Woe to Live On: A Novel Read online

  You wrote for quite a few years before garnering any recognition.

  I wrote for ten years for nothing. And I wrote almost every day. I kept going because I liked doing it. If you really don’t like doing it, it’ll show up pretty soon. I filled up boxes of stuff that didn’t go anywhere. But I needed to do that. And I don’t think of myself as an incredibly fast learner. I learned at the pace that I learned at. But I’m told that ten years is about right. I had to emotionally develop. It’s an emotional thing as well as a technical thing. And I had technique before I had the other. The emotional honesty is what really takes you further and further. It’s an evolving thing.

  You’ve always been a writer. You’ve never been employed in a regular job, not even as a teacher.

  I was not equipped for the conventional world of employment and I didn’t want to be—which has a lot to do with why I wasn’t equipped. I just didn’t want to do that. I would rather live under a fucking bridge and write on old grocery sacks if it comes to that. I remember once I was at a library and it was a place where all the homeless guys would come in and lay around all day and a guy from the university leaned over and said to me, “Dan, they all wanted to be writers once, too.”

  People make a lot about how you write about hillbillies, but most of your characters are not hillbillies, per se.

  Nope, they’re not. Most are just proletariat prone toward criminal activity. This house over here, nobody in that house has had a job in like three generations.

  Did it take you some time to find your writing voice? Did it evolve or was there a moment when you felt like you achieved it?

  At Iowa, a friend of mine and writer, Leigh Allison Wilson, was sitting around with Katie one day, laughing at a story I was telling them, and Leigh said, “How come you never do that in your fiction? Your fiction is cold and hard and stone-faced and chiseled. That isn’t even who you are in your private life, you’re so different from that.” And Katie said, “You know what, that’s true.” That’s a comment from a friend that ended up being very influential. I don’t even think she knows how influential that ended up being.

  The full, unedited version of this interview was originally published in June 2011 on the website of The Oxford American magazine (www.oxfordamerican.org), and is still available there. Reprinted with permission.

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  Woe to Live On gives a much different perspective of the Civil War than the clearer, more regimented North-South conflict in the East. What effect, if any, do you think these irregulars—both Union Jayhawkers and Confederate bushwhackers—had on the central conflict of the war? Would Jake and the other soldiers have been more effective fighting for the South with the regulars down in Arkansas?

  In the first scene of the novel, Jake kills a boy in a manner that catches the attention even of the brutally violent bushwhackers: shooting him in the back as he attempts to free his father from hanging. What do you think were Jake’s motivations? Pure ruthlessness? A desire to prove himself to the rest of the men? Or a strange version of frontier mercy?

  Jake acts out of a more traditional sense of mercy when he works to spare Alf Bowden’s life. But after news reaches the regiment that Alf killed Jake’s father, it appears that Jack Bull is correct when he says, “You taught Alf mercy, but he forgot the lesson.” Did Jake do the right thing, regardless of the outcome?

  Jack Bull and Jake are peers on the battlefield, but in many ways they are very different men—particularly in their interactions with Sue Lee. Why do you think Jake is so tentative in his affections while Jack Bull is so forward with his? Why do you think Jake is so reluctant to take Sue Lee’s hand in marriage at the end of the novel?

  Jake tells Holt that “the rebel is a blight on the Yankee’s will” and that the Northerners believe their “life and person have more loft” than the rebels’. For these men, what is the war about? Slavery? Territory? Or is it just a test of wills in which you are forced to pick one side or the other?

  It’s surprising to think of African-American soldiers fighting alongside Confederate troops, but Holt is loyal to the rebel cause. Why might that be the case? Is his connection to George Clyde strong enough to warrant such a decision, or is his affiliation just a product of circumstance?

  How does Jake’s German heritage influence his status with the rest of the regiment? With whom does it help him? With whom does it hurt him? Do you think that his position in the regiment would have changed if he were born to American parents?

  Although somewhat reluctant to do so, Jake ultimately seems happy to have Sue Lee and the baby in his life by the end of the novel. Do you think they’ll make it to Texas? If so, is there hope for them to build a better life amid such strife?

  The violence in Woe to Live On is swift, brutal, and omnipresent, but often Jake’s narration treats atrocities as commonplace occurrences—just another man dead or homestead burned in a war of many. What effect do you think witnessing such routine horrors might have on a person’s psyche? And what effect did Woodrell’s understated treatment of the violence have on how you read the novel?

  Much of Woe to Live On is based on actual history of the Civil War in Missouri and Kansas—Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence was a real event, for example, and many characters, including Black John, Coleman Younger, and William Quantrill, are based on historical figures. How does the novel change your view of the Civil War and the men who fought in it? What elements of Woodrell’s depiction of the war do you think are true-to-life? Which do you hope are fictionalized?

  BY DANIEL WOODRELL

  Rene Shade Novels

  Under the Bright Lights

  Muscle for the Wing

  The Ones You Do

  The Bayou Trilogy (omnibus edition)

  Novels

  Give Us a Kiss

  Tomato Red

  The Death of Sweet Mister

  Winter’s Bone

  Stories

  The Outlaw Album

  PRAISE FOR DANIEL WOODRELL’S

  WOE TO LIVE ON

  A New York Times Notable Book

  “Woodrell joins Douglas C. Jones and the few others whose novels of western history are mainstream literature…. The violence is fast and understated and bawdy humor relieves the story’s intensity.”

  —Kansas City Star

  “A renegade Western… that celebrates the genre while bushwhacking its most cherished traditions….Jake Roedel recites his tale of woe in an improbably rustic idiom, with a malignant humor and a hip sensibility that are wise beyond his years and way ahead of his times.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Woodrell is on the cutting edge of mean… a born writer. His style is both brutal and touched with poetry. And it’s very much his own. Don’t miss it.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Woodrell pins it down just right… speaks to the universal cruelty of civil war.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “A fine novel….Daniel Woodrell has captured the devastation of war and, more importantly, the twisting of men’s minds.”

  —United Press International

  “An absolutely brilliant performance.”

  —David Martin, author of The Crying Heart Tattoo

  “Like William Kennedy’s, Woodrell’s prose has a lyrical quality that effectively evokes a sense of place.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  “Woodrell’s novel is at once intensely literary and wonderfully cinematic… Woe to Live On is in some ways a celebration of the intertwining of American writing and American speech, of the way, since Huckleberry Finn especially (written by Woodrell’s fellow Missourian Mark Twain, né Samuel Clemens), American literary prose hears itself in dialogue with transcribed, unschooled, spoken vernacular. But, ironically, when you pull that speech off the written page and throw it up on the screen, the results can be oddly ‘literary’—a quality we carefully embraced in the screenplay.”

  —James Schamus, screenwr
iter, Ride with the Devil

  Contents

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Book Two

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Book Three

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author of Woe to Live On

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  By Daniel Woodrell

  Praise for Daniel Woodrell’s Woe to Live On

  Copyright

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 1987 by Daniel Woodrell

  Foreword copyright © 2012 by Ron Rash

  Reading group guide copyright © 2012 by Daniel Woodrell and Little, Brown and Company

  Cover design by Ploy Siripant; cover photograph courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC

  Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  www.littlebrown.com

  www.twitter.com/littlebrown

  First e-book edition: June 2012

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-20618-1

  Table of Contents

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Book Two

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Book Three

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author of Woe to Live On

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  By Daniel Woodrell

  Praise for Daniel Woodrell’s Woe to Live On

  Copyright