The Retyping

I’ve just undergone a sobering experience. In 1975 I completed a novel, The Greenleaf Fires, which was eventually, in 1977, published by Scribner’s. Over the last three weeks – 37 years later – I have retyped the whole damned thing.
When this winter I finally decided to join the 21st century, I commissioned a website to put forth the various books I’ve produced that are still available to a dubious public. The Greenleaf Fires, long out of print, was not among these, yet it was one of the best books I have written. Stephen King gave it a nod in his memoir On Writing. Even better, Alan Cheuse gave it a very generous review on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review: “for most readers, one John Gould novel will not suffice.”
That, however, was then; since, I’m afraid, that one novel has sufficed. And nobody reads it now. So when my new site settled onto the World Wide Web, I thought why not republish Greenleaf electronically as a Kindle text? I had it scanned as a PDF file and sent it off to Amazon.
A friend of mine bought it and reported disaster. Lines were cut off, pages were mis-sized. “It’s unreadable,” he said, and then my son Gardy – a film editor and my technical advisor – said, “Sorry, Dad, you’ll have to retype it.”
Argh. I sat down at the keyboard and began tapping out the first line: “To begin, a river: the Sheepscot, originating from the southern end of Sheepscot Pond, Waldo County, Maine…” The Greenleaf Fires is the story of Alcott Greenleaf, a young, one-handed World War II veteran from Maine, who in 1946 burns every ice-house along the Sheepscot River. Alcott goes to prison for arson, re-emerges to marry, and falls into adultery with his sister-in-law, Evelyn – a dreadful vixen. There is a flashback to the WWII assault on Guam. He is eventually rescued from Evelyn through the agency of his idiot son.
Of course I hadn’t read the novel through in years, not since I wrote it. I ‘ve changed in 36 years – I was an English teacher for most of them – and my tastes in words have altered in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. In fact, the author of Greenleaf doesn’t exist any more; he’s faded into my past. I didn’t know what he’d written.
Actually he hadn’t done too badly. I promised myself I’d make no changes beyond correcting any typos I found, but I couldn’t keep my word. On his first reading my father noticed I’d misspelled “Muscongus” – the big bay east of Wiscasset – and I couldn’t wait to correct that (I had dedicated the book to him, after all!); but thanks to the excellent work of my editor, Laurie Graham, the text was generally clean. I discovered one dangling participle I couldn’t abide and silently fixed it. The original style presented compound times without hyphens – “ten thirty,” e.g. – but I much prefer “ten-thirty” and thus changed them all. A few commas were banished.
I found some errors I’d made with Downeast dialect. In Maine the noon meal is “dinner” – “lunch” does not exist – and the evening meal is “supper.” At one point I had forgotten this fact and thus had to correct an evening’s “dinner.” “Bastid” is the Maine version of the popular slur about one’s parentage; when Evelyn the vixen called someone a “bastard,” a fix was clearly required.
But mostly there were very few of these boo-boos. There was one matter of fact I had to correct. I did not realize when I wrote the novel how heavy a Browning Automatic Rifle was, and a change of dialog was needed to explain why Greenleaf would not carry it on a solo mission in combat.
What was most surprising to me was how comfortable I was with the young John Gould’s work. True, there was lots of Faulkner looming through the writing, but I loved Faulkner, love him still, and honestly if you’re going to swipe from someone, why not swipe from someone you love? So I had no desire to change the occasional page-long sentences, a couple of which I had even paragraphed. I also realized that I had borrowed a good deal of Anthony Powell’s dreadful sexpot, Pamela Flitton, when creating Evelyn – but in the end I believe I built a more believable bitch.
I found too many modifiers, I confess. I used the words “vague” and “vaguely” a lot more than I should have – “vaguely astonished silence,” for example, or “tinged with vague foreboding.” But mostly I found myself pleased with my exercise in literary archeology. It wasn’t as bad as I feared.
So now The Greenleaf Fires has been returned to the reading public via Amazon, for better or worse. I’m sure I made a good many new typos in recreating it, although I looked it over carefully to try to catch them, and a friend, Carmel Rodrìguez-Walter, assisted further with the proofing. Gardy the techmaster helped me paste in several maps and illustrations. All in all the whole process felt bracing. It’s a challenge other writers might take up: pick one of their old books, go over it word for word, and see how it feels today. They will feel both humility and (forgive me) a vague exhilaration.

June, 2011 ©