Inflating a Dog (Audio Book)

Mark Dorset

Note: The following remarks are adapted from a talk entitled “Writing to Be Read and Writing to Be Read Aloud” that Kraft delivered in Rapid City, South Dakota, on May 3, 2004, to the Conference of Librarians Serving Blind and Physically Handicapped Individuals, at the invitation of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress. After laboriously transcribing the recording of the talk that I made on a pocket-size recorder, I found that the Library of Congress had posted the text of the talk on the World Wide Web. This allowed me to check my transcription against Kraft’s remarks as originally prepared for delivery. I found some few trifling discrepancies, which I attribute to “ad-libbing” during the delivery.

Kraft asserts that everything he has written has been written to be read aloud, because everything he has written has been written for Madeline, his ideal audience, whose first experience of each work is as its auditor, not its reader. The qualities that make Madeline his ideal audience are these: First, she is well read; she reads, on average, two or three books a week. Second, her reading is both broad and deep; her tastes are catholic, but she has a discriminating palate. That sounds paradoxical, but Kraft explains that it “isn’t really” because she is that rare reader who meets each work on its own terms. If books were food, she would be an omnivorous epicure. She savors a dainty dish subtly finished with truffle oil, and she downs a hamburger with relish and gusto. To meet her standards or win her praise, each dish—that is, each book—must be superior for its type. Writing to please a muse of such discernment and such broad tastes has encouraged Kraft to broaden his reach, to mix styles high and low, to serve her low comedy and high satire, to dress deep thought with surface scintillation.

So, we understand that Kraft writes to move his muse, but he wants to be sure that we understand that he is always writing to move that muse in two modes: the listening muse and the silent-reading muse. He writes for an ideal audience who will experience the book twice. What does he want to happen to her in general, whether she is experiencing the book as listener or reader? He wants her to see that he can think [!], that he does think, that the life he’s living is an examined one. He also wants her to know that he feels, that his heart is as engaged with the world as his mind is. And he wants her to know that he has his powers, that he can take the data that “the painful kingdom of time and place” supplies him and subject it to artistic alchemy, or at least to a trickster’s sleight of hand, and turn it into something else; he wants her to see that the life he’s living is not only an examined one but also an imagined one.

Well—there you have a portrait of the first audience for whom Kraft writes: voracious and discriminating; appreciative and critical; intelligent and passionate—most definitely an audience worth the wooing.

Kraft: So far, so good. We’ve established that everything I write is written for an audience of one, an audience that is, first, a listening audience.

As soon as Kraft has finished a book, he reads it to his ideal auditor, who happens also to be his ideal reader, one chapter a night, until he has read it all. The anticipation of that reading has given him a way of knowing when his work on a book is finished. How does he know when he has finished a book? He knows that the book is done when it seems “good enough to read to Mad.”

When Kraft was first invited to read his work to a larger audience, to give a public reading, he tried practicing in private. [The occasion was the Boston Globe Book Festival in, probably, 1982. MD] The more he practiced, the worse he got. He was almost as bad as Marcel Proust in Jean Cocteau’s description of him in The Difficulty of Being:

Lying stiffly and askew Marcel Proust would read to us, each night, Du Côté de Chez Swann. Proust would start anywhere, would mistake the page, confuse the passage, repeat himself, begin again, break off to explain that the lifting of a hat in the first chapter would reveal its significance in the last volume, and he would titter behind his gloved hand, with a laugh that he smeared all over his beard and cheeks. “It’s too silly,” he kept saying, “no . . . I won’t read any more. It’s too silly.” His voice . . . became a distant plaint, a tearful music of apologies, of courtesies, of remorse. . . . And when we had persuaded him to continue, he would stretch out his arm, pull no matter what page out of his scrawl and we would fall headlong into the Guermantes or the Verdurins household. After fifty lines he would begin his performance all over again. He would groan, titter, apologize for reading so badly. Sometimes he would . . . go into a closet, where the livid light was recessed into the wall. There one would catch sight of him standing up, in his shirt sleeves, . . . holding a plate in one hand, a fork in the other, eating noodles.

With the exception of the noodles, that is much the way Kraft felt about the quality of his own reading. He thought of backing out of the festival. “I’m a writer, not a performer,” he told his publisher.

Eric and Madeline were living in Newburyport, Massachusetts, at the time, and their elder son, Scott, was volunteering with a local theater group. He persuaded some of the actors to give Kraft some advice. They taught him relaxation techniques, how to breathe effectively, and how to project his voice, but he was still nervous and insecure. As the troupe was leaving, though, one of the actors told Kraft, “You know, you have a great advantage over us.”

“I do?” Kraft said.

“Yes,” said the actor. “You wrote what you’re going to read. You must think it’s good, or you wouldn’t have published it. Sometimes we have to convince ourselves that a play is good in order to give a convincing performance, but you’re already there.”

Kraft realized that what the actor has said was right. He did think that what he had written was good. Specifically, he thought that it was good enough to read to Mad. If it was good enough to read to Mad, then it was good enough to read to everyone else. That conviction relieved Kraft of his performance anxiety and released his inner ham.

Once released, the ham genie refused to return to the bottle. Now, when Kraft reads for his first audience of one, he performs. The occasion is an occasion: it’s the book’s opening night. Kraft is nervous, of course. There’s a lot on the line. As the reader, the performer, he wants to deliver for the writer—put the work over, make it a success. For the cause, he drugs the audience with a martini to try to put her in a particularly receptive frame of mind. His martini-mellow muse is receptive . . . and forgiving.

Kraft has long recognized the effect that his desire to woo—and win—his muse and ideal reader has on his writing: 

Kraft: Early in my work on a book, when the first reading is still so far away, the effect is general, and not very strong. Still, Mad is always on my mind, and her presence keeps me from being lazy at all stages in the development of a book. In the early work, it keeps me from staying on the outside of a scene, merely observing. It forces me to get into the work, to participate fully in the world that my imagination makes, so that when I return, what I return with, the report from my imagination, the “news from nowhere” that becomes a novel, or a volume of Peter’s memoirs, will be as full and rich as I can imagine it. This is the hard work of the imagination. Daydreaming is easy. Generalities are easy. Dwelling in the imagination, exploring and mapping it, and returning with specifics is not easy. The closer I get to the occasion of my first reading, her first listening, the more I have that first auditor in mind. Now the thought of her prompts two impulses, one radical, the other conservative. The thought that she has the generosity of spirit and intellect to indulge a work of art, to accept its audacity, to suspend judgment of even the most outrageous trope or theme or twist of plot until it has had its chance to pay off, sometimes makes me think that for her, if I try very hard, I can fly. On the other hand, the thought that she will spot every error, that her critical perspicacity is so acute, that she is so discerning, that no weak spot, no attempt to hide a blemish, will escape her, makes me careful, painstaking, and precise. Knowing that she will first listen to the book while I read it to her, I know that I have to maintain a thread—a way to trace a path through the novel’s maze, like the clew of thread that Ariadne provided for Theseus when he braved the Minotaur in the labyrinth. I don’t want my muse getting lost in the tangle of my tale; I may want her to feel a bit lost from time to time, just for the frisson of feeling lost, but I don’t ever want her actually to be lost. I want to give her a story line, or the growth of a character, the progress of a problem, one of the good old devices that drives a book along a road, a winding road in my case, maybe even a meandering ramble through a garden of forking paths, but a way from start to finish that the first auditor will find pleasant to follow. Knowing that she will eventually read the book in bed or at poolside, I know that she will find everything I have put into it, all the pleasures that I have hidden for her there. The thought of the two experiences of the work is so ingrained in me by now that I couldn’t escape the duality if I tried. I write to be read, and I write to be read aloud. I write for a reader who will hold the book on her lap and for a listener who will sit on a sofa, across the room from me, with her legs tucked under her, a martini on the table beside her, and listen—who will when I have finished reading, if I have been successful, be wearing a certain smile, the smile that tells me she has been amused, impressed, intrigued, and seduced by what I’ve written for her . . . that she will want to read it again . . . and that at least some of those who follow her, as listeners or readers, will experience something similar . . . that at least some of them, after they have finished listening or reading . . . will be wearing that smile.

The recording of the reading ran from August 2001 to April 2002. The Babbington Press published the audio book on May 24, 2008.

Risking the Ridiculous