Roswald was the main character in the American arm of the plot, though I can’t recall his job, his position in the world. He was pulled into a crazed situation because, while being supposedly treated for a dental abscess, the dentist clandestinely installed a miniature radio transmitter in the affected tooth.
That was the opening foray of my first attempt at a novel, which had to have been in 1973 or ’74, because everything driving me to writing then was the result of reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravtiy’s Rainbow.
No other book has hit me with the same intensity. The day I finished it, as I sat on our improvised couch on Hamilton St., I cried for 45 minutes.
Why? I don’t really know, but it may be because I’d experienced something as complete, as right and true as I’ll ever encounter. Three or 4 times since I’ve gone back to GR but simply can’t read it again. It stymies me. The attempt comes to a full-stop, a roadsign that won’t let me past.
I hope to break through before I die, but somehow I doubt it. That book is telling me I’ve had an experience I can’t repeat – and shouldn’t, even if it were possible.
But as a limping Pynchon acolyte, I decided to write a novel that would encompass all of my life, all of the world’s life, a monumental work that would summarize everything I had to say in a single volume.
Kind of a stupid idea.
A really stupid idea.
I was 35 years old, having written a daily column in the UPenn student paper in my senior year, typed random blather while living in The House on 34th St. in the mid 1960s… then let it all dissolve, dissipate, while I did ill-paying, often incompetent freelance carpentry.
But thanks, Tom Pynchon, for awakening in me the possibility of doing something Significant.
Julie (my first wife) and I had bought a twin house in Philadelphia’s Powelton Village neighborhood. We lived on the first floor, rented out two apartments on the second floor, one (or was it two?) on the third. When the second-rear tenant moved out, we expanded our area to include a better bedroom and study upstairs.
As our marriage collapsed, that area became my refuge, while Julie stayed downstairs. Me, my typewriter, a single bed, and my father’s (originally great grandfather’s) walnut desk with its 15 sq. ft. surface, upon which I spread an expanding sweep of 3×5 and 5×8 index cards, each filled solid with typed notes for some aspect of what I wanted to include in my magnum (or magma) opus.
Between minimal carpentry jobs, I plugged away at the typewriter. Later, once I’d taken the maintenance job at Morgan and Erin’s private school, Miquon, I left Powelton and moved, no longer married, into a delightful garret in Germantown, where I forced myself to produce at least 3 typed pages a day. After that, it was back to Powelton and the Baring St commune where, bless the fates, I met Linda.
Altogether, I kept at this blundered, blindered literary effort for about 4 years. What I produced was something not only unfinished, but harebrained and ultimately inconsequential. So why bother you with its history? Because that’s what I do here in the ruminations, I try to explore and explain my life, more for my good than yours.
Though I can’t recall what Roswald himself was up to, his Irish girlfriend, Rylla, was based (sometimes word-for-word) on conversations with my first great love, Ronnie.
The plotting expanded along two non-parallel lines, one set in Philly, the other in the Australian Outback. In Philly, along with (but mostly unrelated to) Roswald, sat miserable, repressed Michael, living in the apartment I loved up the fire escape at 37th and Chestnut Sts. There he talked to his one true friend, Zeralda, a cockroach who was the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian scarab. (You might think this was not a conventional plot. You would be right.)
Three characters – Tweaser, Klaxton and Bjornstrom – predominated in the Australian plot arm. Were all 3 astronomers? I’ve lost even that hold on memory, but the setting was an observatory that had picked up emanations from a planet orbiting a star that – once they had deciphered the keening messages – the trio came to understand was about to go nova. Mixed in with apocalyptic cries, the outer space broadcasts included pointless snippets of alien life, such as a recipe for chicken dinner.
Independent of either continuig stream, I also introduced interludes featuring Popeye and Wimpy, who argued about Blutto and things like 12th-century polyphony.
But I became most obsessed by how to separate yet identity the non-parallel plot lines. There were close to 20 chapters set in Australia, 30 in the U.S. Toss in the Popeye freebies and the total came to 51.
Could there be, wondered I, such a thing as a collection of 51 similar “objects” that broke into two sub-collections of roughly 20 and 30? Of course not! Ridiculous!
By contrast, 52 would have been easy – the number of cards in a deck, the number of weeks in a year. Any fool could fiddle with that! And if you did uncover 51 of anything, the collection would most properly be divided 3×17 (for those as numbered-crazed as me).
But this is what I found, no idea where, years before the Internet existed (though the quote included here is taken from today’s Wikipedia):
“The molecular formula of human insulin [my note: the first enzyme to have its protein structure determined]… is a combination of two peptide chains (dimer) named an A-chain and a B-chain, which are linked together by two disulfide bonds. The A-chain is composed of 21 amino acids, while the B-chain consists of 30 residues.”
It may not seem possible, but this actually happened to (for) me: Serendipity had entered my bedroom and hoisted her skirts.
I sat for several days, arranging the chapters into the two plot chains, with the Popeye interludes flexibly assigned to either one as needed. The titles I gave to the chapters? The three-letter codes for each amino acid in the insulin sequence.
That gift should have sealed the deal: All was destined to fall into place with almost preternatural grace.
Except… the typed product was total crap. It’s gone now. I officially obliterated its traces a couple years ago. Why hold onto a major error for close to 50 years? Maybe it springs from my personal fondness for a failure that illuminated something about my underlying humanity (which I often come to doubt).
And it’s not entirely gone. 10,000 words remain from the Rylla segments. Something could be done with them, but likely (and rightly) will not be.
As for Ronnie, their muse? I last saw her in 1971, last heard from her in 1973, her one and only letter, sent from Vietnam or Laos, claiming that she had been fired on while boating down the Mekong River.
Who knows?
It’s possible.
At her request, I responded c/o post restante, in Bali of all places. The writing of that letter is yet another example of blatant absurdity. To save weight and (supposedly) postage, I typed my tale of the dissolution of my marriage on both sides of a sheet of onionskin paper. When I removed it from the typewriter, the type from both sides showed through as soon as the light hit it. I was unreadable. I inserted a new sheet of standard copy paper, retyped the entire thing and mailed it.
The letter was returned, undelivered. So Ronnie remains in my life as a packet of memories written down and attributed to a weird skewing of her name (itself an adaptation of a character’s name from Ray Bradbury’s Martian tales).
A lousy mishmash of writing, that almost-book, which never received (or earned) a title, but still not a total failure, because from its impetus sprang, in ways I can’t begin to explain, the complexity and compulsion of Evolution Unfolding in a Small Town in Western Pennsylvania, a novel that took me 35 years to complete.
That novel is in no way a failure. If there’s any continuing blunder attached to Evolution, it’s my deliberate failure to promote what I sincerely believe is a beautiful and extraordinary piece of work. Yeah, it will die with me. But should anyone want to read it in the meantime, it’s there on Amazon.
Second only to my marriage to Linda, it’s my greatest success, the one object I’m most proud of in my life.
lickhaven 