August 29, 2007
Across Noir America: An Interview with Barry Gifford (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 11:00 AM EST According to Wikipedia, Barry Gifford—novelist, poet, critic, and screenwriter—is “known for his distinctive mix of American landscapes and film noir and Beat Generation–influenced literary madness.” Madness, perhaps, but with a method. Gifford has mastered numerous literary forms from fiction (including Wild at Heart, made into a feature film by David Lynch, and this year’s Memories from a Sinking Ship) to biography (Jack’s Book, an oral biography of Jack Kerouac), screenwriting (Lynch’s Lost Highway and City of Ghosts, directed by Matt Dillon), sportswriting (A Day At the Races: The Education of a Racetracker), memoir (A Good Man to Know, about growing up the son of a small-time gangster in Chicago), and even publisher (his Black Lizard Press led a mid-1980s revival of American pulp crime classics). He has also established a cult audience as a cultural critic in such books as Out of The Past: Adventures in Film Noir and The Devil Thumbs a Ride and Other Unforgettable Films. His latest book is The Cavalry Charges: Writings on Books, Film and Music, from Thunder’s Mouth Press. The Cavalry Charges muses on such Gifford fetishes as Artie Shaw’s music, the novels of the mysterious B. Traven, and the horror films of Val Lewton. He talked to us from his home in the Bay Area. (His website is www.barrygifford.com.) This interview is appearing in two parts. Your work has been so diverse, from fiction to memoir to film scripts, that it’s sometimes difficult to get a handle on you. The Cavalry Charges seems like a good place for a reader to jump in because it deals with so many subjects dear to your heart—most of them, if you don’t mind my saying so, way out of the vast left field of American culture. For instance, the essay on the mysterious B. Traven, the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I love the first sentence; “Does it really matter who B. Traven was?” Was he an influence on your early writing? In your essay “Read ’Em and Weep, My Favorite Novels,” you list some books I expected to see—by Nelson Algren, Raymond Chandler, Jack Kerouac—but at least one selection threw me for a loop—the Chip Hilton novels by Claire Bee. What kind of cultural stew shaped your sensibility as a writer of fiction and film? Who were the writers who shaped your own neon-noir sensibility? My formal education was scattered and brief. My reading from the very beginning was random, and later on I read whatever was recommended to me by people I respected. I still do. B. Traven was certainly an early influence, as were Jack London, Joseph Conrad, and Jack Kerouac. They inspired me in terms of a lifestyle as well as a direction in which to develop a literary style, although I don’t write like any of them. I’ve learned equally from writers as diverse as E. M. Forster, Jean Rhys, and so many others. A recent favorite of mine has been Alvaro Mutis, a neglected author in virtually any language other than his native Spanish. I write in many forms—fiction, poetry, screenplays, plays, essays—because they are all, fortunately, available to me. I began as a songwriter, and sometimes the inspiration to write something continues to express itself as a song. I particularly admire the songwriters Augustine Lara, Doc Pomus, Hoagy Carmichael, and Smokey Robinson. These composers have influenced me as much as any poet or novelist. About Clair Bee and the Chip Hilton novels, when I was very young I identified with Chip Hilton, or rather fantasized about having a life like his, in a small town with a gray-haired mother who was a telephone operator, a job as a soda jerk, and being a star athlete who helped everyone with their problems—a life almost entirely unlike my own at that time. My mother was certainly nothing like Chip Hilton’s mother. It’s disgraceful that the recent reprints of the Chip Hilton novels have been revised by a hand other than Clair Bee’s to include religious, namely Christian, instruction. This is a sacrilege, pun intended. What you call my “neon-noir” sensibility was formed from my life on the street. Writers such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett, and Jim Thompson were not so much influences as good beat reporters. Thompson, however, interested me more than the other so called genre writers because of his peculiar psychological edge. Since you mentioned Thompson, could you straighten me out on something? Your name is associated with the Jim Thompson revival of the 1980s. Before then, he was someone who many talked about but few ever read. What was your connection to Thompson’s work? I first read Jim Thompson’s novels when I was 13 or 14 years old, bought off of a wire paperback rack in a drugstore in Tampa, Florida. They made a big impression on me at the time, and I never forgot them. In 1982 I found many Thompson novels in print in France, and I bought all I could find and read them in French. Then in 1984 I founded Black Lizard Books and wound up publishing 13 Thompson novels in that series. Black Lizard ceased publishing in 1989, at which time the backlist was sold to Vintage books. The line is now called Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. I wrote the introductions to all the Thompson novels. He was virtually out of print in this country when Black Lizard began, and I was happy to have brought him to the attention of the reading public again. Several of the Black Lizard Thompson books were made into feature films.
|
