Going Against the Grain : Publishing: Even some of the judges declared ‘Ishmael’ unworthy of the $500,000 Turner prize. Now that the book’s out, its author hopes to create another stir.

For Daniel Quinn, publication this month of his novel, “Ishmael,” was the occasion for more than the usual author nerves. Reviewers will ponder not only the contents of his book but also this question: Is Quinn’s novel worth the largest American literary prize ever given?

The 56-year-old writer was the winner last June of the first $500,000 Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, a prize established in November, 1989, by media mogul Ted Turner to “inspire great writers and thinkers from around the world . . . to write about creative and positive solutions to global problems within an original work of fiction”--in other words, a very large incentive to writers to figure out how to save the Earth.

But Quinn had no sooner been notified of his good fortune than three of the nine fellowship judges--William Styron, Wallace Stegner and Peter Matthiessen--announced publicly that his book was not worth such a vast sum, and suggested he receive $50,000, the amount given to the three runners-up.

“It didn’t bother me in any major way,” Quinn says now, although he does confess that he was “a little hurt” by some of the comments. “Styron in particular seemed to find it offensive that one book would get this much money while there were so many writers going hungry out in the world. If he had asked, though, he would have discovered that I had gone hungry for better than a decade, that I had given up a sizable part of my life to this book.”

Quinn started work on “Ishmael” after giving up his Chicago-based career in educational publishing in 1975. “It came down to a point where I had to make a choice,” he says. “And the choice I made was to be a writer.”

In “Ishmael,” a man and the title character, a lowland gorilla who has taught himself to think, engage in a telepathic Socratic dialogue about the meaning of human history, our collective role in the ongoing destruction of the Earth and what we might do to change our ways.

According to Quinn’s view, around the time the Book of Genesis was written, humanity came to be divided into Takers and Leavers. The Takers are the developed societies that arose with the agricultural revolution--people who alter nature to suit man’s needs. Leavers are the nomadic, aboriginal peoples who leave the Earth as they find it.

Quinn’s book interprets Genesis as a piece of political propaganda written by a tribe of Semitic hunter-gatherers (Leavers) in danger of being overrun by their agriculturalist neighbors to the north (Takers).

Most history is written by Takers, which is why Quinn used the device of an outsider--the wise ape--who teaches that humans must learn to regard themselves as part of nature.

“The character of Ishmael didn’t appear until the book’s final version,” Quinn says, “but I always had the idea of someone on the outside looking in.” Ishmael takes his name from “the prototypic biblical figure of the outcast for the very reason that everything he says goes against the grain.”

Quinn’s philosophies arise from a religious education. He went to Jesuit schools in his hometown of Omaha, studied with the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton at Our Lady of Gesthemane in Kentucky and received a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University in Chicago.

Given the nature of his book and the furor that first brought “Ishmael” to the public’s eye, Quinn is gratified that critical response to the book has been, thus far, positive.

“It was surely for . . . deep, clear persuasiveness of argument that ‘Ishmael’ was given its huge prize,” the Washington Post said in a feature review that praised “the sweet and terrible lucidity of (the novel’s) analysis” and concluded “it was worth every penny” of the prize.

“Given what the publishing traffic will bear these days, Quinn, whose book has gone through seven complete drafts, deserves his money,” said the Los Angeles Times Book Review, which also liked the ape as a literary device. “The news about nature is, in general, so bad we don’t want to hear it. Young people especially don’t want to hear it. Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. But maybe, just maybe, from a gorilla. . . .”

Ray Bradbury, the only Turner judge to come to Quinn’s defense during the controversy, has called Ishmael “a lovely book, a wonderful explanation of part of the history of humankind.”

Quinn is still quick to defend his work against the criticisms leveled against it in June. “At the height of the controversy,” he says, “there was a lot of talk about whether or not Ishmael was a true novel, which, to me, was a case of looking for what wasn’t there--the great hole in the doughnut, as it were. Obviously, it’s not a novel like ‘Billy Bathgate’ or ‘At Play in the Fields of the Lord,’ but there is another tradition, very little observed now, of this kind of a book.”

The Post review found Quinn’s philosophical fiction to be in the tradition of “Candide.” The plot of “Ishmael” is minimal and largely incidental to the book’s structure and substance. This, Quinn explains, is because he set out to write a philosophical treatise, an exploration of ideas rather than characters.

“Ishmael began as a way to give shape to some concepts I was trying to develop. For a long time, I resisted doing it as a novel, since I don’t think people take novels seriously for their ideas. But I also didn’t want to write a scholarly tome. Finally, Turner’s call for manuscripts made me understand that my previous insistence on avoiding fiction was unnecessary.”

In the months before Turner announced his award, Quinn had thought about giving up on “Ishmael” altogether. “By that point,” he says, “I had taken it through seven drafts, seven distinct versions, with very little relation between one and the next.”

His first attempt, called “Man and Alien,” was written partly as a response to what Quinn calls “the idiotic examination of Old Testament stories” in Erich von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods.” The second, retitled “The Genesis Transcript,” ran 1,000 pages.

Another early version was rejected by a New York agent. “He told me it was unreviseable,” the author says wryly, “that there was no hope and I should give it up.” Quinn took some time out and wrote a psychological thriller, “Dreamer,” published by Tor books in 1988. With his wife, Rennie, he also spent several years running a weekly newspaper in New Mexico.

But he continued working on what would become “Ishmael.” The project he had thought would take him six months stretched to 13 years. “In the first four drafts,” he concedes, “I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I knew I was looking for something, but I couldn’t say what it was. It took a lot of struggling for me to see what was obvious.”

Publication was part of the award, and Turner jointly produced the book with Bantam. With the initial printing of 50,000 copies in bookstores and the first of five annual $100,000 Turner prize installments in hand, Quinn hopes his book will cause as much of a stir as winning the fellowship did.

“I’m not suggesting we go back to living like hunter-gatherers,” he says. “I have no program for the world. But I’m very serious about this. I’ll go anywhere, talk to anyone. I want to open things up and give people some new ideas.” He’s contributed an author’s note to “Ishmael” that lists a post office box in Austin, Tex., where interested readers can correspond with him about the book.

Now that he’s free of financial worry, Quinn is at work on another novel. He won’t say much about it, except that it’s no Son of Ishmael, that after 13 years he’s done what he wanted to do and is ready to move on.