Crabcakes: A Memoir

"McPherson’s story is a very interesting one – it’s a very American one. He grew up in the segregated South, in Savannah, Georgia, and I remember him telling me how, when he came to the North to work as a train porter, he sat on the bus and a white woman came on and sat down next to him. And he stood up right away and she asked him ‘What are you doing? You can sit!’ And he pointed out to me that although she thought it was that he was self-segregating, really it was just that he didn’t know how to act – he had never sat next to a white woman before and he didn’t know what to do with himself. So that’s the kind of background he came from. He faced extreme poverty, too. Eventually, he went to Harvard to study Law but decided that he didn’t want to pursue it – I don’t think he liked the idea of litigation – and so he decided to become a writer instead. He wrote two collections of short stories, Hue and Cry (1969) and Elbow Room (1977), and then won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction – it was the first time the prize went to an African-American writer. So, historically he has been an important voice in this country. He hasn’t been forgotten but – by the general public at least – he is definitely less read and less appreciated than he should be. I think he struggled with things because he refused to simplify his situation and his thinking. He was not prolific, that’s true, and he sort of became a writers’ writer and a teacher of writing. He kept to himself but he was not a recluse – he was never a recluse. He was always in the community. He had all these generations of students who really respected him. The reason I chose Crabcakes is because it really is a picture – although ‘picture’ is too light a word – of this man. It is a deeply felt book about being a writer. At one point he writes that words are insufficient – he says something like ‘I will never have the right words’. It’s so clear that he had this deep feeling – he felt something higher, something stronger than himself – and he acknowledges that he can’t express himself sufficiently to convey that. I think the book was written with all of these limitations in mind – in his career, his life, his personal situation, and the racial tensions he experienced. I think a lot of things made his life difficult and yet this book is not a book about a difficult life – it’s a book about a man, a writer, questioning himself and his own writing. The book’s two parts are so different but I think he finds something in the second part. There’s a moment where he’s on a train, dripping with sweat, and a Japanese women comes up to him and sits next to him and wipes his sweat with her handkerchief. That human touch was what he had spent the whole of the first part of the book running away from. He couldn’t trust human beings. A central episode in the book is how he offered a house to an old African-American couple. When he did that there was still no human touch involved; the human touch came much later, when the old lady died. I keep thinking back to this thing he used to say: ‘I was an arrogant young man’. If you knew him, you’d know that he was the least arrogant person in the world, but I think I know why he said what he said. I think when he was a young man he had all these dreams and those dreams were dashed by reality. “ The human touch was what he had spent the whole of the first part of the book running away from. ” It’s tough for me to talk about the book because it was written in the 1990s and I can only talk about it with the knowledge of the 20 years that would follow and what would happen to him – it feels a little unfair of me. But, in Crabcakes , he tries so hard to connect with all these different authors and people and cultures, partly I think because he had this idea of an ‘omni-American’, a more humane version of an American citizen. That idea – the ‘omni-American’ – was the centre of his existence. And that idea just did not work out. So I guess I don’t know that he did manage to find his version of Lewis’s joy. When I think of him I think mostly of the pain that he lived through. There’s a line in another essay, from when he was young, about 17, I think, in de-segregated Atlanta, and a white man came up to him and said ‘Get over to the other side of the street nigger’. McPherson was so angry and he wanted to report this racial attack to these two white policemen who tried so hard to dismiss him. In the end, McPherson and the white man and the two policemen where sitting in the police car, and McPherson kept saying that he wanted to press changes; but the man was drunk and he started crying. It was such a messy situation. And McPherson says something like, ‘in the end, nobody came out of this situation so pretty.’ In the end, he walked away. I think he felt that he didn’t want to be a racial revolutionary – he felt there was something even higher than that. That he couldn’t reach that – that he couldn’t achieve omni-Americanism, I guess – is the limitation that he struggled with his whole life. That’s maybe also what makes him less read today – he was always trying not to be reduced, not to be pushed into being one kind of writer. Yes, and that self-doubt is essential – it’s a privileged and a disadvantage depending on how you look at it. It’s interesting how he tackles the issue of ‘I’. At one point in this book, when McPherson is writing about himself, he goes into a third-person narration. He calls himself ‘someone’. And I can’t be sure why he chose to do that – whether it’s a sign of discomfort about using ‘I’ – but I can say that it’s definitely one of the reasons I am so drawn to the book. He was a philosopher-writer. Much of his later work was concerned with philosophy and culture and time, and concepts like those. And you start to see this interest in the second part of Crabcakes . I really don’t think you can call this book a ‘memoir’ in a conventional sense – this is a book that, if I’m feeling confused about something, I’ll pick it up and find a passage to read to see if it can clear my mind. I think readers – and I count myself among them – do feel drawn to autobiographical writing. The C.S. Lewis book has a line to the effect that ‘It is truly astounding when you find there’s another person like you in the world, someone who feels like you.’ And I feel deeply – and I don’t mean this pessimistically – that we always feel an inadequacy when we try to communicate with another person and try to get close to another person. Autobiographical books can be another way of getting to feel close to another person. We always have to have a few stars in our map, otherwise we will get lost. These books are proof that someone has already experienced what we are experiencing. Of course, on another level, I think perhaps we’re all just very nosey people. We want to know other people’s secrets and that’s why some people get upset if they read a memoir and find there aren’t enough secrets in it. They feel cheated. It seems to be an almost universal desire to uncover a dirty pile of secrets. That’s why I like these anti-memoirs – they work against that desire. They’re not about divulging miserable secrets: they are written with a frankness, a candidness, and they are open – they welcome talk, but not about personal details. They offer so much more than a good tale studded with sparkly bits of gossip."