 |
|
| Jay MacDonald of USATODAY & Life Experiences of JLB |
Posted 08/29/2006
Fame & Fortune: James Lee Burke
Wealth of life experiences brings author big payoff By Jay MacDonald, Bankrate.com
He's been an oil pipeline worker in Texas, a surveyor in Colorado, a Job Corps tutor in backwoods Appalachia and a gangland counselor in south L.A. But it was only when James Lee Burke poured his wealth of life's experiences into a best-selling mystery series featuring Louisiana bayou detective Dave Robicheaux that this Jack-of-all-trades became master-of-one.
Travel came naturally to the Houston-born son of a Texas gas-pipeline engineer, who followed briefly in his father's footsteps after graduating from college. Inspired by a college writing competition, Burke went to Southwestern Louisiana Institute for two years and then transferred to the University of Missouri to major in journalism. After receiving a bachelor's and master's degree he taught at a variety of colleges while developing his fiction writing.
His first three literary novels were well-received by critics but barely noticed by readers. Burke loves to tell the story of his fourth novel and first crime story, "The Lost Get-Back Boogie," that may have set a record for the most rejections by publishers (111 over nearly a decade by Burke's count) before Louisiana State University Press took a chance on it. It went on to earn a 1987 Pulitzer Prize nomination.
But it was his sixth book, "The Neon Rain," that earned Burke his devoted readership. The debut of Robicheaux, a New Iberia, La., cop with a host of demons from alcoholism to lost love, was an instant hit. After two decades of trying, Burke had suddenly found his true calling as a pioneer of the literary mystery along with Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosley, Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane.
In 1997, he launched a new series with "Cimarron Rose," which features former Texas Ranger turned Hill Country lawyer Billy Bob Holland. With the publication of his 15th Robicheaux novel, "Pegasus Descending," Burke continues his winning streak.
Bankrate caught up with the traveling man, who now divides his time between homes in New Iberia and Missoula, Mont., for a look back at his colorful life.
Bankrate: In what financial circumstances did you grow up?
James Lee Burke: I grew up during the Depression and my father had a job. If your father had a job in those days, you were considered fortunate. We always did OK. It was a time of great privation but no one had very much. As a consequence, we never thought of ourselves as poor. It was just a time of great scarcity and frugality and being able to make a little go a long way. The great irony is that everyone who lived through those years looks back on them with nostalgia. I think it's because everyone of my generation knows we are the last generation that remembers what people call traditional America. We're a transitional group.
Bankrate: What did your father do?
Burke: He was a natural gas engineer, a pipeline man. He worked for the Houston Pipeline Co., one of the biggest in the world, I understand.
Bankrate: Did you work as a kid?
Burke: Oh sure, everybody did. My best friend and I had a shoeshine route in the early days of World War II. We would go from door to door with a big cardboard box mounted on a wagon and people would give us their shoes and we would shine them in a garage. But we only had one color polish: brown. So everything got shined brown; if the shoes were red, we would not let that stop us. For 10 cents, we shined their shoes and gave what we called "free home delivery." We also had a blackberry business and a lawn-mowing route, so we made out quite well.
Bankrate: Did you go to college thinking you would write?
Burke: I started in prelaw, but my cousin, the writer Andre Debus, was a year ahead of me and he won first place in the Louisiana college-writing contest in 1954, so I had to enter it, too, and started writing short stories my freshman year. I published my first short story in the college literary magazine when I was just 19, and I knew then that's all I wanted to be. I've been doing it ever since.
Bankrate: No pressure from your father to be a businessman?
Burke: Well, I lost my dad when I was 18; he died as the result of an automobile accident. But my dad had wanted to be a journalist. He wrote very well, but he had a job on the pipeline, and in those days you didn't quit your job. So he worked up until his death as a pipeline man, but the job he really wanted to do was the one he never got to do. He would always tell me, "Never work at a job you don't like," and he was talking about himself of course.
Bankrate: You tried journalism yourself for a time, right?
Burke: Yeah, for a while. Real writers are guys who write what they have to, to be what they are. You write ad copy, cutlines, chase ambulances, do obits, eat lunch with the Kiwanis and Rotary guys. You do all those things as a newsman. Nobody gets to write the Pulitzer Prize story for a long time. The grunt work is the hard work.
Bankrate: Did you go into journalism right out of college?
Burke: I went to Southwestern Louisiana Institute for two years and then transferred to the University of Missouri to major in journalism, but ended up in the creative writing program and then got an M.A. My wife Pearl and I were married in grad school and we're still married. And I went to work on the Houston pipeline just like my dad. That's where I wrote most of my first novel, "Half of Paradise," on the pipeline. I carried a notebook with me, because on the pipeline, you go where it goes.
Bankrate: How long were you a pipeliner?
Burke: Not long. I started teaching in 1960 at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. But I did a lot of things after that. I was a land surveyor up in Colorado, and then I was a social worker on Skid Row in South Los Angeles. That was the biggest learning experience of my life. We lived in a rough neighborhood and I learned about a different world.
Bankrate: What was that like?
Burke: It was the other America, a place where all the inequities were very visible. It was all gangland turf. Today it's Blood and Crips territory, but back in those days it was the Choppers, the Aranas (or Spiders), the East L.A. Viscounts, the Purple Hearts, the Gladiators. They were rough kids. They didn't have the weapons they have today, but it was the same mind-set. We lived there; those were the guys we had to watch out for. The kids in those neighborhoods didn't have a chance; they just had jail written all over them. There was no way a kid on his own could survive; he had to gang up or he was shark meat.
Bankrate: You had kids at the time. Was it hard making ends meet then?
Burke: We had some very lean times. Pearl was going to Southern Cal. She taught at Manual Arts High School, which is written up as the worst school in America, and that was our neighborhood school. At 8 a.m., the security guards would chain lock the fences so the neighborhood would be safe from the kids until 3 in the afternoon. But oddly, much of what I would write later would come out of those experiences. I would transpose it to other places, to New Orleans or New Iberia. I knew great criminals. I was a caseworker for about 110 convicts, about 20 percent were felons and about 20 percent were mental cases.
Bankrate: How did you get from there to teaching college English?
Burke: I went into the Job Corps next. I worked for the United States Forest Service and the U.S. Job Corps. It was another great experience I'll always be proud of. I was in the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky. I drove a truck all over the eastern United States, ferrying equipment, and I taught reading at the Job Corps center. It was a time of great idealism; Kennedy had introduced all of these educational programs and Lyndon Johnson had continued on with them. I was teaching boys from all over, a lot from Appalachia, a lot from the West Coast. It was kind of a volatile combo. The West Coast boys in particular would act contemptuously toward these mountain boys, call them Li'l Abner and stuff. Children went barefoot in the snow where we lived. Their clothes were made out of Purina feed sacks and they lived in dirt-floor cabins. The people were retarded from incest, they carried weapons, had no running water, burned kerosene lamps and their privies were built on the creek where they got their water and where they bathed. It was as primitive as human life gets.
Anyway, I was offered a job at the University of Montana over the phone in 1966 that I hadn't even applied for. Boy, it changed my life. It was one of those crossroads moments because we moved to Montana and it became a love affair, hooked for life. I had taught before at the University of Missouri and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, so I was re-entering the field. And I taught nine years at a community college in Miami. All experiences that went into my work.
Burke: I had a funny publishing career. I wrote all the time while I taught. I was one of those guys who remind me of an old Jewish expression: "You should be rich twice and go broke three times." I published three novels in the early part of my career and they did well critically but they were what is called "midlist books," and that's not good, it really works against you. My next book, "The Lost Get-Back Boogie," I couldn't sell. It was rejected by 111 editors over a nine-year period. That was the bad time; there were 13 years in the middle of my career when I could not sell anything in hardback. I don't know how many books and short stories I wrote, but I had to relearn that old lesson to work a day at a time and not worry about it, it's fate. You send it out and let your higher power be the judge of it.
Bankrate: I guess the punch line was that it went on to be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Burke: That's right. You know that book today is translated all over the world and has been republished numerous times. I cut it by 80 pages from the original.
Bankrate: When did you know that you would be able to support yourself as a writer?
Burke: I knew that with the auction for "Black Cherry Blues." That was the first major commercial success I had. I'd written two books in the Dave Robicheaux series, but they were midlist books, we couldn't live off what they earned, but the third one we said let's put it up for auction. I was amazed: six companies bid on it and the auction was very big. That was it, I knew it. In the same year, the Guggenheim Foundation gave me a fellowship. I had applied for 15 years and they came through, which gave me a year off to write the next book, "Morning for Flamingos." That allowed me to quit teaching. We had children in college and it allowed me to quit teaching and buy a modest home in Montana and we were off and running.
Bankrate: That freed you up for book tours as well.
Burke: Yes. Let me tell you, touring is the hardest thing one will ever do. I developed vertigo really bad about 12 years back. I have violent attacks, I hit the deck. It's triggered by stress and causes dilation of the blood vessels in the brain and really puts you out of action. My hand was seizing up when I was signing books. It came back two years ago and I said -- that's it. It's your body telling you.
Bankrate: Is there anything you would do differently, looking back?
Burke: Not really. I wrote with more light as I grew older, but maybe that's just the process that an author goes through. I always tried to remember Hemingway's words: "A writer must have the probity of a priest of God. A writer is honest or dishonest in the same way that a woman is chaste or unchaste. Once a writer has done a piece of dishonest writing, he is never again the same, and once writing has become his greatest love as well as his greatest vice, only death can separate him from it, and the country he will write about will always be the country that is in his heart." Can you imagine a statement like that? It says everything at one time.
|
|
|
