Writing & Other Bloodsports, page 1
Writing & Other Blood Sports (collection) copyright
© 2000 by Betsy Willeford. All rights reserved.
“Writing as an Art,” Mystery Scene 15, 1988 (written 1953); “The Signs and the Times,” Communique: The Magazine of Florida Communications, November 1974; “The Muse and Sgt. Willeford,” by John Keasler, Miami News, Dec. 14, 1971; “The Burnt Orange Heretic,” by Fred Shaw, Tropic, Dec. 19, 1971; “The World’s First Upside-Down Interview With a Novelist,” by John Keasler, Miami News, April 19, 1984; “Interview” by Ed Gorman, Mystery Scene ; “Notes on Beat Writing,” The Chicago Jewish Forum, Spring 1961; “Chester Himes and His Novels of Absurdity,” American Visions: The Magazine of Afro-American Culture, August 1988; “Soldiers of’44,” Miami Herald, April 1, 1979; “Dress Gray,” Miami Herald, January 21, 1979; “Night of the Jabberwock,” Miami Herald, July 8, 1984; “Diane Johnson’s Hammett,” Miami Herald, ; “Slam the Big Door,” Raleigh, N.C., News and Observer, May 31, 1987; Fred Shaw obituary, Miami Herald, January 9, 1972; Ross MacDonald obituary, Miami Herald, July 17, 1983; Chester Himes obituary, Miami Herald, November 18, 1984; John D. MacDonald obituary, Miami Herald, Dec. 29, 1986; “Characteristics of Gadgetry,” Writer’s Digest, May 1959; “End as a Nihilist,” Media, Palm Beach Junior College, Spring 1961; “Finders/Keepers of the Times,” The Human Voice, 1968; “Only His Analyst Knows Why He Writes,” Miami Herald, June 11, 1972; “What Book Covers Tell You,” Publisher’s Weekly, June 13,1986; “The Black Mass of Brother Willeford” by William Bittner appears here for the first time, courtesy of Acadia University Archives, Wolfville, Nova Scotia; “The Big White Smile” was published, in a much shorter version, as “The Fitzgerald of Florida,” in the Miami News, July 17, 1966; a different version of “Hat” was published as part of I Was Looking for a Street (Countryman Press, 1988); New Forms of Ugly: The Immobilized Hero in Modern Fiction was published in a limited edition of 350 copies by Dennis McMillan Publications, 1987; “Running Away,” “Newsboy,” “The Impavid Aplomb of Henry Miller,” “Jim Tully: Holistic Barbarian,” “Jake Dover as Existentialist,” “Why Write for TV?,” “ ‘Preface’,” “A Matter of Dedication,” “The Name Above the Title,” “Don’t Kill Your Wife—Please!” and “Coda” appear for the first time in this collection.
FIRST EDITION
Published April 2000
ISBN 0-939767-34-1
Dustjacket by Tony Nicoletta
Endsheet photo taken by Michael Carlebach, Dec. 16, 1971, at the publication party for The Burnt Orange Heresy in Kathyrn and Lucien Proby’s garage at their South Miami home.
Dennis McMillan Publications
11431 East Gunsmith Drive Tucson, Arizona 85749
http://www.dennismcmillan.com
By Charles Willeford
Novels
High Priest of California (1953)
Pick-Up (1955)
Wild Wives (1956)
The Black Mass of Brother Springer (as Honey Gal, 1958)
Made in Miami (as Lust is a Woman, 1958)
The Woman Chaser (1960)
Deliver Me From Dallas! (as The Whip Hand, 1961)
Understudy for Love (1961)
No Experience Necessary (1962)
Cockfighter (1962, revised 1972)
The Burnt Orange Heresy (1971)
The Difference (as The Hombre From Sonora, 1971)
Kiss Your Ass Goodbye (1987)
The Shark Infested Custard (1993)
The Hoke Moseley Series
Miami Blues (1984)
New Hope For the Dead (1985)
Sideswipe (1987)
The Way We Die Now (1988)
Grimhaven (unpublished initial sequel to Miami Blues)
Story Collections
The Machine in Ward Eleven (1963)
Everybody’s Metamorphosis (1988)
The Second Half of the Double Feature (2003)
Non-Fiction
A Guide for the Undehemorrhoided (1977)
Off the Wall (1980)
Something About a Soldier (1986)
I Was Looking For a Street (1988)
Cockfighter Journal: The Story of a Shooting (1989)
Writing & Other Blood Sports (2000)
Poetry
The Outcast Poets (1947)
Proletarian Laughter (1948)
Poontang & Other Poems (1967)
Dedication Withdrawn
Writing as an Art
(1953)
The novel is a case history; a case history of the writer, and it is honestly written, with cunning, and it is drenched with the sweat and tears of the artist. “Artist” is a word seldom seen in The Writer’s Digest. Like the plots of the popular, large circulation magazines, the success stories appearing monthly in WD are almost identical. A housewife, a barber, a dental assistant, tells of early struggles—the aim at a particular market, the bombardment of a certain magazine with story after rejected story until the editor (in desperation) begins to add notes to the rejection slips. By continued plugging, by following every precious suggestion, the novice sells his first story. After that, he sells five out of ten, seven out of ten, and then with his new power secure, he branches out and sells to other, similar magazines. In a way, it is easy: pick the magazine you like, study it, write for it, sell to it.
These are the writers who are artists in the same sense that a manufacturer of girdles is an artist. If you order ten girdles, the manufacturer will send you ten. If an editor orders a story 3,000 words long on a young-love theme from a competent craftsman, he knows he will get it. The better the craftsman, the more the editor has to pay, of course. The craftsman receives money, a bit of fame, and he is pointed out in the neighborhood as a writer; as a person who doesn’t have to work for a living. For this money, this fame, this word manufacture, the writer gives up his trade as a barber, dental assistant or housewife.
The novel is a case history of the writer. It is the story of his life written as well as he can write it. It never ends; it goes on day after day, year after year. He is his own hero, his own heroine, his villain, his minor characters—the thoughts of each of these are his own thoughts twisting and churning and wrenched alive and crawling from his conscious and unconscious mind. He writes because he must, because to fail as a writer means to fail as a man. The writer who can interpret life, his own life through language, not by words, is an artist, not a word factory.
When I first began to write it was an act of desperation. It was a blind search, and at first every trail I followed led to the inside of a deep cave. I was searching with my conscious mind instead of my heart. I attempted style after style, writing feeble imitations of the men I worshipped: Thomas Wolfe, Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway. Naturally, my words were pallid, meaningless words. The paper I wasted would have had better use in the bathroom. I tried correspondence schools, laboring late into the night, taking magazine stories apart and putting them together again. I sent my lessons in: This is foreshadowing; this is a plant; this is an example of conflict; this is a biter-bit. This is a humorous story. That’s right, I had to say whether it was funny or not; just like magazine editors give the clue to their readers by illustrations and cover remarks like, “A new, hilarious story by ____________!” If this wasn’t done, how could the reader tell?
I joined writer’s clubs, short story classes, where we sat around and read each other’s efforts. It was terrible. It was a never-ending run on a runaway treadmill. The more I tried to conform to the formula the more hopeless it all appeared. I lost all hope; I reached the point where I no longer cared what people thought about my writing. And that is when I began to write.
I scrapped all of my early efforts and started over again. I put my feelings, my heart, my life, my innermost thoughts on paper. I forgot about publication, readers, and my desire for money. I was writing because I had to, but I colored everything I wrote with what I hoped was more real than life as I knew it. My characters were composites of people I knew, but one person might have the characteristics of twenty before I was through with him. Who can tell where fact leaves off and fiction begins? I learned that I couldn’t write the story of my life in a short story of 1,500 words, 3,000 words or 5,000 words. Sixty thousand words wasn’t enough either, but there was room enough to get started, and it could be followed by another sixty thousand, and another. . . .
The novel is the case history of the writer. Look Homeward, Angel, Ulysses, The Trial, A Farewell to Arms are great novels. They are also case histories of the men that wrote them, and they are written with the heart. Each is an account of what happened to the writer and also what might have happened to him. Fact and fiction cunningly combined.
I wrote for ten years before I sold a line. During this period I discovered that encouragement, many times, is a lot worse than discouragement. Only by reaching the depths of depression can you find the courage to go on. Two weeks after a well-known New York agent returned a long fragment of writing to me with the statement, “I can hardly encourage you to send me any more material,” I sold my first novel.
I could hardly believe that there was to be a first edition of 150,000 copies. My check for the advance convinced me. The publishing of one novel does not make me a success, but it convinced me that my ten years of writing in my own way had not been in vain.
I predict that the short story is on the way out. Already it is beginning to disappear from the men’s magazines. The trend is toward real adventure, true stories that are fictionalized. The “As told to”
Henry Miller, an American writer noted for his frankness and poverty, was once asked: “Why don’t you write for the movies? You can make a lot of money in a short time, and then you can quit and devote your time to writing the way you please.”
“Why don’t you put your daughter on the streets as a whore?” Mr. Miller replied. “After she’s married, nobody will know the difference.”
Nobody would know except the daughter.
If you devote your labors to writing formula fiction; if you write enough of it and send enough to one particular magazine, you will, eventually, sell to that magazine. It is inevitable. There is nothing wrong with it. It’s a good trade, but it isn’t art.
However, if you have daring, if you have durability, if you have the patience to follow the detours and dictates of your heart; if you want that mysterious, elusive thing called “art,” you can also achieve it.
It just takes longer, that’s all.
Autobiography
Running Away
(1950s)
Children run away from home because they don’t like it there. The reasons they don’t like it at home don’t matter. They range from the serious to the trivial and they are usually more irrational than reasonable. The problem is, after a few days on the road, the road becomes home, and the chances are excellent that the runaway won’t like the road either.
The abiding characteristic of the runaway is that he won’t like it anywhere. So he keeps moving. He could return home to the known, but the road, his new home, is an unknown, and a thousand times more interesting than the known.
I ran away from home when I was 12 years old. I learned a lot of things that weren’t worth knowing, but the things I learned on the road gave me a different perspective on life, and a different kind of personality from the kind I would have had if I had never left home.
Aristotle talks about this phenomenon in the second paragraph of Metaphysics, and again in the last chapter of his Analytics. All forms of knowledge come from a common source: “. . . an innate critical faculty which is called sense perception.”
Aristotle knew what he was talking about.
Because I was only 12 when I ran away, I thought that nothing bad could ever happen to me. Such was my experience up to that time. I was wrong, of course, but on the other hand, my experience had already taught me that unpleasant experiences invariably came from association with other people. I became wary on the road. I didn’t associate with others, and I didn’t travel with a buddy.
At night, in the jungles, I hung out on the edge of the campfires, listening. I didn’t contribute to the conversations of the other bums, knowing that I had little or nothing to offer these experienced travelers, and that I could, by listening, learn something useful about survival.
In this manner I learned about freight train schedules and how to catch a train, and how to choose an imaginary destination. I learned the various symbols, too, that bums place on a house with a piece of chalk: Good for a handout; not good for a handout; good for a handout, but you’ll have to work for it; and the mark to be avoided at all costs—good for a meager handout, with a one-hour sermon thrown in gratuitously.
No bum or road kid has a true destination, because the purpose of being on the road is to keep moving; but one must always have a destination in mind in case one is asked by a town clown, a RR dick, or even some man or woman you have dinged for a dime or a cigarette.
People who are not going anywhere because they are already there simply cannot comprehend that you are not going anywhere, that you are simply moving through space and time to nowhere in particular.
Older men usually said that they were going to (fill in a city) to live with a brother, and that the brother had found them a job. People who aren’t going anywhere love the idea that a man is going somewhere to work, especially if the place is not in his particular hamlet, town or city. So one of the most important things I learned was to always have a destination in mind, and some answers prepared for follow-up questions. Usually I said that my mother had died and that I was on my way to Chicago to live with an aunt—a schoolteacher—although I didn’t have an aunt, and I still haven’t made it to Chicago. But because the World’s Fair was being held in Chicago that year, and Sally Rand was on the midway with her fan dance, I did have a vague desire to get to Chicago and see her dance before the fair ended. The need wasn’t pressing, however; after all, in another ten years there would be another fair somewhere and I could see her then.
Meanwhile, because it was late October, with winter coming on, I remained in the sunbelt, traveling back and forth between Yuma, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas.
I never tired of the desert landscape as seen from the top of a boxcar, or, sometimes, from the doorway of an empty. The desert was bleak and beautiful; and I knew places where I could almost always find food and shelter at the division points of Tucson, Douglas, Rodeo and El Paso. These divisions and subdivisions of the Southern Pacific are about 200 miles apart, and a 12- or 13-hour ride apart. The only bad stretch was between Douglas, Arizona, and El Paso. The train left Douglas at night, and the cold all-night ride, especially if you happened to ride in a boxcar with a flat wheel, made it difficult to sleep. Nevertheless, I probably would have continued to yo-yo back and forth all winter long between Yuma and El Paso if the incident at Yuma hadn’t happened.
In preparation for the ride to Tucson, I had filled an empty catsup bottle with water, and purchased a small can of Vienna sausages. I had also managed to steal a Milky Way when I paid for the Vienna sausages. I then walked beyond the town to the water tower where the bums were supposed to catch the train. There was very little yard activity in Yuma, and bums were not allowed to catch the freights east while they were easy to board at standstill. Instead we had to wait outside of town and catch the train while it was moving at about 15 miles an hour. If you know what you’re doing that isn’t too fast, and I can catch onto a train that is moving up to 25 miles an hour. But when a train is going faster than 25, it is best to stand still and watch it go by. There will always be another day, another train.
About a mile past the water tower there was a pile of well-creosoted telephone poles, and a road kid sitting on top of them. He was about 12 or 13, rail thin, with freckles and a pinched face. He told me a bitter story.
He had walked out to the new transient camp outside of Yuma, a tent city on the site of an abandoned airfield, and the camp policeman at the gate had refused to let him in. The camp did not take in juveniles, the guard told him. At first the Yuma camp had taken in juveniles, runaways, but after two kids were punked by older bums in the camp, and had complained about it to the cops in Yuma, the camp commandant had decided that the best way to avoid a similar problem was to bar juveniles from the camp. The kid had tried to lie about his age, but because he couldn’t show any documentary proof he had been turned away.
He had walked the four miles back into Yuma. He probably could have slept at the Yuma police station, the kid said, but then he would have been kept in jail until his family was notified, and he had no family to notify. When they found out that he had no family, he would have had to stay in jail until the welfare people in Yuma could find a foster home for him somewhere. That could have taken forever, so he had said the hell with it and had decided to head out for Tucson.
His story was partially true, but he overestimated the solicitude of the Yuma police and welfare people. He might have been given a bed for the night, but the police would have directed him to the freight yards and told him to leave town.
“Did you eat yet?” This is the standard greeting on the road, and I was prepared to give the kid my Milky Way.
“I got me some day-olds.” He held up a sack. “I nickeled up on a bakery.”
