by Mark Dorset |
What the Author Is Up To
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| Sitting on a Dock in a Dream | . | KRAFT HAS TOLD THAT LITTLE STORY so often now that, he claims, he no
longer knows exactly which parts of it are true:
(Allow me to demur here, briefly. I do not object to Kraft’s designation of Peter Leroy as the narrator of “it all,” and I admit that as a creation of Leroy’s I am, therefore, a part of “it all,” but I submit to you, reader, the evidence of this demurrer to support the claim that I am the narrator of a good portion of “it all,” even if I am dummy to Leroy’s ventriloquist, as he is dummy to Kraft’s.) Peter Leroy tells the sad story of his boyhood friend Matthew Barber in Reservations Recommended; the buoyant love story of his maternal grandparents in Herb 'n' Lorna; the trials and eventual triumph of the sultry older sister of his imaginary friend in What a Piece of Work I Am; and his own life story, greatly embellished, in LITTLE Follies,Where Do You Stop?, At Home with the Glynns, Leaving Small’s Hotel, and Inflating a Dog. He will, I hope, continue telling stories in many volumes to come. |
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| The Years of Daydreaming and Self-Defense |  YEARS
PASSED after that dream in the library. From time to time, the memory of
the dream returned, and from time to time the dream itself returned. It
wasn’t an
obsession for Kraft—not yet. It may be now, but it wasn’t then. It
was just a pleasant amusement, a diversion, a vacation from whatever Kraft
was working on, thinking about, or worrying about. He could drift into
that dream and play with it, and in playing with it, exploring it, he began
improving it. He added a context for the boy—an island, where the old dock
was, an abandoned building on the island—a grand house, perhaps, or an
abandoned hotel—he wasn’t sure which, a gray bay, and the mainland, where
the town of Babbington lay. He wrote none of this down. This
was not writing—not yet. Kraft had
no intention or expectation of making a piece of writing out of this. It
was daydreaming.
SOON, HOWEVER, like most people who read books, Kraft began to want to write one of his own. Like most people who want to write books, he really wanted to write a book about himself. He tried, but he found that he was too close to his subject. His feelings toward that subject, the “Eric Kraft” of the narrative he meant to write, were ambiguous. Kraft wanted “Kraft” to be something better than he was, and he respected that aspiration in “him,” but he wished that “he” could learn to live more comfortably with “himself,” and he could see that “he” would be better company if “he” could learn to laugh at “himself” now and then. Kraft began wanting to trip “him” up, play practical jokes on “him,” deflate “him.” In anything Kraft tried to write, he seemed—more and more often—to be about to make “Kraft” take a pratfall, and since Kraft was “Kraft” he didn’t want “him” falling down in any book he wrote. |
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| Arrival of the
Muse and the Subject |
IN 1963, KRAFT MARRIED MADELINE CANNING. This was a lucky break: the
writer who marries his muse is lucky indeed. By 1965, the couple had two
children, Scott and Alexis. Kraft went on to graduate school and began
teaching.
 Then,
in 1969 or 1970 (“I can’t say just when,” Kraft claims, “but it must have
been around then.”) he found his subject, his obsession, his vocation,
his life’s work. It was, of course, that little boy who had been sitting
on a dock in a dream. One should not assume that he simply began writing
some part of what has become Peter Leroy’s personal history; what Kraft
began writing was nothing like what the work has become. He began
in the wrong way, in a wrong way, but it was a beginning, and he
finds now that when he looks back at that misstep it seems all right, not
a waste of time, not a mistake, but a useful detour, the kind that takes
one to a place one would otherwise ever have visited, might even have deliberately
avoided:
(One
is always pleased to see oneself quoted, even if misquoted or paraphrased,
as in the preceding passage. I have said, on many occasions during
the website “brainstorming” sessions we hold at Corrine's Fabulous Fruits
of the Sea, “Release me from the confines
of the author’s brain! Let me wander over yonder in the
kingdom of time and place!”)
Kraft
began writing about Peter Leroy in an exploratory way, not for publication,
and not even in an attempt to tell a story, just to find out what was there.
This exploratory phase—practice, as we might think of it now—lasted nearly
eighteen years, eighteen years that Kraft spent learning about Peter’s
friends (including, of course, me), the town of Babbington where he lived,
his family, his experiences, his feelings and ideas. Kraft was just
taking notes, though he didn’t realize it at the time. He thought
he was writing parts of a novel—a novel about Peter Leroy. He began
accumulating these writings—scenes, snatches of conversation, encounters,
bits and pieces of something, a work he hadn’t defined yet.
Whatever
this work was or was to become, Kraft found that he couldn’t stop working
on it. He left teaching and became an editor at an educational publishing
company. (He would do this work for the next seven years, from 1968
through—or nearly through—1975.) In the evening or early morning
hours, he continued elaborating Peter Leroy and his world, creating his
personal history, adventures, and experiences.
For
ten years or more Kraft never showed it to anyone but Madeline. The
work grew. He accumulated cartons of notes. “I still have the
cartons,” Kraft claims. “I haven't opened them since 1980 or so. I don’t
need to refer to what’s there; I know it as well as I know my own memories.” |
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| The Game of Forking Paths |  IT
WAS ALSO AT ABOUT THIS TIME that Kraft invented an electromechanical game
that he called, at first, “The Game of Forking Paths” but later came to
call “The Babbington Game.” It was a switching game, in which nine
switches were arranged in a linked circuit so that the state of each switch
controlled the state of subsequent switches along the pathway. Nine
lights indicated the state of the various switches. The object of
the game was to set the switches so that all nine lights were lit.
This would have been a simple matter if the switches were toggle switches,
so that one could see the position of each switch, but Kraft used pushbutton
switches, so that the state of a switch could only be determined by observing
the effect that switching it had on the other switches. In other
words, one could only know the effect that a move would have on the state
of the entire array of lights after making the move. It seems to
me that there are implications about hyperfiction in the design of this
game, and if I had the time I would draw the schematic diagram of the game
and explore the hyperfictional implications further, but at the present
moment (on the morning of June 24, 2001) I do not. (I will say, however,
that it has just occurred to me that the game might also serve as a schematic
for the linked effect that the episodes of a serial novel have on their
readers, since the reading of any one episode will alter the reader’s understanding
of some, and perhaps all, of the other episodes—those to come and those
already read. And it has additionally just occurred to me that the
game models—in a greatly simplified way, of course—the relationships among
the characters in the author’s mind. Some day I really must get around
to including the schematic here.) |
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| The Wearying Quest for a Sufficiently Elastic Form | MORE AND MORE, Kraft began to ask himself what he was going to do with all of the stuff he had written. It had grown so large that he couldn’t imagine a form that would contain it all. The bits and pieces were piling up, and his ideas were accumulating even faster. It seemed that the longer he waited to begin publishing this work, the less likely it was that he would ever get it into a form in which it could be published—or even find a form that could accommodate it all. The hunt for form was wearying and frustrating. It almost killed the work. In this period, roughly from 1970 to 1976, there were times when Kraft wanted to quit, abandon the little guy in Babbington, do something else. Whenever he tried to make something coherent out of what he’d done, he would begin on one tack, go a little way, decide that it was wrong, change course, try again, change again, and so on. Sometimes he didn’t think he was up to the task, and sometimes he began to wonder whether the task was worth the effort it demanded and the toll it was exacting. |
| Hi! I'm Candi Lee Manning, Eric Kraft's
bubbly publicist, and I just bet that you're wondering how you can support
this work!
Well, here's a swell idea: Add yourself to our e-mailing list.
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Copyright © 1992, 2001 by Eric
Kraft
A Topical Guide to the Complete Peter Leroy (so far) is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this guide may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. Portions of A Topical Guide to the Complete Peter Leroy (so far) were first published by Voyager, Inc., as part of The Complete Peter Leroy (so far). The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile. |
COMPONENTS OF THE WORK REVIEWS OF THE ENTIRE WORK AUTHOR’S STATEMENT LITTLE
FOLLIES
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AKE
A TYPICAL CASE: for more than thirty years now, Eric Kraft has been working
to construct 