An Interview with Ernest Gaines

Ernest Gaines was interviewed by Bobby Burns on June 10, 2006, at Ernest Gaines’s plantation in New Roads, Louisiana. Burns is the author of Shelter: One Man’s Journey from Homelessness to Hope and is currently finishing a book of poetry.

Ernest Gaines lives in New Roads, Louisiana, where False River welcomes boaters who cast their fishing lines into the auburn water for catfish. Jet skiers streak across the river. Boat enthusiasts converge upon False River during the Fourth of July Blessing of the Boats Festival. It is the same river where slaves once washed their clothes on the riverbanks.

In addition to a MacArthur Fellowship, Mr. Gaines’s honors include a National Book Critics Circle Award and nominations for the Pulitzer Prize (1993) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (2004). He is best known for his novels The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Gathering of Old Men, and a collection of short stories, Bloodline.

Do you find the slave narrative playing a significant role in American literature today?

I think it can. I have gotten a lot of my ideas from slave narratives for the interviews during the Works Progress Administration the 1930s. I think they’re a source for literature. I don’t know how others feel about it. Having not read slave narratives, I don’t know how I could’ve written The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. So I think the thing today is that they are important depending on what the writer wishes to write about.

Major themes in your work seem to anchor on the relationship between fathers and sons, especially as it relates to a definition of manhood.


Well, it depends on the story. This is a major theme in my work, and I think it’s a big problem in this country between black fathers and sons. In most cases, African American fathers have such limited powers to do anything, job wise, positions in government, [something] that he can make a definite decision to pass down to his son. If a son gets into trouble, it is usually a white policeman who finally arrests him, a white judge and jury will judge him. So, there are probably times the father may be there [physically], he is still absent, because of the position that he’s in. Not all of us are, but most of us are, and this is the problem I think the son has with seeing his father. I think this is one of the reasons so many younger African American men cannot respect authority, and in order to respect authority they must respect the father. More often the father is not there. If the father is [present], the son sees how powerless he is, and so he does not respect any authority, he does not respect the police or anyone else, and he ends up in prison or dead or crippled or whatever, you know.

Why is it important for writers to know about the place or region in which they write?


Well, no one writes out of the void. I think he should know his town which allows him to see, feel, and hear. I write better about Southern Louisiana than Northern Louisiana because I don’t know Northern Louisiana. I can’t write about Texas or even New Orleans. I don’t know the depth in New Orleans, whereas here in the country I know the bayous, rivers, the trees, the crop, the people, the way people speak, the religion, the clothes, and the food. I’m aware of all that. I’m aware of the different accents, the educated group, and how the average working day guy speaks out there, the Cajun dialects, people with thick Creole dialects. I’ve heard it, and I’m around it all the time. I try to capture that in my writing; but in order to do that you have to live it and be a part of it.

           Even when I was living in San Francisco I was always coming back. I’d come back and back and to hear it and see it. I would visit the restaurants, cafés, and bars, walk across the fields and talk to people. But I have to be a part of it in order to write about it. I don’t think any writer can just write out of the void, you know. Take, for example, Faulkner. He could only write about a place like Mississippi, because that’s all he wanted to write about. He showed what the world was about in Mississippi, and I try to do the same thing here. I must know these characters very well. If I know them very well, others will see themselves and react among each other.

When you attended college, you began writing for a publication called Transfer. What was that experience like for you?


[Smiles.] I was taking a class called Expository Writing 110, and you had to write essays, and I had the most difficult time trying to write a decent essay. I was getting Bs, C minuses and Ds. So, I approached my teacher one day and said, “Mr. Anderson, I’m interested in fiction, do you mind if I try to write a story?” He said, “This is not a short-story class, but if you think you can do better than what you’ve been doing, go ahead and write a story.” So, I wrote a short story about Turtles; in fact someone brought us some turtles the other day. I love those turtles [laughs].

           She came to interview me from Florida and she brought me a framed copy inscription celebrating the fiftieth-year anniversary of the Transfer publication. [Mr. Anderson] showed the story around to different people at that time who were organizing a little literary magazine on campus at San Francisco State. They liked the story so much and chose it number one for their magazine. It was published. A literary agent [Dorothea Oppenheimer] had just come down from New York to San Francisco to start a new literary agency, and she read it and got in touch with my teacher and told him she would like to meet me and see my other writings. She liked it. This was 1956. She was my agent for thirty-one years before she died in 1987.

Another one of your trademarks is your ability to suggest complex moral dilemmas with the barest physical descriptions.

I write as well as I can and I learned from reading people like Hemingway, and others, that writing less is better. If I can say something in five words instead of seven words, I’ll use five. Sometimes it’s a little difficult for some people to understand it if they don’t read very much. I think if you read and know something about the history of this place or Southern literature or contemporary literature, I should hope, you’ll see how to get in the spaces, you know.

           I’m not one of those people who has a large, wide brush for canvas. I can’t use words, words, words. I try to get as few words as I possibly can to express myself. I believe in telling a story when I’m writing. I’m not just giving a philosophy or an ideology or social writing. I think this is what movie people see in my work: a story and dialogue. Although the description of place is limited, they get a feeling of it. I’ve had four movies made from my work: The Sky Is Gray, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and A Lesson Before Dying, and I think all these stories have a plot to them and, I should hope, strong identifiable characters, both white and black characters, female and male characters, young, old. I try to be honest with all my characters whether they’re good or bad, cowardly or brave.

How did the The Sky Is Gray come about?

I had a toothache as a child and my mother took me to a dentist. I don’t think I could have written that story if I hadn’t read Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path.” It’s a great story about an old lady going to town to get something for her little boy. She walks and walks to the drug store and then comes back home. I did a lot of walking like that as a child, so comparing that story to my experiences going to the dentist and walking all over town where you couldn’t get a drink of water or something to eat, that’s how I came out with the story.

Is the essence of great fiction writing intellect, skill, imagination, and originality?

[Laughs.] Yeah, all of it. And lots of hard work, work, work, work, work, work. Intellect, I guess. I don’t know what it means. I guess it plays its part in writing something intelligible. It takes skill and it comes from working and working. You must have imagination in order to create something, because it’s almost impossible to create something just about your own experience.

The rules of writing are endless. How do you tell if something is well written?

I suppose it depends on how disciplined and how much the writer knows, how skillful the writer is, how truthful he or she is. Does the writer capture description well? Does he use dialogue well? Are things believable? Is the writer prejudiced when describing blacks or whites, males or females? I think readers look through all these things and then draw their own conclusions. You know, readers see things their way. You might have a good story and you don’t know how to write it. You can have a bad story and not have a thing in the world to say, but you can write so well. . . . I’ve had those kinds of students. They have nothing to say, but they’re good at writing.

           [Writers] should be able to convince their readers that a piece of work is worth reading. I see so many books on the New York Times’ best sellers list. Mystery novels and that sort of thing. I can’t read that stuff. Some have done very well, but most of them are impossible for me to read. I still go back to the great novels, great short stories, and great plays. I have a large personal library, so I’m constantly reading those writers of the past. Every so often I read a contemporary book, but I don’t read best sellers. On the other hand, one should read a bad book if there is no other book. . .or a poorly written newspaper. But if I have a choice of reading a good book, I’m going to read a good book or a well written essay. You know I get a lot of my news from the Internet.

           Of course the Internet is faster. I don’t know who edits these newspapers, but it’s not done to my satisfaction. I’m always reading something. I read every day. I’m constantly reading. I’m always receiving books from publishing houses to write blurbs. Some of the books are well written and some are not.


When you were teaching, did you find that it helped you as a writer?

Yes. I learned things from my students. I don’t know if I’ve had to put their ideas in my writing yet, but I have learned things from different students. For example, I had more white female students in my classes than any other group. I would learn from them how to describe different things from a woman’s point of view—the color of drapes or the color of rugs or the texture of things. And I’d say, yeah, right! I’d think I was not paying particular attention to those things. Male students would come in and write about hunting or fishing and things like that. I can learn certain things from you. I can learn certain things from a bartender. I’m always open to learning things from people around me. I hope I’m a life-long learner.

Why is it important for writers to write something about time and place that others haven’t?

We can only write about our time. We write about a time that we have not necessarily experienced directly but vicariously. Turgenev, Gogol, and Tolstoy, they have written everything, but they have not written about your moment. You cannot write a greater love story than Romeo and Juliet or War and Peace or Shakespeare’s tragedies. You can’t write greater books than those stories. You can write about your period of time. Shakespeare wrote King Lear but he could not write Death of a Salesman because that’s a different time. You can only write about your time. You try to.

Ernest Hemingway once said, “They can’t yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.” Do you find this analogy to be true?

I think it depends on the novelist. The writer has to make that decision. If you’re going to be a writer, you can’t just let editors yank you out anytime they want to because they can do it to your first book and you’ll never pitch again. The writer has to be his harshest critic. He has to say, “I’m through or I’m not through. I still have some strength in this right arm. I can still throw a curve ball.” I don’t know when Hemingway said it, but he could have said it after the critics attacked him so much for Across the River and Trees, a very bad book. It was a bad book. And then he came back, of course, with TheOld Man and the Sea.

What’s your personal definition of fiction writing?

My definition is trying to write a good story. A story that no one has ever heard before, but it’s been done many times before. I think fiction is truer than fact most times. In my novels, I presume I’m writing fiction. Art is lying to tell the truth. I think fiction is lying, but it’s telling the truth. That’s what fiction is to me.

How would you like to be remembered on the literary canvas?

I don’t know what people will say about me. What I would like people to say is that he wrote as sincerely as he could possibly write. He could have done more writing and that’s the way I feel about myself. I could’ve done more. I’m proud of most of what I’ve done, but I could have been better. I might have studied harder and written longer. I could’ve spent a longer time at my writing desk.