Providence

O
NE

         
Well, well,
so, so. Yes, I’m awake. Awake now. Waking up. Give me a moment.

No, that’s all right, really. No need to apologize, no need at all. It’s true I was startled to see you here, momentarily startled, but … But you were—expected. I see this surprises you. I don’t mean you in particular were expected, I’m not a clairvoyant. Someone was expected. Sometime.

In the middle of the night? Well, of course in the middle of the night! What better time? In the very dead of night!

No, we won’t wake Rennie. She’s a light sleeper, the lightest sleeper in the world, but the sound of people talking
in another room nearby lulls her to sleep very nicely. Like distant surf, a babbling brook.

No, to tell the truth, I’m not really quite awake yet, but I’ll get there. Another glass of tea.…

Oh, I know why you’ve come, you don’t have to explain. You’re welcome to explain if you like, of course, but you’re not the first, after all. You’re just the first to have the sense to break into my house at two o’clock in the morning!

You’ve come because
Ishmael
is a mysterious book. I can understand that. It
is
a mysterious book, even to me. You have questions about it and about me, and these questions aren’t just expressions of curiosity. They touch on matters at the center of your life.

Let me start with something simple, a brief history of the writing of
Ishmael.
This will give us a sort of framework on which to build our conversation.

This is the way it was. Back in 1977 I had an idea for a book—or I imagined I did. I thought it would take me about six months, so I sat down and wrote it, and this was
Man and Alien.
But it wasn’t quite all there, wasn’t quite all together. In fact, it seemed to me that all I’d managed to do was to get a glimpse of the book I wanted to write. It was like a great unknown creature that crouched before me, facing away and blotting out the sky, and all I’d explored in this first version was the tip of its tail. That’s all I’d managed to grab hold of. So I said, Well, I’ll start over and get to the rest of it. It’ll take me another six months. By then I’d fixed on one element of the book that was going to be explored again and again in every version thereafter, and this second version was called
The Genesis
Transcript.
Six months later I had a thousand pages of manuscript and I’d pulled myself up as far as the base of the tail. That was as far as I’d gotten in a thousand pages. So I said, Obviously this approach won’t work; at this rate, the thing will be ten thousand pages long.

So I threw away the thousand pages, absolutely dumped them into the incinerator. Then I started the third version and worked on that for another few months, and this venture took me to the middle of the creature’s back, at which point I once again said, Look, I can’t get at it this way. I’ve got to have a whole new approach. So I threw that version away too. At this point we happened to have a small inheritance—a small inheritance that we in our simplicity thought was a very large inheritance—and I had a good idea of what I was going to do with version four, so we decided to move to New Mexico, to a whole new environment, and get this book done once and for all. So we moved to New Mexico and I tried something quite different for version four, and this was
The Book of Nahash—nahash
being the Hebrew word for
serpent,
the serpent that appeared in the Garden of Eden. So you see, I was still working away on that story. With
The Book of Nahash
I thought I’d very nearly done it, but this wasn’t the case. I’d gotten up to the shoulder of the beast, but I still couldn’t grasp what the damn thing was as a whole.

I said, Well, look, I don’t know how to get to the end of this damn thing, so why don’t I write a book
without
an end? That’s what I tried next. I wrote
The Book of the Damned
and started publishing it in parts. I figured I’d just go on writing it and publishing it until I’d said everything I had to say. I produced three parts and they were
in their own way more forceful than anything I’ve done since—but for some reason this method could only be pushed so far. I got to the end of part three and couldn’t figure out how to proceed.
The Book of the Damned
had taken me up the neck of the beast and all the way to the crown of the head, but I knew I still had a way to go.

Now I began version six, which was
Another Story To Be In.
You can tell from the title that I’d gotten beyond the focus that had dominated versions two, three, and four.
Another Story To Be In
was a monumental effort, ultimately running to something like a hundred thousand words, but it was a success. In a sense, a success. For the first time, I had rounded the head of the beast and reached its snout. I had it in hand now and knew what the animal was at last. Everything was there—everything that would eventually find its way into
Ishmael,
and much more. I had no doubt that
Another Story
would be published (which shows how naive I was, even after twenty years in publishing), and I sent it off to one of the most powerful agents in the country with a light heart. Well, the agent hated it. He said, in effect, that the age for drivel like this had passed and that no one gave a damn about saving the world anymore. This was 1984, for God’s sake, and Ronald Reagan was practically an object of worship in this country. My book was not only unpublishable, it was unrevisable. There was nothing—utterly nothing—that could be done with it. I should abandon it, trash it, forget it, and get on with my life. This is what the agent told me.

Well, I was pretty discouraged, I’ll admit that. I knew he was wrong, but I also knew I needed a vacation from
this book. I’d always felt I could do a horror novel if I wanted to, so I took out six months to see if I was right. I produced
Dreamer,
not a bad little book—just a diversion, of course, not a work of literature or anything. That pretty well exhausted my interest in genre writing. I published some stories and fooled around with a few other novels. Then at last I was ready to go back to work on
Another Story.
From a few years’ distance, I could see that a lot of the agent’s objections to the book were entirely valid. For one thing, as I’ve said, it was a hundred thousand words long. Amateurs imagine that publishers love huge books. This is true when it comes to authors with a following, like James Michener or Stephen King, but not otherwise. Readers aren’t eager to spend thirty dollars for a book by an unknown author. Maybe they should be, but they’re not.

And in truth there was a lot of cherished material in there that could be dispensed with, that was mere self-indulgence, so I went at it with a hatchet and cut the book in half. Then I sent query letters to fifteen or twenty publishers I thought might be receptive to its theme. Of course, I’m the world’s worst salesman of his own work, I can assure you of that. I think three publishers asked to see it, and all three turned it down without a word.

As far as I could see, I was finished. I’d spent twelve years on this book. Not every minute of twelve years, but
a good ten years of the twelve. All you can do is chase the deer, you know. You give it all you’ve got, and after that it’s in the hands of the gods. If it’s the deer’s day to live, then it’s your day to go hungry. I had to figure it was over, so I put the book away and got ready to hunt up a new direction for my life. And it was of course at that moment that I heard about the Turner competition.
^*

When I heard about this, I said, Well, okay, so it’s not over after all. There was one more direction to try, and this was a good one. I heard Ted Turner talking. Everyone else was saying, Mr. Quinn, nobody’s publishing stuff like this—nobody gives a damn. Turner was saying something different. He was saying, The human race is at risk here, and I’m not seeing anything new, not hearing anything new, and that’s what I want to see. I want someone with some new ideas to come along and blow me away. That’s worth half a million to me.