For Janie
Introduction
Symbiography
“MY GOD, HE’S COMMITTED science fiction.” So wrote Harry Crews in 1971 in his review of Gray Matters for the New York Times Book Review. Of course, it helped that he went on to say the novel “turns out to be not SciFi, but an engrossing fiction informed by an imaginative use of science.” Still, Crews had a point to make. Writers of serious literary fiction weren’t supposed to dirty their lily-white hands with generic trash. It didn’t matter that such fine work as The Oxbow Incident and The Bronc People were westerns, that both 1984 and Brave New World should be classified as science fiction, and that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler both wrote what anyone would define as detective literature. Genre fiction remained something one despised and avoided at all costs. Even the slightest exposure might infect a writer with a bad case of brow-lowering.
I just didn’t get it. Anyone who reads for enjoyment (and what other reason is there for opening a work of fiction?) knows not to risk such premature judgment. Otherwise, we all would have to give up on the manifold pleasures of Kurt Vonnegut, Graham Greene, Shirley Jackson, John le Carré and Stanislaw Lem, to mention but a few of the “serious” writers who have ventured into forbidden genre territory. I first encountered science fiction at a summer camp when I was twelve. Among the handful of battered secondhand books in the mess hall library was a first edition of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, published three years earlier. From the opening blasts of “Rocket Summer” to the final loneliness of “There Shall Come Soft Rains” and “The Million-Year Picnic,” I was spellbound. Before this, I had read only comic books, golden age cape-wearing superheroes and the more disturbing psychosexual horrors of the EC canon. Bradbury introduced me to the joys of literature and he remains a favorite author to this day.
In high school, I devoured the work of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe and J. D. Salinger (who had also attended McBurney), but in many ways, my heart still belonged to Bradbury. Yet, when I first began writing fiction with a certain seriousness myself, my models were Hemingway and Salinger and not the cherished Ray. I knew well enough to avoid science fiction’s curse. By my mid-twenties, I had written two fairly conventional novels that went nowhere (although the second earned me a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford), and when at twenty-seven I found that the only job for which I qualified was as a stock boy in a grocery store, I realized I had ruined my life with the pursuit of literature.
Writers never choose to write. Rather they discover over time that, for better or worse, writing is in their nature. They simply can’t help themselves. Although I had abandoned all hope of ever earning a living from my writing, I nevertheless continued to write. Every afternoon, when I returned home from a day of trimming lettuce and stamping prices on the tops of canned dog food, I’d sit down at my portable Royal and rattle off a page or two purely for my own pleasure. And here came the breakthrough failure had compelled me to confront. Because I no longer contemplated a writing career, I was free to abandon all the “rules” I had acquired preparing for it: always write what you know, write from experience, never write when stoned, keep a notebook handy. I gave up the misguided notion that writing is hard work. From now on, I wrote for the fun of it, for the sheer exuberant pleasure of making things up. I wrote when I was high as a kite. Best of all, I wrote what I didn’t know.
The outcome of all this rule-breaking fooling around was Alp, a zany sex-farce set in a mythical Switzerland, work that led John Leonard to call me “a satanic S. J. Perelman … by way of Disney and de Sade.” The path my little comic novel followed to a review in the New York Times seemed as haphazard and accidental as the manner of its composition. Tom McGuane had recently sold his first novel to Simon and Schuster and it was hard to stifle my envy when he was correcting his galleys while I stacked boxes of breakfast cereal at the store. In those days, Tom and I showed each other our works in progress, offering advice and hopefully helpful critical commentary. When he kept asking to see what I was working on, I remained evasive. Making the whole thing up as I went along, page by page, seeking only to amuse myself in the process, I had no idea at all where my foolish experiment was going. Finally, Tom persuaded me to let him take the first forty pages home to read over the weekend.
“Quite possibly the finest comic novel ever written in America.” McGuane’s candid assessment the following Monday flabbergasted me. Tom insisted he send the pages on to his editor at S&S. I thought of every possible reason to decline his generous offer. The book wasn’t finished. Worse, it was only a first draft typed on cheap second-sheet canary paper and heavily corrected with Magic Marker strike-outs and ballpoint pen inserts. None of this mattered to Tom. He said he’d have it Xeroxed at his expense (twenty-five cents a page seemed a sum to be reckoned with in those impoverished buck-an-hour days) and pay for all the postage. In the end, I relented. What did it matter? I wasn’t an aspiring professional writer anymore. I was just a guy who worked for minimum wage in a grocery.
Two or three weeks later, a call came for me at Jack Pepper’s General Store in Bolinas, California. This in itself wasn’t unusual. Too poor at the time to afford the luxury of a telephone, I often gave out the store’s number to anyone needing to get hold of me in a hurry. The enthusiastic voice on the other end belonged to Richard Locke from Simon and Schuster. He loved Alp and wanted to publish the book. S&S would pay me a $2,000 advance, a thousand bucks on signing and another grand upon their acceptance of a finished manuscript. At the end of my shift, I untied my stock boy’s apron and walked out of the store into the rest of my life.
The following year, part of the prepublication publicity for Alp involved my inclusion in a Life magazine article about “young authors.” I didn’t feel all that young back then. At twenty-eight, I was the same age as Stephen Crane when he died. Nevertheless, I told the interviewer that I wrote novels “on whim,” a bit of an exaggeration as it certainly didn’t apply to either of my other two unpublished manuscripts. This was the period of the world’s first heart transplant operations and one night, high at a party, I made a wisecrack to the effect that if medical science kept moving in this direction, one day we’d just throw away our vulnerable bodies and simply preserve our brains in some elaborate home entertainment center. Adrift in my hangover the next morning, I thought that if I did actually write novels on whim, I might as well go for a spin with my crazy brain notion. The end result, after a year of work, was Gray Matters.
Whereas Alp almost seemed to write itself and I flew through a first draft in less than six months, this new as-yet-untitled brain project went a lot slower. At first, under the influence of Samuel Beckett or, perhaps, Dalton Trumbo, I endeavored to write the book in the first person. Wasn’t a brain floating in a fish tank the ultimate first person singular? I also decided to use the present tense. Why not describe the future as the present? This time the influence was Joyce Carey’s exquisite novel, Mr. Johnson. The problem, after thirty pages or so, was that nothing was happening. My little brain just floated in solitude, thinking his random thoughts, while the story remained utterly static.
After my false start in a borrowed New York City apartment, I ventured out to Montana for the first time and started again from scratch in a little cabin at Chico Hot Springs near Yellowstone Park. It was the summer of Woodstock and the first moon landing, aside from the ongoing horrors of Vietnam, a time of hope and promise. I salvaged a few odds and ends out of those unusable first pages. The original nameless brain had evolved into Skeets. I also came up with the concept of memory-merge and had some idea of the mechanized world wherein Skeets dwelled. He had watched the films of a Czech actress named Vera Mitlovic and studied the work of Obu Itubi, an African sculptor, so I arbitrarily made them characters in the book. For structure, I fell back on the quick-cutting character jumps I had used in Alp and started making the new draft up day by day as I went along. True to my word, I wrote the novel on whim.
I finished the first draft of Gray Matters