Dirty Words in Deadwood: Literature and the Postwestern

1. David Milch at Yale

1 1 David Milch at Yale An Interview Nathaniel Lewis Art and Tradition. Philosophy and Religion. Literature and Storytelling. Fathers and Sons. These are some of the topics that interest David Milch, and they are among the topics through which he and Nathaniel Lewis maneuver in their conversation about Deadwood. Whereas Graulich begins with a literary historian’s eye for narrative and language, Lewis approaches the series and its creator with a mix of aesthetic and personal concerns, deftly shifting from Deadwood’s thematic representations to Milch’s recollections of working with Lewis’s father at Yale in the 1970s and early 1980s and back again. Through their conversation Lewis and Milch affirm that Deadwood exists as a diversely creative work, available for interpretation on a number of levels. Chief among them, perhaps, is Milch’s stated interest in dramatizing “that we’re all members of one body,” even as an inhumane “failure to respect the integrity of the individual ” will result from “any kind of formulaic approach” to society or art. Milch renders this last judgment in a comment about the rise, during his time at Yale, of deconstruction as a mode of interpretation; his core insight, as Lewis keenly observes, applies equally well to the multivalent and unconventional aspects of Deadwood. David Milch began his undergraduate studies at Yale in 1962. After a series of what he calls “fits and starts,” he became an English major , mentored in large part by Robert Penn Warren and my father, R. W. B. Lewis. In the 1970s Warren and my father, recognizing David’s brilliance and promise, invited him to become their colleague at Yale. During the decade or so that he spent at Yale, David taught writing and literature and assisted Warren, my father, and their colleague Cleanth Brooks on their anthology, American Literature : The Makers and the Making (1973). In February 2009, during a trip to New Haven for several events 2 lewis at Yale, David sat down with me to discuss Deadwood. But because David has been part of the Warren and Lewis families from his earliest days in New Haven, our conversation inevitably moved between the personal and the professional—between the office David shared with my father in Calhoun College (Yale) and the Gem Saloon, between the Warrens’ Vermont home and Deadwood’s Grand Central Hotel. lewis: Let’s start with a couple fairly straightforward questions, and then I hope we can get into some interesting territory. I’ve heard you say a number of times, when describing the origins of Deadwood, that you originally intended to do a show on ancient Rome—and that this idea had to be scrapped because hbo already had a series on Rome in the works. I gather that you kept a number of the central themes but changed the place and time. Out of all the different sites and historical moments you picked Deadwood. Why? milch: I felt that it was a kind of laboratory reenactment of the larger patterns of our settlement or taking of the land, however you want to put it, and that there was a telescoping of the 8. David Milch. “Making of Season Two Finale: ‘Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To’: Mr. Wu Proves Out.” Bonus Features. Deadwood: The Complete Second Season. 2006. dvd. David Milch at Yale 3 accessibility of that theme. This was land, literally, which had not been settled by whites at all, going into, say, 1870. But in addition to that, the first resources of what we’ll call modernity were simultaneously available, so it was as if you could do the two hundred some odd years of the experiment all at once. And that appealed to me enormously. The discovery of the gold was, for a dramatist, such a kindling point. And so I had at it. lewis: That tension between the past and modernity is brilliantly depicted in Deadwood. And thinking along those lines in terms of your own relationship to American literary and cinematic traditions: I’ve read a number of people argue that Deadwood is a radical departure from not only the Hays Code Western but from the genre itself. But I tend to see it as a reworking, and in many ways a very fond reworking, of John Ford, Sam Peckinpah . . . milch: Absolutely, absolutely. I think that the strictures of the Hays Code were such that to me the revisionism was those...