James Sallis: Man of Letters

With the recent demise of Oprah's Book Club, the prospect of James Sallis' books flooding the shelves of Western homemakers grows increasingly dim. Regardless, Sallis will toil on in relative obscurity as he has for over thirty years, penning short stories, detective fiction, poetry, essays, biographies, screenplays, musicology, criticism and other forms of literature that may tickle his hindbrain. The most recognized among the Sallis canon are his six New Orleans crime novels, featuring the perpetually hard-luck-stricken gumshoe Lew Griffin. The series, which ended with last year's The Ghost of a Flea, bridges noir's unmistakable atmosphere with the complex depths mined in more orthodox literature and does so in a non-linear style that, while uncharacteristic to the hardboiled form, is every bit as immediate. His novels eschew tidy, saccharine resolutions, while the very existence of his characters is often called into question through disorienting artifice, leaving the reader to determine what is real. No doubt John Gardner is rolling six-feet under. Sallis was born in 1944 in Helena, Arkansas. He pursued studies at Tulane, where he fell in love with New Orleans, the city which would serve as a backdrop for so many of his stories, its inhabitants providing rich character fodder. At twenty-one, he moved to London to become editor of the influential science-fiction magazine New Worlds, until its demise several years later. Back in the States, Sallis shifted around various cities and displayed his adaptability by continuing to write while working as a respiratory therapist and musician. At present, he resides in Phoenix, with his wife Karyn, their cat Dragon, and a pair of suction-footed geckos keeping watch on the front porch.

Despite an offer of a hundred dollars for an hour of his phone time, James insisted on conducting our interview via email. Accordingly, his responses, always promptly returned, are much like his books: inquisitive, planned without being pat, a tad self-conscious, profusely referential, and enigmatic enough to hopefully prompt you to purchase one of his titles.

-Armen Svadjian

Kafka wrote in a letter, "...one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night it not night enough." Do you seek a similar solitude when writing, and if so, is it often difficult to attain this ideal state of solitude, being a citizen of the Western world?

No question that the jabber and chatter of American life distract. But I wonder if solitude finally may not be less a physical condition than a state of mind, something we carry about with us always, a shell we've moved into and taken for our own. From the first, writers feel apart, I believe: abstracted, exempt. This is a large part of what makes us writers. Goethe said that a talent is formed in stillness, a character in the stream of the world. And Thoreau (to continue our pingpong of quotes) that "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude." I am as insulated from the world as I wish to be, here. As with so much of life, it's a double-edged sword. The solitude, the apartness, all those hours spent alone, staring at bright sky out the window, at the similar brightness of computer screen or white paper -- these are essential to creation. Meanwhile that very isolation may be draining relevance and strength from our work, vitiating it.

Have you always enjoyed your own company, or was it something you needed to work at? I'd imagine the capacity for it increases over the years, after one has absorbed more information to reflect on.

I suspect that, as writers, we're all introspective, and recall an informal poll Damon Knight conducted years ago, asking writers about their background. The one thing all had in common, he found, was that, at some point in childhood, some from illness, others from circumstance, each had spent considerable time alone. But this reflects a choice central to all our lives, doesn't it? We push forward into society, become public; or we pull back into ourselves. The writer may be uniquely privileged in his ability to do both simultaneously.

You've described Damon Knight (editor of the Orbit science-fiction anthologies) as a mentor. What are some things you learned from him?

Perhaps mentor wasn't the correct word. Damon was an editor who early on responded to my work, who made it possible -- cleared a space -- for me to write, to believe that I might go on being published. I have been fortunate in finding such folk: Mike Moorcock, Robert Shapard, Gordon Van Gelder, Michael Seidman. Damon offered a homegrown version of the man of letters I've always aspired to be. He was a fine writer, a great editor, a critic -- a magnificent influence on the field.

Can you discuss the influence, if any, of your brother, philosopher and writer John Sallis?

John's major influence, I think, lay simply in providing a model for me. He's seven years older. American society being resolutely anti-intellectual, and the place where we grew up small and mean, John demonstrated to me that one could escape, one could question, one could stand against received wisdom and everything "we know.

How do you feel about Arizona as an aesthetic climate?

Arizona is America in miniature: culturally diverse, part urban sprawl and part rural remains, resolutely anti-intellectual, profoundly reactionary. Neither rain nor "aesthetic climate" are often encountered. Instead, we have cactus and lizards. It's possible to live well here on limited funds, however, a most important prospect to someone attempting to exist on his earnings as a writer. And with so few distractions to hand, I get a lot of work done.

Are you looking within or without yourself to create characters?

Outside and inside meet: characters, situations and stories are generated out of oneself. But that's only one prong of the tuning fork. The other is observation. Writers are those people always standing off a bit watching, watching even themselves, always abstracted and mentally taking notes, even during personal crises.

What specific traits have you transferred from yourself to Lew?

Like myself, Lew is an autodidact. He has led, like myself, a rather unsettled life. He is from the same part of the South as I am, and claims New Orleans as home. He struggles all his life with self-destructive urges, possibly passed down in part by way of schizophrenic mother.

Is much of your writing a process of sorting out and confronting personal demons?

I don't know that I'm confronting personal demons, but I am -- most definitely -- poking about in things that bother me. When I taught, I'd always tell students: Write about what you don't understand, write about things that hurt. Writing is the only way I can find out what I truly think and feel.

In a David Goodis novel whose name I can't recall, a point is made of the comfort that comes from sharing your problems with a stranger. Is your burden similarly lightened by unloading some of it onto readers?

Do I really come across as that burdened and besotted? I hope not. To my mind, the Lew Griffin books are positive: they're about finding or creating families, about redemption. Is the world a bleak, unforgiving place? Yes. Who with open eyes could believe otherwise? But there is about it, too, a great, abiding beauty.

What's the exact nature of the relationship between alcohol and writing? What is it that impels so many writers towards heavy drinking?

We're alone a lot. We tend to be depressive types. For a long time that drink or two really gets the goods going. What it does is turn off, dampen down, the censors. Received wisdom is that drinking's a way to escape. Closer to the truth is that it's an attempt to join, to be a part, to form bridges. But drinking's also the trickster, the coyote, and what it wants is always more than it gives -- because it wants everything.

How has it played out in your own life?

I'd be a fool to deny that drinking has periodically been a problem in my life. Nothing more than that, however, needs be said. Do you see a correlation between poverty and powerful writing?No. But there's definitely something about being out there, on the street, with nerve ends raw and little or no notion where next week's rent is coming from. Keeps you awake and alive. Comfort is a big cat: beautiful, purring -- but it will eat you.

Are you content with your level of financial security?

Is one ever? I feel privileged to be able to keep writing books, to go on receiving advances that let me work. But it's still a book-to-book, hand-to-mouth existence, and the floor could disappear at any moment. I step carefully.

What qualities make for a strong central character? Does it go beyond simply our ability to identify with him/her?

In serious literature, I think, it's a cat-and-mouse, push-and-pull game. We identify to an extent but are also repelled. Contradictions, daily failures, the stories one tells oneself to go on even when ones knows these are false -- these are things that go to make a great character, someone who is able to catch up the textures, the fabric of disconnected events, fable and self-deceit, that form our lives, where we exist now, at this point in time.

Why'd you decide to make your Lew Griffin detective character black? As insignificant as something like this may seem, rarely are they ever arbitrary.

I didn't chose to make Lew black. I began writing what I believed to be a short story (now the first section of The Long-Legged Fly), starting with the image of this murder by an oil rig. All I knew at the time was that I wanted to have him kill someone on the first pages then make you like him. As I wrote, I began wondering where all his anger came from. Thirty pages in, it hit me: My God, this man is black! I'd been reading a lot of Chester Himes, not just the novels, but the autobiography; ultimately, that's where Lew came from, which is why Chester figures in every book -- one is dedicated to him, in another he actually does a walk-on.

Lew seems to have it fairly rough- he's trying to do what's right, yet trouble always seems to find him. Should we derive a "good guys finish last", "life sucks" moral from this?

Absolutely not. Hey, he's a black man in the South. He lives for much of his life on the streets, working as a debt collector and private investigator. He's out there looking for society's lost children and parents. How the hell's trouble going to avoid him? Yet his whole life is a search for redemption. I don't see Lew as the gloom-ridden character so many do, but as a realist trying to do what he can to overcome his own failings and, in a very small way, to ease the pain of this world for others. He has many who love him, he's had good and loyal friends, he has, all his life, helped others. He quotes lyric poets as often as he does Beckett.

Speaking of which, your novels are littered with names and quotes of other writers and thinkers. Is the day-to-day world something you approach and understand through literature? Will some random encounter on the street often trigger these references?

Oh, yes. Almost everything triggers something I've read. As Mallarme says: the world exists to be put into a book. Arts -- whether formal or primitive -- are the mediators, the buffers that take the impact of the hits, represent us before all the Grand Juries, negotiate for better terms. But remember that Lew is an autodidact, one who has learned much of what he knows of the world through books, one who finds various ruses to keep his distance from that world. I understand how tempting it is to conflate Lew and myself, and yes, there are marked parallels, dreadful symmetries. But the voice of the Lew Griffin novels was developed to evince Lew, to bring him out -- not me.

What, if any moral or underlying philosophy, underpins your fiction?

In an early piece of criticism I wrote: Poetry is what the poem discovers, that which you never knew you knew. We write to find out what we think, what we feel. There is, I am sure, a great current flowing beneath all the words I've turned out. If there were not, I would not have gone on so long and so variously. But each morning, each sentence, each page -- thankfully -- remains a surprise.

What specifically about the black experience in the U.S. fascinates you?

Well, I just wrote a book about that, didn't I? (Chester Himes: A Life.) First, I have to say that I think the racial divide is the single largest problem in U.S. society, the very thing that rips the fabric day after day, so if you are writing about an urban environment, trying to figure out what our cities and our society are all about -- and this is what mystery novels at their best do, probably better than any other form -- you are simply going to have to weigh in on race. Remember, too, that I'm a Southerner, with that rather odd perspective. I grew up playing with black children. The first non-classical music with which I fell in love was the blues. (Sonny Boy Williamson was still playing around Helena, Arkansas, when I was a kid. Robert Johnson lived there a while.) I moved from that visceral love of blues into a deep, vital appreciation of African-American creativity in all its forms.

Your novels are without fussy, complicated plots, where nothing seems overly contrived. Is the process of writing a book very much a thinking process for you? Do you have an idea of how the story will end when you've started a novel?

I rarely have much idea where a book will go except in a very general sense, and that's often more a feeling, a sense of form, than anything else. With the Lew Griffin books, I knew the arc of the story, and the final ending, about halfway through. But the rest was improvised from day to day, line to line. I find this to be the only way I can truly enjoy writing: this poking about to see what's in there.

Are you ever disappointed with what you discover?

Not every ride, every solo, works. But each one gives you material, ideas, notions, for the next.

What prompted your decision to end your Lew Griffin series with The Ghost of a Flea?

I've been working towards the end of Lew's story since I began it. All was adumbrated in the The Long-Legged Fly. I kept listening to what the material had to tell me. With Flea, Lew's story is complete: it's that simple.

What are your writing habits like? Do you feel compelled to put down something on paper daily, a la Hemingway, even if it's forced creation?

I write virtually every day. I take weekends off if Karyn and I are doing something. I start early and go till about four in the afternoon. Everything is obsessively rewritten, again and again. Some days it goes well, other days it doesn't, but once it's all down, I can't tell from reading which were the good days, when it flowed, and which were the days I was giving birth over and over to unwieldly and somewhat angry elephants.

What measures do you take to inspire your creative juices?

I find that panic does wonders. Telling myself that it's either write this or get a real job works most of the time, too. When you've been doing this as long as I have, some thirty-eight years, it's a part of your daily life. You get up, have coffee or tea, and you write.

How about your reading habits?

They change all the time. I'll spend weeks reading nothing but poetry, then make a sudden hard left into criticism or biography. Lots of the time nowadays there's a hefty stack of books on the table for review, since this is one way I bolster my income.

Do they change when you're in the throes of a work-in-progress?

Typically, when I'm writing a novel, I'm devouring other novels, swallowing them down whole, no salt, no sauce, no mercy. Half the time I don't even remember what I've read. This goes back to that "specific hunger" I spoke of earlier. There seems to be something I'm looking for, something I need -- some element, some engine, some motive.

What are some of the major sacrifices you've had to make in headlong pursuit of your writing?

You mean besides a life, a career, peace of mind, a big screen TV, things like that? I haven't sacrificed anything at all. This is what I want to do, what I have wanted to do since I was ten years old telling stories to the other kids. I feel blessed by circumstance to be able to do it. Besides, the MacArthur people will be calling any day now with my grant.... You've worked on and off as a respiratory therapist for about twenty years. Is it still something you resort to when money is tight? More like thirty years, and yes, I do still work occasionally as a therapist. Not only for extra money (money is always tight, one false step sends you tumbling down the stairs), but also to get away from this solitary room, to escape from my own head into the world where most other people spend their lives. Working in intensive care, I face catastrophic illness and death every day. Hard to imagine that your little story matters overmuch in that light.

How have your experiences therein emerged in your novels?

There are few direct, surface influences -- three or four essays, the fact that I chose to set Moth in a newborn ICU -- but, as you can see, many deeper influences. I do find there are a lot of hospital scenes in my novels.

Do you make many distinctions in your head between your "genre-fiction" and other writings?

Thank you for asking this. No, I do not. The Lew Griffin novels are just that: novels. My fantasy and science fiction stories are every bit as "serious" and as seriously intended as those I publish in High Plains Literary Review or any of a dozen other literary magazines. And in fact, I make no distinction concerning any of my work: the poems, the stories, the novels, the essays, even the criticism -- it all comes from the same place. Common threads stitch it through and hold it together.

Your body of work is varied to say the least. Does it come from a desire to dab in it all?

One of the things that happens as you grow older is, you eventually learn you can't do everything. You're not going to be a pilot, or compose operas, so you begin concentrating on the things you do best. I'm a fairly decent musician, an okay actor, a good teacher, but writing is what I'm best at. What I do -- granted this is a small thing -- no one else can quite do. On the other hand, I'm certain I'd have been far more successful if I'd stuck with one kind of writing. If I'd gone on writing fantasy and science fiction, for instance, or if I'd identified myself strongly as a mystery writer. Here in the States, quite apart from the situation in Europe, there are considerable pressures towards publishing conformity.

In many instances, is what distinguishes "literature" and popular-fiction not only what is said, but how it is being said? Not only do your novels defiantly eschew easy answers, the writing itself carries a certain rhythm that has been likened to jazz in its improvised, playful style, that may take some work to get into.

Au coeur, I think, the difference is fundamental. Popular fiction tends to tell us that what we commonly believe, the world we perceive, is the true one, to reinforce "what we know." More complex arts, on the other hand, challenge received wisdom, suggest the world is not as it seems, that there's another world (or several) just behind or alongside the sensible one -- Lionel Trilling's "adversary intent."

We're taught that form follows content. But in fact, form - as we extend ourselves into the world, as we attempt to snare the rhythms and inscapes of the world - gives rise to content. Whatever understanding we achieve, we grope towards it impression by impression, sentence by sentence.

What's the extent of your involvement in music these days? Are you approaching music the same way you would writing?

I'm no longer writing about music, sadly. I would love to do so, but there's just no market for serious musicology, no interest among publishers in the nooks and crannies of music that so interest me. From time to time I'm contacted by them. When I propose a biography of Eric Dolphy or a book on string-band music in the Thirties, they become invisible men. I've not played or taught for years. Recently, however, my interest in Hawaiian and steel guitar has revived, and I've begun playing clawhammer banjo.

Is there a form of writing you'd like to try your hand at?

There's very little writing I haven't done. I started off thinking I might be a playwright, but there've been no plays. Remember that I'm not an academic, that I have no such sinecure or cushion, and, while largely trying to write what I want, try also to make a living from writing. I hope to write more screenplays -- preferably for independent or foreign filmmakers -- possibly to find regular work as a script doctor. And I'd love to write more criticism, but there's little pay available for same. I almost hesitate to ask, but do you see yourself working in the existentialist tradition of literature?I suppose that I must be, though I have to wonder if existentialism's not become so integral to our lives that its affect is flat and the word has lost specific meaning or application.

Writers being a reputedly private lot, are you close with many of them?

Yes. So close that, should we be out of touch for years, we begin again as though no time has passed. So close that we're comfortable leaving one another the space and silence to get our work done.

Being an autodidactic pedagogue, what advice do you have for budding writers? Can one indeed teach writing? How about the influence of your teaching on your own writing?

As with criticism, I believe the great benefit of teaching to be passing on one's personal enthusiasm for the art, for individual writers and for this way of being in the world. One also provides a model of the working writer. Advice? Read. Write. Can you chart the ways in which your chops have developed since your early days?As artists we struggle each day, each moment, against doing again what we know how to do: that's the secret of it. In my early work, when I had little idea what I was doing and was making it up as I went along, solving every problem anew, I see an energy, an originality, I'll never recapture. Yet today I'm ever so much more adept at structure, at limning character. One seeks balance, as in the Guillevic poem:

Toi, ce creux
Et définitif.

Moi qui rêvais
De faire équilibre.

You began your Lew Griffin series with the intent of writing the sort of book you always wanted to read, but could never find. Are you always getting closer to achieving that with every book, and does it frustrate you that there's something very paradoxical, almost self-defeating about your mission, the fact that you can never read or enjoy that book you've been craving the same way you would had someone else written it?

Let's say that with some the gap between intention and achievement is less wide than with others. One always falls short of the vision. But I'm writing exactly the sort of books I wish, I'm fortunate enough to have publishers -- Walker here in the States, No Exit in the UK, Gallimard and Rivages in France -- who support them, and the books are finding their way to readers. There are many, many writers I admire and whose work I enjoy immensely: Walter Tevis, Boris Vian, Marek Hlasko, George Pelecanos, Larry Block, Don Westlake, Thomas Pynchon, Blaise Cendrars, Iain Sinclair to name but a few. What I've done is the ultimate magpie act. I've tried to put all the things I love from all these disparate writers together in one pot. Some call it stew; to others it's just a mess, I suspect. This week I learned that I was being given an award for my Chester Himes biography. I also received the following letter: "Thank you for sharing Lew Griffin with me. I began reading the series when we moved here, to the New Orleans area, about seven years ago. I felt that I could learn about the area if I read local writers and those books set in Louisiana. Through you, I learned about the area of human beings." It's difficult to feel cynical or defeated with a letter like that before you.

Is it enough to know that you're filling perhaps that same void in others?

It's enough to have the privilege of doing this. I hope I'm in some sense addressing a similar specific hunger in others. I think there are lots of other readers like myself, eclectic readers who read across a huge range of literature. In Europe this is not unusual. In the States, it seems remarkable; you get the established canon, you get writers who shouldn't be allowed to take care of Walter Tevis's dog ignoring or actively denigrating "genre" fiction as they slather over the latest novel from the latest hot young "literary" novelist. One of the great passions of my criticism is storming such barricades, insisting that it's all literature, a huge buffet table laid out with plate after plate after plate. You go down the line and around to the back of the table and you take what you want, what you need, at the time.

Do you have an imagined audience in mind besides yourself?

I am writing, as I think, in one sense or another, all writers write, letters to those who've come before me. I am telling them how it is here, at this time, at this place, with me, the son they never knew.