Time Done Been Won't Be No More (23 page)

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 was 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 surprised 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.

JMW   But now we have
The Road
; what do you say about
The Road
?

WG     I knew when I read
The Road
it was going to win the Pulitzer Prize, I actually did. I called Tommy and told him that. The writing is gorgeous, nobody else can write like that.

JMW   That's not quite true. There's one guy around who can.

WG     The end of it has that little uplifting thing. I knew the awards people were really going to go for that and they did. That carrying the light thing and those people showing up when the kid needs them. That book didn't bother me the way it bothered a lot of people. It bothered Chris really bad, it messed him up for a couple of weeks. It messed up Franklin for a while, it depressed him. It made him think too much he said. I think the reason is that Chris has a little boy and Franklin has two young kids. I think that might have something to do with it. But you have Coby and you weren't that bothered by it.

JMW   Well shit, once you've read
Outer Dark
, the horrific parts of
The Road
aren't any more horrific than
Outer Dark
.

WG     It doesn't get more gothic than
Outer Dark
. When I did that thing up in Lebanon somebody asked me what I thought was the darkest gothic novel and I didn't even have to think and I said
Outer Dark
by Cormac McCarthy and that guy said, “You ever read a book called
Twilight
?” He thought
Twilight
was a darker gothic novel than anything he had read. Chris won't even read that book
Twilight
. He read it a long time ago and he said he probably won't ever read it again. Too bleak and too dark for him.