaos behind the image! ... Despite himself Mason saw himself.... This wasn't Mason Ellis: Who then? What then? The guy in the mirror was more triangular, Mason himself was closer to the arc of a circle - slightly bent from despair and running. The mirror firm might be the interwdion of two sets.(81-%2) Despite the fact that Mason river with any certainty finds a unified self, he keeps looking and he keeps discovering the bits and pieces that have gone into him. He wants to forget his own color, but finds he must face it, and his complex heritage, after all ". . . . the separation of body and spirit was going to remain a problem," Mason acknowleges. "Oneness was lost somewhere back there in the ruins" (172).

Such Was the Season (1987) marked a definitive change in Major's fictional style. The smoother, more traditionally coherent narrative account of Juneboy's return to Atlanta to visit relatives after years of absence makes perfect sense if seen in light of Major's concerns about identity and its sources. In My Amputations, he his protagonist to Europe and Africa; in Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar (published in 1988, but written in 1983- 84), he spoke in the voice of a Native American; and in Such Was the Season he assumed the voice of a black matriarch based on his relatives in Atlanta, where he was born and spent his first twelve years. The novel retains the subjectivity of a first-person narrator and often speaks through dreams, shared stories of past times, flashbacks, and the characters on television shows, who are every bit as "red" as the "real" people of the novel. Annie Eliza, the novel's narrator, describes the novel's cause celebre, the week-long stay of her nephew Juneboy, a well-educated scientist researching a cure for sickle-cell anemia, who has come to lecture at Spelman and Emory. Major has taken the focus off literary and artistic identity and placed it on familial and cultural, but, as in Major's other novels, the mixture is paramount. Even "back home," dinner is full of Cantonese, Middle Eastern, French, and Mediterranean even back home, Annie Eliza is aware that her son lives on a "cul-desac," which is a "French word" that means "dead end" (17). Annie Eliza herself, "a plain down-to-earth common person" (16), has a wide array of cultural knowledge:

I was looking at the big bandage on his left ear. It looked Mm that picture of that crazy artist who cut off his ear. You know the one I mean (158)

It is through Annie Eliza, in fact, that we are granted glimmers of an aesthetic sensibility. In addition to her imaginative relationship with soap opera personalities, she has a keen eye, and she and Juneboy slip into a familiar rhythm over morning coffee, driving through the countryside, and watching birds. Annie Eliza is excited to see yellow-chested warblers, to watch a woodpecker among the chinquopins and toothache trees in the family cemetery (53-58). Juneboy may be beyond her complete understanding, but the novel makes it plain that he springs from her as much as from other sources. Annie Eliza seems to take Juneboy's complicated speeches back to the basics and to express them in simpler terms. For example, Juneboy goes into a lengthy explanation of his reasons for coming South (7-8), but Annie Eliza has already told us that "maybe his homecoming was a way of coming down to earth, finding out bout us, his people" (1).

In a similar sense, Major was during this same period refocusing his visual art emphasis, working on straightforward studies of plants, animals, and household objects like lamps and vases. Annie Eliza's voice seems to echo the paintings of this time period:

I use to go out in the garden and cut a bunch of yellow tulips and put them in a tall pretty blue vase.... The bright yellow color always made her smile and the blue right close to the yellow did too.(185)

It's as though part of the identity, part of the reality, that Clarence Major had been seeking he was finding in the rhythms of everyday objects and people, in family history and the patterns of nature. It's as though he has finally discovered that visual sensitivity, as he has experienced it, stems from his African-American heritage as well as from the great European painters. Both his paintbrush and Annie Eliza lead him to that conclusion, and his double vision, once again, takes a unifying focus.

During the academic year, Major writes mostly short pieces - poems, reviews, and so on - and does his novel writing in the summer. Throughout this process, he is painting too, typically for shorter periods of time at the end of a day or week of writing. He acknowledges that, as he works, he doesn't try to connect his paintings and writing, but that invariably the same colors keep turning up, the same clothing, settings, objects. "My identity finds expression, takes care of itself without any conscious or willful act" (telephone interview), and the same concerns show up in both kinds of work. Currently working on a novel about a 1940s/50s blues singer who moves from Chicago to Omaha searching for a sense of self through his music, Major couldn't help but notice the similarity in his paintings.

Suddenly, the paintings are no longer slashed with brooding black and brown strokes. Instead, they have taken on a clarity and calm - large blocks of vibrant colors, a full range of values from dark to hight, forms distint but not barred from each other, lines sinuous and soft. The figures in Saturday Afternoon (1993) stand companionably along the curb; those in Country Boogie (1993) sway in a lively rhythm. There is still melancholy in these paintings, there is still a nervous quality that makes one dancer seem ready to run off the back of the canvas, but the anger and frustration seem decidedly less than during his more restless years.

"For the last ten years," Major says, "I have been feeling extremely good about the work I'm doing both as a painter and a writer. For a long time I was Im secure; I thought an artist had to be of his or her own time, and I forced myself to do things that weren't very satisfying [in my painting]. Finally, I said to-hell-with-it, I'll paint what and how I need to" (telephone interview).

Major's novels and paintings have provided a series of systematic searches into different sources of identity - sexual, literary, cultural, visual, socioeconomic, familial, regional, national, and personal, as well as ethnic. Undoubtedly, his struggles with these issues stem in part from the fact that a "positive, healthy perception of ethnic identity is not automatic birthright for most Blacks" (Gay and Baker 37), especially in relation to the areas of life that compelled and inspired Major - the literary and the artistic. Today, however, Major seems to be reaching a state where his double vision becomes a mature, comprehensive vision, where he is more able to incorporate the many images that confront him:

We know when we are in the presence of individuals who have clarified their Blackness and integrated it into their being, not go much by any specific, isolated-behaviors as by the sense of security, self-direction, confidence, assurance, and comfort with their ethnic selves that they radiate. They neither apologize for nor proselytize about their Blackness. They simply fuse it with an other dimensions of their being. (Gay and Baker 64)

One place where these strands of Major's identity become clear is Fun & Games (1990), his only published collection of short stories, and perhaps my favorite of his works. The collection, like a condensed and intensified version of his range of novels, embodies similar themes, even some of the same characters (Julie Ingram and Al Morris in "Letters," Juneboy and his father Scoop in "Saving the Children"). Divided into five sections, the pieces work in a disticnt direction from traditional narratives in the first part to highly subjective, language-and image-oriented pieces in the last section, which is even called, in painterly terms, "Mobile Axis: A Triptych." There are many ways this progression might be analyzed - daily life to intellectual pursuits, childhood memories to adult obsessions, realism to abstraction - but what is most important here is how the stories speak to and enrich each other. They meld and overlap, and over the course of reading them the whole becomes greater than the parts, like a mosaic made with different kinds and sizes of tile.

In "Liberties," the most directly painting-related piece in the collection, we are introduced in descriptive words to series of van Gogh's paintings. The juxtaposition, the exercise of translating visual image into words, which must then function to recreate visual images in the reader's mind, has a peculiarly unnerving effect. The painting, are there; Un pop up on the page as tangible as the page itself. We are reminded that alphabets begin as pictographs, and, though words are spoken things, to write and read we must see. The line between picture and symbol is a fine one. (Update 7)

The narrator proceeds from portrait to portrait, scrutinizing van Gogh's repeated face much as one might concentrate on a text one is searching for clues. He finds both answers and questions, but concludes that "each face in each picture represents a version of the man in the window" (117).

Major has reached a point in his career as an artist where he can paint his own face as brown, green, or, as in the cover for My Amputations, white with a black outline. As a writer, he can observe similarly that van Gogh's "eyes are sometimes slanted. His skin color varies from dark to pink" (116). Clarence Major's many colors can share one skin and his voices can share one volume, merging with each other into one resonant and touching whole. His double vision has become a genuine gift.

Works Cited

Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P. 1987. Fine, Elsa Honig. The Afro-American Artist New York: Hacker Art Books, 1982. Gay, Geneva, and Willie L. Baber, eds. Expressively Black: The Cultural Basis of Ethnic Identity. New York: Praeger, 1987. Klawans, Stuart. "|I was a weird example of Art': My Amputations as Cubist Confession." African American Review 28 (1994): 77-86. Lacy, Leslie. The Rise and Fall of the Proper Negro. New York: Macmillan, 1970. Major, Clarence. "Clarence Major Interviews: Jacob Lawrence, The Expressionist." Black Scholar 9.3 (1977): 14-27. _____. The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work. New York: Third P, 1974. _____. Emergency Exit. New York: Fiction Collective, 1979. _____. Fun & Games: Short Fiction. Duluth: Holy Cow!, 1990. _____. "Licking Stamps, Taking Chances." Vol. 6 of Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. Ed. Adele Sarkissian. Detroit: Gale, 1988. 175-204. _____. My Amputations. New York: Fiction Collective, 1986. _____. "Necessary Distance: Afterthoughts on Becoming a Writer." Black American Literature Forum 23 (1989): 197-212. _____. Such Was the Season. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1987. _____. Telephone interview. 13 Jan. 1994. Powell, Richard J. The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism. Washington: Washington Project for the Arts, 1989. Thompson, Robert F. "African Influence on the Art of the United States." Black Studies in the University. Ed. Armstead L. Robinson, Craig C. Foster, and Donald H. Ogilvie. New Haven: Bantam, 1969.170-71. Updike, John. "Foreword." Doubly Gifted: The Author as Visual Artist. Ed. Kathleen G. Hjerter. New York: Abrams, 1986. 7-8. Weixlmann, Joe. "Clarence Major." Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955. Vol. 33 of Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed. Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris. Detroit Gale, 1984. 153-61. Yearwood, Gladstone. "Expressive Traditions in Afro-American Visual Arts." Gay and Baber 137-63.