Finding the Lost Country

Excerpt from Finding the Lost Country: The Life of William Gay

As children William and his little brother had a path through the woods from their house to their grandparents’ home. As they walked between the two houses, William would make up stories and tell them to Cody. He had a fascination with Westerns and would tell Cody stories about the adventures of the Cowboy Kid. When they got to their grandparents’ house they would come through the back door into the long narrow kitchen, enthralled by the myriad smells of the kitchen, the coffee and cloves and cinnamon, the heavy fruity odor of basketed apples and the faintly sour smell of dried peaches and other odors, rich and dark and mysterious. It was the odor of time itself, of days the old couple had stacked into years as carefully as a mason lays one stone atop another.

Their grandmother claimed Cherokee blood and William studied her and had no reason to doubt it. The thin gray hair pulled tightly into a bun behind her head had once been as black as shoe polish, her eyes fiercely alive, her tiny body barely containing the energy that animated her every waking moment. With her leathery face and beaked nose she looked less like an Indian woman than some old chief, the repository of the summed knowledge of all his forebearers had passed on by the flickering light of council fires. (p. 32 PN)

By the time William was in second grade his two brothers had been born, Cody had been born in 1943 and then Bradley in 1946. The schoolhouse was a simple one-room affair. It didn’t have electricity or running water and had two outhouses by the creek. The schoolhouse served all the families living on Grinder Creek Road. There were sixteen students in the one room with little more than the desks and a wood-burning heater. The schoolteacher knew all the kids and had helped to deliver many of them, including William. They were learning how to read and write and that was about it. The rest of the time they could play outside. They didn’t have school buses; all the kids walked to school. William lived just down the creek from the schoolhouse, so it was an easy matter walking to school.

While they were at school, if a wagon drove by, all the kids would run to the window and watch. It was the only show in town and all the kids would stand at the window and stare and wonder who it was and speculate about what they were up to. There was a girl in class named Berlene and when she didn’t know a word in her schoolbook she would ask William. Once she pointed to the word “smoke” and William, in a mischievous mood, told her it was the word “monkey”. Later that day the teacher asked Berlene to read from her book and she talked about the monkeys coming out of the chimney.

Because William was such a dedicated reader, they let him use the library before he got to high school. He had a special feeling in the library. On one visit the librarian gave him an old beat-up copy of Huck Finn that had the cover torn off. The library was discarding it and she gave it to William. It was the first book he loved so much he rationed the pages when he was nearing the end, allowing himself ten pages a day. The book thrilled and amazed him. It was as if he was there with Jim and Huck on the sunrimpled Mississippi. He could almost smell the hot torpor of the river and see the country sliding past, until he was hopelessly snared by Twain, forced to seek out the book in surreptitious moments during the day. He was enthralled by the wild humor of Pap’s drunken monologues, the doings of the Duke and the King’s Royal Nonesuch, the moment of revelation when Huck says,
Alright, I’ll go to hell then.

In later years he felt like the book falls off toward the end once Tom Sawyer shows up, but it’s still a great book. Hemingway said that all American writing came from Huckleberry Finn. Even as an adult he saw no reason to dispute that. (p. 200-201 SFTA)

He also found an old copy of Tarzan of the Apes. These were some of his first books and he treasured them and read them over and over. He would read anything he could get his hands on. It didn’t matter if it was a comic book, a magazine or a book. In the fourth grade he got a cheap paperback copy of a used dictionary. He started reading on the first page and immediately loved it. He sat up at night reading it page after page, A to Z, until he had read the whole thing and then started over again, memorizing words that he didn’t know but somehow knew that he wanted to use. He would spend his lunch money buying books at the local drugstore where they had a revolving rack of paperbacks. He was reading all the popular writers who showed up there like Earle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, Nero Wolfe and Ross Macdonald, along with Zane Grey.

At school William stayed to himself. The teachers hardly knew he was there, he wasn’t disruptive and didn’t play sports. His love of reading was apparent to his teachers. In the seventh grade he had a teacher named William Johnson who realized that he had a special talent and started working with him. Mr. Johnson could see William beginning to blossom. Mr. Johnson had a literary side, and he began to show William some of the books that he would fall in love with. He was a patient, dedicated teacher who inspired William and opened doors for him.

William got so inspired after Mr. Johnson gave him a copy of Look Homeward, Angel that he went to the local drugstore and got a three-ring binder filled with lined pages. At home the family had no interest in pens or paper, but William found an old refillable fountain pen. It had a lever on the side that, when you put the point of the pen in an inkwell and lifted the lever it drew ink up into the bladder in the pen and you could write until you emptied the bladder and had to return to the inkwell. The only problem was he had no ink and no place to find any.

There were walnut trees growing by the side of the creek in front of the house and he took the hulls of the walnut and soaked them until the water took up a dark brown stain. He sieved the dark stained water through a cloth and found it made a good substitute for ink. He loaded the pen and posed it at the top of the first blank page and wrote the word, Novel, below that he wrote East of the Sun, West of the Moon. It gave him a great sense of satisfaction as he watched the words form on the page. He wrote,
In a scant few minutes a column of smoke lifted from the butte to the north. The blue smoke rose slowly in the warm air and hung motionless. Then another small cloud arose following the last. For a moment he was struck dumb. Then he turned and stared at his partner. His voice shook slightly as he spoke, ‘Do you know what that means? Apache!’ (Unpublished, William Gay Archive)

He continued writing the adventures of the Cowboy Kid that he had been telling his brother Cody on their walks. He eventually filled the notebook on one side of the page. When he got to the end, he turned it over and wrote on the back side of the paper and filled those pages until every page was filled. It was a habit he maintained for the rest of his life, filling one notebook after another on both sides of the page. It took him a couple of years to fill the notebook and he put a date at the end, 1956. He cherished that old notebook and carried it with him through all the moves he made and had it in his papers when he died.

Growing up in rural Tennessee knowing he was going to be a writer, he was especially interested in authors who were chronicling the American South. Caldwell and some of the others seemed to be writing about shoddy caricatures devised solely to titillate and sell books.

He came upon Faulkner in his early teens. Someone who recognized William’s love of reading had given him a bag of paperbacks, most of which had lurid covers that enticed you inside. There was a copy of Sanctuary in the bottom of the bag with the cover depicting a young woman, presumably Temple Drake, sprawled backward on a pile of hay. Her clothes partially ripped open and a man looming in the foreground, his back to the reader’s eyes. His intentions seem clear. William could see that the genius of these books was that, while people read them for the sex scenes promised by the covers, reading them actually gave them an education in literature. The ghosts of Anse Bundren and the other characters in Faulkner’s novels gave him the template and became like echoes that showed up in the work of many of the writers he was reading, and later in his own. The wry comments and ironic humor of storekeepers and country doctors that Faulkner seems to have invented and patented was immediately recognizable, William knew people who talked and acted like the characters in Faulkner’s books. (p. 210-2 SFTA)

William could see that if Faulkner was able to create this panoramic vision of his little postage stamp of earth, that he could do the same with the area where he was growing up. Faulkner had named his county Yoknapatawpha and its county seat Jefferson, which was his stand-in for Oxford, Mississippi. Stories Faulkner told about the residents of Yoknapatawpha took on the quality of myth, where real events are turned to legend by the alchemy of their constant retelling. The characters were able to take the world as it is and accept it on its own terms with a stoic bemusement. Misfortune and ill luck are recounted with an almost bland equanimity. Fate is treated with a kind of rueful acceptance. (p. 213 SFTA)

This resonated with William. It was exactly the way he felt about life, or at least the way he wanted to feel about life, and the way he trained himself to feel. He felt like when the tab is added up for the outrage and folly of most lives, the sum will be enormous. It is indeed hard to pay the toll, impossible, and that impossibility was simply the circumstances of his life and, now that he knew it, he wanted nothing more than to express it in his writing.

It was only when he started reading Faulkner that he found a depiction of country people who seemed as real as the neighbors and family members he was growing up around. Faulkner never stooped to characterize them, Faulkner’s characters felt like actual people. They were like the people around him, he felt like he had known people like them, heard their voices. Though Faulkner wrote at times about depraved people doing depraved things, he never denied his characters their basic humanity. He wasn’t condescending to them, and he always allowed them whatever modicum of dignity they were entitled to. His humor and compassion were always in evidence, and it set the bar for William. (p. 207-208 SFTA)

When he read As I Lay Dying he thought it was Faulkner’s most perfect novel. He read every word of every one of Faulkner’s books. He was enthralled with The Sound and the Fury, but he read As I Lay Dying over and over and would return to it every year, rereading it for the mythic sweep of the story and the sheer beauty of the language. William recognized moments in Faulkner when his rhetoric evokes Shakespeare, or Homer, or the Old Testament. And yet he managed to do it without his narrators ever stepping out of character as they spoke or thought in letter-perfect dialogue that is always true to who they are.

He was most happy when he was in the barn loft by himself, writing in a notebook. Other times he would go out in the fields around the house and just sit and read a book. There was a place he liked where the woods ended abruptly, and the fields began. He could sit under the thick viny undergrowth awash with bird-song, feeling lazy in the sun. He marveled at how new grass shades the rolling slopes with the palest of green. He watched blackbirds burnished by the noon sun gleaming like silvered contrivances. He worked on his first stories for a long time. He recognized that the writing wasn’t any good, but something told him that he would have to do a lot of bad writing before he could do any good writing. Even then he started out using his own brand of punctuation. He quickly came to the conclusion that writers should be allowed no exclamation points, three semi-colons, no quotation marks, and very few commas for a lifetime. He wrote and wrote and wanted nothing else but to sit and write.