The story begins in Train Whistle Guitar (1974) with a child’s-eye view of life in his hometown – on the north side of Mobile, Alabama, in the 1920s. At school, on porches, in the barbershop, on the streets, in the bayou, and while train-hopping through the surrounding region, an imaginative boy comes of age as he learns about life. It’s a story of community kinship, family, friendship, religion, murders, and sexual awakening.
It continues in The Spyglass Tree (1991), about college life at Tuskegee in the 1930s. This is a novel of the artist as a young man, including tales of plenty of jam sessions.
The story moves on in The Seven League Boots (1995), as the young college grad becomes a bass player in a jazz band – led by a character modeled on Duke Ellington – that travels the U.S. during the Swing Era. He settles down for a while and flourishes in Hollywood before spending some time in Europe.
And things conclude in The Magic Keys (2005), when the young man finds his vocation as a grad student at NYU as he moves through the city’s libraries, art galleries, and jazz hangouts. The soul who gave us the first three stories now matures and reaches a fuller fruition.
This is the quartet of the Scooter novels by Albert Murray. Together, the four novels form an epic personal journey. A gifted child develops into a flourishing young adult.
Why do these four novels make Albert Murray my favorite American novelist of all time? It really comes down to two elements and how they converge.
First, the writing is brilliant. Writing with musicality. Pitch-perfect writing. Writing with lush language and idioms and word-slinging and a rare rhythm and cadence and lyricism. Murray’s voice has all the swing of blues, jazz, and Gospel combined. Every paragraph sparkles with life. Every paragraph is perfection itself.
Each scene is beyond interesting; it’s riveting. Murray takes us right into the experience of his life – with all its emotional depth – and into the heart of life itself. And the scenes just roll along and then flow into a seamless story. Murray has set the standard for the semi-autobiographical novel. He makes language and his experiences engage in splendid feats; he makes them dance.
And second, there is the exemplary character of Scooter himself, one of the great characters of American literature. He doesn’t gloss over the flaws he sees in people, but Scooter (and thus Murray) observes people far more than he judges them.
Scooter and his fellow characters are high-spirited, buoyant, and even joyful. They celebrate life and find the goodness in life, even as African-Americans amidst the darkness of a segregated nation.
Scooter embodies the potential of a youth and young man. He’s grateful to the adults in his community who’ve guided him along for the better, and he absorbs and integrates a range of influences, gaining wisdom as he goes.
Scooter possesses intelligence, good sense, and a certain elan or verve or savoir faire. He’s a hipster – earthy, cool, smooth, even sly – who moves through the world with a certain elegance and ease. And through all his learning and life experiences he becomes fully conscious.
Along the way through the tales in these four novels, we honor the heroism in the African-American tradition – including folk traditions – and we’re reminded how essential the Black experience is to American culture. We get back in touch with our own sense of life, with a mix of reverie, nostalgia, camaraderie, excellence, adventure, humanity, and love.
Murray’s novels are devoid of cynicism and filled with exceptional people. He takes us into the heart of our multi-colored American culture. Ultimately, above all else, he ennobles us as he teaches us what it means to be human.
Albert Murray offers us perfect writing about an exemplary character – and by the time we finish his fourth novel, we surmise that Murray himself was not only a brilliant author but an exemplary individual. What more can we ask for from a novelist?
What an amazing introduction! I found a collected works of all 4 novels plus poems in the library and am excited to read it!
I will definitely add Murray to my list. I never heard anyone talk about Murray in society or in academia until you brought him up. I expect it's because, as you say, he observes rather than judges. He does his own thing rather than what establishment literati want him to do. Or so it seems from the concise and excellent portrait you provide.
It's true that we don't have as many exemplary characters in American literature as we might believe. It's not an easy task, but I also don't think Americans want characters of that level of complexity. Case in point: Uncle Tom, by far the most distinct and exemplary yet complicated character to come from the American tradition. To this day we cannot digest him, and because of the philosophical ramifications of Uncle Tom I think American authors prefer to avoid characters of that sort altogether. After all, the only other candidates I can think of - Philip Marlowe and Humbert Humbert - are literary gifts from foreign authors, be it Chandler the Brit or Nabokov the Russian.