6/5/2023 0 Comments Hue and cry publish dayThey spend their wages on drinking and women in the towns that the trains pass through. They fall in love with trains and don't want a more settled life. They make fun of white passengers and bosses while giving them excellent service. He evokes their world in bold, honest strokes. Two of McPherson's stories are about men who worked as Pullman porters or waiters. Some are potentially gay men ill at ease with their sexuality. Some of them let themselves be led by those who are less intelligent. Many of McPherson's characters are dissatisfied because they are more intelligent or insightful than the people around them. Margot tries to settle for an African American man who doesn't match up to her cutting intelligence, but she's never happy again. Eric is still willing to marry Margot, but she can tell that he's willing, no longer eager. He also loves her, but his mother is almost in tears when she meets Margot. She falls in love with an a young white intellectual man. The title story, "Hue and Cry" is the moving story of Margot, a highly intelligent African American woman who is irritated by people with lazy thinking. McPherson clearly didn't worry overly whether everyone would like his work. This book is a collection of short stories first published in 1968. Everyone should know McPherson's writing. James Alan McPherson was an excellent African American writer whose work I discovered recently when a friend lent me this book. 'Gold Coast', tucked in the middle of the book, was McPherson's first publication in a national magazine one he would later join as a contributing editor. Although overlong and meandering, it's intimate, involving. The best stories are 'A Solo Song for Doc' and 'Gold Coast.' The former conquers the ear as well as the mind - it's a story that actually sounds like it's being spoken directly to you. You rather see what Breece Pancake meant when he said that McPherson could sit for hours pondering the meaning of McDonalds in human existence. They are islands of incident linked by the thinnest of causeways, leading nowhere, and with a lot of pondering along the way. The opener, about a child raised by a religious fundamentalist, starts strong but fizzles out after eight pages. He has a low-key, convincing way with dialogue, especially with working-class characters, black and white. McPherson writes excellent prose: you could tap every word in each sentence with a tuning fork and enjoy the noise. McPherson is a writer whose name you see here and there - in a story stuffed in the middle of one anthology or another, or in a foreword, or in a grateful dedication from an ex-student. I have the sense that he would have been a singular person to know. In 1972 he received the Guggenheim Fellowship, and he donated the entire substantial award to the Black College Fund. He also got an MFA at the Iowa Writer's Workshop (where he was taught by the great Richard Yates). He was born in poverty in Savannah, but through his hard work and remarkable intellect, managed to get a scholarship to Harvard Law. I usually like to keep the author separate from the work, but I do find McPherson, the person, fascinating. I do understand he writes gritty, realistic prose, and is capturing a time and place, but it does definitely feel searing at times. The women are mainly prostitutes or sexual conquests, and it alienates me as a female reader, to a certain degree (and I don't want to be! I love McPherson's writing and I am IN, baby.). One of the characters actually declares: "I hate women". The male characters view women with undisguised misogyny - referring to them as "bitches" or "pieces". The one thing that did bother me in many of the stories is the depiction of women. The title story is the longest and last of the collection, and left me wishing he'd written novels. All the stories are worth reading, though, in my opinion. Of all the stories, I found these at the top of the heap: 'Gold Coast' (and John Updike agrees, choosing it for his collection Best American Short Stories of the Century), and 'All the Lonely People'. His ability to write honestly about his experience as a black person born in 1943 is something more people should know about. The first African American to win the Pulitzer for fiction, I'm mystified as to how this man has earned a somewhat obscure place in American literature. He also gives the impression that the story is going one way, and then it goes the other, and that's another way he's sneaky. But don't be fooled, there's a complexity and depth here that you may not at first perceive. His prose is disarming - no highfaluting vocabulary (ahem, Lauren Groff), just a very genuine, realistic and often conversational tone of voice to welcome you into the stories in this collection.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |