James McConkey (1921–2019)

The late 1980s found me in grad school at San Francisco State University doing, among other things, deep dives into the novels of Joseph Conrad and Philip Roth and the plays of Anton Chekhov (as well as biographies of Conrad and Chekhov) as the "Three Major Authors" on whom I would be taking oral exams for my Masters in English Lit/Creative Writing. Somewhere along the line during those days, a fellow student gave me her copy of To a Distant Island as a gift because it is a memoir by McConkey that has Chekhov as its central figure. How does that work? Toward the end of his life, in 1890, Chekhov made a long arduous trip by boat, train and carriage from Moscow all the way to Sakhalin Island, off Russia's Pacific Coast. McConkey tells us in this book's first paragraph that Chekhov "had been undergoing a depression so severe that his most recent biographer believes he might have been nearing a breakdown" and that this was "a journey of over sixty-five hundred miles, or more than a quarter of our planet's circumference." The trip's avowed goal was to study and document the allegedly horrific penal colonies that the Russian government was running on the Island. But as McConkey, via Chekhov's own letters and the book he wrote about the trip, tells us that Chekhov's real goal was to shake himself loose of this depression by plunging into the unknown and experiencing life away from the restrictions of Moscow society and his own growing fame as a writer. He made it to Sakhalin and spent three months interviewing thousands of prisoners and their families, as well as the island's administrators and other inhabitants of the place. Conditions were even worse than Chekhov had expected. He ultimately wrote a book about his findings, The Island of Sakhalin.

OK, back to McConkey. In the mid-80s, McConkey decided to write a memoir about his family's year in Florence, Italy in the early 1970s. McConkey was on sabbatical from his tenure at an unnamed university, driven away from the school by the late-60s turmoil on campus that he had found himself drawn into but ultimately repelled and distressed by. While in Italy, he came upon a volume of Chekhov's Sakhalin letters and became fascinated, going on to read everything he could find of these letters and of Chekhov's life. From the letters, McConkey imagines and creates a novel-like narrative for Chekhov's journey, interspersing known facts with his own fancy. He makes an admittedly conjectural examination of Chekhov's motivations and psychological evolution during his travels. But this is, as I said up top, ultimately a memoir. McConkey endeavors to thread his own memories of his family's stay in Italy throughout his telling of his Chekhov tale. The problem here is that while the thematic connections between the two story lines were evidently clear to McConkey, he fails, in my view, to present them effectively (or at all) for the reader. Also, McConkey's problems, the issues he's come to Italy to heal from, do not seem that dire. After a tumultuous and depressing year or two on a college campus, he is able to spring free (knowing his job will await him upon return) to have a pleasant year with his loving wife and two sons in Italy. It is hardly on par with a 30-year old man trying to remain in denial about his worsening consumption throwing himself alone through winter across 6,500 miles of wilderness to spend three months in a horrifying prison colony. McConkey tries to bring depth to the work with speculative explorations of Chekhov's mindset and present psychological themes for us to consider. But while McConkey's writing is quite good and his points are generally lucid, it's ultimately hard to care about his speculations, and I ultimately found myself skimming these passages.

I was mostly happy to finally be reading this book. It's been sitting on various shelves in various homes of mine for over 30 years, after all! And I did learn a lot about Chekov's Sakhalin journey, which I had never really explored. Other than reading a short story collection or two over the past three decades, it had been a while since I really visited with Chekhov at all, a writer whose work and life had once been a source of great interest for me and brought me quite a bit of intellectual and artistic enjoyment. But I would recommend this book only to those with a particular interest in Chekhov's life. Anyway, now I can finally tell my friend that I read the book she gave me in 1989!… (mere)

A month or two ago I'd never heard of James McConkey, and this is a guy who's been around for over ninety years and has been writing for more than fifty. But recently I ran across an excerpt from his COURT OF MEMORY in an anthology called MODERN AMERICAN MEMOIRS. It was called "Hector, Dick and I," and told of his time as a grad student at the University of Iowa not long after the Second World War. It was such a delightful piece of writing that I wanted more McConkey, so I researched him a bit and found he'd written a dozen or more books. Some were scholarly in nature, on Forster and Chekhov (he taught English at Cornell for over 35 years), there was some fiction, including a novel, THE TREE HOUSE CONFESSIONS, and, most interesting of all, there were a few volumes of memoirs.

So I settled on this book, THE COMPLETE COURT OF MEMORY, which gathers his first three memoirs, along with some other autobiographical essays which make a fourth volume, all under one cover. It's a fat book, a heavy one, which seems appropriate, since McConkey tackles some pretty weighty matters in his writing. Mostly he ponders the mysteries of life itself.

In his nineties now, and retired from teaching for over twenty years, in many ways McConkey's life has been a fairly ordinary one. Born in the twenties, a child of the Great Depression and its hard times, McConkey attended Cleveland College on a work-study scholarship, married, and served in the infantry during WWII, where he was seriously injured in a jeep rollover in Normandy. He returned from the war to attend graduate schools in Ohio and Iowa, taught for several years in Kentucky, then at Cornell from 1956 until his retirement.

Perhaps the dominant theme in McConkey's four volumes of memoirs is his parents' divorce when he was eleven or twelve years old. Clayton McConkey, almost a dozen years younger than his wife, was something of a blue-sky dreamer of a salesman (Willie Loman comes to mind). He changed jobs and moved often, searching always for his "bracket." McConkey tells us that by the time he graduated from high school he had attended fifteen different schools in several states. His father's second marriage failed after a few years and the elder McConkey even spent some time in prison for writing bad checks, but upon his release he remarried his first wife and they remained together until his death from cancer. But during those four years that his parents were divorced, James and his mother went through some very difficult times, living with relatives and moving around, trying to make ends meet. His mother worked as a maid. Her older son Jack got a scholarship to General Motors Institute in Flint. James went to live with his father and second wife in Chicago for several months, then back to live with an aunt and uncle, finally ending up at Cleveland College, where he earned an accelerated pre-war degree and met his wife. These poverty-stricken peripatetic early years obviously left a permanent mark on McConkey, because it seems to me that he has spent the rest of his life trying to prove his own worth as a reliable husband and father (he has three sons). He even admits that he adamantly refused any opportunities to move on from Cornell for better paying positions, mostly because he wanted his own family to have a firm sense of permanence and stability, of 'home' - all of which were so lacking in his own early life.

McConkey didn't stay put completely, however. He traveled extensively, on sabbaticals to Italy and France, during which time he saw much of Europe, and he writes most eloquently of his time in the Greek islands, Paris and other places.

I found much to relate to in McConkey's memories, particularly in his close relationship with his aged mother, who lived with him for the last dozen years or so of her life (she lived to be a hundred). She told him she no longer believed in heaven, and I remembered how my own mother, also in her nineties, admitted she no longer believed a lot of the force-fed teachings of the Christian church. Indeed, McConkey at one point recalls something "from an otherwise forgotten book" - "Memory is what we now have in place of religion."

I was also touched by McConkey's musings on how our attitudes change toward animals as we get older, "with the inevitable ebbing of the once insatiable wanting that sometimes makes an unholy ... trinity of soul, sex and possessions." He remembers a dog he had as a boy and reflects on the many pets and animals he's had since then, and how many of them are an attempt to recapture that first important boy-dog bond that can perhaps never be replicated. Reading this caused me to think about how important my own dogs have been in my life, especially those that have shared our home since retirement. We lavish our love on these animals, unashamedly and fully. McConkey's "My Life with the Other Animals" is a fascinating look at this concept.

I really enjoyed reading this book, except for one thing. McConkey tends to repeat himself, reiterating many of the same anecdotes, about his parents, his children, etc. His long-time home in upstate New York, for example, is never just an old farmhouse. It's always his "1831 classic Greek revival farmhouse." After the first dozen or so times he describes it this way, I was tired of hearing it. I GOT it, Jim. It's a very OLD house. But then, these stories, anecdotes and descriptions were written at different times, often decades apart, so I should probably forgive him these redundancies. Bottom line: this is a fascinating, often thought-provoking look at a very long life. In some ways it's very ordinary, but McConkey has a way of reflecting on it all that makes it seem very Extraordinary.

If you enjoy autobiography, then this is a must read. Highly recommended.… (mere)

James McConkey's THE TREE HOUSE CONFESSIONS (1979), is a novel all but forgotten. McConkey is an author probably not widely known, but I recently ran across an excerpt from his memoir, COURT OF MEMORY, in an anthology called MODERN AMERICAN MEMOIRS, and I was charmed enough to seek out something else by McConkey, and found this book.

THE TREE HOUSE CONFESSIONS, apparently loosely inspired by St Augustine's famous "Confessions" (which provides an epigraph), gives us fifty year-old narrator Peter Warden's rambling and philosophical attempt to explain to his wife, Ann, why he has been so distant - and perhaps clinically depressed - since the death of his aged mother. He has retreated to a treehouse he built years before for his ten year-old son (who died in a freak accident at eleven) where he is writing it all down - his life, or at least what he considers most important to understanding what has happened to him. Augustine (who was also very close to his mother, St Monica) divided his confessions into 13 books. Warden's, thankfully, are not that extensive; his 'confessions' are presented in three books: "Nature," "My Parents," and "Myself." The first two books are a bit slippery, as he first tries to show his place in the natural world that surrounds him (Nature), and then tries to imagine himself into the early lives of his parents, about whom he admittedly knows little, and is no doubt influenced by the fact that his father abandoned him and his mother for a dozen years or more. His father, a failed vintner, was ruined by Prohibition and the Depression, and probably also by a restless spirit and wandering eye. His mother, still haunted by the death of a first son, comes across as something of a dreamy martyr, but does hang in there and raise her second son, Peter. The mother-son bond is perhaps a bit too close, a relationship that adversely affects Peter's own relationships with women. There's a brief wartime marriage (almost nothing is revealed of Peter's army service, only that he was wounded and sent home), to childhood sweetheart Sally, that results in that son, Tommy, passed between grandmothers until Peter and his second wife, Ann, take him in and raise him.

The most accessible section of the book, to my mind, is the last, "Myself." Although there is some overlap between the three 'books' of the novel, this last section tells you the most about Peter's childhood, adolescence and later life than the first two sections. I was most interested in the details of Peter's boyhood on a small island in Lake Erie, with stories of some eccentric neighbors and his wanderings in nature. I wished there had been more details like these, i.e. more showing and less telling.

There is something quaintly archaic, if not off-putting, about the mannered "literariness" (is that a word?) and the pondering of deep philosophical matters in Peter's story. The way, for example, he explains (and this is a letter to his wife, remember) his college years, a time when he -

"... consistently pursued the sanctity of ideas. Purity of a sort, lay in philosophy, in intellectual abstraction."

There also seems to be something of a struggle for Peter in figuring out his own sexual identity, partly due to confusion and guilty feelings about a one-time encounter with another boy during high school. And his repeated failures to respond to free-thinking Sally's very sexual overtures seemed suspect. They finally do spend what seems an idyllic and sensual week together in his college apartment in Cleveland, and then marry, after which he loses all interest in her and she goes back home to the island.

Bottom line, I often just didn't quite know what to make of this book. Some parts I liked very much and others I don't think I got at all. I was suitably impressed by complimentary blurbs for the book by the likes of Eudora Welty, Allison Lurie and Harold Brodkey. But for me it was often a struggle trying to figure out what McConkey was trying to do.

In fact, at the outset of his narrative, Peter admits to Ann, "Aren't these clumsy words?" And finally, toward the end, he again protests his inadequacy, saying, "How can I express what I am trying to say?" And then again: "My words may sound overly rhetorical, as if I were trying to beat myself into some hysterical acceptance of what I am saying, and by convincing myself, convince you."

Hmm ... Well, I would never accuse McConkey of being 'clumsy' with words. Far from it. He proves repeatedly here that he can be quite eloquent. But as for being convinced of whatever it was he was trying to say, well, I'm more confused than convinced. THE TREE HOUSE CONFESSIONS is simply NOT an easy book to read. Which may explain why it has been nearly forgotten.… (mere)

This book is a nice, early attempt to critically analyze the works of E. M. Forster. There is the sense that McConkey's conception of Forster's work is a bit too neat, too complete, too deterministic, and too dialectical; everything just seems to flow into the perfection of form and style that is "A Passage to India," which is problematic considering the existence of "Maurice." However, McConkey's book is a good, easy read for anyone, especially those just starting out with Forster.

Note: McConkey's book was originally published in 1957, and though it was republished in 1971, there is no analysis of Forster's hidden novel "Maurice," which was only published in—again—1971, after Forster's death. I believe that McConkey's thesis would have changed dramatically if the existence of "Maurice" had been revealed much earlier.… (mere)