We dreamed of Kerouac’s journeys.
For us Americans, the idea that true life is in the heart of the wild lands and not in the cities goes back so much further in time, to Whitman.”
—russell banks1
The increasing degradation of the large American metropolises in the 1980s and 1990s prompted some of their dwellers to escape to the countryside in an effort to get closer to nature. In The Solace of Open Spaces (1985), the Californian Gretel Ehrlich describes her harsh life on a ranch in the hostile but breathtakingly regenerative beauty of the wild landscapes of Wyoming. Her book was an immediate success. Renewing the tradition of Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau, it inspired a new generation of writers to reconnect with nature in order to live a more authentic life and gain a modicum of self-knowledge.
With the development of highways, riding across the vast spaces of America generated feelings of infinite freedom, first extolled by Jack Kerouac’s much earlier novel On the Road.2 Embarking on such a journey across grandiose scenery, more writers awakened a new consciousness of the natural world. At the turn of the twenty-first century they continued to view the open road as a metaphor for freedom, “showing us a new destination . . . and a way of self-discovery.”3 But as we will see in this chapter, they also ventured onto byways to get a closer look at the mostly ignored or forgotten inner country and thus observe this invisible and mysterious natural world in its secret, ebullient, but fragile existence.
Speaking of “fragile existence,” starting from Day One and throughout the next decade, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center would regularly come up at our readings. In this section, two out of four authors address this pivotal moment which has now become an irreversible part of the country’s history.
Barry Gifford
In his 1978 Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac,4 Barry Gifford reinvents Kerouac’s inspirational On the Road, weaving together interviews of the latter’s friends, acquaintances, and the many people he and his companion, poet Neal Cassady, met during their cross-country ride. Gifford is able to portray in some detail this countercultural generation in their pursuit of wider horizons and a more intense spiritual life.
In 1990, in Wild at Heart,5 Gifford updates the theme of the American highway in his neo-noir novel of two teenagers, Sailor and Lula, who, embarking on a ride across the South, leave behind families and any and all societal rules. Soon they get into trouble and are on the run. Their adventure becomes a nightmare of chases and escapes, reminiscent of both Kerouac’s cross-country odyssey and Bonnie and Clyde, the popular gangster couple of the 1930s, also hot-footing it from the police.
Adapted to the screen by David Lynch (and awarded the Palme d’Or of the 1990 Cannes Festival), Wild at Heart became an instant bestseller with Sailor and Lula, the popular antiheroes of their time, bringing the author to write no fewer than seven sequels that follow his over-the-top characters between 1990 and 2015.
Easygoing and friendly, with a good sense of humor and a fecund imagination that produced enormous quantities of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and screenplays, Gifford was a great supporter of our bookstore, writing pieces about it and giving several readings that revealed the wide range of his interests and themes, all the while showing his particular empathy for fictional characters on the fringes of society. He was also a sensitive poet in the Beat style, offering meditations on life in Landscape with Traveler: The Pillow Book of Francis Reeves6 (1980). And there is his vivid depiction of a stifling, ominous atmosphere in the novel Port Tropique,7 bearing a Conradian imprint and published by Black Lizard Press, a press he started himself to reprint the great, forgotten neo-noir classics of the 1930s and ’40s.
His last reading at our bookstore took place on April 15, 2009, with the launching of The Imagination of the Heart8 closing the lifelong saga of Sailor and Lula. It is a short, poetic, diary-form memoir of Lula’s reminiscences of her life with the now-dead Sailor, her restrained emotions as she senses her own end coming, and her syncopated and visually expressive sentences tinged with Southern softness.
“About two years ago,” Gifford said, introducing his novel, “I was between projects and getting older, like the rest of you.”—[laughter]—“I started to think about Lula, my favorite among all my characters and who was now eighty years old. What was she doing and thinking now? I wondered. I started to imagine a new life for her, now alone, by giving her a new adventure, her final one as it were.”
The epigraph of the book, “At the end of what is necessary, I have come to a place where there is no road” (Iris Murdoch), gives Lula’s journey a special depth and poignancy. “I love my characters so much that I always have a hard time getting out of that sort of emotional state,” Gifford confessed. “Now I think of Lula and she’s gone, and I feel a kind of sadness.”
Q: “Does this mean that fiction characters are real to you? If so, what makes them real?”
Gifford: “You indulge in your characters; you embark with them on their adventures. You play with them. You have to be them. I don’t do research. It’s all around, all the time. I just write how the people talk, and one of my intents in my books is to preserve that language. Even the language of Sailor and Lula is going away these days.”
Barry Gifford, Village Voice Bookshop reading of The Sinaloa Story, June 11, 1998. © C. Deudon
Q: “Your language is very colloquial. Your books have been translated into some thirty languages. How do you know that they are true to your writer’s voice or voices?”
Gifford: “To tell the truth, there are some passages I don’t know how translators can reproduce, especially some of my dialogues. My French translator, Jean-Paul Gratias, who’s here tonight, has translated a dozen books of mine. It’s astounding the way he renders them, and I still don’t understand how he does it, all the more since he’s never been to the South nor to Chicago where the voices are so different. I’ve nothing but praise for such translators. You’re only as good as your translator, whatever country you’re in. You don’t have control over them.”9
Q: “There’s a lot of violence in your novels: corpses cut into pieces, cannibalism, kidnapping.”
Gifford: “Violence? There’s a lot of tragedy and death around. If things get a little bit overboard, it’s to make a point, and if you don’t have a sense of humor, it’s not worth living. These people in my novels—I did not invent them. They do exist, but they have no protection and no voice. This is probably why I write about them.”
Q: “What was your reaction to Lynch’s adaptation of Wild at Heart for the screen?”
Gifford: “Lynch showed in the film things that were hardly mentioned in the text. He made certain decisions to make the story more visual, more graphic. I had no control. I always prefer now to be involved in the composition of the screenplay. It’s a language that’s very different from writing novels. The only thing I’d say: novels or screenplays, both necessitate the use of words.”
David Payne
The author of the much-praised novel Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street was in Paris to launch the French translation of his new novel, Gravesend Light.10 We scheduled his reading at the Village Voice for September 13, 2001, which, unfortunately, turned out to be two days after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. The American community in Paris was in shock and fear was in the air, but neither the author nor his publisher cancelled his evening and we kept the date. As I had done on a number of previous occasions, whenever there was tension in the city caused by fears of terrorism, I asked our neighborhood police to keep a discreet watch over the bookshop during our public event.
Payne opened his presentation by admitting that he was at a loss for words: “I wish I had something profound to offer, but, despite the horror and the sadness of the occasion, the only response to such shock is continuity, going forward.”
Gravesend Light is set in North Carolina, the native state of the author and of his protagonist, Joey Madden, an anthropologist who wants to study an isolated fishing community and observe its traditions going back to Elizabethan times, that is, Sir Walter Raleigh’s first colony of settlers on Roanoke Island. Madden’s growing admiration for the island’s fishermen, for their simple ways of life and their deep-rooted family and moral values, instilled by the local Pentecostal Christian Church, increasingly clashes with the critical attitude of his partner, a female obstetrician who has opened a small medical office to provide birth and abortion services to the neighboring population.
Payne read the passage about a terrifying storm at sea that calls for exceptional skills on behalf of the fishermen to keep their boat afloat. Answering a question from the audience about his surprising technical knowledge in his description of the on-board operations, he explained that he had worked as a fisherman for a year after leaving college.
Payne: “I was in storms, but never like this one in my book, truly frightening. This narrow passage that the fishermen have to get through to go to sea is probably the most dangerous one in the whole country. Many people die, and about fifty boats run aground every year. These fishermen have lived a long time in the hope that the government would build jetties to stabilize the gully, but they have waited for twenty, thirty years, and it will probably never happen.”
Q: “You seem to have a strong interest in this community. Why?”
Payne: “I grew up in North Carolina, and the fishermen’s plight is somewhat alike to the tobacco farmers’. Even though tobacco is quite unpopular in the US these days, the tobacco farmers practice an old, honorable trade going back twelve generations. It’s a highly skilled profession, now threatened like that of the fishermen facing the disappearance of fish species. Oceans are being depleted while the idea of jetties to stop the course of nature is probably futile. Nevertheless, these fishermen have to go out day after day and face death. In an increasingly globalized world, these professions become more and more marginalized. I got interested in those two because they are vanishing and they won’t be around fifteen, twenty years from now.”
Q: “Did you get along with those fishermen when you were working with them?”
Payne: “Those fishermen are tough. They have been there on that island on the Outer Banks—that line of islands, thirty miles of open sea between them and the mainland, for a very long time, and it won’t be easy to cast them aside. They have been broken by life, but they’re so tough that when they enter a bar, people discreetly leave. Yet, that hard life has also given them a breadth of perspective and a level of self-awareness that no one else in the novel has.”
Q: “The second excerpt you read is the virulent ranting of a fundamentalist pastor against the new mores appearing in his community. Can this kind of sermon disappear with the older generation?”
Payne: “The public dialogue has been broken down in a shouting match between contradictory systems of beliefs. This Christian fundamentalism I describe is not so far from Islamic fundamentalism. Each one turns back to a time when the world was simpler and things were more identifiable. That’s why doctors who perform abortions are getting shot and clinics close down.”
John Biguenet
The New Orleans playwright and author of the celebrated Rising Water trilogy plays set in the city after the passage of Hurricane Katrina, John Biguenet was teaching at the Paris American Academy in the summer of 2008. We took advantage of his presence to invite him to talk about his novel Oyster, just out in French translation.11 Similar to David Payne’s North Carolina fishermen, Biguenet explores the lives and hardships of Louisiana’s traditional oyster farmers, desperately struggling with the daily realities of their dying trade.
The novel takes place in 1957. “I chose this date,” Biguenet stressed, “for it was a time of transition in the Deep South. That year, Eisenhower sent his troops to the South to enforce integration. . . . The small communities lost their power to federal power,* and, with the oil contamination of the brackish waters, oysters were becoming increasingly scarce, giving rise to rivalries, often between blood-related families vying for survival. These two elements put together—pollution and increasing loss of power—created a feeling of uneasiness pervading this community at the edge of omnipresent water and on the eve of a transition from their known world to one unknown.”
Q: “What incited you to write on such an unusual topic?”
Biguenet: “The drama of this novel revolves around Therese, a young woman with a strong character who refuses to marry a man to cancel a debt. ‘I don’t get bought by no damn boat,’ she declares. I was inspired by Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin and was drawn to his observations of manual labor, and particularly his attention to the work of human beings, especially of women. I tried to be very careful about depicting exactly how the job of raising oysters was being done by men and also by women, as such labor involved the entire family.”
A woman from New Orleans wondered about the future of the place with the increasing oil drilling. “We live in an area far removed from the oil spills,” she told us, “yet the oil is there now, and the whole ecosystem is gone.”
Biguenet: “An oyster takes seven years to mature. The last secured investment has been lost, so the next one will take another seven years for the oyster beds to produce, and the families will have long left to live somewhere else. Now it is family against family, and that culture is dead. I doubt that my wife and I will ever again eat oysters from the South.”12
Terry Tempest Williams
“My medium has been earth” was Terry’s opening remark at her Village Voice reading of March 17, 2009—a thread that runs throughout her writings.
A conservationist and “citizen writer,” she gave four readings in our bookshop, including her landmark narrative Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,13 the story of tragic events brought on by human violations against nature. Every single one of her books, whether a memoir, personal narrative, or essay is concerned with nature and the author’s struggle to protect it from the pillaging of its resources.
We will focus on her talk on Finding Beauty in a Broken World,14 her last reading at the Village Voice, when she shared at length her reflections on the necessity of recovering and creating beauty in a world torn apart by wars and the destruction of nature. “I’m desperate to find beauty,” she declared. “When this book began some eight years ago, I was in a state of brokenness, distressed over the political condition in the US.”
Indeed, when the 2001 attack on New York City occurred, she was in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, next to the White House, for a press conference on a photography exhibit of the natural world. “We had just begun when a guard stormed into the room announcing, ‘the Twin Towers have just been hit, the Pentagon struck and there is no reason not to believe that the White House is next.’ There was nothing that could have prepared us for what we had just been told, and we continued our conversation. A few minutes later, the guard came back with ‘You did not understand. Run.’ I remember grabbing a bunch of photographs and rushing into the street. Fumes were rising above the Pentagon.”
Not being able to fly back to Utah for five or six days, Williams wandered around D.C., realizing how quickly the country had changed. “The only word defining that moment was ‘terror,’” she recalled, “everyone pointing to the alleged enemy.” Yet, as a conservationist, she had likewise learned that terror could take on many different forms, once affirming that “when oil companies spoke about oil drilling and exploitation of the Arctic Ocean, their terms were not ‘if,’ but ‘when.’”
Terry lived in Southern Utah, which she described as having the most beautiful scenery with five National Parks,15 red rocks, canyons rising up, and yet “there were forty thousand trucks crossing that fragile desert. So much had already been broken, including laws, to expedite this oil that finding beauty was difficult at such a time . . . nevertheless, finding beauty was creating beauty.”
Inspired by the word “mosaic,” which came to her in a meditative moment, she went to Ravenna, Italy, to learn its craft. While engaging in this artwork, she discovered that it was “an art of integration.” On her way home, as she was driving, she saw the horizon as a long horizontal line with a small vertical one reminding her of mosaic art: on the horizontal line you place the tesserae, that small piece of cut stone, vertically. That vertical line on the horizontal line was a prairie dog, and she realized that her practice of mosaic art had changed her vision. “Suddenly,” she said, “the landscape of my home appeared to me as an ecological mosaic—broken and beautiful.”
The public began asking questions with humorist David Sedaris wondering out loud, “What is a prairie dog?”
Williams: “You’re not the only one who does not know them. Recently, while talking with a journalist about my current work, he also asked me what a prairie dog was. ‘Something like a wolf?’ he inquired. [laughter] Wanting to be polite and not humiliate him, I mentioned that Lewis and Clark, those two great explorers, thought they were small dogs, but nowadays, they are considered to be vermin, and if my father were here with us, he would have told you that he had shot thousands of them in his lifetime.”
She went back to the fact that Lewis and Clark estimated that, at the time, around 1803-1806, there were about five billion of them living in communities in the Grasslands (mostly on the Great Plains of the Midwest, the prairie of eastern Washington, and lands to the Southwest). Today, according to a New York Times article, they are part of an endangered species, fated to extinction.
“Yet nobody cares. We have forgotten how useful they are. Following the stampede hooves of the buffaloes, the prairie dogs stir the soil so as to let the rain soak through, maintaining it fertile. They also have their own language,” Williams said with excitement in her voice, explaining how a biologist devoted to the study of their language had taken sound slices and identified up to a hundred words for communication among prairie dogs. “A prairie dog is called a keystone species, on which other species depend for their subsistence,” Williams informed us. “Destroy prairie dogs, you destroy a varied world.”
Finding Beauty in a Broken World is, in fact, a mosaic of different narratives. As well as this one on the mysterious world of prairie dogs, there is a chapter on her experience as a “barefoot artist” engaged in the Rwanda Healing Project to reconstruct villages destroyed during the Rwandan Civil War (1990-1994). She was taken to task by some American critics for putting prairie dogs in a book about the Rwanda genocide. “You can’t do that,” they protested. In reply to them, she strongly affirmed that “the extermination of a species and the extermination of the people are calculated on the same input which is: prejudice, cruelty, arrogance, and ignorance. If we cannot begin to see the world as a whole, we’ll continue to see a world fragmented, fractured—the seedbed of wars.”16
Terry Tempest Williams. March 17, 2009. © Village Voice video