Made in S.A.: Neal Barrett Jr.Made in S.A.: Neal Barrett Jr.

Last month, when the SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY WRITERS OF AMERICA honored NEAL BARRETT JR. as Author Emeritus, he wanted to meet New Weird icon CHINA MIEVILLE. To Barrett’s surprise, once the two were face-to-face, it was Mieville who wanted his autograph.

Call it the New Weird meeting the Original Weird.

During his 50-year career, Austin-based Barrett has published more than 50 novels and 70 shorter pieces, a good number of them best described as a little weird. Hell, some of them are a whole lot weird.

Barrett’s short stories have regularly landed in the pages of ASIMOV’S and yearend “Best of…” collections. A couple of his books have even grabbed serious literary praise – the Washington Post called The Hereafter Gang “one of the great American novels.” Along with his “serious work,” he’s also cranked out everything from adult westerns (yep, smut on the plains), Hardy Boys books (as Franklin W. Dixon, of course) and movie novelizations (who knew there was one for Pam Anderson’s “Barb Wire?”).

We caught up with San Antonio-born Barrett at his home in South Austin just before a party honoring his SFWA recognition. In attendance were his friends JOE R. LANSDALE and SCOTT A. CUPP, themselves no strangers to Texas weird.

You were born in San Antonio. Do you have much recollection of it?

Neal: No, we moved when I was very young. I’m not even sure why my folks were in San Antonio. It must have been something to do with my father’s business. He was in the radio business. They were flat out of there pretty quick, though. I’ve been back a few times. I was toastmaster at Worldcon in San Antonio. When was that?

Scott: That was in ’97.

Scott told me that you got to meet a lot of famous people when you were a kid because your dad did radio, but the people were often in their underwear.

Neal: Yeah, they just happened to be. I’d go see Gene Autry backstage and he’d come out of the restroom in his underwear and he’d have on garters. Men had sock garters in those days. Roy (Rogers) would come out like that too. My worst mistake meeting them was I asked the wrong guy about the wrong horse. I asked Roy how Champ was. (Laughs.) Roy said, “Well, I guess he’s probably alright. You probably should ask him.” I just got the wrong horse. I also met Bing and Bob Hope. Met them and my dad played golf with them. A lot of famous people came through in those days, and when they’d appear on the radio, I got to meet quite a few of them. Later, I went hitchhiking out to Hollywood. That was the year I graduated high school. Went out there and stayed with (Western actor) Tim Holt. He showed me how he really was the fastest gun. People like Cary Grant would be walking down the street. I was just amazed to see that. But, (Holt) was the first one I got to meet and talk to and got to know. He had a knife that he’d just twirl all the time.

Were you interested in acting in the pictures, or did you just go out there to see what it was all about?

Neal: About four of us went out there, and some of them ended up joining the Marine Corps. We also went to Galveston and slept on the beach there, worked on carnivals. That was ’48. Galveston was a wild town back then, with gambling and everything else. I think I ran a shooting gallery while I was there. My friend was with the acrobatic lady. It was a real interesting time. I remember one morning we were walking down the street and these prostitutes asked us, “You boys had anything to eat?” And they bought us breakfast. We didn’t do any business with them, but they fed us. If you were hitchhiking, black people would pick you up, but white people would pass you by. I remember a car full of real nice black people picked us up, and we said, “Why, that was nice of you to pick us up.” One of them said, “Well, we can’t read and we need you to help us with the signs.” I met a lot of nice people down there, a lot of strange people. In Corpus Christi, there was this parade and a huge Hispanic guy was riding on a horse. I asked him, “Are you going to give me a ride on that horse?” He said, “Sure,” so I hopped on ended up riding behind him in the parade. We went back his trailer afterward and his girlfriend was even bigger than him. He took me to a bar in Corpus where I probably would have died if he hadn’t been with me. At the time, the coastal bars were really dangerous places to be, but I knew they wouldn’t do anything to me if he was around. It was a real honor. The thing I learned most from all that, though, was that common folk treat you right, and uncommon folk frequently don’t.

From there you went back to back to Oklahoma, ended up in school. You had a writing instructor whom I understand was pretty influential.

Neal: There several writing people there. One of them was Walter Campbell, who wrote under the name of Stanley Vestal, about rivers and things. He was a godson of Sitting Bull. He’d tell us stories about the other side of some of these historical things. Sitting Bull would tell him, “We couldn’t figure out what Custer and those idiots were doing. We just had no clue what they had in mind.”

Joe: Who was your other writing instructor there? I was trying to remember.

Neal: Dwight Swain. Dwight Swain and Foster Harris. Foster Harris wrote for the Saturday Evening Post. Now, I’ve got to tell you, I love Oklahoma, but I tried several years to get in touch with those people up there. I worked for the Oklahoma Publishing Co., owned by the Gaylord family, when I got out of college. Ed Gaylord was just a kid my age back then, and we’d have coffee together. Now, they’ve got the Ed Gaylord Journalism school up there. It’s a pretty big deal. So, I tried to get in touch with (the school) and give them my archives, and they said, “Well, we’ll get in touch with you.” Now, Texas State, they were happy to have my archives. I don’t mind telling that out loud because –

Joe: Because you got dissed by Oklahoma.

Neal: I’ve not no great feelings about that because I was close to all those people at the school. I majored in professional writing. At that time, when you took that major, you took the short story one semester and you wrote a short story. The next, you took the novel and you wrote a novel. You didn’t screw around with those creative writing exercises.

Joe: That’s the way I teach. You make ‘em write.

Neal: Well, you can’t get a job now as a writing teacher unless you have your master’s. I tried to do that several times, tried to get a teaching job. I’d say, “Well, I’ve written 50 books.” “You don’t have a master’s now do you? Need to get that degree.”

Did you set out to write science fiction originally?

Neal: It’s funny because people ask that and I never really set out to write anything, to be anything. Joe will tell you, what writers do is read. There are no writers that have ever come up not reading. I just read everything in the little drug stores I could get my hands on. I started out writing little comic books but I found out I couldn’t draw, so I’d just write the (speech) balloons. That’s how I invented prose. (Laughs.) Because I knew I couldn’t make it with the art.

Do you remember your first fiction sale?

Neal: Of course. The first thing I sold was for $7.50, and it was to Writer’s Digest. It was a series of rejection letters to Mark Twain, Tolstoy and Burroughs. I can remember they told Tolstoy, “Cut this. We need it at about 5,000 words.” I know the Mark Twain rejection was, “We don’t want to encourage our children to ride around on rafts in the river.” That was the first thing. In science fiction, I sold about four things at once. I thought, “What a scam. Are you serious? I can actually do this?” I sold one to Galaxy, another to Galaxy, sold one to Amazing and then I sold one to the Toronto Star. The Toronto Star at that time had a tabloid fiction section. That story was called “Yellow Hair.” It was about a blonde cave girl who conquered one of the stone-age guys and straightened them all out. Years later, a woman made a lot of money writing that book. What was that?

Clan of the Cave Bear?

Neal: That was it.

(Neal goes to retrieve several magazines containing his early stories, including the supplement with “Yellow Hair.”)

Neal: Here it is: “Yellow Hair.” (He reads from the cover promo.) “The great hunter brought her back to his people instead of meat. Would she fit in, this girl from the land of great water?” God, I hope so! (Laughs.)

Joe: Boy, that just leads you right in. (Laughs.) Do you remember the name of the first short story you sold to Galaxy?

Neal: I think it was called “Made on Arterius” or something. About some illegal alien, you know. (Laughs.) H.L. Gold was the editor at the time. The first thing I got at the time that really excited me was around then was a fan letter from Andre Norton. I thought, “Oh, my God!”

Scott: I remember the story you told me about the first time you showed your mother your name in print.

Neal: It was the first book I showed her. She said, “Neal, do you have to use the Barrett name?” (Laughs.) Dad never said much about it, but I found out that he was going down and buying all the Neal Barrett books he could and showing them to his friends.

What was the first Neal Barrett book that came out?

Neal: Kelwin. It was about an antique dealer, a future antique dealer. He was going around trying to find stuff that we’d left behind from this period. You know, a Coke bottle would bring you a few bucks or whatever. I found out later that the reason the book was so popular was because the artist on the cover was so great. I was real disappointed. I thought everybody liked my book, but they were buying if for the cover.

Could you talk about the Aldair series? How did that come about? It seems like an unusual idea, to have a quest fantasy with a piglet as the protagonist.

Joe: (Laughs.) You think?

Neal: I just took a certain period, pretty much the Dark Ages, and men were pigs. I made the Germanic people in the north wolves and the people in the south lizards. There were some other animals in there too.

Joe: You know, I love those books. They’re a union between that old Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs stuff and more modern characterization. And they also had that Mark Twain kind of flavor and satire. The stuff that I really first started to think of as Neal Barrett was Stress Pattern and the Aldair series.

Neal: If I’ve been called unique or unusual in any way, a lot of that unusual bit came from people like Cordwainer Smith. People who seemed to have their own thing going, that no one else was trying to do. Cordwainer Smith didn’t seem that tied down to anything, and I pretty much grew into that business of not being tied down.

Joe: Yeah, you pretty much ruined my life. I coulda had a big career, but I ended up being influenced by you. (Laughs.)

Scott: (Points at Joe.) He was pretty much gone before you met him.

Let’s talk about The Hereafter Gang. That’s a book that’s gotten some pretty nice critical attention. Can you talk about how the ideas for that book came about?

Neal: I guess it was a book of my life. It was just the book I was meant to do. It was everything I wanted to say. Totally unrestricted and full of all the strange things I wanted to think about. I don’t remember exactly how that it came about, just that it was me.

Joe: I remember when you were writing it, you were reading a lot of Thomas McGuane. Since I know that background, when I read that book, I can see that contemporary literature welded to the old stuff like the pulps and Cordwainer Smith. But there’s also a lot of Clifford Simak and that coming-of-age novel in it, all sort of blended together. We were both reading the same books, so I’m trying to remember who else—

Neal: Jim Harrison.

Joe: Yep. Jim Harrison, because we were all reading the same stuff around then.

Neal: A large portion of my own feelings and my own childhood went in there too. A lot of nostalgia and crazy stuff is in there too. I would do things that I wasn’t supposed to do – that were sort of against the rules to do – like bring in a whole character who had nothing to do with anything else. Of course, the religious part was from all different religions. Every possible religion was in there, and it just all came out how it wanted to. Jesus was No. 2 on the basketball team.

Joe: Marvelous stuff. And the girl who smelled like Dr. Pepper. What was her name?

Neal: Sue Jean. Dr. Pepper and Fritos.

Joe: Dr. Pepper and Fritos, the true way to a man’s heart.

Neal: She was the sex interest. Of course, after she –

Joe: Don’t go giving too much away. We wanna see this thing sold again. Why haven’t they made a movie of that book yet?

Scott: It would be perfect for the movies.

Neal: But can you really imagine someone doing it without messing with it?

Speaking of movies, ever had anything optioned? Anything come close to being made into a movie?

Neal: Well, I had one, a mystery called Pink Vodka Blues, which was picked up by David Brown, the producer. It was optioned. And Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson were together at the time, and she was going to do it. They got a really expensive screenwriter to write it up, and the girl in it sounded an awful lot like Whoopi. But, at any rate, nothing ever came of it, except that one day the agent I had called me up and said, “Listen, I’ve got an enormous check here for you.” And it was enormous. I asked him why, and he said, “Paramount bought it.”

Bought it outright?

Neal: Yes. End of story. They bought it and never made the movie.

Scott: They’d have screwed it up really badly anyway.

Joe: Whoopi Goldberg would have been way wrong for the part.

Neal: I got a lot of money for it anyway. (Laughs.) I did work with Joe on one of the best scripts ever done, which hasn’t done anything yet.

Joe: All kinds of nibbles but no firm bites yet.

Can you talk about what it is?

Neal: What it is? You mean what it’s called? It’s called “The Nightrunners.”

Joe: An old novel of mine. Boy we jacked that baby up.

Neal: It was a hot script.

If someone hasn’t experience your brand of fiction, would you recommend the collection Slightly Off Center as a good starting place?

Neal: Well, that and Perpetuity Blues.

Scott: They’re both in print.

Joe: There’s one coming out, man, that’s going to be the ultimate Neal Barrett collection. It’s coming out on Subterranean. What are they calling that? “The Best of…?”

Neal: I don’t know what they’re calling it. It’s supposed be out next year. We haven’t even settled on contents yet, but it’s supposed to be 150,000 words.

Joe: THAT will be the one.

One of the most memorable pieces in Slightly Off Center is the one about the woman who lives in the structure that’s kind of like an anthill. People just stacked on top of each other.

Neal: The name of that one is “Stairs.” What you’re hopping around for there is that I never did say whether she’s in an anthill or an apartment building or up in a balloon or anything. I never said where it was, never intended to say where it was, just that it had stairs. And that was intentional.

Joe: That book’s also got the one about the woman living in the birth-control device. (Laughs.) What’s the name of that?

Neal: Uteropolis. It was an abandoned birth- control device. From a large person. A very large person.

At any point in your career, did anyone recommend that you tone down the weirdness, try to rein some of that in?

Neal: No, they just didn’t buy it. I was up against George Alec Effinger for a Nebula Award for “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus.” George won instead, but at that time, publishers began to notice short stories I’d written. They wanted me to write things like that, but what they didn’t realize was that while they liked the short stories, when I did novels, maybe that would be too much for them. They wanted it straight. When it came to novels, they didn’t like the weird, unique and odd.

Joe: You know, you did both novels and short stories, but don’t you think there were a lot of writers of your generation that were primarily short story writers but ended up writing novels? Think of all the SF writers – Theodore Sturgeon, people like that – who did write novels but were primarily known for, and seemed to be oriented to, writing short stories.

Neal: Including me. I’ve written novels, but I’m a short story writer. Any reputation I may have gained has come from short stories, although some of the novels worked out. But everybody knows me from the short stories. Asimov’s has been kind to me. Both editors have loved me. Short stories is really where it all has been.

You’ve done a lot of work over the years, anything you wish you hadn’t? Anything you wish you could take your name off of?

Neal: Not too much. No. I did all kinds of interesting things over the years: comic books, adult Westerns, novelizations (of Judge Dredd, Barb Wire and Dungeons & Dragons). I’ve always said, and people like Joe believe this, even if you write the silliest comic book or if you write something like an adult Western – and, of course, you know what’s in there – you do your very damned professional best. The minute you write down to people, you go under. You don’t write down, you write something – no matter what it is – the way it should be. The lady who was editor of one of those adult Western series told me, “Neal, you write the very best books in our series.” I said, “Well, thank you. Does that mean I get paid more now?”