The House on Alexandrine

Afterword

w I WENT TO high school outside of Detroit, leaving but not graduating in 1959. Then, in 1961, I enrolled in Wayne State University, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1964. After obtaining a M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Iowa and teaching for a couple of years, I returned to Detroit in 1969 an,d worked as a general assignment reporter for the Detroit News until 1971. During high school my friends and I would think nothing of sneaking out late at night and driving into the city to go to an all-night movie or to the Gaiety Burlesk and once to a Ray Charles concert. Then, in the early sixties, there were coffee houses and movies that showed foreign films and a lot of good jazz—Cannonball Adderley came often and Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Nina Simone. There were half a dozen small theaters, legitimate theater and used bookstores open till midnight. For parts of a couple of summers I worked nights at Stroh's Brewery. Walking to work down John R, I would trade jokes with the girls at the black whore houses and be struck by how pretty they looked. One felt that one could walk almost anywhere. Bit by bit drugs and racism and violence put an end to that sort of mobility. But even by the early seventies there were peculiar pockets of acceptance— a blind pig run by a huge black man named Tang near the Art Institute. Around Christmas Tang would have an aluminum Christmas tree lit by colored lights and the whores all wore plastic mistletoe in their hair. I learned a lot at the newspaper. It taught me how to write (or started me on that path) and it showed me aspects of the world that I would never have seen in any other way. I had two wonderful teachers, two assistant city editors, Wally Hushen and Phil Corner, who helped me make my work better. I was also doing my own writing and by 1970 I had completed two novels and parts of two others: four books that never went anywhere. I had also 232 T H E H O U S E O N A L E X A N D R I N E 2 3 3 completed a book of poems, Concurring Beasts, which was published by Atheneum in 1972. In 1969 I decided I wanted to do a novel about Detroit; a novel about someone coming to the city who was, in a sense, out of his time, a foreigner not just by birth but by temperament, an Innocent; to do a novel about this Innocent coming to Detroit and being surprised by what he found there. I thought I knew a lot about Detroit and I collected many details and anecdotes and bits of description to put into this book, bits which I later discarded. But I was taking notes and as I grew enthusiastic my dissatisfaction with the newspaper increased. I also knew too many reporters who hoped, almost without hope, to write a novel someday and that frightened me. So in 1971 I left the paper, took a Yugoslavian freighter to Tangiers and wandered around Europe for about five months. When I returned I got busy on The House on Alexandrine. In the summer of 1972,1 stopped work on the novel to write another novel: A Man of Little Evils. The House on Alexandrine was going to take a few years (I thought) and I had no money, so I wrote the other novel in order to pay for the writing of the first. Well, writing The House on Alexandrine was like chewing gristle and each time I thought I had finished it, I could see it was not really done. I had put in lots of good stuff about the city (or so I thought) which I then had to take out and there were many more characters than there are now. In 1975 the novel was sent off to various publishers. Some were very positive but said Sorry. Most were negative and said Never mind. I rewrote it, shortened it, tightened it, then gave up on it in 1977. That hurt. It seemed I had put everything I knew into that book and although by that time I had published two books of poems and two other novels, I couldn't pull off the book which seemed to contain more of my...