http://therumpus.net/2012/04/a-world-almost-rotten-the-fiction-of-william-gay/
4/28/2013
A World Almost Rotten: The Fiction Of William Gay
By William Giraldi
April 18th, 2012
The great Southern novelist and story writer William Gay died at his home in
Hohenwald, Tennessee, on February 23rd of this year, at the age of 70. An intensely
private man who valued his reclusion and had no interest in the sometimes shameless
self-promotion required by authors, Gay spoke at great length and on numerous
occasions with William Giraldi in 2008 in preparation for Giraldi’s essay “A World
Almost Rotten: The Fiction of William Gay,” the only in-depth critical analysis of Gay’s
novels and stories. We offer Giraldi’s essay for the legion of Gay’s heartbroken fans, and
for those lucky ones who are about to discover for the first time this important voice in
American fiction.
***
In William Gay’s scorched world Flannery O’Connor is present less like a looming ghoul
than an elderly aunt who lives in his house and will not die. And yet despite O’Connor’s
strong presence (and the unavoidable presence of the Yahweh of Southern literature, the
god from whom no male writer in the South can ever hope to flee) Gay’s work is wholly
its own, pulsing with both tradition and novelty. His books have been crafted from
darkness: The Long Home (1999), Provinces of Night (2000), Twilight (2006), and the
story collection I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down (2002). Gay is, along with
Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy, and Harry Crews, one of the four horsemen of the
Southern apocalypse.
There was not a single pocket in Tennessee in which Gay could hide from Faulkner’s
commanding influence. For an aspiring writer in working-class Lewis County, Faulkner
existed in the very air. He was a kind of Delphic oracle for new scribes: without him
nothing even remotely literary came to pass. Gay read Faulkner in the thirty-five-cent
Signet editions he bought at the local drugstore in Hohenwald, Tennessee. He had been
buying notebooks and pens since childhood, but now, late in high school, charged by
O’Connor’s and Faulkner’s doomed visions of the South, he began to formulate his own
fiction, began to heed the insistent voices calling from within. His parents contemplated
the boy as something of an anomaly; although Gay was the first in the family to finish
high school, his mother and father weren’t sure that writing was a prudent choice of
occupation. Gay’s father toiled as a sharecropper and at whatever blue collar drudgery
came along. His two younger brothers fell in line; they and their father had enough
Southern machismo to fire a rocket. They hunted and fished; Gay, on the other hand,
“wasn’t much interested in killing things.” About his mother, Gay offers one word only:
“Loyalty.”
A vigilant teacher in high school noticed that the boy was reading Zane Gray westerns in
his extra time, and thinking Zane Gray too inferior for the boy’s thriving intellect, the
teacher passed him a copy of Look Homeward, Angel. Gay considers this gift the turning
point of his life: Wolfe’s novel ignited him to his core; it proffered him the insight that
this can be done, that a writing life for him was not a drunken pipe dream. Alongside J.T.
Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel is the quintessential American
novel of experience, of growing, of how a home fashions a psyche for good or for ill. It
allotted Gay the confidence to tell the stories of his own experience and the certain
knowledge that those experiences were valuable even though they lacked privilege and
swagger. Wolfe lit the green lantern at the end of the dock; O’Connor and Faulkner
provided him the vessel to get there.
Here is the horror story, a masterpiece of brutality and loss worthy of O’Connor: In an
upscale region in Tennessee, a wealthy Pakistani couple employs tradesmen to complete
work on their mansion. The paperhanger—he has no name; the force within him eludes
definition—feels belittled by the wife. The couple’s tiny daughter pesters him; she plays
with his hair while he labors on his knees. His calm in the face of this annoyance is
unnatural, otherworldly. Then the tiny girl goes missing in the house; authorities arrive to
mount a search; the paperhanger and others have their vehicles checked, and then they
aid in the search. She is not found. Months pass. The Pakistani couple separates under the
strain. The grief-sunk wife keeps returning to the unfinished mansion. She meets the
paperhanger there one afternoon. That evening they lie in his bed after alcohol and urgent
intercourse; the wife sleeps. And then the paperhanger goes from the bedroom only to
return a moment later with the frozen body of the tiny girl, wrapped in plastic. He
arranges the corpse next to her mother, and then himself disappears into the ancient
evening.
Gay’s “The Paperhanger” temps you to classify it, explain it, wonder at its majesty and
terror—the story is “The Tell-Tale Heart” written by the bastard offspring of Wilkie
Collins and Charles Manson, in a prose part Hebrew Bible, part Hemingway—and then
defies such feeble attempts at comprehension, at reduction. The story breathes,
enigmatically, as if just born; the odors of blood, beer, and birth fluid waft up from the
page. Gay’s story offers almost no information about these characters: not where they
come from, not their fevered dreams, not what they yearn for at first light. In his short
fiction, Hemingway—an early, necessary influence on Gay—famously withholds
motives and histories. Gay learned from Hemingway never to clarify what the reader is
capable of clarifying himself; verbosity maims, insults the dignity of narrative. In “The
Paperhanger” we know only how the characters react in the midst of an unexpected
mystery, how their language reveals their warped psyches, and with that alone Gay
enables us to know them for life, to taste their sweat.
The paperhanger is simultaneously ominous sprite and veritable everyman. Once her
mother drifted from the room, the little girl jabbed out her tongue at him and the
paperhanger’s hand shot from his side like “a serpent” and snapped the child’s neck.
Fragile as a Christmas bulb, she was tiny enough to fit inside his toolbox. What
psychological explanation does Gay give for the paperhanger’s crime? None—not
boyhood trauma or possession by devils—because he knows that such explanations are
trite, exhausted, imaginary, that human beings commit acts of abrupt barbarity that no
therapist, no writer, can ever adequately explain. When the paperhanger appears with the
frozen body in his arms, the moment is outrageous, satanic, inevitable. As the wife
sleeps, the paperhanger whispers: “Sometimes . . . you do things you can’t undo. You
breaks things you just can’t fix. Before you mean to, before you know you’ve done it. . . .
There are things only a miracle can set to rights.” Does he regret the murder in those
lines, the devastation he delivered to a family? Regret is possible only when one has not
accepted one’s nature or the cruelty of the wilderness from which we emerged naked and
panting like beasts. The paperhanger is too much himself, too comfortable with
Hobbesian analyses of human destiny, or what Hume aptly called “the natural depravity
of mankind,” to wonder how he ought be a more benevolent man.
He departs in the wife’s car, “tracking into wide-open territories he could infect like a
malignant spore,” and thinking about “not just the possibility but the inevitability of
miracles.” He will beget more carnage, to be sure. The miracle he ponders: the rabid
injustice of this business called living, God’s abandonment of his creation, lunatics set
loose. It seems a miracle that a place designed by a loving deity could be thoroughly
polluted by such monsters. The man knows he’s an abomination; he’s made his peace
with that fact. The second miracle: how Gay can massage your morality into feeling
miniature sparks of sympathy for this child killer, a lonesome and forsaken recluse who
suspects that his own birth was a cosmic error.
“The Paperhanger” turns V.S. Pritchett’s definition of the short story, “something
glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing,” into something that confronts you headon, always. O’Connor accomplishes the same magic throughout A Good Man Is Hard to
Find, the story collection Gay read as an adolescent; he bought the Signet paperback and
knew—immediately, instinctually—that they were the best American stories ever written.
He marveled over her packed sentences, her perfect endings. Gay studied O’Connor the
way an evangelical studies Genesis, and from her brilliance he learned how short fiction
is shaped, how a character can come alive in just a few lines, and, more important, how to
tell a story that matters.
***
When the novel The Long Home arrived in the world a
decade ago, William Gay was fifty-six years old and right away compared to both Barry
Hannah and Larry Brown. Where did those years go between the teenager who read
Wolfe and the middle-aged man who published his first novel? They went to the Navy, to
Vietnam, and then after the war to stints in Chicago and Greenwich Village (Gay bumped
into Janis Joplin at a pub). Back in Tennessee the years went to marriage, to children, to a
mortgage, and to the construction work that paid for it all. But his time also went to
reading and writing, to accumulating experience that no campus could provide, to honing
his craft into a diamond tip. The chasm of those decades was widened by the fact that
Gay didn’t know writers, hadn’t made academic connections, wasn’t given feedback. But
when The Long Home finally appeared it felt like a masterwork and not a first novel
because it was the product of forty-odd years of practice. At a time when twenty-twoyear-olds scribble sensational memoirs badly disguised as serious novels, it humbles one
to think of William Gay in Hohenwald, Tennessee, patiently tapping the keys of his
typewriter for four decades.
The Long Home takes its name from Ecclesiastes—“Because man goeth to his long
home, and the mourners go about the streets”—and commences with a boom: in the
undulating green environs of 1940s Tennessee, the earth has burst open with the muscle
of an atom bomb, the result of either a seismic disturbance or the dawning of Judgment
Day. This groaning gorge sits center stage as the four principal characters—Nathan
Winer, Amber Rose, William Tell Oliver, and Dallas Hardin—circle it in a contest of
reckoning. Hardin murdered Winer’s father in a dispute over illegal whiskey and then
dropped his body into the gorge. Winer was only a child at the time; he doesn’t know
what dirty fate befell his father. Dallas Hardin earns his fortune bootlegging and presides
over the countryside like an ex-Baptist Mafioso. Old man Oliver takes the teenage Winer
into his tutelage, and by the time Hardin and Winer are done scrapping over Amber Rose,
there is blood.
Like Milton’s dazzling Satan, Dallas Hardin makes off with all the applause. Gay’s
reader becomes a pubescent lass from a good family who falls for the foulmouthed bad
boy with a switchblade. In his villainy and hunger for destruction, Dallas Hardin is first
cousin to the title character of Pete Dexter’s Paris Trout, another masterpiece about a
Southern psychopath with a fondness for bullets and blades. Trout goes through the
damaged world in reticence, creepy and devoid of all charm; one imagines him stinking
of urine and gasoline. Hardin, meanwhile, traverses his won territory with suave
assurance, always in control, always self-righteous. He speaks like a backwards Jesus and
probably reeks of fifty-dollar cologne. His name indicates his worldview: hard-headed,
hard in the heart—only the hard survive. Furthermore, he is hard for Amber Rose, the
teenage girl he helped raise after he stole her and her mother from the dying man whose
property he confiscated and now occupies.
***
Where is the law? In Gay’s world, the law lies mostly impotent and shriveled on the other
side of town. It can be cajoled without much effort or else ignored altogether. In Hardin’s
case, he has paid the scoundrels in uniform to turn their backs on his criminality. If the
law does come knocking, as it does in Gay’s story “Sugarbaby,” the knock seems a
callous affront to an individual’s right to freedom. In that story, Finis Beasley blasted his
wife’s little dog from the back porch with a large caliber handgun because its “yip yip
yip” made him batty. His wife deserted him, sued for divorce, and Beasley ignored the
letters from lawyers and the summonses to appear in court. The law arrives to apprehend
him, and when it does, Beasley simply cannot muster the incentive to go quietly. He tells
his son-in-law at one point, “I’ve always minded my own business. . . .Kept my own
counsel. I’ve always believed if a man minded his own business everybody would leave
him alone.” Beasley’s actions are less a case of gun-toting Southern insurrection than a
fed-up exhaustion in the face of authorities mightier than the individual. The aggravation
of so many inconveniences piles up to the point that Beasley feels disgusted by his own
powerlessness. This disgust for his own pathetic, diminutive place in the cosmos fuels his
violence. He would have chosen peace if he had been given the opportunity to choose, if
he had been left alone. Dallas Hardin, however, stomps through The Long Home
choosing sadism and savagery because he knows no other method of being.
In Gay’s able hands the archetypal characters of The Long Home spring to life as if for
the first time: the young man on a quest; the gray sage who guides him; the comic
sidekick who aids him; the gorgeous damsel who inspires him; and the villain who tries
to thwart him. Their language is so authentic it seems not written at all: you listen to their
dialogue as they sit in the same room with you. It’s speech that smells: the Coca Cola and
cool beer belches, the early morning conversations held through the aroma of black
coffee drunk from jars. Midway through the novel, Hardin and Winer stand out in the
afternoon sun on Hardin’s property. Hardin had hired Winer to do carpentry on a
honkytonk he wants built, and on this day the boy notices that Hardin is clutching his
father’s knife. Hardin took it from Winer’s father the night he murdered him; when the
boy asks how Hardin came by the knife, he claims he found it in the cedar grove.
“Your pa lit out, didn’t he?”
“I don’t know what happened to him. I never did believe he lit out and I don’t believe it
now.”
“Well, folks is funny. I don’t care how close you think you know somebody, you don’t
know what wheels is turnin in their head. Course you don’t remember but times was hard
for folks back then. Times was tightern a banjo string. Lots of folks was on the road. He
might’ve just throwed up his hands and said fuck it and lit out.”
“No.”
“Well. I ain’t tryin to tell you what to think about your own daddy. But seems to me me
and you’s a lot alike.”
Hardin tells the boy that his own father abandoned him as well, which may or may not be
the truth: Hardin, like Milton’s Satan, is the great deceiver. Winer then offers to pay for
the knife.
“Hell, take it. You said it belonged to your pa.”
“Well, you’ve had it all these years. Decide what you want for it and hold it out of my
pay.”
“Hell, no. If it means something to ye, take it on. Seems to me it’s a damn poor substitute
for a pa but such as it is you’re welcome to it.”
You will not locate written speech more authentic than that: every syllable in its place,
the cadence as smooth and firm as the skin on a drum. The lines also suggest the
ambivalence of Dallas Hardin’s character: the killer, rogue, and corrupter of Amber Rose
who nevertheless attempts to give Winer honest employment, world-wary advice, and a
free knife. One roots for Hardin’s comeuppance while at the same time wishing for his
repentance. This is testament to Gay’s tremendous skill as a craftsman: his South contains
no cartoon drawings, no simplistic Zoroastrian division of darkness and light. In Gay’s
world, as in ours, the wicked are laced with good and the good are always part devil.
The Long Home owes its intricacy of assembly to The Sound and the Fury—the book
Gay received from his high school teacher when he finished with Look Homeward,
Angel—and yet the novel never feels as convoluted as Faulkner’s because Gay has a
Dickensian aptitude for densely woven patterns of plot and character that cohere without
seam or effort. The dense, verdant prose style, sweet and slow like sap—a vibrant
language of poetic intensity—achieves newness in every paragraph.
Then lightning came staccato and strobic, a sudden hush of dryfies and frogs, the walls of
the attic imprinted with inkblack images of the trees beyond the window, an
instantaneous and profound transition into wall-less night as if the lightning had
incinerated the walls or had scorched the delicate tracery of leaf and vine onto the
wallpaper. Then gone in abrupt negation to a world of total dark so that the room and its
austere furnishings seemed sucked down into some maelstrom and consigned to utter
nothingness, to the antithesis of being, then cool wind was at the trees, the calm eddying
away like roiled water.
If Gay shares with McCarthy a rich vernacular packed with flare, he also commands
sentences composed of simple independent clauses strung together with the conjunction
“and,” sentences that would feel at home in any of the Nick Adams stories. Hemingway’s
reliance on concrete nouns is a lesson in the accuracy of the five senses, but it is
Faulkner’s and O’Connor’s mytho-religious storytelling sensibility that infuses The Long
Home from start to finish.
***
During one of our numerous phone conversations,
Gay clarified what first struck him about Faulkner: “He took ordinary people and gave
them mythic dimensions. Wolfe’s people are loftier, more aware of themselves. But
Faulkner’s people are in the middle of it all, buffeted and battered by life.” In The Long
Home, the narrator remarks that the men and women who frequent Hardin’s honkytonk—
soldiers, drifters, wastrels with something to hide—are turned grand by their
circumstances: “The songs and the lights and the quickened pulse of their lives made
them larger than life so that they saw themselves as figures of myth and tragedy.” Later,
when Oliver tells Winer the violent history of their region, the boy “wondered what the
truth was, secretly doubted there was any truth left beneath the shifting weight of myth
and folklore.” But of course Gay knows that myth and folklore are truth, or at least one
way of arriving at truth: the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. Winer’s wondering
about the plausibility of truth does not amount to a trendy relativism since the boy is
“buffeted and battered” and thoroughly confused. In the preface to the revised edition of
Brother to Dragons (1979), Robert Penn Warren writes: “Historical sense and poetic
sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make,
history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.” Warren captures
Gay’s mission in The Long Home precisely: the intersection of myth and history and how
the truth makes itself known through living.
Cormac McCarthy’s wasteland mingles history and poetry to produce a bloody modern
mythology that always approaches the Old Testament in its potency. Gay has an
encyclopedic knowledge of McCarthy, as he does of Faulkner, Wolfe, and O’Connor: he
can recall scenes and sentences as easily as he can the names of his children. In the early
1970s, before relocating to New Mexico (and long before the globe knew of his genius),
McCarthy lived in Knoxville, Tennessee. Staggered by those early novels—The Orchard
Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1978)—Gay fanned through a
phonebook one afternoon and discovered that McCarthy’s number was there waiting for
him to dial it. McCarthy had no interest in expounding on his own work, but as soon as
Gay mentioned Flannery O’Connor, McCarthy perked up and was delighted to talk. They
three together shared in their work a violent vision of a postlapsarian South. They spoke
by phone for a year and McCarthy corresponded with Gay about the younger writer’s
stories; it was the only feedback available for an isolated upstart.
Gay maintains that in the 1970s the world of literature seemed to him controlled by ivory
towers strewn from Boston to Manhattan. Barry Hannah was the first Southern scribe of
Gay’s generation to be taken seriously. The publishing Mecca’s ostensible disinterest in
new Southern voices—a mystery as profound as quantum mechanics considering that the
Great American Novel, Huckleberry Finn, is a Southern story—coupled with Gay’s
remoteness from anything even resembling a coterie of writers, made for dim prospects.
He forged on just the same, teaching himself the craft, reading and revising, sending
stories out to magazines and journals when he felt ready (one publication returned his
handwritten manuscript with a note insisting on typed material only). Then, in the 1990s,
two books incited a reevaluation of Gay’s region and material: Cormac McCarthy’s All
the Pretty Horses (1992) and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997). The tremendous
success of those novels shifted Gay’s luck: “Things got easier for me after that.”
In composing The Long Home, Gay flushed McCarthy’s stylistic dazzle from his system:
“That language and those metaphors were all backed up in me. I just let it loose.” By the
time Gay sat down to compose Provinces of Night, the orgasmic splendor of language via
McCarthy had spent itself (although the title comes from McCarthy’s Child of God:
“Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them”). Gay lighted on a
soberer style, yet one recognizably from the same hand that penned The Long Home. The
novel divulges the lives of three generations of Bloodworth men from Ackerman’s Field,
Tennessee. The district in which they live has been slated for inundation in a dambuilding project, and those imminent floodwaters hover over the narrative like God’s
promise of annihilation. When E.F. Bloodworth returns home after thirty years on the
road playing banjo and hiding from his crime of killing a deputy, long-dead sentiments
and scores will be resurrected. He is another of Gay’s clever, irascible old timers: from
Oliver in The Long Home to Meecham in the story “I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go
Down” to Scribner in the story “Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues.” No one matches
Gay’s expertise for unforgettable old men.
Of E.F.’s three sons, only Brady remains in Ackerman’s Field; he cares for his demented
mother and practices voodoo against deserving enemies. Warren, alcoholic and
lecherous, resides over the state line in Alabama. Boyd has left town for Detroit to trail
his faithless wife and her lover. As in The Long Home, the twin heroes of this novel are
the old man and the teenage boy, E.F.’s grandson Fleming—Boyd’s sovereign son—an
aspiring story writer and one of Gay’s most compassionate creations. Provinces of Night
includes no archetypal evildoer like Dallas Hardin, but the vixen-heroine is present in the
form of Raven Lee Halfacre, a cagey wit at sixteen years old. Her heat snags Fleming in a
net of longing; she smells of possibility, of liberation. The relationships Fleming shares
with Raven, his grandfather E.F., and his close friend Junior Albright—an endearing
jester who illuminates every room he walks into—allow this novel a pouring forth of
affection. The hostility of Gay’s universe has not diminished—there is a storm of blood
when Boyd finally uncovers his wife and her lover in Detroit, and E.F. too comes to an
untidy end—but in Provinces of Night Gay has tempered the brutality with tenderness.
Here he has surpassed O’Connor; you will not come upon many moments of tenderness
in her blazing Georgia. Her sanctimonious one-armed conmen, atheistic one-legged
damsels, and half-naked children who crawl from the forest filthy and starved for
destruction like fairy-devils: for them tenderness is but a rumor, the unicorn of her Godforsaken netherworld.
And then there’s the comedy in this novel. Of all of Gay’s people, Fleming comes closest
to approaching the character of Nick Adams—his civility, moral code, grace under
pressure, desire to write, and distressed union with his father—but Fleming differs from
Nick (and from so many of the denizens of the worlds of O’Connor and McCarthy) in his
appreciation of humor. Kingsley Amis once remarked that “the rewards of being sane are
not many, but knowing what’s funny is one of them,” and Fleming is nothing if not sane,
especially when compared to his volatile parents and his witchdoctor of an uncle, Brady.
At one point Fleming’s uncle Warren jars him awake in the middle of the night to
chauffeur him and his sex-scented drunk accountant over the state line because Warren
himself is too intoxicated to know north from south. Fleming says:
“I don’t have a driver’s license.”
“I’m drivin on a revolted, a revoked driver’s license myself and if they catch me it’s my
ass. I’ll pay your fine if you get caught. You’re not drunk are you?”
“No.”
“That’s a start then. You furnish the sobriety and I’ll furnish the car and the money and
we might just get organized here.”
“What about the accountant?”
“Well, yeah, I’m furnishin her too.”
The drunk accountant wants a hamburger, Warren can’t remember where he aims to go,
and Fleming doesn’t make a congenial match with an automobile. They find themselves
stalled in the scrub.
“Now you’re catchin on,” Warren said. “This flat black thing, I think that’s what we’re
supposed to be drivin on. Those woods and shit, I believe I’d just try to stay out of them
as much as I could.”
“We turned over in the woods three or four times,” the woman said in an awed voice.
Fleming slid his hands under his thighs to halt their shaking. “We never turned over,” he
said.
“The hell we didn’t,” she said. “You blackhearted little liar. You tried to kill us. We
turned over three or four times in the bushes and I seen every bit of it through the glass.
I’m wet all over myself and I ain’t ridin with you crazy sons of bitches one foot more.”
Twelve pages of riotous humor, with Fleming exasperated by the silliness of the
circumstances, this car scene reveals Gay’s almost Cervantean facility for the coalescence
of tragedy and comedy.
To those who know only The Long Home and “The Paperhanger,” Gay’s humor in
Provinces of Night might seem uncharacteristic, but comedic play has been his staple all
along. Most of the stories in I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down are distinctive
precisely because Gay can bend types, can marry heartbreak to hilarity in a single
paragraph. Gay claims to have been influenced by the humor of Harry Crews, but
Crews’s comedy is almost entirely satirical, as in the Night-of-the-Living-Dead finale to
his novel Celebration, or his mockery of muscle-heads in Body. Satire has the heavy but
playful hand of fabrication, while Gay’s humor always touches softly, always stems from
characters behaving believably in unexpected quandaries. In the title story of Gay’s
collection, Meecham has fled from an old age community and returns home to discover
that his son has rented his house to an insolent redneck named Choat who will not budge.
Meecham handles this predicament as only an obstinate, iconoclastic eighty-year-old can:
he irritates Choat to no end. (The film version of this story stars Hal Holbrook as
Meecham.) In “Bonedaddy, Quincy Nell, and the Fifteen Thousand BTU Electric Chair,”
the sixteen-year-old Quincy Nell makes it her life’s ambition to acquire for a husband
Bonedaddy Bowers, a Tennessee Casanova who has a difficult time domesticating. When
she finally relents and allows Bonedaddy what he’s been scratching after, “came then hot
honeysuckle nights of eros.” Bonedaddy gives Quincy Nell a stuffed panda, but then
takes another girl to a dance: Quincy Nell “beheaded the panda with a single-edge razor
and set the truncate corpse on the bureau, poor piebald panda with its jaunty air of yardsale innocence.” By story’s end, Bonedaddy Bowers will wish he had never toyed with
the virginal allure of Quincy Nell Qualls.
In The Long Home women are merely wagers in a gory contest for masculine dominance,
but in Provinces of Night and most of the stories, the women are shrewd operators who
see men as the bumbling brutes they are. Fleming’s grandmother tells him, “If sense was
gunpowder ever one of you men put together wouldn’t have enough to load a round of
birdshot.” Raven Lee informs Fleming, “You men are always breaking things you don’t
know how to fix.” In “Crossroad Blues,” when a grotesque little man teleported from
O’Connor Country tells the main character that “a woman’ll warp your mind worse than
whiskey,” he says it in admiration, as if he were contemplating gamma rays from a
supernova. Gay’s story “The Lightpainter” begins: “Jenny’s mother once shot her
husband in the thigh with a small-caliber pistol.” The demonstrable logic in Gay’s world
is simple: if a man behaves himself and treats a woman with courtesy and compassion,
that man will not have his will crushed on the righteous anvil of femininity. Raven Lee
Halfacre arrives as Fleming’s deliverance, not his demise; and Fleming deserves this
deliverance because his kindness has earned it.
Fleming Bloodworth’s fight is against his testosteroned family, not a female. In
Provinces of Night, the central struggle announces itself in the family name: what,
exactly, is blood worth? What does one owe to family members, and for how long? In
Twilight, the protagonist’s sister offers him this on family: “Once you’re in one, you’re in
it for life. You can’t turn away from blood.” Gay’s great theme throughout his work is
not men against women and the agones of that competition, but a Homeric man-againstman and the life or death outcome of that battle. His story “Charting the Territories of the
Red” (published in The Southern Review in 2001)—about an Achilles-like brawler who
cannot let pass a slight about his wife—culminates on a riverbank in a mess of brain
matter, blood soaked into the soil as into the sands of Ilium.
***
Twilight is the crown of Gay’s oeuvre, a taut sweat-inducing
thriller so horrifying both John le Carré and Stephen King should rethink their enterprises
and revise their blueprints. The storytelling sets a new standard for darkness and
depravity. You will find no humor here; like Oedipus Rex, the novel is so unrelenting in
its sinister vision that any hope of light or comedy gets sucked back into the story as if by
a black hole. The year is 1951 and the two killers of the novel, Fenton Breece and
Granville Sutter, are every bit as psychopathic as McCarthy’s Lester Ballard (Child of
God) and Anton Chigurh (No Country For Old Men). Their diabolism and nihilistic
designs sink so far beneath the everyday evil of men that they make Dallas Hardin look
like Saint Peter; what’s more, they make God look like an inebriated lunatic who holds
stock in carnage, “some baleful god remonstrating with a world he’d created that would
not do his bidding.”
Fenton Breece—a corpulent, wealthy undertaker and necrophile who quotes Auden and
listens to Mahler—surgically desecrates the bodies of the dead before interring them. He
removes genitalia or positions men and women in sexual congress within the same
casket, “arm in arm in eternal debauchery.” In some instances he does not inter them at
all, but rather stores them for his carnal bliss, dressing them in lingerie and snapping
photos of his copulation with them. When the siblings Kenneth and Corrie Tyler suspect
Breece’s deeds—Breece violated their father’s body—they unearth several caskets in the
cemetery and discover for themselves the heinous mutilation: they sit “cataloguing these
forbidden exhibits. From a carnival freakshow wended here from the windy reaches of
dementia praecox. He hadn’t known there were perversions this dark, souls this twisted.”
Kenneth spies on the undertaker, manages to thieve a briefcase containing photos of him
with dead women, and then Corrie attempts to blackmail Breece for fifteen grand.
Enter Granville Sutter, a merciless murderer who at one point in the novel uses a
switchblade to slaughter an entire family: mother, father, daughter, sons, even the dog.
Breece hires Sutter to persuade the Tylers to return his property, and when the siblings
refuse, Sutter causes Corrie’s death in a truck crash and then pursues Kenneth Tyler
through the wintered wilderness like an iniquitous hound. While Fenton Breece has his
way with Corrie’s corpse, the cat-and-mouse competition between Tyler and Sutter
reaches deep into a gelid wasteland inimical to life.
As in all of Gay’s fiction, the weather and the landscape become characters of their own,
except that his Wordsworthian nexus to nature becomes the worship not of God’s
presence in the natural world, but rather the worship of nature’s lethiferous command
over human life. Gay’s nature swirls in the same Tennessee towns: Ackerman’s Field,
Centre, Clifton, and a mostly uninhabited expanse of unkind, fabled forest called the
Harrikin, the very ex-mining land into which Tyler and Sutter plunge headlong and hellbent. Tyler
thought he must have crossed some unmarked border that put him into territories in the
land of Nod beyond the pale where folks would shun him for the mark laid on him to
show that he’d breeched the boundaries of conduct itself and that he’d passed through
doors that had closed softly behind him and only opened from the other side of the pale
and that he’d gone down footpaths into wilderness that was forever greener and more
rampant and ended up someplace you can’t get back from.
The Harrikin seems imagined into being by the Grimm brothers. Tyler comes upon a
witch who stirs potions and an old man with a shotgun who sits vigil in his dilapidated
shack. The boy’s desperation, hunger, and shivering soaked body are palpable on the
page. He attempts to pass through the Harrikin to locate the high sheriff in Ackerman’s
Field in hope of finding rescue from Sutter, but the landscape and its deranged tenants
will not yield:
He figured somewhere in these territories there was an enormous madhouse whose
keeper had thrown up his hands in disgusted defeat and flung wide the portals so these
twisted folk could descend like locusts on the countryside.
Gay might not appear at first glance to share O’Connor’s preoccupation with religion, but
every novelist with Gay’s mythic, dramatic vision is religious in his own way. Gay’s
language owes much to the Pentecostal South and the Christianized folklore of his region,
allusions and metaphors that Gay—and his characters—could not help absorbing. By
novel’s end, both Sutter and Breece will be smote by angry angels of the earth, but not
before they have brought brimstone to this patch of Tennessee. Twilight is one of the
most intrepid American novels ever written, absolutely audacious in its confrontation
with hell on earth, as terrifying as medieval torture: “It is true this world holds mysteries
you do not want to know. Visions that would steal the very light from your eyes and
leave them sightless.”
Some of the important Southern writers who have come before Gay—Peter Taylor,
Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Walker Percy—seem timid in comparison to Gay and
his nightmarish depictions. As a reader Gay never took to Taylor or Percy; the gentility of
Southern aristocracy could not communicate with his experience, and the white collar
writers of the New South were not gritty enough for what he knew of the human animal.
The writer Tom Franklin, a dear friend to Gay, tells a story about how Gay was so poor
when he was a youth that he had to mix water with crushed walnut shells in order to
make ink. Gay admits that the family couldn’t afford a car when he was growing up, but
he doesn’t boast of poverty. The writer with unflinching portrayals of human cruelty in
his fiction is in life a mild and dignified man. Franklin speaks of his “purity,” his
indifference to celebrity and the hurly-burly of New York publishing. For such an
astoundingly natural talent, Gay can sometimes sound surprised that he’s a writer and that
he’s been able to earn a living from his work for the past decade.
Surprised or not, Gay continues to beget stories and novels that help splinter the early
twentieth century fairytale of an Edenic South, that shear humankind down to the bone to
lay bare the original sin and the sporadic warmth beating beneath our ribs, and for that
you should thank whichever god you call your own.
***
This essay was originally published in The Southern Review in 2008.
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2012/mar/08/william-gay-19422012-tribute/
WILLIAM GAY (1941–2012): A Tribute
Published on March 8 2012
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William Gay died on February 23, 2012. He established himself as a strong Southern
voice relatively late in life with his debut novel The Long Home. Gay went on to publish
two more novels as well as two collections of short stories. He was a frequent contributor
and dear friend of The Oxford American and will be sorely missed. Here we share our
memories of William, and reflect on his life and work. Please feel free to record your
memories in the comments section.
Losing William Gay, as we just did when he died on Thursday, February 23, is more than
the loss of a seemingly indestructible literary talent. It is also the loss, for me, of a
seemingly indestructible friend. I say “indestructible” even though Will, in the flesh,
often looked, well, not so good. Not that he wasn’t handsome...that dashing mustache of
his, that hard-lined but classic face, often gave him the look of a backwoods Errol
Flynn—or a slit-eyed cowboy villain. Or the Keith Richards of Southern Lit. Like Keith,
it was not his body that necessarily made you think he was eternal, but his spirit, his
presence, his artistic and attitudinal consistency. Which is why I don’t think the reality of
Will’s death is real for me yet. I’ve experienced this before, and what it means, dammit,
is the reality of this loss will hit me only later, and then: very, very hard. Maybe there
should be a word for what I am describing because I doubt it’s unique to me.
In any event, I remember clearly how William came to my attention. John Jeremiah
Sullivan, who is now the lauded author of Pulphead, was then an already brilliant Oxford
American Associate Editor and he was excited about some stories by an unknown writer
from Hohenwald, Tennessee, named William Gay who, I think, he had first found in the
slush pile and then solicited for more work. I read each story by Gay that Sullivan
pressed on me and though I sensed lofty talent, I didn’t fall for any of them completely.
Had I fallen completely, The OA would’ve been known as the first publisher of William
Gay (The Missouri Review, which published “Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues,” in
a 1998 issue, has that honor). The year 1998 means Will was fifty-seven years old before
his first piece of writing got accepted and published. Does the age fifty-seven suggest a
late-bloomer? Well, he wasn’t. Will wrote for most of his life. From boyhood on, he
wrote and wrote and wrote and even though his passion earned him no money or credit
and sometimes no love (just its opposite, from an impatient girlfriend), he pushed ahead.
Writing was what he did in the half-hours he wasn’t working hard manual jobs
(construction, painting, etc.), in the night or early morning hours when others partied or
rested. This is the kind of writer I respect most: The writer, who, in the face of rejection,
keeps writing not for an imagined fame but for the goal of self-improvement and possible
art. These are the writers you don’t meet at bars yapping about their unpublished
greatness in an unfeeling world. Yapping about “process” or schedules or their novel’s
plots. Larry Brown was like that, too: He too was a family man who worked hard manual
jobs and who could only keep going against rejection and silence and exhaustion.
So, back in 1998, I didn’t grab the two or three William Gay stories that Sullivan shared
with me. Not that they needed me; after The Missouri Review story, the publishing world
woke up to William Gay, and soon his fiction was to be found in the smartest places:
Harper’s, The Atlantic, GQ, The Southern Review, and so on. A New York agent and
book contracts followed.
I can’t say I am haunted by my rejection of those two “early” William Gay stories. I
remember feeling uneasy about their stylistic similarity to Cormac McCarthy and
Faulkner. (Down to the trick of not using quotation marks. Maybe editors of Southern
magazines worry about McCarthy/Faulkner influences more than Easterners?) To this
day, Will’s McCarthy/Faulkner strains are what I enjoy least about his writing.
Sometimes he was too forcibly poetic for my taste. (Editors shouldn’t have the same
taste.) Sometimes Will needed close line-editing because he would lose himself in the
sound of language and repeat ideas or unnecessary words.
But. But. But.
He soared beyond homage and raw influence and lit on and perfected his own voice, his
own distinct voice. At his best—when the dark humor hit or the poetry came in tight and
acute—when the understanding was long and penetrating—William Gay was a master. Is
a master.
One day at a lit panel somebody asked Will about rejection and I suddenly and
unexpectedly heard Will bring up my rejection of his stories. He said something like,
“Well, Marc Smirnoff at The Oxford American rejected all my early stories.” The
audience was already on his side; he had just about instantly won their minds and hearts
with his intelligence, humility, and awkward warmth. Even if they missed his every
word—quiet, shy, country Will, without proper mik’ing, was often inaudible—they had
heard enough.
On that day, a few years into our friendship, I had forgotten much about those rejections,
but I sensed my memory was about to be rekindled, in public, and I knew things could
turn ugly. I felt breaths away from being the target of an angry lit-fest mob.
Instead, he went on to say that my longish letters of rejection helped sustain his faith in
his work and that he had kept the letters—because, he said, he liked them. I don’t know if
Will was just being kind that afternoon, but over the years he treated me, always, as a
valued friend, in a way that made me feel really special, because for all his old country
awkwardness and hard-to-hear voice, I soon learned that he was really unlike anyone I’ve
ever met.
From my perspective, he seemed to live through his passions. He was profoundly
sensitive to literature, movies, and music and talked about them endlessly, joyously. He
didn’t read or watch or listen as a collector but as someone who is looking for clues and
insights. The way he zero’d in on music is, to this minute, a reminder of how close,
repeated attention to a work of art can deepen our enjoyment, rather than stifle it. Nobody
I know can pierce through to a song’s heart and spirit surer than William Gay. This love
of music can be felt in the motion and sounds of his prose.
Of course, like all interesting artists he had tics. When he got crazy about an artist there
was no stopping him. I challenge you to find one nonfiction piece of his that does not
contain the words “Bob” and “Dylan.” One. In almost every professional conversation I
had with him, he would say: “I really want to write about Todd Snider.” This would be
right after I said, “William, our next music issue is on Arkansas [or Alabama or
Mississippi]. Who do you want to write about?” (As William well knew, Snider was born
in Oregon.) Other times, he would talk to me as if I did not know who Todd Snider was.
“Will!” I’d say. “I know Snider. You wrote about him for our Music Issue [in 2000]!”
This reply never seemed to persuade him of much. When other staffers here would be
Will’s primary (or, what we call, lead) editor, I’d inevitably get this message from each
of them: “Mr. Gay really wants to write about Todd Snider.”
[You can find Will’s most recent Oxford American piece on Todd Snider, from his
brilliant “Lost Chord” online column, at this link.]
More about his passions: He had enough to keep surprising even his buddies. It was late
in our friendship that I learned he was a serious painter. How could he keep that from me!
(Humility, natural shyness even amongst old friends.) It was also late in our friendship
that I learned he played guitar and sang a little (despite our hours and hours of late-night
music talk, I never knew this). And that he was a serious baseball fan who watched the
Cubs daily when he could (it still baffles me how he could keep that from me, the lifelong
baseball fanatic). For all I know, he was a part-time private detective who tap-danced on
the side.
I could get lost, right now, in memories of William. I now see that. My enthusiasm and
affection for him are leading me there. But it is draining me too so I will end this message
by saying that I am honored that he liked me and that he put up with my quirks and
neglect (I can be a very difficult person and a very neglectful friend and editor). I am
honored that he wrote so well for a magazine he knew I care very deeply about. I am
honored that he shared true thoughts and feelings with me.
What a man.
—MAS
The simple truth is that William Gay, bard of Hohenwald, Tennessee, who could turn out
a sentence so clean and decisive in its poetic lack of punctuation, had been an integral
part of The Oxford American long before I came along. As he related in his most recent
column, though he’d been sending letters and stories and pestering Marc Smirnoff for a
while, it was John Jeremiah Sullivan, then Associate Editor in the Oxford days, who first
invited him to write for the annual Southern Music Issue. Since then, I was only one of
many editors who felt like they developed a close relationship with William, simply
because he had one large quirk that invariably brought you in close contact: We had to
talk on the phone.
I don’t mean we just chatted, or that I had to call him up to assuage his fears about severe
edits. I mean, in these past several months, in order to get his online column, “The Lost
Chord,” on time, I’d have to dial him up, put him on speakerphone, set down a recorder,
and make notes while he read aloud. He always had computer problems and couldn’t
much type anyway, so normally he’d handwrite things and either have his son or
daughter type them and send them along, or he’d send something through our nowwithering postal system.
I developed an intimate relationship with his voice, listening to it on headphones while I
transcribed each installment. I became fluent in the dialect of Hohenwald. While
working, he’d ask me about some album, and I’d admit that I’d heard it or that I hadn’t.
We bonded over the best Dylan cover being “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” by The Byrds
from Sweetheart of the Rodeo. More often than not, I had to suppress giggles while he
read aloud, his wit was so dry. After we’d get done, I’d say, “That was the funniest one
yet,” and he’d say, “You had me worried for a minute there, because I didn’t hear any
laughter.”
It’s safe to say that anyone who had met William, or overheard him on the phone, or
probably even read his articles for The OA (and elsewhere) would be helplessly charmed
by him. He was old school, in the sense that he worked his entire life, secretly tending the
flame of his writing passions, before ever actually becoming a published author in middle
age. He was one of those writers I always admired—the kind that had real life
experience, not just fantasy and grad school, in their wheelhouse. It runs like a dark
current through his fiction, his ability to identify with hard people and desperate worlds
suburban white girls like myself will never have to reckon.
He was also old school in the sense that I will likely never have to call an author again to
transcribe his writing, which deprives us, in a way, of the tenuous intimacy between an
editor and writer that existed in this time before that William seemed to telegraph from.
He was old school in the sense that he would tell me not to read anything Harper’s
published after Willie Morris, even his own fiction. He was old school in the sense that
he’d tell stories about calling up Cormac McCarthy and asking if he could read his latest
stuff, and being permitted to scour would-be masterpieces like Suttree in manuscript.
We met in person only once, years ago when I was still an intern, at the Southern Festival
of Books, in Nashville, where he was permanently invited as a presiding member of the
Tennessee literati. We didn’t know then that we’d become collaborators or friends,
calling each other up to check in or to find out if such-and-such album had been released
or if he’d seen this Bogdanovich movie or other. He had so many gifts, such profound
taste, and so many fine stories. It’s hard not to feel like we might’ve lost access to a
whole endangered quality of literary personae with his passing.
Rest in peace, dear friend.
—NE
An Interview with William Gay
Interview by Keith Rawson December 20, 2011 7 COMMENTS
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Interview
Twilight
William Gay
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Five years ago when I first started sending out my writing, I began to correspond with a
small group of writers from the Midwest and Southern regions of the United States who
were just starting to dip their toes into publishing as well. Among these novice authors
were shared quite a few common influences, such as Cormac McCarthy and Daniel
Woodrell, both of whom walked a thin line between genre and contemporary fiction.
There were also two novelists who I was completely unfamiliar with that were constantly
mentioned as must read authors. Men who existed in the same violent territory as
Woodrell and McCarthy:
Larry Brown and WILLIAM GAY.
I quickly devoured as much of Brown’s writing as I could get my hands on, and vastly
admired his hard charging style. I took my time getting into Gay, but once I read his skin
crawling third novel, Twilight, I just as eagerly devoured the remainder of his
oeuvre. Gay’s descriptive, darkly poetic prose clung to my imagination long after I turned
the last pages. His writing was a sharp contrast to the often plainly told hardboiled stories
I read and wrote most frequently, and acted as a bridge to other Southern writers such as
Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers. Much like McCarthy’s early novels, Gay’s
Tennessee is a violent, volatile world, and in late November, I was lucky enough to speak
at length with this extremely private novelist about his career.
I hope you enjoy.
Keith Rawson: I wanted to begin with how you started writing. You started your career
late in life. What did you do for a living before writing?
William Gay: I actually started writing when I was a kid and kept at it a lot of years.
When I was really young, I read a book called Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolffthat was one of the books that got me excited and made me want to become a writer. So I
pretty much thought of myself as a writer my entire life. But I married younger and kids
were being born and I had to make a living and I wasn’t selling short stories and novels
for a lot of years, so I worked as a carpenter and later on me and my sons had a painting
business. But I still thought I would break in to publishing and then I did with a short
story. Then after that it sort of got weird and seemed to happen really quickly, after a
short story came out in the Georgia Review and an agent called me. I’d been trying to get
an agent for some time, but most agents seemed like they weren’t interested in you unless
you were already selling.
I had really been going about getting published the wrong way. I’d write a story and send
it to the New Yorker or the Atlantic or Harpers or Playboy and they’d reject it. But then I
started sending to the quarterlies and college magazines and the very first story I sent in
was published. It wasn’t long after that, that the fella who bought my story for the
Georgia Review had another job as an acquisitions editor for a small press and he called
me up wanting to know if I had a novel and naturally I did. Eventually, the company he
worked for, MacMurry & Beck, put out The Long Home.
But I always wanted to be a writer, it was the only thing I could picture myself being. I
was never interested in being a cop or a fireman or an astronaut or anything like that. I
always thought being a writer was the highest thing that you could aspire to do.
KR: Were you submitting your writing while the kids were growing up?
WG: I would do it occasionally. The truth is, a couple of things happened: First off, I just
got better. I was kind of a slow study. One of the big complaints from editors when I
started getting personal notes instead of form rejections was that I didn’t concentrate on
the story enough and that I liked to write descriptions of thunderstorms and weather and
they didn’t really care for all of that and they just wanted me to get on with the story. But
the language was what really impressed me about writing. Language was what I wanted
to concentrate on and I stubbornly kept on doing it. If I had taken some of their advice,
I’m pretty sure I would’ve been published sooner.
The other thing that happened was that Charles Frasier’s first novel, Cold Mountain,
was such a huge book and then Cormac McCarthy won the National Book Award for All
The Pretty Horses and people really started to pay attention to him. And because of those
two things, I think editors really started paying attention to Southern writers. For a long
time there weren’t a whole lot of them around. The only guys I can think of was Barry
Hannah and William Styron. But it was Frasier and McCarthy that opened some real
doors.
KR: Was The Long Home a
novel you had written as a young man or did you start it when you began earnestly
sending out your short stories?
WG: I didn’t write The Long Home as a young man. I wrote it a couple of years before it
got published. I had written a book called The Lost Highway that I got some attention for
from an editor at Knopf and an agent took me on temporarily on the strength of that
manuscript. But as soon as an agent took on that book, I immediately started in on
another book and that was The Long Home. And not long after I finished The Long
Home an agent took me on permanently, I started in on Provinces of Night in 1999, I
only worked on Provinces for 4 or 5 months.
That book came to me very quickly. But my personal life had changed for me during that
period, too. I was getting a divorce, I was living alone and had more time on my hands
and worked constantly. I was really caught up in that book. They made it (Provinces of
Night) into a movie. I’ve never actually seen it.
KR: Bloodworth, right? So you’ve never seen the film?
WG: No, I’ve never seen it. My sons and I think both of my daughters have seen it. They
liked it, except my oldest son who said it wasn’t all that much like the book and that they
changed a lot of thing that he liked about the book. He said they moved the timeframe
from the 1950’s to contemporary times. Which I can kind of understand doing because
the director (Shane Dax Taylor)... it was just too expensive to try and capture that time
period. So they changed guys who were drunks and bootleggers in the book to drug
dealers in the movie and the character I had the most fun writing doesn’t appear in it
either. I hear Kris Kristopherson is real good in it though.
KR: Did you get to see the adaptation of "I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down?"
WG: Yeah, I got to see that a number of times. I had gotten to meet Hal Holbrook a few
times at literary events and what not. Holbrook played the old man in the movie. He was
really nice when we met and he told me that he felt his part was one of his best
performances. The guy who made that movie, Scott Teems is a pretty talented director.
KR: I felt That Evening Sun was a fairly faithful adaptation of the story, especially in its
tone.
WG: I think so, too. I really didn’t care too much how it ended, but I can understand why
they wanted to change the ending. When I first saw it, I didn’t like it at all because I
rewrote that last paragraph in the story at least two hundred times trying to get it just the
way I wanted it. And in the movie, instead of the old man dying or going into a coma,
they changed it into kind of a happy ending with reconciliation between the father and
the son.
KR: You mentioned that you rewrote the final paragraph of "I Hate To See That Evening
Sun Go Down" two hundred times. Do you always put that kind of time and thought into
your sentences and paragraphs?
WG: I generally don’t do that. Usually I have it all in my head before I sit down and
write, but for one reason or another I couldn’t get that paragraph right. But most of the
time it just comes out the way I want it to.
One story I had a problem with getting just right was a story called "Death In The
Woods." I worked on it quite a long time and sent it out a few times before somebody
actually published it.
KR: That’s my favorite story of yours
WG: Thanks, I feel pretty close to that story because they actually found a guy dead out
in the woods near where I was living at the time, and he’d committed suicide. The story,
of course is entirely fiction, except the part where he smoked like half a pack of
Marlboros before he shot himself. I couldn’t get that scene out of my head, of the guy
sitting there on a log, smoking, and trying to work his nerve up to shoot himself. Those
woods I lived by seemed to change after that. I used to like walking through there, but I
just didn’t want to go back there afterwards.
The thing of it was with that story, I just couldn’t seem to get the tone right. Particularly
when the husband character finds out his wife was cheating on him with the guy they find
out in the woods. I would either show too much of what was going on or too little, but it
just didn’t work for awhile.
KR: Do a lot of your stories stem from real events or is it a scene or a character that you
just can’t get out of your head that gets you to start writing?
WG: It’s like you said, most of the time It’s a character and maybe I don’t know all that
much about him at first, but I know how he feels and how he’ll react to certain situations.
Or sometimes I just start off with a great line of dialogue. When I first started Provinces
of Night, I thought the story was about a guy whose wife had left him and run off. But at
some point I started writing about the husband at his in-laws house and his mother-inlaw asks about his son and up until that point it hadn’t occurred to me that the guy even
had a son and then I got really interested in writing about the son rather than the father
and the father just seemed to go off stage and up north looking for his gone wife.
KR: What’s your attraction to writing
about the mid-twentieth century?
WG: I’ve been asked that before and I never really have a good answer to it. For one
thing, the south’s really changed and I kind of miss the time when it was really rural and
less like the rest of the country. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of bad things about
it, like the racism and things like that are better. But I think there’s a lot of innocence
that’s gone now. And I think I write about it so much because I know the period better. I
paid more attention back then, cared more about it because I was storing it up to use
later on. But some of the stuff I write is contemporary, like my story “The Paperhanger”.
But certain stories wouldn’t have worked in present time. Like Twilight, with technology
like cell phones there was no way that book could work being set in 2011.
KR: What are some of the biggest changes in the South which have effected you as an
artist?
WG: When I was growing up, most of the people I knew were small farmers. My father
was a sharecropper most of the time and I think that people just weren’t as sophisticated
as they are now. Not as connected and it seemed like the South was its own little country
set off from the world. But now with the internet and things like Facebook, everybody’s
all tied together Back then with everybody living so separately, I think there were a lot
more interesting stories being told…but you know, I’ve never really thought about this all
that much. But it seems now everywhere in the South is trying to be just like Atlanta.
KR: Do the changes bother you? Does the sameness?
WG: No, not really. It doesn’t really affect me all that much. I don’t really get out a lot
except if I have to do some literary thing and I don’t really hang out around my
hometown all that much because things started to get a little weird when I started
publishing stuff. I live in a small town and I would have preferred for everything to have
stayed as it was as far as my relationship with the town. But everything changed and now
it seems like everyone just wants to have a literary discussion.
KR: So there’s no small talk anymore, its just people asking about what you’re writing?
WG: Yeah, somebody’s always asking if I’ve read any good books lately? I had this one
woman ask me if I had anyone helping me write my books and I asked her what she
meant by help me? And she said, ‘I’ve known your family a long time and they’re not that
smart (laughs) and I’ve known you since you were growing up and you weren’t that
smart either.’ And she wanted to know if I had anybody who took out the little words and
put in the big words? (laughs)
KR: So do you feel like an outsider now?
WG: I think I’ve always felt like an outsider to some degree. Back when I was working
construction or whatever it was I was doing, I really didn’t talk about writing. In a lot of
ways it was like being in a closet. You really didn’t go out on Monday morning and talk
about the sonnet you wrote over the weekend. You just tried to blend in. So I just kept my
mouth shut about writing.
KR: Was there ever anybody around that you could bounce ideas off of or were you
entirely isolated?
WG: I never felt very isolated because I was busy with my kids and stuff. Plus, my oldest
daughter was always interested in what I was writing and I had a brother who read my
stuff and he was the kind of guy who was brutally honest and I trusted his judgment when
he read my stuff. But most of the time I wrote in a vacuum. At one point I got so into
Cormac McCarthy that I got in contact with him.
KR: You’ve spoken with McCarthy?
WG: Actually quite a bit…I had finished reading Child of God and on the dust jacket it
said where he lived in Tennessee and on a whim I called information and got his number
and just called him up. I had a few questions about Child of God, but he didn’t want to
talk about his stuff and doesn’t like to discuss his own writing. When I called he was
polite but a bit stand offish until I mentioned something about Flannery O’Connor and he
started to open up about O’Connor’s influence on him. Since then we’ve exchanged a few
letters. Of course this was all before he got famous. As far as I’m concerned he’s the
greatest writer I’ve ever read. He’s very cinematic and as far as I’m concerned a lot of
his writing is better than most movies. Eventually I think he’ll win the Nobel Prize.
KR: I think both you and McCarthy share a very cinematic style of writing. Do you come
at your writing as if it was a film where you work on it chronologically?
WG: I wish I could write chronologically, linearly. But the way I write is I have a lot of
bits and pieces and I just kind of bring all the bits and pieces and tie them all together.
When I feel it’s all done, it all has to be sequenced, almost like like putting a crossword
puzzle together. It’s kind of a hard way of doing it because I don’t write on a computer
or a typewriter.
KR: So you do everything in a notebook?
WG: Yeah, notebooks or yellow legal pads. I seem to think better with a fountain pen in
my hand than at a keyboard. I’m really not all that great of a typist, so when I finally do
get around to typing everything up, it’s pretty much a second draft because of all the
changes I make as I’m typing.
KR: Who are the writers who’ve helped shape your voice? Has Faulkner in anyway
influenced you?
WG: I think Faulkner is one of the writers I’m most interested in. Something I was pretty
proud of was I was asked to write an introduction to a U.K. edition of As I Lay Dying.
The editor felt Twilight was a gothic novel and had a similar feel to As I Lay Dying. I
was real proud and humbled by that comparison. But I don’t think Faulkner was as big of
an influence as O’Connor or McCarthy. Especially McCarthy’s novel Suttree…
I got compared to Larry Brown a whole bunch when I first started getting published, but
I didn’t see the connection between mine and Larry’s fiction at all. But I think critics did
that because he was a working class guy and I was working class guy and neither one of
us had a lot of formal education. I think that’s why Brown and I got along so well. But I
don’t think our writing is at all alike.
KR: I’ve never understood the connection either. But it seems like the two of you have
been critically inseparable, but Brown is far for more straight forward as your work has a
more poetic bend…
WG: I think that’s exactly right. I think Brown wanted to do that type of
Faulkner/McCarthy poetics stuff and a lot of his later work was headed in that direction,
but he died pretty young and didn’t really get to accomplish it. His last novel Rabbit
Factory has some of that surreal stuff in it and the one he was working on when he died
was kind of like that, too. But his stories and my stories don’t really have a lot of
similarities.
KR: I think you’re right about your working class backgrounds having a lot to do with
the comparisons. But let me ask, do you think a more formal education would have
benefited you as a storyteller or was existing in that vacuum a greater benefit?
WG: With education, I think I’m just as about as well educated in literature as somebody
who went to college for it. I’ve read books obsessively from the time I could read and I
don’t think taking writing classes or workshops would have helped me all that much. In
fact, I’m positive it wouldn’t have.
Back when I first got my agent, she wanted me to got to Sewanee and do workshops and
hang out with other writers. I wound up going and work shopping a few stories and I’d
have to say that I wasn’t all that terribly impressed with it. Of course, I’m never really all
that comfortable when another writer asks me to read their book and wants any
comments on it. Because I really don’t know where they’re coming from because it’s
their book. I mean, I don’t mind reading and teaching younger kids, I’ve done that a
couple of times before, but when a manuscript is from someone whose known and whose
been published, I just don’t feel comfortable with that.
The one good thing about doing workshops is that you make contacts. You meet people
who are editors and agents and stuff like that. Those aspects can be really valuable to a
young guy trying to break into the publishing business.
KR: The last thing I wanted to ask in wrap up is about your novel The Lost Country and
its status. I know it was suppose to come out from MacAdam/Cage a few years ago but it
was never released…
WG: Well, I never turned in a manuscript to MacAdam/Cage and I really can’t talk all
that much about The Lost Country or MacAdam/Cage. But I will let you know that the
book will be coming out in 2012 and that’s all I can really say…
KR: That’s definitely good news. Once again, William, thanks for your time.