I remember reading the account of the balloon airship in the newspaper — reading it more than once — and then driving down to the Lucky supermarket on Chapman Avenue in a highly distracted state of mind. I bounced up over the curb on my way into the parking lot (my mind elsewhere) the jolt coincidental with the inspiration for the first chapter of what would become The Digging Leviathan. Later that afternoon I actually started writing the novel (which Lester del Rey would later reject unread, on the grounds that the idea of the book was “cultistic.” “You went to the same damned university that Powers went to, didn’t you?” Lester asked me over the telephone.) The episode of the balloon airship disappeared out of the book in the writing of it; it had simply been a sort of incidental muse.
When those first two UNEARTH stories were published, neither generated wild interest, but more than one reader commented on the odd differences in style and method, as if the stories had been written by different authors. I mean to address that phenomenon briefly, because those perceptive readers were to some small degree correct, and these thirty years later, after writing and publishing some sixteen novels and enough short stories to have lost count, I see no reason that the truth shouldn’t prevail, such as it is.
In 1975, Viki and I traveled to Europe for a period of nearly three months, spending some time in England and Ireland. We stayed briefly in Bristol with our friends Sue and Barry Watts. Barry had developed carpentry skills building wooden boats, and had recently contracted to do some restoration work at St. Mary Redcliffe Church. His project was to restore the large, wood-and-stone garden shed in back of the Sexton’s house next door. The shed was a comparatively recent addition to the grounds of the medieval church, having been built early in the 1920s. In World War II a German bomb blew apart a tramway nearby, the blast throwing a tram rail through the roof. (The errant rail is now a memorial on the church grounds.) The shed had been ineptly repaired, and time and the weather had been nearly as disastrous as the tram rail in the years since. Restoring the shed would take Barry a couple of months of finely detailed work. The details of that work, as interesting as they were, are irrelevant to this account, aside from my helping with the early business of removing the contents of the shed to a nearby garage. Over the years the shed had been used as a sort of warehouse, and it was packed with otherwise homeless junk. It reminded me a little of a yard sale, in that there was nothing apparently interesting about any of it except for the lurking possibility of some small, hidden treasure….
In the end, I had more fun puttering around in that old garden shed during the three days we were in Bristol than I had looking at all the cathedrals and museums and “sites” that Europe afforded us during the rest of our long holiday, and on top of that, I found my hidden treasure, such as it turned out to be. Statutes of limitation and copyright being what they are, there’s no danger in my admitting that now. There were a number of wooden crates with screwed-down lids piled against the back wall, and of course it was none of our business to look inside, although we wanted to badly. There was a steamer trunk, however, out of keeping with the rest of the crates and buried beneath them, which no one had gone to the trouble to lock. I simply couldn’t help myself; I took a look inside. I was disappointed at first to find nothing much in it — some personal documents and vaguely interesting old magazines (more interesting when I came to understand what they were). At the bottom of the trunk, however, lay a number of parcels wrapped in calfskin and tied neatly — manuscripts of some sort, apparently (or allegedly) written down nearly a century earlier. I had no idea by whom until later, when I had the leisure to study them.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What happened was that I left Barry to his work and read through some of it on the spot, quickly coming to a decision that — I’m ashamed to say — could be viewed as reprehensible, not least of all because I took advantage of a friend. That afternoon I boxed up the manuscripts and mailed them home. I wasn’t guilty of theft, mind you, because as soon as I had the opportunity I photocopied all of them and then mailed the originals back to Bristol, where Barry was just then finishing his work. He returned them to their trunk, put the trunk back into the pile of crates and junk, and several days later moved out to Harrogate where he opened a fish and chips restaurant.
“The Ape-box Affair” was (substantially) one of those manuscripts — and so my guilt perpetuated itself when I mailed it to UNEARTH as my own work, although the story originated with Jack Owlesby. I’ll insist, however, that his was unpublishable as it stood. Parts of it were fragmentary, for one thing: the first half was mainly a collection of notes and odd paragraphs. The alchemy that turned it into a story was of my own devising. I considered sending it out as the work of Jack Owlesby, but it seemed to me that UNEARTH, having published one story by Blaylock, might be induced to publish another, whereas they wouldn’t have heard of Jack Owlesby, and wouldn’t be able to contact the man in any event. You can imagine that I wasn’t keen on the idea of explaining how the manuscript had fallen into my hands. The editors wouldn’t have touched it. It turned out to be monumentally simple to rationalize the entire business, and to incorporate Jack Owlesby into myself, so to speak: Owlesby was a mere ghost, after all (and so didn’t need the forty dollars, money being of no value in the afterlife).
It’s sufficient to point out that Jack Owlesby didn’t live to publish his own manuscripts, or to explain or eradicate their inconsistencies and put them into order. You might suppose that I myself would have eradicated inconsistencies, both of style and content, but that would have required reading and reworking the entirety of those bundled manuscripts — essentially rewriting all of it — back in 1976. I didn’t have the patience for it then, and I don’t have the patience for it now, except in my piecemeal fashion. All in the fullness of time, I say, and to hell with the flight plan.
And so the voice, literarily speaking, of the “The Ape-box Affair” is to some small extent my own, as is the voice of The Ebb Tide, although I’m certainly not the “I” of either story, as has already been revealed. It’s best, I suppose, to say that the voice is collaborative (which tells us nothing, since voice in that sense is always collaborative: it can’t exist without character, and character can’t exist without an author. Huck Finn’s “voice” isn’t Twain’s exactly; but is a collaboration between the living author and the imagined character). Plenty of authors have insisted that their characters “write” their stories, and that they — the authors — simply follow along, and I suppose that’s more or less true; it’s simply a little more true in the case of the St. Ives stories.
Ultimately, to what extent the stories of Langdon St. Ives are my own, and to what extent they’re the work of Jack Owlesby, is neither here nor there. Haggling over the issue is pointless. The copyrights are mine. I’ll insist that if I hadn’t borrowed the manuscripts, and if I hadn’t rewritten them and finished them and published them as my own, Langdon St. Ives and his many adventures would still lie buried in the darkness of that steamer trunk, in much the same sense that unwritten stories lie buried in the writer’s mind. Jack Owlesby would remain a mere ghost, living in a garden shed in Bristol. In the end, that intrepid car mechanic in Long Beach, whether he knew it or not, owed a debt to Uncle Wiggily, who perfected the science of balloon airship navigation seventy years earlier, and who never bothered to file a flight plan, either.