Q: How did it go at the unemployment?
A: I asked to see a counselor.
We made an appointment to meet.
Q: Do they help you find a job?
A: They aren’t in the job placement business.
They show you how to use the databases.
They get you to rewrite your resume.
Q: I remember the unemployment in
A: Yes. I was a mature job-seeker even then.
Q: No. 7 was, “Don’t cringe and beg.”
A: Yes. When I would leave Laurel Cottage in the morning on my job search, Brenda would wave goodbye and holler, “Remember No, 7. `Don’t cringe and beg.’”
It wouldn’t do any good to cringe and beg.
I was overqualified.
I would intimidate my supervisor and not get along with my co-workers.
A counselor at Snelling and Snelling told me, “Most employers feel that almost a PhD in anthropology cannot be immediately converted to profitability.”
Q: The first thing they want to know is why did you drop out?
Why didn’t you stay and get your PhD?
A: Yes.
And you can’t say, “They wanted me to eat shit and lie,” because they think, But we will want you to eat shit and lie.
Q: We are looking for writers who don’t want to eat shit and lie.
A: Exactly.
I had one program manager tell me, “You’re a writer. As soon as you sell a book you’ll quit, and leave us in the lurch. You’ll spend all your time thinking about your book. You’ll write in your head on company time. Why would I hire a writer?”
Q: Billy Boy and Bad Boy Hines.
Hunter S. Thompson, moonlighting, when he was a sportswriter for the base newspaper at Eglin.
A: Where Bart Starr, Max McGee, and Zeke Bratkowski played on the command football team.
Q: Thompson went to tech school to study DEW Line radar.
He refused to sign his application for a Secret clearance on the grounds he considered himself a security risk.
To punish him, instead
of sending him to
A: And wrote wrestling promotion.
Q: And fucked the base commander’s daughter.
An enlisted man.
She was acting-out.
A: Base commander’s daughters act out. They’re like preacher’s kids.
Suzette was a base commander’s daughter.
She shacked up with Potter. A seine fisherman.
It must have driven the colonel nuts.
Q: All those bluegrass festivals you all went to.
A: Yes. When Owen and Balder were growing up.
The Children of the Dirt.
Savage and Bronwyn and Josh Bell.
Now they have children. Who play with Owen and Balder’s children. At bluegrass festivals.
Q: The
Sexual Life of Savages of North-Western
A: Yes. The Melanesian gambit.
Terry Southern interviewed Henry Green in the Paris Review in 1958.
SOUTHERN: Do you believe that a writer should work toward the development of a particular style?
GREEN: He can’t do anything else. His style is himself, and we are all of us changing every day—developing, we hope! We leave our marks behind us, like a snail.
SOUTHERN: So the writer’s style develops with him.
GREEN: Surely. But he must take care not to let it go too far—like the later Henry James or James Joyce. Because it then becomes a private communication with himself, like a man making cat’s cradles with spiderwebs, a sort of Melanesian gambit.
Q: We can’t do anything else.
A: No.