He’s Just a Shy Optimist at Heart : Author: Barry Gifford isn’t seeking the limelight. And despite the bizarre tilt to his works and his appreciation for <i> roman noir, </i> he doesn’t believe the world is a dark place.

It was a pretty good day for an interview. The ocean was a giant’s footstep away, the sun was snooping through the window and the lunch was on someone else’s dime. Still, Barry Gifford could take it or leave it.

“Remember what Jack Kerouac said,” Gifford mused over a bowl of fragrant rigatoni, “ ‘I’d rather be thin than famous.’ That’s really my philosophy. And I don’t care about being thin particularly.”

Dimensions aside, Gifford has been the reluctant subject of scrutiny since filmmaker David Lynch made “Wild At Heart” last year based on the Berkeley author’s tender, quirky novel. Random House has been putting him on planes to promote his acclaimed sequel, a bizarre book of novellas titled “Sailor’s Holiday: The Wild Life of Sailor & Lula.” And Gifford himself has courted the spotlight for roman noir authors like Jim Thompson by reissuing their long-neglected novels.

Certainly, the rangy Californian is as responsible as anyone for the recent resurgence of the “psycho-pulp” genre--dark works with a psychological edge that may mirror his own unconventional beginnings. But sometimes all the attention gives him, well, the heebie-jeebies.

“I’m not interested in being like Truman Capote or Norman Mailer, on the talk shows every night,” says Gifford, 44. “What they do and have done, they do very well, but they’re welcome to that territory. Because then, instead of someone saying, ‘Gee, did you read Norman’s last book? It’s really quite wonderful,’ they say, ‘Isn’t he the guy who stabbed his wife?’ ”

Of course, Gifford is mindful that exposure isn’t all negative. The author, who has for the most part labored in critically favored obscurity, is luring a bigger audience. That’s particularly true since the release of Lynch’s film, whose twentysomething enthusiasts are flocking to Gifford’s book signings.

They won’t be disappointed by Gifford’s latest. The book version of “Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula” was fairly tame stuff stacked against Lynch’s vision, with its creepy Oz motif and additions of bizarre plot turns and crippled characters. Gifford’s new Sailor and Lula offering is notably weirder, describing a tilted, chaotic world in which people with fantastic names come to brutal ends.

Perdita Durango, a bit player in “Wild At Heart,” takes center stage in the first novella. “59% and Raining” is a strange brew of cannibalism, organized crime, kidnaping and Gifford’s satirical take on organized religion, featuring Sparky and Buddy’s House of Santeria, which caters to all your ritual needs.

“Most religions were started by someone wanting to get rich or get laid or both,” says Gifford, who considers himself a pantheist, finding God in nature.

In the novellas “Sailor’s Holiday” and “Sultans of Africa,” Sailor and Lula cling to each other while they weather their son Pace’s encounters with a deranged kidnaper, neophyte mobsters and a bearded loner who packs--and blithely uses--a semi-automatic rifle.

Gifford says that although Lynch is a fellow traveler in nihilistic space, working with the controversial director did not shape his vision.

“The truth of it is all the parts of ‘Sailor’s Holiday’ were written before I ever saw the film of ‘Wild at Heart.’ So the answer to that is absolutely not.”

Lynch says he was enchanted by Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune.

“I just fell in love with them,” Lynch says. “I liked the way they talked and behaved and how in love they were and I liked the world surrounding them. It got my imagination going, and I wanted to go into that world. Barry writes, in my mind, fairly minimally and lets the reader fill in in between the blanks and the spaces. You can go off on a lot of little dreams, and I like the slice of life that he likes.”

The beat generation looms large for Gifford. He helped to compile an oral biography of Kerouac, who stares down at him in his writing studio in Berkeley.

“I first started reading Kerouac when I was 12. I think he was a great inspiration to a lot of writers certainly of my generation and even before. I’ll hear nothing bad about Jack Kerouac.”

Gifford himself was a traveling man in his youth. His first stop was Chicago’s Seneca Hotel, where he lived briefly as a child. “It was described to me by an old Chicago con man as containing the lobby of the men with no last names, people who were a little shady.” He moved on to Key West, Fla., and other points as his beauty-queen mother moved on to other men.

His writing blends the mellifluous strains of Southern dialect, reflecting his own sharp ear, with his wise-guy Northern sensibility. Lately, the pull back to Chicago has been particularly strong, because that’s where his racketeering father did illegal business out of the innocuous fronts of pharmacies and liquor stores.

Gifford used the Freedom of Information Act to pry open his father’s arrest records and interviewed his friends--who included mobster Bugsy Siegel. Gifford’s parents divorced when he was 4; his father, Adolph Edward, died eight years later.

He turned his investigation into “a semi-documentary fictional memoir” that he describes as a literary collage crafted from documents, photographs, maps and newspaper articles--real and invented. “A Good Man to Know” will be published next year by a new publisher, Clark City Press, which is also coming out next month with a book of Gifford’s short fiction titled “New Mysteries of Paris.”

“Some people said to me, ‘What if you found out your father was really a bad guy and killed people? I said, ‘Well, I’ll see.’

“I found basically that he was a man of his word. He was true to what he believed in. He was very loyal. He was a very tough guy. If he didn’t like you, that was too bad for you.”

A bored young Gifford dropped out of the University of Missouri to bounce around Europe and the San Francisco Bay area, in the alternate guises of merchant seaman, truck driver, produce worker and editor. But San Francisco proved the strongest draw, and he sank roots there in the early ‘70s. He met his wife, Mary Lou, there. They have two children.

Gifford has been toiling in his Berkeley studio virtually since then, producing 19 books of fiction and nonfiction, some of which explored his zeal for baseball, the racetrack and William Saroyan. The last Sailor and Lula novel, “Bad Day for the Leopard Man,” will be included in next spring’s publication of a complete Vintage omnibus.

Of course, another longstanding passion of Gifford’s is roman noir, crime thrillers of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

“They were books that for the most part had been out of print for many years in their country of origin, and I thought they deserved another shot, a serious reappraisal, and they got it.”

In 1984, Gifford founded Black Lizard Books, which published 80 titles in his 4 1/2 years as editor before it was sold to Vintage Books. The reissues appealed to the great maw of Hollywood, leading to the recent releases of two films based on Jim Thompson novels, “The Grifters” and “After Dark, My Sweet.”

Gifford certainly feels a kinship with those authors’ dark view of the universe, but his own life actually seems like a pleasant antidote to all that.

“I think I’m pretty optimistic. I think I’m a very loyal person. Since my family was a bit scattered in a sense, it wasn’t a classic ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ type of upbringing. I had to go out in the world and find my own family and make my own family. My kids have had a very regular kind of life, basically one address, mother and father in the house.

“So I don’t necessarily think of the world as such a dark place, but I certainly don’t shy away from any of the dark corners. They’re as interesting to me as anything else.”