PHILIP WHALEN
THE DIAMOND NOODLE
Paperback, 144 pages, smythe-sewn in wrappers. Illustrated with black and white line drawings by Frances Butler. Typography and typesetting by Alastair Johnston.
Philip Whalen's novel (part of a trilogy), written in 1956, was published by us in 1980. The equivalent of Kerouac's better-known The Dharma Bums, it also includes Kerouac and Snyder as characters, but is much more expansive, poetic and philosophical than other Beat-era novels (including those of Kerouac, in our immodest opinion).
Curious readers may wish to know more of how this title came to be published by us. I met Philip while researching my bibliography of Auerhahn Press, which published his first book, Memoirs of an Interglacial Age. He invited me to tea at the Zen Center on Page Street in San Francisco. Later I visited him in his rooms. He had small Buddhist shrines and contemplation rocks set up, but no furniture. All of his books were arranged around the apartment along the skirting board. It was quite a unique arrangement. I asked him about his unpublished novel and he told me Don Allen had it. I telephoned Allen in Bolinas who told me it was "unpublishable." I pestered him to send me the manuscript and began typesetting it (on a Compugraphic film-setter) during my job on the nightshift at the West Coast Print Center in Berkeley. It took over a year to produce a decent set of page proofs, along with all of the complex typography, some of which (e.g. pps 7, 37) I drew by hand to achieve the effect suggested by the manuscript. Finally I was able to show a dummy to Philip. He was appalled. There were two major problems, he thought. One was that Frances' illustrations followed the text too closely. A book should have illustrations that take the reader elsewhere, and are not pictures of what the reader is imagining, he explained. The second problem was with his asterisks. He had put the manucript together from many disparate pages of what he called "Prose Takes." In order to cobble together sequences of these he would use groups of asterisks, piles of them like hot buns, or rows of them, or constellations, depending on his mood. He drew them and I had simply set them in type. But "Whalen's Lacunae," as seen in his other works, had been the inspiration for a whole generation of writers who had started peppering their works with triads of asterisks. Whalen wanted them gone. Fortunately I was able to razor them off the paste-up without having to do any major re-typing. The blank space worked just as well, and looked better. Frances set to work and produced a new suite of drawings. Two (pages 11 and 35) were based on photos I had taken. The other two were portraits of her late husband and her mother. Whalen was delighted. (The drawing of "Wallace Creek Bridge" on page two was originally by Philip but his artwork had become separated from the manuscript, so it was drawn by Frances.) After the book appeared I returned the manuscript to Philip. A few years later I found the separator pages with his drawings of stars and returned them too. He wrote me back, in thanks: "MY STARS!"
There is no ISBN, so it turns up as out of print in book searches. But we recently unearthed a box of mint copies which we are offering from this website only at $15 per copy. Limit one per customer.
Two of our other Whalen titles are Out of Print, but you may read or download them here:
(Terms of use: you may download these works for personal use only; not for commercial purposes.)
