The Stories of James Alan McPherson by James Alan McPherson

First published:Hue and Cry, 1969; Elbow Room, 1977

Type of work: Short stories

Early Success

James Alan McPherson was immediately recognized for his talent as a writer. In the same year that he graduated from Harvard Law School, his first collection of short stories, Hue and Cry, was published. McPherson was twenty-five at the time, and a year later he was awarded an O. Henry Prize for the volume’s title story. Less than ten years later, his second collection, Elbow Room, was published and received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. In 1981, McPherson was honored with a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

Such prompt and extensive praise resulted from McPherson’s penetrating examination of themes of racial differences, as in the story “On Trains,” in which a plump, matronly woman boards a train in Chicago. She spends the entire afternoon in the dining car, until she is asked to leave so the waiters can prepare the next table setting. The porters and stewards gossip that she does not tip though she receives good service. Alone in the club car with the bartender, she grows uncomfortable and leaves in a hurry when he comes from behind the bar to wipe tables. The woman moves on to the Pullman car, where she learns that the Pullman porter stays in the car overnight in case passengers need him. She complains to the Pullman conductor that the porter is black and should not be allowed to stay in the car. Told that it is the porter’s job, the woman decides to sleep in the coaches instead of the Pullman, while the porter falls asleep, feeling guilty and ashamed despite his innocence.

A Fiction of Difference

“On Trains” demonstrates the themes of difference and separation that characterize much of McPherson’s work. It is clear from the start that the woman who boards the train in Chicago and the workers on the train are different in more ways than simply their status as passenger and crew. In addition to her portrayal as plump and matronly, the woman is described as “colorless,” an intimation that she is white. She is also called an “old Southern gal,” implying that she represents the Old South. While the train continues on its journey, difference is magnified as the woman moves from one car to the next, always escaping the train crew. Finally, when there are no more cars to which the woman can move, she is forced to reveal that, in her mind, she and the porter are forever incompatible, no matter what the circumstance, because of their different skin colors.

In McPherson’s two collections of short stories, the plots, like that of “On Trains,” primarily revolve around the distinctions that exist between two main characters who are at once together within a particular setting or time frame yet separate because of their differences. Each story lies in how the characters contend with the situation those differences present. McPherson’s heroes and heroines are immediately identifiable within any community. Barbers, custodians, porters, widows, post-office clerks, and shopkeepers are the people he writes about. Even when they represent the underside of life, they are affable. The fact that McPherson worked his way through college as a waiter aboard the Great Northern Railroad could account for his skill in portraying in a natural, unassuming voice the ordinary people who inhabit Hue and Cry and Elbow Room. Most of his characters have migrated from the small towns of New England, southern backwoods, or midwestern prairies to the larger cities of the American landscape. Places such as Boston, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, and San Francisco are the settings for most of the stories (and, incidentally, the major stops of the railroad).

Because readers can easily recognize such characters, McPherson’s stories are particularly unsettling. Throughout both collections, distinctions between people ultimately prove irreconcilable and forever condemn them to be at odds with one another. In “Gold Coast,” for example, the custodians of a building off Harvard Square are opposites in terms of economic, educational, and professional stature. Robert, a Harvard student, takes a job as an apprentice janitor under James Sullivan. Whereas Robert aspires to be a writer and uses the job for its story potential, James has worked in the same building his entire life. Robert mines the garbage cans for bits and pieces of information to use in his stories, while James lives vicariously through insignificant associations he has had with the Harvard elite.

In the end, Robert avoids James, who constantly pesters him for company, especially during late-night drinking sessions in the basement. When Robert finally gives up his job in the building, unable to find value in the trash of those who live there, he is so alienated from James that he cannot even help him on the street one day when he sees him struggling with two heavy shopping bags. Robert is close enough to touch James, yet because James is conscious only of how heavy his bags are, Robert passes him by and never looks back. Though Robert is black and James is white, differences unrelated to race give Robert an advantage over James and prevent him from caring for James.

McPherson on Race

This is not to say that McPherson ignores the adversity that racial differences cause among people. In fact, when his stories revolve around issues of race, particularly in the title stories of both collections, McPherson is at his best. In keeping with the bleak resolutions of the majority of pieces in McPherson’s corpus, in “Hue and Cry” and “Elbow Room” the two main characters’ racial distinctions either thwart their relationships with one another entirely or constantly run as undercurrents, preventing them from existing in a context where difference is not problematic. As in “On Trains,” McPherson, in “Hue and Cry” and “Elbow Room,” masterfully infers and alludes to widely held beliefs ingrained within American culture that ultimately give rise to the racial tensions in both stories. This same technique can be found in “An Act of Prostitution” and “Problems of Art.” Because racial stereotypes get in the way of two couples’ love in “Hue and Cry” and “Elbow Room,” though, the racism portrayed is all the more evil.

In “Hue and Cry,” Margot Payne and Eric Carney’s involvement is hampered by the stereotypes associated with their racial differences. Margot is black and Eric is white. In order to counter beliefs that black women are promiscuous, Eric refrains from kissing Margot for the first three weeks of their relationship. A conversation that Margot has with Eric’s African American roommate, Jerry, also alludes to the racist innuendo that surrounds the story. Jerry tells Margot that he is a better lover than Eric, flaunting the idea of black male prowess. Like Margot and Eric, Virginia Valentine and Paul Frost, the two main characters of “Elbow Room,” must also contend with racist assumptions. Virginia is black, Paul is white. Paul is particularly troubled by such beliefs and spends much of his time learning about them in a constant effort to disregard them.

Ironically, both Margot and Eric and Virginia and Paul are involved in the social movements of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. In fact, their individual commitment to social reform is the basis for their attractions. Eric worked in the South during the civil rights marches for a semester and summer. When he returns to school in the fall and meets Margot, he recruits her to work alongside him. In “Elbow Room,” Virginia is involved in the Peace Corps, and Paul is a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. The greatest contribution that both couples make toward political change, however, is their personal involvement with each other despite their differing racial backgrounds. Through such private circumstances, McPherson speaks to the larger racial anxieties present within the subtexts of both stories and powerfully demonstrates the difficulties in overcoming such obstacles when they are so deep-seated that they intrude upon personal lives.

In both “Hue and Cry” and “Elbow Room,” the couples’ parents, particularly the white parents, function as emissaries of the cultural standards that all but deny interracial relationships. When Eric takes Margot to New Hampshire to meet his parents, his father is mysteriously away in the woods hunting, while Eric’s mother nearly breaks into tears when she looks at Margot. Soon after the visit, Margot and Eric split up. Virginia and Paul, on the other hand, get married; Paul, however, must perpetually contend with his father’s badgering him to desert Virginia.

Not all of McPherson’s stories that deal with racial difference end in despair. In “A Loaf of Bread,” Harold Green, a Jewish shopkeeper, and Nelson Reed, a black assembly-line worker, resolve their conflicts with each other, and in “Problems of Art,” Mrs. Mary Farragot, a black spinster, triumphs over a court system that pronounces her guilty until proven innocent. The fact that “Hue and Cry” and “Elbow Room” end with unresolved racial conflicts, however, makes the conclusions of both stories all the more unnerving. The intrusion of the omniscient narrator in both “Hue and Cry” and “Elbow Room” also expands the pain of irreconcilable racial forces to include and involve readers in a resolution. The narrator forces readers to have a stake in the stories’ scenarios and outcomes.

In “Hue and Cry,” after Margot and Eric’s breakup, the storyteller asks, “If this is all there is, what is left of life and why are we alive?” The question thrusts the racial tensions that Margot and Eric tragically succumb to toward readers, demanding consideration. The narrator’s intrusion underscores the futility of Margot’s and Eric’s existence, leaving readers alone to ponder the possibility of life in the world that Margot and Eric sought but were ultimately unable to grasp. Likewise, the narrator of “Elbow Room” intrusively announces throughout the piece that he is in search of a new story in which differences are not threatening. In fact, it is with this hope that the storyteller pursues a relationship with Paul and Virginia in the first place, hoping to advance his own writing career with the novel idea of a successful interracial relationship. The narrator is especially enamored of Virginia, who tells him that she has made “elbow room” within her head, meaning she has made a space for herself that allows for differences between people. Though the story ends with the description of a picture of Paul, Virginia, and their newborn son in Kansas at Paul’s parents’ house, the narrator regrets that he lacks the insight to tell if Paul and Virginia’s story is a successful one. The narrator is of this world, still largely unable to make “elbow room.” He does wager his reputation on the boy’s story, giving some hope for the future. McPherson raises the possibility of change but cleverly leaves readers in control of deciding the destiny of Paul, Virginia, and their son.

Bibliography

Ashe, Bernard D. From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2002. Includes a chapter on McPherson’s representation of gender relations and his narrative style in “The Story of a Scar.”

Beavers, Herman. “I Yam What You Is and You Is What I Yam: Rhetorical Invisibility in James Alan McPherson’s ’The Story of a Dead Man.’” Callaloo 9 (Fall, 1986): 565-577. Though the narrator in “The Story of a Dead Man” is like other McPherson narrators in that he is visible both as storyteller and character, Beavers discusses how he is different because of his innocence and naïveté, lacking the usual all-knowing authority that legitimizes his role as storyteller.

Gervin, Mary A. “Developing a Sense of Self: The Androgynous Ideal in McPherson’s ’Elbow Room.’” CLA Journal 26 (December, 1982): 251-255. Discusses the androgynous implications of “Elbow Room,” wherein Paul and Virginia assimilate the strongest character traits of the other into their own self-concepts, subsuming their masculine and feminine attributes.

McPherson, James Alan. “Interview with James Alan McPherson.” Interview by Bob Schacochis and Dan Campion. Iowa Journal of Literary Studies 4, no. 1 (1983): 6-33. A rare opportunity to read what McPherson himself has to say about his career as a writer within theAfrican American literary tradition, about classifications in regard to writing and writers, about the publishing industry, about writing workshops, and about the craft of storytelling.

McPherson, James Alan. A Region not Home: Reflections from Exile. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Collection of McPherson’s nonfiction, including his essay “On Becoming an American Writer.”

Wallace, Jon. “The Politics of Style in Three Stories by James Alan McPherson.” Modern Fiction Studies 34 (Spring, 1988): 17-26. Discusses the ways the narrators of “The Story of a Dead Man,” “The Story of a Scar,” and “Just Enough for the City” seek a space within themselves antithetical to the “elbow room” of Virginia Frost, in that they want to defend themselves from human intimacy, involvement, and personal history.

Wallace, Jon. “The Story Behind the Story in James Alan McPherson’s ’Elbow Room.’” Studies in Short Fiction 25 (Fall, 1988): 447-452. Considers the story’s real meaning to be the narrator’s search for a storytelling form that will let Paul and Virginia exist despite their interracial relationship.