Free Symbiography by William Hjortsberg Page B

the summer of Woodstock and the first moon landing, aside from the ongoing horrors of Vietnam, a time of hope and promise. I salvaged a few odds and ends out of those unusable first pages. The original nameless brain had evolved into Skeets. I also came up with the concept of memory-merge and had some idea of the mechanized world wherein Skeets dwelled. He had watched the films of a Czech actress named Vera Mitlovic and studied the work of Obu Itubi, an African sculptor, so I arbitrarily made them characters in the book. For structure, I fell back on the quick-cutting character jumps I had used in Alp and started making the new draft up day by day as I went along. True to my word, I wrote the novel on whim.
    I finished the first draft of Gray Matters in Barra de Navidad, Mexico, during the winter of 1970. It was only ninety pages long. Buying into Hemingway’s notion that an iceberg achieved its “dignity of motion” because two-thirds of its bulk remained under the surface, I left out about half of my story and sent it off to New York with my fingers crossed. This time, not only did I have no phone but, when the time came to talk with Simon and Schuster, I had to ride the bus all the way up to Guadalajara in order to make the call. Although my new editor liked what she saw and offered a modest advance, she did observe that the book seemed “terribly short.”
    Enlarging the novel presented no great difficulty. I already knew the iceberg’s underwater size and shape. Geographical shifts provided the major delays. I moved first to Key West and then on to Connecticut before the revisions were finally finished that fall. In the meantime, my agent (bless her mercenary heart) sold the abbreviated ninety-page version to Playboy for a sum triple my book advance. Gray Matters fared far better in the marketplace than did Alp. The novel went into a second hardback printing, had a decent paperback sale and appeared in several foreign editions. (Three cheers for the French, who’ve kept it continuously in print for over three decades.) Later, it won a 1971 Playboy Editorial Award (Best New Fiction Contributor). Gabriel Garcia Márquez came in second. He went on to win the Nobel Prize, so I guess he doesn’t hold any grudges.
    Of all the accolades and success garnered by Gray Matters, what pleased me the most was a fan letter forwarded by my publisher to my old-fashioned combination-dial mailbox at the post office/general store/gas pump in Pray, Montana. It came unsolicited from John Cheever, one of my all-time favorite authors. He had happened upon my little novel and generously wrote to say he “didn’t think anyone could go that far out and bring it off.” Cheever said I had done just that and offered his “congratulations and best wishes.” My hands trembled every time I reread his brief note. I guess I had committed literature after all.
    With my Playboy money, I moved my small family to a house overlooking the Caribbean at Playa Bonita, Costa Rica. I had expected to dip my toe into the turbulent ocean of science fiction only a single time, but after the success of Gray Matters, the fiction editor at Playboy asked me to risk the undertow once again. This was more of an enticement than an actual assignment. Lured by the potential of another fat paycheck, I plunged back in, writing the first draft of Symbiography between bouts of bodysurfing during the winter of 1971. Alas, when I submitted the piece, Playboy rejected it, as did subsequently a dozen other magazines. Even the pulp rags didn’t want it. I felt like the drowning captain on a sinking ship.
    A year or so later, Dan Gerber (poet, fiction writer, essayist, formula one racer and small press mogul) read the novella in Montana. He offered to publish the piece as the first in a series of short fiction his Sumac Press planned on releasing. There was a modest advance and a beautiful limited edition. “Another short story done up in hardcover,” sniffed the New York