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Shock Point and other books by April Henry are available via the following vendors or your favorite local independent bookseller.
home > fun stuff > interview with James Lee Burke1999 INTERVIEW WITH JAMES LEE BURKE
shortly after the publication of Sunset Limited,
for the literary magazine BOSWELLBurke: My wife and I do the tour one to two months every year. We’ve been doing it for many years.
Henry: You’ve said going on tour puts you behind, and it must be tiring. If your books sell so well, why still go on tour?
Burke: There were so many years when I couldn’t have gotten a tour at gunpoint. My editor is Patricia McCulhaey. And I call her St. Pat. She and I have been a team for years.
Henry: So you’ve never switched publishers?
Burke: Oh, yes. She and I have been to three houses together. We’re kind of like Siamese twins. She’s almost like a member of our family. She’s vice-president of Doubleday now, but she became interested in my work early on, and almost quit the house where she was working because they wouldn’t give her the money to buy one of my earlier books. And I hadn’t met her, but I never forgot the story or the name. And when I had a chance to go with Pat, I told the agent, that’s the lady. My agent and I are in our 21st year. When you find the right people, you never let go. The people who count are the ones who are your friends in lean times. You have all the friends you want when things are going well.
Henry: Why do you drive on your tours instead of flying?
Burke: I don’t like it. I don’t mind, but the people around me do when I insist on taking over the controls. I can’t tell you I don’t like being in small spaces. I don’t do things I don’t like any more. See, I’m 61. That’s one of the great advantages of age. You can say, I don’t want to, I don’t care, you can throw temper tantrums, and nobody minds.
Henry: It’s your version of that poem, “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple.”
Burke: You can claim early Alzheimer’s, throw food, whatever you want to do.
Henry: Since you live in New Iberia and set one mystery series in New Iberia, does anyone ever say, oh, this character must be this real person? Do they draw parallels?
Burke: I’ve never heard anyone make the biographical comparison, in part because even a writer may seek to replicate a living person, the character changes. Second, New Iberia is a very civil place, and the protocol there has always been, always, going back before the war between the states, one of very strict and unswerving deference about privacy, respect for the individual, never imposing on someone else. Decorum has always been very much a part of daily life there. You don’t address people by their first name, unless you’ve known them a very long time. That’s considered very rude. You never blow your automobile horn. You always address people as Sir and Ma’am and Miss. You never use profanity in public. You’ll never hear God’s name used profanely, never, I mean among criminals, no one.
Henry: You spend the other half of the year in Montana. Here’s a good high school essay question for you: Compare and contrast Montana and New Iberia.
Burke: They’re very much alike. Blue collar cultures that are in a state of transition. In many ways the cultures there, the historical or traditional cultures are dying. They’re both working class. The value system has to do with the family, loyalty, friends. Both areas are provincial in a very good way. They love what they have and they don’t like it changed. But it’s being undone. It’s just the nature of history. All things change. The old way of life is disappearing quite rapidly. The other similarity is a negative one. The assault upon the environment in both areas. What makes those areas so desirable is the lack of regulation, the lack of government, a feeling that each person is free to do their own thing. There is a laize faire attitude about behavior. Any eccentricity is tolerated. But, you see, if you allow corporations to work in that same ethos, you’ve got a problem. Because they come in with baseball bats. They are extractive industries.
Henry: What drew you to Montana?
Burke: By chance I was offered a chance there teaching at the University of Montana in 1966.
Henry: Back before you were published?
Burke: No, I’ve been writing since, oh Lordy. I published my first story in ‘56. Wrote my first published novel ... wrote Half of Paradise, my first published book, when I was 23. It all started when I was about 20, and I finished it when I was 23. I taught in Montana for three years. It’s a great place to live, a tough place to make a living. I always wrote more easily than I published. It was hard to get my first book in print. I finished it when I was 23. It took five years before it came out and then I wrote two more that I didn’t publish. Then the next one I wrote came out with Scribners, and then I published with Thomas Crowne and I thought I was home free. The Lost Get Back Boogie was my next book and it wasn’t published until (whistles) fifteen years later. I take that back, I finished in 75 and it finally was published in 86. I didn’t publish in hardback for 13 years in the middle of my career.
Henry: Was it hard to believe in yourself during that long period?
Burke: It was discouraging but I never stopped. I never stopped believing in the work. But it was very discouraging. It’s true that you discover that what seems to be a failure is part of something larger. Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work. Always. I believe the larger story is already written. It’s just a matter of discovering it. I didn’t see it of course, and I wrote all those books that were rejected, all those short stories, gee whiz, and they really got rejected, slammed back with a catapult. But then a person’s time comes round, is what happens. But success is a fickle companion, it comes and goes, I’ve learned that. If it goes away, the success that I’ve enjoyed has been way beyond my greatest expectations so I’ve nothing to complain about.
Henry: I was struck in Sunset Limited, when you’re talking about movie people, and you write, “Their attitudes were those of people who use geographical areas and social cultures as playgrounds and nothing more.” I detected an authorial voice in that passage. Is that something you see, especially in Montana, where every movie star on the planet seems to have a spread there.
Burke: A River Runs Through It. That did it. Big time. (Laughs.) Half of Santa Barbara arrived on the next flight after the premiere. Again, it’s in the nature of things. Places change. Looking at the phenomenon through the eyes of Dave Robicheaux, who sees his area as an idyllic one that is flawed both from intrusions coming from the outside, venal, meretricious interests, the extractive industries, the dope pushers, the Mob, they’re all there, they’ve done enormous damage there. Dope—crack cocaine has just devastated working class black and white families. It has wiped out whole neighborhoods where people of color live frightened all the time. I was working on our new house with some black men, working with them on the job, six black fellows, there are old time blue collar working men, and they were telling me they don’t like going home at night. They don’t like to go back to neighborhoods full of crack, and they all had the same fear, it’s for their children. That their children will be addicted or harmed. I mean, people are killed in drive-bys, and these men are illiterate, they’re French-speaking, and they’re having to deal with an environment created for them that has no equivalent in the world except maybe in Yugoslavia or Beirut, it’s that bad.
Henry: In Portland, the people who do drive-bys are all kids. We’ve had drive-bys on bicycles. Over puppies.
Burke: Over nothing. But the life is gone. And the shooter has no clue what he’s just done. No emotional concept that he’s just taken—robbed someone of a life, destroyed a family.
Henry: That’s why it’s the children who do these things. They don’t understand.
Burke: If you put somebody on a crack pipe and give them a 9 mm Baretta, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going to happen next.
Henry: Cimmaron Rose was set in Texas. How is Texas different in terms of a Southern place, compared to Louisiana.
Burke: It’s far more southwestern. You see, even the English that’s spoken changes dramatically. When you hit East Texas, what is called plantation English, that characterizes most Southern dialects, ends, and you encounter another dialect called Southern Midlands in Texas. Because Texas’ ante-bellum economy was not based on the plantation system. The plantation system made use of English or British tutors. This is where the Southern accent comes from. They drop their r’s, the hard a sound. People will often ask me if I’m from Australia. Listen closely and you hear cockney British. People of color often learned English from 17th and 18th century slave masters who were English. That’s how plantation English evolved. In fact Dixie might be a black corruption of the word Dixon, for Mason-Dixon. Actually what we call black English is really part of the same dialect spoken by Southern whites. It’s plantation English. But when you hit East Texas you get into another dialect. Midlands English is the original American English. It was spoken in Pennsylvania. Southern Midlands—you hear it spoken in Southern Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Henry: What do people in Oregon speak?
Burke: You speak a little bit of all of it, I think. Oregon is a great melting pot.
Henry: Whenever I hear broadcasters on the national news, they all sound like—us.
Burke: Oregon is a great state. When you enter the state you are just impressed by the intelligence at work in everything. You know, the Wobblies were here, the greatest force for social justice in the history of the country.
Henry: I know that you went to parochial schools, and I’ve read one critic who feels there is a spiritual theme underlying all your work—would you agree with that?
Burke: That would be like the author canonizing his own work. The themes all have to do with redemption. That theme runs throughout Western literature. It’s the search for the holy grail. it’s the oldest theme in Western writing. It actually antedates Christ. The search for the grail goes back probably to a Celtic legend about the hunters, and it was an explanation of the sound of thunder among the Celts. They believed thunder was huntsmen pursuing a wild boar or something. But it had to do again with quests. And that Celtic legend, I guess by the sixth century, during the time of Arthur, became associated with the grail. The quest for the grail that you find in early medieval British literature is the same quest you find in Jack Keroac’s On the Road. The story is always the same; the characters change. Man’s epic story, going back to Odysseus, is about the search for a mystical home.
Henry: I’ve heard that there are only two plots: someone goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
Burke: Yeah. That’s probably it. The stranger is often death. It’s The Iceman Cometh. It’s the Seventh Seal.
Henry: Of your four children...
Burke: One’s an educational psychologist, one’s a TV ad producer, and two are prosecutors. One’s a prosecutor right here in Portland. Alafair. She’s assistant district attorney.
Henry: Alafair—I wanted to ask you about her. Why did you name a major character after your daughter?
Burke: She’s based pretty closely on our daughter.
Henry: Your daughter’s adopted from El Salvador like the girl in the books?
Burke: No, she’s our natural child but all her experiences, her growing up, paralleled.
Henry: How does the real Alafair feel about the fictional Alafair?
Burke: I think she likes it okay. It’s a great name, sounds more like a grandma’s name. It’s an old-timey Texas name. I suspect it’s English.
Henry: Dave Robicheaux is a recovered alcoholic. I understood you are also?
Burke: Twelve step program, I had 21 years in June.
Henry: Having had both the experience of drinking and the experience of stopping, how do you think it affected you as a writer?
Burke: I think Neruda said it better than I. He said, ‘Alcohol appears to open doors for a poet. However, the poet soon discovers he has wed himself with an obsession that first will consume his art and then his life.’ That’s what it comes down to. Every artist knows it’s a way of mortgaging tomorrow for today. Say you work at another job, that’s really exhausting, you do lots of things when you’re tired, well, you can’t write well when you’re tired. A writer comes home and takes a few drinks, and he feels relaxed, and it seems to sail for you, and you didn’t think you’d get anything done at all. Of course what you lose is form. And you look at it the next day and you realize this wasn’t near as good as I thought it was. And you’ve also mortgaged the following day. After a while it consumes a person’s art. I think what happens also is that a dark view will come into the person’s art, cynicism. The Id will have its way. We’re just talking about the influence it will have on the person’s work. We’re not even talking about the deleterious affect it’s having in other areas.
Henry: Dave Robicheaux is a Vietnam vet, but you’re not, right?
Burke: No, I’m not. To me the books are more about Central America. I was in Amnesty International for nine years, then I was chairman of our chapter for a year. I heard stories about stuff that was going on in El Salvador or Guatamala. Believe it or not, this is a fact, in 1981 at an AI meeting, this guy, an Iranian, a member of the royalty who had gone into exile after the revolution, told me all the Iranians in Paris will tell you that Ronald Regan cut a deal with the Israelis and with the Iranians to prevent the hostages from being released. That the Iranian army and the Ayatollah were being aided by the Regan administration through Israel. I thought it was the wildest story I had ever heard in my life. The Israelis are sending American arms to the Ayatollah? The guy told me that in 1981. Then I started hearing other stuff through Amnesty about what was going on in Central America. That’s how I began The Neon Rain. Dave Robicheaux’s a Vietnam veteran, but what he’s drawn into is not Vietnam, but instead Central America. However, he sees the similarities. Probably the greatest political scandal in American history is the association between the CIA and opium growers and illegal arms. It goes all the way back the Golden Triangle. The pattern repeated itself in Central America. The Contras, no matter what people say today, were introducing cocaine into the United States. I heard the head of the DEA during the Regan administration, he said on public record, on tape, this is an exact quote, “The Contras are introducing cocaine into the United States.” And they were funding arms purchases with this stuff. The guy in Panama, what’s his name? - Crater Face?
Henry: Noriega?
Burke: Noriega worked for the CIA. The president, George Bush, was director of the CIA. George Bush denied even knowing the guy until someone produced a photograph of the two of them sitting on the divan together. Dave sees the parallels. He doesn’t see one instance of new colonialism as being exception, but instead the continuation of an era.
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