Afterword

Aransas was published in 1980, when I was thirty-two. It was my first book. The eight thousand dollar advance I received for it from Knopf was a financial godsend, since I was a freelance magazine writer frantically trying to piece together a living for myself and my wife and our three-year-old daughter. The two-bedroom brick house in East Austin where we were living at the time bore the prestigious-sounding address of 5 Kern Ramble, but our house payment was only a little over two hundred dollars a month. With the short-sighted rapture of a newly published novelist, I imagined that eight thousand dollars setting me up for years, bankrolling an unbroken creative span in which I would write another novel, and perhaps another one after that, before I had to find paying work again.

Being momentarily flush was a new and intoxicating sensation, but it didn’t compare with the excitement of receiving the first copies of my first novel. It didn’t matter that the book’s title was mistakenly printed as “Arkansas” on the outside of the shipping carton. Reaching inside and hefting a copy of my very own book for the very first time was the embodiment of a life’s dream. This was long before the time of digital image archives, in a bygone age when publishers routinely commissioned original works of art for the covers of their books. The jacket of Aransas featured a beautiful painting by the renowned illustrator Wendell Minor of a small outboard boat making its way through the scruffy inland waters of the Texas coast, with three dolphins leaping out in front. Visible on the boat, if you looked close enough, were two people—presumably two of the main characters of my novel. Since they had only existed in my imagination until now, and their faces were still a little fuzzy to me, more like the faces in a dream, it was a shock to see them rendered so publicly and explicitly. Like a lot of novelists, I would guess, I wasn’t really prepared for the idea that my book might actually be read, that people other than myself, total strangers, could now casually enter a world that on some level I assumed was deeply secret and not really to be shared.

I had been living in that world for a long time, three or four years, though it’s hard to remember just when the idea for the novel had come to me and when I made a strong enough commitment to myself to actually undertake the writing of it. Port Aransas, where the story is set, had always been a lodestone for my imagination. These days the town is a more-or-less typical Gulf Coast resort, its hotels and condos sprawling out over the dunes and backwater marshlands, its narrow streets lined with restaurants and boutiques and cavernous beachwear shops. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when I was growing up across the bay in Corpus Christi, Port Aransas was just a ramshackle fishing village, its self-designation of the Tarpon Capital of the World already on its way to being an empty boast, since the tarpon by then had pretty much forsaken this part of the Texas coast. But Port A was authentic in a way that was intoxicating to a kid from the Corpus suburbs, a grungy, fragile human footprint on a still wild and mysterious stretch of barrier island.

Dolphins were called porpoises in Port Aransas. I saw one for the first time from the back of a fishing boat as we were leaving Woody’s Boat Basin and heading out into the channel that led to the open Gulf. I think I was seven years old. Nothing had prepared me for the sight of that glistening, unknown creature rolling out of the murky green water. It was unbearably tantalizing, the way the porpoise abruptly revealed its existence and then just as abruptly withdrew from my startled sight, folding itself back into the impenetrable sea.

I didn’t get a close-up look at a dolphin until a few years later, when an ambitious restaurateur and developer opened an attraction in Port Aransas called Ralph Plumly’s Porpoise Circus. I only visited the place once, and, as I recall, it didn’t last long, but it made an odd impression on me. Even to a young boy there was something disturbing behind its innocent air of mom-and-pop hucksterism. I wasn’t aware enough to actually disapprove of performing dolphins, but I do remember a fleeting concern that perhaps nature was somehow being toyed with or trespassed upon.

The idea of writing a novel about a dolphin trainer set on the unglamorous Texas Coast was finally sparked by an assignment I was given in 1975 by Texas Monthly, then in its second year of publication. A Galveston marine park named Sea-Arama had unwisely invited the press along on an expedition to Copano Bay to capture two new specimens for its marine show. The dolphin abduction that begins Aransas is pretty much based on the techniques used by the Sea-Arama crew. I was there taking notes when they hauled one of the dolphins—a female who would later be named Bubbles—onto the deck of the capture boat, and I sat next to her on the ride back to the dock, staring down at her terrified eye and listening to her cries of distress.

I wrote a disapproving article, and not a very good one. As was the case with most of my early magazine pieces, it was strained and overwritten and a little snotty, full of attitude and determined to deliver something more than the reader expected or wanted. But my experiences on the Sea-Arama capture boat merged with my memories of Port Aransas and my lifelong fascination with a creature that was at the same time compellingly familiar and conclusively alien. All this finally led me one night to the dark mildewy corner of our falling-down garage that I used as an off ce, where I started to write Aransas.

I had made a good start on the novel, a hundred or so handwritten pages, when I received word in 1977 that I had won the Dobie-Paisano fellowship, the most telling stroke of luck I’ve ever had as a writer. The fellowship gave me six months of residency, plus a monthly stipend, at the 250-acre ranch J. Frank Dobie had once owned outside of Austin. It was the first time—and the last time—in my life that I had only one writing project in front of me, and by the time I left the ranch I had filled up four or five composition books with a completed first draft and most of the second draft of the novel. It took me another few months to finish the second draft, move to the typewriter for what amounted to a third draft, and send it off to my agent, John Sterling. I didn’t know if the book was any good, and assumed that even if it was I was still facing months of rejection before a publisher might decide to take a chance on it. But sometimes there is such a thing as beginner’s luck: John sold it within a week to the first editor he tried, Lee Goerner at Knopf.

The book was a modest success: good reviews, decent enough sales to warrant a second printing, excerpts in magazines. The mass-market paperback that followed misspelled my name on the title page as “Harrington,” but I remember just sort of shrugging that off. I had nothing, really, to complain about. I had written a book, it had been published, it had been praised, and I had been paid something for it. At the time, I had no broader conception of success. Today, after a lifetime of hit-or-miss writing projects, of good luck and bad timing, of frustration and elation and ratcheting expectations, I look back on the publication of Aransas and wish I could experience again the serenity of a young author who was confident that his book—a good book, but not a great one—got pretty much the hearing it deserved.

Shortly after it came out, Aransas was optioned by NBC for a television movie. Beau Bridges was to star as Jeff Dowling, and he came down to Austin to talk about the book and then went on to Port Aransas to soak up the coastal atmosphere. But the movie, like most movies that are put into development, never got made. It has been optioned several more times since, and several more screenplays have been written, including one by me. Enough time has passed that I’ve toyed with the idea of sending the latest draft to Beau Bridges to see if he would consider playing Mr. Granger instead of Jeff Dowling.

Writing a screenplay of my own novel many years after it was published put me in a combative relationship with its novice author. I kept asking myself, with some exasperation, why I had ever thought a particular scene was necessary or assumed a particular character’s motivation was clear. I knew that as an older and more experienced writer, I could tell the story better. But probably only a young person would have felt the urgency to tell the story in the first place. Aransas, it seems to me, is about Jeff Dowling desperately trying to connect—with his past, with the place he grew up, with other people, with another species. Like a lot of young people, he feels the need to hold himself apart, distrustful and wary about the inevitable next step of taking his place in the world.

Taking my place in the world is no longer an issue for me, but in reading this book again I still identify with the protagonist’s legitimate youthful fears about making a fatal compromise or taking a conclusive wrong turn. Most of all, I still respond to the mystery at the novel’s heart, the idea that there are other exquisitely conscious beings with whom we share the earth, but whose lives we are forever barred from truly understanding.