Difficulty at the Beginning is a coming-of-age novel in four volumes, telling the story of John Dupre as he lives through those turbulent years in America, 1958 through 1970.

If you are interested in an account of how I came to write the quartet and how I feel about it, keep on reading:

The Difficulty at the Beginning quartet does not fit easily into any simple category of writing. By the time that I began working with Ed Carson at General Publishing in the late 1970s, I had amassed over a thousand pages of writing and notes under that title. From that mass of material I extracted four short linked novels comprising a classic Bildungsroman covering twelve crucial years in the life of my character, John Dupre. For the convenience of publication, we dropped my original title, and the four novels were divided equally between two volumes: The Knife in My Hands and Cutting Through. I was suffering from a number of life difficulties while I was attempting to complete those books, and I gradually lost the essential internal compass that keeps writers honest. After Cutting Through was published, writer’s block shut me down, and I didn’t write again for nearly two years.

Twenty years later when I was considering the republication of my early novels, I had another look at those two published books. Just as I had suspected, they contained some of the best writing I had ever done and some of the worst. I certainly didn’t want them reissued the way they were, but I felt that mere revision was out of the question. I knew that if I wanted to get John Dupre’s story right this time, I would have to go back to where I’d started—to that huge mass of unpublished material. In some cases, I was reading writing that I hadn’t seen in thirty years.

I can’t say that I felt as distant from it as though it had been written by someone else; it affected me deeply, but exactly how is difficult to describe. The younger author was capable of some extraordinarily sloppy, silly, and overwrought passages; he also wrote with an enviable lack of restraint—the swashbuckling élan of an unpublished writer with nothing to lose. He’s learned a lot from me over the years, but recently I’ve learned a few things from him too.

Of the four books of Difficulty at the Beginning, Running is the only one that is not radically different from the previously published version, and the further I went into this project, the more I had to do new writing. Eventually a new ending emerged, one that I had never imagined before; as I worked my way toward it, I found nothing usable left from any earlier version. In the final two books of the quartet, nearly all of the writing is entirely new.

I have tried to be true to the voice (or voices—the four books have different styles) of the younger writer I used to be, but I felt no compulsion to reproduce his occasional vagueness, clumsiness, purple prose, or solecisms. And I have tried to be true to John Dupre and his times. In a jacket blurb he wrote for The Knife in My Hands, Robert Kroetsch called that book “a real autobiography of a fictional character,” a phrase that pleased me then and still pleases me today.

John’s story was one I needed to tell. I didn’t get it right the first time, so I’ve had another go at it. In going back to John’s story, I was not free to write anything I wanted. This is probably going to sound odd, but, from inside my subjective writing experience, the story exists independently of me, has gone on, and will continue to go on, however I write about it, or even whether I write about it. Only time, of course, will judge literary merit, but to me, the author, Difficulty at the Beginning feels like the core of my literary life.

©Keith Maillard, 2005

This is an edited version of the afterword to Running.