You can ask a few questions if you want to.
If you have any questions that any of you
didn't get a chance to ask questions during the day.
I'm curious on how you [INAUDIBLE]
characters for that novel.
Did you meet people in Las Vegas that--
No, to tell the truth, I was only there two days.
I only met one retired showgirl, who
was raising peacocks out in the desert.
And I think that gave me the idea for the whole novel,
the notion that someone who had spent all her life wearing
these feathers was raising peacocks.
It really seemed wonderful to me.
[LAUGHS]
She was very evangelical.
She was a born again showgirl who--
[LAUGHING]
--held regular baptisms in her swimming pool.
And I don't know.
It just hit me right.
And I didn't meet anybody, really, basically.
I go to bed at 9 o'clock every night normally.
Nothing starts in Las Vegas by that hour.
So I really just wandered around during the day
for a couple of days.
But I did meet the one showgirl and I saw her
with her peacocks.
I didn't get to read any of the stuff
about Harmony and the peacocks, but there's
a lot of it in there.
Just lucky.
You get good accidents and bad.
Yeah.
Yeah, how do you feel about [INAUDIBLE] books
that you've written?
Well, I enjoyed writing this book.
As I said as a preliminary, I've been
writing books for several years that I haven't particularly
enjoyed writing.
I mean, they may have some interest,
but they bore me when I'm writing them.
This book didn't.
It's a matter of switching into a voice that you really like,
I think, and that's refreshing to you.
And Harmony just was for me.
I don't know how I'll feel about it two years from now or even
six months from now.
But when I did it, it immediately felt right,
and I knew I wasn't going to write a screenplay.
I knew I was going to write a novel.
And I really wrote it very rapidly.
Mm-hmm?
How easy is it [INAUDIBLE]?
Not easy.
Very difficult, very difficult. You have to be very persistent.
Is it out yet?
No, this will be out in about May or June.
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, I felt right away that, if I
couldn't create these characters in the screenplay form--
because the screenplay form has a lot of serious limitations.
It's very difficult. And what I proposed to the studio
was that they let me do a sort of novel, what
might be called a treatment.
But in fact, it wasn't even a treatment.
A treatment is a sort of extended synopsis.
And I really wanted to write the characters.
So I wrote the characters, wrote it as a novel,
offered it to the studio.
Turns out what they really wanted was "9 to 5
goes to the Flamingo" or something like that.
[LAUGHING]
So they were appalled by this because it was basically,
in their terms, a very depressing story
about this aging woman getting fired
and being replaced by her daughter.
So there was never any serious consideration
of it being a movie once I figured out that I wanted it
to be about Harmony and Pepper.
But I started with the option of doing it as a screenplay
and just immediately abandoned it.
I mean, within a sentence, I was gone.
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, you can't internalize as easily.
I mean, this is mostly a kind of internal external monologue
in the voice of Harmony.
I didn't read you any of Pepper.
How the novel is actually laid out
is in interlock-- is in alternating
sections, one in Harmony's point of view
and the next one in Pepper's point of view,
and one in Harmony's point of view
and the next one in Pepper's point of view.
And they are describing what's happening
as they go through their day, but they're also
very internalized so that reflections and moods
and feelings about boyfriends, present and past and upcoming,
all are mixed in.
You can't do that easily in a screenplay.
You have to make separate shots for each of those things,
and you have to distinguish between what has happened
and what might happen and what's inside and what's outside.
I just couldn't do it.
I could reduce this novel now to a script.
It would be a very reductive act.
It wouldn't represent the novel very fully.
I could make a dramatic adaptation of it,
which would at least deal with the conflict between Pepper
and Harmony.
And it wouldn't make a bad movie.
It would make it very uncommercial movie.
So it probably won't happen.
How do you feel about [INAUDIBLE]
That's the fun part.
I've always thought that's really the most fun part of--
really, the fun part of writing is getting the names
and fitting the names to the characters.
And sometimes you change around, but I think this time I really
didn't.
I don't think I changed a single name.
I just went right to it.
If you respond to a milieu like Las Vegas--
I didn't hear those names.
I don't remember hearing any of those names
while I was in Las Vegas.
I get names in a lot of different ways.
Sometimes I get-- I'll go to the library,
and I'll just take one name off one book and another name
off another book and keep on doing that until I
get names that fit together.
But this time I didn't do it.
I just made the names up.
[INAUDIBLE] Mm-hmm?
[INAUDIBLE]
Probably be a bookseller.
[LAUGHING]
I don't think it will cease to be fun altogether,
but it definitely-- like any profession
that you practice for a long time,
you will feel different ways about it
at different stages of your life.
If you teach for 20 years or if you run a company for 20 years
or if you plow for 20 years, you're
not going to feel exactly the same about it 20 years down
the road as you did when you plowed
your first burrow, probably.
Mm-hmm?
I just read your book now.
[INAUDIBLE] And I wondered how [INAUDIBLE]
No.
Those essays are all essays that deal in one way or another
with Texas.
And about four or five of--
I think five, if I remember correctly--
were commissioned essays.
That is, I would be sent to an--
there's an essay about an old fiddlers convention,
and I was just asked to go to the old fiddlers convention
and write about it.
There was an essay about the Astrodome.
There's an essay about the movie Hud, and three or four others
that I was just asked to go and write about just for magazine.
I did that.
I mean, I wrote about five essays.
In the process, during the years those essays were written,
I had written three novel--
Horseman, Pass By, Leaving Cheyenne, The Last Picture
Show, which dealt, essentially, with my rural and small town
experience in Texas.
But by the time I finished, I had
been living in the city for 10 years or more.
and I wanted to look, in a discursive way,
at the same body of material that I
had looked at --treated already in an imaginative way
in the novels.
So I decided to do a book.
And I filled in about four essays
that I wrote specifically for that book
and strung them together in some sort of reasonably consistent
pattern about Texas.
That's how it came about.
[INAUDIBLE]
No, I can't say that I enjoyed writing that at all.
I find writing nonfiction very much different ball
game from writing fiction.
Writing fiction, for me, is a semi-conscious activity,
which can't really be called intellectual.
Something like this--
I'm not thinking about anything.
I'm really simply attempting to visualize Harmony
and Pepper and Myrtle and Jessie and Gary
and what they're doing.
It's an intense kind of visualization.
Meanwhile, my fingers are typing,
but I'm not paying any attention to the sentences that
are typing.
I'm paying attention to trying to get the picture in my head
as sharp as possible.
That's an emotional, mental activity, I guess.
But to write an essay, which you have
to put logical sentences one after the other,
is a very different thing.
And I wrote this at a place of 10 pages a day,
and I can barely write two pages a day.
It takes me twice as long about two pages of an essay every day
than it would to write 10 pages of this.
For one thing, I'm not allowed the liberty
of being out of myself.
And the great joy of writing fiction
is that it allows you to make up things.
It's not that you're using your own experience very much.
It's that you're literally making up things,
and it's like an actor escaping into a role, in. a way.
You're allowed to escape into the various characters
that you create.
In an essay, that doesn't pertain.
In an essay, it's you in your own head
and making up sentences that make sense
and that actually say something about whatever subject
you've undertaken in the essay.
That's a lot harder.
[INAUDIBLE]
Read the three novels.
That's pretty well pretty well-covered.
I just grew up in a small town in west Texas,
a very small town, the one that was
used as a location in The Last Picture Show,
if you happened to see it.
And my basic experiences this happened in the '50s, when,
definitely, the movement was away
from the land and the small town,
and the cities were sucking people in.
And therefore, traditions that were agrarian, soil traditions,
were basically being replaced with urban traditions.
And I was interested in that transition
because it's a transition which produces
a lot of interesting conflicts in families,
in people, people of different ages, between generations,
and et cetera--
difference between rural and urban.
More or less, that's why.
[INAUDIBLE]
I'm afraid absolutely nothing, absolutely none.
[LAUGHING]
It's not the first time that comment has been made to me.
I don't say that to scorn the comment because three
other people have-- three other scholars
have said the very same thing.
And I didn't know about The Fisher King at that time.
But if I, in any way, used that method,
it was extremely subliminally, because, again,
The Last Picture Show was a quickly written book.
It was written in about five weeks in one summer.
Again, it was a case of switching off
a very long book, the book that eventually became Moving On,
baffled by that book and stumped by it
and realizing that it wasn't going right,
although I'd done four drafts of it,
I switched off to this little rather simplistic book
and wrote it quickly without thinking about it at all.
I don't even remember.
That would have been in '63 or '64.
Whether I had been reading Frazer recently,
I don't recall.
I'm sure I wasn't conscious of it.
It doesn't mean that the connection isn't there.
Yes, I had a very interesting discussion
with a theologian who read the book in terms of the Trinity,
and I've forgotten the whole argument,
but it was interesting.
When I looked at it, I could sort of see it,
but I certainly didn't think of it at the time.