by Douglas Messerli
William McPherson Testing
the Current (New York: New York Review Books, 2013)
The year is 1939, when a young boy, Tommy McAllister is 9
years of age. His family and all their friends seem to have escaped the effects
of the Great Depression, while living in almost
In the large
rambling house where Tommy and his family live, he is the adored youngster,
particularly by his devoted mother, whose other two sons, David and John are at
college and working, no longer living at home. It appears that the McAllister’s
are the social center of their set, made up of other well-to-couples, and
elderly rich women such as Mrs. Steer, Mrs. Appleton, the outlandish Mrs. Slade
and others of their ilk. The group also includes the handsome bachelor, Lucien
Wolfe, who has mines in Canada and Mexico, the latter to which he retreats for
long periods of time. But if the reader is expecting a satiric vision of the
Midwest somewhat like Sinclair Lewis’ or even Evan Connell’s Mr. and Mrs. Bridge duo, she will be highly disappointed.
McPherson’s tale
is told almost entirely through Tommy’s eyes and through the fairly non-judgmental
thinking of a child simply attempting to assimilate and comprehend the adult
world going on around him. Because he is so young in a world of more elderly
people, Tommy is both spoiled and permitted things that his brothers and their
girlfriends might never have been allowed, and, thus, he becomes a kind of
innocent “witness” to this world in a way no others can be. Indeed, we see
hardly anyone of his age, only a couple of cousins of friends of the family;
and the only child he actually encounters is a school friend, who mocks him for
being a “mamma’s boy.”
The society in
which he finds himself is a highly polite one, celebrating at one another’s
houses with great regularity and splendor, while refusing to speak at length of
family deaths, of the few tragedies they encounter (such the furnace explosion
in his father’s plant), or about their own private misbehavior (although
occasionally gossiping about it). These polite White Anglo-Saxons, although
depending on blacks and local Indians for serving, cooking, and cleaning, would
never dare even mention their race or social standing. The beautiful young
golf-playing Daisy (a character who reminds us of how close McPherson’s fiction
is Fitzgerald’s—also a Midwesterner—The
Great Gatsby), and to whom young Tommy is attracted, has married a Jew,
even though she continues to attend the communities’ preferred Episcopal
Church.
In short Tommy’s world is one very
closed-off. Although he spends long hours with the Country Club’s Buck, its
black cook Ophelia, and the Native Americans who ferry him back and forth from
the mainland to the Island, his “peers,” so to speak, represent a codified
society that is difficult to comprehend by anyone outside its self-built walls,
a world which, given our current political situations, reads quite differently
(in the reprinted 2013 edition) from what it originally did.
McPherson treats
Tommy in this deep narrative a bit like British writer Ivy Compton-Burnett’s
children, as a highly intelligent and completely well-spoken little adults. Only
Tommy has not quite figured out what he is witnessing and what to make of it
all. During the one highly-eventful year that this work traces, Tommy
straightforwardly asks questions of adults who do not always want to answer his
inquiries. If they are generally polite and friendly, they also steer him away
from certain issues, such as what adultery—a word he has obviously
overheard—might mean; or why do his parents, who seem so much in love with one
another, and whose glorious 25 (silver) anniversary party the novel celebrates
near its end—occasionally argue and, at times, seem to move off from one
another? And why does his usually open and honest mother suddenly one day tell
him that she is 22 years of age—a fib he has utterly believed, and is later
mocked when he shares it with his brother? In little ways and sometimes larger
ones, Tommy begins to feel slightly betrayed.
The most
shocking thing he discovers, which he cannot truly explain to himself, is when
he hides under the dinner table during an evening dinner party, observing Mr.
Wolfe rubbing his mother’s foot. Of course, we know what’s going on, but Tommy,
unable to realize its full significance, is confused, even if he senses its
significance. Inexplicable, at least to himself, he later steals and hides a
letter Wolfe has sent to his mother. But this very scene, and Tommy’s later
guilt for his actions, explains why McPherson’s work is so powerful. The author
does not sentimentalize his young hero because, even though, like most
children, he does yet recognize consequences, he is not truly innocent. Like
all children, Tommy realizes his own possible wickedness, as the formerly happy
boy begins to test his mother and his limits, giving Mr. Wolfe a gift of a live
snake, and refusing to be punished for the act.
Despite the
social niceties of this adult world, Tommy observes their petty gossiping, asides
about the self-proclaimed “wicked” Mrs. Slade, and a racial incident when the
drunken Mr. Hutchens demands from Ophelia another drink; when she suggests a
cup of coffee instead, he shouts “Nigger bitch.” Tommy, we perceive will grow
up, as he does in McPherson’s second fiction, To the Sargasso Sea, to be a principled person; the next day he
brings, as a gift to Ophelia, one of his favorite objects, a kaleidoscope, a symbol
obviously of his sorrow for the racial epithet she has had to endure.
Even more
significant, I believe, is the fact his mother’s adulterous behavior, as
Russell Banks has noted, “comes to nothing.” In this world, no one actually
suffers for their actions; the society is too polite and refined to do anything
but to gossip behind closed doors.
But, of course,
this will be the last summer of their existence, and the destruction of their
world will be furious and swift. Already in the book’s very last scenes,
figures such as the curious and loving Mrs. Steers is focused on her radio set,
its broadcasts hinting at the outbreak of World War II. Both Tommy’s brothers
will soon be swept up into the War, and families living in enclaves such as
those in Grande Rivière will have their seemingly never-ending patterns of
parties and social isolation swept away.
The young boy of
McPherson’s tightly-knit realist fiction, is already testing the current that
he will soon have to face, a world that no longer can afford its isolationist
attitudes, but must endure the great rapids facing it ahead.
Los Angeles,
May 13, 2017
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions
(May 2017).
It is sad to think that my dear friend, Bill, did not,
ultimately endure all of those significant shifts of cultural change.
Certainly, he was blessed, after attending the University of Michigan, Michigan
State University, and George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
receiving a degree before becoming a New York editor and gaining the position
of Book Reviewer at The Washington Post.
There, Bill not
only wrote his own intelligent reviews, but encouraged figures, who had seldom
been welcome to the major newspapers, such as critic Marjorie Perloff, and even
a graduate students like me to review, activities that ultimately gained the
attention of the national media, resulting in his winning The Pulitzer Prize
for Distinguished Criticism in 1977.
Over the next
decade, and despite his stated intentions not to do so, Bill began writing the
fiction I write about above, later following it up with The Sargasso Sea. Finally, retiring from the Post, Bill inexplicably—at least to friends like me—moved to
Romania, writing about post-Nicolae Ceauşescu events in several journals during
his 7-year stay.
Bill returned to
Washington, DC after, and I again begin to communicate with him again via
e-mail and Facebook. What I didn’t know—and he was far too embarrassed perhaps
to tell me—is that he now had lost most of his savings, having invested badly,
and was living a near-destitute life, the facts of which are revealed in his
beautiful 2014 essay in The Hedgehog
Review, “Falling,” in which he describes his history and the current
reality of his life. As he writes of his financial mistakes:
"I was never remotely rich by what counts for rich today.
(That requires a lot of zeroes after the first two or three digits.) But I look
through my checkbooks from twenty-five and thirty years ago and I think, Wow!
What happened? It was a long, slowly accelerating slide but the answer is
simple. I was foolish, careless, and sometimes stupid. As my older brother, who
to keep me off the streets invited me to live with him after his wife died,
said, shaking his head in warning, “Don’t spend your capital.” His advice was
right, but his timing was wrong. I’d already spent it. He sounded like the
ghost of my father. Capital produces income. If you want to have an income,
don’t dip into your capital. I’d always been a bit of a contrarian, even as a
child.
My money wasn’t
working hard enough to finance my adventures, which did, after all, come with a
price. I wanted to explore and write about eastern Europe after the fall of the
Wall, which I did for several years. It was truly a great adventure, it changed
my life, and it was a lot more interesting than thinking about what it cost,
which was a lot. There’d always been enough money. I assumed there always would
be. (I think this is called denial.) So another dip into the well. In my
checkbook, I listed these deposits as draws. That sounded very businesslike,
almost as if I knew what I was doing. Sometimes I did. (It’s hard to resist a
little self-justification.)"
A few days before
his death on March 28, 2017, a mutual friend wrote to tell me that Bill had
moved into a hospice, near death, with his daughter Jane in attendance. News
came of his death, of congestive heart failure and pneumonia soon after. After
testing the many different currents of his life, Bill succumbed to the terrible
force of the great rivers around him. He died at age 84.
May 13, 2017
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