My brief career as a novelist

When I went home for the summer of 1958 after my first year in college, I told my mother that I wanted to be a novelist. I can still recall the scene, sitting at the white enameled metal table across from her in the kitchen. "Very good," she said (she had had a similar ambition when she was my age). "But unfortunately your father and I do not have money to support you." She thought about it for a moment and then added, "So my advice is you should marry a rich woman."

You see, I had always loved to read, and that summer I had brought many books home to read including the big biography of Freud, the Golden Bough and Look Homeward Angel, the novel by Thomas Wolfe that, it seemed to me, was a lot like my own life. Unfortunately, by the time I got out of college, the love of reading had been ruined by misuse, but that's an aside.

Anyway, by the summer of 1960 I got my chance to write a novel when I took my first summer as a lookout on Rice Peak in the Boise National Forest of Idaho. Locally the mountain is called Blue Point because that's what it looks like from Warm Lake, something like one mile down and 15 miles across as the crow flies north.

As a topic I chose a semi-autobiographical version of my disillusionment with religion, in the form of a young preacher who abandons the church. And having been very impressed by Joyce's Ulysses (maybe I brought that home in 1958 as well?), I decided to go one further than Joyce and write so that the position of the words on the page added another layer of meaning. I got to the point where I was trying to write two-line and three-line fugues that were meant to be read simultaneously, but I never succeeded in reading such fugues myself, so I didn't finish the project. But I did write nine of the thirteen chapters. Here it is. Many years later in 2018, I reformatted the book and put it on sale at Amazon.

The experiments that I did with fugue-writing and pages with central text and peripheral commentary (like the style of Biblical and Torah commentary), as well as a "scrapbook" chapter where the wording made a design, were experiments in non-linear writing. This began a life-long quest to free writing from linearity, which led to the writing of "page poems" as well as the non-linear style I am now using for Internet writing. It also led to theoretical work on the origins of linear time including development of a geometry of time.

Re-reading the book many years later, I am impressed how the anti-war theme and the role of Kris Goodmann as a prophet which are central to the book became themes that would develop in many ways over the course of my life. And also the writing, especially the monologue of Marian, from which the following page is taken.

page from novel

A page from Master of the House

I recall some amusing anecdotes associated with the writing of MOTH. Going back and forth from college in New York (Columbia) to Rice Peak in the summers of 1960 and 1961, I used to set myself up with my portable typewriter on the back seat that went all the way across the old Greyhound buses and type as we traveled. When folks asked about it I would give them pages that I was typing and get their reactions and ideas. That greatly enriched my feeling of writing for an audience. I never met any of those people again and wonder if they ever looked for the book which was never published.

Once when I had set up my typewriter outside on a beautiful warm day atop Rice Peak, with its views of mountains, forests and clouds up to a hundred miles in every direction, a little whirlwind came up the mountain side and took the piece of paper next to me. For a moment it was suspended in the air in front of me where I could have reached out and grabbed it. But I hesitated and the page continued to mount skyward. Getting my powerful war-surplus binoculars, I watched the paper mount higher and higher until it disappeared several miles into the sky. I know it was very high because once I had made out the body of a smokejumper dangling under his parachute at about five miles distance. And you should be able to see better straight up where the atmosphere is thinner. Well, anyway, I decided that it was poetic justice. The page contained a prayer that Kris, the preacher, was delivering to his congregation and I decided that God did not wish me to write the prayer so he came down and retrieved it. As you can imagine I had no other copy of it. And I decided it was best not to try to rewrite it from my memory.

Back in those days before the advent of the personal computer, you needed to be a good typist in order to be a writer, since each time you made a new version you needed to type it from scratch. I used carbon paper, but that's a painful process when you make lots of mistakes and have to correct the carbon copy. Well, the job that I took at Recordak during 1959 as a professional typist did help me develop my typing speed. I rather think it was at that time that I started working on MOTH, although I would need to go back to my correspondence to find out. I probably wrote about it in my letters to George Wilbur.

At Colombia, I showed my novel to Andrew Chiappe, the professor of Shakespeare, and he got it into the hands of some agents. But since it wasn't finished, there was not much he could do for me except to be encouraging - which he was in a very nice sort of way.

A few years later, I resurrected my novel-writing ambitions when I wrote "Peace" at the same time and in the company of David Rounds, and following the crazy relationship with Joayne O'Connell. Which is another story. But just to add here that I took Peace to Angus Cameron, who was one of the great literary agents of that era. He was very kind and supportive, but pointed out that while the theme was interesting and it was a good read, the character development was weak. When he found out I was getting a Ph.D., he advised me to become a professor to make a living and write novels on the side. Later I used to say that I didn't write novels because my life was more interesting than any novel that I could write. Now as I write this for my autobiography, I am still torn by the same contradiction, as my life is still more interesting to live than to write about. And I have put Peace on sale at Amazon.