trunk back into the pile of crates and junk, and several days later moved out to Harrogate where he opened a fish and chips restaurant.
“The Ape-box Affair” was (substantially) one of those manuscripts — and so my guilt perpetuated itself when I mailed it to UNEARTH as my own work, although the story originated with Jack Owlesby. I’ll insist, however, that his was unpublishable as it stood. Parts of it were fragmentary, for one thing: the first half was mainly a collection of notes and odd paragraphs. The alchemy that turned it into a story was of my own devising. I considered sending it out as the work of Jack Owlesby, but it seemed to me that UNEARTH, having published one story by Blaylock, might be induced to publish another, whereas they wouldn’t have heard of Jack Owlesby, and wouldn’t be able to contact the man in any event. You can imagine that I wasn’t keen on the idea of explaining how the manuscript had fallen into my hands. The editors wouldn’t have touched it. It turned out to be monumentally simple to rationalize the entire business, and to incorporate Jack Owlesby into myself, so to speak: Owlesby was a mere ghost, after all (and so didn’t need the forty dollars, money being of no value in the afterlife).
It’s sufficient to point out that Jack Owlesby didn’t live to publish his own manuscripts, or to explain or eradicate their inconsistencies and put them into order. You might suppose that I myself would have eradicated inconsistencies, both of style and content, but that would have required reading and reworking the entirety of those bundled manuscripts — essentially rewriting all of it — back in 1976. I didn’t have the patience for it then, and I don’t have the patience for it now, except in my piecemeal fashion. All in the fullness of time, I say, and to hell with the flight plan.
And so the voice, literarily speaking, of the “The Ape-box Affair” is to some small extent my own, as is the voice of The Ebb Tide, although I’m certainly not the “I” of either story, as has already been revealed. It’s best, I suppose, to say that the voice is collaborative (which tells us nothing, since voice in that sense is always collaborative: it can’t exist without character, and character can’t exist without an author. Huck Finn’s “voice” isn’t Twain’s exactly; but is a collaboration between the living author and the imagined character). Plenty of authors have insisted that their characters “write” their stories, and that they — the authors — simply follow along, and I suppose that’s more or less true; it’s simply a little more true in the case of the St. Ives stories.
Ultimately, to what extent the stories of Langdon St. Ives are my own, and to what extent they’re the work of Jack Owlesby, is neither here nor there. Haggling over the issue is pointless. The copyrights are mine. I’ll insist that if I hadn’t borrowed the manuscripts, and if I hadn’t rewritten them and finished them and published them as my own, Langdon St. Ives and his many adventures would still lie buried in the darkness of that steamer trunk, in much the same sense that unwritten stories lie buried in the writer’s mind. Jack Owlesby would remain a mere ghost, living in a garden shed in Bristol. In the end, that intrepid car mechanic in Long Beach, whether he knew it or not, owed a debt to Uncle Wiggily, who perfected the science of balloon airship navigation seventy years earlier, and who never bothered to file a flight plan, either.
It’s my belief that “The Ape-box Affair” was undertaken as a work of fiction, with certain recent incidents in the life of Langdon St. Ives being the inspiration. It’s apparently the work of a young writer. The Ebb Tide, however, which occurs at the time of the Phoenix Park murders (and so we can set the date absolutely — May 6, 1822, some seven years after the events chronicled in Homunculus) is something more like a history or a memoir. Owlesby is older now, not half so giddy. There are fewer apparent fabulations and shaggy- doggisms, and Owlesby has developed some admirable self-doubt and a penchant for philosophizing. That’s due, I’ll insist, to the increasing sobriety of age, and it’s altogether fitting that I was a young writer myself when I undertook to put “The Ape-box Affair” into publishable shape.
One interesting thing: there’s no indication anywhere concerning when, exactly, the stories were in fact written. I’ve merely been speculating. Owlesby might have written “The Ape-box Affair” in later years, perhaps when he was doddering into a second childhood, or — equally possibly — after he had taken to drink. I speculated when I first read the manuscript (speaking again of muses) that Owlesby had been heavily influenced by Stevenson, in particular by The Dynamiter and the stories in The New Arabian Nights, although when I checked copyright dates I discovered that those books weren’t published until the mid 1880s, and the events of “The Ape-box Affair” must have occurred prior to 1875, a decade earlier. All of my speculations, in other words, might be nonsense. Questions of origin are further muddled by the fact that in the original texts there are very few clues to reveal when the various events actually took place.
Truth (that slippery eel) exists, but time and tide have hidden it from us, and there’s no way to get at it now. If we’re to keep afloat, we’re left to balloons and an electric fan, and to the bubbles and cobweb of the imagination.
— Jim Blaylock
