Over-paid by others for hyphenated jobs such as lawn-work, snow-shoveling, house-painting, office-boy, dish-washer, warehouse-grunt, table-waiter and hotel night-clerk–I’ve since chosen to be a writer, editor, publisher, and for most of my life, a bookseller, and even managed to occassionally pay myself. Hound is my first published novel.
I cannot remember exactly when I attempted my first novel (in fact the memory has altered over the years and is trustworthy only as story material now), but I completed one when I was fifteen (I still have most of it). This effort was borne upon a wave of great hubris brought on by the success of a story I wrote for Mrs. Menelli in my ninth grade English class. If she is still with us, I hope she has some idea of the trouble she caused.
After a year in New York not completely unlike the experience of Aran O’Neill in Habits of the Heart, the novel posted here, I attended a small ‘experimental’ college, Mark Hopkins, in Brattleboro, Vermont, and graduated in 1969.
In anticipation of spending a few years working for the government, I wrote a novel in 1969 while bumming around in California. But the government discovered after a few tests that I was too blind to get out of my own way–something I could have told them in advance–and refused to have anything to do with me. Being half-blind is useful for some purposes. I’ve even heard that in the land of the blind you can be a king. (One-eyed is about the same as half-blind, isn’t it?).
I wrote half a dozen novels after that, and then quit in the great frustration of too many rejections and new responsibilities which engulf most our lives. We do what we need to do. The details of my own experience in this regard are not so different from many others I know of.
In 1972 I began a small literary magazine called Fiction which later metamorphosed into Galileo , a magazine for science fiction. The messy details of this will be displayed on this site in due time, but let me say it was one of the great experiences of my life.
There being no limit to the hubris of some people, I decided to indulge another of my ambitions and started selling books from a pushcart on the streets of Boston in 1973. And this was done with a half-blind eye to opening a bookshop.
A re-interpretation of Einstein’s second theory of relativity was necessary, but with the subsequent enlargement of the day to accommodate a full 36 hours, the bookshop was opened in 1975.
In 1979 I married the very patient and forgiving Thais Coburn, who had previously assisted in much of my foolishness for reasons now forgotten. In 1980, the first of my three children, Alexandra, was born. Elisabeth and Adam followed in their own good time. And as the second theory of relativity accurately predicted, time thus used or abused both expanded and contracted simultaneously. The Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop grew and prospered, but the world it was meant for was changing in ways that could not be controlled much less stopped.
When the profession of bookselling which had supported me and my family for so many years finally failed to meet the demands of my responsibilities, I took a look back at what I had done. It was not all for the worst, no matter the final result. My own mistakes were only part of a larger fabric. And I was happy with too much of my experience to simply throw it over as a total loss.
I wanted to write about all of this, whether or not anyone beyond the few who cared might ever read it, and set about doing so in the best way I knew how. It was in the realization that I had been a small part of so many larger stories, and with the thought that they might serve as the parts of some greater understanding of the death of the book, that I began to gain a measure of control over the story I wanted to tell.
More about this can be found in the essay ‘The Hound and its consequences’ which is posted elsewhere on this site.
