Looking back, the experience of writing my first novel, The Prairie Dancers, clearly involved euphoric episodes, part of my bipolar syndrome. I recall times o sheer exuberance, flying high as on hash over my hand written pages.
It is the one novel where I followed an outline of sort, thinking that was what a novelist ought to do. Then I didn’t notice my way of having what I wanted to write in my head and just sitting down with it ready write. Something in me prevented editing until the novel was finished. Probably, and this is so with all my writing, I dreaded facing the cruel reality of my work versus the joyous recollection of what it had been in my head.
Arrogance is a blessing to a young writer. After typing it up on the Hermes that my parents had given me I mailed copies to friends and acquaintances. I got bewildered reactions, some quite negative, a writing professor of mine went so far as to reply that “the narrator was an asshole.” I guess I was.
These reactions stunned me. Sampling: “You’ve got some imagination,” “Your style is too verbose for me,” “I don’t find this credible.”
To me the imagination was the whole point. I worshipped imagination in its fullness, reality be damned. I’d wanted to dive into an American Magical Realism and I did. My pain was that others didn’t catch the sheer wonder and fun of what I’d imagined out of thin air.
Prairie Dancers remains my most delighting work. My belief in that cannot be swayed. And I did find a few fans for it after I moved to New York. Readers joining me in its somber deliriousness. I even go long letters carefully delivering an exegesis of it, which I still have and marvel at. Also, it was taken up as a cause by Joy Singer, the landlady of an acquaintance of mine, whose husband Jack was an ABC vice president.
On one of Jack’s business trips, to London, at a Savoy dinner Joy had been placed beside Toby Buchan the co-published of a Buchan & Enright. Discussion went round to contemporary literature and Joy, bless her, mentioned me. Toby, bless him was interest so it was arranged that Joy would send him Prairie Dancers. He and his partner Dominique Enright took it immediately. I had found people to love me.