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that I wrote novels “on whim,” a bit of an exaggeration as it certainly didn’t apply to either of my other two unpublished manuscripts.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
“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
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