If I were obliged to reimagine the beginnings of The End of the Road, I might say that in the fall of 1955, having completed but not yet published my first novel, I began making notes toward its companion piece: a little “nihilist tragedy” to complement the “nihilist comedy” of The Floating Opera. At twenty-five I was married, had three young children, was getting by on the four thousand a year I was paid for grading one hundred freshman themes a week, and moonlighting in local dance bands on the weekends. As there was seldom money in those years for an evening’s baby-sitter, much less a genuine vacation from responsibility, I now invent and grant myself retroactively this modest holiday:
It is the last week of the calendar year. A live-in baby-sitter, unprecedented luxury, has been engaged to care for the children for the weekend, so that their parents can drive with another couple up into the Allegheny National Forest for two days of skiing. We have never skied before, never seen a ski slope. The expense will be dizzying, by our standards, even though we’ve borrowed and improvised appropriate clothing and plan to cook camp dinners on a hot plate smuggled into our room: equipment must be rented, lodging also, the sitter paid, car expenses split, lift tickets purchased. We are intimidated by the novelty of such adventure, much as we enjoy the long drive with our friends up into the bleak mountains, Iroquois country, where natural gas and oil rigs bob like giant bugs in the rocky clearings, and black bears are still hunted among the laurels and rhododendron. Skiing has not yet become popular in these parts; metal and fiberglass skis, stretch pants, plastic boots with buckles, snow-making machines — all have yet to be invented. We have never been to New England, much less to the Rockies or to Europe; the whole enterprise, with its international vocabulary and Alpine ambiance — chalets, stem christies, wedeln, Glüwein, après-ski — is outlandish, heady, alarming. We make nervous jokes about broken legs and Nazi ski instructors.
The facilities are primitive: at the slopes (a modest 400-foot vertical drop, but to us tidewater folk even the beginners’ hill rises like the face of a building), rope tows and Poma lifts; at the lodge — but there is no lodge, only a dirt-floored warming hut at the base of the mountain, with picnic tables, toilets, and vending machines. We rent our equipment — wooden skis with cable bindings, double-laced leather boots — not there but at a cheaper place near our Gasthaus, also chosen for economy: a rude board-and-batten farmhouse just purchased (the proprietor’s wife tells us crossly) from “a bunch of crazies” who in her opinion had used the place for dark unspecified goings-on. She refers to her husband as “he,” without further identification: “He had to go ahead and buy it. We’re still clearing out the junk. He says it was some kind of a rest home, but there’s an awful lot goes on, if a person knew. He’s crazy himself, you ask me.” She is a Seneca woman in her fifties with the odd name of Jimmie Barefoot.
The place is overheated but drafty, clean but cluttered, as if the former occupants have moved out hastily, taking only their necessaries, and the new have tidied up but not removed the leavings. In our room there are a pile of boardinghouse Victorian furniture in dark oak, sentimental 19th-century engravings of moon-faced children and pet animals, a glass-fronted bookcase with the complete works of Walter Scott, and the 92 volumes of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine in cheap turn-of-the-century editions with matched green bindings.
I shall later become an enthusiast of skiing, but this first attempt is merely clumsy and a little frightening: I am relieved when, at the end of the afternoon, I injure my shoulder enough to be honorably hors de combat for the rest of the weekend. While the others advance from the bunny hill to the novice runs, I follow Lucien de Rubempré from the provinces to Paris and through the loss of his several illusions, and sip the homemade beer I’ve brought along to reduce our expenses. I am not a great fan of either Balzac or Walter Scott. Not having expected to spend our holiday reading, I’ve brought only one book with me, a half-read Machado de Assis, soon finished and reread. I yearn for my notes and manuscript from home, especially as my shoulder stiffens and makes sleep impossible. I spend most of the night reading Balzac in a hard ugly rocker and deciding to write no more realistic fictions.
When I can take no more of the Abbé Carlos Herrera (I could take none of Captain Edward Waverly) I cast about for something else, anything else, to read. In the drawer of a crazed and knobby end table I find an inch-thick typescript of yellow copy paper bound into a school report binder, the title inked in block capitals on white adhesive tape: WHAT I DID UNTIL THE DOCTOR CAME. I read the first sentence—In a sense, I am Jacob Horner—and then the others.
The narrative is crude, fragmentary, even dull — yet appealingly terse, laconic, spent. I have no idea whether it is “true” or meant as fiction, but I see at once how I might transform it to my purposes. Now I am impatient for the precious holiday to end!
I leave the typescript where I found it; all I need is the memory of its voice. Once back in the college’s faculty housing project, I write the novel very quickly — changing the locale and the names of all but the central character, making the Doctor black and anonymous, clarifying and intensifying the moral and dramatic voltages, adding the metaphor of paralysis, the small-time academic setting, the semiphilosophical dialogues and ratiocinations, the ménage à trois, the pregnancy, abortion, and other things. Now and then, after its publication in 1958, it occurs to me to wonder whether the unknown author of What I Did Until the Doctor Came ever happened upon my orchestration of his theme. But I am too preoccupied with its successor to wonder very much.
Well. I don’t recount, I only invent: the above is a fiction about a fiction. But it is a fact that after The End of the Road was published I received letters from people who either intimated that they knew where my Remobilization Farm was or hoped I would tell them; and several of the therapies I’d concocted for my Doctor — Scriptotherapy, Mythotherapy, Agapotherapy — were subsequently named in the advertisements of a private mental hospital on Long Island. Art and life are symbiotic.
Now there is money for baby-sitters, but I don’t need them. I’ve changed cities and literary principles, made up other stories, learned with mixed feelings more about the world and Yours Truly. Currently I find myself involved in a longish epistolary novel, of which I know so far only that it will be regressively traditional in manner; that it will not be obscure, difficult, or dense in the Modernist fashion; that its action will occur mainly in the historical present, in tidewater Maryland and on the Niagara Frontier; that it will hazard the resurrection of characters from my previous fiction, or their proxies, as well as extending the fictions themselves, but will not presume, on the reader’s part, familiarity with those fictions, which I cannot myself remember in detail. In addition, it may have in passing something to do with alphabetical letters.
Of the epistles which are to comprise it, a few, like this one, will be from “the Author.” Some others will be addressed to him. One of the latter, dated May 3, 1969, I received last week from a certain Germaine Pitt, Lady Amherst, acting provost of the Faculty of Letters at “Marshyhope State University College” in Maryland. In the course of it Mrs. Pitt mentions having visited in 1967 a sort of sanatorium in Fort Erie, Ontario, “very much like the one described in The End of the Road,” complete with an unnamed elderly black physician. The lady did not mention a “Jacob Horner” among the patients or staff (she was there only briefly); but the fact that her letters speak in another context of a “Joseph Morgan” (former president of the college, whereabouts presently unknown) and a “John Schott” (his successor) prompts this inquiry.