Moontrap - Don Berry (51 page)

To Build a Ship
 
is
different in tone and style than the novels that preceded it. It is
narrated in the first person, by someone who is not a skilled
mountain man and not a fair-minded friend to the Indians.

History tells us that the kind of me-first moral
relativism that consumes Thaler was more typical of the white
settlers to the Oregon Territory than the open-minded,
live-and-let-live attitude of Trask and Monday.

Indians in Oregon were wiped out by disease, killed
by settlers or local militia, and moved to reservations, in a very
short time after first contact. "The cumulative death fate for
Oregon Indians is estimated by 1850 to have ranged between 50 and 90
percent in some originally heavily populated areas," notes the
Atlas of Oreg0on. "... What disease began, warfare completed."

It is to Berry's credit that he wrote honestly and
sympathetically about Indians during a time (the late 1950s and early
'60s) when attitudes toward them had not noticeably begun to change.
Thaler, a rationalist who puts the construction of the ship above
anything his conscience might be trying to tell him, is still
sensitive enough to recognize that he "has never known a more
intelligent man of any color" than Kilchis. When Kilchis asks
Thaler why Trask did not come back and tells him Thaler must keep the
peace in Tillamook Bay, he knows he is asking the impossible from
someone not capable of giving it. The settlers came, and the Indians
soon disappeared.

So did Berry. After four books in four years, a
National Book Award nomination (for
Moontap
)
and a stack of great reviews, nothing. He wrote a children's book
called The Mountain Men in 1966, but published no more novels for the
rest of his life.Why?

When I made contact with Berry in 1997, via email,
that was the first question I asked him. This is his reply:

At different times I've been interested in
different explorations. Some of these explorations involved writing
(my primary medium), but many did not. Writing is not my "career."
I have no idea what a "career" is. Basically, I have
wandered the world physically and mentally, most of the time
fascinated and astounded by what I discover, and sometimes putting
that astonishment into words, or music, or film, or bronze, or
design, or teaching, or philosophy. The trilogy of Oregon novels and
historical works were all done before I was thirty.
Moontrap
and
To Build a Ship
were written in France while I was travelling around the
world with a packsack, a guitar and a typewriter.

I am also hopelessly inept at the business
side of art, and don't have the patience to deal with it. I am not a
dependable source of a predictable product. The vast majority of my
life work—in all forms of art and thought—doesn't fit into market
categories. And I don't think a marketing committee ought to
determine whether what I write gets read or not.

Berry did not make much money from his novels.
Wyn Berry estimated he never made more than about a thousand dollars
per year from his writing, excluding movie options, and Berry guessed
he averaged about a hundred dollars per year in royalties for twenty
years. (There was some movie interest—Jack Nicholson briefly held
the rights to
Moontrap
just
before he won the Oscar for
Cuckoo's Nest
.)
Berry was frustrated that he made money more easily from science
fiction than historical novels. At that time, he thought of himself
more as a painter than a writer, he wanted to travel and follow his
interests wherever they led, so why spend all that time writing
novels?

"He never valued his own work very highly until
much later in his life," said Wyn Berry, who always was the
primary supporter of the family. "He didn't expect great things,
but he was annoyed that he wasn't making a living."

However, there was more writing that never got
published. Wyn Berry said her husband wrote a sequel to
Trask
that he burned because he felt it didn't work as a story
and put another finished novel called
Eye of
the Bear
"into the fire." Love
writes that Berry destroyed these books "because he realized he
had not been changed by the experience of writing [them]." Wyn
Berry said he was "a very accurate critic, but fierce in all
ways."

Berry did have a regular job for a while, as a writer
on the film unit at KGW in Portland. There he met a gifted producer
and director named Laszlo Pal and began a collaboration that lasted
more than thirty years. Berry worked as a writer on many of Pal's
award-winning documentaries and on industrial and institutional
films, which he enjoyed because he could immerse himself in a subject
and learn all about it. Pal accepted Berry's wandering ways and Berry
said that "if I disappear for five or six years, he accepts
that, and when I return we can resume work together again as though
no time has passed."

Berry wrote some commissioned books, such as
The
Eddie Bauer Guide to Flyfishing
and
Understanding Your Finances, and taught creative writing at the
University of Washington and other colleges. He built a bronze
foundry on Vashon Island for his sculpture and played in a band
called Vashimba that performed the music of the Shona tribe of
Zimbabwe. He spent several years living in a boat in Eagle Harbor,
off Bainbridge Island.

And he discovered the World Wide Web. His Web site,
Berryworks, contains a historical novel set in the goddess culture of
Minoan Crete called "
Sketches from the
Palace at Knossos
," eight different
short stories, a children's book, some essays (including "
On
the Submissiveness of Women in Tango
"
and the beautiful "Snapshots of My Daughter, Turning")
twenty—one chapters about living on Eagle Harbor called "
Magic
Harbor
," a large amount of poetry, art,
and philosophy. Some of the writing is excellent and all of it is
original and
wholly Berry.

He was passionate about the possibilities of the
Internet and a strong believer in it as a creative medium. "Long
before I set up my studio in cyberspace, I had been exploring in a
different literary form—a mosiac of individual pieces, rather than
linear narrative," he said. "Each individual piece ... can
be read separately, in any order. In Berryworks, you can move from
any place to any other place, with a single hyperlink. Everything is
available simultaneously?

Everything is available simultaneously, and for
nothing.

"I am invariably asked why someone who has been
nominated for the National Book Award would simply give their work
away," he said. "But I have never been part of that world.
It has always been my dream to write exactly what I want to write and
give it away to anybody who wants it. Cyberspace makes that possible.
And I didn't get paid for probably 90 percent of the other work I've
done, so it's not all that different. Economically I'm marginal and
always have been, even when the books were new."

Berry was cautious but curious when I contacted him
in 1997. He wanted to have Berryworks reviewed as a whole, the way a
book is reviewed, and wanted to do everything by email. Six months of
electronic exchanges led to phone calls and finally a meeting in a
coffee shop on Vashon Island. Berry suffered from chronic pulmonary
obstructive disease, the result, he said, of "forty-five years
of rolling cigarettes out of pipe tobacco." He needed oxygen for
any exertion and carried a portable tank when he left his house. He
spent up to ten hours every day on-line but did confess to a weakness
for "Xena, the Warrior Princess."

Berry died in Seattle on February 20, 2001. At the
end of his life, he knew he would be remembered for
Trask
and
Moontrap
and
To Build a Ship
and
A
Majority of Scoundrels
and was pleased and
proud that people still read them.

"
When I wrote
Trask
I didn't even have any idea anyone would read it,"
he said. "As to the durability of these works, it is much like
watching your children grow up. After twenty years or so you think
'good lord, how did that ever happen?

"A writer can plan to make a book entertaining,
or plan to make a book interesting, and many other things. But a
writer cannot plan to make a book last. That is not in our hands."