JMW When you turned me on to The Hamlet by Faulkner and I read it, I felt like when Cormac read The Hamlet that something clicked in Cormac’s brain. When I read Suttree and Blood Meridian and the other early books I thought this was a huge breakthrough, like this is something that is unique in literature; but then when I read The Hamlet there it was, the whole deal, the whole phraseology, the whole tale untold kind of dynamics that Cormac played so brilliantly was all right there. Then I started feeling like Cormac just took his material and poured it into that mold, into that stylistic device and was able to do it and was able to make it happen that way.
WG I saw a thing in Esquire magazine back about 2000 or 2001and there was this list and one of them was writers who borrow most from other writers or is most indebted from other writers and it said Cormac McCarthy. So apparently a lot of people know that he is sort of indebted to Flannery O’ Connor. But he and Faulkner owe a lot to James Joyce. I didn’t have anything by James Joyce except Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and I was out to the library and, you know those Library of America books, those nice black books, they had Joyce out there and I checked it out and reread Ulysses. I had read it when I was a kid but I hadn’t read it in a long time and I was surprised how much it read like Faulkner and McCarthy. You remember that book used to be forbidden in the United States. I remember I was still in school when there was a lawsuit about Lady Chatterly’s Lover. I guess Grove Press, not the Grove Press of today but the original Grove Press, went to court over that D. H. Lawrence book and then every boy in school got a copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover and they were passing it back and forth.
JMW Lawrence has that stylistic beauty but not to the degree of Faulkner.
WG I don’t know that much about D. H. Lawrence. I read that book and I read Sons and Lovers but I don’t know a lot about him; I never really got as interested in him as I did some of those other people, Faulkner in particular. Faulkner saw James Joyce one time; he was in Paris and James Joyce came in with his wife and daughter and Faulkner wanted so bad to go over and talk to him but he was too timid and he wouldn’t approach him. Faulkner was about twenty-five, he was doing the expatriate in Paris thing, he had grown a beard. It must have been around 1923 or 1924.
JMW That was a great time to be in Paris.
WG I guess so, there was so many of those people kind of gathered there. The best book, to me, that Hemingway wrote was that memoir, A Moveable Feast. That is a really good book.
JMW I don’t get all the excitement about Hemingway.
WG Hemingway annoys me in the same way, I mean he doesn’t always annoy me, but some of that macho stuff and the way the language is so stylized. I mean everybody stylizes a little, but he really goes overboard with the little short sentences, like describing somebody opening a bottle of wine and tasting it or something like that. It is like posturing to me. That is probably the reason I don’t like No Country for Old Men as well; I think there is a lot of that macho posturing, all that stuff about boots and guns. There is too much of that stuff for me. It all comes to nothing because the guy gets killed anyway.
JMW But now we have The Road; what do you say about The Road?
WG I knew when I read The Road it was going to win the Pulitzer Prize, I actually did. I called Tommy and told him that. The writing is gorgeous, nobody else can write like that.
JMW That’s not quite true. There’s one guy around who can.
WG The end of it has that little uplifting thing. I knew the awards people were really going to go for that and they did. That carrying the light thing and those people showing up when the kid needs them. That book didn’t bother me the way it bothered a lot of people. It bothered Chris really bad, it messed him up for a couple of weeks. It messed up Franklin for a while, it depressed him. It made him think too much he said. I think the reason is that Chris has a little boy and Franklin has two young kids. I think that might have something to do with it. But you have Coby and you weren’t that bothered by it.
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.