Bell: Then you published several other books in the meantime. Why did Death of the Fox take so long to write?

Garrett: Partly because I was doing all these other things at the same time. I worked in Hollywood. All kind of teaching and publishing, all kinds of other stuff. And I just never knew enough to be able to do it. I didn't know what I was looking for. And during the period that I was trying to write that book there was the great explosion of Elizabethan scholarship. As fast as I would think I was reading everything I should know, fifty more books would come out.

There was a point when I could have just given up on the book and spent the rest of my life trying to keep up with all the books that were being done about the subject. It was virtually impossible to know enough to feel at ease writing about past time. I finally just kind of gave out. I was locked into it by that time. That was going to be it. I just had to go and write it.

Bell: You ended up knowing a hell of a lot. Were you trying to research particular topics or gobbling up everything?

Garrett: It was more like gobbling up everything because I didn't know what I was looking for. I read as many lives of Ralegh as I could, but that was just the beginning. The other kind of research would follow a topic for a while and that would lead to something else. Trying to know enough to do it, handling truckloads of notes, kind of got in my way. It may have been that they were so disorganized. Maybe it would have been different if computers were around. So, anyway I found I couldn't really do it that way. I would look up all the notes I had on castles or something . . . .

Garrett.- . . . drive me crazy and I wouldn't get any writing done. So, I changed the model of the book from term paper to test. Which are the only two models we have when we come out of college: you write a paper or a test. So I changed it over to test and then I just closed the trunk and wrote it off the top of my head.

Now here is the bad part. The down side is, just like with any other test you cram for, that you forget. Two weeks after Death of the Fox was published I couldn't remember Ralegh's middle name if he had one, let alone any details. So when I came to do The Succession, which had been planned, I didn't know what it was going to be like but I thought it would be real easy because I knew everything. I opened up the blank sheet of paper and I didn't know anything! And I had to start over and do the same thing, exactly, back to square one.

Bell.- The Ralegh in Death of the Fox, is that a portrait of the real Ralegh, do you think, or an invention, or both?

Garrett.- It has got to be a little of both and it has got to be somewhat distorted. Even unintentionally distorted. Things are in there because I remembered them at a particular time. Right? In other words, it partakes of the peculiar urgency of memory.

Bell: You never cheated at all?

Bell: Yet it seems to be completely exhaustive in the way that it reads.

Garrett: I don't know what real experts on Ralegh would think. There were a few notices that said, 'Wonder why he didn't mention his ten-year obsession with so-and-so…. Either I had never heard of it or I had forgotten it. That didn't worry me so much as long as I got the basic outline of his life. And it was a slight cheat to have him in the process of remembering as I am trying to remember. To put the whole story at the end of his life so he is allowed to forget aspects of his own career.

Bell: It's a twenty-four-hour novel covering at least a hundred years of history. How did you arrive at the strategy of treating periods of his life in terms of profession?

Garrett: I was trying to figure out a way to deal with his life, historically, and when he was on the scaffold he said this: 'I have been a soldier, a courtier, and a sea-faring man. And the temptations of the least of these are able to overthrow a good mind and a good man.' So I thought, 'Terrific. I will just treat him in those capacities.'

Sometimes you make a choice that is almost totally whimsical, but you are grasping for some kind of frame and then if it seems to work you will live with it. It is not inevitable at all.

Bell: One of the things in both of the books is a sharp analysis of political behavior. What do you think, was their political life like ours or not?

Bell: There is a lot of detail, especially in The Succession, about ordinary people, rather than historical personalities. Do you think you ended up know what the basic life of the time was like?

Garrett: No, I'm not sure that I did. What one ends up with in a work of fiction of that kind, ideally, is a capacity to imagine living at that time with the elements which you have been given,

Bell: Living as yourself?

Garrett: That is about the most that you can figure. The deeper I got into it the more alien it seemed. I never really got around that. I still think that is the main impact.

Bell: They weren't much like us, then.

Garrett: No. That then began to be one of the points to make in Death of the Fox and more strongly in The Succession. The more you knew about them the odder they appeared, by our standards. Then it get really quite startling if you realize that it hasn't been all that long ago--human beings have changed that much in such a short time. They can't even perceive the world in the same way.

Bell: Does this sort of discovery cause you to believe in progress?

Garrett: No.

Bell: What about progress of intellect and sensibility, evolution of that kind? Do you think it exists at all?

Garrett.- I have my doubts. Are you thinking of whether people are more intelligent or knowledgeable? They know different things. Certainly I don't think they are any better. That would be an outrageous argument for someone living in the twentieth century to make. But I am thinking one of the characteristics of the twentieth century is how often and how successfully we lie to ourselves. Just the other day I was listening to one of these pontificators--one of these guys with the deep voice on National Public Radio. Always has the perfectly rounded thing, like a little sonnet, about whatever the issue is. So the pontificator said, 'We have come to value human life; it has more meaning than it might have had in earlier centuries.' Oh yeah? How many people were killed, eighty million total in World War II?

We value human life so much in the United States that we go to enormous lengths to let people off for murder, rape, arson, pillage, and looting, but the main statistical aim of all traffic control is to keep the number of deaths down to fifty thousand a year. If I told you that that was my goal in life: to hold down that number of deaths to fifty thousand a year, you would probably have the right to say that I was bullshitting you when I was talking about how you must preserve human life at all costs. It seems to me that we are much more duplicitous intellectually than anybody in our recent history, and that we deceive ourselves in millions of ways.

Another small example. Think about this as to whether it represents intellectual progress. Elizabeth could forbid discussion of certain topics. The topic of her succession was illegal to discuss in public. During particularly the last ten years of her life when it was a very important issue. Now, we are very proud of our complete freedom of discussion. Up to a point this is true. When, about two years ago, there was some serious debate about what our strategy should be in the event of a nuclear war, it was suggested quite seriously by a large number of publications run by some of the great liberal minds of America that we shouldn't be talking about this because it would lead people to think about a subject which is unthinkable. Their argument was that if you think about the unthinkable, it becomes more thinkable; and it is more likely to happen. Therefore, so that those dumb-dumbs out there won't start thinking about nuclear war, best we should never bring it up.

Okay. What's the difference? A serious argument could be made, and indeed was made in 1978 in the Harvard Commencement speech by Solzhenitsyn, which had people throwing beer cans at him (and brickbats, in the press). What he said very simply was that it is wonderful to be in a place where there is no State censorship. It would be even more wonderful if there wasn't such a mindset that prevented any new idea from ever surfacing. One of the great tragedies of a free society is when they use self-censorship to such an extent that they might as well have state censorship. There are any number of things that have become unthinkable to discuss. You would be instantly thrown out the room. And what is the difference between that and the Queen saying, 'Goddammit, nobody talk about the succession. They will probably kill me off if they keep talking about it.'

Who can deny some technological progress? But the Elizabethans did at least weigh the consequences of the technological progress they had available to them. There are cases where they changed their mind about something they were going to do because of the dangers involved.

Bell: In terms of making an advance in sophistication?

Garrett: Yes. Old people in America, who were here when the very first automobiles appeared, have said that if they had ever imagined the filth and danger these damned machines would bring into their lives, they would have stamped them out then and there and we would be running around on horses. Now that to us is unthinkable--that someone could stamp out technological progress-- but of course the Elizabethans did.

Bell: You mentioned cases?

Bell: In the light of everything you've been saying, what is the meaning of history any more? What do you get from it, if it is not really progressive?

Garrett: If it is not progressive, it is not so much the meaning of it as the value of it that's in question. There are two sorts of possible notions about it. One of them would be that it is especially significant that things haven't changed that much; there is no particular movement in history-- how people handled their problems in the past is much more relevant than we might have imagined. To approach it not as an inferior form of modern life but as a separate and distinct culture. When we approach the Elizabethans or the Romans or anybody else in the past, it should make the past very different for us, and much more pertinent. At least it changes the perspective for us so that we have different things to learn from it than how they were so stupid they couldn't invent television.

One of our assumptions about progress seems to be that each generation accumulates more knowledge than the past generation. That we are like giants-- we are standing on the shoulders of the last generation like cheerleaders on top of a pyramid. The only problem with that is it seems that we forget as much at the other end as we are learning at this end. The sum total of knowledge does not increase, which is one of the things which makes it so difficult for us ever to have enough information to properly imagine the past.

Garrett: Well, that of course was always going to be the big problem. By the second time around I knew that was going to be the major problem. The first time I stumbled over it and didn't try to deal with it. It would have been fun to do a totally antiquarian, exact thing, except it would have taken me thirty years to learn enough about the way they used language to be at ease with it and then it wouldn't have meant anything to anybody else who hadn't spent thirty years the same way. So I did something somewhat similar to what I described as the use of the facts of the past. I crammed my head for a long time, without trying to get specific, with phrases and things, reading all different kinds of Elizabethan prose, until I got whipped up like in a Waring Blender. I tried to get the rhythmical sense and then I kind of reduced it into a modern equivalent. I wanted a language that was a little strange, that was clearly not the English that we hear, but wasn't incomprehensible. I didn't want to move in the direction of Bergman in The Silence. The uses of incomprehensibility-I didn't want that.

Bell: I've noticed in letters and things and in longhand draft of The Succession that you write on those long yellow pads and in very big letters, about six lines to a legal-sized sheet. Have you always done that?

Garrett: No, not always. At certain points I tried to cram as much as I could on a page. I got interested in writing really really small because I noticed that the manuscripts I saw by Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, etc., were tiny, tiny and got a lot on a page. And I thought that is what you had to do to be a good writer. Practically putting scripture on the head of a pin. But once I started writing big it just got bigger and bigger. When I was doing Death of the Fox there was a woman here in Charlottesville, and from all over the country I would send her the manuscripts in longhand. She would type it and I would work from the typed version. Susan typed the final version. But for the first draft I wanted to make sure that she didn't miss anything in my handwriting, so I wrote large for her to be able to read it very easily-- these huge packages of yellow pads. I think it filled her garage.

Bell: Do you have that stuff any more?

Garrett: No. She said, 'What shall I do with it?' one day. I said, 'Burn it.'

Bell: How many drafts of Death of the Fox go through?

Garrett: I don't know. I honestly don't. I didn't keep track. I didn't say this is draft number one, this is draft number two. Everything was kind of ongoing at the same time. But I would be doing new stuff while I was revising old stuff. Sometimes I lost sections that I revised and would have to do it over again.

Bell: Is that story true about finding the same scene done twice from different points of view when you reread the two thousand final pages?

Garrett: I think that really happened. But I don't remember which one it is. The weirdest thing of that kind that ever happened to me was losing a short story. I thought I could make something else out of the same material, wrote the story again and then the first story was found. And comparing them, there were only about five words different. There was no intent to rewrite the first story. So the concentration at that point was like hypnosis.

Bell: That's amazing. How many drafts did the first three novels go through?

Garrett: It's hard, because of the way I was working, to really call something a draft. I wrote The Finished Man in Rome when I was over there in 1958. And what I would do is every day start out at the beginning and rework up to as far as I had gone and then write some new stuff.

Bell: That's what you'd do in the morning?

Garrett: Yes.

Bell: So, when you get halfway through, it gets to be a long morning.

Garrett: It does. It's kind of silly. I finally figured that out after doing it. But I read that Hemingway did it, so I thought that it must be the way to do it. But the effect of it is that the first few chapters get revised daily, whereas for the last part, by the time you get there, however much revision you do, you are actually doing one draft.

Bell: Starting into the first novel, did you have particular influences? Did you see yourself in relation to the Agrarians or the Fugitives or Southern Renascence writers at all?

Garrett: Not really, but I had certainly read them-- and had read an awful lot of Faulkner. I was trying not to do something that sounded like everything they did, but inevitably some of my concerns were the same concerns.

Bell: What about Faulkner as an influence?

Garrett: I went the opposite direction from some I know. Example:  Reynolds Price says somewhere that he is almost completely unfamiliar with Faulkner. Very early he read one book or something and decided he didn't want to read any more because he just didn't want to be influenced. I did the opposite; I read it all. I think you have to do one or the other. I wanted to use the things he had taught us but I didn't want to sound like him, to pick the rhythms and the words and the tropes and devices. In the best sense, there are ways to use the influence and work better. That's what I wanted to do, and whether it was always successful or not I don't know.

Bell: The Finished Man is a political novel, and I'm wondering how you'd compare Southern politics with the politics of Elizabethan England.

Garrett: In Southern politics failure didn't cost you your life then either, but there weren't too many second chances. As late as the forties and early fifties, you get aced in Southern politics and you are finished. Except, strangely enough, for Claude Pepper, who's the model for the Senator in that novel. He was one of the leading Democratic Senators, very likely would have been Vice President instead of Lyndon Johnson. Instead he got beaten out of the Senate by his own protege. The book is modelled closely enough on the Pepper/Smathers race that most of the papers down Southeast reviewed it with pictures of them and discussed it in that way.

Anyway, Claude Pepper survived all of this. A few years went by and he found himself-- he is now a major national figure again: Claude Pepper the Congressman, now eighty-some years old, leading the aged people of America. They don't even remember Claude Pepper the Senator.

There is a story that goes with this. Susan and I both worked for Jack Kennedy, years and years ago. My job was to try to talk writers into voting for Kennedy. And I must tell you that I made endless phone calls and many famous writers of my generation (I can remember their names and I hope they're reading this interview) said, 'Kennedy and Nixon, Kennedy and Nixon-- two of a kind, I'm not voting!' Later, many of these same guys were very passionate about marching against the Vietnam War. But after they made that statement I didn't take their judgement about Vietnam or anything else very seriously. I thought they were assholes and that their knowledge of politics was zero, and I am not progressively oriented enough to think that they acquired more knowledge as they went along.

Anyway, very shortly after Kennedy's election, I was invited to a Kennedy party and got introduced to one of his hotshot guys as somebody from Florida. This guy said, 'Tell me how we can win over and get next to the Democrats in Florida. We didn't do well there in the election.' Pepper had come into Congress that same election, so I told him, 'Go talk to Claude Pepper. He's a winner.' And the guy said, 'I would like to talk to Claude Pepper but he's embarrassingly New Frontier.' Now, that stunned me, because it was my first experience ever of someone saying, 'He's embarrassingly on our side, so we don't want to talk to him.' And it suddenly dawned on me that their feeling about the voter was like my feeling about beautiful scornful women. Any woman that liked me, something was wrong with her. And beautiful scornful women I wanted to seduce in the worst way. The Kennedy people constantly tried to win over-people that didn't like them. And they had contempt for anybody who thought they were worth a shit. All you had to do was work hard for them to get on their shit list. So they seemed to me to be a joke, in the end.

Bell: There's an episode in that book where the judge provokes a public beating, and gets himself badly hurt, so he can turn it to political account when he finally gets out of the hospital. I have always wondered if there was any truth in that.

Garrett: There is a basis of reality in that, though it did not involve a public beating. My father and his law partner got up at a big Fourth of July picnic where speeches were being made and said that the two of them would defend free of charge anybody who resisted the Klan in any way. Kill them, whatever. And they very shortly had cases and so on. They did in fact run the Klan out of Central Florida and they were in great danger of being killed.

Bell: On the spot. The theatricality of that, putting your life on the line to make the play work properly, was something Ralegh might have done.

Garrett: I think so. The Elizabethans have that sort of thing in common with the Southerners. It's a showboat way to take on the enemy, to really hit them right out there in the open. Something might have happened, but if it didn't happen right then, they were safe. As the only people who could possibly kill them were Klan people, and in those days you died for doing shit like that, it sort of was a shield of protection to do it- so publicly. By doing it quietly they might have easily have been burnt out or killed.

Bell: In the first couple of novels, did you feel like you needed to work for the market at all?

Garrett: I didn't know what the market was. I had no idea what any of this was. I wanted The Finished Man to be kind of a straight novel. I wanted to learn how to do one. The way it got published at all in America was because the English had already accepted it. Scribners had rejected that novel. When they looked at the first hundred pages they said I didn't understand what a novel was like. I did nice short stories, but I had to understand that a novel had a beginning, a middle and an end to it, and my story as outlined didn't.

When Eyre and Spottiswoode took the book then Scribners wanted it also, and I added one thing to their manuscript that wasn't in Spottiswoode's. It took about five minutes. Three pages of manuscript-- you'll see it in the book, if you open it up: Roman numeral I, BEGINNING (and a little epigraph); about midway through, 11, MIDDLE; and in front of the last twenty pages, III, END. When they accepted it they said that I certainly had improved it a whole hell of a lot and had profited from their criticism. But rejection is my middle name-- we could clutter up this whole interview with rejection stories.

Bell: Wasn't it in England that some publisher refused to believe you had written Which Ones are the Enemy?

Garrett: There was a furious letter, I wish I had it, saying that I was generous to a fault, but this was probably somebody else's novel, who I was trying to help out. A cousin or something. They were outraged. But I wondered what they thought-- if I were doing it for someone else, what was in it for all of us.

Anyway, some other English publisher did that one. The very first time I was ever in London, we got off the plane in the morning and the hotel room was not going to be ready until later in the afternoon; so we just kind of wandered around town. We didn't know where we were even. We were walking through an arcade and they had the first big bookshop that I saw in all of England. In the arcade and out in front they have several huge barrels. Unlike our little remainder things, they just dumped dead books in a barrel. A guy came out of the bookstore in like an undershirt wheeling a wheelbarrow full of Which Ones Are the Enemy and dumped them in the barrel. You could get them for a dime apiece or something. Welcome to England, asshole!

Bell: Did you write that in the same way as The Finished Man?

Garrett: Which Ones Are the Enemy was an experiment in consistent voice. It is the only book I have ever written that was puffed up. Originally it was written on the advice of a friend with a possibility to get it published as a novella. We were back from Rome, in late 1959, didn't have any money. I would do anything for a hundred dollars. The short novel possibility was five hundred bucks or something, that was a lot of money. So I wrote it and then the series was cancelled by whatever publisher was doing it and I was stuck with a sixty-page novella. Susan had had a new baby and all the children got mumps or something so she was sick and I stayed home for about a week, changing diapers on two babies, and in between I was sitting in the kitchen figuring out ways to take this novella and pump it into a novel.

Bell: How long did that take?

Garrett: Time doesn't mean anything, but I couldn't possibly have worked on that book for more than about two weeks or so.

Bell: Did it make a difference to the tone of it, or to what happened?

Garrett: I think a lot. Obviously, the more pressure there is on your time-- you don't feel free enough to write something that would be so experimental that you doubt it could get published. It never occurred to me to try to make it difficult.

Bell: It's an alarmingly consistent voice. I've wondered how the idea came to you to write an entire novel in the voice of someone who seems such an evil bastard.

Garrett: I never thought of this guy as an evil bastard. That's just a rhetorical device. I was fascinated by the habits of a first-person narrator who really has to make a case for himself because he's got a lot to be embarrassed about. You have to compare what he did and what happened with the way he told about it. And he, in fact, didn't do anything that bad at all, he just liked to describe it as a horrendously awful thing. This guy conceals his virtue behind a screen of vices. It was a variation on the unreliable narrator. You can't take his opinion as being wholly accurate.

Bell: That novel is set in Trieste but is contemporary with the Korean War. Doesn't the title come out of some Korean War episode?

Garrett: That's a real story. These guys had all been in Korea, which was true of most of the people in Trieste. The reason I was in Trieste was they thought I had been in Korea, because of my serial number. All a complicated thing.

A guy in our outfit, who had been in Korea among the very first American troops, said that his outfit was up there fighting-- dug in-- and here came hundreds of Koreans, who waved and in effect communicated, 'We are here to help.' And it was really a great relief because they were hard pressed. They dug in all around him and then just before sunset they popped out of their foxholes and all began shooting the Americans. 'Christ, it's the wrong ones . . . .'

Bell: I asked you about Southern writers influencing you, always a tiresome question, so now I will ask the same thing about war novelists.

Garrett: At the time I was in the military, you couldn't get around the influence of James Jones, because everybody in the United States Army, starting in 1952, read From Here to Eternity. It didn't change either their attitude or what they did, but they did it referentially, in terms of From Here to Eternity. They would say, 'Boy, you are going to get the From Here to Eternity treatment. We are going to kick your ass just like they did Prewitt.' So it became a literary allusion even as they did it.

Bell: You've written a lot about war, both in Which Ones are the Enemy and in the historical novels. Do you have any general notions about it at all?

Garrett: I have never been in a real war. The only thing that I can claim that I share with people who have been in sustained combat is having been shot at. I know what that's like. You do get the idea that they're trying to kill you.

My own feeling is, first thing, that it is enormously appealing. Even if you have had some experience of it. I suspect that if I had been in the First World War and done a year or two in the trenches I would feel differently. Otherwise, I think the greatest thing said about it was Robert E. Lee's remark: 'It is well that war is so terrible, else we should love it too much.' People love the excitement of being at risk and the pleasure of killing other people.

Bell: Why do you think that is?

Garrett: I don't know-- it comes with the animal, I think.

Bell: Walker Percy might call it the reptile brain at work.

Garrett: Maybe so. It's like denying original sin to deny that that pleasure and that excitement are clearly in the world. There must be fifty separate wars going on right this minute while we're talking.

Bell: It seems to me that your third novel, Do, Lord, Remember Me, the oral quality becomes much stronger; the voice begins to take it over and is impossible to ignore. And the multiple viewpoints come into it. In structure it looks forward to this historical novels more than the others do. Any reason for that?

Garrett: Well, you're right about that, I guess. One difference from the earlier books was that some of the pressures on me to write more conventionally did not exist. With Do, Lord, Remember Me I had no desire to make it simple. I had a job. So therefore I was liberated to try stuff I wanted to do. The version that was printed represented half of that book. Fifty percent of it was cut out. I was under contract to Little, Brown, and I sent in this novel and didn't hear from them for a long time. And back it came two days before Christmas, 1963, with a very short letter that said, 'Goodbye, we don't need this. We find this novel to be scabrous and orotund.' I will never forget the term, 'scabrous and orotund.' I had to get a dictionary to find out if that was good or not. That was Alan D. Williams, and at some point he said, 'Don't give up. Some day you will make a dent in the American consciousness.' Ever since then I have seen it as a fender, this huge fender, the American consciousness.

Doubleday then took Do, Lord on a one-shot basis. They wanted it shorter and I cut it. It was one of those stories with two separate plots that come together and the easiest way to cut was to take one of them out. The one I took out was comic, much more comic than the book that exists now. The long version would have been better.

Bell: Death of the Fox and The Succession were also cut in half, weren't they?

Garrett: More or less, yes.

Bell: By you or by the publisher?

Garrett: By me. They had suggestions, some of which I took, some of which I didn't. They didn't demand anything except that it should come in at a certain page count.

Bell: Would the long versions of those books have been better?

Garrett: I don't know. Maybe they would not have held up at the length they were written. There was a lot that was eminently terrible.

Bell: It looks like, especially once you started working on the long novels, that you must have been working on a lot of different things at once. Does it happen, when a novel won't work or becomes frustrating, that you switch off and work on stories or poems?

Garrett: Oh yeah. That's also a sort of safety valve, working on several things. There are a lot of things that don't work for me. But the older I get, the less I want to allow them not to work. I want to find a way. Way back, if something didn't work right away, I just threw it out as if it was a dumb idea, and went on to something else. So I was very spendthrift at that time, but those things resurface anyway. You forget all about them, but they come back in another form. But that's true-- if you're working on enough different things there is always something you can do. It allows you to escape the total blank page, and total silence, though both of those may be very attractive.

Bell: What about writer's block? Do you have any sentiments about that? Have you ever had it?

Bell: What other kinds of elements were in that book, besides the poison pen letters?

Garrett: What Life with Kim Novak Is Hell was supposed to have been was ten chapters, each of them written under the influence of a fiftymilligram Desbutal tablet. The narrator, John Towne, had ten Desbutals and he took one every other day.

Bell: You were working on that and Death of the Fox at the same time?

Garrett: Yeah, very close together.

Bell: What was the relationship between these two things? They seem so far apart.

Garrett: That's complicated. Doing the Towne stuff was always like dessert, amusement. You didn't have to think about it too much.

Bell: There were a lot of speed freak novels.

Garrett: There were. Some were published and there were tremendous ones I read by people that weren't published. Speed freak novels were all over the place.

I had most of the vices-- amphetamines was just one of them. Not so terribly long ago I had this dream: I was in a pirate crew, the classic pirate crew, with patches over their eyes, with bandannas, all looking like John Ford Noonan. And we were digging and digging at a beach and we dug up a treasure chest and we opened it. Instead of having a lot of gold and jewels in it, all it had was Dexamil, millions of Dexamil pills. Just these wonderful green spansules of Dexamil. And the pirates were all really pissed off and were going to dump it out and leave. But it was like the greatest treasure I had ever found-- it would be a lifetime supply. I didn't want to let them know that I valued this, but I wanted to say, 'Well, if you guys don't want it, if you don't mind, I can find a use for these pills.' At the end of the dream, I think, because I woke up kind of happy, they had gone off and left me this whole chest full of millions of Dexamils.

As I say, during that time and other times, I guess I was a victim of most of the vices. I drank a lot-- that's still kind of a problem, once I really get going. I used to smoke a lot. Three packs a day-- I was never seen without a cigarette. And generally I appear to have tried to commit suicide on about four fronts. Slow, the hard way.

Bell: Are there any procedural differences in the way you work on different kinds of things: stories, poems, long ten-year novels, shorter two-or-three-year novels?

Garrett: The only thing I can say is that nothing has been very much alike. Even the historical novels are significantly different, I think. Therefore, all I learn from doing a book when I finish it is how I should have done it in the first place. It doesn't carry over to the next book. The next book is different. So, I'm always looking for new procedures. Each time it's a new situation. The things that are carried over are slighter and of less significance than the new problems, the things which I have never encountered before.

Bell: What is the first thing you began to write, poetry or fiction?

Garrett: Poems. Back in the early forties, high school and college. I got a lot of readings when I was still in college, which was kind of a new thing. But it didn't even occur to me to try to publish that stuff. My first exposure was reading out loud to an audience, and I did that for quite a little while before getting anything published. That was always the primary basis of everything-- the oral. And that makes for a different kind of poem, in a way.

Early on, in some kind of collegiate contest, Marianne Moore was one of the judges, and she got to be a friend. That was in her reclusive stage. She was asked to introduce a younger poet that she liked the work of at the Museum of Modern Art, and since she didn't know anybody else, she introduced me. In those days, I thought that was perfectly natural: of course I would be taken to the Museum of Modern Art and introduced by Marianne Moore. I went on the fumes of that a long time. It was much later, four or five years, that I ever thought about publishing anything.

Bell: So you were just reading, not even sending a poem out to a magazine?

Garrett: I published some in the Nassau Lit, that was really important to me. I knew so little that when those things appeared I would swagger around thinking I was world famous.

I didn't worry so much about how things looked on the page because I was working with sound. The poems were out of sync with what everybody else was doing at that time because they were mostly writing a formal verse. They were writing stuff to be read on the page and a characteristic of the poetry of that kind, with Lowell and a lot of the rest of them, was the difficulty of discerning what the poem was supposed to be about. What was the action of poem, what was the situation. Part of the game of that poetry was the discovery: 'Oh, this is a poem about tennis!' That didn't interest me at all. When you are reading out loud to an audience, and they are not reading the text and pondering over it, the one thing they have got to know is the situation and the event. If you are getting a response directly on the spot from an audience, then you are perfectly willing to throw away the front of the poem in order to get where you are going to go. In effect, the unit becomes the whole poem, rather than the flashy lines. It also moves more towards punch-line; it's built a little like a joke. It builds as a narrative can build. Lyric exalted feeling has nowhere special to go.

Bell: Charles Israel says that he draws parallels between your poetry and the work of Ralegh and the Elizabethan poets. Is there any merit in that suggestion?

Garrett: I would be delighted if there was. I certainly did read a lot of it. I had my little book of the metaphysical poets-- I carried it around the way George Barker carries A Shropshire Lad. Then it was a relief to come to Ralegh-- he had a lot of the same moves that Donne did, but you didn't have to be a master of the old science to understand it, there weren't all those highly intellectual allusions. Lately it has been as a result of writing about the Elizabethan period that I have come to like the sixteenth century poets more, and understand them.

Garrett: I can give you some of it.

And this is my eternal plea,

To him that made Heaven, Earth, and Sea,

Seeing my flesh must die so soon,

And want a head to dine next noon,

Just at the stroke when my veins start and spread

Set on my soul an everlasting head.

And then a throwaway ending:

Then I am ready like a palmer fit,

To tread those blest paths which before I writ.

The most vivid physical description of a beheading I know of, very realistic, with that bravado…. Those fast moves. If you make fast moves in tone, quick cuts, you are also using a variety of languages. Right within those eight lines there are several levels, moving from the colloquial to the rhetorical to the grandiose and back down. That interested me a whole lot.

Okay, the standard thing being done when I started, and there are still people around doing it, was done most effectively by, say, Richard Wilbur. He was a poet I admired enormously but didn't see anything much in common with. His method was mostly development of one tone, one voice. His only gags or games were more intellectual. He loved puns, sort of functional puns that you hear a lot at the ends of his poems as he wrapped them up. They were quite beautiful, which you can't be in the way that I'm talking about. You can have a beautiful line. But you can't have a beautiful poem if you are going to jump around in language.

The prevailing mode of the time was the poem as finished object, more like a piece of sculpture-- you walk around it. The poems that I was trying to write were meant to give the impression (it's equally artificial) of spontaneously happening now. The poem is making itself up even as you are doing it. The two presuppositions are utterly different, in what you are aiming for. And you can miss very badly with the wrong cut or shift of tone, you can blow the whole poem.

The characteristic poetry of the period was poetry built around the line as unit. And in the poem I'm talking about, the poem that's working itself out, to have a finished line would go completely against the grain of what you are pretending is happening. So nothing falls into place until you get to the end. The lines tend to tumble and tend to be unfinished.

Bell: Is it reasonable to say that the formal poems you wrote earlier and the seemingly looser ones that come later are both constructed--

Garrett., --on the same theory. The same theoretical thing is behind them, whether they are formal or loose.

Bell: Was there any reason for your shifting from a high style a comparatively colloquial voice in the verse?

Garrett: Looking back now, the clearest line that I can see has to do with the relationship of the prose and the poetry. That is, when I was writing short stories or quasi-realistic novels about the army and politics and stuff, I was writing rather formal, old-fashioned sorts of verse. When I started working on these long novels, working with a language which, while I hope it isn't stilted, is certainly removed from colloquial day-to-day English, the verse got loose. To satisfy my own need to be in touch with my own language at the time that I am living, I wrote more and more of what you might call casual and colloquial verse. It also happened to be, unfortunately, opposite from what everyone else was doing at any given time. I have never been in sync (I would gladly be in sync if I could) with whatever movements were going on.

Bell: What do you think of these movements and things?

Garrett: What's bad about it is that each group pretends that none of the others exist. The careerists at the moment seem to have closed their minds to everything except what they are doing- moneychangers in the temple.

Bell: Why is that?

 Garrett.- Well, there's one practical fact: it is worthwhile now for the first time in the twentieth century to be a careerist in poetry, because there are a few rewards, for the few, which are significant. Teaching jobs and grants and prizes and so forth. Until this present generation of poets, poetry had not been anything but a means toward downward mobility. There wasn't anything in it for anybody.

Okay, there are rewards, but not much; there aren't enough jobs or grants to take care of all the poets. So there is a temptation to belong to a group which has some power and prestige and is able to reward you. And there is a temptation to close one's eyes to anything outside of that. I do know, for example, that it makes my friend and esteemed colleague Charles Wright extremely nervous to either hear about or talk about poets he doesn't know. He doesn't want to hear that there are unknown poets in Texas right now. I remember Jim Dickey categorically asserting that there couldn't be life in outer space, but what he had in mind was that he didn't want there to be any poets out there. Right now, writing stuff he didn't know about. It's sort of like a small trough with a lot of pigs trying to get up there, and it makes these people nervous, it takes their concentration away, to have in the back of their minds that right this minute, at desks all over America, poets they never heard of are writing in styles they don't know how to use. That's enough to really throw the old writer's block on a lot of people.

Bell: You've done a lot of editing over the years, the Transatlantic Review, the Contemporary Poetry Series for North Carolina, and so forth. Did you ever feel like you were looking for anything in particular, certain styles, or whatever?

Garrett: No. Ideally, I would want to claim I was an open and eclectic editor. But that claim tells you that I wanted to appear to myself that way, so therefore I would probably not have been as receptive as I might to a good piece of fashionable work.

Bell: You've taught at a lot of different schools and there must be hundreds of publishing writers who've had you as a teacher at one time or another. Do you think writing can be taught?

My approach to this is rather like that of my late uncle Jack, the golf pro, who was supposed to be one of the great golf teachers. He was one of the first guys in the history of golf to get holistic about it. He didn't know the word, but he suddenly realized that all this discussion--'this is the grip, and this is the stance'--was working against the experience of hitting the golf ball. So instead he took people out with a bucket of balls and just had them start hitting that ball. He wouldn't give them much advice at all because what he was trying to find out was what their natural body inclinations were. Basically, all you are then is a critic, you are not imposing a system.

I picked up a class right after a very arbitrary, directive teacher had left, who had told them, 'The following things are in a short story and should be in your short story. And I will not read stories on the following subjects.... We worked as kind of a nice one-two team: when I came in I said, 'Anything is a short story, let's see what you got.' And then worked in terms of what they did. And that is my whole method, such as it is. So you don't end up saying that you taught anybody. You responded to somebody-- they taught themselves. And for writers, maybe that's the best way.

When we first started the Transatlantic Review we solicited work, not in the way it's usually solicited: 'We'd love to see some poems by you with the hope of publishing them.' My pitch was, 'We are going to publish anything you send us.' Out of that I got off-beat stuff, some very good things that the writers liked, but their fans and other editors maybe didn't, stuff they felt pretty strongly about. Only one or two writers in that whole period of the magazine sent me a bummer. Real bad, junk. And we published it.

Bell: To their everlasting shame.

Bell: Do you have any favorite thing out of all the work you've done?

Garrett: No. I always pretend to prefer the latest.

Bell: What are you up to now, or will you discuss it?

Garrett: Not too much. One more historical book which is a short (I hope), spare book concerning the murder of Christopher Marlowe.

Bell: The Succession was supposed to be short too, right?

 Garrett: Right. There's no way I can do something like that again-- I'd be dead, right? This one is going to be different to the extent that I'm going to be without my greatest prop. It's so spare in planning that there's going to be minimal detail about the texture of Elizabethan life. Almost just the people and just the action. So it has to sort of exist in the context of the other two books. It's kind of the underside, without the immediate contrast of the rulers and managers of the nation. My original supposition was, 'What if Raymond Chandler wrote about the murder of Christopher Marlowe? Well, it isn't going to be quite like that.

Bell: Looking over the record, your career has seemed to run in cycles of publication and recognition. Several books a year at the beginning, and you won the Prix de Rome. Then nearly a decade without much happening. Then Death of the Fox makes the best-seller list. Another decade of virtual silence, and now you've got four or five new books out, with The Succession, maybe, in the lead. The wheel of fortune has made a couple of complete revolutions in your case, it would seem. What do you think of the literary life?

Garrett: It's a mug's game, as Eliot called it. That part, that's not very satisfactory. Why I thought it would be immune from the general scriptural description of life on this earth I don't know. I imagined that by writing I would somehow be immune from the normal course of things, which leads inevitably to contempt for the mundane. So the literary life is, of course, rich with disappointments. It's disappointing that I allow myself to be disappointed.

Bell.- Ralegh might not have agreed with that.

Garrett.- No, I think not either. Except, when he came out of the courtroom the day before he died, having been sentenced to death again in Westminster, a cousin of his saw that he was being very witty with a lot of the people, with jokes and burs of laughter. The cousin said it was very unseemly for a guy just condemned to death of be cracking jokes, and Ralegh, punning at the time, said, 'Indulge me a little, I shall be grave enough at the sad parting.'

Lack of recognition does affect what you do. And you find yourself desiring trashy things. The hideous irony is that you box yourself in a position where if you get what you've been waiting for, it turns out to be a nice platter of trash.

Bell: Did you ever wish you had not done this, and instead had made your career as a Marine fighter pilot or something of the sort?

Garrett: I really liked certain aspects of the army life, and I thought for a while that I might just do that. I was a master sergeant at the end of it. I looked around and there were some master sergeants that had a pleasant life. But I'd probably be very dead by this time. I didn't know the Vietnam War was coming.

Bell: With all the irritations and frustrations that come with being a fulltime professional writer, do you still think it's worth it?

Garrett: Nobody chooses. There's a poem by David Slavitt, 'The Calf and the Ox,' based on a fable of Avianus, where a frisky little calf is standing by the fence and laughing at this big dumb ox, yoked and pulling a heavy plough. In his cheerful amusement the calf doesn't see 'the farmer who carries a glittering butcher knife/ and a light halter, coming toward the calf.' And then the last line of the poem, the old-fashioned moral, is, 'Nobody gets to choose which yoke to wear.' And I know that's true.