Interview with a Scarecrow: Jennifer Natalya Fink Talks with Martin Hyatt

When I first met Martin (Marty) Hyatt in Michael Cunningham’s writing workshop, his lyrical, compassionate voice was evident in the note he passed me: “Jennifer, I see you’re from New York. You’re practically my neighbor. And you’re practically (no, totally!) brilliant. Come have lunch with me.” A Scarecrow’s Bible, Marty’s debut novel, further demonstrates Marty’s lyricism and generosity of spirit. Many lunches later, I’m delighted to interview Marty about Scarecrow.

Jennifer Natalya Fink: Marty, this is the most clichéd question known to writerkind—the sort you and I make fun of over our long ladies’ literary lunches—but it’s always an interesting one: whom would you name as your influences? Why?

Martin Hyatt: Oh my gosh, well, I know that it’s very southern boy of me to say, but as far as writers go, definitely William Styron and Tennessee Williams. I did and do idolize them. I think that I’ve read Sophie’s Choice like twenty times and I am constantly re-reading the work of Williams. Sherman Alexie amazes me. JD McClatchy breaks my heart. So do Donald Hall and Graham Greene. Oh, and I love Carole Maso. When I first read her work, I realized that anything is possible with language. And Djuna Barnes, too. I also absolutely worship Jackie Collins and always loved Harold Robbins’ books. But reading is different for me these days. I can’t really lose myself in books the way I used to. I am always overanalyzing the style. That’s why people in other disciplines like Ross Bleckner, Sofia Coppola, and Lucinda Williams inspire me more than anyone else.

Fink: I’m not surprised you mention music; one of the most striking elements of Scarecrow is its use of sound. Gary and Zachary, your star-crossed protagonists, both seem to literalize the concept of music as a drug. And your descriptions of birdcalls, cars, and music lingered long after I finished the book. I know music is important to you—we share a passion for the ’80s angsty stuff—and at times, drugs have been, too. Tell me more about the relationship between the two, and how you see it playing out in Scarecrow.

Hyatt: For better or worse, drugs and music have had a greater impact on my life and my writing than anything else. Perhaps that’s why they are such a force in Scarecrow. I don’t think it’s a secret that I had a serious drug problem; drugs almost killed me. For a long time, heroin, cocaine, and Klonopin were my muses. The problem with drugs is that they work at first. That’s one of the reasons people do them. Then they don’t work anymore. The characters in my book are killing themselves with drugs. They are very much the living dead. They know that they are only sort of alive, and are trying to cross over to the land of the living. It’s a struggle for them to get there. And staying there is another story.

And the music, yeah. Music is just so cool. That’s an addiction I don’t want to kick. It’s always been there. It started with my father playing Porter Wagoner and Bill Monroe when I was a kid. I still listen to that stuff. I’ll never forget my parents taking me to get new records and Creem magazine on Saturday afternoons. I loved and still love all the grit-boy music, you know, Van Halen, Supertramp, and later Ratt, Def Leppard, and Guns N Roses. And then there was, of course, those gorgeously mopey, angst-ridden Brits in the eighties. But later on I started getting into the edgy Nashville artists like Steve Earle and Nanci Griffith. And I was like, wow, they’re telling stories. This is poetry. They are saying in a few words what so many of us need whole books to write. And there was something so pure, and beautiful, and punk about them. They were writing about what it’s like to have that dual, sometimes torn, identity of being southern with a southern sensibility and yet drawn to, desirous of, and at home in an urban or cosmopolitan world. Those forces, the intoxicating nature of drugs, music, and feeling that you’ve seen the ocean and the city, but still you find an open field or a house trailer to be the most electrifying place in the world, is what drives the characters in Scarecrow.

Fink: That shifting, lyrical sense of place in Scarecrow is so striking. Houses—Gary’s trailer, Zachariah’s NY apartment, and even the gay bars that serve as another kind of home—are described almost as vividly as the people who dwell in them. The open space of the field serves as a beautiful, tragic counterpoint to these deeply loved yet confining spaces. I thought the use of space was one of the strongest structural elements of Scarecrow. How did that emerge?

Hyatt: All that stuff is all about home. And feeling at home. Being gay in a small town, or uncomfortable in their New York homes, makes these characters feel completely homeless all the time, even when they have shelter. Gary and Zachary are both shell-shocked in their own ways. Their traumas have led to them being conflicted and feeling that every place is both a potential bomb shelter and also a potential home.

Fink: The simple act of going to the movies uncloseted is the most radical and subversive act of all in Scarecrow. I won’t be a plot spoiler here, but suffice it to say that I like how you don’t back away from homophobia in this book, in all its simplicity and banality. The straight literary world is in one kind of denial about the violence and ubiquity of homophobia, and the gay world is in another, where it’s almost considered a faux pas to write directly about homophobic violence. Homophobia is so unvarnished in Scarecrow. So sadly, simply real. How did you approach this?

Hyatt: It’s so funny because I didn’t make a conscious effort to write about homophobia. But I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t an issue. It is. It would be nice to pretend that everything is fine these days. That everyone loves queers. I wish they did! Unfortunately, some people still want us to go away. I often wonder if straight people realize what it’s like to wake up every day and to know that many people wish that you would disappear, or never wake up at all. That’s certainly what I felt like growing up. I would like to pretend that everyone accepts me when I go home. I know that many of them want to. But I will always be an outsider in my Louisiana hometown, not only because I am gay, but because I tell the truth about it. And telling the truth about being gay forces me to tell the truth about all the hypocrisy and injustice I see. And the Christian Wrong is the thing I fear the most. It’s violent the way people use religion and the Bible as a means to be hateful. I get so sick of people quoting the Bible to make their homophobic comments untouchable. I hate the way people use the Bible. That’s why I wrote my own.

Fink: Hallelujah! Speaking of self-fashioning, popular culture plays a provocative role in Scarecrow. It’s a site for creativity and identity-making for the characters, yet it creates a parallel universe which sets up an artificial, unattainable white standard of beauty and glamour. Did you know that the definition of glamour is ‘false magic?’ I love that! So this false magic both empowers the characters, and keeps them in a passive trance, in which the TV world seems more real than their own. I’m curious about how this (false) magic of pop culture played into your conjuring of this world—its characters, poetics, and politics.

Hyatt: Yes, these characters are completely drawn to magic and are constantly at odds with what is real and what is not. The thing is that they think that finding beauty in something makes it more real. There is a great deal of dishonesty in the way they lead their lives, but still, they are searching for what appears to be true in nature, music, and the rest of the world. They are seeking truth. Of course, they realize that they have to look a bit closer at themselves before they can identify truth and beauty. They are definitely seeking glamour.

Fink: White magic: bad juju! Gary says of the prostitutes he encountered in Vietnam, “The beauty wasn’t just in them physically, it was the way you knew they would hold onto your whiteness, the way you have held onto Gina all these years” (46), conflating his consciousness with theirs in one shocking sentence. Similarly, Zachariah’s own sense of self is limited because he can’t really conjure his Latino lover Carlos in anything but two-dimensional form. For your white working class characters, people of color seem to be another kind of landscape: the colorful inhuman background against which they can articulate their angst. That seemed not only profoundly racist, but tragic. How did you come to render race and racism in this particular way?

Hyatt: I am sure that there is racism in the characters and a lack of awareness of race. Perhaps they are bouncing off the people of color in the book. These characters don’t fully realize the power that comes along with being white because they feel so powerless over everything else in their lives. In that sentence, Gary does recognize that he has, even if it is an illusion, some power over the prostitute.

Fink: You do two things here that are frowned on by the New York literary set: you employ a second-person narrator, and you deny the reader a well-fed American happy ending. In fact, Marty, you do three things that are big no-nos: not only do you use a second person narrator, but you intersperse it with a third person narrator! In italics!! What made you choose these narrative strategies?

Hyatt: I don’t think about those things when I write. It’s how it came to me. The only way for the book to work rhythmically was to listen to the voice of the narrator. I write my stuff the way it needs to be written; for better or worse, every story has a voice, a point-of-view, a rhythm that is essential. And yes, everyone told me that it was a no-no when my agent started sending me out. In fact, Amy Hempel, my writing teacher at the time, told me I was shooting myself in the foot as far as publication went. People in New itYork publishing are so easily scared. They were like, this is brilliant, but I can’t publish something in second person. Of course, what they meant was they were not going to, not that they couldn’t. They don’t have the guts to publish what they love. What a horrible job that must be. Tal Gregory was my first agent. He was great, but he left the business, like so many agents and editors who really believe in the written word. The agents and editors with integrity become discouraged by the greedy, business-oriented, blockbuster mentality that has made the publishing world so boring. And as far as happy endings, yes, maybe it’s not a typical happy ending, but when you look at the transformation of Gary, I think it’s incredibly happy, though unhappy things happen along the way.

Fink: You do a great job of conjuring a world here, yet you also choose to ‘tell,’ often ending paragraphs with an explanatory riff. Again, you’re transgressing the hallowed, shallow rules of the writing workshop types! What are your thoughts on ye olde ‘show don’t tell’ maxim?

Hyatt: First of all, let me go on record as defending MFA Programs a little bit. People often talk about cookie-cutter, rigid MFA-style writing. I don’t know what they are talking about. In The New School MFA program, none of us wrote or were encouraged to write like anyone or anything other than ourselves. Abigail Thomas, Amy Hempel, Darcey Steinke—they really let us find our voices. And once again, I swear, it just happens. I don’t decide oh, I’m going to tell and not show or show and not tell. I wish I could tell you that I have more obvious intentions when I write, but I really don’t. An image comes to me, I sit down and start to write. It’s sort of out of my control in many ways.

Fink: I think all such claims of intentionality by writers are made squarely through the retrospectoscope! Here’s another retrospective question: Marty, we met when we were both at that point when so many writers give up. We had finished manuscripts, and had received some acclaim for our work, but it looked like we wouldn’t ever be able to publish our babies without sacrificing their originality on the publishing world’s pyre of conformity (how’s that for an overextended metaphor?).

So here’s my final question: if you could travel back to that moment in the retrospectomobile and give yourself some advice, what would it be?

Hyatt: Oh, Jennifer. I love this question. It would have been nice to recognize the fact that being honest and bold can quickly make you an outsider in the publishing world. I never realized how anti-establishment people thought my work was. I wish I would have been able to embrace my rebellious spirit as a writer a bit more. I wish I would have known that everything was going to be okay, that it would all work out. Being a struggling writer in New York can be devastating. I wish I would have known what faith was back then. Now, I have brave, cool, beautiful publishers who believe in my work and who aren’t afraid of it. I mean, at the end of the day, those are the kind of people I need behind my career. I write what I write. I’m sober, working on a new novel, and for the first time in my life, I don’t feel like I have to prove that I’m a writer to anyone.

Fink: Because you are, Blanche, you are! Congratulations. Here’s to many more brilliant books—and lunches.

 

Read more about A Scarecrow's Bible at:
www.suspectthoughts.com.
Read an excerpt from A Scarecrow's Bible

Jennifer Natalya Fink is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Burn and the forthcoming novel V (October 2006, Suspect Thoughts Press). She is a professor at Georgetown University, and the Founder and Gorilla-in-Chief of The Gorilla Press (www.gorillapress.com). She lives with her partner, lawyer/poet Sarah Sohn, in a farmhouse in upstate New York.