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

JMW Well shit, once you’ve read Outer Dark, the horrific parts of The Road aren’t any more horrific than Outer Dark.

WG It doesn’t get more gothic than Outer Dark. When I did that thing up in Lebanon somebody asked me what I thought was the darkest gothic novel and I didn’t even have to think and I said Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy and that guy said, “You ever read a book called Twilight?” He thought Twilight was a darker gothic novel than anything he had read. Chris won’t even read that book Twilight. He read it a long time ago and he said he probably won’t ever read it again. Too bleak and too dark for him.

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.