Had I a Hundred Mouths (36 page)

Q: Why is a minor writer like Saroyan more of a problem than a writer like James or Proust?

WG: Saroyan speaks very much to young people. That great freedom—“I'm leaving, I'm going to do what I have to do, get out of my way, let me fly!” But his spiritual transformation was not mine; his style, finally, was not one that I could graft on to me as my own. It was
his
spirit.

Q: Did you read Sherwood Anderson?

WG: He didn't attract me. I didn't know what Ohio was. I hardly knew what Texas was, but I was determined to find out. I did find stories that knocked the hell out of me, and made me want to write—but write my own stories. Flaubert's “Saint Julien, l'Hospitalier”; Thomas Mann's “Tonio Kroger.” I suddenly found literature through classes at college. I had been cutting classes trying to learn how to compose music, and hiding out in vaudeville theaters, and trying to say something through
performing
. I hadn't found the
word
yet. I settled for that, really, when my father told me that I couldn't perform, that I was not
allowed
to, and almost at the same time in my life I came upon writing, and the whole thing burst open for me. I was reading French and Spanish, and German, too, early—languages were easy for me and I was studying them.
Lazarillo de Tormes!
Poetry: Goethe's lyrics. Heine's. Rimbaud. Blake.

The American writing around me seemed to all just hang at that level of life that I spoke about, just at whatever tide there was—there was Hemingway, whom I couldn't abide. Fitzgerald, totally foreign to me. I didn't know about that world, the swell life. Or even Fitzgerald's own transformations. Hemingway seemed to me to be like the brutes that I knew that I wanted to escape from, in Texas. That physical bravado, that leanness of style, that was anathema to me. Why would I not use three adjectives? Why not? I was a rhapsodist, why would I cut down on my adjectives? What was Hemingway trying to tell me, what was he hiding?

So those people were around me, and I chose Whitman, and Saroyan, and Wolfe.

Q: But you chose them as enemies, did you not?

WG: No, I had to go through them. Then I went into people who had a profound influence on me—like Milton, Chaucer, Dante.

Q: It was a long time between 1937, graduating from Rice, and 1950, when you published
The House of Breath
. Were those figures riding with you all that time?

WG: All that time. They rode with me on a godforsaken aircraft carrier, for five years. I got into the ship in 1939 and I got out of it in nineteen fucking forty-five, at the end of the war.
That's
where
I
was. I had to study ballistics, command a battery of antiaircraft guns. But I was carrying these people with me. I was shooting off in my bunk when I should have been in love affairs of all kinds, I should have been in
life
, breaking my heart. That's a forced monastic living—since I'm a late bloomer, that's something to think about. I can see the deprivation of that; but I can see too that it probably added years to my life because I was physically in good shape. I realize as I talk now the extent of a residing anger in me, resentment, bitterness, about that. I've never really assessed that time. It did free me from all the crippling influences in my life, the crippling circumstances—family dependence, Texas, and probably from excessive study and scholarly isolation. I have never really realized the madness of those years. I went quite mad at the end of the fourth year of it, quite crazy, I had to be under morphine on the ship. I became so enraged at the war that my rage couldn't be contained by my body or quietened by one thousand men. We were near the coast of Japan. When would it end? It was all right for a while, but will this go on!? I was a captive. I felt punished. For what? What had
I
done? I recall these maniac feelings. I was a wild man on the ship, a rebel, an outlaw. My poetic and voluptuous youth, I felt, was dying and passing away a mile a minute in the China Sea in 1944.…

Q: One could divide your stories into those in which up-rootedness is central, and those others in which for a moment that homelessness is conquered and there is a sense of getting back.

WG: I had a sense of myself—which has lessened a bit, but is still an underlying sense of myself—as a
passager
, as someone passing through. So many of my stories were almost ballads—saying that I'm on my way, I'm just passing through, I've sung my song, now I'm going on, I just stopped by here. That came out of my feeling that I couldn't live in Texas, that I couldn't live among my own, that something alienated me, that I was drawn apart. And that was a heartbreak for me. I accepted it as a kind of destiny and often as a curse. I couldn't be there, whatever those reasons were, and that led me to an immense homesickness, a longing for where I couldn't be. It's an exile. I don't know what the exiling factors or forces were, may never know.

Q: Were they personal more than artistic?

WG: An artist moves, goes out, comes back and then leaves again.

Q: You're not speaking about a cultural question, about the writer who goes to New York because there is no one to read him in Texas?

WG: No, of course not. When I went back, it was almost—just a death, one of my deaths. I couldn't get over waking and hearing Texans. I couldn't believe their speech! At once I thought, “This is where I belong! I'm here, I'm home here!” And then my second feeling, on the heels of that, was that they would never let me become a part of them. I talk like that, that's my speech, and those are all my people, but why is it I can't be a part of them? Why am I here in this room alone, isolated and exiled from them, just outside my door?

I still feel that when I go home.

Q: Is that relationship something you expect to find, or aren't surprised to find, in other people's work, or do you feel it's peculiar to you?

WG: It seemed to be so deep in me that I thought, if I read it somewhere else, I felt confirmed, or affirmed. I didn't associate it with Joyce and with the classic exile of Joyce, because I felt that Joyce's was much more planned, reasonable, he was much less bewildered by the forces upon him, at him, and he was dealing with a whole huge culture, a literary and an ethnic culture, the whole Celtic renaissance. My case seemed a very personal thing, almost demonic—a curse: dark. Therefore the meditational quality, a prayer-like quality, almost “Help me, Save me, Deliver me.”

Q: Given the passages rising at the ends of some stories, it seems to me that prayer was addressed to the language itself.

WG: True.

Q: And you have called them songs, those stories, as well.

WG: They always came like anthems, or serenades. And they were sung, finally; it was an anthem-, a joyous hymnal-feeling I had, even in “Arthur Bond,” that late. The language is always a principal character in the story for me; I suppose that's why I can't read so many other writers. They feel they're giving me whole characters and they probably are but the characters don't interest me if I can't hear them speak or identify them with
words
, by which they are delivered to me.

Q: Your literary mode, your literary consciousness, your artistic devices, and your gypsy experience, have all been extremely cosmopolitan, but even when you start on West Twenty-third Street with Marietta Chavez McGee [
In A Farther Country
], you always go back to that rural reality, in your work, more a different place in the mind than a geographical place, a world of fewer emblems and more powerful ones, which we seem to say is rural, mostly. A good example is “Old Wildwood,” which begins in Rome, but goes back to the funny little motel cabin on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico.

WG: That saves me each time, though, because it's the detail of the small scope that keeps me from being lost in the Rome of it, or in the New York City of it, because I am not really writing about Rome, or I would have to find the detail of Rome.

Q:
That
sort of fictional texture doesn't interest you, does it?

WG: No. The
house
, therefore. I look for containment. I see this now, and I guess I do at a certain point know when I'm engulfed by too much, and then I really try to get into some little manageable harbor, get anchored somewhere, and it's in simple and homely detail, and often in bizarre detail. An absolutely recognizable detail, that seems trivial. I have to be contained by a house, or a place. I'm then free to do what I want.

Q: And yet, if sometimes you suggest containment, at other times you suggest freedom of a roaming, wandering sort.

WG: Sometimes people just go, and you never hear from them again. Or they come back very different from what they were when they left. What makes them come back? Or changes them—if some force took that demon out of them and put it into swine? Later I'd like to talk about the swine! Somebody was exorcised through me, I took over people's demons and I went on off with those demons, a lot of the time.
They
went off pure and fine. They flew on off, like angels, and I was cursed! I was the pig. The cliff by the sea beckoned me.

The bizarre, and the supernatural, that we were talking about—I thought sometimes I was the receiver of a cursedness. I felt often that I was a carrier: that image. I've written about the carrier, in
The House of Breath
. That image of myself, carrying, benignly walking through and infecting others, or receiving what others put onto me.…

Q: You describe Lois Fuchs [
In A Farther Country
] falling in love at thirty-five with a seventeen-year-old boy, who then dies, as if she has cursed or infected him.

WG: That's what I'm talking about. But I can't account for these people—not Leander either. I'm not responsible for
accounting
for Uncle Ben [“Had IA Hundred Mouths”], although it seems I'm his creator. I'm therefore held, it seems, accountable. But I don't believe the artist is held accountable. Is he, maybe? Morally, we feel that he is. Do we just abandon characters to the destiny that life has for them? Do we let them go into life out of the art we have made? Or do we hold them within our art and try to account for them totally through art? I don't think so. Leander was restored to life, I guess—he had to take his chances out there maybe. I was done with him, in a way. I came upon my own redemption in the streets somewhere, as creator-narrator, and looked upon my own flesh and felt my own reality in Leander now at large from my own creation.

Q: In the French interview [
Masques
, Summer 1982] you were asked if all your characters weren't either waiting for something or wounded. Is that waiting a kind of disablement like the physical disablement that afflicts some of them?

WG: I think they're waiting for miracles, for wonderful visitations—they're waiting for the marvelous.

Q: Is the marvelous that important?

WG: I'm not didactic—it's just surprise, waiting for the wonderful surprise. It's probably waiting for the Second Coming, underneath. I'm sure that's all I've ever been writing about. Salvation, redemption, freedom from bondage, complete release. All those people from those little towns, that's what they were brought up to wait for: the end of the world, when the trumpets would sound, and they'd be free of all this daily labor. That's the whole black southern thing. Rebirth, a new life, heaven—freedom from pain, bondage, travail.

Those characters in my stories all
are
waiting. They're really kind of hopeful people, expecting more. They're open to something. They are forerunners. They've lost place—a lot of them are displaced, that's their sorrow.

“But there's a better place I know,” don't you know that's what they say? “I accept that I've lost my place, my home, my town, my river—a whole river is gone!” When Jessy comes back to her mother, in
The House of Breath
, she says to her, “Life is loss, Mama.” Her mother is just waiting, sitting in a chair. She had closed the blinds, and the wind played memory through them. Jessy says, “Life is loss, don't you know that? I know that, and I'm only ten years old.”

Q: How do you feel now that you have adjusted to living in Southern California, after several years?

WG: I feel exhilarated, it's encouraging and hospitable to me, for my work, because I
am
in a foreign country. This is the way I've been able to accept it. The people are foreigners to me and I am in a strange land. I'm at home in a strange land—always my image of home was of someplace where I would put down the deepest roots and build a permanent place and I would never stray from that. But of course that was pure fallacy, pure idiocy, a fake way of thinking about my life, that was never possible, I would never allow that, anyway. It's not anything I really would care about!

Beckett said this for me at a time when I was looking for the statement, that the artist lives
nowhere. “L'artiste qui joue son être est de nulle part. Et il n'a pas des frères.”

Q: Who would have guessed this of a writer like you, as concerned with such specific speech and with the exile's return?

WG: But that place has become a language, now, for me. That's a language of its own; I've created a language, as I did for Arcadio, that was never spoken there. That's become my
style
, for me.

Q: You're not reproducing a speech?

WG: Not at all, not the way those Southerners do. I'm not a “Texas writer” or a “regional” one. I'm not interested in that, I never really was. I was making a
language
out of
speech
. If you harm that language, you're harming the life of that work, and you're harming the character himself. You're re-dressing him. You're saying, “No, he wouldn't have this kind of a hat on, he wouldn't have that color eyes.” It's a violation. The language has become paint, as for a painter—the quality of the paint, the texture. A Cezanne local mountain
is paint.…