The Art and Life of Clarence Major

NINE: Consolidating a Career

[ c h a p t e r n i n e Consolidating a Career The often-difficult but also productive sojourn in Colorado ended in 1989, when Major accepted a position at the University of California Davis as a professor of English and creative writing. The opportunity developed in 1987 when he served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts with Will Baker, a fictionist and essayist who had joined the faculty at Davis in 1969. The two remained in contact and discussed the move in late 1988. An interview was arranged for February 1989, which meant that Major returned from his visiting positions at Binghamton and Temple and almost immediately went out to California. The creative writing program at the time included Baker, Sandra MacPherson, and Jack Hicks, who was one of its founders, though he was known primarily as a critic. The readings , social events, and meetings with faculty and students went very well. Both the chair of the department and the dean were supportive of the appointment. While the open position was for a writer, Major had the advantage of being able to teach both poetry and fiction, as well as American and African American literature. An offer was officially made in the late spring, and he and Pam moved to Davis for the beginning of the fall term. While looking for a house to buy they stayed first at the Aggie Inn adjacent to campus. Within a couple of weeks, they acquired a ranch-style house at Toyon and Villanova streets, where they lived until moving to their current home on Wren Street in suburban Davis in the spring of 1992. Around this time, he also consolidating a career [ 187 briefly considered another professional move. At the time of the Davis interview, there was some effort to get him to take a position at Binghamton . A job did not materialize then, but the possibility reoccurred in 1992. As part of his thinking about this, he sent out letters of inquiry to several universities to test the waters. Based on documents in the archives, these queries produced no results, and he finally decided to remain in Davis. When uc Davis was established in the early twentieth century as the agricultural campus of the University of California system, the College of Letters and Sciences was created, and the English Department later set up a graduate program in creative writing. Though the program did not have the kind of commitment to experimentation found at Colorado, it was clear that Major had already moved to a different kind of writing. Among his new colleagues were Baker, who published fiction and nonfiction, primarily about the American West; MacPherson, who had established herself as a poet several years before coming to Davis; Alan Williamson, known for both his poetry and poetry criticism; and Sandra Gilbert, a nationally known feminist scholar and poet. Thus, Major’s new situation was one in which critical and creative training were integrated. It is perhaps not surprising that the shift in environment was accompanied by a hiatus in literary publication, with only a collection of stories and figure 21. Major’s Davis home at 3510 Wren Street 188 ] chapter nine a chapbook in the seven years following the move. After all, between 1985 and 1989, he had produced three novels (My Amputations, Such Was the Season, and Painted Turtle) and three books of poetry (Inside Diameter, Surfaces and Masks, and Some Observations). What happened during this period was the beginning of his effort to solidify his reputation as a significant figure in contemporary American literature generally and African American literature specifically. He continued to publish poems and short fiction, but now more often in Black American Literature Forum (later African American Review) and Callaloo, both major academic journals, rather than little magazines. His essays tended to appear in anthologies and general circulation magazines. In addition, he wrote reviews for the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. He also did dust-jacket blurbs for novels published by major commercial houses; the irony here, of course, is that virtually all of these houses had rejected his work earlier in his career. “reaching and leaving the point” As part of the effort to define his career, Major published “Reaching and Leaving the Point,” an essay on perspective and point of view that appeared in 1989 in High Plains Literary Review. The journal itself is...