The Art and Life of Clarence Major by Keith E. Byerman (review)

In the introduction to The Art and Life of Clarence Major, Keith E. Byerman states that he is content to follow the trajectory of Clarence Major’s art rather than to impose a theoretical model of interpretation onto Major’s extensive oeuvre (3–4). As Major’s career includes both writing and painting and has resulted in fourteen books of poetry, nine volumes of fiction, and fifteen individual art shows, just keeping track of his prolific output is itself quite a project. But criticism on Major has not kept up with its plethora of material, as Major’s work resulted in only one monograph-length publication before Byerman’s: Bernard W. Bell’s collected volume, Clarence Major and His Art: Portraits of an African American Postmodernist (1999). Bell includes in his volume ten short essays on Major as well as two interviews and a selection of poetry, prose, and paintings, a spread largely reproduced from the 1994 special issue of African American Review dedicated to Major’s work. Six of the ten articles published in Bell’s volume were originally published in this African American Review issue. While Bell’s book is a significant antecedent to Byerman’s work because it collected the best scholarship on Major, it also collected most of the scholarship on Major. Outside of the African American Review special issue, there is little research on Major’s career and what has come forward has been synthesized and integrated into Byerman’s text.¹ For this reason, Byerman’s volume is a significant advance for Clarence Major criticism and a major contribution to the study of late-twentieth-century African American art.

Byerman emphasizes Major’s individualist ethos by charting how Major fought against conventionality in his personal, artistic, and academic lives—a tenet of his personal philosophy that led to his scholarly neglect, but that also makes him a tremendously appealing subject of study. Byerman describes Major as a man who “went about the business of living and working as much as possible on his own terms in a society and culture that demanded acceptance of certain principles in order to succeed,” in the process “reveal[ing] a great deal about the limits and possibilities of contemporary culture,” an echo of Bell’s introduction which considers Major a “transgressive voice” whose writing “boldly mov[es] beyond traditional literary limits and cultural boundaries in experimenting with different, occasionally multiple, narrative voices” (Byerman 5; Bell 1).

In order to systematically address Major’s prolific output, The Art and Life of Clarence Major is organized simply and chronologically, beginning with a chapter on Major’s family, proceeding through the major publications and periods of his career, and concluding with another meditation on family prompted by Major’s most recent publication, a memoir titled Come By Here, My Mother’s Life (2002). The decision to begin with the story of Major’s heritage reflects how important the genre of biography—the “American racial family romance”—is to the canon of African American literature (Byerman 6). Introducing Major in this way aids Byerman’s project of bringing Major into the canon by foregrounding how his work, while avant-garde, also include hallmarks common to other significant writers. In the process, Byerman demonstrates how Major could begin to be studied within a comparative framework. Immediate connections on the role of mothers within African American families, for example, could be drawn between Major’s memoir and Lucille Clifton’s Generations (1976).

However, the strength of Keith E. Byerman’s volume comes from his attention to the fugitive aspects of Clarence Major’s writing. Byerman notes that Major commissioned his own first book, the ten-page The Fires That Burn in Heaven (1954), by paying his uncle to print copies (22). Major later burned the remaining copies of the volume because he realized how bad they were (18). Major’s impulse to self-publish and then destroy his juvenilia is itself part of a long and storied...