Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes is a marvelous book. Its a first person journal maintained by Charley Gordon, a mentally retarded 32 year old that undergoes a surgical procedure and becomes smarter. As he becomes smarter, his writing improves, he begins to read voraciously and worlds of emotion open to him, including love and disapointment and pain, as he realizes people he thought were his friends used to make fun of him and remembers his family and why he was forced to leave home. As he rebels against the scientists that are studying him, and runs again with a test mouse, Algernon, he becomes aware he may start to loose his abilities. The final touching moments of the book follow Charley's decline.

On March 29th, Theatre Three offered a magnificent evening of scenes from their production of Flowers for Algernon, followed by Daniel Keyes, the author of the book, reading from his autobiography and recollecting about the writing process and the history of Flowers. He remembers how he used to 'second act': dress up, mix with the audience during the first intermission, enter the theatre and try to find a seat. This way he say many 2nd and 3rd acts, but never 1st acts, which he would have to reconstruct.

The first germ of the story came to him when he was 17 and premed at NYU and waiting for the subway from Brooklyn to Washington Sq., and it struck him that education was building a wedge between him and his family, and then together with that realization came a 'what if' idea, 'what if you could increase a person's intelligence'. He later gave up pursueing medicine, and choose psychology as his major, and to become a writer and write about the human mind and its conflicts with itself. He had many false starts with writing the story, but could not find the right character.

Many years later, he got a request for a story from a sci-fi mag, flipping through notes he found an idea that said "boy in a modified english class". He was teaching at Jefferson at the time, and was teaching some classes of slow learners and some of gifted kids who wanted to become writers. In the latter class, there were those that thought success should be a handed over to them. Keyes:" There are those who want to write, and those who want to be writers." In one of the other classes, in the first day one of the boys that had sat in the back, came to him and said he knew he was in "a dummy class", but wanted to know if he worked and hard and did well, whether he could be put in a regular class. The thought that a developmentally challenged kid could want the same as he, knowledge, hit Daniel Keyes in the gut. He now had a character, but no story yet.

The third germ of Charley Gordon, a recollection that is not in his autobiography, is af another student in that class. This student was always silent and didn't know how to read. Keyes taught him afterhours to read using phonics. He learned to read, started reading books and became involved in class. His family had to take him out of school for a while, for family reasons, and when he returned he had lost it, forgotten everything he had learned. This process of learning and then decline gave him the plot.

From that point on, the story wrote itself. Keyes would find out what Charley would do by writing. Daniel Keyes had to defend his story many times from changes suggested by editors. But resisted changing his story at every turn, particularly the end, many times criticized for being downbeat. Interestingly, Cliff Robertson, who took on the tv and then movie adaptation, tried to change the story, but was never able to make a changed version work. The movie, for instance, kept the downbeat ending because they couldn't find a mouse that could wiggle its whiskers for a cute upbeat ending. So they kept the original ending.

An interesting factoid. When Flowers was being made into a musical, Charles Strauss, who worte the music, had to swap the song 'Tomorrow' originally written for Charley, to another show that was having problems, 'Annie'.

Daniel Keyes is asked frequently whether Charlie wouldn't have been better off not having had the operation. To which he has come to respond, paraphrasing St. Augustine, better to have learned and lost, than never to have learned at all.