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The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds

...by Dr. Robert S. Griffin

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19 ____________

PIERCE ON HUNTER

“When I wrote what became The Turner Diaries," Pierce told me, "in my mind I wasn't writing a book. It was a series of installments of a story for the tabloid I was publishing at the time, Attack! It was just an experiment. I thought, let's see how this goes. When I started out, I didn't have a detailed theory about the impact of fiction or the plot of what I was writing planned out. I just thought I'll put some messages in fictional form and see if that would make it more accessible to some types of people, and off I went, one episode per issue of the magazine. I never imagined that it would become a book. Frankly, if I had realized that it was going to be a book I would have been a lot more careful in my writing.

"When The Turner Diaries began to make an impact, I did start to think more about this phenomenon, however, and I came to the conclusion that fiction really can be a powerful medium for getting ideas across. I thought about how other people, including those who see things in the opposite way from how I see them, have used this medium so effectively. I formulated an explanation, which I am sure isn't original, as to why fiction if it is done right has such a powerful impact on people. Simply, the reader— or television watcher or movie viewer or playgoer— comes to identify with the protagonist. And once that happens, you've got this person where you want him. For one thing, he vicariously experiences the action and comes to care about the protagonist. The protagonist gets into a jam and the reader feels what that is like for him and worries about him: 'My God, this is rough, how will he get out of this?' The protagonist falls in love or gets excited or mad or anticipates or fears something, and the reader does too. The reader develops a kind of rooting interest in how things turn out for the protagonist. And not only that, but if something is well-written the reader starts to think as the protagonist does and— the most powerful thing of all— if the protagonist learns something or comes to believe in something, if he changes his ideas, the reader tends to do the same thing, he changes too. So what you have is a powerful teaching tool, a persuasive tool.

"So what you do— and this is what I did with Hunter— is have your protagonist, Oscar Yeager in this case, start out with what you imagine to be the common mindset of the readers who are likely to pick up the book. The protagonist enunciates this mindset in his conversations with other characters and approaches things, solves problems and so on, that way. And then— Wham!— something comes into his life that shakes that way of coming at things. Through his experiences, the protagonist changes his ideas— and the reader, who has gone through things with the protagonist, changes his ideas, or learns, too. You've got to make it convincing, of course. Maybe you have the protagonist resist changing— 'I was never taught this' 'This can't be'— but eventually reality or logic, whatever, forces him to change the way he sees things and acts, and the reader changes in the same way.

"From the beginning with Hunter, I had this idea in mind of how fiction can work as a teaching tool, and I saw it as a book from the beginning. I wrote the first chapter in 1984, and then for a long time I didn't have time to work on it. I finished the whole thing up in one year, 1989. I do think I was a much better writer of fiction with this book compared to The Turner Diaries. I see it as ironic that The Turner Diaries has had such a big impact and, at least so far, Hunter hasn't. But I think that is not related to the quality of the two books. It has been due to circumstances beyond my control. If somebody imitates Oscar Yeager and it is found out that that is what he did, then maybe Hunter would take off like a skyrocket."

"There has been the claim that Yeager was based on an actual person named Joseph Paul Franklin. Is that true?" ( Franklin killed interracial couples in the 1970s and is in prison in Missouri.)

"No, it wasn't based on Franklin,” Pierce answered curtly. “But to go on, the idea was to have Yeager and the reader go through things together, and to change in the same way. I put myself in Yeager's position and tried to have Yeager develop in the same way I did, have his ideas change as mine did. I had Yeager start off with reasonably conventional views and then become radicalized: by his experiences in the Vietnam war, his study afterward in graduate school, his relationship with Harry Keller, and, the biggest influence of all, the effect William Ryan had on him."

"It's interesting to hear you say you put yourself in Yeager's position. When I read the book I thought you would see yourself as Harry Keller of the National League, which I took to be the National Alliance, and that from your— Keller's— perspective Yeager was the kind of raw material you would like to attract to your organization— bright, tough, action-oriented, ruthless— and the kind of person you could educate and mold."

"I especially identified with Yeager because he is the kind of person I would like to be. But actually I put myself in the place of every character in the book when I am dealing with him. I asked myself what I would say and how I would respond to something that was happening to him. Like in the case of the exchanges between Yeager and Ryan, I would switch personas from one to the other as they debated.”

"At the end of the book, where Yeager kills Ryan, you wrote about Yeager choosing flux over stasis— and that Ryan represented stasis. Is that a fundamental message you are trying to get across, that flux is preferable to stasis?"

"Yes. Ryan, was a conservative— a very strong and free-thinking, independent sort of conservative, but a conservative nevertheless. He wasn't fundamentally a racist. And he was basically pro-government. Ryan was in favor of first getting control of the system and then short- circuiting some of its most destructive tendencies. Yeager on the other hand saw the system as so corrupt that it just had to be done away with and completely rebuilt from the ground up."

"It seemed to me you left things hanging a bit at the end of the book." (On the last page, Oscar, who has become a communications person, starts thinking it is about time to go back to “hunting.”)

"I thought, hey, I'll see how this one does and then maybe I'll write a sequel. But really there is a conclusion to the book: the dialogue between Yeager and Ryan, and then Yeager kills Ryan and liberates himself to do as he pleases."

" Hunter is not a book that the bookstores are going to carry, but I did notice you can get it through amazon.com."

"And we have a few other people distributing it for us. Probably the biggest seller is Delta Press down in Arkansas. They primarily cater to the military market— vets and people interested in the military culture, and they sell a line of military manuals that were originally produced by the government printing office for training military personnel on how to use various weapons, how to make booby-traps, how to conduct a reconnaissance patrol, how to build a fortified structure, how to build a latrine, and so on. They sell both The Turner Diaries and Hunter."

"Do you have any plans to write more fiction?"

"I really would like to do more of that. It's hard work, but it is creative, fun, and very rewarding. At the end of the day, I can look and say, 'It's finished and it's good.' But I just don't have the time to do it now. I've got a radio script to get out every week, and I want to stay with the radio program because it gives me a voice. I get to talk to the world every week about something I think is important. I would like to have somebody who could take over at least part of the radio load whom I could count on to do a top-quality job, and get somebody to help out with the administrative work around here. Then I could slide out from under the workload and do other things like write fiction.

"Although if I had the time to write a book it wouldn't be fiction right now. There are a couple of serious non-fiction books that need to be written while I still can write them. Then I can sort of retire and write fiction. One book I'd like to write is one that deals with what is in the Cosmotheist Community pamphlets that I put together, except in plain prose and with lots of examples. It would provide a rationale for this whole thing. It would tell people where it is all going, what it all means, and why they should do what I think they should."

During another conversation, Pierce told me about a book that he wanted to write which probably is this same book he talked about during our discussion of Hunter. On that occasion, he said that he wanted to write a book that would spell out the way he looks at things. It would try to tie everything together philosophically. It would go very slowly and spell everything out, he said. It would deal with fundamental values and purposes. The book he had in mind would get into the considerations a person should keep in mind when setting life goals. It would be about how to find purpose and meaning in life. It would be about natural ethics, absolute ethics— those were the terms he used— and their implications, where they lead. He said that it would lay out why he is concerned about saving his race and why he thought others should be as well. He said that he has written about fifty pages toward this book, but that he wasn't working on it at the moment.

"And then another book I'd like to write," Pierce continued, "about fifteen years ago I wrote installments over about a three-year period called Who We Are. I did a lot of research for it. It was a race history that starts with the origins of life and deals with paleoanthropology— before the dawn of recorded history. It looks at the Greeks, Romans, Germanic people, the Celts, and on down, all from a racial standpoint. I think those writings that I did back then could be shaped into a very good book, because unfortunately most people don't get race history in school. When I was in school, while I didn't get it explicitly, there was enough of a healthy, traditional curriculum that I came away with a feeling for some of these things. When I was at Rice in the early 1950s I took a course called Foundations of Western Civilization. I don't think the instructor was especially inspired, although I must say I had a big crush on her. Her name was Katherine Fisher. She married someone named Drew later on, and went on to great things, including a high position in the American Historical Association. Actually, the material was good in that course and I got interested, but unfortunately I was immature and had a lot of other things to do. But that experience did leave me with enough of a feeling that these are my people I'm studying. This is how my people developed. And then I did a lot of reading and thinking later on my own. Needless to say, now the people who have gotten control of the universities cringe at the thought of white kids paying more attention to the development of European civilization than the different styles of mud huts in equatorial Africa.

“If I were to write a race history like this, I'd have to reformat it and do a lot of studying and make a lot of corrections. Some of our people who know anthropology and history have pointed out places where I made mistakes or was incomplete. I'd have to really hole up and put my mind to this. But I think it would provide people with a useful and convincing source, something they are kept from getting now.

"I would be perfectly happy if a big New York publishing house would publish this book if I wrote it, so I could spend all of my time trying to do the best job of writing I could. But I have had to build an organization and publishing vehicle so that if publishers and bookstore chains block my books— as has been the case with the exception of Lyle Stuart picking up The Turner Diaries for a brief time— I can make them available anyway. I'm very much a loner and would have preferred not to get into all this organizational and administrative business, but I have had to reach people with what I have to say and give them the chance to have access to ideas and material they would not otherwise be allowed to experience."

 

After my talk with Pierce about Hunter, I rethought the way I had perceived the characters in the book. I was taken by Pierce saying that he had identified with Yeager and all the other characters. Or at least all the other male characters— I don't get the sense that he identified with Adelaide or Colleen. So for Pierce it wasn't a matter of Harry Keller being me and every other (male) character being them. More, it was every character was me, every character was Pierce himself— either as he is or as he would like to be or could be. Yeager was the Air Force pilot Pierce would have liked to have been if he could have met the requirements. All that reading about race and history which Oscar did in Colorado — Pierce had done that, or at least he had started it in Colorado and continued it in California and Oregon. And Oscar's reflections on the impact of the Vietnam era on young people in particular— the drugs, the disrespect for legitimate authority, the lessening consciousness of their race, and all— Pierce had done that too. Of course what was different was that Oscar was a man of action and extremely violent. You couldn't call Pierce a man of action in that sense, but as he said in our talk about the book, Oscar was the kind of individual that he would like to be. And while presumably Pierce hasn't been violent as Oscar was, undoubtedly he has at least thought about being violent. And then there was that talk I had with him about his move to West Virginia when he said he had done things in Washington that could have gotten him locked up for life.

Keller, of course, is Pierce as he is. And Saul is Pierce as he would like to be— remember this was written in the late 1980s, before the radio show— a communicator of the message to a mass audience through the media. I thought about the character's name, Saul— an unusual name for a character in a book by Pierce. It might be a reference to the biblical Paul— in discussions with me, Pierce referred to him as "Saul of Tarsus" in order to underscore his Jewishness and the Jewish underpinnings of Christianity. Perhaps Pierce sees himself as the Paul of George Bernard Shaw's ideas and National Socialism, the spreader of the word.

As for Ryan, here is the insider, the person with his hands on the reins of power, who Pierce might have been instead of the peripheral figure he is. Ryan is the part of Pierce that wishes he were on the inside instead of always being on the outside looking in. Ryan is the part of Pierce that longs for contact with the best and the brightest of the mainstream society, where he once functioned. Ryan is the conservative impulse in Pierce which has been obscured by the radical, confrontational side of him that has been dominant since the Oregon State years, over thirty-five years now. Ryan is the realistic, and somewhat pessimistic, part of Pierce, the part of Pierce that knows that the foundations for drastic, revolutionary change are not in place now and won't be anytime soon. When Oscar killed Ryan, Pierce was killing that part of himself that Ryan represents— those beliefs, those longings, those misgivings. Ryan's death affirms what Pierce has done with his life these last three decades, and it takes away some of the weight of regret and some of the ambivalence that he doesn't want to carry. Ryan's death clears the way for getting to work writing the next hard-hitting radio broadcast and setting up the next National Alliance meeting instead of thinking about how it might have all been different.

 

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