“I’ll be dead very soon” | Valedictory visit with William T. Vollmann

Just over a year ago, Alexander Sorondo published a long profile of William Vollmann in The Metropolitan Review. Today, at his website Big Reader Bad Grades, Sorondo has published an account of his recent visit to Vollmann out in Sacramento. Titled “We Always Leave Things Unfinished,” and ostensibly about Vollmann’s forthcoming CIA novel A Table for Fortune, Sorondo’s piece reads like a valediction to a departing hero. Vollmann, sick with cancer, laments his “chemo mind” throughout the interview — less a formal interview, really, than Sorondo taking with a brilliant and tired mind — he, Sorondo, captures in words what I think hanging out with Vollmann for a spell might feel like. Anger, sadness, and resignation weaves through the piece, but it’s leavened with moments of bright cheer (Vollmann blithely greeting everyone he passes) or deadpan humor. Consider this passage, where Vollmann recounts what has to have been the worst year of his life, beginning with the death of his daughter:

“In twenty-twenty-twooo,” like he’s climbing down into the memory, Lisa died, Viking fired me, and—for some reason I don’t understand—Ohio State fired me.” The school had been buying his manuscripts. That amounted to “ten thousand a year…less twenty percent for my manuscript dealer.”

We sit with that a moment. I’m thinking back to the profile I wrote last year. Trying to remember if he’s reciting these losses by sequence or scale.

“You got hit by a car, too, right?”

“Yeah that too.”

There’s so much pain and loss there, but the last bit of dialogue made me laugh out loud.

Perhaps the saddest bit in the interview, from a selfish reader’s perspective, is Vollmann acknowledging that he will likely not finish what is arguably his most ambitious project:

“Do you feel any pressure to finish Seven Dreams?”

“I’m not gonna touch it.” Resigned and certain. He says finishing even one of the two remaining volumes would likely take “more time than I have left.” Plus the fights it’ll prompt with his publishers. “About a quarter of the last one is completed, and then much less of the other one.”

“I don’t want it to come out looking like a piece of crap so,” he flaps a hand, hits a thigh, “just forget it.”

Check out Sorondo’s profile, “We Always Leave Things Unfinished.”