Woe to Live On: A Novel (25 page)

D
ANIEL
W
OODRELL
was born in the Missouri Ozarks, left school and enlisted in the marines at seventeen, received his bachelor’s degree at twenty-seven, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and spent a year on a Michener Fellowship. He is the author of nine works of fiction, including the novel
Winter’s Bone,
the film adaptation of which won the Grand Jury Prize for best picture at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and received five Academy Award nominations.
The Death of Sweet Mister
received the 2011 Clifton Fadiman Medal from the Center for Fiction, an award created “to honor a book that deserves renewed recognition and a wider readership.”
Woe to Live On
was adapted into the Ang Lee film
Ride with the Devil.
His first collection of stories,
The Outlaw Album,
was published in 2011. Woodrell lives in the Ozarks near the Arkansas line with his wife, Katie Estill.

W
OE TO
L
IVE
O
N

A novel by

Daniel Woodrell

S
IX HOURS INTO
my drive I hit the Missouri Ozarks and Doyle Redmond’s (narrator of Woodrell’s novel
Give Us a Kiss
) description of the landscape flares up in my mind: “Our region, the Ozarks, was all carved by water. When the ice age shifted, the world was nothing but a flood. The runoff through the ages since had slashed valleys and ravines and dark hollows through the mountains…. These mountains are among the oldest on the planet, worn down now to nubby, stubborn knobs. Ozark mountains seem to hunker instead of tower, and they are plenty rugged but without much of the majestic left in them.”

Daniel warned me that his house would be difficult to find, but I brushed off this warning, feeling confident that my car’s navigation system would deliver me to his front door. But about a mile from his house my friendly navigation voice informed me that “turn-by-turn navigation” was no longer possible. I cursed and immediately pulled over because I realized I had no idea where I was or where I was going. I had a general map of the area but I couldn’t pinpoint how to get to his house. I called my wife back in Chicago,
and she pulled up a map on her computer and guided me, via phone, to his door.

He was outside, waving me down when I pulled up the small hill. I don’t know if it was because I’d arrived ten minutes later than I said I would or if he knew that my directional confidence would be tested, but he seemed to realize that he needed to be out front, that I would probably drive by a dozen times if he wasn’t. I was in the Ozarks, a little-known place that outsiders quickly stereotype and conveniently lob into the comedic punch lines, but a place, after all, that only natives can truly navigate.

This area (West Plains, Missouri) reminds me a little bit of Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Yes, especially this part of town where I live. We used to live in Arkansas—in Fayetteville, Eureka Springs, and in Jonesboro, for two semesters.

When you lived in Fayetteville did you run around with the University of Arkansas faculty and writers and such—Donald “Skip” Hays, Donald Harington, and others?

Yes, and speaking of Donald Harington, sometimes you get reviewed by someone who understands you so well that it really creeps you out. He was the first person to use the word “expressionism” to describe what I was doing. He was in his hospital bed when he wrote about
Winter’s Bone.
His wife sent it to me, a copy of his handwritten review. He went out
of his way for someone he could’ve regarded as a threat. Some people choose to see other writers from similar parts of the world as a problem and some of them don’t. He was able to so thoroughly grasp what I was doing and even articulate it to me a little bit. I hadn’t spoken to Donald in at least a decade. I knew Skip, and Dale Ray Phillips was around. And what I liked about Fayetteville is you could go down to Rogers Rec any afternoon and find at least one or two other writers hanging around, sometimes seven, eight, or ten of us. Skip would be there sometimes and he’d fill the table top with empty bottles, I do remember that.

I’ve heard that early in your career, agents and publishers were trying to direct you toward a strict genre style.

They were trying to. My first agent really felt that was the path for me. If you’re writing, and not excited by it and getting some kind of interior pleasure out of it—that’s difficult to explain to people who haven’t experienced it—you really shouldn’t do it. In terms of a moneymaking profession, you can find faster ways of making money.

Then you gravitated to writing about the great and mysterious Ozarks.

This region is just not really well defined in most people’s minds. People don’t understand that you can go out in the woods and run into some stained-glass artist from Long Beach. Eureka Springs has got two or three classical artists
who have chosen to live there for one reason or another. I mean, you don’t know what you’ll run into out here.

(Katie Estill, Daniel’s wife, walks into the room, and Daniel introduces us.)

You guys have been married how long?

Katie Estill:
Awhile.

Daniel Woodrell:
We’ve been married, uh….

KE:
[Leaving the room.] Tell him in dog years.

DW:
It’ll be officially twenty-seven years in about a week. Been together thirty. We met pretty quickly at Iowa and followed each other. There seems to be a sense that you shouldn’t hook up with another writer, but I think you have to have that talk at the beginning of the relationship: If you win, it’s a victory for us; if I win, it’s a victory for us.

You mentioned earlier that you think that the Ozarks are difficult to define. Why do you think that is?

One of the big problems for Ozark writers is the state line that separates it into Arkansas Ozarks and Missouri Ozarks. If we were all in one state I actually do think that would make some difference. And there might be one college or another—as in the case of the University of Mississippi, which is basically devoted to keeping Mississippi writers near the public and presented to the public, and their virtues are extolled by various symposia and whatnot. And, too, Faulkner being from
Mississippi, having an impressive town square that stayed alive and vibrant, and Square Books showed up, and
The Oxford American
was out of there a long time, and Willie Morris and all of these people who have been there one time or another.

And you think of Harington as representing the Arkansas version of the Ozarks.

I mention him all of the time. I’m just astonished how few people know who I’m talking about. And I don’t know why that is. He’s got the work.

You dropped out of high school, went into the marines, and then came back to Kansas City. Then what?

Yes, went back to KC and was only there a couple of months and went to Fort Hays State in Hays, Kansas, on the GI Bill, in-state tuition—

Much like Doyle Redmond in your book
Give Us a Kiss.

Exactly. They had rodeos and all of that stuff. I’d never been in the cowboy world. Big ranches, and really big wheat operations, and big cattle operations, too. I’d never really lived anyplace like it—that flat—and I hated it at first, and then after six months I said,
It’s gorgeous out here.
It just took me six months to realize it. I liked it very much, actually. I thought the people were great, very libertarian about everything. They didn’t necessarily agree with my hippie
ways, but they really just observed how you composed yourself and judged you on that.

In your novels I always sense a true respect for the readers, like you know they’re right there, looking over your shoulder.

I’m always very well aware of the fact that I’m telling a story and I’m intending to keep you with me. The first time I ever had a story up at the Iowa workshop this girl says, “Don’t you think it’s sorta cheap to have an opening sentence that makes the reader want to keep reading?” That was my first class at Iowa and I’m thinking,
Oh, shit, what have I wandered into here?
I often think about bards, and I mention bards all of the time, because, by god, they had to tell a story that kept every class of person interested. There are probably a lot of dead bards, too, who wandered, went into lengthy labyrinthine digressions.

Yeah, they didn’t make it.

Even Faulkner, at his most esoteric, is actually pushing the narrative. He is not languid. Sometimes he makes you confused, but he’s not just lolling around, sniffing the lotus blossoms.

I don’t think you get enough credit for your sense of humor. A book like
Give Us a Kiss
made me laugh out loud. And even
The Death of Sweet Mister,
a very dark book, is filled with wonderful humor.

I’m glad you say that because I think most of them have some of it in there. There are many people who say they don’t see
any of the humor. And some of the short stories that I’ve done are very macabre and dark. I remember Pinckney Benedict saying to me, after reading one of my short stories, “I don’t know what you think of this, but I thought it was really funny.” Hell yes, it was funny.

I’m sure you get bombarded with questions about the Ozarks from people who’ve never been to this part of the country. Do their questions ever come across as being extremely naive or silly?

They all want to know if the Ozarks I write about in my novels is what it’s
really
like. No one has ever said that it’s
all
like that. I mean, is everyone in New York a member of the gang in
GoodFellas
? I don’t think so. People just want to believe that you’re showing a total depiction, and also, it’s almost like the idea of fiction is getting devalued. Everyone wants to know what’s the truth of it. I’m getting a little bored with that question, because I never said I was anything other than a creative writer.

You incorporate many popular crime fiction themes into your novels and as a result you’re considered a writer of crime fiction as opposed to a literary writer.

What we call crime fiction now, whether it’s Lehane, Pelecanos, or Laura Lippman, essentially is social realist novels. And I completely agree with that. When I came out of Iowa, I knew that I never wanted to stand in front of a group of academics again and see if they wanted to hire me. I’m never
going to do that again. So I would like to have one novel that had something you could take to the public. You don’t need those colleges or academics to say you’re groovy. You can just run right around them and take it to an actual reading public. So I knew I wanted elements of popular fiction in there to give me a chance to survive and develop.

Other than
Winter’s Bone,
which novel do people most often cite as their favorite?

Tomato Red
. It got some nice reviews but actually got far more nasty reviews than all of my other books combined. And most of them were from the South, which I couldn’t figure out. I thought,
Is it the gay kid or what?
I don’t know what it was.

Really? What did the negative reviews say? Why were they negative?

Oh, a variety of reasons. Some were mildly dismissive. Some were really ugly—one actually, I felt, went way beyond literary reviewing, and I asked my wife, “I didn’t get drunk and fuck his girlfriend did I?” She said, “I don’t think you did.”

The Death of Sweet Mister
is my favorite. I still remember the chilling sensation I experienced reading the final line of that book, “I’d say no dawns ever did break right over her and me again.”

I actually felt like that book broke through in another direction. That was a case where once I got in the tune of it,
nothing was in the way. And frankly, if I get in tune like that, if I’m not pulled out of it, I pretty much shuffle around in a robe staying in there. And I don’t come out. That one was that way, and
Woe to Live On
was that way, too. I don’t know what it is. I’m just running hard to keep up with it.