A Moment of Doubt Page 10

  Patrick: It’s insanely funny.

  Jim: Well, I was really constrained by the so-called clichés of detective fiction. I trashed them out—and then what? I had a precedent. I saw Chandler, one of the originals of the genre—but that was thirty or forty years before— and he just became this hopeless drunk, who had all this attitude about other kinds of writing and really couldn’t stomach Faulkner and, to me, writers that are extremely important. Chandler’s not important—he’s fun, and he was good, but he was not important.

  Patrick: What about Dashiell Hammett?

  Jim: I feel that Hammett was imprisoned by what he invented, too. Have you ever seen an unfinished novel of his called Tulip ? It’s a hundred pages of dialogue between two guys sitting around a kitchen table. It’s really good dialogue, too. But nothing happens. It doesn’t go anywhere, and he can’t figure out what to do—he doesn’t have Nick and Nora, and Asta and gin fizzes and dead bodies. It’s really sad.

  Patrick: Red Harvest is brilliant. In A Moment of Doubt, it seems to me that the characters in the novel within the novel seem to be taken out of Hammett, in a certain way.

  Jim: Sure, there’s a goof on him—you can’t get away from that stuff. It permeates the entire genre.

  Patrick: When did Lethal Injection come out?

  Jim: That was next.

  Patrick: One of the main characters in both Lethal Injection and A Moment of Doubt is the needle. I wondered if you wanted to talk about that at all.

  Jim: Oh, God. [We all laugh.] Sure. Have I been a junkie— no. Have I shot dope—yes.

  Patrick: I wasn’t going to ask you if you were a junkie, I—

  Jim: I never was. I was never interested in a trip down that mineshaft.

  Patrick: Beyond the personal, there is this object, the needle that threads its way through and over the text, like the eye in the Story of the Eye . Lethal Injection is the most ‘needle-ly’ book there is.

  Jim: What happened to William Burroughs?

  Patrick: I was going to mention William Burroughs. [Jim laughs] In Cities of the Red Night —

  Jim: I never read that.

  Patrick: I think that is his best book.

  Jim: Really? Not The Wild Boys , not Naked Lunch ?

  Patrick: No. I think Naked Lunch is kind of a farce. A lucky accident.

  Jim: I agree. And of course it is a farce.

  Patrick: But I bring up Cities of the Red Night because it also has a kind of science fiction element that you also partake in—you forgot about that genre.

  Jim: Hey, Windward Passage won the San Francisco Book Festival science fiction award! So now Barry Gifford gets to say, “Jim, that’s great you won that award, but it’s kind of too bad because I never read science fiction, so now I don’t have to read you anymore.” I doubt he’s ever read me anyway. Well, he did publish Lethal Injection . And Death Puppet . And The Damned Don’t Die . So I presume he read them. It [Black Lizard] was a small house so it’s hard to believe you could get a way without doing that.

  Patrick: I am reading Windward Passage right now and I can see the science fiction element but it’s—

  Jim: Bogus. I got a letter from someone and they wrote, “This isn’t science fiction this is social fiction.” Is that like fiction fiction? Help me out, here.

  Patrick: I think that your writing is about writing, so often. In A Moment of Doubt , the computer plays a big part—do you remember that?

  Jim: Absolutely. The problem is CPM. Who remembers CPM?

  Patrick: Tech nostalgia. You know, the first book from The Green Arcade is Low Bite by Sin Soracco, which was fun to read, for many reasons, but I like it for its eighties quality. And A Moment of Doubt is really an amazing time capsule, with the computer terms, the gender issues— and the fear and the fun. The tech thing seems very pertinent today.

  Jim: Well, here’s a story. I had a big pile of Stendhal books, and I knew the period I was after—the time he spent in Naples—he was writing about Naples. There was a point at which Stendhal stopped keeping his journals and started writing novels. It’s all very interesting to me and I just fail to see how I could have figured that out by just being on the Internet, if only because a lot of what you find on Wikipedia and the balance of the swarming id that is the idernet is unreliable. Just like the real id.

  Patrick: And it’s also very truncated. People fool themselves—they’re mimicking—

  Jim: They’re mimicking scholarship. They’re writing their term papers and they’re wimping—they get little factoids and they salt them in there and it looks like they know what they’re doing. And it’s acceptable. The knowledge is not deep at all.

  Patrick: There is also this cognitive problem, which I have been thinking about and seemed to come into high relief with Bush being re-elected. It seems that in certain dialogues, if you expressed ideas out of the scope of the predominant discourse people would look at you like you were crazy: if they hadn’t heard it already, it didn’t exist.

  Jim: It’s like those Republican talking points. The Bush administration was so good at that. They developed a message, boiled it town to a tag line or two, and then they would not deviate. They’d have everybody in the administration on all these different talk shows saying exactly the same thing. To the point where the Republicans who wanted to believe it were mouthing it and even the New York Times , like Judith Miller—the snake in the wood-pile—made it seem like they weren’t reading their own goddamn newspapers. They’re going with the administration’s message—don’t get me started.

  Patrick: And short term memory is another truncation, as well as the response in print—.

  Jim: There’s a lot of shoal sailing out there. But books are always there to be had and always will be there to be had. I don’t think books are going to be replaced in my lifetime.

  Patrick: Well, one of the funny things about the Kindle, which may be doomed because of other players and platforms—

  Jim: Because of Apple? Because Apple exists. [Laughs]

  Patrick: Really. I was going to say that I can take this book [I pick a book from a stack on a small table in Jim’s living room], this Ettore Sottsass book and you can lend it to me, and I can borrow it and I might even forget to give it back to you, and you might get pissed off —

  Jim: If I remember.

  Patrick: “Who did I give that damned book to?”

  Jim: “Who did I give that book to after the third gin and tonic?”

  Patrick: But, at this time, if you have a Kindle you can’t do that.

  Jim: You can’t zap a novel, that you paid $9.95 for, over to your buddy’s Kindle, not like you can “bump” your business profile. Which, after all, might be worth something to the guy who wants to vend you a single malt scotch or a time-share in Cabo, or something.

  Patrick: He has to pay $9.95, too.

  Jim: It’s fucked. The whole copy ethic and ethos—you can dub direct onto cds some great Coltrane album or this fabulous Jim Nisbet interview and hand it off to Gent or someone, and no one’s paying for anything. But there is a point at which you say, “Hey, I bought this thing in the store and it’s my right to do with this thing what I want.” Everybody knows the copy’s inferior—which is now an unreasonable argument, because even the originals suck, by the way—mp3s and cds and such. The audio quality is so bad, it’s discouraging. Maybe they’ll solve that problem, too. It doesn’t sound like vinyl. God, we do bitch and moan like FM radio in the middle of the night.

  Patrick: Technology may save us, but it may not.

  Jim: It’s not going to save us; it’s all petroleum based.

  Patrick: Your old Coltrane albums certainly are.

  Jim: At least they did something right with that petroleum.

  Patrick: But I also wanted to mention that fact that in 2009 Amazon deleted copies of 1984 from some people’s Kindles, albeit over a copyright issue, and issued refunds and that just seems funny that in the analog world, the equivalent would be a corporation entering your home, ri
fling through your bookshelf and leaving a $11.07 on your nightstand. What have we gained—what are we giving up?

  Jim: On that note, well, another round?

  Patrick: I must have another question for you. Yes, I wanted to ask you about genre writing.

  Jim: You know literature is literature. But I don’t want to say that about my own work—that’s up to someone else. It’s not that I am not aware of what I am trying to do. Sanctuary , for example, always struck me as facile, and not a little sleazy. Excepting the matter of scale—recalling that, when asked about Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor quipped, “Who wants to be standing on the tracks when the Dixie Limited comes through?”—there’s a case to be made for Sanctuary being Faulkner’s moment of doubt. But literature is literature, wherever you find it.

  Patrick: I think that is true about other arts, like music. I don’t care if its Richard Strauss or Little Richard, you know, what’s good is good.

  Gent: I totally feel that way about writing. In fact I’m delighted when a book bounces around—

  Jim: —yeah—

  Gent: —genre-wise. I haven’t read your new one—

  Jim: — Windward Passage .

  Gent: The piece that you read at the event the other night, I assumed was a hallucination.

  Jim: Actually not.

  Gent: It’s not? It seemed like someone was really loaded.

  Jim: [Laughs] That’s the prologue, and it’s the only chapter like that. It begins that way but that character doesn’t turn up again until much later in the book.

  Patrick: The prologue is insane, sci-fi, almost like a Vonnegut sci-fi. I never really considered Vonnegut to be science fiction. Did you? Do most people?

  Jim: No, he was fooling around with it. The early books like The Sirens of Titan . But then came Slaughterhouse Five— nobody thinks that’s science fiction.

  Patrick: But it has time travel and other planets and—

  Jim: —Ice Nine and all that stuff. The name of the Grateful Dead’s publishing company.

  Patrick: God Bless You Mister, Rosewater .

  Jim: Yes, I read all those back in the sixties. Then I stopped reading him. When did I bail? I know Dan Simon had a huge hit with him.

  Patrick: A Man Without a Country . Occasional pieces.

  Jim: He did some great stuff. Philip K. Dick, the same deal.

  Patrick: Crossing genres. Where do I shelve this?

  Jim: Under D. BTW, PK and I have the same publisher in Italy—I’m thrilled.

  Patrick: Who is that?

  Jim: Sergio Fanucci. Fanucci Editore. I’ll show you some of their books. They want my entire list. Did I say I’m thrilled?

  Patrick: I think that I would call Philip K. Dick science fiction.

  Jim: Why not? But it’s a narrow consideration. Philip K. Dick’s entire list. Do you know how many fucking books that is? Fanucci also has an American writer named Joe Lansdale—do you know his works?

  Patrick: No.

  Jim: I don’t either; but Dennis McMillan tells me that when Joe Lansdale is good, he’s really good.

  Jim goes to study and returns with some of his Italian editions.

  Gent: Man, this [ Iniezione letale] has a weird cover.

  Jim: It is a weird cover, nobody gets it.

  Gent: Well, it’s the [lethal injection] solution, cooking away.

  Patrick: Gent got it.

  Jim: Yeah, right. And this is Dark Companion, which they changed to Cattive abitudini , which means Bad Habits . Now, I ask you. And after talking to several people I retroactively understood that they did not get the astrophysical subtext of this novel. Which is too fuckin’ bad. But it’s a hit, so what can I do? “Jim,” my agent said, “enjoy the ride.” Are we not pro?

  I take another of Jim’s Italian editions and remove a strip of colored paper which encircles it.

  Patrick: What do think of bellybands on books?

  Jim: It’s a fact of life in Europe. And actually, that’s a quote from a La Repubblica article by a Strega prize winner. And who am I to complain? I was so mystified by the whole approach to the covers and then it’s storming the country so I just go, “Fuck, you know what? Hey, it’s their culture, they get it and I don’t, moreover, they paid for the right to do what they want.” [Laughs] If I were an artist, I’d get really uptight. As it is . . . . But another point: if your metaphors are getting in the way of a good story, you’re doing something wrong—so maybe I really do know what I’m doing!

  Patrick: I want to ask you another question about existentialism.

  Jim: Oh, yeah, we never finish with existentialism.

  Patrick: I’m curious about Jim Thompson, because he is the first author I read who was, I would say, terminal. There were characters with no redemption. There was absolute ruthlessness and the dead end—

  Jim: Every time I have this conversation, which isn’t that often—

  Patrick: —which one? Which conversation?

  Jim: You know, redemptionless writing, dead end writing, the end of the world. Where do you put something like Absalom, Absalom ?

  Patrick: That is interesting.

  Jim: Jack Hirschman, and I’m not sure if he was skirting the topic or not, said he thought Absalom, Absalom was the most literary novel of the twentieth century. François Guérif [Jim’s French publisher] and I just say it’s the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Bar none, we both love that book. To me, it has a lot of that stuffgoing on that you are talking about.

  Patrick: It does.

  Jim: But speaking as somebody from the South, I’ve never really gotten why anybody from somewhere else thinks they get Faulkner. [Laughs.] But the French really seem to get him. And Jim Thompson too, for that matter. And James Ellroy. François gets all those guys.

  Patrick: But what are these moments, existential, terminal or not, the burning family house, the corpse, what are these moments and how do we get there? We watched this movie, based on a book I never read, The Friends of Eddie Coyle —

  Jim: —George Higgins—I met him. I have his last book, Rat on Fire .

  Patrick: How is it?

  Jim: Not very good; he was having a big problem with that. But then, I don’t think Eddie Coyle is that good. And boy, do I get an argument there. From the people who’ve read it, anyway, which is not that many people. But, on the whole, people I respect. Aforementioned Guérif, for example.

  Patrick: The film is.

  Jim: I have the book if you want to borrow it.

  Patrick: I don’t need to read the book.

  Jim: Aha! [All laugh.]

  Patrick: What’s interesting about the film is that where there was this thing that happened in screen writing where it was okay to have films with characters whose lives were just an absolute dead end.

  Jim: That was the fifties , Gun Crazy , the B movies, the shadows imprinted by the Bomb on the walls of the fifties.

  Gent: It came back, in the seventies version,

  Jim: Version of what?

  Gent: Of that despair, and the seventies version is actually real legit. Shampoo is another good example.

  Jim: Where people usually end that noir story, although it’s not ending, is that Lee Marvin movie that ends on Alcatraz—

  Gent: Point Blank .

  Jim: Yes. And it was color. And they dropped the conceptual ax at that, the pigeon found the little bit of mesh on the roof of its hole. But they can’t bear to exclude that movie, so they include it in noir. But as usual with those definitions—noir…really the original thing was these two French guys—you guys published the book [Gent works at City Lights Books]—who noticed these films coming over—the French film industry was destroyed by WWII and these movies were coming from Hollywood that were approved and maybe weren’t doing so well here, blah blah blah, and they gave this amazing picture of American life and the despair behind the Bomb and everything. Kiss Me Deadly —there’s another great movie that has nothing to do with the book—nothing, nothing, NOTHING! Mickey Spillane, man
. NOTHING! Just the title. And it’s an amazing movie. I mean, the answering machine alone—you remember the answering machine?

  Gent: Fantastic—way sci-fi.

  Patrick: Did you read Nightmare Alley ? Book so much better than the movie—even with Joan Blondell.

  Jim: We could go on—to me one of the better books is Treasure of the Sierra Madre . I love that book—and the end is so much better in the book, where he has been beheaded…

  Patrick: Hey, Faulkner worked on that film—

  Jim: You know who knows a lot about Traven, and is fascinated by him, is Barry Gifford. He wrote a big piece on him, and met his daughter who still lives in Mexico City, she showed him Traven’s library, his typewriter . . . He wrote this really good piece that he’s never been able to get published in Gringolandia—nobody’s interested. He got it published in Spain and in Mexico, though. In Spain and Mexico, they remember the author of The Treasure of The Sierra Madre and, maybe more especially, the so-called Jungle books. There’s another one called The White Rose , which I’ve never even seen, let alone read. The Death Ship.

  Patrick: These things seem go in cycles.

  Jim: Traven’s always been an outsider. First of all, he never wanted to be found. John Huston even thought the guy who appeared to pick up the check for the movie was a schill.

  Patrick: But he seems to resurge every so often. And the publishing revs up and then there’s this great interest, and then he disappears again.

  Jim: Yeah, I remember, in the early seventies there was this whole edition of all these Traven books—

  Gent: Now there are these new editions of all these Huxley titles, all repackaged—a lot of chrome yellow— bright colors.

  Jim: Aside from the fact that one notes that Huxley has a couple of translations in the New Directions Anthology of Fleurs du Mal translations, 1955, you know, nobody’s talked to me about Brave New World in a long time. In one of my books I postulated a sixties bookshelf in which the guy becomes nauseous reading the titles. [All laugh.] And you can name them. It’s in The Octopus On My Head . And it turns out that the junkie who’s collecting them up to sell at Moe’s [Moe’s Books in Berkeley] does so via his membership in a thing called the Sixties Book Club. Darrell Gray, the poet, used to do this. I remember he signed up for a book club and they sent him an OED as an introductory thing, the two-volume one with the slipcase and the little drawer with the magnifying glass, and he took it up to Moe’s and flogged it like for fifty bucks. Then he moved. I shagged this story for my book, although, I finely stipulate, Darrell wasn’t a junky, he was just impoverished.