The Erotics of Quantum Physics And the Horrors of the British Press an interview with Jeanette Winterson by Laura Miller

British novelist Jeanette Winterson -- "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit," "The Passion" -- has a reputation as a holy terror, a lesbian desperado and a literary genius. In person, she's petite and gracious, a brilliant, articulate pixie who holds her famous charm in careful reserve. Can this be the same woman who 1) while acting as the judge of a literary award, nominated her own novel as the best of the year; 2) conducted a torrid affair with her agent, the wife of novelist Julian Barnes; 3) menaced a former friend who said something uncomplimentary about her to the press; 4) claimed to have, in her youth, sexually serviced bored London matrons in exchange for Le Creuset cookware, then later gleefully taunted the media for swallowing such a baldfaced lie? Winterson maintains that her public image is outlandish, a "doppelganger" or "other self" over which she has little control.

The version of Jeanette Winterson who met with Salon during the recent book tour for her new novel, "Gut Symmetries," turned out to be quieter, but no less intense. "Gut Symmetries," like most of Winterson's work, involves an adulterous, bisexual triangle, but this time her heroine, Alice, is sleeping with both husband, Jove, and wife, Stella. Alice is a physicist, and the principles of quantum physics provide Winterson with a vibrant metaphor for the instability of identity once a "rogue element" like love enters the picture. As the symbolically fraught names of the characters suggest, there's more at stake here than just a marriage, and "Gut Symmetries" seethes with philosophy, fairy tales, mysticism and glittering prose, alongside a fairly brutal appraisal of human selfishness. "Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?" Winterson asks early in the book, in a characteristic mingling of the cosmic and the carnal.

Romantic triangles, particularly from the point of view of a woman having an affair with a married woman, seem to attract you as a theme. What makes you want to write books about this?

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy, when it stops being predictable, when there is a chance element which unsettles all the rules, which forces people back onto their own resources, and away from their habits. You see it often with animal behavior: They're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy. Then you see which ones eat the others, and which ones emerge stronger and better, and which ones just give up and die. Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

So, is Alice the rogue element in Jove and Stella's relationship, or are Jove and Stella that element in Alice's fairly calm life?

Well, I think it would be a mistake to think of Alice as a victim. Or as someone who is afraid. She's the youngest person in the book, only 24. Jove and Stella have been about a bit and seen the world. They know the score, but within their cynicism, there is also a huge naivete. They just don't believe that anything can knock them off their perch. There's a kind of smugness to them, which Alice completely detonates because she is the dangerous other who is out of control, because she is seeking and yearning. She is full of passion, and she will take huge risks emotionally. And that is a shock to both of them. In the end, Stella is changed. Jove sees himself as back within the world of safety where he's comfortable. He doesn't grow, he doesn't go forward, and that is always a choice when you have to decide whether you are going to cross over into a different place. There are no happy endings here.

Is that a principle of yours?

I don't believe in happy endings. All of my books end on an ambiguous note because nothing ever is that neatly tied up, there is always another beginning, there is always the blank page after the one that has writing on it. And that is the page I want to leave to the reader.

Alice says, "The human condition seems to be one of waiting to be rescued." Is that Alice's condition or also Jove's and Stella's? Are they waiting to be rescued?

Yes. And I think Alice is the one who really understands that. Jove would always describe himself as a rescuer. In the end, he's rescued by the very element which he has despised: mystery, strangeness, a miracle that takes place at sea, not the rational world of common sense. What happens is entirely unpredictable, which is why he hates it. He likes to be the one that manipulates things. That's why his nickname is Jove.

Alice is very open, partly because she is young. She simply throws herself into this situation because she doesn't really have any emotional sophistication or experience. She's still raw. She has got that openness to her which young people often have, which is very charming. And it is also very risky because you long for them not to be hurt, but you know that they will be hurt, and you know that it's inevitable, that hearts are made to be broken. That's their function.

Even when Stella is raging over her discovery of Jove's affair with Alice, you get the sense that she's done this before.

Yes, and partly because she has seen it before, even though she was hoping she wouldn't see it again. I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older. The trappings of life come to them, and they can function in the world, they have adapted. They have respect from other people, security. And none of that is any insurance at all against the big emotions when they arrive. I worry very much that we are inclined to fall in habits, to set shells of protection around ourselves to stop real emotions getting through. Young people don't do that. It's necessary to keep that openness throughout life. People turn out to be so rigid that they actually snap when a trauma arrives. I mean many people in mid-life ... It's a joke, isn't it, the mid-life crisis? And it's because they have spent 20 years pushing away all the big emotions, all the real feelings. Then, suddenly, those things just come back at you with all the force accumulated over those years.

Writers on Writing: Family Ghosts Hoard Secrets That Bewitch the Living By Amy Tan

This article is part of a series in which writers explore literary themes. Previous contributions, includes essays by John Updike, E. L. Doctorow, Ed McBain, Annie Proulx, Jamaica Kincaid, Saul Bellow and others. Related Articles • Featured Author: Amy Tan • Review: 'The Bonesetter's Daughter' (Feb. 18, 2001) • First Chapter: 'The Bonesetter's Daughter' • Writers on Writing Archive

In the last week of her life, my three half- sisters, my younger brother and I gathered around the easy chair in which our mother lay floating between this world and the next.

"Nyah-Nyah," she moaned in Shanghainese and waved to an apparition on the ceiling. Then she motioned to me. "Invite Nyah-Nyah to sit down. Bring her tea, and quick, fetch her my mink coat."

Indulging my mother these wishes, I began to write her obituary, with the help of my siblings. It was a task that kept our minds focused, unified us, made us feel helpful instead of helpless. That was how I learned for the first time what my mother's birth name was.

"Li Bingzi," my sister from Shanghai told me. My God, to think I had never known the name given to her by her own mother. "Born Li Bingzi," I duly put down, "daughter of Li Jingmei . . . " And another sister chided: "No, no, Grandma's last name was not Li. It was Gu. Gu Jingmei."

I sensed the ghost of my grandmother in the room. "Ai-ya! What a stupid girl," I could hear her saying, "This is what happens when you let them become Americans." I imagined other wispy-edged relatives, more frowning and head-shaking.

As my sisters and I chatted, we exchanged further notes. Our mother, one sister revealed, received a different name, Tu Lian Zen, when she was adopted after her mother's death. Then she chose a school name, Tu Ching, which she kept after she married an abusive man named Wang. Whether she ever legally divorced this man is not clear. Nonetheless, she fled the marriage, left behind three daughters and came to America under the name Ching Tu, then married my father, who christened her Daisy after a song about being half-crazy in love on a bicycle built for two.

My mother, I realized, never told my sisters about the name Daisy Tan Chan, which she took when she married for the third time in her 70's. A year later she had the marriage annulled and reverted to Daisy C. Tan. As to T. C. Lee, the dapper gentlemen whom our family in Beijing met when he and our mother honeymooned there, well, the truth was, she and T. C. had simply lived together without the benefit of marriage. My sisters guffawed.

My mother's many names were vestiges of her many selves, lives I have been excavating most of my own adult life. At times I have dreaded that I might stumble across evidence of additional siblings, husbands and lovers, more secrets, ghosts and shame. I had once thought I was the only daughter, the middle child, a position I took to have great psychological significance. I then discovered I was actually the youngest of five girls, that one had died at birth. There were three brothers as well, including one I didn't know about; he died at age 2 in 1939. With all taken into account, I was demoted to No. 7 of eight children.

There was also confusion about my mother's age. She had one birth date based on the Chinese calendar of ancient lunar cycles and the method of considering a baby 1 year old the day it is born.

In determining her younger Western age, she miscalculated the year and date, thus writing that she was born on May 8, 1917, instead of May 9, 1916. When she was about to turn 64, she told me she was really almost 65. She knew this for sure, she insisted, because she was born in a Dragon Year, 1916, just as I was born in a Dragon Year 36 years later. There was absolutely no way she could confuse this. Thereafter, she fretted day after day, until my husband untangled bureaucratic knots and set the record straight in time for her to retire in the right year and collect Social Security.

But that was not the end to her questionable age. My sisters and I found out that for her obituary the international Chinese-language newspaper wanted to report her as 86 instead of 83, to account for the bonus years she had earned for living a long life. All the confusion about her age, her three marriages, her many names and the order in which her children, living and dead, should be listed led us to nix the idea of a Chinese obituary. It would not look proper if we told the truth.

In writing a simple obituary, I realized there was still much that I did not know about my mother. Though I had written three novels informed by her life, she remained a source of revelation and surprise. Of course I longed to know more about her. Her past had shaped me: her sense of danger, her regrets, the mistakes she vowed never to repeat. What I know about myself is related to what I know about her, her secrets, or in some cases fragments of them. I found the pieces both by deliberate effort and by accident, and with each discovery I had to reconfigure the growing whole.

"Nyah-Nyah," my mother kept calling in the last days of her life.

I finally thought to ask what Nyah- Nyah meant.

"A Shanghainese nickname for `Grandmother,' " my oldest sister, Yuhang, replied. And then I remembered a story my mother once told me, of her being 4 years old, delirious and near death as she called to her grandmother to stop the pain. My mother had been horribly injured when a pot of boiling oil fell across her neck. Nyah-Nyah had sat by her bedside, day and night, telling her that her funeral clothes had already been made but were very plain because she had not lived long enough to deserve anything more elaborate.

She told the little girl that everyone would soon forget her because she had lived too short a time for them to remember much. That was how Nyah-Nyah, who loved my mother very much, scared her back to life. Now my mother was calling for Nyah-Nyah once again. This time I think Nyah-Nyah was telling my mother that her funeral clothes had already been made, and not to worry, they were fancy beyond belief.

For four days my mother's breathing kept me in suspense. She would take three breaths, then nothing would follow for 45 seconds, sometimes longer. It was like watching the tidal wash in anticipation of a tidal wave. At night I lay next to her, sleepless, staring at the pulse bobbing in the cove of her throat, my own heart pounding to this steady yet uncertain rhythm. Later I put a pearl in the hollow so I could more easily see this proof of life. Though I dreaded that she would stop breathing, I was relieved that she would die of natural causes and not from suicide.

For as long as I can remember, my mother talked of killing herself. The threats came at least once a month, sometimes day after day. She would utter them in front of me, my brothers, anyone within earshot. On a few occasions she made an attempt. I remember seeing her lean out an open door as our car sped down the highway, and we, her mute children, sat in the back. Several times she ran into busy lanes of traffic with flailing arms.

In my memories of adolescence there are also flashes of a knife, a cleaver, a pair of scissors. The reasons my mother wanted to die were many. It could have been something my father did or didn't do. It was often something I said or didn't say. Whatever it was, we were supposed to make amends before it was too late. Once I refused to say I was sorry. Then I was really sorry.

I didn't realize until I was in my 30's that her suicidal impulses most likely started when she saw her own mother kill herself. She was only 9 when this happened. And thereafter some part of her would always remain the 9-year-old who believed that the only escape from any kind of unhappiness was the route her mother took, an immediate departure from this world to a heavenly form of China. As long as she was alive, her mother's death was an everlasting punishment to her. Whenever bad luck visited us, she asked aloud whether her mother was angry at her. Was this a curse?

Though my grandmother killed herself in 1925, she was a presence in my young life, a ghostly presence. Ever since I was 4, my mother had believed I could see my grandmother. That was because like most children I had complained about a bogeyman under my bed. Instead of reassuring me that this was only my imagination, my mother asked me to pass along messages. She was convinced my grandmother had taken me as her confidante.

I soon learned not to mention what scared me, and my mother did not press too much for me to talk to the ghost. That was because my father, an engineer, was also by avocation a Baptist minister, and the only ghost he believed we should talk to was the Holy Ghost.

But when I was 15, my father and brother died, both of brain tumors, and my mother began urging me often to ask their ghosts why this had happened. She had me sit before a Ouija board, then noted when the room grew cold, when telltale pings and creaks signaled that the spirits had arrived. She was always hoping for one last goodbye, one more message of love.

Pragmatic woman that my mother was, she would also seek their advice on the stock market. With our fingers poised over the planchette, she would ask, "Should I buy I.B.M. or U.S. Steel?" I would push it to whichever answer was the shortest, a method of stock trading that, by the way, proved quite successful in my mother's portfolio.

For our mother's memorial card, our family selected the photos that captured her best: Grinning as she cooked with a gigantic wok. Smiling shyly for my father in the early days of their courtship. Staring solemnly as an 8-year-old adorned in mourning clothes for her grandmother, Nyah-Nyah.

My mother had always been a natural Shanghainese beauty and quite vain and snobby as a result. She bragged how spoiled she was as a child because she was "pretty beyond belief." She used to lament openly that I had not inherited any of her good Shanghainese features, that I resembled my father, a Cantonese. My nose was too broad, my skin too dark, my lips too coarse. I had long recovered from the wounds of those remarks when Alzheimer's began to erode her logic and memory. One day, my mother announced that I looked just like her. It was not too late to hear such praise.

As I studied the photos with my sisters, I saw that I did indeed resemble her. She and I had the same crimped chin, the wrinkling caused by holding back what we felt but could not say. In her case, it was secrets and hopes. In mine, it was protests and desires. For many years we had been unable to say, "I love you" to each other.

During the last hour of her life, our family murmured to our mother that we loved her very much and were sad to see her go. We whispered to her all the things we would miss: her dumplings, her advice, her humor. To myself I mourned: Who else would worry about me so much? Who else would describe in explosive detail what might happen to parts of my body if I was careless? Who would be frank enough to warn that my husband might exchange me for a younger woman unless I forced him to buy me jewels so expensive it would be impossible for him to leave both me and the gems behind?

My mother did not speak during those last four days, but with her final breath, a long release of an exhalation, she uttered a faint sound, a single sustained note. I had to bend my ear to her mouth to hear. I was the only one who heard it, but I don't think it was my imagination. To me, she sounded surprised.

After my mother died, I began to rewrite the novel I had been working on for the past five years. I wrote with the steadfastness of grief. My editor and dear friend, the great Faith Sale, would have called that grief "finding the real heart of the story." My mentor, Molly Giles, said the bones were there, I just had to reassemble them in a new way. To find that heart and repair the bones, I had to break them into pieces, then start to dig.

And so I rewrote, remembering what scared me: the ghost, the threats, the curse. I wrote of wrong birth dates, secret marriages, the changing place one has in a family, the names that were nearly forgotten. I wrote of pain that reaches from the past, how it can grab you, how it can also heal itself like a broken bone. And with the help of my ghostwriters, I found in memory and imagination what I had lost in grief.

School Lunches by Anne Lamott

from Bird by Bird

I know I set out to tell you every single thing I know about writing, but I am also going to tell you every single thing I know about school lunches, partly because the longings and dynamics and anxieties are so similar. I think this will also show how taking short assignments and then producing really shitty first drafts of these assignments can yield a bounty of detailed memory, raw material, and strange characters lurking in the shadows. So: sometimes when a student calls and is mewling and puking about the hopelessness of trying to put words down on paper, I ask him or her to tell me about school lunches–at parochial schools, private schools, twenty years earlier than mine, or ten years earlier, in Southern California or New York. And they always turn out to be similar to my middle-class Northern California public school lunches. But in important ways they are different, too, and this is even more interesting, for the obvious reason that when we study the differences, we see in bolder relief what we have in common. And for some strange reason, when my students start to jam with me about school lunches, they get off the phone feeling more enthusiastic and in better shape.

One time, in one of my classes, I asked my students to write about lunches for half an hour, and I sat down with them and wrote:

Here is the main thing I know about public school lunches: it only looked like a bunch of kids eating lunch. It was really about opening our insides in front of everyone. Just like writing is. It was a precursor of the showers in seventh- and eighth-grade gym, where everyone could see your everything or your lack of everything, and smell the inside smells of your body, and the whole time you just knew you were going to catch something. The contents of your lunch said whether or not you and your family were Okay. Some bag lunches, like people, were Okay, and some weren't. There was a code, a right and acceptable way. It was that simple.

But in half an hour there was already too much material for me and some of the people in the class, and it threatened to immobilize us. So we decided not to even bother with our parents' handwriting on the outside of the brown paper lunch bag–how much it resembled a Turkish assassin's and what that said about us. We decided to set aside the bag itself for a moment. For the time being we'd stick with the contents, and, to begin with, the sandwich. That was the one-inch picture frame we were going to look through.

Your sandwich was the centerpiece, and there were strict guidelines. It almost goes without saying that store-bought white bread was the only acceptable bread. There were no exceptions. If your mother made the white bread for your sandwich, you could only hope that no one would notice. You certainly did not brag about it, any more than you would brag that she also made headcheese. And there were only a few things that your parents could put in between the two pieces of bread. Bologna was fine, salami and unaggressive cheese were fine, peanut butter and jelly were fine if your parents understood the jelly/jam issue.

Grape jelly was best, by far, a nice slippery comforting sugary petroleum-product grape. Strawberry jam was second; everything else was iffy. Take raspberry for instance–

Now, see, I couldn't remember, as I wrote in class, just exactly what it was about raspberry jam that was so disconcerting. So when I got home that night, I called a friend who is also a writer, very successful and maybe the most neurotic person I know. I said, Remember how in elementary school, grape jelly was best in your lunch, strawberry jam was Okay, but raspberry was real borderline? Can you talk to me about your experiences with these things? And my friend went into an impassioned, disoriented riff about how there was too much happening in raspberry jam, too many seeds per spoonful. It felt like there were all these tiny little pod people. It was Body-Snatcher jam.

My friend then mentioned apricot jam, which was even worse than raspberry. I had not thought about this in thirty years, but now it all came back with horrible clarity. Apricot jam looked too much like glue, or mucilage. But you could count on having apricot jam when your father made the lunch. Fathers loved apricot jam; I don't know why, but I'm sure Anna Freud could have a field day with it.

I sat down that night and kept writing:

In general, come to think of it, when fathers made lunches, things always turned out badly. Fathers were so oblivious back then. They were like foreigners. For instance, a code bologna sandwich meant white bread, one or two slices of bologna, mustard, one wilted piece of iceberg lettuce. (The Catholics were heavily into mayonnaise, which we might get into later.) Fathers, to begin with, always used non-regulation bread and then buttered it, which made the sandwich about as tradable as a plate of haggis. Also, everything was always falling out of the sandwiches fathers made. I'm not sure why. They'd use anything green and frilly for lettuce, when of course only the one piece of wilted iceberg was permissible. Your friends saw a big leaf of romaine falling out along with the slice of bologna, and you might soon find yourself alongside the kid against the fence.

There was always that one kid against the fence. How could the rest of us feel Okay if there wasn't? If it was a guy, there was probably a trumpet case at his feet and he wore strangely scuffed shoes, because he avoided the foot traffic on sidewalks and walked instead through weedy lots with dogs yipping at him. He didn't end up at that station only because his lunches were nightmarish in their eccentricity, but his lunches didn't help.

He almost certainly ended up being a writer.

Now, who knows if any of this is usable material? There's no way to tell until you've gotten it all down, and then there might just be one sentence or one character or one theme that you end up using. But you get it all down. You just write.

I heard Natalie Goldberg, the author of Writing Down the Bones, speak on writing once. Someone asked for the best possible writing advice she had to offer, and she held up a yellow legal pad, pretended her fingers held a pen, and scribbled away. I think this was some sort of Zen reference–the Buddhist disciple remembering Buddha's flower sermon, in which all Buddha did was hold up a flower and twirl it, in silence, sitting on the mountain. Me, I'm a nice Christian girl, and while I wish I could quote something kicky and inspirational that Jesus had to say about writing, the truth is that when students ask me for the best practical advice I know, I always pick up a piece of paper and pantomime scribbling away. My students usually think this is a very wise and Zenlike thing for me to convey. Mostly I forgot to give Natalie Goldberg credit.

But write about what? they ask next.

Write about carrot sticks, I tell them:

Code carrots had to look machine extruded, absolutely uniform, none longer than the length of the sandwich. Your parents would sometimes send you to school with waxed-paper packets of uneven cuckoo-bunny carrots, and your carrot esteem would be so low you couldn't even risk looking at the guy against the fence. Bad juju. If you so much as glanced at him, a visible empathetic arc would stretch between you, and link you two in the minds of your peers forever.

And then there was the matter of the wrapping paper; waxed paper and later Saran wrap. If code lunches were about that intense desire for one thing in life to be Okay, or even just appear to be Okay, when all around you and at home and inside you things were so chaotic and painful, then it mattered that it not look like Jughead wrapped your sandwich. A code lunch suggested that someone in your family was paying attention, even if in your heart you knew that your parents were screwing up left and right. So it was a little like making your bed at lunch. Everything should be squared. Sandwiches should be wrapped with hospital corners. Right?

Okay. That's all. But now I have this material to chose from, to work with, to shape, edit, highlight, or toss. (And that's very nice of you to suggest the later.) That is my version of school lunches. Yours might be different and I would be interested in hearing about it. (Now don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting you mail it to me. But I bet it reveals some interesting stuff about you and your family and the times in which you grew up.) And even though what I've quoted here is shitty-first-draft stuff, the boy against the fence appeared out of nowhere–I had no idea when I started writing that he was in my memory. To me, he is the most important thing that came out of this exercise. Tomorrow when I sit down to work on my novel, he will be someone who matters to me, whom I want to work with, get to know, who has something important to say or somewhere only he can take me.

Polaroids by Anne Lamott

from Bird by Bird

Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't–and, in fact, you're not supposed to–know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing. First you just point at what has your attention and take the picture. In the last chapter, for instance, what had my attention were the contents of my lunch bag. But as the picture developed, I found I had a really clear image of the boy against the fence. Or maybe your Polaroid was supposed to be a picture of that boy against the fence, and you didn't notice until the last minute that a family was standing a few feet away from him. Now, maybe it's his family, or the family of one of the kids in the class, but at any rate these people are going to be in the photograph, too. Then the film emerges from the camera with a grayish green murkiness that gradually becomes clearer and clearer, and finally you see the husband and wife holding their baby with two children standing beside them. And at first it all seems very sweet, but then the shadows begin to appear, and then you start to see the animal tragedy, the baboons baring their teeth. And then you see a flash of bright red flowers in the bottom left quadrant that you didn't even know were in the picture when you took it, and these flowers evoke a time or a memory that moves you mysteriously. And finally, as the portrait comes into focus, you begin to notice all the props surrounding these people, and you begin to understand how props define us and comfort us, and show us what we value and what we need, and who we think we are.

You couldn't have had any way of knowing what this piece of work would look like when you first started. You just knew that there was something about these people that compelled you, and you stayed with that something long enough for it to show you what it was about.

Watch this Polaroid develop:

Six or seven years ago I was asked to write an article on the Special Olympics. I had been going to the local event for years, partly because a couple of friends of mine. Also, I love sports, and I love to watch athletes, special or otherwise. So I showed up this time with a great deal of interest but no real sense of what the finished article might look like.

Things tend to go very, very slowly at the Special Olympics. It's not like trying to cover the Preakness. Still, it has its own exhilaration, and I cheered and took notes all morning.

The last track-and-field event before lunch was a twenty-five yard race by some unusually handicapped runners and walkers, many of whom seemed completely confused. They lumped and careened along, one man making a snail-slow break for the stands, one heading out toward the steps where the winners receive their medals; both of them were shepherded back. The race took just about forever. And here it was nearly noon and we were all so hungry. Finally, though, everyone crossed the line, and those of us in the stands got up to go–when we noticed that way down the track, four or five yards from the starting line, was another runner.

She was a girl of about sixteen with a normal-looking face above a wracked and emaciated body. She was on metal crutches, and she was just plugging along, one tiny step after another, moving one crutch forward two or three inches, then moving a leg, then moving the other crutch two or three inches, then moving the other leg. It was just excruciating. Plus, I was starving to death. Inside I was going, Come on, come on, come on, swabbing at my forehead with anxiety, while she kept taking these two- or three-inch steps forward. What felt like four hours later, she crossed the finish line, and you could see that she was absolutely stoked, in a shy girlish way.

A tall African American man with no front teeth fell into step with me as I left the bleachers to go look for some lunch. He tugged on the sleeve of my sweater, and I looked up at him, and he handed me a Polaroid someone had taken of him and his friends that day. "Look at us," he said. His speech was difficult to understand, thick and slow as a warped record. His two friends in the picture had Down's syndrome. All three of them looked extremely pleased with themselves. I admired the picture and then handed it back to him. He stopped, so I stopped, too. He pointed to his own image. "That," he said, is one cool man."

And this was the image from which the article began forming, although I could not have told you exactly what the piece would end up being about. I just knew that something had started to emerge.

After lunch I wandered over to the auditorium, where it turned out a men's basketball game was in progress. The African American man with no front teeth was the star of the game. You could tell that he was because even though no one had made a basket yet, his teammates almost always passed him the ball. Even the people on the other team passed him the ball a lot. In lieu of any scoring, the men stampeded in slow motion up and down the court, dribbling the ball thunderously. I had never heard such a loud game. It was all sort of crazily beautiful. I imagined describing the game for my article and then for my students: the loudness, the joy. I kept replaying the scene of the girl on crutches making her way up the track to the finish line–all of a sudden my article began to appear out of the grayish green murk. And I could see that it was about tragedy transformed over the years into joy. It was about the beauty of sheer effort. I could see it almost as clearly as I could the photograph of that one cool man and his two friends.

The auditorium bleachers were packed. Then a few minutes later, still no score on the board, the tall black man dribbled slowly from one end of the court to the other, and heaved the ball up into the air, and dropped it into the basket. The crowd roared, and all the men from both teams looked up wide-eyed at the hoop, as if it had just burst into flames.

You would have loved it, I tell my students. You would have felt like you could write all day.

An Interview with Seamus Heaney by Karl Miller

"All we have to go on."

'The Strand at Lough Beg' is an elegy for a murdered cousin, Colum McCartney. In a later poem of yours, 'VIII' in the collection of 1984, Station Island, Colum reproaches you for having 'saccharined my death with morning dew', and indeed there is some morning dew in the elegy. Next to the later poem stands one of your finest, least sweet, poems, in which the ghost of a friend, a murdered shopkeeper, appears to you, causing you to ask forgiveness for a former indifference.

That poem is sufficient in itself to show how a vigilance in relation to events whose significance is at once private and public, personal and political, can produce some of your best utterance. That friend, according to his deposition in the poem, squeezed his wife's hand before descending to the shop, where he was shot. Your Nobel Prize address mentions another squeeze of the hand, administered in 1976 to a Catholic workman by a Protestant workman, two of a party, all but one of them Protestant, which had been captured by gunmen.


I hadn't thought of them in relation to one another until you mentioned the matter. What is at stake in these cases is something frail and true. I did think long about whether or not the story of the murdered workers should be included at this very public moment. Its function in the lecture is pedagogical, I'd say; it's a fable about how little we have to go on, but how precious and real that 'little' is. I hesitated, I suppose, because of the uplift factor: you know, the suggestion that there is that much hope. Even admitting that much hope - there is something overly consoling in that.


The end of the story was bitter enough. They were all killed.


They were all killed. And maybe what should be left is the blood on the road instead of the squeeze of the hand. Nevertheless, the frailty of that gesture is all we have to go on.


The poem which has the apparition of your shopkeeper friend is visionary without being bardic. It encompasses a humbling of the bard, and uses the words that people say to one another in the street or the shop. How do you feel about it now?


It's one that holds up. It's almost twenty years since I wrote it, but I still occasionally include it at poetry readings. I suppose it comes across because it's a story, and because of the colloquial aspect. What I enjoy is the muted rhyming, the slightly Dantesque formality of the verse, being combined with the speech rhythms of South Derry. And you're right about the 'humbling of the bard'. I suppose what got released in it was something I wasn't consciously seeking to release. My conscious concern was with the killings in the North and the adequacy or inadequacy of my response to them in the poetry I was writing, but unconsciously what was going on was a dialogue between my pre-writing, mid-Ulster, adolescent self and the more politically-aware, published-poet side of me.

The speaker in the poem is unnamed, but he's based on a man called William Strathearne who was murdered in circumstances the same as those described in the poem - called down to the shop door in the middle of the night. I hadn't seen Willie for many years but I had known him when he was a young fellow, and famous locally for his style and gifts as a footballer. He belonged to the extra-literary, rural, parochial-hall part of my life, one of the people I gradually lost touch with as I moved on to live in Belfast during the Sixties, and then down to Wicklow, and into a different swim. For all the Troubles 'content', the poem is a kind of dialogue with myself.

One thing I worried about in writing that section of 'Station Island' was whether to make the killers in the poem members of the RUC - since it had been rogue members of the police force who had committed the actual murder. Policemen who were paramilitaries when off-duty, as it were. That was why Strathearne had answered the door in the middle of the night. He saw uniforms and presumably felt safe, although what was about to occur was a sectarian assassination. He was killed because he was an easy Catholic target, living in a largely Protestant village.

But even so, I felt that if I blazoned that into the poem, it would constitute an inflammatory, propagandist, almost pro-IRA gesture. It would be taken as saying that all the RUC were what the graffiti called them - murderers. So, for better or worse, I left the thing bare of political markings. Within the first circle of readers, of course, in Northern Ireland, most people would have known the incident on which it was based. Anyhow, I've never regretted the decision. And I'm inclined to elevate it into a proof of the rightness of Aristotle's claim that the poet is different from the historian, that the poet deals with what typically happens.


You've said that you think you've been lucky, lucky to have found love and poetry in your life. How lucky was the move from your first environment to a succession of very different ones? Did the move involve any forfeitings, any losses?


I don't see what was forfeited or lost. The really valuable thing about my childhood was the verity of the life I lived within the house and the sense of trust that I had among the people on the ground. I'm not away from that. And I'm not away, I don't think, from my first speech. I think of that speech as a kind of guttural bough - as opposed to a golden bough. It's a kind of passport through the perils of the fake speech you are bound to encounter, a register that stays reliable.

It's not that I believe you should confine yourself to the cultural or conceptual limits of that first language. Certainly not. In fact, it is precisely the experience of going beyond those limits that constitutes much of the luck of my life. But as a writer, I never want to get out of my phonetic depth, as it were. I like to feel that the line I am writing is being paid out from some old inner voice-reel, that it is coming up from the place I re-enter every time I go back to where I grew up. I still live a kind of den life when I go home, among my brothers and sisters in County Derry.


That den life is just as evident in the later poetry as it is in the earlier. In fact, one of the great exhilarations of the later poetry is the den that is celebrated there.


There's a ruminant aspect to a lot of the more recent poems. But there's a certain amount of ranging around as well as reaching back. For example, in that Macedonian poem we were talking about, there is the flypaper from fifty years ago in the farmhouse in Mossbawn, but there is also a memory of the sumptuousness of being served a meal on the Lufthansa flight from Belgrade, the learned behaviour of the frequent flyer. You want to be able to include the experience at the circumference and to find your bearings between the circumference and the first centre.

I sometimes wonder how I add up, and am tempted to think of myself as a very old-fashioned instance, a survival from the age of the priest and the plough. But after all, the whole species is going through certain changes in the conditions in which it lives, and whether you are living with your computer in a loft in New York or are still within the smell of silage in County Derry, as a creature of the planet you have to huddle at night, and you're haunted by your dreams.


So you'd mostly want to say that you haven't changed or been changed?


I've learnt far more, of course, but I haven't been changed, no, not in any fundamental way. The image that always comes to me is of ripples in a round pool. They are beaming and brimming out from the original point, but if you look at them long enough, you begin to think that maybe they are rippling back in from the outer edge.

That's what consciousness or selfhood or your meaning to yourself is like. Something inside you is still the same, an element at the centre of your being is still whatever it has been since you came to awareness, but obviously there's an acquired perspective too, new reaches of understanding and comprehension, a whole accumulated set of instincts and bases for judgement. Are there many people who cannot say, 'in my end is my beginning'?


To move into a world of professors and media people, reviewers, interviewers, and other creatures from Dante's Inferno, might be construed by some as a threat to the character. How have you managed to fight them off, if that is the word for it?


I don't think of myself as fighting them off. Conversations, contact with what Auden called the 'ironic points of light' in your life, the ring of vigilance around you which is your circle of friends, the merriment, the sardonic intelligence of people close to you - it's important to be able to trust that, to have internalized that, and to live with that springiness. I think the situation I'm in is eerie in one way: so many interviews, so many reviews, good reviews, but the natural backlash of bad reviews too, and being set up - no, not being set up, being there already, as some sort of phenomenon. Seamus Deane wrote to me after North came out, when I was still living in Wicklow, and he addressed his letter to 'Seamus Heaney', with the inverted commas.


And that was what, twenty-five years ago?


It was.


We spoke earlier about the Vendlerising of the Heaney oeuvre, about her aesthete's reading of the poems. Could you bear to complete the circle by returning to the subject? I'd accept that the category of the public work of art - cognizant, let's say, of fact, doctrine and community - can be made to appear archaic or inoperable, and that the opinions which aesthetes have judged extraneous to works of art can be hard to find, and hard to follow, in the poetry of the contemporary world. But they're there all right, and not always the worse for being hard to follow.

I think of the fine poet Anne Carson at this point. No one is less of a protest poet. She is inward, very much a writer for herself. She is sometimes oracular, if not esoteric, if not incomprehensible. And yet her work is alive with philosophical and political interest. Her Autobiography of Red ends with a gnomic interview with an Ancient Greek precursor of the author of this new long poem of hers: 'Identity memory eternity your constant themes,' her Ancient Greek is informed. And Carson's own poem has themes, which these words help to evoke. It also has the incisive portrait of a theorist, a student of 'the erotics of doubt'.


What Helen Vendler is saying is that there has to be more to a poem than themes, and I think she's right about that.


Yes, but you have themes, don't you?


I know I have.


And it's therefore appropriate - though this is something she can appear to deny - for your readers, if they want, to argue about them. The argument would, of course, do well to avoid the suggestion that you come at us in your poems with a tag saying 'Catholic', or 'Farm-boy turned Professor', or 'Nationalist', or 'Imperialist'. It's true that the attribution to poems of subjects and opinions can go wrong. Things aren't always what they theme, as someone once said. But the pursuit and discovery of themes, by writers and readers, look very like activities that have to happen - that will seldom if ever be entirely beside the point.



Helen Vendler is defending a position that is very much under attack. She has to educate the profession again, though she wouldn't necessarily put it like that. What she has observed, in her maturity, as a reader and critic and teacher, is the disappearance of a capacity for jouissance in the poem itself, and I think a lot of her polemic, a lot of her insistence on the private, aesthetic nature of the experience of literature, is a reaction against the politicization of oral discourse within the humanities.


Harold Bloom, another aesthete, has been reaffirming the need for a canon of great works of literature, which you either belong to or you don't, as if by the grace of God. Jeannette Winterson belongs to his canon, he rules, and Angela Carter doesn't. Candidature for the canon has nothing to do, he says, with themes or opinions; it has to do only with aesthetic considerations. Now, while I can understand a hostility towards its politicization, it seems to me that any experience of poetry should endeavour to take in its fullness what the poet has to say. George Herbert has been seen in some debatable way as a Calvinist, a believer in the wickedness of all but a happy few. And he has also been extravagantly described as a Stalinist.

It's all right, in my view, and more than all right, for the reader to be conscious of the opinions which have been attributed to his poems and other writings, and to ask what it meant doctrinally for this parson to be, as he put it, 'on God's side'. As opposed to saying, 'Let's just consider this aesthetically; let's not bother with what he believed.' You can still love the poems while bothering with, and being bothered by, some of his beliefs, so far as we can be sure that he held them.


If you are a Paisleyite reader of literature, do you come to the poems of someone like Robert Southwell - a Jesuit martyr - and say, 'We don't read them; he was a recusant'? What does it do to your reading of a poem by Herbert, reflecting on the fact that he would have damned people?


Damned nearly everybody, on one construction of the matter.


Yes.


Including you, for being a Papist.


We would have damned him right back: But surely even those readers you call aesthetes possess a vivid historical sense, and know that damning was a given of Herbert's times, just as we know that retaliatory killing was a given of the Beowulf poet's times. Even your aesthete concedes and needs that much context in order to enjoy a text. The sureness of a literary voice may derive from a set of convictions and attitudes which include some that are dismaying.

The Art Of Fiction No. 62 | Interview with Erskine Caldwell

from The Paris Review #7

Wearing the black socks by which he had said we would recognize him, Erskine Caldwell called for us at a motel in Scottsdale, Arizona. A large-boned six-footer who, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, once played professional football, Caldwell’s hair, which in earlier times earned him the nickname “Red,” is now predominantly white; his eyes are an arresting pale blue. On the drive to his Spanish-style, single-story home at the foot of a desert mountain, he remarked precisely each traffic light, turn, and landmark so we could get out there on our own.

On the first afternoon we met with Mr. Caldwell in his red carpeted study for exactly two hours. “I believe in rules,” he declared, “and you said you wanted to go for two hours.” The most prominent feature of Caldwell’s study is his large wooden writing table, faced away from the window, and its view of the backyard pool. Under the table, just a dunk shot away from the portable typewriter, rests a washtub-sized wooden wastebasket. An exercise bicycle, which Erskine says belongs to his wife Virginia, and she says belongs to him, occupies a corner of the room. Above it the wall is lined with Hogarth prints, purchased in London “when you could still buy them pretty cheap.” In a bookcase along the opposite wall is a well-stocked library of dictionaries (he prefers the “old” Webster’s Collegiate for its etymologies) and books on the English language. We did not notice that the bookshelves contained anything written by him.

With more than eighty million books sold to readers in nearly forty different languages, Erskine Caldwell is one of the most widely read literary figures of the twentieth century. His novel God’s Little Acre has alone sold over fourteen million copies. His books have been made into three movies and three plays; the stage adaptation of Tobacco Road made American theater history when it ran for seven and a half years on Broadway. A versatile and prolific writer, Caldwell

is the author of almost sixty books, including novels, short-story collections, autobiographical volumes, interpretive travel books, children’s books, and photo-essay volumes(such as the recently reissued You Have Seen Their Faces) done in collaboration with the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In addition to Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre(1933), Caldwell’s most celebrated novels are Journeyman (1935),Trouble in July (1940), and Tragic Ground (1944), all of which portray an impoverished, early-century, rural South that is both homeland and wasteland for its troubled and sometimes grotesque inhabitants. In a different genre and a different vein, Georgia Boy(1943), his genial short-story cycle about a small-town family enlivened by the antics of a quixotic father, is in many ways his best book and perhaps an American masterpiece. Caldwell’s latest books are a reissuing of his seventy-five story collection, Jackpot, in a Franklin Library limited edition (1980), and the autobiographical “A Year of Living,” now in progress.

Erskine Caldwell was born in Coweta County, Georgia, in either 1902 or 1903; there is no accurate record of his birth. He spent his early years living with his parents in a household that moved frequently among the Southern states. On various occasion she attended Erskine College, the University of Virginia, and the University of Pennsylvania, but did not earn a college degree. Following brief stints at a variety of jobs and a term as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal, he moved in 1926 to an old farmhouse in Mount Vernon, Maine; there during the next seven years he served his literary apprenticeship. A thirteen-year marriage to Helen Lannigan ended in 1938. From 1939 to 1942 he was married to Margaret Bourke-White, and from 1942 to 1956 to June Johnson. He is the father of four children, from his first and third marriages. Since 1957 he has been married to his present wife, Virginia Moffett Caldwell, an accomplished artist who has illustrated several of his books.

The first interview session began rather stiffly. Caldwell’s manner was formal as he addressed our questions carefully, in a firm voice still slightly tinged by a Southern accent. He speaks slowly and deliberately, pausing to formulate his replies and select the precise word he desires. His language, in general, is exact without sounding purposely elevated; and he uses an occasional slang term such as chap or punk as effective seasoning. Seated behind his writing desk, ever now and then he toyed with the typewriter carriage as we talked.


INTERVIEWER

Mr. Caldwell, what first interested you in becoming a writer?


Caldwell

Well, I was not a writer to begin with; I was a listener. In those early decades of the century, reading and writing were not common experiences. Oral storytelling was the basis of fiction. You learned by listening around the store, around the gin, the icehouse, the wood yard, or wherever people congregated and had nothing to do. You would listen for the extraordinary, the unusual; the people knew how to tell stories orally in such a way that they could make the smallest incident, the most far-fetched idea, into something extraordinarily interesting. It could be just a rooster crowing at a certain time of night or morning. It’s a mysterious thing. Many Southern writers must have learned the art of storytelling from listening to oral tales. I did. It gave me the knowledge that the simplest incident can make a story.


INTERVIEWER

How do you go about transforming such a simple incident into a story?


Caldwell

You get a kind of fever, I suppose, mentally and emotionally, that lifts you up and carries you away. You have to sustain this energy you’ve gotten to write your story. By the time you’ve finished, all your energy, your passion, is spent. You’ve been drained of everything.



INTERVIEWER

Is this passion something that comes in a flash?

Caldwell

No. Things that come in a flash you have to hold suspect. If you rely upon a dream, you’re going to be fooled. In the course of writing your story, you have to follow in sequence what your thoughts are.



INTERVIEWER

But your thoughts have to start somewhere.


Caldwell

Well, you have an idea to start with, otherwise you wouldn’t sit down at your typewriter. Whatever this idea is, that’s the solid thing you want to work with. You can’t wait for inspiration because it may never come.


INTERVIEWER

Where do you get that first idea?


Caldwell

You see a school bus going along out there and you wonder where it’s heading. Then you imagine a school, and a teacher. Well, who is this teacher? What is she like? Does she lead an interesting life? Then you recall some of the teachers that you had in the past. So it keeps on going and going.


INTERVIEWER

You mention recalling teachers you had known. Would this experience be important?


Caldwell

Yes. Experience combined with imagination. You have to use your imagination to invent something better than life because life itself is dull and prosaic.


INTERVIEWER

Would this inventing give you your plot?


Caldwell

No. I’m not interested in plots. I’m interested only in the characterization of people and what they do. I understand you can buy a pamphlet called The Seven Basic Plots of Fiction. A plot is applicable to what’s done in a mystery story, where the author knows in the beginning how it’s going to end. I never know how anything is going to end. All I ever know is the first line, the first sentence, the first page. The work terminates itself with dictation from me. Signs and portents indicate in some manner that a conclusion is just around the corner.


INTERVIEWER

Would this be true of your short stories as well as your novels?


Caldwell

Both are just a series of events and a cast of people that grow by themselves. I don’t manufacture tapestries. I let the people say or do what’s going to happen next.


INTERVIEWER

Then your characters control you?


Caldwell

Completely. These are all entirely new people and that means they’re unpredictable. You see, just like a child has to start from infancy to become a man, the character has to develop. You have a vision of some sort, maybe an insight into his appearance, but if you’re true to what you’re doing, he’s telling you what his action’s going to be and why he did it. If you let a person grow like that, little by little, you will have a character that is believable and maybe memorable to the reader.


INTERVIEWER

But you must have some influence over your characters.


Caldwell

I have no influence over them. I’m only an observer, recording. The story is always being told by the characters themselves. In fact, I’m often critical, or maybe ashamed, of what some of them say and do—their profanity or their immorality. But I have no control over it.


INTERVIEWER

But you do at least understand their motivations?


Caldwell

I’m not an oracle by any means. I’m often at a loss to explain the desires and the motivations of my people. You’ll have to find your explanation in them. They’re their own creations.


INTERVIEWER

Among your characters do you have any favorites?


Caldwell

No, because I don’t know that any of them are beloved in that sense. Some of them are reprehensible.


INTERVIEWER

Which are your favorites among your novels, short stories, and books of nonfiction?


Caldwell

Well, if you have to pin a person down, I would say that I like In Search of Bisco in nonfiction, Georgia Boy among short stories, and God’s Little Acre in the novel form. Those three strike me as being acceptable.


INTERVIEWER

In God’s Little Acre, is Ty Ty Walden’s persistence in mining for gold on his land his faith or his folly?


Caldwell

It’s a quirk of nature. There are people who get these tics. One person might get an idea to raise spotted pigs for no good reason at all. It will ruin his family life because the pigpens make a big smell right next to his house. His wife divorces him and so on. Now whether Ty Ty Walden got his tic through a dream or whether his father imbued him with it, somehow he got the idea that the land he owned had gold in it. In North Georgia, at a place called Dahlonega, they mined gold and minted gold coins. Well, that may have influenced him. Anyway, he was imbued with the idea that he had gold deposits and that all he had to do was dig until he could find them. Nothing would stop him.


INTERVIEWER

Do Ty Ty’s manipulations of God’s Little Acre itself indicate his hypocrisy?


Caldwell

I think you would have to blame the author for that; I wouldn’t blame Ty Ty. That was a literary movement to give variety, to give change, to have something happen in this story.


INTERVIEWER

Would you admit to there being symbolism in your books?


Caldwell

No, not a bit. I wouldn’t know how to inject it, and I would probably abhor it if I found it. I think the whole object in the search for symbolism in English and creative-writing courses is just to instigate a thought process in the students. The thinking is what really counts in the end, I guess; even an average student can find symbolism because you can’t prove or disprove it.


INTERVIEWER

Well, in your short story “The Growing Season,” if Fiddler isn’t a symbol, who or what is he? Will you tell us?


Caldwell

Nope.


INTERVIEWER

Does it matter?


Caldwell

It matters to the extent that it interests me to write that way. I know who Fiddler is, or at least I think I do. I can’t be positive because it can go two ways. I won’t even tell you what the two ways are; that would help give it away. But, no, I guess it doesn’t matter in the end. The speculation is what really counts.


INTERVIEWER

You’ve listed your favorites among your own books. What have you admired by other writers?


Caldwell

I haven’t read enough to know.


INTERVIEWER

Do you expect us to believe that?


Caldwell

I don’t make a pretense of that at all. Oh, I used to read the Sears and Roebuck catalog, every year when it came out. But I learned early in life that you can be a reader or a writer. I decided to be a writer.


INTERVIEWER

So you weren’t influenced by any other writers?


Caldwell

Influence is a very tenuous matter. I try to avoid it in every respect. I don’t want to be influenced by anybody. If I were being influenced by Shakespeare or Poe, let’s say, I would be second-rate at it. An imitation is always going to produce something not as good as the original. The original, to me, is the only thing that counts.


INTERVIEWER

How do you feel about your many imitators over the years, such as those satirized by James Thurber in “Bateman Comes Home”?


Caldwell

Well, satire is a very legitimate field. I think you should accept satirization easily, without being affronted by it. But imitation seems to me to be a very low-down form of writing. Hemingway had a great influence on fiction, and while in general that was all to the good, he also had hundreds of outright imitators; I doubt that any of them could do what he did as well as he could.


INTERVIEWER

Like Hemingway, you also worked on a newspaper early in your career. Did this experience help teach you to write?


Caldwell

Yes. It was really good training because it compelled me to write something every day whether I felt like it or not. So in that way even writing obituaries helps fiction writing.


INTERVIEWER

Was it working at a newspaper that got you in the habit of composing at the typewriter?


Caldwell

No. You might think so, but it didn’t happen that way. My father had one of those great big old-fashioned Underwoods, and the first thing I ever wrote was on that typewriter. Since then I’ve always had to see what I’m working on right here before me.


INTERVIEWER

Writing for a newspaper is a kind of on-the-job training. Did you also have any formal instruction in writing, perhaps at the various colleges you attended?


Caldwell

My most rewarding course at three different colleges was a graduate course in composition at the University of Virginia. It was conducted by a chap by the name of Atcheson Hench. I was only a freshman or a sophomore at the time, but I signed myself right in anyway. Life was too short to have to wait for four years. Henchlet us write whatever we wanted to—poetry, short stories, nonfiction—and then everybody else would comment upon it. Hench wouldn’t break my work down sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph. He left everything alone, which was very satisfactory to me. At the end of the course, he told me, “I had heard that you were not qualified for this course, but I watched you and I was satisfied. So, a lot of good luck to you.”


INTERVIEWER

Was this an early version of the creative-writing courses that are so popular in colleges today?


Caldwell

No. It was not called creative writing; it was called English composition. I fell out with the process when they invented the term “creative writing.” To me there is no such thing as creative writing. It’s either good writing, whatever the subject, or it’s not creative.


INTERVIEWER

Does this mean that you don’t distinguish between fiction and nonfiction?


Caldwell

That’s right. It’s not what you write, it’s how you write it. Whether you want to base a work on facts or on imagination does not really matter. You can be a good writer in either field, or both. The use of words is what makes writing, and in the end it’s how well you do it that’s going to count. Nonfiction can be just as appealing in a literary sense as a novel can be.


INTERVIEWER

You said that Hench’s was a composition course. Did you take any literature courses in college?


Caldwell

Well, I tried one English course and dropped out of it because the professor spent his whole time talking about Henry James or somebody of that caliber who was way beyond my comprehension. I also showed up for a graduate course called A Study of Wordsworth. I remember that I’d been there for about half a term, I guess, when the dean called me up to his office. He said, “I’ve received a question from the professor who’s conducting the Wordsworth course. He wants to know how in the world you got into his class.” I had told the professor that I didn’t like either Wordsworth or his poetry, so he complained to the dean. Anyway, I would say those were typical of my experiences with English courses in college. I think the problem was that my interest then had nothing to do with Wordsworth or Henry James but rather with the construction of a short story that had never been written before and that I wanted to write.


INTERVIEWER

Did any of your college studies other than English interest you or help shape your writing?


Caldwell

Yes. Sociology and economics. I studied them because they are the basis of life. But I did not have what you’d call an intellectual interest in them as subjects. They were just a point of departure.


INTERVIEWER

A point of departure?


Caldwell

I wanted to understand what life was, and why, so that I could write about it. But what I was writing in fiction was based much more on seeing life in action than on theory. For example, I really learned about economics by working in the basement of a ten-cent store in Wilkes-Barre and delivering milk in Washington at three o’clock every morning. And I learned about the hardships people were enduring by observing these things.


INTERVIEWER

Yet some readers argue that your books present a distorted, rather than a realistic, view of the South. For example, they say that you exaggerated the plight of the Jeeter Lester family in Tobacco Road.


Caldwell

Many Southern people are not sympathetic at all to the story or to the condition of these people. They had not observed the extreme poverty, or, if they had, they paid no attention to it. When it was said to exist, they denied it immediately. Well, that’s their privilege. But when I was living in Georgia with my parents, there were three or four different families from outside Wrens that would come in almost periodically, early in the morning. They would sit on our porch, begging for something to eat. From grandmothers to infants in arms, they would sit there all morning long, with somebody holding out his hand all of the time, moaning a little. So these things did exist. And I was always short tempered with people who said they did not.


INTERVIEWER

What about editors? Did they ask you to delete or change anything?


Caldwell

I’ve never encountered any situation where the publisher or editor has said, This has to come out. In fact, they never change anything I write. At the beginning of my career Max Perkins, who was an editor at Scribner’s, encouraged me to keep my attitude toward the integrity of writing. Since then I’ve never wanted anybody to tell me to change anything or to take anything out. And no one ever has.


INTERVIEWER

Do you consider yourself unusually fortunate in having been left alone?


Caldwell

Yes, but after what Perkins told me I thought I deserved it, so I was not abashed at all. I had no doubts that I could handle it. I’ve never doubted that I can write what I want to write and do it the way I want to do it.


INTERVIEWER

So no one advises you about your writing?


Caldwell

Well, I don’t pretend to be infallible. When Virginia began helping me as an editorial assistant, I had to browbeat her to find some fault, to find what might be wrong with this particular word or that sentence. Victor Weybright, my publisher at New American Library, had cautioned her not to change anything I had written. So I had to educate her to be critical of my work, and now she’s very strict with me.


INTERVIEWER

Do you need isolation in order to write?


Caldwell

I do like privacy. In the old days in New York you could rent a room very cheaply, and I wrote several books in rented rooms because I had no distractions whatsoever. I could put a typewriter the bed, sit opposite it in a chair, and write that way all day and night if I wanted to.


INTERVIEWER

Do you ever have to overcome inertia to get yourself writing in the morning?


Caldwell

No, I wouldn’t say so at all. Now, I might have the feeling coming in here that I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might be worried about that. But I’ll come in anyway and sit here until something happens. You see, it’s something I wanted to do to begin with and so I’ll still have that urge to see it through. I guess that talent is just a part of being a writer. You’ve got to have desire in order to make it all work.


INTERVIEWER

Have you ever had any long dry spells?


Caldwell

No. You can always write something. You write limericks. You write a love letter. You do something to get you in the habit of writing again, to bring back the desire.


INTERVIEWER

Do you do much revising as you go along?


Caldwell

I always have the biggest wastepaper basket in town, and it’s full at the end of the day. I write three or four lines, don’t like it, and in it goes. I found out early in life that there is no such thing as perfection or even close to perfection. Consequently, I discard constantly and try to do better with the next revision.


INTERVIEWER

What is a good day’s production for you then?


Caldwell

Oh, I might have two or three pages worth keeping at the end of the day. And that’s a lot, you know; three pages is a lot. I probably write forty or forty-five total to get those three I can keep. And it is not unusual to sit at a typewriter all day and end up with nothing. But if you get up, you know you’ll have nothing.


INTERVIEWER

Is there much revising left to do after you’ve completed a draft in this manner?


Caldwell

Normally, yes. Now with God’s Little Acre I dropped the sheets on the floor as I went and didn’t pick them up until I had finished. Then I put them together and that was the book. No revision. But usually when a book is finished, I rewrite the whole thing anywhere from six to a dozen times because I’m never satisfied.


INTERVIEWER

Do you add much in these subsequent drafts?


Caldwell

No. I might insert a description of a house or something, but you can overdo revisions. You can have too much fat and spoil what you should have lean. You have to know when to quit.


INTERVIEWER

Do you read your books after they’re published?


Caldwell

No. I open the books to see how the type looks. But once I’ve finished, I’m done.


INTERVIEWER

Which of your books was the most difficult to write?


Caldwell

When you’re young everything is easy, everything is smooth, everything you write is great. Every young writer feels that way. You don’t have that backward look at it, that self-criticism. You have no judgment. But as you grow older, every book becomes a little more difficult because you’re more critical of what you’re doing. You reach the point where you know something is wrong but you’re incapable of making it any better. So I would say the most recent two or three novels were probably the most difficult in that sense. The older writer is the one who has all the great trouble.


INTERVIEWER

Do you think your writing has changed over the years?


Caldwell

Yes. Your attitudes and your style do change, in a progressive way, as you grow older. Whether there’s improvement or not, at least there is change. Otherwise you’d be writing the same all the way through your career. You’d be writing Hardy Boys books or something. But when each work is a separate entity, there will be flux and change as you go.


INTERVIEWER

As you look back upon your career, do you see it in terms of discernible stages?


Caldwell

Well, I suppose so. The first stage, of course, was learning how to write, which took eight or ten years during the twenties. Then after that was a period when I was able to make money by writing in a subsidiary way, in Hollywood and so forth. My most productive period was probably from 1950 to 1975. During that time I had the desire, the opportunity, and the material so I did not let up. From 1975 until the present has been my least productive period. You might say I’ve been recovering from the excesses of life. Now I’m back to normal, I hope.


INTERVIEWER

Out of this long career, you say you spent almost the first decade learning how to write. Were you also publishing during this period?


Caldwell

The only way you can learn how to write is by writing; but, yes, when you’ve written something, you do want to get it published. When I started writing, the little magazines would publish some of what I wrote, and that gave me the impetus to keep on writing. They paid no money, but because I was supporting myself in Maine, raising my own food, I was willing to stay with it for years and years if necessary until something happened. My first short story was published in the little magazine transition in Paris.


INTERVIEWER

We’ve read that you devoted a year of your apprenticeship in Maine to writing poetry.


Caldwell

I think every writer has to go through the phase of writing poetry. That’s almost mandatory. The lucky people, in my opinion, are those who overcome it and start writing fiction instead.


INTERVIEWER

You gave it up entirely then?


Caldwell

Oh, sure, I learned my lesson. What gave me the courage to forget about poetry was a chap by the name of Louis Untermeyer. I had such admiration for him that I sent him some of my poems. He wrote to me and said that every young man is entitled to write poetry, but the sooner he gives it up, the better he’s going to be as a man. So I took his advice.


INTERVIEWER

He cured you?


Caldwell

Yes. And many years later when Untermeyer edited some children’s books, he asked me to submit a book for his series. “I know you’re out of poetry now,” he said, “so perhaps you can write a good child’s story.”


INTERVIEWER

And did you write one for him?


Caldwell

I did. The Deer at our House.


INTERVIEWER

Did you ever publish any of your poetry, either before or after Untermeyer gave you his advice?


Caldwell

No, but someone else once tried to. Just before Bourke-White died, a researcher visited her at the house we used to have in Darien, Connecticut. The two of them found some of my poetry stashed away under a window seat. This researcher threatened to publish it without my permission, but I told him he was going to get sued and arrested and maybe shot. Anyway, he’s quieted down now and hasn’t done anything about it.


INTERVIEWER

Besides poetry, your apprentice period produced your first extended fiction, The Bastard and Poor Fool. How do you now regard these early novelettes?


Caldwell

As experimental, preliminary, amateurish, but I think necessary to make the transition from a brief short story to a novel. They were basically imaginary—an attempt to find out how to present imaginative ideas realistically. I am much in favor of what I did, but I would not do it now. You have to go through that stage just as much as you have to go through the poetry stage and get rid of it.


INTERVIEWER

An early apprenticeship work that is rather poetic is The Sacrilege of Alan Kent. How does it strike you today?


Caldwell

It too was experimental, a little bit self-conscious maybe. It served its purpose at the time, but it was not traditional enough. It was not in the great tradition of fiction.


INTERVIEWER

A recent French-English edition of The Sacrilege of Alan Kent, published by Galerie Maeght, was lavishly illustrated by Alexander Calder. How did this collaborative effort come about?


Caldwell

Well, Marcel Duhamel, who was my translator for many years, got together with Virginia in Paris one night and they decided to get this book done in an illustrated limited edition. Duhamel said, “Picasso will do it!” You see, Picasso was his neighbor at Antibes and he knew him very well. When I was visiting Duhamel, I met Picasso down on the beach one night and went to his house. We did not have a common language and about all we could do was smile, nod, and improvise gestures. During the hour, we had several drinks and passed comments via Marcel’s interpretations. Picasso’s parting handshake was warm and intensely firm and clinging. Anyway, Picasso put the book on his schedule but died before he got to it. Duhamel did not get discouraged, though. He just said, “Sandy Calder can do it just as well as Picasso or better. I’ll get him!” And he did.


INTERVIEWER

You mentioned a period after your apprenticeship in which you made money, in a subsidiary way, from your writing. Would you explain what you meant by this?


Caldwell

I was in a high salary bracket in Hollywood off and on, and I also had an interest in the Broadway production of Tobacco Road, which ran for seven or eight years.


INTERVIEWER

What did you think of Jack Kirkland’s dramatization of Tobacco Road?


Caldwell

I would say that Kirkland’s version is true and authentic for dramatic purposes. By that I mean he had to manipulate the story to create dramatic highlights for the stage. I had great admiration for Henry Hull, the actor who first played Jeeter Lester, because he played the part straight. But I objected to the actors after Hull who portrayed Lester, both on Broadway and in the touring companies, because they played principally to get laughs. Now Kirkland didn’t like this either, but the producer was happy with the big box office and his authority was almost final.


INTERVIEWER

What about the movie version of Tobacco Road? Did you like it?


Caldwell

Not particularly, no. It had good actors, good actresses, a good screenwriter, and John Ford directing. It had everything in its favor. But then Darryl Zanuck came along and wanted a happy ending. So the characters go off to the poorhouse singing a folksong.


INTERVIEWER

Did Zanuck’s interference surprise you?


Caldwell

Not really. Movies were made pretty much under a studio formula. My agent told me that the movie of my novel Claudelle Inglish was so poor that I shouldn’t even bother to see it. So I didn’t.


INTERVIEWER

What about the film of God’s Little Acre? Were you any more satisfied with it?


Caldwell

Yes, because it was done independently, without any studio control. The studios were very union bound and might have toned down the part about the mill strike. Of course, I didn’t have much to do with it except as an advisor here and there, but the freedom of an independent production was very interesting to me. At least nobody ordered a happy ending put on it.


INTERVIEWER

You say you advised the producers of God’s Little Acre. Did you ever take a more direct part in translating your books into movies or plays?


Caldwell

Well, Journeyman had a disastrous career for several weeks on Broadway. Then I came along and tried to doctor the script. I didn’t succeed, though, and the whole thing eventually flopped. I never felt qualified as a dramatist because I had no training.


INTERVIEWER

So you never attempted to write a complete play?


Caldwell

Oh, one of my misfortunes in life was that I wrote a musical for Broadway. About Mexican politicians. The principal actor, or singer, was to portray the president of Mexico. But this touched on a lot of toes in the State Department. Somebody there thought it might cause a diplomatic rub if we showed the president of Mexico chasing girls around the adobe walls and singing. So it never got produced. I don’t think it was a very good musical anyway.


INTERVIEWER

Did you give it a title?


Caldwell

Sure, sure. “The Strong Man of Maxcatan.” The script is in the Dartmouth College Archives, so maybe someday it’ll get resurrected.


INTERVIEWER

Were any of the movies you worked on in Hollywood particularly interesting to you?


Caldwell

Not especially. My early writing there was for a series of shorts called Crime Does Not Pay. Then I worked on Mission to Moscow, which was a propaganda film. The studio wanted me for it because of my experiences in the Soviet Union during the war. But I did not like the propaganda angle. After some preliminary writing on it, I asked to be relieved.


INTERVIEWER

You said earlier that you need privacy when you write. Did working in a studio environment present any difficulties for you?


Caldwell

Yes. For one thing, in the old days in Hollywood you couldn’t be a writer unless you could dictate your story to a secretary, and I never could dictate to anybody. So I had to go home at night to write where nobody could see me. I used to write in secret.


INTERVIEWER

Did your Hollywood experiences help your fiction writing?


Caldwell

Not a bit. It was just a waste of time. It’s impossible to write your fiction and work in the studio at the same time. I wasn’t doing anything except hackwork for five or six years. But, I needed the money and the longer you stay, the more they pay you.


INTERVIEWER

How did you finally get out?


Caldwell

Saved enough so I could quit. In 1950 I quit cold and I haven’t been back since.


INTERVIEWER

Were you happy to get back to your fiction after the Hollywood years?


Caldwell

Very happy. After that deadly period I spent the next twenty-five years trying to catch up, to write what I had not had the opportunity to do. From 1950 to 1975 I probably wrote more stories, more novels, and more books of nonfiction than in any other period.


INTERVIEWER

Which did you prefer, writing short stories or writing novels?


Caldwell

To me short-story writing is the essence of writing. I think a writer should always write short stories before he tries to write a novel. You have better control because a short story is concentrated into a small area. You also have better range because a short story can be anywhere from one to fifty pages long. You can mold it much better than you can a novel. A novel is a great, expansive thing. You can’t make a change at one point without affecting something another fifty pages away.


INTERVIEWER

But your short-story production seems to have tapered off during the fifties.


Caldwell

Well, you’re always going to like short-story writing better than novel writing. But once you accomplish the short-story form, you’re really stuck with it. So I wrote a hundred and fifty and quit. Of course, a hundred and fifty were probably only half of what got written. The other half I threw into the wastebasket.


INTERVIEWER

We have read that two of your novels, “The Bogus Ones” and “Autumn Hill,” were never published. Do you have many other unpublished manuscripts?


Caldwell

No, they go in the wastebasket. The two novels you mention are the only ones I can recall that I completed but never published. And they were not good enough to be published.


INTERVIEWER

You said that your most productive period ended in 1975. What caused this?


Caldwell

The past five years have been sort of a fallow period because I did too much traveling, going to Europe twice a year and so forth. And I also took two years out to have cancer operations on my lungs. I almost killed myself smoking cigarettes.


INTERVIEWER

I notice you haven’t smoked during this interview. Did you quit completely?


Caldwell

Oh, yes. About six years ago. My doctor at the Mayo Clinic told me I had to if I wanted to keep on living. So I crossed the street to a bar and ordered a drink. I had two cigarettes left in a pack, and I put both in my mouth and smoked them at the same time. I haven’t had one since.


INTERVIEWER

Mrs. Caldwell said that you came close to doing a book on President Carter.


Caldwell

What happened there was that just after Jimmy Carter was elected president, the people at Dodd, Mead wanted me to write a book about him and his hometown. It was supposed to be illustrated with photographs. But there was no great money involved—everything was more or less on “spec”—so I doubt that we could have gotten the kind of photography we wanted. The idea was interesting, I thought, but eventually it just evaporated.


INTERVIEWER

Do you think the Carter family’s Southern folksiness is authentic?


Caldwell

I think so. That ménage is fairly typical of others that I have known, particularly in Georgia. My feeling about them is that they’re just average, down-home Southern people in many ways. They’re very close-knit, very friendly, and very outspoken. I’ve known many men like Billy Carter who drink beer all day and ride around in a pickup truck. In fact, I’d probably rather do a book on Billy than on Jimmy. He’s more of a character.


INTERVIEWER

Your new book, A Year of Living, has so far taken you a year and a half to write. Would you describe your daily writing schedule for that book?


Caldwell

Well, for this particular book I got into the habit of working twice a day. I am here at the typewriter at six o’clock with the lights on every morning and work until ten or eleven o’clock. Then from four until seven I’ll be back at it again.


INTERVIEWER

Did other books have different schedules?


Caldwell

Yes, I used to have all kinds of schedules. Years ago, in the state of Maine, I chose to write my book on even days and work outside on odd days. When winter came, I shoveled snow and slept a little during the day, then stayed up all night to write. Another early method I used was to take a trip to write a short story. I’d ride a bus, from Boston to Cleveland maybe, and get off at night once in a while to write. I’d do a story that way in about a week’s time. Then, for a while, I took the night boats between Boston and New York. The Fall River line, the New Bedford line, the Cape Cod line, all going to New York at night. The rhythm of the water might have helped my sentence structure a little; at least I thought it did. Those were all early methods, or schedules, of writing. Everything since then has been a little bit different.


INTERVIEWER

Do you ever have several different writing projects going at the same time?


Caldwell

No, only one thing at a time. And I stick with it for six months, eight months, nine months, whatever it takes.


INTERVIEWER

You have been an active writer now for almost sixty years. What motivates your continuous devotion?


Caldwell

Well, some people are addicted to singing to themselves. It’s the same way with writing, I suppose. I write because it makes me feel good.


INTERVIEWER

Do you worry about what the critics will say about a book?


Caldwell

Not at all. A critic is an egotist. I am the judge, he says. He will wreck an author’s work by tearing it apart and never getting it back together again. Of course, there are some good people in that field, but I just don’t have much faith in what I call a critic. A critic is a superfluous commodity.


INTERVIEWER

Is there any particular audience whose attention you do appreciate?


Caldwell

Well, in that sense you might say I write for the ordinary man in the street, the golden mean. If I’m appealing to that sort of person, I’m happy. For example, a couple of weeks ago Virginia and I were at the annual ceremonial of the American Academy and Institute in New York. Of course, the American Academy and Institute is a collection of very high-class intellects. Everybody’s a big brain. On this particular occasion I was talking to Malcolm Cowley, I think, when a waiter came up with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. He was just a young punk, maybe a student at NYU working as a waiter. Anyway, he said, “Take one . . . Now shake hands with me. You’re the one person here I want to shake hands with.” So I shook hands with the guy and took another hors d’oeuvre.


INTERVIEWER

Why do you think your popularity as a writer has diminished until recently in this country but has remained steadfast abroad?


Caldwell

Fiction in America changes almost from one day to the next. We are still a very volatile civilization, whereas in an older country there is very little change except in a political sense. In America, fiction reflects current lifestyles, economic conditions, wars, lots of things. The interests of American readers change with the times. Especially here, writing has to be contemporary. But I don’t know that any writer anywhere should consider his work immortal.


INTERVIEWER

You don’t sound very concerned with achieving a lasting popularity.


Caldwell

I have never been interested in popularity because popularity doesn’t mean much. To be popular you have to be exploited.


INTERVIEWER

What kinds of books are publishers exploiting today?


Caldwell

Well, they’ve gone heavily into what they call the Big Book, something seven hundred to one thousand pages long. In recent years the American storyteller has been pretty well shunted aside by this blatant pressure to provide the best-seller. There is no imagination being applied anymore in a storytelling sense. And the bestseller itself is nothing more than a formula.


INTERVIEWER

Do you plan to write any more fiction?


Caldwell

I’ve reached the point where I’m too critical of fiction right now. I’m too abashed by the trashiness of a lot of current fiction to enter into it. The great compendium of knowledge that goes into a James Michener book, Centennial for example, does not interest me. At present I don’t see anything in between the trashy novel and the encyclopedic novel, so I’ll wait it out. I think the novel’s at a stage where something will surface between these two extremes. But what it will be, I don’t know.


INTERVIEWER

Could it be the journalistic novel, such as In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song?


Caldwell

In my opinion that will be a very short-lived pattern. I think it is an attempt to find what the next phase of the novel is going to be. Of course, the Capote book was the first of that kind; then Mailer’s came along. I’ve glanced at The Executioner’s Song and parts of it seem to me to be purely extraneous to the story. The excerpts from newspapers, for example, are just a compendium of a lot of clippings. They had nothing to do with Mailer’s writing at all. Well, to me that doesn’t have much of a future.


INTERVIEWER

Do you think storytelling itself will come back?


Caldwell

It will have to. It’s inevitable that storytelling will come back because storytelling is the whole basis of fiction. That’s where new ideas originate.


INTERVIEWER

Mark Twain was one of America’s greatest storytellers. In an interview a number of years ago you said you hadn’t read any of his work.


Caldwell

I haven’t yet. It’s something to look forward to. I’ve heard so much about him.


INTERVIEWER

You said once that you admired Sherwood Anderson’s short stories.


Caldwell

Yes. In those days there were plenty of novels in existence but very few good short stories. What interested me about Sherwood Anderson were his short stories. I liked the brevity. I liked the way he presented his people. His style was lean. It was not cluttered up with superfluous adjectives and unnecessary paragraphs.


INTERVIEWER

You have often been compared to Faulkner. How do you feel about that comparison?


Caldwell

I don’t know, because I don’t know anything about Faulkner’s writing. I read one of his books, As I Lay Dying, which I thought was a very fine exercise in writing. But I read it only to find out what he was doing, and I don’t know what he did before or since. I met Faulkner a couple of times, once in France and once in New York, but I was not well acquainted with him. The only subject of conversation with him that I can recall was the difficulty of talking to anyone in a foreign language when a person has the use of only his native language.


INTERVIEWER

Have there been any writers over the years with whom you have been well acquainted?


Caldwell

Oh no. I don’t mingle with other writers because it’s a bad class of people. My friendships have always been with the young ladies of life.


INTERVIEWER

What have you got against other writers?


Caldwell

They never talk about anything interesting, just about themselves and their work. The only writers I ever got along really well with were William Saroyan and a chap by the name of Pep West, Nathanael West. I knew him in New York and in Hollywood. These two were the only ones I had any great interest in knowing because they did not talk about their work all the time. They talked about cigars, anything.


INTERVIEWER

But surely you knew other writers?


Caldwell

Oh, I’ve known a few more or less casually. I knew Sherwood Anderson fairly well. Once when he was in Arizona he spent a week with me in Tucson. I also got to know Steinbeck pretty well, in Mexico and again in New York. Aside from those people, I got to know Theodore Dreiser slightly. He was another slave in Hollywood when I was there. In fact, we both had the same agent. Then Sinclair Lewis used to stop at my house in Connecticut on his way to the country sometimes. But I would not say I ever had any deep friendships with other writers.


INTERVIEWER

Writers traditionally are notorious for having difficulty sustaining marriages. Is divorce an occupational hazard?


Caldwell

Yes, and I’ll tell you why. Whoever is not the writer in the family always gets the short end of the stick. That’s because a writer has to be somewhat selfish. For example, I’m a retiring person in social life or in any other kind of life. I suppose you’d call me almost a recluse. I don’t take days off. I work on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. Well, a woman can resent that, and eventually something is going to give somewhere along the way. Of course, once in a while there is a very even-spirited person who can take all this, and that’s why some writers do stay married. But as a rule, no, they don’t.


INTERVIEWER

Have you enjoyed your fame and fortune?


Caldwell

Well, I’m happy to be able to live the kind of life that I’ve lived. But early in life I had a difficult time. Step by step I acquired marriages, and after each of the first three I was divided up. I lost three good houses—one in Maine, one in Connecticut, and one in Tucson. But I’m much smarter now. I put everything in Virginia’s name, so I can never lose it. The car, the house, everything’s in her name. So now I’m safe.


INTERVIEWER

Do you have any superstitions about writing?


Caldwell

I have a red rug in my room. Wherever I’ve lived in life, I’ve carried my red rug with me. I keep it in excellent shape. I have it vacuumed; I have it dry-cleaned. We are sitting on it now, in fact. Why is it here? We have a very good carpet underneath. But I’ve got a reason for wanting it here. It’s part of my life. Back in the early days I had to live on cold and splintery floors. There was a hardwood floor in Maine that was especially cold because the room I worked in was unheated. Now, an unheated room in a New England winter is sort of a difficult dungeon. Then, in South Carolina, I was confined to write for a while in a rented room with a linoleum floor. The linoleum was cracked and it bristled with splinters. Anytime I didn’t have my shoes on, I’d get a splinter in my foot. Well, as soon as I could afford to get a good rug, I bought my red one. And I decided then that I’d carry my red rug with me wherever I went.


INTERVIEWER

And your black socks? You said on the phone the other day that we would recognize you by them, and I notice you’ve worn black socks every day.


Caldwell

On a Sunday I wear white socks. Thick white athletic socks for the outdoors. You should see me on a Sunday sometime.