Hi folks,
Most of you know I'm a huge fan of a living literary legend, William Joyce. Happily, today an interview he did with Richard Godwin just came out on Richard's interview site, Chin Wag at the Slaughterhouse, a must-see stop on the literary trail. Here's what William had to say:
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Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse:
Interview With William Joyce
William Joyce has had an intensive literary career whose
vicissitudes exemplify the shallow fickleness of the industry. This is a writer
who knew Norman Mailer, and who wrote a first novel, First Born Of An Ass, that
baffled the reviewers, not hard given their restricted reader’s skills, and he
carried on. That is what writers do especially those who challenge society.
William met me at The Slaughterhouse, where we talked about his place in the
American legacy and the tethering of literature by social conditioning.
What is your enduring relationship as a writer with the American
legacy?
Enduring?? I don’t
have enough money for next month’s rent so my relationship with the American
legacy is the least of my concerns. I’m hoping to ENDURE without sleeping on
the street.
But since you
mentioned it, which “America” are you talking about? There’s the U.S. “America”
which has misappropriated the name and there’s the continent America named
after America Vespucci, an Italian cartographer.
If you’re talking
about the U.S., as soon as I die–shortly– the academics will build a statue to
me, and put me in the Pantheon of Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, and Charlie
Chaplin. As long as they erect an emaciated statue, I’ll be happy.
But if you’re talking
about the continent America, I identify just as much with Eduardo Galeano as
W.C. Fields or Henry Miller. That would also be true with another dozen Latin
American and West Indian writers like Aime Cesaire, Vallejo, Rulfo, Asturias,
and Jose Donoso.
To what extent do you think America and Europe now are tethered
by social conditioning and a failure to appreciate breakthrough literature, if
you think of the effect Henry Miller had on the literary establishment, and how
much was your novel First Born an anarchic assault on those limiting
sensibilities?
Well, I think the
difference between now and then is that Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer had
eloquent defenders. There was in Europe and the U.S. in 1935, or 1960, an
aristocracy of critics who had the confidence to take on any book, no matter
how low-life, and articulate its vitality. These connosseurs of what is best in
the written word do not exist now.
First Born of an Ass had no such defenders. In 1989 when it came
out, there were book reviewers who applauded the novel but no one who really
took its measure. It was “breakthrough” in the sense that it used apparent
losers to define a way of life in a particular setting, the steel mill towns of
Western Pennsylvania.
What also made it
breakthrough was that like Tropic it disparaged the entire the entire set of
bourgeoise values. Art, thrift, cleanliness, progress, education,
respectability all are washed down the drain.
All of these
“Breakthrough” books have another thing in common–The Body. Donleavy’s The
Ginger Man, Tropic of Cancer, and First Born of an Ass never get far away from
the body. If Tropic could be said to be one large stomach, First Born is nothing
but one sprawling intestine. It is the world viewed from the digestive
apparatus.
This is the last thing
the Modern World of isms and sects wants to hear. The Bible, the Koran, the
Talmud, deny the body. It is always suspect. With its unpredictability, it
needs to be reigned in, harnessed, covered up. All of literary censorship is
predicated upon this. If the body can be denied, it can be used as a tool to
perpetuate profits and a slice of propaganda.
The most important
thing about Breakthrough Writing is that a lot of the time it is funny. And
once you have people laughing, they’re going to look around and see the
absurdity of their own situation. Then, they kick off their high-heels, or
loosen their neckties, become slightly human. Now the writing is a threat.
A long time ago, there
were men, and occasionally women, who saw all this and in a leisurely fashion
wrote about the joy and insights they got from such unpredictable material. No
such arbiters exist today and it is one of the reasons humans are becoming
junkies at an unprecedented rate. What we have in place of excellence is the
voice of the Mob. And there is hardly anything they don’t know.
Do you think that Art and literature are being increasingly
repressed by social engineering and the rise of the far right and its
Christianising tendencies in the US and what is the antidote?
Repression? Social
Engineering?? Whatever is going on it has made people dumb. In all the
countries people are so dumb it’s a wonder they’re alive.
In 1966, Roberto
Rosselini, the pioneer Italian film director, said in an interview that Europe
was headed toward an infantile society. We’re there now. Billions of people
just waiting to be fed, no sign of life anywhere.
Look, if an educated
man has the choice of eating a pizza or reading a good book, he’ll take the
pizza. The pizza has taste right away whereas the good book takes work. You
have to bring something to the book–desire, a sense of adventure, a willingness
to explore; the reader has to have energy. Ahhh, but with the pizza you need
only open your mouth. Bingo! Everything is taken care of. All you need is
dollars or euros and You’re set. And dollars or euros is all that most people
have. Desire was flushed long ago into the gearboxes of nasty machines.
The problem is that
the wheat for the dough in the pizza is full of GMOs. The tomato sauce is
loaded up with a chemical preservative to give it longer shelf life. The cheese
comes from a cow that had its ass shot full of hormones to promote quicker
growth of the befuddled animal.
The body doesn’t know
what to do with all these chemicals. all this sludge. So the pizza just sits in
the guy’s gut in various stages of putrefaction while the body tries to arrive
at a verdict. When the autopsy was done on John Wayne, they found 36 pounds of
feces. The great defender of law and order and he’s dragging around all this
shit while 50 million people across the Earth scream, “That John Wayne, he’s my
hero, he doesn’t take shit from anybody.” Well, he just happens to take a lot
of shit from the whole food network which is supposed to keep him alive but in
fact is responsible only to a group of shareholders.
The guy who just
gobbled the pizza doesn’t care about all this. The next morning he wakes
feeling pregnant when he liked to feel nice and light. He tries to relieve this
bloatedness by yelling at the wife and kids but they’re bloated too and yell
right back. It’s called The Great American Family. Everybody hoping to make A
Stupendous Crap in the hoity-toity-ha-ha-ka-ka Craperia Room so they can go out
and buy more pizzas. Papa then goes to work–usually in some office building–
where anger is not permitted. At lunch in the company cafeteria, someone blames
all the problems on the Commie government, a second guy says, No, it’s the
Jewish bankers. A third party blames all the problems on the Armenian faggots,
they’re the ones who’ve taken over the schools. The conversation has inflamed
the original pizza guy. It’s tapped his adrenal gland and he rushes off to the
Rest Room where if you were ever caught just resting, security would haul you
off for serious questioning.
A modest bowel
movement and the pizza guy feels a bit lighter. “Maybe it is those Armenian
faggots” he says to the mirror as he washes his hands.
There’s always been
Social Engineering going on. In 1850 Alexander Herzen said about Russia that 52
adults were waiting for the infant to plop out of the womb. If your own life’s
a failure, you can always give advice. But humans prepare for this social
engineering by eating a lot of ballast. That way they’re passive and can be
molded this way or that way. They don’t want freedom which is what the artist
represents; they want to be weighted down… with pizzas, with slogans, any kind
of crap will do. Pursuing freedom takes too much work, too much vigilance.
Better to be half comatose and relaxed–cool it, chill out–than all flighty,
flapping one’s wings toward a distant chimera.
Whether it’s the
social engineering in 1491 from Uncle Ephraim or the technological variety now,
there’s always a constant. There’s something that’s inherent in humans that’s
always looking for a shortcut to happiness. In 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand
were looking for a shortcut to the Spice Islands so they sent explorers west in
wooden ships. No spices but Indians who had lots of gold and silver. In 1849,
More gold at Sutter’s Mill in California and this discovery made half the world
insane at so much riches in one tiny locale. 75 years later it was liquid gold
and people went mad at the thought of a model-A Ford that could power them
right up to heaven. Led Zepplin has a lot to say about this. Now it’s a host of
technological devices that are supposed to make people feel Connected but just
a glance around and you see that people are totally disconnected. They can’t
see and they can’t hear. They just poke and pray and wait for the next pizza.
So I don’t think it’s
a matter of repression. Humans have been gutted by seven centuries of looking
for a shortcut when paradise was often right next to them, within them. Very
few have ever been willing to serve that 10 to 15 years apprenticeship that
would have taught them contentment and often ecstasy. They’d rather buy a pill
by that name.
What is called art or
literature is nothing more than a record of an individual’s participation in
the comedy called life. Language has been so reduced in its resonance that
words are now taken literally. Comedians in the U.S. no longer enter college
campuses because they say students take everything literally. That means desire
is gone. The body has retreated into a shell. Dead at 18, waiting for the
teacher to get them down the road to the next Holiday Inn. The far right or far
left or Christian evangelists are just examples of polemicized mobs who take
everything literally. Who are ready to kill if they don’t get their daily
umbilical transfer of pizza. All the groups, when they see that pizza, smoking
from the oven, scream, “AWESOME!”
The antidote??? Hide.
How would you introduce your work to a new readership?
Well, there’s a direct
tie-in with your previous questions.
Given the quagmire the
Earth is in now and the fact that most countries are police states run by
corporations, if I wanted readers I’d have to find rebels, people fed up. This has
already happened. How did you and I meet? Through Les Edgerton. And who is Les
Edgerton?
Well, he’s more than a
rebel. He’s put his body on the line. He’s done time. He’s worked the streets
which means he knows what it takes to get a job done. And he’s not going to be
fooled by rhetoric–he’s not living out of his head. He’s also done the hard
reading; he can decipher the difference between art and the con job called
Prize Winners. He’s not going to be fooled by the Noir crowd, nor any genre for
that matter.
The funny thing is
that before I met Edgerton I dreamed of meeting Edgerton. I knew I needed
someone like Edgerton, someone who as a child had rooted for the Bad Guys in
movies. I knew 10 years ago I couldn’t get along with straight people.
Straight people don’t
get it. They don’t get anything. They have no idea of Charlie Mingus or Miles
Davis. Their parents’ idea of a good time on Saturday night was to watch
Lawrence Welk on the teevee and they’ve followed suit. Straight people don’t
have that little hitch in their giddyup, that savvy on what it takes to get the
day started. They’re content to poke at some machine.
In the old days, there
were publishers who had this sixth sense of how to get a book rolling. Barney
Rosset of the old Grove Press had it. So did the guy who ran Workman’s Press in
the ’70s. Carl Weissner had it Germany and if it hadn’t been for him, Bukowski
would still be working for the post office, even in his grave.
But publishers like
that no longer exist. That means the writer is going to have to have the street
savvy to do it himself but he’s also going to have to find allies. Find his
Edgertons–hustlers, conmen, out-of-work actors and actresses, people with sense
and taste and a sense of humor.
For example, in 1989,
when my poetry book For Women Who Moan came out, I hired two saucy hookers to
go into a bar at Happy Hour time. Later, I’d walk in smiling.
“You look like you’re
in a good mood,” the bartender would say.
“Yeah, my book just
came out.”
“Oh, what book is
that?”
So I show him the
book.
“How much?”
“No charge. It’s your
tip.”
“Thanks, my
girlfriend’s birthday is coming up. I think she’ll like this.”
“But maybe you could
show your new book to those two ladies at the end of the bar?”
The two ladies thank
him and start to read–out loud, together, just as we rehearsed it. Already a
few guys have meandered in and they hear this strange poem about orgasms just
as their sipping their first beer. They knock down that beer tan rapido and
order another. Now the place is starting to fill up. A loud argument starts up
at the bar. The ladies are debating which of them has the best Moan–just as we
rehearsed it.
Well, even in 1989,
U.S. men had a hard time getting laid. And now, no sooner do they get off work
than they hear two attractive women waxing eloquently on the female orgasm.
Potential buyers are creaming their drawers at the sound of it all. Men are
soon packed three-deep around the women. One, then two whisper in the women’s
ears for their phone number.
“Maybe you could buy
me a copy of this book,” the men are advised.
Of course the guys are
going to buy the ladies a copy of For Women Who Moan. A half hour later a new
crop of suckers stroll into Happy Hour at Childe Harold’s Bar and Restaurant at
Dupont Circle in D.C.
Happy Hour indeed! Me
and the ladies are out of there with ten books sold in an hour and a half. I
leave a ten-dollar tip for the bartender and I meet the ladies down the street
at the corner. I have White Out with me and I spread it through the dedications
and resell the books at the next bar.
Many nights I arrive
home so high I fall asleep in bed with my clothes on. I wake in the morning to
ten and twenty-dollar bills all over the bed. In eight months I make more money
from a poetry book than even Walt Whitman did in his best years. Poet &
Writers, the trade magazine, sends out a reporter. D.C. hookers report that
business has never been better.
But if you’re an
enterprising author working the streets, you’d better be prepared for accidents
and prepared for how to take advantage of them.
Example. One day I’m
in a supermarket at the checkout line and a huge Black man pushes me aside,
yelling, “Make way, make way, I have to cook for the vice president.”
I’m so dumb I’m asking
myself, “Which corporation is he talking about?” Then I remember that I do live
in Washington, D.C.
“Hey!” I yell at the
cook, “You rudely pushed me out of the way. Maybe the Vice President would like
a copy of my latest book?”
He hands me ten
dollars and I inscribe For Women Who Moan to “Dan Quayle who is ready to lead
our noble nation into battle.”
Two weeks later I see
the cook in the same supermarket.
“Hey, what did the VP
think of my poems?”
“He never got them.
Mrs. Quayle got a hold of the book and won’t give it up. When I left she was reading
it to somebody over the phone.”
I could have sold him
another copy but I thought, “The hell with it. Let the VP and his wife fight
over the Moan book.”
A month later there’s
that cook again.
“Hey Cook! Did the VP
ever get my book?”
“Naw, Mrs. Quayle lent
it to the First Lady.”
Immediately I started
having grandiose fantasies. I imagined the President of the United States
plucking For Women Who Moan off the bedside table and wondering, “Have I ever
known a woman who moaned?”
Then I imagined
getting a call from the First Lady and it wasn’t about the quality of my poems.
The Moan poem had started her hormones galloping again. I was filled with
dread. What if she actually did call and I had to perform on the First Lady or
watch my poetry career go down the drain? It was remote. It was absurd. But
stranger things had happened to me. How would my tool, John Henry, react when
he saw all that white pubic hair and heard those Secret Service men pacing
outside the door of the motel room???? And what if she did Moan and the Secret
Service men, thinking she was being strangled, came crashing through the door,
guns blazing?? I laughed it off as silly thought; still, every time the phone
rang, my stomach tightened. Finally, after a week when I didn’t hear from her I
figured I was off the hook. Maybe she got George to quit thinking about bombing
Iraq for an hour and he gave her a tumble. Stranger things had happened.
What I wasn’t prepared
for was a knock at the door a few days later. A little guy in a white shirt and
a necktie said he was from Baker & Taylor and could he talk with me. Baker
& Taylor I knew to be the largest book distributor in the U.S. This rep
said Baker & Taylor had received calls from bookstores requesting the Moan
book and did I have a few hundred copies I could turn over to them. I asked him
if anybody important had called the bookstores. Yes, he said. Who? He said he
couldn’t tell me.
We did some paperwork
then and it revealed I wouldn’t make much. Bookstores would get 40%, B & T
15% which would leave me with one dollar profit on each book. I paid the
publisher $3.50 a book. I told him it was no deal.
In retrospect, I made
a mistake. I would have had nationwide distribution and it wouldn’t have
affected my street sales. My ego was just too inflamed with my independence.
But what stories I got every week. So, as far as readers now, it’s just a
matter of matching the right book to the right locale… and being careful of
elderly ladies who have power.
Thank you William for a great interview.
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