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My years in Vermont College’s low residency program have provided me with ongoing connections among faculty and students from both the undergraduate and graduate programs. Among the friends I made from that experience is Lawrence Sutin, author of When To Go Into The Water (Sarabande Books, 2009). Sutin is perhaps best known as the biographer of Philip K. Dick and Aleister Crowley, and served as my advisor one semester in grad school. His new book tells the tale of ficitional author Hector de Saint-Aureole by way of alternating sketches from Hector's life and the lives of future readers of his epic of philosophy, When To Go Into The.Water.
Through the course of the book, Hector uses his privilege as the inheritor of a small fortune while a barkeep in London to follow his wanderlust ceaselessly where it may lead him, turning up in new Asian, European, African and South American locales page by page. At one point he competes with an unknown rival in Hong Kong for the favors of a red-haired woman who never loves him in return, finally leaving the door to her boudoir in room 23 unanswered, before moving on to another tryst .
After his death, Hector’s descendent, Daphne de St. Aureole contacts film star You Know Who about a film adaptation of Hector’s work after seeing his remark in a cult classics rag. You Know Who claims not to be interested in the role, but admits to having answered Daphne’s call for ulterior reasons. In turn, she admits to having used the adaptation proposal as a ruse for meeting You Know Who, having long admired him from afar. And that’s just the beginning. This book is a time machine.
Sutin’s use of imaginary responses from an imaginary audience to an imaginary book by an imaginary author in When To Go Into The Water creates an entertaining, scattershot trajectory. Did he write it during breaks from composing the Crowley bio, Do What Thou Wilt, or the Dick one, Divine Invasions? More than once, I found myself wondering.
Besides the books already mentioned, Lawrence Sutin is the author of two memoirs, Jack and Rochelle: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance and A Postcard Memoir; and a historical work, All Is Change: The Two Thousand Year Journey of Buddhism to the West.
Please click here for my conversation with author Lawrence Sutin.
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