Three times in fifty years.
It doesn’t seem so many now, does it?
Not just Aptor and Beta-2, but all three books here had a run of almost two decades in bookstores — and that was in a book environment where the average life of a new volume on the store shelf was under three weeks. That interests editors and marketing folk, trying to anticipate how this book will do. I’m interested in that peripherally, of course — but not centrally. “No man but a blockhead,” said Dr. Samuel Johnson, the poet, scholar, and writer who put together the first comprehensive English language dictionary, “ever wrote, except for money.” A surprising number of writers since Dr. Johnson who have pursued the life of writing, however, have been blockheads — many of them good writers too. You have to think about too many other things while you’re writing that drive such considerations from the mind, so that dwelling on money is distracting, intimidating, and generally counterproductive. Also, the number of people who, if they were not calling me, personally, a blockhead for wanting to write at all, thought I was nuts, strange, or patently out of my mind for doing it (and it was never a munificent living) seemed at the time innumerable — starting with my dad. When I won a prize in high school or a scholarship, he was proud. And when his best friend, our downstairs neighbor, who wrote and published children’s books for black kids like myself but made his living editing immense economics textbooks he called “doorstoppers,” read some of the work I’d written at sixteen or seventeen and told my father I would probably be in print before I was voting age (back when that was twenty-one and the drinking age was eighteen; since then, they’ve reversed). Dad even paid the sixty-seven dollars to have my third novel — the one that got me the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship I mentioned in my foreword — retyped by a professional typist in Queens.
It never appeared.
Mom had a more liberal attitude. She wanted me to do whatever would make me happy, and from childhood on she encouraged me in all my enthusiasms. Clearly, though, she shared Dad’s misgivings. Except for intermittent lapses in which he tolerated my career choices — which were most appreciated and probably the only reason Dad and I had any positive relationship at all — generally my father argued and raged about those enthusiasms. My mother mulled over them and looked glum. They had lived through the Great Depression. Like many parents in the 1950s, they were concerned about security and their children’s livelihood. They had seen many disasters themselves. We, who were too young to remember those disasters firsthand, however, felt the manifestations of their fears were the harshest parental oppression. I wish I could say eventually I learned they were right, as they kept telling me I would. (“Just wait. You’ll see…”) In truth, however, they weren’t. Some things were much worse. Some things were far better. Many were different. The world had changed — including the speed of its changing.
Novel writers, short-story writers, science-fiction writers, and many writers from the “unmarked” category, which bears the genre mark “literary,” have told me they cannot read their past or early work. When they try, many say, they feel something akin to pain.
That’s not me, however.
Possibly it has to do with how I write — though I can’t be sure.
I’m dyslexic — severely so. Therefore, to put together a manuscript that’s readable, much less printable (by my own standards), I must read it and correct it and reread it and correct it again and reread it again; not three or four times, but twenty-five, thirty-five…some sections I must read forty-five times or more. (Now you know one reason so many people — not just my parents, but teachers and friends — thought I was nuts for wanting to write at all. Clearly I was so bad at the basics and everyone around me was better.) It’s the first five or so readings, however, I find painful. Between them, someone who is not dyslexic has to read it too and mark those places, usually with underlining, where the words are out of order and often incomprehensible or even missing, where I’ve spelled words so badly you can’t tell what they are, or where I’ve dropped other words and phrases that must be there for the sentences to make sense.
I’m a grammar fanatic. I have been since I was in the sixth grade — probably to compensate for the other things I did and still do so poorly. Mistakes slip through even now; now and again other readers catch them, for which I am always grateful. (You may find some among these pages.) I couldn’t — and I still can’t — spell some simple words correctly three times in a row. But I was the best in my fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-grade English classes at diagramming sentences on the blackboard (in those days when blackboards were black, not green) or on tests. (“If you can do that, I don’t understand why you can never remember how to spell ‘orange.’ It doesn’t make sense,” my seventh-grade English teacher would say. It didn’t make sense to me, either. But her sincerity, concern, and honesty made me love her at the same time that it made me feel I was profoundly and irrevocably flawed.) Still, it’s why today I’m comfortable using both formal grammar and informal grammar at all colloquial levels. Point out the errors you find, and I can usually tell you why they’re errors and often the formal names these errors have or once had and how to correct or improve them. But these are what my dyslexia initially prevents me from seeing. (Today we know it’s neurological. Back then we didn’t.) In the course of my rereadings, however, phrases, words, or sections that to me are painful — for stylistic and content reasons that become one as the hand falls from the keyboard, from the page, and the ear and the eye take over to judge or to approve or, more frequently, to find fault with what I’ve put down — I excise or clarify so that, over time, the manuscript moves closer and closer to something I can enjoy. That’s how I wrote my earliest books, the ones here; that’s how I write them today. That’s how I build a text I’d like to read: by way of retardations, excisions, expansions, compressions, simplifications, and rewordings, along with numberless additions and plain corrections. Each layer is the trace of a different “self” as much mine as the self who tries to impose the effect of a controlled voice by suppressing one or enhancing another — to form a text I hope will fall within sight of my notion of the way a “good writer” writes, even though I am not one “naturally.”
The only way I can get a text to feel (to me) that it is one my true thoughts might inhabit is through layers of revision.{4}If I try to express anything directly that I believe deeply and intensely without a fair amount of thought beforehand and during a many-layered process afterwards, what comes out is banal, overwrought, and riddled with errors in which clichés and imprecisions mock anything one might call intention.
Another way of saying the same thing is that the unexamined “I” in an unexamined “world” is boring.
I’m much too much like everyone else — because, presumably, the world has made me so: more venal than I would like to appear or admit, shy, deluded by clichés and commonplaces, eager to be liked, and for accomplishments, intellectual or social, that most of the time I feel I do not possess.