(first published in Chronicles, June 1998)

For a good many years George Garrett has been known at colleges and conferences, and indeed almost anywhere writers and readers may meet, as one of the great natural storytellers of all time. He draws crowds and holds them easily, making any audience laugh or groan at will and apparently with only the slightest effort. He's sometimes a rambling talker, but however desultory they may seem, his tales always pull together in the end. Master of a ready and sometimes dangerous tongue, Garrett remains as light on his feet as the welterweight boxer he was long ago. That public personality is at once forthright and beguiling, yet probably not sufficient to explain the depth and diversity of his work.

This interview took place on September 18 and 19, 1985, at Garrett's house in Charlottesville, not far from the University of Virginia, where he is now the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing. It is a sizeable stone house, rented, with most of the available wall space covered with hastily erected brick-and-board bookcases. Not quite settled yet, Garrett and his wife Susan joked about how they were still living like graduate students, after thirty-odd years of an extremely peripatetic career.

"Here we are back in Charlottesville, after twenty years," Garrett told me when I arrived. "My driveway is directly behind the house that I lived in when I was here before, and the backyard of that house has this absolutely marvelous studio that Susan and an architect put together. Shows you can't get too comfortable when things go wrong.... It was wonderful; it had a steambath and huge closets and space.... The only place I ever had that had a space for every book that I owned, and we still had empty bookshelves for expansion. Underneath the bookshelves were spring-action shelves for manuscripts. It was just a marvelous thing, and I was gone out of here while the new paint smell was still on the place."

Garrett, who'd been an Associate Professor at UVA in the sixties, parted company with the institution over the question of his unfinished Ph.D. from Princeton, preferring to use his time to work on his first historical novel instead. "Okay" he says now, almost twenty years later, I do get the Ph.D., and what is it awarded for? What the Princeton University faculty decides constitutes a dissertation: the historical novel, DEATH OF THE FOX. Then you're here to do the interview and the Ph.D. itself arrives in the mailing tube there. I can't even read it, because it's in Latin. So if you're into ironies, which is by and large like being into foreplay, they are sure there. And I get a little lesson in humility every day when I wake up to that marvelous studio, now owned by a psychiatrist, who keeps patients in there."

Madison Smartt Bell: I always get mixed up trying to count but it seems to me that An Evening Performance is your twenty-first book. There's novels, story collections, poetry collections, plays, one biography . . . . It seems that the best thing to do would be to try to approach it by genre. I just read an essay by Monroe Spears which says that the two historical novels, Death of the Fox and The Succession, take the form of the novel as far as it possibly can be taken, along with Ulysses and a couple of others he mentions. It looks that those two are going be fairly well established. I wanted to ask first how you got started on the period?

George Garrett: I got started at Princeton doing a Junior Paper. I was working on the poetry of Sir Walter Ralegh. And at that time there was a fairly new text out in paperback by a woman named Agnes Latham. In the introduction, she got me really interested in him as a person. She pointed out that there hadn't been a biography of him for many, many years. I said, 'Oh good, that is something I can do. I will be the one to do that.'

I didn't realize it, but by the time it gets into the introduction of a paperback, anyone who is going to be doing it is doing it already. But in a vague way I started reading about Ralegh, keeping little notes, thinking I would do a biography. I continued to do this until I went in the service where it was no longer possible, but I didn't really forget about it. Came back, and by that time there were plenty of biographies on the market and there have been ever since.