Late last week, The Wall Street Journal published “The Last Untamed Writer in America,” a profile of William T. Vollmann. The piece begins with its author Alexander Nazaryan politely refusing breakfast scotch from Vollmann, who is hosting Nazaryan at his studio (a converted Mexican restaurant):
It was breakfast time at the Sacramento, Calif., home of the novelist William T. Vollmann, which meant time for scotch. Out came two gold-colored shot glasses, modeled after 50-caliber rounds, a gift from a relative to the gun-loving writer. Despite gentle pressure, I stuck to my coffee, so Vollmann poured himself only a perfunctory nip of the Balvenie DoubleWood 12. “This will get me buzzed up,” Vollmann said. Then he added, ruefully, “I can hardly drink at all anymore.”
The piece has some interesting quips from Vollmann, but it doesn’t really expand on Alexander Sorondo’s long essay “The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann’s Battle to Publish an American Epic,” from this spring–notes on Vollmann’s cancer, getting dropped by his publisher Viking, and finding a home for his epic A Table for Fortune with Skyhorse, an iffy group that has published books by RF Kennedy Jr. and Alex Jones. A lot of the notes will be familiar with those tuned into the myth of the Vollmann (guns, drugs, sex, volume, etc.), but it’s kinda sorta interesting to see how the conservative Wall Street Journal frames Vollmann. They play up Vollmann’s enthusiasm for guns and note that he is not an author to be “cowed by sensitivity readers”; they even get a quote from him decrying “people who want trigger warnings.” And yet even when Vollmann professes a tinge of patriotism, he deflates it immediately:
“I love America because it’s my homeland, and I love Americans,” Vollmann says. “What I dislike is the whole hypocritical American exceptionalism. We do all these dirty, crummy things.”
There are some cool photos by Ian Bates accompanying the article, which you can read unpaywalled here.
Biblioklept 
New Pynchon and Vollmann w/in months of each other? Stirs something in my soul. Really enjoyed the Metropolitan piece. WSJ was whiplashing brief for a Vollmann piece, hah. Found the TrueAnon podcast for anyone interested:https://soundcloud.com/trueanonpod/grief-is-a-witch-hag-part-1#:~:text=We%20visited%20legendary%20writer%20William,talk%20about%20lots%20of%20things.
Cheers, Edwin.
LikeLike