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Thomas McGuane’s fiction projects a volatile, highly personalized mixture of power, vulnerability, and humor. His first three novels—The Sporting Club (1969), The Bushwhacked Piano (1971), and Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973)—while never achieving mass-market appeal, earned McGuane considerable critical attention: Bushwhacked won the Rosenthal Award, Ninety-Two was nominated for the National Book Award, and all three works were widely and favorably reviewed. In addition to his novels, McGuane has also written screenplays: The Missouri BreaksRancho DeluxeNinety-Two in the ShadeTom Horn. During the mid-seventies, McGuane’s tempestuous personal life—drinking, some drugs, two divorces—won him the nickname of “Captain Berserko.” From this tempest, McGuane produced his fourth novel, Panama (1978), his most surreal and nakedly autobiographical work to date. Panama’s Chester Pomeroy is an exhausted, artistically depleted, emotionally wrecked rock musician who resolves to come clean with himself and the world, to work, for the first time, “without a net.” The critical response to Panama was overwhelmingly negative, not merely lacerating the novel, but also attacking the promising young novelist for having “gone Hollywood.” Although McGuane continued to believe Panama his best work, he was troubled by the vehemence of the criticism and his next novel did not appear for five years. Both Nobody’s Angel (1983) and his latest novel, Something to Be Desired (1985), reveal changes in McGuane’s craft; less rambunctious in their humor, with more subtle textures of characterization and a tighter control of language, these last two works indicate an attempt at a quieter, more evocative kind of verbal power.

Since the mid-seventies, McGuane and his wife, Laurie, have lived just outside Livingston, Montana, where their ranch has been a focal point for a burgeoning artistic community—people like William Hjorstberg, Peter Fonda, and the late Richard Brautigan have made this western town into an enclave of diverse talents. The McGuanes’ is a working ranch, and they are justifiably proud of their spread, where they raise and train cutting horses, some to be sold for ranch work, the best to be used in rodeo competition. Tall, muscular, rugged, McGuane has been the Montana cutting horse champion three years in a row, and, at forty-six, exudes a powerful physical presence. He is the kind of man who knows how to do things, who studies how things work, who can talk with equal assurance and knowledge about guns, horses, books, boats, and hot peppers from Sonora. As he took us on a tour of his ranch and we talked about water problems, fishing, and his fiction, we got a sense of McGuane’s approach to things: When you find something you want to do, whether it’s learning to tie casting flies or writing a novel, you work at it systematically. That you’d want to do it well, that you’d be willing to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to that end, goes without saying. As we sat together over coffee with the busy, cheerful household buzzing around us, McGuane seemed a man at peace, emerged hale and whole from a difficult time of personal and professional upheaval. It was to this period of turmoil that we addressed our first question.

 

INTERVIEWER

Has the personal storm really passed?

THOMAS McGUANE

The storm has passed in the sense that my steering linkage has been restored. A storm system is still in effect, though, and in fact if it weren’t I’d want to change my life because you can get to a point where the risk factor has been overregulated. That’s an alarming condition for me, a ghastly thing. 

INTERVIEWER

Without going into all the particulars, could you talk a bit about what you feel, in retrospect, was going on in the mid-seventies—the period of stumbling down the yellow line, when you were known as “Captain Berserko”? 

McGUANE

During the early part of that time I had been successful in creating for myself a sheltered situation in which to function in this very narrow way I felt I wanted to function, which was to be a literary person who was not bothered very much by the outside world. My twenties were entirely taken up with literature. Entirely. My nickname during that period was “the White Knight,” which suggests a certain level of overkill in my judgment of those around me.

INTERVIEWER

What sorts of things had led you to develop this white-knight image?

McGUANE

Fear of failure. I was afflicted with whatever it takes to get people fanatically devoted to what they’re doing. I was a pain in the ass. But I desperately wanted to be a good writer. My friends seem to think that an hour and a half effort a day is all they need to bring to the altar to make things work for them. I couldn’t do that. I thought that if you didn’t work at least as hard as the guy who runs a gas station then you had no right to hope for achievement. You certainly had to work all day, everyday. I thought that was the deal. I still think that’s the deal. 

INTERVIEWER

I’ve heard that you had a brush with death in a car accident that shook you up pretty badly. The usual, maybe simpleminded, explanation is that you suddenly realized that you could have died there without ever having given yourself a chance to live.

McGUANE

That explanation is not so simpleminded. I still don’t know exactly what it meant to me at the time. I do know that I lost the power of speech for a while. And I had something like that realization going through my mind. It was outside Dalhart, Texas. I was driving fast, one hundred and forty miles an hour, and there was this freezing rain on the road that you couldn’t see, so when I pulled out to pass, suddenly life was either over or it wasn’t. I thought it was over. The guy I was driving with said, “This is it,” and all of a sudden it did appear that it was the end: there were collisions and fence posts flying and pieces of car body going by my ears. It would have been as arbitrary an end as what’s happening to a friend of ours who’s now dying in a hospital of cancer, or our friend who has an awful neurological disease, or a kid who chases the baseball out in the street. You believe all this stuff, but then suddenly you’re standing in the middle of it with the chance to choose and it seems like a miracle or a warning that you’ve been spared this time but you’d better get your life together. I remember thinking along these lines, but my thoughts were so overpowering that I couldn’t speak for a week, even to ask for something to eat.

INTERVIEWER

Pomeroy says at the beginning of Panama that he’s going to be “working without a net.” It’s tempting to read that novel as your attempt to work through some of your own turmoils from that period. If you were up there, taking the risk to expose yourself, the highly negative, even personally vicious, reviews of Panama must have hurt a lot.

McGUANE

The whole Panama episode really jarred me in terms of my writing because that was one time I had consciously decided to reveal certain things about myself. I was stunned by the bad reception of Panama; it was a painful and punishing experience. The lesson that I got from the reviewers was: Don’t ever try to do that again. And it was odd to watch reviewers incorrectly summarize the story, then attack their own summaries. It was like watching blind men being attacked by their seeing-eye dogs. But then, I look back at when John Cheever published Bullet Park, which was the advent of the good Cheever as far as I’m concerned, and the critics and public crucified him over that book. Afterwards he went into an alcoholic spiral. People don’t understand how much influence they can actually have on a writer, how much a writer’s feelings can be hurt, how much they can deflect his course when they raise their voices like they did over highly personal books like Panama or Bullet Park.

INTERVIEWER

If it’s any consolation, I feel Panama is your best book.

McGUANE

I think it may be my best too. In the middle of all this outcry, I’d get the book out and read stuff to myself and say, “I can’t do any better than this!” I really do love Panama. But I’d also have to admit that right now, if I were driven to write another novel like that I wouldn’t even try to find a publisher for it. It simply wouldn’t be published. I’d be writing it to put in my closet upstairs.

INTERVIEWER

So what effect did the Panama experience have on your work?

McGUANE

Its first effect was to confirm my desire to write a book that was, in a traditional way, more shapely than anything I had done before. Actually, I’d been wanting to do that for a long time. That at least partially explains the architecture of Nobody’s Angel. The novel I’m working on now picks up from Panama more than from any other point. Importantly it’s not a book in the first person, which made Panama completely different from anything else I’ve ever done, so it doesn’t sound and look like Panama. But Panama is still the last piece of growing tissue that I’ve been grafting from.

INTERVIEWER

In terms of its flights of poetic language, its surrealism, and other formal features, Panama is probably your most extreme novel to date. And yet these features seem entirely appropriate in capturing the sensibility of its crazed narrator, Pomeroy. Was creating this voice and perspective especially difficult for you or did your identification with him make things easier, in a way?

McGUANE

It was very difficult. I invented a word once a long time ago and I was always going to write a book that could be described with this word. The word was “joco-splenetic.” Panama was to be my first joco-splenetic novel. What was especially difficult about that book was that I knew that in certain parts I wanted Pomeroy to be absolutely lugubrious. I saw him as somebody who would live quite happily in a Gogol novel, a laughter-through-tears guy. I knew that his emotions are frequently “unearned,” that the kind of hang-over quality in which he lives produces fits of uncontrolled weeping. I’m not saying that the book isn’t sentimental in that technical sense, but I also felt that this tissue of distance that I created between myself and Chester was adequate for people to understand this and to see the book for what it is. For people who don’t like the book, when poor Pomeroy goes off into one of his spirals, they think, “What right does he have to this?” The point is that he has no right—that’s what’s interesting about him.