William T. Vollmann
[In the following excerpt, based on an interview with Vollmann, Coffey discusses Vollmann's works to date and the author's approach to writing and publishing.]
"I'd say the biggest hope that we have right now is the AIDS epidemic," offers William Vollmann, sipping from a glass of dark rum in his living room in a quiet section of Sacramento, Calif. "Maybe the best thing that could happen would be if it were to wipe out half or two-thirds of the people in the world. Then the ones who survived would just be so busy getting things together that they'd have to help each other, and in time maybe the world would recover ecologically, too."
Vollmann delivers this startling observation in a languid, deceptive drawl, like a pitcher with a slow, deliberate windup blazing a fastball by your eyes. You look closer to see just who this guy is, but his features recede in a haze of blandness. In person, the prolific young writer—at 32 he has published seven books of fiction and nonfiction, three of them in the last four months—is unprepossessing and somewhat odd. His bearing is distorted, or distorting: he seems wider in the hips than at the shoulders (perhaps an occupational hazard of the writing life) and looks the taller for it, narrowing toward the top; behind glasses, his right eye has a bleary cast to it, and his complexion is that of a 15-year-old. He sports a moth-eaten mustache and his sandy-colored hair looks unwashed. In conversation, he is gentle and considerate, but one gathers that his informal uhmmms … and wells … are the ways his lightning intelligence brakes for pedestrians. In blue jeans, sneakers and a madras shirt, this man who has written about everything from San Francisco's Tenderloin district to the impoverishments of Peshawar to the ravages of 17th-century Canada is an enigma dressed like a schlemiel.
Vollmann is ostensibly holding forth about his latest novel, Fathers and Crows, just out from Viking. But inevitably, his observations widen and address the larger historical themes of his Seven Dream series, of which Fathers and Crows is the second installment. Having tracked the violent journeys of various Icelanders to Newfoundland in the first Dream, The Ice-Shirt and then researched and reimagined the missionary efforts of Jesuit priests in Canada in Fathers and Crows, "the Young Man," as he sometimes refers to himself in his books, has seen enough of human foibles to call down the scourge of AIDS on all of mankind in hopes of setting something aright.
"The only times people really get along is if they're united against a common enemy," he calmly observes. "Perhaps that's what Sartre meant when he said, 'Two people can form a community by excluding a third.' The Huron," he says, referring to the Indian nation backed by the French in a war against the Mohawk, a conflict pitilessly described in Fathers and Crows, "were no better than we are. The reason they didn't have the equivalent of drive-by shootings and riots is because they had the luxury of this continuous blood feud that had gone on for as long as they could remember. So every summer they would go down and catch people who were not members of their particular nation. They'd bring 'em back and torture 'em to death and really make 'em suffer horribly, and everyone would just have the greatest time watching them die, and all the community hostility would be turned outward upon that one unfortunate person."
If Vollmann sounds a bit inured to violence, perhaps he is. He has surely made a study of it. He spent several months living among neo-Nazi "skinheads" in San Francisco, and gave a stirring account of the experience in his collection Rainbow Stories. He maintains a "professional interest" in prostitution—visiting whores and brothels in the Far East, Mexico and many ports of call in the U.S., gleaning the tales of a streetwalker's life that inform his masterful novella Whores for Gloria, the first of his three books published this year (from three different publishers). And, just out of college, Vollmann "made a trip to a battlefield" after convincing Afghani rebels to take him behind the lines during the early months of the Russian occupation, which ordeal he turned into An Afghanistan Picture Show, published last month by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
How did this young man—the product of a stable if peripatetic American family, an honors graduate of Cornell—come to be so widely published, all without benefit of an agent? From the outlines of his life's tale, the answer seems to lie in a mixture of genius, vaunted ambition and fierce self-reliance.
Vollmann was born in Los Angeles and lived there until the age of five, when his family moved to Hanover, N.H., where his father taught business at Dartmouth. The family later moved to Rhode Island and then to Indiana, where Vollmann went to high school. Vollmann supplies these details graciously but with disinterest, as if he were talking about a person he has only reluctantly taken aboard. But a query about a personal revelation dropped into Picture Show (in which he prefaces a chilling tale of fording a swift and icy stream with a reference to the accidental drowning of his sister) draws a tortured response. "She drowned, yeah. Well, I was nine and she was six and she didn't know how to swim and I was supposed to be paying attention to her and I sort of forgot. The floor of the pond started out very shallow and just dropped off…."
Vollmann seems almost embarrassed by the cloud of discomfort that besets the room. He gallantly moves to disperse it. "I went to college first at Deep Springs in California, in Death Valley. It's a weird, private place, sort of a whole story in itself. It was set up by the guy who pioneered alternating current, L. L. Nunn, in 1917. His idea was to create 'trustees of the nation.' He wanted to turn out this little elite leadership to go and take over the world, basically. There are a few minor twists to it—he was gay, probably, and it was an all-male school….
"It is a working cattle ranch and the students run the ranch," he continues. "There are usually 10 or 12 students. They send brochures to the boys who have SAT scores in the top one half of one percent and if you are accepted, everything is paid for. Nunn's idea was to 'develop the foundations of character' in this isolated desert valley the size of Manhattan. You're not supposed to see anyone else during the school year. Once you develop the foundations of character punching cows, then you go on to places like Telluride [Nunn set up schools within larger universities, where Deep Springers finish their schooling] at Cornell, where you play around with stocks and ballroom dancing. I liked Deep Springs; I didn't like Telluride."
Vollmann's first book, You Bright and Risen Angels … was about a school and master vaguely suggestive of Deep Springs and Nunn. The novel drew comparisons to the work of Pynchon and Burroughs—remarkably, considering that it had been plucked from a slush pile. "I don't believe in agents, nah. I sent Angels in '87 to a bunch of places. I hadn't [ever] published anything. Andre Deutsch in England was the only one interested at that time. They took it and they were just great to me and they've been great ever since. My advance for Angels, I think, was £12,500."
Deutsch has published all of Vollmann's work in the U.K. except Whores for Gloria, which Picador issued, and Picture Show, which has not appeared there. In fact, Deutsch has really been Vollmann's first publisher, selling American rights to Viking for Ice-Shirt and Fathers and Crows. Esther Whitby is his editor at Deutsch, "although she hated Fathers and Crows," Vollmann adds with a mischievous squint. "But they had to take it. I had a two-book contract. But they wised up after that. Now it's book by book."
Vollmann likes hard truths. Just as he gamely recounted his role in his sister's death, just as he understands the imperfectibility of society ("If men learned anything, sons would be smarter than their fathers," observes the narrator of Father and Crows), he is resignedly circumspect about his publishing future.
"I'm at a tough time in my career: I'll either make it or I'll be out of it fairly soon. On the one hand I seem to be getting better known all the time—I get fan mail all over the place. I'm getting great reviews, and that's a good sign. On the other hand, my books don't sell in huge numbers, and it seems to me that most publishers today, particularly American publishers, are more anxious to sell in large numbers than they were 10 or 20 years ago. I don't know how long they'll keep being patient."
Vollmann is not exactly pausing to see if he should continue writing. Viking has already accepted the Sixth Dream, called Rifles—about the ill-fated Franklin expedition to the North Pole in 1933—and will publish it next year. Thirteen Stories, which is in the Whores for Gloria vein, is being brought out in the U.S. by Fred Jordan at Pantheon in January (Deutsch has already published it in the U.K.). Vollmann wants John Glusman at FSG to see a "book-length essay on firearms" (Glusman, while at Atheneum, published Angels and The Rainbow Stories), and he has just finished Butterfly Stories, which Deutsch has bought and Pantheon is pondering.
Nor is Vollmann letting the hard truths of literary publishing dampen his hopes for Fathers and Crows. "In many ways I think this book is comparable to War and Peace. I'd like to see these books taught in history classes." Through the book's mixture of exhaustive research (the 73 volumes of Jesuit Relations, the writings of Ignatius Loyola and the diaries of Samuel de Champlain are just a sampling of the source material) and imaginary characters weaving in and out of the past and present, Vollmann has aimed to create a "symbolic history … an account of origins and metamorphoses which is often untrue based on the literal facts as we know them, but whose untruths further a deeper sense of truth" [from the end notes to Fathers and Crows].
Vollmann is not the first to suggest that a mingling of fact and fiction is at the heart of history and art. After all, Herodotus was no mean dissembler, and Shakespeare disfigured a king or two. But it isn't so easy to recall writers who have blended the sacred and the profane in the manner that Vollmann has in all his books. In Fathers and Crows, Kateri Tekakwitha, a Huron woman who converted to Catholicism after encountering the missionary Jesuits—and now a candidate for canonization as a saint by the Church—walks through the novel as if with a message to deliver. At book's end, her previously smallpox-scarred face clear and beautiful, Kateri strides through the red-light district in modern-day Montreal with a priest at her side. Seeing scantily clad women huddling in the cold, she approaches them with the call of "sisters," reaching across centuries and cultures to make a bond.
"I'm fond of prostitutes," admits Vollmann, when asked about their prevalence in his work. "I love watching them pick guys up. It's beautiful, the various ballerina-like movements that they perform on the corner. I think that we're all prostitutes. We all do things that we otherwise wouldn't choose to do, for the sake of getting somewhere else. And there is nothing wrong with being a prostitute. I like to remind myself of that by looking at prostitutes and talking to them."
Asked about the identification of the venerable and holy Kateri with Montreal's ladies of the night, Vollmann doesn't hesitate. "On the one hand Kateri has prostituted herself—to the Jesuits. She is trying to become a French girl, something she is not. On another level, prostitutes are despised people, and as an Indian she is despised also. Thirdly, most of these Catholic priests were very haughty and perhaps overly moralistic, ready to expel someone for being a fornicator, or if necessary having them executed for adultery. A true Christianity, if it existed, would insist on the equality of all the people who lived."
Soon Vollmann will be off on another research trip, this time to Mexico. It no doubt will be a refreshing break from his 16-hour days at the computer or in libraries. "I need to make $30,000 a year or so on these books, that's all. The trips I can write off, mostly. When I go away, I take my notebook, and when I come back I've got pages and pages of great stuff to put in my computer, and it's fun, it never seems like work. I'm always enjoying myself."
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