Notes in the Margin (Part III)

McPherson I

You get to the point where elegies feel fraudulent. A self-involved, too-late gasp of appreciation. James Alan McPherson—he’s been dead now how long? Three, four years? I can check the exact number, but once someone’s gone, the years they’ve been absent weigh on you differently, depending on how often you do or don’t think about them. We, the living, are irresponsible, haphazard in our remembering.

He wasn’t so much a teacher as a soft-spoken, reluctant oracle. One day during class, he played an old cassette tape of an interview he’d once conducted with Richard Pryor. Mostly it consisted of Pryor laughing. Imagine a man who could make Richard Pryor belly laugh. There were a few pauses when you could clearly hear Pryor snorting coke. Then he’d go back to laughing at something that McPherson had muttered under his breath. Why did he play us this tape? It wasn’t to boast that he’d hung out with a celebrity. It was about something a lot more fundamental: two people, two human beings, connecting, talking, laughing, all guards down, open-souled. That’s what he’d wanted us to hear, not the substance of the interview, of which there wasn’t much, anyway.

McPherson sniffed out posers, and if graduate students were anything, we were posers. Full of ourselves, our youth, our worth, our talent; we were waylaid in this corn-fed town only for a couple of years before we conquered the coast of our choosing. But McPherson didn’t knock us down for being such dipshits. He knew a certain amount of dipshitery went along with being a human being, and above all he was interested in what makes people human. He encouraged us not to follow anybody’s script, including our own, and loved to collect examples of human beings refusing to be typecast. A neo-Nazi is hit by a rock at a rally outside Chicago. The Nazi, a pimpled kid, falls in the street, bleeding. A protester who happens also to be a black woman rushes over to him, kneels, holds his bleeding head, protects him from more rocks. A McPherson moment: when a generous instinct overcomes a societal/cultural/clan-imposed identity. It was not a photo op he was after; he would have preferred that the gesture not be identified as anything other than an ordinary human thing to do. A kid’s hurt: comfort him, shield him.

Another time, he taught a class—I forget what it was called, but the syllabus was superimposed over a picture of Richard Jewell. Remember Richard Jewell? The security guard accused of planting a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics? He’d been among the first to rush in to try and save people. But the theory was that he was...