Bangtail Press: Can
you talk about the writing of
The Snow Leopard’s Tale?
Thomas McIntyre: It
was always about creating the experience, the sensation of pursuit—a character
who gave chase and was chased. It’s the looped fate of the “monster.” That’s
what interested me, the peripateticism, the flight.
This monster was inspired by the
feral image of the green-eyed Afghan girl staring from the cover of a
National Geographic [June, 1985], an
image that paced some back corridor of my thoughts for a long time. And that is
as far as the tale developed, its keel settling into biogenous sediments on a
mental deep-ocean floor, for many years nothing mo
re than
an accumulation of fractions, never totaling quite a whole number. I have
traveled somewhat. I started going to Europe in the late 1960s, to Africa in
the mid-1970s. I have also gotten to the Arctic, Scandinavia, Mexico, Central
and South America, Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, and in the late 1990s
I went to China. It was mid-March when I flew from Beijing to Xining in the
west-central part of the country, to drive onto the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau,
the world’s highest and largest. The gravel highway summited up where blinding
snow still lay under the sky and then crossed an alpine wasteland plain where
we were met by another vehicle and struck off over roadless steppes. The winter
grass was grazed down to near nothing, and that reminder of growth for some
reason only intensified the impression of lunar-scape. Driving from dawn to
dark brought us to a camp of Tibetan gers at an elevation of 15,000 feet and the
nominal source of the Yellow River. At that altitude, without time to
acclimatize, you live with a pounding headache, no appetite, and remorseless
shortness of breath. So we rode ponies with Tibetan herders into the steep
surrounding mountains in search of blue sheep. And that was where I found the
mise en scène for
my monster’s native range. Later I spent some days back in Xining, absorbing
the city. We went to the local forestry department, and in a back room they had
a collection of genuinely stuffed animals, rather than the modern taxidermy we
are more used to seeing in museums. And in one cabinet were rosette-ed skins
that had been confiscated from poachers. Out of all this I realized I had the
island of Polyphemus for this odyssey. So I made notes. I studied Chinese
legends about Huangdi, the “Yellow Emperor,” who ruled in a greenstone palace;
about a secret looking glass that was shattered, its quicksilvered shards
spreading into fields of shining snow and a maiden’s desolate tears
crystallizing into blue glaciers; or how in the candle-less chamber of a summit
cave a crabbed crone’s hand clutched a singular elixir as red-eyed carrion
birds assembled, glossy crowned, tendering decaying flesh with mandibles of
jagged keratin. And then I put all that aside. I learned the mandarin name for
the snow leopard (
xue bao), and held
onto that. How long should the book be? Who was it being written for? Over
fourteen years, starting with a hastily scribbled text, then literally
perennial rewriting, the sending out of unfailingly rejected submissions, the
failure of other publishers even to reply to an unsolicited manuscript,
approaching agents who wanted me to limn for them how they should make money
off my book (wasn’t that supposed to be part of their job description, along
with making me money?), and for some reason never ultimately losing my resolve,
I realized that questions about how long and for whom were immaterial. I was
writing the book to be the book, if I may be so sphingine. And then finally,
the finding of Allen Jones and Bangtail, or our finding each other; and in the
Johnsonian manner in which the knowledge of the advent of hanging concentrates
the mind wonderfully, the prospect of actual, upcoming publication led to a
flurry of changes and re-craftings that had simply been unseen before, though
patently obvious. Then after that it was a matter placing it all between covers
and letting it continue on its own way to Ithaca.
BP: When did you
first want to write?
TM: I’m not sure
I wanted to write, at first, I just started. I remember when I was five or six
trying to produce a stick-figure comic book based on some 1940’s movie I’d seen
on the television. All I can recall today is that a peacock rattan chair, a
tropical setting, and I believe either Walter Slezak or Sydney Greenstreet
figured prominently. In the eighth grade at Our Lady of Perpetual Help School
in Downey, California, I wrote a “prose poem” as an assignment from Sister Mary
Dolores of the Sisters of Notre Dame—they still wore wimples, black robes, and
rosaries in those days, unlike the shameless hussies now—a description of a
desert sunset that ended, “Night was now ruler of the world.” I remember her
stopping in the middle of reading it aloud to the class and declaring, “We’ll
be reading you in books someday!” I later submitted the sole copy of the work
to the student literary magazine at Loyola High School (I would be one of the
editors of the magazine in my senior year) in Los Angeles where it promptly,
probably all for the better, vanished. From that time on I wrote fairly
constantly for many years in ring binders, stuff hardly rising to the level of
juvenilia. Tried to write a novel about a sport-fishing boat out of San Pedro
(I actually had some minor experience of this). It and all the stories are gone
now, or buried too deep in some cluttered corner for me to lay my hands on. During
my freshman year in high school, a classmate, Kevin Doherty, now called back,
showed up with a “novel” written on three-by-five index cards (curiously, this
is the same composition method employed by Vladimir Nabokov). I think the title
was Wild Thing, after the song of the
time. And what impressed me was the notice he received for this accomplishment
from our coevals. People seemed to think highly of someone who wrote, and gave
them attention and perhaps respect. Need I say more about the real moment when
I first wanted to write?
BP: Who do you
consider your influences.
TM: Somewhat
embarrassingly, I think writers influence us in both our ways of, or outlooks
on, life and ways of writing. I’m sure more than one person’s been perversely
attracted by the idea of turning himself into an unwashed, absinthe-swilling,
licentious symbolist poet after reading the verse and, even more important, the
life, of Arthur Rimbaud. (My grandfather, who was not a writer, read Jack
London as the books came off the presses, and went to sea in homage.) So, from
the day I heard of Hemingway’s death on the AM radio of my father’s blue Chevy
Bel Air as we rode down a small avenue called Cherokee, which was probably my
first definite knowledge of that writer’s existence, I was fascinated by an
artist who engaged life in the way he did. It was only later, in the course of
reading all his works, that I came to appreciate his writing above his persona.
Mailer had the advantage, as it were, of being alive and a regular presence on
television. Again, another writer with a certain, to say the least, swagger,
and again a lack of realization on my part how much pure ass-sitting at a desk
went into doing the writing that allowed him to affect such panache (especially
that hair) and swagger. I read The Deer
Park, The Executioner’s Song, Armies of the Night, and for some
unfathomable reason, Why Are We in
Vietnam? three times, though never The
Naked and the Dead. In the year of grace, 1971, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas appeared in two parts in Rolling Stone, and the less said about
the impact that had on one’s writing the better. Luckily, in light of the
above, I read Charles Bukowski outside my formative years. Of the writers I
came to, first, for their writing, and without naming the far too obvious,
there was Joyce, grinding to a halt short of Finnegans Wake, Eliot, Beckett, The
Gambler, Fathers and Sons,
Nabokov, Lewis Carroll, Huckleberry Finn, desultory swaths of Melville, full
works of Camus, Gide, Flann O’Brien, A
Hundred Years of Solitude, Borges, very little Proust, The (great) Great Gatsby,
The Ginger Man, The Grapes of Wrath (still a very fine novel, no matter what
anybody tells you), The Sound and the
Fury, Junichiro Tanizaki, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Lafcadio Hearn, Yukio
Mishima, Under the Volcano, and a
steady diet of noir—all of Hammett and Chandler, most of Ross McDonald, James
M. Cain, Jim Thompson, Simenon, and Patricia Highsmith. Along with mystery
writers I read mysterious ones, such as B. Traven, Mikhail Bulgakov, Horacio
Quiroga, and John Collier. From the half generation preceding mine I read
McGuane, Harrison, McCarthy, even Brautigan, as well as Pynchon (well, The Crying of Lot 49), and his friend
David Shetzline (author of the criminally neglected Heckletooth 3). Obviously, not many women writers, which I do not
necessarily account as a benefit to my work. I also seem to have failed to
develop an interest in most contemporary authors—too many Jonathans to keep
track of. In a place in my heart reside a number of special odd, generally-small
books, including, but not limited to, The
Circus of Dr. Lao, Heart of Darkness,
“The Metamorphosis,” Candide, Rameau’s Nephew, Animal Farm (though Orwell’s non-fiction shines rather brighter), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
Michael Kohlhaas, Billy Budd, The Mysterious Stranger, and “The Bear.”
BP: Did you take
any formal writing classes?
TM: Two. The
first was at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in my freshman year there (as
for college, I adhered to the true Reedie tradition of dropping out without a
degree). Admission to the class was dependent upon submitted work; and I had to
see the instructor, the poet Robert Peterson, who was writer-in-residence at
the time, for thumbs up, thumbs down. I remember this rather good looking blond
girl on the stairs at the same time as I, and her saying, “Looks like we’re
walking up together”—I should only dare hope. She went into Peterson’s office
in Elliot Hall first, and about three minutes later rushed out, holding her
hand over her face. Not the best of signs, I thought. When I walked into his
office, Peterson, gray-bearded as I recall, veteran World War II combat medic,
sat in his desk chair, nodding at my submission in his hand and saying,
miraculously, sure, you can take the class. We would get blank
beet-juice-smelling mimeograph stencils to type our poems on (the class was all
poetry); and then we’d meet at his off-campus rented house where he’d have
French Market coffee waiting, and we’d read our poems aloud and critique. Again,
it is my good fortune that none of this verse survives, to my knowledge. I was also overtaken by D. H. Lawrence’s
Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence was a curious, particular
favorite of English departments of that day, as B. F. Skinner was of the
psychology professors—perhaps it had to do with the double-barreled initials in
lieu of forenames) and under his unhinged, stylistic influence produced a term
paper for Humanities 201, which the teacher, the historian F. Smith Fussner,
tore to shreds, sobering profoundly my opinion of my writing talents. I
retreated to a small red notebook and began writing the clearest, most
declarative sentences I could, only to have to relearn this ability all over
again when I took two writing courses with the novelist John Rechy in the late
1970s through the UCLA Extension. There is, it seems, simply no excuse for
verbs not agreeing with nouns and leading logically to objects.
BP: Where were
you first published?
TM: I believe I
wrote some poetry and film reviews for a Portland underground paper after
college, and also did some book reviews for a small newspaper in Pasadena. I
got a few more book reviews in the Herald
Examiner and the Times in Los
Angeles. I must have two or three partial and completed novel manuscripts lying
around somewhere from this period. My first published story, fiction, for which
I earned actual money, was “Africa Passing Relentlessly Beneath the Sun,”
published around 1976 in Gray’s Sporting
Journal, which was about the time E. Annie Proulx, as she was, then, was
also publishing stories, like “The Wer-Trout,” in Gray’s. From there our two career roads diverged. I sent another
story, “The Bandtail Above All,” non-fiction, that Gray’s was not going to publish anytime soon, to Sports Afield, even though the editor at
Gray’s told me “good luck” and that
SA was hardly likely to take it. But they did, and in a year or two the SA
editor Tom Paugh made me a contributing editor on the masthead. My SA story
“Buff” was selected by The Sporting News
as the Best Magazine Story Co-Winner for Best Sports Stories 1982, which led to
a book contract with E. P. Dutton and two books that today can be found as
those small gray flecks of paper used for padding shipping envelopes. My third
book, Dreaming the Lion, was probably
for better or worse the best composed of all my “works” up till now. After Tom
Paugh retired from the magazine, the notorious Terry McDonell took, in
journalese parlance, the reins; and that was a, if not entirely long, certainly
strange trip. I actually got Terry out to Wyoming on a pronghorn hunt, to which
he responded, after taking a buck, that he had received a vision of shooting
me. After Terry came an editor who shall remain nameless, with an expression
that seemed to lack only the nictitating membrane to rival a feeding thresher
shark’s and a penchant for placing zoftig bikini-clad fly-fishing models on the
covers and running articles about “pum’kin chunkin’.” I went over to writing
for Field & Stream. The Hearst
Corporation murdered SA; and Robert Petersen of happy memory, for some, bought
the title; and I came back. That lasted until Petersen committed his own
magazine-icide in the advertising downturn following 9-11. Back to Field & Stream, then the
resurrection of Sports Afield under the
enigmatic aegis of Ludo Wurfbain, publisher of Safari Press. At this point SA
has intentionally reduced its circulation to a level which permitted me to work
for both it and F&S without considerations of competition. Did another
book, Seasons & Days, this time
for my long-time editor and friend Jay Cassell at The Lyons Press/Globe Pequot
Press, and an anthology for Ludo, Wild
& Fair (do note the mania for ampersands), in which I managed to
publish works by Robert F. Jones, and two Pulitzer winners, Philip Caputo and
David Mamet. During the last few years I have written hundreds of
outdoor-television scripts for Orion Entertainment. And in the meantime I
continued to scribble, scribble on The
Snow Leopard’s Tale.
BP: What about
your personal life?
TM: I can’t
improve upon Hemingway’s dictum that the best early training for a writer is an
unhappy childhood. Because there are those still alive who knew all the
principals involved in that disastrous ménage, and to avoid opening partially
healed emotional wounds, I won’t say more. Nonetheless I wanted a wife and
child of my own (insert Philip Larkin here). And in pursuit of that, I, like
Churchill, married and lived happily ever after.
BP: Do you have a
wish for your book?
TM: I wish, more than anything, that I had not
been the one to write it, so I might be able to read it for a first time with
new eyes.
Kenneth Patchen's first book of poetry, Before the Brave, was published by Random House
in 1936. His earliest collections of poetry were his most political and
led to his being championed, in the 1930s, as a "Proletariat Poet".
This description, which Patchen rejected, never stuck since his work
varied widely in subject, style and form. As his career progressed,
Patchen continued to push himself into more and more experimental styles
and forms, developing, along with writers such as Langston Hughes and Kenneth Rexroth, what came to be known as jazz poetry.
He also experimented with his childlike "painted poems," many of which
were to be published posthumously in the 1984 collection What Shall We Do Without Us. Patchen's Collected Poems, in which "At the New Year" appeared, was first published in 1969, just a few years prior to Patchen's death. 
Kenneth Patchen's first book of poetry, Before the Brave, was published by Random House
in 1936. His earliest collections of poetry were his most political and
led to his being championed, in the 1930s, as a "Proletariat Poet".
This description, which Patchen rejected, never stuck since his work
varied widely in subject, style and form. As his career progressed,
Patchen continued to push himself into more and more experimental styles
and forms, developing, along with writers such as Langston Hughes and Kenneth Rexroth, what came to be known as jazz poetry.
He also experimented with his childlike "painted poems," many of which
were to be published posthumously in the 1984 collection What Shall We Do Without Us. Patchen's Collected Poems, in which "At the New Year" appeared, was first published in 1969, just a few years prior to Patchen's death. 
