Malcolm and I: Remembering Malcolm Margolin (1940-2025)

Editor's note: We are pleased and proud to include this remembrance of the late legendary publisher and activist extraordinaire Malcolm Margolin, Heyday founder and friend, ally, mentor to so many. It arrives from an admirer, collaborator and personal friend who both mourns Malcolm's passing and celebrates his life. Peace.

I was a bit of a late comer to the exhilarating world of Malcolm Margolin, when Heyday Books published the groundbreaking Highway 99 anthology in 1996.  But what took my breath away and caught my rapturous attention was that the publication did not end with the physical printing of the book, or even the single celebratory event of a book “launch,” nor even a standard lecture tour featuring editors and/or contributing authors.  Reaching a level incomparably beyond those typical niceties of publishing outreach, Highway 99 was the occasion for a vast web of readings and discussions in libraries, museums, historical societies, colleges and community centers of all kinds, both large and small, urban as well as rural.   These events went on for well over a year.  Many were led by my very own colleagues at UC Davis: Jack Hicks, Jay Mechling, Gary Snyder, and many more, including upcoming graduate students.  The beauty here was in the creation almost ex nihilo of an entire community interconnected by the activation of the myriad institutions of a civil society in abeyance, and most miraculously the revelation of California’s Central Valley, long denigrated as a backward farmland, as in fact its own distinctive literary region powered by some of the Golden States’s greatest writers.  The simultaneous summoning into existence of a hitherto neglected literary and cultural community was, of course, the most distinctive hallmark of Malcolm’s radical view of the publishing industry, not just the making of money from books (more on that later) but the avid cultivation of human engagement, whether this came in the form of a lifelong advocacy of indigenous peoples (from the Bay Area’s Ohlone to the Māori) or the many migrant communities that make up the intricate tapestry of California’s marvelously diverse demography.

At about this time, I was appointed to lead the Davis Humanities Institute, which involved a surprisingly inspirational interview with then Provost and Executive Chancellor, Bob Grey.  I say “surprisingly inspirational” since I’ll confess that most of my encounters with the higher-ups of university administration have been more dampening, if not overtly dismissive, of any preexisting enthusiasm, but also since Bob Grey, like his name, was viewed deceptively from afar as the very epitome of academic decorum and restraint.  But underneath that only apparently drab exterior was one of the most revolutionary minds in higher education. Taking me into his confidence, he shockingly, brazenly declared the very core of UC Davis’s signature profile to be terribly out-of-date, its renowned research excellence in life sciences – over 50% of UC Davis faculty at that time were in some branch or other of biology, including Grey himself -- incarnated in the campus’s vast statewide network of agricultural extension.  He explained that this powerful infrastructure was appropriate for the rural population and commercial base of 20^th century California, and was also the source of UC’s enduring popularity with the public, since almost every farmer in a state full of farmers was directly indebted to UC Davis Extension services for help with improving crop yield or managing pests or simply how to grow a better tomato.   But now the state had also built itself into an equally imposing urban society with all the new associated industries of film, media, and information technologies.  To account for these changes, Davis, the UC campus most committed to outreach and development, needed to expand the traditional agricultural extension into an urban and suburban equivalent. But what that equivalent should be, he was not so sure. I truculently assumed it would mean removing the agri- prefix and embracing what one could call simply and more generally “cultural” extension.

While I was fired up with the zeal of such an ambitious project, I was also daunted by the challenge of how to go about actualizing it.  At the time, I was a successful scholar of French literature, well-trained in the arcana of critical theory, but not at all equipped to engage in the kinds of institutional change and community engagement I was now called upon to pursue. But this is when I thought again about Malcolm and his radical approach to publishing, epitomized in the Highway 99 initiative.  A further catalyst came in the form of a major grant competition announced by the National Endowment for the Humanities, whose chair, Bill Ferris, boldly imagined the institution of ten regional humanities centers that would bridge academic research with the local cultures of those ten regions.  Each grant would award a generous $ 5 million to the chosen institution with a 3-to-1 match requirement that would end up endowing each center with a very healthy $ 20 million endowment.  As for these regions, they were to be carved out rather arbitrarily and not without significant controversy by the ten census districts of the United States.  But not only was California, the largest, most populous state, not its own region, it was folded into the vast “Pacific” region, which also included the states of Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawai’i, as well as the U.S. territories of Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands.  An incomparable behemoth in its geographical and demographical extension, larger than all the other designated regions combined, my task had become exponentially more daunting.  To boot, I had to contend with a widespread academic prejudice against any project focused on local or regional rather national or international issues.  California history? California literature? That was just too low brow it seemed for the leading institutions, and so our major competitors would not be Berkeley or Stanford or even USC but San Francisco State, and this pattern would be repeated in all the other regions, triggering a stunning amount of publicity decrying the “dumbing down” of the humanities, a ridiculous and peevish response that in hindsight appears even more absurd than it was then. 

UC Davis, it turned out had a huge advantage in this competition stemming straight from its tradition of agricultural extension.  It turned out that we were already doing much of the cultural extension I was supposed to be building, not just through my aforementioned colleagues in English and American Studies but even more dramatically through the Department of Native American Studies, the first and largest in the nation with the only Ph.D.-granting program in the field.  And this academic jewel led back again to Malcolm and his signature periodical, News from Native California, that was a fundamental venue for research and program development in Native American studies.

And, with all due apologies for this overly long preamble, that is how I became close with Malcolm as my guide and partner in this quest.  Meeting him in person was a thrill, and he exuded every bit of the wit and wisdom attributed to him by countless mutual acquaintances.  But I couldn’t resist a deep-down suspicion that he must have been the model for that classic Robert Crumb cartoon character, Mr. Natural, with that improbably long, rabbinical beard and shiny bald dome of a head that exuded wisdom in all matters, and never more so than in his penchant for the perfectly placed wisecrack.  But that mirror of course worked both ways, since I had long been accused since my undergraduate days at Reed College of being the incarnation of that other Crumb character, Eggs Ackley, a bit too cheery, waving a foreshortened hand bigger than the rest of me as I pulled up in whatever car I was driving. Of course, this caricature was thoroughly exacerbated by my penchant to shout out “exactly!” whenever someone said something I agreed with.  Moreover, I was as always congenitally overdressed to Malcolm’s far less formal attire, making us ever strange companions as our friendship grew. In any case, I found myself a frequent visitor at the old Heyday offices, then located at the top of University Avenue in Berkeley, right near the intersection with Shattuck. Hours would go by as we talked and plotted and tried out ideas on each other, with either a lunch or dinner break downstairs and a few steps down the street at a charming Italian restaurant that surely no longer exists but where we would feast on fettucine alfredo or the like delightfully accompanied by correctly chilled Pino Grigio. But whatever the discussion, books would fly off the shelf at the mere mention of some relevant reference, and at the end of the day, I would find myself carrying off armloads, if not boxes full, of books Malcolm insisted I take with me, in response to which cartoon bubbles would float over my head as I wondered, “either I’m the recipient of some special generosity, or else there is no way this guy can make money if he gives out more books than he sells.”  Of course, Heyday would never make the big bucks, but that was never Malcolm’s bedrock intention, although the kind of clever subsidies and community events occasioned by the kinds of books Heyday would publish no doubt recouped much of the costs. 

And then there were the countless meetings up and down the coast, with various institutions and interest groups, or what Jack Hicks insisted on calling “stakeholders,” as we worked out the partnerships and arrangements to build the vast and novel infrastructure for the proposed Pacific Region Humanities Center, or PRHC as we affectionately called it.  Malcolm memorably quipped after these reunions: “A roomful of interesting folks with no money.” As usual, he hit the nail precisely on the head regarding the contradiction between the wide and enthusiastic network of small institutions and communities promoting the arts and the humanities, on the one hand, and the abysmal lack of serious investment in those communities by either the state or private investors.  No big bucks in the offing despite a vast popular appeal, a contradiction Malcolm himself incarnated with a successful publishing enterprise nonetheless always on the brink of insolvency and unable until quite late in the game of even providing its founder and owner with basic insurance and benefits. 

As if to underscore that contradiction, while UC Davis did indeed win the competition to be designated home for the PRHC, the dollar amount of $ 5 million stipulated by Clintonian largesse was seriously reduced by the incoming Bush administration to a much less robust $ 1.3 million dollars.  And despite the fact we had indeed succeeded in fundraising the required matching dollars, after I left, a change in academic administration and a new dean abruptly decided to cancel the entire project, despite its manifest prestige, and bizarrely returned the money to NEH, no doubt for being too locally low brow a venture.

But that was utterly to ignore what Malcolm understood so exceedingly well and far beyond the meaningless bromides about the global and the local being intertwined in that awful neologism of “glocality” or the pontificated rhetoric espousing the “public” humanities, whereby university administrators cynically imagine little more than directing the over-supply of graduate students towards nonacademic jobs.  What Malcolm knew was that the local was what touched people, what engaged them to think in fact through and beyond the local not just to globalization per se but to the biggest questions of who we are and what we are about as human beings and as creatures embedded in the vast complexities of what we all too simplemindedly call “nature.”  If what I continue to call cultural extension represents a more uplifting and activist vision of the humanities, it is because it takes place in the world and partakes in what is right at hand, the real that is necessarily localized in the face-to-face with the other who is perhaps none other than our neighbor.

No surprise, then, that the Heyday offices had such a warm neighborly feel, a place you could just walk in and browse, or strike up always illuminating conversations with whoever else might just happen be there, writers like Jim Houston or Gary Snyder, editorial director Gayle Wattawa, or Malcolm himself.  And the perfect place for meetings and intimate events, like the interview I recorded in Malcolm’s office with Maxine Hong Kingston and Jade Snow Wong, just a few weeks before Jade sadly passed away, the godmother of Asian American writers. 

My success at developing cultural extension, building bridges between academia, publishing, and the countless people and institutions that make up the extended field of the humanities writ large (I’m not saying “public” humanities for the reasons already given) did not go unnoticed.  I found myself all of a sudden getting recruitment calls for deanships and other academic administrative jobs, and eventually accepted one at Santa Cruz, before later moving to Boston, and eventually to Irvine.  But these so-called “leadership” positions paradoxically led me further away from my newfound passion for cultural extension as well as my own teaching and research. I also found myself oddly with much less time and freedom to launch the kinds of initiatives Malcolm had inspired in me.  Instead, I found myself caught in an ever-narrowing cycle of bureaucratic “oversight,” budget cutting, and delivering unsavory mandates from higher-ups.  It wasn’t all drudgery, to be sure, but in general the lesson I learned is that change doesn’t come from the top, it comes from below or even better from just a bit outside.  Despite all the challenges and difficulties Malcom faced, he could never have done what he did had he been hired as the senior editor of a large, well-heeled publishing house, earning much more money no doubt but with far less creative possibilities.  Malcolm, of course, knew this from the get-go.  Why did it take me so long to understand this?

And, even worse, I lost many of my old contacts, Malcolm included, over the next few years, until for some reason, I got invited to a reception up in Los Féliz at the home of the new Board Chair of the Gene Autry Museum of the American West in LA.  This new director was no ordinary appointment, however, but Marshall McKay, whom I knew from my Davis days as the chief of the Yoche Dehe Wintun nation in Cache Creek, a major benefactor of Native American studies at UC Davis, and now the first ever indigenous chair of the Autry in a revolutionary shift from its traditional legacy in honor of its eponymous figure of the white settler cowboy, a sea change further signaled  by its merger with the nearby Southwest Museum of the American Indian.  I should have known Malcolm, with his close, longstanding ties to the native community in California, would be there, but still it was a wonderful surprise and a joy beyond words to meet up again with him, a lovely moment captured by the photo above.  After catching up on our lives, he concluded with a line redolent of irony, good humor, and a dose of reproach: “So, that’s what happened to you!” “Eggs… actly,” I believe I must have answered.

Of course, no encounter with Malcolm could fail to generate some new opportunity for collaboration.  At the time, Heyday was looking to expand its presence in southern California, and the thought of some local anthology was already in Malcolm’s mind.  Indeed, he had already been in touch with my colleague, Andrew Tonkovich, and Lisa Alvarez, about just such a book project, focused on writings from and about Orange County.  

I, of course, instantly recognized the strategy of Highway 99 and the calling into being of a hitherto underappreciated literary region.  Orange County, a hotbed of writerly inspiration, who would have thought? The area Robert Crumb, from his perch up North in the town of Winters (where both of us had lived for a while, not quite overlapping), had decried as “a vortex of evil”?^[1] Malcolm, of course loved the idea, and I enthusiastically helped with the support of some subvention funds I was able to cobble together.  The eventual anthology’s subtitle, “A Literary Field Guide,” also channeled that whole line of Heyday books in aid of observing the unsuspected flora and fauna “among us,” initially of the Bay area, then encompassing other parts of California.  It was vintage Malcolm urging “us” to see what is actually right under our noses, locally, right in our neighborhood.  And that most enterprising team of Tonkovich and Alvarez delivered most impressively with a stunning array of literary contributions from the likes of Joan Didion, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Chabon, Susan Straight, E. L. Doctorow, Philip K. Dick, and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, among many, many others to reveal a culture far more profound and endlessly more intriguing and complex than all the hoary stereotypes of white suburban dreariness, entrenched conservative politics, megachurches and gated communities.

Malcolm’s great eye for seeing beyond the stereotypes, encouraging us to appreciate the unsuspected richness of the people and places right around us, is for me, his lasting lesson and the legacy we should all grasp and celebrate.  When I was developing the principles of cultural extension in the humanities at Davis, we often spoke of the arrogance of university “outreach,” exporting academic supposedly “good ideas” and research to a presumed-to-be uninformed community.  Rather, we should be supporting “in-reach” where the university becomes the repository and collector of the very real wisdom others have to teach the teachers. That is what really matters.  No one, but no one, though, has ever been so proficient at in-reach as Malcolm Margolin, making possible the dissemination and appreciation of the real knowledge that lies hidden in plain sight right in our own localities.  Thank you, Malcolm!

^[1] As Gustavo Arellano reminds us in his foreword to the volume, p. ix.

Georges Van Den Abbeele is a literary scholar, culture critic, philosopher, and writer. He is Professor of Humanities at the University of California at Irvine, with appointments in the departments of English, and European Languages and Studies, with affiliated appointments in Comparative Literature, Classics, and Philosophy, as well as the PhD Program in Culture and Theory.