Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 2, 1995 TAG: 9506300015
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HILLEL ITALIE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
The author dips his head slightly, then looks up.
``I've had a bizarre life. I shouldn't be sitting here, to tell you the truth.''
Where should he be?
``I guess I should be dead.''
French is a shy, handsome man with a gray mustache and a small, round face. Over the past two years, he's published two novels, ``Billy'' and ``Holly,'' and he's working on a memoir, ``Patches of Fire,'' which is expected to come out in 1996.
This summer French will turn 52, three decades after nearly losing his life in Vietnam. A squad leader for the Marines, he was advancing one morning across rice paddies not far from Da Nang. Gunfire was all around, but he remembers hearing just one shot, the bullet that hit him in the throat.
``It was like getting hit with a sledgehammer, but for some reason I did not lose consciousness,'' French recalled. ``The guy next to me got me down in the rice paddy, took my finger and placed it inside my neck and told me to keep in the spot. He said if I didn't I was going to die. I had to shake my head to let him know I heard him.
``I don't know what my life would have been like if that hadn't happened. I may not have had the respect and appreciation I had, oh, for reality,'' he said.
``One of the things Vietnam veterans share, there's a fondness for Vietnam, not because of the horror, but because it's real. So many things we have here is just surface stuff. There, it's real. When it rains you got wet, when it's hot you got sweaty. There's a reality to it that was very stimulating. People got real - real quick.''
For much of his life, French's only connection to the literary world was through his cousin, John Edgar Wideman. He has less than a year of college education, and hasn't taken a writing class since dropping out of school. When asked about his favorite books, he cites only Wideman.
French still lives within walking distance of Homewood, the Pittsburgh ghetto where he was born and raised. Conceived out of wedlock, he never met his real father. His stepfather was a security guard, his mother a housewife. For a while, cousin John lived in the same house.
``I don't think either one of us in those days knew what a writer was,'' Wideman said. ``We were more interested in playing cowboys and Indians or soldiers."
French's jobs have included working in the steel mills and taking pictures of autopsies at a hospital. Starting in 1971, he was a photographer for 12 years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. For seven years he ran a women's publication called Pittsburgh Preview Magazine.
Heartbroken when his magazine folded in 1988, French turned to writing to lift his spirits. He did well. ``Billy'' was a best seller in England, named a ``notable book'' for 1994 by The New York Times and has been optioned for a feature film. Time compared the author's potential to that of Toni Morrison's.
``For a long time I had no idea how much he was writing. He's always been very surprising. He's done things that there was no way to predict,'' Wideman said.
``He was very self-conscious about his problems with grammar and spelling and that kind of stuff. I had to convince him that I could give his manuscript to one of my graduate students and have them edit and clean it up, but what he had was something more important, an original voice.''
French said there's no great secret to his work. He just puts a piece of paper in the typewriter and lets music lead him to the pictures in the back of his mind. His prose has a direct, intimate style shaped in part by a cassette he keeps in his briefcase: blues and pop and gospel on one side, the soundtrack to Ken Burns' ``Civil War'' series on the other.
Both of his novels take place in the South during the first half of this century: ``Billy'' in Mississippi in 1937, ``Holly'' in North Carolina during World War II. French likened his writing to time travel, a journey to a world without computers, TV sets or air conditioners. When it's hot, people sweat.
``If you have a town like Banes [in `Billy'], or like Supply [in `Holly'], that's it, it's not terribly influenced by what's going on at CNN,'' he said. ``You're not looking at McDonald's on the beach, you're looking at just the beach, just the water, the reality of it.''
Water plays an important part of his fiction. It's the great meeting ground between black and white, where all the unspoken tensions and passions come out and none of the old rules matter.
In ``Billy,'' two black kids trespass on a pond owned by a white family. They are spotted by two white girls. One of the girls taunts one of the boys, Billy, so badly that he stabs her to death. Although only 11, he is sentenced to the electric chair.
The water in ``Holly'' is a creek where the title character, a high-spirited young white woman, meets a young black man, a moody World War II veteran. They first quarrel, then fall in love. They see each other in secret, plotting their escape from Supply. Only around the water will they know such freedom.
``Water has its own way about itself. When one is in water or on water, or just around water, there's a different feeling to it. Maybe, subconsciously, I was thinking this is a place where people are vulnerable at,'' French said.
``Some of my most beautiful moments as I recall in my life was being at sea, at night. When I was in the Marines, we spent a lot of time on ship. I used to love to go out and look at the water at night.
``You could feel you were everything in the world, or nothing in the world. It gave you that feeling."
There's nothing man-made: no lights, no nothing, just the stars, just the waves, just the sound. Nothing you could do could stop anything.''
by CNB