Around the clubhouse turn

I have a really good feeling about my last three books: In My Old Age: Poems, Eight Oregon Plays, and Sodom, Gomorrah and Jones. Together they seem to summarize my career and bring it to an end in a very tidy way. Some good work is left out of this trilogy -- I'm thinking particularly of my plays Sad Laughter, Famililly and Oregon Dream, of my screenplays The Brazen Wing and Sad Laughter, of my novels Kerouac's Scroll and Love At Ground Zero (Christ, I'm a prolific son of a bitch!) -- but all the themes I've dealt with this past half century are there.

I'm always saying my work comes from whole cloth and usually I get blank stares in response. What the hell does that mean? This new short novel, more than anything else, illustrates what I mean. The novel is a marriage of invention, my past work and my life. For example, the protagonist goes to a hyperdrama in the Pittock Mansion called Chateau de Mort, written by his friend (I wrote such a play); the protagonist writes poetry and several poems are shown, which just happen to be poems from In My Old Age; trips to camp at Flathead Lake in Montana, to celebrate the summer solstice at the Stonehenge replica out the gorge, are significant trips from my own past; and so on.

One of the most unusual devices in the book, perhaps, are excerpts from a journal that my protagonist keeps about his "heavy reading." One of the reasons many will dislike this book is that it is driven by an unpopular premise: that the intellectual life can drive the personal life and is as worthy of dramatic expression. You see something close to a "novel of ideas" in the European tradition but not so much here. I wouldn't call Sodom a novel of ideas but it does take ideas seriously because the protagonist takes them seriously -- and we see what specific ideas we are talking about. Some will read this as pedagogical, pedantic. Fortunately others won't.

When I say I have a sense of an ending here, I don't mean a sense of quitting, but ending. Ending a certain path. Ending a certain journey. I really don't have much to say after Sodom, and it's about time. It's about time! My future writing now can focus on outside-in matters, not inside-out matters.

To be honest, I doubt if I have the mental and physical stamina to write another novel. Each one is more draining than the last. I can see why some writers have had nervous breakdowns after writing a book. If you're writing inside-out, a serious book, a book that seeks to tell some kind of truth, not just to entertain, and to express this in an artistic form unique to the material -- well, it's a heavy experience, heavier than seeing a shrink. Outside-in, on the other hand, is craft driven, an exterior matter, not introspectively driven.

So I hope in my future writing I am doing short, craft-driven things, and doing them for Kindle because the environment there is so friendly and there's a chance one can pick up some coffee change doing it. I've already put down some foundations for doing just this.

I think the new novel deserves a far greater audience than it's going to get -- but then I always think that about my work. It comes with the territory when you're "a marginal writer" in the culture, rather than a mainstream writer. It's a consequence of some decisions I've made along the way. But I wouldn't change a thing. I'll get my due because the work always wins out. The work always wins out. And if my work is worthy of attention, it will get it, even if later rather than sooner, and if it isn't worthy of attention, well, all I can say is I did my best to make it worthy. You can't do more than do your best. Guess what? This is enough.