by Mark Dorset
GUIDE
INDEX
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What the Author Is Up To (continued)
LTHOUGH
Kraft never let anyone but Madeline read what he had written, he did talk
about it to anyone who would listen. He talked about what he hoped
to do with, it, what he hoped to make of it. He was becoming a bore,
always talking about the big book he intended to write.
His
friends, weary of hearing him talk about this big book, began asking, “So,
where is it?” They wanted to read it, but Kraft couldn’t write it.
That is, he couldn’t write it well enough so that he would be willing to
let them read it.
It
seems clear, now, that throughout that time Kraft was wrong about what
he was looking for, or, rather, that he was only half right. He was aware
that he was looking for a form, but he was not aware at the time of the
fact that he was also looking for a voice. He was—as he had been all along—writing
about
Peter
Leroy, in Eric Kraft’s voice, not as Peter Leroy, in Peter’s voice.
Kraft’s own voice wouldn’t do because it was still constrained by all the
instincts of self-preservation that had made him such a lousy protagonist
when he tried to write about himself. As a character, he had been
the sort of guy who won’t dance because he may take a tumble, and as a
narrator he was the sort of guy who won’t say what he thinks because he
may sound like a fool. Only when Kraft began trying to write in Peter’s
voice, letting him tell his own story and make his own observations, did
he begin making progress. That is also when Peter began making
mistakes, falling down, doing things that—to Kraft’s surprise—people found
funny. Before that time, none of what Kraft had written was comic; there
isn’t a laugh in all those cartons of notes.
n
his essay “On the Essence of Laughter,” Baudelaire provides an explanation
of one source of humor—or of the reader’s response to humor—that could
serve as a coment on the role of humor in Kraft’s work. Baudelaire wrote:
Observe that it is with his tears that man washes the afflictions
of man, and that it is with his laughter that sometimes he soothes and
charms his heart. . . .
To
take one of the most commonplace examples in life, what is there so delightful
in the sight of a man falling on the ice or in the street, or stumbling
at the end of a pavement, that the countenance of his brother in Christ
should contract in such an intemperate manner, and the muscles of his face
should suddenly leap into life like a timepiece at midday or a clockwork
toy? The poor devil has disfigured himself, at the very least; he
may even have broken an essential member. Nevertheless the laugh
has gone forth, sudden and irrepressible. It is certain that if you
care to explore this situation, you will find a certain unconscious pride
at the core of the laugher’s thought. That is the point of departure.
“Look at me! I am not falling,” he seems to say.
And a little later in the essay, we come to what is, I think, the essential
fact about humor in Kraft’s work, and about the gift of detachment that
Peter Leroy has given him. Baudelaire goes on:
The man who trips would be the last to laugh at his own fall,
unless he happened to be a philosopher, one who had acquired by habit a
power of rapid self-division and thus of assisting as a disinterested spectator
at the phenomena of his own ego. But such cases are rare.
I
have sometimes thought that Kraft might have called the entire work,
the work that includes all of Peter’s work, and also includes this essay
and all the other essays in Very Large Fiction, everything on the
Peter eroy website, the entries in my topical autobiography—in short, “it
all”—The Last to Laugh. |
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Cheerfulness Breaks In
I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how,
cheerfulness was always breaking in.
Oliver Edwards
quoted by James Boswell
in the entry for
April 17, 1778
Life of Samuel Johnson
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Peter Leroy’s Version
of Kraft’s Story |
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HERE IS PETER, in LITTLE
Follies, telling a version of Kraft’s story, the story with which
I began this essay:
SOME EIGHT YEARS later, on a cold February afternoon during
my sophomore year at Hargrove University, I sat in Cranston Library, trying
to study for a mathematics examination. The library was overheated;
I was sitting in an overstuffed leather wing chair, the type of chair that
I have, ever since my days at Hargrove, thought of as the only type of
chair proper for a library. Snow was falling outside, and the air
in the library was heavy with the odor of wet wool, wet leather, old books,
painted steam radiators, and students, many of us dozing over our studies.
I
stretched, yawned, and decided to take a break from my work to read a letter
from a high school acquaintance, Robert Meyer, a boy who had passed through
Babbington High School almost unnoticed, but who had this year done a daring
thing for that time, taken a year’s sabbatical from college to be on his
own in Europe. As soon as he reached European soil, Robert began
writing to everyone who had ignored him in high school. He wrote
long, tedious letters full of strained insights, accounts of unlikely sexual
encounters, and snatches of the local language. I received at least
one a week.
When
the first of his letters arrived, I had no idea who Robert Meyer was, and
it wasn’t until I began hearing from friends who had also received letters
from him that I was able to retrieve a blurry face from my memory of high
school, someone rushing past in the hallway, mumbling a greeting, but averting
his face and hurrying on, someone still sitting in the stands after a football
game, alone, at one end of the upper row of bleachers, while the rest of
us headed for the gate, the parking lot, cars, pizza. I looked him
up in my yearbook, but his photograph was no more help to me in recalling
Robert just a year after we had been in school together than the photographs
of my other classmates would be twenty-five years later. Though I
was happy to receive any mail, even letters from Robert, they grew wearying
after a while, and so when one arrived I delayed opening it for a little
longer than I had delayed opening the last. This one had been in
my book bag for several days. I tore open the thin blue envelope,
unfolded the letter and read.
“Ich
bin nun endlich in MÙnchen und sitze hier in meinem Zimmer bei Frau
Brenner in der Schellingstrasse,” the letter began.
The
heat, the odors, and Robert Meyer’s prose style put me to sleep nearly
at once. I had been sitting with my feet up on a table, and I had
leaned backward in the chair until it rocked on the back legs only.
When I woke, I was sitting on a dilapidated wooden dock, the sort of dock
from which you are certain to pick up splinters in your feet if you walk
along it barefoot. Rusty nailheads projected from pilings where boards
had once been attached. Other boards, half rotted, hung at odd angles.
Beside the dock was a rowboat, a sunken rowboat, resting on the sandy bottom
in a foot or so of water. An old line, green with slime, still made
the rowboat fast to a piling at the end of the dock. I was barefoot,
and I was playing a game with the surface of the water—the same game that
I used to play when I let my feet dangle over the stern of the Rambunctious,
Big
Grandfather’s boat: I was trying to bring the soles of my feet as close
to the surface of the water as I could without touching it. It was
day, but the day was foggy. It was summer, and I was wearing only
a pair of shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. A wavelet touched my
heel, which meant I’d lost another round, and I kicked my feet and ran
my toes through the water. It was still and warm. I was nine
or ten.
Faintly,
I began to hear something through the fog. As the sound grew stronger,
I thought I recognized it, but I couldn’t be quite sure. It might
be only the lapping of waves, but the water was still. It might be
laughter, but who would be out in the fog, laughing?
“Are
you all right?”
A
young woman with dark hair stepped out of the fog and brought her face
near mine. I found myself sitting straight in a leather chair, my
back pressed firmly along its back, my legs flat along the seat where the
dock ought to have been, my lower legs against the edge of the cushion,
and from around me I heard a sound that I thought I recognized, a sound
that might be laughter, but I saw no people; a sound that might be the
lapping of waves, if there were waves inside a building. Certainly
I was inside a building, but I was looking at the ceiling, and if
the evidence of my eyes was to be believed, the ceiling had been moved
around to occupy the plane ordinarily occupied by a wall. Some sort
of practical joke? Not likely, I thought. A trick of the mind,
the not-quite-fully-awake mind? Transpositions of this sort were,
I knew from my several attempts to read Á La Recherche du Temps
Perdu, not uncommon illusions upon awakening; in the misty margin between
sleep and wakefulness Marcel might seem to recognize the architecture and
furnishings of his room at home, only to find, as he came slowly to his
senses, that the uplifted forefinger of day had rearranged the furniture,
the windows, the doorways, and the walls, and transformed his bedroom into
a hotel room with a view of the sea.
(Since
it has occurred to me just now and is such a fine illustration of the fundamental
truths one sometimes finds in fiction, I will mention briefly a comparable
anecdote that Porky White told me many years later. He and his wife,
Marcella, had traveled to a small lakeside village somewhere in New England
for a wedding. The ceremony was intimate and touching, and the party
that followed was long and exuberant. Porky retired in wonderful
spirits, more than a little soused. “In the middle of the night,”
he told me, “I get a message from my unconscious: ‘Porky! Wake up! You
have got to take a piss, and you have got to do it right now,’ it was saying.
Quiet as I can be, I get out of bed, step out of the bedroom into the dark
hallway, turn right, turn right again into the bathroom, walk to the toilet,
reach into my shorts and pull out my pride and joy, yawn, and let myself
go. Instead of the basso splashing I usually hear under these circumstances,
I hear an odd, hollow, splattering sound, and this incongruity wakes me
up. I discover that I’m not in my own house, of course, I’m not in
my bathroom, and I’m pissing onto the caned seat of a fine old bentwood
chair.”)
“Oh,
sure,” I said to the young woman with dark hair. “I’m fine. I just dozed
off.”
I
yawned and stretched and rubbed my eyes. I thought that some fresh
air might be in order, and I tried to get up. Only then, when my
body told me that gravity was pulling from the wrong direction, did I realize
that the chair and I were lying on our backs on the floor, and that the
laughter was real, directed at me. I scrambled to my feet, righted
the chair, and stacked my books and papers, trying not to raise my head
all the while, so that I wouldn’t have to see any of the people who were
laughing at me. I made my way, with what I hoped was dignified haste,
through the doors of the main entrance and out into the bright sunlight.
The sun was so bright after the library that I closed my eyes against it
for a moment and reeled with a dazzled dizziness. In the iridescent
images in my mind’s eye I saw a piece of a persistent memory of part of
a dream, no more than a snapshot, but a clear and intriguing snapshot:
that moment of sitting on the old dock.
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The Dummy Invents
His Ventriloquist |
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T
WILL NOT surprise you, I think, to hear that this dream stayed with Peter,
that it puzzled and intrigued him. Nor will it surprise you to learn
that, like most people who read books, he eventually began to want
to write a book . . . about himself. He had, by the age of
thirty-six, become “Roger Drake,” the pseudonymous author of a series of
adventure books for boys—the Adventures of Larry Peters—(actually, he had
become merely the latest in a long line of Roger Drakes, writers hired
as hacks by the publishers of the Larry Peters series) but (and perhaps
I should add “of course”) he found that it hadn’t brought the artistic
fulfillment he once thought it might.
THERE WERE times, many times, when what I was doing seemed
not the sort of thing that I ought to be doing. It seemed, at times,
fit work for a child, or perhaps for a young man who would otherwise be
idle, a mere flâneur, chasing skirts and nursing hangovers, but not
fit work for a man of thirty-six, which I had somehow, very suddenly and
surprisingly, become.
One
night, I was sitting in Corinne’s Fabulous Fruits of the Sea, talking to
Porky White, complaining along familiar lines.
“It
still isn’t enough, Porky,” I said. “Now that I’m Roger Drake, I ought
to be satisfied, but I’m not. I still keep trying to write that big book
about myself, that book as rich and various as a good clam chowder, loaded
with useful and interesting information, hilarious anecdotes, recherché
allusions, philosophical speculations, intriguing stories, clever word
play, important themes, striking symbols, creative sex, intricate diagrams,
mouth-watering recipes, big ideas—”
“Yeah,”
said Porky, “but you want to know something?”
“What?”
I asked.
“I
don’t think that the guy I’m listening to now is ever going to do that.”
My
heart sank.
“Don’t
get me wrong,” said Porky. “I mean just what I said: the guy I’ve been
listening to for the last hour is never going to write it. He takes himself
too seriously, much too seriously to do what you’re always talking about
doing. His ego is too tender, and he protects it too well.
He’s too afraid of making a mistake. He’s afraid of making a fool of himself,
afraid of falling on his face in print, afraid that people are going to
laugh at him.”
There
was a danger of my bursting into tears. To hide my face from Porky,
I brought my beer mug up and drained it slowly. Porky signaled for
two more.
“Let
me give you some advice,” he said. “You don’t have to take it.”
“Okay,”
I managed.
“What
you need,” said Porky, “is a new dummy. You’ve got a dummy called Larry.
Now you need another dummy. Let the dummy write the big book.”
Porky
held his hand up to show that I should hear him out.
“Years
ago,” he said, “I used to listen to Bob Balducci on the radio. You
probably don’t remember him. He was a ventriloquist, and he had a
dummy named Baldy. Baldy used to say the craziest things, insulting
things, embarrassing things, stupid things. I don’t remember any
of them now, but they were crazy things. He used to break me up.
Sometimes, though, Baldy would go a little too far: he’d say something
too stupid, or too embarrassing, or too insulting, and you know what he’d
say then? He’d say, “The big guy made me do it.’”
Porky
laughed long and loud at the memory of this remark.
“And
you know what Balducci would say to that?” he asked through his laughter,
and answered himself at once. “He’d say, ‘Don’t listen to him—he’s
only a dummy.’”
He
laughed long and loud again, and then he pulled his handkerchief out of
his pocket and blew his nose twice. He shrugged.
“Maybe
I’m not making myself clear,” he said.
But
he had made himself so clear that my heart had begun to go pit-a-pat and
I couldn’t speak. I just sat there wearing a wacky grin.
Peter had had an idea, an extraordinary idea. He was, though he didn’t
quite know it yet, about to invent his ventriloquist . . . Eric Kraft.
He continues:
I
left Corinne’s and took a walk. I headed for the bay. At the
town dock, I sat on a bench and looked toward the island, Small’s Island,
where there was no hotel except the one that I had imagined, and I drifted
back into my daydream. I became, again, that small boy on the dilapidated
dock, dabbling my feet in the water, but this time, for the first time
ever in this daydream, I raised my head and looked outward, into the fog.
There, in front of me, not more than a few yards away, was a young man
in a rowboat, staring at me. He wore a puzzled look. He seemed
to be astonished to see me. I waved and smiled and felt a thrill
ripple across my back. I had never before imagined that someone else
might be having the same dream.
That
night, lying in bed, sleepless, I figured it out, all of it. This,
I decided, is what must have happened:
One
cold winter afternoon in 1962 I insinuated myself into the mind of Eric
Kraft, a sophomore at Harvard, who had settled himself comfortably at a
large table in Lamont Library and was dozing over a German lesson.
His feet were up on the table. His chair was tilted back. The
room was warm. He was tired. He dozed. When he woke up,
he was lying on the floor. His book, notebook, and papers were scattered
around him, people were laughing, and he was embarrassed. He gathered his
things and rushed out of the library. In the cold air, the memory
of a dream returned to him, surprising him. He recalled seeing .
. . me—a little boy, sitting on a dilapidated dock, in the sunny warmth
of a summer day, dabbling my feet in the water, playing a game: trying
to bring the soles of my bare feet as close as I could to the surface of
the water without touching it—and I have been on, or in, Kraft’s mind ever
since I made that first appearance.
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Peter on the Muse |
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ETER
GOES ON to tell his version of the story that I have been telling here,
and I won’t repeat all of it, but I think that a few more excerpts may
interest you. Here he is on the importance of Madeline to the work:
Kraft
met the love of his life when he was fifteen, and in 1963, at eighteen,
he had the good sense to marry her. This was a lucky break—for Kraft,
of course, but also for me, because Kraft wanted to do something that would
make him look good in Madeline’s eyes. That desire was absolutely essential
to the work that would eventually become my personal history, adventures,
experiences, and observations, because it kept Kraft on the job.
The job was going to get very much more difficult, and very confusing,
and he was going to feel like a lost soul in a labyrinth, but he would
press on and press on and continue to press on, and he would keep on working
at the writing, even through the most difficult patches, because he was
writing not only for himself, but for Madeline: to amuse her, to impress
her, to intrigue her, to seduce her. (I suspect that more books are
written for such reasons than the vanity of authors allows them to admit.)
Even when Kraft wasn't having any success at all, the thought of Madeline’s
reading his work someday and being affected by it kept him writing.
(Readers who later came to feel that his books seemed to have been written
just for them, as if the path between author and reader had become a shortcut,
were responding to this underlying motive.)
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Peter on the Moment
of the Essential Transition |
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ND
HERE HE IS on the night when Kraft stopped trying to write about himself,
in his voice, and began writing as Peter, in Peter’s voice:
Kraft
was becoming a bore, always talking about the big book he intended to write.
“So, where is it?” his friends began to ask. They wanted to read
it, but he couldn’t write it. That is, he couldn’t write it well enough
so that he would be willing to let them read it.
On
an unforgettable day sometime early in the 1970s, he had come to the brink
of despair, and he thought of destroying everything he had done, but it
represented so much time and thought, so many years, such a large part
of his life. He sat with his head in his hands and drifted back into
that daydream he had had so many years ago, and this was the time when
I raised my head and we found ourselves face to face, across time, in an
interior universe, and each of us understood at once that he had found
his life’s work: me, who had once been a little boy sitting on a dock in
a dream. That night—that very night—he began a draft with the words
“In my family,” meaning my family, and both of us sighed with relief.
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Earliest Forms of Publication |
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N
OCTOBER 21, 1975, Kraft was laid off by the educational publishing company
he was working for, and he became an independent supplier of editorial
services—that is, a free-lance writer and editor who employs other free-lance
writers and editors to put together large projects for educational publishers.
His editorial-services business grew, and as it did it put useful tools
at his disposal—copying machines, electric typewriters, word processors,
tax deductions for stationery supplies—all the things one needs to publish
in samizdat. Having the tools, which brought new possibilities,
made him see a new form for the work.
In
the next couple of years, he self-published some of Peter Leroy’s juvenilia—Larry
Peters Is Missing and Larry Peters, Child No More—and a manifesto
or prospectus for the work he had in mind—“Large and Unsolicited Fiction,”
which imitated the form of an article in a magazine very much like Scientific
American. Most importantly, he began sending to a list of friends
pages that looked like excerpts from a longer work, as if the work were
complete, as if he had finished it and had it sitting on his bookshelf
in several volumes. Every Wednesday night was “publication night,”
when he would retire to the cellar after dinner, lay out a few pages so
that they looked as if he had taken one of the published volumes down from
the shelf, laid it open on the copier and run off copies, and pack them
up. On Thursday, they went out to that list of friends. These
friends wanted more (how indulgent friends can be!), so Kraft kept at it,
writing in the early morning hours, as he has ever since, publishing on
Wednesdays, shipping on Thursdays. (The equivalent, at the present
writing is his laying out HTML pages and posting them to the Web on Saturday
mornings. The writing still gets done in the early morning hours,
every day.)
Of
this form of publication, Kraft has said, “it may have put me in the ideal
relationship of author to audience.” Henry Fielding wrote, at the
start of Tom Jones: “An author ought to consider himself, not as
a gentleman who keeps a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one
who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their
money.” Perhaps he was right, but let me tell you that giving a private
treat can be quite nice. Very cozy. Not very demanding, perhaps,
but within the comforting protection of a small circle of friends, one
can be bold, bolder perhaps than when one is out in society, at a public
ordinary, where there are strangers who will laugh if you fall on your
face.
Kraft
asked the people who received his mailings to recommend others for the
mailing list, and by June of 1981 there were more than two hundred people
on it. By then he was publishing a four-page leaflet almost monthly,
in a format that resembled a newsletter. Included in these newsletters
were a serial account of Peter's doings and a serial Larry Peters adventure
as well. Both had begun, somewhere in the middle, months earlier.
He
thought he had found the ultimate form for the work.
OWEVER,
life wasn’t ready to let him settle down just yet. In the fall of
1981, he and Madeline—now Kraft & Kraft Editorial Services—went broke—well,
nearly. Educational publishing was in a depressed period, and they
were pretty depressed themselves. Kraft felt that he couldn’t justify
the expense of publishing the newsletters. What, then, was going
to become of the work? What was going to become of his audience?
(Once you’ve got one, you really hate to lose it.) He called a small
literary publisher who had found his way onto the mailing list and asked
whether he’d be interested in a novel with Peter at its center. The
idea of writing such a novel made Kraft awfully anxious, but it seemed
like something he had to do. This publisher, who ran Apple-wood Books,
of Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that he thought part of the pleasure
of Peter’s story and everything that surrounded it came from receiving
the work in pieces. He suggested that that quality be preserved by
publishing novellas at regular intervals, the whole adding up to a serial
novel with no anticipated end. The idea was to keep the installments
to a uniform length of about 20,000 words and publish four a year.
Well,
Kraft thought, why not? Here was a chance to start again, at the
beginning. He took it. In effect, he sat Peter down in a quiet room
at the top of the old hotel on that island he had imagined and . . . but
we will let Peter tell it:
The
pact we made, was, essentially, that I would supply the materials—the reminiscences,
the characters, the fabrications, the details—and Kraft would put the whole
work together. In effect, he told me, “You go upstairs to a quiet
room at the top of the hotel, where you can look back across the bay toward
the town where you grew up, and just let your mind wander through your
past. I’ll do the rest.”
When
Kraft reads from the work at bookstores and libraries he usually begins
with a description of my part in it:
magine,
please, an island, a small one, not in some pellucid subtropical sea, but
in a gray bay, shallow, often cold, Small’s Island, in Bolotomy Bay, and
on the island imagine an old hotel, Small's Hotel, where a middle-aged
dreamer, Peter Leroy, lives with his beautiful wife, Albertine.
Albertine
runs the hotel, and Peter spends much of each day sitting in a room on
the second floor, writing the Personal History, Adventures, Experiences
& Observations of Peter Leroy, his life story.
If
you could look over his shoulder and watch him at work, you would be likely
to find that he was rewriting an episode from his past, altering it, embellishing
it with entertainments, distractions, romance, and history, making of his
life a story that it never was, because when he reminisces he finds that
he's as interested in the possibilities as he is in the facts, and also
because memory, like an old radio receiver, picks up a lot of static.
So,
there is a curious kind of partnership between us. The usual descriptions—author
and character, ventriloquist and dummy, left brain and right brain—are
inaccurate and inadequate. At first, when we were just beginning
to think about working together, Kraft may have thought that in me he had
merely found a way to write about himself, and I may have felt that I had
found a ventriloquist who was willing to play the straight man while I
got the laughs, but as time has passed, each of us has found himself liberated
by the other, and each of has found that to a certain degree he has become
what he is through the agency of the other.
Since
that time, we have worked together nearly every day, and the author-character
relationship between us has become extremely complex. We are not
the same person, though we share a mind. Sometimes, I feel as if I have
developed another self—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that
I have divided myself in two. I do the writing, and the new self
does the editing. He is the other self I have made. Since he
is somewhat less attached to my self, he doesn’t treat that self
with the delicacy and reverential regard that I do. Though our functions
sometimes overlap, I generally supply the notes and ideas, and he makes
something out of it all. I’m the nouns. He’s the verbs.
Like most things, this process can be compared to the making of a good
clam chowder. I supply the clams, the vegetables, the herbs, the
spices. He’s the cook.
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Notes on Form |
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EFORE
I MOVE ON to the subject of the manifold relationships between the author
and his characters, I’d like make a few remarks on the form. Kraft’s work
is a single work with many parts. The parts are distinct but they
all work together.
What
forms are there for works big enough to include novels as parts, for works
that fold back upon themselves and include as parts the containers of other
parts? Many metaphors for form and substance have appealed to me
over the years—a string of pearls, a nest of boxes, a Japanese Daruma doll,
a line of dominoes, a five-foot shelf—but they were all, in their individual
ways, also metaphors of linearity, either a simple linearity (the pearls),
or linearity with growth and envelopment (boxes or dolls), or with causality
(dominoes). I offer here four richer metaphors, each of which comes
closer to a model of the work:
A Town
The
form is the pattern of streets that lead you anywhere in the town, and
the substance is the Personal
History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations. The individual
books are individual places, places where you might stop to visit—homes,
shops, historical markers. You walk along one of the streets in the
quiet of a summer evening, and through the window of a small house you
see something interesting. You glance over your shoulder to see if
anyone’s watching you, and then you tiptoe across the neat lawn, squeeze
between the bushes, and peek into the open window. You seem to be
looking back in time, to an evening just before the Second World War.
A very young woman, dressed in the style of Dolores del Rio, is saying
to her parents, “I’m
going to go next door to see if Dudley can help me memorize the parts of
the frog.” The odor of the bay drifts in on the evening breeze,
and you begin to think that you might linger here for a while. Perhaps
there is an old hotel where you can find a room.
An Atom
Especially as Niels Bohr Imagined the Atom, as a Little Solar System
with a Compound Nucleus
The
nucleus is Peter’s personal history, a whole, a unity, but with a complex
internal structure and parts of its own, and the orbiting electrons are
the other books, the ones that stand a bit apart from Peter’s tale of himself
but are bound to it invisibly, powerfully.
One of Those Ball-and-Stick Models of an Organic Molecule that High-School
Biology Teachers Construct
The
balls represent the several works that compose the Work, the sticks the
relationships among and between them. One thing that I particularly
like about this one is that the substance of the individual elements does
not simply “add up” to the substance of the whole. The molecule is truly
more than the sum of the parts, with characteristics that the component
atoms do not have alone or even in the aggregate. The substance,
therefore, is the substance of the molecule, which inheres in the characteristics
of the molecule and not in the component atoms.
A Good Clam
Chowder
This,
I think, is the richest and most revealing of all. In a good chowder,
there will be clams, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, celery, onions, some
bits of bacon or salt pork, and herbs and spices. If you use good
fresh clams, you’re going to get some dark, gritty bits at the bottom,
too, some sand and bits of shell and—how shall I put this—artifacts of
the clam’s digestive process. Holding all these disparate bits together
should be a rich broth. Basically, then, there are two kinds of stuff
in chowder: chunky bits and the broth that links them, that makes them
components of a chowder and not just a bowl of chunky bits. The chunky
bits in this chowder—the clams, the potatoes, tomatoes, and so on—are the
books, and the broth is the whole system of cross-reference and allusion
that links and flavors and spices the chunky bits. Taken as a whole—that
is, as a chowder rather than as a bowl of the components of a chowder—it
is a metaphorical approximation of the mind of Peter Leroy. The work,
in
toto, reveals, represents, and recreates his thinking about himself
and his world and his past and the people in it.
Mark Dorset
East Phantom (the largest of the islands in the Phantom archipelago)
New York
October 26, 1996; revised July 1, 2001
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