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.
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.