David Gilmour Part 2: November 1, 2002
Epp: The last time I was here I had asked you to talk about the way you use sex as a metaphor in your books, and you had said that you certainly don't do that.
Gilmour: Right. I don't use it as a metaphor for anything. For me, if you're going to write well, you have to go to the hot spots, you have to go to the things you daydream about. You have to go to places that you inhabit in your imagination. I don't think about sex now as much as I used to, probably because I'm sexually taken care of, but a lot of my books were written in times when I wasn't sexually fulfilled. It's interesting, the only book of mine that I really hate is An Affair With The Moon , and that was the only book where I was getting really well-fucked, all the way through the writing of it, from beginning to end. Now I'm not going to draw some specious theory out of that, all I know is that How Boys See Girls , for example, was based on an erotic fascination with a young street vendor on Yonge Street . I asked her out a few times, she rode around on my motorcycle, but she wouldn't fuck me because I was too old . How Boys See Girls was really a protracted daydream about how nice it would be to fuck her. So sex in my books tends to be a pleasant arena where I want to hang around. Now there's a real hazard there, because there's nothing creepier than the hair-over-the-bald-spot novel, which is one of those novels in which an aging guy is working out his sexual fantasies because he can't score in the real world, so he writes up these scenarios where his guy ends up with a young girl and she's wearing tight jeans and she takes them off for him and he gets her in the book but he doesn't get her in real life. You have to be very careful when you're writing about sex that you don't fall into that category. I don't think my book does, but the motivation behind writing that book was certainly wanting to fuck this girl, not being able to, and writing this protracted daydream about it all. I was actually with another woman at the time, but I wasn't particularly sexually interested in her, so I went to something that was really a hot imaginative arena. So that's why sex tends to be in and for itself in all of my books. Lost Between Houses originally started out as a story of a sadomasochistic relationship between two teenagers, because I had just broken up with a girl with whom I had had a kind of sadomasochistic sexual relationship. Nothing, you know, illegal, but certainly nothing you'd want photographed and mailed to your parents. After I lost her, I wrote the first draft of Lost Between Houses as a sort of daydream about us being together. Fortunately, I came to my senses by about the third draft and said to myself, ‘This is a jack-off novel here, this is not literature, this is a soiled Kleenex that should have gone down the toilet.' So I then started to make it into a real story. One of the editors who read it early on said, “David, this is not a sexual relationship that would happen between two teenagers, this is a sexual relationship that would happen between two adults,” and I realized that what I was doing was using a novel as a way to get off, and you can't do that. So I said, ‘Never mind the fantasies, what actually happened between two teenagers?' and then I wrote it lots of times and finally got it right. But I have to confess, it originally started out as a sadomasochistic relationship between two teenagers. It might have sold a lot more copies if I'd left it like that, but it would have been bullshit.
Epp: I guess the kids are into some pretty wild stuff these days.
Gilmour: They really are. It's a generational thing. When I was in my 30's, S&M just never fucking came up at all. You got a girl, you took her home, you slept with her and that was enough, man. When I was 45, I very abruptly became single and began to date a lot of women until about the age of 50. I encountered and slept with a whole bunch of 30-year-olds, and S&M came up all the time, at their suggestion. These were girls who, on the first date, wanted to be tied up, wanted to be spanked, wanted to be sworn at...there's a section in Sparrow Nights which is actually true, you take a girl home on the very first date and she says, ‘Well, where are the handcuffs?' And this happened not once, but a series of times. My theory about that is, when I was younger, just getting your hand into a girl's pants was bang enough, but this generation has done that so much that it's not that interesting anymore, so they have to push it further out there. Because sex, to be any good, must feel slightly dirty. It must. At any age. The idea sex being a healthy wholesome activity is nonsense. It should feel a little bit bad, a little bit corrupt, and a little bit naughty. And in order for people to feel that way now, they have to go way, way, waaaay further out. What do you think of that?
Epp: It makes me wonder what'll happen next.
Gilmour: Well yeah, where can it go from here? But of course, it won't go further, it will swing back into arch-conservatism, that's my guess.
Epp: There have been past eras in which women were covered in flowing dresses from the top of their throat to their feet, and seeing a collarbone or just a little bit of bare forearm would have been enough to drive a guy crazy.
Gilmour: Absolutely. When you look at those early Playboy pictures from the early 1950's, that men were jacking off to by the tens of millions, it's stuff that you could practically put on a Christmas card and mail to your aunt, these days.
Epp: I guess if sex is a totally personal, idiosyncratic, mental experience, a human being can get off on whatever gets him or her off.
Gilmour: Sure. But it is interesting, what this generation of 30-year-old women are into. And I asked my daughter, in a very discreet fatherly way, if she had noticed a lot of girls being into the kinds of things I had encountered the last time I was single. My daughter's 25, and she said yes. She said sadism and masochism is kind of chic. She said in my day, people would smoke pot and grow their hair, and now it's, handcuffs, and ‘Tell me what a filthy little slut I am.' I don't know if that's depressing or not...some part of me thinks it's a more enlightened attitude, in that they're more emancipated, they're not afraid to actually say the things that are crawling around in their imaginations, they're allowing themselves to be the way they want to be. Or, is it just a borrowed activity? My suspicion is also that it may just be a borrowed activity.
Epp: It could just be...fashion.
Gilmour: Right, which is a cruel misuse of sex. If there's one time in your life you want to play it straight, it's in the sack.
Epp: It's like, how many people in 1972 became more curious about possibly exploring bisexuality just because they liked David Bowie's music?
Gilmour: I was certainly a big David Bowie fan, but I sure never went that route, I'll tell you.
Epp: But some people did.
Gilmour: I know. But I wonder about that, though. I know a bunch of women who had bisexual experiences in their 20's and 30's and who were absolutely head-on heterosexual, there is no question about it. I don't know any guys who had ‘dabblings' into homosexuality who aren't gay. I've never met a bisexual guy in my life. When a guy tells me he's bisexual I just laugh in his face. I say, “No you're not. You're gay! For some reason you're too fucked-up to admit it.” That's my experience, I've never come across a strictly bisexual male.
Epp: It's like that old saying, ‘If you build a thousand bridges and suck one cock, in the eyes of the world, you aren't a bridge-builder, you're a cocksucker.'
Gilmour: Yeah. I don't think you're just a cocksucker, but I do think you are a cocksucker who builds bridges. Or maybe you're a guy who builds bridges and sucks cock. But that's true. So, to come back, in a long-winded way to the answer to your question, yeah, sex in my novels is of and for itself, it's not a metaphor for anything. Since I'm now sexually taken care of, it's not as profound a hot spot as it used to be. These days—and I know this is peevish, but I'm going to be straight with you—I find myself distracted by thinking of really stupid things. I find myself, for the first time ever, slightly annoyed that my books, which have been so well-received critically, haven't sold better. I also find myself uncomfortably enraged by the success of mediocre writers around me, and that's bullshit, and that is a really slippery road down into misery and cretinism. I know that. But I was disappointed by what happened with Sparrow Nights . I was disappointed that it was really well-received critically here and in the States, and I'm now starting to sell the European rights, but I didn't make bestseller lists, and I didn't win prizes. Normally I don't care about that, and it's been a badge of honour with me. ‘Fuck them, my books are more interesting, and the people who like that kind of bullshit don't like my books.' These days, I do find myself thinking about that and I hope it's a stage I pass through very quickly because I don't like it and I think it's destructive and I don't think it's good for my work at all. It's a shitty way to live, where you can't walk into a bookstore without your body tightening because you're book's been placed in the wrong spot, or because you're going to see that some novel you despise written by a writer you consider mediocre has been given a prominent position, and you're afraid to open the Globe & Mail on Saturday afternoon because you're afraid to see someone else's novel being praised. It's a bad place to be. My girlfriend assures me, and I hope she's right, that this is just a stage on my way to a larger wisdom. I've been careful all my life not to indulge in that. You just do your work, you do it the best you can, and you move on, you know? That's an answer to your question, too. Because if my girlfriend left me, and I had no lover, I would probably forget about all this shit and all I would be thinking of would be finding a new woman.
Epp: Speaking just a reader, I feel the same way you describe when I read the Globe & Mail, and they're praising mediocre books and ignoring stuff that I think is superior.
Gilmour: Good, I'm glad. But I hope you understand that for a writer, that's a very destructive thing to indulge in. I remember that story about Truman Capote, after In Cold Blood was published. He sold 4 million copies, he was the most talked about writer in North America , he was being translated all over the place, he made millions and millions of dollars. He took a car trip across the United States, and in every small town, he hopped out of his car—this is not apocryphal, this is true—and ran into the local library, and went to see who had more library cards signed, himself or Gore Vidal. Now, I don't want to end up there, because you can't win that race. There's always going to be someone who's more successful than I am who's less deserving. And once you start to be selective about how you see the world, you're going to run around like a clenched rectum, angry all the time, and it's not a wise way to live. But I'm temporarily in this slightly black bag of peevish comparativeness and sour competitiveness, and I truly hope I come out on the other side of it. This book has done almost better than any other book I've done. It's been better-reviewed and made me more money so far than any other book, but somehow, like a cocaine addict, I need a bigger hit, because I'm not getting off for long enough.
Epp: I guess the question is, would you still have written this book if nobody else got to read it? Or, would you have worked any harder on writing this book if I had told you at the start that a million extra people would end up buying it? Or half a million people, or a thousand people?
Gilmour: You're touching on a really important point there. Proust said ‘All life is a march toward oblivion,' and I believe that's true. In the end, you really do have to sit down and say, ‘I'm going to be a fucking bag of ashes someday. Not only will I be forgotten, all the people who remember me will be forgotten. No matter how successful I am, over time my significance will just get smaller and smaller until I'm a little dot that goes ‘Poof.' So why, exactly, am I doing this?' John Lennon used to say you join a band to get chicks, and there was a time in my late teens and early 20's that I thought I wrote to get chicks. One of my girlfriends finally said to me, “Why don't you stop saying that, because you're doing yourself a disservice. You're not in it for chicks, you're in it because you're in it, period. You do it because you want to do it.” And she was right. I do it because I love to do it. I truly love to write. It makes me feel good. Even if I write badly, it makes me feel good. When I sit down at that machine over there and I start to write, it doesn't matter how I feel, I will feel better when I'm in the middle of the act, and that's why I do it. On some emotional level, I have lost sight of that in the last five or six months. I don't quite know why. I think I might be moving towards a larger understanding of my life and my work, and I haven't quite arrived yet, I'm stuck between two places. But I must remind myself why I'm doing this, and it's because it makes me happy. I'm writing a seventh novel right now, and the sixth one isn't anywhere near being published. That's obviously not for chicks, that's obviously not for posterity, that's just because it pleases me.
Epp: Do you think that negative outlook you're talking about is just a by-product of getting old? At most family gatherings, there's always some old aunt or uncle who does nothing but complain.
Gilmour: You might be right, but all the people who know me say that I'm softer and kinder and gentler in my description of the world now than I ever have been before. I don't know if you've ever learned a foreign language, but when you learn a foreign language, like French for example, you get to a certain level and you think you're pretty good. Then there's this period of time where your French improves, and you move to the next level where it gets even better. There's this weird period of time between those two stages when you can hardly speak at all, where things that came easily to you at one point are forgotten. Structures, accents, phrases you used to use are suddenly gone. This happened to me when I was living in France and I remember saying to somebody, “Fuck, I speak worse now than I did six months ago!” But it was a stage that I went through just before I went to the next stage of speaking much better French. My suspicion is that this is what's happening to me on a philosophical level about my writing. I'm between two stages, and the progress I've made about how to feel about where you are in the world, that's kind of disintegrated before I move to the next level. And I honestly think that's what happening. I think that I haven't arrived at this larger wisdom, this larger perspective about my work. And my vanity's taking a bruising, because it's just vanity, it's not about art. It's just vanity. I hope I'm right about this, or I'm going to end up like those aunts and uncles you mention. I know guys like that, failed writers, failed actors, it doesn't matter whose name you bring up, they don't have a good word to say about anybody. You can't live there. It's a bad place to live, and I don't think it makes for good work. Maybe it makes for good work when you're a young poet and you're pissed off at everybody, I'm not sure, but it sure makes for a shitty place for a man in his 50's to live.
Epp: Getting older is about the narrowing of possibilities, and it makes some people bitter. When you're six, people can say you can be Prime Minister or an astronaut or anything, but as the years go by there's a smaller list of things you can turn out to be.
Gilmour: But there's also a smaller list of things that you want to be, too. The nice thing about being older is that you stop wasting a lot of time, chasing women who aren't really right for you, and even if you can score with them you know they'll be gone in a week or two, or you'll be gone in a week or two. You don't have certain fantasies about what your life might have been. I'm not going to go out tomorrow and buy a drum kit and start playing in a band. I'm not going to be a movie star...I actually went to acting school at one point in New York, and eventually discovered that I didn't want to act, I just wanted to be a movie star. That was an enormous waste of time and energy. It was edifying because I was in my 20's but I don't need to do that kind of stuff now. The one great thing about being 52 is: I know what pleases me. And that's not bad. Consequently, my life is much simpler. My activities are much fewer and my friends are virtually non-existent. I have friends, but the numbers are much much smaller. When I was your age, I was like the mayor of Toronto , when I walked down the street you would have thought I was campaigning for office. “Eddie! Frank! Shirley! Come over to my house, everybody's welcome to stop by anytime!” Now, if someone drops by unannounced they get a .357 Magnum at the door and I say, “What the fuck are you doing here?!” When I was your age, I hadn't even started writing my first book, and when creative people don't write, they turn other activities into creativity. I thought that I was some kind of gregarious genius, that I knew everybody and everybody was my pal, and it was an enormous waste of energy. Proust was the biggest party boy in Paris until the finally thought, ‘There's nothing out there. There's nothing out there.' Proust discovered that if you wanted to actually be alive, the greatest act of living is in the act of creation. If you had said that to me 20 years ago, I would have said, “Yeah,” and remembered to say it to some chick at a party. I actually know that that's true now.
Epp: I think that was Oscar Wilde's big downfall. Whenever he would actually shut the door and sit down and write something it would turn out okay, but he was more interested in being the life of the party, being entertaining and witty instead of actually working in an empty room.
Gilmour: It was Truman Capote's disaster, too. There was a guy who had as much talent as any human being could ask for, and he spent it at Club 54 showing off. He never outgrew the appetite for company. You can't imagine what my house was like when I was your age. I would have a dozen, 15 people drop in, and I would like it. They'd come at all hours, sit around, smoke dope, have stupid conversations, and I somehow thought that it was a creative act. It was just what happens when a writer doesn't write. Their creative energy gets subverted into all sorts of odd activities.
Epp: I'd like to act the original sex-as-metaphor question again, but I'd like your answer to be less personal and more from the technical side.
Gilmour: Okay.
Epp: Maybe I'm not using the word ‘metaphor' in the right way, but even though you say you don't use sex as a metaphor, I think the sex in your books still does work as metaphor...
Gilmour: But what's it a metaphor for? I can understand something being a metaphor for sex, but I can't understand sex being a metaphor for something else.
Epp: A person's attempt to find meaning or—
Gilmour: Sex is not about meaning. Sex is about sensation.
Epp: Um...
Gilmour: You're saying it's a metaphor for somebody trying to...be happy. That sounds rather speciously simple, but if it's a metaphor for anything it is a metaphor for what routes in life can you pursue that will take you—well, here it sounds a little bit lofty, but I'll say it anyway—into the absolute present.
Epp: How about if instead of using the word ‘metaphor' we say that the sex is a device, that a character's attitudes toward sex reveal some secret truth about the character that you couldn't reveal in any other way?
Gilmour: Let me ask you a question. If the guys in my books spent their time shooting junk instead of fucking girls, what would that be a metaphor for? My guess is that it would be exactly the same thing. A guy who's on a quest to shoot up and get high, that tells you a lot about his life, just like somebody who's seeking sex, that tells you a lot about his life. Or does it? I mean, surely the junkie just wants to get high, and the guys who's obsessed with fucking girls just wants to get off.
Epp: You can write a book about something that's really specific, like an addiction to sex or heroin, and it could be good or bad. And for it to be good, it has to make the reader think about something more than just the protagonist's narrow pursuit. In the sense that, if a sex sense is just about the sex, then it's not literature, it's just porn.
Gilmour: Right. I understand.
Epp: The first time I'd read a How Boys See Girls sex scene, I'd like it and think, ‘Yeah, that's kind of funny,' but it was done well enough so that when I read it again it still worked. I wasn't concentrating on the mechanics, I'd start to wonder things like, ‘Hmm, I wonder about the way these two people are relating, I wonder how much time they've got left, I wonder what she's really like, what she's really thinking, this reminds me of this one time when I was 19...' And it seems like, in these books and in most books I like, there's two stories being told simultaneously, the story that's on the dust jacket and another story beneath the surface that's more meaningful and more slippery. The plot of the surface story you've been sold works to get at the really meaty stuff that harder to express, and may be ineffable.
Gilmour: Right.
Epp: And your books do work for me in that way, so I was wondering if that's something you think about when you're plotting, with the idea of dropping these hints of the secret story underneath, because it is there.
Gilmour: I'm either too stupid to answer that question, or that's a question for a critic, not a writer. The question, I think, implies that the act of writing, or at least my act of writing, is a much more premeditated activity that it really is. I honestly don't think about any of that stuff at all when I'm writing. I move into the arena of sex because I feel like it. It's not unlike heading out on a Saturday night to a bar where you think you might score. What drives you towards that bar is just the anticipation of pleasure. Without sounding like Johnny Simpleton, there's really not much more to it for me than that. It's an intuitive gravitation and I don't think about any of that stuff, ever. People often ask me questions about my books and those kinds of things, and I haven't the faintest idea what they're talking about. And I'm not being disingenuous. I remember a Polish intellectual cornered me in a bar on College Street and asked me about the gesture Holly makes at the start of How Boys See Girls , when she scratches herself under her arm, and the implications of that gesture with regard to men, women, relationships, and I had no idea what he was talking about. It may all have been true. But I was just sexually attracted by, and artistically pleased by, the image of this girl doing that. That's why I put it in the book, period , and then I moved on. I haven't given it a second thought since.
Epp: I guess that's a good thing, because if something can be perfectly summed up in a couple of sentences, it can't be art.
Gilmour: I think you're right. I think, as soon as you can say what a metaphor means, it's dead. It's bad writing.
Epp: If you could have expressed how you feel about a subject in three paragraphs, you would have. You wouldn't have had the need to write a novel about it.
Gilmour: Exactly.
Epp: Okay, so I guess that question was a dud.
Gilmour: But you got a bunch of other interesting stuff on the way by.
Epp: Yeah, sure. Although I do think a character's specific attitudes toward sex would be more revealing than a character's heroin addiction or anything else like that, because it's far more universal, since every reader has a sex life.
Gilmour: Maybe you're right...you know, I interviewed John le Carre once, and I asked him a question about the process of writing one of his novels. He's a very bright and a very articulate guy, and he said, “I don't know the answer to that question, and I actually don't really want to think about it.” Now this is not an idiot savant, this is not like asking Mike Tyson about the extraordinary choreography of that balletic move near the end of round 4. He followed it up by saying, “This is actually one of the reasons why I don't like to do a lot of these interviews.” I think he didn't want to get self-conscious about whatever that thing was that happens when you're writing. I don't know why a story works, and I really try not to think about it too much. There's lots of stuff that I try not to think about, and this is one of them.
Epp: So by analyzing something too much, you might risk killing it?
Gilmour: Maybe. I don't know. It's just that that kind of thinking has nothing to do whatsoever with the act of creativity when I do it. And when somebody reads one of my books and says, “Yeah, that was extraordinary how this theme kept resurfacing all the way through the book,” I almost invariably have no idea what they're talking about. They'll say, “Surely you can see this bird imagery that reappears throughout Back On Tuesday ,” and I'll be thinking, “I don't remember any birds in Back On Tuesday !” I'm not playing the artist as simpleton-genius here, I just never think like that.
Epp: Okay. Let's try something else, then.
Gilmour: Absolutely.
Epp: I remember my interest level in Sparrow Nights shot up on page 141 when I read something I'd never expected to read in one of your books. Darius is having that weird epiphany in the restaurant, and for the first time a Gilmour protagonist contemplates the idea that there might be more to life than sex, and that life's meaning might actually lie beyond the orgasm.
Gilmour: Right.
Epp: ‘No, it was something else, something more elemental perhaps: the possibility that sex might not be all I had heretofore believed it to be; that it might be instead a sort of subway stop on the way to somewhere else. What a curious thought, that sex, this thing that had always struck me as the heart of the matter, might be only a way of clearing your head, rather like clearing a table, so that you could get down to the real business of life.'
Gilmour: That's great, isn't it?
Epp: Yeah.
Gilmour: I couldn't have said it better myself. Well, I did say it myself, but when I hear that it's very satisfying, because as you're reading it, I think to myself, ‘God, I'm going to muff it any second. I'm going to get close to the thought and then I'm going to miss it, I'm just going to veer off...' but I got it, there.
Epp: It was interesting, coming to that line after reading all your books in sequence. It felt like a culmination, like a breakthrough.
Gilmour: It was. You're right, you're absolutely right. I didn't think of it like that until you mentioned it, but I know exactly what you're saying. And after five novels, I think that was a breakthrough. And I think that I didn't know I was going to write that sentence until I actually wrote it. That's how unworked this stuff is. I mean, I re-write the sentences like crazy once I've written them, but I don't believe I knew that sentence was coming up. I don't believe when I started Sparrow Nights I knew I was graduating towards an epiphany. I think, literally, as I was writing that sentence I thought, ‘Oh. I'm different now.'
Epp: Yeah, in the past I wouldn't expect a Gilmour protagonist to display that kind of emotional perspective, so it really seemed to give the book some added weight. He wasn't just playing it for laughs, he was getting serious.
Gilmour: Yeah, but I don't think you can play a sexual obsession for laughs any more than you would get in the way of a junkie on his way to score. It's no laughing matter. The greatest suffering I've had in my life has always been about sexual jealousy, sexual breakup. I've never suffered from a shattered relationship with a decent woman. I've only suffered under the notion that someone I liked fucking is fucking someone else. That's probably a personal shortcoming. At the time, How Boys See Girls seemed like a deadly serious obsession to me. Now, it seems rather frivolous.
Epp: That books reads a lot differently now that I'm 30 than it did when I was 24.
Gilmour: How is it different?
Epp: A book like that, funny with some dirty sex bits, was just the kind of thing a guy wants to read at that age. I still think it's a good book, but it's a much sadder book now. I guess I've been through the ringer over the last few years, and I'm just so lucky I met Dorothee.
Gilmour: Do you still enjoy reading it? You can be candid about this.
Epp: Actually, yeah.
Gilmour: Well that's wonderful, because then the book is alive.
Epp: Yeah. There are some books that everybody reads when they're 19 or whatever and they think they're great literature just because they can relate to them, they personally identify with them in some way, and then when you re-read them when you're older you're embarrassed by it all. It's like being reminded of the stupid haircut you had in grade 11.
Gilmour: Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas is a classic example of that. I read that book when I was 22 and thought it was one of the high points of modern literature. Now it just seems like a series of set pieces that are absolutely static and haven't grown one inch over the years. I'm glad to hear that you have a different experience with my book, but you still do have an experience. It's nice to know that, because if it's second-rate, it's never anything more than just what it is the first time you read it. When you say How Boys See Girls seems like a sadder book now, I think that's interesting because that means it has another life. It's got another life, as a portrait of a rather sad guy, or a guy who's having a rather sad episode in his life. And I never thought of that before this conversation.
Epp: If the book was just the surface story and didn't warrant a second reading I wouldn't be here (interviewing you). I think a lot of the movies and books I like the most are kind of funny and sad at the same time.
Gilmour: Right.
Epp: Even the first time I saw Five Easy Pieces , I thought it was great and entertaining, but even as I was laughing, I still knew that it was a very sad movie, about a guy who was desperately running away from something. And even when Bix was making me laugh, it was kind of sad, because that scene wasn't going to last and eventually he'd have to grow up and move out of the space he was in, and I was kind of wishing that he'd do it sooner rather than later, because he'd be better off. And on one level he knows that, but he isn't quite ready to make the move, so instead he's just making jokes about it all.
Gilmour: That's really interesting. That's more interesting to me than any of the reviews that were ever written about that book. No review was that interesting, because you had time to think about it, and you've also done what reviewers almost never do, which is read a book twice, over a certain period of time. Anyway, onward.
Epp: I want to go back to Darius' epiphany. It was made really interesting, from the reader's point of view, due to its novelty. I liked how the Gilmour protagonist was funny and very observant of his surroundings, but up until then he'd just been spinning his wheels.
Gilmour: Yes.
Epp: And I was wondering where this change came from. Did your character have this change in outlook just because you had aged, and your own outlook had changed?
Gilmour: I think so. That comes back to what we were talking about earlier. When I started Sparrow Nights I'd been single for 5 or 6 years. I'd had a lot of girlfriends, and I was beginning to intuit that this was a diet of a fairly thin gruel. And, rather like what you said about the guy in How Boys See Girls , I was sensing that I was going to have to move somewhere else. I wasn't quite there in my real life, but I think that sentence was deeply meant, and the reason I like hearing that sentence so much now is because it's true. It really rings true. And the great thing about good writing is, even if you wrote it 50 years ago, it does remain true.
Epp: So that one sentence is autobiography?
Gilmour: Well, without being glib, I think that almost every sentence in Tolstoy is autobiographical, too. I truly mean that. I think when Natasha goes to the dance and looks around and sees her father dancing really well and knows that he knows that he dances really well, I think that's an autobiographical sentence, even though it's through the persona of a young girl. I'm reading Ian McEwen these days, and regardless of who is thinking, most of the sharpest observations in those books you know are his, he's just put them in a different head. Much of Sparrow Nights is autobiographical in the sense that there's virtually nothing in that book, if anything, that I couldn't do tomorrow. Including, killing somebody. I think that the difference between the autobiographical nature of my earlier stories is that they involved real events. Now, these are imaginary events, but my responses to them are real, so that too is autobiographical. I like that sentence so much because that sounds like a thought that I literally discovered as I was writing it. Sometimes a thought isn't clear until you actually articulate it, and I was actually clarifying a thought in the act of writing it.
Epp: With the exception of Lost Between Houses , the protagonist had been aging along with you. I was interested in how these books have helped you to mature or grow personally, by serving as some sort of cracked mirror you can hold up to yourself, forcing yourself to take a closer look at your behaviour than you would have had to if you hadn't been doing this project.
Gilmour: I don't think that literature should be ‘improving.' I don't write it to improve myself. I'm not interested, and that's one of the reasons why I despise most Canadian literature. It has some delusion that it should be improving, or worse, that it actually is improving. I don't believe that for a second. I'm not interested in books that are improving. I'm interested in books that speak directly to lived experience. And I certainly don't write these books with the aim of becoming a better person.
Epp: I wasn't saying that. It was just interest how you and your protagonist seemed to be on parallel tracks, and with page 141 had both made some progress together.
Gilmour: That's absolutely true, but that's coincidental, and in that particular case it was improving. And I don't want to use a bad example but I must: if he'd also discovered in the same book that look, if you want to get your mind off a chick who's dropped you, kill somebody, because it will take your mind off it, that also is a real thought that happens also to be true. Now, I haven't killed somebody but I've certainly had catastrophes happen to me while I've been in the act of getting over a woman and they really work. But I don't think of literature in that kind of way. Still, has my life been different since I wrote that sentence? Yeah, I think you're right, I think that how I see my life has been different since I wrote that sentence, and consequently my interest in writing my 7 th novel, even though it's years away from ever being published, I think comes out of that sentence, because he then goes on to say that actually there is something else out there, there is some other activity. Um, what am I saying here? I had a really great lover and, she used to joke about this, whenever I was finished sleeping with her, the first thing I wanted to do is go work on my novel. It really was like a table had been cleared, like, all right, we got rid of that distraction, now let's get down to some serious business here, let's do some work. I think I never really put that all together until I wrote that sentence, but since I wrote it I see more and more clearly that the real business of my life is to work. That is the real business, it isn't just about fucking people, and getting off.
Epp: What is it about writing in the first person that makes you like it so much?
Gilmour: I think that I am more self-involved than most people are. I think I do see the world in terms of me and I. Consequently, my natural strength is to describe the world in terms of myself. So it seems to me that using the first person is capitalizing on a much-honed talent. I have tried writing in something else than the first person, and it's been a failure every time. People who like my work have read it and said it's boring. The glib answer is that I'm not interested in a story unless I'm at the centre of it. I think for me to be interested in a story, for me to give it the zap and the energy and the momentum it needs, it must happen to me . I think that is a personal shortcoming which I have turned into a virtue in literature. And An Affair With The Moon , I think, is a failure, because it's the first time in my life I tried to put the centre of attention on somebody else. My two third-person novels, they're well-written, but there's no narrative drive. But when I'm telling you about what happened to me, and then this happened, and then that happened, and I thought this and I thought that, I have such an enormous vested interest that it gives the story real heat and real momentum. I know how fucked-up that sounds, but I believe that that is really the truth.
Epp: When I read An Affair With The Moon , I had the idea that if you had written it in the first person, from the killer's point of view, the book would have been Sparrow Nights : a story of a smug, self-important guy trying to self-rationalize away a murder.
Gilmour: Darrell, what you just said there, it took me fives years to figure that out. Literally. It's amazing that you arrived at that so easily. I don't know where the fuck my editors are. I was having a conversation with my girlfriend last year and I suddenly said, “I know why An Affair With The Moon is a bust. I should have written it from the standpoint of the killer!” It's so obvious, but it honestly took my five years of looking at that book and thinking, ‘Why is this book such a failure? Why does it not work?' I should have written it in the first person, from the killer's point of view. And you know what? If I had written it now it would have been Sparrow Nights , but if I had written it back then, it would have been Canadian Psycho (my version of Ellis' American Psycho ). And I could have really done it, but I blew it. I had a really good fucking chance, I had a great story, and I blew it. Last year when I got hired to write the screenplay, I wrote it like Canadian Psycho . I thought, ‘I'm going to put myself at the centre of the story, and I'm going to do the killing.' And it was wonderful. The movie people were horrified, they thought it was repulsive, but they paid me for it anyway. I had this private satisfaction, after looking at that book for so long, of having finally got it right. I finally told the story the way it should have been told, with me as the killer. But you're right, and I wish you had edited the book for me.
Epp: I thought the problem with the book that I could never understood why Christian like Harrow so much. He kept fawning over a guy who just seemed like a pathetic loser, as far as I could tell.
Gilmour: I know. It was a love affair with a guy who I had ceased to like. Imagine you had a childhood best friend who you adored and don't like anymore and tried to write a story about him as if you still loved him, so you keep telling people, “Yeah yeah yeah, I
know he's an asshole and he beats up his girlfriend and he shits on the floor, but he's a really great guy and he's really fun to drink with...” and nobody got it, you're exactly right. Nobody got it, and I don't either, because the truth is that when I wrote the book I didn't like the guy anymore either. It was like I was a shoe salesman, saying, “Yeah, but he was also this and this and this,” but in my heart—and he was based on a real guy—I didn't like him anymore either. You know, people read The Great Gatsby and they can understand why Nick Caraway liked him so much. Everyone understands why people like Holden Caulfield. But people read An Affair With The Moon and thought, ‘I don't get it. The guy's an asshole.'
Epp: (reading from the book) ‘Suddenly, umsummoned, it came back to me, the memory of reading Sonnet 30 that feverish spring night years and years ago when I wished I could rescue him from a castle, throw up a grappling hook, shimmy over a wall, do something heroic to show my friendship.' And I'm thinking, ‘What are you talking about?'
Gilmour: It's bad art. If I had done it properly, you'd understand. I'd forgotten about that sentence. Now I hear that and it's almost embarrassing. I think, ‘Oh my God, people read that, and they must have thought...'
Epp: Yeah, well, it's sitting there in the library, anybody can go and read it any time they want to.
Gilmour: Is that really what's wrong with that book? I like the first 100 pages because I like the prose in the first 100 pages, but what do you think is wrong with that book?
Epp: Um, it reads well, sentence-by-sentence, it isn't clunky, you can tell it's written by a professional who knows the craft, but it wasn't any fun, because it almost felt like there was something I wasn't being told. Christian kept on going on about how much he loved this guy, and I'm reading it thinking, ‘Tell me why. What did this guy ever do that was so great?' And I never found out. Then he kills somebody, and the normal thing to do would be to walk out and say ‘See ya later,' but he stays by him even when there's brains on the floor. I'm thinking at that point there must be some off-camera secret deal keeping him there, blackmail, maybe...but basically I wanted to know why the narrator liked that guy so much, since we never got any evidence of any merit, or anything.
Gilmour: I made a big mistake with that book. What you say is interesting because I knew I hate it, but I didn't know exactly why.
Epp: Also, the bit with George Harrison at the end felt really tacked-on and unconvincing.
Gilmour: Yeah, it was. It's a lousy book.
Epp: Lost Between Houses is a really good title for a book, and An Affair With The Moon is a really lame title for a book.
Gilmour: I discovered it in some 18 th century writer who was describing some part of his life as being like an affair with the moon....why is it a lame title?
Epp: Lost Between Houses is really well-suited to what the book's about, but it's also vague enough so you can hear that line and make allusions to whatever you want to, and it's got a nice poetic ring to it. How Boys See Girls is a great title for a book, it's obviously a strong hook. And Sparrow Nights is a good title. It didn't ring any bells with me, since it's not a common phrase, but it sounds nice and made me curious as to what it means, and that's good. But when I read the phrase, An Affair With The Moon , I don't think of anything.
Gilmour: Right. Did you like Back On Tuesday , as a title?
Epp: That's a great title.
Gilmour: I LOVE that title. I don't know why that's such a fabulous title, but it came to me just like that (snaps his fingers).
Epp: It really just seemed to suit the book, somehow.
Gilmour: I've always been looking for the next one, because I've never titled a book as satisfactorily as Back On Tuesday . I got hired to write the screenplay for that, too. The guy said, “Yeah, of course we're going to have to change the title.” I remember thinking it over for 3 or 4 months and I couldn't come up with a title that was anywhere near as good as Back On Tuesday .
Epp: Sparrow Nights is a great title since it also works to increase reader interest in the story. For the whole book, I'm waiting to find out what the title means. It isn't until the very end when you find out, and it's just at the point you're interest is very high and all you want to know is, does he get away with it, what if the cops walk in, and instead of giving you want you expect and what you want, he then jumps tracks by saying, “That reminds me, I once read a book where the author used the phrase ‘sparrow nights,' and blah blah blah.” And it's really satisfying, because your curiosity as to what the book's title means is finally satisfied, just when you don't want it to be.
Gilmour: So, that worked for you?
Epp: Oh, yeah.
Gilmour: Good, because that was a real chancey thing for me to do. When I got to that section, I asked myself, “Are you sure you want to do this? Because everybody is going to say, ‘Fuck THIS, just get on with it.'” But it worked for you?
Epp: Yeah.
Gilmour: Good, I'm so glad.
Epp: In my reading experience, there's few things more satisfying than knowing you've been hosed. In the sense of, not getting what you thought you'd get, based on what the back cover blurb suggests, but that's okay, because what you got instead makes up for the bait-and-switch.
Gilmour: Good.
Epp: The way you used first person is Sparrow Nights was different from the way you used in the past in a few ways. I think this was the first time you might have had to do ‘research,' in this case into the life of a French literature professor. So how was that different than in the past, where any background details you'd need to fatten things up could just be drawn from your personal experience?
Gilmour: Well, I studied French literature at the University of Toronto, I have a degree in it, I went to the University of Toulouse, I speak French, so I was already, as they say, on board.
Epp: Oh.
Gilmour: I also have a friend who I have lunch with every three months, and he's a retired professor of French literature, so I know these guys. It was really simple. Most of it I just made up, and I gave him an early manuscript and asked him about how he spent his day. Interestingly enough, he made a number of changes that I then changed back. He'd say, ‘No no, it's not done that way,' but I liked my version better. There's a principle that I'm very interested in, which is: Never do your research until after you've written the novel. In other words, just make it up. Because there's something about your natural storytelling talent that will create the time and the place and the ingredients that will be compromised if you have real facts. Not only that, if you have real facts, you'll feel compelled to use them. I just make that stuff up so it has the natural organic flow of a well-told story, and I fit in whatever else I need. You know, you can tell when you're reading a well-researched novel. Sometimes you'll have a page of compulsory research, and I can't stand that stuff. You should only hit it on the way by. For example, the second line of Sparrow Nights is, “She'd been introduced by the Chairman at a cocktail party.” The guy read it and said, “No no, the Chairman wouldn't do that, the Dean would do that.” But the capitalization of ‘Dean' right after ‘Emma Carpenter' just had the wrong ring to it. So there were a whole bunch of things he suggested where I said, “I like my version better.” And he said, “But that's not how it goes.” And I said, “Well, who cares? I'm not writing a tract for university professors, I'm writing a novel, here.”
Epp: Another difference with this book is that al your past protagonists were, if not heroic, at least mainly harmless, but this time the narrator's a villain.
Gilmour: I don't think he's a villain. I think I'm not a villain, and I think that under those circumstances, I could really kill a guy and chop him up and put him in the furnace. I really could, but I've just never been in the situation where it's come up. And that's not glib. I truly believe that it's true. I don't think there's anything in that book that I couldn't do myself. I think the guy that he killed was a real asshole, and I think that there are some people who deserve to die, and if I could kill him and get away with it, I would, and if I killed him and had to get away with it, I would.
Epp: Okay...
Gilmour: What part of him strikes you as villainous, may I ask?
Epp: He's a villain because he murdered somebody.
Gilmour: He didn't murder him. It was self-defense.
Epp: That would be hard to prove in a court of law, and I think it might not be true because the prosecutor could simply say, “Why didn't he just call 911?” He took several steps, consciously or not, where he manouvered himself into that position. He could have just ended it by calling 911, but he didn't.
Gilmour: Isn't there a section in the book where he talks about getting on a kind of roller coaster, where something can have only one outcome?
Epp: Yeah, but that just sounds like someone who's guilty and trying to defend himself. Just because he's a smooth talker and a witty guy doesn't mean he can get away with shooting an unarmed man. He could have called 911.
Gilmour: Maybe I am partly psychotic, because even as a narrative technique that never occurred to me. I'm trying to think, why didn't he call 911? Why wouldn't I have? I probably wouldn't have...maybe the combination of alcohol, sexual psychosis, and profound humiliation just made him want to kill a guy. But haven't you ever committed a criminal act where, once it starts, it's got its own logic?
Epp: No.
Gilmour: Sometimes when I've gotten waaaay out there, and done something quite crazy, it's like there was a starting point on a railway track, and there was nothing to do but follow that railway track right to its dreadful conclusion.
Epp: Yeah, well, tell it to the judge. No matter what kind of day you're having, if you do something, it's because you want to do it, and Darius took careful steps to get himself in the situation where he'd get to kill a guy.
Gilmour: But didn't the guy make a gesture on the stairs and say, “I've got a gun, too,” even though he didn't?
Epp: Sure.
Gilmour: So he didn't plan to kill him...
Epp: He wanted something to happen. I think he either wanted to kill the guy, or he wanted the guy to kill him.
Gilmour: You might be right. And you don't think he just wanted to have a sufficiently intimidating defense so the guy would go away and leave him alone? You think he actually planned on something happening?
Epp: Yeah, because intimidating thugs wasn't in his nature. It wasn't like he was from the mean streets, he'd lived a pretty soft life as a professor, and he knew if he tried intimidating some pimp, the pimp would just laugh. It would be stupid. So he was engineering an extreme situation to put himself in, because he wanted something extreme to happen to him.
Gilmour: So does that mean that when he has a few drinks and goes looking for that girl, was that the early stages of it?
Epp: When he went searching for Passion?
Gilmour: Yeah, he has all those drinks and has that revelation that the most important thing in his life is his work, and then he sets off—do you think that's the same thing?
Epp: You know, one question I had was whether Darius' epiphany was somewhat invalidated by the fact that it takes place as he's on his way to psyching himself up into shooting somebody. It's like he says, “Sex isn't all there is to do in life,” and then he steps out and gives murder a try. And I'm like, “Nice try, Buddy, but yeesh...” It's pretty funny, but still...He finds out Passion robs him, goes to her and tell her he knows what she did, and what is he trying to accomplish there? He knows that Passion probably has some sort of criminal protection and isn't going to take it, so he's putting himself into a dangerous spot.
Gilmour: Haven't you ever woke up in the morning and thought about some slight that someone laid down on you a few years before, and you felt like going and looking the guy up that day and giving him a smack on the face? I have. Somebody was rude to my daughter about 3 years ago, and every so often I daydream about running into him and giving him a real fucking smack across the face. And to be absolutely honest with you, I think a few times when I've been loaded, I might have drifted into an area where I felt there was a reasonable chance of me doing it. Now, this is not a big deal. This is something that happened 2 or 3 years ago, and it didn't even happen to me. I think that that kind of mental activity—I don't want to alarm you—is something I have felt and can understand. I never forget when someone's fucked with me, and I tend to want to even the score. That doesn't happen to you?
Epp: I just noticed a long time ago that whenever I got angry and out of control, I really really didn't like the way it felt. It made me feel sick to my stomach, and just really bad. So I take great pains to avoid getting angry.
Gilmour: There are things that happen to me when someone makes me feel bad, physical sensations in my body, and I do get the feeling that unless I square it with them, the bad feelings are going to stay there. And I have had not-so-great conversations with someone who took a shot at me, and they made me feel better. It's like I carried a bad feeling in my body, and it wasn't until I got it out at the person who had made me feel bad that I actually felt okay. I think I'm too old to kill somebody now, but sometimes I do have the sensation that I've got a bad feeling in my body that I'll carry around until I make the situation right.
Epp: And I find that any confrontation with someone like that just gives me a bad feeling, and doesn't help at all. I guess we're different.
Gilmour: Right. That's very interesting.
Epp: The book's dust jacket suggests that the crack-up Darius goes through is entirely caused by Emma leaving him, but that doesn't quite ring true as an explanation. He mentions the incident with his brother and the steak knife when they were kids, and he really seems to show a tendency to react to minor conflicts with great intensity, and I was wondering where that came from.
Gilmour: Turning a steak knife on your brother seems to me to be a completely normal childhood act. Everybody wants to kill their older brothers. Everybody who's a little brother who's ever been bullied by their big brothers has gone to bed with murderous thoughts. If they say they haven't, they're lying.
Epp: But vividly recalling the incident when you're 50?
Gilmour: It's not like he went out looking for his brother. He just remembers a murderous fury from when he was 12. And yes, I do remember that. I remember being put in a headlock in front of a bunch of girls when I was 11, I remember the guy's name, I remember where it happened. I don't feel like I have to look him up today and put him in the ground for it, but I remember the humiliation very vividly. The flagpole incident, the incident with the dogs, and the incident with the pimp, all those things happen after he's lost Emma, and it's an escalating level of actualized violence. My theory about this book—and you tell me if I'm wrong—is that this guy is having a nervous breakdown and doesn't realize it. So these violent daydreams that you don't seem to have, but I do, you actually start to do them. They seem like legitimate activities. And it seemed to me like the line between imagining these things and actually doing them is something that you could cross. I don't think he's a bad guy, and—maybe this is revealing some huge moral chasm—I think he's a guy in the grips of a psychotic episode. I mean, I have, under the duress of alcohol and sexual jealousy, done some extraordinarily odd things. We don't have to go into what they are, but I have. So much so that it seems that almost anything is possible, once that little trolley starts up. Does that ring true to you, or am I just deluding myself?
Epp: Maybe, I'm not sure. Isn't the line between doing something bad and actually doing it a pretty big line?
Gilmour: It depends on what it is. Like, every time I walk over the Bloor Viaduct I think about throwing myself over the bridge. Every single time. I'm never walked over that bridge without thinking of throwing myself off. But it's not an important thought, because the difference between daydreaming about it and actually doing it is enormous. I think that there are other things where the line between imagining it and doing it, under the right circumstances—I don't know whether you've ever experienced this, but when I have become sexually attached to someone and that sexual attachment is then broken, it is like being in a horror movie. It is truly like a state of madness, it really is. Darius also has an incredible amount of rage. This woman has left him and he has all these incredible conversations and profound feelings inside of him with no way to get them out. And then suddenly, this other guy pops up who can serve as a legitimate target for all of this violent hostility. You've got to remember that when somebody's been sitting in that kind of emotional pain for a long time, they've gotten really pissed off. There's a lot of fury there. And suddenly somebody pops up, a mailman or a waiter is rude to you, and you take all that fury and you take it out on them. I understand that.
Epp: When I was in my early 20's I could see having strong reactions to things—a girl dumps you so you feel like killing yourself, or whatever—but as I got older things didn't bother me as much, and I just assumed I could get through whatever it was, and things would eventually get better. So seeing a 50-year-old guy having that kind of reaction that I had grown out of seemed kind of weird, since I just assumed that as you got older you'd have a greater ability to just shrug things off.
Gilmour: But at the same time you've described these parties you've been to where aunts and uncles do nothing but bitch about how much they hate everything.
Epp: Yeah. I'm not sure how much of that is just a kind of routine. I've got a friend who worked at a nursing home where everyone there was very old. They all had two or three years left, at the most. And he said that among the patients who lived to be that old, there were only two kinds of people: people who react to the deaths of all their loved ones and the failings of their bodies and their approaching death by being angry all the time, just punching and cursing and biting all day long; and people who were so thrilled to still being alive they were just relentlessly euphoric. Among people of that certain age, everybody was either in this camp or that camp. They reacted to the same thing in opposite ways.
Gilmour: Hmm...I want to ask you a question. You said that sometimes at your job, people rag on you or piss you off. What form does that take?
Epp: Well, I'll be putting in my 40 hours a week, doing the same thing over and over again, and I'll just start to get the impression that I'm wasting my life. And those kinds of thoughts will make me a bit more sensitive than normal, and some smart-ass remark that should just roll off your back doesn't. You know. It's like the classic situation where someone puts you down and it makes you feel terrible, and 5 minutes later you think up the perfect comeback for it, but it's too late.
Gilmour: Right.
Epp: Sometimes it can all really start to build up, but I don't hit people, and I can't stand confrontation, so I just take a few days off and forget about it.
Gilmour: Well, I think that's admirably different. And you don't find yourself, five minutes later when you think of your perfect rejoinder, gravitating back toward that person in the hope that they're going to take another shot at you, but this time you're going to fix their wagon for good?
Epp: No, I don't. Any confrontation I've been in just left me convinced that, win or lose, I was left feeling worse than the other guy did, so why bother?
Gilmour: You're right, it's like a nicotine fit, it really does pass. It's like the O.J. Simpson thing, if he had just waited six months he wouldn't have given a shit who she was fucking.