Aspiration, Inspiration,

Respiration, Expiration

INTRODUCTION TO A READING FROM CHIMERA

       While Allen Ginsberg was being disrupted by the Buffalo Motherfuckers and John Balaban was rescuing oral poetry and burned children in Vietnam, Yours Truly was finishing the successor to Lost in the Funhouse: the book Chimera, which, like its predecessor, has nothing to do with politics at all. Through the season before its publication, I read from it on the campuses with some variation upon the following introduction, which I include here mainly to keep the chronicle complete and by way of transition to the Friday-piece after it. It would have been from one such reading that I returned to the Buffalo disruption aforedescribed.

       Good evening.

       In classical Greek myth, the Chimera is a fire-breathing she-monster with a lion's head, a goat's body (the word chimera means "nanny-goat"), and a serpent's tail. The term has three other definitions. 1. It is a creature of the imagination, any impossible or monstrous fancy. 2. It is an organism composed of genetically distinct tissues, such as one partly male and partly female. 3. It is a novel written by Yours Truly, to come out from Random House this fall (1972). This so-called novel -- so called because novels sell better than collections of short stories, not to mention series of novellas -- is in fact a series of three novellas, as different in appearance as a lion from a goat, et cetera, but built upon a single skeleton, warmed by the same blood, and in turn, I hope, all fueling equally the beast's internal-external combustion.

       You may remember that the original Chimera was done to death by the hero Bellerophon, an ambitious cousin of the hero Perseus. Bellerophon flew over her on the winged horse Pegasus (who was born when Perseus beheaded Medusa) and stuck a lead-pointed spear, like a great big pencil, down her throat, so that the lead was melted by her flaming breath and seared her vitals. In a sense, Chimera cooperated in her own demise, at the hands of a fellow who subsequently (and vainly) attempted to join the company of immortals by flying directly to Olympus aboard Pegasus, his horsefeathered half-brother. Such presumption does not please the gods, who call it hubris and punish it with bolts of lightning. As you see, the Chimera story is a complicated myth of aspiration, inspiration, respiration, and expiration. I myself take it to be also a story about story-writing, but never mind that.

       My version of it, the largest third of my so-called Chimera novel, is a longish novella entitled "Bellerophoniad." "Perseid," a novella about Bellerophon's more authentic cousin, is the middle-sized shaggy center of the beast. Her tail (which however leads off the book) is a shortish novella as apparently different from Perseus's and Bellerophon's stories as is a pretty garter snake from a goat or a lion. It is not about myths at all, Greek or barbarian, this last one: It's about an endless love affair of mine with one of the most splendid women and storytellers ever, Scheherazade. To be sure, like most autobiographical fiction -- a genre I have no use for -- my love story pretends to be about something else: Scheherazade's kid sister, Dunyazade, who in my version as in the original sits at the foot of the royal bed for 1001 nights, watching Scheherazade and the king make love and listening to all those stories. The four characters in this novella are Shahryar, "King of the Islands of India and China"; his younger brother, Shah Zaman, King of Samarkand; Scheherazade, the daughter of Shahryar's Grand Vizier (I cannot speak her name without hearing the solo violin of her voice in Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade Suite); and little Dunyazade herself. The story, "Dunyazadiad," is in three parts, like the Chimera: the first is told by Dunyazade to Shah Zaman, in circumstances not revealed until the end of her narrative; the second part, shorter, is a dialogue between Dunyazade and Shah Zaman, narrated by the author; the very short conclusion is an address by the author to the reader, or listener.

       The story is really meant more for telling than for reading -- but as it takes two hours to tell it all, I shall stop halfway through, in the manner of Scheherazade. You can read the rest, if you care to, in the May issue of Esquire magazine -- and you are not forbidden to buy the whole beast when she appears, breathing fire and algebra, in the fall.*

* More upon the subjects of fire, algebra, the novella form, and the Chimera book in the Friday-piece "Algebra and Fire: A Chat With the Doctors," farther on.

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