Barry Gifford
Author
of Wild
at Heart talks with Robert Birnbaum
Author [poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, editor, memoirist,
biographer, critic, songwriter, and playwright] Barry Gifford was
born in Chicago in 1946. He very briefly attended the University
of Missouri on a baseball scholarship and also briefly attended
Cambridge University. He published a book of poems, Coyote Tantras,
in 1973 and co-authored Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack
Kerouac.
Gifford continued his collaboration with Lawrence Lee with William
Saroyan's life story, Saroyan: A Biography (1984). He began
writing novels in 1980, Landscape with a Traveler (1980),
Port Tropique (1980), Wild At Heart (1984), Sailor's
Holiday (1997), Perdita Durango and Wyoming.
In 2000, he published his collected short stories, American
Falls. This spring Dan Simon's Seven Stories Press published
The Rooster in the Reptile Room: A Barry Gifford Reader.
Gifford's books have been translated into twenty-three languages.
Affirming the banality that movies have more consumers than books,
it was David Lynch's Palme d' Or [that's from the Cannes Film Festival]
winning adaptation of Wild At Heart that has pushed Gifford
beyond cult status. He has continued his collaborations with Lynch
on Lost Highway and a HBO series, Hotel Room.
I would count it sufficient for Gifford's street cred to say he
has won numerous awards and contributed to countless periodicals.
He also co-founded and edited the influential crime story-publishing
imprint, Black Lizard. Barry Gifford calls the San Francisco Bay
area his home.
The Rooster in the Reptile Room is a nearly five-hundred-page
compendium of selections from cross section of Barry Gifford's writing.
It features an introduction by Andrei
Codrescu that concludes:
Barry Gifford is both a cult writer and a great one. In Europe,
where his cult and his prose are not in conflict, he is read as
an American original who meets his reader's expectations of America's
violent pioneering spirit. Eventually, he will be read the same
way here. Critics will have no choice but to abandon their terror
of fertility and genre crossing and read his work for the purposes
of delight, just like real readers do.
Robert Birnbaum: Do you have any thoughts on how
long you intend to live? This reader is a kind of mid-career retrospective.
Barry Gifford: Someone made the comment that this
was a really a milestone having a portable Barry Gifford reader.
I said it was really a milestone or a headstone. I would hope the
former rather than the latter.
RB: [laughs] Sure.
BG: My family, the Colbys, my mother's side of the family, at my
daughter's wedding—my uncle was there, he is ninety-two. He
was there with his thirty-year-old companion, dancing up a storm.
My mother is just turning seventy-nine with two knee replacements
and had a broken leg, and cancer and everything else. She was having
a ball and looks great. So the Colbys and many people on that side
of the family lived into their nineties and hundreds.
RB: Are you counting on those genes?
BG: It's a question. I made it this far. And even my grandfather
on my father's side made it to ninety. I could be hit by a laundry
truck like Roland Barthes, so you never know. I'm optimistic.
RB: I was looking at your productivity and inferred that you must
not have had any addictions or terrible things happen in your life—you
have been quite prolific. Movies, books, poetry, chap books. What
haven't you done?
BG: I started writing, really, when I was eleven. And since that
time I pretty much always knew what I wanted to do. It was either
that or be a baseball player, right? So I played baseball as long
as I could—I was a musician but that was an avocation—it
wasn't really until I was in my 30s that I realized that I was really
fortunate, in the sense that I had, even if I were deluded, known
what I wanted to do. I was a writer. I grew up in a particular way
that I had a great university for a writer, sitting around talking
to people in hotel lobbies and being around my father's friends
and this and that. And having to keep my mouth shut and listen to
the way people spoke. So I was fascinated by language. But the thing
is that I didn't know that not everybody knew what they wanted to
do and had a role in life, until I was in my early 30s. I was often
impatient with people who seemed to be dithering around and not
knowing what direction to take. Then I realized I was a lucky guy.
And I was even luckier in the sense that I had some chops, as it
turned out. More or less is relative. At least I have been able
to do it and support a family by doing it, and I still have a lot
that I feel I have left to say.
RB: I hope this is the only reference to our joint high school
careers, but you mention being engaged by your interactions with
adults. I am trying to remember if you were at all connected to
your high school life. Were you?
I started writing,
really, when I was eleven. And since that time I pretty much
always knew what I wanted to do. It was either that or be
a baseball player, right. |
BG: Only as a baseball player. Certainly, somewhat
socially, like all of us. But I always had a private life. And it
was really sports that in school, in general, kept me sane. And
so that’s what kept me interested. But I didn't like school
and it didn't like me. You were a lot like me. Not that I felt so
much like an outsider, it was just that I had my own agenda and
that's what happened to me going to university. Because I didn't
last very long. I had a very brief career.
RB: Why did you go to Missouri?
BG: To play baseball. But what a terrible place to go to, Columbia,
Missouri, in 1964, little Dixie there. But I had grown up in the
South too. I had that split life, don't forget. Which a lot of people
didn't realize. I had Chicago, but I had also grown up in the Deep
South. I would always go back there. So I had this double life.
And that was all right. I compartmentalized things. But I didn't
want to be in school. I was impatient to do what I was already doing.
So then I went to work as a merchant seaman to make money. I was
a musician. I went back to school very briefly in '66, one term
at Cambridge, at King's College. But they didn't want me. They were
about to throw me out because I couldn't make my gate requirement.
You had to be there sixty days or whatever it was. And that was
that one brief term. I didn't have time for school and that was
the end.
RB: Do writing programs contact you? Are you invited to seminars
and things like that?
BG: I have been but I really don't do those things. I know it's
an industry now—like film programs and all that sort of thing.
I even had a problem going to my kid's preschool.
RB: [laughs] Why is that?
BG: I just felt like I was walking into a prison. I really felt
it was this institution and I was telling my publisher Dan Simon,
today. One time I remember, I was at Clinton Public School and I
was talking in line before recess one day. It was second grade or
something. So the teacher said to me, "Barry, you stay here"
as a reprimand and probably was going to come back to me and tell
me not to talk in line and then let me go out and play. So all the
other kids went out to play, and I was humiliated, standing alone
in the classroom as everyone else went out. As soon as they went
out and down the stairs one way I went out of the room and down
the stairs and walked home. It was ten o' clock in the morning.
About forty-five minutes later my mother, who was home, asked me
why I was home. I said, "Oh they let us out early today."
RB: [laughs] And so begins your career in fiction.
BG: I was probably well along by then. And then I went about my
business. So then the phone rings. She gets a call. It’s the
school saying, "Gee we don't know what happened to Barry. He
disappeared." She said, "Oh, he's right here." And
then she got the picture. And she never really questioned me and
I didn't go back that day. But when I went back the next day, the
teacher treated me a little differently. I wasn't going to be shown
up by her. I had my own personality and my own agenda and I felt—I
guess kids now would say—disrespected. And I wasn't going
to take that from anybody.
RB: I loved the anecdote you relate about your visit to the Cohiba
factory in Cuba and the reader [it is an acclaimed legend of the
cigar industry in Cuba that the workers hire someone to read to
them as they roll the cigars] there knows your work and you happen
to have a copy of your book Wild at Heart.
BG: I had a copy in Spanish because it is my habit when I travel
to whatever country I am going to try to take along a copy of my
book in that a language as a kind of a second passport. And that
has really proved valuable. What really happened was I said I was
a writer and all of that and she asked what I might have written
that she could have read. I said the most popular was Corazon
de Vajhe. She broke into this big grin and embraced me. A kind
of little miracle. I thought that maybe she knew the movie. She
didn't say. But no, the books get around. It was popular in Mexico
and Perdita Durango was enormously popular and so what
you find out being a writer and being published in other languages
is that there really is a global readership as well as a global
economy and some of us do much better in foreign countries than
we do in our own. And that's okay.
RB: Is that true for you?
BG: It has been. France especially, Spain, Italy, even Japan. Often
I have done better than here. I just signed a contract for Wild
at Heart in Russian Before; they just used to steal the books.
Now you have to sign contracts.
RB: So they can steal the books.
BG: My agent told me that this was our twenty-third language. Not
for all the books but for various among them. It's a kick. It’s
like William Saroyan told me years and years ago. He said, "I
go to Armenia every year. [It was Soviet Armenia then.] There I
am a multi multi millionaire. Though I can't spend the rubles outside
of the Soviet Union. I buy everything for everyone in the town."
So he was a god there. It's kind of a nice feeling, and I learned
this early in my twenties. I could go into a publisher wherever
I was, in Denmark, it didn't matter where I was, Spain, and they
would treat me well. I could use the restroom. They would buy me
lunch. Find me a good hotel; advance me twenty bucks if I was broke.
And so I had a home in all of these places. And then I began seeing
that in fact there was an entirely different take on what I was
doing in other countries. And it began in France, I have to say.
That was the first place that really, I saw that kind of acceptance
or understanding of what I was about.
RB: Well, people like to joke about the French, especially the
Jerry Lewis and Mickey Rourke jokes, but someone like Paul Auster
is well regarded there. Edmund White too.
BG: Paul is the most popular American writer in France, by far.
Paul lived in Paris for eight years. He was fluent from early on
in France. He does French translations. I have been a friend with
Paul for over thirty years. His sensibility was formed, in a way,
by the French writers. Without going too deeply into that, he appealed
to them. They understood him. And it worked. So in different places—it
started in France but then in Spain and Mexico and Latin American
countries— all of a sudden my books became very popular. I
did a reading in Mexico City at the Opera House, and four hundred
and fifty people stormed the stage. I said, "What is this,
I'm not Madonna?" It's because of the popularity of a couple
of the books and the film of Perdita Durango, which was
big deal there. So you don't have a control over this. You just
send those things out like ship out at sea and wherever they land…
RB: It's not that you are invisible, but you are not connected
to the Newyorcentric publishing business. If you lived in New York
what would your stock in that world be? I am thinking of a host
of fine writers. Tom McGuane comes to mind…
BG: Tom was more a part of…I know Tom slightly. I've been
good friends with Jim Harrison for years and various others in that
bunch.
 RB:
Right, you had a book published by the [now defunct] Clark City
Press.
BG: Yeah that little press, Russ Chathams' press. He's a great
guy. So the Montana group. Tom was more a part of that, early on.
He spent more time in NY and certainly in LA. He was a director
and wrote screenplays. He didn't turn his back on it, necessarily.
He's had some ups and downs in his career and it’s been a
long and mostly healthy one. But he's a private man.
RB: What about you?
BG: Since I was 18, I have basically spent half of my life in Europe.
I just never liked to play anybody else's game, I guess. I never
lived in New York. I never lived in LA either—as far as the
movie business is concerned. I was surprised at some point to see
myself written about as a kind of outlaw, in the literary world.
In that I am slightly exotic. They didn't know what to make of me.
I am not part of any group. I come into New York. I don't read at
the 92nd St Y. I read at the KGB bar. I'll go to Mexico City and
read in the Opera House. Actually, I have lived in Rome four out
of the last five years. And read in the most distinguished venue
there. In Madrid, in theaters, London in theaters. It's kind of
amazing. But here, it's sort of less so. But I don't play the academic
game. I find that in this country, it's really people sort of trading
off, in a way. You hire me, I'll hire you. That sort of thing. In
any case, I am not very academically connected. A few years ago
the Film Studies program at the University of California at Berkeley
had been after me to come in and teach there for a while. I kept
saying, "No, no, I don't teach." I have this peculiar
aversion to schools. The buildings, maybe. I don't know. But finally
Tony Case, who is head of the department there, prevailed upon me
and said, "Look, we'll make you a professor. You can be an
adjunct professor and we'll pay you so much money." I said,
"That's not enough. I can't stick around for thirteen weeks
to do this sort of thing." But finally he kept raising the
ante. And so he tripled the ante and I was being the most terrible
prima donna because I really didn't want to do it but I didn't want
to insult him. I was very flattered. I have to admit I was flattered.
I said, "Okay Tony that sounds good. But one more thing."
He said, "What's that?" "I need a parking place next
to the building."
RB: [both laugh]
BG: He said, "That's the deal breaker. People have taught
here for thirty years and they haven't gotten a parking place…"
I said, "Well, sorry but thanks a lot." The next day he
called me back and said, "All right, we got you a parking place."
You know how that is, when you play hard to get. Anyway, I did it
for one semester. I had a lot of fun. It was a graduate seminar.
The kids were so filled up with theory that they wanted shoptalk.
So I would bring people in—directors and writers who really
worked in the industry. It was great fun, but then I retired. I
gave everybody an 'A' at the beginning, at the first class. The
first thing they said to me before I went in there was, "Now
the one thing we don't want you to say is, 'Drop out and just go
write.' because after all this is a business and we need the money
and we like them to go on to graduate school, UCLA or wherever.”
So the first thing, I went into class and said, "They just
told me that the one thing they didn't want me to say was, 'Drop
out and write.'" So it kind of progressed in that way. I am
gratified that a couple of people in the class have gone on to begin
good careers—not due solely to me… one of them has directed
his first feature. But I retired. I said, "No that's it. Thank
you," and I left. I was flattered. After all, I am nowhere
near a college degree and then based on my work, I was accorded
this. I considered it an honor and made sure they knew that and
I appreciated it. But I'm too restless for that kind of thing. It
would have been nice to have a good health plan. [chuckles]
RB: Do you have a home?
BG: I sort of do. I have kept a base in San Francisco for thirty
something years. I have a writing studio and loft that I have kept
for all these years. It used to house a printing shop; no longer.
I liked it because it was very Balzacian in the sense that I could
hear those commercial printing presses going. And there are nothing
but artists in these lofts. And I was the only writer. I always
identified more with the visual artists than with writers. In fact,
I am not friends with very many writers. I never cultivated those
friendships. Maybe that's why I am a bit dutres when it
comes to the academic or more established world, if you want to
call it that. I have always kept that, and I have a house there.
And so I have always gone back. And my children live there, most
of them. So that's been home for a long time.
RB: It would seem that putting together this collection of your
writings would cause you to think about your career. Having done
so what are you looking forward to? I know you wrote an opera.
BG: I wrote an opera that is going to be staged at the Bolshoi
in a couple of years. It's being completed by Ichiro Nodiara. It
was written at the behest and with Toru Takemitsu who was a wonderful
man who passed a way a few years ago. And organized by Kent Nagano
and then the Opera de Lyon. Now it's a part of the Russian National
Orchestra productions. It's funny because Takemitsu liked my poetry.
He himself was a poet and somehow knew my books and filmwork and
I got a call one day. I was watching my youngest son play baseball
in San Diego. And I got a call asking if I would fly to Vienna to
meet with Takemitsu and Seiji Ozawa and Daniel Schmid, the Swiss
director and Nagano and Jean Pierre Brossman from Paris. And I said,
"About what?" But it was great experience, actually. It
was really wonderful to work with Takemistu. We worked in Tokyo
and San Francisco and Vienna. What a great man. He did ninety film
scores, many for Kurosawa. He was really one of the kindest, smartest
terrific guys…but anyway. He passed away so Nodaira who had
recorded all of his piano music is writing the music. So I wrote
the libretto. Not knowing much about opera except I like listening
to the music.
RB: Is there a narrative form that you haven't attempted? Or are
uncomfortable with?
BG: I am in a kind of happy position that I have various forms
available to me now. I try to keep things interesting for myself.
It took me a while to get to the novel. I started by writing songs
and writing poetry. Then I got to the novels and wrote novels for
ten years. I have written some memoir essays and various journalism
and non-fiction over the years. And then David Lynch asked me to
write for the series that we did, Hotel Room, for HBO—which
is a great lost directorial work of David's. You do it for TV and
it's gone…
RB: 'Gone' meaning?
BG: Who sees it? But it's wonderful work. I stated writing plays
for that and then I went on and did a full-length play an adaptation
of my novel Wyoming that they did at the Magic Theater
in San Francisco. So that was added to the repertoire. All these
forms are available and I like trying them out. Some I am probably
better at than others, but they entertain me. That's the best thing
I can say. I came late, in a way, to the short story. I would write
short stories in the form of vignettes that would be included in
the novels. But then I started writing short stories just for their
own sake. Now I am working in a shorter form. Novellas and short
stories.
RB: What's a novella?
I always identified
more with the visual artists than with writers. In fact, I
am not friends with very many writers. I never cultivated
those friendships. |
BG: It's just an easy reference for something
that is in between a short story and a novel. But it does have beginning,
a middle and an end. There are three acts, more or less. But there
are no rules in this. I think they are just labels and they sell
something. I'll tell you something; my feeling is, in a strange
way we are at the end of the literary era. If you go back to the
Han era in Japan, it's been a thousand-year run since Lady Murasaki
and Sei Sinagun and the Pillow Book and The Tale of Genji to now.
Or if you use the European model, it's been about four hundred years.
I thought before we were through I wanted to try [chuckles] all
of these different avenues. And that's what I am doing.
RB: And why do you think the end is near?
BG: Television.
RB: It seems that television is getting more literary and story
driven.
BG: I hope you are right.
RB: The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and now The Wire.
I spoke with George
Pelecanos and he thinks a lot of what they are doing on The
Wire….
BG: But George is a category writer. He's not really a literary
writer. Not that he's not a good writer, but he is working is a
prescribed form. I'm sure he would even say that. And that's fine.
I have great admiration for people who do something well regardless
of what form they are working in. I have great respect for those
guys having edited Black Lizard books for years. I admire great
writer like Jim Thompson and Charles Wileford. One interesting thing
about France is that they don't make mystery writers or crime-fiction
writers second-class citizens in terms of literature. I think that's
right. Why would you think of doing that to Raymond Chandler, for
example?
RB: Why do we do it here?
BG: You got me, I don't know.
RB: [laughs]
BG: You're the critic. I'm not; you're the analyst. [both laugh]
RB: Don't blame me.
BG: I'm not blaming you.
RB: I'm a fan. I'm not a critic.
BG: That's the best thing to be, in a way. To be an informed aficionado.
Which I am, too. I think all of us are who love literature, which
are just interested in stories. People's stories and from the beginning
I was always interested in language. Because early on. I was raised
moistly in hotels, often in the company of my father and his friends,
and my dad was a racketeer based in Chicago but traveled all over—Miami,
Havana, New York, New Orleans. And so I listened to the way people
spoke. All the dialects, especially in those days. In The Rooster
Trapped in the Reptile Room I talk about my affection for Mencken's
The American Language.
RB: In the Q & A you did with Tom McCarthy.
BG: I want to mention that specifically because Mencken's book
was great. He was recording all those dialects. Everybody coming
from Ellis Island and all of that. By listening to the way these
different people spoke, it was fascinating. It was like doing a
kind of translation. In a way I am still doing it. You know.
RB: Tell me about the book you did called Bordertown.
Is there a movie version?
BG: There was a documentary done on me by the French for Arte called
Bordertown: A journey with Barry Gifford. That was inspired
by the book. Chronicle Books in San Francisco, which was doing really
lovely visual books, an editor there approached me one day and said,
"I'd love to do a book with you of your own choosing. Where
would you like to go and what would you like to do? Perhaps we can
do it." So I found the time and chose this photographer, David
Perry, who is one of the great black-and-white photographers since
Robert Frank. So we decided to travel along the US-Mexico border.
I would write the text and he would take the photos. I was familiar
with the territory. I had written about it in the novels and had
spent a considerable amount of time there. So that's what we did.
The result was the book Bordertown that was pretty controversial
at the time. It won some awards and it's being reprinted. We have
done a second one a sequel called Las Quartos Reinas [Four
Queens], which was just published this last year in a very limited
edition…
RB: Four Queens?
BG: It was the name of a bar in Tijuana. It's in a little different
form than Bordertown.
RB: Bordertown was done in a kind of fragmentary collagistic
diaristic way.
 BG:
It included a lot of things from my drawings to poems. And there
are short stories. It's a trip book. What I really wanted them to
do…there is whatever I was writing clippings from newspapers
and magazines, collages all of that. Some of that obfuscating and
obscuring the photographs themselves. It was meant to be like that,
like a scrapbook. And it was over a period of several weeks that
we did this. But we had more material. We decided to do a second
book in a different way. Four Queens was published for $1500 a copy
by a gallery, Gallery 16, in an exquisite edition. There are probably
twenty-four copies or whatever they did. Now it's coming out in
a commercial edition. What I do in this book is write descriptions
or responses to David's photographs. The font is in my handwriting.
It's a beautiful book, you'll see.
RB: Is there a literature of the border?
BG: Absolutely there is. A number of people who write books just
concerned with that border area, as I wrote in Bordertown.
It's really kind of like an island, its own country, fifty miles
either side, things are different there than they are in the rest
of Mexico or certainly than in the rest of the United States. I
was always interested in people who live life on the edge or in
isolated circumstances, who aren't parts of the mainstream for whatever
reason. I don't know that I identified with those people more but
there is something else going on. There is a movement that you don't
find in more complacent communities, let's say. And there's more
action, some of it violent, that takes place in that kind of territory.
So it was fascinating to me and I was happy to be able to do it.
RB: Let's see, you feel somewhat liberated and also you feel that
is the end of the literary era…
BG: I just think the market has shrunk. This can be statistically
born out. I don't think people read—there are certainly exceptions.
We are still alive and we still read. But I don't think it is the
same. I think television and now the computer has changed things.
I don't know exactly how. But I am going to go on. As a writer who
has passed away sometime ago, Douglas Wolf, once said, "Even
if there were only one reader out there, I would still be writing
for him or her." I feel the same way. Making a living is another
matter. I have been fortunate enough for some years to make a living
by my writing and writing pretty much what I want to. Even with
films I only work in the movies with projects that I think will
be special. Or with directors that have a vision that is exceptional.
In that way, I have been pretty lucky.
RB: I don't need hard numbers. Are your books selling more or less
now?
BG: Depends where you are talking about.
RB: In the US.
BG: Some sell more than others do. That's really how I can answer
that.
RB: I'm trying to get a sense…
BG: A book like Wild at Heart, which was helped by the
movie, has never stopped selling.
RB: How many of your books are in print in the United States?
BG: I couldn't tell you. But a lot, still.
RB: I am trying to get a sense of your personal experience with
the decline of the literary market.
BG: Let's say this, the mid-list writer, the mid list has shrunk.
And you can talk to any publisher and they will tell you that. The
expectations are pretty high.
RB: I see more short story collections being published, which are
traditionally not profitable.
BG: Maybe that has to do with shorter attention spans in general.
RB: Even so, there is a profit motive involved, why are they being
published?
BG: You'll have to ask the publishers. I really can't answer the
question. That's fine. Good writing is good writing in whatever
form you find it. And so that's great. It didn't hurt Chekov any.
RB: That was before TV. [both laugh]
BG: A different era certainly. I'm all for it. That's fine with
me. Maybe that's what the writing programs are turning out, short
story writers. I don't know.
RB: The programs are turning out short story readers.
BG: That's good. I always said that. When people have asked me
what do I think of all these creative writing programs or whatever.
I'd say, "I don't think you can really teach anyone to write."
They are either a writer or they are not. But what it can do is
engender reading, reading of more interesting and difficult material.
So it can engender a greater appreciation of what some people are
doing. Also, that's okay. I have no complaints about it. As long
as I don't have to do it.
RB: In your response you reminded me of two ongoing issues. One
is the exceedingly deep resentment that there is of writing programs.
And then the second one is the deep resentment toward certain writers
that represent that they can't understand. The names that come up
are Salman Rusdie, Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo. These people are
regularly slammed.
I'll tell you something,
my feeling is, in a strange way we are at the end of the literary
era. |
BG: Let me tell you. One thing I love about writing,
serious work, painting. [long pause] This is all subjective. It's
not a competitive sport. I was an athlete—you know that—I
mean the thing is, in a game is to score more points than the other
guy, the other team. This is not that away. I prefer to think of
it as entirely subjective. “Comparisons are odious”
as Gary Snyder once famously said to Jack Kerouac when discussing
Buddhism. And I really embrace that philosophy. I am just loathe
to say…look if you like Salman Rushdie's books, god bless
you. If I do or I don't it doesn't matter. There are plenty of writers
out there. There is a lot to choose from. Certainly you will find
writers that you prefer or that speak to you. More than others.
Dan Simon [my publisher] has really done his best to revive Nelson
Algren. It's one reason I admire him as a publisher. I loved Algren.
Nowadays he is not well read. But thanks to Dan the books are available.
It's a shame when good writers fall by the wayside.
RB: It's okay that people are passionate about writers, and you
are correct, it's not a competition, but I am mystified at the vilification
that takes place.
BG: So don't pay any attention to it. Jack Spicer, an early influence
on me, a poet who died in San Francisco in 1965 in one of his poems
was addressed to William Shakespeare. He said, "This is the
way we dead men write to one another."
RB: I like Will Self's observation in another context [about literary
prizes], "How do you win in fiction?"
BG: Well, this is another matter. The funniest thing that ever
happened to me with that was that is I got a call one day that I
had won this prize in Italy, the Premio Brancati named after Victorio
Brancati and it was a prize established by Alberto Moravia and Pier
Paolo Pasolini. So they wanted to fly me to this little town in
Sicily where Brancati was from. The prize was five thousand dollars.
And the other two honorees that year were Paul Bowles and Ceri Hulme,
a New Zealand writer. This was in the early '90s sometime. And so
I said that's great. In any case I fly from SF to NY and I get to
NY and there's a blizzard and they close JFK. And I can't fly out.
I only have another sixteen hours to get to this place and somebody
was waiting for me at the airport in Rome and all this kind of thing.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I didn't get there. So they
said we will do it by telephone. We will make the presentation by
telephone. So my editor from Bompiani was there. She came from Milan
to this town. Everybody was there and they called me and the first
question was "Why aren't you here?" “Because there
is a snow storm and I can't get out of New York.” So I thanked
them for the honor and what not. So Elisabetta Scarbi my editor
got on the phone and said, "I will accept the prize for you."
Which I was assuming that she had done. That was the end of that.
I didn't hear anything and finally I wrote to her. I said, "What
about the five thousand dollars?" It turns out the Sicilians
just grabbed it. They said, "He wasn't here. One of the rules
was he had to be here."—which they made up on the spot,
was that the recipient of the prize had to be present to receive
the monies. So my only prize in Italy, I never got the money, but
they still list me as a prizewinner.
RB: Can't you go collect?
BG: I was living in Italy for four years, but you don't mess around
with those people, in Sicily. [laughs]
RB: What are you looking forward to?
BG: Somebody asked that question recently, they asked me, what
my best book was? I said the next one. But I am, not exactly sure
what the next one is, really. I just finished a new book. So I guess
that's why. The book is Do the Blind Dream? It comes out
next year. I sort of like not knowing. I really go back and forth
between film projects and fiction.
RB: When you are where you are and beginning something, is one
of the early thoughts what the form is? What is your starting point?
BG: The story itself dictates the form. You asked earlier about
writing in all these different forms. And some times it comes now
in the form of a short story. Or it takes longer and I call it a
novella or novel. Or sometimes in the form of a play. Even in the
form of a screenplay. And sometimes even an essay or a poem. Or
on those rare occasions, songs. And sometimes I can change it from
one form to another. So it's really the subject that seems to dictate
the form to me. I am sure I can manipulate it in some way. That's
why I don't say strictly speaking I am a novelist. I like having
the choice. The choice is very important to me. I used to think,
years ago, that kind of when I had said all I had to say in a certain
way, that I would, just in those later years, if I had them, that
I would just write a kind of Chinese poetry. Not necessarily in
the form of Wang Wei or Li Po or To Fu or Su Tung Po. But I have
been influenced by the Chinese poets in particular. And I have written
a lot in that mode. In fact, I have had people come from China to
interview me just about that. Even when I was in Japan that happened.
They saw that I had something in common with them. That's another
side of me that the people that read the novels like Wild At
Heart which are full of violent satire or whatever wouldn't
know about. I think that's a good thing about the reader. It's eclectic
in that way and it's a survey of the work. I'm not sure exactly.
RB: Some reviewer observed about you that you spent the last twenty-five
years charting the decline of American civilization. Is that a grandiose
assessment of your work?
BG: I remember that quote and since it came from the NY Times,
the newspaper of record in the US, it must be correct. No, I don't
know. That to me—those remarks are just remarks. The decline
of Western Civilization? I thought Oswald Spengler did that long
before me.
RB: It's an ongoing task.
BG: I think in the novels that I wrote for ten years—that
period between 1989 and 1999 —I was really dealing with some
monsters in American society. Specifically, racism, fundamentalist
religion, like that. Certain kinds of absurd violence and trying
to come to grips with it and understand it and describe it, sometimes
graphic ways but always with a kind of unreal aspect to it. And
I began to realize after several years that this is what the French
liked about my work. They thought I was being critical of the society
in the US and that in a way I had affection, certainly, for my own
country, but there were things I didn't like and that appealed to
them.
RB: Whom do you talk to? Who do you exchange ideas with?
BG: Without trying sound like Mr. Natural my friends tend to be
plumbers and race trackers, anything but writers. I've always found
that being friendly with painters, visual artists, was always interesting
to me. There is no evidence of competition between writers and painters,
we work in different disciplines and I have always been fascinated
by images. Often when I am writing something I have an image. Sometimes
it's a painting; sometimes it's a postcard or a photograph. An image
in my head. When I wrote the Sinaloa story I didn't know I was going
to write a novel. But one day I was sitting there and I had this—it
wasn't a dream. I had an image in my head of someone in an old car
driving across a desert landscape, I don't know where, and it was
a fairly dark sky, and there was a bolt of cloud-to-ground lightning
behind the car. I wanted to know who was in that car and where were
they were going. And that was what inspired the beginning of that
novel. And then it took its own course. Sometimes it’s just
some kind of image. I have always been close to that. It's not ideas.
I don't say I am going to write a novel about the Holocaust. Or
a novel that deals with slavery. Or whatever. Some people, they
can do it well. That's why I love this. Everybody has a different
way in.
RB: What is the longest you go without writing?
 BG:
I basically write when inspired. I don't feel its necessary to write
every day. When I start on a project then I go I through to the
end. Then I am devoted to it and I stick with it. I don't sit down
everyday at the typewriter. I actually write in longhand and then
go to manual typewriter. The thing is, I don't feel I have to sit
down every day with a blank sheet of paper in front of me and wait
for what comes or try to force something. I have never been that
way. I try to sneak up on it, I don't know how else to say it. I
like to do it without a certain kind of pressure.
RB: Is there a revision process? Who edits and revises?
BG: I do.
RB: And when it gets to the publisher?
BG: I write in long hand then I correct the manuscript. That's
two drafts. Then I put it on the manual typewriter. I don't own
a computer because I don't like the hum. I don't like the cybernetic
insistence. Then that becomes a third draft. Then I correct that
by hand and that's a fourth draft. Then I make a clean copy that's
a fifth. And perhaps when the book is in galley form I will make
some other corrections. So there are [at least] five drafts. Very
seldom have I had an editor rewrite for me or ask me to rewrite
or redo something. The best editors I have had have been the ones
that said, "Maybe you should add something here. Or maybe we
should move this. Or maybe delete this." I will take that advice
if I think it's good advice. I'm not averse to editing per se. It
comes out pretty much the way it's supposed to be.
RB:[chuckles] Thanks.
BG: Okay. My pleasure.
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Posted:
June 22, 2003
