Symbiography: A Novella

By William Hjortsberg

In postapocalyptic America, a solitary man crafts the world’s latest form of escapism: dreams
For eighty-five years, Par Sondak has crafted dreams. Each night he retires, probes attached to his sleeping body, and builds magnificent worlds for the people of the City to enjoy. His dreams have been bestsellers for decades, and he has more than three hundred still in circulation. Sondak’s niche is escapist fun; his current project is a ten-hour swords-and-sandals epic. More than a month’s sleep has gone into the dream, and when he completes it, his public will clamor for more. But when he isn’t asleep, this rotund, 105-year-old man sits on his terrace and enjoys a view of the American wasteland. Beyond Sondak’s laser-guarded walls, herds of Nomads lurk, scavenging for food and making sacrifices to pagan gods. Lately these savage men have stirred Sondak’s curiosity. But attempting to understand them might just destroy the kingdom his dreams have built. This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Hjortsberg including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Mar 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781453246610

William Hjortsberg

William Hjortsberg (1941–2017) was an acclaimed author of novels and screenplays. Born in New York City, Hjortsberg’s first success came with Alp (1969), an offbeat story of an Alpine skiing village, which Hjortsberg’s friend Thomas McGuane called, “quite possibly the finest comic novel written in America.” In the 1970s, Hjortsberg wrote two science fiction novels, Gray Matters (1971) and Symbiography (1973), as well as Toro! Toro! Toro! (1974), a comic jab at the macho world of bullfighting. His best-known work is Falling Angel (1978), a hard-boiled occult mystery. In 1987 the book was adapted into a film titled Angel Heart, which starred Robert De Niro and Mickey Rourke. Hjortsberg’s work also includes Jubilee Hitchhiker (2012), a biography of Richard Brautigan, American writer and voice of 1960s counterculture.  

Book preview

Symbiography

A Novella

William Hjortsberg

For Janie

Contents

Introduction

Symbiography

About the Author

Introduction

MY GOD, HE’S COMMITTED science fiction. So wrote Harry Crews in 1971 in his review of Gray Matters for the New York Times Book Review. Of course, it helped that he went on to say the novel turns out to be not SciFi, but an engrossing fiction informed by an imaginative use of science. Still, Crews had a point to make. Writers of serious literary fiction weren’t supposed to dirty their lily-white hands with generic trash. It didn’t matter that such fine work as The Oxbow Incident and The Bronc People were westerns, that both 1984 and Brave New World should be classified as science fiction, and that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler both wrote what anyone would define as detective literature. Genre fiction remained something one despised and avoided at all costs. Even the slightest exposure might infect a writer with a bad case of brow-lowering.

I just didn’t get it. Anyone who reads for enjoyment (and what other reason is there for opening a work of fiction?) knows not to risk such premature judgment. Otherwise, we all would have to give up on the manifold pleasures of Kurt Vonnegut, Graham Greene, Shirley Jackson, John le Carré and Stanislaw Lem, to mention but a few of the serious writers who have ventured into forbidden genre territory. I first encountered science fiction at a summer camp when I was twelve. Among the handful of battered secondhand books in the mess hall library was a first edition of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, published three years earlier. From the opening blasts of Rocket Summer to the final loneliness of There Shall Come Soft Rains and The Million-Year Picnic, I was spellbound. Before this, I had read only comic books, golden age cape-wearing superheroes and the more disturbing psychosexual horrors of the EC canon. Bradbury introduced me to the joys of literature and he remains a favorite author to this day.

In high school, I devoured the work of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe and J. D. Salinger (who had also attended McBurney), but in many ways, my heart still belonged to Bradbury. Yet, when I first began writing fiction with a certain seriousness myself, my models were Hemingway and Salinger and not the cherished Ray. I knew well enough to avoid science fiction’s curse. By my mid-twenties, I had written two fairly conventional novels that went nowhere (although the second earned me a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford), and when at twenty-seven I found that the only job for which I qualified was as a stock boy in a grocery store, I realized I had ruined my life with the pursuit of literature.

Writers never choose to write. Rather they discover over time that, for better or worse, writing is in their nature. They simply can’t help themselves. Although I had abandoned all hope of ever earning a living from my writing, I nevertheless continued to write. Every afternoon, when I returned home from a day of trimming lettuce and stamping prices on the tops of canned dog food, I’d sit down at my portable Royal and rattle off a page or two purely for my own pleasure. And here came the breakthrough failure had compelled me to confront. Because I no longer contemplated a writing career, I was free to abandon all the rules I had acquired preparing for it: always write what you know, write from experience, never write when stoned, keep a notebook handy. I gave up the misguided notion that writing is hard work. From now on, I wrote for the fun of it, for the sheer exuberant pleasure of making things up. I wrote when I was high as a kite. Best of all, I wrote what I didn’t know.

The outcome of all this rule-breaking fooling around was Alp, a zany sex-farce set in a mythical Switzerland, work that led John Leonard to call me a satanic S. J. Perelman … by way of Disney and de Sade. The path my little comic novel followed to a review in the New York Times seemed as haphazard and accidental as the manner of its composition. Tom McGuane had recently sold his first novel to Simon and