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.

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 tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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.