Author: Alex Beam, Globe Staff
Date: May 12, 1999
Page: F1
Section: Living
GLOUCESTER - Former Globe book editor Herb Kenny has lured me to the wilds of the 978 area code to meet Jonathan Bayliss, one of the great self-published authors of our time. Kenny has read the first 1,200 pages of Bayliss's "Gloucesterman" quartet and confesses: "Frankly, I don't know what to make of it all. It's easy to say that ['Gloucesterman'] is unreadable, with a vocabulary exceeding Shakespeare's and sentences that outpace Edmund Burke's, and let it go at that."
But Kenny finds Bayliss's work hard to dismiss. Suppose the difficult, erudite tetralogy proves to be a work of genius? I suspect that Kenny is calling me in to offer a second opinion. In that regard, my trip is a bust, because I agree to meet Bayliss only if I don't have to read his work. My life is difficult enough without difficult books. I'd rather read Thomas Harris than Thomas Pynchon, and even though I don't share Harold Ross's confusion - "Was Moby Dick the man or the whale?" - about the Herman Melville classic, I understand where the late New Yorker editor was coming from.
But I am interested in Bayliss, a soft-spoken, Harvard- and Berkeley-educated author/scholar, because he has eschewed conventional publishing. Starting in 1992, he has printed a thousand copies each of his three doorstops: "Gloucesterbook," 607 pages; "Gloucestertide," 663 pages; and "Prologos," 1,089 pages. Bayliss's narrator Michael Chapman says he is writing "transfiction": "As a matter of personal integrity, in resistance to the times, and in the interest of efficient information, it was impossible for me to render this transfiction in the demotic language of contemporary American literature."
Melville, Walt Whitman, and Vikram Seth, to name just three, all self-published. But most writers want to be published conventionally. On the other hand, authors understand the gossamer dividing line between published and unpublished work. It is hardly a secret that no end of unpublishable manuscripts find their way into hard covers. Large corporations, like Gillette or Occidental Petroleum, have been known to launder official histories through reputable houses by underwriting both the author's and the publisher's expenses. That is a form of self-publication. And when an author's third or fourth book finds a large audience, it is commonplace for the publisher to trumpet earlier works, in some cases books that the publisher itself rejected.
Not surprisingly, the Internet has offered some interesting variants on self-publication. Several authors have released novels on their Web sites that have later been snapped up by pulp-and-paste publishers. Now, with the appearance of programmable electronic "books" like Rocket eBook and SoftBook, Seattle-based PublishingOnline.com (also the address of its Web site) offers digital self-publishing. For $500, an author can buy a space on POL's "bookshelf," and share in the revenues from each sale or download, at a price ranging from $1 to $20.
For his part, Bayliss has never tried to land a publisher. "What is the point?" he asks. "I know the odds are a million to one against me." When asked why he self-publishes, he paraphrases George Mallory's famous explanation of why he climbed mountains: "Because it wasn't there. My book didn't exist and I wanted it to be out there where people could read it."
Some of Bayliss's friends have now read his work, and sent favorable notices to the local newspaper. The books outline a complicated epistemology, which he calls "dromenology." I asked Bayliss how many readers actually understood his message. "About three," he answered. Only once has he received money for his fiction, a $3,000 Massachusetts Arts Council grant in the mid-1970's. Novelist Russell Banks sat on that committee. "He said it was a work of genius," Bayliss recounts.
Reached by telephone, Banks dimly recalls Bayliss's 9-inch-tall stack of manuscript pages: "I vaguely remember this wonderful, wacked-out piece of writing."
Bayliss's novels are available from Basilicum Press, 121 Lake Shore Drive, Ashburnham, MA 01430.