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The Haunted Hillbilly Derek McCormack ECW, 2003 |
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Carnivalesque
and creepy, The
Haunted Hillbilly tells the fantastic story of "Nudie"
the Rodeo Tailor, a gay couturier vampire who makes and breaks the
career of country and western legend Hank Williams. Derek McCormack
is the author of Wish Book and Dark Rides, as well as the Toronto
Book Award nominee Wild Mouse (with Chris Chambers). GEORGE: So what's the deal with McCormack and tiny books? Wild Mouse (great bits) and Wish Book are my two previous reads. Never got to Dark Rides. I read The Haunted Hillbilly in about an hour. This was partly because it's a spare, lean, engrossing read that moves along at quite a clip and partly because it isn't really a novel -- it's a short story with generous margins, executive line spacing, and aspirations of novellahood. Loved it, by the way. Freaking twisted. DARREN: It's not about the length, it's all in how you use it. Seriously, the scope of Derek's writing is a reflection of his syntax -- compressed, precise, extreme. If James Ellroy was gay and from Peterborough, he'd be Derek McCormack (it's always amazed me that Ellroy manages to pass off outrageously stylized books like The Cold Six Thousand as genre fiction). But Derek's roots are in small-press, artisanal production (Ian Phillips of Pas de Chance, who designed Wish Book, has done all the typography and design on The Haunted Hillbilly too), so there's obviously something about working in that mode -- producing bijoux-like texts -- that attracts Derek. A good metaphor for this kind of writing might be the process that Nudie uses to produce tiny bone sequins for Hank -- rendering down jagged splinters from a girl's leg, then letting the essence set in a dollhouse muffin pan. PETER: Yeah, that's nice. To me, the scale of McCormack's books is related to their concern with disconnection. His style is stripped back and minimal to the point of disruption, and I think the resulting narrative disconnection -- or instability, or incoherence, or whatever you want to call it -- reflects the social ruptures that are the real subjects of McCormack's tales of depravity and lust (not necessarily in that order). He kind of fractures the traditional mechanics of storytelling and reassembles them in a new order, which is loaded with significance when you're dealing with a historical subject, as he is with The Haunted Hillbilly, or any of his books for that matter. It's that old trick of rewriting a historical narrative to uncover what's been suppressed, but McCormack certainly has his own unique bent to it. I would call McCormack's style more "precise" than "spare." There's an incredible focus to his lines -- his style is really the opposite of minimalism -- so that every sentence resonates with meaning. That meaning isn't always initially clear -- the repetition of the narrator sticking his face into Hank's ass bothered me at first, because it seemed such a clumsy move in an otherwise sophisticated book, until I understood what was really going on -- but at the end of The Haunted Hillbilly, or any of McCormack's works, you suddenly realize how tightly integrated everything is, and how each part of the book signifies in so many different ways. I think his books are slim because he's such a master of compression. GEORGE: I really didn't find his style disruptive -- in fact I found it quite direct. But I think I see what you mean. Though having a music industry puppeteer as an ass-sucking vampire isn't really that subtle on one level, when packed shoulder to shoulder with plot and wordplay, it can take off in some really interesting ways. I was also impressed by how much he could pack into a word, much less a line. I'm thinking of things like the atelier imagery and the repetition around words like "crewel" and their homonymic meanings. DARREN:
Sure, Derek is constantly picking up dead metaphors and
re-animating them (in the Frankensteinian sense), which gives the
book its creepy vitality. But one of the things that interests me
most about The Haunted Hillbilly is the content -- the reassessment of pop culture figures that we think
we know, or pop institutions that we think we know. Derek
is a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, and I think that
there's a little of the Buffy ethos at work here. Buffy's
world is a world without metaphor: yes, your high school really
is built on the mouth of Hell. Yes, your best friend is in fact
a lesbian witch. Yes, your mom really is dating an evil robot from
the 1950s. The Haunted Hillbilly is about killing nostalgia
by tearing off the gauzy filters that time has placed over people
and events ... It's not really queer revisionism so much as it is
an unflinching look at the things we choose to ignore about our
cultural icons. Though
The Haunted Hillbilly is a self-proclaimed "phantasmagoria"
and "Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events,
or locales is entirely coincidental", "Hank" isn't
all that far off the mark from Hank Williams: a self-proclaimed
sadist, dead in the back of a limo at 29 from an overdose of either
heroin or a sexual stimulant for cattle called Ampheniamide, depending
on whose story you believe. The Grand Ole Opry, Country music's
most hallowed institution, banned Williams from its boards. He was
more rock and roll than country ... But rock and roll didn't exist
yet when he was recording. It's just too bad that Hank Jr. didn't
end up in that jar full of formaldehyde ... The
case of "Nudie" is a much further stretch, but there's
obviously been some research done here as well.
Nudie's Rodeo Tailors, owned and operated by Nudie Cohn (b.
Nudka Kohn) for 37 years was the source not only of suits for Hank
Williams, but also Elvis' $10,000 gold lamé suit and Gram
Parsons' infamous white suit from the cover of Gilded Palace
of Sin, with the marijuana leaves, opium poppies, peyote buttons,
amphetamines and syringes all over it. The shop's label is almost
exactly as The Haunted Hillbilly describes it
-- "The woman's straddling a snake fence, twirling
a lasso. The noose a word balloon" (22). Far as I know, Nudie
Cohn was neither gay nor a vampire. He sort of looked like Roy Orbison's
mini-me, which is unsettling at least. PETER:
I may be the only person in North America who hasn't seen a single
episode of Buffy, so I can't speak to that... But I can see
McCormack as Frankenstein. I
agree that Hillbilly isn't "queer revisionism," and
that surprised me a little when I came to the book, as I think queer
politics are present at some level or another in McCormack's other
books. Dark Rides seems to be engaged with queering CanLit
history -- as opposed to actual Canadian history -- by fucking with its tropes, while Wish Book touches on similar
themes. I think Wish Book is much less "queer" and
more concerned with the conflation of consumerism and sexuality or
sexual identity, whichever you prefer, but there's still a lot of
queer moments, if not queer politics, in the book. (Just as an
aside, either of you read or see Mark Ravenhill's play Shopping
and Fucking? Wish Book reminds me a little of it.) I
was expecting more of the same with Hillbilly, and I was
suprised by the different direction it took, at least in terms of
content. And by this I don't just mean the fact that the narrator is
a vampire (all of McCormack's narrators are somewhat vampiric, so
there wasn't much of a stretch here), but its focus on, as you say,
Darren, cultural icons. Those icons pop up in other books -- the Ex in Wild Mouse, the department store in Wish Book -- but Hillbilly has such a heightened focus on this. Maybe it's
because there's a real person involved this time. Or maybe it's the
celebrity angle. I
agree with the idea that Hillbilly is involved in "reassessment,"
because that seems to be McCormack's modus operandi as a writer,
but I did find myself wondering what exactly its ultimate goal was.
With Dark Rides and Wish Book, and even Wild Mouse,
I can find connections between the historical setting and the present,
and I can see a point to their reworkings of the past, but this
one was less clear to me. This is probably because I know nothing
about Hank Williams, the Grand Ole Opry or country music. I mean,
is The Haunted Hillbilly just a really twisted history lesson?
Is it just undermining nostalgia and that's it? Or is it really
commenting on some aspect of the present (as I think his other works
do)? My ignorance here didn't really bother me, though, as I was
too busy chuckling at the audacity of the book. Another
aside: While I was reading The Haunted Hillbilly I was reminded
of a conversation I'd had with Christian Bök about Blood Meridian,
in which he'd called that book "unrepentantly evil." I'd
call The Haunted Hillbilly slyly evil. DARREN:
Actually, Peter, I think that the questions that you're raising
about the larger meaning of this project really provide their own
answer. On a philosophical level, The Haunted Hillbilly is
about extinguishing the nostalgia for nostalgia. In his
big book on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson writes that when we feel
nostalgic, what we're actually longing for is not the original object
any more, but the memory of memory, the nostalgia of nostalgia
-- of
a time when things -- in this case, writing -- "meant
something" and we could ask "the big questions" without
wondering about the presumptions involved. Baudrillard says the
same thing: that nostalgia takes us out of present uncertainties
and surrounds us with the comfort of the known ... the fixed world
of the museum. The Haunted Hillbilly
runs
through the Country Hall of Fame with a baby sledgehammer, smashing
all of those prettified displays that have been covering up the
somewhat grittier and uglier face of country music -- what critic Nick Tosches calls the "twisted
roots" of rock and roll. But its effect on Canadian literary
culture could be more interesting, and ultimately more important.
Books like The Haunted Hillbilly make it much more difficult to pretend that the
veneer of "pastness" that we like to maintain, not only
about the world of country music, but also the safe world of
Canadian realist fiction and the critical discourse around it, is
still intact. If no one knows what to make of The Haunted Hillbilly when it
comes out -- its brevity, its design, its plot, its style,
its goals -- then good, it's doing its job. GEORGE: I like the ideas of "pastness" and of exposing what we choose to ignore in our icons, but I wonder if they play (or don't) in Canada in a way they do (don't) in other countries. I mean, it seems to me that the U.S. is starved for its own myth system and overcompensates for crappy legends (like Paul Bunyon and Johnny Appleseed) through this sick, vampiric celebrity culture (perhaps Joseph Campbell could jump in here with something about shame and guilt). Whereas we in Canada seem relatively content with our Mounties and studying the cultures of others. If the Haunted Hillbilly is a comment on the safety of the Canadian novel, why the American singer and the country music, an (what some might call the only) American art form? Is it because Derek had to go south for a story with the sequin-studded magnitude worthy of (re)examination? Could this story have been told with Stompin' Tom or Gordon Lightfoot? What are the chances Ashley MacIsaac actually DOES have his own vampires and polaroids somewhere? Is it just the flashy sequins or something deeper that was missing? DARREN: My point was that the Canadian novel is still pretty much grounded in mimetic realism, and the critical tradition around the Canadian novel, at least at the level of journalistic reviews, is still based in the nationalist track established by myth critics in the 60 and 70s -- Northrop Frye and his proteges, Margaret Atwood and John Moss. The chief agenda of these writers was the opposition to US cultural imperialism by the creation of our own mythology; this is all laid out pretty clearly in Frye's The Bush Garden, Atwood's Survival and Moss's Patterns of Isolation. I take the fact that we still ask questions like whether or not this story could have been told with Stompin' Tom or Gordon Lightfoot as QED. It's time for critics and writers alike to move on. Both the political and cultural climates in Canada have become much more complex than they were when manufacturing our own brand of cultural nationalism seemed like a viable solution to US corporate monoculture. Myth criticism, be it Campbell's or Frye's or their successors', is entirely unequipped to deal with the issues raised here. When are we going to give ourselves permission to write and read books like The Haunted Hillbilly without worrying about the CanCon level? In any event, Derek has done yeoman service on CanCon in his other books; yes, it's important, but not all the time, at the expense of the story. And, come to think of it, there's an amazing alchemical change in the very last line of the book, where, among various other changes of state, by virtue of one of McCormack's ultracompressed puns, "Hank" (whose patronym is never specified) actually becomes a Canadian country music star: Hank Snow. GEORGE: I wholeheartedly agree with your point about criticism and review, but what I was asking wasn't about the critical response (though I did throw in that aside about "safety of the Canadian novel"), so much as whether this book COULD have been written without, or outside, the American cult of celebrity. Does it have to do with celebrity or the uniquely western (ie, American) version thereof? I think the choice of a country singer had something to do with this. I'm not worried about them American characters comin' up here an stealin' our jobs at the Ford Fiction plant, but I am interested in how a Peterborough boy finds himself dabbling in fantastical historical fiction. Is it simply because the story itself couldn't exist without an American celebrity like Hank? PETER: I was in the bathroom -- what did I miss? Personally, I'm skeptical about the relevance of cultural borders these days. I think McCormack is writing in the pop culture sphere you mentioned, Darren, but it's not a part I'm versed in, which is the real reason for my uncertainty in how to approach it. I think maybe Dark Rides was the only book of his that was "Canadian" in some way, insofar as it tackles those CanLit issues I mentioned earlier, but the approach that book used made sense for a Canadian writer entering (primarily) the Canadian marketplace. Wish Book is far less concerned with any issues that could even remotely be described as Canadian and much more focused on broader ideological issues that are played out in a sphere that is more social than national, if you get the distinction. In that vein, I guess The Haunted Hillbilly is no more American than it is Canadian. The kind of pop culture we're immersed in may have its origins in America but is effectively transnational now, for better or worse. This conversation reminds me of working with Bert Archer at eye weekly. One of his editing issues was the use of the term "pop culture." He argued that there was no longer any distinction between popular culture and any other form of culture, that it was all just "culture" now. I think that intersects with this a little. Anyway, I'm ready to finish up, but I would like to get back to the book briefly. It seems to me that we've been talking so much around it that we've barely touched on what's in it. I said earlier that McCormack is a master of compression, but I think he's also aces with juxtaposition. His writing style is almost montage, which he uses to amazing effect. It's this constant cut-cut-cut from one sharply defined moment, or even idea, to another. I'll quote the beginning here just so people get a sense of McCormack's style.
Everything is so simple and stripped back in this passage, but it says so much about their relationship, about the kinky undercurrents to the book, and so on. And that use of "straight" right before the blindfold, and all that's to come -- nice. This style really complements the weirdness of the book, or contributes to it, whichever. It does away with some of the necessities of narrative logic that you'd need to follow with a more conventional form of storytelling, which opens up the book more without causing structural problems of questions of believability. The book's logic is more imaginative leap to imaginative leap than plot point to plot point, if that makes sense. So, for instance, when you have Hank visiting the empty fair with Nudie and then returning later to find only a farmer's field, with no sign of the fair, you have no problem with the "phantasmagoric" feel of it because the book's very structure forces you to read it in a way that is less concerned with mimesis and realism and more with speculation and uncertainty. As a final point, I'd like to say how much I liked The Haunted Hillbilly's shifts in point of view, which I thought McCormack handled skillfully. I usually don't like books that alternate between first-person and third-person, but it really worked for me here, probably because the sudden shift to omniscient point of view makes sense when your narrator is a vampire and could potentially see everything. I love the way he kind of fades in and out of the action physically, but that eerie voice and cruel presence are always there. And I mean cruel in that good way. McCormack's best book yet, I'd say. GEORGE: I agree. Definitely worth the price of admission. I hope this book gets a lot of attention. Thanks for the chat, boys.
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by George Murray, Darren Wershler-Henry, and Peter
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