From Daniel Quinn's writing, you would never suppose that he lives in Houston. Isn't Houston the ugly epicenter of the gas and oil business? That reputation runs counter to every idea Quinn conveys in such novels as Ishmael, The Story of B., My Ishmael and his latest, a collaboration with cartoonist Tim Eldred, The Man Who Grew Young. One expects him to be living in one of America's groovier locales, like Santa Fe, N.Mex., or Austin, Tex. But it is part of Quinn's charm that he is never predictable. In fact, Quinn has lived in both places, but he and his wife, Rennie, prefer living in the Montrose district of Houston, where they own a two-story condominium. The couple have two desks in the large room that runs the length of the second floor. The walls are hung with paintings, and there are assorted odd objets d'art scattered about.
Daniel Quinn has a white beard, large glasses and the genial presence of a retired professor. When PW arrives around noon, Quinn suggests going for lunch at an Italian restaurant just around the corner. He is obviously known there by name and food preference. Lunch goes on long into the afternoon, until the patient staff hint that it is either time for us to leave or to lock up ourselves. The manager offers to let us have the key to the place. We leave.
It seems like a good life, yet its easy pace is at some cognitive remove from the urgency with which Quinn argues that civilization has to be literally abandoned. This is a man who uses the phrase "saving the world" without irony. His audience is correspondingly stirred by his books, especially his most famous novel, Ishmael. "People take Ishmael in particular very personally," Quinn says. "I'm not sure what magic I wrought to produce that effect. One woman wrote to me that she was going to commit suicide and that she was going to leave Ishmael as her suicide note."
Such feedback is easy to understand once you enter Quinn's world, as adumbrated in his Ishmael trilogy. The first novel clothes a startling message in a fable, a favored form for Quinn. The eponymous Ishmael is a gorilla, who communicates a vision of the world to selected students via mental telepathy. The science fiction trappings might sound hokey, but the book actually makes its premise work by giving Ishmael the kind of rhetorical moves first invented by Socrates—a patient reduction of conventional concepts into their sometimes irrational origin. Ishmael's probings give us a vision of civilization in which the usual story line of progress is turned on its head.
"What I am really saying in all of my books—people of our culture grew up with a history that said that humans were only a few thousand years old; before that there was nothing. In the 18th, 19th, 20th century, it gradually became apparent that this was not true. No one wanted to let go of the history that we have been teaching our children for so long. So now it was, okay, real humans are only 10,000 years old. We are the real humans, and we go back to the agricultural revolution, and before that there weren't any real humans.
"I took a different assumption, which was, golly, if humans have been around for this long, then there must be something there. Not as something missing, but something positive. They had something really working for them. One of the things was that they had a social organization which had come about through the same process of natural selection that produces any other social organization—the pack for wolves, the pod for whales, the flock for geese, the tribe for man. This has to be something that really works pretty well if it lasted for a million years."
Daniel Quinn's own life is worth a look as an example of unexpected twists of fate. Born in 1935, Quinn was part of what he himself calls the "silent generation." Quinn says of his childhood: "There was just me and my brother. It is sort of funny, growing up in a family where the breadwinner is a career criminal." His father was "Omaha, Neb.'s biggest bookmaker in the 1950s. I'm quite sure he knew Meyer Lansky. Although my father was not part of the mob, he was quite a respected figure in the underworld. He owned the Baseball Headquarters, a cigar store he bought from Omaha's previous leading bookie. Al Jolson was one of his customers." Even as a boy, Quinn felt restricted by the "terrible parochialism" of Omaha. "I got the hell out of there as soon as I could." He went to St. Louis University, attending classes at the school's Writer's Institute.
In Quinn's spiritual autobiography, Providence: The Story of a Fifty Year Vision Quest, he touches the religious passions of his youth. "While I was still at St. Louis University, I went into the Trappists. By a complete stroke of coincidence, the novice master at that time was Thomas Merton. He was my novice master, my mentor and my spiritual director. At the time, he was struggling to get released from his vows, although none of the novices knew it. I think he knew that this was not the right life for me; it wasn't the right life for him."
Instead of becoming a monk, Quinn became a caption writer for an encyclopedia based in Chicago. Moving up in publishing, in the 1960s and '70s, Quinn worked extensively in educational publishing. His writing ambitions were plugged into his work as an editor, while his private life was, he says looking back, sterile. "I did all of the stuff that you were supposed to do, and as a result I didn't have an interesting life."
Things started changing for Quinn, as they did for the country, in the '60s. "When the children's revolt of the latter '60s occurred, it was just astounding. 'Cause these kids didn't give a shit if it all ended tomorrow. They were just fed up with that way of living. And God bless 'em."
Quinn's own liberation came painfully. His marriage to his first wife broke up. "I married a second time, more or less on the rebound. It was that which taught me that I really was screwed up. I split with her, found a wonderful psychotherapist. After two years of working with her, made a breakthrough that changed my life and then I met Rennie." Of his present marriage, Quinn says: "Rennie and I are so close that most people have a hard time dealing with us. People are often intimidated by us. We read each other's mind; we've always been like two faces of the same person." Soon after his third marriage, Quinn's parents died, leaving Quinn a small inheritance. Quinn had already started the book that would take 12 years and go through eight version before it became Ishmael.
The Quinns moved to Madrid, N.Mex., a ghost town about equidistant between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, buying a house-cum-general-store, which failed. "So we started the East Mountain News—which was a newspaper that covered a thousand square miles east of Albuquerque. We did quite well."
Quinn's attempt to write Ishmael was an epic struggle. He would devote three days to the newspaper and three days to his manuscript, which he conceived, at first, as a nonfiction book. "Rennie urged me to write it as a novel, but I resisted, because I felt people wouldn't take the ideas seriously in fictional form." The sixth version of the book logged in at 100,000 words. Quinn sent it to the New York agency Scott Meredith. "The agent who looked at it said, you are wasting your life. Nothing you can do with this is ever going to be publishable."
Quinn is not easily discouraged. Quinn finished his fictional version of the book in time to submit it to the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, a contest inaugurated in 1989 to award $500,000 to a book that proposed "creative and positive solutions to global problems." A panel of five judges selected Quinn's book out of the more than 2,500 submitted—but not without controversy. "I got word from the then editor of Turner Publishing, Michael Reagan, that I was the winner. The judges wanted to meet with me, so I flew up to New York and I met Ray Bradbury and Nadine Gordimer and John Holland. But the terrible trio—Wally Stegner, William Styron and Peter Matthiessen—were boycotting. They didn't have a problem with my book, but they didn't want anybody to get a prize that big. They went to Ted Turner to try to persuade him not to give me the prize, saying that he should give me a $50,000 fellowship instead, plus some prize money. So Turner said, okay, I can play that game—I'll give him a prize of $50,000 and a fellowship of $450,000, how do you like that? The protestors came off looking petty and nasty."
Ishmael did respectably in hardback, but took off in paperback, becoming a regular choice in high school curriculums. "I'd spent years trying to smuggle these ideas into the curriculum through my career in educational publishing, and here were teachers smuggling my ideas into the classroom using this book," Quinn chuckles.
Since the astonishing success of Ishmael, Quinn has developed a fairly acerbic view of the publishing industry. "Looking at the big picture, every year, what do you see? The gross number of books go up, and the number of people working on books, the editors, etc., go down. If authors stick around a while, they figure they have to hire their own editors and publicists. Meanwhile, publishing houses have even gotten rid of their slush piles, by having agents take over that function. So it comes down to what you want—do you want money? Life is sweet if you get picked for one of those advances, a half million dollars. But I'm odd, because I actually would prefer people to read me."
An experience he found particularly educative was the selling of his nonfiction book, Beyond Civilization. "My agent, Kim Witherspoon, showed Random House Beyond Civilization. She'd also shown Harmony, and there was an editor at Harmony that wanted it. Well, what happened is that there was a tacit agreement among these publishers not to bid against Harmony. I could hardly believe that they let me know this. It was a hard lesson about the publishing business."
Dissatisfied with big publishers, Quinn was ready to find another venue—which offered itself in the guise of Beau Friedlander's Context Books. "What happened is, Beau called me up to get a quote for Derrick Jenkins's book, A Language Older than Words. Rennie picked up the phone. Rennie's tougher than I am, and she generally tries to keep people from bothering me. So he called and called, and finally he persuaded Rennie to let him send me a copy of Jenkins's book. I was so impressed by how hard Beau fought for his book that I asked him if he wanted to see my next book. After he saw it, he got back to me in three days, and said he wanted it."
Perhaps because of Quinn's multimedia experience in educational publishing, he is unusually open to other mediums, including the graphics novel. "I had the idea for The Man Who Grew Young in the mid '90s—a man going backwards in time. Strictly, it can't be done as a traditional novel. Then I got a call from Michael Taylor of Boyle-Taylor productions, who wanted to know if I was interested in writing a screenplay. I wrote it as a screenplay, and Michael said it was fascinating, but it couldn't be filmed. Then I was contacted by Tim Eldred, also in California, who was interested in doing a dramatic reading from the screenplay. It turned out Tim was a comic book artist, and he started working on it as a graphic novel."
Quinn takes the book seriously. "I liked the idea of a man saddled with immortality living through human history in reverse. And this could bring out the rationalizations we take for granted—why, for example, it was beneficial to give up bows and arrows for spears. Each step back seems to them a legitimate step forward, just as we see each step forward as some kind of advance."
Of course, the question that occurs to anybody who reads Quinn is: what is the practical purport of this work? Giving up civilization is such an enormous idea, it seems crazy. Quinn grows a little impatient with that question. "What is the practical side of Sons and Lovers? Or Judith Krantz? No one ever asks about the practical side of Scruples, because everyone understands the world in that novel in their bones. The question is meaningless about my work, but because the material I am dealing with is so strange, people struggle to find a rationale for dealing with it at all. I am always trying to hit people in the head, rattle their universe, shake them up so powerfully that they cannot, and don't want, to be put back to the way they were. I am always trying to awaken them from the dreamworld of Judith Krantz where they feel comfortable automatically."
