VIEWSnANDREW LYTLE TALKSnto Madison Smartt BellnAndrew Lytle lives in a log house on the AssemblynGrounds in Monteagle, Tennessee. It is a busy area innsummer, but in the wintertime most of the other houses arenclosed, and he has few immediate neighbors. The house isnbuilt on a cross plan and has somewhat unusually highnceilings. Most often Mr. Lytle sees company in the bar ofnthe cross onto which the front door opens, where chairs arenringed around a sofa, before a big stone fireplace. Left of thenmantle is a small portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest, whosenbiography was Lytle’s first book. Further into the house arensome family portraits, and within handy reach there is ansideboard with several silver cups bearing signs of use and anbottle or two of Weller’s bourbon whiskey.nThis interview took place in the form of a generalnconversation among a various group of people seated beforenthe fire. The talk was by no means exclusively literary, butnranged over country matters and otherwise, from what mightnhave gone on in the Garden of Eden to what was going onnthen in the garden out back.nMr. Lytle held the center of the conversation, withoutnparticularly trying to. To a considerably greater degree thannthe rest of us, he displayed a facility for connecting ideasnboth to one another and to the practical affairs of life. Henlives, it appears, in a whole world, whose parts are allnorganically related and where every notion finds its naturalnplace in an order of things. The listener senses that for himnideas are less abstract than concrete, meant not merely to benspeculated upon, but lived. One suspects that he may be onenof the last adepts of a developed art of being, which by nownhas been almost entirely lost.nBell: I wanted to ask you about a term you’ve used fromntime to time, in letters and in print: “the hovering bard.”nWhat is the hovering bard, exactly?nLytle: An extension of Henry James’s “central intelligence,”nthat’s what it is. It’s somebody who sees everythingnfrom above and can bring it together. Just as you have in anreal country community somebody who knows somethingnabout what happened. Every country society has one, whondoesn’t do anything, doesn’t work, just listens to everything,ntells tales, tells what everybody’s doing, you know. A sort ofndisappointed or incompleted artist, who gathers it all together.nAnd — he would hover over it all.nBell: So it’s a person inside the story that that voicenMadison Smartt Bell’s most recent novel is The Year ofnSilence.ncomes from.nLytle: Yes, he can be a character. Jack Cropleigh wouldnbe it in The Velvet Horn. Someone like Jack Cropleigh, whondoesn’t dominate every scene, but could have. Everythingncould have taken place in his mind, you have to assume that.nSo it’s rather tricky, but it’s not an omission, it allows thencomment to come through this particular hovering bard tonbecome a choral effect, along with the action.nBell: Can the function of the bard move from person tonperson in a story?nLytle: Yes, but you can’t just move it briefly. You can’t donit just for several paragraphs or a page or a short chapter. Itnhas to be a whole section which comes to some kind ofnconclusion, but which is part of the general, ultimatenconclusion. But it’s never stated. As long as you say, “Inremember,” then it ceases to exist. Because nothing exists innthe past. So what you have to do is make the past into anmoving present tense, joined to this one. It took me monthsnto work it out.nBell: How long did you spend on The Velvet Horn,naltogether?nLytle: Seven or eight years. I had started a book that Inthought was going to be about a society that is dead. Andnthen I realized that nothing which is dead ever moves. Sonwhat you really write about is people and a given condition.nI spent two years on that before I realized you never writennnSEPTEMBER 1988/9n