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James Morrow
A: I spent about a half-hour tooling around one of the principal websites devoted to the ordeal of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley. This particular cyberspace precinct didn't have a whiff of paranoia, crank psychology, or ideological ax-grinding about it: every sentence was a cri de coeur. So I opened my heart to the story, and it moved me deeply.
Later I exchanged some e-mails about the West Memphis Three with a local scholar, Phil Jenkins of Penn State University, whom I'd encountered socially over the years. Not surprisingly, Phil was already quite familiar with the case—he has published extensively on the myth of Satanic cults—and he confirmed my impression that a monstrous miscarriage of justice had befallen Damien, Jason, and Jesse. I was pleased when Phil agreed to contribute a nonfiction piece to The Last Pentacle of the Sun.
Obviously I am struck by the crude religious bigotry that evidently characterizes the community in which Damien, Jason, and Jesse came of age. One thinks immediately of plays like Ibsen's An Enemy of the People and Miller's The Crucible. But what's appalling is not so much the behavior of the Christian fundamentalists, who after all acted predictably, but the failure of those institutions whose job it is to counter such intolerance: the police, the courts, the governorship.
A: When I'm lying on a slab in the morgue, having lost the good fight against the Bush Theocracy, the tag on my toe ought to read Secular Humanist or possibly Scientific Humanist. I find the worldview of Jacob Bronowski, Carl Sagan, Loren Eisley, Lewis Thomas, Jonathan Miller, Daniel Dennett, and Bertrand Russell isomorphic with my own. For these thinkers, there is no incompatibility between knowledge and awe, science and mystery, intellect and art.
Am I also an atheist? That's not my favorite label, though I much prefer it to the wishy-washy and flavorless term "agnostic." Certainly a major theme of Blameless In Abaddon, which I see as a modern-dress retelling of the Book of Job, is that God is either nonexistent or else possessed of a malevolent streak so broad as to problematize any impulse to worship him.
That said, I must admit that I respect the handful of believers I've met whose decency seems all bound up in their theism. My colleague Michael Bishop comes immediately to mind. But I wish the theism-decency equation was more common and reliable. Indeed, the disconnect between religion and morality seems to grow more radical every day, which has been the main subject of my fiction since Only Begotten Daughter.
A: Perhaps surprisingly, I can think of only one occasion when a story of mine brought me into bitter conflict with a believer—a fellow science-fiction writer who shall remain nameless. I've never received a genuine hate letter, an obscene phone call, or a Jesus-inspired death threat. I like to think that this is because, while I indeed take a certain delight in "poking fun at religion," my ultimate agenda lies beyond mere scoffing. I'm essentially inviting people to think through their beliefs, which is not on the face of it an insult.
But the real reason I don't get harassed by scorched-earth Christians is that approximately 100% of the serious fiction published in this country flies right below the fundamentalist radar. Hard-line religious conservatives simply don't know that books like Blameless In Abaddon or Gore Vidal's Live From Golgotha or Christopher Moore's Lamb exist—and if they did know, they wouldn't care. Neither Morrow nor Vidal nor Moore is reaching a large enough audience ever to scandalize what SF author Elizabeth Hand calls "the Christian-Industrial Complex."
A: I'm a major movie nut, with generally indefensible tastes: Hammer Frankenstein films, fifties sci-fi movies, dubious biblical epics starring Charlton Heston. In high school my friend George Shelps and I made a series of short horror and science-fiction films with his 8mm camera. Our version of The Tell-Tale Heart is probably still the best Edgar Allan Poe adaptation ever made for $25.
At one level my novel-writing is really movie-making by other means, so it's not surprising that I try to render each scene as vividly as possible. And yet I've never written a book with an eye to a motion-picture sale. Big-budget blasphemy has never been attractive to Hollywood, and Hollywood and I both know it, and so we keep our distance from each other. About six years ago my agent of the time submitted a bunch of my stuff to her L.A. liaison, and the reaction was something like, "These Morrow novels are certainly entertaining and outrageous, but nobody out here in his or her right mind would ever imagine making any of them into a movie."
Over the years, independent filmmakers have taken out options on City Of Truth and This Is The Way The World Ends, but they never found the necessary backers.
A friend of mine recommended this book, and Towing Jehovah. My husband bought them for me for Christmas. Not only will I never take a book recommendation from this friend again, I will never read another book by James Morrow. This book was thought provoking? Only if your thought was "What the heck is he thinking?!" Morrow's writing style is sadistic, boring, and painful to read. My first thought reading the first book—"It's got to get better . . . it has to." During the second book, "This one can't be as bad as the first one . . ." I was wrong on both accounts. I am a collector of books, and for the first time ever, I have toyed with the idea of burning or just throwing away two books. Due to the religious themes of a lot of your work, do you find it hard to discriminate between criticism aimed at your actual skill as a writer and criticism based on the critic's personal beliefs?
A: The late Walker Percy—a novelist I greatly admired, though we were politically incompatible—distinguished four types of critical reactions: the good good review (in which the critic understands and loves the book), the bad good review (which praises the book for the wrong reasons), the good bad review (which the author must begrudgingly admire for its perspicacity), and the bad bad review (written out of malice). I've received all four varieties over the years. The piece you quoted at length strikes me as a "bad bad review." It reads like something written by a bitter personal enemy I didn't realize I had. I can't help asking: if the lady detested Only Begotten Daughter so much, why the hell did she subject herself to more than a page of Towing Jehovah? And if she really wants to steer people away from the James Morrow books, why doesn't she offer some examples of their alleged sadism and dreariness? There's obviously something else going on here, and I don't want to know what it is.
If only all the criticism I've received was this inept! But occasionally, alas, I do encounter a stinging but astute appraisal of my work, the sort of "good bad review" that forces me to say, "Well, if I'd read this thing before the novel went to press, I might have tweaked a scene or two." In all of these "good bad reviews" the author is honestly trying to describe the book's artistic failures; he isn't dissenting from my religious opinions—or, if he is simply dissenting, he has hidden his tracks so well that I'm obliged to take his displeasure at face value.
A: Way back in 1998 I signed a contract with my customary publisher, Harcourt, to write the novel in question. The company's new editor-in-chief claimed to be very taken with premise, which I described as "a postmodern historical epic about the birth of the scientific worldview." In theory the book's artistic worth would be judged solely by Michael Kandel of the MLA, who was freelancing for Harcourt and had done all the official editorial work on The Eternal Footman. Alas, by the time I'd finished The Last Witchfinder, I was no longer a particularly respected figure at the company. My backlist was selling, but not well enough to satisfy the "maximum profit motive," and Ms. Editor-in-Chief suddenly saw her big opportunity to get rid of me: all she had to do was to give the manuscript a "bad bad review" (to use Percy's term again) and tell my agent that it would be very hard for Harcourt to get behind the project.
For better or worse, my agent used a conservative approach in trying to place The Last Witchfinder elsewhere, going one house at a time instead of holding an auction, so that after two years we had only three rejections in hand. But I don't really regret that interval, because I spent much of it rewriting and improving the manuscript.
This saga, like the novel itself, has a happy ending. I ultimately obtained a new agent, the estimable Wendy Weil, and now my epic has a good home with Jennifer Brehl at William Morrow, who will publish the damn thing early in 2006. And, by the way, my nemesis at Harcourt ultimately got fired. I am trying not to indulge in schadenfreude.
A: Like millions upon millions of Americans who are fed up to the teeth with the neo-cons, I voted against George Bush. It's hard to know where to begin in articulating the case against this vile man. I'm quite convinced he's a "dry drunk," that is, an alcoholic who is literally not drinking but in whom the qualities of the true recovering addict—humbleness, repentance, vulnerability, fearsome self-knowledge—are nowhere in evidence. It's a sure bet that Bush doesn't attend weekly AA meetings, though no one within our craven news-media establishment has ever had the courage to ask him about this.
But the problem with Bush is not ultimately pharmacological. The problem is that he is a cruel and corrupt man surrounded by cruel and corrupt men (and several cruel and corrupt women, most conspicuously Condoleezza Rice). In Bush the whole idea of the American republic has died—the Enlightenment dream of a secular state in which God's name cannot be evoked to rationalize savagery against the powerless—and it probably won't be revived for at least a generation. Or maybe the idea of America has been killed forever. I simply don't know.
A: Having just sold The Last Witchfinder to Jennifer Brehl at William Morrow, I thought I'd look into her other satirical writer, Christopher Moore. I'm about halfway through Fluke, and I'm finding it a hoot. My favorite authors of recent vintage include John Irving, Mark Helprin, Anne Tyler, Michael Chabon, T. C. Boyle, and Mark Jacobson (I have in mind his one-shot wonder, Gojiro). And I thought Kurt Vonnegut, to whom I am relentlessly compared, went out with a bang: Timequake is a compulsive read, abrim with grade-A Vonnegutian hi-jinks.
A: If you're halfway serious about writing fiction, you need to believe that the book you're working on right now will be the best one yet: more audacious, more moving, more insightful than anything you've done before. You're probably kidding yourself, but it's a necessary delusion, because without it you'd run out of energy. Unless you're a hack or a genius, fiction-making is an exhausting business. Faulkner got it right when he said that writing a novel is like a one-armed man trying to nail together a chicken coop in a hurricane.
A: To an overwhelming degree the weapons of mass destruction are in the arsenals of the United States of America. Which is why George Bush has to call them "weapons" instead of what they really are: diabolical instruments of mass murder that a civilized country would cultivate only with manifest shame, infinite reluctance, and unending moral revulsion.
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