I got a hold of Garen Drussai’s Sonoma State University thesis.  I haven’t had time to read through the eleven stories (it’s called “Tryptich” because the thesis is divided into three sections), but the introduction gives some more information on her life, and also confirms some of what I had been guessing.

According to the introduction, Drussai was a born story-teller.  When, as a child, she was supposed to be dusting the furniture, she would instead hide under a table and tell herself stories.  (She felt herself an “alien,” adrift from others.)  As she looked back on that time, she valued her imagination—it is imagination, the ability to create vivid images—which makes the writer.  She seems to have a romantic, as opposed to craftsmanlike, say, view of writing.  Movies fed her imagination—although never stories with violence—and reading, of course.

The first stories she read were adventure tales, Lost World, and fairy tales, and the travels of Richard Halliburton, and the fantasies of Jules Verne.  She was influenced by Jack London and H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holes—this may have given her a connection to Anthony Boucher—as well as Greek, Roman, and Norse myths.  She read A Tale of Two Cities and memorized the poems of Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe.

While she was in high school she tried her hand at writing—“melancholy teen-age poems and stories” as she says on page ix, and though she submitted them they were never published.  After graduating high school, she lit off for Hollywood—this would have been about 1937—and took a speech class at Hollywood High School to get rid of her New York accent.  (It would have been about this time that Clara Hettler changed her name to Garen Lewis, and so it is likely that Garen was changing her entire identity with the move across the country.)

It was in California that Garen met and married the (also newly-renamed) Kirk Drussai.  She was attracted by his love of reading and interest in things philosophical.  He introduced her to science fiction where she could work out her own philosophical ideas: Science Fiction “opened up new vistas for me,” she wrote.  “There were subjects I could not tackle, at least it might be unwise to do so if I wanted to be published in popular magazines.  Sexual, racial, and violent themes might not be acceptable, and yet put the same ideas on another planet or at another time in the future, and they were all right.”  Garen name checked some of the masters, Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Matheson (although she mis-spelled Asimov and Heinlein).  She went on to tell a story about how the editor of Galaxy recognizer her on a return trip to New York and invited her to a party, at which a man asked her what her husband did.  She put him in his place.

According to Garen’s later account, she sold over a dozen stories (of which I have found five), some of which were reprinted.  Apparently, she had no other job at the time.  Her first sale—and first hundred dollars ever earned—came from the second story she sold to Anthony Boucher at F&SF.  (This was “Extra-Curricular.”)  She had to do three rewrites.  At the time, Drussai also began auditing courses at San Francisco State University, which fed her love of learning but left her no better off when she and Kirk divorced and she was left to support Milo.  (Who was, she said, ten years-old, which puts the divorce at about 1959.)

She did indeed end up in Southern California again, where she had a “managerial position” (likely this was running the coat check) and happened onto the UCLA campus.  Vowing to return to academe, she applied at Santa Monica Junior College and spent six years getting her bachelor’s—so she was in school from 1974 to 1980.  During this time, she also wrote a four-hundred page novel, although this remains unpublished.