TAKING STOCK
James Ellroy, circa May 2001:
Call it a portrait of the author at a crossroads.
At 53, Ellroy was three-quarters of the way through an international book tour which had taken him across France, Italy, Spain and Great Britain. Ellroy was touring North America.
In September, he planned to return to Europe to kick off what he had dubbed, “the Axis Tour.”
It was an unprecedented campaign conducted by an author renowned for audacious book promotion.
It may be the biggest tour ever conducted by an established American author (if you want a parallel, you have to cast back to the 19th Century when Mark Twain went globe-trotting).
Ellroy’s extraordinary efforts were paying off:
The Cold Six Thousand, Ellroy’s largest and most ambitious novel to date, became the first of his books to crack the New York Times’ hardcover bestseller list.
Reviews were running in his favor.
Ellroy was thrilled by his new novel’s snowballing success.
However....
The public image and reputation for wild readings he had spent more than 20 years cultivating had begun to tire and trouble the author.
Like Ernest Hemingway’s Papa persona, Ellroy’s craftily conceived and constructed public image attracts fans, reporters and filmmakers (name another living author to inspire at least FIVE documentaries).
That image — susceptible to misunderstanding — at times threatens to eclipse THE ART.
Ellroy, like Hemingway, has been a shrewd and tireless self-promoter.
Like Hemingway, Ellroy was finding his cultivated celebrity cuts two ways.
The difference?
At 53, Hemingway’s best works lay behind him.
Papa was eight years from the grave and succumbing to alcoholism.
Ellroy was adamant that his best works lay ahead.
Ellroy stated his intention to live a very long time:
He works out regularly, practices yoga and is a vegetarian (he was munching on baby carrots during audience Q&A sessions and washing them down with water).
James Ellroy was determined to slip the collar of genre tags and be judged as a historical novelist, sans any noir- or crime- prefixes.
He trusted fans “who truly get it” would follow him.
His reputation seemed secure.
He could have shifted into coast mode.
Instead, Ellroy was forging ahead, experimenting with language and narrative forms contemporaries wouldn’t contemplate.
He claimed to write his books for himself and is blessed that they find an audience.
Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: James Ellroy is now writing for eternity.
Cynical cracks regarding tax write-offs aside, Ellroy’s decision to donate his original manuscripts, notes and personal papers to the University of South Carolina tacitly underscored his determination to transcend the strictures of genre.
Check out that heady company: The Ellroy papers are now archived alongside those of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joseph Heller. Those three authors are dead.
Ellroy is north of the dirt, in full creative flower.
His books are already taught in colleges.
His archived manuscripts await Ellroy’s Edmund Wilson:
The scholar who “gets it” and who, with all of those materials at his or her disposal, will elevate Ellroy criticism/analysis to the next level.
James Ellroy spoke about his career, his image and his new novel with Craig McDonald during a wide-ranging discussion held in the lobby of a posh old hotel in downtown Ann Arbor on May 29, 2001.
If spring 2001 saw an Ellroy ready to move beyond manipulative marketing (“I’m tired of myself, if you want to know the truth,” he confided. “I’m tired of the story of my mother’s murder”), it also saw an Ellroy who was very road-weary.
Ellroy increasingly remarked about the rigors of his audacious world tour to promote the new novel as his campaign ground on: “Really, frankly, when you’re on a tour like this you’re too busy staying alive. The logistics and prosaics of this kind of tour more than anything beats you down,” he confided.
Ellroy’s comments made in the following exchange proved harrowingly prescient:
Two days after this interview, he canceled the balance of his tour. A few days later he issued a statement:
“It is with great regret that I have had to cancel appearances on my U.S. book tour. I have been on the road since March 12 and the effect of this global tour finally caught up with me in Chicago on May 31. I went home and, upon visitation with my doctor, was advised to lay low for at least a few months. Those of you who know me well know it would take a doctor's orders to keep me off the road. I love meeting my readers and the booksellers who support my work, and look forward to the next opportunity to do so. In the meantime, many thanks to the people who have expressed concern and good wishes.”
By Spring, 2002, a rejuvenated Ellroy had published new essays in GQ Magazine and TV Guide. He was reportedly shopping a talk show concept to television networks, and taking an active hand in the filming of his memoir, My Dark Places in which former X-Files star David Duchovny was set to portray the author.
McDonald: This is your biggest tour?
Ellroy: Oh yeah, it’s my biggest tour by far.
McDonald: How are you holding up?
Ellroy: I’m holding up. I’m holding up.... The book’s doing great. And that thrills me. It’s all about getting a good night’s sleep. If you can sleep, you’ve got it made. If you can’t sleep, you’re fucked.
McDonald: I’ve read you have insomnia though, so how are you doing on that front?
Ellroy: No, I’m fine here. In Europe I have insomnia. Jet-lag.
McDonald: You have an international reputation and following. Why this scale of tour at this point in your career?
Ellroy: It’s a huge book. It’s a daring book. It’s the whole of the 1960s — five years of it and the great key events. There has never been a book like this about the American 1960s. It’s the centerpiece of a trilogy. This seemed to be the book to do it for. I will always do a huge tour here in the states.
McDonald: The scale of the European tour seemed unprecedented....
Ellroy: I always go over to France and Great Britain. But this time we had the opportunity to piggy-back, to play Holland, Italy and Spain, as well.
McDonald: You’re fairly well-noted for your lack of use for the Internet....
Ellroy: Right...
McDonald: ....so let me just tell you some of what has been going on at the fan level on the Internet. There has been some tussling, particularly among French and American fans. The French fans rush to lay authentic claim to you, purporting to have “discovered” you first. Fans in the U.S. are wondering, well, this is such a damned American book — why Europe first in terms of the release of the novel and the tour?
Ellroy: There is no significance to it at all.
McDonald: None?
Ellroy: None. We had the book scheduled for May (2001) here. I could either tour continuously, get it all out of the way (in the U.S.) and tour continuously in Europe — meaning France, Holland, Spain, Italy and Great Britain in one fell swoop. Or go over a bunch of times. The truth is I’m doing the Axis Tour in the fall — Japan, Germany and Sweden. That’s the only significance to it.
McDonald: It is interesting you were out promoting translations first. Is the translation ever really the book — particularly with this book? The language in this novel is very specific....
Ellroy: Right, the style is very specific. The story and plot of a book always mandate the style. I became aware of style when I was writing L.A. Confidential and had to cut it down 150 pages. The story was thematically and dramatically inviolate but too long. I started removing words. I shaved 130 pages. When I began to write White Jazz in the conversational first person style it felt flat to me. I cut and cut and cut. I saw that I had developed a style directly consistent with the character, Dave “the Enforcer” Klein, a white racist cop in 1958 L.A. whose life is burning down and who gets hooked, inexplicably, on black bebop jazz. From that point, I became aware of language and all its implications. The style of The Cold Six Thousand is a direct representation of the violence of the American 1960s — the violence of the inner and outer lives of the three main characters. It is comprised of short rather than longer sentences, and a good deal of racial invective because it is a novel of racial hatred and attempts to derail Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. The next book will be in an entirely different style. It may be a style that stresses concision. It may not be.
McDonald: If you are not reading it (Cold Six Thousand) in English I’m not sure what you’re getting.
Ellroy: My wife speaks fluent French and they say the French translation is great. The Spanish translation is supposed to be great. Ditto Italian. Dutch?… You know, who knows? We haven’t translated to German yet. The book will be out in September there.
McDonald: Do you manage — or even attempt — to write when you are touring?
Ellroy: I try to sleep. No, you can work and you can travel and you can sleep and make a few phone calls and that’s the extent of it.
McDonald: You’ve been quoted as saying The Cold Six Thousand has gone through five drafts. If one were to look at draft #1 and #5, what would stand out as the big difference?
Ellroy: You’d see how much more precise the language is. How much more stylized. The style of this book, which some critics love and some critics hate, is extremely coarse and vulgar. It’s full of racial invective. It is full of odd riffs on Yiddish, French and Spanish. It’s a direct representation of both the violence of the events that I describe and the violence of the inner and outer lives of the three main characters. I wanted a perfect ordering of words. I wanted a perfect reworking of the American idiom, and I think I achieved it with this book.
McDonald: Positive reviews seem to be running about 3 to 1 over the negative. People are finding any number of things to like about the novel. It is the voice that seems to be singled out by a lot of the critics who haven’t been very charitable to the new novel. Does that affect you at all in terms of the third volume?
Ellroy: No. Just kiss my fucking ass. No. There’s a couple of reviewers — and you’re right, it’s about 3 to 1 — the negative reviewers say the book is sloppy. Well, there’s not a word out of place in this entire book. There is not a plot thread that isn’t buttressed. There isn’t a thread of incident or circumstance or character that isn’t layered-in seamlessly. You have to develop this tack: If you don’t like my books, kiss my ass. Or you’ll write books for other people. Or you’ll write books for the critics. Or you’ll write books for a perceived readership. You know, I’ve written every book I’ve written for myself and I’ve developed a readership and that says something... (Ellroy pauses.) This book scares people.
McDonald: From sentence one.
Ellroy: Yeah, that’s it. In paragraph one, the word “nigger” is a warning.
McDonald: Preview the possible presentation of the next book — it’s hard to imagine you being more concise in terms of the language.
Ellroy: No. I’ll develop some other style. It may be a style that stresses concision. It may not be.
McDonald: I might be wrong about this, but I’ve read virtually all of the interviews you’ve given so far during this tour (laying a stack of printouts between us). It seems to me that during the promotion of American Tabloid, I didn’t see people trying to pin you down in terms of —
Ellroy: (Ellroy seizes on one of the articles at this point) See, look at this: How tall do you think I am? (Ellroy reads the lead paragraph aloud): “Jeez, the man’s a giant.” How tall do you think I am?
McDonald: Six-three.
Ellroy: On a gooood day. Six-two...Six-two-and-a-half. “Jeez, the man’s a giant. The person towering over me and shaking my hand looks nothing like the photo.” Come on...You want a giant? Shaquille O’Neal is a giant. It’s not that I’m tall, it’s that he’s short. You’re six-feet. So what?
McDonald: (Continuing). It seems like people on this tour are really trying to pin you down in terms of getting you to delineate between the fictional and nonfictional elements of the novel. Is that a fair estimate at all on my part?
Ellroy: They want to know, and I try to head them off at the pass and say the one question I never answer is what is real and what is not. What thrills people about this book is the combination of complexity, the language, the style, the scope and the ugliness of it. You are in the minds and the souls of these horrible guys who are nevertheless empathetic on some levels.
McDonald: It wouldn’t work otherwise.
Ellroy: I beg your pardon?
McDonald: The books wouldn’t work if the characters didn’t have an underlying quality of empathy or reader identification. You get the rep with some for supposedly writing about unsympathetic characters, but they aren’t that.
Ellroy: You love these guys. You’ve read the book —
McDonald: Absolutely. I’ve been a fan for more than a decade.
Ellroy: Then you love this book. When Pete Bondurant kills those guys — this is going to have to be off-the-record...well, it doesn’t have to be off-the-record — in the middle of the heart attack, you love the guy. My wife came up to me, put her hands on my shoulders and said, “Do not fuck with Pete Bondurant, or Pete Bondurant will fuck with you.” Women love Pete Bondurant.
McDonald: He’s the first person, the first character of yours I can think of who actually has a committed relationship.
Ellroy: Well, yeah. I know, I know. He doesn’t even look at other women. And he loves his cat.
McDonald: Yeah, that cat....There was one thing that did kind of bounce me out of the book once or twice — my mom’s name is Betty McDonald, so those bits about “prostie beefs”....
Ellroy: Really? Oh, my Lord. Betty McDonald was a real woman.
McDonald: Really?
Ellroy: Yeah. She used to work for Jack Ruby. She committed suicide in her cell on the exact date given in the book.
McDonald: I’ll be damned. I thought she was an invention.
Ellroy: (Smiling) Now you see how I do it.
McDonald: This current series was a trilogy from the get-go....
Ellroy: It was a trilogy from about two-thirds of the way through American Tabloid when I realized, “Oh shit, it’s three books.”
McDonald: When you were writing American Tabloid, how locked-in were you regarding the arcs of the characters that continue on through the subsequent books?
Ellroy: Everything was set up in American Tabloid from the outline stage to be continued on through The Cold Six Thousand. If you look at Littell, his Jesuit background, his liberalism, his relationship with Mr. Hoover....It’s all there. Pete Bondurant’s reflexive, yet committed anti-communism...his longing for a woman early on in the book...his sentimentality toward animals. He’s always trying to avoid hitting stray dogs...and stray ’gators, when he’s down in the Everglades.
McDonald: In between hits.
Ellroy: Yeah, in between hits. Yeah. Littell assumes the psyche, the manipulative qualities of Kemper Boyd of American Tabloid. He gets stronger and stronger and stronger throughout that book, yet there is still a bumbling quality to him. And, of course, he miscalculates egregiously as far as Mr. Hoover is concerned.
McDonald: Let's talk J. Edgar Hoover.
Ellroy: Gay Edgar Hoover? I just gave him the best lines in the fucking book. I don’t believe for one iota that J. Edgar Hoover ever had sex with man, woman or beast. I do not believe that he went in drag to the Waldorf Astoria. He was much too extreme, much too ugly to ever successfully impersonate a woman. It’s my wife’s theory that Clyde and Gay Edgar were an old Victorian gay couple that enjoyed their antiques and their rare dogs and never did the dirty dog deed. That’s the way I have portrayed him. All of J. Edgar’s sexuality, in fact all of his personality, because he only appears in telephone transcripts in this story, is sublimated into language.
McDonald: Between American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, it’s been five, six years?
Ellroy: It’s been six years. Of course, I wrote My Dark Places.
McDonald: Right, you put a hell of a memoir in the middle there, but has that — combined with the GQ articles and the TV and screen scripts — contributed to the uncharacteristically long period between novels?
Ellroy: The TV projects, with the exception of Mitch Brian’s scripting of Detour, these take up hardly any time. Film work is stuff I do for the money and I go into it with the assumption it will never be made into a movie. I’m good at it and it’s very fast for me. I do a lot of journalism and I love feature journalism. I also published the book, Crime Wave, a collection of my GQ pieces. I continue to work for GQ and I love the relationship. There will be a second book of GQ pieces, I would think between this novel and the next. Also, I like to think. It’s my biggest book, The Cold Six Thousand, and I like to think and I like to brood and I like to plot and plan. And I like to deliberate. I’ve never read this book, parenthetically, but there’s an Anthony Burgess book called The Tremor of Intent. I remember seeing a Reader’s Digest Condensed version of The Tremor of Intent and the title stuck in my head. I like to savor the tremor of intent where I think of how the next several years of my life will be eaten up by the creation of an epic novel where I will live with the characters. I’m to this day in awe of the fact that I can do what I do as well as I do it and write books on the scope that I write. I love big things. I love an epic film. I love an epic piece of music. A great symphony or concerto. A sustained work for solo piano. That I can do this...it continues to blow my mind and I savor it. What I am savoring now in the odd moments when I’m not thinking this book tour is going to kill me — and fretting over every new little dot on my arm and thinking it is a malignant melanoma and I have six months to live even though I know it is not — is the tremor of intent. My mandate now is to recreate 1968 to 1972 America. To create a new language. To live with (and I’ll tell you when we’re done who the three guys will be) the three characters who will carry the story in the next book and that takes a lot of time.
