Algernon, Charlie, and I: A Writer's Journey

  Like most writers, I took solace in the opening and closing phrases, putting the two buts out of my mind.

  I reread the novel and saw how amateurish it was, how much I had to learn before I could call myself an author: how to get beneath the surface, how to understand a character's motivation, how to revise. I put the manuscript aside, knowing I would have to find another profession to support myself while I learned how to write.

  Many writers began as reporters, among them Twain, Hemingway, and Stephen Crane. Well, why not?

  A few days after my novel was rejected, I went to the New York Times building in Times Square, and asked to speak to the publisher. Only now do I realize how presumptuous it was of me to approach Mr. Ochs without an appointment or introduction, how amazing it was that I actually got in to see him, and how generous it was of him to give me the time.

  "I'd like to start as a cub reporter," I told him, "then to become a foreign correspondent."

  "Has that always been your goal?"

  I squirmed as I searched for the right words. "Well, not exactly. My real goal is to be an author."

  He nodded gravely and turned a framed picture on his desk to show me a photograph of a young man. "I'm going to tell you the same thing I told my son," he said. "In the immortal words of the famous journalist and author Horace Greeley, 'Go west, young man. Go west.'"

  I suspected that Mr. Ochs interpreted Greeley as advising young would-be authors and journalists to hone their skills and seek their opportunities away from New York, somewhere in the minor leagues.

  I thanked him for his advice, but I didn't follow it. Instead, I enrolled in a summer-session journalism course at NYU. I sat in a crowded lecture hall for two weeks before I realized that I would have to devote all my time, energy, and single-minded striving to become a good reporter. Using words constantly in newspaper work, I realized, would leave me too tired to create fiction at night. I dropped the course, got bade part of my tuition, and searched for another career that wouldn't interfere with writing.

  I applied to Brooklyn College, which, at that time, was free for those whose high school records showed a B average, or who achieved a B or higher in an admissions examination. Unfortunately, I had been a C+ student. In high school, my English teachers had always given me A for creativity and D for grammar and usage. But I placed high on the entrance exam, was accepted for tuition-free admission, and resumed my college education at night.

  I was still trying to decide what profession might leave me energy and time to write. I enrolled in an introductory psychology course and found the subject matter fascinating, the instructor stimulating. I was surprised to learn that he was a lay psychoanalyst—not a psychiatrist with an M.D.—and that with only a Master of Arts degree he had developed a clinical practice.

  Here, I decided, was my solution.

  As a lay psychoanalyst, I would be able to set my own hours for therapy sessions and charge reasonable fees for helping people deal with their mental problems. I would learn about peoples' motives, and come to understand their conflicts. And I imagined how that would help me create believable characters—living, suffering, changing characters—for my stories and novels.

  As Faulkner said in 1950 when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature: "...the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat ... leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed..."

  Instead of exploring "the human heart in conflict with itself," I decided I would write about the human mind in conflict with itself, and psychology would be my path. I declared it my major.

  I took a daytime job selling encyclopedias from door to door. I hated the cold-calling, high-pressure selling, but I was good at it and the commissions stopped the hemorrhaging from my savings account.

  During this time, I took psychology, sociology, and anthropology courses, but the more courses I took, the more disillusioned I became. Not about the subject matter, but with the professors. Except for that first instructor who had inspired me, I found most of them dull, pedantic, and pompous, and their research trivial.

  In my senior year, I confided some personal anxieties to my advisor, a professor of Psychological Tests and Measurements. She gave me the Rorschach test, and as I responded to the inkblots, a memory flooded my mind.

  ...I see a little first or second grader sitting at the kitchen table doing his homework, dipping a steel-nibbed pen into a bottle of black ink, and scratching cursive letters in a black-and-white-marble covered notebook. As he nears the end of the page, the boy's hand trembles. He presses too hard on the pen. A blob of ink flows down the nib, and before he can lift it from the page, an inkblot drips onto the paper.

  He knows what will happen. For the third time that evening—after two errors and now one inkblot—a hand comes out of the shadows, over his shoulder, and rips the page from the notebook.

  "Do it over," his mother says. "It has to be perfect."

  After the Rorschach, my advisor, the professor of Tests and Measurements refused to discuss the results, and never spoke to me again. I thought of going to another Rorschach specialist to find out what those inkblots had revealed, but I decided I was better off not knowing.

  Years later, I satirized some of my psych professors in "Flowers for Algernon." Digging up that old homework inkblot memory, and my mothers hand tearing out the pages, I transformed my frustrating Tests and Measurements advisor into Burt the tester whom Charlie Gordon frustrates with his responses to the inkblots.

  Writers get even.

  7. The Boy on Book Mountain

  AFTER GRADUATING summa cum ordinary in 1950, I took a one-year postgraduate course at CCNY, City College of New York. The course, called The Organismic Approach to Psychopathology, was given by the world-famous psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein. His method of teaching, both semesters, was to read to us—word for word, with an impenetrable German accent—his book: The Organismic Approach to Psychopathology

  During the same period, I began what was called a didactic analysis. Anyone who hoped to practice pure psychoanalysis was expected to plumb his or her own depths, to unearth biases, traumas, and personality defects, and to be able to compensate for them when treating clients. I went twice a week, Mondays and Fridays, at the reduced rate of ten dollars for each fifty-minute hour.

  My analyst was short, middle-aged, with a thick Austrian accent difficult to understand. He used the Freudian method—me stretched out on the couch, him sitting in a chair behind me, out of sight.

  He laid down the ground rules, which I thought of as the Four Commandments. During the course of my analysis, I was to avoid making any major alterations in my life: I was not to change jobs, move, get married or divorced, or—and this was especially important—I was not to quit therapy. These restrictions, he explained, were based on the theory that painful self-awareness surfacing during depth therapy, along with transference with the analyst, often leads people to find creative ways of dumping their therapists. And therapists have reasons for not wanting that to happen.

  I accepted the rules. Actually, I felt I'd be getting my money's worth. In addition to becoming trained as a psychoanalyst, I'd be getting an insight into myself and—at the same time—I'd learn how to use the process of free association as a writing tool.

  Three goals for the price of one was a bargain, but at first it didn't work.

  Although the dynamics of psychoanalysis require the analyst to sit passively, and merely facilitate free association, I became frustrated. Each time I lay on the couch, the first five or ten minutes of the fifty-minute hour came up blank or with inconsequential talk about what was currently going on in my life. One afternoon, I sat up and faced him.

  He looked startled.

  "I seem to be wasting your time and my money
," I said.

  He cleared his throat to prepare it for the unorthodox procedure of actually talking to a client. "Daniel, let me to you something explain. Is perfectly usual what you are experiencing. You see, in Vienna, the analysand to therapy comes six days a week. Only on Sundays are there no sessions. Is common experience that after a day with no free association, the psychic wound a protective layer forms, and on Monday, it takes a great deal of work to break through to real, substantial association. This blankness, or garbage, you experiencing are, we call, the Monday Morning Crust."

  "I don't understand."

  "Since you only twice a week to sessions come, with off-days in between, it always some time takes to break through the Monday Morning Crust."

  Although it seemed wasteful to spend ten minutes of each fifty-minute hour in silence or spewing out expensive emotional garbage before penetrating my mental crust, I lay back on the couch again. After ten minutes I began really free-associating. And I remembered...

  ...Betty's Beauty Parlor, near the railroad depot of freight sidings, beneath the elevated trains ... my mother Betty, a self-trained beautician, washing, curling, and setting women's hair...

  We live in one room above the beauty parlor, my bed beside the window close to theirs, and I wake up every time the elevated train thunders by...

  ...circus season ... Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus trains have pulled into the nearby freight yards. Side-show people and lady performers come to Betty's Beauty Parlor to have their hair and nails done. Some of them wait out on the stone porch, sitting on the steps, playing with me, doing tricks and telling stories. The bearded lady and the tattooed lady are my mother's customers. They say I am a cute little boy.

  A lady trapeze artist comes to have her hair done. Her little girl ... about five or six with blond Shirley Temple curls is crying as her mother drags her inside kicking and screaming.

  My mother calls out to me to let the little girl play with my toys. I hand her a train engine from my toy box, but she flings it and it breaks.

  "Danny," my mother says, "play with her."

  No matter what I do the brat keeps crying.

  "Danny..." my mother pleads.

  I run upstairs and come back with an armload of my books. I open one and begin: "Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess..."

  Though the girl keeps crying, I don't stop. Eventually, she grows silent and listens. Of course, I can't really read at that age, but my mother has read the stories to me so often that I know them by heart.

  "He can read" one of the customers says.

  The girl's mother asks, "How old is he?"

  "Three and a half," my mother says proudly.

  "He must be a genius." She opens her purse and takes out a penny. "That was very clever, Danny. Here, buy a piece of candy."

  I tilt back my head and try to see my analyst's face. "I guess that's when I first learned I could be paid for telling stories."

  I can't make out his face, and he makes no comment.

  I must have been three or four years old when those memories were locked in, because Wall Street collapsed in 1929 when I was two, and President Roosevelt closed the banks in 1933 when I was five. Some time between those two dates, my parents were forced to close Betty's Beauty Parlor and move to Snediker Avenue, where they rented two first-floor rooms from Mr. Pincus.

  When the hard times came, since my mother had no time to read me to sleep, I taught myself the alphabet. Sounding out the words came easily, and I was a reader long before I entered first grade at the age of six. The teachers at P.S. 63 convinced my mother that there was no point in sending a five-year-old who could read as well as I did to kindergarten.

  I associate the connections of memory to the age of six or seven when I first learned what it meant to be a storyteller.

  On a humid summer evening, as my parents and I sat on the front porch, I discovered a group of neighborhood kids congregated under the streetlamp in front of the local grocery store.

  With my mother's permission, I ran to see what was going on. Most of the boys were older, and they were in front of the store sitting on large wooden crates the grocer used to keep milk bottles cold in the wintertime. Someone boosted me up to sit with them so I could watch and hear.

  A boy named Sammy stood on the sidewalk telling a story. I still see him clearly, his uncut hair falling over his ears, his shirt patched, his scuffed black shoes unlaced.

  He told of Joan of Arc being attacked by the Frankenstein monster, saved in the nick of time by the Hunchback of Notre Dame. And then King Kong captured Mae West and dragged her out into the jungle, but Charlie Chaplin had a sword in his cane, and he killed the huge ape and wandered off twirling his cane.

  Everyone sitting on the wooden boxes listened intently as Sammy unfolded his tales. They screamed with disappointment when he stopped with the hated words: "To be continued..."

  Tony, the next storyteller, tried to imitate Sammy, but he didn't have it. He rambled and lost track of his plots, and the audience showed their disapproval by banging their heels on the sides of the empty milk boxes.

  In the summer evenings that followed, I was always there to listen, and to learn what kinds of stories made them kick, and what kept them silent. I wanted to join in, to show that I, too, could be a storyteller, but at six or seven I was the youngest and too frightened to perform in front of this audience of tough critics.

  I couldn't seem to memorize anything. At home, before joining the group in front of the grocery store, I planned my plots and visualized how I would tell the stories. But when it was my turn, I became confused.

  It was the same at school. I did poorly on tests that relied on memory. My mother would get me up early in the morning before a math test to review the multiplication tables, but by the time I got to class it was all gone.

  Years earlier, I'd been able to memorize stories from children's books word for word, without even trying, but later, in school, I couldn't recall anything. I guessed I wasn't very bright.

  Then one night, in bed, with my eyes closed, I tried to review for the next day's arithmetic test, going over the material again and again. Nothing. Forcing myself to stay awake, I tried to see the numbers. I couldn't add or subtract without counting on my fingers. But next morning, while washing my face with icy water, I stared into the mirror over the sink, eyes stinging with soap. I knew that I knew it all. I rattled off the eight and nine times tables to my reflection.

  Between night and morning, no matter how hard I'd struggled, after foiling to get this stuff straight in my head, something or someone had learned it in my sleep.

  I applied the system to the grocery storytelling group: struggle with the material hard before sleep, then put it out of my mind. In the morning I face the other me in the mirror, and discover I've got it.

  It took me a long time to get up the nerve to perform, but with sleep learning, I had my stories down cold. My plots were dramatic, filled with menace and conflict, and my audience never banged their heels against the boxes.

  Years later, I published a short story about Sammy—called "The Spellbinder"—in the North American Review. And I transformed my memory of learning during sleep into the sleep-learning machine that Charlie Gordon struggles with during the experiment to increase his intelligence and knowledge.

  "I loved storytelling almost as much as I loved books," I told my analyst.

  "And what does that make you think of?" he asked in one of his more talkative moments.

  "It reminds me of climbing Book Mountain..."

  "Yes...?"

  I remembered.

  By the time I was in third grade, my father had worked out a partnership deal with a potbellied, bald man whose name I don't remember. They opened a junk shop in Brownsville and bought and sold scrap metal, old clothing, and newspapers. Junkmen would pull up to the warehouse with horses and wagons and unload their day's accumulation onto the huge scale.

  From time to time, my father would take m
e with him and let me play in the shop. What interested me most was the mountain of books...

  ...It's a hot August day, the summer I turn eight. ...My father explains that he and his partner pay a few cents for boxes of old books to be baled, and pulped into cheap paper. "You can take some books home."

  "To keep?"

  "Sure."

  "How many?"

  He hands me a small burlap sack. "As many as you can carry."

  I can still visualize the books piled up to the ceiling. I see three huge men, stripped to the waist, bodies glistening with sweat, bandanas around their foreheads, loading books into a baling press.

  One worker grabs an armful from the base of the huge pile, rips off the covers, and hands the naked pages to a second worker who dumps them into the baler. The third tamps them down and sets the baler's press lid.

  Then the first man punches the button that crushes the books, and I hear the grinding sound. The second man inserts wires into the machine that will make wire-bound bales encased in cardboard from old boxes. The third man opens the machine and pulls the bale out with a hand truck and deposits it on the street with the others so the truck will be able to back up, load them, and drive them away to pulp them into rolls of paper.

  Suddenly, I know what I have to do. I climb up to the top of Book Mountain and make a place to sit. I grab a book, read a few passages, and either toss it down to the base or put it into my bag. Quickly, I go through as many as I can, desperately sampling enough of a book to decide if it's worth rescuing from the sweating book destroyers who will feed them to the baler below.