James Sallis

Interviewed by Barry Forshaw

Barry Forshaw talks to the man as Ghost of a Flea appears from No Exit Press

Can we talk about your new books?

Since you're buying the coffee, of course we can. The latest major work to be published is the Chester Himes biography, two years of my life packed into 400+ pages, commissioned and brought out by Canongate Books in Edinburgh. The man to blame is Jamie Byng. It's quite a fine book, I think, though I remember partway into it complaining to a friend that, whereas writing novels was like building a treehouse or sundeck, all light and air, doing biography more closely resembles remodelling your bathroom: broken tiles and stinky pipes everywhere, floor torn up, nothing fits anything else.... Also recently out, from Toxic, is a volume of my collected stories, Time's Hammers. And from No Exit, an 'ace double' edition of the first two Lew Griffin novels, The Long-Legged Fly and Moth. In the States there's also an essay collection, Gently into the Land of the Meateaters, and one of two scheduled poetry collections, Sorrow's Kitchen. The final Lew Griffin novel, Ghost of a Flea, is the new one from No Exit Press.

Favourite writers?

It would prove a very long list. The first to influence me strongly were science fiction writers. I grew up pretty much reading everything: Dickens and Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, alongside Sturgeon, Jerry Sohl, Richard Matheson, not recognizing much difference. (I still don't.) But it was the science fiction writers I learned the most from, at first, and from whom I took inspiration. Time's Hammers divides rather neatly into two volumes, one of them science fiction and fantasy stories, the other mystery and suspense stories. A third collection, Beautiful White Ruins of America, as yet unplaced, comprises more directly 'literary' or 'experimental' stories.

When I first began writing seriously, or trying to, I thought of myself as a poet and was strongly in thrall to Frost, Creeley, Lowell, Stevens - that whole range of modernist poets. I'd also discovered Joyce and Pynchon and begun groping my way towards Apollinaire and Cendrars, which led to what may be the most urgent single influence on my work, certainly on my poetry, and which to some considerable extent defines that work's difference from most contemporary Stateside writing: French literature.

But favourites in your field?

Well, I'm not sure what you mean by 'my field'. I have peers among mystery writers, another set among science fiction folk, a cadre of poets, critics and 'literary' people who are friends. Sadly, they're rarely seen at the same parties, and rarely intermarry. If I ran the zoo...

Of working writers, I read everything by Thomas Pynchon, George Pelecanos, Iain Sinclair, Daniel Woodrell. I try my best to keep up with Larry Block, Don Westlake, K. C. Constantine, Jim Burke. As columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and earlier as SF critic for the LA Times, I've kept up with all that. And I reread, regularly, Ulysses, Chandler, Candide, Nathanael West, Gravity's Rainbow, Auden and Yeats, The Recognitions, much of Queneau, favourite Sturgeon, Guillevic, L'Ecume des Jours. I subscribe to various literary journals, different ones each year - High Plains Literary Review, Field, The Georgia Review - and read those closely, along with issues of many others in which my own work appears.

How important is your privacy?

Let us always have a condom, Flaubert wrote to mistress Louise Colet, to protect the health of our soul amid the filth into which it is plunged - Flaubert remarking in particular the breakdown of language under the degrading impact of journalism, advertisement and political slogans in a culture over-inflated with unassimilable data. In a culture where even simple civility has come under attack, where constantly we are urged to 'share' our every untoward thought and to 'express our feelings' under peril of isolation, social ill, or madness, it's not too surprising that values such as privacy and discretion should come to be thought of as suspicious, even aberrant.

An oblique, discursive answer to your question - if an answer at all - for which I apologise. But it is a very complicated question. Stephen Daedalus fears those big words that make us so unhappy. Lew and my other characters, I think, tend to fear the word 'should' more than most others.

With either Bush or Gore as the next president, can you remain apolitical?

I'm not sure it's possible to write seriously - as opposed to scarecrow writing, when you just stuff old clothes with straw, excelsior, styrofoam peanuts or old copies of TV Guide and set them out in a field - without being political. This is rather a different thing from taking a political stance. But whenever one writes from the centre of self, alternately struggling and dancing with the material, the writing has to be imbued with one's personality, and that in itself - personality, speaking up - is political. Remember that crime and mystery fiction (virtually all American literature, some would insist) developed not from the novel, which concerns itself with man making his way in society, but from the romance, which typically concerns itself with an individual opposed to that society.

One of the things that drew me to crime fiction was the prolapse into it, in the late 1970s and early 80s, of writers like Roger Simon and Stephen Greenleaf, writers who clearly in earlier times would have been 'mainstream', liberals seeking new ways to grapple with all they were seeing about them in a radically transfigured society. It was the same thing that drew me to science fiction a couple of decades earlier. Someone said of Voltaire that he wished to express himself freely yet avoid the Bastille. These writers hunted that same elusive rabbit. They wished to write freely, fully, yet still have readers.

Wallace Stegner among others (including Chester Himes in his great speech at the University of Chicago) noted that many if not all our most serious problems derive from the fact that we here in the States comprise a nation of highly stimulated appetites. There's this constant stimulation of appetites for things - from the brimming cornucopia promised us by our Constitution, to everything the movies, television, magazines and shop windows dangle before us - without provision of economic and other means of gratifying them. The writer, it seems to me, has to remind us to step back from all that, from the deluge of messages, the reductive news, the virtual instruction manual our media have become: buy this, desire that, behave in this socially-approved manner. Our reading of the world is formed by the language through which we experience it, by the language available to us.

So: on the one hand, more and more information coming at us all the time; and on the other, ever-diminishing content.

Can we put the genie back in the bottle once it's uncorked? Probably not. We can follow Flaubert's advice to have always at hand a condom, though. Lash yourself to the mast and sail past those cheesy sirens!

Are you a dutiful writer - or do you need a rocket to get started?

Well, I tend to be a binge worker, throwing myself overboard and swimming like hell till I've reached shore. The Long-Legged Fly was written in a month, most of the other novels in four to six months. Working on the Himes bio, I went down in a kind of intellectual bathysphere and didn't come up till, eighteen months later, it was done. The bends are an amazing experience. That having been said, I have to add that I sit down here every morning about six o'clock and begin work. And I keep at it most of the day, with time out to read a bit, walk up Park Slope or down Third to the library, munch on bagels at Einstein Brothers' across the street here in Phoenix, Brooklyn's Bagels by the Park, La Madeleine in Fort Worth, to sit on the porch with Karyn watching hummingbirds dart to and from the feeder there, geckos emerge in their saucer-toe gravity boots, bats drop by the dozen from the hula skirts of palm trees, while violent pink-and-charcoal sunsets open like parachutes above us.

As time goes on, too, there's more and more busy work - reading proofs, overseeing new editions and vetting translations, checking text for reissues, interviews, correspondence. Work hard at what you're called to do, my brother (also a writer) says, and that's the bird you wind up holding. All the sludge conspires to keep you from the very work that made it all possible, and gave you reason in the first place.

The cinema?

I wonder sometimes if the foreign films upon which I gorged as a young man (because I could find what was in there nowhere else) may not be the most important early influence on my work, on the way I perceive and elect to adumbrate the world. More than once I've compared this to specific hunger in pregnant women who, sensing somehow that it contains elements they need, will peel paint off the wall and consume it. Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, many obscure and often forgotten films.

Music. Ah, well… I'd suppose that three books having to do with music, dozens of articles and hundreds of record reviews and the like address the importance of music to me better than I, prattling on here, ever could. Not to mention music as a constant theme in the Lew Griffin books. Or that the title of Black Night's Gonna Catch Me Here: Selected Poems 1968-1998, this sometimes arcane collection of poems, derives from a standard blues line.

Is the book still relevant?

Perhaps more like hanging by a single toenail, and that nail pulling free... No one who's spoken with young folk these days can sustain much illusion that books, literature, have anything to do with life as most of us live it now. Alas. Whereas religion still has a hold…but I'm bound to be unhappy with that.:. I have not a religious bone in my body. In fact, having been raised in Baptist churches and with Southern assumptions, I have, if anything, a decided anti-religious bias. Basically, though, I just don't get it.

Any new Lew Griffins due?

The next published book will be the last, the sixth, Lew Griffin novel, weighing in at about 150 pages just now and, as I mentioned back at the beginning, due next Fall. Past that, I can't say much. We'll take up position on opposite banks, burn fires to convince the other we have more troops than we do. Then one morning one or the other of us will attack...

And from Jim...

So far this year, a trade paperback of one of my novels, new editions of my translation of Raymond Queneau's Saint Glinglin and of my book on noir writers, Difficult Lives, a collection of essays, Gently into the Land of the Meateaters, a collected stories, and a biography of Chester Himes have appeared. Now, from Michigan State University Press, comes Sorrow's Kitchen, a major collection of poems.

It's been a landmark year, highlighted by last month's UK tour: many fine interviews, much fine conversation, discussions over Death Will Have Your Eyes becoming a movie, even plans for (no one is safe!) a record. There was tremendous interest all over in the Himes biography.

My essay on Guillevic is due shortly in the Boston Review, my column on Neal Barrett and Terry Bisson up any day now in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Other pieces on Gerald Kersh and Boris Vian are underway. Next year sees Black Night's Gonna Catch Me Here: Selected Poems 1968-1998 from Salmon Publishing in County Clare, Ireland, and the final Lew Griffin novel, Ghost of a Flea.