What we’re reading: Clarence Major’s book rooted in the Chicago blues is now officially a classic

At the risk of sounding flip, there are two kinds of people: Those who have never heard of Clarence Major. And those who sometimes wonder: Whatever happened to Clarance Major? Some of that is natural, to be expected, the not-at-all surprising narrative of an artist once described by World Literature Today as an “iconoclast, black esthetician, modernist, surrealist, postmodernist and deconstructionist.” He grew up on the South Side then left Chicago in 1966 and taught at Howard University, the University of Nice in France, Sarah Lawrence College; this past New Year’s Eve, now a retired professor emeritus from the English department of University of California at Davis, he turned 85.

The guy has never been easy to pin down.

He’s written more than a dozen poetry collections, and two dictionaries of Black slang. He’s been a lexicographer and an ethnologist; he started painting while still in grade school, once he received a scholarship from the Art Institute of Chicago. If you thought Clarence Major was a painter, you would not be mistaken. He’s a well-regarded painter.

I know him — and admittedly, I don’t know Clarence Major nearly as well as I would like to know him — from a single novel I that read when it was first published about 25 years ago, passed down to me by a colleague. “Dirty Bird Blues” tells the story of a Chicago musician moving through his day, marking his time, taking jobs, writing lyrics, working at Sears, leaving Chicago, wondering if he will become just like his parents, wondering if he will eventually dry out, feeling lousy, hoping for something greater, finding a moment of release in a blues show. It opens with this man — whose name is Manfred, though spends the novel identified as Man — getting a stomach full of buckshot. If that doesn’t sound like a blues song in itself, his wife also ran off with a preacher — the guy who shot him. And it’s Christmas. Major writes: “Man couldn’t feel much because he was still sailing high, the good liquor coating him from the hawk, the howling, now the gunshot wounds. Snow up-to-the-ass cold, colder than a witch’s behind up here, cold as embalmed lovers still locked together, colder than Stagger Lee’s grin.” That’s page one.

If you hear a bit of the Beat Generation in there, yes: After serving in the Air Force in the 1950s, Major returned to Chicago and created a short-lived literary journal that made room for original pieces by Beat icons, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Henry Miller.

Though it lasted only three issues, it provided Major with publishing-world connections.

Even as he painted, he wrote, many novels, poems, histories. By the mid-’90s, when he wrote “Dirty Bird Blues” — his bestseller, courtesy of Random House — his prose was consciously musical, flowing, capturing the grinding, strumming chug of American blues.

Specifically, the Chicago blues of his youth, in Bronzeville.

Major spoke on the phone the other day from his home in Northern California. At first, he was understandable fuzzy on many names and places — he has not lived in Chicago since the Daley Administration, the first one — but otherwise, he was lively and sharp.

On “Dirty Bird Blues,” he remembered everything.

Which is fortunate.

“Dirty Bird Blues” will be finally reissued this month, with honors, as the latest member of a venerated literary tradition. It becomes a Penguin Classic, which, by nature of that hallowed, 76-year-old imprint, lends a degree of posterity and indelibility. In other words, whether Clarence Major likes it or not, “Dirty Bird Blues” now becomes a signature work.

For the record, he likes it.

“It’s funny to me that, because it goes into Penguin Classics, it literally becomes my classic. I’m not a great judge of my books. I am too close. With this one, I can say I am satisfied, which is about as much as anyone should hope to say, I suppose. The way I see it, most writers, famous or not, are eventually known for one book. Hemingway, maybe he had a few, but not everything, right? Fitzgerald? ‘The Great Gatsby.’ That’s true of writers today and yesterday. You are best known, if you are known, for one book. That’s it. I’m happy this is the one for me. I never sold in huge numbers but this one sold well. Speaking of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ that didn’t sell a whole lot when it first came out.”

Fitzgerald’s classic now sells roughly half a million copies ever year, but for the 20 years after it was initially published, less than 20,000 copies of “The Great Gatsby” were sold.

“Oh, well,” Major said, “I did better than that.”

“Dirty Bird Blues” was a kind of culmination for him. It drew on the etymology of slang, and completed an unplanned trilogy of novels that he had written about artists. His father was an Atlanta businessman who did so-so. “He was self-employed most of his life which I guess is an accomplishment.” When his parents divorced, he moved with his mother to Chicago. They lived near Oakwood and King (then Grand), across from the Ritz, a jazz mecca. He set “Dirty Bird Blues” in this period, “after World War II, as blues is being institutionalized and renamed Chicago Blues, with distinctive Delta roots.” A few years ago, after being away a while, he drove through his old neighborhood and was surprised by the deterioration, he said. He remembers a livelier Chicago. They lived on the top floor. Musicians like Johnny Otis and Lionel Hampton would rent the rooms below.

By the time he was a teenager, he was traveling weekly to the Art Institute for classes, reading the Midwest classics (“Studs Lonigan,” “Native Son”), meeting Chicago artists (Archibald Motley, Charles White); later, in France, he became close to James Baldwin.

“Dirty Bird Blues” became, to an extent, he said, about the tension between finding space as an artist and making a living, nurturing relationships, existing in the world. This is felt no stronger than in scenes at Sears, among Black men hired to clean the building in the dead of the night. When they take a break, they play the dozens, insulting each other, back and forth, sort of in jest. In his forward to the Penguin edition, Pulitzer-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa writes that Major’s Man is a Coltrane figure, “not satisfied with the mere fingering of the elemental strings of his existence but determined to see into the mystery of his being.” When the dozens comes up, it’s no just put-downs being felt here, but history, Black American “pathos passed down through generations.”

You feel Chicago history, the Great Migration, a legacy of inequality, the promise of more. If “Great Gatsby,” broadly, captures a melancholy about the American Dream, “Dirty Bird Blues” is, broadly, about Black American talent for finding a way out of no way. I asked Major if, despite cliches and caricatures, he thinks of the blues as actually hopeful, full of promise. He said, yes, that’s the book. “It’s about the glory of having life left, overcoming, moving on. I never wanted (Man) to be a guy just down on his luck, I wanted him to strive. The blues, in the end, if you think about it, is for staying positive.”

Otherwise, why create anything?

At 85, Major is painting again, he’s writing a new collection of short stories. He says with a laugh that he hears from people now that he is “iconic,” “legendary.” But he also hears that he’s obscure. “So I don’t know what I am. But I’m OK with it. I think of Patti LaBelle, who said she knew she had finally made it when Richard Pryor bought her a Cadillac. That she didn’t know if she was successful until then? Tells you a lot. Who ever knows?”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com