Backstory

In Goya’s Disasters of War, you can see an armless corpse impaled through his anus on the branch of a tree.

Most of the rest of the drawings, or etchings to be precise, are equally grotesque (made more eerie by how beautifully styled they are), and the first time I saw the book, as I kept turning the pages, I had to ask, why? Not why people do such horrible things, but why draw that, why am I even looking at somebody impaled through his anus on a tree?

In Ian MacMillan’s Village of a Million Spirits (his best book, I think, next to The Red Wind) you witness the horror of Nazis roasting a mound of corpses at Treblinka: “As Janusz looks up once more at the huge fire, which has become so hot that he and the others now have to move back from it, he sees the belly of the woman split open. A fetus rolls out of the opening, a tiny incandescent body, like a bright doll, and explodes in flames as it settles into the white-hot base of the fire.”

Ian wrote three of those WWII books, each with the same striking prose and exacting attention to brutal detail. When I asked him why, he flatly said that when he was a kid, he used to watch the old WWII docu-series Victory at Sea.

What?

I didn’t press him on it, but maybe it was just the case of an author annoyed at being asked to explain his work. I keep coming back to this question, though, most recently when I published Ian’s In the Time Before Light in 2017. The novel, set in 18th/19th century Hawai‘i and other places around the Pacific Rim, is once again laser-focused on human depravity: “The stench was quite strong, and the severed necks of the corpses glistened with the movement of maggots. Some of the corpses were without clothes, the genitals swollen and dark as were the hands. We stepped lightly around them, myself glad that some time ago I had been given sandals.”

A simple answer to “why?” might be that authors (or artists) are showing the world these horrors so that they are never repeated. I don’t think so. Human depravity has been on repeat since forever, and any Goya or MacMillan can see that it’s comfortably settled in for the long haul. Maybe this “why?” is because we are being handed a mirror, enlightened with the great truth that this is the fundamental base of humanity?

No. You can do that in your five-page freshman philosophy paper, quoting Hobbes and shit—no need for two pounds of novel here.

I’ll try to answer that big question, among other things, as I discuss In the Time Before Light, but first I’ve been asked to share in this book review, or whatever it is I’m about to disgorge, the story of how I came to publish the book in the first place. I resisted at first, saying it’s a sad story, and one that will meander—a lot—but an agent of the publisher of this fine website insisted, so here it goes.

Publishing “like a raggedy old shave-ice stand”

2008 ended miserably. My mother died from cancer in October, and then I learned that my writing mentor from UH, Ian MacMillan, had cancer. His wife, Susan, had cancer too. She died in November, and Ian died two weeks later in December. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say—a man I never met but feel a grandfatherly connection to.

Before Ian died, I was toying with the idea of starting a publishing company, and Ian let me know that he had a big unpublished novel looking for a home. It had been rejected recently, he told me, mostly because of its size. This was to be the fourteenth book from an established, award-winning author, but small market fiction (looking at you, Hawai‘i!) is no financial rain maker, and putting five-hundred pages of it between two covers is a nonstarter for most publishers. It simply costs too much to produce.

“I’ll do it,” I told Ian a few weeks before he died, me being the guy who wasn’t a publisher yet. I said I had intended to publish a book of my own first, a collection of short stories, just to figure out the whole book publishing thing, but now, I told Ian, I would instead start right away on his. “No, no,” he said over the phone, “do your book first. Take your time.” Wow, that’s just like Ian, so humble, I thought for a moment, but what he really meant, I’m pretty sure, was: “I’d rather die with the certainty that my final book won’t be the first one you publish.”

Good thinking. That first book I produced with my newly founded Lō‘ihi Press, Hawai‘i Smiles (2009), has some stories that I’m still very proud of, but it is one hell of an ugly book. I hate the title I gave it (Hawai‘i Smiles has since become the name of a dental office in Mililani), the cover has all the charm of a smiley-faced “I got vaccinated” sticker, and the construction is so poor that it creaks when you open its glaring white pages.

The last time I spoke to Ian, about a week before he died, we discussed breaking his novel into chapters. He agreed that it would be a good idea, and I said I’d make the breaks and send it back for approval. “I’ll try to keep up,” were the last words he said to me.

After Ian’s memorial a few months later (Paul Theroux there with an anecdote that absolutely nailed who Ian was as a writer), his daughter, Laura, handed me an old Thank You card, saying I might like to have it. She had found it in his desk as she and her sister, Julia, were going about the painful task of clearing their parents’ home in Kailua. I recognized it. I had given it to Ian about twelve years earlier, when I was a junior in one of his classes. “Thank you for helping me become a better writer,” I had written on it.

In 1999, I finished my master’s thesis under Ian’s direction. It was a novel, Meļaļ, and it was ultimately published by University of Hawai‘i Press in 2002. I felt like a rock star even before it came out, and then when it got some national attention I was over the moon. I had come to college about a decade later than most students, after nearly failing high school, utterly failing at an attempt to start a fishing business, and drifting from one unskilled labor job to another. I’m not sure why I settled in as an English major, or why I wanted to write, but I do know that without Ian encouraging me I’d have moved on, and not to a good place.

When I think of Ian, I mostly think of how much I owe him, but it’s not like he had to bust his butt for me. He was just there at the right time. I remember him applying this same effort toward students who thought taking a creative writing class would be nothing more than easy credits. They’d turn-in some half-baked story they wrote the night before it was due, then be stunned to watch Ian spend thirty serious minutes pointing out its merits and explaining how the story might be improved. He wasn’t just teaching that single student, though. I got a lot out of those minutes too. Meļaļ was, and still is after almost twenty years, a very successful book for UH Press. Thank you, again, Ian.

So in early 2009 I was looking at this monster of a novel Ian had given me, Ian gone, and wondering how the hell I was going to do it right.

His WWII trilogy had been painstakingly researched, and lauded for its accuracy, so I was confident that he had done his homework for In the Time Before Light, which delves into pre-Contact Hawai‘i, sailing ships, and various historical atrocities. Still, I found a couple of researchers willing to double-check. In the meantime, Hawai‘i Smiles had taught me that I couldn’t just wing it with book production, so I got some books and—might have thought to do this in the first place—studied the craft.

The next book I published, The Idea Man (2010), looked legit inside and out. It was a YA novel by then Hawai‘i state senator, and now lieutenant governor (and gubernatorial candidate), Josh Green. After that came Mark Panek’s 568-page monster novel, Hawai‘i (2013). He had run into the same problem as Ian: book awesome but too big, market too small. “I’ll do it,” I said, feeling like a raggedy old shave-ice stand that only gets customers when the line at Matsumoto’s is too long.

“Our lives do have meaning, not because we are endowed with meaning at birth, or because we serve one master or another, but because we earn it by making ourselves meaningful to other people.”

But I didn’t have six grand to pay for such a large printing cost. I didn’t have the money to pay Josh’s printing costs either, so the handshake deal was they front the money, I produce the book, and they get the royalties—100%. That’s the kind of shrewd businessman I am. (Mark offered a 50% split once his book broke even, which it finally did a couple years ago, but I don’t want his money.)

Ian’s book presented the same financial dilemma: I still didn’t have thousands of dollars to spare for printing, and there was no way I was going to ask his daughters for it. Fortunately, around that time, advancements in print-on-demand publishing made it a high-quality option. I could design a book however I wanted, and just upload the files to Amazon for online print and e-book sales, and upload to Ingram for world-wide distribution to brick and mortar stores. Buying and storing a stock of books no longer made any sense.

The first book I tried this strategy with was Sia Figiel’s Freelove (2016). Seriously, Sia is the Toni Morrison of Pacific writers—Sia freaking Figiel—and she was getting the cold shoulder from publishers. Even Random House New Zealand said it would be a year before they would look at it. “I’ll do it,” I beckoned from my little shave-ice stand.

It’s an absolutely gorgeous novel, Sia going where no Pacific novelist has ever gone before (yes, there’s Star Trek allusions in the novel, as well as a quasi-incestuous, two-page female orgasm, if you’re up for it). I put the book out in a matter of months, at very little expense. And, per my ingenious business model, made sure that I received absolutely nothing for my efforts. At the book’s launch party, a documentary filmmaker in attendance was so impressed that she is now making a feature-length film on Sia’s life. I’m in about four seconds of it.

So finally, after about nine years, Ian’s novel was close to birth. Mark Panek and I had been working on tightening it a bit, using the same simple strategies Ian had taught us. With basic copyediting skills, you end up reducing every other page or so by a single line. This adds up in a 500-page novel, and we ended up cutting about 40 pages without sacrificing any of the story. After that, and some layout and design work, a friend of Ian’s family, the renowned artist Carl F.K. Pao, graciously offered one of his paintings for the cover, and in 2017 out into the world the novel went.

“Natural Publishing” means no money, no contracts, no submissions

We held the launch party as part of a Windward Writers event at Windward Community College, and Ian’s young granddaughter, Emma, read a beautiful (non-human-depravity) passage. It’s the part where the main protagonist, Pono, learns to see underwater by trapping a bubble of blown air under his eye. I’ve been trying to do that trick ever since I read it, but no luck so far. If you read that passage, you’ll try it too.

Since then, Lō‘ihi Press has published a couple more books I wrote myself, Ashley Nakanishi’s Okinawan YA novel The Last Sakura, and Dakuwaku, an extraordinary novel from Fiji by Anurag Subramani. I also started Pueo Press at Windward Community College, and it is, I believe, the only press in the UH system, other than UH Press, that publishes single author works—eight books so far, the latest being Angela Nishimoto’s sly, darkly comic novel Isabella’s Daughter.

Altogether, I’m proud of the small library I helped bring into existence, and my pet fantasy (I guess that’s what to call it) is to one day see somebody reading one of those books as I run by on the beach. I make no money at this, I create no contracts, and I don’t solicit or accept submissions. I work with what falls my way naturally, and I give myself permission to quit at any time. That’s the freedom and bliss that comes when your business sits atop the Fortuneless 500 list.

So there’s the story of my small press and how I published In the Time Before Light. Now here’s what I think about the novel.

Plotwise, it begins with Matthew Davis, a British merchant arriving by ship in the port of Honolulu. Like many haoles at the time, and maybe still today, he was eager to see savages in their native costumes and hear about their exploits in primal warfare. Instead, all he sees is misery and disease, alcoholism and prostitution, until by chance he meets Ka‘alokulokupono, an elderly Hawaiian man who Davis is shocked (and eventually not shocked) to discover is more literate, intelligent, and civil than he is. The novel then dives into the story of Pono’s life, the pivotal moment being when, as a young man, he is rescued by privateers just before he is about to be executed by a vengeful priest.

The captain of these privateers is Roger Beckwith, a sort-of reverse blackbirder whose entire crew is men he’s rescued from being executed by whatever authority they suffered under. Beckwith is fascinated with, and thoroughly disgusted by, human depravity, and for years they sail around the Pacific Rim confronting and trying to understand the design of a world consumed by it.

Pono, as he tells it, is a cursed man. For over forty generations, at the whim of the gods, a son within their family is destined to rise above his father in rank, force him to kneel in obeisance, and, more often than not, slay him. As we wait to see how this will play out if Pono is ever reunited with his son, we travel a world, from one culture to the next, full of horror, pain, and loss.

In a sense, human life everywhere is like Pono’s family curse—just as we become old and wise enough to understand the senselessness of all of this fighting, we are brought to our knees by youthful ignorance and self-righteousness, and an unchecked, masculine impulse for violence and dominance by the next generation to come along. A critical flaw in our species, the novel speaks to me, is that we segregate into leaders and followers, and when people become leaders “less logical principles” drive their behavior.

Followers, then, in the interest of self-preservation, become the soldiers and laborers of these principles, deluded to the point where, according to Beckwith, “On the face of every man I have ever seen commit an act of cruelty upon another man, I have seen in the tightness of his jaw an expression of conviction of his justification and the rightness of what he was doing, regardless of the inconvenience of the obvious.”

To study this phenomenon, this design of our species, is of course Beckwithʻs mission. By extension, this also becomes the mission of the reader, to make some sense of this. Early in the novel, Pono’s father observes, “Life is aught but fleeting good fortune, and those who wield power fool themselves into the conviction that theirs has meaning. We are creatures capable of dreaming and that is out curse. We believe we matter.”

If the novel were to leave us there, saddled with that fatalistic pessimism, that might be okay in a resigning sort of way—but it doesn’t. Later, when Beckwith is depressed over losing five men, he says, “My account is in danger of going into a debit. I can’t ‘ave that Pono. My life will have meant nothing.” Pono responds: “Your life has meant much to me.” 

Here is the heart of the novel, and the redeeming heart of our species. We do matter, and our lives do have meaning, not because we are endowed with meaning at birth, or because we serve one master or another, but because we earn it by making ourselves meaningful to other people. We have that possibility, and it is demonstrated by the protagonists of this novel, Pono, Beckwith, and Davis, who give of themselves so that they become meaningful to others. Through them, we see how we can separate from the herd and transcend the curse of our species. As such, it is no curse to dream; it is our salvation, and it connects us on levels that are as beautiful as they are timeless and mysterious.

Now to the big question I posed at the beginning.

Yes, ours is a world consumed by depravity, unconscionable atrocites that never end. But does making sense of this in a novel really need “severed necks” that “glisten with the movement of maggots.” I don’t think thereʻs a pat answer, but to me, it has to do with inhabiting characters whose humanity, or better qualities, shine brighter against the backdrop of this kind of darkness. It’s one thing to keep it together if “there’s a dead body” and another thing to hold on to your sanity, and your ability to remain a loving, caring human being, if you are actively witnessing the abomination of a broiling corpse give birth to a fetus that “explodes in flames as it settles into the white-hot base of the fire.” The prose in this case operates as a kind of hypnotic inoculation, allowing you to see without becoming sick and turning away, allowing you to think it through.

Kurt Vonnegut confronted this in his real life, while trying to keep a grip on himself after surviving the fire bombing of Dresden as a POW, being forced at gunpoint to work in that blackened hellscape, collecting so many charred bodies and body parts for burial. He, of course, tried to make sense of this trauma in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, where the protagonist finds peace in the acceptance of trauma’s existence, its repetition, and the recognition that the good in life rolls around too. Vonnegut was also an excellent writing teacher at Iowa’s famed Writers’ Workshop in the late 1960s, where he was a valued mentor to a young Ian MacMillan, much like Ian was a mentor to me.

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Banner image by Levi Meir Clancy. Ian MacMillan photo by Susan Bates MacMillan.