By
THIRSTY
William Least Heat-Moon captivated
the American reading public in 1982 with the release of his first nonfiction
book, Blue Highways, an iconic travel
narrative that spent 42 weeks on the New
York Times Best Sellers List. Now, 35 years later, he has written his first
novel, Celestial Mechanics, that
transforms “the journey” into a compelling story that exists between the worlds
of illusion and reality. In this precisely written book, Heat-Moon has traded
the asphalt of Blue Highways for the
pathways of the mind and the gasoline for his Econoline van for the thoughts
and philosophical musings that come with age, all wrapped up in his characters’
haunting quests for rationality and spirituality in their complicated lives.
Stay
Thirsty Magazine was honored to visit with William Least Heat-Moon at
this home in Missouri for this Conversation.
STAY THIRSTY: In your ninth book and first novel, Celestial Mechanics, you spin a haunting
love story that oscillates between dream
and reality. What motivated you to switch gears from nonfiction to fiction at this time in your life
and to write a philosophical journey
through the mind?
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON: Over the nearly four decades
following the blue-highways trip and on to the completion of Celestial Mechanics, my experiences have
expanded, and that means I’ve seen more of the human experiment underway on our
beloved planet. I hope my perceptions have enlarged, one of them leading to
this new journey. Isn’t it ever more apparent that our species has made itself
into a threat to our continuance--as well as endangering the survival of so
much else--through our exploitations and extractions that lead to exhaustions
and extinctions? At the base of our behavior, so I believe, lies our widespread
failure to understand and honor the sources of our existence and to acknowledge
our relation and dependence on them. Just look at the leaders we elect: Among
them all, where is their vision of humankind beyond themselves? Or our
planet beyond now?
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| William Least Heat-Moon |
STAY THIRSTY: You tell the reader before your book begins that it
is a work of fiction with “inventions,” but also with “resemblances” that are
not coincidental. You intentionally “alert the reader” that you will be “fusing”
the lines between fiction and “actual.” After writing five nonfiction books
about traveling the road, how comfortable were you working in the space between
illusion and reality?
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON: We all live and work between our
illusions and the realities surrounding them, especially so if we define
“illusions” to include our imaginative life, our dreams, our hopes, and many of
our most fervent beliefs. I am, to use your term, more than “comfortable” there
because of the richness of those mental states of being. To quote one of the
epigraphs in Celestial Mechanics,
“Those lacking imagination take refuge in reality.”
STAY THIRSTY: Your novel has garnered some excellent reviews that
use phrases like: “masterfully crafted,” a “sprawling, fantastical work” that
explores “man’s spiritual journey.” It is a novel in search of something
greater than the story and its characters. When you conceptualized this book,
did you plan it out well in advance or did the characters and story become your
guides?
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON: The incipient idea of Celestial Mechanics arose from simple
images of a man confined temporarily to a wheelchair, a 1903 seed catalog,
a
ghostly neighbor, and a wandering spouse. At that moment, the concept was
entirely plot, virtually free of ideas beyond straight narration, yet from
those basic givens, notions emerged to propel the story. I’m interested in
plot only as a means to explore sentiments emerging from the character of the
characters and their actions, including what they say. As I wrote, I considered
the narrative as a kind of “play for voices.” Let’s face it, in the 21st
century, our yak-yak carries us along farther than our legs.
STAY THIRSTY: Silas Fortunato, your protagonist, says toward the
end of the novel: “I want the clarity of reason. I want release from delusions.
To see who’s really who. What’s truly what. What has real meaning and genuinely
lasting worth…The damnable uncertainty of it all! How can I be certain I’m
actually here.” You are 77-years-old. How closely do you resemble Silas
in your thoughts about your place in America, in life and in the universe?
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON: Silas is a better man than I, and
he’s half my age, but a number of the details of his boyhood I purloined from
my own. His youthful experience with organized religion, for example, was
exactly mine. His boyish drawings of helicopters are those I drew at age twelve.
I must say though, any resemblances are beside the point. Silas now has his own
existence free of mine, and I have a feeling he’ll be around longer than will
I.
STAY THIRSTY: Your undergraduate degrees are in photojournalism and
English, and your Masters and Ph.D. are also in English. Did you view the
writing of Celestial Mechanics through
the eyes of a photographer/journalist or a storyteller or both?
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON: I always try to write visually, to
see the scenes, but equally to hear the voices. Hearing the dialogue is crucial
for the story to function as I intend, and such hearing is contingent on a
reader’s imaginative participation: To hear
the characters rather than just see their words in print. Such a wish is common
among novelists.
STAY THIRSTY: Before your story begins, you set forth “An Octet of Postulates”
that frames the themes in your novel. Why did you choose these eight particular
quotations and the ideas contained within them?
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON: Each of the epigraphs can prompt a
reader to evaluate ideas within the tale. I hope the quotations, brief as they
are, expand the story to reveal the universality of central themes and expand
the reach of a single author.
STAY THIRSTY: From your famed bestselling book Blue Highways to Celestial Mechanics, you write
about “the journey.” What is it that calls you back to the road, whether real,
imagined or spiritual?
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON: The journey motif is one of the
oldest and most honored mechanisms in world cultures--even ones lacking the
written word--perhaps because the essence of all existence is movement--a topic
the characters address in Celestial Mechanics. From
our explosive genesis called the Big Bang and on to the circulation within our
veins and arteries, all is motion. In literature, consider The Odyssey, the book of Exodus,
The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Tom Jones, Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn. We move, we wander, we
discover, and in so doing we answer to what we are and thereby become who we are.
Evolution has designed us bipedals for long-distance movement, and as we know
(especially in our time), when we become sedentary, our hearts clog, our lungs
weaken, our muscles atrophy, and we begin to die. To rise and move is to
embrace existence. To live!
STAY THIRSTY: Now that you have your first novel under your belt, will
there be others?
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON: We’ll see. As you’ve mentioned, I’m
past the three-quarters of a century mark, but I still play basketball, still
walk the backroads around my place, and I’m still driven by curiosity and
astonishment--sometimes more than I’m comfortable with. My reading--elemental
and essential to my life--has shifted in recent years from literature to
science, and that brings me into new worlds to range around in. My ignorance
urges me to rise and take up another day to address vexations and greet joys,
and in them both to search for stories with potential to change--to lift--another’s life. If I’m not
trying for that, then there’s no reason for me to occupy space on our ever-more
crowded planet.
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