The Re-Publishing of It
In 2001, Kraft’s publishers allowed What a Piece of Work I Am to go out of print. This development disappointed, disturbed, and depressed him, of course, but it did more than that: it also frightened him. The word is not too strong, I think. He was afraid that the integrity of the Personal History was threatened. The overall work had been mutilated by the amputation of one of its parts, and he feared that it would not be recognized as a single work composed of many parts if all of its components were not available.
Kraft promised himself that he would find a way to get the book back into print . . . someday. As a step toward that end, he requested a reversion of all rights in the work. He received it in January of 2002.
Because there was always something else to do (the next book to write, the next piece of hackwork to find and finish), Kraft did not pursue the objective of bringing What a Piece of Work I Am, which he usually refers to as WaPoWIA, back into print.
Years passed. During those years, Kraft completed several new books, including Inflating a Dog, Passionate Spectator, and On the Wing, all published by St. Martin’s Press and Picador USA, but more books were allowed to go out of print, including Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, At Home with the Glynns, Leaving Small’s Hotel, and Where Do You Stop? Still, because there was always something else to be done, always something else that had to be done, he never managed to find the time or energy to try to get WaPoWIA back into print or even to request a reversion of rights to the other books that had gone out of print.
In 2008, something snapped. With the help of legal counsel at the Authors Guild, Kraft began the process of obtaining reversion of rights in the books that had gone out of print (see note below), and, since he already had a reversion of rights to WaPoWIA, he decided to bring it back into print on his own, through the Babbington Press.
Immediately he began thinking about new covers for the books, and also about a subtle change in the structure of the presentation of the text, the framing of it. In part, his motivation was a simple desire to make the re-issued books his own, to “take them back,” and in part it was to end the misinterpretation of them as “children’s books,” a curse that had begun with the original Apple-Wood Books editions of the novellas.
The re-design process began with a cover for WaPoWIA, then extended to new covers for all the books in the Personal History, and eventually included the creation of a book within a book for each title, with Kraft’s work framing and enveloping Peter Leroy’s memoirs, which acquired internal title pages of their own. The development of the new covers is so significant to the process of reissuing the work that I have outlined their evolution in “The New Covers: The Design and Development of Them.”
Because What a Piece of Work I Am would serve as a template for the Babbington Press versions of all the other previously-issued books, it went through several revisions of internal design and layout, culminating in a hardcover edition very similar to the original Crown Publishers hardcover edition and a paperback edition in a compact size suitable for pocket or purse.
The Babbington Press published What a Piece of Work I Am on July 23, 2008.
Note: Reversion of Rights
On June 30, 2008, Kraft received three reversion letters from Crown Publishers. Two were copies of reversion letters for Herb ’n’ Lorna and Reservations Recommended, which originally had been sent in 2004, but to Kraft’s former agents, who had never forwarded them to him. The third letter granted reversion of rights to Little Follies, At Home with the Glynns, and Where Do You Stop?
While walking cross-town in Manhattan, on their way to a performance of a revival of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, the Krafts were “stopped in their tracks” by the sight of this lamp in the window of a small hotel. Kraft immediately recognized its potential as an illustration of Ariane’s proclamation of her success in creating a worthy and independent self. He took this picture at once and then dashed into the hotel to take another from the front.
The Secret History of It
Part Four
What will the “point” of “BW’s book” be? At the risk of making myself appear foolish, I will make a prediction. As this little book, In an Undisclosed Location, neared publication, I began to recognize that the sequence of six little books would be about the fate of Kraft’s work. What would become of the pieces of the Personal History that had gone out of print? What sort of struggle would Kraft have to go through to reclaim the rights to them and bring those pieces back into print? Should he bother making that effort? Should he allow himself and the work to be tethered to the past in that way? Would he be wasting time trying to break the tether? Should he just accept things as they were, as they had become? Or should he move forward, and concentrate only on moving forward? How could he manage to escape his worries about the fate of the early work—and the integrity of the entire work? If he couldn’t escape those worries, how could he possibly do anything new?
The Babbington Press published In an Undisclosed Location on June 19, 2008, in an edition limited to fewer than one hundred copies.
If “BW’s book” is a message from Kraft to himself, it is also a message to others, to people who — like me — have conceived large projects — in my case a topical autobiography, encyclopedic in its scope — but have never managed to get those projects “off the ground.” Perhaps it is inappropriate for me to introduce my proposed work into this account of the making of In an Undisclosed Location, but I feel compelled to confess that I, like the unnamed protagonist, have deluded myself with the idea that if I could just get away to a tranquil spot I could finally undertake the work that I have always wanted to do. The unnamed protagonist’s wise companion has made me see the danger and even the folly of such romantic rustication, and I am grateful to her for that.
The Secret History of It
Part Three
However much BW might have objected to the addition of “words, words, words,” by the time Kraft began work on In an Undisclosed Location, including a text with the images had already become inevitable, a “foregone conclusion,” because during the writing of the text for Just Now, at Present, he had begun to perceive the full arc of the narrative that would stretch across what he referred to as “BW’s six little books,” or the six parts of the one large book that he hoped they would eventually become.
The arc begins in There I Was, when the unnamed protagonist experiences a sense of being somewhere and nowhere at the same time, of being only where he is told he is.
Then, in Just Now, at Present, that feeling of being at once stuck in place and lost in place leads to — one might say that it inspires — the feeling of being similarly stuck in time, a feeling of progress stalled, of being in stasis, tugged equally toward the past and present, as if he were tied at the middle of the rope in a game of tug-of-war.
In his desire to escape stasis and find a new course — or a way to get back onto an old, correct, course — the unidentified protagonist is tempted, in In an Undisclosed Location, by the charms of a place where life would slow and give him time to think, but his interlocutor (his lover? his counselor?) correctly identifies this as the land of the lotus-eaters, a place where he would probably never finish anything, where a cup of coffee and a misty vista could consume a morning.
Now we venture beyond what Kraft had done in the first three of “BW’s little books” and into the area of —
Kraft (deliberately echoing BW): Stop there.
Dorset: You don’t want me to give the game away?
Kraft: I don’t want you to make one or both of us look foolish.
Dorset: How would I?
Kraft: You’re making predictions, and despite the fact that your predictions match my intentions, just now, at present, at the midpoint in the development of the six parts of “BW’s book,” neither of us can say with certainty whether I will actually do what I currently intend to do.
Dorset (thoughtfully): I see.
Kraft: I suggest that you return to a discussion of the current book.
As the text of the book began to move away from a cautionary satire on the theme of paving paradise and toward a theme that I want to call “seductive setting as enemy of promise,” Kraft began to alter the presentation of the images so that the reader-viewer’s experience of them would parallel the if-you’re-thinking-of-living-in visitor’s progress through the place: arrival, wandering through the village, being tempted to stay, but, finally, moving on.
Of course, the unseen and unnamed protagonist would be moving not through the physical space of the beautiful undisclosed location, but through the idea of living there, progressing through the thought experiment of placing himself there, of “trying on” a life in the place. Without the aid of his unseen and unnamed interlocutor, he might never emerge from the experimental space.
The Secret History of It
Part Two
Let’s visit the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, New York, on the evening when Eric and Madeline finally did acknowledge their mutual attraction to “If You’re Thinking of Living In.” They have been living in East Hampton for nine years—long enough. They both know it, both feel it. While they are chatting, the name of a neighborhood in Manhattan where they might move comes up.
Eric: Apartments tend to be small and expensive there.
Mad: Right, and it’s served by only a single subway line.
(There is a pause. Each of them is thinking the same thing, but neither voices it. Finally, Eric breaks the silence.)
Eric: You read the profile in “If You’re Thinking of Living In,” didn’t you?
Mad: I did.
(Another brief silence.)
Mad: Do you read that, too?
Eric: Yes.
Mad: Every week?
Eric: Every week.
Mad: I do, too. Every week.
Eric: And do you imagine—
Mad: Living there? Walking the streets? Shopping in the shops? Having drinks and dinner? Yes.
Eric: Am I with you?
Mad: Of course you are, my darling. Did you need to ask?
Eric: No. I just wanted to hear you say it.
(Another pause.)
Mad: And when you—am I—?
Eric: Of course you are, my darling. Did you—
Mad: No. I just wanted to—
(Each of them swallows hard and brushes a tear away. After they have composed themselves, they order another round and begin making plans to move.)
So, with “If You’re Thinking of Living In” in mind, Kraft at first thought that he would arrange the images in a sequence that would invite the reader to make the kind of visit that he and Madeline had made to so many communities, beginning with sweeping views of the area, then moving to views of the village, and finally focusing on the details. However, the images began to have an effect on Kraft that neither he nor BW, nor Madeline would ever have expected: they inspired fear. He brought the matter up with the photographer.
Kraft: You’ve shown me a beautiful place.
BW: A beautiful gem in a beautiful setting.
Kraft: Exactly. But—
BW: But?
Kraft: It is such an alluring place that I was immediately afraid for it.
BW: Afraid for it?
Kraft: Yes. I was afraid that if I published these pictures just as you gave them to me, this place would be overrun, ruined.
BW: Ah, yes. I see what you mean.
Kraft: So I’ve added some images from other places, to throw people off.
(He arranges a selection of images on a table in the workroom. BW, with his eyes narrowed, scans them.)
BW: It won’t work. You’re being naive.
Kraft: I resent that.
BW: Oh, really? You resent that? You, who have given me so much to resent? You, who have been so very, very generous in handing out reasons for resentment?
Kraft: BW, I have put a lot of work into publishing your work, into preparing it for publication, into—
BW: Into playing fast and loose with my work, you mean. You’ve manipulated and distorted my poor defenseless images, and you’ve put words into my mouth, and now you resent my calling you naive? Well, I resent your abusing my images and overwhelming them with your words.
Kraft: My words—
BW: Your words, words, words.
Kraft: Enough. Please.
BW (petulantly): All right.
Kraft: Will you at least listen to what I propose?
BW: Yes, I will listen to what you propose.
Kraft: I propose to turn the book into a cautionary satire. Following the images that you gave me—and the added images of other places, the red herrings—I’ll add images showing what could happen to the place if it became widely known. I’ll show it defaced by “luxury” condominiums, hotels, restaurants, and legions of cars.
BW: Stop there.
Kraft: Why?
BW: I really don’t understand this impulse of yours—I might say this need of yours—to alter the images, to find so many ways to turn them into something other than what they are. The images stand on their own. They are enough.
Kraft: But to me they imply something—
BW: Why can’t you keep that to yourself?
Kraft (sweeping the images into a stack): I’ve had enough of this. Let’s adjourn.
BW: Gladly.
Left to himself, Kraft did add some images from other places, “to throw people off.” The undisclosed location is, therefore, a nowhere made of images of Santa Pau, in Garrotxa, Catalunya, Spain, altered, or adulterated, by the addition of bits of Zaragoza, Cardona, and Barcelona; Deer Isle, Maine; Marco Island, Florida; Newburyport, Massachusetts; and New Rochelle, New York.
The Secret History of It
Part One
When B. W. Beath delivered the images, he suggested calling the book Lotus Land. As soon as Kraft looked through the images, he sketched in his mind a straightforward plan for presenting them. It was based on the idea of a couple of visitors—the unidentified man and woman from Just Now, at Present—approaching the place, wandering through it, and then leaving it, moving on.
To some degree, that plan was suggested by the images themselves, but it also grew from a vicarious experience that Eric and Madeline had shared for several years, individually and privately. They didn’t realize that they had shared this experience until one evening in 1997 or 1998, when Kraft had finished Leaving Small’s Hotel and was at work on Inflating a Dog.
At the time, The New York Times ran a regular feature in its real estate section under the series title “If You’re Thinking of Living In.” That title was followed by the name of a community in New York City or its environs, so that the title of an individual article might become, say, “If You’re Thinking of Living In / Hell’s Kitchen” or “If You’re Thinking of Living In / Sleepy Hollow.”
For Eric and Madeline, the series might better have been called “Close Your Eyes and Imagine Yourself Living In,” because that was the invitation that each of them accepted with every installment of the series, every time, for every place that was presented, however peripheral it might previously have been on the map of places they might have imagined living. For a while, in the theater of the mind, they lived there. They would, in imagination, walk its streets, shop its shops, have lunch or dinner in its restaurants, ride the train or take the subway from wherever it was to wherever they might want to go. They would, usually, decide that living in that place might be nice . . . for a while.
Though each of them visited the places in the articles nearly every week, neither of them spoke to the other about it. Why? As they do now, they ended each day with a cocktail hour, a time when they drank a couple of martinis and talked. There was hardly anything that didn’t get said during those cocktail hours . . . but their imagining living in other places remained off the table. Why? I don’t know.
Behind the Recording of It
Part Three
Eric and Madeline were living in Newburyport, Massachusetts, at the time, and their elder son, Scott, was volunteering with a local theater group. He persuaded some of the actors to give Kraft some advice. They taught him relaxation techniques, how to breathe effectively, and how to project his voice, but he was still nervous and insecure. As the troupe was leaving, though, one of the actors told Kraft, “You know, you have a great advantage over us.”
“I do?” Kraft said.
“Yes,” said the actor. “You wrote what you’re going to read. You must think it’s good, or you wouldn’t have published it. Sometimes we have to convince ourselves that a play is good in order to give a convincing performance, but you’re already there.”
Kraft realized that what the actor has said was right. He did think that what he had written was good. Specifically, he thought that it was good enough to read to Mad. If it was good enough to read to Mad, then it was good enough to read to everyone else. That conviction relieved Kraft of his performance anxiety and released his inner ham.
Once released, the ham genie refused to return to the bottle. Now, when Kraft reads for his first audience of one, he performs. The occasion is an occasion: it’s the book’s opening night. Kraft is nervous, of course. There’s a lot on the line. As the reader, the performer, he wants to deliver for the writer—put the work over, make it a success. For the cause, he drugs the audience with a martini to try to put her in a particularly receptive frame of mind. His martini-mellow muse is receptive . . . and forgiving.
Kraft has long recognized the effect that his desire to woo—and win—his muse and ideal reader has on his writing:
Kraft: Early in my work on a book, when the first reading is still so far away, the effect is general, and not very strong. Still, Mad is always on my mind, and her presence keeps me from being lazy at all stages in the development of a book. In the early work, it keeps me from staying on the outside of a scene, merely observing. It forces me to get into the work, to participate fully in the world that my imagination makes, so that when I return, what I return with, the report from my imagination, the “news from nowhere” that becomes a novel, or a volume of Peter’s memoirs, will be as full and rich as I can imagine it. This is the hard work of the imagination. Daydreaming is easy. Generalities are easy. Dwelling in the imagination, exploring and mapping it, and returning with specifics is not easy. The closer I get to the occasion of my first reading, her first listening, the more I have that first auditor in mind. Now the thought of her prompts two impulses, one radical, the other conservative. The thought that she has the generosity of spirit and intellect to indulge a work of art, to accept its audacity, to suspend judgment of even the most outrageous trope or theme or twist of plot until it has had its chance to pay off, sometimes makes me think that for her, if I try very hard, I can fly. On the other hand, the thought that she will spot every error, that her critical perspicacity is so acute, that she is so discerning, that no weak spot, no attempt to hide a blemish, will escape her, makes me careful, painstaking, and precise. Knowing that she will first listen to the book while I read it to her, I know that I have to maintain a thread—a way to trace a path through the novel’s maze, like the clew of thread that Ariadne provided for Theseus when he braved the Minotaur in the labyrinth. I don’t want my muse getting lost in the tangle of my tale; I may want her to feel a bit lost from time to time, just for the frisson of feeling lost, but I don’t ever want her actually to be lost. I want to give her a story line, or the growth of a character, the progress of a problem, one of the good old devices that drives a book along a road, a winding road in my case, maybe even a meandering ramble through a garden of forking paths, but a way from start to finish that the first auditor will find pleasant to follow. Knowing that she will eventually read the book in bed or at poolside, I know that she will find everything I have put into it, all the pleasures that I have hidden for her there. The thought of the two experiences of the work is so ingrained in me by now that I couldn’t escape the duality if I tried. I write to be read, and I write to be read aloud. I write for a reader who will hold the book on her lap and for a listener who will sit on a sofa, across the room from me, with her legs tucked under her, a martini on the table beside her, and listen—who will when I have finished reading, if I have been successful, be wearing a certain smile, the smile that tells me she has been amused, impressed, intrigued, and seduced by what I’ve written for her . . . that she will want to read it again . . . and that at least some of those who follow her, as listeners or readers, will experience something similar . . . that at least some of them, after they have finished listening or reading . . . will be wearing that smile.
The recording of the reading ran from August 2001 to April 2002. The Babbington Press published the audio book on May 24, 2008.
Behind the Recording of It
Part Two
As soon as Kraft has finished a book, he reads it to his ideal auditor, who happens also to be his ideal reader, one chapter a night, until he has read it all. The anticipation of that reading has given him a way of knowing when his work on a book is finished. How does he know when he has finished a book? He knows that the book is done when it seems “good enough to read to Mad.”
When Kraft was first invited to read his work to a larger audience, to give a public reading, he tried practicing in private. [The occasion was the Boston Globe Book Festival in, probably, 1982. MD] The more he practiced, the worse he got. He was almost as bad as Marcel Proust in Jean Cocteau’s description of him in The Difficulty of Being:
Lying stiffly and askew Marcel Proust would read to us, each night, Du Côté de Chez Swann. Proust would start anywhere, would mistake the page, confuse the passage, repeat himself, begin again, break off to explain that the lifting of a hat in the first chapter would reveal its significance in the last volume, and he would titter behind his gloved hand, with a laugh that he smeared all over his beard and cheeks. “It’s too silly,” he kept saying, “no . . . I won’t read any more. It’s too silly.” His voice . . . became a distant plaint, a tearful music of apologies, of courtesies, of remorse. . . . And when we had persuaded him to continue, he would stretch out his arm, pull no matter what page out of his scrawl and we would fall headlong into the Guermantes or the Verdurins household. After fifty lines he would begin his performance all over again. He would groan, titter, apologize for reading so badly. Sometimes he would . . . go into a closet, where the livid light was recessed into the wall. There one would catch sight of him standing up, in his shirt sleeves, . . . holding a plate in one hand, a fork in the other, eating noodles.
With the exception of the noodles, that is much the way Kraft felt about the quality of his own reading. He thought of backing out of the festival. “I’m a writer, not a performer,” he told his publisher.
Behind the Recording of It
Part One
Note: The following remarks are adapted from a talk entitled “Writing to Be Read and Writing to Be Read Aloud” that Kraft delivered in Rapid City, South Dakota, on May 3, 2004, to the Conference of Librarians Serving Blind and Physically Handicapped Individuals, at the invitation of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress. After laboriously transcribing the recording of the talk that I made on a pocket-size recorder, I found that the Library of Congress had posted the text of the talk on the World Wide Web. This allowed me to check my transcription against Kraft’s remarks as originally prepared for delivery. I found some few trifling discrepancies, which I attribute to “ad-libbing” during the delivery.
Kraft asserts that everything he has written has been written to be read aloud, because everything he has written has been written for Madeline, his ideal audience, whose first experience of each work is as its auditor, not its reader. The qualities that make Madeline his ideal audience are these: First, she is well read; she reads, on average, two or three books a week. Second, her reading is both broad and deep; her tastes are catholic, but she has a discriminating palate. That sounds paradoxical, but Kraft explains that it “isn’t really” because she is that rare reader who meets each work on its own terms. If books were food, she would be an omnivorous epicure. She savors a dainty dish subtly finished with truffle oil, and she downs a hamburger with relish and gusto. To meet her standards or win her praise, each dish—that is, each book—must be superior for its type. Writing to please a muse of such discernment and such broad tastes has encouraged Kraft to broaden his reach, to mix styles high and low, to serve her low comedy and high satire, to dress deep thought with surface scintillation.
So, we understand that Kraft writes to move his muse, but he wants to be sure that we understand that he is always writing to move that muse in two modes: the listening muse and the silent-reading muse. He writes for an ideal audience who will experience the book twice. What does he want to happen to her in general, whether she is experiencing the book as listener or reader? He wants her to see that he can think [!], that he does think, that the life he’s living is an examined one. He also wants her to know that he feels, that his heart is as engaged with the world as his mind is. And he wants her to know that he has his powers, that he can take the data that “the painful kingdom of time and place” supplies him and subject it to artistic alchemy, or at least to a trickster’s sleight of hand, and turn it into something else; he wants her to see that the life he’s living is not only an examined one but also an imagined one.
Well—there you have a portrait of the first audience for whom Kraft writes: voracious and discriminating; appreciative and critical; intelligent and passionate—most definitely an audience worth the wooing.
Kraft: So far, so good. We’ve established that everything I write is written for an audience of one, an audience that is, first, a listening audience.
How It Came to Be
Kraft finished Inflating a Dog in December of 2000. It was scheduled for publication in July of 2002. Ordinarily, after Kraft has read a book to Madeline, made the necessary corrections, and delivered it to the publisher—he considers it finished, and he moves on. Because the next book has always been in the works for some time when its predecessor is finished, he gets up the next morning, brews a Balzacian dose of coffee, and turns the focus of his attention from the book just finished to the book that he intends to finish next. At the time of the delivery of Inflating a Dog, he had already been at work for some time on Passionate Spectator, Making My Self, and Phantom Island, so the ordinary thing for him to have done would have been to leave Inflating a Dog behind and move on to one of those three. That would have been the ordinary thing; it would have been what I expected him to do, and I think it was what he expected himself to do, but it was not what he did. Instead, he stayed with Inflating a Dog. He began adapting it for the screen, and a few months later he began recording a reading of it.
Why? Why did he depart from his usual practice in the case of this book?
Was it simply the hope that the screenplay might bring him some money? I’m sorry to have to say this, but I think it was. The cash flow in the Kraft household had slipped into the red, and hackwork had become hard to find. Kraft was driven to seek work from odd sources, including a New York grocer whom Kraft approached with the proposal that he enliven the labels on the foodstuffs in his chic shop. Eventually, Kraft was even forced to apply for a loan from the Authors League Fund, which helps writers who suffer “temporary loss of income or other misfortune.” I doubt that Kraft would have undertaken the work of writing a screenplay “on spec,” in the hope that the result might be salable, if he hadn’t been very desperate. Although there had been from time to time a trickle of interest in turning one or another of Kraft’s books into films or movies, most of it centered on Herb ’n’ Lorna, the trickle of interest had never swelled to anything broader or deeper, and Kraft had always resisted taking time from other work to write a screenplay based on a book that he was ready to leave behind him. Kraft, however, claims another reason. When I asked him about his motivation, a distant look came into his eyes, he grinned in an abstracted way, and he said this:
Kraft: It was the light on the water, the rolling of the deck, the sun on my arms, the bay breeze in my hair. I wasn’t ready to let those sensations go.
Perhaps. I will not argue the point. The screenplay lay neglected for seven years. The Babbington Press published it in May of 2008.
The Story Behind It
Part Ten
All that remains for me now is to consider the evolution of the cover. It followed a course of development nearly identical to that of the cover for There I Was, and for nearly identical reasons. There. That’s that.
The Babbington Press published Just Now, at Present in an edition limited to fewer than one hundred copies on April 22, 2008.
