For reasons that I cannot explain, I once found myself in the old Brooklyn Heights branch of the public library, leafing through the 1970s Manhattan Telephone Directory.
There they all were, the grocery stores – the A&P, Grand Union – restaurants -- Cafe Heidelberg, Kleine Konditori -- and clothing shops – Gee-The-Kids-Need-Clothes, Melnikoff’s -- of my childhood.
Reading Clifford Thompson’s latest essay collection – Jazz June – brought me back to that summer afternoon at the library where I stepped back in time, revisiting a previous life, in a neighborhood I no longer lived in, with a family now splintered by age and mortality.
“It was easy to feel,” Thompson writes, “in those moments of contentment, that life would remain as it was: that my brothers and sisters would stay under my parents roof, that my parents themselves would both remain alive and in that house, going to work and reading the paper and drinking instant coffee, that I would be in the capable hands of my whole family until…well, until a time I couldn’t imagine.”
As I found one childhood gem after another in the telephone directory, I pictured my parents, like Thompson’s, in our Yorkville apartment, my father in his armchair reading The New York Times, while his instant coffee kept him company on the side table, and my mother, knitting while sitting on the living room sofa.
One of Thompson’s many talents – he illustrated the cover of the collection – is his ability to reflect on the small moments, the ones most people miss, in breathtaking language. In The Moon, The World, The DreamThompson meditates on his Washington, DC childhood:
“In my memory this sleepiness was at its sweetest in the spring and summer, when the front doors of houses up and down my street were routinely left open to let the breeze it, when, as darkness came, people rocked on metal gliders on their small porches, when sounds were mostly of cicadas whirring and crickets chirping and the occasional car passing with a lazy roar up the street, when the only other movement was of moths floating near the yellow glow of the streetlamps.”
Such lyricism, especially in reflecting on childhood, is not easily found these days and Thompson here evokes a certain type of writer – Horton Foote and Harper Lee come to mind – whose storytelling abilities are slow, measured, and perfectly paced. That these writers are Southern and Washington was once considered part of the South, is not lost here.
Yet Thompson is hilarious. Here he is reflecting on his ability as a word nerd and complete inability to navigate directions:
“I am capable…of spotting a dangling modifier…but if you need a lift to the airport, call Lyft, not me: I have what I am convinced will be diagnosed in the future as a disability…which is not a bad sense of direction but a sense of misdirection…My cousin…once compared me to a ‘homing pigeon on LSD.’ ”
The collection follows Thompson from childhood through late middle age, while tracing his evolution as a writer. In adolescence his discovery of comics and their use of words is beautifully traced in Ming Yang Fu, Or Seeking Words at Age Thirteen:
“There were the human failings of the characters, and there was also the power…of Stan Lee’s writing. And there was the other irony. The words that so often failed me in my daily life – failed me with girls, with friends, with my own mother…these words made up so much of what I embraced in comics.” Indeed, this is where Thompson’s taps into the writer’s universality: words are “a way of being in the world.”
In addition to comic strips what places this collection particularly in the mid-to-late 20th century is Thompson’s television references to “the programs I had actively viewed or had on in the background while I did my homework or played with my toys”. No moment is more absurd – or familiar, as I might have bought this book -- than the image of Thompson on a late night New Orlean’s-bound bus, reading The Complete Directory to Prime Time TV Shows, 1946-Present.
Time in Thompson’s collection is a theme that returns over and over. There is the passage of time, in terms of growing up and crossing the river into adulthood, but there is also the use of time and Thompson’s dogged determination to become a writer, while marrying, having children, and holding down day jobs that are less than dreamy.
When I first met Thompson – I had written an article that he edited – he discussed his first novel and how he wrote it for one hour a day before work. I was struck by his level of self-discipline – it reminded me of my father, a classical pianist who, into his late 80s, practiced for one hour every morning – and the fact that a working New Yorker who was married and raising a family managed to write a novel in the most distracting and expensive city in the world.
There is one question Thompson poses – “What is a personal essayist if not self-obsessed?” – that I challenge. While there are many non-fiction writers who are only concerned with themselves on the page, I don’t think Thompson is one of them.
His work, rather, is about reflection and in this beautiful collection he has dared to make sense of the world and his place in it with courage and, above all, conviction.