I remember Marian Anderson was my first experience with what truly was a spiritual moment. Suddenly when she sang she was purely an instrument for the spirit, pure spirit. Through her mouth, here was this blessed moment, the light and the fire were on her, way beyond her training or the song itself. I was sixteen; I identified thoroughly, purely, with her. “That’s where I belong, I come from that,” I said. “That’s why I feel so alone, because I belong to whatever that was.”
Q: What’s your sense of the occasion of a story? What starts you writing?
WG: It starts with trouble. You don’t think it starts with peace, do you? It’s an occasion that brings a whole cluster of occasions together.
Q: You don’t worry about the connections between them?
WG: No. The bridges start forming. That’s the fun sometimes, and the slavery too, in making the bridges. They are always implied, because they come of their own volition, I feel.
Trusting the connection is the process of work.
Everything I’ve written has been generated that way. I once spoke of medallions [Interview, Paris Review 68, Winter 1976]: when my mother made a quilt, she made what she called medallions first, a whole bunch of separate pieces. They don’t do the whole quilt at once! When these were all together—till then, you don’t see the connections, but it makes a whole.
Q: I think of your work as domestic in a similar sense.
WG: I understand. One of those stories I saw as a kite—and we used to make our own kites. The idea of buying a kite! Who bought a kite? We made it out of stuff at home. String, newspaper—and it flew, it flew. But it was made domestically. That’s what you call domestic invention. The cruder the better, sometimes. I think of writing as that very often. I’m most comfortable with things that happen at home.…
Without art…would I just have been a kind of evangelist?
Style is, or has been, for me, the spiritual experience of my material.
Q: How do you mean, “spiritual”?
WG: Well, people say craft, and I’m talking on the other side of craft. Of course, I know my craft, I know what I will let go and what I won’t, and I know when it’s not the best. More and more I know about the control of words. But I’m talking about the spiritual experience of Arthur Bond [“Arthur Bond”]—to have experienced those characters and the world they have created around them through their own infirmities or…life in the world has become a spiritual revelation of the human being that I would not have got by studying the work of other writers.
Q: What’s the bridge between that experience and the words that make up a story?
WG: The bridge is the transformation. An artist transforms. He can’t just stay where life is as he finds it, not at just the level of life. Or so it is for me: the art of it becomes the transformation that must occur of that spiritual experience into the controlled craft so that the vision is tied down, is anchored everywhere, by craft. “Arthur Bond” had to be anchored in all kinds of detail, and mostly painterly detail—there was some yellow (the color came to me), the worm with the head of a doll: it all became very pictorial for me. But the man was caught in a spiritual wrestling. This was what I experienced first, his wrestling. “It is not his fall you see, but this man’s wrestling,” Shakespeare said about one of the kings.
Q: The word “spiritual” then doesn’t mean “religious”?
WG: Not at all. It has to do with a certain program of action. By that I mean I don’t come into this experience to get my eyebrows longer, or my muscles stronger, or my belly flatter. So it is therefore not physical. O.K.? That’s as clear as I can make it. Something else is involved beyond the corporeal. Shall we all start there? I can’t define it any more than that. That’s what I mean by my spirit. It is not my body. So let’s go away from whatever we think of as physical and try to get into an area that is noncorporeal. Something happens to me which changes my attitude toward… you. What is that? It’s not that you’ve given me a lot of money, or bought me a house, or given me a reward. What changed my attitude toward you? Something, I say, came from outside me. And I see as I say this that I tend to look up, because we’ve been told that heaven is above us, though it may not be at all, it may be quite lateral, I don’t know. But it has come from beyond me somewhere, it is not anything I have learned, been taught, or even done. So that the spirit is involved in this change of feeling between me and you.
Style, then, is directly related to that experience. So that style is a spiritual manifestation of the experience of the story, for me. My stories are spiritual.
And yet there are an awful lot of genitalia in them.
Q: Why is that?
WG: That’s spiritual, too, I guess. “Ghost and Flesh,” I wrote—one’s expressed right through the other, for me.
Q: Is there some writing that, you feel, doesn’t have this spiritual element?
WG: I don’t feel it’s in most contemporary writers that I try to read. I feel that they really are too busy with repeating themselves, and repeating their own success, not necessarily material.
Q: But despite your artistic intransigence on this point, I know that as a person you have been extremely generous and helpful to many writers who haven’t displayed much of the spiritual in this sense, at all, haven’t reached that level of art.
WG: I’ve tried to lead them toward it, I guess. That’s all I can give them. An opening out. That’s obviously why they have come to me. I’m not proselytizing and I’m not looking for disciples. I think that’s my freedom as a teacher—I don’t think people should write like me. I couldn’t, by my nature, stay very long in a classroom, teaching. I’ve started out thinking, this is a class about craft, and that’s what we’ll be about. But halfway through it I soared into this other thing, we’re off into another realm. I can’t talk about writing very long without talking about seeing that possible transformation. And this is what I talk about a lot. There has to be a change, some change has to pass over what happens to me, what I experience. It seems to come from a deeper reality than a knowledge of what literary device I can use to bring the change.
So I like to talk about style that way, and maybe finally I will write about it a little. In the past few years I’ve had fresh experience with these things—style, image, and life-writing—in my work. Image brings a spiritual revelation of the very life-material itself.…
When I first wrote The House of Breath, and it was published in that very form, in Accent, it was called “Four American Portraits As Elegy.” I wrote four lives: “Aunty,” “Christy,” “Swimma,” and “Folner.” In A Farther Country is written the same way. And so is Come, The Restorer. This too is style.
Q: It seems less style than shape.
WG: It is shape. The design is the last thing that comes, for me, yet it is the first thing, as well as the last. But without it I’m lost. I get it early. But then I have to lose it, and the feeling is that I’ll never get it back. But finally it’s the design that I’m able to see, specifically, the architecture of it. The two parts of “Leander”* were pretty much of a whole, and actually the second part is contained in the first few pages of the first. It is there. All these people seem to me to be out of some book of the accurst. They’re evil figures. They’re demonic figures. They frightened me to death, those three sisters! Or they’re just spiteful figures, or just nuisance figures. But the horror of the Klan, the blackness of that, the evil of them, just pervaded that whole land. And there always seemed to be henchmen of it, and it seemed to be a nightmare of mutiny and banditry. This is the world I was in.
Q: At the end of “Had I a Hundred Mouths,” the narrating nephew sees his cousin in white sheet and hood, with others. Then that Klan nephew is tormented and tortured by the Klan in the second part of the work, for having spoken of their doings.
WG: Because he told their secrets. And what were they? That they had had children by black women, and that they had hanged black men for fucking white women. They had scapegoats. Those are horrors, horrors! A m
edieval world of terror. You know it was like that, to me; as a child I really felt that. I lived around all of that. There was a man preaching the salvation of my soul in a tent across the road from my house, but up on the hill beyond there the Ku Klux were burning their crosses and I saw them run tarred and feathered Negroes through the street. I saw them running like that, twice. Aflame. We stood and watched that.
Q: What sort of reactions were apparent in those around you?
WG: They were terrified. Just as if you were a Jew and those were Nazis. Most of them simply lived in terror and hid. It was that kind of world, as I saw it. And it could only have to do later with the brutality that I wrote about and also with salvation. It was also full of the erotic and the sensual and all that, for me, too. It was a maelstrom, it was a cauldron.
Q: Does that world seem another universe now, as if you were writing about something you could present only emblematically, that sort of horror?
WG: How is it another universe? It seems very contemporary. If they murdered how many hundreds in those camps in Beirut… the terrorism around us… Hollywood is a town of absolute terroristic violence. It’s a cursed place. It’s full of a violence that comes out of a whole lot of things, but out of abuse, and persecution.…
But the town, the environment, which for me was the river and the fields, and the wonderful things that bloomed, that are so much in my stories, was still stalked by some horror all around it. And the tales I heard—a whole lot of that is stated in “The Icebound Hothouse.” That story comes to be about that. And at the end there is an apotheosis, again, to say, “Why did I ever think that that house, that door, where I’d like to go home, that promised hospitality to the one who was arriving—why did I think that there were all sunny stories of joy and laughter?” The door is a dark door. Whose chose that door? Who is the dark presence in that house? This is a culmination for me of the House of Breath metaphor, all these years later—this is what I came upon in finishing this story. So it is precious door again.
And now as I grow older and I go through these experiences—of almost dying, and changes of place, as from the East to the West, here—I keep getting closer to those images of terror and horror, as well as of the sublime pastoral garden.
Q: So there’s a way to redeem that experience?
WG: Yes, and it’s art and the holy spirit, which are one for me, more and more. Without art, without the process of memory, which is the process of art, and the spiritual experience of it, which for me is style, what else would I do about it? Would I be an addict? Would I be dead from alcoholism and addictions of one kind or another? Would I just have been a kind of evangelist?
Q: Are you saying holy spirit with small h and small s?
WG: Well, you know, I tend to capitalize where other people always strike things down to I.c. That means that I’m elevating it, somewhere, that’s what it means in my head, and I insist on keeping that, because it is somehow elevating it beyond the pedestrian lower case.
I think there’s no such thing as meaningless suffering, and this is spoken by someone who sees the terror of life. You know, there’s a recent book called The Horror of Life) Of course, I bought that faster than I’d buy something called Days in My Garden. And it’s the lives of five people who all view life as horrible. This life-view was one of horror and fear. Baudelaire, De Maupassant, Flaubert, Jules de Goncourt, Daudet. It turned out that they were all syphilitic and had a horrible disease. I’m not talking about that. I’m not talking about the horror of life. But the horrible and the terrible element in life. Why would I endure life if I thought life was horrible? What good would I gain by enduring? Enduring is a hopeful action.
Q: Flannery O’Connor said in answer to those who criticized the apparently despairing content or material of modern novels that people without hope don’t write novels.
WG: Of course it’s an act of hope, and faith. Art is redeeming, and art is an affirmation. There’s no other way. The creation, the result, may not be very wonderful in some cases, or even very good, but I’m given joy and faith again through watching people’s impulse to make something, and their energy in making it, their willingness to make something.
Q: You also seem to agree with Lowell, however, that poetry is not a craft. Do you think that the craftmentality of the writing schools is all right? Does craft drive out art?
WG: I don’t think that’s possible. Art won’t have it. There’s no way possible to substitute anything for art. I believe in the absolute hegemony of art, and craft can’t hurt it.
Q: You have said that “elegance in fiction frightens me, and exquisiteness.” Even if you were speaking there of style, I suspect that “elegance” applies also to the impulse to wrap things up a little too neatly. You certainly leave a lot of things just flapping their wings in the air. That can seem to mean something in itself. Do you worry about being too symbolic?
WG: No. I don’t have any worry about being symbolic, I don’t think I’m symbolic. Arcadio has got two genitals—
Q: But you take a figure like Leander, and you castrate him. He is desexed; he is half white, half black. He was a man and is no longer a man; Arcadio is half man and half woman: these things are emblematic. Not that I can put a ready meaning to them, but you seem to be interested in more than the shape of a man, you’re interested in the significance of the shape of a man.
WG: And yet, you know, how emblematic is a woman with one breast? I saw a great photograph yesterday in a bookstore, a huge life-size photograph of a very beautiful woman with a wonderful breast, and on the other side was a tattoo of roses across no breast at all. She had had one removed, and yet the photographer was saying, “This is all right. This is beautiful. Don’t be horrified. She has one breast!” But it was a creature: it seemed almost like Leander. I said, “What a defamation of a beautiful thing!” I heard myself say that. “How defaming to take a breast off her! How they slaughter women in the name of cancer.” But I was with a woman, and she said, “But look how beautiful, it’s all right.” So I caught myself. It was kind of a wreath of roses tattooed. So that is very emblematic—that’s what I’m talking about: there’s a breast, I could suck that breast! That’s very exciting. On the other hand, there’s a kind of monster.
Q: And a kind of symbol? Not a real rose, but the picture of a rose?
WG: No, a woman, who is saying, “I am a woman, and I am beautiful still.”
Q: Is it the physically grotesque that interests you?
WG: I really mean more of a spiritual deformity. Of course, dwarves, and humpbacks, and harelips, and so forth. That’s only the beginning for me. I can’t linger on that very long but it delivers me from the boring reality of realistic reporting. Since I am not writing Zola-istic realism, then everyday reality, the detail of it, is obviously not going to sustain itself for me, forever. I’m not Dreiser, I’m not interested in that at all. I’m aware that there is no everyday trivia in itself; that beneath it, or going on within it, there’s always some slight deformity of thought or action. It’s the hidden life I’m talking about.
I’m not writing within the vogue for the bizarre. My insights are deeper and deeper into what we’re talking about, and the revelations that are corning to me make me more and more aware of an overwhelming imagery of the crude and the violent, but I mean more than that. I suppose it’s always been with me, and I can see it back in The House of Breath, my earliest work. It really has more to do with tenderness, rather than less. It’s not hardness of heart that is happening. I see more and more brutality, and the metaphor that exists in brutality. It may be that in my earlier work I gentled that, but I see it more now. It begins in the latter half of Arcadio, for me, and continues on through Leander’s story [“Had I A Hundred Mouths”] and the last I’ve written [“Tongues of Men and of Angels”].
Q: Far from the sorrow and the wonder and gratefulness that surround the erotic in “Ghost and Flesh,” you’re moved to consider it a dark power.
WG: True.
; Q: A dark power over men, not a mystery in their lives that is constructive or renewing.
WG: Yes. It was a great power, that’s true. I’m really astonished by all that, myself, it’s still new for me, I have no hypothesis about it yet. Where I am in this work—and it’s leading me more and more—there’s a tenderness, always, at the core. “Had I A Hundred Mouths” is a tender story—the love of that man, and the love of the black man: those people have a tenderness that is almost old-fashioned. But what I really see is that within that tenderness is a brutality and a striking violence of feeling and action. It has nothing to do with disillusionment—I was never more spiritual in my life. It has nothing to do with losing faith, or any of those cliches. It’s that the light is on that now, I see that: I see lust as demonic. I have never known it to be anything else! Have you? Good Lord! The lust is the very devil working, a demon in me—my lust. I don’t know about anybody else’s. I’ve had a demon in me.
Q: How can la Santa Biblia and that lust inhabit the same creature, as they do in Arcadio?
WG: It’s the human arrangement, it’s just our very nature, I think. It created people like St. Paul, but oddly enough it didn’t create a man like Jesus, did it? We don’t think of Jesus as a lustful man, but it’s very possible that Paul was—he’s so angry against women, against marriage, against sex.
Q: Is that fruitful anger?
WG: Fruitful in his case—he did a lot of good work, and he did walk among real violent, lustful characters—all those Romans! I think lust is a very rare feeling, and one of the grand emotions. Arcadio is a grand figure of lust and tenderness, I think.
Q: With a Bible in his hand?
WG: Sure. Redemption is what he was looking for. And the Bible is the handbook of redemption. It’s the song at the end of a life, he’s an old man, in his seventies. And he seems a bit deranged, too—I don’t know what he is! He’s gone a bit mad. I’m not sure how much is true and how much is false of what he’s telling me at the end. He’s now such a fabricator that he’s one of the great fabricators.
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