FEATURED WRITER OF THE MONTH

William Gay has carved for himself an enduring position in the modern Southern literary landscape, and the echoes of his work have reverberated far beyond the red clay hills surrounding his home in Hohenwald, Tennessee. The South of his books is often dark and violent, yet thankful for such simple sights as a hayfield at dusk filled with fireflies, or a demure feminine smile. In a 2000 NEW YORK TIMES book review, fellow Southerner Tony Earley wrote, “At his best, Gay writes with the wisdom and patience of a man who has witnessed hard times and learned that panic or hedging won’t make better times come any sooner; he looks upon beauty and violence with equal measure and makes an accurate accounting of how much of each the human heart contains.”

Gay has published three novels: THE LONG HOME, PROVINCES OF NIGHT, and TWILIGHT, as well as a collection of short stories called I HATE TO SEE THAT EVENING SUN GO DOWN, with a new novel, THE LOST COUNTRY, forthcoming. Recently, we traveled to Hohenwald to interview the author in the rural area of Tennessee that forms the backdrop of his stories. We found him there, tucked away in the misty hills where many of his characters have been lost and never heard from again, in his hopelessly idyllic log home. Inside, we sipped coffee and listened as he spoke candidly of his life and his work on a drizzly, cold day that lent itself to the unwinding of old Tennessee mysteries.

THE OXFORD AMERICAN: You’ve got a novel coming out soon. Can you tell us a little about it?

WILLIAM GAY: Yeah. It’s called THE LOST COUNTRY. It’s sort of a road novel, about a guy named Dewey Edgewater who’s just been discharged from the Navy and he’s hitchhiking back from California to Tennessee. The idea is like a place you can’t get back to, like youth or innocence, and Edgewater’s trying to get back to his life before he lost his innocence and became more worldly.

And it’s about a one-armed con man—there used to be these con men that went around the South. They had these ways of ripping people off. When I was a kid this guy came through, and he was spraying barn roofs. And my grandfather’s barn leaked real bad, so he hired this guy. He told him that it was guaranteed to stop all leaks. So my grandfather came up with the money and paid the guy to spray the roof, but it was just like a mixture of black oil and diesel fuel or something. He just sprayed it and got the money and split, and then when it rained, it rained inside as well as outside, just like it did before. But that’s what the guy did for a living. There were people who sold Bibles. They had your name printed in a Bible and would tell you that two or three payments had been paid on it, you know, but they read the obituary notices in the paper, they knew when somebody had died. And then if it was a middle-class person, somebody with a little money, they would show up with a Bible that had their name stamped in it from the deceased person. And that person would want to own that Bible, you know, because her husband or whoever had already paid some on it for her. But it was just a cheap Bible.

The con man [in THE LOST COUNTRY], Roosterfish, is a guy like that.

THE OA: What did you do before you became a writer?

WG: Well, I joined the Navy. After I got out, I bummed around for a while. I lived in New York for a while, then Chicago. But I came back to Hohenwald. I like the South better than anywhere I’ve ever lived, although New York was nice, too.

THE OA: What did you do in New York and Chicago to pay the bills?

WG: In Chicago, I worked in a pinball machine factory called Williams Electronics.

THE OA: Pinball machines are in some of your books.

WG: Yeah, they used to be a big thing when I was growing up around here. All the beer joints and pool rooms had pinball machines and they paid off on them, you know. If you could beat the thing, you could get five or six bucks. A lot of people played pinball machines, I don’t know if they do anymore.

THE OA: There was a character who played and beat a pinball machine in THE LONG HOME [Gay’s first novel].

WG: Yeah, there was a big guy they called Buttcutt.

THE OA: Yeah, he got into it with the Mexican bouncer, Jimenez. Is that bouncer based on anyone you know?

WG: No. Some of those people came from life, but some of them are just made up. As far as I know, there never was a Mexican bouncer around here. And there was nobody like Hardin either, I never knew anybody as evil as Dallas Hardin [the antagonist in THE LONG HOME].

THE OA: Whew, yeah, we were going to ask you about Hardin. How did you come up with him and make him so realistic and cunning?

WG: He was kind of a weird guy. When I started that book, I didn’t have a plot, and I had a character who had been in World War II. And he got discharged after the war and came back and he couldn’t get a job, and he wound up hauling whiskey for a bootlegger. But then when I started the book, that guy wasn’t even in it, you know, it turned into a book about the kid, [protagonist Nathan] Winer, trying to find out what happened to his father, and Hardin was nothing like the guy that I initially envisioned.

THE OA: When you were writing about Hardin, was it depressing trying to penetrate the psyche of an evil guy?

WG: I kind of liked Hardin. I understood him a little bit. There used to be a guy who lived here in town who was a bootlegger, but he was just kind of sneaky, he wasn’t cunning and everything like Hardin was. But he had killed somebody and got away with it, and he used to—I worked in a furniture store at the time—and he used to come in there, and he figured out that I liked hearing him tell stories. So he would come in there and hang around. And he told me one time that there were old abandoned wells and cisterns in this county, with bodies in them of people that nobody ever knew where they went. You know they just disappeared, and he was the only guy who knew where they went. And that was a kind of chilling thought, and I thought about it for, I don’t know, years before I started that book. I mean, the guy wasn’t anything like Hardin, but just the idea of killing people and throwing them in old wells and getting away with it….

THE OA: You write about rural Tennessee in the 1940s and 1950s; of people in the lower class. A lot of the people who read serious literature are well educated and economically well off. Maybe what’s so exciting about reading about such characters is that the demographic that reads literature doesn’t come into contact with people like that often.

WG: Yeah, that’s what surprised me most about getting published and getting letters and phone calls from people. Because I thought what I was writing about had really limited interest for anybody. I was interested in it, and a few people who read early Cormac McCarthy were probably interested in it. But I had no idea that people in colleges, you know, academics, would be at all interested in it. And I still think that’s a little bizarre.

THE OA: Maybe it’s because it’s so different from their own lives.

WG: Maybe. It makes sense. Mostly I was just writing about the types of people I grew up with. People like Motormouth [in THE LONG HOME] whose own picture of themselves is not quite the picture that everybody else has. Self-important and at the same time really insecure—I’ve seen people like that before. Like Albright in PROVINCES OF NIGHT.

THE OA: People think of hillbillies as being rural, backwards, and dumb, but there’s a lot of subtext that’s going on in the dialogue in your stories. You’ve got to be smart to survive in that environment, and not get swindled or disrespected.

WG: Well, I think by and large people are good at what they do. They may not fit in with what everybody else is doing, but everybody’s got to live their own life, and if they’re not capable of doing it, then they’ve got to learn how.

You probably don’t smoke, but you’re welcome to if you want to.

THE OA: Thanks.

[WG lights a cigarette]

WG: I don’t smoke in people’s cars or their homes. But, a couple years ago I did a thing down in Memphis and they put me in a non-smoking hotel. I mean the whole hotel was non-smoking, and you had to go down to the ground floor and smoke outside. And it was cold, you know, it was wintertime. I mean I know smoking’s not good for you or anything like that, but I think it’s gotten kind of ridiculous, the whole second-hand-smoke thing. You know, smoking in a bar. People who are in a bar are taking their own lives in their hands anyway.

I used to go to Oxford a lot, and hang out down there, and you can’t smoke in the bars in Oxford anymore. I’d see Barry Hannah down in Oxford, and he would smoke wherever he was, you know, if people didn’t like it they could just throw him out and he’d leave. But he was the only guy that could smoke in Off-Square Books. He’d light up when he did a reading. He went to Vermont to do a thing in some college, and this friend of mine called me, she was there, she was appalled and said, “He lit a cigarette right on the stage while he was reading. This campus is non-smoking.” And I said, “Well, what happened, did the cops get him or what?” and she said, “No, he just smoked a cigarette and then put it out.” [laughs]

THE OA: Nobody died?

WG: Well, down the line they may, but not yet. [laughs]

THE OA: What, if anything, do you owe to Cormac McCarthy and Larry Brown in regards to your writing?

WG: Well, I think Larry was like me, he was influenced by the same people I was influenced by. I came on to Larry late, I didn’t read anything until everybody kept telling me, “You should read Larry Brown.”

To be honest about it, I really can’t overstate how much I was influenced by McCarthy. I was influenced a lot by him, and by Faulkner. But I think McCarthy was influenced a lot by Faulkner, too. The best thing I’ve read lately, I reread THE HAMLET, I hadn’t read it in years, and I’d forgotten how good it was. And I realized how much I got from Faulkner and how much McCarthy did, because a lot of the characters, like storekeepers and just minor fringe characters, in THE HAMLET—it’s almost like you’re reading SUTTREE or THE ORCHARD KEEPER or something like that.

The first book that really influenced me when I was a kid was LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL, by Thomas Wolfe. That’s really the book that made me want to write, to think that I might possibly be a writer. But I was trying to write a lot of stuff I didn’t know anything about. I was writing about painters living on the Left Bank, or expatriated Americans living in Paris. I didn’t know anything about it, except what I’d read. Then I read THE ORCHARD KEEPER, and it was just about Tennessee, you know, about rural Tennessee, and the weather. Everything was palpable about that book, you could feel the sun, you could feel the summer storms that blew up. And it was like a revelation—I thought, well this guy’s writing about what he knew, he was writing about Knoxville, where he grew up. So, I started writing about rural situations, like people I had grown up with, and saw hanging out at the pool rooms and stuff like that. And it got easier after I did that. It was still a while before I got published, but at least I thought I was improving.

THE OA: Tony Earley reviewed your first book in The NEW YORK TIMES in 2000, and wrote, “One of the more modern verities is that Southern writers are easier to sell to the world if they’ve done a lot of heavy physical labor before taking up the pen.” Do you mind people saying that you’re authentic because you’ve done all this work, does that help your perspective in your writing?

WG: No, it doesn’t affect what I write one way or another.

I’d had THE LONG HOME accepted by a small press and sold two stories I think [in 1999], and my agent thought it’d be a good idea if I went to the writer’s conference at Sewanee [TN] and met some writers. Because, she said—she was like a sophisticated New Yorker, you know, she thought I was a hick or something, probably thought I’d never been out of the county—“You go up there and you’ll meet some writers.” So I went to Sewanee, and it was really weird, I was like a fish out of water, maybe. The first person I saw up there was Barry Hannah. He was sitting on a front porch drinking a club soda or something, he wasn’t drinking [alcohol]. And I walked up on the porch of this old Civil War house, and he said, “What’s your favorite Bob Dylan album?” That’s the first thing he said to me. And I said, “Probably BLONDE ON BLONDE or HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED, what’s yours?” And he said, “Probably BLONDE ON BLONDE or HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED. What’s your favorite Cormac McCarthy novel?” And I said, “Either SUTTREE or BLOOD MERIDIAN, what’s yours?” And he said, “Either SUTTREE or BLOOD MERIDIAN.” And I never knew how he knew that—well, I had kind of long hair, I don’t know. But I thought it was very astute of him to figure out that I was a Dylan fan or a Cormac McCarthy fan without ever having heard of me before. Turns out I was in his workshop, he was teaching fiction, and I workshopped that story THE PAPERHANGER.

THE OA: That was a chilling story.

WG: That was like my greatest hit, I think. That’s the story that’s anthologized in books. It’s supposed to be in one this fall called BEST NOIR STORIES OF THE CENTURY or something like that. My friend Tommy Franklin’s gonna be in it, too, he’s got a novella called POACHERS that’s gonna be in that.

THE OA: Your novels so far have been coming-of-age stories, and a lot of your short stories are about older people. Is there something special about someone’s first brush with a loss of innocence, love, betrayal—does that fascinate you and spur you on to try and write a novel-length book?

WG: Yeah, I think so. I think the reason is that, when you’re sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, it seems like everything’s up for grabs. Anything can happen. Someone asked F. Scott Fitzgerald to describe the 1920s, and he said something like, “You felt like something was going to happen in the next thirty seconds that could alter your life forever.” And to me that’s sort of what being young means, it’s just like being free to be whatever you want to be.

And then when you get married and into middle age and all that, you’re locked into a pattern, you know, you get up and go to work. This is probably not right, but it’s sort of the way I look at it, I just don’t care. I’m just not interested enough in something like that to write about it. But then old people, they sort of have freedom again, you know, old people can do pretty much what they want to do, and people look over it and say let them do what they want to do.

THE OA: Do you wish you could have been a writer from the first and skipped the manual labor?

WG: Well, I was a writer anyway, I was writing a lot then, I just wasn’t getting published. But I don’t wish that I had missed it, because I was married for like twenty-five years. All my kids were born during that period, my kids grew up, I’ve got four kids. And I was being Pa in LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE. I wouldn’t—when my kids were young, it was probably more important to me than anything else. Yeah, I liked being Pa Ingalls, it was kind of fun.

THE OA: Your prose is very distinctive. It seems like you enjoy playing with language. How much of your prose is you kind of riffing, and how much is pre-planned?

WG: I think most of it. When it’s going well like that, it’s just how I think, what comes in my head. I sort of have a mental picture of it. It’s not always spontaneous. I pay a lot of attention to words. I think it would have been nice to be a poet. When I was trying to get published, I got a lot of criticism from editors who said, “This is a good plot and a good story, but you’re messing it up with too many metaphors, similes, and this quasi-poetic language. You need to be more straightforward and just tell the story.” But the language was what I liked about Herndon, it’s what I liked about Wolfe. I didn’t really change it, just kept on doing the same thing. Eventually the wheel came around, I don’t know what happened. I think when Charles Frazier published COLD MOUNTAIN, and it was a huge success, and McCarthy published ALL THE PRETTY HORSES, I think publishers started paying more attention to Southern writers. There are a lot of people who I met from the South who got published about the same time [the late 1990s].

THE OA: Do you have a writing routine?

WG: I’m driven by guilt, I guess. If I’m not doing it, or at least thinking about it or planning to do it, I feel like I’m wasting my time or something. It just feels like what I ought to be doing.

THE OA: So you feel like you’re letting yourself down?

WG: Well, certainly [laughs] not the readers. I don’t really know. I’ve always done that. I feel lazy and really sorry if I’m just lying around reading. I do a lot of that. It’s easier to just pick up a book and start reading, or watch a movie, than it is to write. But usually, it depends on how into it I am. If it’s going well, I work maybe all night, or way into the night. But then I generally feel depleted, kind of shot the next day, so I might not do anything for two or three days. It sort of depends on where I am. If it’s toward the end, usually there’s some kind of compulsion to finish it. I work faster towards the end.

THE OA: And you’ve been writing since you were a teenager?

WG: Yes. I started, I think, in seventh grade. I had a teacher who noticed I was reading a lot of books, but I was reading a lot of Zane Grey westerns, and Erle Stanley Gardner and Perry Mason novels, that kind of stuff. He thought I should be reading better material, and he said, “I’ve got a book I’ll give you, if you promise me you’ll read it.” And I said, “Yeah, bring it on,” and he gave me LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL. I read it, and then after that he gave me AS I LAY DYING and THE SOUND AND THE FURY. I didn’t understand all of it, but I loved the language. That’s still one of my favorite books, THE SOUND AND THE FURY. I was a little surprised that ABSALOM, ABSALOM! was number one on the OXFORD AMERICAN list [of best Southern fiction of all time].

THE OA: That wasn’t your favorite Faulkner?

WG: It’s the hardest one for me. It’s absolutely the hardest book to read that I’ve ever read.

THE OA: Maybe that’s why people put it up there, they were saying if it’s so difficult to read then it must be the best.

WG: Maybe that’s what it is. I met this girl one time a couple years ago and we went for a walk, she was a Faulkner scholar. And she thought that I was really ignorant because I liked AS I LAY DYING better than ABSALOM, ABSALOM! She said ABSALOM, ABSALOM! was the best novel ever written. And she went and bought a new copy of it, and I tried it again, but it’s still not my favorite, it’s too….

THE OA: Dense?

WG: Yeah, and it also seems concerned with things that might have been important in 1930s Mississippi, but don’t seem all that important now. You know, apparently, miscegenation, if you had black blood, was a big deal, but now that just seems, I don’t know, not worthy of devoting a four-hundred-page novel to.

THE OA: There aren’t many black characters in your books, and the white characters don’t seem preoccupied with racism. In many Southern books, race is the number-one issue. Is it fair to say that race isn’t very important to you and your work?

WG: Yeah, it is fair to say. I don’t really feel qualified to write a lot about race, because when I was growing up race was not a big issue around here.

THE OA: Were there many black folks around here?

WG: Well, there were quite a few. ’Course, they lived on the wrong side of the tracks, in Hohenwald, but I don’t recall any trouble between the races when I was growing up. My parents never really paid that much attention to race. You know, I think a lot of that stuff is what people tell you when you’re at a real formative age, and my parents didn’t seem to be prejudiced, so I guess I wasn’t either. I used to get questions sometimes at readings. This black girl asked me one time why there were no black people in my book. And I said, well, because there were no black people in the story, you know, the people in the book are the people who were in this story. And it was kind of a lame answer, but it was true. There’s racist references in those books, but they’re generally from unsavory characters.

The people that I think are the heroes of books, or the protagonists…. I seem to be interested in kids who read books and aspire to be writers. That always seems to be what I write best about. I don’t know why that is. Well, PROVINCES OF NIGHT, when I began that book I thought I was writing a short story, about this guy Boyd, who was down in West Tennessee looking for his wife. At one point, his mother-in-law says, “How’s that boy? He must be about seventeen by now.” So then I thought, “Well, I’ll take time out and write a scene about him.” So I wrote a scene where he was waiting on the mailman, and I got so taken with this kid, that it turned into a book about Fleming Bloodworth.

THE OA: So the coming-of-age format is not something you set out to do, just what felt the freshest?

WG: It’s what I was most interested in, I think. But when I was growing up, I read a lot of those kinds of books. Probably the first one was CATCHER IN THE RYE. For a long time, that was one of my favorite books, J.D. Salinger. James T. Farrell wrote some books about coming of age in Chicago, STUDS LONIGAN. I don’t think anybody reads James T. Farrell anymore. But, William Goldman, who’s now a screenwriter—wrote BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID and a bunch of other movies—he started out as a novelist in the Salinger vein. He wrote a book called THE TEMPLE OF GOLD. When I was fifteen or sixteen years old, I was really influenced by that, the kid coming of age. That’s just interesting to me. I don’t know a lot about it from the female perspective. The woman who edited PROVINCES said, “Next time, you should write about a woman, because you’ve got two books now about literate white guys growing up in the South, you need to branch out.” And I tried TWILIGHT with a female protagonist, but it didn’t work for me. So I went back.

THE OA: Do you consider what you do “textbook” Southern Gothic writing?

WG: I think probably some of it is and some of it’s not. I don’t think PROVINCES OF NIGHT is Southern Gothic, but I think TWILIGHT is. That book actually got better reviews than I expected, I figured because it was Southern Gothic. Some guy called it “a benchmark in Southern Gothic,” or something, and I was flattered by that. When I was writing it, I just had the idea of a fairy tale, like Hansel and Gretel lost in the dark woods and evil people stalking them and that stuff.

When I was young, I read a lot of early Truman Capote. There were Signet paperbacks—Signet published everybody. Almost everything I read that was any good when I was a kid was published by Signet. They’d put these really lurid covers on it, but it would be literature, you know, they would publish [Faulkner’s] SANCTUARY and show this half-undressed babe getting manhandled by a guy with a corncob in his hand. And they tricked you, you thought you were going to read pornography or something, and you wound up reading literature. I’ve always felt grateful for Signet Books for publishing all that stuff. But I had a book called A TREE OF NIGHT AND OTHER STORIES by Truman Capote, and everything in it was Gothic. He was influenced by Carson McCullers, and almost every story in that collection, you can’t call it anything but Southern Gothic. A lot of people call Flannery O’Connor Southern Gothic, but I’m not sure she is.

THE OA: How do you define Gothic?

WG: Maybe something like Edgar Allan Poe, THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER. That’s Gothic.

THE OA: Both Dallas Hardin and Granville Sutter [the antagonists in THE LONG HOME and TWILIGHT] had bad childhoods. Each has flashbacks throughout of their childhoods. Where do you come down on the nature versus nurture debate? Are people born evil, or do they learn it? And is there such a thing as pure evil?

WG: I believe that there is such a thing as evil. And I believe that your DNA, or how you are, you’re sort of programmed that way. But you could be deterred from it if you were treated differently as a kid. I think they were already sort of leaning that way, and then they had terrible childhoods.

Or maybe it’s just a series of bad decisions. There was this guy I knew growing up. He started out stealing 45 RPM records in a record store, you know, and then just worked up. They sent him to reform school—by then, he’d graduated to robbing people and that kind of stuff. But he never seemed to learn anything, you know, that if he kept doing that kind of stuff.... And he wound up eventually killing someone and being in there for life. But he started that way when he was a kid. He came out of a decent family…. He just didn’t have any scruples. He would do whatever he wanted to do.

THE OA: Often your characters seem unable to escape their enemies; they’re on a collision course with one another. What do you think about people’s ability to control their own fate, or whether things are preordained?

WG: Well, I think that that’s probably more true of TWILIGHT. I was taken with the idea of doing something kind of outrageous, where Fate’s—where from that point on, everything goes wrong. That kid [protagonist Kenneth Tyler] and his sister were digging up graves, and it’s part of culture that that’s sacred. People are buried with respect and decorum, and if you dig them up and open the casket to see what kind of shape the body was in…. They really pissed off whoever was running things, pulling the strings. Something behind the curtain. It was like looking at things they weren’t supposed to look at, like a little kid looking at a pornography book.

But that wasn’t a huge factor in writing that book. Mainly, I just got caught up in the story. They had this story on the news of an undertaker up in Franklin [Tennessee] who was abusing corpses, dumping garbage in the caskets. The guy was really respectable, well off, had a great house. And I started wondering what you would do if you were in that position to protect your reputation and your livelihood. And then I thought it would be neat to write a story about somebody trying to blackmail a guy like that, and just see what happened. And I wrote the scene where the girl goes to the undertaker and tells him they want fifteen thousand dollars [because of what the undertaker had done to their father’s corpse]. But then I saw that it wouldn’t work as a short story, there wasn’t enough room to tell the whole thing. So then, at that point, it turned into a novel.

THE OA: It seems like a lot of the trouble in your books starts with women.

WG: A lot of trouble in my life started with women [laughs].

THE OA: In your stories, circumstances always seem to overwhelm the characters who just want to tread water. They can never just stand still and be, they have to proactively form their futures.

WG: I guess that’s true. When my collection of stories came out, there was a woman who said it was about people making bad decisions, and then they’re compounded because they make another bad decision to try to straighten out the first bad decision, and it just gets worse and worse. I had never noticed that before.

THE OA: Is the Harrikin of your books based on an actual place around here?

WG: It is, yeah. It’s not like it is in the book anymore, if it ever was. It’s a big area of this county, and it takes in a little of Wayne county, and it was all mining land. It used to belong to a mining company that mined iron ore down there. There were a lot of people, a commissary, all kinds of shanties where these people lived who worked in the mine. And it was a going concern. When the iron ore played out, or became unprofitable, the mining company pulled out. And then all these people didn’t have any way of making a living, so little by little they moved out, too, and it just all grew up. Nobody could move down there and build houses because it belonged to some mining company in Pennsylvania or New York. And it just grew up, just a wild area.

I used to go down there and dig ginseng in the fall. I discovered that nobody went down there anymore, and it was a good place to dig ginseng. And then it got to be just a place to get away from everything, you know, if I worked all week, I could go down there on the weekends and walk in the woods and everything would all go away. There was no telephone, nobody telling you to do something, it was just nice being in the woods. And I started finding these houses where people used to live. There’d be fallen brick or pieces of tin that were on a roof, and it was almost like there was memory imprinted there, like you could pick up the vibrations of whatever lives had been lived there before. I mean, obviously it was just your imagination or something, but it was almost as if it were haunted, almost like something supernatural. The lives that had been lived there were imprinted, all the hard times and struggles and fights, and disharmony between the sexes. It just seemed like the air was still vibratory with it.

THE OA: You do get that supernatural impression from the stories that mention the Harrikin, it does seem haunted.

WG: Yeah, I sent a story to my agent, and he said, “Have you ever noticed that your writing gets better once you get your characters down into the Harrikin?” and I said, “No, I thought it was okay all along” [laughs]. And he just said, “Something about when you get them into the Harrikin, your writing changes.” That is the fun part of doing it, but I have no idea why.

Another thing that I’ve noticed about my writing is that I seem to get rid of the parents right away. There don’t seem to be very many parents hanging around with the kids. And I’m not sure why that is, either, because I had great parents. They were poor, but they treated us well and stayed together. They were married for fifty years or more. So it seems to me that the parents in these books are pretty much despicable, they’re a sorry lot.

THE OA: What do you think about the term “white trash”?

WG: I don’t care for it. I’m not sure exactly why. Erskine Caldwell made a whole living writing about it. I don’t like labels in general like that, you know, I think my problem with it—I’m sure, obviously, there’s people who are white trash, or if they’re trash and they happen to be white then they’re white trash—but as a label, I don’t like lumping a bunch of people together—I think more about individuals, I like to go down through each person, rather than lump a group as any kind of trash, white or whatever color. I’m really big on individuals rather than the group at large.

THE OA: Are you very religious? The characters in your novels don’t seem overly concerned with religion. And they’re not judgmental.

WG: I don’t really like those kind of people [who are judgmental] and that’s probably why I don’t write about them very much. People who are guaranteed a spot in heaven. When I was a carpenter, I used to work for a guy who was really religious, and he actually used to worry because I didn’t go to church. He would try to get me to come to meetings and go to church and all that, and it was because—I figured out why—it was because he sort of liked me, you know, and he knew that he was going to heaven, and that I was going to hell, because I didn’t go to church, and he kind of wanted to get me into heaven, too, and that’s why he kept trying to talk me into coming out to his little meetings.

When I think of religion, I always think of Robert Mitchum in that movie THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. He plays this bogus preacher who actually thinks he’s a preacher— he’s really a psychopath, he’s killed people—and he’s being tried in court for stealing a car, and the judge refers to him as “Mr. Powell.” And he says, “That’s Reverend Powell, I’m Reverend Powell.” And the judge says, “Just what denomination are you, Mr. Powell?” And he says, “My religion is a religion worked out ’twixt the Almighty and me.”

THE OA: Robert Penn Warren had a quote that said something like “the two pastimes in the South are storytelling and copulation.” Do you agree to a certain extent? Is storytelling a big part of your life?

WG: Amongst the people that I knew, especially when I was working carpentry, copulation was probably a bigger part of it than storytelling. I just remember I felt like an undercover man or something when I was working with construction crews. I mean, I could do the work and I could do the saw, and I did it for years, but it’s because I compartmentalized things. I never mentioned trying to write, because you don’t go out on Monday morning—with these guys talking about deer hunting—and tell them about the sonnet you wrote over the weekend. You keep your mouth shut about things like that. It don’t take you long to learn that.

THE OA: Did you find that suffocating?

WG: It was really weird, I was telling you before, the first time I went to Sewanee, because all the sudden I was hanging out with these guys who were quoting lines from Coen brothers movies that I had been quoting around my family for years, and it was like the were kindred spirits or something.

THE OA: Fleming Bloodworth, the young protagonist in PROVINCES OF NIGHT, is an interesting character. He was kind of all on his own, but he seemed to already have the underlying goodness in him to make it through, he just had to follow his conscience and his heart.

WG: Yeah, there’s an actor named Anthony Zerbe who fell in love with that book, and he actually made a trip here from Santa Barbara, just on the strength of that book. He said the reason he fell in love with this guy, Fleming Bloodworth, was because that speech he makes along toward the end of the book, where he’s getting sort of overwhelmed, with his grandfather, and his grandmother, and Brady. People just doing things that don’t make sense, because of pride, or because of whatever reason. And the Zerbe guy said that he thought there was innate goodness in this guy, you know, that he was appalled with the way people behaved, but at the same time there was no way to change it, you know, people were the way they are.

THE OA: Is Fleming the evolution of the Bloodworth family?

WG: Yeah, in a way. And he’s also learned a lot from books. He’s learned how people behave or how they misbehave, he’s kind of a bookish guy. And he looks around him, you know, and he sees people who aren’t behaving like the people in the books, and he’s sort of faced with the same thing that E.F. [Fleming’s grandfather] realizes one time when he’s on a Greyhound bus on his way to make a record. He realizes that he can have one thing, or he can have the other; it’s unlikely that he’ll have both. And the kid (Fleming) is sort of facing the same thing. He’s got artistic leanings, but he also wants a normal life, you know, a family and all that kind of stuff.

When I was writing that book, E.F. had been a demolition man on a pipeline, he’d gone to Arkansas and he’d been a pipeliner. But the whole time I was writing it I was listening to Harry Smith’s ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC, and there was a guy, Dock Boggs, on there, and he had two songs that I kept playing over and over. And it came to me that it would work better if E.F. was a musician rather than a pipeliner, because there was a resonance between what he wanted to be and what his grandson wanted to do with his life. And I actually swiped a couple of those Dock Boggs songs and had E.F. record them on his race records.

THE OA: The people who heard the race records thought E.F. was black, and E.F. took it as a compliment. He thought that the black musicians were better than the white musicians.

WG: Well, I was sort of thinking the same thing at the time. I was listening to a lot of old blues, listening to Robert Johnson and people like that. Nobody was writing songs like Robert Johnson, and the guy died when he was twenty-seven years old, he had no formal education. He had to be some kind of genius in order to have all the insight into human nature, how people think, why they do one thing and not another thing. And I had been reading a lot about the early days of the recording business, the stuff about race records. They actually used to manufacture records that they called race records, and they were marketed to blacks.
 
THE OA: In the community that your characters form in your books, there are very few leaders, and a lot of hangers-on. And a lot of the events that happen are determined by either the evil leaders or the good leaders, and the other people kind of fall in line. Dallas Hardin, for instance, supports this whole cottage industry of drunks, and what he does is what determines the action in the book.

WG: Yeah, that book [THE LONG HOME] is more of a conscious “good versus evil” thing than I’ve ever done. The William Tell Oliver character is almost like the good side of the coin. He’s good, but he’s had terrible things happen to him in the past. He’s actually killed a guy who was his wife’s lover, and served some time in the pen, but he sees the world in a different way than Hardin sees the world. Hardin’s only interested in what benefits him—the money, or sex with the girl. But even then, his plan is to prostitute the girl, to sell her to other people, so it’s not like he’s in love with her, it’s just a commodity.

THE OA: Hardin seems empty. He doesn’t know what he wants, other than that he wants to have more than everybody else.

WG: Yeah, someone pointed out in a review that there’s a part where he becomes more human when he gives the kid [protagonist Nathan Winer] the pocket knife of his father, but that wasn’t my intention when I wrote it. My idea was, it was an ambivalent gesture. He might have been being kind giving the kid the pocketknife that his father had owned, or he might just get a kick out of knowing that he killed a guy [Winer’s father] and kept the knife and gave it to the kid, almost as a non-verbal taunt, in a way. But I never really knew which way it was. I liked the idea that Hardin was ambivalent, that his motives were always open to question, subject to interpretation.

When I was writing it, William Tell Oliver seemed to represent the natural world, and Hardin was more modern, more interested in money and acquisitions, ownership. The hardest part of that book to write was the last paragraph, because I rewrote it, I don’t know how many times, but it’s where the old man is sort of expressing his gratitude—although he’s not putting it into words, it’s just something he’s thinking—that his world is pretty much the same. The storms still come in the summer, it still gets hot, and he’s part of that world, and he’s sort of given up on people. He thought of Winer almost like his own son, but the kid’s gone, he don’t know if he’s doing fine or if he’s not. And he’s sort of satisfied with what he’s got, which is just sort of being in the world.

THE OA: A lot of your stories start in the spring or summer and then events happen in the summer and the fall, and then the story accelerates towards some sort of conclusion. Then in winter, when it gets cold, violence and bad things tend to happen. Is that a conscious parallel you make between action and the seasons?

WG: No, I never had noticed that before. Now that you mention it, it’s true. One reason that it gets winter is I like to write about snow. I remember reading this paragraph that James Joyce wrote about the way snow looked when it was falling, and it was great writing. And then I read ORCHARD KEEPER in that McCarthy book, which was similar to the paragraph in the Joyce book, that leads me to believe he [McCarthy] was impressed by James Joyce, too. And I just tried to write something as good as McCarthy’s paragraph about the snow.

I actually like wintertime, I like the snow, which it don’t do as much anymore around here. But it’s fun to write about the weather, which I may do too much of.

THE OA: It seems like the weather and the natural world become actors in the fiction.

WG: Yeah, these people are so close to the ground. They’re actually affected by the weather, whereas most people now are not. They’ve got air conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter, everything’s pretty much uniform. They don’t have to get out and work in the weather or anything like that. When I was growing up, my father was a sharecropper, and the weather determined what we did, what we worked at. Or even whether we worked. If it was real stormy, we’d get a day off, so I think that’s why I pay more attention to the weather.

THE OA: That must have been an ambivalent feeling, because it was fun not having to work, but you weren’t getting paid either.

WG: Well, when I was a kid I didn’t get paid anyway, so I loved a day off. [laughs]

THE OA: One of the details in PROVINCES OF NIGHT is fireflies. What do you like about fireflies?

WG: When I was writing that book, I used to get kind of burned out writing, and I would have to get outside and walk around, drink a cup of coffee. There was a big field behind my house, with a fence that separated my land from this big field, probably fifty acres. And one night I went out there just about nightfall, just when dusk was gone. And the whole thing was full of fireflies, and they were moving, it’ was almost like—well, the way I described it in the book—like water flowing, and it it was just impressive to see. And I put it in the book and gave it some importance, some freight, I loaded it with freight that really it weren’t meant to carry. Similarly, in THE LONG HOME, the old man is just grateful for the natural world. In PROVINCES OF NIGHT, I write [about Fleming]: “In the end, he was left only with the fireflies.”

They made it [PROVINCES OF NIGHT] into a movie, by the way. I don’t know anything about it.

THE OA: Did they show it to you?

WG: I don’t think they’ve got a finished cut, yet. I’ve seen the other movie, based on I HATE TO SEE THAT EVENING SUN GO DOWN, seen that one. But this one’s not going to be anything like my book, I already know, so I’m not interested in seeing it.

The good thing that happened about PROVINCES OF NIGHT [the movie] was—my daughter was sick—and I didn’t want to leave to go to the premiere. And Kris Kristofferson plays E.F., and one night Kristofferson called me. [Editor’s note: We later learned the cast also includes Val Kilmer, Hilary Duff, and Dwight Yoakam.] And I was really surprised—he didn’t say a lot, he just said, “I loved that book, wish you could have come down, hung out. We would’ve drank beer and had a good time. Sorry you couldn’t come.” I thought that was really nice of him to do that, because he knew from the director that my daughter was sick, and he asked me about her. He was really nice about it. He must be a nice guy. I don’t know anything much about him, other than what I’ve read.

THE OA: He sounds like a cool guy.

WG: There was a piece in ROLLING STONE about him, where he was at a concert, and Willie Nelson and this other guy—[the writer] never names the other guy—but it says that he’s got a right-wing hit record about kicking Saddam’s ass, so I knew he was talking about Toby Keith. But the guy who was writing the piece was standing there talking to Kristofferson, and this other country singer, who was Toby Keith, walks by, you know, and he says, “None of that lefty shit tonight, Kris.” And Kristofferson said, “What the fuck did you just say to me?” And he’s like seventy years old, you know, and he was going to kick Toby Keith’s ass. And Willie said, “Calm down, Kris.” Willie had to keep him from getting on that guy.

THE OA: [Laughs]. Have you been in many fights yourself over the years?

WG: I used to get beat up a lot. I got in a lot of fights when I was in the Navy. Not much anymore. I had some kind of a Southern thing, where you didn’t take anything off anybody. If somebody insulted you, you had to stand up for yourself, that’s the way I was raised. So I got beat up by a lot of people.

Most of the fights I was ever in were because two people wanted to hit on the same woman or something like that. I got beat up in Long Beach, California, when I was in the Navy by this bartender, he worked me over. I wandered into the bar, I’d never been in that bar before, and there was this really good-looking woman behind the bar. And it turned out that she was working part-time, and she was going to college, and she was a T.S. Eliot scholar. And I hadn’t been around anybody in a long time that was interested in talking about poetry. So we hit it off really well, and this was like eight o’clock when I went in the bar and they didn’t close till about two in the morning, and by two in the morning, she was going to leave with me. She was living in a hotel, so we were going to go back to her hotel and hang out. What I didn’t know was that the bartender had been sleeping with her, and the bartender—at first, he was nice, and he told me, “You don’t need to be fooling with this girl,” you know, “You need to go on your way, get back to the ship, don’t hang around here.” But I just kept hanging around, because she was good-looking. He told me three or four times, and kept getting madder and madder, but then right before closing time, he said, “I want you to leave, you’ve got to leave now, everybody’s leaving.” And she left, too, and she went outside. And he said, “I’m gonna clean out and lock up the cash register, and you’d better not be standing outside this bar when I come out.”

But naturally I was, because she was still out there when I came out. The bartender came out almost at a run as soon as he saw me, and I tried to swing at him a couple times, but it didn’t do any good, he just beat the hell out of me. Dislocated my jaw, tore my shirt clean off of me. But by then, the girl was crying and trying to hit the guy with stuff and pull him off me, and call the cops, and all that. And the upshot was that, even though the guy beat me up, she felt so involved with me—because I wanted to be with her so much—that I wound up spending the night with her anyway.

THE OA: There’s something honorable in that, when you know you’re gonna get beat up and stepping up and taking it anyway.

WG: Well, I thought so. There might not be, but I thought if I just left, if I just cut out, I’d lose everything. I wouldn’t respect myself, I’d never be able to sleep with the woman.

THE OA: All right, one last question. Have you ever had moonshine?

WG: Oh yeah, [laughs] back when I was growing up.

THE OA: When did people stop making moonshine and start drinking manufactured stuff?

WG: Around here it was probably in the 1960s. It got to the point where it was cheaper to buy a half-pint of bonded whiskey. I mean, everything got higher. Sugar got higher; it took a lot of sugar and meal to make whiskey. And you could buy a half-pint of cheap bonded whiskey cheaper than you could get it from a bootlegger.

THE OA: Have you ever had good moonshine, or is it all pretty nasty stuff?

WG: I’ve tasted good moonshine one time. They told me it was moonshine, but I was never sure.

THE OA: Thanks for talking with us.

Photos by Hunter Adkisson.