LOVELY COMPANY

Authors, filmmakers, aviators, and a raft of ordinary people speak out in Broughton’s collection of colorful interviews.

The author, a novelist, playwright, poet, and oral historian, gathers 25 conversations (spanning decades) with an eclectic group of subjects. Some are celebrities, including film director Sam Fuller, who expounds on the art of story structure; SF novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, who opines vehemently on both good and bad scribes (“Kill…Kill….I don’t like hack writers”); and fellow SF novelist Isaac Asimov, who expounds on his own charisma. (“I would describe myself as the best off-the-cuff after-dinner speaker in the whole damn world.”) Broughton talks to lesser-known novelists as well, including Elizabeth Spencer, who reflects on the similarities of Italy and Mississippi; George Garrett, who revisits his father’s exploits as a pioneering civil rights attorney in Florida; and Kay Boyle, who discusses visiting political prisoners in Franco’s Spain and refusing to meet Hemingway because of his womanizing. Broughton also takes an interest in flyers, including Dorothy Hester Stenzel, a stunt flyer who barnstormed air shows in the 1930s after pushing her way past male chauvinist gatekeepers, and George Gay, a United States Navy pilot who was shot down at the Battle of Midway in World War II and watched the destruction of the Japanese fleet while bobbing in the sea. And there are unsung but interesting figures like James Billie, a Florida Seminole leader who made the tribe billions of dollars building casinos, and Earl Wilson, a man celebrated in the town of Winter Park, Florida, for continuing to work at a plant nursery at the age of 97.

Broughton elicits chatty, free-wheeling conversations from his interlocutors, using a mix of open-ended questions, attentive follow-ups, and the occasional off-the-wall query. His interviews with authors are the most polished and introspective in the collection, with much analysis of the writer’s craft and its roots in character and psyche that feels fresh rather than hackneyed (“Humphrey Bogart, who looked the world straight in the face unflinchingly and who talked tough and hard, very manly, said exactly what he meant, and called things by their right names,” is how poet Richard Hugo describes one of his poetic alter egos). Many of the interviewees aren’t professional wordsmiths, but their rough-hewn observations are still evocative and atmospheric; remembering a woman caught in an avalanche with her children in an Idaho mining town, Anne Dunphy Magnuson says, “She was hurt, too, but she kept hollering about ‘Where’s my babies,’ and they said, ‘Well, they’re up there dead on the kitchen table.’ ” Even the most plainspoken exchanges can carry a complex, powerful emotional charge: “One man told me that he’d rather I didn’t come around anymore because every time his wife saw me, she got sick,” recalls George Gay, the sole survivor of his 30-man torpedo bomber unit at Midway, of his attempts to reach out to the families of his dead friends. “She felt her son should have been there, instead of me. That was a little hard to take.” The result is captivating.

A scintillating collection of interviews full of rich memories and piquant insights.