Afterword to E-Book Version of New Moon

Afterword

I began to write New Moon in 1960 when I was sixteen. Back then it was an autobiographical novel called Salty and Sandy, composed mostly during the last two years of high school and completed during an eight-week “teen tour” on which I was dispatched for the summer prior to college.

I continued to add to the manuscript through my first two Amherst years, never sure if a new tale belonged to the original novel, another book, or was its own short story. I submitted portions of it for freshman English assignments, worked on it sophomore year under the tutelage of Catherine Carver at Viking Press, then defected to experimental prose junior year. This “betrayal” took place after I met Robert Kelly (and his circle of avant-garde poets) and changed my literary and philosophical stance. CC never forgave me.

My vestigial novelistic ambitions came to an end with a transitional short story, “New Moon,” published in a 1966 issue of the Chicago Review. Thereafter, until 1975, I put my narratives and personal tales into nonlinear, projective, metaphysical scrolls out of which I eventually carved Solar Journal, Book of the Earth and Sky, Spaces Wild and Tame, The Continents, and six volumes of the “Cranberry Island” sequence (from Book of the Cranberry Islands and The Provinces to the acme of the form for me in The Windy Passage from Nostalgia and The Slag of Creation).

I returned to the autobiographical genre briefly in 1975–1976 to write Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, but I wrote no personal narrative between 1977 and 1988. During that time I researched and assembled three books: Planet Medicine, The Night Sky, and Embryogenesis. All told, I set aside the source material and narrative context of New Moon from before I got married till after my children were almost grown up.

When, out of curiosity, I decided to look at Salty and Sandy, it was a rubber-banded bundle of pages that I had not unboxed since 1964. In fact, the rubber bands had dried out, cracked, and melded in Braille-like characters to the outer pages.

As I read the manuscript through fresh eyes, two things jumped out at me: One, I was shocked by how pretentious and cumbersome the writing was, especially given the praise I got from teachers and editors of high degree. I wondered how CC thought we could turn it into a publishable item for Viking. It seemed indulgent and primitive (embarrassingly wussy and asshole in spots too).

On the other hand, it was guileless and profound and conveyed the feelings and mystery of its times. I had forgotten many details of my early life and, more significantly, I had forgotten their tone and moods. I could never have depicted childhood and adolescence without reconstructing some of their events while I was still close to them.

I worked on Salty and Sandy for several years, trying to protect the book’s sense of wonder while weeding out its pretentiousness and unexamined teen obsessions. Leaving many parts exactly as I wrote them, I attached the high-school novel, which ended with the “Teen Tour,” to later narratives (like the story “New Moon”) to make the first draft of New Moon, which ended, as this e-book does, with the chapter “Angels.”

The major way in which New Moon differed from Salty and Sandy was in abridging the teen tour while adding on college years after it, thereby enclosing a period from my earliest memories to just before my twenty-first birthday.

However, as I continued to rewrite the manuscript during the early nineties, I impulsively chose to expand it by another five years, taking it to 1970 with a three-chapter section entitled “The Alchemical Wedding.” Then, on top of that, I added an “Epilogue” that brought it to 1987. The original closure (at age twenty-one) now lay short of even the halfway point of the new chronology (age forty-three), with the additional twenty-two years condensed at an accelerating rate into just fifteen percent of the text.

The 1996 version of New Moon concluded with the decision to write it: “I went back to the narrative Katey Carver once loved and rejected. I opened the carton that held Salty and Sandy. Robert Kelly’s warning about confessional prose had kept it sealed for twenty years.”

To create “The Alchemical Wedding” and “Epilogue,” I had to pilfer large excerpts from Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage and Out of Babylon. I also took sections from several other texts, notably six of my experimental prose books from the early seventies: Solar Journal: Oecological Sections; The Continents; Book of the Cranberry Islands; The Provinces; The Long Body of the Dream; and The Book of Being Born Again into the World. Trying to squeeze my life into New Moon, I essentially cannibalized these other books as if (in the case of the already-published experimental prose) they didn’t exist or (in the case of the new memoir writing) wouldn’t ever be published.

Bad idea. As New Moon grew by almost a hundred pages, it turned into a different book. It lost its shape, structure, and ending.

There was a reason, kind of. At the time, I had no premonition that I would salvage most of my other autobiographical prose, as it seemed too private to publish. Instead I tried to transfer as much of the “okay” stuff as I could into New Moon. And the experimental-prose books were dead in the water, marketwise anyway.

While I rewrote the book during the nineties, I circulated this manuscript in bound photocopies to about a hundred people, rewriting (rexeroxing and rebinding) it numerous times along the way. It was like an old-fashioned, privately circulated mimeo. A few New York editors to whom I submitted a draft of New Moon liked it enough to recommend it to their bosses (one said it was her second-favorite novel ever), but it was turned down by every publishing board. The so-called super-editor of Pynchon and Breslin, Cork Smith, rejected it quickly, saying: “It’s so straight. Couldn’t you at least put one kink in it?” But it was a campfire tale, meant to be witnessing and wonder, not some pseudo-Márquezian, magical-realist squeeze, and Cork was already infatuated by The Beans of Egypt, Maine.

I finally brought New Moon out under Frog, the companion company to North Atlantic Books, in 1996 because a number of the marketing folks at our distributor, Publishers Group West, read the photocopy version and believed that they could make a hit out of it. And Andrew Harvey, the British-raised spiritual writer who was the Frog imprint’s lead author then, hyperbolized that it was one of the five best books he had ever read by an American. He said, “You should have the courage of your convictions.”

No hit, the hardcover print version of New Moon may have had plenty of epiphanies among readers and reviewers, but I gave away far more than the five hundred or so copies that sold.

My choice fifteen years later is different. I have removed the last ninety-eight pages (“The Alchemical Wedding” and “Epilogue”) from the print version, reinstating the original shape of the novel. I have also made some other small changes. On pages 6, 7, 10, 11, and 12, I have attempted to restore the text to its original intent. Either from my inattention at the time or an uncaught reversion of computer files, some material appeared in a form that, if perused closely, doesn’t make sense. I didn’t discover the glitches until 2011 when I read the finished book for the first time.

Then I added a few sentences on pages 281–282 to handle the fact that I cut so much material from the “Teen Tour” that it lost its frame of reference.

For this e-book I also returned many of the pseudonyms used in the print version to their original names, as a number of people from the past complained that I had made it difficult to figure out who was who (if you had been there). I found the “wrong” names discordant too, as if New Moon were a memoir trying to masquerade as a novel (when it really isn’t either). Sometimes too people’s names carry their own innate music.

I didn’t revert all of the names, as a few of my acquaintances needed to be protected (“Murphy,” “Keith,” “Monica,” and “Diana,” for instance), while other reversions would have been confusing because another, nearby character had the same name. In re-reading I also discovered two instances where an original name, changed everywhere else, slipped through. (I recall being similarly startled by an appearance of the real “Gary Snyder” instead of Japhy Ryder in one of Jack Kerouac’s novels.)

Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage is the continuation of New Moon, extending its narrative from 1965 to 1975. That’s why its early chapters were such tempting fodder for “The Alchemical Wedding” when I went for an enlargement of New Moon’s frame.

The main body of Episodes recounts the evolution and awakening of Lindy’s and my marriage during our first nine years. While it maintains the thread of New Moon, it is a departure from a coming-of-age memoir written by an adolescent, and falls somewhere among Robert Creeley’s The Island, D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, and perhaps a less vulgar and less narcissistic—I hope—version of the popular confessional novel of the time, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. In Episodes I was also espousing Robert Kelly’s mythopoetic themes, the radical truth-telling of peer poets like Charlie Vermont and Bill Pearlman (notably the latter’s lunatic Inzorbital Freak), and the free-wheeling aesthetics of some of my wild Goddard College students.

Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage has nuances of movies of the time too like The Graduate and Annie Hall, but in place of their comedy and slapstick, a nod toward Creeley’s gravitas and narrative transparency. (In fact, my first widely circulated piece of writing was a 1967 review of The Graduate as seen through the filter of P. D. Ouspensky’s occult novel The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin.) Like New Moon, Episodes is a psychospiritual narrative, but it is not New Moon, and my taboo against publishing it has remained.

When you get married very young (Lindy and I were twenty-one), you not only don’t know who the other person is, you don’t know who you are. In order to make marriage a real thing, you have to live through each other’s and your own shadow selves and fantasies together; you have to experience the unrevealed parts of yourself and your partner until you each know exactly who is in play and what you have gotten into. Then you have to commit to the relationship anew, at levels of intimacy and acknowledgment unforeseen during its troubadour phase.

So if you were to imagine New Moon continuing after “Angels” through the hippie era with the same degree of frankness and romantic-magical inquiry, that would be Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, not “The Alchemical Wedding,” which was excerpted, in part, from it. Conceived during the seventies, Episodes was innocently candid, reflecting sex-positive attitudes in both the counterculture and our literary world. But so many sex-negative and sex-idolatry plagues followed it that the book has become not so much dated as ardent, plaintive, callow, earnest, melodramatic (no one word covers it), at least by comparison with later sensibilities and discretion.

This tangled legacy also explains why “The Alchemical Marriage” didn’t work as the conclusion to New Moon. Selectively expurgated out of Episodes, it tried to cast not just a happy but a copacetic resolution. Everything dangerous and edgy was edited out.

Lacking his radical and passionate elements, my character became pat and self-congratulatory and didn’t grapple with the real issues and turmoil of the time. And even if I had wanted to keep all that plucky stuff, it would have made the book too long. It truly belonged in a sequel with its own scale and pacing.

Instead parts of Episodes were puréed into the back end of New Moon. As one droll reviewer remarked, a subtle novel suddenly turned into lists of my graduate-school courses and the contents of issues of Io, and I lost my innocence as an observer.

That was what came of raiding Episodes for single chatty out-takes instead of keeping it a separate book.

After finishing New Moon, as I continued writing (and rewriting) personal narrative in the mid-nineties, my initial task was to make a new draft of Episodes, pulling it back together after the concession of material to “The Alchemical Wedding.” Then I reengaged another batch of abandoned prose, my writings about my larger family, especially my brother Jon’s vision quests and the world of my father’s resort hotel. This project, half of which I created from scratch after the publication of New Moon, became Out of Babylon, published in 1997 with a subtitle, Ghosts of Grossinger’s.

Out of Babylon encompasses five generations of my family, from the imagined lives of my great-grandparents to the adolescent years of my children. It is a literary homage as well—to William Faulkner of Absalom, Absalom! at one level, Charles Olson of The Maximus Poems at another.

While New Moon properly stops in 1965, Babylon/Ghosts has subplots continuing into the mid-nineties. It discloses mysteries and outcomes concealed in New Moon, re-tracking parts of it from a more spacious perspective and at a different pitch.

When I eventually prepare Out of Babylon for an e-book, I will restore roughly thirty pages taken out of the Episodes/Babylon pool to make “The Alchemical Wedding.” I will similarly try to return chunks to Episodes (if I ever rewrite it).

Reconstructing altered texts is not a straightforward deal, since pieces of “The Alchemical Wedding” were sanitized and adulterated in order to be written into New Moon and cannot be simply reinserted back where they came from. They must be rewritten again, and then space must be made for them where I fixed and sealed the gaps that taking them out created.

Most of the rest of what was used in “The Alchemical Wedding” remains in print in my early experimental prose books and in issues of Io, so I am content to let it remain there as well as (of course) in the still-available hardcover of New Moon.

“Leave well enough alone” would have been good advice in the first place.

When asked for a New Moon sound bite, I describe it as a record of the enchantments through which one passes en route to adult life: initially board games, candy bars, toys; then school daze, baseball, summer camp and color war; then the watershed of adolescence, dating, and romance; initiation, apprenticeship, marriage, kids, a career. Each enchantment breaks a prior trance while opening another. New Moon also captures the evanescent moment of a young writer trying to create a novel out of the materials of his own unformed consciousness.

Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage is the grail of forging an emotionally real marriage out of an idealized alchemical one.

I “sound bite” Out of Babylon as: why do people in families do the horrible things they do to each other, even while claiming to love them?  Its epigraph comes from a college drinking song: “Now we’re bound by ties that cannot sever/All our whole life through….”

The title itself is a variant of a reggae song that my brother Jon invoked as an epigraph, decades later, to our growing up on Park Avenue. He put a pin serving as a needle on a scratchy record on an old victrola on the floor of his trashed Second Avenue flat while he pointed up and to the west. The music that filled the hollow room was “Stepping Out of Babylon” by Max Romeo and the Upsetters: “One steppa forward; two steppa backwards….”  Yes, always.

I deepened some of New Moon’s themes, particularly those in its first eighty pages, in books and essays between 2001 and 2011. By then I had a more nuanced and transparent view of early childhood.

A few of these breakthroughs actually came while composing Out of Babylon, with its second pass over “The Child in the City,” so they appear there. Others emerged in subsequent years through events that invoked old memories and traumas, particularly my brother Jon’s suicide in 2005.

When I reviewed New Moon in February 2011 to make corrections for the digital edition, I was disappointed that those revelations and my current perceptions were missing. I kept looking for passages that I knew I had written, but couldn’t find them. I had subliminally nursed a fantasy that the pages of every copy of the physical book were being updated by magic as my insights got subtler.

Of course they were not. The text was right where I left it in 1995, not a terrible thing at all, but lacking some significant recalls and realizations.

In New Moon I skirted the surface of my mother’s household and its oppressions, never really getting under it the way I did in later writings. Yet the version in New Moon is true to how I chose to see the past for a long time. It is not wrong, just missing a level that came into recognition later.

My mother’s realm and the extreme nature of her indoctrination and hexing were under unexamined interdict when I created a Proustian, stylized version of my childhood in New Moon. In the last fifteen years the full shamanic and karmic implications have hit me.

My new insights and retellings constitute a different look at the place of loyalty and terror in our family agon; they reenact early childhood panics (aliens, demons, dungeon stairs, and spooks) and my mother’s inquisitions: how she taught us to scare ourselves. They also encompass Hebrew School (and being Jewish), childhood games and number compulsions, rock music, baseball (both playing and following it and not playing other sports), the transition of symbols from Zest soap ads to the tarot, and my relationship with my brother Jon up to his death. They take retrospective glimpses at incidental matters like the first Easter egg, childhood candy bars, the morning of my first day at Horace Mann, and the summer of the cabin in Aspen.

If I were to rewrite New Moon today, I would not change most of it, but I would fuse some of its narrative with these later takes on the same events. That would be my perfect version, though I have no inclination to start tearing apart manuscripts again.

The books into which I wrote these childhood addenda are (otherwise) medleys of diverse topics: On the Integration of Nature: Post-9/11 Biopolitical Notes (pp. 150–158, 177–181, 276–277 for “New Moon” narrative); The Bardo of Waking Life (pp. 73–80, 83–84, 95, 138–144, 203–232, 246–258, 283–284, 352–353, 401–408, 429–476 for “New Moon” narrative); and 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration (pp. 90–91, 152–156, 268–275 for “New Moon” narrative).

On the Integration of Nature also has a fuller version (pp. 236–260) of the story of Schuy, “Diana,” and me, some of the material for which comes straight out of the sections of Episodes that I chose not to include in “The Alchemical Wedding.” It also puts the story of Catherine Carver, Salty and Sandy, freshman English, my ingénue literary career, and my apostasy in a larger context.

The Bardo of Waking Life (pp. 196–197) completes New Moon pages 359–365.

Another offshoot/synopsis of New Moon/Babylon, this one originally written for the magazine The Sun and dealing with paternal issues, appears on my website:

http://www.richardgrossinger.com/2010/03/father/

My essays with “New Moon” addenda are “A Phenomenology of Panic” in Panic: Origins, Insight, and Treatment edited by Leonard J. Schmidt and Brooke Warner (pp. 95–163), and the first two chapters and last section of The New York Mets: Ethnography, Myth, and Subtext— “Endy’s Catch: Retrospective from the 2006 Playoffs” (pp. 1–69), “Playing Catch with Terry Leach: Baseball as an Act of Transgression” (pp. 71–141), and “The Ultimate Game” (pp. 289–292).

“Endy’s Catch” goes back to the birth of the Mets in 1961 and includes a short version of “The Prom and Rod Kanehl” (pp. 17–20), a chapter totally removed from the “New Moon” rendition of Salty and Sandy.

I am also currently (mid-2011) working on a manuscript entitled Dark Pool of Light: Reality and Consciousness, which re-tracks some of New Moon’s territory, notably in its chapters “Fear,” “Fear Has an Intelligence,” and “One Encounter, One Chance.” It is scheduled for publication in 2012.

***

In the “Notes” to the print version of New Moon I made these two observations, which still stand:

I have always been ambivalent about publishing this material. I offer it finally as a statement of consciousness and memory, not as an autobiography or memoir.

There should be no illusion that I am telling anyone’s truth but my own.