If those things have been said, I’m flattered, though I’d never consider myself a better writer than either of those two, in any sense. Harder to be funnier (or darker, for that matter) than “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” or “Good Country People” or “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” If I’m darker than Miss Welty, maybe I’m just more crude. I love the lovely darkness of “The Hitchhikers,” “No Place for You, My Love,” “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” the comic darkness of something like “June Recital.” I really don’t believe I’m worthy of comparison to either writer, but I’d love to believe I’ve learned some things from them, and certainly both writers have influenced my own writing. The way Welty’s stories plumb the mysteries without simplifying them — she leaves the mystery and the wonder intact, doesn’t violate it but enhances it. O’Connor — I just wish I was nearly as smart as she was, as she is in her stories. She and Welty both, what beautiful minds. I have discovered that it is very hard to be funny in the way that O’Connor is funny; I’ve failed at trying a few times. But I do love her black humor, and the merciless way she exposes the truth in her stories. Who could not love the moment when the Misfit says the grandmother would’ve been a good woman if she’d had someone to shoot her every day of her life?
So I don’t think of the tradition as a burden at all. Thank the gods for it. I read Faulkner, O’Connor, Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and listen to their sentences as I read, try to understand their visions of the world on their own terms as well as how they may give language to my experience. I want their language and vision to inform my own, to educate me about what I already know on some level and about what I did not know before reading them. I think Eliot was right in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” there is no way we cannot be a part of and extend a tradition, in some sense, as writers. I’m embarrassed when I see someone obviously straining to be different because they think it’s weak-minded and boring not to be different. Did Cormac McCarthy adore Faulkner? I don’t know him, but it seems to me that he did, and his first novel sounds very much like Faulkner, to me. By “Suttree,” he’d taken what he learned from Faulkner and made something entirely his own, though the influence is still obvious. Now we have writers who sound like McCarthy, and that’s okay with me. They’re learning something new from him.
One of the most beautiful aspects of the novel is the way you capture the thoughts of older people, and the physical aspects of aging. You’re not such an old guy yourself…how did you research that?
In the company of old people, listening to them, watching them. And by being something of an old soul, myself. I’m a cranky old man in a middle-aged body. I always loved and respected my older relatives, though, loved to listen to them talk, tell their stories, vent their anger over long-held grudges and disappointments. Most of my older relatives — though not all — were cheerful and bright, but they all had some tough stories. These people were the most alive of all the people I knew; they lived more in the moment than young or middle-aged people, even though they loved to revisit the past. The spoke directly, they told the truth and didn’t care about the consequences. They didn’t have time for polite lies, anymore. I loved that. If I could get away with acting like an old man all the time, I would.
So your grandmother was a model for Birdie Wells Urquhart — how do you think she’d take to your publicizing her secrets this way? If she is watching from heaven, aren’t you in trouble?
Unlike my grandmother, I don’t subscribe to the notion that people go to a heaven that is much like earth (conceived apparently by an earth-bound mind), only grander and less troubled. (See answer to question one, above.) But if Mimi’s spirit is with me, in some sense, I sense humor as well as admonishment. She used to tell what she considered awful things about herself, as well as others, and be horrified by them, and then laugh at them. Maybe you live to be ninety-three by not being so resistant to the things that happen in life, I mean by accepting them and moving on. She, for one, did not hold a grudge, even against those who had mistreated her terribly, and did not excessively mourn her losses, until her last years, when she grieved most that she was still alive while her children had already died. She complained about that, thought she was living too long. I loved her very much, still do, and she knew that I loved her.
Besides, the secrets she told me weren’t really secrets, and I invented the rest. Mimi didn’t read fiction, but I’ll never forget what she said to me after reading my first published story, which was a little bawdy: “Well, I know you’re a good boy, anyway.” She meant, “in spite of what you’ve written.”
The novel blurs the distinctions between life and death in interesting ways — most provocatively, in a scene with the undertaker’s young son that some people might find offensive — what’s that all about?
I hope not too many people find Parnell Grimes’s latent necrophilia (as I call it) offensive. Parnell knows his desire is wrong, perverted, grotesque, and he seeks some kind of salvation from it, which he finds in his wife, Selena (who understands him and does not condemn him). And I tried to write about Parnell’s troubling desires in a way that shows him to be a fundamentally good man, one of the most compassionate people in the novel, in spite of his problem and being a kind of weird, goodhearted fool. In a strange way, his great love for other people, his compassion, contributes to his problem. It’s a darkly comic vision, of course, this character. I enjoy certain kinds of morbid humor; I can’t be alone in that, in a country that made Edward Gorey a bestseller. Maybe Flannery O’Connor would have written about such a character, had she been born thirty or forty years later, and done a better job of it. I don’t know.
Concerning the scenes when the world of the dead and the living merge in other ways, such as when Finus sees his dead wife in a chair in his bedroom, or hears her voice through a stray cat in the graveyard, I was playing with some sort of notion about the ephemeral nature of earthly life, I think, and the sense that we commune in all kinds of ways with the dead, ways that aren’t spooky or supernatural or weird; they’re with us always, in a real sense, if we cared about them.
In the scenes with Birdie after her death, I like to think a reader can see her spirit travel as either real or as a moment of compressed time and brain travel in the moments between life and death, the moments when the body has given up and some sort of residual energy still exists in the brain. A hugely imaginative time, I would think.
How exactly do you describe the relationship between your two main characters, Finus Bates and Birdie Wells? If this is a kind of love story, why didn’t you let them get together and live happily ever after?
I think all too often people don’t end up with the love of their lives. They end up with someone they love okay and they stick it out, or they don’t. Finus and Birdie never get together, and to some extent it’s a result of the bad timing, the odd luck of timing, that so often keeps people who seem right for each other apart. We’ve all had it happen: a love at first sight that tears our hearts out instantly, but we’re committed to someone, or they are, and we don’t act. Same with these two. It’s a shame, when that sort of thing happens. But there usually are shameful consequences, sometimes ruinous, that follow if we do act.
I didn’t have a real vision of Finus and Birdie as a couple, a vision of what their lives together would have been, until one night late in the time I was revising the book. I’d met some friends at a nice restaurant in Cambridge, and this older couple kind of shuffled up to the hostess to inquire about a table. They stood there a while, waiting, holding hands. They were older, and kind of frail, but there was something obviously beautiful about them, individually and as a couple. I had the strongest sense that these people were as much in love as when they first fell in love, and it seemed to me that they were in a sense Finus and Birdie. It added something, I think, to the last draft, seeing that couple.