I printed a copy and headed back to Hohenwald and showed it to the family. I wanted to get back in the attic and see if I could find more material. William’s ex-wife Diane and all the kids reviewed the draft we had done. Diane said William did his greatest writing during the seventies, and she thought these pages were from that time. She thought Laura had typed those pages, although his oldest daughter Lee also helped from time to time. When I mentioned the names Edgewater and Roosterfish, Diane immediately knew the people the characters were based on. She went on at some length about Roosterfish and how he was based on two different people, both now dead, who were the most reprehensible people in Lewis County.
Diane’s trailer sat beside the house William had built, and she was living there helping Kory with Laura’s four kids. I walked next door and showed Kory the draft, and he was very pleased to see that I had found something useful. He got a flashlight and we went up the narrow steps, pushed aside the boards, and there I was again with all those books and magazines. I started digging through the boxes. The first one was full of old Ramparts and some Esquire. Kory’s flashlight was getting weaker by the moment. I picked one last box, and bingo, there was a sheet of crinkled typewriter paper sticking out between some magazines. I dug deeper. There was a pile of typescripts near the bottom. I showed them to Kory; it was nearly dark and he was ready to get out.
Then I noticed a few pieces of sheetrock leaning again the end wall. I peered behind them and saw a plastic tub sitting there, wedged against the wall. Kory held the sheetrock while I pried it out. It was filled to the top with old notebooks.
I had gotten to know William’s brother Cody who lived nearby, so I dropped by his place to show him the manuscript of The Lost Country and these latest finds. When he looked at the pages, Cody remembered that he had read them when William originally wrote them. He confirmed what Diane said about when the manuscript was written. When he saw the name Roosterfish, he asked if I knew what it meant. I said I had never heard it, and he said it was a term they used when they were kids—common slang in Lewis County in the fifties for cocksucker.
Now I knew that William had started writing The Lost Country nearly thirty years before. I remembered him telling me that he couldn’t find the manuscript, that he had looked through his papers and he didn’t know what had happened to it. Here it was, in a box in the attic, yellowing with age. Finally it had surfaced, too late for him to have any personal benefit from it, but not too late for his readers, who had been anticipating the title for years. I found notebooks with material from The Lost Country in this newest tub as well. To our surprise, the ending to The Lost Country was in one of the notebooks that had been hidden behind the sheetrock. We celebrated. I assembled the entire novel into a first draft and then called a couple more friends, Lamont Ingalls in Florida and Paul Nitsche in Wisconsin, who were great admirers of William. Lamont, a native Tennessean, has been working as an editor and reviewer since Wild Dog Press published William’s collection, Time Done Been Won’t Be No More, in 2010. Since then he has been involved with recovering and publishing all of William’s works. Paul Nitsche has also worked tirelessly, reading the manuscript repeatedly, editing, proofing, and helping in all aspects of preparing The Lost Country, and all of William’s posthumous works, for publication.
I contacted the publisher, who was thrilled to hear the news. But they no sooner got a copy of the manuscript than the publisher died of a heart attack. Suddenly we were entangled in a huge mess. The publisher left his business in total disarray, owing all his authors, including William, huge sums of money, and the company had nothing but unpaid debts. Some of the staff tried to salvage the operation, but it was hopeless. It took over two years to work through the legal morass and get the rights to the book back. Finally the rights reverted to William’s family, who were anxious to get it into print. But it wasn’t a simple matter to place it with another publisher. After many months and what seemed like endless delays, we placed the manuscript with Dzanc and now, more than six years since his death, William’s greatest work is seeing the light of day.
There aren’t many stories about great books that show up after the author has died. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole springs to mind. Typically, posthumous works are a bit piecemeal and have an unfinished feel to them. However, William is a special case. He completed his first novel at age twenty-five and continued writing nonstop, though he didn’t get published until he was fifty-nine years old. He honed his skills over all those years so that, while he revised slightly in his handwritten notebooks, once they were typed he did few if any revisions. It wasn’t until I had access to his entire archive that I realized the extent of his unpublished writings, which included four unpublished novels and a collection of unpublished short stories.
William’s writing was the driving force of his life. He cared about little else. He was a free spirit and lived like a true artist in a self-ruling world. To many people, he seemed aloof and detached. He lived a hardscrabble earthly life, rugged and simple. It really didn’t matter to him where he was, he lived in a writer’s trance. He served his art and let his art serve him. He was creating something original, something brand new, high energy, cut to the bone, coming out of the darkness with an element of danger, exploding onto the page. He was a gentle person but in his books life is cheap. Sitting up writing in the still of the night, he wrote prose that is heartfelt and melancholy. In a world that didn’t seem to care, he was an earth angel singing from some imaginary corner of the universe, which he imbued with beauty and concern for all life.
J.M. White
William Gay, The Lost Country
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