Time Done Been Won't Be No More

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JMW I’ve seen several interviews with you recently in various magazines around Nashville. Seems like the most substantive was the one you did a couple of years ago for Water Stone.

WG Yea, it kind of wears me out. I feel like it is hard not to repeat myself. Water Stone sent this woman down. She was nice, said she was from Ireland. She just showed up and stayed for several days. She wanted to tape and to tape and to tape and we rode around in a car talking and it got kind of bothersome since she had been there for three days at that time and I rapidly lost interest.

JMW Yeah, end of interview. When I first met you over at the trailer on Grinder’s Creek I would go home and write up our conversations

WG Yeah, Truman Capote could do it. People were intimidated by the tape recorder. He would test himself. Early on he would tape things then he would write it and then listen to the tape and see how close he came.

JMW You can come pretty damn close.

WG It’s hard to go back and go over stuff. That’s why I’ve never rewritten or tried to go back over that Natchez piece. (He is referring to a book he was working on several years before, a novel about the early days on the Natchez Trace. He had one scene where the characters come up to a swollen river that he thought was the best thing he had ever written. However the manuscript was stolen and has never been recovered.) It just seems like ground I have already covered. I’ll probably do it sooner or later, especially since I don’t have another idea for a novel. I’ve finished Lost Country and now will have to start on another.

JMW I’m trying to remember was Bloodworth’s band in Provinces of Night the Skillet Lickers?

WG No, it was the Fruit Jar Drinkers. I had that woman asking him, “You don’t have a drink on you, do you Mr. Bloodworth”. And it said, “Of course he did.” What would a Fruit Jar Drinker be without a drink?

JMW Weren’t the Skillet Lickers in there somewhere. Were they a real band?

WG They were a great band. They were like the Beatles of their day, like the rural Beatles They sold a lot of records; they were from Georgia. They had a sound that nobody else has been able to duplicate. My brother and I talked about this once. He was a big Skillet Lickers fan and had all these records. They figured out how to have more than one fiddle player and most of the other bands only had one. They didn’t even have a banjo player just guitar and fiddle with an extra fiddle that made it sound different. I want to see if Oxford would like me to write about the Skillet Lickers before people forget about all that stuff.

JMW Are the Skillet Lickers on the Harry Smith album? (Harry Smith compiled and edited the three album Anthology of American Folk Music, commonly known as the Harry Smith Anthology, which came out in 1952.)

WG No.

JMW I don’t think I have ever heard them.

WG They have the best version of Casey Jones I have ever heard and I have heard a bunch of versions of Casey Jones. They were sort of humorous and did country comedy and sometimes they would just do straight songs. There were a lot of people who imitated them, I found that out when I was living in that trailer and I was writing a piece on the Delmore Brothers. I researched a bunch of that stuff about that time and found out about some of the other groups. I’ve got anthologies with songs that sound like the Skillet Lickers.

JMW Did you hear that kind of music when you were a kid, either on the radio or being played anywhere around Lewis County?

WG Nobody wanted to be backward, or consciously backward. The music I heard as a kid came from a stack of records my Daddy had, a bunch of old 78’s: Jimmy Rogers, the Skillet Lickers and the Carter Family. We had an old crank up phonograph. I listened to the radio all the time but I didn’t like country music; I was listening to pop music. When Elvis Presley came along it kind of reordered my world. Not the later Elvis but the stuff he did for Sun Records, that was great stuff. I went from there to folk music. It was what I thought was real folk music but it was like the Kingston Trio, the Limelighters and Peter, Paul and Mary. When I first got into Dylan I went backwards. I read this thing that said a lot of his influences came from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music so I got into that and I ended up going into it backwards.

JMW Harry sure opened that door for a lot of people.

WG Oh yeah.

JMW So now it seems like the Kingston Trio and all that were just doing popularized versions of songs from Harry’s Anthology. Is that right or not?

WG They did some; how they got famous was nobody was buying Dylan records because people thought that he couldn’t sing with his raspy voice. Well Albert Grossman was Bob Dylan’s manager and he thought how can I get this stuff out over the radio so he formed a group. He knew these folk singers around the Village so he put three of them together, Mary Travers, Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow. So Grossman put them together to do Dylan type songs.

JMW Wow that worked great huh?

WG Yeah with “Blowing in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice”. Grossman was a very smart man; apparently he was not a very likeable man but he was certainly smart at what he did. He managed Dylan perfectly; he kept him appropriate for the times and didn’t try to make him too accessible. He never tried to make him be more congenial to the press or anything like that, he just let him be who he was. Of course Dylan would be who he was anyway.

I know a record I would like to play for you, my daughter drove me up to Columbia to go to the Doctor for a check up. She asked me what I wanted for my birthday so I said to take me over to the sound shop and I was looking for this record called “I’m Not There” and they had it on sale. It is the soundtrack to the movie and boy is it good. I figured it would be a bunch of really crappy covers of Dylan songs but not so, it was good versions of the songs with a bunch of relatively famous people and then it had more obscure people that you don’t hear all that often. It must have twenty-five songs, plus it has Bob Dylan’s version of “I’m Not There” which has heretofore been available only on bootlegs on the Basement Tapes.

I don’t think I get it. I read a book by Greil Marcus one time, you probably read it, called Invisible Republic where he talks about that song and goes on and on about it. So I listened closely to that song to try to hear what Greil Marcus heard and I like the song, it is an ok song but I don’t hear all the significance, which is not to say that it’s not there.

When we go by Barnes and Nobles I want to pick up a copy of Best Mystery Stories of 2009. It might have a Joyce Carol Oates story in it. It seems like forever since I bought any magazines, I subscribe to some magazines but I am hardly ever where they sell magazines, I want a copy of No Depression and see what kinds of CD’s are with the magazines. My subscription to Fortean Times is out but I won’t buy one of those, they cost over $11 on the newsstand and they aren’t that big anyway.

Mark Smirnoff of Oxford American is making noises about me writing something. We had a little falling out over my Dylan piece. (Smirnoff wanted him to cut the piece significantly and he refused and instead sold it to Paste who made it the cover article and printed it in full.) He has been calling every now and then. Sonny Brewer told him I was sick and his girlfriend called and then he called from Little Rock. He wants me to do something and I want to do it. I like being in there, they still have me as a continuing writer. Anyhow Sonny is coming up for a reading next month. He will stay over and then carry me up to the reading and then stay over again that night. He is on a never-ending tour.

He told me a story about his dog. I’ve been down there a lot and had seen the dog so he has written a memoir of the dog and he calls it Cormac, which of course is the dog’s name. He really thought the world of that dog and the dog comes up missing and he goes to all kinds of efforts to find it; he even hired a private eye, and the private eye discovered that the dog had been kidnapped and to make a long story short the dog eventually turned up in Connecticut and he tracked him down and he had a lawyer to get the dog back and prove that it was his dog. The dog had been neutered but it was still his dog.

He told me this long story and I said “Damn Sonny, you ought to write about your dog.” So he wrote a whole book about it. I’ve seen it in bookstores. There’s one called A Sound Like Thunder and I tried it. He has been everything and no telling what he may do; he may be a movie producer or director or anything.

JMW Is there any news about your movie?

WG You know No Country for Old Men is being released as a movie. Paste magazine had a big review and it is a rave. I haven’t seen a bad review and everything is saying that the Coen Brothers are at the top of their game. This is the first movie for a long time that I have actually considered going to the theater to see. When it opens in Columbia we might drive up there and watch it. We went and saw Shrek III not too long ago.

My least favorite actor in the world is Adam Sandler. I don’t like Jim Carrey much either but I like him better than Adam Sandler. There is something weird about that guy. I kind of like that movie Dumb and Dumber. Tommy Franklin, down in Oxford, had all these guys hanging around together and they started going over to each others’ house on Sunday night and it would be movie night and all these guys were semi-intellectuals and they were showing arty type independent films and when they came over to Tommy’s house he showed Dumb and Dumber but they didn’t really get into it. I think there are some really funny scenes in that movie.

JMW I have never seen it.

WG It was made by these two brothers and they were good when they started out. Something About Mary, was their movie, but it (Dumb and Dumber) is really crude.

JMW Can the kids watch it.

WG Well it has bad language in it. But most of my grandkids they get to watch anything they want to watch except when they are over at my house and I won’t let them watch anything with an R rating, but that is just me. I never let my kids watch everything that anybody else got to watch.

JMW I just saw you are going to be a fellow with the United States Artists foundation this year.

WG They are making the announcement later this month and they have been calling me wanting me to fly out there and they are having an award ceremony at Paramount Studios. They wanted a picture so I took care of that but I don’t want to fly out there.

I need to quit smoking like I quit drinking. That would be really good. I’ve got patches but I just haven’t used them yet. I should have checked into this stuff, I’ve never had any interest in disease or health for that matter. I have always been healthy and I never went to doctors. I have never been seriously sick; it is a little disquieting to have to face all that. I knew I was feeling really rotten all last year. I probably had high blood pressure for months before this deal happened. (He recently had a heart pacemaker installed.) It was probably an accumulation of things like a lot of stress over the kids’ situations and worry about that dog. Then my heart just said, “Fuck it, I’m not putting up with this crap no more”. It was time to go to the house.

JMW Yep, the long home.

WG When I heard that phrase used I knew that would be a book title. I heard it at my Uncle’s funeral; it’s a quote from Ecclesiastes. My editor didn’t like the title and we fought over that. That was one of the few fights I won. He wanted to call it The Pit.

JMW Sure glad you won that one.

WG One time I was with this guy who runs a writers program over at MTSU and he was trying to get a program going for Tennessee writers and I said that I hoped Tennessee would treat its writers like Mississippi or Georgia. Alabama and Mississippi have these awards like Writer of the Year and as far as I could see Tennessee doesn’t have anything. (William became the first recipient of the Tennessee Writer of the Year in 2009.)

JMW I got a grant once from the Tennessee Committee for the Humanities. I set up a program called Prehistory of the Cumberland Valley. They gave me $3,000 in a grant and I got the state archaeologist and the leading archaeologist from the University of Tennessee and gave them a stipend and travel expenses and they agreed to come and then I got the High School gym and advertised in the paper and invited everyone in the local counties to bring their artifacts in and the archaeologist would talk to them about it. It was really popular. I couldn’t believe it.

WG What sort of stuff did you see?

JMW The best of it was large sandstone statues that are very famous in the Cumberland Valley and some guy in Celina had a really nice one. Of course lots of common arrows. Some guys had some big fakes. They are weird looking flint pieces called slave killers and the archaeologist immediately called them fakes. The old Indians just didn’t make shit like that.

WG There is a guy In Hohenwald who has a lot of that stuff. The old dentist. I was working on his house one time back when I was painting, remodeling and that sort of stuff. Some of the brick were flaking off and he wanted me to rebuild the brick, so I got a bunch of different dyes and then made up different mortars and got them to match the colors on the house and I went around with a ladder building up the bricks all over the house. But he was going to a meeting where everybody brings their stuff and trades it or sells it and he let me look and he had a big box in the bed of the truck and he had really interesting stuff. But I think that guy dug up stuff. It was all years ago. I don’t think he does that any more.

He is an interesting fellow and one of my favorite people in Hohenwald. He is in Provinces and he knew it too; he recognized himself. I did a thing at the library and he turned up and came up and sat down with me and he said, “Hey Speedo, what ya doing?” That is a line from the book and what the Dentist calls the character in the book. It is kind of neat that he took it well, but he comes off, there is nothing bad about him. He is giving me magazines and giving me books, which he actually did; he gave me a lot of magazines.

There used to be a magazine called True and when he had accumulated too many magazines he would stack them up and give them to me and there would be several issues of True and I kind of liked that magazine. It usually had articles about UFO’s and government conspiracies to keep you from knowing about UFO’s and that kind of stuff. That was before the days of men’s magazines being what they are now. There was always good stuff to read in there. I remember seeing an issue back in the 70’s with this woman on the cover and it looked like a shoddy imitation of Playboy or Penthouse and all it was was fifty pages of tits and ass. They were trying to survive but it wasn’t working and there isn’t any True Magazine any more. I have a couple of real old issues from the 50’s.

JMW Do you remember a magazine called Argosy.

WG Oh yeah, John Keel used to have articles in Argosy and there was a magazine called Saga and John Keel had a column in Saga for a while. There were good magazines when I was a kid. There was Saturday Evening Post and there was Colliers. I never liked Look because there wasn’t that much to read in it and Life was the same way. There was a magazine called The American Magazine that used to run Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe novellas.

JMW Did you read Reader’s Digest when you were a kid?

WG If I didn’t have anything else to read. I hate Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. They were completely worthless. And with Reader’s Digest even when I was young I could divine that what I thought didn’t exactly jive with what they thought. It has always been a conservative magazine.

JMW I read it for the jokes.

WG Yeah the jokes were good like “Life In These United States” and “Laughter: The Best Medicine.” There was a lot of funny stuff in that magazine. Fate magazine used to be a good magazine back in the day. Magazines have to undergo changes to compete, so they don’t always work.

JMW So what do you read now?

WG I still read Rolling Stone but it is more out of habit than anything else. I read Fortean Times because I’m always interested in that weird stuff. The New Yorker is probably as good a magazine as there is around. I read Oxford American; that’s a good magazine, not as good as it used to be but it is still good. I used to read Harper’s and Atlantic but I don’t read them much any more. I like to read No Depression but they are kind of hard to find. It’s roots music, really good articles; it’s not as flashy as Paste, it doesn’t try to grab your eye as much. It has more reviews; they don’t try to cover the whole field. Paste covers movies, video games and books. They call it popular culture. No Depression doesn’t cover anything but music.

JMW That phrase “No Depression”, didn’t that come out of a song that is on the Harry Smith Anthology?

WG There is an old Carter family song called “There Will Be No Depression in Heaven.” It was pretty sharp of somebody to pick up on that phrase and name a magazine after it. I thought I was going to write another piece for Paste but somehow it didn’t work out. I was going to write about Tom House. I interviewed House twice and felt like I knew pretty much all there was to know about Tom House that he was willing to tell anybody. The magazine kept calling, calling me all the time. Then I went and did the Southern Festival of the Book and this guy from Paste was there.

He called me the next day when I got back home and he said, “Did you know that guy from No Depression magazine was stalking you”. I said, “What do you mean stalking me?” And he said, “That guy was following you around wanting to talk but he was afraid of you.” So I said, “Why the hell was he afraid of me?” and he said, “He told me you had a sinister wine-ravaged face.”

I was sorry not to do the piece on House. He was a nice guy. I kind of like his music. The more I listened to it the more of a downer it was. I thought maybe he should have a little humor every now and then. For a while he made his living just going around to bars and places and saying that he wanted to play and picking up gigs. He was a poet before he was a song writer and he lived in North Carolina and he had a cousin who made it really big in the country music business as a song writer so he came to Nashville and tried to fit in but he was too much of a poet. He had too much integrity. He had a lot more integrity than his cousin and they had a falling out. He said he got drunk one night and told his cousin, “Why do you write this crap?” But in the meantime they were in this guy’s basement with a pool table. He lived in a big mansion up in Nashville and he had won an award for some song Kenny Rogers sang.

Paste has a policy that they want the issue of the magazine to be in conjunction with the issuance of the CD so it would be like cross-pollination. So that was why the guy was bugging me. He needed my piece to match up with the release of the CD. I wrote about half of it. It would have been a pretty good piece because House was so interesting; he was interesting to me so maybe it would interest people who buy those types of magazines. The guy is strange looking with orange carrot colored hair. I think he was like a misfit in his family. They more or less threw him out because the guy was different from everyone else. He wanted to be a poet and in the background where he came from that was not one of the choicest options he could take.

JMW You got any readings coming up?

WG The library in Lobelville is trying to get a grant to pay me $500 to come down there and read. (Lobelville is a small community in the neighboring county.) I will tell them about the sorriest job I ever had in my life, which was in Lobelville, Tennessee. I worked in a boat paddle plant down there and my job was to take these big racks of paddles and dip them. They had this vat of varnish or sealant or something like that. It was a big round thing like a swimming pool. It was like sixteen feet diameter and a few feet deep and it was full of that stuff they used and it was hot, they kept it warm. I had to lower these racks of paddles down in this stuff and leave it a certain length of time and then pull them up. I worked nights and by nine o’clock I would be drunk and when I would wake up the next day I would have this unbelievable headache. I 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.

Outer Dark has the darkest ending of any book I have ever read where the blind man is going into the swamp and you would think somebody would show a blind man the way but he doesn’t bother to do it. When that guy comes to the end of the road, where the road ends in the swamp he calls it, “a sucking velvet waste” and that is all the guy comes to and then they do the thing about the dream where they reference the dream that the guy has at the start of the book. I think that is the first book I ever read I was really affected by; everywhere the guy goes something terrible happens. It’s like he is a harbinger of doom everywhere he shows up, and I think that Twilight is a lot like that; that’s where I got that when the kid shows up at somebody’s house. I didn’t know I was doing it at the time when I was writing it but it does sort of remind me of Outer Dark now.

Nothing ever seems to happen to him, he seems to survive when all these other people get butchered. You know the place where Holmes goes and the guy gives him the rattlesnake rattles and tells him that people put them in guitars and put them in boxes and then sometime in the night when Holmes leaves those three people show up, the guy with the scythe and says, “When he fell he fell sidewise and without a cry and when he fell he fell”. I loved that. In reading his stuff I always felt he didn’t care; he wanted to do it the way he wanted to do it and if you didn’t like it that was just tough.

JMW He sure made that clear and lived that ethic for a long time

WG Yeah, until he showed up at the Oscars. I was disappointed to see him out in the crowd. In a tux no less. But if anybody deserves it, he deserves it. I don’t know what year he got that Macarthur Grant.

JMW It was a long time ago. He got it pretty early on.

WG He must have got it before Blood Meridian. He probably got it and headed out. One of his ex-wives seemed pretty bitter about him; of course ex-wives always are. After All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award Time and Newsweek was trying to talk with him and he wouldn’t do interviews, they went behind his back and talked to his ex-wife. She was kind of complaining about when they lived in Maryville and she said they lived in a converted dairy barn with a telephone outside on a pole like Green Acres on television. Colleges were offering him $1,500 to come and talk and he refused to do it and said, “I don’t have anything to say that is not in the books that nobody is reading anyhow.’” I don’t know if that was true or not but that would have been the timeframe when I was talking to him on the telephone. I didn’t know that the telephone was outside. You remember that show Green Acres where the telephone was outside.

JMW Sure, sure.

WG I used to think that was a pretty funny show. I haven’t seen it in thirty years

JMW Yeah so did I. We watched it in my house when I was a kid. When I read that book by Tim Gautreaux I didn’t get into that book much. I felt like the main characters were raping the earth, clear cutting the old growth forests, exploiting their laborers as much as they possibly could without any conscience about it and the plot of it carried out that these guys, who were clear cutting the forest, were the good guys. They were clear cutting hundreds of acres of cypress and then the bad guys come in, and the bad guys were a bunch of immigrants, and then the good guys kill the bad guys, and that just didn’t play well with me.

WG To be honest I don’t remember much about that book. He wrote me a really nice letter after I gave his editor the blurb. I’ve been reading a book by a guy named John Wray, you ever read anything by him?

JMW Never heard his name before.

WG I read about him in the New Yorker, I saw a book by him a couple of years ago that was compared to Blood Meridian and the New Yorker had this long review for his new book. Low Boy was the name of it and it is about this bipolar sixteen-year-old who runs away from home and he is off his medication and he is in New York I guess and he and his girl friend just sort of elope and take off and it is all about what happens to him on his trip but the writing is kind of hallucinatory. The guy is a really good writer. There is a woman who runs a bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina and she told me if there was ever any book I was interested in she would send it to me, so I called her and told her to send me Low Boy and she did. She started sending me stuff about Thomas Wolfe, anything that was published about Wolfe, she would send it to me.

JMW What about Sonny Brewer, is he coming out with anything?

WG Sonny has a book that MacAdam Cage is supposed to publish this fall. Sonny told me about when he married his first wife, she was a lawyer and Sonny was traveling with a rock ‘n roll band, he had a band that did Neil Young songs. But they didn’t make any money; they were really struggling. They would go on the road and they were trying to get a record deal. I have actually heard Sonny do a Neil Young song and he can sing like Neil Young. He said this woman was like trying to get him to settle down and get away from the rock ‘n roll band. So she wanted some kind of resolution and he said they were on the road one night and they were all in the same hotel room and they hadn’t had enough money that day to buy anything for supper and they hadn’t had any food and he was laying there listening to those people snore and he just got up in the middle of the night with everybody else asleep and drove back to Mobile and married that woman.

JMW Is there going to be anymore Blue Moon?

WG He thought they were doing one, of course that was MacAdam Cage too. I don’t know why they couldn’t do something like that; they were getting the writers to give them the stuff and nobody was getting paid anything for it. Tommy said Sonny was telling him about the new Blue Moon Café book and they were going to have a party and were going to spend eight or ten thousand dollars to put up everybody in Jackson at a big hotel and Tommy said if they had that kind of money it looks like they could give all the writers a couple of hundred bucks instead of doing this big party and Sonny got mad at him and didn’t speak to him for a while. Sonny was the editor for those things and he was the one talking people into contributing.

JMW Are you writing any articles now?

WG I got really interested in that Todd Snyder song, The “Thin Wild Mercury”, the one I played for you and I had talked to Marshall Chapman about him. She knows him and she had opened for him a couple of times or they had opened for somebody bigger. He has a new CD, so I had tried to talk Oxford American into letting me do some writing about Snyder and he said he had too many pieces on singer/songwriters and he wasn’t really interested in it. He has to answer to that college and the whole thing is about selling magazines; it isn’t as much fun as it used to be. I only enjoy writing when it is about something I want to write about and the idea of writing about Glen Campbell has no appeal.

Todd Snyder is an interesting guy. He is still plugging away, playing in small venues and still manages to put out albums and he had that deal with MCA and they paid him a big advance and then when the records didn’t sell he lost the deal and then he lost his band and went back to playing acoustic guitar and harmonica in bars and wherever he could get a gig. That seems kind of interesting to me, especially if you have talent. I think “Thin Wild Mercury” is a good song and he had a song on that same album about the Bush brothers. “You Got Away With It” was the name of that; it was a good song too. He is an engaging guy to watch, he is sort of charismatic but not charismatic enough to sell all kinds of records.

The record business is so damn fickle. The sorry stuff that is coming out of Nashville now, they ought to go hide their faces or something. The people the record companies are pushing are no good, and the new crop is even worse. Country music, like when Hank Williams was around, country music used to be real; I wasn’t that crazy about it, but it was real anyway. Now it is formulaic, cowboy hats and buffed up shoulders. They have some of the biggest tours in the country. That guy that married Nicole Kidman, his tours are some of the biggest things going.

JMW One last question before we have to go, I’ve noticed your characters aren’t religious; they don’t seem to believe in anything?

WG I’m suspicious of people who say they don’t believe in anything. I’m not religious but I believe in all sorts of things. I was at a reading and someone wanted to ask me what I believed in so I just quoted from a scene at the end of Twilight where Tyler comes up on these people who are digging up a grave of a relative so they can be sure the body wasn’t desecrated and he watches them for a few minutes and then turns to go and the man doing the digging stayed him and said that digging up his relatives was the least he could do for them, that he owed them that much. (He had a copy of the book beside his chair and he picked it up and read.)

I’d hate to meet em up yonder and have to explain why they was done so shoddy. Ain’t that the way you think?

What Tyler really thought was that the dead were so absolutely beyond anything the living might do for them it was almost past comprehension and he had no commitment to meet anyone anywhere. He feared that beyond the quilted gray satin of the undertaker’s keep there was only a world of mystery that bypassed the comprehension of men and did not even take them into consideration. A world of utter darkness and the profoundest of silence.

JMW Well, I guess that about says it. The dark night, the long home.