13. Getting There

I TYPED THE FOLLOWING opening pages in one sitting, pounding away on the keys with more excitement writing than I'd ever known before. Here is the unedited first draft:

"The Genius Effect"
by Daniel Keyes

"What makes Gordon, here ideal for the experiment," said Dr. Strauss, "is that he has a low intelligence level and he's eager and willing to be made a guinea pig."

Charlie Gordon smiled and sat forward on the edge of his chair to hear what Dr. Nemur would answer to that.

"You may be right, Strauss, but he's such a small, frail looking thing. Can he take it, physically? We have no idea how much of a shock it will be to the human nervous system to have the intelligence level tripled in such a short time."

"I'm healthy," offered Charlie Gordon, rising and pounding on his slight chest. "I been working since I was a kid, and—"

"Yes, we know all about that, Charlie," said Dr. Strauss, motioning for Charlie to reseat himself. "What Doctor Nemur means is something else. It's too complicated to explain to you right now. Just relax, Charlie."

 

Turning his attention back to his colleague, Dr. Strauss continued: "I know he's not what you had in mind as the first of your new breed of intellectual supermen, but volunteers with seventy I.Q. are not easy to find. Most people of his low mentality are hostile and un-co-operative. An I.Q. of seventy usually means a dullness that's hard to reach.

"Charlie has a good nature and he's interested and eager to please. He knows that he's not bright, and he's begged me for the chance to serve as the subject of our experiment. You can't discount the value of motivation. You may be sure of yourself, Nemur, but you've got to remember that this will be the first human being ever to have his intelligence raised by surgical means."

Charlie didn't understand most of what Dr. Strauss was saying, but it sounded as if he were on his side. He held his breath as he waited for Dr. Nemur's answer. In awe, he watched the white-haired genius pull his upper lip over his lower one, scratch his ear and rub his nose. Then finally it came—a nod.

"All right," said Nemur, "we'll try him. Put him through the personality tests. I'll want a complete profile as soon as possible."

Unable to contain himself, Charlie Gordon leaped to his feet and reached across the desk to pump Dr. Nemur's hand. "Thank you, Doc, thank you. You won't be sorry for giving me a chance. I'll try hard to be smart. I'll try awful hard."

The first of the testers to encounter Charlie Gordon was a young Rorschach specialist who attempted to get a deeper insight into Charlie's personality.

"Now, Mr. Gordon," said the thin young man, pushing his glasses back on the bridge of his nose, "just tell me what you see on this card."

Charlie, who approached each new test with tension and the memory of many childhood failures, peered at the card suspiciously. "An inkblot."

"Yes, of course," smiled the tester.

Charlie got up to leave. "That's a nice hobby. I have a hobby too. I paint pictures, you know they have the numbers where you put the different colors—"

"Please, Mr. Gordon. Sit down. We're not through yet. Now what does it make you think of? What do you see in the inkblot?"

Charlie leaned closer to the card and stared at it intently. He took it from the tester's hand and held it close up. Then he held it far away from him glancing up at the young man out of the corner of his eye, hoping to get a hint. Suddenly, he was on his feet, heading out the door.

"Where are you going, Mr. Gordon?"

"To get my glasses."

When Charlie returned from the locker where he had left his glasses in his coat pocket, he explained. "I usually only have to use my glasses when I go to the movies or watch television, but they're really good ones. Let me see that card again. I'll bet I find it now."

Picking up the card again, he stared at it in disbelief. He was sure that he'd be able to see anything there with his glasses on. He strained and frowned and bit his nails. He wanted desperately to see what it was that the tester wanted him to find in that mass of inkblot. "It's an inkblot..." he said, but seeing the look of dismay on the young man's face, he quickly added, "but it's a nice one. Very pretty with these little things on the edges and..." He saw the young psychologist shaking his head and he let his voice trail off. Obviously he hadn't gotten it right.

"Mr. Gordon, now we know it's an inkblot. What I want you to tell me is what it makes you think of. What do you visualize—I mean what do you see in your mind when you look at it?"

"Let me try again," pleaded Charlie. "I'll get it in a few minutes. I'm not so fast sometimes. I'm a very slow reader too, but I'm trying hard." He took the card again and traced the outline of the blot for several minutes, his forehead knit in deep thought. "What does it remind me of? What does it remind me of...?" he mused to himself. Suddenly his forehead cleared. The young man leaned forward expectantly as Gordon said, "Sure—of course—what a dope I am. I should have thought of it before."

"Does it make you think of something?"

"Yes," said Charlie triumphantly, a knowing smile illuminating his face. "A fountain pen ... leaking ink all over the tablecloth."

During the Thematic Apperception Test, in which he was asked to make up stories about the people and things he saw in a series of photographs, he ran into further difficulty.

"—I know you never met these people before," said the young woman who had done her Ph.D. work at Columbia, "I've never met them either. Just pretend that you—"

"Then if I never met them, how can I tell you stories about them? Now I've got some pictures of my mother and father and my little nephew Miltie. I could tell you stories about Miltie..."

He could tell by the way she was shaking her head sadly that she didn't want to hear stories about Miltie. He began to wonder what was wrong with all these people who asked him to do such strange things.

Charlie was miserable during the non-verbal intelligence tests. He was beaten ten times out of ten by a group of white mice who learned to work their way out of a maze before he did. It depressed him to learn that mice were so smart.

I remember typing that opening fragment. I saw myself writing my homework, the ink dripping from my pen, making an inkblot on the white paper, my mother's hand coming over my shoulder and ripping out the page. I laughed out loud as I saw it happening to Charlie, saw his reaction, heard his words. There was no thinking ahead. It was as if the sentences were flowing from my fingertips to the typewriter keys without passing through my brain. Something inside told me I had it. I finally had it.

Henry James wrote of the donnée—"the given"—as being the heart of the work given to the writer. Well, a boy had walked up to me and given me what I needed to spark the story, and, in return, I would give him some of my own memories to bring his character to life on the page.

Charlie's story had begun to tell itself. It felt right. It felt good.

Yet, the next evening, when I sat down to work, I couldn't go on. Something was blocking me. What? I knew the idea was original; I felt it was important; it had stayed with me over the years and demanded to be written. What was wrong?

As I reread the pages, I laughed aloud at Charlie's responses to the inkblot. Then, suddenly, it hit me. I was laughing ¿¿Charlie. The way I was telling the story, the reader would be laughing at Charlie. That's what most people did when they saw the mentally disadvantaged make mistakes. It was a way of making themselves feel superior. I remembered the day I broke the dishes, and the customers laughed and Mr. Goldstein called me moron.

I didn't want my readers to laugh at Charlie. Maybe laugh with him, but not at him.

Sure, I had the idea, and the plot, and the character, but I hadn't found the right way, the only way, to tell the story. The point of view, or what I prefer to call the angle of vision, was wrong. This had to be told from Charlie's perspective. It had to be first person, major character angle—in Charlie's mind and through Charlie's eyes all the way.

But how? What narrative strategy would let the story unfold?

Would the reader believe that a developmentally disadvantaged person could write this as a memoir from beginning to end? I couldn't believe that myself. I liked the idea of each event, each scene, being recorded as it was happening, or right after it had happened. Diary? Again, not plausible that—at least in the beginning and at the end—Charlie would sit down and make long journal entries.

I struggled with the narrative strategy for several days, growing more and more frustrated, because I felt I was so close to unlocking the story. Then one morning I awoke with the answer in my mind. As part of the experiment, Charlie would be asked to keep an ongoing record, a progress report.

I had never heard the term before, or read a story or novel in which it had been used. I suspected that I was developing a unique point of view.

Now that I had found Charlie's voice, I knew he would tell it through my fingers on the keys. But how would I handle the sentence structure and spelling? Students in my modified classes provided the model. How would I know how he thought? I would try to remember what it was like to be a child. How would I know his feelings? I would give him my feelings.

When Flaubert was asked how he could have imagined and written of life through the mind of a woman in Madame Bovary, his answer was: "Iam Madame Bovary."

In that sense, I gave Charlie Gordon some of myself, and I became part of that character.

Still, I was worried about opening with the illiterate spelling and short, childish sentence structure. I wondered about the readers reaction. Then I remembered what Mark Twain did in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Before plunging into the vernacular of the uneducated Huck, Twain alerts the reader with the authors educated voice.

The novel opens with a "NOTICE": "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

"BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, Per G. G., Chief of Ordnance."

This is followed by an EXPLANATORY:

"In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri Negro dialect, the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect, the ordinary 'Pike County' dialect, and four modified varieties of this last..." signed "THE AUTHOR"

Only then, after having prepared the reader, does Twain begin the first-person narrative from Huck's point of view and in his voice.

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

I decided to follow Twain's strategy My original opening—which I later deleted and can no longer find—begins with Alice Kinnian coming to the lab and asking Professor Nemur if he has heard from Charlie. Nemur hands her the manuscript, the first pages of which are written in pencil, pressed so hard she can feel the words raised on the back of the paper.

Only then does Charlie's voice take over as I type:

progris riport 1—martch 5

Dr. Strauss says I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. I dont know why but he says its importint so they will see if they will use me. I hope they use me. Miss Kinnian says maybe they can make me smart. I want to be smart. My name is Charlie Gordon. I am 37 years old and 2 weeks ago was my brithday. I have nuthing more to rite now so I will close for today.

When I saw those words on the page, I knew I had it. I wrote through that night and the nights that followed, feverishly, long hours, little sleep and lots of coffee.

Then, in the middle of the night, partway through the first draft, after the scene in which Charlie races the white mouse, I called out loud, "The mouse! The mouse!"

Aurea jumped up, startled. "Where? Where?"

I explained and she smiled sleepily, "Oh, good."

I turned back to the typewriter and typed a note to myself:

The mouse, having had the same treatment as Charlie, will forecast events connected with the experiment. It will be a character in its own right, and a furry little sidekick for Charlie.

A name—I had to give the mouse a name. My fingers went over the keys. It just appeared on the page. Algernon.

 

After that, the story wrote itself, about thirty thousand words—what would be called a long novelette or a short novella.

In that first complete draft, the story ends with Alice Kinnian looking up from the folder of progress reports with tears in her eyes, and asking Professor Nemur to go with her to help find Charlie.

Phil Klass (William Tenn) by this time had moved with his wife, Fruma, into an apartment across the street from me in Seagate. Phil was ‹-he next person to read the story after Aurea. When he returned the manuscript the next day, he said, "This will be a classic."

I knew he was teasing me, and I laughed.

My next move was to get a different literary agent. I phoned Harry Altshuler, introduced myself, and told him of H. L. Gold's request that I write a second story for Galaxy. Altshuler asked to read "Flowers for Algernon," and I sent it to him. He said he liked it, and would be pleased to be my agent. H. L. Gold should, of course, have first crack at it.

Euphoria is a mild word to describe my feelings. I had just finished a story that had been in the back of my mind for years, and I felt good about it. And I had landed a respected agent who liked it and an editor who had asked for it. My troubles, I thought, were over.

I was mistaken.