Had I a Hundred Mouths (35 page)

Q: At the end of “Had I a Hundred Mouths,” the narrating nephew sees his cousin in white sheet and hood, with others. Then that Klan nephew is tormented and tortured by the Klan in the second part of the work, for having spoken of their doings.

WG: Because he told their secrets. And what were they? That they had had children by black women, and that they had hanged black men for fucking white women. They had scapegoats. Those are horrors, horrors! A medieval world of terror. You know it
was
like that, to me; as a child I really felt that. I lived around all of that. There was a man preaching the salvation of my soul in a tent across the road from my house, but up on the hill beyond there the Ku Klux were burning their crosses and I saw them run tarred and feathered Negroes through the street. I saw them running like that, twice. Aflame. We stood and watched that.

Q: What sort of reactions were apparent in those around you?

WG: They were terrified. Just as if you were a Jew and those were Nazis. Most of them simply lived in terror and hid. It was that kind of world, as I saw it. And it could only have to do later with the brutality that I wrote about and also with salvation. It was also full of the erotic and the sensual and all that, for me, too. It was a maelstrom, it was a cauldron.

Q: Does that world seem another universe now, as if you were writing about something you could present only emblematically, that sort of horror?

WG: How is it another universe? It seems very contemporary. If they murdered how many hundreds in those camps in Beirut… the terrorism around us… Hollywood is a town of absolute terroristic violence. It's a cursed place. It's full of a violence that comes out of a whole lot of things, but out of abuse, and persecution.…

But the town, the environment, which for me was the river and the fields, and the wonderful things that bloomed, that are so much in my stories, was still stalked by some horror all around it. And the tales I heard—a whole lot of that is stated in “The Icebound Hothouse.” That story comes to be about that. And at the end there is an apotheosis, again, to say, “Why did I ever think that that house, that door, where I'd like to go home, that promised hospitality to the one who was arriving—why did I think that there were all sunny stories of joy and laughter?” The door is a dark door. Whose chose that door? Who is the dark presence in that house? This is a culmination for me of the
House of Breath
metaphor, all these years later—this is what I came upon in finishing this story. So it is precious door again.

And now as I grow older and I go through these experiences—of almost dying, and changes of place, as from the East to the West, here—I keep getting closer to those images of terror and horror, as well as of the sublime pastoral garden.

Q: So there's a way to redeem that experience?

WG: Yes, and it's art and the holy spirit, which are one for me, more and more. Without art, without the process of memory, which is the process of art, and the spiritual experience of it, which for me is style, what else would I do about it? Would I be an addict? Would I be dead from alcoholism and addictions of one kind or another? Would I just have been a kind of evangelist?

Q: Are you saying holy spirit with small h and small s?

WG: Well, you know, I tend to capitalize where other people always strike things down to I.c. That means that I'm elevating it, somewhere, that's what it means in my head, and I insist on keeping that, because it is somehow elevating it beyond the pedestrian lower case.

I think there's no such thing as meaningless suffering, and this is spoken by someone who sees the terror of life. You know, there's a recent book called
The Horror of Life
) Of course, I bought that faster than I'd buy something called
Days in My Garden
. And it's the lives of five people who all view life as horrible. This life-view was one of horror and fear. Baudelaire, De Maupassant, Flaubert, Jules de Goncourt, Daudet. It turned out that they were all syphilitic and had a horrible disease. I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about the horror of life. But the horrible and the terrible element in life. Why would I endure life if I thought
life
was horrible? What good would I gain by enduring? Enduring is a hopeful action.

Q: Flannery O'Connor said in answer to those who criticized the apparently despairing content or material of modern novels that people without hope don't write novels.

WG: Of course it's an act of hope, and faith. Art is redeeming, and art is an affirmation. There's no other way. The creation, the result, may not be very wonderful in some cases, or even very good, but I'm given joy and faith again through watching people's impulse to make something, and their energy in making it, their willingness to make something.

Q: You also seem to agree with Lowell, however, that poetry is
not
a craft. Do you think that the craftmentality of the writing schools is all right? Does craft drive out art?

WG: I don't think that's possible. Art won't have it. There's no way possible to substitute anything for art. I believe in the absolute hegemony of art, and craft can't hurt it.

Q: You have said that “elegance in fiction frightens me, and exquisiteness.” Even if you were speaking there of style, I suspect that “elegance” applies also to the impulse to wrap things up a little too neatly.
You
certainly leave a lot of things just flapping their wings in the air. That can seem to mean something in itself. Do you worry about being too symbolic?

WG: No. I don't have any worry about being symbolic, I don't think I'm symbolic. Arcadio
has
got two genitals—

Q: But you take a figure like Leander, and you castrate him. He is desexed; he is half white, half black. He was a man and is no longer a man; Arcadio is half man and half woman: these things are emblematic. Not that I can put a ready meaning to them, but you seem to be interested in more than the shape of a man, you're interested in the significance of the shape of a man.

WG: And yet, you know, how emblematic is a woman with one breast? I saw a great photograph yesterday in a bookstore, a huge life-size photograph of a very beautiful woman with a wonderful breast, and on the other side was a tattoo of roses across no breast at all. She had had one removed, and yet the photographer was saying, “This is all right. This is beautiful. Don't be horrified. She
has
one breast!” But it was a
creature:
it seemed almost like Leander. I said, “What a defamation of a beautiful thing!” I heard myself say that. “How
defaming
to take a breast off her! How they slaughter women in the name of cancer.” But I was with a woman, and she said, “But look how beautiful, it's all right.” So I caught myself. It was kind of a wreath of roses tattooed. So that is very emblematic—that's what I'm talking about: there's a breast, I could
suck
that breast! That's very exciting. On the other hand, there's a kind of monster.

Q: And a kind of symbol? Not a real rose, but the picture of a rose?

WG: No, a woman, who is saying, “I am a woman, and I am beautiful still.”

Q: Is it the physically grotesque that interests you?

WG: I really mean more of a spiritual deformity. Of course, dwarves, and humpbacks, and harelips, and so forth. That's only the beginning for me. I can't linger on that very long but it delivers me from the boring reality of realistic reporting. Since I am
not
writing Zola-istic realism, then everyday reality, the detail of it, is obviously not going to sustain itself for me, forever. I'm not Dreiser, I'm not interested in that at all. I'm aware that there is no everyday trivia in itself; that beneath it, or going on within it, there's always some slight deformity of thought or action. It's the hidden life I'm talking about.

I'm not writing within the vogue for the bizarre. My insights are deeper and deeper into what we're talking about, and the revelations that are corning to me make me more and more aware of an overwhelming imagery of the crude and the violent, but I mean more than that. I suppose it's always been with me, and I can see it back in
The House of Breath
, my earliest work. It really has more to do with tenderness, rather than less. It's not hardness of heart that is happening. I see more and more brutality, and the metaphor that exists in brutality. It may be that in my earlier work I gentled that, but I see it more now. It begins in the latter half
of Arcadio
, for me, and continues on through Leander's story [“Had I A Hundred Mouths”] and the last I've written [“Tongues of Men and of Angels”].

Q: Far from the sorrow and the wonder and gratefulness that surround the erotic in “Ghost and Flesh,” you're moved to consider it a dark power.

WG: True.

Q: A dark power over men, not a mystery in their lives that is constructive or renewing.

WG: Yes. It
was
a great power, that's true. I'm really astonished by all that, myself, it's still new for me, I have no hypothesis about it yet. Where I am in this work—and it's leading me more and more—there's a tenderness, always, at the core. “Had I A Hundred Mouths” is a tender story—the love of that man, and the love of the black man: those people have a tenderness that is almost old-fashioned. But what I really see is that within that tenderness is a brutality and a striking violence of feeling and action. It has nothing to do with disillusionment—I was never more spiritual in my life. It has nothing to do with losing faith, or any of those cliches. It's that the light is on
that
now, I
see
that: I see lust as demonic. I have never known it to be anything else! Have you? Good Lord! The lust is the very devil working, a demon in me—
my
lust. I don't know about anybody else's. I've had a demon in me.

Q: How can
la Santa Biblia
and that lust inhabit the same creature, as they do in Arcadio?

WG: It's the human arrangement, it's just our very nature, I think. It created people like St. Paul, but oddly enough it didn't create a man like Jesus, did it? We don't think of Jesus as a lustful man, but it's very possible that Paul was—he's so angry against women, against marriage, against sex.

Q: Is that fruitful anger?

WG: Fruitful in his case—he did a lot of good work, and he did walk among real violent, lustful characters—all those Romans! I think lust is a very rare feeling, and one of the grand emotions. Arcadio is a grand figure of lust and tenderness, I think.

Q: With a Bible in his hand?

WG: Sure. Redemption is what he was looking for. And the Bible is the handbook of redemption. It's the song at the end of a life, he's an old man, in his seventies. And he seems a bit deranged, too—I don't know
what
he is! He's gone a bit mad. I'm not sure how much is true and how much is false of what he's telling me at the end. He's now such a fabricator that he's one of the great fabricators.

Q: Near the end of an interview, in French, you mentioned St. Francis, and the sense that certain saints had of sexuality, of the erotic and the sensual. I think the popular image of St. Francis is of someone feeding the birds from his open hand, and not of him as a sensual creature.

WG: Have you ever fed a bird? It's very exciting. These holy people were walking around with the same impulses that I have, or else they wouldn't be able to reach me. They had the same equipment that I have, if they were men, the same desire, man or woman. Those desires were not submerged; they exist; the Pope perhaps wakes with a hard-on.

I think there is an inevitable confrontation with the spiritual in every human life at some time or other.

Q: Right in the most sensual experience? Eating?

WG: Coming. Absolutely. Certainly all the nailing, and the Penitente things, are sensuous. No: sensual.

Q: You want the word that seems more animal?

WG: Yes. The French
sensuelle
is the word that applies to all those almost genital actions. St. Francis to my mind was a genital human being. St. Theresa was—she no doubt menstruated. This is what I mean—this helps me to find purity and holiness. It's even there in the act of hiding away: like that woman in my story, Inez Melendrez McNamara, who went into that convent [“Tongues of Men and of Angels”]. Her hair became more and more sexual. Her body itself became more voluptuous.

Q: At the same time,
Arcadio
, like Leander's story, leads to genital horrors.

WG: I see people who have emasculated each other. I see people who have been made Leanders of, by wives and husbands, by lovers. My God, the brutality of love-relationships! A mastectomy would be more benevolent than what men do to women's bodies sometimes, making them loathe their bodies or abusing them or hating them or whatever. That's why that picture of that woman with one breast, and one scar, was such an
affirmation:
She said “I am beautiful.” So that in a way Leander means that to
me
—as much as all the other abuses of whites upon blacks, and so on. People render each other sexless, finally; they can castrate each other, and the denial can close up the genitals of a woman and she can grow together. She's been denied that, or it's been abused.…

Q: Were there some writers whose influence you felt you had to reject or throw off?

WG: Oh sure. I had to work through them. Because a lot of them are standing in the way. We have to go through their legs or get around them or really just kind of
have
them, in order to be free of them, or let them have us. Thomas Wolfe. Singing people. Whitman. Early Saroyan. I had to find out whether I could do it or not, and since I didn't have anything to replace it with yet—I tell students this: since you don't have anything to offer yet, then
take
what they have to offer, and spend it. If somebody wants you to make love to them that badly, then go ahead and do it. Just go ahead and do it, get out, get through it! Never James—though he astonished me. The same as Proust: those were abundances, flowerings. They confirmed me.