Inflating a Dog (The Screenplay)

Mark Dorset

Kraft finished Inflating a Dog in December of 2000. It was scheduled for publication in July of 2002. Ordinarily, after Kraft has read a book to Madeline, made the necessary corrections, and delivered it to the publisher—he considers it finished, and he moves on. Because the next book has always been in the works for some time when its predecessor is finished, he gets up the next morning, brews a Balzacian dose of coffee, and turns the focus of his attention from the book just finished to the book that he intends to finish next. At the time of the delivery of Inflating a Dog, he had already been at work for some time on Passionate Spectator, Making My Self, and Phantom Island, so the ordinary thing for him to have done would have been to leave Inflating a Dog behind and move on to one of those three. That would have been the ordinary thing; it would have been what I expected him to do, and I think it was what he expected himself to do, but it was not what he did. Instead, he stayed with Inflating a Dog. He began adapting it for the screen, and a few months later he began recording a reading of it.

Why? Why did he depart from his usual practice in the case of this book?

Was it simply the hope that the screenplay might bring him some money? I’m sorry to have to say this, but I think it was. The cash flow in the Kraft household had slipped into the red, and hackwork had become hard to find. Kraft was driven to seek work from odd sources, including a New York grocer whom Kraft approached with the proposal that he enliven the labels on the foodstuffs in his chic shop. Eventually, Kraft was even forced to apply for a loan from the Authors League Fund, which helps writers who suffer “temporary loss of income or other misfortune.” I doubt that Kraft would have undertaken the work of writing a screenplay “on spec,” in the hope that the result might be salable, if he hadn’t been very desperate. Although there had been from time to time a trickle of interest in turning one or another of Kraft’s books into films or movies, most of it centered on Herb ’n’ Lorna, the trickle of interest had never swelled to anything broader or deeper, and Kraft had always resisted taking time from other work to write a screenplay based on a book that he was ready to leave behind him. Kraft, however, claims another reason. When I asked him about his motivation, a distant look came into his eyes, he grinned in an abstracted way, and he said this:

Kraft: It was the light on the water, the rolling of the deck, the sun on my arms, the bay breeze in my hair. I wasn’t ready to let those sensations go.

Perhaps. I will not argue the point. The screenplay lay neglected for seven years. The Babbington Press published it in May of 2008.

Risking the Ridiculous