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JM: Had you spent much time in New York City or in the vicinity?
In that area, and in Westchester, you have quite a few writers and poets: Billy Collins lives up in Northern Westchester, and I lived up there for a few
years.
WH: And Billy was a friend of Eamon’s, and he was the editor at that
time of the Mid Atlantic Review, which published several of my poems, so
that was nice. I didn’t know much about New York when I came but quickly
learned what it was like. I went to readings and so forth but mainly went for
the bookstores—and also for just the ambiance.
JM: Did you ever attend St. Mark’s?
WH: Yeah. In fact, one summer I stayed in New York right near St.
Mark’s in the East Village. I spent a whole summer down there and hung around.
I was part of a workshop at the New School run by Stanley Diamond. People were
drawn from all different disciplines. That was an interesting, stimulating
thing. I did another one of those NEH seminars up in Amherst one
summer—Contemporary Lit, with Benjamin DeMott. At that time Robert Stone was
up at Amherst, and that’s where I first met him. I dropped in on his house one
evening and said, "I really admire your work," and we spent a nice
evening talking. I later brought him to Vassar to give a reading.
JM: How long were you at Vassar?
WH: Five years.
JM: Five years. So you had quite an exposure
then to that area?
WH: Right.
JM: Next, you went to Spain?
WH: Right. Then I was a Fulbright in Spain for two years. I was at the
University of Seville, and Seville is one of the really beautiful places of the
world, so I had a posh place to hang out. I lived in the old city in Bario de
Santa Cruz, which is the tourist place. It’s the old Jewish ghetto and has all
the narrow streets. . . . The other three Fulbrights—actually two Fulbrights
and the husband of the other Fulbright—were all poets, and we convinced the
State Department that we were good poets, and they sent us on a poetry reading
tour of Spain. Jimmy Nolan was one of the poets. He’s published two or three
books of poems, at least. And James Hall was the other one. He’s now famous as
a writer of crime fiction, but he had written several books of poems. And
Aaron—I forget Aaron’s last name—he was the other poet. Anyway, we had a
great time. We gave readings all over Spain at the major universities and hopped
in the car and got to tour the countryside. That was a wonderful experience.
And, again, you know, it certainly kept my hand in as a writer and gave me
reinforcement as a writer. That’s a priceless experience I wouldn’t trade.
We got to travel elsewhere, too.
JM: But, after Spain you began to shift toward fiction away from poetry.
WH: Right. I wrote Devil Dancer in
this little town called Maro on the Costa Del Sol in Southern Spain. Almost all
of Costa Del Sol was high-rises and so forth, and then there’s this little
town called Maro, near Nerja. It’s remained in its pristine pueblo state,
surrounded by fields, and there are no high-rises or anything.
Maro, Spain (click
here for larger image)
Anyway, someone had told me that the southern coast was interesting, so I
went down there and apartment-hunted and got the upper floor of a normal
family’s house there. I spent the whole day writing, then we’d go to the
local bar, El Guapo ("the handsome one"), and I’d have my meals
there, then go back and write some more. It’s very hot there, of course, but
it does cool off. We were on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, and in the
evenings I’d walk down to Nerja, which is two or three miles downhill to have
dinner and then walk back up at night, which is sort of spooky sometimes because
you’re way out in this sort of nowhere, walking a dark road—there are no
lights or anything. But that was sort of fun, in its own way. One of the
interesting things is that because it was hot, the kids often weren’t allowed
out to play until midnight. So about midnight when you’d think everyone’s
going to bed, all the kids go out in the street and run around for an hour or
two because it’s cool enough for them to be out and play.
JM: So a lot of things must have taken you by
storm, not only as an American, but as a writer. Did you discover any writing
customs that were different in Spain?
WH: Spanish literature is marvelous. My own Spanish isn’t good
enough to take advantage of that very much, although I’ve read some things in
Spanish in translation. I actually chose Spain as a Fulbright because of Paul
Blackburn. He was the first really good poet to have some influence on me. And
Paul Blackburn had spent a lot of time in Barcelona. The other poet I admire a
lot who lived in Barcelona and loved that area is Phil Levine. I wanted to get
out of the country and go do something else, and the obvious place for me to
head was Spain, if I thought of myself as a poet, because that’s where
Blackburn and Levine had gone. Barcelona was their place.... The poet in the
Spanish-speaking world who really wiped me out at that time was Neruda. I just
thought his stuff was amazingly good—and still do, the best of it.
JM: Did you have a favorite among translators?
WH: I did. Is it Alastair Reid?
JM: Yeah. And then there was some Merwin—
WH: I liked his a lot, though, you know, I haven’t made a close
study of it. One of the sequences in Neruda that I liked best are the elemental
odes, though various people have taken their shots at those. The book that I had
in Spain of the translations of his odes I didn’t think were translated well.
Periodically, I would try to retranslate those, put a lot of energy into that.
So I’ve never actually done a complete translation of a Neruda poem, but
I’ve fussed with it. I did do a whole book of translations of Catullus’
works just for fun—
JM: Just for fun?
WH: Which I thought worked out pretty good, and Painted Bride
Quarterly did about thirteen in an issue. Thomas Berger, who’s another
writer I got to know in those days, was a great fan of those Catullus
translations. He used to say he really liked those a lot. So I’ve published a
few more of them, sixteen or seventeen.
JM: Do you intend to collect some translations?
WH: Well, if I ever wrote some more poems, then it might make sense at
some point. You know, if I live long enough to come out with a selected
poems—that would be some of The Walking Man
plus what I’ve written since, plus translations, plus I also have this book of
children’s poems called Let Me Say A Secret,
and three of those are in The Walking Man.
That’s another sort of remarkable sequence, I think. When I was at Vassar, I
came across a manuscript in the Education Department that a teacher had kept
since sometime in the 1950s or 1960s. They had kindergarten and younger kids
there, and there was this bright little kid named Stewart. He used to walk
around the classroom doing monologues, and the teacher suddenly realized these
are remarkable things this kid is saying. So the teacher began to write them
down verbatim, and she typed all these up at one point, and they were stored in
the Education Department. Someone for some reason showed them to me one day, and
I began to read and say, "This is great found poetry. I think I’ll pull
out segments and break them into lines, and see how many poems I can get out of
this." And I think I ended up with a whole book of like 40 poems, just
based on these prose monologues of Stewart. All I did was figure out where to
start, where to stop, and how to cut the lines. I didn’t add or subtract
anything from the meat of it. I think they’re absolutely remarkable poems, in
their own way, because this kid is a walking genius at four. He’s the epitome
of cummings’ line "and down they forgot as up they grew." This kid
had the poetic mind like you wouldn’t believe. You wonder what ever happened
to him.
JM: Yeah, that was my next question.
WH: His parents, I believe, were Jewish, and they had survived the
Holocaust. The Holocaust was very much on their mind. And so Stewart overhears
his parents talk about World War II and the Holocaust and is haunted by some big
questions that you wouldn’t think a four-year-old is haunted by. Some of the
ones I include in The Walking Man are
Stewart brooding on the nature of war and death and injustice, but in this
amazing way. Anyway, I would want to include more of those, too.
It’d be nice to pull a Robert Penn Warren. You know, Robert Penn Warren
started out as a poet then had this long career of novels. Then, at the end of
his life, he went back to poetry and wrote a very good series of books of poetry
in his 70s, I think. It would be nice to do that. If that happens to me, then
maybe we’ll get a selected poems. Otherwise, I’ve got The
Walking Man as sort of the memorial for what I did over those 15
years.
But anyway, I wrote Devil Dancer in
Spain, then came back and rewrote it. I went to Bread Loaf a couple times,
hoping to get somebody interested in it, and Stanley Elkin worked with me and
was very impressed with what he saw. He featured one of the chapters from it in
his workshop, sort of as a "how to." He saw that it was a very
unconventional book and that I was going to have a monster of a time getting it
published. Some other people at Bread Loaf helped me with it, and I got an
agent, actually, for it back in the early 1970s. And in those na�ve days, you
thought, "If I’ve got an agent, then I’m home free." So I started
telling her, you know, what to do with the movie rights and so forth, and she
said, "Look, Buster, this is really good writing, but I’m going to have a
monster of a time selling this thing." She more or less warned me.
And that’s what happened. It got rejected fairly roundly at the time
because it’s an absolutely unconventional detective novel. I mean, it has the
format of a detective novel, but it’s about the shooting of a race horse
called Devil Dancer, and the crime, at least as it was put together at that
time, is never solved. The book is much more about the detective and his
problems than about solving the crime, and more about the underworld of
Lexington and how it plays against the fancy world of horse farms. The crime was
an excuse to do a bunch of other things. In a way, it’s a book about how you
don’t get what you look for—you get something else. And your life is
determined by how you respond to that something else. It’s sort of existential
and philosophical, which means they can’t market it as a crime novel because
it doesn’t fit the genre, and they can’t market it as a literary novel.
I’ve written the perfectly unpublishable novel.
But anyway, so I put that aside, finally, realizing that ship wasn’t going
to sail. Then I turned to writing The
Children Bob Moses Led in the early 1980s. Took me about 10 years
in all. Took me about six or seven years to research and write it and a couple
more years to get it published. I always get agents fairly readily, but getting
published in the present world is very tricky. Anyway, it got rejected fairly
roundly in New York. The closest we came—this is sort of a model for what’s
happening now in the writing world—I was in Spain, and I got a call from my
agent, who said that the editor at Morrow really loves the book, and the other
people who’ve read it at Morrow are really enthused. We’ve really got
something going here because everyone who’s read it loves it. And I said,
"Great. Let’s do the movie," and she said, "Well, it’s not
quite a done deal yet." Morrow was owned by the Hearst Corporation at the
time—maybe they still are—and what that means is that you have to go in to
the Hearst money man and make your pitch. So these editors went to the Hearst
money man and made their pitch, and apparently he told them, "The last two
books we published that had anything to do with civil rights didn’t sell, and
so I don’t think you can look me in the eyes and guarantee me that this will
sell 10,000 or 20,000 copies of a first novel." They had to say, "No,
I don’t think we can honestly guarantee you that," and he says,
"Then sink it."
More and more the literature decisions in publishing houses are being made by
the money manager of the larger corporation who owns them, who isn’t a book
person and wants the larger margin of profit than the books business
traditionally has sustained. And what that’s meant in the grand scheme of
things is that what used to be called the "midlist author"—the good
author that a publishing house stays with book after book because he or she
keeps getting better, and eventually they build a reputation and it all pays off
after 30 years of faith—that’s gone with the wind. No author gets that
treatment anymore. So someone like a Wright Morris, who could have a whole
career without having a bestseller, or even someone like an Anne Tyler—she’s
my age, but she got started before all this happened to a degree—it’s not
until her seventh or eighth book that John Updike reviews it and says,
"She’s wickedly good." Suddenly they’ve got the right gimmick to
get her a readership. Now she’s still not a guaranteed bestseller, but she is
certainly a guaranteed sale, so that now her publisher is reaping some money for
her. But she didn’t start out as a blockbuster author. She started out as a
quiet author with her own voice and vision, and it took her a bunch of books for
that to catch on. Publishers aren’t willing to play that game anymore. They
want their money quick and up front, and the more serious writers almost never
fit that image of what the writer should be.
JM: What do you plan to write after you finish
with—or are you finished with Devil Dancer?
WH: I hope I’m finished with Devil Dancer.
JM: Does it ever end?
WH: Well, there’s a sequel in mind to it even though as the book
originally was written, the reader could assume that the detective dies of a
heart attack. I now make it clear in this latest rewrite that he has a heart
attack but he doesn’t die. And so the last chapter is in the hospital where he
has to deal with what he knows and so forth. So he could come back if I needed
him to, but actually my plan was to have him come back in a sequel novel as a
minor character. I thought that would be an interesting twist—that he sort of
has a bit part in the second novel.
Actually, the person, at present, if I write a sequel to that book, who would
be featured would be Tom Morton again, who is the narrator of The
Children Bob Moses Led, one of the two, along with Moses. He is
mentioned very briefly in Devil Dancer,
but you don’t realize it. There’s a picture of a guy looking into a
used-bookstore window with long hair and an Indian headband and wearing a
T-shirt that says "Minor Kentucky Poet," and later we learn that
that’s Tom Morton, who now teaches at Transylvania. At the end of the Moses
book there’s a reference that Tom Morton is now teaching at Transylvania. The
afterward is written in 1972, which is when Devil
Dancer picks up. I had planned, in the grand scheme of things, to
come back to Tom Morton and situate him in Lexington in the 1970s around the
most famous unsolved murder case in Lexington. It’s called the Betty Gail
Brown Case.
The most famous drug case related to Lexington involved a guy named Drew
Thorton, who parachuted to his death in Knoxville trying to smuggle cocaine in
from the Caribbean. He was part of the horse-farm world. If I revisit Lexington,
it’s going to be to do variations on those true-crime stories and get Tom
Morton in the middle of it somehow. I think he’s going to be a college
professor at Transy who falls in love with the Betty Gail Brown character, who
is then strangled, and he’s blamed for it. He won’t be guilty of it, but the
evidence will point toward him, so he’ll be caught in that kind of dilemma. At
the same time, there will be this drug scene going on in the horse-farm world.
The Betty Gail Brown character will be the daughter of a horse farmer, and so
the horse farm again will play in with the sleazy underworld, and at the same
time the world of Transy will get into it. Obviously that stuff is still
swirling, but the ingredients will come out of that.
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