David Gilmour Part Four: December 13, 2002
Epp: The father of the protagonist in your first book, Back On Tuesday , killed himself, as did the father of the protagonist in Lost Between Houses. Why did you choose to repeat this idea?
Gilmour: I repeated it because it's actually true, my father did shoot himself. I used it once, flippantly, in Back On Tuesday , as a way to get chicks. When somebody dies like that, particularly when you're young, it has a suspiciously ‘literary' feel to it. It doesn't really feel like real life. It takes a long time to realize what death really means, which is that you're never going to see anybody EVER, for eternity. But then of course when you get to be my age you understand that that's not actually true. It's not a question of not seeing them forever, it's a question of not seeing them until you're dead. So it's actually only twenty or thirty years that you have to go without seeing them. It sounds flippant but it's actually quite significant, because the horror of an eternity of never seeing someone again seems unimaginable, but actually, when you cease to be—and if you assume that there is nothing after death and that you completely cease to be—then you are removed from these people for only twenty or thirty years. But when my father died, I didn't understand what never seeing someone again really means, and it wasn't until many years later that I actually understood how sad it really is. And I wanted to write about it properly, so when I wrote about it in Lost Between Houses , I wanted to really do it once and for all, and really allow myself the morbid imaginings of what went on in that kitchen when he actually did shoot himself. And it was, in real life, a little bit like it is in the novel, but not entirely. I'd been expelled from Upper Canada College for running away to Mexico , firstly, and I was also caught in the girls' dormitory in Bishop Strachan at the end of grade twelve and they said, ‘Okay, that's it. You're gone.' My parents enlisted me in an exclusive private school for bright, but troubled, youth. It was called Muskoka Lakes College . When I was there it was pretty much the most expensive school in Canada and they sort of said, ‘Listen, if you get expelled from here, this is not a money-back deal, you lose the whole shot.' So my father said to me, ‘It's only one more year, do NOT get expelled.' And I was pretty good for most of the year, and then, as the year went on, the sixties were happening, it was 1967, and I discovered a monk who had retired from a gay, narcotic life in Los Angeles and had moved into a Jesuit retreat about fives miles down the road from my school. He and I bonded immediately. Not sexually, but spiritually. He used to meet me after school, and we'd have a coffee together and he'd talk about his decadent life in Los Angeles and why he had retreated to this Jesuit monastery, and I would tell him about my life in Forest Hill, and how I had ended up where I was. One day I brought along some hashish, and asked him if he wanted to go into the church van and get high. I thought I was in safe hands. I turned this guy on, only to have him—spineless creep that he was—go back to the monastery, wake up his Father Superior, and make a full and thorough confession to him which included my name. So there was knock on the door at six o'clock in the morning. It was the Headmaster, practically in his pyjamas, saying, ‘This is really serious. We don't have any rules in this school, but you cannot break the laws of the province. That's the deal here, and this is a real no-no. So I think what I'm going to have to do is get you out of the school for three or four days while I decide what I'm going to do with you. And I understand also that if I kick you out now you're probably going to lose your year and if you lose your year you may possibly not go back to another school, so I realize there's a lot going on here.' So he called my father and told him I'd be returning to the family house. At this point my father had moved from the city to the country. He was living in this expansive snowy countryside in this white house in the middle of nowhere. My mother had left him and moved to Florida , so he was all by himself. I turned out there at 12:30 at night on the bus, and he and I spent this very odd weekend together, because he suddenly understood that I was not going to turn out to be the Bay Street stock broker that he'd been hoping for. He kind of gave up on me, that weekend, but what he also gave up on was everything else. I remember sitting around with him and listing to the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour , and just for him to even allowing that music playing in the room he was in was unusually yielding for him. This was a stiff, golf-playing Bay Street stock broker. Then, when my suspension was up, on Sunday night, he drove me to the train station, and I said to him, ‘Maybe I'll come back next weekend,' because we had just had this extraordinary weekend. And he said, ‘Yeah. Great,' and went home and shot himself. That was a part of the story that I've always felt relieved about, because I was there, I wasn't one of the people who left him alone, I actually made my peace with him. I don't think he did it because of me, I think it was just because he had come to the end. He was also of that generation who took shock treatment and tranquilizers and drank a lot and didn't understand that any one of these things had enormous psychological depressive effects. A lot of people killed themselves after shock treatments, because the rebound from it is an enormous depression, and a lack of memory. My father wasn't equipped to deal with any of this stuff. He was an old-time, secretary-chasing, golf-playing, man's man. The metaphysics of depression and reflecting on one's life were not things that came naturally to him, so he just shot himself in the kitchen. It was a mistake on his part, you don't kill yourself when you've got a couple of kids, but on the other hand, when you have that kind of soot-like depression over everything you're looking at and everything you're feeling, you don't make those kinds of equations about how anything is going to feel to anyone else. He simply wanted to stop, and he couldn't see any alternative. He could only see more of this horizonless parking lot, stretched out forever and ever and ever. It must have been an unendurable embarrassment, because there was no literary cachet in depression for him. He wasn't going to turn it into a poem or a novel, there was just the sensation of it. He had nowhere to go with what he was feeling, and no way to express it. He had no vocabulary for it. So...I wanted to revisit that incident, not in a maudlin but in a literary way, and as crass as it is to say, when you're a writer and you're given images like that, it's almost impossible not to use them.
Epp: How did you feel about it at the time? How long did it take you to work it through?
Gilmour: It had a kind of literary excitement. My first thought when I heard he was dead was, ‘Good. There's no one to boss me around anymore. I'm free.' Then I got in the shower and had a somewhat self-conscious and slightly literary weep. Then I came out of the shower wondering how much money I was going to inherit. It took a long time to develop any sensation of loss, and it was many years later that I finally considered how he must have been feeling that particular day. When I was seventeen I was pretty selfish. At that point all my father's death meant to me was money and freedom. It was pretty exhilarating. The funeral party was a whole lot more fun than the funeral party in Lost Between Houses . It was more like the funeral party in How Boys See Girls . I was seventeen years old, everybody was paying a lot of attention to me, I had on my best clothes, I had a lot of money, and I was starting my literary career with a throbbing definable sadness that I exploited endlessly. I took I don't know how many girls to bed after the anecdote of the miracle of me and the tragedy of my father. I'm not sure if that's what got them into bed with me but it certainly didn't hurt.
Epp: That material was pretty well-handled in Lost Between Houses . It seems like the first impulse of an amateur writer, when handed such a meaty scene, would be to just wring the pathos out of the page, but because you didn't, instead going for a more emotionally flat approach, it seemed a lot more realistic. At that point the character didn't have the maturity to have any more of a reaction to his father's suicide than he did.
Gilmour: Sure. When you're seventeen, you think someone who's fifty-five is such a dinosaur he must be okay about dying. I'm that age now, and I assure you I am definitely not okay about it. I'm not remotely frightened of it, but I'm certainly not interested in doing it today.
Epp: I guess when Back On Tuesday was published you were around thirty-seven.
Gilmour: Thirty-six. Late for a first novel.
Epp: Well, Conrad and William Burroughs and Raymond Chandler didn't start writing full-time until they were late-thirties or early-forties, after they'd had other careers, so maybe it's a good way to go.
Gilmour: We've talked about this before, but artistic maturity is not an affair of choice. Artistic maturity is like a seed that opens up inside of you and it opens when it opens and there is nothing you can do to rush it. It can open up at twelve like it did with Arthur Rimbaud, or it can open up real late like it did with me. How it manifested itself in me wasn't so much in giving me my voice, but in teaching me how to work. It's simple: you get up in the morning and you write for two hours. It sounds like a very easy thing, now, but I didn't know how to work, and until you know how to work, you can't really work.
That book came out, and it changed my whole life within the space of nine months. Entirely. I mean, I went from being an aging prodigy to being a national personality in the space of nine months. It was great. The book did really well, I got a full page in the Globe & Mail with my picture, I got a full page in Maclean's magazine, and then about six or seven months later I was offered a chance to audition for a television show. It was The Journal , with Barbara Frum. They asked me if I wanted to audition for film critic. As a lark, I did it, got the job, six months after that I hosted the whole show, all within nine months of that book coming out. So I'm a big believer in finishing your work. If I hadn't finished that book, my life would have gone in a completely different direction. All I had to do to have a good life was finish that book. So I think you should always finish the novel, no matter how shitty it is. The tragedy isn't writing a bad novel, it's not finishing a novel. More damage is done by unfinished novels than by bad ones. That book got me this job in television, and that job in television got me the money to write everything that I've written since, on my own time, since I only worked on television part-time. It literally changed my life from black and white to colour. When that book came out, I was this bloated alcoholic husband of an over-achiever, kind of known as an interesting guy who never amounted to anything. That book changed my life when it came out fifteen years ago. It took me five years to write and I almost didn't finish it. Nobody wanted to publish it, nobody wanted to give me any grant money to finish it, but I finished it. And honestly, my life would have been such a sad affair if I hadn't finished that book.
Epp: You've written screenplays based on your books...
Gilmour: The screenplay business is a terrible business, but it pays really well. It paid for me to buy a loft in Toronto . I wrote screenplays for How Boys See Girls, Lost Between Houses , and An Affair With The Moon . I've been paid for them, but none of them have been produced. The problem with screenplays is you can spend ten years writing them, getting paid for them, and have no product. The great thing about writing a novel is that when you write and it gets published, it physically exists in the world, and a screenplay only exists if it gets made into a movie. On the one hand I'm very grateful for the money, on the other hand I think that screenwriting is an enormous waste of creative talent and I'm glad I've never taken it very seriously. I'm glad that I never spent very much time on it, because it really is the road to broken promises and disappointment.
Epp: Has anyone expressed any interest in making Sparrow Nights into a movie?
Gilmour: No, not yet. When I got reviewed in the New York Times, I got a whole bunch of nibbles from American film companies, but what happens is, they read the reviews of my books and go, ‘God, these are fabulous!' But then they read the novels themselves and they realize that almost nothing happens in them. The novels are almost entirely internal. What makes those novels interesting isn't so much what happened; it's what the guy says about what happened. Film producers discover that the reviews are always very colourful, but they're colourful about the personality of the narrator, they're not actually very colourful about the events of the novel. My plots tend to be very simple: sort of getting the girl, sort of losing her, sort of getting her back, end of story.
Epp: Well, Sparrow Nights seems like it has more interesting filmable action than your previous books.
Gilmour: It does. I've sold film rights to all my books, and of course I'd like to sell the film rights to Sparrow Nights , too. They're very visual books, so what always happens is, some young guy will read them and go, ‘Holy fuck, this is just made for a movie, I can see this inside my head.' He then goes and gives it to a film company and they say, ‘Well this is like trying to film Tropic Of Cancer , though. It's a neat book, but there's no surface action. Much less, the three things a movie needs, a first, a second, and a third act.' My novels are sprints. They start somewhere and just screech to the end.
Epp: Back On Tuesday reminded me a lot of Joseph Conrad's second novel, An Outcast Of The Islands .
Gilmour: You know, I've never managed to read Joseph Conrad. I've tried, valiantly. I thought Heart Of Darkness , which I read about two years ago, was such a piece of shit I couldn't believe it. Except for the very beginning when the guy's planning his trip and he's looking at his maps and he gets transported by this S spreading into the jungle. But as soon as he starts up the river, with that ooga-booga talk about the blacks and how close to nature they are, and then that nonsensical, incomprehensible, metaphysical twaddle at the end—what the fuck is going on there?! No wonder Apocalypse Now disintegrated at the end. Coppola couldn't shake off the nonsense of the novel. It's one of the least-satisfying conclusions to a novel I've ever read in my entire life. Never mind its ooga-booga heart of darkness, you know, aren't the black people close to--close to what? Close to the spirit of violence, anarchy, murder and cannibalism. I can't imagine how they ever taught that book in schools without someone going, ‘Uhhhh, this book is saying that these people are closer to animals than we are. And that this white guy became like an animal like they are by spending time with them. That's what the heart of darkness is: it's... black! ' Anyhow, tell me about his second novel.
Epp: All the criticisms people have of Conrad, I read him and go, ‘Yeah, you're right, I can see that. These faults are there,' but for some reason I just really like it. Sometimes he tries stuff and it works, and sometimes he tried stuff and it doesn't work. I'd read a page of Heart Of Darkness and go, ‘Okay, I really like that,' and then I'd read the next page and go, ‘Okay, that was pretty stinky,' and then I'd read the next page and go, ‘Okay, that was interesting,' and so on.
Gilmour: Yeah, I agree.
Epp: I like how, when he's having a good day, he just has this weird, feverish way of discovering banal objects like chairs or trees, where his descriptions go on and on until everything becomes a metaphor for something else, and Conrad almost feels like a surrealist. Something that's not that unusual, like steaming up a river or enduring a thunderstorm, starts to seem really strange and mysterious. I don't know, maybe it's just me.
Gilmour: If I was going to read one novel by Joseph Conrad, which one should I read?
Epp: Oh, man...he has a short story called ‘The Secret Sharer,' and it's good, and I thought a novel called Victory was good.
Gilmour: I have one anecdote for you, on the subject of Joseph Conrad. When I was hosting The Journal , they re-issued Lawrence Of Arabia , and because I was working for a big television show, they flew me over to England to interview David Lean, the director. He lived in this extraordinary four-level house overlooking the Thames River . On the ground floor he had a chartreuse Rolls Royce on a rotating stand so you could actually park it and then move it out of the way. He had a very spry, young, big-bosomed wife. Television has its vulgarities, but it also has its high points, and one of the highlights of that job was when the interview was over. I thanked him, the crew started packing up, I went to leave and he said, ‘No no no, I'm just about to have lunch. Come up to the roof with me and keep me company.' I said, ‘Are you sure?' and he said, ‘Yeah, I'm actually working out a problem I'd like to talk to you about.' We went up to the roof and he brought out some diagrams and he said, ‘I'm directing Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, and I can't decide who I should use in the lead role. Do you think I should use Marlon Brando or John Cleese?' I said, ‘Well Mr. Lean, thank you for asking me. I think Brando would probably be my choice. I think John Cleese might bring too much history. I think, for anyone who'd seen Fawlty Towers , that's the end of the movie right there. I think Marlon Brando would be fine.' Then he said, ‘Listen, I've got some costumes in mind, would you mind if I showed you some of the costumes?' I think he was just a very democratic guy, as opposed to be being particularly impressed with me. I told him that would be fine, and the next thing I know, he comes shuffling out with this sketch pad, full of the costumes for Nostromo . He was eating an orange, and the Thames was four floors below us, flowing by, and I remember thinking, This is a nice job.
Epp: I think a movie based on Nostromo would have to be about ten hours long.
Gilmour: I've never read it.
Epp: It's this ambitious sprawling thing that covers several decades in the political history of a fictional South American country.
Gilmour: Fuck, I hate those novels! They're so contrived, they're not organic, and they never feel necessary. That kind of book never feels like a necessary expression of a soul. The novels that I like to read are the ones that are truly necessary.
Epp: I think I like Conrad best not when he's trying to tell some epic ‘big picture,' but when he's going for something smaller, just one guy looking out a window or something. And even when Conrad's writing isn't ‘good,' it's always strange and distinctive. Anyhow, in An Outcast Of The Islands , there's this not-too-likeable guy working at a trading post somewhere in the border lands between ‘civilization' and the wilderness of—
Gilmour: --ooga-booga land.
Epp: Right. And his boss finds out he's been taking money out of the till. His life falls apart, he ends up running away from the safe zone he'd always been in, alone, into strange unfamiliar areas, and then things get crazy and out of hand. So the forcible geographic dislocation of the guy was a nice metaphor for the mental rearranging he was forced to do, and also provided a good chance to really put your protagonist through the ringer. So that was the connection I saw between it and your first book: a guy with a pretty soft station in life reacting to a crisis by running to a strange place and putting himself into a different kind of crisis in an attempt to make some sense of things.
Gilmour: I think that's very true.
Epp: So I kind of thought of Back On Tuesday as feeling like a Conrad novel, but properly edited, with someone clamping down on the fifty-word sentences.
Gilmour: That makes complete sense. That's an excellent description of not only the impulse of what the guy feels in the book, but the impulse I actually felt when I was doing things like Back On Tuesday in my own life. I was seeking a chaotic place with different rules.
Epp: I think Conrad's a good writer sometimes even when his writing is bad, because I'm not interested in the craft so much as what's going on underneath this web of words.
Gilmour: I agree, and that's why I like the first fifty pages of Heart Of Darkness . I liked them a lot. The guy, Marlowe, telling this story on the boat, and the fog, and the foghorn, and the wonderful mood, and his thoughts of leaving it all behind, there's a lot in it that I really like. I remember moments of Conrad almost cinematically.
Epp: Oh, yeah. His quality level would really vary from page to page, and his bad pages don't bother me too much, because the good pages are still there. The ending for Heart Of Darkness is really crappy, and I think it's good that the ending's crappy. I think it's funny, how the whole book is this guy sailing up the river looking for some big answer to life's heavy question. You're sold this bill of goods, like you're on your way to some big payoff, and then finally when you arrive, all you get is this shrug, this ‘I dunno.' Because, what ‘answer' could have been given that would have been satisfying? Nobody else can tell you the answer...
Gilmour: Right. It's not even that I was simply turned off by Conrad's racism, because I don't mind someone being racist, he just seemed rather naive. An adult should understand that human beings are human beings all over the place, and there aren't these spooky darkies out there who are close to the animal state. So it struck me as odd that an adult, fully-developed writer was naive enough to not understand the interior lives of the black men out there were as vivid and as developed as his. They weren't, in fact, shaved monkeys. They were humans with a culture of their own and thoughts of their own and interior lives of their own. And it seemed unpardonably naive for a novelist to not get that. It's one thing for a kid to not get that, or a tourist to not get that, but it's another thing for a novelist to not get that. Particularly when he'd already spent decades living in places with large black populations.
Epp: You've already touched on this a bit, but I just wanted to ask what you'd been doing before you wrote Back On Tuesday . Had you always wanted to be a novelist, and when did you get serious about it?
Gilmour: From the age of about seventeen onward, I suspected that the only game of hardball in town was writing novels. Not poetry, not short stories, not plays, not musicals, only novels. And it took me until I was about thirty to actually know how to do it. I don't know why it took so long. It seems like a relatively simple decision now. I graduated from university, I inherited a lot of money. I lived in that country house where my father shot himself with my German girlfriend whose father also shot himself. I kind of wandered around for a few years, taking downers, trying to figure out what to do with my life. After the last time I strangled her and she didn't come back, I went back to the city and just became one of those interesting ‘bar guys.' You meet him and think, Gee, this is a really interesting guy, but is he ever going to do anything with his life other than just sit in this bar? But I did have a feeling that at some point I would get up off of my barstool and go home and actually write a book. Then twenty-seven went by, and twenty-eight went by, and twenty-nine went by, and then I was thirty, and there were times at four o'clock in the morning when I'd think, God, it's not going to happen. But it happened. I guess I'd just been waiting for that seed to open up. And when it opened, I wrote Back On Tuesday . God only knows what my life would have been like if I hadn't.
Epp: So you were just waiting for a story to reveal itself?
Gilmour: No, when I started to write the book I didn't have a story. I just had a sensation of needing to write. And if you need to write, you go to your obsessions for your subject matter, and out of your obsessions comes the story. I had no story with Back On Tuesday . I had one image of a guy looking at a photograph of his ex-wife with their child and her new boyfriend. I had an image of a guy dancing by himself at four o'clock in the morning at the bar at the Wharf Club...it was a series of images. I wrote that book many times, and every time I wrote it the story would insinuate itself more forcefully. I just wrote thousands and thousands and thousands of words, and gradually and quite unconsciously the skeleton of the story began to emerge, until I suddenly thought, Oh! This is about a guy who kidnaps his daughter and goes on a drunken binge in the Caribbean for forty-eight hours. Now, that's not a really complicated story, and you wouldn't think it would take me five years to figure that out, but it did. In the course of that, I was writing about romantic disappointment, self-loathing, a writer who doesn't write, longing, regret, and self-destruction. Those are all things that the book is about. But I didn't get a tree to hang them on for years. Then, there was this very simple story.
Epp: So it wasn't like you had the ending in place when you wrote the first sentence?
Gilmour: Oh, God no.
Epp: Because there are writers who work like that.
Gilmour: Yeah, but I don't. I didn't have anything. I didn't have the next paragraph in place. I still work that way. When I started the novel I'm working on now, I literally had a sentence about a guy walking into a room, throwing a bunch of money on the table, and his friends ask him where he got it, and he says he'd just robbed a fucking bank. That's all I had, and the whole book has grown out of that particular scene. But I've now written this novel at least five or six times and I've thrown out at least the length of the novel already. Blind alleys, trajectories that don't work, storylines that don't work. For me to write a novel it has to have a kind of flow, and if I can just close my eyes and not force it, I'll know where the book should go next, and if I can do that for two hundred pages I've got a good book. If I try to force an idea on it, you can always tell. It goes from living tissue to dead tissue, and as soon as I stop thinking and start allowing it to flow again it feels like living tissue. But I'm not a cerebral writer at all. If I try to impose ideas or a narrative on a story it dies right in front of me. It turns into something wooden and mechanical.
Epp: Do you know who James Toback is?
Gilmour: He did Fingers , right?
Epp: Yeah.
Gilmour: I didn't like Fingers much, and I don't think I like him much. He's really impressed by gangsters and fucking a lot of girls, and he seems like a large, angry child. His movies have a real juvenile sense of impressionableness. He's got a real hard-on for gangsters, and fancies himself quite the stick man. You have to be careful about how you write about romance and sex, because if you're not careful it can become an advertisement for yourself. The instant that people know you're boasting, it just flops as literature.
Epp: He also wrote the screenplay for The Gambler --
Gilmour: And that's a bullshit movie, too. Dostoyevsky wrote the novel in thirty days, for one thing. I don't know why I disliked the movie so much. It may have been James Caan, but I don't think I've liked anything Toback's done. Didn't he do Two Girls And A Guy ?
Epp: Yeah.
Gilmour: That's another advertisement for himself, that's another example of self-mythologizing. ‘I'm a player, I've done two chicks at the same time, this is really my story here.' It's one thing to do your story, it's another thing to wink at the audience and say, Hey, this is really my story we're talking about here.
Epp: I thought The Gambler was good.
Gilmour: I found The Gambler to be a real downer, and I found Fingers to be a real downer. But I haven't seen The Gambler in twenty years, so...
Epp: Anyhow, I just mentioned him because those two movies impressed me maybe just because they were so much more character-driven than the movies I was used to seeing. I once had a conversation with him where I said I got the impression he was more interested in character than plot. He said yeah, for him plot is a by-product of character, the plot is just a series of situations he puts this guy in so that you can learn stuff about him.
Gilmour: Yeah, but on the other hand, that alone just won't cut it. Good storytelling requires a good story. And you can say ‘I put my characters is situations to see how they'll respond to them,' but that also sounds like a guy who's bankrupt when it comes to story ideas. You leave a child in a hotel room and you go on a drunken binge (the plot of Back On Tuesday ), that is not a detail that's just there for character, that's a dramatic event. But what you're saying is interesting because now that I think about it, what's disappointing about his movies is that they're all rather poor stories. Now I'm not great at telling a story myself, but I do believe that in the end you've got to have a good story. You can have all the interesting characters you want, but if you look at all the books that I really like, books like War & Peace and The Great Gatsby , they've all got really good, really interesting stories.
Epp: The last sentence in Back On Tuesday was good.
Gilmour: What was it?
Epp: ‘It was as if we had worked on Stonehenge together.'
Gilmour: Yeah, right.
Epp: That was good.
Gilmour: I'm glad you liked it. You know, that whole last chapter was one of those gifts from God, it just came to me really fast, practically no rewriting at all. I knew I had a real winner with the last four or five pages, I just knew it. I knew I'd be able to reread it in twenty years and it would still be a winner. It's like the ending to Lost Between Houses . I know I'll be able to read that in twenty years and it'll still be a winner too, I just know it. And the only thing that made me hesitate was the Stonehenge thing, I wondered is it a little bit on the ‘literary' side, or is it okay? I decided it was okay because it came out of me so quickly. I thought, Don't fuck around with this, because those last four pages, I typed them as quickly as I could, and I probably didn't change anything. So I knew I had a winner there.
Epp: Is that something you have to watch for, with your writing? Every couple of pages there'll be some zinger, some comment that either's funny or just really-sharply observed, like when you looked at your reflection and said it looked like Madame Toussaud's with the heat turned up, that helps to keep me turning the pages as much as the plotting or suspense or anything. But do you have to watch that it doesn't get too show-offy?
Gilmour: You've got to be very careful about that.
Epp: What do you do?
Gilmour: You just cut. You just cut them out because they are like jewels. You put one jewel on a page and it's wonderful, you put two jewels on the page and one takes away from the other, you put three jewels on the page and the page is cluttered. So you actually have to be disciplined enough to take a good turn of phrase, a really polished image, that's on the same page or in the same paragraph as another one, and make a decision. Phrase-making and writing pretty sentences has always been really easy for me. I could do it before I had anything to say, before I had a voice or a persona or a story to tell. So I've always had to pull that facility in, or hold it back, because the best jewels are rare jewels, and you have to find the discipline to cut them. And it's really easy to do that. When you're writing and you read something and go, There's something wrong on this page, but this is really good and this is really good and this is really good, I'm going to keep it the way it is, you're screwed. You have to obey your instincts. If you allow yourself to be courageous enough to go, All right, I'm going to cut this just to see what happens, just to see how the page feels, and then if the page does in fact feel better, you just act on it. And you stop thinking that there's only so many bullets in a gun—what if I can't think of another image as beautiful as this one ever again? Because in fact, beautiful images are like interesting personalities: they're a dime a dozen.
Epp: But little asides like the Madame Toussaud's remark serve an important function. They help to change the mood, and give the reader a bit of a break from the story's relentless obsessive forward drive for a second.
Gilmour: It's a literary device, sure. If you're going to write about an unattractive character doing unattractive things, the only possible mitigating factor is self-awareness. And those zingers you're talking about are often crystalline bits of self-awareness. Not only do they excuse the depravity of the act in question, they also add a certain wit and charm to it. In other words, they are a way of making unattractive acts forgivable, by dint of an attractive self-awareness. Sparrow Nights is a perfect example of that. There's a lot of nasty stuff happening in there, and the only thing that saves that guy from being just a fucking crashing asshole is his self-awareness and, I hope, his amusing self-deprecation. If someone can describe himself in a way that makes you laugh and at the same time mocks himself, he's instantly human. The whole thing with my books is, you have to be able to really like the guy that the story is happening to. And if you don't like the guy that the story is happening to, the book is a bust. My vehicle for bringing the reader on-side is to be self-aware and amusingly self-deprecating, because that allows the reader to throw an anchor into my boat and to sort of say, Yeah, I have actually had equally unattractive, equally spurious, equally vain thoughts. But there are a lot of people who don't like my books at all, and the reason they don't like them is because they don't like the guy and they're not charmed by his wit, nor do they accept his self-deprecation as an excuse. They say, So he's an articulate creep instead of an inarticulate creep, so what? I think the people who don't like my books actually don't like the guy who tells the story. I actually don't think many of them take issue with the way the story's told or the skill of the writing.
Epp: I don't know. I liked Sparrow Nights , but I don't think I liked the guy very much at all.
Gilmour: You didn't, eh?
Epp: No. I think I was at him more than I was laughing with him. Like, how he kept on dropping in all those French phrases when he was talking to himself.
Gilmour: But French professors do that. I am a French major and I also know a lot of French professors and they really do talk like that. Between you and me, I found the French asides very amusing. Some people found them really grating and really affected, but I found them rather clever and rather amusing.
Epp: I thought they were really bad, but good in the sense that they made me dislike the guy more. They gave me another chance to laugh at this shmuck.
Gilmour: That's what I don't understand. I found them charming and engaging the same way that Nabokov's narrator in Lolita is constantly dropping French asides. And I didn't just drop them in anywhere. Dennis Lee, who was the first guy who read Sparrow Nights , said, You gotta take that French stuff out of there, it just really pisses me off and it's really grating. I love Dennis and he did a great job editing Lost Between Houses but he's the wrong editor for this book because I was actually right. This is what the guy's like, this is how he talks, even when talking to himself!
Epp: I remember talking to a girl after a performance of one of my plays in Hamilton . She really didn't like it, so I spent a few minutes talking to her to find out why. It turned out that my play was set in my neighbourhood, which is a poor neighbourhood, and she lived in Ancaster, to the west, in a very wealthy neighbourhood, and she hadn't enjoyed the play just because she really didn't like poor people. She didn't want to know about them, so...(shrug)
Gilmour: I feel the same way, though. Like, I can't stand the guy who wrote Short Cuts , Raymond Carver. He's one of the great over-rated writers of the American canon. There's a bunch of reasons why I don't like him—his alcoholic self-loathing is certainly one of them—but his stories are all about poor losers. And I'm an upper middle-class guy. I'm actually not interested in unhappy wife-beating frustrated alcoholic blue-collar people. So I understand that woman's response. I don't like reading novels about poor people. And you read The Great Gatsby and it may read like a satire, like Fitzgerald's putting down the people at the those parties, but he wasn't really, because Fitzgerald loved those parties with all those rich people. He loved what he called ‘the comforting proximity of the rich.' So I understand that. I don't go to kitchen-sink dramas, I don't want to read about unemployed Hamilton contractors getting drunk out of frustration and slapping their wives around. I'm not interested in that at all. I am very interested in an upper-class private-schooled alcoholic slapping his heroin-addicted wife around. That has a bit more of a tingle to it. But that, obviously, is just where I'm coming from.
Epp: And I tend not to like books about rich people. Fitzgerald's love of rich people, which you can feel so strongly when you read him, I just don't understand it. It seems like money means a lot more to him than it means to me.
Gilmour: Oh yeah. It certainly did.
Epp: And I certainly think a rich guy can be just as dull as anybody else.
Gilmour: And yet the guy in all my books is an upper middle-class guy. This is not a blue-collar guy. He never seems to have a job, or if he has a job, he never seems to spend any time doing it. Someone said to me, Have you ever noticed that nobody ever works in your books?
Epp: Maybe that's the real reason I like your books, because that's my fantasy. I'm stuck at a day job that I hate.
Gilmour: Hey, have you heard of a writer called Fante?
Epp: John Fante?
Gilmour: Yeah, do you know anything about him? A guy in a bookstore recommended me to him a couple days ago. Is he any good?
Epp: Um, long story short, he was one of Bukowski's favourites.
Gilmour: Oh, fuck! I hate Bukowski. I liked him when I was a kid, for about fifteen minutes. And after fifteen minutes I just thought, Ugh. The disservice he did to modern poetry, by inspiring a whole generation to celebrate their assholeness with undisciplined verse is breathtakingly damaging.
Epp: Right. What are your work habits like right now? Have your methods changed since you started writing novels?
Gilmour: My work habits are the same as they've always been. I get up in the morning, I make a cup of coffee, I don't read the newspaper, I turn the computer on, and I work until about twelve or twelve-thirty. I never work for more than about two hours a day. I never work on the weekends, and I never work at night, because if I find something that's wrong or unsettling or unfixable it will actually disturb my sleep and give me nightmares. My feeling has always been that if you put in two good hours of writing five days a week, you're going to have something really worth reading in a year.
Epp: And each novel has several drafts?
Gilmour: Oh God, yeah. Back On Tuesday was seven or eight drafts. The novel I'm working on right now is called Not Fade Away . I'm sure that this is the seventh eighth completely new draft I'm working on. Right now it's about forty-five thousand words long, and I'm sure I've thrown out at least forty-five thousand words, and not just first-draft words but polished words. Because this is a difficult work of imaginative fiction it'll probably be ten or twelve drafts. Lost Between Houses was eight drafts. An Affair With The Moon , terrible book, but it was still six or seven drafts. I probably average seven drafts a book. And I mean starting right from the very beginning. Sometimes I actually do throw the whole book out and write it without looking at the earlier draft, because I don't want to be chained to what's there. I want the new draft to be informed by my new ways of thinking about it, and sometimes you have to get away from the words and the architecture of the earlier work to allow the new innovations that you've imagined to sprout in the writing of the new draft.
Epp: You said Not Fade Away was ‘difficult.' What makes it any more difficult than past novels?
Gilmour: It's further away from me than anything else I've written. It's about a violent heroin-addicted bank robber, and I haven't come close to any of those things. I've never been a heroin addict, I've never robbed a bank, and the guy is violent, and I'm not particularly violent. Virginia Woolf would describe such-and-such a writer as having literary integrity, and what she means by that is not whether he sells out or not. Literary integrity is being able to persuade someone that even though they didn't see the world that way, that it's described in a way that it could be. And for this book to have literary integrity, in other words, for this book to actually persuade a reader that this story really could have happened, is proving to be very difficult for me. Also, because I'm becoming less and less interested in fancy language and verbiage, it's very stark. It's very short, and consequently every punch has to count. I've been writing a lot of scenes and chapters that just aren't interesting or aren't plausible, and I don't seem to realize it until after I've written them. So my guess is that this book will be ten drafts, and it may never get published at all. It may be just too much of a stretch for me to pull off. I may have to stay closer to home, but for the moment the book is black and it's amusing and it's violent and it's about the only thing my attention span can stay engaged to.
Epp: It seemed like the gap of time between Sparrow Nights and the book that came before it was a lot shorter than the gap between your earlier books.
Gilmour: Well, I'm really learning how to write fiction now, and once you learn how to write fiction it's much easier to use your imagination than your memory, because you don't have to mash up events and make them fit; you can just create them. And as long as the story makes sense, and every scene feels like an organic growth out of what came before, you can just make it all up. Whereas if you're using autobiography, you have to mash up the events you're dealing with so that they actually fit contextually into the narrative, and that can take a very long time. So it's become a lot easier for me to write fiction now, because I'm actually writing fiction as opposed to autobiographical fiction.
Epp: You had said you had started some work on a novel to come after Not Fade Away ?
Gilmour: Yeah, and it's so thin, and so bad, that I kind of feel like if I turn my back on it, it will collapse onto the floor. It doesn't even have one leg to stand on at the moment. But that's how it goes. I'll finish Not Fade Away , with any luck I'll publish it, and then I'll go back to it, I'll hammer away at it for a year or a year-and-a-half until I find something that works, and then I'll just streak down that road. The problem is, I don't really have an emotional need to write anything now. Not Fade Away and the book that I'll write after it, they're not necessary books. They're books that a writer who needs to write writes, but they're not necessarily books that I need to express myself emotionally in, and there's a difference. I'm in the physical habit of writing, so I like to write, but I don't actually have the emotional need to communicate anything right now. It's a very flat emotional time for me. I'm very happy these days, and quite flat as a result.
Epp: But the pleasure you get from doing it is still enough to keep you going?
Gilmour: Yeah. I get enormous pleasure from it. I'm a writer who really loves the physical act of writing. It makes me feel better. It's not agonizing for me at all. Maybe if it was agonizing for me and I worked harder at it my books would be better, but I wouldn't want to live like that.
Epp: So you'll keep on writing novels for as long as you can?
Gilmour: I think so. I can't imagine stopping. You know, if I went back to working only in television I would die of some kind of starvation. Television is very good for bronzing your vanity, but it's a very insubstantial diet. You can't live on television. I'm sure that's why most of the people who are on television are drunks, or somehow chronically unhappy. It feeds your vanity but it doesn't feed your heart at all . And novels don't make me a lot of money but they give me the most important sensation in the world, which is the sensation that I'm doing exactly what I ought to be doing.
Epp: So I still have some more good stories from you to look forward to.
Gilmour: Well, I hope so. You only have so many stories in you that are actually important to you, and after that you start making them up. It's like...Paul McCartney. You've only got so many great songs in you, but you just can't stop writing songs. I understand that, because, he's going to retire and do—what? So the songs aren't very good, they're definitely not as good as ‘Can't Buy Me Love,' but he still needs to write songs. And I may be sliding into that area myself. I don't say this with any self-loathing and I'm not sure this is right, but I can see how eventually you could write out all of your great issues. And after that, all the issues are gone, and what do you write about then? You either repeat yourself, or you write about less important things.
Epp: Well, Kurosawa made Ran when he was eighty...
Gilmour: Right. But I know that I don't feel as strongly about needing to write to express my soul as I used to. I don't keep a diary anymore. The diary was a manifestation of my fascination with my own life. I don't feel that fascination anymore. Consequently, I'm not that interested in writing about myself. And by writing less about myself, it's possible that I'll become a more competent craftsman, but a less compelling read.
Epp: Raymond Chandler had some great observation about the process a writer goes through, something like, A writer starts out having all this important stuff to say, but doesn't know how to say it. Then he spends all these years writing, learning the craft, and finally figures out how to express himself exactly the way he wants to, only to find he has nothing left to say.
Gilmour: That' right, that's very good. But I hope that it's not true. My guess is that there's another approach, that of a writer who writes the same book over and over again, so he consequently never runs out of things to say. He just finds different ways of saying the same thing. Right now I am feeling a little bit like Raymond Chandler. Not only do I feel like I don't have anything to say, I feel like I don't feel anything that's necessary to say. It's not that I don't feel a lot and think a lot, it's that I don't feel compelled to express them or to be admired for them anymore, even though I now have the craft to do it. But the pleasure I get from the act itself is absolutely enough reason to continue writing. I'm only really exploring this idea for the sake of this conversation, but I don't feel the emotional urgency to writing novels now that I used to. I no longer feel that the sentiments I have are so vitally interesting that the world must know that I thought them. Secondly, I also felt, early in my life, that if I didn't become a novelist and get some novels published that I would die of shame, and a sense of never having had a real life. I don't feel like that now. I feel like I've outgrown the notion that one activity defines the quality of your life. Now maybe it's only because I managed to write novels that I can say that, I don't know. But I think that there are some people who can actually outgrow the need to do something, and I sometimes wonder if I will. I could never understand it before—people walking away from acting, people walking from music, people walking away from novel-writing—but when you think about novel-writing as a way of proving yourself to the world, the way it is for some people, I can certainly imagine outgrowing that. And I've very nearly outgrown it myself right now. So if I stay in the game, now that I have nothing to say and I am in it just for the pure love of the art form, I will be in the game for all the right reasons.