A Moment of Doubt (14 page)

Jim:
You know literature is literature. But I don't want to say that about my own work—that's up to someone else. It's not that I am not aware of what I am trying to do.
Sanctuary
, for example, always struck me as facile, and not a little sleazy. Excepting the matter of scale—recalling that, when asked about Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor quipped, “Who wants to be standing on the tracks when the Dixie Limited comes through?”—there's a case to be made for
Sanctuary
being Faulkner's moment of doubt. But literature is literature, wherever you find it.

Patrick:
I think that is true about other arts, like music. I don't care if its Richard Strauss or Little Richard, you know, what's good is good.

Gent:
I totally feel that way about writing. In fact I'm delighted when a book bounces around—

Jim:
—yeah—

Gent:
—genre-wise. I haven't read your new one—

Jim:
—
Windward Passage
.

Gent:
The piece that you read at the event the other night, I assumed was a hallucination.

Jim:
Actually not.

Gent:
It's not? It seemed like someone was really loaded.

Jim:
[Laughs] That's the prologue, and it's the only chapter like that. It begins that way but that character doesn't turn up again until much later in the book.

Patrick:
The prologue is insane, sci-fi, almost like a Vonnegut sci-fi. I never really considered Vonnegut to be science fiction. Did you? Do most people?

Jim:
No, he was fooling around with it. The early books like
The Sirens of Titan
. But then came
Slaughterhouse Five—
nobody thinks that's science fiction.

Patrick:
But it has time travel and other planets and—

Jim:
—Ice Nine and all that stuff. The name of the Grateful Dead's publishing company.

Patrick:
God Bless You Mister, Rosewater
.

Jim:
Yes, I read all those back in the sixties. Then I stopped reading him. When did I bail? I know Dan Simon had a huge hit with him.

Patrick:
A Man Without a Country
. Occasional pieces.

Jim:
He did some great stuff. Philip K. Dick, the same deal.

Patrick:
Crossing genres. Where do I shelve this?

Jim:
Under D. BTW, PK and I have the same publisher in Italy—I'm thrilled.

Patrick:
Who is that?

Jim:
Sergio Fanucci. Fanucci Editore. I'll show you some of their books. They want my entire list. Did I say I'm thrilled?

Patrick:
I think that I would call Philip K. Dick science fiction.

Jim:
Why not? But it's a narrow consideration. Philip K. Dick's entire list. Do you know how many fucking books that is? Fanucci also has an American writer named Joe Lansdale—do you know his works?

Patrick:
No.

Jim:
I don't either; but Dennis McMillan tells me that when Joe Lansdale is good, he's really good.

Jim goes to study and returns with some of his Italian editions.

Gent:
Man, this [
Iniezione letale]
has a weird cover.

Jim:
It is a weird cover, nobody gets it.

Gent:
Well, it's the [lethal injection] solution, cooking away.

Patrick:
Gent got it.

Jim:
Yeah, right. And this is
Dark Companion,
which they changed to
Cattive abitudini
, which means
Bad Habits
. Now, I ask you. And after talking to several people I retroactively understood that they did not get the astrophysical subtext of this novel. Which is too fuckin' bad. But it's a hit, so what can I do? “Jim,” my agent said, “enjoy the ride.” Are we not pro?

I take another of Jim's Italian editions and remove a strip of colored paper which encircles it.

Patrick:
What do think of bellybands on books?

Jim:
It's a fact of life in Europe. And actually, that's a quote from a
La Repubblica
article by a Strega prize winner. And who am I to complain? I was so mystified by the whole approach to the covers and then it's storming the country so I just go, “Fuck, you know what? Hey, it's their culture, they get it and I don't, moreover, they paid for the right to do what they want.” [Laughs] If I were an artist, I'd get really uptight. As it is . . . . But another point: if your metaphors are getting in the way of a good story, you're doing something wrong—so maybe I really do know what I'm doing!

Patrick:
I want to ask you another question about existentialism.

Jim:
Oh, yeah, we never finish with existentialism.

Patrick:
I'm curious about Jim Thompson, because he is the first author I read who was, I would say, terminal. There were characters with no redemption. There was absolute ruthlessness and the dead end—

Jim:
Every time I have this conversation, which isn't that often—

Patrick:
—which one? Which conversation?

Jim:
You know, redemptionless writing, dead end writing, the end of the world. Where do you put something like
Absalom, Absalom
?

Patrick:
That is interesting.

Jim:
Jack Hirschman, and I'm not sure if he was skirting the topic or not, said he thought
Absalom, Absalom
was the most literary novel of the twentieth century. François Guérif [Jim's French publisher] and I just say it's the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Bar none, we both love that book. To me, it has a lot of that stuffgoing on that you are talking about.

Patrick:
It does.

Jim:
But speaking as somebody from the South, I've never really gotten why anybody from somewhere else thinks they get Faulkner. [Laughs.] But the French really seem to get him. And Jim Thompson too, for that matter. And James Ellroy. François gets all those guys.

Patrick:
But what are these moments, existential, terminal or not, the burning family house, the corpse, what are these moments and how do we get there? We watched this movie, based on a book I never read,
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
—

Jim:
—George Higgins—I met him. I have his last book,
Rat on Fire
.

Patrick:
How is it?

Jim:
Not very good; he was having a big problem with that. But then, I don't think
Eddie Coyle
is that good. And boy, do I get an argument there. From the people who've read it, anyway, which is not that many people. But, on the whole, people I respect. Aforementioned Guérif, for example.

Patrick:
The film is.

Jim:
I have the book if you want to borrow it.

Patrick:
I don't need to read the book.

Jim:
Aha! [All laugh.]

Patrick:
What's interesting about the film is that where there was this thing that happened in screen writing where it was okay to have films with characters whose lives were just an absolute dead end.

Jim:
That was the fifties
, Gun Crazy
, the B movies, the shadows imprinted by the Bomb on the walls of the fifties.

Gent:
It came back, in the seventies version,

Jim:
Version of what?

Gent:
Of that despair, and the seventies version is actually real legit.
Shampoo
is another good example.

Jim:
Where people usually end that noir story, although it's not ending, is that Lee Marvin movie that ends on Alcatraz—

Gent:
Point Blank
.

Jim:
Yes. And it was color. And they dropped the conceptual ax at that, the pigeon found the little bit of mesh on the roof of its hole. But they can't bear to exclude that movie, so they include it in noir. But as usual with those definitions—noir…really the original thing was these two French guys—you guys published the book
¹
[Gent works at City Lights Books]—who noticed these films coming
over—the French film industry was destroyed by WWII and these movies were coming from Hollywood that were approved and maybe weren't doing so well here, blah blah blah, and they gave this amazing picture of American life and the despair behind the Bomb and everything.
Kiss Me Deadly
—there's another great movie that has nothing to do with the book—nothing, nothing, NOTHING! Mickey Spillane, man. NOTHING! Just the title. And it's an amazing movie. I mean, the answering machine alone—you remember the answering machine?

Gent:
Fantastic—way sci-fi.

Patrick:
Did you read
Nightmare Alley
? Book so much better than the movie—even with Joan Blondell.

Jim:
We could go on—to me one of the better books is
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. I love that book—and the end is so much better in the book, where he has been beheaded…

Patrick:
Hey, Faulkner worked on that film—

Jim:
You know who knows a lot about Traven, and is fascinated by him, is Barry Gifford. He wrote a big piece on him, and met his daughter who still lives in Mexico City, she showed him Traven's library, his typewriter . . . He wrote this really good piece that he's never been able to get published in Gringolandia—nobody's interested. He got it published in Spain and in Mexico, though. In Spain and Mexico, they remember the author of
The Treasure of The Sierra Madre
and, maybe more especially, the so-called Jungle books. There's another one called
The White Rose
, which I've never even seen, let alone read.
The Death Ship.

Patrick:
These things seem go in cycles.

Jim:
Traven's always been an outsider. First of all, he never wanted to be found. John Huston even thought the guy who appeared to pick up the check for the movie was a schill.

Patrick:
But he seems to resurge every so often. And the publishing revs up and then there's this great interest, and then he disappears again.

Jim:
Yeah, I remember, in the early seventies there was this whole edition of all these Traven books—

Gent:
Now there are these new editions of all these Huxley titles, all repackaged—a lot of chrome yellow— bright colors.

Jim:
Aside from the fact that one notes that Huxley has a couple of translations in the New Directions Anthology of
Fleurs du Mal
translations, 1955, you know, nobody's talked to me about
Brave New World
in a long time. In one of my books I postulated a sixties bookshelf in which the guy becomes nauseous reading the titles. [All laugh.] And you can name them. It's in
The Octopus On My Head
. And it turns out that the junkie who's collecting them up to sell at Moe's [Moe's Books in Berkeley] does so via his membership in a thing called the Sixties Book Club. Darrell Gray, the poet, used to do this. I remember he signed up for a book club and they sent him an OED as an introductory thing, the two-volume one with the slipcase and the little drawer with the magnifying glass, and he took it up to Moe's and flogged it like for fifty bucks. Then he moved. I shagged this story for my book, although, I finely stipulate, Darrell wasn't a junky, he was just impoverished.

Patrick:
Have you read Simenon?

Jim:
I've read quite a lot of Simenon. Let me tell you a story about Simenon. I'm in the south of France, in Frontignan, not too far from Sète and the Cimetière marin, where Paul Valéry is buried. So I'm in Frontignan for this festival and there are many stories—that's where I met George Higgins, for an exemplary coincidence. Anyway, there was a display there of Simenon artifacts, a glass display case about waist high. It had his typewriter. zIt had a manuscript open to page 75, with some little red marks, and then it had a calendar of something like May 1953. And the calendar had 9 or 10 days x'ed out in black and then 3 or 4 days blank and then 3 or 4 days x'ed out in red. And then it had the published book, which was open to the same page displayed in the typescript. So, the days x'ed out in black were the composition days, the blank days were devoted to post-compositional whoring and drinking, and the days x'ed in red were what it took to edit the thing. Done.