"Longing for a male love": an interview with Lewis Nordan.

Bjerre, Thomas Aervold

THOMAS AERVOLD BJERRE: IT'S BEEN FIVE YEARS SINCE WE MET AND TALKED. In the meantime you've retired and you've moved to this smaller town. What's your "new life" like?

Lewis Nordan: Well, so much of our time has been spent dealing with health problems that I have not worked much here. I had cancer a couple of years ago. I had a serious stomach operation last year. My wife had a heart attack and open heart surgery. So we've been, coincidental to our moving here, just inundated with health problems. But we're at last coming out of that. So things are very good here. We love it in this smaller town. We have lots of friends here already. My wife was originally from here and went to high school here, so she's connected to a lot of friends that she hadn't seen in decades. And life is good. And then, just a few months ago, three months ago maybe, I was working on some things, in fact I had decided to try to put a book of short stories together. And my computer crashed and everything I had written for the last twenty-five years is gone. And I've taken it to a specialist who supposedly can get things back, and they cannot. I didn't really mind about losing all the things that are in print, but the more recent work I had no copies of, so it's all gone. It was shocking at first, but since then I've come to terms with it, really. What I was writing I didn't really like that much anyway. I had really not come back into my stride as a writer since all this illness, and what I was writing was quite forced and even though there was a lot of it, I don't really feel that I lost very much.

TAEB: I know Larry Brown would burn whole manuscripts to start over.

LN: I deleted from my computer a whole novel one time, because it was either that or revise it for the rest of my life [laughs].

TAEB: So you have begun writing again?

LN: Yes, I've started to write again. Part of the health issues I've been dealing with is a problem called peripheral neuropathy, which is a nerve damage in the arms and legs, so I have practically no feeling in my hands. I'm really having to type with just one finger now, as I can't feel the computer keys well enough to type normally, so I'm very slow now and things are not where I want them to be, but my mind is clear and I'm back where I want to be in that way.

TAEB: That's good. Do you miss teaching?

LN: You know, I have not missed it. I missed seeing students and seeing my fellow teachers. But it had gotten to be so hard for me to work and deal with these illnesses that it was no fun in the last couple of years anyway.

TAEB: I know you went back to your old hometown, Itta Bena, recently. What was that like?

LN: It was a little sad. The whole Delta, except for a few towns, like college towns that have reasons to stay alive, has pretty much died. In the town where I used to live, when racial integration occurred, the school system broke down and the whites all fled to the private schools and so the local school systems were no longer the center of town life. And then the large corporations like Wal-Mart took away the small businesses that were in the town, so literally every business that I knew as a child is now boarded up and collapsed. There have been a few service stations and markets that sell junk food and things like that to open up, but everything else is gone. The railroad is not running anymore so the depot is gone and all the landmarks that I knew except for the houses are really just collapsed. So it was very sad. Part of the tour that I was on, it was a bus tour of the Delta, especially the literary landmarks of the Delta, and it was a little embarrassing that my house was one of the landmarks [laughs] and I was asked to say a few words about my house, and all I could see was that all the pecan trees had been cut down. It just wasn't the place it used to be. It was sad.

TAEB: You've been an expatriate for decades now. You've never considered moving back to Mississippi?

LN: No, I've really loved Pittsburgh and I loved my job. The twenty-three years that I taught there were the best working years of my life. I was treated like a prince there, kind of an exotic prince, I'd have to say. There's an untrue belief that Southerners are different from everybody else. So I had a really good job there, my children were educated there, I re-married there and have step-children and a wife, and I bought three homes there. So this is really home to me now.

TAEB: Your last book, Boy with Loaded Gun, was a memoir. What made you to choose that form instead of your usual form of storytelling?

LN: Well, this is not much of a secret, so I might as well tell it the way it actually happened. My publisher wanted to know if I wanted to write a memoir. I think this decision had to do with commerce more than anything else [laughs]. And it just so happened that I had been writing some personal essays and I said, listen, why don't we call it an autobiographical novel instead of a memoir, because I'm not going to be able to just stick to the truth. There's just no way I'm going to be able to do that. And they said, OK, we'll pitch it as a novel about Buddy, a novel about you. So that's the way it was sold. And so I just started to write with no serious intention of sticking directly to the truth but just to take parts of my life the way any storyteller or taleteller would do and exaggerate what you wanted to and stick close to the truth where you felt necessary, and that's what I did. And it turned out that the parts about my childhood could almost as easily have been written about Sugar Mecklin. I seem in that version of myself a kind of a Sugar Mecklin-type innocent who has one episode after another in which life is revealed in its fullness and lessons are learned. And towards the end as I get to some less charming parts of my life, and especially about the death of my children, I began to write much more closely to what actually happened and with a lot less exaggeration, in fact, in some cases with no exaggeration. So I think the book, although I love the book, I think it doesn't really work very well. It doesn't exactly work as a novel and it's not a true memoir, and it seems broken-backed, between the charming little boy and the not so charming alcoholic adult and the death and there's the Emmett Till chapter which may not have fitted very well either. The truth is, it's kind of a hodge-podge between truth and fiction.

TAEB: Did you feel there was more on the line here, personally?

LN: Yes, I did. Where I realized I could hurt people, like my wife or my former wife, whom I'm still very close to, I knew that this was a dangerous area to go into. And I just had to think of it as somebody else when I was writing about it, myself. At the end of the day, I would think, oh my God, what have I done, have I told this already? But I didn't think of that while I was writing, it was like writing fiction about somebody else. And the parts about my son's death, two sons really, one an infant and one a twenty-year old, were very scary to me. I didn't know whether it would seem maudlin or make me too great a villain or just what it would do. So in one sense there was a great deal more at stake, but only in sections of the book, I would say.

TAEB: I would like to talk a bit about some of the gender dynamics in your work. Most of your work revolves around father-son relationships and in that sense it's a masculine nature. But there is often this fascinating play with gender-crossing going on. In "The All-Girl Football Team," the sixteen-year-old male narrator dresses up as a cheerleader and eventually finds himself "on the sweet sad brink of womanhood." In Lightning Song, Leroy momentarily renounces his masculinity and embraces femininity. Why this gender confusion?

LN: [laughs] Thanks for noticing that. Let me see how to answer that.... When I was eighteen months old my father died, and my mother and I began to make a life together. It was a pretty hard life in some ways. It was made easier by the fact that we eventually moved back to the town where my mother's parents lived. And her mother, whom we called Mammy, was a strong, wonderful, funny, intelligent poetry-reading person. So my mother and my grand-mother became the center of my life. I had no brothers or sisters, no father in the house. My grandfather was a physician, a very fine guy, but he was a very distant guy too. So these two women, really, were my whole life. This was during the Second World War, so all the men were gone anyway. And to grow up in a little town in the South where all the men were off to war was to grow up in a woman's world anyhow. So the role models were all women. And when I became a writer, many years later, an ironic consequence of this was that all my writing was about longing for a male love. T felt totally secure in women's love but was scared to death of men, because I had seen so few of them. And when my mother re-married--I loved the guy that she married, but he was an alcoholic--distant doesn't describe the relationship. He was from a dirt-poor family and completely uneducated, went to sixth grade, really just loved to hang out and drink with the guys. I had no idea what it was like to be a man, really, and so I wrote about yearning for a man's love. But also because I had this feminine influence that was completely me, I also thought of myself more relative to my mother than I did to my father. I thought of yearning for a father. I wanted my mother to--this is ridiculous [laughs]--I wanted my mother to marry her brother, so that I would have a father. But I think that the gender confusion really has to do with a kind of hyper-developed side of me, a feminine side of me that informs everything I do.

TAEB: When the boys in your fiction encounter the opposite sex, often this is at an early age, it leaves them shaken, and often violence and death follow. The way I read it, the women are often presented, through the eyes of these boys, as these corrupting creatures. You have Cheryl in The Sharpshooter Blues and Ruby Rae in Lightning Song. These two women are very different. But both are these threatening predators who ruin the boys that they come in contact with. It seems a pretty bleak picture of adolescence.

LN: It does, doesn't it? I hadn't really realized it was that bleak. The way I look at the women in my work is that they are almost invisible until they become visible for some scary reason. Sugar Mecklin's mother never has a name. She is never given a name in any story. My own mother is not like that. She was completely dominant in our family. But Sugar's mother lives in the shadow of the father's alcoholism. Now, from my point of view, ! was probably taking women for granted and didn't have to do it all to make accurate or major sense but just thought of them as good creatures. I think of Sugar up in his room with his mother sitting by his bed talking to him about his father driving drunk and things like that. I just think of this sweet presence of that woman. And in the stories that are not about Sugar, like "John Thomas Bird," in which the girl goes swimming and ends up ironically saving the athlete who gets an eel attached to him--she's self-doubting and puts herself down some in comic ways, but she's really the strongest person in the story. And Alice in Wolf Whistle is the strongest person in that story, and the second-strongest person in that story is Sally Anne Montberclair. And they actually begin and end the book. So from my point of view, the best people in my books are generally women even though they may be overshadowed by the evil of men, like Solon. And poor Mrs. Gregg who can only speak by singing "Here Comes Santa Claus," is a good person but is overpowered by this monster that she is married to. So that would be more my view of the male-female relationship.

TAEB: But these are all adult women. The young women who corrupt the boys are more of the dangerous type. In The Sharpshooter Blues, Cheryl rapes Hydro. And Ruby Rae rapes Leroy in Lightning Song.

LN: Well, that could be. Let me start a little further back than that. Leroy first encounters women through that Playboy magazine that he looks at. And his vision is that the naked model has been tricked and that she's been given clothes that don't fit her. So he projects his own innocence onto her. And even though he's attracted to her, he wants to help her and save her. So his view of women is not what comes to happen to him later on. Now, you could say, in a literary sense, that he needs some corrupting influence to challenge his innocence. And that would be true for Hydro as well. And so who better than somebody that one would be attracted to, to use that attraction to corrupt you? That's the literary answer to your question. I think, though, that the real basis of the problem is that my son was raped by an older woman. And I have a feeling that that is kind of a hurt or an anger that keeps coming up. And so, although I want to defend the books against misogyny, I believe that those specific sexual cases may be directly related to that.

TAEB: It's also a taboo, of course, in a male-dominated culture.

LN: Right, that she should get that kind of power.

TAEB: Many of the adult men in your work are these silent ghosts that are incapable of filling their roles as fathers and husbands. They seem to have "retired" from manhood.

LN: It really describes my father.

TAEB: They seem to have withdrawn from the society of men. Swami Don of Lightning Song is one. But I think the best example is probably Dr. McNaughton from The Sharpshooter Blues.

LN: Oh, he's such a sad character.

TAEB: Yes. He watches TV at night, while his wife is having sex with her young lover in the same house. One of my favorite scenes in the novel is when Dr. McNaughton tries to re-enter the male world, by participating in "Monday Music"--breakfast at the drugstore. But he fails miserably because doesn't follow the code of male talk. He wants to talk about real stuff, how he has wasted his life, which causes the crowd to be stunned into silence.

LN: [laughs]. I forgot that. Monday Music is a place where people can limit the contact that they have to make with another person, and yet let some of the power out of what has happened to them by telling a narrative of it. I'm not sure that I need to say more, except that there's a time in my years when I thought talking was storytelling. I thought talking was narrative. And only later did I learn that you could talk about yourself the way Dr. McNaughton tries to talk about himself and the way they want people to talk about themselves at the confessional part of the bar. So really I'm more contrasting what I now believe with what I used to believe about what conversation means. There is a slight difference, though, in the confessional at the store. They want the dirt [laughs]. They don't want to hear your feelings.

TAEB: So what's a man like Dr. McNaughton to do?

LN: Let me think.... When I first conceived this book, I thought that Dr. McNaughton was the doctor who failed to identify Emmett Till. I thought, this is the coward who looked at that body and said, "We don't know who he is." But as I got into the book I realized it wasn't a book about that at all. And so everything about him stayed except that point, which would have changed the book into something else. And what I suspect the doctor, who actually did that in real life, did was rationalize his behavior for the rest of his life, that's what I guess. I don't want to think that about Dr. McNaughton, I want to think that at least his attempt at Monday Music to speak the truth of his heart is a way of saying he'll try it some other way, some way it will work better, but I don't know what that will be.

TAEB: But actually, when Dr. McNaughton and his son leave Monday Music together they do have a moment of close bonding after this.

LN: So in some way it worked.

TAEB: Yes, even though they came at it from totally different angles. But how do you feel in a male crowd like the one in Monday Music? Do you feel comfortable playing along, putting on this mask of storytelling, or does it seem phony to you?

LN: No it doesn't. It just seems like a game. It seems like television or any other entertainment. I've been in places where I heard my own stories retold by people. And they tell them pretty well [laughs], they tell them pretty accurately. It isn't communication in the way that I now know how to communicate with a person, but it's the best I could do at the time and it's the best they can do, and so I don't mind just slipping back into it just to entertain people.

TAEB: There are some men in your fiction who vent their frustrations through violence, especially Solon, who is a perfect study in insecurity and emasculation. The gun becomes Solon's token of masculinity, which seems like a particularly American issue to me. In The Sharpshooter Blues, you also take on America's gun culture. Morgan, the sharpshooter, uses his gun to boost his inferior masculinity. In that character, Morgan, you have a bit of fun with the whole myth of the heroic gunslinger. What is a character like him doing in the Delta?

LN: Yeah, he is a foundling. His origins are not quite clear. He thinks that his parents were in the circus, but he only thinks that because of his size. I believe that I intentionally leave him sort of rootless and unsure of just what his origins are. But I wanted him to be an outcast, in part because he is more connected to the black community than the white. And so he overcompensates for his size and his alienation from white society in some ways, not completely, but in some ways, by use of the gun.

TAEB: Again, he is another of your characters who has built his life on a lie. His fame is built on a lie about shooting a Mexican. So he's created himself almost as a Western hero. And the locals really prefer this myth to the truth. What is so appealing about a gunslinger?

LN: [laughs]. You know, in the story I'm not sure there is an answer to that question. In my own life, I grew up on Western movies on Saturday mornings, and I could name a dozen of them. People carried guns back when I was a child. In fact, when I was fourteen, I ordered a .38 pistol out of a magazine and got it. And my parents let me carry a loaded pistol [laughs]. So, particularly I guess in the South, but I'm sure in America, guns were just always part of the mythology of manhood and that's where it comes from in me. In the story, I'm not sure it's justified at all.

TAEB: You're part of an entire generation, especially boys, who, as you said, grew up on Saturday Westerns. Do you think that the worldview of Westerns has somehow influenced the way you see the world?

LN: Yes, I do. And I'm not sure exactly how. I think that people of my generation, especially--I started to say especially town people, but maybe country people too--sometimes their only fun outside farm work was to come in on Saturday and look at this Western movie. So we got cowboy equipment for Christmas, and there was a part of town that had wooden sidewalks, and we loved that because it was just like Western-movie sidewalks. And we said words that they said in the movies, like "podner" instead of "partner", and we practiced fast-draw. It was all the culture we had, really. I mean, we didn't do much else. So that's very much influenced who I am.

TAEB: Do you still try to keep up with new writers? LN: Yes, I do.

TAEB: Do you read mostly Southern writers, or is it just whatever is out there?

LN: No, I just read whatever is out there. I just ordered a book yesterday, by a guy named Eric Hansen, which is a travel book. I read more non-fiction than I do fiction, for some reason. He is a big travel writer, and this is a book called The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer. It's basically nine essays about places he has been. And he has written another book called Motoring with Mohammed, which is about crossing the Middle East. He's a really good writer. And I bought Annie Tyler's new book. I keep up with my friends, Clyde Edgerton and those people, you know. But really, I just read whatever's out there. I don't actually like a lot of what I read, if you want the truth. I want old-fashioned storytelling and I get a lot of tricky stuff.

TAEB: Well, I'm glad that you have started writing again.

LN: Yeah, thanks. You know I wrote a three-page piece about my mother. It's not a story, and it'll never see the light of day, but it helped so much. My mother died in September and I'll never be over it. I mean, we were really close, as I've told you before. She was in her nineties and just as bright as a dollar right up to the end. And somehow that helped me, you know, just to write a piece about her just sitting on a balcony, I don't know how.

Sewickley, 14 May 2006

THOMAS AERVOLD BJERRE

University of Southern Denmark, Odense