by William Gay
JMW I got a grant once from the Tennessee Committee for the Humanities. I set up a program called Prehistory of the Cumberland Valley. They gave me $3,000 in a grant and I got the state archaeologist and the leading archaeologist from the University of Tennessee and gave them a stipend and travel expenses and they agreed to come and then I got the High School gym and advertised in the paper and invited everyone in the local counties to bring their artifacts in and the archaeologist would talk to them about it. It was really popular. I couldn’t believe it.
WG What sort of stuff did you see?
JMW The best of it was large sandstone statues that are very famous in the Cumberland Valley and some guy in Celina had a really nice one. Of course lots of common arrows. Some guys had some big fakes. They are weird looking flint pieces called slave killers and the archaeologist immediately called them fakes. The old Indians just didn’t make shit like that.
WG There is a guy In Hohenwald who has a lot of that stuff. The old dentist. I was working on his house one time back when I was painting, remodeling and that sort of stuff. Some of the brick were flaking off and he wanted me to rebuild the brick, so I got a bunch of different dyes and then made up different mortars and got them to match the colors on the house and I went around with a ladder building up the bricks all over the house. But he was going to a meeting where everybody brings their stuff and trades it or sells it and he let me look and he had a big box in the bed of the truck and he had really interesting stuff. But I think that guy dug up stuff. It was all years ago. I don’t think he does that any more.
He is an interesting fellow and one of my favorite people in Hohenwald. He is in Provinces and he knew it too; he recognized himself. I did a thing at the library and he turned up and came up and sat down with me and he said, “Hey Speedo, what ya doing?” That is a line from the book and what the Dentist calls the character in the book. It is kind of neat that he took it well, but he comes off, there is nothing bad about him. He is giving me magazines and giving me books, which he actually did; he gave me a lot of magazines.
There used to be a magazine called True and when he had accumulated too many magazines he would stack them up and give them to me and there would be several issues of True and I kind of liked that magazine. It usually had articles about UFO’s and government conspiracies to keep you from knowing about UFO’s and that kind of stuff. That was before the days of men’s magazines being what they are now. There was always good stuff to read in there. I remember seeing an issue back in the 70’s with this woman on the cover and it looked like a shoddy imitation of Playboy or Penthouse and all it was was fifty pages of tits and ass. They were trying to survive but it wasn’t working and there isn’t any True Magazine any more. I have a couple of real old issues from the 50’s.
JMW Do you remember a magazine called Argosy.
WG Oh yeah, John Keel used to have articles in Argosy and there was a magazine called Saga and John Keel had a column in Saga for a while. There were good magazines when I was a kid. There was Saturday Evening Post and there was Colliers. I never liked Look because there wasn’t that much to read in it and Life was the same way. There was a magazine called The American Magazine that used to run Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe novellas.
JMW Did you read Reader’s Digest when you were a kid?
WG If I didn’t have anything else to read. I hate Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. They were completely worthless. And with Reader’s Digest even when I was young I could divine that what I thought didn’t exactly jive with what they thought. It has always been a conservative magazine.
JMW I read it for the jokes.
WG Yeah the jokes were good like “Life In These United States” and “Laughter: The Best Medicine.” There was a lot of funny stuff in that magazine. Fate magazine used to be a good magazine back in the day. Magazines have to undergo changes to compete, so they don’t always work.
JMW So what do you read now?
WG I still read Rolling Stone but it is more out of habit than anything else. I read Fortean Times because I’m always interested in that weird stuff. The New Yorker is probably as good a magazine as there is around. I read Oxford American; that’s a good magazine, not as good as it used to be but it is still good. I used to read Harper’s and Atlantic but I don’t read them much any more. I like to read No Depression but they are kind of hard to find. It’s roots music, really good articles; it’s not as flashy as Paste, it doesn’t try to grab your eye as much. It has more reviews; they don’t try to cover the whole field. Paste covers movies, video games and books. They call it popular culture. No Depression doesn’t cover anything but music.
JMW That phrase “No Depression”, didn’t that come out of a song that is on the Harry Smith Anthology?
WG There is an old Carter family song called “There Will Be No Depression in Heaven.” It was pretty sharp of somebody to pick up on that phrase and name a magazine after it. I thought I was going to write another piece for Paste but somehow it didn’t work out. I was going to write about Tom House. I interviewed House twice and felt like I knew pretty much all there was to know about Tom House that he was willing to tell anybody. The magazine kept calling, calling me all the time. Then I went and did the Southern Festival of the Book and this guy from Paste was there.
He called me the next day when I got back home and he said, “Did you know that guy from No Depression magazine was stalking you”. I said, “What do you mean stalking me?” And he said, “That guy was following you around wanting to talk but he was afraid of you.” So I said, “Why the hell was he afraid of me?” and he said, “He told me you had a sinister wine-ravaged face.”
I was sorry not to do the piece on House. He was a nice guy. I kind of like his music. The more I listened to it the more of a downer it was. I thought maybe he should have a little humor every now and then. For a while he made his living just going around to bars and places and saying that he wanted to play and picking up gigs. He was a poet before he was a song writer and he lived in North Carolina and he had a cousin who made it really big in the country music business as a song writer so he came to Nashville and tried to fit in but he was too much of a poet. He had too much integrity. He had a lot more integrity than his cousin and they had a falling out. He said he got drunk one night and told his cousin, “Why do you write this crap?” But in the meantime they were in this guy’s basement with a pool table. He lived in a big mansion up in Nashville and he had won an award for some song Kenny Rogers sang.
Paste has a policy that they want the issue of the magazine to be in conjunction with the issuance of the CD so it would be like cross-pollination. So that was why the guy was bugging me. He needed my piece to match up with the release of the CD. I wrote about half of it. It would have been a pretty good piece because House was so interesting; he was interesting to me so maybe it would interest people who buy those types of magazines. The guy is strange looking with orange carrot colored hair. I think he was like a misfit in his family. They more or less threw him out because the guy was different from everyone else. He wanted to be a poet and in the background where he came from that was not one of the choicest options he could take.
JMW You got any readings coming up?
WG The library in Lobelville is trying to get a grant to pay me $500 to come down there and read. (Lobelville is a small community in the neighboring county.) I will tell them about the sorriest job I ever had in my life, which was in Lobelville, Tennessee. I worked in a boat paddle plant down there and my job was to take these big racks of paddles and dip them. They had this vat of varnish or sealant or something like that. It was a big round thing like a swimming pool. It was like sixteen feet diameter and a few feet deep and it was full of that stuff they used and it was hot, they kept it warm. I had to lower these racks of paddles down in this stuff and leave it a certain length of time and then pull them up. I worked nights and by nine o’clock I would be drunk and when I would wake up the next day I would have this unbelievable headache. I wa
s riding with this guy who had a little Volkswagen bug and he would get drunk on the fumes too and one night he ran into a tree in the parking lot and I thought maybe I should be looking for another job. It paid minimum wage.
JMW Tell me about writing Provinces of Night. What was going on around that time?
WG When I was writing Provinces of Night before it got published I had just gotten divorced and Chris had a girl friend and wasn’t around much. Then I got into a habit. I would go to the edge of the field behind the house and sit there and write and I would write until it got dark then I would come in and fix supper, fix a sandwich or something and then I would type and at ten o’clock a Seinfeld rerun would come on TV and then Letterman after that and it got like Seinfeld and Letterman were my friends; they were the only people I saw. I still think that is the funniest comedy that has been on TV, except maybe the Simpsons.
JMW I just read The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux. I read it mostly because you had written a nice blurb on the back cover.
WG He also wrote a book called The Missing. My daughter went to Franklin one night and I sent for an Uncut magazine and a Fortean Times; that’s the only place I knew where you can get them. Uncut had a review for his new book; it was a rave revenue. I wrote that blurb for a reason. I like Tim Gautreaux and I like his writing and his editor called me and asked if I would do a blurb for that book and I said, “You are Cormac McCarthy’s editor aren’t you?” and he said, “Yes I am”, and I said I would like a little news about Cormac. I’d like to know what he is working on and if he has anything coming out and all that kind of stuff. So we sort of swapped, so I wrote it. I like Tim but I figured if I had any leverage with him I might as well try to find out something. That was just before No Country for Old Men
JMW What did he tell you, did he give you any low down?
WG He told me McCarthy was working on two things at the same time. He sort of knew what one of them was but not the other. He said he had stopped working on the longer thing he was working on and wrote a short book. He didn’t know which one they would publish next. Apparently McCarthy is in charge of that operation and has the say over what he wants published and how he wants it published. He said the same thing I had heard before, that it was a book set in 1950’s in New Orleans and it was about people salvaging shipwrecks or boat wrecks or something like that. I was hoping that would be the one to get published because apparently he worked on Suttree for many years and then Suttree was great when it came out. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of No Country for Old Men; that is not a book that I reread, like a lot of his books.
JMW I know you have been reading him for a long time, did you read The Orchard Keeper when it came out?
WG Not when it came out, it was a few years later. It would have been four year’s later, I read it in ‘69. In ‘68 he published Outer Dark and I read it. so I had the people in the bookstore look up what else he had written. This was long before the internet of course. But they checked it and said he had done one called The Orchard Keeper. So I got it from the library and I ended up stealing it. I just couldn’t give it back.
JMW So when he published Suttree, it was a breakthrough, although it was not totally distinct from the earlier books but was more like a culmination. Then there was Blood Meridian and it was like he was at some incredible peak; and then came All the Pretty Horses, So what did you think when you read All the Pretty Horses?
WG I remember the day I bought that book. I was working and on payday we would go to Columbia and buy groceries and there was a bookstore that I always went to, it isn’t even there any more. So I went in the bookstore and they had a whole rack of All the Pretty Horses and I bought All the Pretty Horses and a copy of Entertainment Weekly and then when I got home I opened the Entertainment Weekly to the book review section and it was the lead review. I thought that was a nice coincidence. They gave it a rave review. I read the book, it was beautiful writing but it wasn’t exactly like what I was used to.
But that was how I ended up meeting Tom Franklin, McCarthy’s editor was up at Sewanee and you could ask him questions. You had to get in this line and there were a bunch of people in his line. I got to talking with the guy in front of me, and he asked what I was going to ask him, and I said I was going to ask if they had taken that manuscript away from Cormac and edited it really heavily because I thought that book was edited differently from his other ones. And Franklin said that was the damnest thing because that was what he was going to ask him too. Of course it turned out to be Tom Franklin and we had both read all the other McCarthy stuff and we were both a little confused by All the Pretty Horses. It was more like an adventure story it seemed to me, not quite like a young adult novel but definitely not Blood Meridian. Blood Meridian was the one before it and there was like a vast difference between Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses. When my brother read Blood Meridian, he read it right when I did and he called me when he finished the book and he said, “The son of a bitch is finally crazy, he’ll never write another decent book”. And then the next one was totally straightforward.
JMW The first one I read was The Crossing. I came to Cormac really late, and I thought it was pretty good and there was one passage in the front of it where the Indian is sitting by the water with a gun hoping some game would come by and the kid comes up on him and all at once the language was transformed and it glittered and shimmered. I felt like this guy has really got something here but then he didn’t follow through like that anywhere in the rest of the book, you know with that literary style, but I enjoyed it and I wanted to read more. Then after I met you, you said I should read Suttree and when I read that I said now he is doing what he was doing in that one passage all the way through the book, page after page and it was one of the most exciting things I had ever gotten my hands on.
WG That is probably my favorite novel and I have a lot of favorite novels. That is the one. I read a thing by Madison Smartt Bell, it was an essay about McCarthy, although at that time nobody really knew anything about McCarthy. He said there was a long period when he kept Suttree on his nightstand and would read from it; he knew it by heart but he would read himself to sleep with Suttree and I can fully understand that. Then one day my agent called me and asked, “Have you ever heard of Madison Smartt Bell?” and I said, “Yeah, I know who he is” and she said, “He is reviewing your book for the Washington Post”. and I said, “Oh hell, I’m going to get it from this guy.” and she said, “Why?” and I said he is one of the cult McCarthy freaks and is really into him and then sure enough the title of the review was “All the Pretty Phrases” but it wasn’t a total knock, he had some nice things to say. He said I wrote about women a lot better than McCarthy did. I think that is probably true; I don’t think he writes about women well at all.
JMW When you turned me on to The Hamlet by Faulkner and I read it, I felt like when Cormac read The Hamlet that something clicked in Cormac’s brain. When I read Suttree and Blood Meridian and the other early books I thought this was a huge breakthrough, like this is something that is unique in literature; but then when I read The Hamlet there it was, the whole deal, the whole phraseology, the whole tale untold kind of dynamics that Cormac played so brilliantly was all right there. Then I started feeling like Cormac just took his material and poured it into that mold, into that stylistic device and was able to do it and was able to make it happen that way.
WG I saw a thing in Esquire magazine back about 2000 or 2001and there was this list and one of them was writers who borrow most from other writers or is most indebted from other writers and it said Cormac McCarthy. So apparently a lot of people know that he is sort of indebted to Flannery O’ Connor. But he and Faulkner owe a lot to James Joyce. I didn’t have anything by James Joyce except Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and I was out to the library and, you know those Library of America books, those nice black books, they had Joyce out there and I checked it out and reread Ulysses. I had read it when I was a kid but I hadn’t read it in a long time and I was su
rprised how much it read like Faulkner and McCarthy. You remember that book used to be forbidden in the United States. I remember I was still in school when there was a lawsuit about Lady Chatterly’s Lover. I guess Grove Press, not the Grove Press of today but the original Grove Press, went to court over that D. H. Lawrence book and then every boy in school got a copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover and they were passing it back and forth.
JMW Lawrence has that stylistic beauty but not to the degree of Faulkner.
WG I don’t know that much about D. H. Lawrence. I read that book and I read Sons and Lovers but I don’t know a lot about him; I never really got as interested in him as I did some of those other people, Faulkner in particular. Faulkner saw James Joyce one time; he was in Paris and James Joyce came in with his wife and daughter and Faulkner wanted so bad to go over and talk to him but he was too timid and he wouldn’t approach him. Faulkner was about twenty-five, he was doing the expatriate in Paris thing, he had grown a beard. It must have been around 1923 or 1924.
JMW That was a great time to be in Paris.
WG I guess so, there was so many of those people kind of gathered there. The best book, to me, that Hemingway wrote was that memoir, A Moveable Feast. That is a really good book.
JMW I don’t get all the excitement about Hemingway.
WG Hemingway annoys me in the same way, I mean he doesn’t always annoy me, but some of that macho stuff and the way the language is so stylized. I mean everybody stylizes a little, but he really goes overboard with the little short sentences, like describing somebody opening a bottle of wine and tasting it or something like that. It is like posturing to me. That is probably the reason I don’t like No Country for Old Men as well; I think there is a lot of that macho posturing, all that stuff about boots and guns. There is too much of that stuff for me. It all comes to nothing because the guy gets killed anyway.