Provinces of Night
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William Gay offers a piercing portrait of a vanishing rural culture
INTERVIEW BY ALDEN MUDGE
In novelist William Gay's hometown in rural Tennessee there used to be a man who painted a huge sign on the side of his house. It had his name written in large letters and then it said: POET, WRITER, SONGWRITER, MUSICIAN, ARTIST. "The guy was crazy," Gay says with a sort of bemused laugh, "but he really thought he was a poet, a musician, an artist and a songwriter." Gay tells this story because during the many long years when he was writing his short stories and sending them out and getting them back with form-letter rejections, while he supported himself and his family "by doing construction work, drywall work, painting, carpentry . . . whatever worked," he sometimes thought about that old guy. "You have to have some confidence in yourself," Gay says, "but at the same time there's a line between confidence and being a total idiot." Gay occasionally wondered if he'd crossed the line. "I didn't really come out of a background that would indicate that there was much possibility of becoming a successful writer. I came out of a really rural, poor sharecropper type environment. Growing up I was sort of an anomaly, I guess, because I read so much. . . . When I got to the seventh grade, I had a schoolteacher who noticed that I was reading a lot and that I was reading past the level of what I should be reading. He gave me Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe and that just sort of screwed me up. I just got drunk on the language, the rhetoric. I thought that it was a normal progression from wanting to read books to wanting to write books. I thought if somebody else could do it, I could learn to do it too." Apparently Gay read and learned from just about everyone, ranging from James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald to Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. For a while, in his youth, he guessed he should write like F. Scott Fitzgerald. "Not like Fitzgerald, exactly, but about that set, the high society that Fitzgerald worked in. It was just a farce. I had no interest in it, I couldn't do it, and I finally figured out that the only thing I could write about was what I knew and cared about." What Gay cares about is the life of the rural South, a culture he says has largely vanished in recent years. "The urban South has been different for years," he says, "but the rural South sort of hung on to its ways. Reconstruction seemed to be going on into the 1950s in the rural South. There was a strong sense of regionalism. The people in the rural areas were very poor but they had an individuality about them. I always felt they were really vital people, concerned about the things that mattered. They wanted a roof over their head, enough food to feed their families, just enough money to keep the wolf away from their door. Today, with TV and the Internet and the various media, everything's been sort of assimilated. The people I'm writing about don't exist anymore." Except, perhaps, in Gay's fiction, where they live with vivid intensity. His first published novel, The Long Home (1999), is a dark, unsettling story of the epic conflict between Nathan Winer, a young carpenter in Tennessee, and Dallas Hardin, a malicious backwoods patriarch. Powerfully told, in lush metaphorical language that reminds one of both William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, the novel was widely praised and won the 1999 James A. Michener Memorial Prize. All of which surprised William Gay. "I was expecting a couple of decent reviews. The height of my ambition was that the book would sell enough not to lose money so that MacMurray & Beck would publish another. I was already working on Provinces of Night. I just hoped that they would take the second novel, and that eventually I would build a sort of cult audience." But Gay's modest ambitions were far exceeded. The Long Home sold well enough to interest Doubleday in publishing Provinces of Night. Early readers have been enthusiastic about the new novel and, Gay says, his publisher is strongly behind it. With good reason. Set in 1952, Provinces of Night is the coming of age story of Fleming Bloodworth of Grinder's Creek, Tennessee. In the novel's opening pages, as the modern world -- in the guise of the Tennessee Valley Authority -- begins to intrude upon valley life, Fleming's grandfather, E.F. Bloodworth, returns to his home after 20 years of roaming the countryside as a bluegrass musician with a magnetic personality and a penchant for violence. Fleming's father, Boyd, leaves for Detroit to hunt for his wife and kill the lover she has run off with. Fleming's uncles, Warren and Boyd, seethe with anger and resentment against their father. Fleming, an observant boy who writes magazine stories that are returned unread and unpublished because they are handwritten, befriends his aged grandfather and struggles to escape the family's history of violence and frustrated ambitions. For all its brooding undercurrents, Provinces of Night is a more lyrical and more optimistic book than its predecessor, The Long Home. "I wanted Fleming to have an option if not to escape fate then to have a different kind of fate," Gay says. "I also know that life has a sense of humor and that it confounds your expectations." Gay, too, has a sense of humor. In fact, he has the rare ability to capture the wry, stoic, understated humor of country conversation. Provinces of Night is often a funny book. Gay's character E.F. Bloodworth is not just a man with a legendary, violent past but also something of a delightful, reprobate trickster. And in Junior Albright, Fleming's well-meaning, bumbling, guilt-ridden and rather lucky friend, Gay has created a wonderful comic foil who lends light and perhaps even grace to the tale. But, finally, it is Gay's use of language that makes Provinces of Night such a pleasure to read. Three short passages alone make the book well worth the effort: an early description of the wandering Boyd Bloodworth huddled in a culvert outside an anonymous town watching the rain fall; a description of Fleming driving Junior Albright's car home at night in an ice storm; and the first conversation Fleming has with Raven Lee, the girl whose love will eventually help him change his life. "Good writing," Gay says almost shyly, "is first off about language. It needs to give the illusion at least that it is about more than it seems to be about. There needs to be some depth to it, and it ought to be about things that really matter." Gay tells me there are passages in this novel that left him feeling elated when he had written them, then he pauses and says, "I haven't done that many interviews and I don't really want to come on with a lot of ego. I don't want to tell you how great I think I am. I hate writers who are really full of themselves, and I'm making an effort not to do that." We move on to a discussion of writers he likes to read. Which is just fine. Because the truth is, Provinces of Night doesn't need William Gay to tout its virtues. This is a novel that speaks volumes all by itself.
Alden Mudge writes from his home in Oakland, California.
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