William Gay: Time Done Been Won't Be No More

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.