JM: During the month of August 1983 at Yaddo I had the opportunity to converse with James Still on a daily basis, so what I'm doing here this evening is a continuation of that conversation. I recently came across an interesting statement by Saul Bellow, Jim. He said that "a writer is a reader who has been moved to emulation." How did you begin writing?
JS: I wish I remembered and could tell you. I don't think I began exactly. I never had any thought of being a writer. I didn't know what it meant, to tell the truth. I do recall writing a little poem once, which, honestly, is not too bad. I was fourteen. I pitched a little tent -- you know you have to have romantic associations with the poem -- I pitched a little tent in the yard, and I went into that tent and wrote this little verse. I still know the poem now -- I won't say it, I assure you. But I'm still astonished when I see this little verse. I do intend to publish it some day to show how far you can come from something of that sort.
JM: Well, that Bellow statement suggests that there's some kind of connection between reading and writing. What sort of things did you read?
JS: We had no books in our home. Well, there was the Bible, of course, which no body was reading. I tried to read it once, but I got stopped in the "begats." My father was a veterinarian, that is, a horse doctor, a man with no formal training at all. We had one volume called The Anatomy of the Horse, which wasn't very entertaining. And we had another one which was called The Palaces of Sin, or The Devil in Society and which had to do with a man inheriting a million dollars and going to Washington, DC, where he observed the wicked life that was being led by the congressmen and senators. It seemed that these people played cards and they also drank gin. Now I didn't know what gin was. I knew all about liquor, but I thought gin must be pretty bad. Then there was one more book. It was called The Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge. It was a very large book. I remember that one of the backs was torn off. But it had a great many things in it, including how to play all kinds of games, even the game of hoyle. There were about twenty poems -- great poems by Keats, Shelley, and so on. I memorized those. And I knew i was surely the only person in my area who knew twenty words of Arabic when I was eight years old. I also knew maybe twenty-five words from various languages, how to say hello, goodmorning, and so on. I learned from that book how to prune fruit trees, how to write business letters. And there was a little bit on physics and on the chemistry of that day.
JM: Did you get any urgings or guidance from your parents as to what you ought to be?
JS: None. Well, my father wanted me to be a lawyer. I'msure hd didn, though he never said it, because he dragged me around to every lawyer in the country and anywhere else. I was always being introduced to lawyers and judges. And when the governor came to town, he pushed me through the crowd to shake hands with him. But I never thought of being a lawyer. That was nothing I wanted to do. My father never urged me toward anything. In fact, I don't recall my parents' ever asking me if my homework was done. I don't think we did homework in those days. I carried my books home every night and then carried them back to school, but I don't think I ever opened them. I don't recall that I did. Anyway, they were sort of dull. However, in time I came across other books -- Tom Swift books and Tom Slade books. I didn'tcare for them really. We subscribed to the Country Gentleman, and Zane Grey had serialized novels in it. But I didn't like them. I don't know how I learned so early, but anyway I didn't care for them at all. But one day we moved at last to a little town called Shawmut, and in one corner of a building there was a small library. There was an elderly lady who took care of the library, but she would never let you touch the books; she would go bring you one. And one day she kept bringing books and I didn't want to read them -- I didn't like them -- so she told me to go look for myself. So I went back, and I found a book called Father Goriot by Balzac -- I'd never heard of him. It had no pictures in it and had very small print and looked very unpromising, but I took it home. And that night I read this book. I don't know that I read all night, but I read a long time. That was my first approach to literature. And I never turned back. After then I read adult books when I could get them. I think the only other book I read about that time was Treasure Island, which was a children's book and an adult book as well. I looked at it again not long ago, and I think it is still a classic, a very fine book.
JM:
JS: Yes it was.
JM: From there you came up to Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee.
JS: Well, not from there. We moved again.
JM: But from the state of Alabama you came to LMU?
JS: I did. I graudated from high school there in Fairfax, Alabama, and then I went up to Lincoln Memorial. The way I happened to get there was we had a substitute teacher, or rather, one of the teachers left school and they hired a man through a teachers' agency. All my teachers were women -- well, I recall one who wasn't -- all the way through school until this man. And one day he said his father was dean of a school in Tennessee and he left some catalogues on his desk if anybody wanted one. So I saw in reading it that they had work programs. And when I graduated, I went there. I didn't have any money, but I went. They didn't know what to do with me, but they kept me. I was very small -- you wouldn't believe it. So they signed me up in the Academy; they couldn't imagine I was college age.
JM: Now, we're sitting here at a literary event. There's a writer here to be interviewed. What kind of literary events or literary influences did you encounter at Lincoln Memorial?
JS:None.
JM:Well, you had access to a library there, I'm sure.
JS: Oh, yes, that was the main thing about that school, and it's the main thing about any school as far as I'm concerned. If you've got a good library, that's about all you need. Oh, it's good to have a few teachers to lead you and to direct you to the library where the information is. I think a teacher should just crack the door open. That's all you can hope to do. That's all I ever hoped to do when I tried to teach. I did work in the rock quarry in the afternoons and then in the evening as a janitor in the library. I was always too tired to study. I didn't have time to study. I don't suppose I did very much. But I did have that library. As soon as it closed at nine o'clock, I locked the door, swept the floors, emptied the wastebaskets quickly. And then I had this marvelous library all to myself. Some nights I never left. I slept in the magazine room. Anyway, I was like a child in a candy store: I didn't know where to start eating. It was frustrating.
JM: That was not your only college campus experience. What about the situation as you found it at Vanderbilt or later at Illinois?
JS: I think I should mention, before I go on, Harry Harrison Kroll, who was there at LMU as a teacher. I did have a couple of classes under him. I sat in his classes anyway. One was called the teaching of composition. We just wrote compositions: that's all we did, one a day. And I had a Shakespeare class. We would read the parts in class. I usually would sit back with my book and another book inside of it. Anyway, I tried to make up for that later.
JM: There were some connections, of course, between Harry Harrison Kroll and some of those teachers at Vanderbilt. Did you encounter any different kind of literary scene at Vanderbilt when you were there?
JS: Oh, yes, it was quite different. Well, I don't want to give the wrong idea about Lincoln Memorial. I'm sure it's greatly improved since my day: they had no where else to go. I think it's a standard school nowadays, like any other. And I appreciated the chance to be there. I went with nothing and came away with a little bit more than that. But anyway, I went to Vanderbilt to graduate school. I don't know why they let me in, because I didn't know anything except what I'd read. I had read madly for four years. As I look back, they were pretty good books. Even there, I wanted to write. I thought, then, I wanted to write things, and I did. There used to be Sunday School magazines -- many of them that they gave out in church for children on Sundays. Many denominations. And so I wrote and, as we say, sold -- for a dollar, two dollars, three dollars -- little articles on various subjects. I don't know what they were about, but I do remember that I did it.
JS:I could say now that I don't. I will do anything to keep out of writing. I want to with all my heart, really, but it's very difficult to go to that desk, except when I get to working on something, say, a long piece. Some nights I can hardly wait for day so I can go back to work. But once it's finished, that's it. I'm through with it.
JM: You just wait until you're struck again?
JS: Well, until some idea comes along and I want to do it. I want to write to get rid of it, partly. You know, some idea bothers me. I've written many stories because they bothered me. I kept thinking about a little dialogue, the characters came to life in my head and they begin to talk a little bit and finally I'm putting it down. Somebody said to me once, you make it sound so easy. Well, it wasn't I don't think. But I didn't have any large ambitions. I just wanted to write one poem, and then, of course, in a little while I had to write another one, and pretty soon another one. It's sort of a disease, I think: once you get it, there's no cure. The same way with stories. I'll have to say I've known a good many unhappy writers. I read about them and hear about their great unhappiness. I think they had unrealistic goals, maybe. And I don't think I was ever unrealistic about it. In fact, for the most part, this has been the happy part of my life. I enjoy doing it. Even if nobody else reads it, that's OK. I like for everything to be published, and I intend for it to be published. That doesn't mean that the first magazine I send a story to is going to take it. But I don't worry about that. Maybe they're not buying turnips today. So I send it to the next best place. And I didn't know any better than to send them to the Atlantic Monthly. The Atlantic, I believe, published my first story. Is that right?
JM: Yes, and then some twelve or thirteen pieces beyond that.
JS: But they kept changing until whatever it is today. I don't know. I subscribe to it, but I just look at it nowadays.
JM:Well, after Lincoln Memorial University,
Vanderbilt, and the University of Illinois, you went over into Knott
County in east Kentucky and joined the Hindman Settlement School staff.
Can you describe that situation -- the way it was at that time?
JS: The situation was that after I got out of school with three
little degrees I still didn't have a job, even pumping gas -- no kind of
job. I even went to a foundry in Rome, Georgia. I hitchhiked around, all
over, but I never found anything. Then I ran across a man you may know
of, Don West, who had been a classmate of mine at Vanderbilt, and at
Lincoln Memorial too, and he wanted me to work in Knott County for the
summer. This was for a Vacation Bible School for the Congregational
Church. Well, I was having nothing to do with that. He wanted me to
organize Boy Scouts and the baseball teams. I worked with his
brother-in-law there all summer. We had the Boy Scouts and we played
baseball and camped all summer long. It was very pleasant. And they
asked me then to stay and work with him, which I did. They had no money
to pay us, but they did feed us and house us and furnished soap. So I
worked six years, three years with no salary. I would have been very
happy to have had one, I assure you. At that time, I liked the place.
But when I was going to have to leave -- you run out of socks,
eventually, and razor blades -- they found somebody who would send $15 a
month to keep me there, so I stayed on. Times got better and they paid a
little, and at the end of six years I figured up one day I had worked six
years for an average of six cents a day. I felt so rich, I retired. I
went nine miles away back in the country -- backwoods in those days, and
some say backwoods now. By this time I was publishing a few stories and
poems. And my publisher at Viking asked me to take a year off and they
would put me on a salary. But I was kind of proud: I wouldn't accept
their salary. But I did go back to this big log house, where I still
live, and I raised a garden and finished writing the novel River of
Earth there. Then I had the luck to have The Saturday Evening
Post take a story. That wasn't such great luck except in terms of
money: they paid very well indeed -- actually, fabulous prices for those
days. So after then I just wote one story a year for them. That was
all.
JM: You could sustain yourself on one story a year?
JS: Not only that, I could go to Florida for February.
JM: Robert Penn Warren siad that he quit writing stories because
they robbed him of poems. Have you ever been in doubt about the way an
idea ought to go, which way it should be developed, either as a story or
a poem?
JS: Well, they're two different things, so different. I think
that when I'm writing prose I don't write poems. I do recall once
writing a story and while I was working on it this idea for a verse, I
call it, came in my mind. It kept bothering me, so finally I quit and
wrote it. It wasn't a very good one. But I remember The Saturday
Evening Post published both the poem and the story.
JM: I wanted to get a response from you about the way you saw it,
because I developed this notion in a critical piece on your work that
there are many, many connections between the themes in the prose fiction
and in the poems: similar images, similar thematic developments. I
quoted from Katherine Anne Porter, who had commented on your River of
Earth and on Hounds on the Mountain. She said something like
this: the novel is an extension of the experience that gave rise to the
poems. She saw a connection there, too. So I've got a lot riding on
this thesis, and that's why I was asking about that.
JS: The same person was writing both of them. I think they all
come from the same place. The poems are just a little shorter. I've
written two this past year. I think I don't have another one in me.
Last winter I was driving one night in the fog, and a fox flared up in
front of me, and I ran over it and killed it. I felt pretty bad about
that, and I kept thinking about it. In fact, I wrote a letter to you on
some other subject and mentioned this, but when I mentioned it I had to
write the poem, which I did the next day.
JM: People are interested in the lives of writers maybe more
than they ought to be, because after all it's the work that matters,
it's what gets written that matters. And yet there's this persistent
interest in the way it gets written. You think about all those Paris
Review volumes, interviews with writers called Writers at
Work, and so forth. I think this is probably a legitimate
interest, after all. One of the things that interests me particularly
in your work is that it is so beautifully focused on this one
particular part of world, really eastern Kentucky, and one particular
phase of its history and its culture, and yet I know you have a
longstanding interest in Central America. Is there any connection
between these two things or are they just two things you happen to be
interested in?
JS: I've had a longstanding interest in a number of things. I
used to go off on jags reading in a certain area. For example, I was a
Civil War buff for many years. I read every book on it I could get hold
of. And then one day I got through, and I didn't read another one and
may never read another one. Well, I might. I was interested in Tibet
once. I'm interested in mountain climbing. I have quite a library on
mountain climbing in the Himalayas. But I've always been interested in
primitive peoples. Now I'm not saying that the people where I live are
primitives, but they're more so than they are in Lexington or
Louisville. I would read anything about, say, the aborigines in
Australia. Once I got interested in the South Sea islands, and I read
everything I could possibly find. I just had to go there, but I
couldn't. And I haven't got there yet. But that doesn't mean I'm not
going. Oh, yes, Central America. Well, I don't know how to start it,
really. In the winter of 1971, I decided to go to Yucatan. I was hired
to teach a little winter semester, and they paid me a $1,000, and I
decided I would spend it on a trip to Yucatan, which I did, and I was
hooked when I went down. So since then, I've been there five times, and
to Guatemala five times and to Honduras a couple times and very briefly
in El Salvador and southern Mexico -- to Chiapas and Tabasco.
I'm interested in Mayan civilization. That's the main thing. And I
believe the thing that holds me is the great mystery of the
disappearance of the Mayan people -- the virtual disappearance within
fifty to one hundred fifty years. There seems to be no logical
explanation for it. And the usual ones don't apply, apparently -- the
ones you would think of right off -- disease, earthquakes, and so on.
After all, these people lived in several different conditions. A great
many scholars are working on this and I have been reading after them.
I don't do any digging, I assure you, in that 140 degree temperature. I
just want to go down and see again. And then when I learn more I want
to go and look again. I didn't go the past winter, but winter before
last I was in Belize, that is, British Honduras, and Guatemala again.
I may go this year.
JS:
Yes, I was in El Salvador on the streets
when there was an
uprising. It was the beginning, at least for me -- I didn't know
anything about it -- it was the beginning of the civil war which has
been going on ever since. I flew down to Mexico City. Of course, they
never tell you these things before you get there. Somebody should have
warned me. And I flew into El Salvador. When I hired a taxi to take
me to the hotel, he took me only part way, because the barbed-wire was
across the street. I had to walk the rest of the way. But I didn't
see anybody. I didn't know there had been a curfew for a week.
Anyway, I went to the hotel. I usually stay in a good hotel when I go
to a country I haven't been in before, so I'll be OK. Than maybe I'll
move the next day. But there were no guests in the hotel, as far as I
could see. And in the dining room that night, which was a beautiful
place, a marvelous place, there were only two people. That afternoon
I walked around. I went to a church, which was filled with people,
and I am fairly certain I heard a sermon by the cabinet official who
was later assassinated during Mass. That was the church, I'm almost
certain. I walked around and soldiers came out and looked at me. They
say I was Americano, and you know, Americanos don't have much sense
from their point of view. As my hotel had no tourist office, I was
told that there was one in another hotel nearby. When I got there,
there was a sign saying that we should call a certain number, which I
did. A lady answered, and I told her where I wanted to go. I wanted
to go to Santa Ana to see the Mayan ruins there, and she said that she
had a trip the next day and maybe she could talk the others into
going. But she said, "It will be a very long day." Talk about
prophecy.
The next day the curfew was over, the streets were crowded, and I
though I would walk up to the tourist office again. I remember there
were so many people on the main avenue there that I walked in the
gutter. But then the stores did not open; the great metal covers were
all fastened down. It's a very beautiful city, incidentally, and very
modern -- this part of it anyway. This was the main avenue going up
to the government buildings. At a little distance I saw a group of
marching people. I thought they had swords, but they actually had
iron bars, as it turned out. I watched them. They marched up to a
bus. Everybody jumped off. They threw a bottle of gasoline in and
started burning it. Then they started turning over cars and pulling
people out. There were no police, no soldiers anywhere that I could
see. And I wondered about that.
Then all of a sudden people began to run every which way, like turkeys
in a thunderstorm. There was the sound of just running feet. I
didn't know, of course, what had happened. What had happened was that
the army had blocked us in with tanks. There was no escape. Pretty
soon they began to fire into the crowds. There were over 200 killed
that day, according to the report in Newsweek. I was right
there among them, trying to stay out of groups. I got up against the
wall. Two little groups came to me and begged me to join them. You
know, it would have been real nice to have an American assassinated
that day for publicity. I kept saying, "No Espa~nol." I knew what
they were saying, but I didn't go.
When the first rush came I was out in the street and I was swept off
my feet, but I never did touch the sidewalk. I was just pushed and I
managed to get to my feet again. I had a straw hat on, and it went
sailing somewhere. You won't believe this, but somebody brought
that hat back and pulled it down way over my ears. Sometime that
morning a little boy rushed up to me -- maybe he was ten -- and he
spoke in English and he said in anguish, "What do you think of my
country now?"
Well, I kept trying to stay out of groups. It looked like they
were firing wherever a little group came together. And riot guns
sound like firecrackers: they don't sound dangerous. To me they
didn't. I saw a big cathedral, and I decided to go toward it, but
when I got there the iron gates were chained. So I started going
toward what I thought were government buildings, and they were. I
got in front of the census bureau -- about the size of this room,
very small. I was across the street from it. A big gentleman was
standing there. He didn't look like a native; he was too tall. He
didn't speak to me. I decided that this was his post. As we stood
there, here came a truck with soldiers firing bursts once in a
while, left and right. And there was nowhere to go. But the man
turned to me -- he had a big key -- and he opened a door and said,
"come into the American house." That was the name of this little
pensi'on, this little boarding house, which had eleven boarders, I
remember. He went in and told me to sit down, and I did, and he
went away.
Eventually the boarders, who were in their rooms, came out. I
stayed there all day, adn the firing went on all day. It went on
until 3:30 the next morning. They shared their food. They had had
no deliveries of food for a week. I think we had fried bananas and
plantains or something. We had very little to eat. Anyway, the
next day the water came on, lights came on. It was all over. I
went back to my hotel and asked them if they could get a taxi to
take me to the airport. They did. I felt so good when I got out
of the main street.
But when I got to the airport, of course the army was there. A
plane was going to Costa Rica within 30 minutes. I was booked on
it -- I had an open ticket already. But when I started to board
the plane, they wouldn't let me get on. They took me back into the
station and detained me for five hours. They asked for a picture.
Well, I had one on the passport, but I had no other picture. I
once wanted to go to the restroom, adn there was a soldier there
with a big gun with a bayonet on the end of it. He wouldn't let me
in. Somebody finally let me in, and he noticed and went right up
behind me and stood there.