Author’s Afterword

THIS, THE second volume of the Difficulty at the Beginning quartet, bears only a distant relationship to the version of John Dupre’s story previously published as the second half of The Knife in My Hands (General Publishing, Toronto, 1981). The large general shape of the story is roughly the same, but nearly all the details of it have been changed. Although I incorporated some of the writing incorporated that appears in the published version, I based most of my work on earlier, unpublished drafts now housed in the archives at the University of British Columbia library. Much of the writing and all of the reorganization was done in the last two years, and I consider this book to be a new work.

I knew that if I wanted to get John Dupre’s story right this time, I would have to revisit the places where the story happened, and it is only fitting that I thank a few of the many people who assisted me on my quest. Gordon Simmons helped me out so often and in so many ways that I don’t have space here to list them all. Patrick Conner and Cookie Coombs shared invaluable memories of Morgantown with me. Harold Forbes, the Associate Curator of the West Virginia Regional History Collection at WVU, provided me with copies of the student handbook and university catalogues from John Dupre’s years there and then went far beyond the call of duty to answer my long series of questions. Phyllis Wilson Moore, that greatest of friends to West Virginia writers, drove me around—and around and around— the city of Morgantown as I attempted to reconnect how it was then with what it is now.

John’s opinions of WVU and Morgantown are, by the way, very much his own and are not those of the author. My years at WVU were quite different from John’s and, in most respects, better.

The translations of Rilke that appear here and in later volumes of Difficulty at the Beginning are John Dupre’s—that is, they were done by me in a way that I imagined John would do them. My colleague Andreas Schroeder assisted me in untangling Rilke’s German. The “already lost beloved” poem is “Du im Voraus.” The lines “Lord, it is time (Herr: es ist Zeit)” and “Whoever doesn’t have a house by now isn’t going to be building one (Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr)” are from “Herbsttag.” “Consider: the Hero sustains himself . . . (Denk, es erhält sich der Held . . .)” is from the First Elegy of the Duino Elegies, and Rilke’s resonant comments on childhood (“O Stunden in der Kindheit . . .”) are from the Fourth.

I want to acknowledge some of the other literary works that had a strong impact on me as I was writing this one. I am not talking about influences; I am talking about dialogue. In previously written versions of this story, Alice in Wonderland was always the figure John chose to embody on Halloween in 1949, but I doubt that I would have looked again as deeply as I did at Alice as a mythic figure if I hadn’t been inspired to do so by my colleague Stephanie Bolster’s brilliant book, White Stone: The Alice Poems. My Bildungsroman would not have taken exactly the shape it has if I had not been struck by the clarity of Meredith Sue Willis’s splendid “Blair Morgan trilogy.”

One cannot organize one’s thoughts around concepts that have not yet been socially constructed, so it is not possible for John in the early 1960s to think in terms that we now might find useful—“gender dysphoria,” for instance, or “anorexia”—and I tried to keep such contemporary concepts out of John’s consciousness, but what I have written would not be what it is if I had not read Marya Hornbacher’s stunning Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, a book I cannot praise highly enough.

Now I must make, and mean, the standard fiction writer’s disclaimer: the people in this book are not real and should not be mistaken for any real people. John and Marge and Natalie are fictitious characters and so, of course, never sang in the basement of the Episcopal Church in Morgantown; neither did WVU’s minuscule chapter of the Student Peace Union ever meet there, and I should know because I was the president of it. But, having said that, I must also say that I have tried to make my characters, inside their fictitious world, as real as I can get them. And, finally, I must end with another standard line from authors’ afterwords, one that I also stand fully behind: yes, many people helped me with this writing, but I am the one who is ultimately responsible for anything that’s wrong with it.

Keith Maillard
Vancouver, October 31, 2005