I said abruptly, «How’s it doing, Tom?»
«Darius!» Tom saw me at the last minute. It’s a way people have. It’s as though it takes them time to bother with anything not at eye level. «Fine. Fine. Lots of inquiries about Evergone.»
He didn’t look happy. In fact, he looked strained, but I wasn’t worried about that. I wasn’t exactly happy myself. I said, «What in hell do I care about Evergone! How’s my book doing?»
I could swear that Tom had to think before he remembered having a new book of mine on his list. «It’s hard to say,» he ventured at last, «without actual copies to show around. We’ll have those in time for the American Library Association Convention. That’s where your sales are, anyway.»
«That’s where they’ll stay, I guess. Wasn’t my manuscript in your hands before Giles’s was?»
«Yes, but remember, there was some question about revising the—»
«I remember, I remember,» and I waved him quiet. I didn’t want to go through it again.
5 GILES DEVORE (in retrospect) 4:45 P.M.
How the devil had Giles Devore done it? I didn’t understand it even when I was helping to make it possible. I don’t understand it now. What he writes is not well written; it is clumsily constructed. Yet it has a kind of rough-hewn vigor about it that seizes you at once and won’t let you put down anything he writes. You keep meaning to, but only after turning one more page, and then one more page, and then one more—
I met him in 1967, when he was twenty-one. I was thirty-four, with two books under my belt (and very little else). Still, that meant I was an established author, if not a successful one, so young Giles felt it made sense to come to me with a manuscript.
Like all authors I know, I suffer from the arrival of unsolicited manuscripts and from the eagerness of budding practitioners to get those one or two hints («Start all sentences with a capital letter and place a space after every comma») that will suffice to convert their fledgling works into absolute masterpieces.
Generally, I return such manuscripts unread, but Giles was too innocent to send me one in the mail. He arrived in person, without as much as phoning to make an appointment first. He told me, when I asked, that if I had not been in, he would have called again, and then again, until I was in. This was a level of unsophistication which wrung out of me a kind of shamefaced pity.
I daresay I could have knifed the literary throat of the young man without remorse if I hadn’t had to see it so trustingly exposed to the knife.
He was six feet three inches tall, appropriately wide, but in those days he was very thin. (He has filled out considerably since then.) He walked with an apologetic stoop as though he were sorry he was six feet three inches tall. He was, and still is, the only man I ever met who managed to get across, convincingly, the embarrassment of height. Had I never met him, I wouldn’t have thought such a thing existed, or could exist.
So there he was, in 1967, standing before me with a manuscript in his hands—an honest-to-God manuscript of a novel in a typewriter-paper box, wordlessly apologizing for being tall, and looking down on me in such a way that it seemed he was looking up to me. No, I don’t know how that can be possible, but he made me feel taller than he was and it may be that which worked on me to the point where, to my own surprise, I heard myself saying, «Well, sit down and let’s take a look at this thing.»
Three hours later, he was still sitting there, and I was still reading, and it was seven in the evening. I invited him to the diner across the street, where we both had sandwiches, and then I went back to the reading.
No, I wasn’t under the impression I had discovered a genius. To tell you the truth, the book was awful, simply awful—unbearably overwritten with abominable dialogue.
But I kept reading. That was the surprising thing about it.
I kept reading. He had the trick of making it impossible for you to guess what was coming—and of somehow making you want to know.
For the first and last time in my life—never again, I swear to you—I took personal charge of a human being and his book. He rewrote it twice under my direction, and it took two years.
It wasn’t exactly a pleasant two years. Except for an allowance he had from his father, Giles was without perceptible income, and my own suffered because of the time I was spending on him, damn it. Toward the end, when I was determined to hold him face down at the typewriter till he was done, I even had him move in with me for two months and five days.
I remember the length of the period to the very day, because he was unbearable.
He wasn’t loud. He didn’t drink or smoke. He stayed carefully out of my way. He was unfailingly polite and humble. He was meticulously clean.
That was the thing, the «meticulously clean» part. I don’t mind cleanliness, of course; I make efforts in that direction myself.
But carefully washing your hands every time you stand up from the typewriter? Carefully folding your clothes at any time they are not actually on you? Carefully dusting and mopping and cleaning a little area about yourself till it seems like a jewel set in the rusty metal that was the rest of my apartment?
The only messy habit he had involved pens. Almost every writer I know has a thing about pens—they hoard them, bite them, favor them, and who knows what else. As for Giles, he unscrewed them. Whenever he was off in the limbo where all good writers go to hear their dialogue and arrange their plot sequences, he unscrewed his ball-points.
And quite frequently, perhaps three times out of ten, the little spring inside would fall out and land on the floor. I must have helped him find them a dozen times at least. I had to.
He wouldn’t return to his writing without it. Later, he took to using throwaway ball-points that couldn’t be unscrewed and that had no springs.
But never mind the cleanliness and the unscrewing of ball-points. He finished at last and I brought the manuscript down to Prism Press myself. I would have taken it to Doubleday, but I felt it only fair to give Tom the first chance.
Besides, I felt I could talk Tom into doing it even if he didn’t want to, and I couldn’t do that to anyone at Doubleday (and even if I could, it would go up before a board meeting and be turned down).
Tom agreed, with some hesitation, to publish it. He now denies he felt any and would have it be recognized that he was aware of its merits at once, but I have every faith in the accuracy of my powers of recall.
The book was published in 1969 and didn’t really go anywhere particularly at first. It sold a little over four thousand in hard cover—which, at that, isn’t bad for a first novel that came out just when the Nixon administration was cutting the heart out of any federal support for libraries.
This may surprise you when I tell you that the book I’m speaking of is Crossover, which is now virtually a cult object.
It wasn’t until 1972 that Prism Press managed to find a paperback publisher for it and that was when the book hit its stride. It suddenly found its public in the colleges and it became an overnight sensation. Perhaps it was the kind of semi-fantasy that appealed to people who were living in the semi-fantasy of Watergate. In the book the crossover point (the title, you see) between fantasy and reality is reached half a dozen times and crossed now in this direction, now in that. By the time it ends, as you know if you have read the book, it is doubtful whether the over-all decision is for fantasy or reality.
Even though it is not well written it is beautifully done, almost as though the flaws in the writing are an essential part of the flaws in the Crossover universe—the flaws that make it possible to slip back and forth.