Adios, Scheherazade

Anyway, he says the same thing can be done with novels. You have a novel that claims to be a novel. His own book The Captain’s Pearls is a perfect example. The lead character is this submarine captain on a two-month cruise under the North Pole, and what his big fantasy is, this captain, is that actually he’s a giant in belles lettres, like Carlyle or somebody like that. His big dream is that three hundred years from now one of the main literary things from the twentieth century to be treasured and remembered is his log, so he fills the log with literary criticism and free verse and political essays and all sorts of stuff, all intermixed with the regular notations that are supposed to be in the log, and even those things, latitude and longitude and speed and who was on sick call and like that, even those things are done in very flowery sentences, as though with a quill pen. In fact, the captain’s name is Captain Quill. And what he writes, his log, is the book The Captain’s Pearls. So what Dick has done is, he’s written a book that doesn’t claim to be actions in a submarine, he’s written a book that claims to be a book.

His second book is the same way. He’s still working on it, I guess he got enough money from the movie sale of The Captain’s Pearls so he can really take his time. He told me about this new one, and it’s even nuttier. It’s about this Negro junkie and this psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist has gotten interested in the junkie and wants to try out a lot of new theories on him, and the junkie is going along with it because the psychiatrist is keeping him out of jail and supplied with dope. And the basic thing in the psychiatrist’s theory is self-understanding, so what he’s having this illiterate Negro junkie do is write his autobiography. So the book is the autobiography.

Except there’s more to it than that. The junkie turns out to be this total put-on type, whose whole purpose in the book is to put on the psychiatrist. He doesn’t want the psychiatrist to know one true thing about him, not even his name, so he weaves all these falsehoods, lies inside lies, then sticking the truth away in one little corner, or other times putting part of the truth right out in the open where it looks like a lie, or telling a lie the psychiatrist will be sure to catch but doing it in order to lead the psychiatrist to believe a different lie, doing all these things chapter by chapter, and of course after every chapter the junkie and the psychiatrist have a talk, and what they say gets mentioned in the next chapter. Also, the psychiatrist has footnotes throughout the book telling what he thinks is the truth and what he thinks is lies, or explaining other things the junkie left out, or defending himself when the junkie has made remarks about him and like that. I read the first couple of chapters a few months ago and it was very funny stuff, even funnier than The Captain’s Pearls, but it was also weird stuff, too, and I think after a while it might turn out to be hard reading.

About the title for this one, Dick says it’s time for another legal breakthrough. He says it’s been established in the courts you can put anything you want inside a novel, now it’s time to establish you can have the same leeway in your title, so he wants to call the book Adios, Motherfucker. But his editor told him there was one big trouble with calling a book Adios, Motherfucker, and that is, he won’t get any reviews. The editor says nobody can possibly review a book if they can’t mention what book they’re reviewing, and Dick says he understands that, he can see the problem, but worrying about reviews to the point of changing your book for them is the tail wagging the dog, and the absolutely best and right and perfect title for his book is Adios, Motherfucker. So the editor suggested he call the book A. M. and inside on the title page there would be an explanation of the title in parentheses, but Dick says that’s an awful cheat and a cop-out, and if he’s going to cop out he wants to go all the way and use his alternate title, which is Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

Frankly I agree with Dick that Adios, Motherfucker is a beautiful title, particularly for the book he’s writing, but I also agree with his editor that this is not the world in which to title a book Adios, Motherfucker.