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Overview
Originally published in 1986, this new edition returns to print a classic, influential work of American fiction
The author of the acclaimed novel Reflex and Bone Structure returns here in My Amputations to the question of identity, the double, adventure, detection, and mystery, but with more hypnotic power and range. In My Amputations he has his protagonist, Mason Ellis (who may just be “a desperate ex-con” or a wronged American novelist out to right the wrong done to him), jump through flaming loops like a trained dog, so to speak. In other words, there seems to be no end to the troubles Mason Ellis faces.
His story takes him from the South Side of Chicago, to New York, with a stint in Attica prison, across America and Europe and into the primal depths of Africa. Mason, all the while, tries to convince the reader that he is the important American writer he says he is. Upon his release from prison he sets out to prove his claim. After an audacious bank-robbery and a couple of burglaries that are hilarious, he goes into hiding to escape the malice of one of his cohorts, and eventually flees to Europe. The irony is that he is now as much the runner as the seeker. After encounters with a Zuni ex-folksinger, kidnappers, the New York underworld, literary groupies, an Italian swordsman, a violent German secret society, and an anti-bellum cotillion in rural Greece, he finds himself face to face (behind a mask) with his own destiny.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781573668385 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Series: | Fiction collective ; , #2 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
My Amputations
A Novel
By Clarence Major
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1986 Clarence MajorAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-838-5
CHAPTER 1
Again, as in a recurring dream, Mason opened the closet door and stepped hesitantly into its huge darkness, its nonlineal shape: he pulled the door shut then crouched there on the floor—which seemed to be moving—with the breathing of The Impostor. This dimness was not illuminated by the glowing Mason felt. He could smell the man: his sweat, his urine, his oil. The skin of Mason's eyes was alive with floaters. Faintly in the background—perhaps coming through the wall from the next apartment—Sleepy John Estes was singing "Married Woman Blues." Mason pushed hard for the beginning, some echo or view. Anglosaxon monosyllables clustered there. He couldn't remember how it all started nor even his muse's birth. He called her Celt CuRoi. Yet memory was expanding ... Low clouds crawled against a terrible sky. Lots of rainstorm-damaged trees, houses, fences. His birth—?—came like that. He swore to the date, the year, the damage, the blood. And afterbirth ... and his broken-grasping for sea, land, form. Why'd he remember overturned cars, the Great Flood, a woman up in a tree, words: nigger, jig, darky, convicts at gunpoint working to rebuild a broken dam, a six-hundred-or-more death toll ...? and, and from eighteen Woodrow Place? river moving out to lake, to sea, to ocean. Sea? ... already searching for it: to float upside down in its membranous-liquid grasp. Giant sharks might be deep in it but Celt would guard ... yet she, too, was only a beginning—not a sailorette, joe, just ah ... bug-examiner like Lil Massy: transparent wings, pink underbelly bright and silky as panties—mating dogs smelled like a rain forest full of moss and rotten logs. First letter of alphabet fascinated them: a house: Egyptian pyramid, farmer's joke; picture on box of crayons; then D: door to darkness, closed-off mystery. Together they went down the earth-passage—at underworld's first level Celt and Mason dimly expected to encounter themselves waiting—locked in a dark, secret, everlasting closet. Instead, they stood uneasily on the bones of a dog-like animal dead a million years. On level two they plowed through the remains of a dinosaur already taped and labelled MRF. They uncovered the majority—but were too innocent to connect ... to force. Strutters, diwalkers. V was clearly an upside-down hat: it protected them the way back up where—just before the exit—they stumbled into the clutches of cruel aunts with syphilitic-eyes, long-eared witches, drunk crab-shaped uncles, the broken—yet joyous, powerful, love-bound—spirit of a people: his—and by spirit, hers, too. They tasted salt, sugar and felt the frozen ground in winter; watched bird feet, were stung by fish fins. Turkey rot! Mason and Celt discovered it was possible to fly—even with broken wings: flying was not why you are but how: and then why: it was also not rushing downstream on a raft or being engulfed by a storm or swept away in a flood. It was how he got to know Celt. Before Celt he'd been a blind bat struggling to embrace the sky: his spirit existed before he was born: he simply stepped into it—as though it were a Union Suit. At sixteen he was unfinished; eyes: large, blank brown things. Did his mother Melba love him? She was certainly not his muse. Look at her apron: too clean: something is wrong. Is it that she doesn't like him much but loves ...? Her eyes: unfriendly—yet she's a person of responsibility as big as the Atlantic. Small, tight mouth—Anglosaxon. Her skin was lighter than his. He was—in color—between her and his father Chiro: nutmeg. Her Irish-African eyes? His were more in the tradition of Chiro's. As Mason grew: there was laughter in his thunder while he beat his wings against the page—attempting to become a good writer. He jus' grew: Chicago, 1955: there's Mason along the lakeshore: gulls cry. In the stockyards: pools of blood from the slit throats of hogs. He heard Wind Voice here howling in from lake Michigan. He claims he swallowed the lake. Art Institute's lions roared at traffic. Ashtrays and pink salmon. Calendars without dates. A private collage: he was reborn constantly in it: to the gills he settled in this stuff. Distractions, spectacles—where'd he find the force for his connections, a vent for the smoke clouding the thrust of his crisis? And how to fit in simple things, moments, only he knew the shape of—or so he claimed. Hold his hand, reader. Example: a particular line in the sky, skywriting—a particular rose on a particular bush—bushwriting. No echo; no snow in the hills—which hills? Wyoming, of course. He tried too hard to be, uh, profound. But he was young: eighteen. Take him by the throat, dear—. He thought himself, he says, Rimbaud or somebody. The sky, roses, appletrees, you name it. He says William Carlos Williams wrote him, encouraged him. He came to realize he wanted it all flat or upright and permanent like cubism—like things: surfaces. Now, here in the closet there was a feeling not of claustrophobia but one of plague, glut, glue; a sense of pestilence—and redemption—worse than East Africa—1368, a glut worse than Henry the Eighth, a glue thicker than Egyptian cement. Mason: holyshit: heard the pained-breathing louder than ever, smelled The Other with pity and contempt. He was no longer squarely sure these sounds, these smells, were not his own.
Mason, early in life, got slapped in the face by the unmistakable separation of Church and State. Hard-headedness made the hit come easily and irreversibly: his "innocence" became irrecoverable: he'd traded it in for an existential shot in the dark: A bidet was not a toilet without a seat; whores didn't necessarily kiss better than housewives; but ... yeah, you're getting warm (take your time—as Mississippi Fred McDowell used to say: time, time ...), even hot: keep the Clean (Church) separate from the Dirty (State). Point: early Mason lost faith in both. Remember, he was a rat from the get-go. The separation itself: his stepfather, for example, never taught him anything except the separation part: his sensibility was a peephole through which you could see frost gathering on military sternness. He polished his old army boots every Saturday morning although he'd been discharged twenty years before: spit-shined, spotless dude, he was, who chopped beef, not pork, not lamb, for Swift's at the stockyards. Could barely write his name: connected crudely printed letters with cross-bars: was not visibly intelligent either: just noble—full of nobility. Mason's mother caught her bottom lip between her teeth and chewed on it thoughtfully: held it that way, puzzled by the demands of the Church on one side (forced connections?) and the State on the other: that lasted for two, no, two and a half years. Mason's youngest sister, Maureen (never thought of her as half), was the offspring of that civil wedding made holy between Wilbur Young, The Man of Rules, and Melba, Woman of Blues. In six months he'd be fourteen: after school Mason walked to the cleaners—Rapid Magic Delux—his mother and stepfather owned on Forty-Fourth and Langley, South Side. It was December—it had snowed heavily three days before: snow now muddy, slush. He had the sniffles, a runny nose, chills. His pea jacket, though warm, had no buttons. When he entered Rapid Magic he saw Melba—thin, chilled, with folded arms, walking toward the pressing-machine, barefoot. At first glance nothing seemed unusual. As Mason went behind the counter, Melba turned and came toward him. He knew instantly: something was wrong: her eyes: it showed in her eyes: they'd never been that way before: they were, how d'ya say, blank crazy ...! He spoke: "Are you all right?" She gave him a glazed look—unfocused ... His mother didn't know him. He felt shot-through-the-grease. Mason watched his mother count the money in the cash register; then she wrote down the total on a scrap of paper alongside the machine. He stood at her side: she'd already totalled the same amount eight times on the same sheet. Had she forgotten? Obsessive fear of—? Mason's fear raced out of him, flapping, bloody, like a rooster with its head just chopped off. He felt desperation: a mindless mother meant being at the mercy of The Man of Rules. As usual, Mr. Young left his gig at Swift's at five, got to Rapid Magic at quarter-to-six. He normally ran the deliveries in his old car. Today when he came in, he casually spoke to his wife—who didn't return the greeting, didn't seem to recognize him—then turned to the boy who was pretending to read Catcher in the Rye. Mason quickly put his book aside, seeing that his stepfather hadn't even noticed the change in Melba: Mister Rules was busy gathering garments for delivery. Mason went to him. "Mister Young" (they were that formal) "uh, mother is ... there's something wrong with her ..." Young continued to sort through dresses, suits, jackets, slacks on the rack, separating them by address, street, city section. Young said nothing. (Melba, though able to hear this conversation—she was perched on the high stool by the cash register—was clearly not hearing it.) Then without looking at the boy, Young spoke: "Get the bucket and mop. The floor is dirty." Mason, tenderfoot, foolish, didn't get the connection, he stood there with his mouth agape. "But—" "I said get—" Young turned his violent deadfish-eyes on Mason—the skin of his thick, bulldog face, which was the color of potato skin, sunk to a splurgy purple-brown. Mason wiped a tear—which tasted like salt-pork—out of the corner of his mouth. "But look at her!" Young raised his hand, as though ready to strike. Mason turned and ran to the toilet at the back of the shop where the mop and bucket were stored. Trapped, framed, he filled the bucket at the sink, dumped Liquid Magic from its plastic bottle into the water. He was sobbing. Taking his equipment out by the pressing machine, he dropped the mop, then lifted the bucket with both hands and threw its contents across the shop, on Young and the garments he was fussing with. Before Young could respond, Mason ran out the back door, dashing through the smelly gangway, he reached South Parkway (later called Martin Luther King Drive); and it was while running, as though carrying the pigskin of his future tightly gripped under his arm, that he had a vision: Celt CuRoi would guide him firmly from the middle ground of separation sprawled there between Church and State. He would not fumble—would kickoff with skill unbound: would not need the protection of anybody else—ever. It was midnight before he climbed the steep stairway of the apartment building at Church Avenue and State Street where the family lived in Apartment C.
But it was only a vision. Before long, in Cheyenne, on an Air Force base, he sat at a typewriter. Knocked up girls floated through the balloon of his thinkbox. In high he'd already impregnated three or four fast members of The Jailbait Society. Each night now, while asleep, Pony Express gallopers brought him summons to appear in civil court to answer contributing-to-juvenile-delinquency and bastardy charges. It was hard to get up early enough to be there on time. He couldn't get permission to leave the base. Meanwhile, he was trying for a kind of literary apprenticeship. Mason's apprenticeship started like this: after reading and imitating Dumas, Dickens, Conrad, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Zola, there were Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Ellison, Baldwin, Himes, Toomer, Hemingway, Faulkner. Yes, yes—Faulkner! Well, you know old Joe Bullock, Jr., the guy who cut his girl's throat and threw her body out back behind the shed? (The yella girl story was the one Mason could hear—not just in Faulkner, in Stein, in Toomer! his mother was one too.) Yella was a waitress in a greasy-spoon in 1921. They made her wear a hairnet. Joe thought she was stepping out with John the white boss. Scribner's turned down their attempt to make their story known to the public. That was in 1930. American Mercury published it in 1931 under a title the town leaders later changed—by forcing previously unknown connections. It all went back before the fury and in some of the early versions you could hear at the redneck barbershop or general store (where old white men spat tobacco juice into the flame in the stove) in the winter: Yella was a decent young woman, not just a part-time colored (Faulkner would've said "nigger") prostitute: More to her life than contrast of southern grotesque and racial irony: more than fear and hopelessness. A boy, Bobby Joe, went about telling the story from his own point-of-view. People liked his version. Mason learned about first-person-plural from it. H.L. Mencken, however, cut the "white" baby out of Yella's womb before revealing her story to the public. While here nearly freezing in the snow and filing military documents at Stock Records, Mason made an earnest attempt to write. Results? I clear my throat.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from My Amputations by Clarence Major. Copyright © 1986 Clarence Major. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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