Time Done Been Won't Be No More (24 page)

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.)

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTE: The “Bibliography” does not include all his shorter reviews, liner notes or other miscellaneous prose. Everything in the book, except for the excerpt from
Lost Country
and the “Interview”, has been previously published. The “Bibliography” indicates the first publication of each of the other pieces included in this book.

NOVELS

The Long Home
, MacMurray and Beck, Denver, CO, 1999

The Long Home
, Faber and Faber, London, England, 1999

Provinces of Night
, Doubleday, New York, NY, 2000

Provinces of Night
, Faber and Faber, London, England, 2000

Provinzen der Nacht
, Argon Verlag GmbH, Berlin, Germany, 2001

Twilight
, MacAdam/Cage, San Francisco, CA, 2006

Twilight
, Faber and Faber, London, England, 2007

Lost Country
, Forthcoming

NOVELLAS

The Paperhanger, the Doctor's Wife and the Child Who Went into the Abstract
, The Book Source, Hohenwald, TN, 1999

Come Home, Come Home, It's Suppertime
, The Book Source, Hohenwald, TN, 2000

SHORT STORY–COLLECTIONS

I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down
, The Free Press, New York, NY, 2002

Wittgenstein's Lolita and The Iceman
, Wild Dog Press, Brush Creek, TN, 2006

SHORT STORY–PUBLICATIONS

‘Those Deep Elm Brown's Ferry Blues”
Missouri Review
, (Fall l998)

“I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down”
Georgia Review
, (Fall 1998)

“Closure and Roadkill on the Life's Highway”
Atlantic Monthly
, (November l999)

“The Paperhanger”
Harpers
, (February 2000)

“A Death in the Woods”
GQ
, (November 2000)

“My Hand is Just Fine Where it is”
Oxford American
, (September October l999)

“The Crimper”
Harpers
, (October 2000)

“Good Til Now”
Oxford American
, (January February 2001)

“Charting the Territories of the Red”
Southern Review
(Spring 2001)

“Wreck on the Highway”
Chattahoochee Review
, (2005)

“Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?”
Tin House
, (2007)

ARTICLES

“Sweet Songs Never Last Too Long”
Oxford American
, Music Issue, (July August l999)

“Queen of the Haunted Dell”
Oxford American
(October 2000)

“Sitting on Top of the World”
Oxford American
Music Issue (2000)

“Time Done Been Wont Be No More”
Oxford American
, (July/August Music Issue, 2001)

“Crossroads Blues”
Oxford American
(2002, website only)

“Blind Willie McTell”
Oxford American
, (Summer, 2005)

“Calves Howling at the Moon”
Oxford American
, (Fall, 2005)

“The Man in the Attic: A Memoir”
Paste
, (June/July, 2006)

“The Banjo Man”
Oxford American
, Music Issue, (Summer, 2006)

ANTHOLOGIES

New Stories from The South, The Year's Best
, Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 1998

New Stories from The South, The Year's Best
, Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 1999

New Stories from The South, The Year's Best
, Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 2000

Best New American Voices
, Edited by Tobias Wolff, 2000

New Stories from The South, The Year's Best
, Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 2001

O' Henry Prize Stories
, Edited by Larry Dark, 2001

Best Mystery Stories
, Edited by Lawrence Block, 2001

Best Music Writing
, Edited by Nick Hornby, 2001

New Stories from The South: The Year's Best
, Edited by Shannon Ravenel, 2002

Stories From the Blue Moon Café
, Edited by Sonny Brewer, 2002

Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe II
, Edited by Sonny Brewer, 2003

They Write Among Us
, Edited by Jim Dees, 2003