The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room

GIFFORD: I’ve never stopped seeing myself as anything but a poet. The point of writing poetry was to figure out the language. I wasn’t so conscious about that at first, then gradually I became conscious of writing poetry to learn how to write a sentence. I’m not the first person to say that but it’s true—it was true in my case.

Where did you first get the idea that you could be a writer?

Nobody encouraged me to be a writer. My father was dead by the time I was 12 so he never had a say in the matter. My mother was distracted, involved with her own life and so she really didn’t have anything to say about it, either . . . Nobody really challenged me.

But when I began reading the stories of Jack London, and then Joseph Conrad—because I thought these were adventure writers—I began to see a way, that they were men who got out, and saw the world, and had things to write about. And they had their own way of observing and recording the events, and that was really what inspired me—reading those stories.

My idea of being a writer was in that traditional sense, being a merchant seaman, working on the railroad, hitchhiking, doing whatever it was, just to be out there in the world and experience as much as I could experience, a classic approach to it. School was not part of my plan.

You got the idea from the books themselves.

I got the idea that it was possible to make a living, and to have an interesting life. I figured that I’d never get married, I’d never have children or a conventional life, really—which I did eventually have. I never lost this wanderlust, or whatever you want to call it. I wanted to do it in the way these guys had done it. It meant a lot to me. To experience as much as I could experience.

Are there writers in the family, besides yourself?

Not that I know of. On my mother’s side there were a couple of artists, painters. And musicians, certainly. There were always musicians. And that’s basically how I began writing poetry, as song lyrics.

You worked as a musician for a little while.

I did. I was a musician in London in the mid-1960s, then later when I came to California in the early 1970s, I was writing songs. I must have written a couple hundred songs. I still write songs sometimes. I was never a very good musician. But I could write songs.

These weren’t exactly pop tunes?

No, the songwriters that I admired the most were more the Tin Pan Alley songwriters: Hoagy Carmichael, Harold Arlen, and later, guys who could write anything, the Brill Building people like Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. Really, I admired anybody who could write good songs: Kurt Weill, Johnny Mercer, Agustín Lara.

And all this, the songwriting and poetry, was part of getting to know the language, to figure out how to use it, eventually to write prose?

Expanding the vocabulary.

You know, the real story here begins well before all of this. As a child I grew up mostly in the company of adults. I traveled a lot with my mother and my father, separately, most of the time. I was virtually an only child, in my early years certainly. Since we traveled so much, I grew up in hotels. We were living at the Seneca hotel in Chicago when I was born, then moved to a hotel in Key West, Florida, a hotel in Miami, a hotel in New Orleans, a hotel in Jackson, Mississippi, a hotel in Havana, Cuba, in New York, then back to Chicago. Growing up this way, as I became a conscious child, I had to be quiet and listen to what the adults were saying.

So the thing was I had to listen to people talk, that was the key. I heard a lot of people speaking, like my father’s associates, many of whom spoke in different dialects, and they spoke often in a symbolic kind of language. If somebody said, “Chicken Charlie’s down in two,” I had to figure out what they were saying—what the symbolism of that was. But it was a very creative, inventive, and colorful language.

The role of the child was to listen and to observe. And then of course I was meeting people all the time. New people. Fresh faces. People from everywhere. And so I would meet them in the lobbies, around the swimming pool, on the street, wherever it happened to be, and I’d hear their stories. And then I would invent my own stories. After a while, instead of telling the same old thing of who I was, I really didn’t know who I was or what was going on . . . My father had a rather shadowy profession. I mean he was involved in the rackets. So nobody was ever very specific about what was going on. I used to make up stories about my own life. I used to tell people that I had this house in a small town somewhere with a dog, that I had brothers and sisters, this and that, which was totally untrue. And then they would meet my mother, and my mother was, well, interested to know what I’d said.

You’ve written poetry, novels, essays, reviews, journalism, short fiction, plays, screenplays . . . Is any one form most important to you?

I do cover a spectrum, from poetry to the movies. I’m not saying that I’m wonderful at all of the forms or any of the forms in that sense. I really am no judge of that and I’m not very analytical. All I know is that, except for work that has been assigned, early journalism, screenwriting jobs—if I’m self-generating, if I’m generating the story, the expression entirely on my own, I really find that it’s the subject, the way it comes to me that inspires the form. A thought may come and it may be best expressed as a poem, or it may be best expressed as an essay, or a short story, or maybe it takes a long time for me to get at a novel . . . hard to say. The great thing about it all is, since I have experience now in a great many forms, I have these to choose from.

You’ve said that the short story is the most difficult to write, and also your favorite.

Often my favorite. It is tough to put so much into relatively few pages. To get three acts into a small space. I always admired the great short story writers, Kafka, Chekhov, James, Salinger, others. I did write a lot of short stories but they were all contained in the novels. Or what I chose to call novels. You know it’s a kind of arbitrary term, too, in that there are a lot of books called novels that aren’t continuous narratives. It’s a marketing term, these days, more than anything else.

Have you changed your definition of the novel over time? Your novels certainly have changed.

No, to me a novel is just a longer form of a story. I can’t define it any more clearly than that. That’s why I like the form of the novella. It falls somewhere in between. It might be 50 pages, it might be 100 pages. I take as much space as I need to tell the story and when the story’s done, that’s it. When the voices stop talking, it’s over.

What do you mean by voices?

When the characters have said enough, or when I determine that they’ve said enough, that’s it. It’s finished.

Do they let you know or do you let them know?

Oh, they always let me know. They absolutely let me know. This is not automatic writing. Or taking dictation, as Yeats’ wife pretended to be doing in order to impress him.

So you don’t actually hear them?

Well that’s a funny thing. I’ve told the story before. I began writing Wild at Heart, the first of the Sailor and Lula novels, in a little hotel in South-port, North Carolina, right on the Cape Fear river.

Which is where the book itself starts . . .

Where it starts. I was doing something completely different, I was down there to write about deep sea fishing.

I woke up one morning and I heard these people talking in my head, and I sat down and started writing it down, and it was the voices of Sailor and Lula having a conversation. At first I thought that this was just a little story, a fragment, or a short story, I didn’t know what it was. But they kept talking, they wouldn’t leave me alone.

Where did the voices of Sailor and Lula come from? Can you trace it to a person, a couple you had seen? These were people’s voices you’d been hearing your whole life.

No, I’d never heard their voices before.

But you’d lived where they live in the novel, you’d heard people who spoke that way.

I had never before really written out of the Southern side of myself. Not in fiction. There was a bit of it in Port Tropique, where the protagonist comes to New Orleans at the end. But I’d never really written out of that side of things, using those voices. And that’s what Sailor and Lula represented. It began a cycle of novels that I wrote for ten years. So that’s really what happened.

Many of your characters speak in dialects, from the bayou to the barrio. They talk in different ways.

Just like real people.

I’m just trying to honestly reflect the way people talk. Nothing more, nothing less. For example, I have a lot of black, African-American characters. I’ve had people at readings, always young people, college students, give me this politically correct argument: “How can you, a white male”—and these are always white people asking this question—“presume to write with an African-American voice, or out of an African-American perspective?” First of all, they don’t know shit about me, that I helped to raise two African-American boys. But that doesn’t matter. What really matters is that I can identify with people to a certain extent, or accurately or closely reflect the way that people really do speak.

I write about white characters who speak in different dialects as well. I don’t speak that way, I don’t have to speak that way. I can mimic them, I’ve always been interested in the way that people speak.

I love H. L. Mencken’s book, The American Language, a great document of what became disappearing language. Writing down how people spoke entering Ellis Island. How English was transformed. This is still fascinating to me.

In New Orleans, if you know the way people speak there, you say oh, this person must be from the ninth ward. Because that’s how they speak, they’re Yats. “Where yat?” If you write about a certain neighborhood in Chicago, at a particular time in history, then you’re going to reflect the way people speak there and then. And that’s what I’m doing. And I’m identifying these characters by the way they speak.

Some of the characters talk like they’re straight from the Bible, the fire-and-brimstone part.

I have for many, many years been a big reader of the Old Testament. I’ve always thought this was a very interesting book, all these versions of these events. As Allen Ginsberg said about Jack’s Book,² “My god, it’s just like Rashomon—everybody lies and the truth comes out!!” With the Bible, you could turn that around: Everybody gives their version of the truth. And what is it really? Is it all lies?

Kerouac you’ve named as a literary influence, along with B.Traven, Jack London, Conrad, Flaubert, others.

Kerouac was a great inspiration. Not his autobiographical style, but he was a great inspiration. And he was another one who had his own universe to inhabit and to write about, and he created his own legend.

Kerouac said of his work, “The whole thing frames an enormous comedy . . . the world of raging action and folly and also gentle sweetness seen through the keyhole of his eye.” Does your work form one big whole?

I think the novels that I wrote, beginning with Wild at Heart, those six novels and novellas: Perdita Durango, Sailor’s Holiday, Sultans of Africa, Consuelo’s Kiss, Bad Day for the Leopard Man, and then continuing with what I call the Southern Nights trilogy, harder-edged books—Night People, Arise and Walk, Baby Cat-Face—and then finally The Sinaloa Story, all of these written within a decade, they certainly form a coherent whole, for me. I was dealing with the things that were bothering me in America. Religious fundamentalism. Racism, which is the biggest wound of all. And basically I was dealing with relations between men and women, women and women, men and men. In other words I was really playful at times, but writing a kind of violent satire, to better make my point. I think that there definitely is a connection among all those books.

Kerouac uses the particular word comedy—

Yeah, but he was taking from Balzac, the Comédie Humaine. And William Saroyan, who was another great influence on Kerouac, also wrote The Human Comedy.

And the word suggests that these writers wanted to capture a particular quality of existence, of the human predicament, and that is why they wrote. Is that why you write?

Well, I suppose I’m just trying to make sense out of everything, a futile enterprise. Certainly I think that many of my books are comic novels. Not everybody sees it that way. But there’s a lot of funny stuff in those books. I mean even with violence, and strange sexual goings on and what not, these books are full of comedy.

In Kerouac’s case, being a Catholic Buddhist as he was, and knowing that the motto of his family was “Live, Work, and Suffer,” you’re seeing everything through a veil of tears, so you’d better laugh to keep from crying.

Traven was famously self-abnegating, believed that the life of the writer meant nothing, that the work was everything. Do you see it the same way?

That professed opinion of Traven’s was slightly disingenuous. I believe he was not entirely sincere if and when he said this. He was living in Mexico and had an interest in covering up his tracks, disguising himself due to his own radical political past in Germany.

The work is what always matters certainly. Because we’re here now, I’m alive, you’re alive, we can sit here and we can talk and that’s worth something. But no matter what I say I can’t explain all of this. The work is either going to survive for a while or it’s not. Either I’ve made a contribution that makes sense to some people, enough people to keep it alive, or not. I’ve been pretty lucky so far.

So writing started out for you as a means of seeing the world. But then the writing takes over, outlasts, supersedes experience.

Certainly, what you do, how you spend your time, all of that, sometimes intrudes on the writing as well as informs. Fiction means you made it up. And there are no rules here. It doesn’t matter if you took six weeks, six months, six years, sixteen years, or sixty years to write a book. It’s either good or it’s bad. It either works or it doesn’t. The world isn’t waiting for the next great book. You really have to have a passion, you have to be obsessed, this is what it comes down to.

The tough part about this is if you don’t have any chops, if you don’t have any talent, if you don’t have any luck—all of these things—if you get sidetracked by drugs, women, horses, whatever it happens to be, you don’t do it.

So there’s passion and there’s discipline.

Exactly. There’s passion, there’s discipline and you do need a certain amount of good fortune. But I think that you basically make your own fortune, good or bad. I’m not exactly a big believer in predestination, the way Conrad seemed to be. And I’m not very analytical about the writing itself. I’m not very good talking about it.

You don’t know what the next book will be?

I don’t plan these things, to tell you the truth. Probably some people would say well, it shows. But that’s part of it for me. I like to be surprised, I like the mystery of it all. I’m really as curious as anybody else about what comes next, and how it’s delivered.

How extensively do you roadmap, plan the interlocking characters and themes? How much is on the fly?

One thing leads to the next. That’s the best way I can describe it. When I came toward the end of Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango, one of the characters, began taking over. She was such a strong presence that I had to do everything I could to suppress just dropping Sailor and Lula and writing about Perdita, but I was able to bring her in at the end of Wild at Heart and then go on and write a whole novel about her. One thing just led to the next.

Then finally one day, six or seven hundred pages later, because it really is one book [The Wild Life of Sailor and Lula], even though I at first published them separately, I saw a very tiny little item in the newspaper. And it said, “Sailor dies in car wreck.”

I see it, it’s right here, on the wall [in BG’s studio].

That’s all it took. That was the sign. I saw it, and then I knew how the last novella, Bad Day for the Leopard Man, was going to end. However, I did bring Sailor and Lula back again, in Baby Cat-Face, as a prequel to Wild at Heart, when they were younger. So there are all kinds of ways to do it.

An advantage of the Reader is that people have parts from most of the novels in one place, and can go in the order they want. Where should one start?

This is an impossible question for me to answer because, like I say, I’ve written in different forms; various readers are partial to certain books and not others. There’s certainly a choice out there, it’s not all the same. Where to begin is anybody’s guess.

Wyoming is a state of mind. It’s a dream. It’s an idyll. It’s a place where the little boy dreams of having a big ranch, a place to run with his dog, which he doesn’t really have. He lives in hotels. His mother is generally unhappy with her life, and they’re in this hermetic situation in this car, driving in the South and the Midwest in the 1950s. And so Wyoming is a place where neither of them has ever been. It’s a mythic place for them. And they agree upon Wyoming as a place where perhaps they can go some day, and then they’ll be happy. It’s a panacea, a Shangri-La. Wyoming is not real. It’s an idyllic state of mind, not the state itself. This novel was for me a way of not only recapturing time passed but reinventing it, to make it live again albeit with a difference, a different kind of truth.

What about within each novel? Do you do much revising?

When I write a novel, I don’t necessarily plan it out, I don’t know what’s going to happen. But as I go, things occur to me and I note them down, on another piece of paper or in the margins, so that I’m going to get to that part. And that’s as much as I’m willing to do. I’ve never made an outline in my life.

I’ll say this much. I write in longhand. Then I reread it. As I reread it, I make changes. Those are two drafts. Then I move it to the typewriter. I still use a manual typewriter. On the typewriter it undergoes another change. Three drafts. Then I reread that. I make changes, by hand most of the time. Four drafts. Then I make a final copy, on the manual typewriter again. That’s the fifth draft. If you then include changes which might be made in galley proofs—that could be six, even seven drafts.

Now people write on computers, people work in different ways. I never even owned an electric typewriter. I didn’t like the hum; I didn’t like the idea of being plugged into the wall. I didn’t want the insistence of that. I don’t want the computer staring at me. To me it’s very tactile, writing is a physical event, it’s a physical activity. I like to hold the paper and the pencil or the pen. It’s corporeal. It’s a living being, the manuscript. I wouldn’t know what to do without it.

Not getting all that you could out of it?

Not getting the real thing. Although I know that Flaubert was considered a mad masturbator, would masturbate as he wrote, not to waste any time, have to get up from the desk—that’s not what I’m talking about. You understand the difference.

Same thing with poems?

Your writing contains numerous scathing depictions of organized religion. Especially in the Southern Nights novels, with the likes of Dallas Salt and his Church on the One Hand, and Mother Bizco’s Temple of the Few Washed Pure by Her Blood. Then Wig Hat Tippo Jr., a charac-ter in Baby Cat-Face, says “Shit, Jimbo, time peoples get a clue. Orga-nize religion be dangerous to dey health. Ought to da gov’ment put warnin’ signs on churches, same as on cigarettes.” Is this Barry Gifford talking?

I would say that Wig Hat Tippo speaks for me.

Let’s just say that the books are filled with fear and trembling. Or fear and loathing. There’s so much hypocrisy. We’ve seen this in our lifetime so many times. The hypocritical acts of so-called religious men and women, people who supposedly have an answer, are guides through the wilderness, through belief or disbelief. And I don’t buy any of it. I never have. I don’t know where this cynicism came from exactly, but I saw the way the world worked very early, with my father and his friends. These were people who were trying to control others, and their circumstances.

It’s not just organized religion in the books. Also there are the militant feminist groups, like Hilda Brausen’s Brausenkriegers and Marble Lesson’s Mary Mother of God group, and Big Betty and Miss Cutie’s Raptured Holy Brides of Ms. Jesus.

You notice that the heroes of most all of these books are women. Heroines, I should say.

Yes, but they have an agenda that’s more justifiable, in a way.

And anybody who’s reading these novels . . .

Perhaps that’s why so many of my readers are women, that they come to the readings . . . they have thanked me. This has been gratifying and unexpected. Certain people are relating to it, responding to it in a way that has meaning for them, not just for me, and that’s important, it helps to keep me going.

What about all of these violent things that happen to the men in your books? Are you a man-hater?

They’re getting “cantalouped,” castrated, shot, beheaded.

Yes, but what’s been happening to women, or people of color? I mean, I’m not the most politically correct person on the face of the earth. Nor do I ever hope to be. I’m just observing. This is not necessarily my philosophy. Like Hamlet says to Horatio—and Bram Stoker later used this in Dracula: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Well, I take this seriously.

Are your novels topical? The section of Night People entitled “The Secret Life of Insects” seems to make a case for abortion rights. Arise & Walk features the assassinations of two racist provocateurs.

Everything I have to say about race and religion and politics is in the novels. I’m interested individually in what drives people, what motivates them, how they react in particular situations. I’ve seen all manner of behavior, good, bad and indifferent. We all have, it’s just that some people choose to ignore or blind themselves to some or much of it.

Which do you consider the greater conflict, that within the individual or that between individuals?

What’s on the inside comes out.

Look what happens when you have the religious zealots running the country. Look what’s happening now. It’s The Crusades all over again. They never quit, these fucking people! It’s just fear and trembling all over again. And that’s what I’m writing about in those books. That’s why I changed, in a way, in 1997.

I can’t inhabit that universe forever, I can’t do it intellectually. It becomes a vacuum and you’re just never gonna have a good time again. In a way your most recent books—The Phantom Father and Wyoming—represent a return to simplicity, to works of the self, writing like Landscape With Traveler, your first novel.

I’m just writing [in the middle novels] about how certain people see the world. It’s personal in another way. I’m always reminded of a quote from Pound’s Cantos. He recounted a conversation between Aubrey Beardsley and William Butler Yeats. Yeats said to Beardsley, “Beardsley, why do you draw such horrors?” And the illustrator replied, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats.” This told me, really, the truth about a lot of things.³

Is a gritty book, such as one of the Southern Nights novels, a depiction of beauty?

No, I think it’s a catalogue of horrors. Not so much with Sailor and Lula, they’re two innocents, naïve, going through the world, and the shit is raining down from the sky and some of it’s gonna fall on them. And then they’re going to be forced to deal with it. That’s how most of us go through life.

What do you mean by harder? To read? To understand?

Less compromising, in certain ways. And in some ways really a kind of a catalogue of one unspeakable act after another. But if you inhabit that universe all the time, it starts to wear on you. It’s like I used to hear when I was a kid: “If you walk like a duck and talk like a duck and you’re seen constantly in the company of other ducks, I can only assume that you, too, are a duck.”

[Author quack-quacks]

How do you spell that?

Q-u-a, Q-u-a, Q-u-a, as Beckett has in Godot. Qua qua qua qua. I want to see how you transcribe that one.

In a 1975 letter to your friend and literary confidant Marshall Clements, you wrote: “There are so many weird things that go on out there, you don’t have to make it up. It’s going on all the time.”

In fact I say this all the time. Obviously [by 1975] I had already drawn my conclusions.

The books are realistic, however. These things do happen. I’ve had detectives in Oakland, New York, New Orleans, tell me the most horrifying stories of things that they’ve seen, first-hand, that I can’t even begin to approach in these novels.

You told me once about a reader who found a particular scene in Arise and Walk, where a rat bites the nipple of a breastfeeding mother, so offensive that he quit reading the book.

This was an old acquaintance of mine; he thought I was being sensational, that I used it just to get a reaction. “How could you make this stuff up?” he said. Well, I didn’t make it up. It was told to me by a painter who grew up in New York, in a tenement, and as a child had witnessed this very thing.

So how to say whether you made it up, or whether it’s based on a story somebody told you, or something that you saw—it doesn’t really matter. Was I complaining about poverty? Was I talking about man’s inhumanity to man? What was I talking about? Rats have to eat too? He had a political agenda, and this was not consistent with his idea about how to proselytize.

In Arise and Walk the escaped con, Ice D, reads a century-old poem written by another African-American desperado, Rufus Buck. Ice-D wonders, “How could a man, black, white, or brown . . . do such terrible things as Rufus Buck apparently did, and then express himself in such tender fashion?” Is this a question you answer in your writing?

I’m just stating a fact. Because of circumstances in the world, Rufus Buck was forced to behave the way he behaved. He was put into a context in which he was in effect made to behave in a certain fashion if he wanted to survive—after his own definition of survival. And so it’s no mystery at all that he could also be compassionate, be generous, be tender-hearted.

Do you have a favorite character from your books?

This is a very tough question. I really think that Lula is my favorite because she’s a little nutty, she’s not a hypocrite, and she’s generous, and she’s a survivor. I really care about her for this. She’s really not a victim. And the fact that she is not a victim and never sees herself as a victim is in itself a victory. And people who see themselves as victims are anathema to me.

Do you believe in victimhood, ever?

Oh, it’s a religion! I mean, forget those people. Keep them the hell away from me. That’s all I have to say about that.

Are you taking more risks now?

I never thought I was doing anything but taking risks. But I didn’t think of myself as particularly brave. I was just doing what it was that I could do. I tried at various times, certainly very early on, to write in different styles, to make money and what not. I found that I was an unsuccessful prostitute. I was really incapable of writing to order because I believed that writing was my vocation. I don’t want to sound holier than thou, I’m not, it’s just that I was really bad at it. One time somebody offered me $400 to write a little semi-pornographic soft-core paperback book. I had known a couple of writers, poets who had done this quite successfully, written a bunch of them under pseudonyms. I couldn’t get past page two. I mean I really couldn’t do it. It just bored me to tears. I couldn’t imagine doing it.

Is writing a radical act?

There’s nothing radical about it. It’s part of the fabric of who I am, as I’ve been explaining all along. I don’t think in these terms, radical or reactionary. When it occurs to me to tell a story, I do it. I write it. The form is dictated to me by the inspiration itself.

Is there a Barry Gifford style?

You tell me, you’re the critic.

I’ve heard you deny it.

People have said there is, so there may be, I don’t know. André Gide said an interesting thing. With each new book the writer should understand, and be almost intentionally willing to lose fifty percent of the audience that he had for the previous book. Because he’s going to go on. And fifty percent of the readers that he had for the previous book didn’t understand him in the first place. They bought the book for a multitude of reasons, but not really because they understood the writer himself, what he was saying, what he was doing. The thing is to not worry about it; the fifty percent that did understand you, and are interested in the way your mind works, will follow you to the next book, and you’ll pick up the other fifty percent along the way. In other words, don’t be afraid to change, don’t be afraid to follow your own mind, your instincts. I guess that’s what I’ve been attempting to do all this time.

I want to talk about your film work. You’ve written numerous screenplays and thus far have had two novels, Wild at Heart and Perdita Durango, made into films. How did you first start working with filmmakers?

In 1982, Port Tropique was bought for the movies. The producers asked me to write a screenplay, which I did, having never written a screenplay before. I got a couple of screenplays and I read them.

They didn’t like what I wrote. Then the producers hired a couple of other writers to write two or three different screenplays after that. There was a director involved in the project who collaborated with the screen-writers, but each script was worse than the one before.

By the third screenplay, they’d changed the title of the novel, which they’d always professed to love, and was ostensibly untouchable, to Oil and Water, which was about as good a phrase I can think of to describe how I was getting along with the producers and the putative director for this movie.

You said you started reading screenplays more often. Did this reading influence your writing?

Not at all. It’s odd that I never did read screenplays. Perhaps in those days there weren’t so many easily available. I’d had this great affection for movies since I was a boy. I don’t know why I hadn’t read screenplays before.

Did you have reservations about adapting your work to film? Were you worried that the filmmakers might degrade your work?

Nobody can degrade my work. The book is always the book, the book exists on its own. There is a certain danger, because more people see movies than read books, and they have a greater influence these days, that the film can influence people’s thinking . . . but the book is always the book. David [Lynch, director of Wild at Heart] didn’t do anything to my novel. The novel’s still the novel—read it.

In the mid-1980s you started Black Lizard Books, which printed noir fiction, crime novels and the like. What’s the story behind that?

Black Lizard began publishing in 1984 and ended in 1989.

In 1982, on a trip to Paris, I went into a bookstore and I saw all these novels by Jim Thompson in print. I had read Jim Thompson when I was a young teenager, and remembered The Killer Inside Me and others.

So I bought up a bunch of these books and read them. And then I started trying to find them in English. I went to a friend of mine, who was a publisher, Don Ellis, and suggested to him that we publish a série noire, books that have a very particular psychological edge, and that we ought to start with Jim Thompson, because he was out of print in America. He liked the idea, and Don became the publisher of Black Lizard Books.

I set about to obtain the rights, and I acquired thirteen Jim Thompson novels for next to nothing. Because we had nothing. We had fifty cents, a pencil and a telephone. And I was the founding editor. We decided to make them like the old fashioned Gold Medal paperbacks but with a higher quality. Only the rights to the The Killer Inside Me were owned already. We did all the others. And some were made into movies. The Grifters, which was produced by Martin Scorsese, a couple others. This popularized Jim Thompson all over again.

You said you were reading Jim Thompson when you were a young teen. How would you describe the influence of this kind of writing on your own?

Take writers like Jim Thompson or David Goodis, or Charlie Willeford. These were guys who wrote about a lower echelon of society, they wrote about the people who were downtrodden, the people who were usually ignored. Characters who might stick up a liquor store or rape their father. They lent these people humanity. They wrote about them not as stereotypes but as real, living, breathing human flesh. And this is what I admired so much about them. Mostly these people they were writing about were dismissed out of hand. And this gave them a voice. Not unlike what Nelson Algren did. With just a little difference, or less literary talent, Nelson Algren could have been one of these guys. Women were also writing in this field at this time, often using male pseudonyms.

What’s the difference?

Algren was a better writer. I mean, Charlie Willeford could be a great writer. The Burnt Orange Heresy, which was one of the first ones we published, is a brilliant book, and very well written and as literary a novel as you’ll run across. But the first time around these books were mostly published as paperback originals; they weren’t reviewed very often, they were not taken seriously, for the most part, by the literary critics. I read them as a teenager, buying them on the wire rack at the drug store or the bus station. That’s the only place you could find them. They had lurid, provocative covers.

Why is a book like Night People published as literature, or fiction, taken seriously, and why is a novel of Charles Willeford’s, or Jim Thompson’s, for example, considered crime writing? What’s the story? Or Elliott Chaze’s great novel Black Wings Has My Angel? That’s a terrific novel. I mean, it’s just a novel; but because of the form in which it was published it was just not seriously considered. That’s too bad.

Are you concerned about the state of literature?

It’s like the state of Wyoming, isn’t it? In my novel. It’s a kind of ideal, a place that we don’t really know about. How could I be concerned about the state of literature? It’s an absurd idea.

To me, the writing of so-called literature is really a very subjective thing. You can understand it or like it or appreciate it on your own terms. You have to be prepared to understand or appreciate it or not. Also, it’s not a competitive sport. There are different voices for different people.

It’s not my place and not my inclination, anyway, to make pronouncements about anything so grandiose as “the state of literature.” If you ask me, do I think so-and-so is a good writer, I’ll tell you yes or no and I’ll tell you why, if I’ve read them. That’s the best I can do. Other than that, I’m only concerned with my own work.