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

JMW So when he published Suttree, it was a breakthrough, although it was not totally distinct from the earlier books but was more like a culmination. Then there was Blood Meridian and it was like he was at some incredible peak; and then came All the Pretty Horses, So what did you think when you read All the Pretty Horses?

WG I remember the day I bought that book. I was working and on payday we would go to Columbia and buy groceries and there was a bookstore that I always went to, it isn’t even there any more. So I went in the bookstore and they had a whole rack of All the Pretty Horses and I bought All the Pretty Horses and a copy of Entertainment Weekly and then when I got home I opened the Entertainment Weekly to the book review section and it was the lead review. I thought that was a nice coincidence. They gave it a rave review. I read the book, it was beautiful writing but it wasn’t exactly like what I was used to.

But that was how I ended up meeting Tom Franklin, McCarthy’s editor was up at Sewanee and you could ask him questions. You had to get in this line and there were a bunch of people in his line. I got to talking with the guy in front of me, and he asked what I was going to ask him, and I said I was going to ask if they had taken that manuscript away from Cormac and edited it really heavily because I thought that book was edited differently from his other ones. And Franklin said that was the damnest thing because that was what he was going to ask him too. Of course it turned out to be Tom Franklin and we had both read all the other McCarthy stuff and we were both a little confused by All the Pretty Horses. It was more like an adventure story it seemed to me, not quite like a young adult novel but definitely not Blood Meridian. Blood Meridian was the one before it and there was like a vast difference between Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses. When my brother read Blood Meridian, he read it right when I did and he called me when he finished the book and he said, “The son of a bitch is finally crazy, he’ll never write another decent book”. And then the next one was totally straightforward.

JMW The first one I read was The Crossing. I came to Cormac really late, and I thought it was pretty good and there was one passage in the front of it where the Indian is sitting by the water with a gun hoping some game would come by and the kid comes up on him and all at once the language was transformed and it glittered and shimmered. I felt like this guy has really got something here but then he didn’t follow through like that anywhere in the rest of the book, you know with that literary style, but I enjoyed it and I wanted to read more. Then after I met you, you said I should read Suttree and when I read that I said now he is doing what he was doing in that one passage all the way through the book, page after page and it was one of the most exciting things I had ever gotten my hands on.

WG That is probably my favorite novel and I have a lot of favorite novels. That is the one. I read a thing by Madison Smartt Bell, it was an essay about McCarthy, although at that time nobody really knew anything about McCarthy. He said there was a long period when he kept Suttree on his nightstand and would read from it; he knew it by heart but he would read himself to sleep with Suttree and I can fully understand that. Then one day my agent called me and asked, “Have you ever heard of Madison Smartt Bell?” and I said, “Yeah, I know who he is” and she said, “He is reviewing your book for the Washington Post ”. and I said, “Oh hell, I’m going to get it from this guy.” and she said, “Why?” and I said he is one of the cult McCarthy freaks and is really into him and then sure enough the title of the review was “All the Pretty Phrases” but it wasn’t a total knock, he had some nice things to say. He said I wrote about women a lot better than McCarthy did. I think that is probably true; I don’t think he writes about women well at all.

JMW When you turned me on to The Hamlet by Faulkner and I read it, I felt like when Cormac read The Hamlet that something clicked in Cormac’s brain. When I read Suttree and Blood Meridian and the other early books I thought this was a huge breakthrough, like this is something that is unique in literature; but then when I read The Hamlet there it was, the whole deal, the whole phraseology, the whole tale untold kind of dynamics that Cormac played so brilliantly was all right there. Then I started feeling like Cormac just took his material and poured it into that mold, into that stylistic device and was able to do it and was able to make it happen that way.

WG I saw a thing in Esquire magazine back about 2000 or 2001and there was this list and one of them was writers who borrow most from other writers or is most indebted from other writers and it said Cormac McCarthy. So apparently a lot of people know that he is sort of indebted to Flannery O’ Connor. But he and Faulkner owe a lot to James Joyce. I didn’t have anything by James Joyce except Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and I was out to the library and, you know those Library of America books, those nice black books, they had Joyce out there and I checked it out and reread Ulysses. I had read it when I was a kid but I hadn’t read it in a long time and I was surprised how much it read like Faulkner and McCarthy. You remember that book used to be forbidden in the United States. I remember I was still in school when there was a lawsuit about Lady Chatterly’s Lover. I guess Grove Press, not the Grove Press of today but the original Grove Press, went to court over that D. H. Lawrence book and then every boy in school got a copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover and they were passing it back and forth.

JMW Lawrence has that stylistic beauty but not to the degree of Faulkner.

WG I don’t know that much about D. H. Lawrence. I read that book and I read Sons and Lovers but I don’t know a lot about him; I never really got as interested in him as I did some of those other people, Faulkner in particular. Faulkner saw James Joyce one time; he was in Paris and James Joyce came in with his wife and daughter and Faulkner wanted so bad to go over and talk to him but he was too timid and he wouldn’t approach him. Faulkner was about twenty-five, he was doing the expatriate in Paris thing, he had grown a beard. It must have been around 1923 or 1924.

JMW That was a great time to be in Paris.

WG I guess so, there was so many of those people kind of gathered there. The best book, to me, that Hemingway wrote was that memoir, A Moveable Feast. That is a really good book.

JMW I don’t get all the excitement about Hemingway.

WG Hemingway annoys me in the same way, I mean he doesn’t always annoy me, but some of that macho stuff and the way the language is so stylized. I mean everybody stylizes a little, but he really goes overboard with the little short sentences, like describing somebody opening a bottle of wine and tasting it or something like that. It is like posturing to me. That is probably the reason I don’t like No Country for Old Men as well; I think there is a lot of that macho posturing, all that stuff about boots and guns. There is too much of that stuff for me. It all comes to nothing because the guy gets killed anyway.

JMW But now we have The Road; what do you say about The Road?

WG I knew when I read The Road it was going to win the Pulitzer Prize, I actually did. I called Tommy and told him that. The writing is gorgeous, nobody else can write like that.

JMW That’s not quite true. There’s one guy around who can.

WG The end of it has that little uplifting thing. I knew the awards people were really going to go for that and they did. That carrying the light thing and those people showing up when the kid needs them. That book didn’t bother me the way it bothered a lot of people. It bothered Chris really bad, it messed him up for a couple of weeks. It messed up Franklin for a while, it depressed him. It made him think too much he said. I think the reason is that Chris has a little boy and Franklin has two young kids. I think that might have something to do with it. But you have Coby and you weren’t that bothered by it.