My Vita, If You Will: The Uncollected Ed McClanahan [Paperback]

Ed McClanahan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 12, 1998

This gathering of short fiction and essays traces the artistic rsum of Ed McClanahan, a masterful Southern stylist working under the influence of Mark Twain, Flannery OConnor, and Eudora Welty. Highlighting the collection is Grateful Dead I Have Known , a long prize-winning meditation about Jerry Garcia and the fanatical devotion of his fans. Also collected here for the first time are McClanahans earliest short stories, along with book reviews, lost chapters of The Natural Man , and a substantial afterword to Famous People I Have Known . His recollections of famous friends and fellow travelers form an integral part of this book. He joins his buddy Ken Kesey in a bus-journey reunion with other gray-haired Merry Pranksters, and he pokes fun at his own graduate-school flamboyance in a touching remembrance of his mentor Wallace Stegner. This gathering of short fiction and essays traces the artistic development of the masterful southern stylist and storyteller Ed McClanahan. In this autobiography of a voice, the earliest stories are gloomy tales of existential despair, full of flashing neon signs, fly-specked mirrors, and characters whose eyes could be likened in various ways to black holes. How McClanahans writing evolved into the ribald comedy for which he is well-loved is a mystery unveiled in his fascinating ars poetica, Empathy Follows Sympathy . McClanahans nonfiction includes firsthand accounts of the hippie culture into which he dove headlong upon arriving in California. From that era comes Grateful Dead I Have Known , a long prize-winning meditation about Jerry Garcia and the fanatical devotion of his fans; an insiders portrait of beat hero Neal Cassady; and a chronicle of a bus-journey reunion with buddy Ken Kesey and other Merry Pranksters--long-hairs now become gray-hairs. Whether reflecting on the once-radical urgency of a generation now aging, or a childhood that fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry describes in his afterword as an ordeal of provinciality, McClanahan writes with warmth and hard-earned wisdom.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"This is really a book about a writer finding his voice," explains McClanahan (A Congress of Wonders; Famous People I Have Known), describing this assemblage of short fiction and essays written over five decades. From a 1952 C+ student story to the delightful nitrous oxide-vapored memoir "Grateful Dead I Have Known" (1972), McClanahan emerges as the stylist of the "wild-eyed anarcho-syndicalist Yippie peace creeps" generation. An endearing candor marks his comments on his career's triumphs and setbacks as he admits to an early fondness for "descriptive tics" and "wretched excesses." His memoirs of his days as a prot?g? and colleague of Ken Kesey, Richard Brautigan, Wallace Stegner, Bernard Malamud and others are devoid of braggadocio and full of bemused affection. McClanahan watched a baseball game between the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane, and he rode Kesey's psychedelically retrofitted school bus three decades after Tom Wolfe did. A Kentucky native drawn to California by a writing fellowship, McClanahan has parlayed his Southern provincial sensibilities and front-row-at-Fillmore-West experiences into a mastery of language, and a valuable sensibility, as seen in the tantalizing sops of short fiction here, notably "Postcard" and "The Greatest Writing Ever Wrote." With help from editor Tom Marksbury (who also contributes an afterword), McClanahan has exposed himself as it were, laying bare the history of his entire body of work. Robert Stone, who met McClanahan in a writing class three decades ago, contributes a short foreword.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Southerner McClanahan is a writer's writer, which means he's little known outside writers' circles. Let the greater public be aware of his talents. And this anthology of his essays, reviews, short stories, and novel excerpts (from early drafts) ought to do the trick. His friend, noted novelist Robert Stone, declares in the foreword that McClanahan's writing is "whimsical, and absurdist, outrageous, extreme, and most pleasurable." Readers will not dispute Stone's words and will have some of their own descriptions to add to the list--all flattering, of course. His essay "Bob's Lost Years: A Memoir of Robert Hazel" is a particular delight as he fondly recalls the influence of one of his writing teachers on his own work. Readers will certainly enjoy the short story "The Little-Known Bird of the Inner Eye," in which a sculptor from Kansas goes to pursue his art in the Pacific Northwest and there meets a character he'll never forget. And try McClanahan's review of Richard Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn for an example of keen critical discernment. Brad Hooper

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; 6000 edition (September 12, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1887178775
• ISBN-13: 978-1887178778
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,481,749 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A new form of literature happening in our time, May 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: My Vita, If You Will: The Uncollected Ed McClanahan (Paperback)

Ed McClanahan is one of those writers that many years down the road you will wish you had each of his books in first edition hardback on your shelf.

His voice is totally new and original. The writings are hilarious, disturbing, and all too real. He is already a legend in the south, so I suggest picking up his books and read them. I guarantee you will read them again at least for the laughs. Not very often these days can a book make us laugh out loud.

If you enjoy McClanahan, I suggest reading John Dufresne also. These two must share genes somewheres in their backwoods lineage I would guess.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quite a Nice Read, March 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: My Vita, If You Will: The Uncollected Ed McClanahan (Paperback)

For many years -- through two marriages and God knows how many moves -- I have kept a moldering issue of PLAYBOY for the simple reason that I didn't want to turn loose of one of my all-time favorite examples of the New Journalism, Ed McClanahan's "Grateful Dead I Have Known." It's THAT good. That landmark piece and other tasty goodies have been collected into McClanahan's MY VITA, with Ed providing some new bridging material describing his growth as a writer. It's a pity he's not a more widely recognized writer. If you dig Terry Southern, Charles Portis, or Hunter S. Thompson, you'll like Ed McClanahan. If you're of that bent, I'd snatch up this book before it falls out of print.

4.0 out of 5 stars A miscellany, clever but sadly dated, December 9, 2008

By 

R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: My Vita, If You Will: The Uncollected Ed McClanahan (Paperback)

Ed McClanahan is a Kentuckian who spent most of the 60's and 70's "riding the Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing circuit" at various Western universities, including Stanford, during which decades he participated in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements and joined in the drug- and alcohol-fueled high jinks of the time, perhaps best exemplified by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. McClanahan has three published books of fiction to his name (none of which I have read). MY VITA, IF YOU WILL is a collection of miscellaneous other works from his career, both fiction and non-fiction, most of which are revised somewhat, together with a couple essays written expressly for this book. In addition, each piece is accompanied by an "End Note," which provides retrospective commentary on the piece, or updates it, or somehow relates it to McClanahan's career as a writer and his sojourn on earth.

I was relatively unimpressed by the six fiction pieces, although their inclusion is arguably justified on the grounds of showing the process of McClanahan "finding his voice" as a writer. The non-fiction pieces are clever, irreverent, satirical, anecdotal -- very much typical of the "New Journalism" a la Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson -- and moderately entertaining. Cumulatively, together with the End Notes, the non-fiction pieces provide a good picture of a certain era and segment of American society, besotted and benighted and, looking back from 30+ years, sadly dated and not particularly lamented. Of chief interest to me were the pictures of personalities from the era whom McClanahan knew and, to varying degrees of intimacy, interacted with -- Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, Richard Brautigan, Paul Krassner, and Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. (I especially like the description of Garcia "yawning and stretching and scratching like a freshly dehibernated bear.") Among figures more literary in nature who make appearances in the book are Robert Stone, Bernard Malamud, Wallace Stegner, and Wendell Berry. (Berry is a fellow Kentuckian and long-time friend and some-time neighbor of McClanahan's; he writes an afterword of sorts to the book, which is just about the best piece of writing in MY VITA.)

There are many witty lines, many clever and ironic digs at the "Establishment" or of self-deprecation, and some funny episodes (the account of the drunken afternoon and evening McClanahan shared with Richard Brautigan, Gurney Norman, and Ken Kesey is hilarious). But the style, although perhaps fresh and welcome in an article in "Rolling Stone" or "Playboy", does not wear well for an entire book, and there is very little of lasting value.

Three-and-a-half stars. I tossed a coin to determine whether to round up or down. It came up heads.