A Word on Words; 2301; James Le Burke

A word on words, a program delving into the world of books and their authors. This week, James Lee Burke talks about Dixie City Jam. Your host, for a word on words, Mr. John Siganthala, chairman of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. Hello, I'm John Siganthala. Once again, welcome to a word on words. We have as our guest, a friend, an old friend who's been here before with his friend, Dave Robeshow. Welcome, James Lee Burke. It's great to have you back. Thank you for having me here, John. It's nice to be back. Dixie City Jam. Dixie City Jam. Dixie City Jam is the title. And once again, that cop, that Robeshow, is heavy into mystery and intrigue and surrounded by violence and danger. You sort of introduce us to some old friends and new friends of his this time and some enemies.

I thought that the introduction of this one was fascinating because you take us to New Orleans and the Cajun country. You put us slightly offshore in New Iberia, Louisiana, where there was a sunken sub. If I ever knew that Nazi submarines patrolled the Gulf Coast, I've forgotten it. And so that was a little piece of history. Talk a bit about how you came to use that sunken sub as a way of getting us into this book. Well, there was, in fact, a U-boat pack or a wolf pack that operated from the Jersey shore, excuse me, all the way along the edges of the continental United States through the

straits of Florida into the mouth of the Mississippi from the onset of the war until about February of 42. And they sunk hundreds of thousands of tons of American shipping. But the sinkings were never reported because of the wartime news blackout. Sons of ship. That's right. That's right. But people in Louisiana knew that at night there were oil fires burning on the southern horizon, like an orange mudge against the sky. These U-boats were eventually recalled by Hitler to help with the sea blockade of Great Britain after the Luftwaffe wasn't able to deliver England during the blitz, as its name Goring had promised. But there are several of those sub-sunk out there. They bounce up and down with the currents and they slide up and down the continental shelf.

The show is an interesting man, and I've said that before when you've been here, but he's a man of diverse interests. First of all, for a cop, he's very well read. He is a fisherman. That's right. He is a scuba diver. He's a lover. I mean, he and Boots have a terrific relationship. Rocky at times, difficult at times. He's not an easy man. He's not an easy man, I would imagine, to get along with all the time, because he's so an dependent man. Well, he's an extraordinary person, but he's also the every man protagonist in the medieval morality play. He represents what's best in us. He's chivalric. He tries to give voice to those who have none, the politically disenfranchised.

And he comes from a blue collar background, so he understands the world of working people. But he also understands that our greatest vulnerability lies in the frailty of our moral vision. And Dave subscribes to the notion that people are basically good, but we're often misled by unscrupulous and demagogic leaders. Well, he at times runs into people who are not basically good. That's right. I mean, Max and Bobo Carlucci, to mention too. That's right. These two mobsters, two guys in New Orleans. Now, Cleak Purcell, his pal, is almost a counterhero and Cleak begins in some difficulty, right from the outset.

Cleak, and he used to be partners, and Cleak stays in trouble. All of a lot of people would like to take Cleak out, put a hit on him. A few would like to do the same for Dave. How is it that heroes find themselves constantly threatened by the forces of evil? I mean, I never knew two guys who sort of walk the edge of danger on a day-in-day basis that a lot of people from time to time pick on them. Well, I think it's in the nature of our relationship within the human family that good people, people who, as William Faulkner said, will raise their voice against hypocrisy and mendacity and venality and cupidity, the love of money. People who, in other words, have integrity and political courage will always be the enemies of those who would exploit both the earth and their fellow man.

That antagonistic relationship will manifest itself in five minutes after a person of integrity and honor raises his voice against those whose agenda is a venal one, always. Just to sort of put the story in context of the submarine after it's discovered by Dave, some years back. There's there and he knows it's there and he goes back and we discover it because he knows there's a little doe out there. There is a man around town, hippo, who is willing to pay some doe and so Dave is flirting with the idea. Now Dave has another pal, Batiste, and Batiste and Dave have a fascinating relationship. And, Batiste is black, dedicated to him, committed to the cause of righteousness, shows

moral indignation when he sees children exploited, and you get Batiste in trouble very early on. Now why? Well, there have been a series of vigilante murders, or at least people think these are murders committed by a vigilante in New Orleans. It's one of the themes in the book, as though things are falling apart at the center. And we live in a time when we seem to have problems that offer no easy solution, narcotics, racial problems, gangs, the general debilitation of our cities, and it's in times like this that people seek facile and brutal and simplistic solutions. One of those that seems to be at work in the book is a vigilante. There are people who offer simplistic political solutions that wink at the Constitution.

That's the grave danger. And Batiste, in this case, has been arrested, charged with one of the vigilante killings. Of course, he's innocent because he's a good person. Yeah. Well, I'm thinking now that Batiste is not only arrested, but he's really arrested by a guy who hates Dave. That's right. This unscrupulous cop. Yeah. And he also hates cleat this cop. And he tells Dave he thinks cleat may be the vigilante. That's right, and still he nails Batiste for one of the murders. And I think that early on, you create this sort of interaction among several different personalities, several different characters, and we know from the outset who the good guys and the bad guys are.

Now let me ask you, in writing, is it your idea to sort of create the personalities, give them an identity, for all fans of Dave Robeshow, reintroduce him, and sort of establish the good guys and the bad guys and the threshold of the plot, and then let it develop because it seems to me that this time there's no clue going in as to where we're going. That direction you're going to take, Dave, we hear the vigilante, and that's sort of a hint that that's going to be one of the main themes of the book. But talk about from a rightist point of view, what goes through your mind, in terms of setting up a plot, it's not a complex plot, but it does seem to me that I have to know the people before I know the direction you're going to take them, but maybe I'm wrong about that.

Well, no, I understand your feeling, but in truth, I never plan the books, and I've never really understood where the characters came from. I know they're composites in some way, but it's as though they're entities unto themselves, and I have a feeling, a general feeling about something is disturbing me at the time when I begin a book. George R. W. W. said, the writer is compelled to set history straight. He's bothered by some kind of injustice. It's an obsession, a compulsion, but in this book, I simply began the first scene writing about this wrecked Nazi U-boat off the coast of Louisiana. I knew the story was already written in the unconscious. It's a feeling I have. It's already there, and it's as though I discover it daily. I call it the Autistic Sevant School. I have a hard time claiming credit for what I do.

It almost sounds like an other life or an other spirit that was in your ear, but as well as I can describe it, I never outline anything. I never know which way it's going. So you didn't have the vigilante in mind before you went down to put Dave down tapping on the submarine with his bowie knife. No, it was on my mind at the time. I began this novel before the last presidential election. What bothered me were things I was hearing in the rhetoric. That's about rounding up the homeless. Again the law and order rhetoric that goes back to Governor Wallace, who introduced that theme, who once said, almost 30 years ago, George Wallace said, this is the future of American politics.

It's the same theme that plays successfully again and again when politicians address themselves to the motions of the mob. I just have a very bad feeling about the direction we're headed at, that I think we have to start doing things differently. We have some very serious problems, but the kinds of solutions that some people have offered are I think worse than the problem. It almost sounds as if there was some hidden message, and I know I'm wrong about this. As you talk about it, it sounds as if there's some hidden message about that you're conveying through your hero, Dave Robyshow, about the society in which we live. I don't get that message. I get a good story. I get a fantastic plot here, and I'm going to say at the end it has a neat little ribbon on it.

It's like giving me a present with a bow on it. To find out now that there was not a plot outline from the outset, but you simply let Dave, and maybe Dave by this time knows where to lead you, I don't know. Well, I think you got it. There's some of our readers who are going through this process. They all want to be writers, you know. I get letters from them, and they say, well, you look at my outline, and please, I mean, I don't do that, because I send them back. Well, you look at my outline, tell me if you think this has the making of a good novel, and you have no outline. No, you know, a pop of him, and I said something real good once. He said, I don't outline a story. If I outlined it, I would know its conclusion. If I would know its conclusion, so would the reader. It's a good line. It is a good, it's a great line. Well, tell me, tell me then, where do the characters come from? Let me just give you an example.

Let's take Sister Marie. She's sort of introduced into the book Midway. We're into the plot before she emerges, and we don't know who she is. She's sort of a mystical figure that flits around a little bit, and Dave knows who she is, he thinks, and then suddenly he finds out. I don't know who she is, and when he finds out who she is, she ain't Sister Marie. That may sound complex to our viewing audience, but as a matter of fact, you create a mystery within a personality, and then expose the mystery. Again, it's difficult for me to think that you hadn't sketched out the parameters of our personality or the character before you began. Well, part of the book's complexity or its tension has to do with the fact that oftentimes characters are not what they seem, but as an effect of fictional drama to us, I subscribe

to that notion. It's the greatest drama lies in the discovery of people's complexity. In this case, the evil characters in the book seem to have almost metaphysical properties, and certainly through a will book author. Will book culture, this neo-Nazi whom we meet. The characters seem emblematic of forces that are almost like a roaring sound out of the abyss. And of course, that theme has to do with William Butler Yates, his poems about the second coming, and also the biblical prophecies in the Old Testament about the struggle between Gog, G-O-G, and Megag, and the Battle of Armageddon in the Book of Revelation. I had those things in mind when I was writing the book, because it's a book about the ending of the millennium.

When we began always in history to see, our own history being representative of larger and apocalyptic events, fortunately, they never have been so. We went into the next century, right, as we were about to meet on the curtain of ourselves. But this book has characters that seem to represent not only sociopathic evil, but evil that seems diabolical. Well, you get us into just how diabolical it is. He has some suspicions about Sustomerie. She has a Cajun family name, so that should have eased some of his attention. But you know, he was suspect, and the interesting thing to me is how you titillate us. He's going to call the Monsignor and find out about this Sustomerie. He can't get the Monsignor, so you make us wait until the Monsignor calls back in the

meantime. There's another event or two, there are a couple of interludes, and then he gets the call back, and he knows that he's got a problem on his hand. Talk about the right to start processes in that sequence of events. Okay, the neo-Nazi whom we first meet will buckhalter is far more than simply a villain. Early on we realize that he seems to have powers that go beyond anything mortal. The preacher appears in the story, a fellow named Brother Oswald flat, used to have a radio ministry on station XERF down in Del Rio. And he warns Dave that he thinks the Antichrist is at hand, or the time of the Antichrist is at hand. Dave dismisses this as the rhetoric of a rather innocuous and harmless religious fundamentalist, okay, or fanatic, but then we begin to see that perhaps there are people here whose

evil is truly of awesome proportions, and in this case, evil seems to clothe itself in disguises. And this is part of an ongoing theme in the series that the great harm that's done in human affairs is done through a few agencies which insinuate themselves into the mainstream of society. It's not the people who are physically or psychologically different from us and in apparent why. Those who do the grave injury are those who look most like us, who talk like us, who are part of our system. It's they who impose misery and death and ruin on human society. It's not the guys who have unicorn horns growing out of their heads or pentagrams, and they don't come to us in the form of the satyr with goat's feet.

Comes the time when Bucalter appears almost in that guard, I mean he's wearing khakis and combat boots, but I mean that is at a climactic moment in the book. How did you develop him as a character? Neo-Nazism is a problem in this society. It's a world problem. You embody all of the vile and willful and corrupt and oppressive tactics of the Nazis in this one personality. He comes across as a as as venal a human being as one could ever meet. Would you ever worry that you couldn't make him as bad as you wanted him to be?

Well when I was writing about this person, again he seemed to come out of some place where the story had been written earlier, but I was reminded again and again of Albert Karmou's description of the evil of the Nazis. He wrote it in his underground newspaper right before the liberation of Paris. Karmou said we may again see a group that would equal the evil of the Nazis, but none would surpass them because evil reaches an apex, a zenith beyond which nothing could be its equivalent. And it represented not a political ideology, but the ethos of the bully, the sadist, the missing thrope, and I had these things in mind when I was writing about book halter. He was not a man who would ever use a racial slur.

He appears intelligent. He's a physical man, but he has no tattoos. There's nothing physiologically repellent about him except little flaws in his makeup that make us think that perhaps he came out of a different gene pool than the rest of us, but what is most disturbing about him is his intelligence and the ubiquitous nature of the evil which he represents. It seems to float like smoke through screens. It floats on the wind in the evening. It's suddenly inside the home like a presence. No one can breathe, suddenly, that it's as though buck halter has a way of being able to rob people of breath. I think Dave says that he could be the introducer of a regime in which the shaved headed and jack booted out would become caretaker of the sun. What would you say if I suggested that as evil as he is and as menacing as his persona

is, that Nate Baxter, the cop, represents the shaved head and the jack boot in a different but equally oppressive and menacing way? Oh yes, he's the kind of fellow who would quickly join the ranks of Will Buckhalter. Dave confronts Nate Baxter, this corrupt cop, and tells him, I think, Nate, you're not a bad cop because you're on a pet. You're a bad cop because you don't understand that it's our charge to protect the defenseless. Instead, Nate Baxter exploits their weakness. And has raped and sodomized people that he's a cruel and sadistic man with what a psychologist would call an imperious urge to acquire power over others.

He's the guy who'll find a brown shirt if it's hanging in the closet and probably has one under his wife's shirt and tie. Is Buckhalter drawn on, I mean, I've pumped you about this sort of thing when you were here before. There are aspects of his personality that strike me as reflecting a public figure who sort of flirted on a fringe of politics and almost got into its mainstream Louisiana not long ago. Is there, are there elements of David Duke in Buckhalter? Whatever thought about it, I mean, not consciously. I think the neo-fascist personality or, finally, the person who represents the psychology of the bully is one that is always driven by fear.

And what he fears most is in the egalitarian and pluralistic society. I was very surprised in the last election by the rhetoric of a conservative commentator whom I always respected. I might have disagreed with him, but I couldn't believe the things he was suggesting in the campaign about quarantining the homeless and anger toward what I think was minorities. It bothered me, and I always thought of him basically as a man of goodwill, but the fact that that rhetoric could be introduced into a presidential campaign as the Willie Horton employee was a direct, overt appeal to racial and sexual hysteria. The fact that in my lifetime, I'm 57, that I would see this kind of thing on a national level, and it would be found to be not particularly exceptional, is disturbing stuff.

I mean, I mentioned Governor Wallace a moment ago, George Wallace never waged a campaign like the Willie Horton one. Lucinda Burzoran is a new type type cop. Yeah, I mean, she wouldn't have made it in your books a few years ago, and she wouldn't have made it on a police force. Black woman, strong will talk about where she came from. Well, Lucinda Burzoran is a detective, playing closed detective with New Orleans police department, a black woman, whom Dave meets, and at first they have a kind of answer. Yeah. He does her own favor and she turns him off. They have a contentious and antagonistic relationship, and then he begins to discover where she does, that each one of them is a complex and decent person, and she's a fine character, I think, in the book. She's one of my favorites. She's very tough-minded and has even gone to the execution of some of the men whom she

arrested and made the case against, but she says she goes there because the victims of those men cannot. Dave has reservations about capital punishment. She does not. Yeah, she's a fine character, I think. Let me ask the camera if it can come in on this. That book says something about James Lee Burke after seven days of Robucho novels and how many six other books? Yeah, 13 all together. Now, that cover says that James Lee Burke to a core of readers out there is more important than the title of the book or the artwork on the book. That's a great compliment, too. Well, it is. I congratulate you on that. Thank you. I mean, how do you feel about that? Well, I have wonderful publisher. Well, I mean, he should be one of them. I mean, he wouldn't be there if you weren't making dough for him. Well, they're a very great house, a high period, and I have an editor named Patricia Mulkehi. She's just, I call her St. Pat.

She's just a great lady to work with and Bob Miller, the president of the publisher out. James Lee Burke, author of Dixie City Jam, has been our guest on a word on words. Your host has been John Seganthaler, chairman of the Freedom Farm First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. This program was produced in the studios of WDCN Nashville.