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NATIONALITY: American
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PERSONAL
Born 1921, in Lakewood, OH; died October 24, 2019, in Enfield, NY; married; wife’s name Gladys; children: two sons.
EDUCATION:Western Reserve University, B.A., M.A., 1946; State University of Iowa, Ph.D., 1950.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Morehead State College, Morehead, KY, lecturer, founder of Morehead Writers Workshop; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, assistant professor of English, beginning 1956, then Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus, 1992-2019, Cornell Council for the Arts, cofounder, 1965. Guggenheim Fellow.
MIILITARY:U.S. Army infantryman, served until 1945.
AWARDS:Essay award, National Endowment for the Arts; award in literature, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
WRITINGS
Contributor to the New Yorker; editor of the anthology The Anatomy of Memory, 2001.
SIDELIGHTS
James McConkey was a writer and academic. After completing his Ph.D., he began working at Cornell University’s English Department in 1956. He remained there for nearly four decades, becoming the Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus in 1992. His writings were largely nonfiction narratives that offered glimpses into his own life and experiences. He was the founder of the Morehead Writers Workshop and cofounder of the Cornell Council for the Arts, in addition to serving as a Guggenheim Fellow. McConkey died in 2019 at the age of ninety-eight.
McConkey first published To a Distant Island in 1984. The account retraces Anton Chekhov’s 1890 journey from Moscow to the island of Sakhalin north of Japan. McConkey considers Chekhov’s motivations and experiences as he passes through Russian wilderness and medically treat individuals along the way on his escape from his fame.
Writing in Smithsonian, Michael Dirda described the book as being “neither history nor fiction, but rather a kind of reimagining of the past, enriched by McConkey’s reflections and accounts of his life in Florence.” Dirda admitted that “this tricky technique–recalling a teacher’s presentation of a poem or novel, interlaced with his or her personal commentary –works marvelously if one gives it a chance.” Dirda suggested that for it to be suitably “appreciated McConkey’s book needs to be read deliberately, as it was written.”
In 1992 McConkey published Rowan’s Progress. The book looks at eastern Kentucky’s Rowan County through parallel narratives. Part of the book illustrates the life of Dr. Claire Louise Caudill and her efforts to treat and cure the people of this impoverished area. The other part of the book deals with the a murderous town marshal who is Caudill’s descendant, Craig Tolliver, and his role in the Rowan County War of 1880 that pitted local families against each other. A contributor to Publishers Weekly found the first half of the story to be “wonderfully unaffected.” The same reviewer lamented, however, that the second part of the book “becomes prosaic,” adding that the section about “the founding of the medical center is dull.”
McConkey published Stories from My Life with the Other Animals in 1993. The book serves as the final part of his autobiography, following Court of Memory. The memoir largely focuses on his burdens and thoughts between 1984 and 1991. He writes about the value of life in the age of nuclear destruction; his son’s cancer diagnosis; illness and death of loved ones; his relationship with his wife; and the animals he has cared for since his childhood.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly stated: penned “with perception and humor, his brave inward journey has plainly enriched himself.” Reviewing the book in America, Patrick H. Samway recalled McConkey’s story about how he and his wife marked a trail in the woods so their younger two sons would be able to find their way back home. Samway commented that “McConkey is particularly conscious of the moment of revelation: ‘As we heard not only their shouts but the nearby crackling of underbrush, Jimmy’s eyes began to glow with the anticipation that Jean and I also felt; and, at that instant before they found us, I knew the kind of love for family taht resonates against love for place, with the family imposing value on land even as land, the Earth itself, grants value to the interwining human lives.’ Unlike many of his contemporaries, McConkey seems to trust his memory, and with very good reason.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
America, August 28, 1993, Patrick H. Samway, review of Stories From My Life With the Other Animals, p. 19.
Publishers Weekly, January 6, 1992, review of Rowan’s Progress, p. 61; August 16, 1993, review of Stories from My Life with Other Animals, p. 93.
Smithsonian, November 1, 1984, Michael Dirda, review of To a Distant Island, p. 221.
ONLINE
Cornell University, Department of English, https://english.cornell.edu/ (December 21, 2019), author profile.
OBITUARIES
American Scholar, https://theamericanscholar.org/ (October 29, 2019), Diane Ackerman, Brad Edmondson, and Robert Wilson, “Remembering James McConkey.”
Cornell Chronicle (Ithaca, NY), https://news.cornell.edu/ (October 28, 2019), Daniel Aloi, “Writer, Emeritus Professor James McConkey Dies at 98.”
Cornell Daily Sun (Ithaca, NY), https://cornellsun.com/ (October 29, 2019), Meghna Maharishi, “Prof. James McConkey Dies Age 98, Remembered For ‘Lively Personality’ by Former Students and Colleagues.”
James McConkey
Goldwin Smith Professor of English Emeritus
Educational Background
State University of Iowa, PhD
Western Reserve University, MA
Western Reserve University, BA
jrm9@cornell.edu
Overview
Known for his meditative nonfiction narratives, James McConkey began teaching at Cornell in 1956, as an assistant professor in the English department. He wrote fiction until the early 1960s, and retired in 1992 as Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus. McConkey is the author or editor of 14 books, including Court of Memory, Stories from My Life with the Other Animals, To a Distant Island, and The Anatomy of Memory.
Departments/Programs
English
Research
Creative writing (poetry and fiction)
Modern literature and prose
Modern fiction, particularly British
News
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Writer, emeritus professor James McConkey dies at 98
October 29, 2019
obituary
Prof. James McConkey Dies Age 98, Remembered For “Lively Personality” By Former Students and Colleagues
By Meghna Maharishi
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Celebrated writer and mentor Prof. James McConkey, english, who had been a professor at Cornell for nearly four decades, died on Oct. 24. He was 98 years old.
McConkey was known for his nonfiction essays, which were heavily rooted in his own personal experiences. In addition to some of his works that appeared in The New Yorker, McConkey also wrote and edited 15 books, according to a University press release.
“We all came to love his presence, and subversiveness, his calmness and patience as much as his nonfiction,” Prof. Helena Viramontes, English, wrote in an email to The Sun.
Some of McConkey’s works include his 1968 novel “Crossroads: An Autobiographical Novel,” which is based on his experiences with his wife and three sons. McConkey also wrote “Journey to Sakhalin,” a 1971 novel that is based on the 1969 Willard Straight takeover.
During his time at Cornell, McConkey taught the popular “Mind and Memory” English course, according to the press release. He was also instrumental in establishing the Cornell Council for the Arts in 1965, an organization that still exists that promotes contemporary art on campus.
McConkey, who was known for inviting prominent authors to visit Cornell, also hosted the Chekhov festival in the late 1970s, which the creative writing program described as “one of the most memorable cultural events in Cornell history.” The festival featured distinguished authors like Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Denise Levertov and Walker Percy.
McConkey was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts essay award and American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature.
Former students of McConkey remembered him for his prose, intellect and humility.
Diane Ackerman M.A. ’73 MFA ’76 Ph.D. ’78, one of McConkey’s graduate advisees, said that McConkey helped her learn how to go about writing prose.
“In all those different phases and stages of life, I’ve felt privileged to know someone so keenly nourished by literature, gifted with creative insight, full of curiosity about the world, sincerely caring, candid about having a social and environmental conscience, uxorious, wickedly smart but immoderately humble, down-to-earth, and to use a very old-fashioned word and concept, ‘decent,’” Ackerman wrote in The American Scholar, a magazine published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society,
Robert Wilson, the editor of The American Scholar, remarked that throughout his life, McConkey always had a lively persona.
“Sometimes when you love a book too much, it is hard not to be disappointed by its all-too-human author,” Wilson wrote. “But that was dramatically not the case with Jim. He was a boyish 70 or so when I first met him and still puckish at just past 90 when I saw him again.”
The English department plans to host a memorial for McConkey but has not announced a date.
McConkey is survived by his two sons and two grandchildren. His wife Gladys, a chemist at Cornell, passed away in 2013.
Writer, emeritus professor James McConkey dies at 98
By Daniel Aloi | October 28, 2019
Acclaimed writer James McConkey, the Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus and mentor to young writers at Cornell for nearly four decades, died Oct. 24, 2019 at his home in Enfield. He was 98.
Provided
James McConkey with his dogs.
Known for his meditative nonfiction narratives based on personal experience, McConkey created profound imagery sparked by memory, making intuitive connections as he wrote. His essays often were about himself or his family.
“Memory is a fiction, but it’s a fiction that’s true to us,” McConkey said in 2004.
He joined the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences in 1956 as an assistant professor, and retired in 1992. He taught modern literature and prose, creative writing courses in poetry and fiction, and modern British and American fiction; and was an adviser at Epoch magazine.
He was faculty adviser to Thomas Pynchon ’59, author of “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Other students of McConkey’s included “The King’s Speech” screenwriter David Seidler ’59; fiction writers Joanna Russ ‘57, Richard Fariña ’59 and Lorrie Moore, M.F.A. ’82; and memoirist and fiction writer A. Manette Ansay ’91. Many of the writers he mentored earned M.F.A. degrees in the Creative Writing Program, including Julie Schumacher (1986), Paul Cody (1987), Melissa Bank (1988), Stewart O’Nan (1992), Junot Diaz and Susan Choi (1995), and Nina Revoyr (1997).
The program honored McConkey’s life and work in September 2016 with a 95th birthday celebration and reading, “James McConkey: Courting Memory.”
Born in Lakewood, Ohio in 1921, McConkey attended Cleveland College and served as a U.S. Army infantryman during World War II. Injured during the war, he was discharged in November 1945 and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Western Reserve University (later Case Western Reserve) in 1946 and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1950. Before coming to Cornell, he taught at Morehead State College in Kentucky, where he founded and directed the Morehead Writers Workshop.
He began publishing fiction in the mid-1950s and experimented with autobiographical fiction into the mid-1960s, until “he decided to give up creating characters and write about his own experiences,” colleague Robert Morgan said at a 2009 “Cornell Writers on Cornell Writers” event.
He avoided the term “memoirist” and preferred to call his work “life writing” – a style that was uniquely his, Morgan noted.
“A theme that runs throughout McConkey’s work is the search for human connection, for brotherhood. He finds the extraordinary in the ordinary,” Morgan said in 2009. “[He] is so clearly a modern secular writer. In another life, Jim would likely have been a theologian. Jim McConkey is a poet without verse and a churchman without creed.”
McConkey helped found the Cornell Council for the Arts in 1965, and initiated the popular Mind and Memory course and a related lecture series in 1996, exploring creativity across various disciplines. A former student established a summer fellowship in creative writing in McConkey’s name in 2008. His collected papers (1948-90) are housed in Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.
Cornell University File Photo
James McConkey
He wrote or edited 15 books, many of which have been republished and kept in print. His early works include a critical study, “The Novels of E.M. Forster” (1958); “The Structure of Prose: An Introduction to Writing” (1963); a short story collection, “Night Stand” (Cornell University Press, 1965); “Crossroads: An Autobiographical Novel” (1968); and “Journey to Sakhalin” (1971), written in the aftermath of racial conflict at Cornell in the late 1960s.
“To a Distant Island” (1984) retraced Anton Chekhov’s 6,500-mile journey across Russia in 1890; and “Court of Memory” (1983) included “Crossroads” and a series of essays that first appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines.
His many professional honors include the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts essay award.
McConkey’s other books include: “The Tree House Confessions” (1980), “Rowan’s Progress” (1992), “Stories from My Life With the Other Animals” (1993) and “The Telescope in the Parlor: Essays on Life and Literature” (2004). He also edited the anthology “The Anatomy of Memory” (2001).
Survivors include two sons and two grandchildren. His wife of 68 years, Gladys, a former research chemist and editor at Cornell, died in 2013.
The Department of English is planning a memorial service to be announced at a later date.
Remembering James McConkey
Diane Ackerman, Brad Edmondson, and Robert Wilson celebrate a real writer’s writer
By Our Contributors | October 29, 2019
Cornell University
Diane Ackerman:
I was supremely lucky when I went to Cornell as a graduate student, because Jim McConkey, who died last week at the age of 98, was my advisor. And I still remember sitting in his office at Goldwin Smith Hall on my first day. Jim was wearing: a cornflower-blue shirt with an open collar. Not button-down. There was nothing buttoned down about him. I already knew from his books that he patrolled the skies through a telescope of his own devising, haunted the world of Russian fiction, mucked out cow stalls, had sampled the heart of prewar America, was someone who could be “moved at a touch between serenity and desolation,” someone who’d been to war and understood the reality of not just physical, but moral injury.
In his books, wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table of the heart. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time. I loved all the poignant tripwires of memory in his books, and also the fine mesh of faintly remembered encounters, mishaps, moments of pride or embarrassment that leave indelible traces in one’s life.
I also remember what I was wearing at that interview: a lavender blouse with ruffled cuffs. The blouse had a tiny burn hole from smoking, a habit I was trying to quit. An ash must have seared the nylon fibers, and the burnt edge of that blemish felt like a scab. I did quit, but to this day, I’d know how to flick ashes from a cigarette thanks to the body wisdom of “procedural memory,” and I have a Kodachrome recollection of meeting Jim thanks to the untidily bulging album of “autobiographical memory”—a distinction I would later learn to appreciate in Jim’s uniquely eye-opening and altogether wonderful Mind and Memory class.
Unlike some professors who taught “all that must be learned,” Jim tried to discover how a student learns best. It was just what I needed to flourish, because traditional schooling had never worked well for me. For instance, as an undergraduate, I’d flunked Basic Logic.
A classic syllogism goes: “Johnny has a bat. All bats are blue. What color is Johnny’s bat?” I panicked when that question appeared on an exam, and I reasoned like this: “Well, if all bats are blue, and Johnny has a shred of individuality, he’d want his bat to look different. Blue is traditionally the color of sadness, the Virgin Mary, the sky—maybe he’d prefer a color that better reflects his mood or goals. I’ve noticed that shadows really aren’t black, they’re blue. Would he want a bat the color of shadow? Blue is a color easily affected by changing light. Do the blue bats appear lifeless at dawn, but jewel-like at high noon? Are all the bats the same size? Are they crafted of different woods, whose grain might absorb the paint more deeply? What sort of blue is it, anyway—pearly, sapphire, luminescent?”
I was altogether too strange to pass Logic. But, in time, Jim helped me realize that a free-associative, serpentine style of thought might be useful and have a power of its own. I’m sure I wasn’t the only student whose eyes he opened to the merits of cultivated idiosyncrasy.
I went to Cornell as a poet with a miscellaneous muse. But I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to write prose. I’d put one craggy sentence at the top of a page, one craggy sentence at the bottom, and I had absolutely no idea how to rappel between them.
When, early on, I took a Comp Lit class that Jim taught, he wisely suggested that instead of writing essays, I write dramatic monologues spoken by characters in the books we were reading. I worked like the dickens on those poems and no doubt learned more about character, plot, and style than I would have if left to my own naïve devices.
So, I’m indebted to Jim, for that lesson among so many others, of “How will this person learn best?” I’ve found it invaluable in my own teaching career, and also in a completely different arena, three decades later, in tailoring the standard aphasia workbooks to help my late husband, Paul West, regain language after a stroke.
Something else I treasure about Jim is that, in an era when literary criticism was becoming more like an act of remote viewing, he encouraged exquisitely close readings, championed style, and showed how books can shape one’s bedrock identity and choices. He simply wasn’t strait-jacketed by literary vogues or labels. I’ve always admired him for being an -ist among the -isms.
So, Jim began as my advisor, taught me creative writing and literature, then became a member of my MFA and PhD committees. Then I took his Mind and Memory class, which warmed the cockles of my interdisciplinary heart, then I team-taught the course with him, then we were office spouses, then I inherited the Mind and Memory course from him for a couple of years, and since then I’ve been honored to embrace him as a friend.
In all those different phases and stages of life, I’ve felt privileged to know someone so keenly nourished by literature, gifted with creative insight, full of curiosity about the world, sincerely caring, candid about having a social and environmental conscience, uxorious, wickedly smart but immoderately humble, down-to-earth, and to use a very old-fashioned word and concept, “decent.” Jim was someone in whose hands the planet would be safe. And there are precious few people you can say that about. Not a saint by far, but maybe one of the 36 just men.
According to ancient theology, these few alone, through their good hearts and good deeds, keep the too-wicked world from being destroyed. There needs to be at least 36 in each generation. If there are, for their sake God spares all of humanity. The legend tells that they are ordinary people, not flawless or magical, and that most of them remain completely unrecognized—even by themselves—throughout their lives. It’s simply that they choose to perpetuate goodness, sometimes even in the midst of inferno.
In so many ways, my life was made abundantly richer by Jim’s kindness, his books, his example, and his friendship.
Diane Ackerman is the author of two dozen works of poetry and nonfiction, including New York Times best sellers The Zookeeper’s Wife, A Natural History of the Senses, and The Human Age, and Pulitzer Prize finalist, One Hundred Names for Love.
He told a great story, on the page and in the classroom
Brad Edmondson:
I was 21. I wanted to be a writer, and someone told me that Jim McConkey was good at it, so I took his creative writing class in 1980. I expected that he would pour his wisdom into me as if I were an empty vessel, as all my other instructors at Cornell had done. Instead, he told stories that veered from funny to sad to profound and then back to funny again. He held my attention with vivid images, and I kept listening because I wondered where the story was going. When he was done, the scenes he described stayed with me. Jim’s stories helped me understand my emotions—he would take his audiences on tours of love, abandonment, despair, and hope, all brightly illuminated, in 10 minutes or less—and they were invaluable to me because at that age, emotions can be baffling, cruel masters.
Although he had a casual style, I always felt that I had witnessed a performance, and I wanted to figure out how he did it. I tried to emulate Jim’s style by cultivating memories and viewing them from different angles, turning them over and over until something clicked and I believed that I had something worth saying. He was a whole lot better at this than I was, but he was also unfailingly generous. He gave me the confidence to try.
After I got a newspaper job in Ithaca, I would run into Jim at the grocery store or at meetings. He always had the time to chat, and his stories had the same elliptical structure, but as I aged, they had a different effect. After I experienced real loss, or the complications of marital and paternal love, what I felt was more like recognition, as if we were fellow travelers.
Jim’s stories have been with me for four decades now. He retired in 1992 but kept writing until his wife died in 2013. He and Gladys were a team for 68 years. She was an accomplished editor, but he claimed, incredibly, that “they never had a reason to quarrel.” He told me that after she died he could no longer make the intuitive leaps his stories depended on. The last thing he published was a dedication to her in the foreword to The Complete Court of Memory. In it he describes her funeral and how, as she is being lowered into the ground, he realized that the body, “encased in its white shroud, was shaped like a carrot.” He loved to use humor when his readers least expected it.
A year ago I took Jim a spinach lasagna and invited another guest, a young poet who seemed awed by him, as I had been 38 years earlier. Matt Kilbane represented his fourth generation of students, and Jim rose to the challenge. We sat with a neighbor, Michael DeMunn, who was Jim’s companion and caregiver during his last years. We lingered at the table while Jim talked about hosting Eudora Welty at Cornell; the eccentricities of Flannery O’Connor, whom he had known at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop (“she kept peacocks, you know”; and how he had been bowled over by Robert Lowell’s reading of Shakespeare’s 73rd sonnet. It was dark and cold outside when Jim recited for us the couplet Lowell had recited for him:
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
He and Gladys loved that sonnet, he said, because it compares life to a fire that is consumed by the source that nourishes it. They loved it so much that he put it at the end of Court of Memory. Life is precious because it is finite, he said.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
I remember silence at the table as Jim’s words, and Shakespeare’s, sunk in. Damn if he hadn’t done it again.
Brad Edmondson is a writer and business consultant in Ithaca, New York. He was the founding vice president of ePodunk.com and editor-in-chief of American Demographics magazine.
A magnum opus of the ordinary
Robert Wilson:
James McConkey was a novelist (The Tree House Confessions, 1979, among others), a biographer and memoirist (To a Distant Island, 1984), and a critic (books about E. M. Forster and Anton Chekhov), but his magnum opus, Court of Memory (1983 and 2013), was a work that is difficult to characterize. When the first section of it was published in 1968 under the title Crossroads, it was mischaracterized by his publisher, McConkey would later write, as an “autobiographical novel.” Autobiographical it certainly was, but a novel it was not. It was a collection of what McConkey simply called stories, or narratives, or sometimes essays, that began in the present moment of their writing and explored some aspect of his past.
The pieces in Crossroads had to do with his wife and three growing sons, but also with the family he was born into. The work grew as McConkey aged, and by 2013 became The Complete Court of Memory, which included the contents of two more books and a number of previously uncollected stories published in magazines. Because they were made up of the real materials of McConkey’s life, or at least his memories of them, but were crafted so beautifully in the mode of the traditional realistic short story, I thought of them as nonfiction short stories. A number of these from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s appeared in The New Yorker, and I’m proud to say that most of the later ones, which McConkey called “personal narratives,” were published in The American Scholar.
The Complete Court of Memory is remarkably complete, the record of a single, fairly quiet life (he was a college professor as well as a writer), begun in the shadow of nuclear war out of a need “to acknowledge my love for my family and the sacredness I felt in everything about me.” That word about, importantly, is meant in the British sense of “around,” for this work is anything but an exercise in navel-gazing. The transcendence that McConkey discovers in the ordinary—beginning with a “wretched little night stand” that he had made for his mother in shop class when his family was Depression-poor—and the craftsmanship of the writing, his artistry being his continuing tribute to the meaning of his memories, have made this, for a long time, one of my favorite books. (At one point I even tried to write stories in imitation of McConkey’s.)
I was lucky enough to meet Jim a couple of times, the latter one in his Greek-revival farmhouse in the country near Ithaca, New York, the house beside a crossroads that in his books had become for me an almost mythical place. Sometimes when you love a book too much, it is hard not to be disappointed by its all-too-human author. But that was dramatically not the case with Jim. He was a boyish 70 or so when I first met him and still puckish at just past 90 when I saw him again. Even in his years since that visit, as he struggled with the loss of his beloved wife and one son, my wife and I discovered in telephone conversations with him that he retained his wonderful attentiveness to the world about him.
Robert Wilson is the editor of the Scholar.
Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.
For 40 years Dr. Claire Louise Caudill has medically tended the fiercely proud, mostly poor Appalachian folk of eastern Kentucky's Rowan County. This independent-minded woman who radiates healinig optimism is a descendant of Craig Tolliver, murderous town marshall in the Rowan County War, a spectacular vendetta of the 1880s in which families decimated one another. McConkey (Court of Memory), who teaches literature at Cornell, contrasts the drunken lawlessness of the county's past with the humanitarian progress spearheaded by Caudill, a determined physician who has delivered thousands of babies and who helped bring a medical center and hospital to the county. More than half of this gently heroic story is wonderfully unaffected, as the author recounts his reunion with Caudill after a 30-year absence. Then the writing becomes prosaic and the tale of the founding of the medical center is dull. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1992 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rowan's Progress." Publishers Weekly, 6 Jan. 1992, p. 61. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A11836803/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dce81b1c. Accessed 7 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A11836803
To a Distant Island
Vladimir Nabokov, speaking of Anton Chekhov's twilit fictional world, once described it as "dove-grey.' The same evocative adjective might be used of To a Distant Island, James McConkey's meditation on Chekhov's 6,500-mile journey to Sakhalin, a prison island off the far coast of Siberia, and familiar now as near the place where KAL Flight 007 was shot down. Notwithstanding a measured, exceptionally serene prose, this is a book about the author's recovery from depression, anxiety and loss of purpose.
Back in 1971 McConkey, a professor of English at Cornell University, left for a year's sabbatical in Florence, Italy, taking with him "a paralysis of will, the affliction of a miserable and self-centered despair,' and a paperback collection of Chekhov's stories. Instead of working on his intended project (the revision of a play) he found himself reading about-- and gradually identifying with--the Fussian writer's own weariness with life. In 1890, at age 30, Chekhov had begun to make a name for himself as a storyteller, was supporting his family and seemed content, successful and self-confident. Yet he felt compelled to make an arduous journey across Russia to survey the population of a distant penal colony. Why?
McConkey's answer to this question becomes the thematic impulse of To a Distant Island. Taking the known facts, he interprets and extrapolates from them, adds imagined conversations and attempts to reconstruct a plausible version of Chekhov's psychology on this journey. The result is neither history nor fiction, but rather a kind of reimagining of the past, enriched by McConkey's reflections and accounts of his life in Florence.
This tricky technique--recalling a teacher's presentation of a poem or nevel, interlaced with his or her personal commentary --works marvelously if one gives it a chance. Most nonfiction today emphasizes a surface glamour and speediness against which To a Distant Island will seem old-fashioned. To be properly appreciated McConkey's book needs to be read deliberately, as it was written. Not that the writing isn't fine; how could it fail to be when it quotes extensively from Chekhov? "When a cold wind blows and ruffles up the water, which now after the floods is the color of coffee slops, one feels cold and bored and miserable; the strains of a concertina on the bank sound dejected, figures in tattered sheepskins standing motionless in the barges that meet us look as though they were petrified by some unending grief.'
Our of this gray despondency McConkey depicts the unlikely growth of his own Wordsworthian joy in the created world. He returns from a trip to Sicily with a feeling of elation and purpose much as Chekhov, halfway across Russia, escapes injury in a carriage accident and finds himself reborn. On Sakhalin, in Chekhov's shift from concern with his sickness of heart to the sickness of his society, McConkey detects their mutual salvation and writes: "One can flee life as a loathsome prison to find it redeemed in an actual prison at the cold edge of the world.'
Lest I make this book sound lugubrious, let me add that it is leavened with sharp observation and subtle wit. McConkey: "One most fears death during those intervals in which life approximates it, and seems pointless.' Chekhov: "[the people in Siberia] could speak openly of whatever they wished, for there was "no one to arrest them and nowhere to exile them to.'' Chekhov's most constant theme, McConkey shrewdly notes, is "the restrictions we consciously or unconsciously impose upon the degree of freedom and happiness possible for us.'
In the end, Chekhov fully recovers his spiritual health and writes "Gusev,' a masterpiece about the acceptance of death. Surprisingly, McConkey finds himself embarked on "a novel I had not expected to write.' The reader may not experience such cerative renewal, but from it he or she will certainly learn again the most important of human lessons: one must struggle against the world's "oppression and suffering while loving an evanescent life and its sensuous pleasures.'
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1984 Smithsonian Institution
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dirda, Michael. "To a distant island." Smithsonian, Nov. 1984, p. 221+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A3497513/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=89224378. Accessed 7 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A3497513
James McConkey. Godine, $19.95 (192p) ISBN 0-87923-967-0
In this final instailment of his three-part autobiography (Court of Memory appeared in two volumes), McConkey, who teaches creative writing at Cornell University, records the thoughts preoccupying him from 1984 to 1991. A humanist concerned with our survival, McConkey was driven to explore the value and meaning of his life by the threat of nuclear destruction. In a series of eloquent reminiscences, he reflects on his relationship with animals during his childhood and as an adult. Other sketches deal with his son's cancer, the illness of an old friend and the author's loving relationship with his wife. Present events trigger childhood memories that in turn touch the present. Written with perception and humor, his brave inward journey has plainly enriched himself, and will do the same for readers. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1993 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stories from My Life with Other Animals." Publishers Weekly, 16 Aug. 1993, p. 93. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A14302834/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f88165e5. Accessed 7 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A14302834
WHEN BETTY FRIEDAN published her book The Feminine Mystique in 1963, men and women sat up and took notice, and looked at the implications of feminism. Now it is quite common to see contingents of men, sympathetic to the struggles of feminists, marching and carrying signs wherever women gather together to express what they consider a violation of some human or political right. In her latest book, The Fountain of Age (Simon & Schuster), Ms. Friedan, now 30 years older herself, has again boldly entered the public forum to demolish myths about the illusions of youth regarding age and the denal of wisdom that age often brings.
Above all, Ms. Friedan wants to liberate those held hostage to popular beliefs that grip our culture. As she writes: "My own dread of age and personal denial because more cute at first as I plunged into the gerontological research, but this dread gave way to growing excitement as I found in many studies implications for a new truth about age that belied its definition only as decline and deterioration from youth, even though the authors of the research themselves have not spelled out these implications or the dry facts may not have pierced through because they simply did not fit that dread mystique that is responsible for our own and society's fear of age."
In preparation for her book, Ms. Friedan taught and did research at Harvard University, attended seminars here and abroad and took an Outward Bound wilderness survival trip. Never having felt particularly Peter Panish or Dorian Grayesque, she thinks it is time for her--and countless others--to face that beauty of advancing age and to put names on its values and strengths. No need to airbrush portraits of our senior citizens to make them look appealing! Ms. Friedan does not deny the genuine problems of the elderly--problems of food, housing, economic support, intimacy, medical care, purpose and respect--but these can only be dealt with once we put aside the fantasies of too many in our society. Though academics have been involved in gerontology for decades, this book will undoubtedly become seminal in helping non-professionals rethink their views regarding advancing age. For me, at least, feminism a la Friedan is acquiring a new mystique.
Memoirs and autobiographies are in abundance for the fall season. Doris Grumbach in Extra Innings: A Memoir (W. W. Norton) continues the close examination of her life begun in Coming Into the End Zone. In this journal, the noted novelist, biographer and former professor of literature at The College of St. Rose in Albany, N.Y., chronicles her 71st year, and adds the personal view that complements Friedan's work. Ms. Grumbach is well aware of the artistic enterprise of writing such a personal memoir: "I levae out what no longer pleased my view of myself. I embellish with euphony and decorate the prose with some color. I subordinate, giving less importance to some matters, raising others to the weight of coordination. I modify. During this literary activity that surrounds the 'germ' of fact, as Henry James called it, I am moving into, well, style, and away from, well, let's face it, truth. But I persist, driven by the need to record in readable form what I think about and remember, however unreliable."
Her story is about the landscape and mindscape of Maine and New England, about the human side of the publishing world, her reasons for joining the Episcopal Chruch and her friends. This charming book is like a prose version of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. The pages come alive as we learn what Ms. Grumbach has garnered through the years: "Last night we watched the film 'Amadeus' on VCR. It is splendid, moving entertainment and the music is fine, but I am aware that its portrait of Mozart is dubious, as is its view of Antonio Salieri. Is it history? Well, I suppose, of a kind. Millions of viewers will accept it as 'the truth.' It will be all they will ever know of Mozart, which is too bad in a way, but better than complete ignorance. Absolute truth (if that is ever possible) is rarely the best entertainment."
Willie Morris, too, has written a memoir, New York Days (Little, Brown), a sequel to North Toward Home, which recounts the exhlarating and devastating New York years of the youngest-ever editor-in-chief of Harper's. The late 1960's, especially 1968, were heady years for Morris. In this book, he shares what transpired in his office at Two Park Avenue as he sets about transforming one of the country's leading magazines. Morris discussesd his friendships with such notable fiction writers as William Styron and Truman Ca pote--and wih others, Bobby Short, David htalberstam, Gay Talese and Christopher Cerf, who would gather at Elaine's on Second Avenue and 88th Streetto share their views on the war in Vietnam or the deaths of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Stories From My Life With the Other Animals (David R. Godine, Publisher), by James McConkey, a professor of creative writing at Cornell University, is the concluding volume of 21 autobiographical meditations entitled Courttof Memory, originally published by Dutton but which Godline will reissue in October. The shape of the earlier work is unusual, as McConkey admits: "I may have invented some new kind of form here. It's certainly caused me some difficulty in terms of the acceptance of the work; it's liked very much, but nobody knows what to call it." In the present work, which deals with material written between 1984 and 1991, McConkey matter-of-factly describes those moments in his life that seem to have bonded his family together: the remarriage of his father an dmother after his father had strayed too far and come home again, the death of thier dog Puppsy-Daisy, or marking a trail with his wife Jean and their eldest son Jimmy in the woods on their property outside Ithaca so that the two younger sons could find them. In this last vignette, McConkey is particularly conscious of the moment of revelation: "As we heard not only their shouts but the nearby crackling of underbrush, Jimmy's eyes began to glow with the anticipation that Jean and I also felt; and, at that instant before they found us, I knew the kind of love for family taht resonates against love for place, with the family imposing value on land even as land, the Earth itself, grants value to the interwining human lives." Unlike many of his contemporaries, McConkey seems to trust his memory, and with very good reason.
Two recent works celebrate the lives of two men who are remembered for their efforts to bring about peace and brotherhood. Ann Waldron, the author of a fine biography of Caroline Gordon, has recently written another informative biography entitled Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist (Algonquin Books). Carter (1907-72), a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, became primarily known during his lifetime as the bold and outspoken editor of The Greenville Delta Democrat-Times. His words written in 1947 and meant for a Mississippi readership, but heard throiughout the nation, clearly announced what he advocated:
1. Raising eduational, health and living standards of the Southern Negro to improve 'the economic well-being of the South.'
2. Attainment of equal justice for Negroes in Southern courts.
3. A greater recognition that the Christian concept of man's responsibility for his fellow man has a very practical meaning....
4. Condemnation of the bigots of all sections of our country who would deny to minority groups even their right of self-respect and self-advancement.
Above all, Waldron documents with great insight the personalities and the times that prompted Carter to wield such a ferocious pen.
In the second biography, Gandhi: Voice of a New Revolution (Continuum), Martin Green, author of The von Richthofen Sisters, Children of the Sun and Prophets of a New Age, assists his readers sin understanding why Gandhi's questions and lifestyle, which stressed spiritual growth, love of peace, reverence for the environment and vegetarianism, place him squarely in the forefront of New Age thinking. Though known worldwide, in great measure because of his Autobiography and the popular film "Gandhi," this enigmatic, elusive, paradoxical, slight man, with his homespun cloth wrapped about him, his staff and sandals, still has much to reveal to us, as evidenced in the 95 volumes of his writings, notes and speeches still in preparation. In particular, Green explores the years Gandhi spent in England (1888-91, 1906, 1909, 1914) and in South Afraica (1893-1914) as a preparation for him to live in India, as Green says, "as if one person, or a small group, could alter life, without using power of force against others, and without developing elaborate analytic theory, simply by beginning to live differently, between one day and the next."
In his autobiography entitled The Letter Carrier (Sheed & Ward), William J. Leonard, S.J. a native of Boston and a member of the Boston College faculty since 1939 (he taught theology there for 34 of those years), and one-time superior of the America House community, traces the origins of his vacation. This book is a delight,s especially when Father Leonard points to the experience of countless generations of Jesuits adjusting to the newness of novitiate life: "As time went on we acquired a decent fluency in Latin, but in the beginning it was a matter of patching English words together with such Latin phrases as we could remember. My boss in the scullery gave me directions: 'Noli put the dirt here,' he said; 'put it over there if you want to, but noli here.' The regulation certainly dampened any temptation to indulge in small talk inside the house." I, too, am reminded of a first-year novice who once said to me in his best house-Latin, "Wantum helpum?" Father Leonard gives a careful account of his training and years as a priest, including his chaplaincy during World War II in New Guinea and the Philippines. A teacher, writer, confessor and lecturer (he gave 480 lectures, homilies, conferences, etc., between 1965 and 1967), Father Leonard is well known for his abiding interest in the liturgical movement. As a "letter carrier," a white-collar job that communicates the message of the Spirit, Bill Leonard helps us understand not only himself, but where we, his fellow Jesuits, have come from.
A possible companion to A Letter Carrier might be Hearts on Fire: Praying With Jesuits (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 3700 Pine Boulevard, St. Louis, MO 63108), a collection of prayers collected and edited by Michael Harter, S.J., former managing editor of America and soon to assume a new task as master of novices. All the prayers in his volume are by Jesuits; some are paraphrases of material in "The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius," others are practical applications of these exercises.
As Father Harter writes, "The words of Jesuits at prayer are reprinted here with the hope that the hearts of all those who pray them will also be set on fire."
Why Catholics Can't Sing, a book that shook many a choir loft, has a sequel, and Thomas Day's Where Have You Gone, Michelangelo? The Loss of Soul in Catholic Culture (Crossroad) is bound to stir up more debate, particularly with the priest who walks about the sanctuary, microphone in hand, giving his friendly warm-up monologue. Day is well aware of his critics, as he admits: "The impertinence of his man! He has taken the gift of faith and reduced it to style criticism. He cannot see that a life in Christ and liturgy are more than just beauty, art, and other earthy distractions." When Pope John XXIII announced the opening of the Second Vatican Council on Jan. 25, 1959, he started a process that some see merely as a series of changes, while others view the process as occasions for spiritual growth and renewal. Day is among the keenest and cleverest of the critics of Vatican II because he is articulate about his experiences both before and after the council. In his rather long discussion of the liturgy in Latin, Day clearly concedes that Latin liturgies and Gregorian chant will nto automatically produce a vibrant Christianity and a commitment to the social order. "I am only pointing out that this is not a simple matter. Hearing or singing liturgical texts, in the vernacular, about social justice willnot automatically motivate someone to work for equlity or help the poor. A Latin Mass in one parish--celebrated fervently and with conviction--could be associated with as much social justice, hospitality, and service to other poor as the most up-to-date 'contemporary' liturgical environment (with up-to-date, relvant words) in another parish down the street. Human beings are not predictable; they are not puppets."
This book explores in anecdotal fashion a wide range of topics--women priests, the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston, the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, Hipsanic music. Day starts a discussion that needs to continue on many different levels.
In Radical Tradition: Revolutionarys Saints in the Battle of Justice and Human Rights (Doubleday), Gilbert Markus, O.P., the Catholic chaplain at the Unversity of Edinburgh, has edited short biographical sketches of the lives of 16 saints, from Thomas More and Teresa of Avila to Canaire of Inis Cathaig and Roque Gonzalez. Here we glimpse champions of children's welfare, conscientious objectors and radical peaceniks. This volume brings into bold relief a group of saints who sometimes do not to get the recognition they deserve.
In Mercy or Murder?: Euthanasia, Mortality and Public Policy (Sheed & Ward), edited by Kenneth R. Overberg, S.J., professor of theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati, 18 essays have been collected that deal clearly with the troubling problem of euthanasia. The book is divided into four sections: "For Euthanasia," "Again Euthanasia," "The Patient Self-Determination Act of 1990" and "Nutrition and Hydration," plus an overview by John J. Paris, S.J., and appendices that present medical cases, a glossary and sources. For those who face decisions about whether or not to aid in the process of death of a relative or loved one, and who want to interpret the significance of "Initiative 119" considered by the citizens of the State of Washington or read the documents of the Oregon and Washington bishops and the "Declaration on Euthanasia" of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, this volume will serve as a tremendous resource. No one wants to be alone or uninformed when asking: What can be done? What ought to be done? Is euthanasia an act of mercy--or murder?
For a fictional account of a poignant death. I recommend A Lesson Before Dying (Knopf), a novel by Ernest J. Gaines, recently the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Award and the author of A Gathering of Old Men, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Bloodline. Jefferson, a young black, is accused of murdering three men in a shootout that takes place in an liquor store. The defense attorney claims that Jefferson, precisely because he is black and "a hog," is incapable of premediated murder. Jefferson's life
intersects with Grant Wiggins, another local black school teacher who takes up Jefferson's cause and tries to change Bayonne, a community well set in its prejudiced ways. Quietly Grant raises Jefferson's spirits and teaches him about heroism. "A hero is someone who does something for other people. He does something that other men don't and can't do," Later, at a short distance from the scene of the execution, Grant knows deep down that he cannot change what has been decreed: "I stood up and stretched and looked across the highway at the river, so tranquil, its water as blue as the sky. The willows near the edge of the water were just as still, and no breeze stirred the Spanish moss that hung from the cypresses.... I was the only person in the road. Just me, and my gray car parked farther down the quarter, in front of my aunt's house." Gaines' works always show deep human compassion and an understanding of the humasn psyche.
In Bluesman (Faber & Faber), Andre Dubus Ill, the author of the acclaimed The Cage Keeper and Other Stores, has written his first novel about a young man, Leo Suther, whose world in 1967--a small town in the Connecticut River Valley where he lives with Jim, his guitar-playing father--gradually loses its clear-cut boundaries. In particular, two women change the way he perceives life: Allie Donovan, his girlfriend, and Katie Faye, his mother, whose diaries and poetry (really stories within stories) written before she died, when Leo was in kindergarten, reveal the pain and wisdom he had not suspected. In trying to cope with his own personal decisions, particularly whether or not to joint the army, Leo finds consolation by playing his harmonica. Dubus deftly explores what he seems to know best: family life, music and searching for love.
Streets of Laredo (Simon & Schuster), Larry McMurtry's sequel to Lonesome Dove, takes place 20 years after the death of Gus McCrae. In this novel, Captain Woodrow Call, McCrae's old partner, tracks a young Mexican train robber, Joey Garza, with the help of a railroad accountant named brookshire, a Texas deputy named Ted Plunkett and Pea Eye Parker, who is trying to build a family life with his wife Lorena and their children. Across the Texas Panhandle and into northern Mexico, Call pursues his prey, and eventually kills Mox Mox, a deranged manburner. The motley posse feels the tug to return to their homes and forget about the coce of the frontier. McMurtry's women, particularly Lorena and Maria, the mother of Garza, give the novel a humanizing charm that balances the bravado of those men who pursue renegade outlaws. The saga contionues....
Let me conclude by mentioning a collection of short stories that should not be overlooked. In Rumors From the Lost World (New Rivers Press, 420 North 5th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55401), Alan Davis, chairman of the English Department at Moorhead State University in Minnesota, has published 12 stories, some of them microstories reminiscent of the technique developed by Raymond Carver. In the innovative story "World Poetry Slam," three neo-poets, Jan,e Kafka and Draper, compete with one anothe ras if in a boxing ring. This clashing of opposites creates a tension that suggests that these poets hve more to reveal than can be contained in a few pages. And it is this sense of fullness that energizes the slice of life that we do see. Here, as in the other stories, the images, characters and dialogue work together to produce an original and new voice.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1993 America Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
http://americamagazine.org/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Samway, Patrick H. "Stories From My Life With the Other Animals." America, 28 Aug. 1993, p. 19+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A13267609/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c0505a47. Accessed 7 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A13267609