Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 8)

The legacy of William Gay–who became an iconic Southern Gothic writer after beginning his career as a published novelist in his late 50s–is alive and well with the posthumous release of one of his last novels, The Lost Country.

Fortunately for his fans, Gay’s longtime friend, editor, and road trip buddy, Sonny Brewer of Fairhope, Alabama, is taking the new book on tour himself.

True to Gay’s memorable style, The Lost Country is classic Gothic at its best: downtrodden characters who continue to suffer defeats, blended with a show of violence and a haunting sense of sadness as they struggle for redemption.

After the publication of his prize-winning first novel, The Long Home in 1999, Gay went on to add Provinces of Night, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, Wittgenstein’s Lolita, and Twilight to his list of successes–after spending the previous four decades as a construction worker, house painter, factory worker, and TV salesman. He died of an apparent heart attack in 2012.

Sonny Brewer

Brewer, who wrote the foreword to The Lost Country, has spent much of his career in the roles of publisher and/or editor for a newspaper and a number of magazines and other publications, including the Eastern Shore Quarterly, The Southern Bard, and the Red Bluff Review.

His the author of four novels: The Poet of Tolstoy Park, A Sound Like Thunder, Cormac, and The Widow and the Tree. He also edited the widely known Blue Moon Café anthology series.

Tell me about your relationship with William Gay and how this book tour came about.

The publisher asked me if I would tour with this book and I said yes. The main reason for the request, I think, is because I was editor-in-chief at MacAdam-Cage Publishing at the time of William’s death, and the book was under contract there. A big search found only some 250 handwritten pages from the manuscript (which had been lost). I read those pages and had to deliver the disappointing news to the publisher that about half the book was missing.

So, my early involvement with the manuscript was part of why I was asked to help the book on the road. The other part was my friendship with the author. I write about how I met William in the foreword included in The Lost Country, so I’ll leave that bit for readers who get the book.

William Gay

But, I’ll say that I was instantly drawn to him in a way that had little to do with his writing, or his looming celebrity. He was a good man. Unassuming, honest, self-effacing, funny, intelligent, generous, and on and on. What was remarkable to me was how strongly and deeply he conveyed those qualities at a glance. It’s sort of like the old saw about judging the qualities of a man from the shoes he wears–which is inaccurate, but not ridiculous. Our faces and our eyes tell the story of who we are. And William was a good story.

Why was The Lost Country said to have been “anticipated for a decade”?

William first spoke publicly of the novel’s existence long before its release here in 2018. He read from its pages at literary conferences and at bookstores. But the whole manuscript was missing, and there’s a suggestion that he simply couldn’t remember where he’d put it for safekeeping. I can believe that because I recently failed to find a screenplay I had written. I had my sister looking and a friend looking. We never found the original. But a movie producer friend has a copy on his computer. I was too embarrassed to ask him for a long time.

Gay’s writings are noted for their trademark elements that make up true Southern Gothic writings, including mostly rural and often eccentric characters whose lives are trapped in poverty, crime, violence, and hopelessness. What, in your opinion, draws readers to Southern Gothic literature?

I was recently asked why I thought 125 readers bought Fifty Shades of Gray, and I said it must be good, on some level.

I think you want to know on what level are Southern Gothic stories and novels found to be a good read, and I would say for those readers they find settings, situations, circumstances, events, and characters that stir in them emotions of fear and love, of empathy and wonder, of curiosity, and find in the whole of their reading experience a common bond of humanity that wobbles along between the ditches of a highway taking us all someplace, to the same place of truth. And the company of these others, like us, that we find in these books helps to fend off loneliness.

In The Lost Country, set in rural Tennessee in 1955, main character Billy Edgewater seems to be a magnet for attracting troubles and aligning himself with the wrong people, as if his own bad decisions are not enough to add to his despair. It seems that Gay had a a gift for creating harsh stories yet offering them in a beautifully literary form. How would you describe his work, and his writing style?

I was a used bookseller, owned a store in Fairhope called Over the Transom Books, and I had some volumes that were collectible and pricey. When I found a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird worth several thousand dollars at a yard sale, a colleague in Florida told me there’s a distinction among antiquarian booksellers between scarce and rare. A scarce book comes along once in a few years. A rare book like the one I’d lucked up on comes along once in a lifetime. William Gay’s literary talent, his work, and his writing style, and, indeed, the kind of man he was, is like that. Rare.

Tell me about Gay’s personality, what motivated him, how he became so interested in the Southern Gothic genre, etc.

William told me about a middle school English teacher who “saw something” in him and handed him a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. It was not a homework assignment. There would be no test. The book was a gift. And, by grace, something in that book plumbed the depths of his soul and discovered there a gift in him.

He told me that he read twice, before he turned 14, that 544-page book. Had he found in Eugene Gant a version of himself? Had William found in Wolfe’s dense prose writing that he believed he wanted to imitate? I don’t know. We didn’t talk about that. But William, it was apparent, did fall in love with words, their rhythm, their cadence, their flow, and had from reading an experience that electrified him and drove him to an addiction for the masterworks of Southern writers. And when he set his own pen to paper he became able to match them word for word in power and beauty.

I read to William a paragraph from his novel The Long Home and asked him about how long it took him to compose those sentences that staggered me when I first read them. He told me only as long as it took for him to write them down longhand because he had already crafted that paragraph and others during an eight-hour day hanging Sheetrock. How he didn’t cut off a finger with a hawkbill knife, I don’t know. William also said he could do that because he had a photographic memory. Which gift he also employed in the recall of long passages from his favorite books and that he could quote word-for-word. William Gay was called to be a writer, pure and simple. And, pretty as a song, he answered.

Are there other “lost” stories or novels by William Gay that are in the works for publication?

William’s home was robbed and vandalized while he was out of town doing a reading someplace. He told me his music CDs and his movie DVDs were slung out the back door and down the hill behind his place. He told me a box of his writing was stolen, and it included a completed novel manuscript on the bloody days of the Natchez Trace.

I asked him did he think we’d someday get it back as a posthumously published novel. He said no. He told me that he didn’t write sequentially, and some times forgot to number loose pages. He might write a scene from the end of a book at the beginning of a manuscript, for instance. “Nobody could put it together but me,” he said. Plus, the thief could be easier named if it comes out of hiding. I expect, too, however, there could be clemency granted the perpetrator if fans of William Gay had verdicts to cast.

Gay’s talent as a writer has been compared to that of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy. Why is that, and do you believe that is an accurate assessment of Gay’s work?

I don’t like questions about comparisons between William’s writings and these three authors. It’s not unfair to ask. But the answer is readily available to those who read the books of Faulkner, and O’Connor, and McCarthy, and William Gay, or, at least from such reading an answer is personally well-formulated. Anyone who hasn’t read these writers does not care what I have to say. Nor, in fact, do those who have enjoyed the work of these masters.

Anything I didn’t ask that you’d like to include?

It should be said, for the record, how William was utterly devoted to his kids. Laura, and Lee, and Chris and William, Jr. drew a damn fine daddy.

Sonny Brewer will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, July 10, at 5:00 to sign and discuss The Lost Country by William Gay.

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 27)

A native of Macon, political historian Joseph Crespino has enjoyed a successful career as a writer whose books help to explain and interpret some of the most pivotal times and people of the American South, especially within the context of politics.

His most recent work, Atticus Finch, the Biography: Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon, gives a thought-provoking case for the mostly understood assumption that the character of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman is, indeed, her father, A.C. Lee.

Crespino ties up the details most readers have only speculated on about the Finch-Lee comparisons, and examines the truths about the real man, A.C.

A professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, Crespino went on to earn a master’s degree from the University of Mississippi and a doctorate from Stanford University.

His other books include the political biography Strom Thurmond’s America and In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevoultion, which earned the nonfiction prize given by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, among other awards.

He talks about his Mississippi heritage.

Joe Crespino

“I’m from Noxubee County, where my mother’s side of the family has lived since the 1830s. My dad was from the Delta–he grew up in Benoit–and my parents met at Ole Miss, where my dad played on some of the best of Johnny Vaught’s legendary teams before going on to play in the NFL for eight seasons. My parents moved to Macon after my dad retired, and that’s where I was born and grew up.

“After graduating from college, I taught at Gentry High School in Indianola for two years as part of the Mississippi Teacher Corps and earned my master’s degree in secondary school education as part of that program. My wife, Caroline Herring Crespino, is from Canton.

Describe the character Atticus Finch in your own words.

Atticus Finch is a fictional character that should be understood in the full context of Harper Lee’s creative efforts–not merely as the upright, civic-minded figure who vigorously defends a wrongly accused black man in the 1930s, but also as a character in the 1950s South who is embittered over the changes being demanded by the modern civil rights movement. Exclusive sources that I gained access to in writing this book make clear that Harper Lee always imagined these two seemingly contradictory figures as different aspects of the same character, seen at different times, and through different lenses.

Summarize the real A.C. Lee for us, based only on his writing and actions.

Like Atticus Finch, A.C. Lee was a lawyer and state legislator from a small town in south Alabama. Unlike Atticus, A.C. was also the co-owner and editor of a small-town newspaper, the Monroe Journal, for nearly 18 years. I’ve read every one of the editorials he wrote over those years, and, through them, I’ve reconstructed A.C. Lee’s political worldview. Clearly, he was the inspiration both for the idealistic figure in To Kill a Mockingbird as well as the reactionary figure in Go Set a Watchman.

In your opinion, was A.C. Lee typical of the “educated” white Southern Christians of the time, torn between doing what he knows is right and trying to survive in a racist society?

Well, first off, A.C. Lee wasn’t well-educated, at least not in terms of formal schooling. He was born in 1880, and the highest grade he ever completed was eighth grade, although he was Lincoln-esque in his habits of reading and self-education.

Second, the typical white Southern Christian of the time was not “torn” in the way you describe–and neither was A.C. Lee–so, in that sense, he was typical. Lee had no trouble surviving in the racist society because he was white. I found no evidence that he had any doubts about the rightness of his racist, paternalistic view of blacks. That’s not to say that Lee wasn’t a moral person in many respects, but it’s wrong to assume that white Southern Christians of an earlier era had some moral sensibility in regard to race that they couldn’t act on without threatening their standing in society. It makes it sound like they were among the victims of the Jim Crow South, when, in fact, they were the chief defenders of it. One way A.C. Lee wasn’t typical was as a Christian. He was much more devout and sincere than any of the typical Christians I know, and count me among those typical Christians. He was a pillar of the Methodist Church in Monroeville. But, as was the case with all but a tiny minority of white Christians of his era, his religious faith was in no way in tension with his racial views. One of the most poignant stories in the book is how in the early 1950s, as chairman of the pastoral relations committee of the Monroeville Methodist Church, Lee engineered the ouster of a  young minister, Ray Whatley, who spoke too frankly about racial issues. Whatley was reassigned to a pulpit in Montgomery, right before the black community there started a boycott to protest segregation on city buses. Whatley volunteered to serve as president of the local Council on Human Relations. His vice-president was a young black minister new to town himself whose name was Martin Luther King Jr.

Harper’s two books, Mockingbird and Watchman, seem to show two different sides of Atticus Finch. Was this only  her attempt to show two different sides of the South at that time?

I don’t think that she was explicitly trying to show two different sides of the South, so much as she was struggling to try to reconcile them in her own mind. It seems to me that if she had really wanted to show that other side of Atticus, then she would have come back to Go Set a Watchman and tried to make that novel work in a more successful way. Why she never did that in the 1960s, or 70s, or 80s after the incredible success of Mockingbird, and when so much political and racial struggle was still taking place, is a fascinating question. I offer some thoughts in the epilogue of the book as to why that might have been.

In a 1964 radio interview, Harper Lee discusses why she thinks the South has produced so many great writers: Western European heritage, agrarian society, etc. Do you see any correlation between this and the racism that she writes about?

Yes. In Go Set a Watchman, the character of Uncle Jack expresses lots of hoary ideas about the ethnic homogeneity of the white South as key to its distinctiveness. There’s no reason to think that Harper Lee’s views on the subject were the same as Uncle Jack’s, but clearly, she knew all those old arguments, and I suspect that, like Jean Louise in Watchman, she was trying to figure out whether there was anything to them, or whether it was all just a bunch of bunk.

It has been reported that Mockingbird is a “highly revised version”of Watchman. What is your opinion?

It’s incorrect. Documents from the files of Lee’s publisher, HarperCollins, make this clear. Harper finished a draft of Go Set a Watchman and her agent shopped it around to various New York publishers. White he did that, she started writing a new novel that used the same characters, but moved the drama back some 20 years in time to the 1930s. She and her agent discussed how she could write a bridge that could connect these separate pieces, a reference that Lee’s representatives have taken to suggest that she has plans at one point for a trilogy.

The documentary record is quite murky on that point, but what is clear is that she always imagined Watchman and Mockingbird as distinct novels that connected as part of a larger narrative arc in the lives of these characters.

What drew your special interest in Harper Lee, Mockingbird, and Atticus Finch?

Many different things. One is that I grew up in a small Southern town like the one that Harper Lee was from. Another is that for a significant part of my life, I wanted to be Atticus Finch; a lot of earnest, well-intentioned white boys like myself, who were also naïve  and misguided, have chased that ghost for many decades now.

But in the last year or two, I came back to Harper Lee’s fiction because I think it has resonance for our own political moment. Harper Lee wrote her two books in the late 1950s South, at a time when right-wing, demagogic politicians–many of whom were nobodies, or political jokes in Southern politics only a few years earlier–won tremendous political power by appealing to the most base instincts of voters. I think her struggles in writing the character of Atticus Finch were part of her struggle to make sense of her father’s own conservative political heritage at a time when the conservatives had been overrun by right-wing reactionaries. Why didn’t folks like her father stand up for their principles when it really mattered?

Are you now working on a new book or other writing project?

I have at leas two other books in mind at this point. One is a history of Atlanta during the five or six years after Martin Luther King Jr. Moved back to his hometown from Montgomery. I imagine it as a book about prophets, and hometowns and unwelcomeness.

I also want to write a history of racial violence in Noxubee County, my home county.

Joe Crespino will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, June 6, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Atticus Finch: The Biography.