He mounts the stage to applause lustier than what greets most sexagenarian novelists, but still he demands more, waiting silently for the claps and cheers to whither before gesturing with feigned impatience to keep it coming. We comply, and he soaks up our squeezed adulation with Mussoliniesque stoicism. James Ellroy has arrived. He’s in Toronto to promote Blood’s a Rover. His opening speech rallies against “the internet invasion,” invokes Elliot, Sexton, and Houseman—supplier of his new novel’s title—before paying tribute to Knopf, his publisher, rendered in this bat-shit reverie as a prophet dog who came to Ellroy moments after his birth—his parents had slipped out for a drink—and deigns Ellroy the savior of literature, author of a string of future masterpieces, decrying that in the year 2009 he’ll publish a book that will single-handedly reverse the downturn in the global economy. Ellroy then promises an afterlife of divine promiscuity to everyone in he audience who purchases ten copies. He’s quite insistent that we each buy ten copies. As though storing up for the Apocalypse.
Blood’s a Rover’s the final installment of Ellroy’s ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy. It picks up where The Cold Six Thousand left off, covering 1968 through 1972. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King are dead. Black militancy is on the rise. Organized crime’s setting up house in the Dominican Republic. “I wanted to tell the story of the unsung leg-breakers of history,” says Ellroy. “Bad men in love with strong women.” The bad men include Dwight Holly, muscle for J. Edgar Hoover, Wayne Tedrow, ex-cop and drug-runner, and Donald Crutchfield, a kid with a penchant for peeping who becomes swept up in a tsunami of lethal clandestine activity. Prominent among the women is Joan Rosen Klein, an enigmatic, sexually ambivalent, leftist shadow figure. There’s also a gay, black undercover LAPD cop who easily constitutes one of Ellroy’s most intriguing and sympathetic creations. The novel runs over 600 pages. It’s dogged and ambitious, a labyrinth of conspiracy and conjecture through which Crutchfield functions as our sole convoy. It is at times almost comically grotesque—the cameos from Hoover and Howard Hughes especially—yet it also features some of the most emotionally textured interactions Ellroy’s ever penned.
Ellroy’s most famous for his ‘L.A. Quartet,’ which includes the novels The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential, though I’d argue his real masterwork is his 1996 memoir My Dark Places, in which Ellroy traces the investigation into his mother’s unsolved 1958 murder with chilling clinical detachment, describes his own desperately lonesome youth of window-peeping, drug addiction, Oedipal fixation and homelessness, and chronicles the re-opening of his mother’s case in partnership with Detective Bill Stoner, whose portrait is crafted with such elegance and compassion as to anticipate the most compelling of Ellroy’s later protagonists. My Dark Places is so astonishingly frank, its author’s public persona so shameless in every sense of the word, that Ellroy would seem every interviewer’s dream subject—you can ask this guy anything. But Ellroy’s also the emphatic architect of his own image. Descended from a long line of Scottish preachers, empowered by his considerable height, he holds court more easily than he converses. He's a practiced showman. He is also however a perfect gentleman, inquisitive, playful, observant, hilarious, and endearingly unabashed about his neediness. I truly enjoyed his company. I met him at Random House’s Toronto offices the morning after his triumphant Harbourfront Centre reading in early October.
JB: With Blood’s a Rover your fiction begins creeping into a period that you actually lived through as an adult. Does having personal memories of history change how you write about it?
James Ellroy: I was ten when this trilogy begins, 24 when it ends. So it’s my youthful cognizance. But frankly I was bombed. I was very self-absorbed. I recall history bopping around on the margins of my consciousness, but I didn’t care particularly.
JB: You expressed antipathy toward Martin Luther King when you were young.
JE: I was a dipshit kid. Now I revere Martin Luther King. He is in every way the moral voice of the trilogy. You live, you learn.
JB: You’ve endowed the character of Donald Crutchfield with an awful lot of the young James Ellroy—he lost his mother at ten, takes Dexedrine, does B&Es. Would you say this overlapping of characteristics your method of entry into the story?
JE: Crutchfield’s a real man. He’s a security consultant. He was a wheelman back in the ’50s and ’60s. He’s ten years younger in the book than he is in real life. We share certain passions. We interested in crime. We both love boxing, particularly the lower-weight, Latin fighters. He told me about the wheelman world and I thought this was something I couldn’t have invented. So I cut him in for some proceeds of the book and he gave me access to history I wouldn’t have had otherwise.
JB: But, for example, him mom being from Wisconsin, like yours?
JE: That’s all made-up.
JB: So was it important for you to give him some of your own history, neuroses and experiences?
JE: I was out to attack the iconography of my own life in a way that I’d never done before in fiction. He’s very much me. He’s a genius. He’s indefatigable. I did not go to the Dominican Republic and eat herbs and kill people. Or invade Cuba. Or disrupt the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I didn’t do those things. Did Crutch? Ask him. I think he’d probably avoid the question. He was a way in, and I began to see the viability of the construction early on because I’ve never written a dipshit kid. He’s impressionable. He’s malleable. I never say it in the book, but he’s never been laid.
JB: Crutch’s also a voyeur, as you once were. Voyeurism permeates the book. I think the dominant characteristic that you nurture in your depiction of J. Edgar Hoover’s also a deeply entrenched voyeurism.
JE: Hoover was a celibate homosexual. I swear to you I don’t think he ever had sex with man, woman, or beast. Or centipede. The idea that he would show up at the Waldorf Astoria in drag is preposterous. He was much too repressed. Much too circumspect. He liked to bullshit with big, rugged, good-looking men. But the idea of being a identified as homosexual would have been repugnant to them.
JB: To get back to voyeurism, do you find that by channeling this aspect of your persona into varied points in your story it enables you to rocket forward into a new kind of writing? Because in many ways Blood’s a Rover is departure from your earlier work.
JE: It is a departure, and I’m glad you mention it. It’s about the women. About women with children. It’s about the lost boy finding his way to some women who disperse and cut him loose in the end. The women are smarter than the men, stronger-willed, undeterred.
JB: So maybe what you’re doing is surpassing voyeurism. These female characters are more sculpted than you’d expect when the author’s viewpoint is that of an outsider looking in. Last night you spoke about how part of what accounts for the eight-year gap between The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s a Rover has to do with recent tumult in your personal life, and the role that women played in your recovery.
JE: I had a crack-up. You think I’m skinny now. I was 20 pounds lighter. I couldn’t sleep. I’d been working way too hard for too many years. I’d neglected my marriage. I went on a book tour for five months. I went to five European countries and 32 cities in the US and Canada. I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep, and I’m just going full-boar, performing every night. I was losing it baaad. I was out to dinner with a colleague in Chicago, and I went to the bathroom and I forgot where I was. I thought I was in Toronto. I passed out in the Pfister Hotel the next day in Milwaukee. Meanwhile my marriage tanked, and damned if there wasn’t a woman named Joan, and damned if there wasn’t a woman named Cathy, who I changed to Karen in the book. I dug as deep as I could into my own life. Helen Knode, my ex-wife and best friend, said Cold Six Thousand was too rigorous in its presentation of a very complex text. Go back to your art. So this is a much more heartfelt book than the two that preceded it.
JB: There’s a tenderness that recalls moments in your early novels, but it seems conveyed with more conviction, complexity and vulnerability here.
JE: I’ve learned a lot about myself, and put everything I could into this.
JB: Was it important to inject a theme of racial reconciliation into Blood’s a Rover?
JE: I recall the times, and I recall a tenuous coming together of whites and blacks because it was cool.
JB: But you’ve got some of the unlikeliest guys imaginable making peace with the black community, with black women in particular. It’s interesting to arrive at a point in your body of work where racial animosity isn’t just a given, something casually accepted.
JE: You’re very deft. PC people want racist to be a defining characteristic, rather than a casual attribute. You’re supposed to like these guys despite their vile sentiments and vile expressions. Dwight Holly’s obsessed with racial invective because he feels guilt over killing Martin Luther King, because he’s a Klansman’s son and he knows it’s wrong. But all these guys need women to show them the way.
JB: Do you think you might be able to attract more female readers with this book?
JE: I don’t know about developing a significant female readership at this point in my career. It’s a very male vision. It’s an American vision. It’s a Protestant, heterosexual vision. Don’t look for me on Oprah. Don’t expect me to be invited to the Obama White House.
JB: Would you like to be invited to the Obama White House?
JE: I’d like to look around. I'd like to ask Obama if being President of the United States the biggest fucking blast on Earth. George W. Bush would laugh like hell. Bush’s dad would laugh like hell. Ronald Regan would love it. Clinton would be beside himself. I think Obama’s a stiff. I don’t think he’d get it. He’s tremendously self-important and he’s humourless. He has an infectious smile. I watch the media so little, so I only get snippets of him.
JB: You’ve often said you don’t read anymore, don’t really keep up with the cultural current, but I know you’ve at least read Don DeLillo. You’ve read Libra.
JE: 20 years ago, yes.
JB: I think it’s interesting that both you and DeLillo have created bodies of work around an idea of Americaness, not really pinpointing it, but circling it continually. When you read Libra, or any other DeLillo, did you feel a certain kinship?
JE: Libra knocked me on my ass. Flat on my ass. I’d never read DeLillo before. He’s very self-conscious. He’s more than a little self-important. He’s much, much more intelligent than me, much more learned. I may be a better writer moment-to-moment because I’m not that self-absorbed. And I am a vulgarian at my core. But that he gave us this portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald as this overachieving, grandiloquent American snoop before me gores my goat. That thesis of his, that the JFK assassination is the world’s most over-glamourized business dispute killing, that Jack mandated his own death by fucking with Castro, unleashing a tidal wave of forces, all of whom were professional killers—organized crime, crazy Cuban exiles, renegade CIA guys—who couldn’t get Castro, who had to kill somebody and it had to be him: it’s astonishingly deft and complex. The best explanation I’ve ever heard. I had a slight correspondence with Mr. DeLillo. We met by accident at an Amsterdam book fair and had breakfast. He’s a difficult man. He’s reserved. He’s very intellectual. He’s almost impenetrable. Yet I’m fond of him.
JB: I was also thinking about the way you evoke these mountains of files in Blood’s a Rover. This also echoes Libra, obsession embodied in paper and ink.
JE: It’s an epistolary novel. The characters are all file hoarders. That’s how you solve crimes: you read files. A shit detective will read a file ten times, a great detective 50. He’ll find something nobody ever found. There’s no postmodernism here. This is not a comment on me. This is just the way it was done then. An interviewer said this is a comment on the death of the analogue age. Beats me, I’m computer illiterate. I will do anything to simplify my life in order to think more efficaciously and live in bygone periods.
JB: I was surprised to learn you don’t do much first-hand research.
JE: I trust myself to extrapolate fictionally. I hire researchers to compile fact sheets and chronologies so I won’t write myself into error. I had a ten-second girlfriend in France the better part of two years ago. She was Spanish-fluent, and we were going to go to the Dominican Republic together. But what is the DR? Shitsville-fucking-USA. What, I want to go to some third-world slum? So I sent a friend of mine who’s an inveterate traveler. She came back with some slides, maps, history. She sat me down with her foldout computer. I looked at it for 45 minutes and said that’s enough. I got it. It’s fiction—you extrapolate. I knew about Joaquín Balaguer. I knew he was this tall.
JB: I was also surprised to learn that you’re a man of faith. Did this spring from your addiction recovery experiences in the ’70s?
JE: I’ve always been a man of faith. I had a Christian upbringing. People are astonished at this. It’s a happy way to live. I’m not a Creationist. I believe in evolution, as do most Christians. Like most Christians I don’t bomb abortion clinics, don’t beat up homosexuals, don’t lynch black people. If you look at my books there is always, however tenuously, a note of redemption struck at the end. Even if it’s a cliffhanger. The books are profoundly moralistic.
JB: I’m fascinated that you spend so much time in the very dark, frequently grotesque world of your books and still maintain faith in some cosmic order.
JE: I believe in love. I believe in the conjunction of men and women. I am as fuck-struck and sex-crazed as I was when I was 20. I just met an extraordinary woman who I think will be the love of my life and it’s an amazing experience. I blundered around a lot. I’m very fit at 61, and I’m back where I was at 14—obsessed with classical music and women. I don’t think about much else.
JB: What do you think about when you lie awake at night? Or have you beat the insomnia?
JE: I’ve gotten over my fear of death. I’ve largely gotten over panic attacks. Faith helps. It’s just suppressed emotions, repressed sexuality. It’s all that crazy shit that accumulates in your body. Although I’m not a freak, I have chased women compulsively for many years. But I always had the crazy idea that I’ll meet a woman one day and that’ll be it. And damned if it didn’t happen. Just when I thought it’s my karma to lie around in the dark waiting for women to call and then go out like a pitbull and attack the female race, it happened.
JB: When My Dark Places came out you were often quoted as saying that you don’t believe in closure. Has that changed?
JE: No. I think life is open-ended. I think the cosmos is open-ended. Of course, I could be wrong. We’ll see.
