Had I a Hundred Mouths (34 page)

Q: Rescued by what?

WG: I felt that I was rescuing myself. I got a sense of myself, in a flash. It was a spiritual experience, of course. And with that clarification, I was able to move on out of what might have destroyed me. I don't know that I have ever felt that I have been lifted by a higher power—a god or anything. By divinity. It must have been art, then—a sense of one's self suddenly frees him, at least for that time, and one is able then to go on.

Q: The story is quite free of what readers normally expect from a story—

WG: God bless them!

Q:—it doesn't give them a plot or character development.

WG: But I see that it was a form I found for myself, and used over and over again, in a whole body of work, without knowing that I was using it. I didn't put it up on the wall and say, “This is the form I will now follow.” But it was deep pain, a feeling of utter isolation and removal from the community of human beings—that kind of lostness. And then, through an acuteness of feeling and an awareness of things around me, coming back to life, through life around me—in this case—in the story you quoted from, “Nests in a Stone Image”—people in the rooms around the speaker in the story. In his misery and isolation he was surrounded by human beings, all singing and making love and talking, and life was in those rooms around him, and then rising. It was always the rising action, that I felt, over and over again.

Q: That's what you mean by the sense of form?

WG: Coming up, yes, from the bottom, rising to the top and then being freed of that pain and being
identified
, is surely what it was, wasn't it?

The form was new each time. But two things—it's about love, and total giving in love till there was nothing left, total faith in life and love; and then feeling destroyed and abandoned, and then finding again… through life going on. Despite my misery, life was just going on! Those were such great revelations, do you know that? Suddenly you heard people next door saying, “Well, do we need eggs? Well, let's see, we need eggs, bread…” They're making a list of groceries! And writing checks. That life was restored to me, so often not through great bursts of something, like St. Paul's revelation, but through just the trivial, which I still hold to, the everyday trivial detail. That has always pulled me through.

Q: Is the meaning of a story as much in the act of telling it as it is in its substance?

WG: It has a spiritual significance. Someone wrote that about my work—that the liberating, therefore spiritual, significance of storytelling was in the very telling itself, a kind of a prayer or meditation or apotheosis of feeling, a dynamic spiritual action. So: the need to tell, on the part of a lot of characters I have written about, like Raymon Emmons [“Ghost and Flesh”].

But in some writers what one gets is diction more than voice. That is, it's
thick speech
, rather than voice. There's a great difference between speech and voice. “Correcting” the speech of my characters, as some copy editors wish to do, affects the voice. That's the pitfall of some writers, some of the Southern writers, who get hung up on diction and speech. Synge was in danger of that, too. There is a quality of voice that is, I guess, undefinable. I feel I know what that is, and I have to wait for it, and that determines my work: voice. I can't fake it, and I can't find it if it's not there. I have to hear it. This I know for myself. Sometimes the voice, the same voice, tells me a bunch of stories.

People in my life told me stories, and I sang. They had the speech, and I got the voice. And I place the burden for that difference on angels, good and bad. Some people seem to have a good angel, or a bad one (can there be bad angels?), and yet some have none at all.

Q: Still, you have to work at the art—the angel's not going to do the work for you, is it?

WG: But it can put a tongue in my mouth for a little while [“Tongues of Men and of Angels”]. That's what happened to me.

When I first rode a bicycle, I couldn't ride it without my father pushing me, holding me there, and I said, “But what am I going to do? Don't let loose! Don't let loose!” (We had just a little hill.) He said, “Son, I wouldn't let you aloose, don't you worry.” And one day, he
had
, and I was going right along! And I looked back, and he wasn't there, and I was doing it! From then on I rode the bicycle.

Now, when I'm really working, really writing, I have the feeling it's coming from outside of me, through me. An absolute submission, absolute surrender. It's being
had
, being possessed. I'm being used.

Q: Are you very curious to define that “it” that is using you?

WG: No. I recognize it, and know when it's
not
there. It's like being in love, or being mad—all those radical emotions.

Q: Are you reluctant to talk about it?

WG: There's something in me that shuts it off.

Q: Is it like that moment when Dante describes Virgil and Statius walking ahead, speaking of poetry, and Dante won't repeat what they said?

WG: I'm not able to talk about it. St. Paul speaks of the inexpressible, what you
don't
repeat. There are some revelations I have, he said, that there are no words for, and why should I try? There is a reticence.

Q: In an interview with William Peden, you said “the storyteller is a blessed force in telling his story to a listener; a redemptive process occurs, and it's therefore a spiritual situation, and one cannot avoid that.” What do you mean, “a spiritual situation”?

WG: It has to do first of all with distinguishing simply between spiritual and material. It's not, “How much am I going to get for it?” And if it doesn't have to do with tangible rewards, then it has to do with intangible ones, with my spirit, with my own yearning toward something higher than I, something by definition divine, some outer higher power working through me, that I have no power over or at least did not create.

I remember Marian Anderson was my first experience with what truly was a spiritual moment. Suddenly when she sang she was purely an instrument for the spirit, pure spirit. Through her mouth, here was this blessed moment, the light and the fire were on
her
, way beyond her training or the song itself. I was sixteen; I identified thoroughly, purely, with her. “That's where I belong, I come from that,” I said. “That's why I feel so alone, because I belong to whatever that was.”

Q: What's your sense of the occasion of a story? What starts you writing?

WG: It starts with trouble. You don't think it starts with peace, do you? It's an occasion that brings a whole cluster of occasions together.

Q: You don't worry about the connections between them?

WG: No. The bridges start forming. That's the fun sometimes, and the slavery too, in making the bridges. They are always implied, because they come of their own volition, I feel.

Trusting the connection
is
the process of work.

Everything I've written has been generated that way. I once spoke of medallions [Interview,
Paris Review 68
, Winter 1976]: when my mother made a quilt, she made what she called medallions first, a whole bunch of separate pieces. They don't do the whole quilt at once! When these were all together—till then, you don't see the connections, but it makes a whole.

Q: I think of your work as domestic in a similar sense.

WG: I understand. One of those stories I saw as a kite—and we used to make our own kites. The idea of buying a kite!
Who
bought a kite? We made it out of stuff at home. String, newspaper—and it flew, it flew. But it was made domestically. That's what you call domestic invention. The cruder the better, sometimes. I think of writing as that very often. I'm most comfortable with things that happen at home.…

Style is, or has been, for me, the spiritual experience of my material.

Q: How do you mean, “spiritual”?

WG: Well, people say craft, and I'm talking on the other side of craft. Of course, I know my craft, I know what I will let go and what I won't, and I know when it's not the best. More and more I know about the control of words. But I'm talking about the spiritual experience of Arthur Bond [“Arthur Bond”]—to have experienced those characters and the world they have created around them through their own infirmities or…life in the world has become a spiritual revelation of the human being that I would not have got by studying the work of other writers.

Q: What's the bridge between that experience and the words that make up a story?

WG: The bridge is the transformation. An artist transforms. He can't just stay where life is as he finds it, not at just the
level of life
. Or so it is for me: the art of it becomes the transformation that must occur of that spiritual experience into the controlled craft so that the vision is tied down, is anchored everywhere, by craft. “Arthur Bond” had to be anchored in all kinds of detail, and mostly painterly detail—there was some yellow (the color came to me), the worm with the head of a doll: it all became very pictorial for me. But the man was caught in a spiritual wrestling. This was what I experienced first, his wrestling. “It is not his fall you see, but this man's wrestling,” Shakespeare said about one of the kings.

Q: The word “spiritual” then doesn't mean “religious”?

WG: Not at all. It has to do with a certain program of action. By that I mean I don't come into this experience to get my eyebrows longer, or my muscles stronger, or my belly flatter. So it is therefore
not physical
. O.K.? That's as clear as I can make it. Something else is involved beyond the corporeal. Shall we all start there? I can't define it any more than that. That's what I mean by my spirit. It is not my body. So let's go away from whatever we think of as physical and try to get into an area that is noncorporeal. Something happens to me which changes my attitude toward… you. What is that? It's not that you've given me a lot of money, or bought me a house, or given me a reward. What changed my attitude toward you? Something, I say, came from outside me. And I see as I say this that I tend to look up, because we've been told that heaven is above us, though it may not be at all, it may be quite lateral, I don't know. But it has come from beyond me somewhere, it is not anything I have learned, been taught, or even done. So that the
spirit
is involved in this change of feeling between me and you.

Style, then, is directly related to that experience. So that style is a spiritual manifestation of the experience of the story, for me. My stories
are
spiritual.

And yet there are an awful lot of
genitalia
in them.

Q: Why is that?

WG: That's spiritual, too, I guess. “Ghost and Flesh,” I wrote—one's expressed right through the other, for me.

Q: Is there some writing that, you feel, doesn't have this spiritual element?

WG: I don't feel it's in most contemporary writers that I try to read. I feel that they really are too busy with repeating themselves, and repeating their own success, not necessarily material.

Q: But despite your artistic intransigence on this point, I know that as a person you have been extremely generous and helpful to many writers who haven't displayed much of the spiritual in this sense, at all, haven't reached that level of art.

WG: I've tried to lead them toward it, I guess. That's all I can give them. An opening out. That's obviously why they have come to
me
. I'm not proselytizing and I'm not looking for disciples. I think that's my freedom as a teacher—I don't think people should write like me. I couldn't, by my nature, stay very long in a classroom, teaching. I've started out thinking, this is a class about craft, and that's what we'll be about. But halfway through it I soared into this other thing, we're off into another realm. I can't talk about writing very long without talking about seeing that
possible
transformation. And this is what I talk about a lot. There has to be a change, some change has to pass over what happens to me, what I experience. It seems to come from a deeper reality than a knowledge of what
literary device
I can use to bring the change.

So I like to talk about style that way, and maybe finally I will write about it a little. In the past few years I've had fresh experience with these things—style, image, and life-writing—in my work. Image brings a spiritual revelation of the very life-material itself.…

When I first wrote
The House of Breath
, and it was published in that very form, in
Accent
, it was called “Four American Portraits As Elegy.” I wrote four lives: “Aunty,” “Christy,” “Swimma,” and “Folner.”
In A Farther Country
is written the same way. And so is
Come, The Restorer
. This too is style.

Q: It seems less style than shape.

WG: It
is
shape. The design is the last thing that comes, for me, yet it is the first thing, as well as the last. But without it I'm lost. I get it early. But then I have to lose it, and the feeling is that I'll never get it back. But finally it's the design that I'm able to see, specifically, the architecture of it. The two parts of “Leander”
^*
were pretty much of a whole, and actually the second part is contained in the first few pages of the first. It is
there
. All these people seem to me to be out of some book of the accurst. They're evil figures. They're demonic figures. They frightened
me
to death, those three sisters! Or they're just spiteful figures, or just nuisance figures. But the horror of the Klan, the blackness of that, the evil of them, just pervaded that whole land. And there always seemed to be henchmen of it, and it seemed to be a nightmare of mutiny and banditry. This is the world I was in.