Straits of Messina

Samuel R. Delany

Preface

To read writers writing about their own work is to watch often

intelligent and graceful men and women stumble between the pompous and
the pitiful. The spectacle is so disquieting I’ve sometimes suspected the
benighted folk requesting these displays must do so in happy anticipation
of the too-frequent clown show that results. A simple “No” to such
requests, it might then seem, should staunch the idiocy. And for many
writers constrained by a larger sense of decorum, it does.

For many years it did for me.

Why then, knowing better, does a writer from time to time to such a
request say, “Yes”?

There probably are some overwhelmingly popular writers who receive so

many demands for self-explication that they are simply worn down by the
onslaught. But that is not most of us.

I can think of two other reasons, however, that cover much.

One is, oddly, the “fascination of what’s difficult.” Having watched so

many other writers fail to negotiate the waters between the Scylla of
overweening self-importance and the Charybdis of childish self-
deprecation, the prose writer is drawn to take up the challenge in much
the same way as the poet is sometimes tempted to wrestle something
interesting into some particularly complex form—canzone, rondeau, or
chant royal—which seems, by the very intricacy of its structure,
restricted to the trivial.

The pieces in this book signed by me grow largely from that fascination—
although what made the task of self-criticism difficult was often more
difficult than I suspected; thus, on that count, they fail more often
than they succeed. Still, save their occasional headnotes, I don’t
believe they need further explanation.

The second reason, however (to which the second set of pieces cleaves),
is that desperate human failing, wishful thinking: “Wouldn’t it be nice
to have someone say all the fine and brilliant things about my work I so
desperately would like to hear ...?” Out of such wishfulness the “author”
of five of the pieces, K. Leslie Steiner, was born. Ms. Steiner is a
product of pure excess desire. Her specific point of genesis was London,
in the winter of 1973, when I was finishing up a late draft of a
pornographic novel, Hogg. The book had already produced a writer’s
preface, signed by me, “The Scorpion Garden.” But at that time there was
still rampant a tradition that the only recently legalized erotic text
carry as much apparatus as possible, in the form of scholarly exegeses,
medical disclaimers, and apologiae—many of them, of course, bogus. So “K.
Leslie Steiner” sprang full-formed from the writer’s head with her
initial critical offering, “‘The Scorpion Garden’ Revisited: The Anti-
Pornography of Samuel R. Delany.” Her ruminations are what it would have
been utterly wonderful to have discovered someone else had written about
my recent effort.

No, I wouldn’t have agreed with Steiner’s assessment or analysis, even at

the time. (My real opinions are still to be found in my own piece on the
novel, which opens this book.) Yes, it would have been nice. But
Steiner’s piece—as do all her offerings—gives not so much an insight into
the text it purports to consider, in this case Hogg itself (still, at
this writing, unpublished), as it gives a view into the dreams a writer
must dream in order to write at all. If there is anything instructive in
them, I suspect it is what troubles in them rather than what reassures.

Back in New York City in 1975, after a term teaching at SUNY Buffalo, I
was seeing a long and somewhat controversial SF novel through its first
half year of publication, when an invitation arrived from Tesseraci, the
SF Society of the University of New Hampshire, to address them on the
book and take part in a discussion of it. The critic within rose up to
respond with the letter/essay, “Of Sex, Objects, Signs, Systems, Sales,
SF, and Other Things.” But I was halfway through the dozen notes about
which my dis-tractionary essay on the semiology of cities centered when
more notes began to collect on other pages of the same notebook. Wouldn’t
it be grimly satisfying if someone did say about the book ...

... and Ms. Steiner, unthought of more than a year, rose, shaking her
hair and eyes, from the slough of desire, with “Some Remarks toward a
Reading of Dhalgren.”

For at least another year I didn’t show the piece to anyone. I must have
mentioned it, however, because at one point someone busily writing an
article on me asked to see it. With trepidation, I consented—and
discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that Steiner was “alive” enough for
me to put the opening pages through the typewriter again, updating the
various facts about sales, etc. And careful readers will realize that Ms.
Steiner has taken the opportunity of this publication to update her first
footnote on textual matters right to the present day.

At about the same time as I was first writing “Sex/Objects” and

“Remarks,” I was also seeing through publication another novel I’d
completed just before my return from England during the Christmas season
of 1974. The book had been conceived, written, and sold under the title
Trouble on Triton. I thought of it as a far-future comedy of manners, and
I was fond of its name. A friend had looked it up in the Day SF Index for
me, and I’d learned that there had been two insignificant short stories
with the same title in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Also, it recalled Simak’s The
Trouble with Tycho as well as a Henry Kuttner tale, “Trouble on Titan”—
all of which were resonances I was pleased with, since one of the
protagonist’s problems is that he lives his life by certain cliches he
has not developed the ability to question or deal with historically. But
even more strongly, at least to me, Trouble on Triton whispered of
Leonard Bernstein’s 1952 opera, Trouble in Tahiti. Bernstein’s seven-
scene opera takes place largely in a generalized suburban America. In the
course of it, a trio of radio voices from time to time connects the
audience and the characters to the escapist world of art, represented by
the technicolor musical movie, Trouble in Tahiti, showing a little ways
down the road—an alternative world of romance, adventure, and fulfilled
desire. I was much drawn to the irony. In one sense, the Triton of my
novel is to Earth very much as the Tahitian never-never land of
Bernstein’s opera is to U.S. suburbia—at least in terms of general
(American) associations: both Tahiti and Triton are imagined as places of
comparative sexual and spiritual freedom vis-a-vis the repressions and
constraints of Earth in general and suburban America in particular.
Looked at in terms of the opera’s structure, at the end of the novel the
trouble on Earth plays an ironically contrasting role in the lives of my
Tritonians similar to the role the distanced Tahitian movie construct
plays in the lives of Bernstein’s despair-ridden suburbanites—all of
which is to say that, in terms of what I took to be its ironies and
associations, I liked my title.

“Try and think of another one, Chip,” editor Fred Pohl said to me one
afternoon when we were returning to the Bantam offices after lunch.

“Whatever for?” I wanted to know.

First, Bantam had recently published a blockbuster bestseller called

Jaws, and the current theory reigning in the Bantam offices was that one—

word titles were a priori a Good Thing (i.e., commercial).

Second, as Fred put it so succinctly, “It sounds too much like too many
other SF stories. People will think they’ve read it before.”

I said: “But—”

“No ‘buts,’” said Fred.

So much for ironies and associations.

But while I was making the painful transition in my mind between Trouble
on Triton and the final, published, one-word (ho-hum ...) Triton,
something happened within me: desire asserted itself again,
excrutiatingly, insistently, uncontrollably. In this case, it was the
desire to read a positive, intelligent review, perhaps in a better
fanzine, of a book called Trouble on Triton—my book called Trouble on
Triton. And Ms. Steiner was once again at work.

Steiner ‘s briefest and penultimate offering emerged several years later,

when, from the West Coast, a fanzine called Venom appeared. More
accurately, Venom was a “killer review-zine.” Indeed, it shouldn’t be
called a “fanzine”: despite its mimeographed fanzine format, it was
published by professional SF writers and its contributors were limited to
people like Marta Randall, Robert Silverberg, Ursula Le Guin, and Vonda
Mclntyre. Venom encouraged SF writers to produce scathing reviews of
their colleagues’ books, publishing them under pseudonyms. The price of
admission, however, was a pseudonymous review of one of your own books—
equally scathing—that appeared in the same issue. It was great fun since
there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that the writer of any book
reviewed was also a contributor. From there on, the game was to try and
spot which reviews were mock self-put-downs and which were, however
tongue in cheek, the product of long-held critical grudges.

Before I reached the end of the first Venom, Steiner’s ectoplasmic

emanations had begun to re-cohere. This seemed Steiner’s perfect vehicle.
Here were people actually asking for a pseudonymous review of Delany by
Delany. But could Steiner, up till now such a fervent Delany partisan,
turn tail and attack ...?

I feel that in her review of Tales of Neveryon she has done a dangerously
fine job. The problem came, however, when, having penned the admission
piece for Venom, she turned to the work of another writer, where the true
fun was supposed to start ... and I realized: though Steiner could praise
or damn Delany to a faretheewell, she could criticize no one else!

By now, of course, there were other, practical problems. In the

appendices of the first two books of my Neveryon series, Steiner had
taken on the larger life of a fictive character. She had begun merely as
a voice, writing down wonderful things in the nebular dark where wishes
are whispered
The Scorpion Garden

Editor’s Note: Hogg, the novel “The Scorpion Garden” prefaces, is

Delany’s second experiment in pornography. The first, Equinox, was
published by Lancer Books as The Tides of Lust in 1973. Maurice Girodias
of The Olympia Press expressed interest in Hogg before he quit publishing
; no other publisher, however, has stepped forward to repeat M. Girodias
offer. At present, there appears little likelihood that Hogg will be
published.

—Douglas Barbour

“But how, Mr. Auden,” the interviewer from Life continued, “do you know
if what you are reading is really pornography?”

“That’s simple,” replied the poet. “It gives me an erection.”

Questions of “author’s intentions,”

“the leer of the sensualist,” and “lewd and lascivious thoughts” aside, I
am content with this as the informal emblem, if not the formal
definition, of pornography—with all its contingent ambiguities: What is
pornographic for X may not be pornographic for Y. What is pornographic
for Z at six o’clock may not be pornographic for Z at quarter to seven.
What is pornographic for the reader may not have been pornographic for
the writer; and vice versa.

Hogg is a work of pornography—that is, it was pornographic for the writer

at the time of its writing. Rereading the many-times reworked manuscript,
however, it strikes me that, in many places, it accomplishes many things
I should like to see in any novel and—you must allow for the writer’s
bias towards his latest work—in the rest is preparing to, or recovering
from, accomplishing them, with varying skill. Yet, it is only a novel.

Somehow, with such material, or, rather, material from such volatile
places in the psyche, one is surprised it is no more.

It does not twitter, bong, flash nor, in general, show any signs of life
other than aesthetic. After all that was undergone in its creation—after
all, it

is pornography—one might expect the manuscript itself to quiver and

vibrate beside the typewriter, sending out rays to alter the lives of
passersby on the street! But, while it is pornography, it is only a
novel. And the pornographic novel is only a novel of a particular type.

Two years ago (well after Hogg’s initial draft, and well before its
final) I listened to a member of the Academie Francaise, at a small New
England University, deliver a lecture (I translate the title freely):
“Sade: The Com-pleat Bourgeois.” It was a lecture of great humor, quite a
tour deforce. To have belabored, during our discussion following, the
fact that its main points, well embodied in its title, stood against all
historical evidence, as well as the literary and scholarly consensus of
the past three hundred years, would have been to attack wit with a
jackhammer. But when our discussion gave way to the inevitable sherry
party, where the professor received our compliments, someone did remark,
now that our avowedly socialist scholar had finished with his dismissal
of the Divine Marquis as a mere bourgeois moralist: Granted Sade’s
bourgeois morality, perhaps his particular type of it is the only
admirable aspect of the bourgeoisie—the aspect which, when one bourgeois
recognizes it in a second, the second is immediately clapped into jail or
an asylum; for it is that aspect which can ignite the fuel of revolution
garnered by the world’s oppressed.

To define any of this more rigorously, we must, of course, throw out the
initial premise and start again seriously—Sade was an aristocrat. But
that leads me from, not to, my point.

Pornography is didactic. That is one of its intrinsic qualities—a quality

that has more to do with the type of attention we pay to it than the
mten-tion of the writer. Better, then, a pornographer like Sade who at
least tries, however clumsily, to take advantage of this quality and,
more importantly, takes responsibility for what he preaches. This is
certainly preferable to the bulk of modern pornographer s who, convinced
they are writing healthy, liberating, sexually un-hung-up entertainments,
are actually espousing, when their work is examined, the most
conservative and reactionary Weltanschauung, one that no Victorian
patriarch would have argued with.

The didactic purpose of Sade’s major work, that diptych of novels the
first of which has been ubiquitously available in one form or another
since I learned to read, and the second of which has been nearly
unobtainable since its composition (only paragraphs of it had been
translated into English as late as 1968), was “to bring to birth the New
Woman.”
And what strange sister volumes are Justine and Juliettel

For almost three centuries, people have taken the former as the virtual
synonym for pornography. For much of the same period, people could never
quite agree whether or not the latter was even extant.

Justine, or the Miseries of Virtue, for three hundred-odd pages, depicts

a young woman who believes passionately that the myths of Womanly Virtue
and Female Honor are sacred to God; she suffers every conceivable abuse
and indignity at the hands of society in the impossible attempt to live
up to these ideals till, moments after she finishes recounting the
pathetic comedy of her life story to her sister, Juliette, she is struck
down by lightning—by the God she was so sure would bring her at least one
breath of peace before her death, in reward for her belief. That, anyway,
would be Justine’s interpretation. But, Sade assures us, there is no such
God. Her death came, as all of ours must, from chance; for the rest, she
is the victim of stupidity, ignorance, and truly pernicious values.

Juliette, or the Riches of Vice, the sister volume (but what a sister!—
over a thousand pages to Justine’s three hundred!) gives us the story of
Justine’s long-lost sibling: Juliette quickly learned in childhood, she
narrates, that womanly virtue and female honor—any trait society deigns
to call “virtuous,” but the “womanly” ones in particular—are a sham and
are only invoked at the expense of the “virtuous” person to the profit of
those in the position to apply the label, even if they are applying it to
themselves. Hiding behind the facade of “the virtuous,” unscrupulous men
and women have exploited her as a child, body, soul, and fortune.
Therefore, by the age of twelve, Juliette decides to commit any and every
crime and violence to better herself, or simply for amusement: she
indulges in theft, blackmail, a panoply of sexual pleasures and
atrocities; she commits innumerable murders, some for gain, some for
passion, and an amazing number from sheer caprice. Some are clever and
sly; many are overt, violent, and gory. As a result of all this, she
gains wealth, social prestige, personal happiness with her final husband
and her remaining lovers, male and female—and lives to a ripe, joyous old
age.

Shocking?

Far more than Justine. But, as Sade says in his Preface to Juliette, “...
the New Woman will only emerge when she learns to commit every horror and
violence that till now society has denied her as foreign to her
temperament.” In short, though he talks of a personal revolution, it is
still a real and corporeal one—as real as the one he lived through.

Why should such a revolution be necessary?

For a moment ignoring the overwhelming evidence of life, let us simply

look at what literature makes so evidently manifest.

This is the moral stance that controls, totalitarianly, the modern novel
in all its genres, high or low:
“It is the novelist’s duty to attack society, for its false complacency,
for its repressive rigidity, and for its self-righteous insensitivity.
Society is women. Therefore, the novelist must attack and punish women in
his works.”

At first glance, this must look very similar to the moral template of
Justine. It is, with this difference: Sade goes to great pains to show
that the idea that women are the upholders of the values of society and
civilization is an illusion fostered on them purely to get the better of
them—so they may be raped, enslaved, and all money and economic power
they may be fortunate enough to have inherited or actually to have earned
by their own work can be stripped from them the more easily. And the
larger point, of course, is that Justine is only a fraction of the
dialogue, the fraction that sets out this stance in order, at so much
greater length, to demolish it by positive example. And it is this
denial—Juliette, not Justine—that is Sade’s truly “banned” novel.1

Understandably, the most successful novelists are not the ones who have
espoused the novel’s moral stance intellectually, but the ones whose
basic psycho-sexual mechanism holds them to it despite their more
cerebral beliefs.

Reading the modern novel, one realizes all its energy, its bravura, its
whole aesthetic life springs from this stance; both its art and its
intelligence are straited by it, whatever its ostensible topic. Without
it, novels would miss the very drive that propels them from incident to
incident; and the novel as a form would deliquesce.

These are the novels of Fielding and Tolstoy, of Flaubert and Hawthorne,
of Lawrence and Joyce, of Hemingway and Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald, of
Mailer and Gaddis and Baldwin and Bellow, of Gide and Collette, of Kesey
and Brautigan and Berger. Even Beckett, as his novels stray near plot,
catches in the same gaping groove. These, to take the most random and
easily replaceable of examples, are spectacularly the novels of Thomas
Pynchon: Where is Oedipa Maas’s treasured collection of pre-thirties
Coca-Cola bottles? What happened to her passion for discovering new
junked car-yards? The major punishment is that novelists deny the very
calculus of invention second nature in their creation of the male
character to any and every female character. They cannot place her in a
structural position in that completely artificial construct called “the
story” so that, in her purposes, in her actions, and in her reactions,
she resonates as a whole and autonomous creation. Whereas the male
characters are automatically conceived as a matrix of purposeful,
habitual, and gratuitous actions, the female characters, if they are
“bad,” are all purpose, or, if they are “good,” are all gratuitous. It is
not that the female characters in the modern novel are characterizations
of bad or limited people—although, incidentally, they almost always are—
but that they are badly drawn, because the writers flatly refuse to apply
the same complex of literary artifice in their character realizations to
both males and

females—out of habits that begin as a response to some terror that human

individuation would make the female characters equal to the males. In a
political field where men have declared women must be kept inferior,
especially at the level of language, actually to show a woman as equal
threatens the whole field with overthrow because it implies the
possibility of superiority, which is so socially anathema that no one
(except certain Radical Lesbian groups and Radical Effeminists) will even
consider it. The proscribed limits on what is allowed women characters in
novels are stricter than any Hayes Code or Lord Chamberlain’s Office.
They define the novel. If the novel is dying, this above all (as Fiedler
hinted at, but could never quite come out and say, in Love and Death in
the American Novel) is what is killing it. And if no novelist, from
Barthelme to Oates, from Didion to Gass, can break these strictures, then
better it die! For it is always understood—it is worked into the texture
of the language with which the novelists cover their pages—that the men
in these books, no matter how formal a structure binds them, be it the
Czarist Army arrayed against Napoleon’s troops or the intrigues of Left
Bank Bohemia, are free; it is only the betrayal of this freedom that
decides if they are bad men or good men; no matter how grudgingly, they
are a fraternity of free beings. But they are not society, even when they
have power over it. Often they are society’s victim. Through stupidity or
malice, they may be society’s dupes. But society itself—no man in a novel
is ever shown thus.

Those occasional all—(or almost all-) male extravaganzas, from Melville’s

Moby Dick to Dickey’s Deliverance, ask to be considered, to the extent
they are womanless, as complex prose poems whose significance is in their
exploration of the sui generis existential embattlements of the free,
male spirit, allegorically dramatized in landscape or decor. Kate Millett
to the contrary, this is true even of Genet. But these books are never to
be taken as social commentary, unless, like Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest, they
contain one Awful Woman and/or, like Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, a
herd of faceless, immoral ones. Should we mistakenly examine what we can
of the author’s social ideas from his depiction of actual life on a
nineteenth-century whaling voyage, or a twentieth-century canoeing trip,
the picture seems oddly fascistic. And that certainly could not have been
the authors ‘ intention ....

The fictions of writers like Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, or Ronald

Firbank at first appear as a much needed respite from this standard
stance. Is it that their casts are all—(or almost all-) female? Perhaps
their characters simply tend to have what is so easily labelled a “female
sensibility,” i.e., they seldom act or particularly think of themselves
as apart from society and consequently seldom act or particularly think
of themselves as “free.” Yet

the socially marginal and the insane are important characters for all
these writers. Take a second look: These are the “Uncle Remus” tales of a
slave culture. “Society is women” is still their unquestioned
supposition. They simply choose to ignore the attack that is the
“novelist’s duty.”

But either in whole or in part, the moral stance of the novel is as

absurd and self-perpetuating a lie as the one given by those Southern
critics of American Slavery who claimed that the only flaw in the society
of the American South was the appallingly weak character, lack of honor,
laziness and scheming of its nigger chattel—who, according to them, had
been given too much power and responsibility at every level already.

This is ridiculous.

In our society, men have all the real social power: men are society.
Women, at best, are men’s viceroys in its administration. If some women
think of this as freedom, few men will trouble to dispute them. Man has
created the institution of womanhood, all to his own profit. And any
woman who would move even slightly beyond the allowable margins of that
institution is likely to become man’s hunted and hounded victim,
economically threatened and jeopardized at every turn, jeered toward any
slough of guilt and madness she can be shoved into: Man will commit any
indignity upon those human beings he has set aside into that minimal
social area he has reserved for women.

On observing the newborn infant, he notes the minutest physical

distinction and sets all who bear it apart linguistically: They are
“shes,”

“daughters,”

“girls,”

“nieces,” who will grow into “ladies,”

“women,”

“females,”

“aunts,”

“mothers,” and “grandmothers,” forever cut from the linguistic collective

of mankind. (Whoever claims the word “mankind” includes women is simply
ignorant of the language’s history: “... she knew too much of the
obstinacy of mankind to oppose any of their ridiculous humours,” writes
Fielding in Tom Jones, Chapter 5, paragraph 2; it is only since 1920,
i.e., the year women forced men to cede them the vote, that, as an
appeasing gesture, anyone even suggested the obviously masculine word
might, on occasion, be interpreted with such generous inclusiveness.)

I recall a theater audience, a few years ago, gasping when a sensa-

tionalistic documentary showed some ten—and twelve-year-old African boys
who, from the ages of two and three, had been kept in tiny cages, molds,
and mangles their whole lives to stunt and deform their limbs so that
their owners could put them to beg on the highways where their
deformities might excite sympathy.

But half the population on any street in any civilized western city is
victim of an equally vicious process of physical deformation.

Man imposes on any one female—and on females alone—from

infancy on, an aesthetic standard that equates the fragile, the weak, and
the powerless with the Good and the Beautiful. Consider: an uncritical
infant, you are encouraged by the giving and withholding of affection to
be dainty; should you be fleshy ... well, some men find that attractive.
But you must not be muscular! Perhaps in your legs, if you are a dancer,
for even that can attract men. But you must never have muscles in your
arms and hands. In you, muscular strength is the definition of
grotesquery; it is unthinkable; it is more obscene than any toilet
graffiti; it must never be depicted, even in jest. (Because, of course,
its possibility is much too serious for jest.) But the mental deformation
has been proceeding apace: The only toys we will give you with full
approval are first-level reproductions of the domestic surround. Do not
play with anything that might move your imagination beyond the home. Play
with nothing that must be built, constructed, created, or figured out;
with nothing that might stretch the mind or, even worse, encourage
competition in the physical sports or the fantasies of the moving, adult
world. Once in school, you can be as intellectually advanced as possible;
and (because at home the imaginative and fantasizing facilities, as well
as displays of physical energy, have been continually discouraged) how
customary it is in those early years for girls to excel in those purely
imitative exercises by which the intellect of the young is first judged.
And at first the praise you receive for your accomplishments seems
lavish. But soon you notice a discrepancy: While your efforts are
praised, any tangible results are subtly devalued. And the scale against
which the devaluation occurs is the efforts and achievements oi ... him.

If you write a poem, it is nice.

If he writes a poem, it is an evidence that his is a creative

personality.

If you organize some social event, that too is nice.

If he organizes some social event, it is because he has organizational

ability that may lead him on to greater things.

Everything he does seems to have both a history and a future.

Everything you do seems to register on only the most immediate attention

matrix.

With the most outrageous thing he does, even the condemnation of it,
again and again, reiterates that he and his outrage exist.

Any outrage of yours is glossed over, inarticulately excused and, as soon

as possible, forgotten.

Do you question the why of this?

“It is because you are a girl and are to partake in the mysteries of
‘womanhood.’ You will go on till some man find you. You will serve him
and bear him children. That alone will make you happy. Should experience
ever seem to say other than this, know that you have strayed from the
true
path: all true happiness, for you, lies upon it. Look: You have written
poems, organized events, committed outrages; and you have gotten less
satisfaction from it than he has. That is because you are a woman and it
is your place to be less happy. (Not because I, who praise and condemn,
regard you differently and have praised and condemned you less.) Believe
this till you die. If you do not, you will be mocked by the world, damned
by God, and will get no love.”

The reward of love given and the punishment of love withheld have been
the instruments with which these very real deformities have been
inflicted till now. The temptation to acquiesce again, no matter the
pain, is great. And if mothers collude with fathers ... well, educated
slaves worked as clerks and accountants in the slave markets of the ante-
bellum South. Brutalizing, psychological systems can hold the personality
to shape as surely as a bamboo splint, bound with thongs about the leg of
a child and left for years, will produce the desired crippled limb.

A gallery of laws once existed to ensure there was no appeal from this
situation. I know a woman, up this morning, as I write, at six, to make
bread for her family, who was forty years old when women finally took the
right to vote. If the legal system has altered, it is only because men
are convinced that the damages inflicted in childhood are much too
serious to be—seriously—affected by anything so abstract as a law. And it
hasn’t altered much.

“If the crippled creature really wants to limp about the edges of the
playing field during the game—well, let it!” is the tone in which men
have passed most sexually equalizing laws, after the incredible work of
the women who formulated and fought for them.

And having been so magnanimous by day, at night men turn to view your
atrophied limbs, at last undraped, your attenuated body they have pared
away with the acid of their dreams, your breasts praised if they are
immature, dismissed as repellent if they are long and mature, your vulva
above the fleshy thighs where the pelvic blades still jut in the
parchment skin, and above it all your reticent smile which says: “I have
no history, no memory of injustice. You are safe. I am not even capable
of rage toward something so awesome as youl”—and their cocks rise ....

And perhaps next day, the same men sit and fondly remember when they last
put some feisty old biddy in her place; when they last shocked some
tightassed virgin; when they last got the best of some castrating bitch;
and they smile and they think: “I am helping to liberate society ...”—
while war and environmental pollution and economic exploitation make
miserable and destroy, by frightening design, among all, all the earth’s
peoples!

A very healthy sound: the rage a-broil behind that reticent smile. No
person can deny another’s history; history comes into being as humans
endure because all humans remember, and women’s history is remembered

and broadcast by the mothers and the daughters who have lived it.
“But the very suffering that is God’s law women endure ...” someone
cries.

Well, man is very quick to label his most brutal whim “God’s law.” (All
those “deaths in childbirth” that plagued the nineteenth century and
infected the whole idea of motherhood well into the twentieth were not
deaths from childbirth itself; the overwhelming majority were from
puerperal fever, a complication that resulted because male doctors were
too squeamish [or ignorant] to curette away the afterbirth that did not
come out naturally—a complication that became prevalent, incidentally,
only when midwives were replaced by male attending physicians.) The same
voice again: “But you learn by your oppressions—”

No. Oppression teaches us nothing. It weakens us and demoralizes us,

makes us shallow and coarse. Under it, we may be forced to learn the
limits of the survival of the human in us. But it is the human that does
the teaching, not the oppression. And the learning justifies the
oppression not one bit.

And the novelist?

The lie that society has conditioned into the fictional practitioner is
inchoate, sexual in genesis and political in effect—and practically
opaque to intellectual analysis. Society, and the novels of others,
constantly reiterate that the novelist’s is the normal sexual syndrome.
It is condoned on every side. Bluntly, one who does not suffer from it—
whether male or female, heterosexual or homosexual—in our society is not
likely to become a novelist.

The great women writers of the nineteenth century came as close as anyone
to escaping the syndrome.

Yet Emma Woodhouse must be humiliated. (And if Jane Austen came the
closest of all, what a price she pays!)

Maggie Tulliver must drown.

So must the heroine of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, perhaps the most
pathetic, because it is the suicide of a person who has everything to
live for.

The novelistic lie seems inchoate to the medium of fiction. If one can
enumerate its effects on the art’s great practitioners, one could fill
encyclopedias with examples of how it has defaced the works of the
unskilled and the clumsy, whose fifty-thousand-word-plus endeavors fall,
by want of another name, under the heading, novel.

It affects me.

I am distressed when, writing a novel in which I am consciously

struggling to deploy men and women characters among the incidents of my
tale in some way that violates this moral template, I discover the
development of
what I first thought some innocent piece of stage business or decor
suddenly demands the situation resolve completely faithful to this sexual
determinism. When I think I have conquered even this—for one small
section of my story—then to step back from it and discover I have set
loose elements in my narrative which, in league with the basic structure
of the narrative itself, conspire backwards and forwards through the plot
to support this moral lie by the overall structure more firmly than
before, I am frightened. Some of this, the honest critic must admit, is
the attitude we bring, as readers, to the fictional gesture—so different
from our attitude toward the same gesture in life—so that one action,
performed by Joseph, gets a completely different interpretation when
performed by Judith; though we change only the proper noun, a phrase of
description previously neutral is at once pejorative; another, before
purely praising, now takes on an ironic tone of censure. But much more
frequently, it is simply the insidious workings of the writers’ own
prejudices.

Having constructed a scene in a book where a man and a woman must have a
physical fight and the woman win, rereading it three days later I notice
that I have written the whole six pages without a single declarative
sentence beginning with the pronoun She followed by an active predicate!
(Needless to say, there are many such sentences that begin with He.) All
through the scene, although he occasionally reels from her blow or the
like, she never actually hits him.

Another scene, another story: a discussion between a man and a woman. I

want the woman to make an epigrammatic point that happens to be one I
particularly believe in. Reading my tale later, I notice that somehow my
woman is completely unanchored to the world of my story. No profession is
mentioned for her, or any other source of income. How does she live?
Where does she come from? Where will she go when the story is over? She
is there only to make the point, and because she is, as a result of my
failure, an insubstantial character, the point, as made in the
discussion—in fact the whole discussion—is fairly insubstantial too. Yet
I know that had I given the point to an equally minor male character,
without even a second thought I would have constructed a whole series of
past experiences, as well as a present situation, for him that would
define a personality from which such a point might naturally flow. I know
that ideas must be connected to character in fiction; it is one of the
major aesthetic canons of my personal approach to writing. Yet time and
again these methods of character consti net ion, inchoate to the way in
which I write male characters, have simply blanked out while I tried to
create a female character in first draft after first draft. When I have
been lucky, in second, third, or fourth, I have been able to correct some
of this by conscientious contrivance.

Ten years ago, the result of this was that a number of readers (women)
took it upon themselves to let me know they understood and appreciated
what I was doing, and, in various letters, praised me for it—well before
the phrase Women’s Liberation had received any of its much-needed
currency. But language is a delicate medium; often it reflects the
thought of the practitioner despite what he thinks he is thinking. A more
recent and more informed reaction has been to note that, while there is
the (rare enough) attempt to fill out my women characters, the attempts
are contrived. I cannot argue; I know my method.

If it is annoying to watch methods creak, clank, and falter, it is

shattering to watch intentions carom off the track to smithereen against
the grandstand of cultural determinism:

I conceive a story around a form: “A set of couples, each member a

distinct personality type, undergoes a series of situations in which,
alternately singly and in pairs, each person must have an encounter with
every other.”

That is the note I wrote to myself at the head of my first work-page.

After this comes much labor to construct a set of situations that will
propel my characters from one encounter to the next; six weeks of five-
hour-a-day labor later, I have finished a reasonable second draft.
Picking it up from the kitchen table where I do most of my work, a day or
so later, I notice—and for the first time!—that while each man has his
encounter with every other man, and while each man has an encounter with
every woman, somehow I have neglected, in express opposition to my stated
form, to have any encounters among any of the women characters at all!
Anyone with a sense of symmetry can feel the tale drastically list; and
yet through two drafts the idea of fixing a situation so that two women
might have to talk to one another never even occurred to me! Indeed, as I
look again, I realize that there is one very definite non-encounter
between two of the women: one refuses to speak to another because of
mistaken jealousy over one of the men. At this point, the only way to
return to the form is to wrench apart all the elements of the story—plot,
themes, motivations—and build these missing encounters back in. On more
than one occasion I have wrenched, and, at least in terms of my own
satisfaction, found it well worth it.

The more distressing point is that I do not think I was any less aware of
this problem twelve years ago when I started writing than I am today. My
twentieth and twenty-first year were dominated by hundreds of discussions
with women writers, housewives, women psychologists, and the men around
them, on the position of women in society and literature. These are the
points that were made then: why can neither male nor female writers show
women in the psychological richness that they show men (or with the

psychological generosity they show to their male characters); why can

they not show the social and economic realities that hold their women to
the world of their fictions; and why can they not show women’s relations
with one another, involved and fruitful. And these are the places I still
find my own fictions failing at age thirty-one. The mark of the failure
is usually some blatant violation of a perfectly obvious aesthetic
symmetry—thankfully! I have become so numbed by the world I live in, were
it not for this over-determined relation between aesthetics and ethics, I
sometimes think I would not even be able to recognize these inequities at
all, even critically, much less have a hope of recognizing them from the
more complicated position inside the creative, story-making process.
But when I speak of the inequity of literary artifice, the above examples
only define the pernicious category. Again and again, over twelve years
of writing, when my intentions have been the most conscientiously
egalitarian, my initial results have been sabotaged by them. Looking at
it objectively, it seems to have all the earmarks of a compulsive
neurosis; and it is not in the least heartening that this particular
neurosis seems endemic to almost all novelists in the West. What we are
dealing with, here, are those fine elements of language and sensibility
which the novelist uses to amass the life of the book. To see them so
insidiously outside control as soon as the material wants to veer from
the well-worn groove is terrifying. All writers who have confronted this
problem must have felt the pressure on the vein, the tightening around
the throat, the heart itself crushed, their lives as novelists in danger.
But, somehow, during the uncritical years of reading, when the novel was
weaving its initial enchantment around us, it also managed to scribe out
on the base materia of recognition memory the pattern which the most
energetic or considered efforts seem unable to erase and still leave a
narrative recognizable to us, who have been so seduced, as fiction.

It is sexual.

I suffer from it.

Which brings me to the pornographic novel.

Each genre has its particular attractions, some of which appeal to the
most serious writers, others to the most cynical. The attraction that the
pornographic novel holds for the serious writer is a chance to organize a
structure with which to explore his own, inchoate fantasies; the
temptation to the cynical writer is that he can make minimal moneys while
indulging his. And it is a bold writer who can claim he or she has a
clear and certain view of the illusive line, especially here, between
indulgence and exploration.

Nevertheless, this is the sexual syndrome—the truth behind the novel’s

standard, moral stance—that I have chosen to explore:

Power in our society is overwhelmingly allotted to men; no matter how

socially marginal a man is, the power situation is maintained in all ways
when it is at the expense of women. Women are almost always society’s
victims, when society deigns to consider them at all—which is rarely.

That is the didactic template under Hogg.

It is not Sade’s.

Still, do not mistake it for the standard lie ....

Though if any woman wishes to construct a proof that I have, indeed,

fallen victim to it, at any level, subtle or overt, I bow to her argument
sight unseen. It is all too possible. It is all too probable. I can only
say: “Produce some fiction that contradicts it. That is the novel I wait
for more eagerly than any other.”
In 1963, Marilyn and I, returning at dawn to our apartment on East Fifth
Street, found a young woman asleep on a schoolyard bench on West Fourth.
She had been the manager of a coffee house where I occasionally played
guitar and sang for what Greenwich Village tourists would leave in the
wicker basket—it was “seeded” with a dollar bill, but we were happy if
there were quarters. We took her back to our second-floor apartment at
the end of our dead-end street, and a complicated and harrowing story
followed to explain why she was sleeping on a schoolyard bench in the
first place: the only detail I remember was that, among other
sordidnesses, someone had hired three men to rape the woman friend she
had been staying with; and, indeed, such hirings, in certain circles,
were common.

Once, I spent a boozy evening at a Clancy’s on Twenty-third Street,

listening to a man regale me till closing with a tale, verging on
psychotic incoherence, of the years he had spent as a “rape artist,” when
he had been paid to sexually molest women—usually strangers to him. His
account was punctuated by unfathomable statements like: “But I never
killed none of ’em. Not one—at least not on purpose ...”—a sort of line
frequently used to lend ironic poignance to certain romantic fictions
but, when encountered in life, somehow says more about fiction than about
the incidents under discussion.

These, among other things, are the basal subject matter for Hogg.

It is perhaps time to say that Hogg is certainly not pornography for-

women, despite my concern—no, I can be more honest: despite my honest
guilt.

Having said that, it is only fair to say: neither is it pornography for

most men.

Though the majority of the goings-on inside depict sex between

males, I would be astounded if even a plurality of male homosexuals found

these goings-on particularly to their tastes. And I suspect it will be
the rare lesbian who enjoys contemplating the ensuing scenes.

But it is the most rigorous and honest fictional exploration I can render
of what crawls and wriggles and grubs among the roots in my own scorpion
garden.

That is its only excuse.

The Scorpion Garden is a dangerous place.

I have worked and reworked my map carefully over the last four years. It
will take you, certainly, past a few of the more interesting growths.
Followed carefully, it will even lead you out again—but a warning: These
gardens are far larger than they appear. Are they pretty? I would not
dare suggest it. But when you have browsed on the excrescent foliage;
when you have observed the wet, sloughed bark, whose odor of decay is its
most savory feature; when you have glimpsed the dark things glittering
beneath the shadowy overhang, perhaps you will find something to make you
look harder .... Listen!

The hinges are grating to behind us.

How long have we been within?

—London

September 1973

1Justine (1791) and Juliette (1797) are, of course, as much manuals by a

man for women’s behavior as were Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa
(1748) fifty years before. Indeed, Justine and Juliette may be read as
parodies of their English forebears in much the same way that Gulliver’s
Travels (1726) can be read as a parody of the phenomenally successful
Robinson Crusoe (1720) that had appeared six years before it. But while
Sade’s and Richardson’s works share the same respective physical
proportions, the pornographic (i.e., fantasy) element in Sade allows a
margin of interpretive play Richardson sorely misses.

A note on the titles of the two novels is appropriate here:

In 1787 while in prison for his revolutionary activities, Sade wrote a

novel he entitled Les Infortunes de la vertue [The Misfortunes of
Virtue]. Several times Justine has been translated into English under the
title Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, which is a good
approximation of this early title. In 1791 under the title Justine, ou
les malheurs de vertu [Justine, or the Miseries of Virtue], an expanded
version of the novel was finally printed in Paris, chez Girouard on the
rue du Bout-du-Monde in two octavo volumes, with a frontispiece depicting
Virtue between Licentiousness and Irreligion. At the place on the title
page generally reserved for the publisher’s imprint there appeared the
vague description: In Holland, At Associated Booksellers. The novel sold
quite briskly in Paris until 1797, when an immense book appeared, in ten
volumes, entitled Lo nouvelle Justine—which the 18th century French
reader would have read as: A New [version of, or edition of] “Justine”

The full bibliographic citation is of interest:

La nouvelle Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu. Ouvrage orne d’unfron-

tispice et de quarante graves avec soin. En Hollande [Paris], 7797. Four
volumes, 18mo. These four volumes comprise the first part of the
definitive edition of this work, of which the second part, in six
volumes, bears the title: La nouvelle Justine, ou les malheurs de la
vertu, suivie de Vhistoire de Juliette, sa soeur [ou les prosperites du
vice]. Ouvrage orne d’un frontispice et de cent sujet graves avec soin.
En Hollande [Paris].

Assuming the final six volumes of this 4,000 page epic carry Sade’s final
thoughts as to title, etc., then we are justified in calling the separate
novels, Justine, ou les malheurs de vertu and Juliette, ou les
prosperites du vice. The most respectable English translation, that of
Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (Grove Press, New York: 1965), still
chooses, nevertheless, to call the first volume Justine, or Good Conduct
Well-Chastised, which is, I’m afraid, an importation of Victorian
smuttiness that simply has no bearing on this 18th Century revolutionary
document. La nouvelle Justine sold more or less without hindrance for a
year. Then searches and seizures began. On March 6,1801, Sade and his
publisher, Masse, were arrested. Sade vigorously denied being the author
of either work (there was no author given in the original published
version), but was again incarcerated, first in St.-Pelagie, and, two
years later, in Charenton Asylum, where he remained until his death.
“The Scorpion Garden” Revisited:

A Note on the Anti-Pornography of Samuel R. Delany

by K. Leslie Steiner

In his preface, “The Scorpion Garden,” holding up a witty exchange

between W. H. Auden and a Life Magazine interviewer, Delany introduces
his novel Hogg as pornography. I acknowledge the writer’s opinion—and
maintain, by the same emblem he cites, the ability to produce erection
(and, one presumes, vaginal dilation and lubrication ...?), he has erred.
Though the material of Hogg (and his previous “pornographic” novel
Equinox [published as The Tides of Lust, New York: Lancer Books, 1973])
is the constantly perverse aspect of sexual mechanics (does a page go by
without intense exploration of their textures, their smells, their
tastes?) and remains insistently so and at a density greater than
numerous more exploitative and cynical works, I think I can say that
while there may be places here and there which stimulate the average male
(or female) reader, frankly, there aren’t many!

What he has written I would call anti-pornography—in the sense, say,

Samuel Beckett’s novels have been called anti-novels.

Let me explain.

The novel is traditionally rich, in description and design, in incident

and action, in social reflection and psychological density. In contrast,
the anti-novel is traditionally thin, a minimal presentation of a minimal
consciousness at a minimal level of activity.

Conversely, traditional pornography has always been thin—even

18

Sade, even Apollinaire. (Many anti-novels, less successful than

Beckett’s, read like pornography with the sex excised.) In the bulk of
pornographic films and novels, the situations in which the sex occurs are
only sketched. Even in Sade, though he allows great length to the
didactic passages, the sex has an oddly emblematic quality. In most
traditional pornographic movies, the bulk of the extreme close-up footage
could be of any couple having sex, and the majority of scenes in most
modern pornographic fiction seem to be written from a glossary of some
hundred, a hundred fifty phrases denoting stock positions, stock
passions, and stock physiological/ emotional responses—to allow, quite
understandably, the imagination to do the work necessary if the
pornography is to be, by Delany’s informal emblem, successful.

Delany’s pornography, however, is rich. One reason why it bypasses

eroticism is that, even should a particular act described happen to be
Your Thing, he is always telling you too much about it for you to lapse
into the fantasy state necessary for excitement. There is too much
information about what is going on, how it is being done, who is doing
it, and whom it is being done to, so that the reader has as much chance
for real, extended arousal as a Masters-and-Johnson researcher busy with
lights, photometers, cameras, and measuring tapes. This is why I call
Delany’s work anti-pornography.

Of course, the anti-novel is a sub-genre of the novel; in the same way,

anti-pornography is a sub-genre of pornography—not, as the morphology of
the terms suggests, a distinct and opposite form; it is rather a smaller,
apposite area in which some of the genre’s overt traditions have been
reversed for particular purposes.

My own reaction on reaching, for the first time, the final line of this
dark and bizarre concoction—Hogg—was a sudden rush of resonant horror, as
all the images of the novel came back to sweep around me, much like my
first reaction to the finale of Moby Dick, where the author calls up all
the major images of his book in a verbal recreation of the whirlpool he
is describing. It is interesting that other Delany works have been
compared with Melville. As august a publication as Time said, a bit
extravagantly, of his fine science fiction novel Nova “... it reads like
Moby Dick at a strobe-light show.” But both Melville and Delany are
concerned with an intensely American experience, though both often
abandon the terra firma of America per se to explore it, Melville in a
boat, Delany in a space ship. But this (as Delany also says in his
preface) leads me from, not to, my point.

Susan Sontag, in a charmingly naive essay, has pointed out some of the
structural similarities between pornography and science fiction. In the
past decade a number of writers, with varying aesthetic success, have
moved back and forth from one to the other (e.g., Philip Jose Farmer,
Theodore

Sturgeon, Glen Cook, Andrew Offutt, and Richard Geis). Delany’s primary
dramatic purpose, sounded in the novel’s opening line, is to give a
significant portrait, and ultimately a sympathetic one, of a monster—a
laudable science fiction theme if there ever was one, dating from
Frankenstein. But Delany has transferred his theme to pornography: his
monster is a sexual human.

We are romantically conditioned to extend—while we can remain at a safe

distance—much sympathy to the human creature who errs into the monstrous.
But once we have decided that the man or woman walking on two legs, with
two hands, a brain and a mouth, really is a monster, we become
monstrously cruel. Delany’s characters are monsters; they are not merely
deluded or mistaken in their actions. They are psychotic, they are
depraved, they are selfish and vicious, but they are not deluded: Even
though the worst of Harkner’s crimes are committed in a psychotic half-
trance, he can say, when the trance is past: “I don’t want anybody to
feel sorry for me ... I’d kill a mother-fucker for that.” Future crimes,
as heinous as the ones already done, are by no means out of the question.
And the reader must close the book aware of it. The job of sympathetic
portraiture here is a huge one.

An interesting side-note: The finest science fiction writer in the

American language, Theodore Sturgeon, once stepped across his genre’s
boundaries to deal with the same theme as Delany, a dozen or more years
ago, in an exquisite (if the rather saccharine opening pages are
excepted) short novel, Some of Your Blood. Sturgeon’s temporary field for
this work was the Psychological Mystery. His very effective character
study (of another human “monster”) is presented as a palimpsest of
portraits of a young army recruit (a perfect model for e.e. cummings’s “i
sing of Olaf) whom we learn, in about the third portrait down, has a
sexual fetish for human blood. As effective and moving as Sturgeon’s tour
de force is, it is finally marred by the happy resolution using a
technicality involving menstrual blood and cunni-lingus (all implied with
pyrotechnical discreetness). It is believable for the length of the story
only because the actual psycho/sexual mechanics are kept pretty much in
the background. Examined closely, however, the technicality seems rather
flimsy, i.e., very few people whose sexual fetish is human blood would be
completely satisfied with, let us say, an occasional polystyrene
container from the local blood bank. Comic vampires aside, such
fetishists do exist, they have been somewhat studied, and the method of
acquisition is usually part of their fetish and involves some violence,
no matter how ritualized. Sturgeon’s “solution” avoids this.

Delany’s method for handling this theme is to explore, and keep on

exploring, the psycho/sexual relations of his monster with a host of
other monsters, a more ambitious undertaking than Sturgeon’s and, as much
as I admire the earlier tale, I feel a richer one.

To explore this richness, I am going to discuss the language of the book,

the structure of the book, the political template that underlies it, and,
finally, the book’s significance.

II

It is the novelistic effects of Hogg, most readers will agree, that give
it its power.

A reason for this, I suspect, is that the serious approach to Hogg’s type
of material in the past has been very different. We are more used to the
violence, the sordidness, the degradation, the brutality that fill, that
clutter Hogg’s pages, presented in the hysterical, sparsely punctuated
prose of a Hubert Selby, Jr. or a William Burroughs. Such things must be
shouted about, must excite some harangue, some dithyramb, or other
Dionysian mode of rhetoric ...

After two, single sentence paragraphs, stating the major and minor themes
of the book, Delany confronts us with the blatant mechanics of his
relationships, but in the calmest, most off-hand manner possible. He
commences his description—and suddenly our heads are locked, fixed inches
from the appalling parts; and, with the exception of a page or two here
and there, our gaze is never let deviate; we are not allowed to draw back
an instant, even to take breath.

The story is not shouted; it is sighed, sotto voce, in the quietest

diction. But, quiet as the diction is, its substance is raw, painful,
tortured. There is no way to keep the rawness from distracting us from
the formal organization and orchestration going on within each section,
each scene, each incident—so that when the novelistic effects do occur,
they hit like hammers!

The first monster Delany introduces us to is his narrator, a nameless

eleven year old boy in whom practically anything resembling human
sensibilities has been numbed or extracted—the first chapter gives us
with insidious coolness some of the extraction process—and in whom, by
little else than chance conditioning it would seem, a whole set of
brutalized and degraded responses has been substituted. Hogg is presented
to us through the ironical distancing of this childish and alien mind in
a vocabulary that, like Beckett’s, seldom exceeds a slightly colloquial
Basic English.

The book begins practically in a whisper. But by the time we have

finished the first six numberless and nameless chapters, climaxing with
Harkner’s self-mutilation, the effect is of one constant shriek—though
the

diction of any sentence, even here, is the same as in the opening pages:
measured, impartial, precise. But to go back, even from here, and reread
the opening pages (as I did my second time through the novel) is to hear
that shriek from the very beginning. It is our ear that Delany has been
tuning, from his very first sentence.

The excuse for the language in which Hogg is written (its directness, its
simplicity, its clarity) is that it is the language of a child. Anyone
with an ear for the nuances in the development of American prose,
however, will hear that it is an artful variation of the language of
Chandler—whom no less a figure than Andre Gide called the finest stylist
in America. Granted the tendency of the French to go overboard for things
American, there is something real to consider here.

America has no classic diction—at least not in the mainstream of its

literature. Its “Great Styles”—the gothic paragraphs of Faulkner, or the
experiments to capture the cadences of “real speech” of Stein and
Hemingway (significantly, both had to leave America before the
experiments became successful, and Hemingway’s return to this country
seems to have thrown his method into self-parody), the balanced play-at-
refinement of Fitzgerald, or even the earlier, self-conscious Britishisms
of Henry James (James’s British, like his Britain once he moved there,
was very much a British of the mind) are all artificial, individually
architected, and essentially romantic dictions. They are the opposite of
classic. They are all brilliantly suited for the presentation of a
region, geographic, psychological, or social; at the same time, none of
them could be the language of a people. Even the naturalists who tried to
capture the language the people spoke—Farrell, Dos Passos, the Dahlberg
of Bottom Dog—were bent on an innately personal task. What Chandler did,
even more than Hammett, was to take the language the people read and
refine it—purify it, bring it to pitch, crystallize it. Chandler, and
writers like him, took the language of journalism and the pulps as their
basic material and honed from it a verbal tool that was as close as
American could come to a classic diction. What were its hallmarks? It was
easy; it was graceful; it did relate, and relate closely, to the language
people spoke—not in a slavish imitation of individual quirks and
angularities, but in the sane and measured way speech and writing must
relate if both are to remain alive. It could absorb immense colloquialism
without strain. There was nothing in the real world of things and actions
it could not describe. But Chandler’s letters are written in the same
language: in them, you will find the most fine and subtle critical
concepts put as clearly as any of Philip Marlowe’s descriptions of
Southern California manners and mores. By the use of idiom (essentially a
product of speech—as distinct from cliche, primarily a manifestation of
writing), it could be witty, concise, or cutting.

(And using idioms is a very different process from accurately recording

them to lend color and verisimilitude to a reproduction of regional
speech.) Above all, it had the classic virtue of clarity. Unlike
Faulkner’s, James’s, or Stein’s (and even Hemingway’s), you never had to
ask of Chandler’s prose: “But what does this sentence mearil” While the
grammar was often that of informal speech, the substance was never
ambiguous on first hearing to a native American speaker. You never had to
track back through even one of his sentences or paragraphs to untangle
the antecedent of a lost pronoun, or to discover what some dangling,
baroque clause was actually modifying. This meant the aesthetic effects
in fictions built of such language had to be achieved by formal means. It
was certainly a visual language, but visual with a clear, sharp light,
rather than a murky, glossalized glimmer. The fictive effects arose from
the resonances set off in the mind of the reader between objects,
situations, emotions, and actions, clearly limned and significantly
placed.

The mainstream of American literature would, of course, claim this

technique for its own. But its writers were always concerned with
generating the greatest number of vibrations from (rather than
juxtapositions of) individual objects, individual situations, individual
actions, detonated by as much verbal charge as each author, using his
individual verbal methods, could muster.

The mainstream American writer must practically invent his own language.

But Chandler’s is the language still handed to the maverick. The idioms
and topical phrases change, year to year, decade to decade. Other than
that, however, it remains, structurally, practically intact. It is a
vastly supple language: it can be glitteringly cold; it can be tender-
tough; it can chant; it can yawp; it can sing. More at home in the
street, it can still enter any drawing room, business conference, or
ambassadorial hall—though seldom without gaining a slightly ironic note.
That it was often abused is the inevitable fate of a fine tool tossed
away in the corner, but it has been taken up by enough superb artists,
working in their maverick fields—Stanley G. Wein-baum, Bester, Sturgeon,
the early Zelazny, in science fiction; Hammett, Chandler, and both
MacDonalds, in the mystery; Nathanael West, Darryl Ponicsan [The Last
Detail], Robert Kelly [The Scorpions and Cities] in that oddest of
American genres, the Art Novel—to have proved itself over and over. I do
not mean to imply that each writer does not use this tool in a
recognizably different way. Each uses its virtues to make it very much
his own.

What sort of language does it become on Delany’s page?

What sort of language is it in Hogg?

It is clear. (I do not think there is one ambiguous sentence, despite

colloquial grammar, from beginning to end of the book.) It is supple. It
is

cold. There is perhaps a slight reliance on the genitive over the

prepositional (“... his fist’s black knot ...” rather than “the black
knot of his fist ...”), presumably because, though the diction of the
former is cramped and angular, so is the image; and it’s briefer. Verbal
economy, Delany has written elsewhere, is the center of style.

The discussion of language is the place to address myself to the

question: Is Hogg obscene?

In a classic language, while there is blasphemy—the conscious and

articulate insulting of the gods—there are no “dirty words.” Words, the
words of the people, are used for what they fit. The idea that there are
things in themselves not fit to be said is a romantic notion; the classic
ideal is that anything, put well into the classic language—even the
blasphemous—may be heard by all. Greek drama, of course, gave us the word
“obscene”; but it is perhaps well to go back to its classical meaning:
Ob-skene, Off-stage, i.e., “not-shown.” In the classic Greek drama, there
were many things not shown; but there was nothing that could not be
talked about. And the ob-skene actions, on which the plots of the
tragedies turn, were described to the audience in exhaustive detail by
that ubiquitous Messenger, just arrived from the blood-soaked bed-
chamber, the corpse-strewn bath.

From a first reading of Hogg we get a first impression that the author
has held nothing back. But a second look shows there is a whole
complicated matrix of ob-skene events, far more horrendous than the on-
stage ones, that are only talked about, or reported—by radio, by Monty
and Bill, or by Rufus. Everything that revolves around Mr. Jonas, for
example, is merely speculation. And Mr. Jonas’s death, certainly the most
gratuitously violent in the novel, takes place in the break between
chapters.

Violent as what appears on stage in Hogg is, the reader should note that,
as with the Greeks, there is a point of violence—not of sex—that, as
incidents approach it, determines whether they are to be shown or
reported. As with the Greeks, this is not for moral reasons, but
aesthetic ones. As Aristotle pointed out, once things go beyond this
point, placed ob-skene they are simply more effective.
But we are already into the form of the novel.

III

Hogg is a version of pastoral.

Most genre fiction (or “category fiction” as publishers now call it) is.

In Hogg, however, there is the difference that the Antiseptic Tenet of

the pastoral is thrown, gear-grindingly, into reverse. From Sade, through
Cleland, to Apollinaire, and on, how many pornographic writers have
religiously provided us with the moment in which, after the sweat—(and
worse-) drenched orgies are over, the participants leap up to wash? There
is only one time anything near this happens in Hogg, and its use,
effectively enough, is not for any symbolic (and, with those other
authors, how hollow that symbol always feels!) purification, but rather
to strip the character even further, to leave him more naked, with even
the protection of his own dirt—the filth, the blood, the excreta—gone.
Harkner, naked in the truck, newly scrubbed and still dripping, listening
to another radio report, must be one of the most pathetic creatures in
American fiction.

Hogg is pastoral, but with its focus fixed on the sordid goings-on in
Caliban’s cave—what Delany calls, in his preface, the Scorpion Garden.
For the writer of Hogg, Caliban’s cave, it would seem, forms most of the
world. And from it, the Prosperos of the universe—the Mr. Jonases (and
the Martin Sells!)—are a terrifying bunch. Even the Ariels—Monty, Bill,
Whitey, Officer Pelham, and Inspector Haley—are mean and tarnished.
Caliban is still rutting after various Mirandas, with Prospero’s
blessing. Ferdinand, by shipwreck or any other means (look at what lives
on the broken-down boats along Crawhole!) has not arrived on this shore!
From the author’s preface, one suspects he is not about to.

And the dramatic structure of the book is Shakespearean in another way:

there is a typically Shakespearean penultimate act in which the main
characters retire from the stage to rest up for a final, bravura entrance
and the climactic sword fight. One of the most impressive formal devices
occurs in this hiatus, with the use of the aforementioned radio-casts. A
horrendous catalogue of mass-murders is coming to us in a series of
parodistic news bulletins that punctuate the chapter’s foreground action.
They have all the hysterical piety of the small-town media faced with a
shattering horror, effective enough as set pieces (and the only example
of a really contrasting diction); but Delany turns them to far more
complicated ends. The crimes are bringing one of our monsters closer and
closer to the Crawhole docks (where the narrator has been sold[!] as a
waterfront catamite). The last crime is committed on a barge just the
other side of the bushes where (and while) the narrator is being buggered
by the two scow owners and one of the dockside

police. Minutes after the shots and screams, when we burst from the
bushes ready to face the reality of the horrors that have been
tantalizing us till now with their approach, we find ourselves, instead,
face to face with the radio crew and their mobile van, embarking on their
own On-The-Spot coverage, so that this crime is given us as a bizarre
fugue, both live and (after a thirty second delay) on the police car
radio speaker. This would be an impressive enough cadenza, but Delany
goes a step further. He manages to give us the whole anti-world of the
novel in miniature with the director, the announcer, and the various
assistants. Among them, indeed, you will find Delany’s most subtly drawn,
ob-skene monster, the absent program producer Martin Sells, who is
apparently the guiding force behind the station policy of poshlust and
sensational, kitschy sentimentality. Sells’ characterization is completed
a chapter later in one cutting stroke (in the scene mentioned with
Harkner, naked, in the truck), when, in the last radio report, we are
told that Sells has been “on the phone long distance” with the officers
of the Womack County Correctional Institute for Boys “... to find out for
you ...” what sort of a boy Harkner “... really is.” The other extremely
effective thing that comes out of the brief appearance of the radio crew
is the moving encounter between the young black girl, Honey-Pie, and the
radio director, which supplies us with the reading for the final exchange
between the narrator and Hogg—the reading that, more than anything else,
is responsible for the significant horror that I spoke of before, and
that creates the book’s final, overwhelming effect.

But there are many other formal excellences in the book: The way in which
the opening section first seems a completely unrelated prologue, but
turns out to supply so much, both in characters and theme; or Hawk’s
bizar-rely comic monologue on “his thing” beside the flaming car; or any
of the numerous dovetailing ironies of which only the narrator and the
reader are aware. (Hogg, for example, never learns that Mr. Jonas is
dead; and isn’t this used, in just the tiniest way, to gain sympathy for
Mr. Jonas’s unsavory ex-employee?) Then there is the book’s formal
hierarchy of monsters: the major monsters, Hogg, Denny, Nigg, Dago, and
the narrator, are buttressed by a gallery of minor ones—Pedro, Mr.
Alvarez, the Townley brothers, Big Sambo, Rat, Chico, and Hawk—who are
highlighted in turn by a Gogolian collection of mini-monsters, some, like
Martin Sells, who do not even appear, or others, like Monty, Bill, and
Whitey, who merely drift through with only an indication of the horror
that might accrue to them.

IV

At this point, having examined both the texture and the structure of the
book, we can ask the simplistic question “What, then, is Hogg about?”
with hope of a non-simplistic answer.

Delany has prefaced his book with an essay which, though it begins by
discussing pornography, is primarily about sexism in the novel. It is in
turn witty, elegant, and impassioned. My own reaction, when I first read
it, was a frank suspicion that the novel could not live up to it.

And indeed, one can make a case that it would be hard to conceive of a
more sexist novel than Hogg; but if it is sexist, it is not misogynistic;
the range of women characters and their fates, for example, is far
greater than, say, in Hitchcock’s somewhat similar Frenzy. And there is
an honesty to the sexism that, if not redeeming, is, at least, hopeful.
Delany does not commit the particular sexist flaws he describes in his
opening essay; and, in a book composed of material such as Hogg, that is
an achievement.

But sexism and the treatment of women is
asks us to view his novel against. Given
character, and the avocations of most of
amateur rape—it is a template that it is
mind.
the political template Delany
the vocation of his main
his minor ones—professional and
hard to let slip too far out of

One of the things Delany warns us of, by indirection, in his preface, is

that all the monsters in his book will be male. If his view of the world,
particularly in the relation of men and women that the preface presents,
is correct, then it follows (I am assuming this is his logic) there
simply is no room for female monsters in fiction. It seems he has decided
this in the same way that a generation of American writers in the
thirties and forties decided that there was no longer room in fiction for
the black monster—such a mainstay of both American and European light
fiction for the previous seventy-five years (and whose avatars can still
be seen in films like Griffith’s Birth of a Nation). It is not, I think
Delany would concur, that there are no female monsters in life. It is
rather that there are no female monsters as usually presented in
literature; and that the famous ones, such as Kesey’s Big Nurse, or
Arthur Kopit’s Mom (from Oh, Dad, Poor Dad) are a trivializing political
lie. I gather, from book and preface, that Delany feels the presentation
of any female monstrousness without a firm, fictional appeal to the
sociological, economic, and psychological indignities women are forced to
endure (as a political class) on every front from men, is, at this point
in history, merely a politically egregious cliche. I suspect he feels,
further, that since the monstrousness with which men treat women, in all
walks, so outweighs those times when women are brutalized into behaving
monstrously in return, that

to harp on a particular monstrousness from a woman before the monstrous-

ness of men is fully explored and revealed for what it is, is to render
the fiction, at this particular moment, somewhat irrelevant.

This is a liberal (not a revolutionary) position; it is a sympathetic

one; but it is one whose flaws have been shown before. And it is
ultimately what opens Hogg to the charge of Feminist-Uncle-Tomism—that,
indeed, Delany invites toward his preface’s close.

All the women in Hogg are martyrs, saints, or heroes. We have seen that
Delany is concerned with the political statement the book makes. But I
cannot help thinking what a different, and possibly more effective,
statement it would have made if it had been, say, Maria, rather than
Harkner, whose horrendous and outraged slaughterings we were forced to
listen to in report after report. On multiple readings, I find myself
questioning whether Delany’s making the crippled girl the only young
woman with any rebelliousness in the face of direct fire is a bit of the
same, unconscious, political maneuvering he decries so in the preface.

Delany talks about the failure of women to encounter in fiction. There

are only two such encounters in Hogg:
In one all that is exchanged is an inarticulate roar.

In the other, the abortive encounter of the director and Honey-Pie, one
of the participants utters only a single word.

But the book does go beyond this—not in spite of the author’s political
concerns, but because of them; it is a mark of his political intelligence
that, feeling as he does, he has not tried to write a book about women;
the author is, we know, a man (and a black man), as Mrs. Stowe was white.
Unlike Mrs. Stowe he did not try to write a book about “life among the
lowly.” The book is about life among the monsters. And, where women do
come into it, he has done better than most. At this particular moment,
that may be all a man can do. Delany has shown men in their most
psychotic relations, with each other, and with women. Women’s rage at
what in this situation affects them, as well as their reactions to and
their actions against it, are subjects a woman might be able to handle
with more authority, if not passion. I think this is the book Delany, in
his preface, says he is waiting for.

So am I.

In his preface, Delany claims that his book, in personal terms, is as

honest as he can make it. There is a similar claim in the dedication to
his first anti-pornographic work, The Tides of lust. “This is an
artificial, extravagant and pretentious book ...” he claims of the
earlier novel, in a cunningly accurate assessment: “... But it is honest
before its artifice ....” Honesty is, apparently, important to him in
erotica. The first book was a cluster of bright fragments, here a
Jamesian pastiche on necrophilia, there a surrealistic nightmare

of copulating chimera, now some elegant essays on the significance of the

erotic interspersed with monologues of transcriptive doggedness by
illiterate sociopaths about their sexual disasters, all strung, catch as
catch can, on a modern Faust story set on the Texas coast.

It is flamboyant, it is dazzling, an anthology of brilliant verbal show

pieces that, ultimately, aims at a serious point.

In Hogg, however, the extravagance and the pretension have been set by.
And the artifice is so rich it has become art. Hogg is a novel, a novel
that, in the face of monumentally unpalatable material, can move us, can
touch us. I feel it is the more important book; and the more significant.

But if a political template helps us trace our way in it, points out some
of the intelligence as well as some of the failures in it, that template
is not the significance itself. Art that is exhausted by the politics
around, above, and beneath it tends to be transient and, ultimately,
lifeless.

We are closer to the significance of Hogg with such bald statements as:

It presents the horrible in the world.

What it has to say about it is even more horrible.

But it is said with such intelligence and persuasiveness that, if we
refuse to listen, it is we who are condemned.

So far, in our textural, structural, and political discussion, we have

been fairly, strictly formal. But if a book is ultimately to be taken
seriously, other things than its formal excellences must be considered.

And this is the point where the serious critic is tempted to say: “Now I
shall leave you, the serious reader, to consider them.”

One of the problems with saying more, of course, is ihatHogg is a new

novel. It does not have the advantage of having been around for sixty
years, or even six months (as I write this), to garner the benefit of
discussion consensus on What It Is Trying To Do. It is a book I was sent
in manuscript and asked to see if I might say something favorable about
it.

It is a book that, between manuscript and galleys, I have now read »

through three times end to end; and have read sections of it over many
more. It is a book I write about far more from compulsion than I do
merely to provide a legitimizing afterword. I think it has something dark
and dangerous to say about the world, and about all our relations with
it. Though for exactly what to be defined, other voices than mine will
have to enter the dialogue.

I can only marvel.

Hogg is not a novel to be interpreted. It is a novel to be experienced.

All a critic can really do is to warn the prospective reader that to
experience it fully, he must undergo much terror and must bridle his
disgust; or, with the reader who has just emerged from the novel, the
critic can discuss some of that terror’s quality.

I began with a mention of some of the classic overtones in Delany’s work.

Let me return to them as I move toward summation.

As Hogg throws some of the traditional conventions of pornography into

reverse, it also reverses some of the values of classical tragedy. The
characters and situations in Hogg are terrible and they are pathetic. But
where tragedy begins with characters who are terrible in their height,
rendered piteous by their fall, the monsters in Hogg begin as
pathetic.Then their pathos is stripped away, only to show them as even
more pathetic; then the process is repeated. Then repeated. And repeated—
insistently, inexorably, and without surcease, till somehow, in full
denial of the romantic claim that the pathetic can only elicit low
emotions, the characters pass into the terrible: by the book’s end, Hogg
and Denny, if not the narrator, are larger than life, casting shadows far
longer than our first encounters with them could have possibly indicated.
Without losing an iota of their texture, their smell, or any physical
presence, they are becoming archetypes.
Much (if not most) of the criticism around Delany’s work to date has
concerned itself with the relation of his work to myth. Most of this that
I have seen, well intentioned as it is, is trivial. Those critics with
adequate scholarly equipment for the task get caught in a labyrinthine
search for more and more tenuous plot parallels to more and more obscure
myths; those with inadequate equipment (the majority) usually founder on
the simple problem that, having no clear picture themselves of the way
myth works, they have no clear position from which to examine Delany’s.
Intermittently, Delany’s works have contained mythical ornaments (at
least that’s how I have always seen them), which encourage this type of
criticism—e.g., the Faust-foam swirling on The Tides of Lust. But what is
centrally mythic in his work is the quality, as in Hogg, I have just
mentioned.

The first critic to note this quality in print, seven years ago, Judith
Merrill, actually caught the distinction which subsequent critics have
tended to ignore: The work is mythopoeic (to borrow her terms) rather
than mythopoetic: It makes myth, rather than merely utilizes and refers
to it.

Though the treatment of Harkner suggests Delany has a great understanding

of how modern myths are generated (by administering some shock to a
media-solution super-saturated with cant and cynicism, searching among
situations well beyond morals and hopelessly into the pathological

for something to moralize over), while Harkner perhaps becomes a myth

figure for the world of the fiction (Frontwater, Crawhole, Ellenville,
Fairhaven and the adjoining towns), Hogg himself is the myth figure who
emerges from the novel into our world—horrible as Frankenstein’s monster,
vicious as Dracula, and stolid as Babbitt.

“HOGG!” proclaims the blurb: “An eleven year old boy stumbles upon an act
of brutal rape—but this is only prologue to a weekend of sexual mayhem,
destruction and mass murder.”

What a suggestive blurb it is! But it also, I suspect, will help begin a
popular mythology around the book that will confuse Hogg with the mass
murderer, as Frankenstein is confused with his monster, or as Faust is
confused with Mephistopheles—phenomena Delany himself has commented on in
Tides. But the situation of Hogg is far more complex than the blurb
suggests: Hogg, a murderer and a monster himself, is morally and
psychologically responsible for precipitating Harkner over the edge into
his far more monstrous death-rampage—and is then responsible for bringing
him (however temporarily) back! It takes some mature considering to
figure out what, ethically, is going on here.

It is not a simple book.

An extremely perceptive female reader once remarked in my hearing,

“Literature survives by fertile ambiguity.” And an equally perceptive
male poet once committed to a letter, reprinted many times, “All
criticism comes down to a more or less happy misunderstanding.” These two
statements can be used to define (or better, in Delany’s term, emblemize)
the positive and negative poles of the romantic axis, the main axis of
American literature and letters. But there is a classic axis that cuts
across it. Its tenets are not so easily defined: classic literature is
harder and, finally, more complex; and in America, as I have said, the
classic is maverick rather than central to established literary concerns—
whether it appear in the avant garde of the little magazine or the
commercial works of mystery, science fiction, or in the most recently
rejuvenated and perhaps liveliest genre, pornography. The substance of
classic work (and Delany’s is) is all in what is told. (And the classics
are notorious for telling all—which is why they so upset those super-
romantics, the Victorians.) Its significance is in what it suggests.

Its technique is the organization of what it tells into the most

suggestive form.

But even if the coordinates of concern continue the rotation begun with
the turning of attention of “serious” critics to “popular” culture, I
still doubt if Delany-the-pornographer will ever be an accepted writer.
His message is too dark.

I have mentioned my first response to Hogg.

My second was to search, almost hysterically, for some romantic synopsis.

I fell on the frequently quoted lines of Yeats:

But love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement. For nothing
can be sole or whole That has not been rent.

As quickly, I had to turn away. Moving as they are, these lines—we must
insistently remember if we are to understand the seriousness of the book—
define exactly the attitude the book is not concerned with. The word
“love” does not appear once in the novel. At one point, the narrator
misses Hogg to a point where he is about to cry. At another, Hogg goes to
a fair amount of effort to repossess the narrator who has been spirited
off by Nigg and Hawk. But to call the relationship of the narrator and
Hogg “love” at any time during the book, or to assume it partakes of
anything but the structure of the most sado-masochistic infatuation, does
not dignify it in the least; it merely imposes a romantic distortion.
Delany is concerned with something vaster and icier. The Human Condition
(as much a romantic cliche as “love”) comes closer to naming that
concern. But it is a cliche, and therefore not accurate enough.

While the author’s disclaimer that Hogg is not pornography for

heterosexual women, for heterosexual men, for male homosexuals, or for
Lesbians is accurate (But, if it isn’t, who is it for? Another reason to
call it “anti-pornography”), what I can say, finally, is that Hogg is a
book for anyone who finds the novel itself fascinating; for anyone who
wants to see the effects that occur when this most un-novelistic of
material is subjected to an intricate, re-complicated (I borrow this
useful term from Knight’s early criticism of Harness and Bester; it
refers to a formal, self-critical narrative device, such as the Burning
Man in The Stars My Destination or, indeed, the fugai broadcast in Hogg)
form.
I predict the book will be discussed.

If I am wrong and it falls from our attention, my prediction, as it

appears here with it, will vanish too.

—K. Leslie Steiner Ann Arbor, 1973 [London, 1973]

Of Sex, Objects, Signs, Systems, Sales, Sf, And Other Things

Note: Tesseract was the name of the science fiction society of the
University of New Hampshire. In August or September 1975, their then
president, Frank Brunner, extended an informal invitation to me through
Bernard Kay to come and discuss my science fiction novel Dhalgren, which
had been published eight or nine months before in January 1975. I sent
them the following open letter, which, I was later told, would appear in
the Tesser act-sponsored ‘zine, S-Forum. At the end of that year,
however, Brunner graduated from the university, and S-Forum suspended
publication before the piece could appear there. A dozen years later, it
appeared in Australian Science Fiction Review.

Dear Frank—Thanks muchly for your letter. (Bernie Kay read it to me over
the phone; so I haven’t, as it were, been exposed to the actual text.)
Thanks also for the invitation to sit in on Tesseract’s Dhalgren meeting.
I’m afraid, however, I have to decline. A couple of years back I would
have replied to such an invitation, quite imperiously, “I never discuss
my work in public,” and let it go. But I’ve mellowed. I dislike
discussing my own work for a host of reasons, some highly admirable I’m
sure, others no doubt suspect, lowdown, and neurotic. Nevertheless,
that’s me.

The discourse of personal criticism is useful as it treats of the writer

as a fictional Other. For A to ask ? what ? thinks writer Y was trying to
do (and for ? to return an answer either the same as or different from
A’s) is a

useful, even a rich enterprise. For A or ? to turn to writer Y and ask

such a question (and for Y to come back with an answer) defeats the whole
enterprise of fiction. (As you can see, I love to theorize about
language/writing and will do it at the drop of a postcard; the fact that
I enjoy it so much is one of the [possibly neurotic] reasons I like to
stay away from such discussions of my own work.) Such discussions, for me
as a writer at any rate, are essentially fictions—as much as any story or
novel. The relation between two fictions is a complex business to map
out, especially when it must be done by the creation of a third. Julia
Kristeva, Carol Jacobs, and Jacques Lacan (among others) have been
exploring, from their respective positions, the complexities that lurk
behind that most complex of fictions: commentary. Fictive discourse aims
at producing a range of reactions, a field of multiple responses,
responses not as in a scatter-pattern of buckshot, but as interrelated
and ordered as lightwaves in a spectrum. Critical discourse between two
readers, both by its disagreements and by its angles of agreement, no
matter how linear, preserves that plurality in emblem and embryo. The
same discourse between reader and writer rotates the lines of
communication ninety degrees away from the currents that pass between
equals so that now it lies directly across those currents, stalled in
that ill-charged space auc-tority (authority) creates, that plurality
abolished.

I work hard on my science fiction. Much of that work is theoretical

(though the theorizing done when entangled in the text of fiction has a
very different feel to it from the theorizing whose end is a theoretical,
rather than a fictive, text); but the work is to read, and reread,
reform, and respond to (making sure they proliferate properly) the
resonances of whatever is being put down on paper. In a live question-
and-answer situation, the spontaneity alone—on my part at any rate—would
defeat all accuracy in linearly verbalizing what was (as is so much of
writing) such a many-layered and finally non-verbal process.

I am perfectly happy to write about what’s outside the text. You asked
about sales, for example. Last time Bantam communicated with me anent the
subject, there were 273,000 copies of Dhalgren in print, with more to
come. Actual sales are hard to judge after only six months, but the
general Bantam policy is not to order a new printing until at least 80%
of the previous one has sold out; the sixth printing is currently on the
book racks. The seventh is on order. Yes, it’s a minor record for an SF
novel in the first half of 1975, but in only a few weeks The Mote in Gods
Eye will raise its braying yawp in paperback and go galumphing off, I’m
sure, with all the medals.1

Because I love the SF field, in some respects I’m downright gleeful to

discuss what’s outside the text! In a giant field like the Post-Modern
Novel, with thousands upon thousands of examples high and low produced
each year, it would be terribly presumptuous for any single author, even
a postmodern Proust or Mann, to hope that a single work, or even a series
of works, might restructure to whatever extent the concept of the form.
In a field like SF, with not quite 325 original SF novels produced this
year from substantially less than that number of writers—and most of
these novels in a commercially fixed form the writers themselves would be
the first to admit was dead from the outset—it is not so preposterous for
a writer to hope that a single work, fermenting in the acknowledged live
area of the field, might loosen and recontour the web of possibilities,
charging that web at each repositioned intersection of possible word and
possible word. I think, in exactly that slow and inevitable way that
causes shrieks both of rage and delight, Dhalgren is doing that. And I
like it. What I don’t mean here is that I want to see more novels that
resemble Dhalgren either in texture, form, or subject matter. (What
writer would!) But I would like to see the range—the space of
possibilities—that the textures and organization in Dhalgren imply
explored by other SF writers.

Of course the line between what is inside the text and what is outside
the text is frequently foggy—especially for the writer. And it is at
least as permeable as Lacan’s version of the Saussurian bar between
signifier and signified2. Another reason I hesitate to attend a live
discussion is because in live discussions that line may be too easily
transgressed, by auctorial accident or enthusiasm—with disastrous
results. I prefer the reflection afforded by ballpoint and notebook. As
an SF writer I frequently see myself as trying to reach the boundary, the
edge, the limit of fiction, a journey that can only be made on paper.
Similarly, I am tempted to come as close to the line as possible from the
critical side—one wants to live not just dangerously, but dangerously and
intelligently.

Is this, for example, outside or in?

I’ve always wanted to write books that I wished to read but could not
find on any library shelf or bookstore rack. A kind of book I’ve always
liked is one that is witty, intelligent, formal, colorful, written with
life and brio. But there’s another that, from time to time, I hunt out as
well:

Oddly enough, you will find it described in occasional contemporary

introductions to various novels by Eliot and Stendhal. It is a long book,
covering exhaustively the social workings of some heretofore unexplored
sector of society, orienting it within the greater social context—but it
does this almost off-handedly, as if in a passing nod to Arnold’s
observation that the life of fiction lies in the exactitude with which it
can evoke the surfaces of life. But much more than that, it is a complex
metaphysical construct: to

understand it requires considered and deep response, measured and

multiple readings. We note, at this point, the novels described in these
introductions are novels-of-the-mind. They are seldom the novels of Eliot
or Stendhal that follow. I do not mean that Eliot’s and Stendhal’s are
not rich works, or that they do not benefit from close attention or
careful rereading. But the entire critical stance these introductions
assume is, in historical terms, a back-reading. A critical gaze that has
no existence before the commentary garnered from the specific aesthetic
undertakings of, first, Flaubert and, second, Joyce, can only meet with
its true object as long as it gazes forward.

It has been known as long as narratives have been recognized for what
they are that stories are made more coherent, vivid, exciting, and
energetic by resonances leap-frogging from one section over another to
relate to yet another; a multiplicity of such resonances binds the living
and lively construct together. (What else is “plot” other than something
at the end of the tale relating clearly and strongly to something at the
beginning? And if “plot” is “dead,” it is only because in most people’s
minds the only relations they will respond to have become far too
limited, formalized, and restricted to a ridiculously narrow repertoire
of revelatory actions.) But for a writer to expend such Flaubertian
labors to make a complex web of responses the experience of the fiction
is a specifically post-Joycean enterprise. And it is worth reminding
ourselves that Joyce, to do this, had to shatter, more and more as
Ulysses progressed, the novel’s fictive foreground (though he allowed one
to retrieve a foreground structure by means of the referent myth); in
Finnegans Wake, he shattered not only the fictive foreground but all
foreground mythical reference as well, so that all could be used,
infragmentia, to form the infrastructure to which the recomplicated
resonantial textus was moored. Yes, Stendhal and Eliot used such
resonances to bind their work together; but they did not use them in the
same way as Joyce, to the same extent, or with the same intentional
charge: this charge is fixed on so many other things in their work that
it makes the kind of modern criticism that frequently introduces them
court distortion of them each time it is evoked. Nor does such criticism
fit, say, with Proust, Mann, or Kafka. These are all very nineteenth-
century-oriented artists. If they add an obsessional concern with one
sensibility or another, reflected in “excessive” (with Proust and Kafka,
at any rate) labor over the text itself3, this still only winds up the
decadent ends of the nineteenth century. We still have not approached the
parameters of Stein, Charles Olson, and Frank O’Hara around which the
vital art of the second half of this century organizes itself. (And if
Olson and O’Hara respected Pound and Williams, it was as much for their
negative as for their positive examples—the only truly rich examples one
generation of artists can bequeath another.)

Fictive discourse contains within it (as one of its most powerful

fictions) the possibility of exhaustiveness. Critical discourse, as
Foucault showed in The Order of Things, is inexhaustive by virtue of the
very episteme in which it generated back with its birth in medieval
commentary. (The basic reaction of most readers of Barthes’ S/Z has to
be, when all is said and done, how much more could have been said! The
margins of my own copy crawl with commentary upon his.) Which brings me,
abruptly, back to Dhalgren. Was it written for the critics, as various of
them have megalomaniacally suggested? Well, it was definitely written to
appease a certain richly critical response in myself—a response which, in
myself, I associate with something mature and measured. I wanted to read
a book—solid, sedate, sexual, and complex—full of mysteries that
proliferate in orderly fashion by the very fact of their solution, a book
I could sink my mental teeth into after they had been sharpened by what
I’d found valid in the art and aesthetic discourse of the past century-
and-a-quarter. But if it was written “for critics,” it was not written
for any fancied reward to be gleaned from any critical commentary.

The largest influences on the book that I am aware of, at any rate, were
Michel Foucault (primarily Madness and Civilization, secondarily The
Order of Things), John Ashbery’s poems The Instruction Manual (and the
Richard Howard essay on Ashbery in Alone with America) and These
Lacustrine Cities, G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form (given me as a
birthday present, months after its publication, by a young Harvard
student when I lived in San Francisco), Frank Kermode’s Sense of an
Ending (bits and pieces of Dhalgren were worked on in Kermode’s old
office at Wesley an University’s Center for the Humanities, where I was a
guest for a couple of weeks in 1971), and, of course, the works of Jack
Spicer, whose memory and whose poems haunted San Francisco the years I
lived there, where much of Dhalgren’s first draft was written, as
Cavafy’s hovered over Durrell’s Alexandria. Anyone who thinks the
elucidation of my science fiction novel worth the trouble might pursue
these works with hope of at least a small reward over and above the great
interest of the works themselves4. But certainly anyone who had read the
Foucault thoroughly would know I could not expect much commentary: We can
separate fiction into foreground and recit: recit is the written
commentary that occurs within fictive discourse. Foreground is the
referential presentation of “what was there” and “what happened to it.”
Foucault demonstrates clearly that it is commentary which breeds
commentary—and very little else. By a simple extension, only those novels
proportionately rich in recit (James, Proust, Joyce, Stendhal, Kafka, or
Faulkner, for examples) are likely to be much commented on at length.
Novels proportionately rich in foreground

(Chandler—whom no less than Gide called the finest stylist in America and
of whose works no less than Auden said, “... they are darkly powerful
works of art ...”—R.L. Stevenson or D. Merezhkovsky, for examples) are
experienced as more or less richly detailed slabs of experience itself;
if this presentation is done with a rich web of language (to do it in a
conscientiously impoverished language, e.g., Robbe-Grillet, to whom we
shall return, reduces foreground to the status of recit; thus the
commentary), the effect is of a double text of structured reality
highlighted by a complex superstructure of attentional nodes. Mapping the
relation between the two illusory texts (the “referent” [or even
“meaning”] of the text and the nodal highlights of the text) is an
infinite job because the separation between them—only the old warhorse
“content vs. style” in another guise—is illusory and vanishes into an
ungraduated unity wherever we fix our attention on it. Possibilities of
commentary in such cases are so endless (they will generate wherever we
decide to fix gradations) that the sane critic must eschew them. The only
thing that, as a reasonable endeavor, we can comment on in such works is
what they have to say about certain subjects. But heaven protect us once
we get lost in the primary critical task of discovering and recovering
what such works, phenomenologically, are. That is best left to the
solitary dialogue between sovereign reader and playful page; those are
the only participants in the dialogue that I, or the novel I wrote, are
concerned with.

Dhalgren is (as is most SF) practically all foreground—at any rate, the
proportion of foreground to recit is high enough to assure a paucity of
serious (written) analysis. Here, standing on the line, it would be most
presumptuous for me to suggest that the language within the text was
rich, complex, or worked. It may well (and from my own, most unprivileged
position, despite what anyone says, I shall never know) be simply flabby,
opaque, and confusing. What I can hazard—not as my own response to any of
the words on paper but merely as a projected observation that someone who
visited me at any of the places I lived while I was writing it would have
had to make—is that the language was worked on. (And what a Lacanian
plenitude of readings that little preposition offers up to that most
Calvinis-tic of verbs!) Where one goes with Dhalgren after that is
entirely a matter of personal temperament. The reasons I wrote it are
precisely those which prevent me from urging anyone else to read it. I
can far more easily think of reasons to encourage people to avoid it.

My most vituperative critic (not Lester del Rey, but Harlan Ellison, in
his review in the Los Angeles Times), abandoned the book at page 361,
remarking that Dhalgren was not a novel but a “career.” I wonder if it
doesn’t mean something when the most violent detractor hits the point
precisely. Certainly the greatest single fiction among the many that
weave

together to make up the text are subsumed by the two dates which,
nominally, enclose its creation—the last writing of mine one reads in the
novel.
One person who has read Dhalgren a number of times writes me she found it
easier to hear the voice of the writing if she actually paused, when
reading to herself, between sentences. Many hundreds of sentences in the
book were written down on index cards and/or separate notebook pages,
worked over and revised as autonomous verbal objects to assure they did
their particular micro-jobs as economically as possible before they were
mortared back in edificial place. (Many of the sentences I am least
satisfied with are ones I did not give this kind of attention to and
which only underwent their various buffings on their half dozen trips
through the typewriter.) Is there any relation between this reader’s
discovery of a way to respond to the text and my way of composition?

I don’t know.

But her method and mine are ultimately outside the text and of merely
anecdotal interest.

But let me see how closely I can approach the dangerous city-limit from a
different direction.

A few months ago someone doing an article on “Sex in the Future” called
me, along with a number of other SF writers, for a quote. I sent him:

There’s a prevalent theory that society, in some mysterious way, is and

will always be a mirror of some mysteriously eternal sex act, i.e.,
standard missionary position. This theory, of course, is nonsense. Every
sex act, from the most “normal” to the most “perverse,” is an
internalization of one or another set of social parameters. Once
internalized, however, they are sexual and no longer social—save in their
social effect as sexual behavior. Though an easy and uncritical passage
from the social to the sexual is, therefore, always suspect, I would
hazard that sex in the future will be no better or worse than society in
the future. If future society is vigorous, open, and varied, then so will
future sex. If future society is repressive, authoritarian and
monotonous, you won’t be able to hope for too much better in bed.

Somewhere in the text of the last chapter of Dhalgren, readers have noted
some sentences that they feel express more or less the same thoughts as
the first four sentences of the above. It would ill behoove me to argue.

Without commenting on what is in Dhalgren, I will say that the first four
sentences of my quote (we can ignore the last three speculative ones) are
about psycho/social facts-in-the-world. One might quibble with terms—
perhaps it is not a “theory” so much as a largely unexamined model that
explains much ill-considered action, many glib statements, and vast
numbers of movies, novels, and plays; one could argue over how and in
what

way and when and exactly which social parameters are internalized to give
specific forms to the varieties of human sexual responses. But that is
arguing over whether the earth is a sphere, an oval, or a pear—not
whether it is flat or round. Dhalgren certainly isn’t about this
psycho/social fact—nor the conflict between those who are aware of it and
those who are its unknowing victims and/or exploiters—any more than
Shakespeare’s Tempest is about the fact that the Earth is round, a fact
which the discovery of Bermuda had brought to the general attention of
the British public only a few years before the play was written.
Nevertheless, to know about the discovery of Bermuda and the new status
of both magic and science that had resulted from it is certainly to make
the Tempest more comprehensible. More to the point, contemporary
playgoers who did not “believe” in the roundness of the earth, nor in the
existence of outlying tropical islands, and had no feeling for the new
distinctions between fantasy/magic/reality/science that were then being
etched on the modern English-speaking consciousness, though they might
recognize the form of the Masque, would, with all else in the play, be
totally at sea. They simply would not be able to make the storm-tossed
landing on that tropical island, nor read properly the emblems of what is
real and what is not and the dialogue between them which are the
structure, significance, and charm of the play. It is not that they would
miss the surface plot: they would miss the subtext which gives the
surface plot its reason for being what it is.

I think a good number of Dhalgreris more incensed readers, the ones

bewildered or angered by the book, simply cannot read the proper
distinction between sex and society and the nature and direction of the
causal arrows between them, a vision of which lies just below the novel’s
surface and which gives the book its logical coherence. Though these
readers are perfectly willing to respond to a “sympathetic portrayal of
the social problems of those who deviate sexually from the statistical
norm,” they are at first confused by and ultimately angered with a
presentation that completely subverts the entire subtext that informs a
discourse of “social problems/ sympathetic/sexual deviate/normal” in the
first place. They still see “real” society as a projection of an
“idealized” sex act (which somehow involves vast amounts of male
aggression inchoately coupled with total female passivity), and read all
fictional accounts of sex-and/or-society as accurate, relevant, and
charged with value as they constitute themselves under the shadow of this
model. Such a mistake is understandable. Precisely this model charges
with sense the fiction of writers as diverse as Lawrence, Mailer,
Malzberg, Oates, Ellison, Barth, Roth, Bellow, and Thomas Berger. To read
Dhalgren against this model, however—that is, to use this model as a
template against which to discern the sense and weight of various scenes

OF SEX, OBJECTS, SIGNS, SYSTEMS, SALES, SF ... 41

and sentences—is to render the book a non-sense far greater than any
which might come under the rubric of “unorthodox plot,”

“sexual explicitness,” or “reality vs. fantasy.” It renders a very long

book a mere mass of unordered, quotidian psycho/social detail.

I think this model—a platonically ideal sex act after which all social
relations must be formed in order to partake of the good—is pure literary
excrescence. (To call it “literary invention” implies that someone,
sometime, somewhere invented it with malice aforethought: and I do not
think this is the case.) I would like to see it dispelled. It distorts
the true polarities of the human universe, mystifying the known and the
knowable, subverting and diffusing human energies away from where they
might help real women and real men: because it makes human problems
accessible to analysis appear adamantine, monolithic.

Sex is sex, pleasure is pleasure, anger is anger, sadness is sadness, joy

is joy, and fear is fear: all are intricately and intimately related, and
the sudden paths from one to the other are endlessly surprising. All of
them, and all the paths between, are affected by the material universe we
live in. All affect our picture of that universe. Also, each of us
experiences the complex of them differently, first because we are in
different positions vis-a-vis the ordered external universe and moving
through that order at different trajectories, and second because we are
different individuals at our respective positions and the internal
factors—capacities for pleasure, anger, joy, sex, etc.—are constituted
vis-a-vis themselves differently in each of us.

Mapping all of this, either with the fictive device of “character” or

“narrator,” or employing such a map to move with words the “character” of
the reader through such a territory, is one of the writer’s possible
tasks. Confusion in the map (or generalizing too quickly between one
element and another) is an aesthetic flaw.

To use the sex-produces-society model as a mapping tool (rather than

society-contours-sex) in any sort of narrative fictions (science or
otherwise) foredooms us to losing our way, both practically and
ethically, once we turn back to the world—and it does so without any
implication that any particular set of morals need be reflected in the
fictions themselves.

Here follows a random galaxy of notes, most of them no doubt familiar to

anyone who has read at all in the last decade-and-a-half ‘s work in
semiotics and structuralism, which, from their disorder, will hopefully
force at least some coherence between what has gone before and what will
come after them.

(1) Our actions influence the material world.

The material world (not just the modes of production!) influences

(among many other things) our emotions and our general psychology.
Frequently we are unaware of it—often we are only partially aware of it.

(2) Our landscape, entirely true for any urban environment (and, today,
almost entirely true for any rural environment in Europe, the United
States, and Canada), is made up totally of emblems of former human
actions. From the sky (overcast because of the industrial effect or the
greenhouse phenomenon), to each tree or grass blade in the city parks
(the trees are there because someone put them there, or because someone
left them there when clearing away others), the landscape is a dense,
interlocked web of the detritus of haphazard human action and/or
intentional human undertaking.

One way to look at it is as a vastly recomplicated code of human signs

(or semes).
As we walk down any street, we read (or sometimes misread), consciously
or unconsciously, this code. What it says affects us. It is the real
world influencing (among many other things) our emotions and general
psychology.

(3) I call it a code; but this code has many aspects of a true language.
For one thing, syntax is all important. A new building encountered in a
section of the city where all the buildings around it are new has one
meaning; a new building encountered in a section of the city where all
the buildings around it are decrepit slums and tenements has another. As
well, these signs, semes, or codons affect one another in purely
autonomous ways that change their meanings so that those meanings cannot
be traced back to any intention on the part of the initial human actors:
soot in the air (one seme) defaces a new building (another seme) creating
a new seme—a grimy building—with a new meaning for the city itself. An
unused sewer main beneath the street (one seme) collapses and causes a
tenement (another seme) to drop a wall and collapse at one corner.

The abandoned, half-ruined building where people have been injured and
have fled from it is a different seme (with a different meaning) from
either an over-crowded tenement or an abandoned sewer main.

(4) Fiction as we know it today begins as a response to an industrial

phenomenon, to which the social analysis of Marx was equally a response.
To quote Sartre quoting Marx: “The means of production affect the
political, spiritual, and economic life of the people.” Responding to the
same phenomenon that Marx’s words were attempting to model, various
nineteenth-century novelists (in France, they included Balzac, Stendhal,
the Goncourts, and Zola; in England, they included Thackeray, Charlotte
Bronte, George Eliot, and Dickens) realized, more or less articulately,
that to describe the products of production, to evoke their textures and
suggest their

syntagmatic relation to one another in various settings, in the novel’s

foreground social space, not only fleshed out the representation of
material life, but was also a way of implying—through their relation with
the means of production—a commentary, in the novel’s background social
space, on the values, aspirations, and ethics (political, economic, and
spiritual) of everyone involved in the described object’s production,
distribution, and purchase. Thus to describe an object was to generate a
web of commentary, just beyond direct apprehension yet nevertheless
strongly felt as one reads the texts to hand, on the politics, economics,
and religion of both the material and the fictive world, charging the
whole work with significance and a sense of coherent worldly knowledge.
This is what all those descriptions of furniture, fashion, fabrics, and
carriages are doing in the novels of Balzac. More or less under control,
this is (more or less) what they have been doing in the novels of all
fictioneers since—and this includes science fictioneers.

(5) Consider: Our clothes are a sign system. So are our hairstyles; and
whether or not we wear makeup, whether or not we shave; natural pigment
in our skins is a direct sign (or an indirect reminder) of others’
actions. The pigment acquired by exposure to sunlight is a sign of our
own recent histories. Again, syntactic relation is all: deeply tanned
skin on a well-dressed young man carrying an attache case means one
thing. Deeply tanned skin on a ragged old woman carrying a bulging,
frayed shopping bag speaks something else entirely.

The entire visible surface of every urban landscape we walk or ride

through, as well as ninety-nine percent of the visible surface of every
human being in it, is constituted of signs of specifically human actions,
human reactions, class and individual histories, ordered in informative,
syntactic relations. (At a previous point in history, it might have been
useful to distinguish between human signs and natural signs. Today the
distinction is meaningless. The reading of “purely natural signs”
generates the whole discourse we know as science; but with its humanly
organized “controlled experiments” we have devised to verify our
readings, the natural signs at this point have been absorbed by that
discourse—at least for the West. Nature, or the study of nature, as soon
as we turn to a book to help us pursue it, is absorbed in the implied
discourse of human technology.) The autonomous inter-effects of these
signs on one another and one another’s meanings suggest the volatility of
a living language—rather than the lexical extensionality of a simple code
or cipher.

We may, for a moment, locate two areas in this language of human signs:
the signs constituted under the rubrics of nature, architecture,
furniture, cooking, craft and science form one area; and in general they
are far more ambiguous, resonantial, and connotative than the signs in
the

other area we can locate, i.e., those signs constituted under the rubrics
of bodies (gestures, deformations, and wounds), fashions, faces
(expressions), texts, and voices, which, by comparison, are
straightforward, clear, and denotative.

(6) Marx still provides the basic transformation by which the rare,
simple declarative statement in the nonstop din of this language of
human-made, human-charged, and human-structured signs may be translated
into its political, economic and spiritual equivalent: “Who made it? How
much were they paid? Who profited, and by how much, from its sale? Who
profits most from its having been put specifically there—in that specific
syntag-matic order with the world around it?” Though they may use the
answers differently, both the poet and the politician will find these
good questions to ask of the objects they encounter on their trek and
trajectory.

But “simple declarative utterances” in the total surround of the sign

language we live in today are rare.

(7) We tend to forget that Shakespeare’s art was precisely an art of

bodies, fashions, faces, texts, and voices—with a little music thrown in
on the side: lavishly costumed, full of poetry, and from report
brilliantly acted. But how many thousands of post-Elizabethan
performances have obscured the fact that the plays were performed without
scenery and with an astonishingly meager prop-box: letters,
handkerchiefs, swords (which are really part of fashion), jewel boxes
(ditto), cups, chairs, and a few musical instruments practically exhaust
the lot. Precisely what there was of the sixteenth century language of
objects, so connotative and resonantial, Shakespeare, on his bare boards,
collapsed with the language of the actors. Another thing we tend to
overlook is that, thanks to the fleshing out provided by the imagination
of modern theatrical and film directors, for all the rich gallery of
character types, covering such a goodly span of Elizabethan society, high
and middle (if not low), it would be next to impossible, from the corpus
of thirty-six, to construct a rich vision of the material life of any of
those types: details of architecture and shelter, food and food
preparation, textile weaving and sartorial technology are just not
terribly forthcoming from his texts. And these are the same details that
the novels of the Goncourts and Zola—following from examples begun in
Balzac—threaten to collapse under. The list of foods, clothing, and
shelter mentioned in Shakespeare is thin and generalized: wine, roast
meat, bread, fruit, “sweets” and “sweet meats,” doublet, hose, cloak,
hat, bonnet, gown, armor, sword, shield (encore ditto), castle,
courtyard, dungeon. And an unbiased translator would confirm for us that
there were not many more things on this list than could be found, say,
mentioned in the Iliad, written twenty-five hundred years before (we
except the descriptions of war articles—we are talking of the texture of
material life).

The language of artifacted objects did not become the relative treasure
of connotative riches it now represents for literature until it had been
recom-plicated by industrial development, as well as given a clear
reading by that development’s political consequences.

But the social developments that made the language of objects literar-ily
decipherable did not halt; those developments that made this language
both rich and clear (by providing an industrial, or sometimes an
industrial vs. cottage, reading) continued to lay complexity atop
complexity in that language so that its resonances, by the end of the
First World War, if not well before, were too complex for the orthodox
rhetoric of nineteenth-century fiction to represent clearly and
precisely.

(8) Some months ago, I happened to encounter, by one of those chains of

coincidences which are fiction, six Sony eight-inch portable color
television sets:

The first was in the office of the chairman of the philosophy department
at the University of Buffalo where I was teaching. The chairman was
keeping it, on top of his filing cabinet, he explained, for a woman
professor who was picking it up from him later that afternoon.

The same model set, a few days later, was brought around to the bachelor
digs of one of my older students (who worked as a carpenter when not in
class, and who had bought the house with three other young men some two
years ago, though now its kitchen was filled with dirty dishes, its
carpet worn through, its bathroom always in the midst of home repair, and
its porch steps in need of new boards), by a rather scroungy, bearded
seventeen-year-old, who wanted to sell it. My student didn’t want to buy,
and it was carried away across a wet, leaf-plastered Buffalo street.
Several weeks later, in New York City, I encountered the same set on the
large, teakwood desk of a successful homosexual novelist in his largish,
plant-filled, one-room studio apartment in Soho.

That same evening I found it on the cigarette-burned table top in the

room of my next-door neighbor in the residence hotel where I’d been
staying: he was a twenty-two-year-old black, a year out of North Carolina
and ten months into a job as a security guard for an uptown building. He
was sharing the room with (and I suspect supporting as well) a friend who
was a not very effectual grass-dealer and their two girlfriends, who were
always in to borrow my iron.

I’d already resolved to write down this chain encounter, so it was

something of a humorous footnote to my proposed text when, almost two
months later (and no writing actually done), I noticed the same model set
under the elbow of a fortyish salesman in a green banlon shirt in a
Fourteenth Street appliance store where I had gone to buy a digital clock
radio.

What finally impelled pen to paper, however, was encountering a

46

half-mad old woman who used to wander, mumbling, around Union Square and
who later turned out to live on welfare in the basement of a building on
Avenue D where a friend of mine lived on the third floor. In her basement
room, where she beckoned us in to see, were piles and stacks of old TV
chasses, broken sets and discarded pieces found all over the streets. I
did not see the Sony. But there was a plastic Sony colophon in a large
paper bag full of knobs and electronic parts, leaning against the leg of
a rickety table—all of which, considering what had gone before, brought
up quite clearly a Sony-of-the-mind.

Now the point of all this: the Sony eight-inch color portable speaks in
far more muted tones than, say, the Aubusson tapestry on the wall of a
Proustian drawing room—a simple cipher of money and taste, a simple
symbol of time, if not history, passed in sight of an emblem of both.

The sociological syntagmatic accompaniments to solid state circuitry,

both synchronically and diachronically, are too complex for us to read
from these half dozen situations a simple, industrial message. We live in
a world where the language of signs has grown too complicated for money,
morals, aesthetics, philosophy, and technology to collapse, as in the
case of Proust’s Aubusson, under a single symbol.

This does not mean that the objects of modern technology—by virtue of
their likelihood to appear in such varied social syntagms—have gone lit-
erarily mute. Rather, we simply must listen much more carefully if we are
to hear what such a TV set truly has to say. Certainly it fulfills its
task in generating a Marxist commentary, trailing the image of myriad
Japanese women technicians (like a sexually inverted Hamlet’s ghost
viewed through the eye of a fly) as well as implications about wealth,
supply, demand, production and production values, international tariffs,
and the like. But in complex harmony with these, it signs a whole web of
social values and social values denied, of communication—between classes,
sexes, ages—and communication subverted. Even to say, “Several weeks
later, in New York City, I encountered the same set ...” generates a
discourse almost totally congruent with one of those tedious aesthetic
texts that begins, “Can we locate the single object under consideration
in, say, six copies of Ulysses ...?”—a problem that does not raise its
head with the individually fashioned wall hanging. The Sony, if only
through the greater multiplicity of its possible environments, sings a
far more complicated, if quieter, song. One must constantly invoke the
clanking music-box of nineteenth-century nov-elistic rhetoric just to
make clear that these jigs and brass cadenzas are not what we are
listening for: that we are attempting to hear a much subtler and more
complicated interweave of melodies.

(9) The best-known attempt to present fictively the language of

objects in all its modern complexity is, of course, the novels of Robbe—
Grillet. By suppressing all traditional novelistic rhetoric, he hoped
that the complex interrelation of object and object (or object perception
and object perception), would speak forth loudly and state itself with
its own, inchoate voice. The flaw in his strategy, a shy quarter of a
century after the appearance of the first of the novels that made Robbe-
Grillet a scandal and then an institution, is today too apparent:

Objects in the world speak the language of objects in the world: material
life. Words on paper speak the language of words on paper: writing.

The other thing one must remember is that a good deal of that suppressed
nineteenth-century novelistic rhetoric grew up precisely to represent in
words the growing complexity in the language of objects that
industrialism had rendered so aesthetically rich. Much of that rhetoric,
frankly, was successful. (There is also the fact that the language of
human signs in the seventies is substantially more complex than it was at
the appearance of Les Gommes in 1953.) The solution to the problem of the
fictive representation of signs is more complicated than Robbe-Grillet’s
solution—indeed, it is not likely to be found in any specifically
unilateral method. Like any other artist, the contemporary novelist must
take from the past what seems to remain useful, discard what is
irrelevant or what specifically distorts, and invent an artistic
structure or set of structures adequate for what she or he feels has not
been dealt with before. For the novelist, this means devising a set of
fictive tropes, rhetorical devices, etc., complex enough to
present/represent what one wants.

If Robbe-Grillet’s novels are powerful works and remain viable, it is

rather in the way Seurat’s paintings remain forceful nodes of aesthetic
tension/attention, i.e., not because of the method but because of the
artists’ faithfulness to it. That, as artists, they needed their
particular methods psychologically as well as intellectually (what a
strange vision of the mind, where these aspects are so sundered!) only
circles our point. One must remember that if what Seurat in particular
and the impressionists in general wrote about their methods were to be
taken literally, then their canvasses, when viewed from more than ten
feet off, should suddenly look like Andrew Wyeth’s! Similarly, the
problems spelled out in Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel (1965), while
they are certainly real problems, are not the ones his novels triumph
over.

Since the literal interpretation of neither of these artists’ written

theories appears, after an encounter with their works, as a literal
description of their aesthetic undertakings, we are in the somewhat
tricky position of asserting—in a work that is essentially a written
theory of our own—that artists writing about their own theories are
constructing not a description of

their work, but a metaphor to take with one into the orderly chaos of
that work as a tool for making one’s own, personal map.

As Seurat’s paintings create their stunning impression of stylized light

and life by the power of paint placed so systematically on canvas, so
Robbe-Grillet’s novels gain their hypnotic quality through the strength
of systematically disciplined words.

(10) The sexual/social myth that the good society takes its form from the
most socially condoned sexual act is a result of two factors that, here,
need only be mentioned, as elsewhere others have exhaustively described
them. First, there is a mental template that was worked into the very
form of fiction (among social entities) by the same industrial forces
that contoured so much of the rest of the rhetoric of the nineteenth-
century novel—forces that compelled all people, to the extent of their
identification with, or even their contiguity to, the white male, middle-
class nodes of power, to see the working class in general, racial and
religious strangers in particular (as they represented, in large amounts,
possible additions to the labor market), and the unstable (do they work
or don’t they? are they property or aren’t they?) status of women in a
radically revalued patriarchal society, as perennial threats to the order
of things. The second factor—the twentieth century’s addition—was to lay
over this basic template a muzzy misreading of Freud, that saw “... sex
as the source of all things.” (What Freud said, of course, was that, in a
society which represses and/or sublimates it, sex is still very strongly
at work, even in places where the repression and/or sublimation appears
successful—which is another thing entirely. And though the mechanics of
the workings are different, the same can be said of anger, pleasure,
sadness, fear, grief, joy, pain, and intelligence.)

Lay over this the general aesthetic laziness of most modern novelists
before the admittedly immense task of untangling the significance of the
dense surround of human signs that is our life in the modern world, and
you have the limits on the “impoverishment” of modern fiction.

One of the failures of Robbe-Grillet’s method, for example, is that when

he embeds all these objects in such textureless discourse (or, at least,
discourse of such limited texture), rather than our reading the true
message that flashes out from their syntactical-interaction-as-objects,
it is too easy for us to read the style itself as saying, “None of these
objects means anything other than the amassed, inarticulate presence it
achieves through the repetition of names, attributes, dimensions—the
stuff of terror and despair.” The cumulative force of a Robbe-Grillet
novel is, essentially, a negative one: the reaction of the reader to the
text is best taken as a metaphor for despair before the task of ever
untangling meaning from a complexity of objects—which is why his books
that work best are the books that are about, in the most nineteenth-
century way, “characters” for whom such despair is

an appropriate reaction: a psychotic murderer, an obsessively jealous

husband. And one cannot divorce the aesthetic success of these novels
from the failure inherent in fictive discourse itself, which failure is
emblemized by the “fact” that the “victim” in both the “successful” books
is that terror and time-bomb which, in nineteenth-century fiction, must
be gotten rid of, either by death or marriage, at any cost: the Female.
(In a sense, Lolita [1956] can be seen as a novel struggling, both in its
textures and its plot/structure, with precisely what defeats Robbe-
Grillet in Le Voyeur [1955].) What one is looking for is a novelist who
can make sense out of the plethora of semiotic associations our world
yields throughout every arc-second of its field, whether or not her or
his “plot” dramatizes the “success” or “defeat” of a “char-acter” before
the same task.

(11) To return to the end of the nineteenth century: The general despair
of novelists at negotiating the recomplicated language of signs produced
a fiction that responded, in historical terms, by becoming highly
subjective and/or psychological. Between the seventeenth century and the
end of the nineteenth century, the convention was established that a
certain proportion of sentences in serious fiction must be devoted to
recit—commentary on the subjective world of the characters or the
sociological significance of the situation. To conform to this proportion
was a way of meta-fictively signaling that the fiction was, indeed,
serious.

It is just after the turn of the century that the myth of the sexual
source of everything becomes an articulate force in modern fiction. It
allowed the modern novelist (most specifically and successfully, D.H.
Lawrence) to recharge these recit sentences, hitherto devoted to
psychological analysis, with a certain energy that comes as much from the
repetitions of real speech as it does from real speakers’ ever-present
topical interest in the passions. Before Lawrence, those recit sentences
had to stand or fall on pure wit and socio/psychological insight. These
sentences were not so much to “present character” (though this was how
their task was referred to) as to present what the novelist knew of the
workings of human psychology in interface with society—the task of the
light essayist. (Yes, they knew this was not the “character” itself: in
the nineties Wilde had quipped: “The more one analyzes one’s characters,
the more they come to sound like everyone else.” Yet the whole history of
the novel had shown the form committed to presenting the distinctions
between human beings within the coherent matrix of society. The modern
task of the novel, to show that all human beings are essentially the same
while at the mercy of the flaws and contradictions of an incoherent
society [a Durkheimian entity which, as Saussure’s langue claims for
itself an ontological status apart from parole, claims for itself an
onto-logical status apart from the social behavior of any given
individual], does not emerge until later.) But, at the same time,
psychology itself, at the hands

of Freud and others, was becoming a science. Lawrence’s sentences of

repressed sexual rhapsody implied, in the background social space of the
novel, just as strongly as Balzac’s descriptions of furniture et al. had
accomplished an implication of economic commentary before, the entire
discourse of that science. How could this implied discourse of a branch
of medical science fail to triumph over those merely clever observations
by amateurs who stated in their texts that psychology was a matter of
verbal paradox, mental contradiction, step and misstep through the social
dance, knowledge and ignorance of What Is Expected? At this point in the
development of the novel, insightful and/or witty analysis of social and
psychological situation was replaced by subjective rhapsody. Subjective
rhapsody implied the entire discourse of a science—psychoanalysis—just
behind it; novelistic psychological analysis suggested a competition with
that same science that the novelist, as amateur, could not possibly hope
to win in the face of the new erotics. Looking slightly askance at this
development, one also notes that such rhapsodies are certainly easier to
read, if not write, than the rhetoric it replaces.

I have written elsewhere (as have a number of others) that science

fictional discourse redistributes the fictive attention between character
and landscape (i.e., between subject and object) in a manner different
from mundane fiction. Science fiction makes the attention on the
landscape much higher. To work within this reorganized fictive frame
gives us, first of all, a basically better matrix in which to deal with
the recomplications of modern “sign” language. And I can think of no
better place than science fiction in which to avoid “certain conventions
of fiction” that make so much fiction such a political disaster.

I am attracted to those areas that most fiction handles with both textual
and structural cliches—blacks, women, the mentally ill, the socially
marginal, the relationship between society and sex—because I have had
firsthand experience with many of the situations they imply: I am black,
I have spent time in a mental hospital, and much of my adult life, for
both sexual and social reasons, has been passed on society’s margins. My
attraction to them as subject matter for fiction, however, is not so much
the desire to write autobiography, but the far more parochial desire to
set matters straight where, if only one takes the evidence of the written
word, all would seem confusion.

One of the most pernicious things about the myths—for that is all one can
call them—shadowing these areas is that they preclude any possibility of
envisioning a different social order whose members, in response to it,
might grow up reasonably to seek and expect, for example, quantitatively
more sexual encounters and/or who might foster a more reasonable and re—

laxed attitude about those sexual encounters they do have. The view of
sexual encounters as affected and affective processes is abolished from
possible consideration by the kernel of illogic at those pernicious
myths’ core: sexuality is a substance, and what is more, some individuals
possess more of it than others, in measures entirely proportional to
their distance from certain centers of bourgeois power.
To deny this whole set of prejudices, kernel and superstructure, is to
affirm that, from the inside, all people experience their own surface
behavior, sexual and otherwise, as a negotiable dialogue of response,
reaction5, desire, and control: not to experience the generation of one’s
own behavioral signs in this manner is the subjective experience of
madness.

(12) So we will always recognize it, let us have this model one last time
in all its raw absurdity: All peoples who are not by heredity and/or
active bonds of control fixed to the centers of bourgeois power are
seething masses of dull, inarticulate sexuality. The man’s is completely
identified with jealousy and aggression, the woman’s with jealousy and
acquisitiveness. Take, as an example, the bulk of men (one could as
easily take their wives, sisters, and daughters with very little
translation in the ensuing description) that statistically form the
plurality of unskilled and semi-skilled labor in this country—
traditionally referred to once as “The Working Class Male” and now as
“The Lower Classes” (this social group is not to be confused in any way
with any revisionary or other Marxist view of “the proletariat”), the
“Under Class,” or most recently by ironic European sociologists as “The
Fourth World.” In him, sex and aggression are one. The appalling and
inhuman conditions under which he lives barely keeps this sexuality/
hostility under control. Conceivably, if he could ever lower his
persistent and dull anger enough, he might be able to employ enough
intelligence to exert some beneficial influence over his own life as an
individual or over the lives of his fellow men. (The obliteration of
women and their labor, within the home and without, from this model is
pivotal to its working efficacy.) But since this dull and disfocusing
rage is fed by that inexhaustible and ever-brimming pit of sexuality
(with which it is one), this lowering is not very likely—except now and
then, when a particular lower-class male is able to exert great self-
control, repress all primitive urges (which, for him, will be a nearly
killing effort and cannot help but cause some great psychological
crippling) for the rest of his days. And should he ever fail to repress,
and that sexuality/anger should break free, he will destroy himself and
all he lias achieved in a single sweep, probably taking the odd
bourgeois-born woman with him. On the one hand (the myth continues), it
is mildly sad that the conditions under which the majority of such men
live are so oppressive; and it is sighed over that things don’t get
better for them—so that the lower

class male could blossom forth, while sticking to his place. But any
logical assessment of the situation makes it perfectly clear (declares
the myth) that if the restraints of inhuman labor and/or inhuman
conditions over inhuman hours were removed for more than one or two days
a week, the sexuality/ hostility would erupt and run berserk, and lower
class males would destroy everything, more than likely including
themselves6.

One can find this myth in all its quintessential absurdity in the
portrait of Carlton Walpole, the migrant fruit picker, at the beginning
of Joyce Carol Oates’s 1967 novel, A Garden of Earthly Delights. It
contours the portrait of all the prole-origined soldiers in Norman
Mailer’s 1948 novel, The Naked and the Dead. One tries to give these
novels liberal readings—of a sort any contemporary social worker or
psychologist might be expected to bring to the situations the novels
portray: ‘The hostilitity here is a response to the inhuman conditions.
If these men cannot seem to get it together to do anything about the
conditions, the best explanation is what behavioral psychologists call
‘psychological generalization,’ an inescapable process that is a response
to emotional overload—a process that occurs on all social levels; as
well, the pressures to be dealt with, from inside the situation, are more
complicated than they could possibly appear from outside, since they
include the conditioning of these men and our conditioned view of the
situation.” But one can no more find emblems for this reading in the
fictions than one can find emblems of the knowledge of the existence of
the moons of Jupiter in Don Quixote.

The existence of the moons of Jupiter was simply not part of the
aristocratic and upper-middle-class Spanish fifteenth-century episteme.

What makes the situation of the modern novel so appalling is that the
liberal reading was, more than likely, very much part of the episteme of
twenty-five-year-old Mailer in 1948 and certainly part of the episteme of
twenty-eight-year-old Oates in 1967. But it is not part of the episteme
that generated the nineteenth-century fictive discourses they write. And
to write nineteenth-century fictive discourse, precisely to the extent
that given examples of such discourse are recognizable as fiction, is to
doom onself to projecting the nineteenth-century episteme of which such
appalling myths as the one above are part and parcel.

Fictive discourse’s treatment of women, blacks, Jews, homosexuals, etc.,

takes off from the same point as the myth we have outlined and moves
along similar trajectories—with women’s fictive treatment having a couple
of particularly frustrating contradictions, which, to understand, we must
begin with the understanding that women are not, as even my list might
suggest, a category among four, but rather marginally more than half of
the other three, and are just as exploitable within the work force (as
that phrase is traditionally read) as they are “outside the work force”
(i.e., at work in

home for a father or husband), and that the two modes of exploitation are
intimately connected and endlessly and mutually supportive. What all
these fictions do is, first, take only a novelistically valorized set of
visible elements (never an individualized totality: everything done by
one woman, one working man, one Jew), and, second, suggest causal arrows
between these elements in absurd directions. What makes modern fiction so
uninteresting is that the causality and analysis implied by the fiction
is demonstrably not the matrix of causality and analysis that the writers
themselves could possibly believe in. We are at a point in history where
the basic models proposed by the objective discourse of sociology and
psychology—even in their most vulgarized, cocktail party versions—are
more accurate and interesting than the basic models that underlie most
“serious” novels.
Let the above galaxy of twelve be the readings which anchor all our
subsequent statements to this text as we put our toe over the brim into
the oceanic text of Dhalgren.

Here, on the edge, we note that some of the most disappointed readers
were those who tried to read the “city” as a “projection” of the
protagonist’s (or, heaven forbid, the author’s) “fantasies.” I suspect
these are the people who see the recit/foreground (subjective/objective)
proportion of sentences as a fixed sign evoking an interpretive judgment
that—for the SF reader, at any rate—such a proportion simply doesn’t call
up. The logic runs: If there are too many subjective-sounding sentences,
this is a sign that some objective mystery exists to be solved; it is a
sign that there is some objective correlative which will clear up the
mystery and make “sense” of all this confused “subjectivity.” (One
recalls the more naive critics of books like Finne-gans Wake demanding to
know what it was “really” about, or those even more naively claiming to
have “discovered” its “plot.”) Such readers simply assume that every book
must have a clear and linear reading that “explains” the “story”; for
them the sign of its existence is the distortion of that proportion of
sentences away from the objective. By the same token, too many objective
sentences, again violating that proportion, for these readers is a sign
to take all this objectivity as a projection of some traumatic, inner,
subjective state-of-character: dream, guilt, psychosis ...(One recalls
the equally naive readers of Le Voyeur at this point.) Dhalgren is almost
all foreground—as I have mentioned. One can only speculate that these
readers took this as a sign for some great and inner subjective
distortion (above and beyond the description and analysis of
psychological distress the text supplies) which would “explain” it all.

They were, understandably, disappointed when the text did not supply
one7.

And I suspect these were readers who, on the deepest level where it

counts, simply could not read the book as science fiction—a practice of
writing which has familiarized its readers with another proportion
weighted toward the objective.

I would like to make the following suggestion humbly, but perhaps I have
already crossed a limit, a line, into a landscape where humility has no
existence. I may well be already in the city of the unacceptable:

Anyone who finds it helpful may approach Dhalgren, without fear of

misreading the text because of the approach (though there is, alas, no
way to insure a “proper” reading: it may have none) as (and in) an
attempt to explore and respond to a small sector of the grammar of the
language of human signs. It tries to focus on the grammar of that
language by a science fictional reorganization of these signs’ textual
production/reproduction. Kid’s sanity remains in question (and hopefully
is never fixed to the circumscribed area of meaning that respectively
overshadows the officially “sane” or the officially “insane”) for the
same reason the disaster of the city is unexplained: such explanations
would become a fixed signified straiting the play and interplay of the
signifier—the city of signs—that flexes and reflexes above it. To “clear
up” either question (that of the Kid’s “sanity” or that of “what happened
to the city”) would prevent us from apprehending Dhalgren’s real/true(?)
topic: the organizing and reorganizing transformations we are free to
view and experience once these restraining models are tossed aside.

—New York September 1975

!A dozen years later (November 1987), Dhalgren’s sales have settled at

about a million. It is still in print and sells a few more thousand each
year. While more popular with the hardcore SF readership, The Mote in
God’s Eye never did catch up.

2Lacan, Jacques, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,”

included in Structuralism, edited by Jacques Ehrmann, A Doubleday Anchor
Book, New York, 1970.

3Roland Barthes has quipped in Writing Degree Zero that Flaubert made
writing acceptable to the bourgeoisie by welding the idea of “labor” to
the creation of the text.

4Readers who detected the pastiche of Caliban to the Audience in Newboy’s

second monologue might wonder if Auden shouldn’t be included. Let me say,
Auden is a writer who concerns me and delights me—rather than who
influences me.

5I intend these first two categories to cover habitual reactions that may
run counter to more recently manifested desires.

6In a depressingly real sense, the Marxist glorification of work for its
own sake, coupled with the naive assumption that as long as everybody is
working hard, all sexual “problems” will disappear, i.e., reduce to a
pastoral (and suspiciously bourgeois) vision of respectful, shy, young
working men getting up the nerve to propose to respectful, shy, young
working women, who must get up the nerve to respond, quiveringly, “Yes”
(both, finally, taking courage from the fact that they are serving the
state—the Marxist equivalent of “doing it for Old Glory”?), is
historically, if not archetypally, one with the nineteenth-century
industrial mythos: “Keep the proles working hard enough and they’ll be
too tired to break out into the orgies of lust, rapine, and
[incidentally] economic devastation [the absent text supplies for this
term, “looting”] we know seethes just below the surface of every prole
soul. Under industrial containment [read: exploitation/exhaustion] their
sex [read: aggression] can be limited to the most conventional and tepid
expressions.” The entire template, Marxist and Capitalist, is a pre-
Freudian disaster area which Freud’s own inability to distinguish between
sensuality, sexuality, biological gender, and sex role socialization has
done as much to perpetuate in the West as his basic discovery of the
unconscious, sexual repression, transference, and infantile sexuality
have prepared the groundwork to alleviate.

7A11 possible readings of a book, naive or otherwise, are of course in

dialogue with one another—but in different modes and at different
intensities!
Some Remarks Toward A Reading Of Dhaloreh
by

K. Leslie Steiner

Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany, belongs to that scant handful of science

fiction novels with obvious aesthetic range and clear seriousness. At our
most cynical, if we cannot state that a full appreciation of that range
and seriousness is the reason for the book’s near three-quarters of a
million sales to date (among paperback original science fiction where a
hundred thousand is considered notably successful), we can reasonably
maintain that such sales are due in large part to a curiosity over what
such range and seriousness look like in a science fiction novel.

Sex will not account for it.

Thirty-five odd of Dhalgren’s near nine hundred pages do deal with

copulatory mechanics, but this is simply not a high enough percentage—
especially with the real and near-real pornography seldom more than a
bookrack away. Also the “sex” in Dhalgren is too psychologically
portrayed for real arousal. From the beginning to the end of it the
characters never stop thinking.

It isn’t publisher promotion.

Besides a somewhat more elegantly designed cover than is usual for

paperback original science fiction, there’s been none. Also, three
quarters of a million sales in any field outside science fiction is just
not that spectacular—especially from the publisher of Jaws and Day of the
Jackal.

What has made Dhalgren a phenomenon at Bantam Books is not the

sales so much as that those sales have come without one advertisement in
prozine, fanzine, or general readership newspaper—a distinction neither
The Dispossessed on the one hand nor The Mote in God’s Eye on the other
(both books which have sold less well by respective factors of three and
four) can claim. Sales in the multiple millions helped on by hundred
thousand dollar ad campaigns are not uncommon at Bantam. Sales of over
half a million with only the standard seventy-five review copies are.

Dhalgren is a novel that has achieved its readership entirely on garnered

reputation. To the extent that reviewer response contributes to such
reputation, we must note that not one such response we have seen, whether
the praiseful New York Times Book Review piece by Gerald Jonas or the
hyperbolically glowing appreciation by Theodore Sturgeon in Galaxy,
whether the vitriolic reaction of Ellison in The Los Angeles Times or the
outrage of Del Rey in Analog, has even suggested that the book was
traditionally “entertaining” or a “good read.” In fact it has probably
been the most appreciative reviewers, like Barbour and Lupoff, who have
been the first to warn the general reader that the book, besides long, is
involuted, obscure, and difficult—if not downright tedious.
Yet today, just over a year and a half after these first critical
reactions, the tremors of one sympathetic reviewer concerned with whether
or not Delany could continue to find publishers for such obviously
uncommercial work, or the philistine remarks that, for a few months,
littered both prozines and fanzines on the stupidity of the publishers
for taking on such an obvious bomb, today seem like natterings from a
parallel universe quite out of touch with our own. Dhalgren has found its
audience. It is not the runaway audience of the manufactured bestseller.
It is not the all too swayable and, finally, all too naive audience of
hardcore science fiction readers. Because it is neither of these, we may
speculate that it might well be the basis for that most important of
audiences, the vertical audience of concerned and alert readers
interested in the progress of American fiction. For it is our sincere
belief that only this audience could find such a novel truly absorbing.

Among Dhalgren’s array of poets and priests, astronauts and engineers,

lay analysts and leather queens, outlaws and oligarchs, all interlocked
in a daymare plot sired by Borges out of Genet, each in intracranial
trajectory across the deliquescent and quintessentially American
cityscape of Bellona—a ‘scape duplicated in how many photos of burned-out
central Harlem, depopulated Buffalo, dying Detroit and half a dozen other
towns for which the book presents the fantastic calculus that, despite
(or even because of) its avoidance of specific economic and political
explanation, nevertheless demonstrates with exhaustive accuracy the
workings of such images within the meaning codes that form and inform our
epoch—we can

only touch, in an essay of this scope, on the novel’s most formal and
framing structures.

As formal and framing as our exploration will be, we feel it is

justified: Dhalgren does not yield up its center easily on first reading—
at least not to this its first wave of readers. Our own attempt to
illuminate that center, in all its dislocated play, is formed by
highlighting elements on the borders of its vast tapestry: the center
itself, which is not so much a location as a set of optical strategies to
refract their glimmer, this essay must largely leave out; for that is
something only a careful reading of the text itself can supply.

The simple key to Dhalgren is an old and familiar one to serious novel
readers: Dhalgreris central character, the Kid, has great charm. Unless
one is prepared, however, to find a meticulous and exhaustive portrait of
a somewhat shy and dubiously honest (if well-intentioned) ex-mental
patient charming, Dhalgren cannot be a pleasure to read.

But one must find doughty old men charming to enjoy Don Quixote.

And one must find high spirited if somewhat naive young women charming to
enjoy Emma. Indeed, if one does not find high spirited if somewhat naive
young women charming, all Austen’s extensive art, inexhaustible wit, and
moral fervor will seem pretty cold fare. Similarly for Cervantes’. And
one must find Delany’s wandering madman charming; if one does not, the
great net of verbal resonances Delany sets up around him, the glimmer of
evanescent experience half comprehended in the burning city, the
metaphoric superstructure of language and logic as well as the precision
and energy with which Delany propels the Kid through them will seem
pretty rarefied stuff.

The Kid, of course, is much more than a charming wastrel. He is deeply

sensitive, sharply observant; he is very brave and sincerely—almost
agonizingly—modest. But our approach to these qualities must be through a
sense of his charm. If it is not, these other qualities will seem quite
disembodied, and the structural complexities of the novel which support
Kid’s tragedies—tragedies which are the tragedies of our epoch underlined
and highlighted by an extraordinary fictive surround—will seem mere
cleverness or less.

Over a wide field of reading we can locate two categories of successful

character. Characters of one category, on our first exposure, wrench at
our sympathies, frequently overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds, to
push us toward laughter or tears. One thinks of Salinger’s Holden
Caulfield, of Osborne’s Jimmy Porter. Characters of the second category
are presented usually at much greater length and always with greater
analysis

—frequently too much analysis for even a diligent reader to absorb at a

single reading. Though the author, by this analysis, compels us to think
about the character more, our initial emotional responses are much
cooler. If we must watch such a character suffer or despair, we watch as
we would a real person suffer in the street: it is sad, yes; but we do
not get involved. One thinks of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, of Eliot’s
Dorothea Brooke. The characters in the first category, on repeated
reading, pall. Their play on our emotions begins to appear too
calculated, too strident. At worst, they dissolve, on fifth or sixth
reading, into the various rhetorical postures out of which their authors
cobbled them together but which adhere, finally, to no rich organization
of psychological veracity. At the same time that we must now make an
effort of will to experience these collections of verbal tropes as human
beings, much less respond to them humanely, we realize that the intensity
of our initial response was basically due to safety: we could cry and
laugh so easily because, finally, we were not crying or laughing about
anything very much. Characters of the second category, if we are lucky
enough to indulge multiple readings of the works in which they occur, we
find gaining an intense presence. Though we still may not cry at their
suffering, frequently we are deeply moved by it, if not truly frightened.
We begin to know in our bones why their insoluble problems are, for them,
insoluble. Against this, their triumphs, however minor or momentary,
present for us all we can know of our own human possibility, or the
possibility of humanity for humanity. As their significance becomes for
us more and more universal, our picture of them becomes more specific,
more individual, unique. Without further denigrating the pleasure or
importance of characters in category one, those in category two are the
indisputable triumphs of the writing art.

In the eighteen months since its publication, we have read Dhalgren cover
to cover six times. Though this suggests an enthusiasm of a sort usually
associated with works containing category one characters, our own
experience of the Kid is far closer to what we have known of category
two.

But if the simple key to Dhalgren is character, the complexities it

unlocks, like Austen’s complexities, are structural. And it is finally an
aspect of structure that we shall here explore.

In the second half of Don Quixote, the errant Don encounters men and
women who have read of his adventures in the first half—which, in concert
with the Don’s literarily mediated ideals of chivalry from the first
half, justifies the interpretation current among a number of critics that
the Quixote is, among other things, an allegory of the progress of the
text.

In the first chapter of Dhalgren, the Kid encounters a notebook which,

though he only recognizes it in dim flashes, could only have been written
by himself. The text of this notebook sweeps up the text of the novel
proper

and, in the last chapter, comes to replace it. We do not need to be

critics, then, to assert that Dhalgren, in its foreground, deals with a
theme others have found buried in allegory in Cervantes. What it does
perhaps require a critic for is to trace out the organization of the
numerous variations on this theme. For this organization recalls, in its
complexity, one of Austen’s minuets of affection and self-deception, if
indeed it does not go beyond that complexity into a new mode altogether.
Let us leave Austen and Cervantes and explore the play and progress of
texts in the text of Dhalgren.

Dhalgren makes constant reference to, and/or quotes extensively from,

three inner texts: the poems written by Kidd (his earlier onoma) which
eventually form the booklet Brass Orchids (as well as the mysterious
“second collection”); the newspaper published and edited by Roger
Calkins, The Be liona Times; and the journal which appears in fragments
throughout the novel and which, with Chapter VII, becomes one with it.

The most traditionally privileged of these texts is, of course, the

poems—i.e., literarily privileged. The sign of their privilege, in the
novel Dhalgren, is that they are not anywhere quoted in the text—at least
not in final draft. We see (and experience) Kidd write them, revise them,
correct them; we watch others read them, recopy them, and miscopy them.
But whenever we are given any phrase from their text, almost immediately
we are informed that the phrase is to be deleted or rewritten. And the
once Denny reads a line aloud from the printed version (p. 568)\ and we
think we have at last heard a true fragment of these most privileged
utterances, we learn two sentences on that he has misread the line. The
astute reader will recognize that misreading as a combination of two
rejected versions of the same poem (p. 271), which perhaps explains Kid’s
extreme anxiety at Denny’s mistake: for a moment Kid must believe he did
not make the corrections he remembered making, which corrections make the
text of the poem authentic for him—and inaccessible to us.

But if we stand back from all three inner texts—poems, newspaper, and
journal—and the text of the novel in which they are embedded, we notice
what a substantial amount of the machinery of this very long book (far
more than is devoted to the too often mentioned “sex”) is given to
debunking the traditional authority on which their various textual
privileges are founded.

Thus, the newspaper’s traditional authority of accurate public

pronouncement is thrown into question by its shifting dates, its absurd
headlines, and even its highly affected style. There is the suggestion
that many of the articles assumed to be written by Calkins are really
written by Bill. The Bellona Times has dealt in scandal, muckraking, and
libel. It announces the publication of the “second collection” without
Kid’s agreeing to it,

exaggerates the number and nature of the scorpions and their runs, and we
catch it in at least one specific error of fact that is typical:

We would much prefer to give our opinions on Lower Cumberland Park [...
where apparently all power has gone out with the breaking of the water
main on my last Thursday ...]. But another writer (page one, continued
page seven) has already rehearsed his eyewitness, first-hand account.
And, anyway, in his words, “... chances are, no one lives there any
more.” (p. 547)

It is in Lower Cumberland Park that Dragon Lady has her nest and that
George Harrison lives with his populous entourage of blacks.

The traditional authority of poetry is its claim to aesthetic integrity.

This is thrown into question at the party given for Kid by the publisher
Calkins—with Thelma pro and Frank con: and before the party ends, the
poems’ very authorship is put in doubt. During the party, the
specifically social de-privileging of art and the art-text, for which the
poems are a symbol, becomes explicit in the novel:

Lanya sighed. “I guess that’s why I’m glad I’m not an Artist ...1 mean
Artist in the way this party presupposes ...1 don’t just think you can be
that kind of artist any more. Lots of people do things lots better than
lots of others; but, today, so many people do so many things very well,
and so many people are seriously interested in so many different things
people do for their own different reasons, you can’t call any thing the
best for every person, or even every serious person ... This party—it’s
ritual attention, the sort you give a social hero. I guess that can be an
artist if there’re few enough of them around—”

“—like in Bellona?”

“Bellona is a very small part of the universe. And this party is a very
good place to bear that in mind ...” She glanced down under her brows.
“Maybe that’s what Mr. Newboy was trying to tell you?” (pp. 692-693)

The journal, which is found in the novel’s first chapter and quoted in
fragments throughout Dhalgren (and was therefore written, at least in
part, “before” the novel’s action begins) is given in substantial portion
as the last chapter. We reread a number of the same quotes we have read
before, only this time in context. (This identifies what we are reading
as the “same” journal.) Nevertheless, the journal seems to continue the
story of the characters and events “forward” through time from where it
takes up at the end of Chapter VI. Also, Kid claims never to have seen
the journal before Lanya finds it in the park (p. 37), and yet when we
are finally presented with the journal text, it certainly appears to be
narrated by Kid—all of which undermines the traditional authority we
grant a journal: that of a real

recounting of real happenings written by a real person in real time. Even

the variorum apparatus with which the opening section of the journal
chapter is encumbered seems to be there essentially to point out its own
inconsistencies, flaws, and generally to deflate itself (p. 723 & pp.
735-736).

As we stand back, however, we must also notice something else: the

multiplicity of places these texts-within-texts connect with one another;
and that the connections are most unlinear. We hope to show that these
texts connect in such a way that their various
privileges/deprivilegements form an interlocking and interdependent
structure. A section of this structure, which we feel is indispensible
for the true appreciation of the novel and a key to much that is in it,
is what, in this essay, we shall explore.

We have already used once in this essay that most privileged of critical
terms: symbol. The sin of privilege is that it allows what we grant it to
pass without closer examination. But we shall not, I hope, indulge such a
sin here.

Modern Active symbolization is semantic and plurally metonymic—rather

than allegorical and globally metaphoric. If, for example, one character
robs another in an alley, and we read at the incident’s conclusion, “The
buildings stared down with blind, accusing windows,” the way to retrieve
the symbolism of this (admittedly hackneyed) sentence is by imaginative
metonymic extension and semantic substitution: by metonymic extension,
the “buildings” and the “windows” symbolize the landscape in which the
crime occurs. By semantic substitution, then, the landscape in which the
crime occurs is “blind” and “accusing.” The windows are blind because
presumably (by metonymic extension) no one is looking out of them. The
windows are accusing because (by metonymic extension and semantic
substitution) //people were looking out the windows, they might proffer
an accusation. In another mood then (i.e., conditional subjunctive) the
inhabitants of the landscape are symbolized by the sentence. We may also
say (continuing the semantic substitution that allowed us the previous
statement) that the symbol sentence symbolizes the material of the
landscape and the inhabitants of the landscape in different moods. The
double pair “buildings/windows” and “blind/accusing” symbolizes (again by
semantic substitution) alternation in properties of the landscape, i.e.,
opacity and transparency, efficacy and ethics. We can say, by semantic
substitution, that the alternation symbolizes the complexity of the
landscape. We can then go on to discuss these various complexities of
landscape, remembering that they are organized around a crime, and
organized in relation to one another by the symbol sentence. We might
return to other parts of the text to retrieve the trajectory at which we
enter this symbolic structure (i.e., the web
of signifiers that is our only expression of this symbol’s signified):
Was the crime recounted from the criminal’s or the victim’s point of view
...? This will ultimately play a part in organizing our symbolic elements
and their referents2.

But the way not to untangle the symbolism of such a fictive sentence is
to say: “The buildings, with their blind, accusing windows, are an
allegory for the forces of society and justice.” The metonymic leap here
is too great and the semantic collapse too complete to be useful.

The first method explodes (as with a microscope) the elements of our
awareness as we experience the symbol sentence itself, retaining those
elements in their various moods and in their various structural
relationships. The second merely takes one symbolic structure and
replaces it with another, which, despite any accuracy of intuition, puts
too little analytic energy to the task.

We have already said, rather conservatively, that the poems in Dhalgren

symbolize the art-text and, by extension, art. We also say that the
situation of Kid, his poems, and Bellona, symbolizes the situation of the
modern artist, his art, and his landscape. But though we note that one
situation might be considered an allegory (or metaphor) for the other,
still we reiterate that we have arrived at the various symbolic
correspondences not by intuitive leap, but by an extensive
semantic/metonymic matrix which orders the symbol in the way it is
experienced while reading the text. It may be assumed that such a matrix
is constructible behind any subsequent use of the word “symbol” in the
text at hand.

We have gone on at such length about our method here because it is

precisely such a method that will most aid a reader in retrieving what,
symbolically, is occurring around those sections of fictive discourse
that so many have found nearly impenetrable, and which Dhalgren presents
us with again and again—for example the following from Kid’s musings as
he approaches the city of Bellona:

This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain. Very
few suspect the existence of this city. It is as if not only the media
but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and
perception to pass it by. Rumor says there is practically no power here.
Neither television cameras nor on-the-spot broadcasts function: that such
a catastrophe as this should be opaque, and therefore dull, to the
electric nation! It is a city of inner discordances and retinal
distortions, (pp. 15-16)

We shall return to this passage to show how it is symbolically related

(i.e., lies a mere step away in the symbol matrix) to another passage
further on. That connection will strongly suggest one aspect necessary to
the theme

cited—i.e., the progress of the text. But we cannot leave the general
problem of symbology without touching, in Delany’s work, on its sister
problem, the problem of mythology.
Our approach to the mythological allusions in Dhalgren is this: While
there are mythical fragments scattered throughout the novel, we suspect
that their symbolic significance (by semantic substitution) is precisely
that they are fragments and not wholes. To locate a single myth with the
same “plot” as Dhalgren and say that one symbolizes the other would be to
commit, on a grand scale, the allegorical error that, on a small scale,
we have analyzed above. At least one of Dhalgren’s explicit themes is the
fragmentation of modern social myths (p. 278ff); the fragmentary nature
of the mythic allusions merely dramatizes in privileged literary terms
what the foreground of the novel dramatizes in action.

The novel begins with a clear recall of the myth of Daphne3. But when, in
the next scene, Kid, about to discuss the incident with the truck-driver
who has given him a lift, thinks, “No, the Daphne bit would not pass—”
(p. 11), we suspect Delany is also telling us that we cannot discuss this
novel as though it were a contemporary Ulysses, i.e, a novel with a
coherent referent myth in place of a traditional foreground structure or
plot.

It won’t pass.

The Daphne encounter takes place outside the city of Bellona. The myth
fragments are encountered after we cross the bridge into Bellona proper.
We think the symbolism here is: clear, recognizable myths—not only
literary, but (by metonymic extension) social ones as well—are to be
found outside Bellona. Inside the city all myths/fictions/signs—literary
and social—are shattered, revalued, and recombined.

We have spoken of connections between texts in Dhalgren. Let us examine

one such connection—between the text of Brass Orchids and the text of the
novel proper.

In Chapter II, Kid is walking up Brisbain Avenue, looking for Calkins’

mansion. He is carrying the notebook; recently he has broken into a house
for something to eat. When he is on the street again, continuing his
search, we come across the following description:

Charcoal, like the bodies of beetles, heaped below the glittering wall on
the far corner. The sharpness of incinerated upholstery cut the street’s
gritty stink. Through a cellar window, broken, a grey eel of smoke
slithered the sidewalk to vaporize in the gutter. Through another,
intact, flickerings ... The singular burning among the dozens of whole
buildings was the most uncanny thing he’d seen.

He crossed quickly to the next block, (p. 86)

Kid continues up the avenue, writes his first poem (“Brisbain”) on the
blank verso of a notebook page, finds the Calkins mansion and, while he
is trying to look over the wall, is set upon by three scorpions (who will
be revealed later as Copperhead, Glass, and Spitt); he is revived by
Newboy the poet and Fenster the black liberal, but is not allowed within
the mansion gates. He starts back down Brisbain Avenue; and, after he
sees some people down the block who might be more scorpions, he responds
to his terror by sitting down against a lamp-post to write again:

His heart pounded.

His armpits grew slippery.

Breathing hard, he sat with his back to the post’s base.

He took the pen from his pocket ....”Charcoal,” he wrote down, in small
letters, “like the bodies of burnt beetles, heaped below the glittering
black wall of the house on the far corner.” He bit at his lip, and wrote
on: “The wet sharpness of incinerated upholstery cut the general gritty
stink of the street. From the rayed hole in the cellar window a grey eel
of smoke wound across the sidewalk, dispersed before” at which point he
crossed out the last two words and substituted, “vaporized at the gutter.
Through another window,” and crossed out window, “still intact, something
flickered. This single burning building in the midst of dozens of other
whole buildings was,” stopped and began to write all over again:

“Charcoal, like the bodies of beetles, heaped below the glittering wall.
The sharpness of incinerated upholstery cut the street’s gritty stink.”
Then he went back and crossed out “the bodies of” and went on: “From a
broken cellar window, a grey eel wound the sidewalk to vaporize at the
gutter. Through another, intact, something flickered. This burning
building,” crossed that out to substitute, “The singular burning in the
midst of dozens of whole buildings,” and without breaking the motion of
his hand suddenly tore the whole page from the notebook.

Pen and crumpled paper in his hand; he was breathing hard. After a
moment, he straightened out the paper and, on a fresh page, began to copy
again:

“Charcoal, like beetles heaped under the glittering wall ...”

He folded the torn paper in four and put it back in the notebook when he
had finished the next revision, (pp. 93-94)

What Delany has done here is construct a purely verbal perspective that
begins, broadly, below the baseline of the novel’s text, then rises
through it until it converges somewhere above at the vanishing point—at
the “next revision” we never see—that is, presumably, the poem. The
history of poetics gives us the reading for those perspective lines. They
progress from the direction of prose and in the direction of poetry. From
Coleridge’s “Prose is words in the best order; poetry is the best words
in the best order,” through Flaubert’s rhetorical inquiry of George Sand
in a letter of 3 April 1876, “Why is there a necessary connection between
the right word and the

musical word? Why does one always end by writing a line of poetry when
one condenses one’s thoughts too much?” to Marianne Moore’s “In poetry,
the instantaneous solution to almost any problem is to delete,” the
history of poetics is littered with topoi that leave the reading clear.
And these perspective lines establish a clear connection between the text
of the novel and the text of Kid’s poem—though in such a way that we
cannot say for sure that any word in the novel text, including “charcoal”
or “beetles,” survives into that final draft.

Here we refer the reader back to the paragraph quoted on page 64 of this
essay, and particularly the sentence: “It is as if not only the media but
the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and
perception to pass it by.” It, of course, is Bellona. The first clear
appeal to perspective we encounter in the novel is in this purely verbal
illusion of perspective. At this point we should also recall that
historically the “laws of perspective” arose as an essentially ironic
two-dimensional commentary on a ponderous, three-dimensional real: lines
that met were suddenly signs for lines that no less than Euclid had
claimed would never touch; one angle was a sign for another; ellipses
were signs for circles; in short, systematic distortion was a sign for
the organically undistorted. And what facilitated the codification of
these laws in the west? A specifically ponderous architecture! Japan,
despite a solid tradition of highly representational painting, never
developed these “laws,” and there are numerous examples of Japanese, till
the beginning of the twentieth century, reporting that Western painting
was “curiously distorted.”4 All this metonymic interplay between
perspective, perception, distortion and architecture, as well as
Dhalgren’s precise rendition of the first of these (and its overwhelming
rendition of the last) as language, is the first clear, symbolic
suggestion that Bellona is a city of words, on a far deeper level than we
might have suspected—indeed, on a level that recalls nothing so much as
that astonishing Chapter II in Book V of Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris,
“This Will Kill That,” where Dom Claud outlines, in a way that, to the
modern ear, casts forward to McLuhan far more than it recalls anything
medieval, how the birth of printed language signals the death of
architecture.

But there are other junctures between text-and-text within Dhalgren

which, when we begin to trace out their pattern, reveal even more
interesting symbolic structural exfoliations.

The Necker cube is a visual illusion with which we are all familiar. As
we regard the two dimensional projection of the three dimensional object,
spontaneously what was the back face leaps forward to become the front,

and what was the front face drops away to become the back. Planes seen
from above are suddenly seen from below; outsides are now insides and
insides outsides:

To some extent, once we know how the illusion is supposed to affect us,
we can control the switching back and forth—the alternation of “readings”
for its interlocking junctures.

Dhalgren is a novel that is frequently described as circular—because the

last non-sentence in the book (“Waiting here, away from the terrifying
weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into
the hills, I have come to”) can be read as the first part of a sentence
completed by the book’s opening non-sentence (“to wound the autumnal
city.”). But we must point out that a circle is not the only closed
figure possible to inscribe on a plain sheet of paper. A careful reading
of Dhalgren shows that the connecting nodes of various textual modes of
discourse give rise to a figure more closely resembling a Necker cube
than a simple circle. The resultant shifts in authority of the various
fictive planes, leaping back and forth as we observe them, are, we feel,
crucial to the appreciation of Dhalgren.

We take the trouble to describe these shifts in the hope that, once the
reader can bring them more or less under control, she or he will
appreciate the structural beauty and complexity of the novel Delany has
architected.

The first movement of Dhalgren’s Chapter I begins with subjective

rhapsody:

to wound the autumnal city.

So howled out for the world to give him a name.

The in-dark answered with wind.

All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the
clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight
elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle;
student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last
week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee
tastes after you’ve held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute, (p.l)

The second movement of Chapter I begins:

It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the

terrible and vivid ephemera of now. In the long country, cut with rain,
somehow there is nowhere to begin .... (p. 11)

In the fourth movement of Chapter I, the harmonica player (who will later
be identified as Lanya) brings a notebook up to the park commune’s
campsite. And when Kid reads this notebook, it begins on its own page
one:

In Palmer-perfect script, an interrupted sentence took up on the top

line:

to wound the autumnal city.

So howled out for the world to give him a name. That made goose bumps on
his flanks ...

The in-dark answered with wind.

All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the
clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight
elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle;
student (p. 36)
But here, apparently, the text alters. For when Kid picks up the notebook
again to show Lanya the mention of student riots:

He reached for the book (she pulled back sharply from the orchid), spread
his free hand on the page (she came forward again, her shoulder brushing
his arm. He could see her breast inside her unbuttoned shirt. Yeah) and
read aloud:

‘“... thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student happenings with

spaghetti filled Volkswagens, dawn in Seattle, automated evening in LA.”‘
He looked up, confused, (p. 37)

And the next day when Kid is looking for Calkins’ mansion, he discovers
(shortly before the writing scene with which we examined our—but not the
novel’s—first textual juncture) the following passage in the notebook:

It is not that I have no future. Rather it continually fragments on the

insubstantial and indistinct ephemera of now. In the summer country,
stitched with lightning, somehow there is no way to conclude ... (p. 85)

Whatever the significance of the correspondences between the text of the

narrative and the text of the enclosed (and enclosing) journal, in terms
of “plot” or “symbolism,” what we can say unequivocally is that such
correspondences do exist and that they exist between texts of differing
modes—modes that differ even though some of the words shared by these
differently moded texts are identical.

The correspondences are furthered in more generalized, semantic ways as

well: in the scene at the commune, from which we have already quoted, the
two young women, Milly and Lanya, discuss the notebook’s contents:

Milly had taken the book, turned to a later page.

The green-eyed girl leaned over her shoulder:

“Read that part near the end, about the lightning and the explosions and
the riot and all. Do you think he was writing about what happened here—to
Bellona, I mean?”

“Read that part at the beginning, about the scorpions and the trapped
children. What do you suppose he was writing about there!”

They bent together in firelight, (p. 37)

Chapter VII, which is the text of the notebook itself, indeed begins with
some entries concerning the scorpions and the five children who had been
trapped in the burning house (and rescued by George and the Kid); and,
indeed, it ends with a description of catastrophe in the city, involving
lightning, riot, and explosions. The notebook, which will begin in the
middle of a line, will not, however, begin with “to wound the autumnal
city.” But there is internal justification for this. We shall read among
the journal entries:
I’ve read some pages so many times they’ve pulled loose from the wire
spiral. Some of these I’ve caught before they ripped completely free,
folded them up and put them inside the front cover. Carrying the book
around, though, I must have let them slip out. The first pages—poems and
journal notes—are all gone, as well as pages here and there through the
rest. (pp. 759-760)

We have seen how Delany has connected the text of the novel proper with
the poetic text: a section of text is condensed until it is one with the
novel’s, then that text is condensed and recondensed until it disappears
into the poem, via the verbal perspective lent by poetic tradition. What
is the nature of the correspondence between the novel text and the
journal text?

From an examination of the above examples, we see that sometimes the

texts are identical and sometimes they are substitutive variants, one for
the other5. What do these correspondences accomplish within the novel’s
foreground space? Besides unequivocally connecting two modes of
discourse, they hint, whenever, as in his stopover en route to Calkins’
mansion, Kid becomes aware of one, that “he pay attention to part of his
mind he could not even locate” (p. 85). We might let this phrase pass
without comment were it not for another passage earlier in the book, in
which Kid, referring to his stay in a mental hospital, tells Tak what
it’s like to be insane:

“Look, about ... being nuts.” He
the doubled fist of flesh, hair,
it suddenly seemed weighted with
never have been. That means what
... you think that is your mind.
felt self-righteous and shy, looked at
horn and callous pressed into his groin;
the bones in it. “You’re not, and you
you see, and hear, and feel, and think
But the real mind is invisible: you’re

less aware of it, while you think, than you are of your eye while you see
... until something goes wrong with it. Then you become aware of it, with
all its dislocated pieces and its rackety functioning, the same way you
become aware of your eye when you get a cinder in it. Because it hurts
... Sure, it distorts things. But the strange thing, the thing that you
can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you’re lucky, a
doctor who has an unusual amount of sense—stranger than the
hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety—is the way you begin to
experience the edges of the mind itself ... in a way other people just
can’t.” (pp. 53-54)

Though Kid cannot “locate” the “part” of the mind where these
correspondences are significant, he is at least aware that its “edges”
exist, because he has had some firsthand experience of them, thanks to
his bout with mental illness.

I suspect that these places in the mind, “dislocated” and functioning in

a “rackety” way during mental distress, are nothing less than the
unconscious itself—though they are not the “Freudian” unconscious (i.e.,
the popular misconception of Freud’s discovery), filled with lurking
monsters, repressed terrors, and archetypes. Rather, it is a very
specifically Lacanian unconscious (i.e., the concept of the unconscious
Lacan has retrieved from a close examination of Freud’s original work),
an unconscious composed of the infrastructure of language itself, where
such syntactic substitutions may be made, and where the reality-model is
stored “as a language.”6 The circularity that so many elements of
Dhalgren suggest is, symbolically, not so much a circularity through time
as it is a circularity through the great, unconscious storehouse of
language itself, where modes of discourse are stacked, helter-skelter, up
against one another—as in the great MSE Warehouse, in which are stored
all the inventions in (and the inventions of) the novel. Here is the
prokaryotic magma of speech itself, which erupts the words actually
composing the novel7, as well as, presumably, those words that make up
the journal, the newspaper, and even the final, unuttered utterances of
Brass Orchids.

We may reasonably assume Delany is aware of the differing weights of

varying modes of discourse—reportage, fiction, fantasy, etc. On the final
page of Dhalgren, we read that work on its immense text was begun in
January 1969 (p. 879). Just a week or so before, on 27 December 1968,
Delany delivered a talk at the MLA Seminar on Science Fiction that grew
into the paper “About Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words,”8
which deals with the various levels of subjunctivity that inform various
types of discourse—reportage, fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. It
is therefore reasonable to assume that in the novel he began work on
between four days

and four weeks later he may well have been interested in exploring the
fictive possibilities resulting from juxtaposing one discourse with
another, embedding one in another, transforming one into another. (If the
paper cited—which begins with an appeal to an extremely close reading of
fictive sentences, literally word by word—does not precisely announce the
theme of the novel [and a reasonable argument can be made that it does],
it is nevertheless closely related to it.) As we have seen, Dhalgren is
lush with such juxtapositions, embeddings, and transformations.

If we read across the book’s final circularity, we see one of these

transformations accomplished: as we reach the final pages of the last
journal entry, in which the diarist has been describing his exit from
Bellona, suddenly the entry loses narrative coherence and becomes—for the
third time in the journal—schiz-talk. The schiz-talk joins with the
subjective rhapsody which begins the book, out of which, phoenix-like,
emerges the jeweled and polished prose of the novel’s text, describing
the initial encounter between the Kid and the strange tree-woman, just
before Kid’s entry into the city. But let us look a little more closely
at what is going on around the juncture of these modes.

At the beginning of the book, Kid (then nameless) encounters an Oriental

woman (with a Midwestern Standard accent) in the woods. They make love.
He asks her to tell him his name; instead of answering, she shows him
where to get a strange chain of prisms, mirrors, and lenses. While he is
taking it from the cave, she runs away. He follows, to find her in the
middle of a field, whereupon she turns into a tree. He runs away.

Going only so far into the novel, we note that there are two possible
modes in which this opening incident can be read: either it is one with
the base-line reality of the novel, i.e., we are to take it as something
that really happened and assume there is some implicit or explicit
fantastic/science-fictional explanation for it, an explanation that goes
along, as it were, with the mode; or it happens against the base-line
reality of the novel, i.e., we are to take it as a dream, a
hallucination, or a fantasy (in whole or in part) of the character, a
mental fiction that Kid reads, as it were, in the wrong mode.

These are the two modes of fictive authority that such fictive
discourses—especially that discourse labeled science fiction—present us
with.

Kid runs away from the meadow and, on the highway, is given a lift by a
trucker:

The driver, tall, blond, and acned, looking blank, released the clutch.

He was going to say thanks, but coughed. Maybe the driver wanted somebody
to rap at? Why else stop for someone just walking the road.

He didn’t feel like rapping. But you have to say something:

“What you loading?”

“Artichokes.”

Approaching lights spilled pit to pit down the driver’s face. They shook
on down the highway.

He could think of nothing more, except: I was just making love to this
woman, see, and you’ll never guess ... (p. 11)

This is their only exchange. Later, when the ride is over, most of the
actual ride—so various sentences in the ensuing text would indicate—slips
from Kid’s mind; the only thing that remains with him is the word
“artichokes” (that plant of many leaves and many layers, its own
exfoliation of its most sumptuous heart), which rings here and there in
his mind throughout the novel, an absurd emblem from the gap in the Kid’s
memory9—a gap that the text of the novel has traversed and retrieved for
the reader. For the character, it is an emblem of ignorance and absence;
for the reader it is both an emblem and a reminder of privileged
knowledge, of the sort only third person narrative fiction can supply.

Kid, at any rate, is let off by a river and starts across a bridge into
the bizarre and shifting city. At this point, however, the conversation
with the women he meets while crossing the bridge must be reviewed in
full. Rather than quote three entire pages, however, we urge our readers
to open their own texts of Dhalgren at this point and re-read pages 12
through 15 before continuing.

Other parts of the novel supply us with more information about these
“characters.” It is very easy to identify the small, pregnant black woman
with the black, pregnant fifteen year old Gladdis, whom we meet in the
scorpion nest during the journal chapter. As well, the woman who has the
fever could easily be the nameless girl who is referred to as “Denny’s
girlfriend.” Also, we will hear that at the woman’s commune there is a
Eurasian woman sculptor who made a lion out of scrap metal and old car
parts.

Let us now skip to the closing entry in the final journal chapter—but we
must note that our first encounter with this section of text is not in
the closing pages of Chapter VII, but rather in Chapter III, when Kid is
visiting Newboy at Calkins’ mansion. At one point, the notebook falls
from Newboy’s knee while the elder poet is reading the poems:

The poet bent, but Kidd snatched it up first.

Its back cover had fallen open. Kidd frowned at the final block of
handwriting that ran off the page bottom:

... The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear
them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the
terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland
and into the hills, I have come to

... Kidd’s hand fell on the page. He looked up slowly, (pp. 291-292)

Again, this suggests strongly that this entry—which in Chapter VII we get
in full and to which the above lines indeed form the abrupt conclusion—
was written before the action of the novel proper, i.e., before the
action recounted in the first six chapters begins.

At this point, we must look closely at what happens in this final entry:
it begins with a description of a strange catastrophe, from which Kid,
along with a handful of scorpions, flees to the bridge. As the little
bunch are crossing the bridge, they encounter an Oriental woman coming
into the city. At this point we again urge our readers to open the novel
and review the exchange that begins on page 875, and continues on to the
“end.”

Our general tendency to exercise fictive coherence makes it very easy to

read the Oriental woman who enters over the bridge as none other than our
lion-sculptor, coming into the city to begin her stint at re-education
within the city of revalued signs. (It is equally easy to identify her
with the tree-woman Kid first makes love to. We note in passing: if the
woman is, as Lanya elsewhere describes her, Eurasian, that means she is
half Oriental and half Caucasian. Kid is half American Indian: the
American Indians are traditionally considered a Mongoloid race.) As Kid
was given the orchid by her on her departure and his entrance, now he
gives the orchid to her at his departure and her entrance—and it is
precisely at this point in the cyclic completion that the journal’s
narrative coherence breaks down and becomes babble.

Coming out of the journal text (and the novel) at this particular
trajectory, we note that there are two possible modes in which the
closing incident may be read—as there are two possible modes in which any
first person account, found in a notebook, may be taken: either it is
real; or it is invention. One recalls Cecily’s diary of her non-existent
romances in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: “These are merely
the innermost thoughts of a young girl and consequently meant for
publication.” What presses a diarist to fictionalize, however, need not
be so cynical. More to the point, one recalls the occasional chimerical
or fantastic occurrences that appear in Kafka’s, Rilke’s, or Nijinsky’s
diaries, without comment, among the more quotidian concerns, and the
occasional account of what could only have been a dream, notated exactly
like some diurnal happening.

We have already pointed out that the opening of the novel avails us two
possible modes of interpretation—reality or hallucination—just as the
closing journal entry avails us two possible modes—reality or invention.

We maintain, in this essay, that the amazingly close correspondences

between both dialogue and description in the two texts—novel and journal—
strongly suggest that one or the other of the two passages must be read

in a non-reality mode: Two real events are just not likely to occur with
such extended similarities.

How one reads the temporal relation of the journal to the novel
determines which passage we take as real and which passage we take as
hallucination/fiction.

If the journal does precede the novel and does recount an actual exit (of
Kid’s) from Bellona, then the novel’s opening, i.e., everything that
happens outside the city—the tree woman, possibly the driver, and
definitely the women on the bridge—are most likely some sort of
hallucination; moreover, the hallucination of the women on the bridge is
probably based on the real encounter recounted at the journal’s close.

If the novel precedes the journal, however, and the meeting with the
women on the bridge did occur when Kid first entered the city, then the
closing account in the journal must be a fiction, extruded no doubt under
some neurotic pressure, but based on the real experience of the encounter
which occurred when Kid entered Bellona. (“Real” here means, of course,
one with the novel’s base-line reality.) It is under the pressure of this
anxiety—the character’s anxiety at producing such ? fiction—that the
narrative discourse breaks down into the babel that ends the book10, and
out of which, as we swing round to the beginning, the true Active
discourse of the book arises.

Need we make it explicit?

These two readings are not to be chosen between.

They are to be experienced as shifts back and forth between possible

textual authorities, like the shift between foreground and background of
the vertical planes in the Necker cube.

The shift symbolizes the paradoxical frame of the novel itself:

If Kid really entered the city, then he never truly left it.

If Kid really left the city, then he never truly entered it11.
We have described two faces of Delany’s Necker cube, flickering between
background and foreground by the interplay of modes of fictive authority.
We reiterate: to ask which of these two readings is “correct” is as
pointless as asking which is the proper interpretation of an optical
illusion that has been so carefully drawn to allow our interpretation to
fall back and forth between them.

What the illusion does, of course, is maintain both readings while

deprivileging the authority of each—and as such is in keeping with the
theme of deprivileging certain textual authorities that runs through so
much of D hal gre ?.

In light of this fictive paradox, we turn to another which we shall only

explore briefly: the death of June’s brother—Did he fall or was he

pushed? Some readers have felt the book leaves the situation unresolved.
But when Kid outlines both possible interpretations of the situation to
George, in Chapter V, what George tells Kid in effect (p. 534) is that
the asocial nature of George’s sexuality deprivileges the traditional
social value—June’s innocence or guilt of the crime—that traditionally
accrues to either reading of June’s actions.

We have already mentioned the theme of deprivileging the art text; it is

carried through the book by a host of ironic and symbolic machinery: the
poems are written on the verso sides of totally impossible journal pages,
or in the margins of a completely bogus newspaper. Such aesthetic
deprivileging has been one of the major problems of art for the last
eighty years (if not the major problem since Romanticism)—at least since
Gertrude Stein first began to write in Paris12. There would seem to be
two major sets of reasons for this. The first set are internal to the
fiction itself: they are the reasons Delany discusses so lucidly in his
letter/article “Of Sex, Objects, Signs, Systems, Sales, SF, and Other
Things,”13 i.e., the great tendency of fiction to be staunchly
conservative even in the face of its writer’s own liberal, if not
radical, political sympathies. The second set of reasons are external,
and Delany has discussed them in part in his essay “Popular Culture, High
Art, and the SF Landscape,”14 i.e., the various types of mystification
that accrue to the art object and the artistic enterprise through the
granting of social privileges by a critical public that, itself, will
lose much of its social privilege should the mystification ever be
dispelled. Delany treats the social emblems of the privileged art text
with much irony in Dhalgren: the publisher has not read the poems, but
publishes them purely on the mention (not even the recommendation!) of an
establishment poet, who refuses to say if he thinks the poems good or
bad; the publisher gives an elaborate party on the book’s publication, at
which he does not bother to show up because he is having a religious
crisis. This is rare irony indeed! One reason the social emblems of
artistic privilege are a problem is because there is no way today that
they can possibly be doled out according to merit. As Lanya says, there
are too many good artists around, and too varied a range of serious,
public tastes. At best these emblems are a distraction and at worst they
are a prison—a gilded prison the desire for which helps promulgate
literature’s internal conservatism. The traditional aesthetic response to
this problem, beginning with writers like Stein, has been to write
purposefully impoverished texts (frequently under the banner of social
and psychological honesty; but as frequently with a sense of aesthetic
purity), and to create works too bare to be considered political. But, as
Lacan has demonstrated15, a

signifier (such as a work of art) always takes some of its meaning from
the signified (such as the social response) that accrues to it. And since
such works do indeed answer the aesthetic problems of the times, the
establishment world of better informed aesthetic opinion-makers
frequently responds by turning all its traditional privilege-cum-
mystification powers on these conscientiously impoverished works,
granting Beckett a Nobel Prize, or devoting an official museum show to
found-object art.

What Delany has done is construct not an impoverished, but a rich text,
that deals specifically with the break-up of social signs (and, I think
most readers will agree, treats of this break-up as a good thing), and in
which the various social privileges of the text (in its various modes)
simply cannot be held onto, because each is laid against a fictive
foreground plane that, as we perceive it, vanishes into the background
and is swallowed up in a concert of possible deconstructions.

We have outlined one of the most important of these shifts. As we began

by discussing a textual mode that was not vital to this particular shift,
so we shall close by discussing another:

The journal/Chapter VII/novel closes with an entry we have already

discussed in part, which deals with Kid’s actual-or-invented exit from
the city. Marginal to it, however, beginning (p. 864) immediately after
the last, textual lacuna, is an entry which has Kid still in the city,
still writing his poems, still living with Denny and Lanya. How are the
marginal entries of the journal connected to the major entries? The
editorial apparatus, as well as internal evidence, suggest a clear and
coherent answer:

... The rubrics running pages left or right, which we print in slightly
smaller type, are marginal (sometimes rather wide) entries made along the
sides of our typescript at somewhat narrower spacing; most probably they
represent “entries in quarter-sized, near illegible scrawl all over the
margins”—that is, entries of a later date than the one beside them we
print in ordinary sized typeface. (Note also that the rubric which breaks
off marginally to the last entry in the notebook continues as the major
entry just two previous to this.) (p.735 [Italics mine.])

We wonder how many readers who have been baffled by “what happens in
Dhalgren” have stopped to make use of this extremely important note on
ordering the events of the text.

The first implication of this note is certainly, at any rate, that the
last marginal entry concerning Kid’s, Lanya’s, and Denny’s stay at Madame
Brown’s (and Kid’s finally getting to work on his new poems), is written
after the entry about trying to leave the city.
The marginal entry concludes:

Woke up loggy but clutching for my pen. Took some blue paper to the back
steps, put the pine plank across my knees and wrote and wrote and wrote.

Went back into the kitchen for some water.

Lanya and Denny were there.

“Hi.”

“Oh, hi.”

Went back to the porch and wrote some more. Finally it was (p. 869)

And the entry continues, a hundred thirty-eight pages previously, on page

731:

too dark to see.

So got up, stretched, put down my plank, went inside—and was suddenly
bellowing and yelling and laughing ....

Running marginally to the second half of this entry (which, now, is the
major entry) is one of the entries concerning the rescued children—which
suggests that the whole incident of the fire, rescue, and its aftermath
happened even after Kid began to write again, which happened after the
catastrophe with the lightning and explosions (during which Kid may or
may not have actually tried to leave Bellona). If all this chronology is
to be trusted, then the “second collection” that gets destroyed before
being published would actually have been written before Brass Orchids,
making the actual text of Brass Orchids his third collection ....

We shall cease here.

But the point can be made that critics are simply not prepared to discuss
Dhalgren until they have wrestled that last chapter into some sort of
chronological order—or, more accurately, retrieved some of its possible
chronological orders, for there are more than one and all are in
dialogue. Delany has allowed several possible interpretations to the
chronology of events. These alternate chronologies play as alternate
signifieds beneath the fixed signifier of the musically satisfying order
of the fragments as presented in the text. (The American reviewers who
shout, with high-flung vitriol, “Joyce” or “tenth-rate Joyce pastiche”—
most recently Barry Malzberg in a near-schizophrenic article in the
September ‘76 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—are
simply revealing that sad, abysmal, but typical ignorance of their
country’s literary production. If there is a source to be located for
this technique, it is the opening movement of Faulkner’s The Sound and
the Fury. But Delany presents such a rational and effective development
on this technique, bringing it into such a clearly autonomous mode, that
no one could really make the accusation—as one can with the Brunner of
Stand on Zanzibar vis-a-vis Dos Passos—of simple imitation. At any rate,
the technique has no parallel in either the Portrait, Ulysses, or the
Wake16.

And if Dhalgren does borrow the technique of pastiche itself from

Ulysses’”Oxen of the Sun” episode—for Dhalgren does contain pastiches, of
Auden, Rilke, and Valery, as well as an amusingly covert allusion to John
Ashbery’s early poem “The Instruction Manual” (p. 164)—it does so in such
an idiosyncratic way as to put the whole concept of “borrowing the
technique of borrowing” into its necessarily dubious light.) Some have
argued that nothing in Dhalgren is resolved. We maintain the specific
contrary: practically everything in the book is furnished with at least
two possible resolutions, one of which is in the foreground and one of
which is in the background, the two always ready to change places at an
eye’s blink, depending on which way we choose to read Delany’s complex
Necker cube. “Most of the time,” writes Flaubert in another letter,
“conclusions seem to me acts of stupidity.” One can only go back to the
frequently quoted line from Delany’s Einstein Intersection11: “...
Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.” But inconclusive does not
mean unstructured. And the ending(s) of Dhalgren are organized into the
most dazzling of fictive structures, to preserve even more purely that so
necessary inconclusiveness.

The careful reader will note, on second or third reading of Dhalgren,

that the book contains not two or three of these optical illusions, but
dozens. Indeed, to trace out all their interconnections is to realize the
novel is constructed of practically nothing else. Dhalgren accomplishes
the Herculean task of presenting us with a totally coherent foreground
which, by the fictive geodesies it establishes throughout the contours of
its fictive field, allows not one plane of meaning to hold to any one
single level. The task of treating the major problem of modern aesthetics
in such a rich and recomphcated mode in the already deprivileged field of
science fiction is certainly an impressive undertaking. Symbolically what
the concert of Dhalgreris illusions says is that we cannot trust too
deeply in any socially privileged certain knowledge18. All we may trust
are our own readings of the paradoxes of the world, until we encounter
evidence that things are not as we have thought, and our reading drops
into the background and a new reading springs to the fore. In our
quotidian rounds, all but philosophers (and certain types of madmen) tend
to forget what a flimsy mental construct “certainty” is. As Wittgenstein
says in the beginning of On Certainty, “If you can prove to me that ‘Here
is one hand,’” referring to a line in G.E. Moore’s A Defence of Common
Sense (a line Delany plays with in Chapter VI of his most recent novel
Triton, Bantam Books, New York, 1976, p. 268), “I will give you the
rest.” Knowledge, even knowledge of the laws of logic or the facts of
science, is a mode of belief. Belief is always a matter of faith. Faith
is a mystical occurrence, whether it be in the existence of God or the
existence of the external world. What is mystical is not that we have
more evidence for one

or the other, but that we are able to constitute whatever evidence we

have—for either one—into belief in the first place. Human knowledge has
only been able to grow to the staggering proportions it has reached in
this century of technological advance because our belief in reality, as
Delany’s book symbolically suggests, must be like our belief in one
reading or the other of the Necker cube: the earth may appear flat, or
the scatter pattern through a pinhole may suggest light is made up of
particles, but there is evidence waiting just over the horizon, or in the
diffraction pattern through a fine mesh grid, for another reading of both
phenomena. This symbolic evocation alone, we feel, is enough to judge
Dhalgren science fiction. (It is certainly epistemological fiction!) And
the skill, art, richness and complexity with which the work accomplishes
its theme and themes, within its highly articulated structure, renders it
science fiction of the highest order.

—Ann Arbor, 1975 [New York, 1975]

1 All page numbers in parentheses, e.g. (p. 568), refer to Dhalgren, by

Samuel R. Delany, Bantam Books, New York, 1975,6th printing & ff, as
emended by the author’s correction sheet Correct line-readings for
DHALGREN, 6th printing & ff, circulated by the author September 1975.

In February 1985 on the occasion of the 17th printing of Dhalgren, which

marked the book’s first decade in print, in Locus, The Newspaper of the
Science Fiction Field (edited by Charles Brown: Oakland, 1985), Delany
published an article on the textual history of his novel since its
publication in January 1975. According to his article, some sixty-odd
typographical corrections were made in the 6th printing in 1975. A
further set of c.150 were incorporated in the 16th seven years later in
1982, with a dozen more incorporated into the 17th, at the end of 1984.
That printing also included what appeared to be an error on the copyright
page: a list mid-page citing the month and year of each of the sixteen
previous printings fails to include the present, 17th, printing. But a
row of descending numbers at the page’s bottom, beginning at 25 and
ending at 17, gives the printing’s proper designation. This designation
method holds true for Dhalgren’s 18th and 19th printings as well—
printings which are textually identical to the 17th. As this essay goes
to press, the 19th was Dhalgrerfs last printing. For the first time since
it reached print almost fifteen years ago, the book is now out of print—
and has been for more than a year. Though now and again a great deal has
been made of them, everyone who has actually taken the trouble to examine
the corrections has judged them of a minor, if clarifying, nature.

Some months afterwards, Delany circulated a short list of further

corrections still remaining to be made. They are, indeed, typical of the
others.

The most major of these is the removal of Madame Brown’s name from a
scene in which obviously she does not appear (304/9/1). The name endured,
Delany states, through a late, hasty retyping of a former version in
which she was present.

As this terminal list is brief, with Delany’s permission I reproduce it

in full.

The numbers indicate page/paragraph/line-of-paragraph, follwed by the

correct line reading and/or a typographical instruction in square
brackets. This list, used on the 17th printing and beyond, Delany says,
will produce an all but error-free text.
CORRECTIONS REMAINING TO BE MADE IN DHALGREN 17th printing & ff

16/1/1:

ception to pass it by. Rumor says there is practically no

36/9/3:

tresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight

61/5/3:

Where was Dad now? In one of three cities, in one of two

85/2/4:

country, stitched with lightning, somehow there

94/2/2-3:

ing hard. After a moment, he straightened out the paper

and, on a fresh page, began to copy again:

100/2/1:

(“Muriel! Now, Muriel, be quiet!”

131/9/1:

[Typesetter: This should be reset as two lines, both of them centered:]

MYSTERIOUS RUMORS! MYSTERIOUS LIGHTS!

132/8/2:

We are sure something happened in the sky last night.

304/9/1:

“What is that?” the man on Mr Richard’s left

339/3/21:

since he was in the area, why didn’t he stay there. So the

367/2/4:

[Typesetter: Note this is in a different font from the main text. Observe
the spacing:] ? ? G TA Y

389/7/1:

It fell open in Kid’s hands:

384-412:

[Typesetter: In these pages, change the spelling of “Tayler” to “Taylor”

throughout.]

414/3/3:

international spies—I mean, maybe the whole city here

643/1/2:

the blowout George gave for the Reverend Taylor in Jack—

693/6/4:

Pure Reason, The Phenomenology of Mind, and Being

729/2:

[Typesetter: Retaining its present placement on the page, reset this

paragraph so that

there is no widow at the end and the last line ends flush right with
“actual—”]

749/5/6:

chin toward Glass and Risa. “That nigger can fuck!”

767/4/2-3:

the pussy. Despite George, and a city consecrated by twin

moons, I know there must be some greater, female deity

785/2/21:

the Emboriky for

795rubric/l/l-2:

The active ones (of whichever sex) are denser

and crueler. The passive ones (of whichever

805/14/7:

funny things about me, and what had happened on the roof

820/5/3:

the train-tracks, boy. Apocalypse has come and gone. We’re

835rubric/10/l:

She: “Madame Brown took me to the

838/6/1:

Mrs. Arthur Richards

For these corrections, I am particularly grateful to Ron Drummond, Robert

Morales, and Paul Blackwell, whose names I happily add to the list of
readers (Douglas Barbour, Camilla Decarnin) who, over the last decade,
have pointed out other errors that have been corrected in previous
editions, i.e., the 6th, 16th, and 17th.

—SRD, 1986

2Three further points may be of interest in our discussion of our

symbolic model:

One) Imaginative metonymic extension and semantic substitution may of

course proceed out from the symbol sentence in several “directions.” The
further they move from the initial symbol sentence, the more likely any
two extensions are to diverge—though there is always a possibility of
later intersection.

Two) Some ideas (and the words expressing them) are more strongly
associated than others. (Here we see the power of the Saussurian concept
of sound-image over word.) There will frequently be, therefore, a
stronger disposition to begin the journey out from the symbol sentence in
one direction rather than another.

Our point One) accounts for the richness and multiplicity of symbolic
retrievals, while still keeping what is retrieved in some sort of order.
Point Two) accounts for the fact that while two individual retrievals may
be arrived at by the same number of steps, one may still be a more
“obvious” retrieval than the other.

Three) is an answer to a possible question our model for symbolic

retrieval may elicit at this point: Do we then say that in fiction
something is always a symbol for whatever it is an example of! Briefly,
yes. But examining our example should make it clear that not all symbolic
retrievals may be accomplished merely by asking what various images in
the text are examples of. Consider the mode in which “The buildings
stared down with blind, accusing windows” symbolizes the landscape’s
inhabitants, or the complexity of the landscape, or the relation between
opacity and transparency. We could not say our symbol sentence was an (or
contained any) example of these without indulging catachresis in its most
pejorative sense.

3There is an intriguing paragraph on page 4 of Ernst Cassirer’s Language

and Myth, translated by Susanne K. Langer, Dover Publications, 1946,
reissued 1953, which connects the mythical name Daphne, through the
Sanskrit, with the word “sunrise”—intriguing in terms of Delany’s setting
his Daphne scene in the moonlight, and the subsequent rising of the giant
sun that apparently bears some ineffable female name (p. 767). Delany is
obviously something of a Langer admirer (see Nova, p. 25, Bantam Books,
New York, 1969, also Triton, p. 352, Bantam Books, New York, 1976, both
by Samuel R. Delany); so it is not so farfetched to suspect he is
familiar with the Cassirer. For the import of those myths that connect
human beings with vegetation in general and trees in particular there is
of course all The Golden Bough (Frazer) to browse over. And it is not
forcing the basic plot structure of D hal gre ? to describe it in terms
of one of the most elemental myth plots: The hero, after an encounter
with the Goddess, is struck with madness and poetry. But as we have said
above, to specify any more than this is to violate the book.

4For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Art and Illusion, by Ernst

Gombrich, Princeton University Press, 1960, a book which Delany discusses
briefly in his article “Shadows,” page 63, in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw,
Berkley Windhover, New York, 1978. Delany’s use of “perspective” to
project these never-uttered utterances is, we feel, also ultimately
ironic.

5One of the most interesting correspondences between novel and journal

text is found between the scene in Chapter IV where Kid is searching for
Lanya at the mysteriously abandoned commune site (p. 353) and the end of
that mysterious journal section (that begins p. 832) in which Lanya,
again in her glittering dress, exhorts Kid over Fenster’s murder and the
burning of the “second collection”—and there is the hint of a tree
beginning to turn back into ... something! This entry, after Lanya
disappears and Kid, hiding from the marauders, sleeps in the park,
finally degenerates (as he returns to the commune site) into a page of
schitz-talk—the first of three such in the journal.

The novel section we would consider (p. 353) begins:

“Lanya?”

He turned, waiting, for her answer, uncomfortable at any noise in this

ringed, misty clearing. Even at the height of the project period, there
were ... etc.

The corresponding journal section (p. 837) begins:

“Lanya?”

They squatted to the furnace, simulatable in every break on those

fenestrated, rusty fill-ins. Only for a distance in civet furrow, here
hid ... etc.

With the exception of the participle “waiting,” the article “the” (before
“height”), and the possessive adjective “his,” the one is an almost
perfect morphological rhyme of the other: pronoun/pronoun, verb/verb,
participle/—, preposition/ preposition, adjective/article, noun/noun,
adjective/adjective, preposition/preposition ... etc. The correspondence,
with perhaps half a dozen exceptions, is perfect/or one hundred eighty
words. To discuss the significance of this correspondence in detail would
require an essay almost as long as this one. But for those searching out
“plot” in Dhalgren, we suggest that here is a clue to some of what
transpired during

Kid’s missing five days. The vanished time obviously must have started
somewhere around Lanya’s (and the commune’s) disappearance. This suggests
that the fight in the park with the man from the Emboriky, recounted in
the journal (p. 785), might have occurred some time within the “forgotten
time,” as Jommy claims it was the people from the Emboriky who’d already
“run them from one side of the damn park to the other” (p. 785); which
may also, given the correspondence, be the explanation of why the commune
was abandoned in Chapter IV. There is internal evidence in the journal
not only that it was written before the novel and after the novel, but
during the novel as well.

6See “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any

Subject Whatever,” by Jacques Lacan, in The Structuralist Controversy,
edited by Macksey and Donato, The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1972,
and particularly Lacan’s comment in the discussion afterwards on how
reality is stored in the mind, page 198: “I said like language, French,
English, etc.” See also The Language of the Self, by Jacques Lacan,
translated by Anthony Wilden, Delacorte Press, Delta Books, New York,
1975.

7See “Thickening the Plot” by Samuel R. Delany, in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw,

op. cit., pp. 147-154. Compare Delany’s description of the continual
inter-effect of words and mental images with Lacan’s description of the
inter-effect (or “intrusion”) of the signifier into the signified in “The
Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” by Jacques Lacan, included
in Structuralism, edited by Jacques Ehrmann, Doubleday, Anchor Books, New
York, 1970.

included in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, op. cit. See note on page 37.

9In connection with memory-gaps, so significant in the action of

Dhalgren, we quote the following text-plus-text-within-text from The
Prison-House of Language, by Fredric Jameson, Princeton, 1972, page 51:

Shklovsky’s famous definition of art as a defamiliarization, a making

strange (os-tranie) of objects, a renewal of perception, takes the form
of a psychological law with profound ethical implications. The passage of
Tolstoy’s journals which Shklovsky quotes in illustration is as close as
he ever comes to taking an actual metaphysical or ethical position:

I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and
couldn’t remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements
are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was
impossible to remember—so that if I had dusted it and forgotten—that is,
had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If some
conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established.
If, however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, then such
lives are as if they had not been lived.

Art is in this context a way of restoring conscious experience, of

breaking through deadening and mechanical habits of conduct ... and
allowing us to be reborn to the world in its existential freshness and
horror.

Three points are to be made here in terms oi Dhalgren.

First, we note that art, forgetfulness, and strangeness have a venerable

tradition of intellectual juxtaposition, which is not begun, but only
developed, in Dhalgren. Some familiarity with that tradition, however,
will make us more appreciative of the

intensity and originality of Delany’s development. Second, we note that

Tolstoy’s “couldn’t remember whether or not I had dusted it” is a
signifier which has collapsed a much more complicated process beneath it
than first appears. Taken literally, the phrase contains a nonsensical
double negative. (How much of this is translation, of course, we do not
know.) One cannot “remember not doing something.” One can only remember
deciding not to do something. In his preoccupied meanderings around the
room, obviously Tolstoy came upon evidence that the divan had been
dusted, i.e., it was probably free of dust. Also Tolstoy had no memory of
dusting it. Yet there was probably other evidence to suggest that the
duster had been, indeed, himself, e.g., perhaps he had a dust rag in his
hand; perhaps he had memories, only seconds old, of dusting other pieces
of furniture in the room; possibly he also knew no one else was in the
house; possibly he also had memories of being preoccupied; or perhaps he
realized his mind had not been on much of anything because what memories
he did have of dusting some of the objects in the room were so hazy.
Presumably, however, if his wife or a servant had run into the room just
then and explained that only minutes before Tolstoy had come in to dust,
she had been in and dusted only the divan, Tolstoy would probably have
been quite happy with the explanation. In other words, it is the
apprehension of evidence that things have gone other than one remembers
them that sparks a certain sort of personality to “be reborn to the world
in its existential freshness and horror.” The strange thing encountered
is both the stimulus to be reborn as well as part of the freshness and
horror one is reborn to. (This rich strangeness, I suspect, is the be-all
and end-all of that so elusive “difference” that is such a central
concept in Delany’s The Einstein Intersection.) But it is not some
impossible memory-of-something-not-remembered. Certainly the Kid’s world
is composed of practically nothing but such evidence of things gone
differently. But what is, by implication, analytically muzzy in the
Tolstoy passage is, by the same implication, analytically clear in
Delany. The progression from one to the other presents a true diachronic
development, however minor; and it is not insignificant (if the reader
will forgive us our single litotes for this paper) that such analytical
clarity should be manifested in a modern science fiction novel. Our third
point is this: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, and Jameson would no doubt all agree
that it is the habitual which dredges out the inland seas of
forgetfulness, beneath which occur the slippages in the faults of the
real that leave their evidence on the beach of perceived reality. Kid
forgets, at least for a while, his last hitchhiking lift.

Is he then a habitual hitchhiker?

We quote:
I recall and want this:

Swinging up into the cab of a truck, miles north of Florida, and the
driver asking how long you’ve been hitching, and the sunlight fills his
lime-splattered lap and your rank jeans and he lets the radio play pop
music for a while, for a while country; then twists the dial; your
forearm burns on the door, your hair snaps and your cheek freezes, and
the motion is spindled on the rush of music. So you sit, just breathing,
to hear and to move through the red and green country, with the sun in
the tree-tops a stutter of bright explosions.

The City suffers from the lack of it.

But most of us have come here by way of it. (p. 734)

It is easy to read Dhalgren as a response to the horror of the world. But

we must remember that it also contains some marvelous and lyrical
responses to the freshness.

10At the end of Delany’s more recent novel Triton, op. cit., the
protagonist, on being proposed to by another character, breaks down under
the accumulated pressure of his/her life-lies to produce another such
neurotic fiction, thence to retreat, under pressure of accrued guilt,
into a near-psychotic mode. But in Triton, unlike Dhalgren, the retreat
is not sudden but is, rather, mapped out step by painful step over the
novel’s concluding seven pages.

11 See the discussion of the antinomies in “Shadows,” by Samuel R.

Delany, in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, op. cit., pp. 38-118.

12For an extended discussion of this problem, see Roland Barthes’ Writing

Degree Zero, Cape Editions, London, 1967. Delany cites Barthes in passing
in a number of places, notably in his essay “Of Sex, Objects, Signs,
Systems, Sales, SF, and Other Things,” pp. 33-55 supra, and in his essay
on Ursula K. Le Guin, “To Read The Dispossessed,” in The Jewel-Hinged
Jaw, op. cit., pp. 218-283.

13Pages 33-55 supra.

14In The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, op. cit., pp. 3-18.

15See “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” by Jacques

Lacan, in Structuralism, op. cit.; see also note 7.

16To pursue beyond the development of a Faulknerian technique the

literary precursors of Dhalgren, we note that the general template of the
novel (a young man comes into a strange and isolated place where time
seems to have lost all meaning and where a group of eccentric retirees
from the real world put him through a series of educational and
frequently disillusioning experiences) sits only a hair’s breadth away
from the general template of Mann’s The Magic Mountain (that other seven-
hundred-plus-page text also divided into seven further subdivided
chapters). It is easy to see Kid as a sort of counter-culture Hans
Castorp. In the two novels’ use of psychotherapists and psychotherapy, in
the general makeup of their respective social microcosms, indeed, there
are too many parallels even to enumerate in a note that already threatens
to be overlong. Nevertheless, one can reasonably argure that, for Delany,
Dhalgren bears a relation to Mann’s work similar to the relation that,
for Bester, The Stars My Destination bears to Joyce’s. To retrieve the
former relation, then, let us outline the latter: During the ‘teens of
the century, Joyce noted that the single, classic plot-structure he was
assuming for Ulysses actually covered a number of tales. As Hugh Kenner
puts it in The Pound Era (University of California Press, Berkeley & Los
Angeles, 1971, p. 147): “In Zurich James Joyce was drawing the 18 hours
of Leopold Bloom through a patterned integrity defined by Homer: a tough
self-interfering pattern through which, he discerned, Shakespeare had
already drawn the skein called Hamlet (Telemachus, Stephen), and Mozart
his Don Giovanni (Anti-nous, Boylan) and even the elder Dumas his Monte
Cristo, returned avenger (Odysseus at Ithaca, the stone guest at the
banquet, the ghost at Elsinore). Time, place and personnel alter; the
pattern remains.”

“In 1941,” Paul Williams continues the tale for us in his introduction to
the Gregg Press edition of Bester’s The Stars My Destination (G.K. Hall &
Co., Boston, 1975, p. vi), “Mort Weisinger and Jack Schiff, the editors
who had purchased

Bester’s first story and with whom he had held running discussions of
James Joyce’s Ulysses for several years, invited him to write scenarios
for them at Superman Comics, their new employer.” (Delany, in the early
70’s, briefly scripted Wonder Woman for Superman Comics’ corporate
descendant, National Comics.) “For some time,” Williams goes on to quote
Bester directly from his article “My Affair with Science Fiction”
(written in 1972 and published in Hell’s Cartographers, edited by Brian
Aldiss, Harper and Row, New York, 1975), “I’d been toying with the notion
of using the Count of Monte Cristo pattern for a story. The reason is
simple: I’d always preferred the anti-hero and I’d always found high
drama in compulsive types,” {op. cit., p. ix). When Bester got to the
actual writing of his novel (begun in England, rewritten in Rome during
1955), he signaled his position vis-a-vis Joyce by paraphrasing on page
14 of his own text (the first page of Chapter One, after the prologue)
the poem that Fleming had written on the flyleaf of Stephen’s geography
text (on page 16 of Joyce’s) opposite Stephen’s attempt (in A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man) to record “himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland
Europe

The World

The Universe”

Fleming had rendered this:

“Stephen Dedalus is my name, Ireland is my nation. Clongowes is my

dwellingplace And heaven my expectation.”

Bester’s Gulliver Foyle, the wrong choice of an oxygen bottle away from
death, in the midst of his struggles, prayers, and blasphemies, suddenly
remembers “a nursery jingle:

Gully Foyle is my name

And Terra is my nation.

Deep space is my dwelling place

And death’s my destination.”

To recognize the Joycean source under Bester’s jingle (as a piece of

demotic folk doggerel alive in the Midwest it provided a title for
Thornton Wilder’s novel Heaven’s My Destination) is to realize that
Bester has flung down his version (with existential obliteration—“death”—
replacing fundamentalist salvation—“Heaven”) as a challenge that is
merely intensified by the choice of the Monte Cristo version of the
pattern that Joyce (and, presumably, Bester both—as Joyce states it in
the text of Ulysses) knew was finally one with The Odyssey. For as
Joyce’s Portrait and its peripatetic sequel are, in our time, the novels
of the privileged aesthetic sensibility, so Bester’s book is the most
resonant, intense, and reintensified image/metaphor/

exploration of the “common man,” the man who lacks precisely this
aesthetic sensibility, the man “too easy for trouble, too slow for fun,
too empty for friendship, too lazy for love,” (The Stars My Destination,
p. 14), the man with

EDUCATION: NONE

SKILLS: NONE

MERITS: NONE

RECOMMENDATIONS: NONE

(p. 15)

the opposite of the privileged Joycean artist if ever there was one. And
this is the man who becomes, not the fatherly supporter, drinking
companion and somewhat bewildered admirer of the artist, but rather the
vibrant, demonic, and implacable savior of humanity itself—in Bester’s
novel.

In the twenty years since its publication, no one in the science fiction
community (with the possible exception of Delany himself; c.f., “About
Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words,” cited in note 8) seems to
have noticed this illuminating Joycean parallel in what has come to be
regarded as the greatest of far-future SF novels. Let us not allow such a
time to elapse before noting the Mannian parallel in what is no doubt the
most ambitious S F novel to date, of futures near or far.

As Bester’s novel of 1956 challenges the Joycean precept of privileged

aestheti-cism, so Delany’s novel of 1975 challenges the Mannian precept
of decadent bourgeois centrality. (Mann’s comment on the artist’s
knowledge of the value of his own work—“I cannot know and you cannot tell
me.”—is quoted by Newboy in Dhalgren; and the Mannian passion for “the
exhaustive” which was, Mann felt, the only thing that could be “truly
interesting,” is reflected in Dhalgren by the whole, massive and
intricate text itself.) Mann’s hero, the young engineer Hans Castorp, is
a socially central naif. Delany’s basic precept is that today there is no
social center; and Delany’s hero is a socially marginal naif, in a world
where there are only margins. (Compare Delany’s “young engineer,” the
oddly “Germanic” Tak Loufer—the first person to befriend the Kid when he
enters the city—with Mann’s: the contrasts between the two are a bouquet
of exfoliating ironies.) Society for Delany is merely an interweave of
social margins, with various economic privileges—magically invalidated by
the novel, but nevertheless leaving their mythic detritus—but none with
true social primacy. (Henry Hatfield, in his Thomas Mann, New Directions,
New York, 1951 revised 1961, p. 40, recounts Trotsky’s remark “that the
German workers would not seize a railway station unless they had bought
tickets first,” in relation to Mann’s comic description of the ill-fated
German-liberal revolt of 1848 in Buddenbrooks. Delany’s scorpions are far
closer to the energized Gully than to Mann’s bumbling workers.)

At intriguingly corresponding points in their respective novels, Proust’s

Mme Verdurin and Delany’s Mrs Richards express the conviction that the
much more sophisticated Guermantes, in the one case, and the much more
sophisticated Calkins, in the other, no doubt actually pay people to
attend their parties. But if Mrs Richards is a Mme Verdurin, think of how
much more drastically, tragically, pathetically she is displaced in her
particular illusions of social centrality.

Delany’s Kid is a socially marginal naif, but he is streetwise; and his

literary education is—as are all educations today, in light of what there
is to be known—eccentric. He speaks Portuguese and has read Mailarme in
that language. He is a

long-time reader of Poetry (Chicago) but has never read The New Yorker,
and he has never heard of iambic pentameter before, and the suggestion is
made that trying to write in it may have hopelessly perverted his
natural, Olsonian breath-line. Hans Castorp, after his epiphany in the
snow, moves on to disillusion and flight from the illusions of Devos. In
Delany’s book, as we have tried to show in the discussion above, it is
both the flight and the disillusion that are posited in themselves as
“optically illusory.” For the same structure that so playfully challenges
the Kermode theory of fictive resolution (q.v. note 17 below) throws down
the gauntlet before Mann’s privileged bourgeois centrality as Bester
threw down his own before Joyce’s privileged aestheticism.

We end this note with two comments: first, science fiction has always
been ambitious, and if we are not put off by its constant taking on of
the problem of Humanity in the Universe, we cannot be too surprised by
its taking on en passant the ethical (if not the aesthetic) challenges of
a Joyce or a Mann—though even this suggests a self-confidence that would
leave most modern mundane fictioneers quaking in their boots lest they be
found out. That Bester and Delany have signaled their ambition so off-
handedly without rippling the surface of their works (by, essentially, a
rewritten quatrain and a plot choice in one case and by a mere chapter
schema—but not a table of contents—and a line or so of quotation on the
other), in what have proved to be two very popular novels, and with signs
only readers likely to care are, finally, likely to notice, is itself a
sign of the reticence, sensitivity, and intelligence of the field, as
well as a sign of the aesthetic self-confidence of the respective
writers. Our second point is simply that if those reviewers so miffed by
Dhalgreris popularity, such as Malzberg and Ellison, would cease to bandy
about “Joyce” as a literary catch-all (that should have been the cry
twenty years ago with Bester) and turn their attentions to Mann—whether
to praise, denigrate, or merely explain Delany—they would quit the merely
rhetorical and approach what is at least documentable.

17See The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany, Ace Books, New York,
1967, reprinted 1973 (4th printing), page 137. In regard to this point,
we note that Delany, in his article “Of Sex, Objects, Signs, Systems,
Sales, SF, and Other Things” (q.v. notes 12 & 13), cites as an influence
on Dhalgren Frank Kermode’s excellent study in the theory of fiction The
Sense of an Ending, Oxford University Press, New York, 1967. (One of
Newboy’s books of essays is called ? Sense of Commencement.) In
connection with this, let us simply juxtapose a passage from Kermode’s
study with a passage from Dhalgren.

Kermode writes, on page 45, “The clock’s tick-tock I take to be a model

of what we call ‘plot,’ an organisation that humanizes time by giving it
form .... Tick is a humble genesis, tock a feeble apocalypse.” In his
journal (p. 784) the Kid observes: “People probably do hear watches go
tic-tok. But I’m sure my childhood clock went tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic
.... Why do I recall this in a city without time?” We may answer the
Kid’s rhetorical question with Kermode’s terminology: Kid recalls this
because Bellona is a city (as Dhalgren is a novel) of perpetual humble
genesis. And Dhalgren’s “plot,” which substitutes a continuous movement
toward rebirth for the sense of closing finality that Kermode cites as
one of the basic forms of literary expression, reflects this. Most modern
clocks do not go tick-tock. And in Kid’s sensibility, or the sensibility
projected by the novel, tock is therefore unnecessary. For, as Calkins
says, in Bellona “Apocalypse has come and gone ... That simply isn’t our
problem any more.” (p. 820).

18The title “Dhalgren”—which so many readers have found baffling—is a

symbol for the uncertainty of certain knowledge. It is a symbol for this
in no more complicated a way than “A Streetcar Named Desire” is a symbol
for human movement toward emotional catastrophe, or than “The Iceman
Cometh” is a symbol for the inevitable arrival of death, in the
respective works that bear those titles. Upon remembering his own first
and middle names (and the first initial of his last one), Kid suddenly
experiences certain knowledge of the last name of the newspaper reporter
Bill, prompted by the double metonymy, no doubt, that Bill is the
nickname associated with William and that William Dhalgren was a name on
the list of names that pulled free from the notebook (pp. 859-861). Yet
Kid has no logical reason to think he knows. The point is: the name is
not mentioned anywhere in the scene. Yet the reader is just as certain in
his or her knowledge of what the name in Kid’s mind is as the Kid is
certain to whom that name belongs—though there is as little logical
reason for the reader to know as there is for the Kid. This is another of
Delany’s most striking optical illusions. What Delany is saying,
symbolically, is that “certain knowledge” is really founded on the
interaction of random encounter (the list of names, pp. 70, 590, etc.),
accidental correspondence of phonemes (the name of the Oregon workman, p.
696), mythical resonances (Grendel/Grendal/Grendhal, p. 753),
psychological propinquity (the one name he remembers from the list once
it pulls free of the notebook and is lost, p. 853), and aesthetically
prejudiced expectation (the novel’s title). Delany is saying—
symbolically—that even this evidence is hugely scattered and only rarely
encountered. For this is how we encounter the evidence—whether we choose
to draw our conclusions from it merely by intuition, or we try to
reconstitute it into the form of a scientific experiment complete with
controls—scattered through life as widely as it is through the vast,
paradoxical tapestry of Dhalgren.
Trouble On Triton

by K. Leslie Steiner

Samuel R. Delany must have an amazing love-hate relation with science

fiction. From time to time, I really feel he is trying to do in the
field. To get it out of the way at the beginning: Delany’s new novel
Trouble on Triton (the most recent Frederik Pohl selection) is the best
science fiction novel I’ve read in half a dozen years. It is a better
read than The Mote in God’s Eye. It has more to say about the condition
of man (and woman) than The Dispossessed. And it is a more profound book,
to my mind, than Delany’s own Dhalgren—that is, Delany’s last frontal
attack on the field. Dhalgren was a science fiction novel that (What?
Yes, it is science fiction: the hero enters over a bridge into a parallel
world—see, silly!—into an alter-version of an American city where “...
the ordinary laws of time and space,” as they used to say, “no longer
apply.” I mean, really!) attacked the field by being a great book (though
it makes the ascent to greatness, as someone once remarked of George
Eliot, with laboring breath) in just those ways most science fiction is
not even good: by density of psychological construction and depth of
social insight, as well as by the richness of its metaphysical
superstructure. To say that Dhalgren was not good in the ways that,
frequently, science fiction can be dazzling—brio, endless color, surface
excitement, recomplication of surface and surface invention—is simply to
miss the point. Dhalgren was not even interested in exploiting these.
That is why, for all its ponderous greatness, it can be read as an attack
on traditional science

fiction. Trouble on Triton is an attack too. Only it is highly readable,

brilliantly colored, and the speculation in at least three areas of
science (physics, linguistics, and biology) should be enough to keep even
the hardest of hard-science fans happy. The sociological extrapolation—
government erected “ego-booster booths” where, with a coin in the slot,
you can get a peep at the secret government files on yourself; unlicensed
sectors in the cities, where no laws are binding and which become, in
interface with the rest of the city, the safest place in town; government
grants to “micro-theater” troupes, which perform elaborate, surreal
productions that only last a minute, for an audience of one, literally
dragged off the street and drugged for the performance; and that’s just a
sampling from the first chapter—is in the great tradition of Pohl’s and
Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants. But Delany has taken this classic SF
approach and used it to write a deeply tragic tale—or at least a very
moving one. Yet the controlling mode of the book is irony; and it is the
many-edged irony of the great novelists, a Thackeray or a Dickens—though
the book never sinks to Dickensian caricature. The title, straight from
some barely remembered Startling Stories with an opening illo by Frank R.
Paul, announces that irony on the cover. But never fear: in the last
pages, the title is lifted from its intentionally nostalgic banality into
another sphere altogether.

What’s in between?

What’s the book about?

Well: Two hundred or so years from now (the novel posits), there will be
extensive human population on both Mars and on the various satellites of
the gas giants, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. The cities of Mars
and the satellites are kept going by “plasma fields” that hold down an
Earth-normal atmosphere with the help of artificial gravity, about which
Delany does some of his fanciest hard-science extrapolation—eat your
heart out, Larry Niven! But the stringencies of life under glass—or under
plasma—have made it necessary to restructure the whole concept of human
society. Such a city simply cannot tolerate either a runaway population
growth or a vast, unskilled labor supply that can do very little
efficiently except breed. The way the satellites have restructured their
society to accomplish this is radical.To begin with, there is universal
birth control for both women and men. Anyone can have children who wants
to. Pills that temporarily counteract the birth control system
(established with a single injection at puberty) are freely available.
All that has to happen is for two people (man and woman) to agree to take
the pills at the same time and have a child. But this changes the
procreation process from what systems analysts call a normal-on system to
a normal-off one: conscious effort must be coordinated between two
parties to have a child. Laziness, absent-mindedness, accident,

or just general inability to get it together, in satellite society,

mitigates against reproduction, instead of for it, as is the case on
Earth. But this is only one point in Delany’s many-valenced
restructuring. Except in the unlicensed sectors, where anything goes,
marriage is illegal, and for the same reason that prostitution is: under
satellite law, no contract may specify either a sexual or a religious
condition. Both of these, in satellite society, must always be dealt with
by gentleman’s (and gentlewoman’s) agreement. Does it have its bad
points? You bet it does! But Delany (as Babel—17, Nova, and Dhalgren have
shown) is the master of coherent future societies. And Trouble gives
glimpses of everything, from the new family life to the new welfare
system. But as his presentation of the society is (one of) the delight(s)
of the novel, I won’t spoil it by too much prologuing of its endlessly
fascinating features.

To get on with the plot: After a few generations of this, you can see how
all sorts of cultural friction might arise between this system and the
current Earth society. The Outer Satellites’ economy is also quite
different from Earth’s (and presumably inextricably intertwined with it).
The result is that a cold war has grown up of such proportions that its
damages, by the end of the book, dwarf that of most hot ones we’ve seen
to date. (One can’t help but compare it to the “military conflict” in
Mote, with its good-guy Imperial Navy making war on the fractious rebels
to avoid fractious rebellions that might turn into war ... isn’t there
some circular thinking in that somewhere? Delany’s war is so much more
believable! And so much more scary!)

Between Earth and the Outer Satellites sits Mars.

Though we never visit it, we hear a lot about it. Not only physically,
but culturally and politically as well, Mars lies halfway between Earth
and the Satellites: the same encapsulated cities, but it’s easier to ship
natural resources around on it than it is among the satellites; the same
birth control system, but marriage and the nuclear family persist there.
And Mars has sided with Earth in the conflict. Only a few years before
the hostilities reached their present boil, there was fairly free
emigration between all three societies. It was back then that our hero,
Bron Helstrom, as a young man, left Mars’s capital city Bellona (named
after what ...?) where he was born, to come first to Callisto Port, then
to Lux on Iapetus, and finally to Tethys on Triton, the largest city on
the larger moon of Neptune.

Helstrom is a misfit in the Outer Satellite community. His “mis-

fittedness” does not consist of the comic mistakes of the newly arrived
immigrant trying to learn the new manners and mores. For him, those
mistakes are fifteen years in the past. His is the deep, cultural
unhappiness that so frequently comes to people years after they have made
all the surface

adjustments. On Mars, as a teenager, Helstrom was a male prostitute, a

sort of paid, heterosexual super-stud. (Male prostitution is legal on
Mars, as female prostitution is legal on Earth.) He was also something of
a drifter and a sociopath. At nineteen, he was brutally raped by a
Martian women’s street-gang, and came close to losing his hearing for
life from the injuries. Now, on Triton, at thirty-seven, after government
education programs and what-have-you, he has a good job as a designer of
“custom styled metalogics,” a branch of computer mathematics. {He feels
it’s a step up ...) Helstrom lives in a co-op specifically set up for men
like himself who have trouble adjusting. He has even developed some
friends there: a seventy-five-year-old homosexual from Earth’s South
Africa, Lawrence; a seventeen-year-old hopelessly neurotic boy from
another moon, Alfred; and Sam—who turns out to be not at all the happy-
go-lucky, back-slapping, good-natured black man he first appears. The
plot is launched when Helstrom encounters a fascinating woman from the
city’s unlicensed sector who creates the magical micro-theater pieces.
They have an affair, the progress of which, counterpointed with (and at
times influenced directly by) the war, is the book’s substance. In the
course of the relation, we learn just what the real, deep, and hopeless
nature of Helstrom’s “unfitness” for satellite society is. There is no
way, for instance, he could be happy on conservative Earth. At one point
in the tale, with a bit of novelistic sleight-of-hand that should leave
anyone fascinated with pure SF storytelling technique gasping and
applauding with delight, Delany transfers the whole cast to Earth
(symbolically enough, to the site of an archeological dig: the one thing
the new society cannot have is an ancient history of artifacts), and we
see why Helstrom could not live here. The only thing resembling
compassion he finds on Earth is from another ex-Martian, now an Earth
government guard, and even that, here, can do him no good.

The twists, turns, and final resolution of the whole business are nov-
elistically rich, aesthetically satisfying, tragic in human terms, and
are of the sort only science fiction can provide; and they are disturbing
at just the level one wants to be disturbed by a science fiction novel:
intellectually.

What Delany has given us is a richly detailed treatment of the problem of

the liberal, in a society that has radically implemented what began as
liberal pipedreams for a better world. At first he finds himself happy
with the benefits; then he finds he cannot deal with the contingent
responsibilities; he tries to retreat to the conservative, but he cannot
tolerate the imprisoning strictures there; and purely personal solutions
leave him a life too thin and stripped of human texture to bear for long
without establishing oneself so far down the beach of eccentricity that
the tides of madness begin to suck at one’s toes, ankles, knees ....

Delany has written elsewhere: “The only message that the mundane novel
can have, whether the hero succeeds or fails, is that the values of
society—whether you or the author likes them or not—will, eventually,
triumph.” In Trouble on Triton he has given us a portrait of a new
society: I will not reveal (nor, believe it or not, have I already)
whether the hero wins or loses. But society’s values do follow Delany’s
dictum. Whether or not this society is better than ours is moot. (One of
Delany’s subtitles, an ambiguous heterotopia, puts the book in direct and
fascinating dialogue with Le Guin’s ambiguous utopia, The Dispossessed—a
venerable tradition which runs through the Utopian fiction of the
Victorians, including a number of Wells’s scientific romances, through
Gordon R. Dickson’s Traitor to the Stars, an answer to Heinlein’s
Starship Troopers.) What Delany does manage to convince you of, by the
book’s end, is that 1) this society’s values are different from ours, and
2), better or not, they are certainly no worse.

That is an achievement.
But I said that Trouble on Triton is an attack on science fiction. In the
face of all the foregoing praise, I’d better elucidate.

Science fiction is usually conservative—especially the kind of science

fiction traditionally rich in the strengths that Trouble on Triton bulges
with: color, invention, sociological extrapolation, what-happens-next
readability. Sometimes science fiction with these strengths poses itself
as liberal, but always with the liberal’s inevitable, conservative roots
at base—which, inevitably, cause the liberality to self-destruct as soon
as you get one step beyond the surface good intentions. So hopelessly do
SF’s imaginative strengths and its political conservatism correlate that
many SF readers, of a more radical turn, have about decided that the two—
strengths and failings—are inextricable aspects of an unshatterable
entity: If you love science fiction for its intellectual stimulation and
life, you have to put up with its political pig-headedness. We readers
love it; and we put up with it.

Delany’s book shows that linkage is not inextricable; and that a colorful
science fiction novel can take off intelligently and subtly from a
radical position. (The average reader may be halfway through the book
before realizing how gently, but expertly, he or she has been brought to
the edge of the politically acceptable, then just as gently, but quite
firmly, pushed over and sent smilingly on her or his way—or how cleverly
the values appealed to in the first chapter have been, by the end of the
fourth, quietly but systematically—and with malice aforethought—
reversed.) The reason I say Delany may be “doing in” the field is because
from now on it is going to be just a little harder for us to read the
kind of science fiction we love and still be so easy on those aspects we
have had to put up with till now. Those unpleasantnesses will be just a
little harder to ignore, a little harder to make excuses

for. The reason is that Delany’s book—both in the new terms established
by science fiction such as Malzberg’s, Russ’s, Disch’s, and Delany’s own
Dhalgren, as well as the old terms set up by Heinlein’s, Bester’s, and
Clement’s—is just better.

Trouble on Triton will definitely make some science fiction (some that I
love a lot, too) harder to read sympathetically. If his attack succeeds
in making those aspects that mar the kind of science fiction I love a
little harder for science fiction writers to let slip by, in (and into)
the future, I for one will be a very happy science fiction reviewer.

—Ann Arbor, 1976 [New York, 1975]

Ruins/Foundations

or:

The Fall of the Towers Twenty Years After

Demolition for the Village View Apartments hadn’t quite finished: on a

July dawn you could wander the small streets (shortly to be replaced by
concrete paths between scrubby lawns and red-brick buildings) and, among
the devastated acres, catch sight, in the muggy morning, of fires here
and there beside one or another still standing tenement wall. Off beyond
the Jacob Riis Houses and the park’s green sliver, the East River’s
sluggish oils nudged the city’s granite embankments or bumped the pilings
beneath the Williamsburg Bridge: girder, cable, and concrete rose from
among the delis and cuchifrito stands, the furniture and fabric stores,
the movie marquees of Delancey Street to span the night waters—where cars
and subways and after-dark cruisers took their delicate amble above the
blue-black current banked with lights—before striking deep into
Brooklyn’s glittering flank, above the Navy Yard.

In summer of 1961 no one had yet named it the East Village: it was still
the Lower East Side.

Behind the public school, the five-story tenement toward the dead-end of
East Fifth Street was the house into which the balding landlord, who
owned a goodly number of buildings in the neighborhood, just happened to
put all the interracial couples who came to his dim, storefront office
out on Avenue B, looking for apartments.

On the top (fifth) floor, there was Terry (eighteen, plump, and Italian,

from up-state New York) and Billy (thirty-five, black, and vaguely
related to me by marriage). They and their one, then two, kids lived in a
living room crowded with a fold-out couch and a kitchen very full of a
newly purchased washing machine. Shortly after we moved in, Bill and
Terry took over the management of a tiny Greenwich Village coffee shop on
3rd Street, the Cafe Elysee, where, with my guitar, I would go to sing in
the evenings and pass the basket, along with the likes of Bob Dylan, Tim
Hardin, Karen Dalton, Dick Glass, Lisa Kindred, Fred Neil, my long-time
friend Ana Perez, a friendly and talented youngster, Vic Smith, from whom
I learned endless guitar riffs, and an extraordinary blind Puerto Rican
guitarist, Jose Feliciano, who slept on our living room daybed for a
couple of weeks before taking an apartment upstairs in the same building
with his girlfriend (and later wife), Hilda, Ana’s sister. Alex, who was
a very lanky, very black, very stoned folk-singer, and his wife, Carol,
who was a very blonde, also very stoned, dancer, lived on the fourth
floor. I was nineteen. Marilyn, my new wife, was eighteen.

We’d rented the four small rooms on the second floor in July of ‘Sixty-
one.

Filthy when we moved in, the gray floorboards were littered with news-
papers, orange rinds, an apple core, tunafish cans, torn paper bags; the
sink counter was strewn with matches, candle stubs, twisted spoons; and a
hypodermic needle lay among the floor splinters by the sink—detritus of
the junkies who’d had the place before us and who, according to the other
tenants, had spent their three-month stay without ever having the lights
turned on. (As it was, we were still diagonally across the tiled hallway
from a local “shooting gallery”—an apartment where neighborhood heroin
addicts dropped in to shoot up.) Primitive drawings sprawled the dirty,
lead-white walls, and in the front room foot-high green, blue, and red
crayoned letters proclaimed:

HEY, HEY! WE FOUND SOMETHING THAT PLEASES THE CAT!

Over several visits we cleaned it out, got the electricity working, then,
with a loan from Sharon Ruskin, a high-school friend and wife of Mickey
(in a few years to be owner of Max’s Kansas City), went off to Detroit by
Greyhound to get married. While waiting out the three-day period of
“residency,” we sat for hours in coffee shop booths, writing the opening
chapters of a novel about a dead horse, a little girl named Messalina
Schmidlap, and a lady taxidermist called Octavia Declivity (“One day, on
the outskirts of Detroit, in a field of blowing grain, a horse died
...”); or we took six hour

walks through the city or crossed into Windsor; and slept the night in
separate Y’s. The wedding took place in City Hall, at eleven o’clock,
August 24th, 1961. We were under-age, of different races, different
religions, and without parental approval on either side; and—in most
states of the union, besides Michigan—without legal support. In the small
bare Judge’s office beside the empty, echoing court, while the pedestrian
ceremony took place, Marilyn broke out in barely suppressed giggles. As
we were leaving through the beige paneled courtroom, I asked: “What on
earth was that about?” She whispered, holding my hand tightly: “I kept on
imagining that, when we came out, we’d find a dead horse in front of the
judge’s bench!” Returning by bus to New York at August’s end, the first
thing we did, on leaving the Greyhound Bus Station, was see Gone With the
Wind, which had just been revived at 42nd Street’s Harris Theater: in
Part Two, where Vivien Leigh, Butterfly McQueen, and Olivia de Havilland
make their way by wagon away from the flames of Atlanta, suddenly their
horse keels over, clearly defunct, and Butterfly McQueen cries out in her
childish soprano, “Miss Scarlet! Miss Scarlet! The horse is dead ...!”

We howled for ten minutes, while, around us in the audience, black women
or Puerto Rican men tried now and again to quiet us.

That first night back in the city we spent at my childhood Harlem home up
at 2250 Seventh Avenue, where my cousin (named Brother) sometimes lived
above my father’s old funeral establishment—I remember I cried that night
to see the furniture of the house in which I’d lived till I was fifteen
practically unmoved since we’d gone, the same drapes still at the window,
uncleaned for four years.

We left before five in the morning.

Back in the Lower East Side just after dawn, we threw ourselves into more
cleaning, straightening, and fixing, sleeping on the floor over the next
few nights till some friends, Randy and Donya, who lived up near Columbia
University, loaned us a day-bed. A musician friend, Dave Litwin, gave us
a combination house-warming and rent party, during which we collected
some twenty-eight dollars in a zinc pail tied to the livingroom light
cord toward the exorbitant $58.00 a month rent. A trip to the New York
City Rent Commission brought up a building inspector who brought down the
rent to $52.00, on account of the sub-standard pipes—and earned us the
landlord’s undying detestation and, a few weeks later, an invasion of
plumbers and carpenters, who tore holes in our kitchen and bathroom
floor, through which we could see into the apartment below, and holes in
our kitchen wall, through to the bathroom pipes.
The obligatory rapprochement visits to our families?

On my first trip home, while Mom dithered a bit, wondering why on

earth we’d done it, my grandmother asked to see the marriage license and,
after reading it over with her glasses held away from her nose,
announced: “Well, then, you’re married. And you have an apartment. All
right, what kind of things do you need?”

My uncle, Judge Paige, invited us up to his summer home in Greenwood

Lake, where we spent the Labor Day afternoon at another uncle’s home
(Judge Delany), down by the lake itself, in a bevy of relatives and old
friends of my family, while my cousin inveighed us to go water skiing.

And our friends, Dick and Alice Entin, living then in the Van Rensselaer
Hotel, besides taking us out to innumerable restaurants over those early
months (now to Chumley’s, now to Fedora’s; I sometimes wonder if we would
have survived without them), carried us off to a post-wedding celebration
at Palisades Amusement Park, where we all rode ferris wheels and roller
coasters to calliope music, there above the waters at Jersey’s edge.

In a Grand Concourse apartment, set about with flowered chairs and sofas
under transparent plastic covers, there were odd, Friday night dinners
with my shrill, brilliant, bewildered mother-in-law, who, for those first
months, seemed so tragically surprised when, after dinner, Marilyn would
get ready to return with me to the Lower East Side.

Usually, those nights, we walked down through the Bronx, across the
Hundred-Forty-Ninth Street Bridge, along Seventh Avenue, then by Central
Park West, finally to cross Forty-Second and Sixth Avenue, all the way to
Eighth Street and across town, through Tompkins Square Park, on down
Avenue ? by the RKO Theater facing the public school—the ancient movie
palace already slated for destruction.

To return to Fifth Street, at least from the west, you walked east on
Fourth Street a third of the way along the block beyond Avenue B, then
turned up an alleyway between the back of the schoolyard’s handball court
and the red brick of the window-frame factory. D.T.K.L. A.M.F. was the
only graffito scrawled in black paint over the handball court’s wall in
those days. An extraordinarily handsome fifteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy
named Rusty, whose mother ran the aforementioned shooting gallery,
explained to us that the D.L.A.M.F. part meant “Down like a mother-
fucker.” The T. and the K., however, were mysteries.

Then, there was another party, this one a wedding celebration for my tall
cousin, Nanny, who, a scant month after we wed, married a small, intense
musician/karate instructor/black radical, with a gentle smile and a sense
of humor that could smart like finest emery cloth. It was a quiet,
Buddhist ceremony at a small, mid-town temple, and my elderly maiden
aunts, whom everyone feared would be shocked, sat primly on the floor
with everyone else. Those two slim black ladies, one a dentist (I
remember
a photograph of Dr. Bessie in a college schoolroom at the blackboard with
a pointer, before the conjugation of ????, ???ˆ??, Travel ...), one a
home-economics teacher (who, as she got older and older, became more and
more like Dr. Bessie’s less aggressive twin), had, forty-five years
before, stormed the theater at the premiere oi Birth of a Nation and,
with the pickets and protests outside, torn down the screen and started a
riot. Fifteen years later, they would take up the serious study of yoga.

Then the younger guests repaired to East Fifth, where I had cooked pounds
and pounds of yellow rice and paella, vaguely perturbed as to whether
anyone would think to ask if the lobster tails had been, indeed, imported
from South Africa, a fact I’d only discovered on the bottom of one label
after I’d gotten the dozen of them home from the supermarket and out of
their red, white, and clear plastic wrappers.

1961’s was a hot September. Outside, among the domino games in progress
on sagging bridge tables at the sidewalk’s edge, grubby kids in shorts
and sneakers opened both ends of empty beer cans (this was pre-pop-top;
this was when some women carried a “church-key” [a pocket can opener] to
rip the necks of muggers or sexual assailants) and used them to deflect
bright arcs from the spuming hydrants up through the harsh purple
illumination of the mercury vapour street lights newly installed that
year, high enough to splatter our second story windows, while I crouched
on the daybed in the living room, working in my notebook in red ballpoint
on a one-act play, The Night Alone, inspired by James Ramsey Ullman’s
novel, The Day on Fire, which, though it contained the best, if
fragmentary, translations of Rimbaud’s prose poems yet to appear in
English, seemed (to me) to show no understanding of the young writer’s
inner psychology. My play dealt with the shooting of Rimbaud by a
Verlaine urged on—in my version—by his young wife, Mathilde, from her
frustration over having been kept a Victorian prisoner, first by her
parents, then by her twenty-eight-year-old husband—Mathilde herself only
a few months older than the eighteen-year-old vagabond poet.

There was no lock on the front door of our building—indeed, there was no
front door. Day and night, especially in colder weather, from the hall we
would hear the claws of two, three—sometimes half a dozen—ownerless dogs,
running on our stairs; daily we found their turds on the landing.

Across from us was a factory where they made aluminum window frames. A
doctor’s office was on the ground floor of the building directly
opposite. Along the block were various bodegas, botanicas de fe, garages,
other apartment houses—most of them tenements as squalid as our own; one,
next door, called The Mildred, was in miraculously decent condition at
the head of the row of slums.

Weeks before we’d rented our apartment, the Daily News had carried,

104

on one day, a story of a rat that had gnawed the head off a baby in a
house just down from ours and, on the next, the tale of some juvenile
delinquents who’d murdered a neighborhood cop by hauling a concrete
paving block up to the roof of an apartment house across the street from
ours. One of the kids blew a police whistle in the hall. When the cop ran
up to the doorway, they dropped the concrete on him over the roof’s edge.
And in the first months I lived there I went with some acquaintances to
clear out (read: loot) an apartment a block or so away that had belonged
to a twenty-five-year-old male dancer who’d died of hepatitis in a city
hospital, though the only thing I could bring myself to take away was a
bathtub stopper. I recall looking at an immense pair of tennis sneakers
lying on the invaded bathroom’s tile, wondering just how tall the dead
dancer had been.

At home, now and again, the apartment rat would jump up on the back of
the kitchen sink, while one or the other of us was brushing our teeth—
shocked paralysis holding a moment between human and rodent, before one
of us shrieked and the other fled; or it skittered out from under the tub
to dash toward the toilet and leap to the rim for a drink—halting only
because I was sitting there! (The next day, when Marilyn was leaving the
apartment, in the hall she met the middle-aged Polish woman from the
apartment next door. “I hear you have rats,” the woman said. Marilyn was
surprised. “Eh ... yes,” she answered. “But how did you know?” The woman
laughed: “I heard your husband shout out last night!”) In a grimly comic
gesture, we named him Gregor, after Kafka’s giant waterbug.

Our first months of marriage were a time of emotional turmoil. Pregnant

by me when we wedded, Marilyn miscarried in October. Someone had thrown
out an old appointment calendar in the alley, and for days the large,
broken paving squares were strewn with white rectangles marked with large
black numbers signifying days in the waning year, each day a few of them
blowing nearer and nearer the Fourth Street curb.

Toward the beginning of the month, in that unusually chill autumn,

Marilyn had written of life in our second-floor slum:

These nights old madwomen chant in the streets wailing their deaths to
the October dusk. Precocious cold sullies our gelid sheets. Our hands
turn yellow, and a sticky crust devils our eyelids wakening ... The rats
wax bold without enough to eat.

A few days later, when the temperature had crept back up into the sixties
and she was coming home through the alley, a few calendar pages still
strewn about, Marilyn realized she was hemorrhaging.

In the apartment, perhaps an hour later, she miscarried.

I came home maybe an hour after that.

It was a day of fear, endless frustration, and finally futile rage: at

that time it was just assumed that any eighteen-year-old mother who
miscarried, married or unmarried, must be in the aftermath of an illegal
abortion (then, the only kind there were), and was treated by hospitals
and their staffs as a criminal. The doctor Marilyn was seeing during her
pregnancy, when she tried to gain admission to the hospital and he was
called by the admittance staff, claimed he had never heard of her, and,
with Marilyn still hemorrhaging and in great pain, we were just sent
away.
When, half a day later, Marilyn finally managed to obtain the necessary
D&C, we stayed at my mother’s a few days, emotionally drained and Marilyn
physically exhausted by a complex of tragedy, inhumanity, and general
fiasco that had assumed Kafkaesque proportions before it finally
resolved.

Back on East Fifth, alone one afternoon in the apartment, I looked out of
the narrow back window of our living room, which opened onto the foul
roof of a small out-building between the airshaft walls. The platform was
thick with defenestrated refuse from the floors above. On it lay a rat’s
corpse, which made me wonder—as I had seen still another dead rat in the
gutter up the street only a day before—if, at least for the neighborhood,
we weren’t due for an outbreak of plague. With such thoughts, I turned to
lie down on the daybed in the shadowed living room, to sink, tingling
with hyperawareness (once again), into the luminous evening waterfront of
a primitive city, to climb, dripping, from the river into the ruined
streets of an abandoned futuristic metropolis, to toil through glimmering
jungles alive with violet sunsets and red-bugs and ghouls, above which
soared ivory and onyx vampires and in whose rivers dwelt a slimy aquatic
race, jungles where I watched a man turn into a wolf while I tramped past
moss-grown temples to the foot of a volcano abroil on the night, and
where great violence was done to a four-armed child, which woke me
(again), sharply and shockingly, in the dim tenement—

The dreams (nightmares, I’ve called them since, though they clung to
memory, lurid, fascinating, as pleasurable as they were unsettling) had
returned for the sixth or seventh time in four or five days, and I
resolved: yes, I would try to catch their hyper-vividness in language. I
would weave some science-fantasy novel through those light-shot
locations, one that might even appease Marilyn’s complaints about the
books she was now editing. In

106

the shadowy second floor living room, I sat on the edge of the bed, palms
and bare feet tingling, between writing and sleep, while outside, a rainy
weekend in November rendered the remains of the calendar gray mulch.

My tenure as a book clerk at Barnes and Noble had fallen to part-time at

the end of that year’s textbook rush; but Marilyn had just gotten a job
at Ace Books as an editorial assistant, where she’d lied about her age to
secure the position. Once the youngest on the TV “Quiz Kid” show, she had
gone to college at fifteen and all but graduated by eighteen—when she’d
decided to marry me. She had told them at work she was twenty.

That November I got involved in my first (major) gay infidelity—with

another book clerk from Barnes and Noble, the shy, handsome son of a
Chicago minister, who, in the course of the whole thing, one night burst
into our apartment and actually declared, “We can’t go on like this!” (On
an immobilely chill evening that month, within the alleys adjacent to the
Village View construction, through a window, Marilyn glimpsed two or four
or six naked people—multiplied or confused, in a moment of astonished
attention, by some mirror on the back wall, as the window itself added a
prismatic effect to the bodies inside, gilded by candlelight or some
mustard bulb—before they moved behind a jamb, or she walked beyond the
line of sight, the image suggesting proliferations of possibilities, of
tales about those possibilities, of images in harmony, antiphon, or
wondrous com-plimentarity.) It was a time of strained discussions in our
tenement living room, in the midst of which a bit of plaster from the
newly painted ceiling would suddenly fall to shatter over the arm of the
red easy chair Marilyn’s mother had given us.

This was life in our new neighborhood.

Without him many of us would have never happened ...

Karl Shapiro/”Auden”

W.H. Auden lived at 77 St. Marks Place, practically on the other side of
Tompkins Square Park, with his lover, the poet Chester Kallman. One of
our earliest plans after getting married had been to show some of
Marilyn’s poems to Auden. That October, Marilyn had taken some
manuscripts over to his apartment. Auden had generously asked her to come
back in November to discuss them. And five weeks after the new year, the
two older poets graciously accepted an invitation to dinner.

I’ve always wanted to write a full account of that evening in 1962, when
Auden and Kallman came to eat at our grubby second-floor apartment (2-B)
at 629 East 5th Street, if only to provide a possible footnote for some
future edition of Osborne or Carpenter; or to supplement Charles Miller’s

charming An American Friendship. According to the Mendelson chronology of

Auden’s poems, Auden wrote no (or at most two) poems between September
1961 and July 1962, a fairly long period—for him—to go without producing
even a few ephemeral pieces, a period all but unmentioned in the recent
biographies. Carpenter notes an anecdote told about Auden’s 1962 birthday
party, held at St. Marks Place (a few weeks after he and Kallman visited
us), in which Auden became upset when an unidentified “Jewish girl”
inadvertently opened the door to his bedroom. But from “A Change of Air”
(the poem he wrote toward the completion of his and Elizabeth Meyer’s
translation of Goethe’s Italian Journey, in 1961) to Thanksgiving for a
Habitat (begun in the summer of ‘62), there is practically nothing.

My account only locates the poet for one freezing night in February,
1962. But for that, if not the night’s effect on me, or on Marilyn (or on
her poem, “Prism and Lens,” or on my novels), I give it here.

A school friend of mine, Johnny Kronenberger, had come to our rent party-
cum-house warming. Johnny’s father, Louis Kronenberger, had collaborated
with Auden on The Oxford Book of Aphorisms. Along with accounts of
Kallman’s imitations of Diana Trilling at Johnny’s parents’ last
Christmas fete, Johnny had given us Auden’s address and assured us the
poet was a genial and accessible man, with a sincere interest in young
writers. I’d first gone to 77 St. Marks Place at the tail-end of August,
1961 (the basement bar on one side of the steps up to the entrance, the
printer’s shop on the other), days after our return, to introduce myself
to Auden and mention that my wife of a week was a poet who’d already won
a number of writing awards and scholarships—but I learned from the golden
summer sublets, who, when I pressed the bell button, came down to answer
the door, that Auden and Kallman would not be back from Austria till
September. Sometime later, toward October’s end, Marilyn took some poems
over to their house, where she was received by Kallman, who, at the head
of the first floor landing, in a blue kimono, asked her what she wanted
and somewhat grumpily took her poems in to Auden. In November, Auden
phoned Marilyn at our apartment to come to St. Marks Place for tea and a
talk about her poems. One of the poems she had given him was “The Song of
Liadan,” whose source in Graves’s The White Goddess, at their November
meeting, Auden recognized. After they’d spoken about some of the other
poems, he asked her if she thought Marianne Moore had a tin ear—a few
years before, he’d dropped the “... week/... physique” quatrain from the
famous Yeats elegy, because he found his own rhyme tinny. Auden mentioned
his boyhood interest in engineering, which, Marilyn later told me, she
recalled having read about before in some text-book blurb in one of our
old high school poetry anthologies.

When she came home from her critique session, Marilyn wrote a nine—

108

line fragment and a sonnet about the visit (“In the chill outer rooms of
strangers’ houses ...” and “We sit in a cold room. A. pours the tea ...”1
as well as some doggerel bits on the encounter); also, at my urging, she
wrote a note to Auden thanking him for his time and asking whether he and
Kail-man might come to dinner.

Auden returned a friendly note saying they would indeed come, but that
they were busy all through the Christmas season and, really, through
January as well. They would not be free till after the first week in
February. Marilyn responded with a note giving them their choice of
Monday, February the eighth, or Friday, February the twelfth.

Auden phoned to accept for the eighth.

At that time what I knew of Auden’s work was largely his half dozen over-
anthologized warhorses. A few years before, I’d seen him read on the
Sunday morning television show, Camera Three (and become an admirer,
through ttiat reading, of his poem “The Shield of Achilles”). And I’d
watched the NBC Opera production, on Channel Four, of The Magic Flute,
with the young Leontyne Price as the Queen of the Night, more or less
unaware that Auden and Kallman had translated (and rearranged) the
Schikaneder libretto. Years before that, while working at a summer job as
a page at the St. Agnes branch of the New York Public Library when I was
fifteen, I’d spent an hour or so in the basement with the score of The
Rake’s Progress, where I’d traced out, between Stravinsky’s staves of
neoclassic melody, Auden’s and Kallman’s verbal inventions for Tom,
Shadow, Ann, and the bearded Baba-the-Turk. And only months ago, in the
Barnes and Noble basement, where I’d gotten that first post-marital job,
I’d stolen several hours over several days and, back in the stacks,
perched on the top of a ladder, my head among the asbestos-covered pipes
with purple rounds of light falling on the page from the dirty glass
tiles in the sidewalk above, now and again blocked by overhead pedestrian
feet, I’d read Auden’s Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being. I felt, as
I suspect many of its Forties’ and Fifties’ readers did, it was a more
ambitious, focused, and finally better poem than The Waste Land, some of
whose themes it shared. The fact that Auden’s poem had been written
twenty years after Eliot’s had not really registered. To me, at nineteen,
both Auden’s and Eliot’s efforts were simply “modernist works.” After
all, the two names had always appeared in the same sentence in the
introductions to the various high school poetry anthologies where I’d
first met them.

At the prospect of the dinner visit, Marilyn and I had taken out of the
Tompkins Square Library (named after Vice President Tompkins, buried over
in the churchyard at St. Marks in the Bowery), Nones, Homage to Clio, and
The Shield of Achilles (and looked in vain for Kallman’s Storm at

Castlefranco), read them over quickly (dwelling on “Primes,” on “In

Praise of Limestone,” on “Shorts”), and returned them a few days before
the poets arrived—so as not to have them ostentatiously lying about. Yet
if you’d asked me just before that evening, I’d have said I was far more
familiar with any number of other poets—Eliot, Pound, Dylan Thomas, Hart
Crane, e.e. cummings, George Starbuck (“Oscar Williams fills a need, but
a Monkey Ward Catalogue is softer, and gives you something to read ...”—
Starbuck’s scathing acrostic was the intellectual secret of every bright
fifteen-year-old with literary leanings in the latter half of the
Fifties), X. J. Kennedy, Allen Ginsberg, John Crowe Ransom, or Gregory
Corso.

The morning of the eighth, I worked for a few hours on my SF novel, now
called The Jewels ofAptor, stopping when the landlord’s carpenters
arrived to start work on our bathroom, built into the kitchen’s corner,
to go out to the open-front fishstore around on Avenue C. Tramping about
in the sawdust among the larger, cigar-smoking, rough-languaged men
working there, Johnny, the red-headed near-midget fishmonger, measured me
out a pound and a half of shrimp. A young man probably no older than I,
in a bloody white apron, orange work shoes, thick grey sweater out at the
elbows with a rolled down shawl collar, his small, heavily veined hands
sported frantically bitten nails, his fingers translucent from fillets
and ice.

Back home, with rice, canned tomatoes, some wine, onions, and curry
powder, I got started on dinner as the winter windows darkened to blue,
then black. Just before six, Marilyn came home from work. I slipped out
of my jeans and flannel shirt to dress.

In my dark brown suit and bright red tie, I was, by my own choice, to be
merely the cook and the maker of conversational filler. Though I was
certainly as excited as she, it was, of course, Marilyn’s evening. Her
two and a half feet of bronze hair were up in a bun; she wore a green
wool winter dress, a bronze deco pin on her shoulder from which hung a
brazen fringe. Charging in and out of our tiny bathroom off the kitchen,
we were about as flustered as an eighteen—and nineteen-year-old couple
could be, anticipating such guests, and kept making anxious quips to each
other to the effect that we hoped they would be fashionably late, to give
us time to get organized. In rather a frenzy, we passed from arguments on
how to do this or that to hysterical laughter, then back, minute by
minute.

The night of the eighth was freezing. The apartment was swelteringly
overheated. Steam from the saffron rice I was preparing licked up under
the blue kitchen cabinets, with their painted-over broken panes. From
time to time I glanced at the eye-level hole in the kitchen’s blue,
blistered wall, within which sweated new copper piping.

About ten minutes before the eight o’clock dinner hour, someone

twisted the key outside on our ancient door bell. And I turned to answer
it. Unbuttoning overcoats over grey herringbone suits and somber ties,
first Kallman, then Auden, stepped in. After I greeted them in our
cramped kitchen, with Marilyn somewhat nonplussed behind me (I don’t
think she really believed they were coming), I told them: “If we had a
schedule, which we don’t, we’d be about twenty minutes behind it.”

“Then perhaps,” Kallman said (as Marilyn finally got out her “Hello,” her
smile, her hand ...), taking a paper bag from under his arm, “we should
all have some of this—” and broke out a small bottle of gin (not vodka,
that night)—“unless you’re serving something else ...?”

There was also a small bottle of Noilly Prat in the bag.

When I shook Auden’s hand, I noticed he was a serious nail-biter and, I

think, fell in love with him a little.

I took their coats and put them in the back bedroom. Left over from the
house-warming (and we only had two real glasses), paper cups did for the
martinis.

Auden and Kallman were both big men, and our apartment was suddenly very
small. Beneath the somewhat long, greying hair, Auden’s face had already
begun to split into those astonishing crevices from the Touraine-Solent-
Gole syndrome he suffered with—though they were not yet so deep as later
photographs show them, nor was his increasing fleshiness yet so
pronounced. For now, indeed, he was a handsome fifty-four—days away from
his fifty-fifth birthday, though we didn’t know it.

Through the opening conversation both men were as complimentary as

possible about our apartment. They wanted to know how much we paid for it
and told us they paid, I believe, $148.00 a month for their own St. Marks
Place flat—which whispered to us of the luxurious life truly successful
writers might lead.

From somewhere or other Marilyn and I had acquired a copy of the 1949
translation, put out in Paris by Edition Morihen, of Genet’s Notre Dame
des fleurs, called, rather rakishly, in English, Gutter in the Sky. The
black hardcover had an oddly illustrated double-spread title page, which
included a drawing of a 17th Century French wig in a little circle on the
upper right of the recto. In the actual text, each new male character was
introduced with a parenthetical aside, e.g., “(Peruque, nine-and-a-
quarter inches.)” or “(Peruque, seven-and-a-half inches.)”: peruque means
“wig” in French and is also argot for “cock.” (Apparently Genet omitted
these bits from the 1952 Gallimard edition from which Frechtman did the
current translation that appeared in 1963—unless they were extra-
auctorial interpolations to begin with, inserted to spice up a text that,
while lurid as to its depicted social milieu, was, in texture, all but
non-erotic.) In the living room the book was lying on the bridge table my
mother had given us, and on

which we were to eat. Either Auden or Kallman picked it up; one or the
other of them hadn’t actually seen the translation before, but I don’t
remember which. The peruques were duly chuckled over. As I recall, Genet
didn’t linger in the conversation.

They approved of and cuddled our black kitten, Tammuz.

“He’s a marvelous cat,” Marilyn told them, “except at four o’clock in the
morning when he decides to do his imitation of six dray horses pulling a
beer wagon over the living room floor.”

“Dray horses!” Auden declared, laughing. And to Chester, “This cat can
imitate a dray horse!”

Auden told a story about a cat of theirs in Ischia, who walked over his
typewriter and sat on his papers, and whom I was sure I recognized, from
his poems, as “Lucina,/Blue-eyed Queen of white cats ...” Her initials,
“L.K.-A.,” Marilyn and I had identified only a few days before as “Lucina
Kallman-Auden.” After a bit Kallman suggested we three men remove our
jackets in the overheated living room. We did—and opened some windows as
well.

Dinner was a very mild shrimp curry—and I note that the martinis were
probably a good idea, as Marilyn and I, still teenaged hosts, had only
thought to provide (for four!) a single fifth of red wine. The
conversation ranged from the preparation of escargots with Chester
(“Really, the best thing to do in this country is to get them canned; the
shells come separately, and you can always reuse them ...”) to the proper
reading of a line from King Lear with Auden.2

Some years before, out of Pound’s ABC of Reading, I’d memorized two
poemlets, by, respectively, Walter Savage Landor and Arthur Hugh Clough.

One was:

DIRCE

Stand close around, ye Stygian set,

While Dirce on one barque conveyed, Or Charon, seeing, may forget

That he is old and she a shade.

The other was:

ON SEEING A LOCK OF LUCREZIA BORGIA’S HAIR

Borgia, all that remains to thee these plates enfold: Calm hair
meandering in pellucid gold.

Today, without looking them up, I couldn’t tell you which poem was by
which poet. But I recall, that evening, I broke out one of them and asked
Auden: “How do you pronounce ‘Clough’—‘Arthur Hugh Clough’? I mean, is it
‘Clow’ or ‘Cluff’?” Myself, I’d opted for ‘Cluff.’

With the surprise of an adult realizing, faced with children, that

history is running out, Auden answered: “It’s ‘Clow.’ Oh, it’s very
definitely ‘Clow.’ Not ‘Cluff.’Arthur Hugh Clough.”

Carpenter and Osborne both tell of an Auden who, by the Sixties,

pontificated rather than conversed. Had he been inclined to pontificate
that evening, he would have had a willing audience in Marilyn and me.
That night, however, both he and Kallman were convivial. Auden sat
forward on our daybed, which doubled as a couch, alert and asking
questions about everything. Kallman sat most of the time, more relaxed,
his back against the beige wall. Where had we gone to school? they wanted
to know. They asked about the Bronx High School of Science, where Marilyn
and I had attended high school. (In those days everybody did.) Most of
the talk was aimed at Marilyn, Auden conversing with her, while Kallman
talked—about cooking, largely—to me. At one point, however, when Kallman
returned from the bathroom and sat down on the daybed beside Marilyn,
leaving Auden between us, Auden turned to me and asked: “And what do you
do?”

“Oh,” I said. “I scribble science fiction to survive.” Immediately I grew

embarrassed.

The science fantasy novel I had been contemplating back in October had
grown, by now, to a handful of chapters. After a couple of weeks’
hesitation, I’d shown what I’d done to Marilyn, who’d suggested, as I’d
hoped she might, that I submit it to the publisher she worked for, when
it was finished. But as yet no one besides her at Ace Books had even
heard of it, much less seen it; survival, i.e., money, was not even a
question.

At this point Kallman looked over. “What was that?”

“He scribbles science fiction,” Auden said, “to survive.”

“Oh,” said Kallman, not unkindly at all.

But hearing my words come back at me like that, they sounded awful! What
I’d intended, of course, was to maintain an appropriate modesty about an
enterprise I took as seriously as anything I’d ever done. But what I’d
actually managed to blurt was an untrue boast, laced—I could hear it when
Auden repeated the words to Kallman—with the most ingenuous self-
contempt. The conversation went on, while, red to the cheeks, I swore to
be more circumspect about what I said in the future concerning my SF
writing.
It’s only small consolation, though I didn’t discover it until years
later, but Auden himself had already noted, somewhere in The Age of
Anxiety, that human beings are creatures who can never become anything
without

pretending to be it first—such as a publishing science fiction writer. I

had managed to get in my moment of pretense; then I sweated for it the
rest of the night.

Before the evening was through, there was a fire in the paper garbage bag
in the kitchen, from one of Auden’s several times emptied and refilled
cigarette dishes (we had no proper ashtray). We learned of it through our
elderly upstairs Filipino neighbors, who smelled smoke before we did: it
had trickled from the garbage bag, to be sucked into that hole in the
wall, where it was drawn by the draft beside the new copper pipes and
into their rooms above.

When I opened the kitchen door to their insistent ringing, they blurted:
“You have fire! You have fire!”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Kallman said, stepping up behind me. “There’s no
fire here.”

“Oh, yes! Yes! You have fire!” the wizened couple persisted, while Auden
and Marilyn joined us, looking at one another.

Then Marilyn or Auden noticed the smoke threading up from the rolled down
rim of the paper garbage sack against the wall by the sink ...

When it was out, the couple had gone, and we’d been sitting again for
perhaps twenty minutes, the doorbell key was twisted once more. Once more
I went to open it, and found myself staring at an old high school friend
in a black leather jacket, who, as soon as he was brought awkwardly in
and introduced (“Cary, this is Chester Kallman and Wystan Auden ...”)
said hello, wide-eyed, and, recognizing the visitors on whom he had
intruded, fled—as did our auspicious guests, a polite ten minutes later.

Marilyn and I were left wondering whether, despite the night’s

adventures, the dinner had been a success or not. But we were pretty
pleased with ourselves.

There is a process politicians know well: a hand shaken is a vote

secured. The reason is simply that once the hand has been touched, all
subsequent information about the politician’s policies takes on the
character of gossip about a person briefly known; and to the extent
there’s any intelligence behind those policies at all, the attention one
pays to gossip is more likely to ferret it out than the attention most of
us (Americans, at least) pay to politics per se. There is an analogous
process in literature, by which the great writer, once met, however
fleetingly, ceases to be a passing, passive interest and becomes an
active object of study. Shortly after that dinner, a copy of the old
Random House Collected Poems of W.H. Auden found its way into our
apartment, to be digested practically poem by poem. Then the Faber
editions of the Auden/Isherwood plays began to arrive on our shelves. At
one point I even had a xerox of Auden’s bit of rhymed pornography

about a gay tryst between the narrator and a mechanic. In later years I
always tended to be at the edge of a social circle that knew Auden,
though I never spoke to him again after that night. A librarian friend in
San Francisco claimed to have been picked up by him in Washington Square
during the Fifties. And in the spring of 1966 in Athens, in a moment of
sun-shot and beer-soaked Gemutlichkeit, outside a Plaka cafeneon, Gregory
Corso invited me to lunch at Alan Ansen’s elegant Kolonaiki home, with
its gray walls and original Cocteau drawings. That afternoon Gregory
cooked a bizarre casserole with many too many hot peppers, which Ansen
and I sweated over but ate anyway. (Gregory said we didn’t have to, and
didn’t eat any himself beyond the first bite.) But from that afternoon’s
conversation, about the book I was then working on, A Fabulous, Formless
Darkness, Gregory, still a bit irritable over his culinary failure, made
a comment that I lifted for an epigraph to one of the chapters.

Nine years later, while visiting Ansen in that same house, some fifteen
months after Auden’s death, Chester Kallman died.

And in 1982 I found myself in the center of the confusion over the
location of some forty pages of Auden letters, found at 77 St. Marks, by
a friend of a friend when, after Auden’s and Kallman’s death, the
apartment was left open almost a year.

Today Auden is certainly the modernist poet whose work I know best. Time
tends to shift our allegiances to encountered gods. I suppose this all
brings up the obvious, if pompous-sounding, question: What influence has
Auden had on my own writing? Well, a few pages in one SF novel are a
direct pastiche of “Caliban to the Audience,” and another SF short story
goes to some troubles to reflect/refract The Sea and the Mirror, but
these are more in the nature of allusion than of influence. Auden has
certainly given me great pleasure as a reader on many fronts. But, as to
writing, I don’t think influence per se is there. The reason simply is
that, very soon, I knew his work too well. Writers who influence us, at
least when we’re young (pace Harold Bloom), are not usually the ones we
read thoroughly and confront with our complete attention, but rather the
ill—and partially-read ones we start in on, often in troubled awe, only
to close the book after pages or chapters, when our own imagination works
up beyond the point where we can continue to submit our fancies to
theirs.3

I think it’s reasonable to suppose that, as poets, Kallman and Auden were
broadly and generously interested in what younger writers might be doing.

That’s why they accepted Marilyn’s invitation.

But parental transference working as it does, the visit was more

important for us than for them, however it might have assuaged their
curiosity: under the older writers’ gaze the youngsters’ self-critical
faculties turn up
another anxious notch. No matter how dispassionate or non-judgemental the
elder actually is, the youngster can only read it as the awful gaze of
History.

This is not a bad thing.

Some days after the visit, work on The Jewels of Aptor was halted again,
as the heat in our apartment gave out entirely. At the same time, I
developed an ingrown hair on my jaw which became badly infected. After a
week of sitting about all day huddled with Marilyn under blankets, the
spot on the left of my face had swollen to the size of an emperor grape.
A trip to Bellevue’s emergency ward one cold grey afternoon only got me
seen by a rather nervous intern who suggested that the swelling might be
an abscessed tooth and, before they did anything, I should come back to
their dental clinic—just to make sure. That was on Friday. The dental
clinic was not open till the following Wednesday.

Sunday, I was stricken with chills and fever. The swelling had gone from
the size of a grape to the size of a plum. Monday night, in my old army
jacket, with a towel around my neck for a scarf, I walked, fevered and
shivering, to the drugstore on the corner of Fourth Street and Avenue B:
an impossibly crowded counter, a small tiled floor, and three wooden
phone-booths along one side, where we’d often gone to make phonecalls
when we’d first moved in. The druggist was a large, round-faced, balding
man who ran the store with his small, white-haired father. In such an
impoverished neighborhood, he served as a kind of first level doctor,
within the limits of the law. That night he talked to me for a minute,
heard my chattering teeth, saw my hunched shoulders and ballooning jaw,
and phoned a small clinic just below Houston Street. Yes, I should go
there right away. There was a doctor on duty till nine o’clock.

The clinic was on the second floor above a storefront. I remember

fluorescent lights, blue walls, white enamelled pots on a table, a white
glass-faced cabinet, and a very tall, white-haired doctor in
shirtsleeves, who, when I said something about the Bellevue intern’s
suggestion of a possible impacted tooth, muttered: “... idiots!” and
anesthetized and lanced open the swelling, to drain a good half-cup of
bloody pus from my cheek. Then he packed the wound with gauze and
bandaged it.

My fever broke in the office.

Soaked and cold, I walked back through the blowy February night, my teeth
chattering, the street lights incredibly sharp on the black, now and
again doubled in reflection on my glasses. I climbed upstairs in the dark
(the hall light had been smashed again) and crawled into bed with Marilyn
in the cold apartment.

This is more characteristic of our time on Fifth Street than dinners with
famous poets.

But Auden? Two years after that, with our friends Dick and Alice
Entin, Marilyn and I attended a reading he gave at the New School for
Social Research. Though he could occasionally do inspired readings of his
own poems, Auden was sometimes a worse reader of his own verse than even
Delmore Schwartz—who was pathologically shy and had some small speech
defect that you immediately overlooked in person, when you met him,
wandering through Washington Square with Dick, but which became glaring
from the podium of the Columbia University Auditorium, where we’d gone
one evening to hear him.

At that night’s New School reading, Auden was not inspired. Afterwards,
however, Marilyn went up among the others who’d gathered around him to
offer him her good wishes and congratulations.

When she returned to us through the crush, Dick asked: “Did he remember
you?”

Marilyn laughed. “Of course not!” The four of us walked back across
Fourteenth Street toward the Lower East Side.

If those first months of marriage were not the most emotionally

satisfying time, they still produced a flurry of writing. I mentioned the
play, finished in days; there was also, finished days later, a fairy
tale, “Prismatica”—published twenty years afterwards. I also wrote a
hundred or so pages on what I then considered my major project: a vast
novel about poets, criminals, and folksingers loose in the streets of New
York City, Voyage, Orestes! Today only fragments of it survive; but in
it, a young poet, named Geo, had written a booklength poem called The
Fall of the Towers, which I’d envisioned as something between The Waste
Land and The Bridge. And, despite my February pretense, The Jewels
ofAptor had sold in May, to Ace.

In the last two days of February, I’d finished and dated a draft of the
final chapter. Then, for the next three weeks, I did what major rewriting
struck me as still necessary—so that it might be more accurate to say
that the book wasn’t really completed until late March, four or five days
before my twentieth birthday. (I’ve always let the February date stand,
though.) I got through the retyping by mid-April. Marilyn was still
working as an editorial assistant at Ace Books (where Carl Solomon, of
Howl fame, was “Idea Man”; and where William Burroughs’ first novel
Junkie had been published as a paperback original; and where the second-
in-line senior editor had the distinction of having been the reader who’d
rejected Nabokov’s Lolita from Scribner’s, an accomplishment about which
he still boasted—“I just don’t think it’s a good book”—making him seem,
at least to Marilyn and myself, a fool); she had taken my manuscript into
the office. It carried the pen-name “Bruno Callabro” (lifted from a
melancholy character in an adolescent novel I’d written some years
before, Those Spared by

Fire); Donald Wollheim had read it, had liked it, had contracted for it
at the tail end of May—at which point Marilyn mentioned that “Bruno
Callabro” was her husband, Chip.

“Good,” said Wollheim. “Then he can just go back to his own name. I hate
the name Bruno Callabro.”
Samuel R. Delany signed and returned the contracts on his first book in
the opening days of June.

Throughout one night, a few days later, kneeling on the living room
daybed with its threadbare spread the color of dirty Pepto-Bismol, I cut
the manuscript by 740 lines (at Wollheim’s firm suggestion. “But why?”
I’d asked, back in the office. “Was there some place you thought it
needed tightening?”

“Oh, no,” said Don. “But it has to fit into a hundred-forty-six pages.
And it casts off at 740 lines too long. I’ll cut it for you if you want
me to ...”

“Oh, no!” I said. “That’s all right! I’ll do it.”). It was the most
painful self-mutilation I can conceive of performing. Once or twice, when
there seemed nothing more that might reasonably go, in a sour-mouthed
daze, I simply pulled out a random page, tossed it on the blackened, bare
wood floor, and wrote the ends of the sentences on the page before and
after together.

Still, for all the pain, the possibility of selling fiction was
fascinating. And I had already begun a second science fantasy—a set of
five short stories of various lengths that I assumed could be published
together as a novel. With titles like “They Fly at ?iron,”

“Ad Steshobovne,” and “In the Ruins,” only two were even vaguely
readable—and their relation was tenuous. As far as making a coherent
book, they were only cobbled together. Still, that September, I was
surprised when Wollheim rejected them. But it brought home a lesson every
young writer must learn: just because one book or one story or one poem
has placed, this still doesn’t mean one is “in”—indeed, the condition of
“in-ness” itself is only an illusion of people who are out. (Back in
February, hadn’t Auden himself mentioned in passing some poem of his that
had recently been rejected?) But the same day he gave me my second
manuscript back, Don also gave me the galleys for the Jewels to correct.
Four or five days later I turned the corrected galleys in. Publication
was scheduled for the coming December. The work of correcting, along with
the rejection, pushed me to come up with an SF project of density and
seriousness.

Various fragments had been gathering in my head for a few days now. I ‘d
made a few notes in the spiral notebook I always carried with me.

It was sometime the previous June ...

Ambling down the Bowery to the narrow stone steps under the lower
stanchion that led up to the bridge’s central wooden walkway, Marilyn and
I had been discussing the limits of the American “buddy novel” as a
template

for adventure fiction since we’d left the house. (Writing was something
we could always talk about; often we took refuge in it when our more
emotional problems threatened to swamp us. In the midst of high ire or
deep depression, “Tell me about literature,” from either of us was always
a sign for truce; and the other would usually try to take up the topic.)
As the late afternoon’s first violet understained the clouds over the
sounds beyond the intersections of slant and vertical cables, we started
across the Brooklyn Bridge, talking about the problems of making the
“social chronicle novel” as exciting as the “adventure novel” and
worrying whether or not this could be done in science fiction.

Among the conclusions we reached that evening, as we strolled or paused

at the rail with the cars sweeping by below us, or walked once more,
fingers interlocked, cables wheeling above us, was that for a novel, SF
or otherwise, to show any aesthetic originality in the range of extant
American fiction, it must portray, among many other sorts of
relationships, at least one strong friendship between two women
characters. Also, the major heterosexual relationship would have to
involve a woman as active as the man. (Leslie Fiedler was shortly to
announce that the proper subject for the novel was “mature heterosexual
relations”; and we were too young to realize the phrase itself might just
be—in our culture—a contradiction in terms.) Both characters must be
developed as human beings, we decided, before they hooked up.

Once, in the first weeks of our marriage, Marilyn had come back to our
Fifth Street apartment with an armful of groceries, shouldering through
the kitchen door, sopping wet from a surprise downpour. “Here,” I said,
taking the bag from her and putting it on the sink counter while, with
over-pearled glasses and hair stringing down her forehead, she muttered
above the puddle forming about her on the kitchen floor-boards. “Let me
go get you some dry clothes.” A minute later I was back with a pair of my
own jeans—we both wore the same size back then, twenty-eight, twenty-
eight—and she shrugged out of her blouse, peeled off her wet trousers,
and slipped a leg into the dry pair I’d brought. As she finished zipping
them up, absently she slid her hands into the pockets.

The strangest look came over her face.

I paused, handing her the paper towel to wipe off her glasses. “What’s
the matter?” I asked.

“The pockets!” she declared.

“What about them?”

“They’re so big!”

Then she showed me the pockets in the pair of girls’ jeans she’d bought a
few weeks back; and the pockets in her overcoat. And in her skirts.

They were too small to hold a pack of cigarettes unless it stuck out the
top. (Remember, this was 1961: pre-Kennedy assassination; pre-Beatles;
pre-wrap-around skirts; and nobody admitted they liked either rock’n’roll
or American movies.) The idea that pockets in men’s clothes were
fundamentally functional had never occurred to her. The idea that pockets
in women’s clothing were basically decorative had never occurred to me. I
already knew that Marilyn, at Ace, was making twenty dollars a week less
than a young man of the same experience, education, and basic age as she—
simply because it was customary to start women at lower salaries. But
that afternoon in 1961 we started a discussion that was to go on, almost
non-stop, over many years, analyzing the ways women and men, even within
the same house, simply lived in two different cultures.

For months before that June evening we had discussed what was necessary
in fiction to portray characters of both sexes accurately: both male and
female characters needed to be presented by purposeful, habitual, and
gratuitous actions. With both men and women, the character’s economic
anchors to the world of the tale had to be clearly shown. And I had
already found out in one novel, how hard, starting with these principles,
it was to apply them egalitarianly.

It was tepid stuff in the face of the analysis that, some six years
later, the women’s movement was to provide in a clearly articulated
critique. But by 1962 it occupied a good deal of our thought and talk—
about 80% of it, as I recall.

The experience of cutting The Jewels of Aptor to fit Ace Books’ 60-
thousand-word/ 146-page paperback original format still smarted. I knew
that SF series were often popular. We were talking about a sizable work.
The idea of making this a trilogy of SF novels came up before we reached
the first stanchion.

(We joked about Oscar Wilde.)

But how to make it art?

Formally, parallels and contrast among the three volumes would provide
the major aesthetic resonances. The first chapter of Book One would cut
across all the social classes the remainder of the story would deal with.
The final chapter of Book Three would survey the same locations but in
reverse order. (The notion of having each volume turn on a different
slogan didn’t come until I began writing the second book.) The theme
would be freedom. The story would begin with the main character’s escape
from prison—no, better: just after his escape. The escape itself would be
recounted in each volume, but each time from a different point of view.
The prison escape in the first book would be an “objective” narrative;
the second book would retell the escape from the point of view of a
prison guard, which

would deepen its meaning. The full meaning would not come clear, however,
until in the final book it was recounted by one of the prisoners
remaining behind.

As we walked the bridge that evening, before a city skyline not yet
dominated by the World Trade Center, the U. S. was already in the first
years of the immoral and grueling Viet Nam War. Glorifying war as a
viable field for personal growth, Heinlein’s S tar ship Troopers had
recently won a Hugo award for best SF novel of its year. At the
insistence of Ana Perez, who frequently nudged SF books my way, I had
read it a little over a year before while at my parents’ home, and my
response had been complex.
Much in the book had fascinated me.

But much in it had appalled.

I wanted to make my work an answer to what I felt (and still feel) was
specious in Heinlein’s argument.

We talked about War and Peace that evening on the bridge (both of us had
read it several years before), in terms of the proportion of the story to
be devoted to civilian life.

I very much wanted to write a tale that would deal with the real effects
of war on what, some years later in his fine SF novel Camp Concentration,
Thomas Disch would call “the fabric of the everyday.” If direct
portraiture of military action took up more than a certain percentage of
the whole, then by definition that portrait would be distorted—at least
if its aim were social completeness. I would use the alternate chapters
of the middle volume alone, I decided, to tell a military tale that would
critique the soldiers’ relation to what was happening in the greater
society.

A night or two before that evening’s stroll across to Brooklyn Heights,

I’d had another intensely vivid dream that was to become the
assassination of Prime Minister Chargill at the dawn ball, which begins
Book Two, The Towers of Town. And there had been still another dream, of
soldiers in a foggy landscape cupping hallucinatory sea-shells and
flaming women in their dirty palms—an image I’ve since traced to an
illustration by Don P. Crane in a child’s life of Goethe I’d read as a
boy. That image would appear in the military novella that weaves through
the second volume. That particular evening on the bridge, however, while
I knew both dreams would eventually produce scenes for the books, I had
no idea where or how.

What else had I been reading?

James Baldwin’s Another Country had come out that year; I thought of it
as a dauntingly negative example. It seemed a modern tale trying to
grapple with something approaching the social scope I wanted for my own
story, but its lack of formal organization had undercut its every
novelistic

effect, and I wanted to avoid such disfiguring chaos. I had recently

reread that favorite novel of Sigmund Freud’s, Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s
marvelous and magical fictional biography of the renaissance painter,
Giovanni Beltraffio, called after Beltraffio’s teacher, The Romance of
Leonardo da Vinci. It seemed, and still seems, an almost perfect
historical narrative, marred only by an egregious burst of historical
teleology (the Greater Mission of Mother Russia ...) in its closing fifty
or so pages. Its dazzling orchestration of ideas and action was what I
would strive after. (I’ve been striving after it ever since.)

I’ve already mentioned my reading of Auden, both before and after his and
Kallman’s winter visit. As we mounted the steps of the stanchion to walk
under the arched and cabled stone, I knew that I wanted my books to
convey the same air of compassionate analysis and abstract topicality as
Auden’s longer poems. I even considered calling the project And at the
Present Time for a few minutes—a homage to Auden’s oratorio. But soon The
Fall of the Towers, the original title around which the ideas had come,
returned as first choice.

For me, at twenty, fiction itself was the series of overwhelming effects
from works I’d read in adolescence: the torture scene in Heinlein’s
“Gulf”; the scene in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath where, after endless
and exhausting trials, the Joad family comes upon the peace, cleanliness,
and community of the government migrant labor camp; Dr. O’Connor’s
“Watchman, What of the Night?” monologue in Barnes’ Nightwood. That
evening on the bridge I decided, about as cold-bloodedly as any twenty-
year-old could, who’d suddenly realized that, through a largely
preposterous nuke, part of his meager livelihood might now come from
making novels, that, in my SF, I would try for science fictional effects
comparable to those that, in my other reading, had so struck me.

The Queen Mother’s interrogation of Alter in Book One was my essay in

reproducing the Heinlein.

John’s and Alter’s arrival at the City of a Thousand Suns in Book Three
was my attempt to duplicate the Steinbeck.

And Vol Nonek’s terminal monologue was my try at recreating the Barnes.

What else had I been reading? Beside Gutter in the Sky, I’d also been
very much enjoying Beckett’s trilogy, as each volume appeared in the
early Grove Press trade paperbacks. For four or five years now, I had
been following each new work by Camus to come out in Vintage Paperback.
Two years before I had been in the second night audience of Alan Kaprow’s
Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts (to which I’d dragged my older cousin,
Boyd

Savoy, in that week from medical school4), and my friend Judy Ratner had
taken me to see the revival of James Waring’s Dances Before the Wall at
the Henry Street Playhouse, where she led me backstage afterwards and
introduced me to dancers Fred Hurko and Vincent Warren. I had followed
John Rechy’s stories, eventually brought together in City of Night,
through their initial publication in The Evergreen Review, reading the
“Winnie” section and “The Wedding of Miss Destiny” aloud to my high
school friend, Chuck Abramson, at all hours. In the second issue of
Evergreen, I’d first read Duncan, Olson, and Ginsberg. Alexander
Trocchi’s Cains Book was my personal nomination for the most successful
novel of 1960. But it wasn’t till some years later that I began to recall
these in a search for new aesthetic models. For now, the gut effect of
Heinlein and Steinbeck seemed more trustworthy. Gut effect, I thought,
was what I’d best try for—compassionate analysis notwithstanding.

By the bridge’s second stanchion, we’d made it from Tolstoy to Balzac:

the novel, modern or classic, always seemed at its most lively when a
character was learning to negotiate a social position somewhere up or
down the scale from the one that he (or she) was used to. Take a lesson,
then, we decided: make sure the plot pushed the various characters out of
the social strata in which they began. Did that work for the science
fiction novel too? It certainly seemed to provide the frame to support
all the energy in Bester’s The Demolished Man and, even more so, The
Stars My Destination. If it worked for Balzac and Bester, then it could
work for me.

The fragmentary and episodic method Sturgeon had used in The Cosmic Rape
to depict the carrying out of complex plots and schemes had always struck
me as an effective, suggestive, and economical way to put over general
plot hugger-mugger, of which I was sure my books would have a fair
amount. Very well, then, I would appropriate Sturgeon’s method for
myself.

What else had gone into the preparation?

My high school senior English teacher had been a marvelous woman, Dr.
Isobel Gordon, and a great fan of Conrad Richter’s trilogy, The Trees,
The Fields, and The Town. One incident from her description of Richter’s
novels always stayed with me: the kidnapping of the heroine’s younger
sister by Indians in the first volume. “But then,” Dr. Gordon had
explained enthusiastically to our Advance-Level English Class, “she
returns as an adult, who’s been raised by the Indians, in a later volume
...!” When Richter’s trilogy appeared in paperback, I bought all three
volumes and plunged into the first. But after forty pages, I’m afraid I
found it unreadably mucky. (Was it an influence? Undoubtedly. I could
never read more than twenty pages at a

sitting!) I’d even tried a brief parody, where the heroine, Seyward
Luckett, became Swayback Lunkhead. But still, I thought, someone ought to
have written a trilogy with such an exciting effect—thus the abduction of
Prince Let to the forest in Book One and his return to the throne in Book
Two.

Shortly after my seventeenth birthday, I’d first read Moby Dick. From the
“Afterword” to the gilt-covered Mentor paperback, I’d gleaned the notion—
or at any rate first seen it articulated—that greatness in a novel was a
matter of form: the richness to the pattern of emotional contrasts
between the various sections, the pacing and placing of those lines or
metaphors that recall for the reader whole scenes or sections located
earlier in the text—in short, the entire range of intratextual mechanics
by which a novel sets up resonances and echoes within itself. Struggling
even then with juvenile attempts at novels of my own, I’d logged Moby
Dick’s thirty-five “non-fiction” chapters and noted where they came in
the narrative proper, as well as where Melville had chosen to place his
rhapsodic “silent monologues”5 or the several playlets that punctuated
his book.

One of the Pequod’s crew had been a Gayheader.

During my seventeenth summer, my family had spent a few weeks on Martha’s

Vineyard in the black section of Oakbluffs. While there, we took a trip
to the multichrome clay cliffs at Gayhead. During our car ride across the
island, it rained; by evening the air was thick with yellow fog. When I
got out of the car and went to look down the rocks, all I could see in
the sunset was a single spot of ocean burning orange-white down at the
sand’s edge, like a splatter of glass and silver in the mist, fifty yards
below.

It might as well have been a lake as the sea ...

It might as well have been a foggy dawn as evening ...

1960’s summer I’d spent waiting table at the Breadloaf Writers’

Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. Along with my memory of the spot of
water below the Gayhead cliffs, the experience produced a novella I’d
called The Flames of the Warthog, after a line from a poem by John Ciardi
(then Breadloaf’s director), about a young waiter in a summer resort who
suddenly stops speaking, leaves his job, and goes to live in the woods,
where he is taken in by a kindly, woods-wise hermit. With the hermit’s
help, the young man returns to language.

The central section of Warthog, with about a third of its pages

rewritten, became Prince Let’s sojourn in the forest with the forest
guard, Quorl—Chapter Eight of Out of the Dead City. And in the first
practice session for my high school’s short-lived freshman gymnastics
team, I’d learned my first three stunts at the hands of our coach just
the way Tel learns his at the hands of Alter in Chapter Five.

During my high school years, the acknowledged star of our school’s

creative writing program (which included the future journalists Tod
Gitlin, Sheldon Novik, Stewart Byron, and Michael Goodwin; poets Lewis
Warsh and, of course, Marilyn Hacker; and SF fantasy writers Peter Beagle
and Norman Spinrad) was a bright, gaunt youngster named Cary.

(Yes, you’ve seen him, in his black leather jacket, at the end of the
Auden/Kallman dinner.)

Cary was a Marxist and had been two years ahead of me at Science. His
dark hair was very thin. He usually spoke softly, intensely, and he could
be very funny when he wanted to. For half a dozen years, starting in my
first year at high school, his moody lyric prose, now in letters, now in
short stories or personal essays, often passed around in more and more
dog-eared manuscript among the awed students, was the exemplum of art—at
least as far as I was concerned.

Cary also drew.

In his junior or senior year he’d done a set of perhaps seven drawings
he’d called The Fall of the Towers. They were multiple portrait studies,
three to five heads on a sheet: a variety of children and old people, men
and women, boys and girls, some clearly middle class, some explicitly
working class, reacted to a catastrophic incident, outside the frame and
never shown—this one with a look of curiosity, that one with an
expression of distrust, another with an excited gaze, but most with a
stupefied fascination hardly distinguishable from indifference. He’d
first shown them to me on a Bronx street corner one breezy November
afternoon. To me they had all the forceful commitment of Kathe Kollwitz
(an artist we all admired hugely) combined with the delicacy of Virgil
Finlay (who only those of us familiar with science fiction magazines knew
of). And like everything else Cary wrote or did or even said, to me they
were Art!

Today I suspect that, as figurative drawings go, they were pretty good.
But I was overwhelmed by them—at least by what I took to be the concept
behind them.

We are speaking of the Fifties now, a decade in which our parents,

reacting to the Great Depression’s hardships and the war years’
disorientation—first World War II, with the horrors of Auschwitz and
Hiroshima, then the Korean War—along with the McCarthy period’s blow to
leftist and liberal thought, made “security” our nation’s watchword.
People who lived in Greenwich Village, or people, like Cary, who spent
time there sitting in coffee shops, talking or reading, people who were
members of YPSL (the Young People’s Socialist League) or YSA (the Young
Socialists’ Alliance), as almost all my teenage friends were, people who
moved away from home

early to live on their own (and during one of my teen-aged attempts to

get away, I’d slept on the floor of Cary’s roach-infested, East
Fourteenth Street furnished room for a week, and gone to meetings and
parties with him at the St. Marks Place offices of The Militant, New
York’s Communist Party newspaper, where I’d folded circulars and stuffed
envelopes for mailings and where I was bought a fair number of meals by
the sympathetic older volunteer workers), people who played go and chess
at Liz’s coffeeshop above The Gaslight on McDougal Street, waiting to
score a nickel bag of pot from a black dealer named Ronny Mau-Mau: such
people were still “Bohemians.” And even those odd folk who were actually
“beatniks” did not yet have long hair.

A few weeks after our Detroit marriage in late August ‘61, Cary had
dropped over to our East Fifth Street apartment in his black jeans and
black sweater. What had happened to The Fall of the Towers, I’d asked.
Myself, I’d been convinced that the fullness of time would bring them to
some museum wall between the Modigliani portraits and the smaller nude
studies of Gericault.

Cary explained that, in one of her periodic attempts to shake this “art”
nonsense out of his head and make sure he did something with some
“security” to it, his mother had destroyed as much of his writing as she
could find, along with as many of his notebooks and letters and drawings
as she could manage to cram down the incinerator. The Fall of the Towers
had gone up in smoke in a basement furnace somewhere in the Bronx.

Had I visited the Museum of Modern Art and found that Picasso’s Guernica
or Tchelichev’s Hide and Seek had been destroyed, I couldn’t have been
more devastated.

There had to be a way to make some gesture to the fact that the drawings
had existed, had delighted, had awed. And while I wondered how, wandering
with Marilyn through the cable shadows slanting the planked walkway,
looking back at Manhattan’s towers, looking ahead at Brooklyn’s, I
decided that must be my trilogy’s overall title.

But not all things I felt on that bridge walk were so admirable. Among
the other things I wanted that evening—simply and baldly and with
absolute envy—was to write a novel at twenty that would be more ambitious
and better wrought than Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, which I’d
read a few years before and knew he’d written by the same age. I wanted
to write a novel better than Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely
Hunter, which she’d finished at twenty-three.

The five hundred dollars I’d received after I signed the contract for my
first SF novel (with the promise of another five hundred on publication,
six

whole hopeless and uncountable months away) along with the equally real
warning from the rejection of my second, had convinced me that fiction
was—and, yes, science fiction—serious business.

Today the only thing I can look back on with complete sympathy from that
evening (and even that sympathy makes me smile) is the seriousness with
which I jumped from “Gulf” to War and Peace to Star ship Troopers to The
Grapes of Wrath to The Cosmic Rape to Pere Goriot to The Stars My
Destination to Nighrwood to ... well, to whatever had struck me as
effective, to whatever had seemed instructive.

Provencal poetry has its tradition of the dompna soiseubuda, or “borrowed

lady”—that ideal woman with the eyes of Judith, the complexion of Susan,
the voice of Linda, the breasts of Roxanne .... Whatever its ambition,
The Fall of the Towers was the most “borrowed” of SF works. Perhaps all
that can be said for it is that, given the age and experience of the
writer, it couldn’t have been much else.

As I strolled through summer’s opening with Marilyn, between two island

shores, trying not to look down at green glitter between the wooden
walkway slats, two hundred feet below (I am a hopeless acrophobe), the
sky went yellow then blue behind the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Watchtower
offices. We paused to speculate, as usual, on whether any of the windows
we could see might be the one through which Hart Crane and his lover, the
nameless ship’s printer, had gazed out on the bridge in winter, listening
to “... the long, tired sounds—fog-insulated noises: / Gongs in white
surplices, beshrouded wails, / far strum of fog horns ... signals
dispersed in veils. // And then a truck will lumber past the wharves / As
winch engines begin throbbing on some deck; / Or a drunken stevedore’s
howl and thud below / comes echoing alley upward ....” We continued
through the June warmth into Brooklyn Heights, to join Dick and Alice for
dinner, where they now lived in a small brownstone.

I don’t believe I’ve said:

Dick was a playwright. Sometime later Alice was to become a

psychotherapist.
The talk that evening was mostly over the play Dick was writing, The
Tyrant, about a revolution in an imaginary Central American country.
Mostly we argued over the presentation of its single woman character,
although from time to time the conversation drifted to Stendahl,
Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, Auden, or Provencal poetry ....

Next day, back on East Fifth Street, I sat down at the manual portable
typewriter I’d borrowed from a wonderful woman named Rosemary; I ran a
piece of paper around the narrow black platen and typed:

THE

FALL

OF

THE

TOWERS

Then I rolled the paper down, moved it to the left and typed:

a trilogy of novels:

1) Out of the Dead City

2) The Towers of Toron

3) City of a Thousand Suns

I rolled the paper down further and moved it right:

by

Samuel R. Delany 629 East 5th Street New York 9, New York

(Yes, this was before zip codes.) I took the page from the typewriter,
slipped it into my notebook where I’d already begun to make notes on the
organization of Book One’s first chapter and the last chapter of Book
Three, and went on with what I’d begun in longhand of Chapter One.

What I’ve described so far is the context, the preparation, and the
ambition behind The Fall of the Towers.

What my reader has in hand today is the uneven, faltering work of a very
young man. I was twenty when that first title page went into the
typewriter—and only weeks away from twenty-two when I wrote out the last
of the epilogue in my notebook and turned back to retype Book Three’s
finale. Today, I am appalled at how thin it all is. And the “borrowed”
effects, for all the analysis of Heinlein and Tolstoy, Bester and Barnes,
Sturgeon and Steinbeck, Baldwin and Balzac, are among the thinnest.
Although I can still enjoy the seriousness with which it was all planned,
the results still contain a large helping of the ludicrous. As early as
Chapter Two of Book One, for example, I became mired in some nonsense
about human transparency. I certainly never thought it scientifically
possible. Still, over those summer months when I wrote it, I felt it was
beautiful and poetic and mysterious. All that bothered me was a suspicion
it had nothing to do with the book I was

writing. Today it reads like nonsense—because it has nothing to do with

the book I was writing. And though from time to time some gift of the
muse let me wring a vaguely interesting image from it in the subsequent
two books, I still wish it wasn’t there.

The “gosh-wow” exposition from beginning to end will always be an

embarrassment. (“Hey, now that must be because ...”) In creative writing
classes since, I’ve been railing against such barbarousness for years.
Here, my beleaguered students can see why it shouldn’t be done: each of
these unspeakable clutches creates the occasion for the next. They breed
in the creaking awkwardnesses of plot. They lie across the substance of
fiction, science or mundane, like rotten tenement timbers. More than any
other rhetorical figure they are what give “plot” its bad name. And if
plot can only be brought off by such horrors, then those who say plot is
dead are right.

I suppose my story did, however clumsily, move my characters between

social strata. But once I got them to this level or that, I would sit
dumbly with my notebook and no idea how, once there, a person from one
stratum, now at a new one, might act. I had no sense of the hesitation
and play of their gestures or the care and turns of their speech: and
that is tantamount to saying that I had no talent for fiction. The
details that would make them read right and recognizable were simply not
there. At a loss to generate any rich and human-scale behavior, I would
drag in another wooden bit of exposition for another piece of
unbelievable “action” no reader could have possibly cared about.
(‘Action” is what the unskilled writer substitutes—often in despair—for
observation.)

My first SF novel The Jewels of Apto f s official publication date was

December first, 1962.

But when I was a handful of chapters into the Tower’s Book One, in
November the first copies of The Jewels of Apt or arrived at Ace Books
(in a double volume with James White’s novella Second Ending on the other
side), recently moved up to new offices on Sixth Avenue and 48th Street.
The cover, by artist Jack Gaughan, a deep and layered blue, depicted bony
vampire creatures staring after floating pearls, within which glimmered
skulls. My only real memory of the day is, after buying the special
Sturgeon issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction at the
Sheridan Square newsstand, walking, after dark, with Marilyn along West
Fourth Street, somewhere near Gerdes Folk City (then two blocks east of
Washington Square). Suddenly I hurled the clutch of paperbacks into the
air with a whoop of joy, then ran along by the manhole cover in the
cobbled street to swipe one from where it had landed, spraddled open,
cover up, while Marilyn stood behind me, laughing.
The next day at the Fifth Street apartment I was back at work on the
Tower’s first volume, but with a strangely distanced feeling. Why didn’t
the

real pleasure of my first book’s publication (a copy lay on the green

metal wing of the typewriter table, as I typed up the current chapter
from my notebook) do more to impel me on with the writing of this one?
But it didn’t. And it seemed grossly unfair—since I knew by now that
worry over what was happening to an earlier book could trouble work on a
new one.

Still, a few months later, when Out of the Dead City was finished, I felt
it was rich and accomplished and infinitely superior to Jewels. I was
particularly proud of the climax, a chase through the universe in Chapter
Eleven (that I planned to repeat in miniature in Chapter Five of Book
Two), whose episodes had been generated according to a complex pattern of
the four classical elements (fire, water, earth, air) overlaid on the
modern states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma) deployed between the
epic spheres (underworld, real world, heavens).

“Yes, we’re going to publish it,” Don said, when, after what seemed years
of waiting for him to read it, at last he called me into the Ace office
to talk about it. “It’s not as strong as your first book, Chip. But that
often happens with second novels. Still, it’s got some interesting
stuff.”

On the subway back down to the Lower East Side, I found myself thinking
that, though they might add a feeling of range to the episodes, probably
no reader would experience the elements behind the chase as a pattern,
even though they made one.

A few days later, I took out my notebooks and looked over the notes on my
June dream, then launched into the assassination scene that begins The
Towers of Town.

In memory, that second volume remains the most difficult book I’ve ever
written. Though certain sections gave me much satisfaction (the long-
planned-for friendship between Alter and Clea, some of the sections in
the military chapters), in general everything around them seemed thick to
write, thin to read, and sunk in an endless personal dullness.

That winter I was going weekly to Queens to tutor poet Marie Ponsot’s
ten-year-old son, Antoine, in arithmetic. (Two years before, when I was
eighteen, it was Marie who had given me my first copy of Barnes’
Nightwood.) Three chapters into the second volume, and I had to give up
the weekly tutoring sessions. “Well,” Antoine told his mother, “I guess
Chip is writing another novel.” I was; but it was going very slowly.

The summer of that June walk, Marilyn went to Mexico with her mother for
a month and a half. Upstairs, Terry laid a place for me at dinner for ten
dollars a week, somewhat over my protests. An Italian girl from upstate
New York, she could not be convinced that, in our house, I did the
overwhelming majority of the cooking. But her and Billy’s company was
pleasant.
Months before, a painter named Simon had told me about the trucks

parked under the highway out by the docks at the river end of Christopher
Street as a place to go at night for almost instant sex. (That Simon was
also gay came as a jarring surprise after I’d known him almost a month.
His vivid and precise canvases seemed more luminous to me than any art
since Cary’s.) I went once, stood across the street under the light,
watching the trucks almost twenty minutes—and saw nothing of the mass
orgies Simon had described. Now and then, a lone man in jeans wandered
across the street to disappear among the parked vehicles—some driver
checking his van.

That was all.

“No,” Simon told me the next afternoon, “you have to cross over and walk
around between them. And you still probably won’t see very much.”

“Isn’t that kind of scary?” I asked.

“You got it,” Simon said.

And a few nights later, I went back. And crossed over. And discovered
that, from about nine o’clock in the evening on, between thirty-five and
a hundred-fifty (on weekends) men were slipping through and between and
in and out of the trailers, some to watch, but most to participate in
numberless, silent, sexual acts, till morning began to wipe night from
above the Hudson, to blue the oily waters. I stayed there for perhaps
five or six hours, had sex seven or eight times, and finally left
exhausted.

Once, coming home one rainy dawn from the Christopher Street docks that
summer, I picked up a two-hundred-forty-pound, thirty-year-old Canadian
ex-convict, hanging out at the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue,
named Sonny. He ended up staying with me for a couple of weeks while
Marilyn was away, his illegal activities bringing down on me only one
invasion of the police. Another time that summer I brought home with me a
very intelligent and incisive acting teacher, named Claud (a friend of
the aging and infirm Carson McCullers, it turned out). As he came into
the apartment and saw the clutter I’d allowed to gather over those hot
days, he declared: “My god, is this what you think of yourself?” I was
surprised. But we remained friends for years.

Besides these distractions, by now the sheer bulk of the trilogy was
beginning to tell. Once, I decided to abandon it and began another
science fiction novel, The Ballad ofBeta-2. Planned to be much shorter,
it could be finished in some reasonable number of weeks, I was sure. But
when I was sixty or seventy pages along in the manuscript, it too hit a
point beyond which I could not go. Finally I gave the manuscript to an
older friend of mine, Bernie Kay. “Yow finish it,” I told him. “Here’s
the outline. There’re only two chapters to go. If you complete it, I’ll
split whatever it sells for with you, fifty-fifty.” And again I took up
the abandoned Towers of Town, pausing now and again to work on Voyage,
Orestes!, the only thing I seemed actually able to write.
As July gave way to August, the trip across to the Village and along
Christopher Street to the docks became a nightly journey, till I came
down first with gonorrhea, then (once that was cured) pneumonia; and I
disappeared into my apartment for four days so that, on the evening of
her return, Marilyn had to take me to the hospital with a hundred-four
fever, where I stayed, first at Bellevue, then at Sydenham, for two
weeks.

With its title changed by editorial mandate from Out of the Dead City to
the more commercial Captives of the Flame, Book One appeared while we
were still living on East Fifth Street. Shortly afterwards, in December
‘63 (a year after the publication of The Jewels of Aptor) another ex-B&N
clerk, this one a tall, bespectacled, black-haired graduate student in
English at Columbia, Susan, appeared one day at our door, destitute, to
stay with us for an unspecified number of weeks. “Literature survives by
fertile ambiguity ...” she told me, handing over her copy of Wyndham
Lewis’s Time and Western Man.

I was having my first bout with ulcers that month but I tried to be
appreciative.

Some years before I had read D.B. Wyndham Lewis’s study, Frangois Villon.
Now I discovered that this Lewis was not the same person at all: the
pointed and polemical critiques of Joyce, Woolf, and Proust, interlarded
with near-impenetrable bouts of metaphysics, were the very opposite of
the arch, learned, gossipy, and finally somewhat suspect recreations of
Twelfth Century life and thought.

But through ulcers, through semi-permanent house guests (through Time and
Western Manl), I worked away on the second volume.

One nagging problem with the book was simply that when the civilian
chapters of the Towers’ Book Two had finally developed a plan, I realized
that, if I wanted to end it in anything other than chaos, changes would
have to be made as far back as Chapter One of Book One—which was now in
wire paperback bookracks across the country. My solution—a most clumsy
one, I felt, even at the time—was to drag on some robots who would
explode at the end of Book Two and destroy, along with themselves, a few
loose ends lingering from the earlier volume. But that was nothing
against the sheer difficulty in getting the pages written.

Though Wollheim was not pressing for completion, the weeks when I could
not write a word of science fiction were upsetting. The deadline I’d set
myself was long past. When I was some three-quarters of the way through
The Towers of Town, I spent a night talking to an artist named Al in his
East Village studio. (He had a sprawling purple birth mark over his eye
and cheek, very like my character Rara.) Near tears the night long, I
went on till after sun-up, explaining and explaining and explaining
again, as the sky lightened behind the bars of the fire escape outside
the windows in his grey

loft walls, that I had no idea what was happening any more in the book I
was writing. I honestly did not believe I could finish it. Indeed,
starting such a grandiose project—much less expecting it to pay my rent
and feed me—was the biggest mistake I’d ever made! Too many of its pages
were simply written in a daze by a befuddled youngster clambering to
reach the end.

And when, somehow, the second volume was finished and submitted to
Wollheim, and, over lunch at the old Blue Ribbon restaurant on 48th
Street, Don commented, ‘Oh, we’ll definitely publish it. Readers like
series books. But it’s not quite as strong as your last one,” I wasn’t
surprised.

From the first two volumes, it was clear that I was not producing a
better work than McCullers’ or Capote’s. Aside from mine’s sheer
limpness, Capote’s and McCullers’ books were astutely observed
psychological novels; and just as the social chronicle represents an
advance on the picaresque, so the psychological novel, when well wrought,
is an advance on the social chronicle. I hadn’t even noticed the
particular problems of rendering psychological movement among the
specific SF parameters, nor had I even thought about orchestrating such
effects in concert and counterpoint within a richly envisioned, coherent,
alternate world. But I had noticed by now that even the SF conceit behind
my whole enterprise had been chosen rather thoughtlessly, governed more
by my zeal to “say something meaningful” than to say something coherent.
A small, isolated empire still managing to maintain a developing
technology and culture (so very like our own!) for five hundred years
...? In my anxiety to say something important, what I was doing was
babbling!

It was a painful lesson in the split between theory and practice. It

would have been a wonderfully simple one if I’d been able to say,
honestly, my mistake was merely that I’d done too much planning. But it
was also clear that the only thing that made the first two books of the
trilogy minimally publishable was, indeed, what planning there had been.
If anything, they’d needed a lot more: without it, there were simply too
many stretches where I was flailing at my notebook with my ball-point
instead of writing. And it was only the plan that had kept the results,
however far they strayed from anyone’s notion of “good writing,” within
the comprehensible.

And I’d already begun the third volume ....

As far as I can see, at the start of City of a Thousand Suns something

happens to the writing. Every time I’ve read over the galleys for the
trilogy’s dozen various editions during the past twenty years, the change
has struck me. As much as I can tell from my all-too-subjective position,
the energy increases.

An artist’s evaluation of his or her own work is probably the least

trustworthy judgement possible in the range of human judgements. Still,

the move between the end of Book Two and the beginning of Book Three is,
at least for me, the change between the wholly unbearable and the barely
acceptable.
This is not to say that the third book avoids the mawkish, the moralistic
(“Alter turned to face the sword ...” Cringe!), or the mucky. Yet it does
not cause me quite as much aesthetic pain as the previous two.

What intrigues me about this change—if it is actually there—is that I

can’t point to anything in my life that might have caused it. I finished
the handwritten version of The Towers of Town’s Chapter Thirteen and
immediately—within minutes? hours? certainly after no more than a day—
skipped a page in my notebook to begin writing out “Chapter One” of Book
Three. In fact, I finished the hand-written version of Book Three’s
“Chapter One” before I turned back to re-type the last few chapters of
Book Two (in the midst of which I was suddenly struck by a method to make
the vowel progression in the successive mentions of the “flip-flop”
creature appear as random as possible: actually a very simple formula, it
took me a day-and-a-half of work to carry it out. But the effect of
uniform variety that is the way art conveys the random always requires
organization, if only to avoid the aesthetically distracting clumps and
repetitions that the truly random always displays and around which
meaning forms), to hand it in to Don, once Marilyn had checked it for
spelling, a few weeks after my twenty-first birthday that April. I
remember, right afterwards, showing the first chapter of Book Three to
both Terry upstairs (an avid SF reader) and Marilyn. Do I fool myself by
remembering both women seemed to think it substantially more vivid and
immediate than what had gone before?

In the first months of ‘64, while I was in the middle of writing City of
a Thousand Suns’ Chapter Two, we moved to another apartment that had
belonged to yet another ex-Barnes and Noble clerk—Rose Marion—at 739 East
6th Street (4-D), a block north and a block east, where that final typing
of Book Two was completed and where, over the next two months, Book Three
came as easily as Book Two had come haltingly. But the change had already
occurred.

I recall some subjective differences in what writing felt like before and
after the break between those last two volumes. Until I began City of a
Thousand Suns, what pressed me to actual writing were images, ideas, a
kind of ill-seen “movie in the mind” (what current narratologists call
the diagesis), which, in order to clarify, I would sit down and describe
on paper. There were occasional words and phrases involved in that
initial inner imaging, but not many. And those that were there usually
went into the text pretty much unchanged. (The
Towers’”beetlewings/carbuncle/silver fire” motif is

an example.) From its first pages, however, once the expository opening
was finished and the first scene in Toron begun, City of a Thousand Suns
came to me with just as many ideas and images, but now what pressed me to
put words on paper—what made me take up my notebook and pen—were
comparatively large, if vague, blocks of language that came as well. It
was as if the whole writing process had finally secreted another, verbal
layer on top of what had been going on till then.

These “language blocks” were not, certainly, lengths of finished prose,

all words in place. But now, as well as the vague images and ideas that
formed the pre-written story, I would also hear equally vague sentences
or paragraphs, sometimes as much as a page and a half of them—which was
the point at which I knew it was time to write.

In these vaguely imagined blocks, there would be one to ten clear words
and/or clear phrases, as well as a sense of the lengths of language
between them—even a sense of that language’s intervening rhythm. The
actual writing, of course, would revise all this greatly. (If anything,
the rhythm gave the most cliche, common, and least energetic way to say
what I wanted, so that its loose, lazy, and lax periods became a base
meter against which to write hard prose: but that soft and lilting
underrhythm would let me know what the line must be hard in relation to.
Till then, simply because I had never consciously or conscentiously heard
it—or listened for it—before, it had been the rhythm that, too often, my
writing followed rather than fought.) Pre-set phrases would change. The
vaguer material would shrink or expand as words made it real. And, as
always, images would clarify and complete themselves in the writing. But
the language part, at least to this extent, just hadn’t happened before.
I was probably sixteen when I first read George Orwell’s “Politics and
the English Language” and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Along
with Pound’s ABC of Reading (which I’d found at about the same time),
very little else is teachable about writing. Getting rid of superfluous
adjectives and extra words, the advantage of the active voice, the
breaking of overcomplex sentences into smaller ones—these were all things
I’d learned before I’d begun my first SF novel, back in ‘61. Had I not
known them, no doubt that first book would never have placed. But what
I’m talking of now is a certain psychological relation to the work.
Before the change, I would have been very open to the pernicious
mythology of professionalism that, save when it serves as a polemical
counter against a kind of romantic self-indulgence (that, certainly, no
romantic we still read today could have indulged), does so much to
pollute contemporary paraliterary art.

Before the change, I thought of myself as a writer who could write

everything. I probably could have—all equally badly. After, I began to
realize that I was profoundly limited in what I could write—at least if I
wanted

to write with the best language my inner tongue could offer up for
conscious working and reworking. Once this change, invisible in its
actual occurrence, was complete, I knew I wasn’t a poet or a playwright
or a journalist or a writer of naturalistic short stories or of
historical novels.

I was a science fiction writer.

I suspect I am describing here the largely psychological experience

others have written of as “finding” one’s own “voice”—though it is given,
not found (the poets Yeats and Spicer spoke of it as “dictation”), and
has not so much to do with voice or writing as with language itself,
somewhere in the very reading and listening centers of the brain, a new
level of stabilization in the discursive mechanism that precedes and
informs all rhetoric, to the most revolutionary.

I write of “a new level of language,”

“new confidence,”

“voice,”

“energy,”

“dictation.” And even before City of a Thousand Suns had appeared, I’d
gone and retrieved the incomplete manuscript of The Ballad of Beta-2 from
Bernie. He’d only written a page or so, before other tasks had distracted
him. I discarded his additions, and within weeks I wrote the last two
chapters, then retyped/re-wrote the whole: once the change arrived, the
smaller book was no problem.

“My own voice,”

“dictation,” or however you characterize it, it came, however, with a

price.

The acrophobia I mentioned parenthetically during our June walk across

the bridge in ‘62 had grown more and more intense in the first months of
1964, so that by the time I finished the Towers, I could not have taken
that walk again. Even to be in a room with windows more than one or two
stories above ground level was almost physically painful. The longhand
version of the City of a Thousand Suns was finished in late February; but
retyping and rewriting continued for another six weeks or so. The Ballad
of Beta-2 was handed in and sold at the end of June. But by that time,
the acrophobia had slid over into another fear that I would, first, fall
under a subway train and, shortly after that, that something inside me
was compelling me to throw myself under an on-rushing subway. But general
anxiety was rising all through my life.

Two or three times that spring I woke at three or four in the morning, to
leap from the bed and stand, shaking, naked, in the middle of the room,
unable to breathe, my heart pounding, a red film over everything that, as
my breath came back, would swirl clear in patches. Shivering, I would lie
back down, unable to explain to Marilyn what had occurred, who now tried
harder and harder to ignore my stranger and stranger behavior.

Over the summer months I got well on the way to becoming one of the
common, garden-variety madmen you see wandering about New York City:
filthy clothes, all unbuttoned, going nowhere, mumbling to

136

themselves. By October of ‘64,1 was making daily, circuitous, ambling

trips to the Second Avenue subway on Houston Street, where, finally,
inside the turnstile, I would sit at the top of the stairs leading down
from the underground concourse to the track level, clutching the
bannister rails, feeling myself drawn to the tracks, while some unlocable
force impelled me down, pushed me to throw myself under the next incoming
train. When, below, I saw the subway rush roaring up beside the platform,
I’d hug my chest and face to the bars and hold my breath till I broke
into a sweat. (Did I want to kill myself? No, there was nothing in my
life I was dissatisfied with, which made the compulsion the more
unnerving!) I only realized how much I needed help one evening when a
young policeman came up and pried me loose from the bars I was clutching
with his billy club and shooed me out of the station with the logical
question that, in my obsession, had somehow never occurred to me: “If
you’re afraid of the subways, why do I see you come and sit here every
day?”

In November Dick Entin arranged an appointment for me with a psychiatrist

he was seeing. The meeting was about five minutes long; I doubt the
doctor made his diagnosis on what I said so much as on the way I looked
and my general affect: the next morning, on a chilly autumn day, I was
admitted into Mt. Sinai Mental Hospital, where I stayed for the next few
weeks. City of a Thousand Suns appeared while I was still at the
hospital’s “Day/Night Center.” But I wrote no more science fiction (nor
could I have written any) from June, when Beta-2 was finished, till
sometime after Christmas and I was out of the hospital—when, tentatively,
I began another novel, Babel-17.

The pressures of writing were only one cause of the breakdown. Still, in
three years I had written and sold five SF books—with another unsold.
(Not to mention the thousand pages of Voyage, Orestes!6) That pressure
was certainly one of the factors.

Science fiction has always been attractive to young writers. It offers a

possibility of writing for a living rather more quickly than certain
other practices of writing, literary or paraliterary. But to the extent
young writers take their work seriously, it opens them to a great deal of
internal strife for very meager rewards. And it’s arguable that the nil-
reward situation that greets most young literary writers is finally
healthier because it does not hold out the initial illusion of economic
stability, which becomes hopelessly muddled with the thrill of seeing
your work in print—in devastatingly embarrassing packages!

Today The Fall of the Towers’ three volumes strike me as very naked. They
show—not necessarily in the best light, either—all the preoccupations to
be expected of a young man whose family two years before had merited

a paragraph in a popular non-fiction bestseller, High Society in the

United States (in a chapter on “Negro High Society”), who now lived in a
Lower East Side tenement where rats leapt on the sink when you went to
brush your teeth in the morning and wild dog packs roamed the stairwells.
To say that the homicides, suicides, and madmen who come to dominate the
final volume reflect the pressures that were building within me is
probably too dramatic. Nevertheless, they are there to be read however
one should read them. The relationship between Jon and his sister, Clea,
is very much the one I would have liked to have had with my own sister,
Peggy—and which I did not begin to develop until some years later, when
she came to my rescue during a bout of illness while I was languishing in
a seedy residence hotel. (The ulcers had acted up again ....) The
rapprochement between Jon and his father (that I meant to be the
emotional climax of all three books; only it’s in the wrong place ...) is
very much the rapprochement my own father’s death, three years before,
had prevented me from having. I wept when I wrote the scene—aware, as I
wrote, as I cried, that tears were no assurance it would be more than
melodrama.

It may come as a surprise after all this Sturm und Drang that, as a
writer, I like my own work. Somewhat glibly, I’ve advised many creative
writing students, who, under whatever misapprehensions, have ended up in
the various writing workshops various universities have coerced me into
teaching over twenty years (“We’ll let you teach the theory class if
you’ll just do a writing class for us too ...”), that they’d best choose
topics interesting enough to maintain their enthusiasm—at least through
the time it takes to finish what they’re writing. Otherwise, they’ll be
very unhappy.

The Towers is where I learned that first hand. I hadn’t known it would
take most of two years ...! And at twenty and twenty-one, two years is a
long time.

Yes, I like my own work. That means I find, even today, aspects of the
Towers that retain charm and interest for me. But I am more and more
surprised when they can charm or interest anyone else.

In 1966, when I was on my way back from six months in Europe to the U.S.
via London, Michael Moorcock, editor of New Worlds, held out the first
possibility of a British edition. Weeks later, that May, again in New
York and back on Sixth Street, I did the thirty-odd pages of retyping
necessary to make Book One and Book Two coherent with each other and
conform to a modicum of common sense. (I cannot tell you the pleasure it
gave me finally to strike the few paragraphs devoted to those robots!)
The new pages were typed for me by a friend I’d met in Europe, who’d come
back to the U.S. at about the same time I had, Ed Maxey, a former
secretary to Ay ?

Rand and who now worked for a translation bureau that Bernie ran, up on
42nd Street. Those revisions are described in a note to the one-volume
American edition that first appeared in 1970.

When I was preparing that volume (a month before I was to leave for San
Francisco on New Year’s Eve, 1968), the artist Russell FitzGerald, who’d
already done the stunning cover paintings for the British Sphere Books
three-volume edition, told me one October afternoon that he feared
“preparing” might mean drastic cutting. We sat in his East Third Street
fourth-floor apartment, sipping white wine, while a winter breeze
chattered in the bare trees and naked brush about the graveyard outside,
below his back window.

“Have some respect for the little boy you were when you wrote them,”
Russell said. ‘After all, Chip, he’s largely responsible for anything
you’ve done since.”

Sobering advice.

But I’ve tried to follow it.

In the one-volume edition, the books are all there.

Either as three volumes or as one, The Fall of the Towers has been in
print practically without break since its initial publication twenty
years ago. (And in 1968, an edition of The Jewels of Aptor was issued by
Ace, reset from the carbon of the original typescript, with the excised
740 lines returned to the text. “Expanded and Revised,” said the book’s
jacket copy, though it’s only the novel as originally written.) The
Towers’ initial reception was three generous and supportive reviews by
the late R Schuyler Miller (may his criticism be collected and
canonized!)—although I didn’t see the third and most generous of them
till long after it had been published, when SF editor Terry Carr, to whom
I’d made the mistake of complaining that the trilogy had never been
reviewed as a whole in the United States, ferreted out the last and most
glowing of the pieces that Miller had written, for Analog Magazine’s
“Reference Library.” It had appeared the winter I was stuck on an island
in the Aegean, with one boat a week from the mainland—and only the memory
of Orion straddling wintery West Fourth Street as I made my way back from
the Greenwich Village coffee shops, lugging my guitar case past the all-
night vegetable stand on Avenue B, at two or three o’clock in the
morning, where I’d stop to look long and hard at the kale, tomatoes, or
zucchini under the unfrosted electric bulbs under the awning, largely
because the seventeen-year-old kid on the night-shift, sitting on the
vegetable crate beside the electric heater in his ragged sweater and
dilapidated sneakers (happy enough for a winter’s night’s chat), was
another nail-biter.

The three books had also elicited a favorable review in England from New
Worlds reviewer James Cawthorne, which I had seen on that first trip to
London in the spring of ‘66. It appeared in one of the last digest format
is sues before New Worlds went on to tabloid size and notoriety with
those writers who would soon be called the “New Wave.”

Out of the Dead City had drawn a single fan letter—from a teenage reader
who decided “Samuel R. Delany” must be a penname for A.E. van Vogt
because (one) my plot was as complex as any of Van Vogt’s and because
(two) he had never heard of an SF writer named “Delany” before and
because (three) letters could be taken from parts of my name to spell
“Slan,” the name of Van Vogt’s best-known novel; therefore (Q.E.D.) Van
Vogt I must be.

City of a Thousand Suns brought half a dozen notes from readers—one, a

warm, appreciative, and wholly unexpected letter from SF writer John
Brunner in London. I think that letter was half the reason I decided to
include London on my European itinerary; and, when the book was
reprinted, why I re-dedicated it to him and his wife Marjorie for their
great kindnesses to me on that first London trip.

The most pleasing response the books elicited, however, was one I
discovered perhaps three months after City of a Thousand Suns appeared
and I was still living on the Lower East Side. It may be the greatest
single satisfaction I’ve ever gotten in return for writing.

I’d picked up a mimeographed avant-garde poetry magazine, The World, at a

bookstore on St. Marks Place. Kneeling on the bed, now at East Sixth, I
was browsing through the legal-sized pages when I came across a poem by a
poet I’d never heard of before, Tom Veitch—pretty usual in such a
magazine. The title of Veitch’s poem, however, was:

“SAM’S FICTION MACHINE DELIVERS THE GOODS”

As I read it, I realized that much of it was made of phrases taken from
the last chapter of the Towers’ Book Three.

I hooted with delight!

The way I read the poem at the time was that, somehow, another person
somewhere had been moved to write by what I’d written as strongly as I
had been moved by any of the texts that had ever moved me.

I don’t think I would read it that way now. From twenty years’
perspective, a more reasonable explanation is simply that Veitch was also
young. (I met him later, and our birthdays were indeed within weeks of
one another’s.) My age had been mentioned here and there in the
biographical squibs appended to my (by then) four published SF novels.
Probably Veitch

identified with me as a young writer as much as, or even more than, he

responded to any merits of the texts—the same way I instantly became a
fan of any writer I heard about who was under twenty-five, from Canada’s
Marie-Claire Blais to England’s Shana Alexander, an urge that always
preserved a historical spot of fondness in me for writers like Raymond
Radiguet and Natalia Crane and Samuel Greenberg (from whom I had lifted
an image for that last chapter, which Veitch had lifted in turn for his
poem) and Chatterton (some of whose Rowley forgeries I had, as a
teenager, rendered into modern English) and Rimbaud (whose Le bateau ivre
I had translated when I was eighteen) and Keats ....

Ace Books published something like six science fiction books a month in
those days. To say The Fall of the Towers was better than four-fifths of
them is not to say much. That so many of those books, however, mine among
them, are still in print after twenty years speaks well of the vigor of
the SF field as a whole at that time. But presented with the blunt
question, “Why should anyone read your books today, much less your
reminiscences about them?” I would have to answer, after the polite
attempt to wriggle out of the whole embarrassing topic, that if the texts
are looked at with enough of a squint to blur the egregious awkwardness
of their surfaces, a bit of the ambition may be discernible here and
there. And in certain moods some readers can find ambition pleasurable
for itself.

An extraordinary amount of thinking went into The Fall of the Towers.

That the books are no better than they are merely confirms the truism
that talent and thought do not necessarily run neck and neck. (Auden
writes somewhere: “When a successful writer analyzes the reasons for his
success, he generally underestimates the talent he was born with and
overestimates his skill in employing it.”) But the happiest reader of the
books will, I suspect, be the one who can, on whatever level, look for
the thought and can more or less ignore the myriad stupidities, in the
name of whatever personal or political indulgence. (Somewhere Goethe
writes: “One is not necessarily wiser at fifty than at twenty. One simply
knows different things.”) Ambition—even thoughtful ambition—is not,
however, accomplishment.

And though popularity always involves the blur in vision that can be
counted on over any statistical range of readers, art demands an
individual reader’s clear and responsive gaze. Any clear gaze at these
texts will meet with cascades of thinness, interrupted by clumsiness,
giving way to pure clutter. If, after that, there is still some aesthetic
response, then I am simply and humbly grateful.

Valery has reminded us that the work of art, good or bad, is always a
disproportionate act. The reader does at least 50% of the work—while the
writer, if only in typing time, does at least another 725%. And that’s
not even mentioning any work that may actually make the text
praiseworthy.

The writer’s sense of disproportion (and the reader’s or critic’s

identification with it) is the largest factor promoting the nostalgia for
the artistic preparation associated with a given text—those ideas and
images, those memories and enthusiasms, those experiences and influences
that were developed, enriched, impoverished, forgotten, or transformed
(but never left unchanged) by the writerly encounter with the page that
is Active creation, a process by which that preparation is modulated into
something both more stable and more playful: a specific discursive genre,
a particular literary or paraliterary text. We speak of critical
researches into such preparation as “instructive.” Yet most of us know we
are only indulging in the curiosity of the gossip: “I wonder what that
odd person was actually doing when she wrote ...? What did he think he
was doing ...?”—a question that can be asked precisely because the
creative process, even when the aesthetic intention is strictest
autobiography, is always as great a violence to the preparation as it is.

The modernist aesthetic claims the art work must “stand on its own.” Most
of us generally believe this. And even when the rumblings of ego make me
temporarily wish otherwise, as a young writer I accepted this in
principle once and for all when I signed the contract for my first SF
novel. In an age of mass printing to be distributed to an audience larger
than any the writer might ever meet in person, anything else would be
silly. And what else could one think when one lived across the park from
the modernist poet who wrote: “Literary confessors are contemptible, like
beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the
public that buys their books .... Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so
far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They
are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human
condition. A suffering, a weakness, that cannot be expressed as an
aphorism should not be mentioned.”

I don’t know how many writers who have “found their voice” cracked up
over the next few months. But until those who have write about it, we
can’t know how typical the occurrence is or isn’t. And a more
sophisticated post-modernist aesthetic tells us that historical context
is all important for any true understanding of the text—that, indeed, the
illusion that is “the text” is, itself, only the interpenetration of
various historical economies at various levels of language, of genre, of
social code, and of real and imagined experience, their play only
somewhat restricted by a set of socially agreed-upon signs (the letters
the writer, convulsed by whatever inter-economic traumas, fixes on the
page); and that there are other economic stations between individual
experience and “the human condition”—group, neighborhood, class, race,
gender. Writing about it is the only way to locate a given personal
experience within the political context that the most radical

social critique says the personal always is. In the face of nostalgia the
determining line between historical context and personal history
sometimes blurs, however, beyond our ability to hold onto it.

One reason I’ve risked so much nostalgia here (and nostalgia, like
mythology, is always conservative) is that while most people have a sense
of the historical context that shapes the lives of artists in the
literary practices of writing, many of the same people have no sense at
all of the context that shapes the lives of artists in the paraliterary
fields—science fiction, westerns, mysteries, pornography, comic books,
song writing, film scripts, contemporary journalism, advertising copy,
and, yes, even scholarly criticism. Because of historical context, the
forms of these writers’ lives are very different from the forms of lives
lived within the literary precincts. Also there is far more paraliterary
art than literary art; there are far more paraliterary artists than
literary artists. The majority of texts we encounter daily (song lyrics,
advertising, TV, film, journalism,...) is from the paraliterary.
Understanding the paraliterary condition is necessary, whatever its
sordidnesses, whatever its glories, if we would understand our world. But
neither the romantic myth of the nineteenth century artist oblivious to
all save the sublime nor the corresponding myth of the crassly commercial
contemporary creator insistently oblivious to every cultural reality save
money can organize the real information available about the lives and
processes of the creators of the vast majority of texts most of us are
exposed to on any given day, whatever their difference from literature,
whatever their overlap.

Too often someone comfortable with the impassioned underlinings a Keats

might make in his copy of Shakespeare is quite surprised to learn that
the twenty-two-year-old renegade art student, hired by Marvel Comics last
week to draw Teen Romances for six months before going on to ink The
Fantastic Four or The X-Men, can likely be found on his time-off roaming
the Met or the Whitney or a Soho gallery or the Society of Illustrators,
ransacking the paintings of Rembrandt or Leger, Hockney or Rauschenberg,
along with the giants of the comic medium itself (Kirby, Adams, Novick,
or Kubert; Moebius, Wilson, Crumb, Corben, or Hernandez ...) with the
same appetitive passion for the usable as, on that June evening in ‘62,1
ransacked my memories of Tolstoy and Heinlein and Balzac and Bester and
Sturgeon and Baldwin and Barnes and, yes, even if only to reject them
momentarily, Waring and Kaprow. I am not passing a judgement. I am
locating a process—indeed, locating several processes—that are necessary
if judgement is to be intelligent and analytical. I have known many comic
artists, many SF writers. Such passionate intertextual appetitiveness is
the seriousness loaned to the paraliterary condition by economic reward,
and even more by the statistical reality of the audience.

In their desire to locate the use-value of art, a desire they share with
many post-modern literary artists, many post-modern paraliterary artists—
and not a few post-modern experimentalists—have been too quick to think
they have solved the problem by assuming “entertainment value” is the
useful presence to be located in the text rather than “aesthetic value.”
Joined with the notion of “political value,” these three concepts
(“aesthetic value,”

“entertainment value,”

“political value”), seen as presences in the text, operate in almost the

same manner, and are what assure that art, literary or paraliterary, will
ultimately function only as exchange value—tending toward the most
inflated rates possible, with a kind of aesthetic Parkinson’s Law (“Bad
art drives out good.”) reducing the whole cultural landscape to the
crumbled brick and broken glass we are all so familiar with. (The
politics of presence, identity, and transcendence are too familiar and,
alas, too complex to rehearse here.) If my own texts have any use
whatsoever, whatsoever political, aesthetic, or entertainment concerns I
had (or, pace, still have) when I wrote them (or write this), that value
is not to be found in any of the three—art, entertainment, or politics—
interpreted as values the texts contain in some essential form and can
therefore somehow project, promote, or translate into the world in any
direct way. The texts’ use is only that they were able, more or less, to
stabilize, however briefly, certain images, patterns of images, images of
pattern into which, indeed, other images might go—images and patterns the
reader is free to use or not use in political or entertaining or literary
processes/interpretations.

That is the situation of any text, of every text.

The Fall of the Towers was written in an historical context: it’s the
writing of a young, privileged, gay, black male who’d recently entered
into an actively heterosexual, interracial marriage, living in an
impoverished neighborhood of a great city, while his country created a
hideous and immoral war—a context that provided a certain urgency to the
writing: the urge to dramatize what I saw as the vast meconnaissance in
the whole concept of war as presented by SF writers like Heinlein in
books like Star ship Troopers. But while the context informs the meanings
that play through—that are—the text, those meanings are not the text’s
use. They are rather what we and the text, always within historical
restraints but always, also, with a marginal range of historical
freedoms, use to create and construe our selves and the world.

—New York

Winter’81/Autumn ‘85

2The two verse paragraphs currently appear as Part III of “Prism and
Lens” (in Separations, by Marilyn Hacker, Alfred A. Knopf, New York:
1976, pp.70-71). That long poem was assembled from a number of disparate
pieces, whose occasions more or less occurred between September of ‘61
and spring of ‘62.

The exception is, of course, the monologue that comprises Part II (“My
mother got me awfully overdressed ....”), which was written at (and
refers to) an earlier time, at least a year before.

I had told Marilyn about my homosexuality before our marriage. She had
been my confidante during the whole previous three years, when I had been
exploring the gay side of New York (as I had been hers through her
various heterosexual affairs, which, at the time, to me seemed far more
adventurous, if substantially less numerous, than mine). Our own sexual
play together always seemed to be an anomaly in that life, more her idea
than mine, though—about a third the time—pleasant enough physically, if
troubling emotionally. Standing on the subway platform at 125th Street in
the summer of ‘61, where she told me that, from the second (or third?)
time we’d actually gone to bed with one another, she was pregnant and we
finally decided marriage would be best, she had explained that it would
not bother her, as train after train rolled by. But we were both very
young. Neither of us really knew what it would mean. Working out our
lives around the fact of my sexuality was one of the problems, negotiated
with astonishing success, now that I think back on it, we faced.

Reflecting her pregnancy and miscarriage, “Eternal pressure shrinks the

finite earth./The waxing body swells with seeds of death./The mind
demands a measure to its breath ...” (Separations, p. 23), was written
just after that October, as, a little later, was “Catherine”
(Separations, p. 22), a name borrowed for its euphony from a redheaded
cousin of the composer and musician, David Litwin, though the feelings
were Marilyn’s.

“Eternal pressure ...” was finally excluded from “Prism and Lens” for
formal reasons: Marilyn felt that the triple off-rhymes would call
attention to themselves in ways that the several other sonnets in “Prism
and Lens” would not. Likewise, “Catherine” was omitted through narrative
considerations: the voice of the longer poem, excluding the opening verse
paragraph and a four-line narration in section II, was an “L” Marilyn
felt a third person incursion, which also gave the voice a Active name,
would not suit the poem.

By ‘63, when “Prism and Lens” had all but achieved its final form, the
two excluded fragments, now entitled “Catherine” and “Catherine Pregnant”
(Separations, pp. 22-23) were interspersed with two new poems inspired by
incidents in the lives of sculptor David Logan and his French-born wife,
Claudi. In terms of biography, however, poems one and three of the
“Catherine” cycle date from Autumn/Winter ‘61 and reflect Marilyn’s own
feelings then, while the remaining two are observed fictions from ‘63.

(The Logans’ newly born daughter, also named [wholly coincidentally]

Catherine, became the inspiration, fifteen years later, for “The Hang-
Glider’s Daughter” [Taking Notice, by Marilyn Hacker, Alfred A. Knopf;
1980], during Marilyn’s 1979 visit with the Logans in Tourette, France.)
Marilyn’s first poetic response to her initial visit at 77 St. Marks
Place, when Kallman intercepted her on the landing to take her poems in
and give them to Auden without effecting an introduction, was a bit of
doggerel composed the same afternoon: “Critic, do not beat your
breast/Though Chester Kallman is a pest/He must

have done strange things to broaden/The attitudes of Wystan Auden.” This,

however, was eventually put by—though I suspect it was recited at least
once before our dinner guests arrived.

At about the same time as her visit to Auden, Marilyn wrote another
doggerel bit, when one or another of us were joking about Joyce Kilmer:
“A tree can grow from any clod,/But only Jews could make a God.” Either
she or I copied it in ballpoint pen on the flaking blue hall wall around
the corner from our apartment door, where I (I confess) expected it to
stay till the ages rolled by.

If this essay fixed on Marilyn’s esthetic development during that very

important time, I’d have to reiterate “change” as her then theme,
concern, and obsession. Discussions of it were intense and intricate; and
she led them to all their insights and through most of their
elaborations. (The reflection of the theme in The Jewels ofAp-tor, say,
was secondary and very much my borrowing.) I should mention two of her
poems, which, more than “Prism and Lens,” were focuses. The first was
written days before (or just after) her birthday, November ‘61.

Here is the background.

With the marriage, Marilyn immediately felt a decrease in her creative

energy and output. It worried her; and, together, we worried over it in
our late-night discussions—the same discussions where she finally
confirmed something she’d long suspected: the famous “vaginal orgasm” of
fifties fame, whose praises had been sung by male writers from D.H.
Lawrence to Norman Mailer, was a physiological myth—and, at best, a
psychological anomaly.

In 1960, Marilyn had invented a ten-line stanza for a poem called “The
Terrible Children”: two quatrains and a couplet, as serviceable and as
solid as a sonnet, but which lent itself to a strong narrative. As she
worried about her failing output, I suggested she explore her ten-line
form further. She debated it, now enthusiastic over possibilities, now
listless with the suspicion that finally she’d write nothing anyway.
November was emotionally difficult—for her, for me—because of my affair
with stockclerk John. These discussions came as respite from it all.

Shortly, alone, Marilyn took a walk one afternoon among the wintery paths
of the East River Park. A little later she showed me a poem in an
intricately complex and symmetrical nine-line form. I took it as a happy
reaction against our discussion of the simple, straightforward ten-line
stanza. For a while, I believe, the poem bore the title “Birthday Poem”:

Growing older I descend November.

The asymptotic cycle of the year

plummets to now. In crystal reveries

I pass beneath a fixed white line of trees

where dry leaves lie for footsteps to dismember.

They crackle with a muted sound like fear.

That and the wind is all that I can hear.

I ask cold air, “What is the word that frees?”

The wind says, “Change,” and the white sun, “Remember.”

The story of the second poem is this.

Dick Entin had loaned us a copy of the young suicide Klaus Mann’s (son of
Thomas, brother of Erika) biography of Andre Gide. Marilyn and I had read
a fair

amount of Gide already. And Marilyn had pointed out to me, in Les Faux-
Monnayeurs, the unfairness of Gide’s judgment on Lillian, who, because
she saves her own life in the lifeboat, is judged a blunt and coarse
sensibility. I’d often told Marilyn about my own first, traumatic
awareness of death at five or six, when I’d sat on the steps of my
father’s embalming room, watching my father’s chief embalmer, Freddy,
work on the naked corpse of a woman who’d died of diabetes. A few days
after the first, in the same intricate nine-line form, Marilyn wrote
another poem, “Gide.” It began:

Action was evil. Death and his grey mother cornered him early in a moral
trap. One yawned before. The other gaped behind. The choices locked to
stasis in his mind: to give up lying, atrophy, and smother—or plunge
headlong into the appalling gap.

And it ended:

He called out, crying, “I’m not like the others!”

She’d begun the poem, intending it to describe some conflation between

Gide and me. But, like Gide, Marilyn had been brought up to think of
herself as different from the people around her—and special ... a notion
that only began to die its necessary deaths, beaten out on the shingle of
her New York University experiences. (I’d always been raised to believe
everyone was different from everybody else, so that, for me, uniqueness
itself had never seemed unique.) Within the hour of her showing me the
second poem, however, we were discussing how much it spoke of her own
situation—with her mother, her own sense of self. For by now, she’d been
struck with—and distressed at—the extent to which, as a girl, she’d
internalized values that said to be passive was to be good; values that
hinted any action at all would lead to pain, immorality, and evil; values
which, by now, she could no longer intellectually—or practically—
tolerate.
Within a month, she’d written half a dozen more poems in the same iambic,
nine-line strophe, all telling bits of the Elektra story. The parallels
between Elektra, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, and Orestes and Marilyn, her
mother, her late father, and me were minute and fascinating. Just about
simultaneously, both Marilyn and I realized the first two nine-line poems
were part of the series. Now she rewrote “Gide,”

“she” replacing “he,” as the second stanza of the larger series: Elektra.
The series became a psychological/intellectual (the sort so often called
“spiritual”) autobiography. At least five times between 1962 and 1970,1
typed the entirety of it out—the whole of what had been written finally
ran to more than thirty pages, with villa-nelles, a prose fragment, and
pentameter monologues added to it—preparatory to various attempts from
Marilyn to bring it to a conclusion.

The poem grew. But it would not end.

Though it was never published in its entirety and, today, remains

incomplete (November 1987), it was still one Marilyn was adding stanzas
to, in the same nine-line form, in San Francisco as late as 1969 and ‘70.

If / had any major revelation in the early months of ‘62 on Fifth Street,
it came from my life—and largely went back into it—particularly from my
homosexual

adventurings. (If it affected my writing, others must tease that out.)

But, as winter gave to spring in our dead-end alley, I can call back my
sitting in the red armchair, explaining to Marilyn, on the daybed, head
to one side, intense and attentive: “You know, it struck me last night.
If you define intelligent people as the ones who know all the same facts
you do, who think all the same things and like all the same things, then
whenever you meet someone new you spend a lot of time testing them out,
asking them leading questions, and checking over whether they’ve given
the right answers or not—only to discover most of them don’t measure up
too well. But if you define intelligent people as the ones who know
something different from what you do, whom you can learn something from
if you’ll only ask the right questions and listen carefully enough, it’s
strange: suddenly there aren t any more stupid people!”

A few times after I’d said it to her, when we were talking to some of our
intellectual friends, I heard Marilyn say much the same.

At about that point (Spring ‘62), Marilyn brought back news of a poetry
contest. One of its judges was Robert Lowell, for whose work she had
great respect. She put together a submission. (I wrote a few pieces using
her ten-line “Terrible Children” stanza form, which I submitted.) It was
a national contest and widely publicized. Doubtless there were several
thousand entries.

When the winners were announced, neither of us had placed.

Never having considered myself a poet, I was not greatly bothered. But
Marilyn was depressed over it for several days—leaning toward a week.
Once, when we were talking about it and I was trying to lift her spirits,
she pointed out it was the first contest she’d ever entered of any sort
where she hadn’t gotten first or second place. It was the first test
she’d ever taken where she hadn’t been among the top two or three
performers. It seemed to contribute even more to the drawing in of her
creative energies and output.

But the building on East Fifth Street housed skeins and snarls of memory
and change.

About 1967, however, long after we’d moved, 629 was gutted, the roof
taken off, and pre-fabricated apartments lowered in. Finally, a new
fagade was erected over the ground floor, with a new entrance, eight feet
higher than the old, at the head of raised metal stairs. By 1980, with
its “new” unrecognizable face now half-ruined, it (and the Mildred) stood
alone behind the school, the rest of the buildings on both sides of the
street reduced to shattered brick around them. And the alley to Fifth
Street was no longer an alley, but only a handball wall beside a stretch
of broken paving running by desolate acres.

2Marilyn and I had recently sat in on an evening Shakespeare course given

at the New School. Our instructor, Professor Lewis, was a theatrical and
enthusiastic man with a reputation for making “dead topics” come to life—
for this term, As You Like It, Coriolanus, The Tempest, and King Lear.
Infected with Lewis’s charisma after taking the first half of the course,
a red-headed Barnes and Noble stock clerk, Rose Marion, had insisted we
take the second half. During his first class on Lear, in his explication
of the Scene i altercation between Lear and Kent just before Lear curses
Cordelia, as Lewis read the text to us, paraphrasing along, I realized he
had interpreted Lear’s line 144 (“The bow is bent and drawn. Make from
the shaft.”), which interrupts Kent’s petition, as: “You’ve spoken too
long. Get to your point,” i.e., “Your bow is bent and drawn, Kent. Let
your arrow fly.”—as if the line were a metaphorical version of Gertrude’s
exhortation to Polonius in Hamlet, “More matter

with less art.” In the discussion that followed, I took what I thought
was the mildest exception and suggested the line was better interpreted:
“My anger is ready to become action. If you do not move away from it, it
will strike you too,” i.e., “My bow is bent and drawn. Move away from the
arrow.” I pointed out that he’d conflated the meanings of “bow” and
“shaft” (i.e., “bow” and “arrow”). Lewis declared, however, that here
shaft just meant a piece of wood (like staff) and that the word was,
indeed, synonymous with bow. My reading was, he declared, obviously and
patently wrong. The argument became rather heated, with Marilyn and I the
chief spokespersons for my reading, with most of the class on Lewis’s
side. (At one point, he actually took a vote!) Poor Rose Marion was, I’m
afraid, the most upset of all.

In the course of the evening’s dinner with Auden and Kallman, the
Shakespeare course came up. Auden mentioned he’d also taught Shakespeare
at the New School, some years before, as well as at Swarthmore. When we
outlined the controversy to him, he exclaimed that “of course” my reading
was right and that Lewis’s was “ridiculous.”
Several weeks later, this was reconfirmed for me by Auden’s long-time
friend, Louis Kronenberger, whom I met one day walking in the street and
whom I strolled with for several blocks. I’d known Mr. Kronenberger as
the father of my element-ary schoolmate, Johnny. Years before, he had
taken Johnny and me to see Michael Redgrave in The Night My Number Came
Up—while Johnny had explained to me in whispers that for his father (then
Drama Critic for Time magazine) to condescend to go to a mere movie was a
monumental rarity. Johnny had come to visit us several times in the first
weeks after our August marriage and, indeed, unbidden, had first given us
Auden’s address.

The confirmation of the line reading was repeated, eventually, in the

textual apparatus in the various paperback Shakespeares, such as Signet
and Folger’s, that began to appear widely a year or so later.

That February, however, I was in the midst of writing the concluding

chapters of The Jewels ofAptor. I’d been working on it the morning of
Auden and Kallman’s visit. The next day I went back in the text and
memorialized what now I began to think of as the Lewis/Auden debate in
anagram in The Jewels’ Chapter Six, when Iimmi and Geo discuss their
feuding teachers at the university of “Olese Olwn” (New School). The
incident was, however, among the first times I was led to question the
status of various textual readings and the various authorities that
propound them.

In my science fiction criticism of recent decades, I’ve tried to validate

a demotic reading of science fiction, a reading no less complex than that
which any other true language can support, a reading through which, in
the very meaning of sentences, the object is privileged over the subject,
a reading, certainly, in which the subject is, however disseminated, not
absent, a reading that can be as recomplicated as any that literary
hermeneutics can devise, a reading that SF texts, since the late Thirties
at least, have all been written in expectation of—a reading, finally, in
the midst of which the traditional literary expectations of the priority
of the subject can generate semantic disasters as palpably wrong-headed
as Professor Lewis’s reading of Lear. But the complexities of exactly
which reader (and how that reader) becomes a privileged reader of the
text I first felt as a palpable reality that night in February, 1962.

3Gaddis’s The Recognitions was an influence: I dawdled over one copy or

another, reading a few pages or a few hundred pages, from the first
hardcover I saw

in 1956 at the Greenwich Village home of a boyfriend of my cousin

Barbara’s, through various trade paperback editions in the Sixties, till
the Avon mass market paperback appeared in 1975. Again and again during
these partial readings, some snippet of Gaddis’s text would propel me
from the page into various reveries and reflections on what the whole of
such a novel might be doing, which notions would become hopelessly mixed
up with what I wanted my own novels to do. Finally, cooped up in a
Buffalo motel room in ‘75,1 read the entire book end to end. The next
week I lectured on it to my creative writing class at SUNY. But though I
greatly respect the book and have reread it with both admiration and
delight, it hasn’t been an influence since!
4For a number of historians the year I entered high school, 1956, marks
the transition from America’s “Industrial” to its “Post-Industrial”
period: it was the year the country’s white collar workers exceeded in
number its combined blue collar and agricultural workers. As a
transition, it’s somewhat arbitrary. Whatever effects might be ascribed
to the shift in work deployment, they’d long since occurred in the
country’s major urban areas where that redeployment had been the case for
decades: three years before, the New York Subway fare, which had remained
a nickel since World War One, had doubled—to the outrage, consternation,
and bewilderment of the whole urban populace. And the price of milk,
which for many years had been more or less stable, between 21 and 24
cents a quart, had recently moved up to 25, to 27 cents, and, in very
little time, to 35 cents a quart, introducing cities to the constant and
inexorable inflation that has since become the national condition—a
condition very different in feel, cause, and form from the irregular
upward jerks in pricing the U.S had lived with since the depression.

Four years later in the late summer of 1960, only a few years after this
post-industrial point, an artist named Alan Kaprow first presented a new
work, Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts. It was repeated for several
evenings in a Second Avenue studio apartment; it was the first time the
word “happening” had been used in such a performance context; and, though
the initial work itself in this form did not achieve overwhelming
popularity, over the next dozen years, through Kaprow’s later “happening”
works and from its appropriation by many other artists, the word passed
into the general U.S. vocabulary. Several times now I’ve seen Kaprow’s
initial piece (today we would call it “performance art”) cited by several
art historians as the (equally arbitrary) transition between the modern
and the post-modern. But I don’t believe I’ve yet read a first-hand
account of it by any of its original audience. I jot down here what I
remember, then, twenty-five years after the fact, for much the same
reasons as I have reconstructed the evening with Auden.

Walking somewhere along Eighth Street, in 1960, on the side of an army-

green mail collector I saw a black and white mimeographed poster stuck up
with masking tape announcing: “Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, by Alan
Kaprow,” giving the weekend dates (“Friday, Saturday, and Sunday”), time
(7:30 P.M.), and price (Contributions, $3.00), and location.

Such posters were fairly common in the Village area at that time,
advertising the newly burgeoning galleries on Ninth and Tenth Streets, or
telling of a poetry reading at one or another coffee shop on the
periphery of the tourist area. From the same period, another such poster
had put me in touch with a group called Chamber Theater, run by an
energetic and visionary woman, Risa Kurzen, an undertaking which occupied
me for a summer. Another introduced me to the New York Repertory Company,
which had rented the St. Marks Theater for a summer season, where

I performed for several months, at the site of what is now a vintage

clothing store, between the Valencia Hotel and the St. Marks Baths.

In this case, it was the word “Happening” that intrigued me. A notion was
abroad—and it had saturated the air so that even a bright eighteen-year-
old might respond to its modernist currency, if not its Wagnerian roots—
that art must somehow get up off the printed page, must come down from
the gallery wall. And the word “happening”—with its lack of fanfare on
the poster—spoke of just such a movement of art stepping from its current
frame into a larger and more theatrical concept and context.

I wrote down the dates, time, and place in my notebook.

And I spent a lot of time mulling over what “Eighteen Happenings in Six
Parts” might, indeed, comprise—quite sure, however, that I would find
them exciting, whatever they were.

The weekend of the “Eighteen Happenings,” my cousin, Boyd Savoy, five

years older than I, was in from medical school. Why didn’t he come along
with me?

Boyd was a lover of Fielding’s Tom Jones and a figurative artist of some
talent, as well as a medical student. I think he was intrigued—if not by
the artistic prospects, then by the notion of “the Village” with its
romantic glimmer; as well, he had some curiosity as to what his younger
cousin, who’d already established a reputation in the family for
intellectual eccentricity, might be into. And so we got on the subway
(with the small, new, copper tokens, brighter than clean pennies, just up
from the size of dimes, whose price had just risen from fifteen to
eighteen cents), and wound our way down to the Village, wandered across
town by Cooper Union, in plenty of time for the performance.

Below the bell in the apartment building’s narrow, white vestibule the
same poster I’d seen on the mail-holder was taped up.

Upstairs, when we walked in, most of the space was taken up by

temporarily erected polyethylene walls on unpainted wooden frames. These
walls divided the performance area into what I assume, at this distance,
was six square chambers, each about eight feet by eight, each enterable
from a doorwide space on the outside, but separate from one another, and
through whose translucent, wavering planes, you could just make out what
was going on in the chambers beside or across from yours.

Possibly because Boyd and I were early, no one seemed set up to take our
contributions.

Two or three young women were walking around in black leotards,

apparently part of the proceedings. There was at least one male assistant
in jeans and t-shirt, all shoulders and cheek bones and deep-set eyes,
who had something to do with the small, harsh overhead lights. A gangling
man in his late twenties or early thirties, in khaki slacks and a short-
sleeved shirt, with a short haircut that nevertheless peaked in front—the
fifties prototype for any number of today’s more conservative punk
coiffures—was Kaprow himself. The rest of the audience (somewhere between
twenty and thirty-five of us) wandered in over the next half hour.
Someone eventually took our money, looking rather surprised that we were
actually paying.

Clearly most of the audience had been invited.

In each of the polyethylene walled-off chambers, there were half a dozen
or so blondwood folding chairs. It became clear that we were to be
deployed between the six rooms—I don’t remember whether or not there was
some lottery arrangement to divide us up. But at one point I suggested to
Boyd: “Why don’t you sit in another room so we can see as much of it as
possible and compare notes afterwards?”

“That’s all right,” Boyd whispered to me. “I’ll stay in here with you.”

Were there four people in our particular room?

Were there six?

The only truly clear memory I have of the performance proper was that I
wasn’t very sure when, exactly, it started. One of the assistants came in
and set a small mechanical wind-up toy to chatter and click about the
floor—which ran down faster than it was expected to; and so had to be
wound up and set going again, numerous times, throughout the twenty or so
minutes of the work’s duration. I also recall a dish of water sitting on
the floor, and a ball of string on a small table—but they may well have
been in other rooms than ours, whose entrances Boyd and I had looked into
while we were walking around, waiting for the work to begin. During the
duration, while we sat in our room, now and again from one of the other
spaces we could hear the sound of a single drum or tambourine beat—or, at
one point, intriguing laughter from one of the isolated groups when
something in another room went (presumably) not quite according to plan.
And just above floor-level, through the greyish plastic wall to our
right, a wobbling glow came through from a candle that had been set up
as, or as part of, a happening in an adjacent chamber.

There was general silence, general attention: there was much

concentration on what was occurring in our own sequestered part; and
there was much palpable and uneasy curiosity about what was happening in
the other spaces, walled off by the translucent sheets, with only a bit
of sound, a bit of light or shadow, coming through to speak of the work’s
unseen totality.

At one point another assistant carried another child’s toy—this one a

blue-tin noisemaker with two little balls, which, when twisted back and
forth, make a childish racket—silently into our room; but two steps in,
she realized she had the wrong space, and ducked out.

After a while, a leotarded young woman with a big smile came in and said:
“That’s it.” For a moment, we were unsure if that were part of the work
or the signal that it was over. But then Kaprow walked by the door and
said, “Okay, it’s over now,” and we got up and stepped out of our plastic
walled cubicles.

“Did you understand that?” Boyd asked softly as we waited our turn among
the crowd at the apartment doorway to go downstairs. “I mean, could you
explain to me what that was supposed to be about?”
“I don’t think it’s about anything in the way you’re asking,” I said in
my best tone of aesthetic neutrality. “You’re just supposed to experience
it.”

A woman was standing next to us, wearing some voluminous kaftan in a

green print.

“That was kind of fun,” I said to her, to get out from under what I took
to be the embarrassment prompting my cousin’s question.

“Oh,” she said. “Did you think so? How did you come here?”

“I saw it advertised on a poster taped up on the side of a mailbox. It

sounded interesting. So we just came by.”

“You did?” she asked, a bit incredulously. I’d already noted that Boyd
and I were probably the only two black people in the audience. Today I
also suspect we were two of the very few there that evening unknown to
the others, at least by sight. “You liked it?” And she smiled. “How
unusual.”

This was, remember, 1960.

Then we were going down the stairs.

Boyd continued to question me on the “meaning” of what we had just seen,

all

the way up town. And I continued to resist explaining. But he had

obviously been tickled by it all. And clearly it had meant something,
though I was only willing to clarify it for myself once Boyd’s somewhat
amused attentions were diverted from me, and he could boast to the rest
of the family about this strange artistic gathering Sam had taken him to
in the Village.

Figuring it out for myself, I began by reviewing my expectations from the

title:

Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts.

I’d assumed that the work, regardless of its content, would be rich,
Dionysian, and colorful; Fd thought that the happenings themselves would
be far more complex, denser, and probably verbally boundable: someone
might come in and put on or take off a costume; someone might come in and
destroy a baby carriage. Someone else might come in blowing bubbles under
colored lights. Fd also thought the eighteen happenings, despite their
partition, would crowd in on one another, would tumble into my perception
one after the other, that they would form a rich, interconnected tapestry
of occurrences and associations. In short, while I had not assumed they
would have the singular, totalized meaning Boyd was asking for, Fd
nevertheless thought that they would be rich in meanings and meaning
fragments, full of resonances and overlapping associations, that they
would be thick with ready-made suggestions, playful, sentimental, and
reassuring—like a super e.e. cummings poem; indeed, Fd assumed from the
title they would be much like what many “happenings,” as other artists
appropriated the term, were actually to be over the next decades.

The work F d actually experienced had been, however, spare, difficult,

minimal, constituted largely by absence, isolation, and even distraction.
For all its immense framing in wood and polyethylene, the actual work was
even difficult to locate as to its beginning, content, and ending. (Other
than the chattering toy, Boyd and I were very unsure which were “our”
actual happenings and which were things that merely facilitated them.) An
hour later at home, however, I was already reflecting to myself that a
little arithmetic might have disabused me of some of my expectations of
meaningful richness: eighteen happenings in six parts generally suggests
about three happenings per part, which, in turn, suggests concentration,
sparsity, and analysis—not Dionysian plenitude.

But what exactly had been our three happenings? Or had we only had one
happening in our room, while four or five happenings took place in one of
the others? Or perhaps the title had simply lied about the work: either
by accident or design, there could have been a few, or many, more than,
or less than, eighteen happenings deployed among the chambers. In our
isolate groups there was simply no way to know.

Had there, indeed, been six chambers?

I, of course, had expected the “six parts” to be chronologically

successive, like acts in a play or parts in a novel—not spatially
deployed, separate, and simultaneous. Fd expected a unified theatrical
audience before some unified theatrical whole. And it was precisely in
this subversion of expectations about the “proper” aesthetic employment
of time, space, presence, absence, as well as the general locability of
“what happens,” that made Kaprow’s work signify: his happenings—clicking
toys, burning candles, pounded drums, or whatever else comprised them—
were organized in that initial work very much like real events in
history.

No two groups had seen the same ones. No group was even sure what the
other groups were seeing. No one in the audience—nor, possibly, the
artist nor any of his assistants—could have more than an inkling (at best
a theory) of the relation of a

textured and specific experiential fragment to any totalized whole. Nor

could the audience be sure any authoritative statement about it, from the
artist’s title to the assistant’s announcement of the work’s conclusion,
was the truth.

The unity of the audience had been shattered as much as any other aspect.

And of course there still remained the question for me over the next few
days: how, in our heightened state of attention, could we distinguish
what a single happening was? What constituted the singularity that
allowed the eighteen to be even countable? Had the performance of our
wind-up toy been one happening? Or was the winding up one happening, its
walking about a second, and its running down still a third? And how were
we to distinguish facilitation from content—that is, how were we to
distinguish “information” from “noise”? Certainly noise could figure in
the interpretation or the meaning of a particular performance. (Earlier
that spring I’d played and played a record of George Antheil’s Ballet
mecanique to a frazzle.) But that presupposes the noise can be identified
as such.

But was that mistaken assistant’s momentary ingress one of the eighteen
happenings or not?

The impressive three-dimensional frame, which not only contained the work
but the audience as well, and that divided the work and the audience as
well as contained them, truly shattered the space of attention and,
therefore, threw as many, or more, such distinctions into question than I
was ready to deal with. And in a work whose title, organization, and
accidents seemed set up to question precisely such distinctions, how was
one to fit their sudden problematization into an interpretation?

It would be disingenuous to say that the interested eighteen-year-old,

just back from the ?readloaf Writers’ Conference earlier that summer, who
was me that year, went through this entire analysis in the hours and days
after Kaprow’s piece. Exactly how much of it I went through then, I
can’t, at this distance, say. “Subject,”

“problematization,” and “interpretation” were not then part of my

aesthetic vocabulary; but “man,”

“question,” and “meaning” were. And they were adequate to much of it.
Certainly I had no particular difficulty accepting it as art or believing
that, along the lines I’ve just sketched out, the piece was decipherable.
Nor was I caught up in the search for narrative singularity—at whatever
level of allegory—that, I suspect, Boyd wanted.

Still, I confess now (in a way I was unwilling to admit to Boyd at the
time), I’d been disappointed in it: Boyd wanted his singular narrative
meaning. And I still wanted my meaningful plenitude. But I can also say,
at this distance, that mine was the disappointment of that late romantic
sensibility we call modernism presented with the post-modern condition.
And the work I saw was far more interesting, strenuous, and aesthetically
energetic than the riot of sound, color, and light centered about actorly
subjects in control of an endless profusion of fragmentary meanings that
I’d been looking forward to. Also it was far more important: as a
replication and analysis of the situation of the subject in history, I
don’t think Kaprow’s work could have been improved on. And, in that
sense, Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts was about as characteristic a
work as one might choose in which to experience the clash that begins our
reading of the hugely arbitrary post-modern.

5”Silent monologue” was Stuart Gilbert’s term for Joyce’s “stream of

consciousness” technique that, today, more usually goes by the French
term, monologue interiere. Gilbert used it in his Study of “Ulysses,”
which I read at about the same time as, if not before, I read Moby Dick.

6Voyage, Orestes! was begun in a notebook when, at eighteen, I spent the

summer of 1960 working as a waiter, on scholarship, at the Breadloaf
Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. After writing ten or fifteen
pages toward a forty page “Prologue,” I put it aside a few weeks later—
until my marriage, whereupon I started in on it again and worked pretty
consistently at it, till, nearly an even thousand pages later, I
completed it near midnight on November 21, 1963, its hero and heroine
strolling along the wintery beach at Coney Island, looking for a new
world and their future. The next afternoon, as I lugged the MS up to an
editor at a mid-town publisher who had expressed interest in it from
reading earlier sections, I heard, from a portable radio on the counter
of the newspaper kiosk in the Astor Place Subway station, news of
President John F. Kennedy’s death from an assassin’s bullet, fired
minutes before, during the Dallas motorcade, an event that for many of us
marked the beginning of a new age and of the Sixties proper. The last
complete copy of the MS was lost by my agent, in a move between offices,
in 1968. In 1982, when my friend of many years, Bernie Kay, died, some
two-hundred-fifty-odd pages of the manuscript surfaced among his papers.
They are on store at the Mugar Memorial Library at the University of
Boston.
The Early Delany

Response to a panel, The Early Delany, given at Madison, Wisconsin,

318181, after presentations by Mary Kenney Badami, Catherine McClenahan,
Thomas Moylan, and Janice Bogstad.

Most writers do not have a chance to see their work parsed and parceled
out into periods, early, middle, or late, with appropriate bridges and
transition phases. And we begin—all of us—to respond to any such effort
as an orderly compliment. And for the compliment—the compliment of
orderly attention—I am grateful.

There is too little of it in the world, of any sort.

Yet, if one happens to be the writer in question, it is hard not to be

aware of a certain violence, a certain displacement, a certain
reorganization ocurring, will-ye, nill-ye, before the greater concerns
that shape all critical discourse.

Lurking behind such organization, “The Early X,”

“The Middle Productions of Y,” or—horror of horrors—“The Last Thing ?

Ever Wrote,” are a set of assumptions on development, growth, and, yes,
regression that reads all textual signs as constituents of orderly
processes, progresses, continuities, in short as part of a unity for
which the differences between texts as much as the images repeated from
text to text are the constitutive signs of its unquestioned coherence.

The writer watching this continuity, these progressions and regressions

spun out of critical rhetoric, remembers, however, a much more dangerous
game. Did the writer want to develop? Always. To develop for the writer,
however, was not a process of continuity but rather one of radical

disruption: How to become a person who can never write a sentence like
that again? What experiential violences must one endure never to conceive
of a man or a woman again in such shallow, stilted terms? What kind of
gaze must be turned on the world to assure one will never again see it
through such simplistic, schematic prejudices? What can I build with this
wondrous, volatile, associational malleability called language which will
hold contour clear enough and clean enough to be read!

Does the writer want to regress? Never. What then are the exhaustions,
distractions, responsibilities, or experiential shocks that make the
writer no longer know what was known? What strikes the writer at the
heart of the sentence so that, at last, when the words lie limp on the
page, clarity and contour, energy and precision are gone?

Even the repeated images and themes, seized on by the critic as the most
lucid emblem of the existence, the location, and the structure of that
continuity the critic tries to create, come to the writer like the
insistent repetitions of some initial plosive in the mouth of a stutterer
who is only as aware (or unaware) of his defect as any speaker might be
in his rush to be understood, repetitions whose meanings, whose very
constitution is that of an occurrence for which iteration, as in the
stuttered vocable, is the sign, not of a closed and conscientious
structuration, but of an open and radical incompleteness. Repetition is
desire, said Freud. No, suggests the critic, it is merely organization.
From where the writer stands, let me state: Freud’s is the assertion thai
feels right.

In short it would seem that the writer is playing the more dangerously
... till we turn to look at “The Early Criticism,”

“The Middle Period Criticism,” and “The Late (and Supremely Difficult!)
Criticism” of a given critic.

After all, our critics are writers too. They are subject to the same
violences as any other writer. They know these violences first hand—and
that is why one wants to see them more willing to admit such violences
into the compass of the critical gaze. But one must indulge the fictions
of both order and violence if one is to make sense of the world, if one
is to understand the world’s codes and readerly operations by which we
make its texts make sense.

The “early Delany” begins with a fiction by a nineteen-year-old who,

while he loved science fiction, was certainly not (at least when he began
it) planning to write it for more than one book. It ends with another by
a twenty-five-year-old who, having written eight more of the things, had
more or less decided he didn’t want to write any more fiction of any
sort—and didn’t, for about a year.

Here at the verge of forty, I still have a great deal of fondness for
that befuddled, confused, if somewhat engaging youngster. I knew him
fairly well. I have some pleasant memories of our time together, as well
as my share of scandalous, scabrous, and simply embarrassing anecdotes,
which, in less guarded moments, I am likely to break out, and which may
cause the odd eyebrow to raise:

“Did he really?”
“Oh, no, he couldn’t have!”

There are even one or two, “No, I was there; and it just wasn’t like
that!”

And, more and more as my beard turns whiter and whiter, I hear, from
people who have only read what he wrote but were never in his company:
“Oh, no, that really doesn’t sound like him at all!”

I am often astonished, when I look at the calendar, by how long it’s been
since I’ve seen him. Yet he is, possibly more than anyone else, why I am
here today. For that I have not him to thank so much as you.

All I can really say, then, is thank you—and exhort you to be as violent
and as adventurous as you can in all your criticisms, not only of him but
of our whole SF field. From what I remember of him, however suspect, I’m
sure he would have appreciated it.

Again, on his behalf, I thank you.

Tales Of Neveryon

by

?. Leslie Steiner

Once we get beyond the bright and active Bantam cover, on which a Conan-
style barbarian draws a mighty bow against a dragon to save two lovely
ladies, very little happens in these five interconnected sword-and-
sorcery stories.

In the first, the main character (presumably the cover lad) ages—from
about fifteen to about thirty-five. In the process the only thing he
actually does—somewhere about the midpoint—is throw up.

At the beginning of the second, an island hag, alleged to be a bit of a

brain, explains to a bunch of children that she has an idea: “But I can’t
tell you what it is,” she says to them. Seventy pages later, after she
has gone on, and on, and on, died, and been all but forgotten by
everybody in the story, we realize in the tale’s concluding pages she was
right.

At the end of the third tale, a young mountain girl tells the tale’s main
character, a barbarian boy who has been dragged into the country as a
slave, “You’re a fool, barbarian!” She too, it turns out, is right.

In tale four, a number of moderately engaging characters, including a

rather stocky potter’s apprentice, a traveling secretary, and a masked
woman warrior, go to a lot of trouble over nothing—a whole castle full,
it turns out. Since one of them winds up dead and the other two are
afraid to go home, this seems, somehow, a little too “Much Ado ....”

In the final story, the hero (the one who threw up, remember?) and his
little friend (the one we said wasn’t very smart ...?) liberate the
slaves in castle after castle after castle after castle after castle ....

The general theme all the stories share, as far as I can make out, is
that children do like to bounce rubber balls—or did I miss something?

The whole closes with what I suspect is a fannish joke, about a

nonexistent Necronomicon-style “ancient text,” though it is written in a
half-eccentric (but not, alas, eccentric enough to be interesting), half-
scholarly (but not, alas, ditto) diction that will leave precisely the
fans who might get a chuckle from it ho-ing and hum-ing. I hear there
really is a contemporary archeologist named Denise Schmandt-Besserat,
who, for reasons too baroque to speculate over, Delany cites in his mock-
scholarly hodge-podge.

I wonder what she thinks of all this?

Finally your reviewer is left with the observation that Proust’s opening
twenty-thousand-word analysis of the bedtime preparations of a chronic
invalid is hard-boiled action-adventure compared to any of these
soporific, if not somnolent, narratives.

And I hear there’s to be a sequel ...!

—New York 1982

Return ...

A Preface

by

K. Leslie Steiner

Humankind still lives in prehistory everywhere, indeed everything awaits

the creation of the world as a genuine one. The real genesis is not at
the beginning but at the end, and it only begins when society and
existence become radical, that is grasp themselves at the root. The root
of history, however, is the human being, working, producing, reforming
and surpassing the givens around him or her. If human beings have grasped
themselves, and what is theirs, without depersonalization and alienation,
founded in real democracy, then something comes into being in the world
that shines into everyone’s childhood and where no one has yet been—home.

—Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung

Come to a far when, a distant once, a land beyond the river—but a river
running no-one-knows-where. That’s the invitation the following fantasy
series here holds out. But where does its landscape lie? Some have
suggested it’s Mediterranean. Others have thought it Mesopotamian. Yet
arguments can be made for placing it in either Asia or Africa. And its
weather and immediate geography (sun, fog, rain, but no snow, in a city
on the sea BUI rounded by mountains) make it sound like nothing so much
as prehistoi V Piraeus—or San Francisco, in both of which modem cities,
in the h before he began this series (if we are to trust the several
books on him b overeager commentators), Delany lived.

What’s certain, however, is thai it was fl long tim< ago

But four thousand years? Si\ thousand ‘ l tghl thou land ‘

The most accurate placement is, afltei all, ? happ) ao Id ill ol th

advertising copy on the back of one of the paperbacks in which some of

the tales were first published, putting it at “the borderland of
history.” For before this ancient nation there is only the unrectored
chaos out of which grew (and we watch them grow page on page) the techne
that make history recognizable: money, architecture, weaving, writing,
capital ... Yet a whiff of magic blows through it all, now as the flying
dragons corralled in the Faltha mountains, now as a huge and hideous
monster, part god, part beast, turning back would-be defectors as it
patrols the ill-marked border.

Re-readers of these tales may be curious why I, who am after all only a
Active character in some of the pieces to come, have taken this preface
on. Yes, it is an odd feeling—but finally one I like. The publisher
wanted me to jot something on the stories’ cryptographical origins. (You
may have already encountered a note on their archeological ends.) I
agreed, under condition I might include this extended historical
disclaimer. But something about these stories defers origins (not to say
endings) in favor of fictions. Still, for those readers, old or new, who
do not recall, I will (again) explain:

Picture me, if it will help, as your average black American female

academic, working in the largely white preserves of a sprawling
midwestern university, unable, as a Seventies graduate student, to make
up her mind between mathematics and German literature. (The politics
required eventually to secure a joint line in our Math and Comp. Lit.
departments are too rococo to recount.) Category theory was all the rage
when I emerged from my first meaningful degree. But there was an
intriguing spin-off of it called naming, listing, and counting theory,
which perhaps seventy-five people in the world knew anything at all about
and which another twelve could actually do anything with. There, on those
rare and stilly heights, I decided to dig in my heels—while, during
summers, I ran around the world reading as much as possible in the oldest
and most outre languages I could find.

Well.

Sometime in the mid-Seventies, my mathematical work led me to apply a few

of naming, listing, and counting theory’s more arcane corollaries to the
translation of an archaic narrative text of some nine hundred or so words
(depending on the ancient language in which you found it), sometimes
called the Culhar’ Fragment and, more recently, the Missolonghi Codex.
That fragment has come down to us in several translations in several
ancient scripts.
The occasion for my own translation was the discovery, in a basement
storage room of the Istanbul Archeological Museum, of a new version of
the Culhar’ in a script that was, by any educated guess, certainly older
than most previously dated. Appended to it was a note in an early version
of Greek (Linear B) to the effect that this text had been considered, at
least by

the author of the note, to be humanity’s first writing.

And Linear ? has not been written for a very, very long time.

But since the Culhar’ only exists in its various partial and, sometimes,
contradictory translations, we do not know for certain which script it
was initially supposed to have been written in; nor can we be sure of its
presumed initial geography.

The origins of writing are just as obscure and problematic as the origin
of languages in general. Some of those problems are discussed, in the
appendix to Delany’s first published volume of Ne very on stories, by my
friend and sometime colleague S. L. Kermit. Yes, that appendix was
written at my request. For, though I have (still) never met him, Delany,
after he had written his first five tales, sent me at my university a
warm and appreciative letter about what my work had meant to him. (Till
then, bits had been scattered only in the most recondite journals; though
soon—praise the gods of tenure—they were to coalesce into the precious,
precious book.) He also asked if I, or someone I knew, might write a
piece about my cryptographic successes that would serve as an appendix to
his collection. On his behalf, then (regardless of what my old and dear
friend claims—though I’ll admit the circumstances were confused, the time
period rushed, and the weather just frightful), I asked Professor Kermit
to lend the entertainment his limpid expository manner.

But anyone interested in the details may consult the appendix to the
first volume and pursue the matter through the first appendix to the
second.

I have worked with that ancient, fragmented, and incomplete narrative,

with its barbarians, dragons, sunken cities, reeds and memory marks,
twin-bladed warrior women, child ruler, one-eyed dreamer, and mysterious
rubber balls, for many, many months, spread out over what has become many
years; and I’m delighted that the pressure of my own attentions drew
Delany to pose (with the help of my commentary) his own land of Neveryon.

Professor Kermit’s generous essay, which concludes the first volume, is

rich in suggestions as to ways the Culhar’ may have prompted Delany to
elaborate elements in his fantasy. But to say too much more about that,
especially before you have read the stories themselves, is to suggest
there is a closer juncture between post-modern tales and ancient Ur text
than there is. For the relation between the Culhar’ and these stories is
one of suggestion, invention, and play—rather than one of scholarly
investigation or even scholarly speculation. If anything, Delany’s
stories are, among other things, a set of elaborate and ingenuous
deconstructions of the Culhar’—a word I take to mean “an analysis of
possible (as opposed to impossible) meanings that subvert any illusions
we have of becoming true masters over a given

text,” a word which I have, like so many in the last decade, become
rather fond of; and one which Professor Kermit abhors.

Still, I am happy to fulfill the publisher’s request for a general

introduction to the series as I was first pleased by the fact my
translation called Delany’s attention to the Culhar’ in the first place.

But there, really, you have it.

This recompilation of Delany’s immense and marvelous fantasy will mark a

return to the series for thousands on thousands of readers, some of whom
may even recall when the first piece, “The Tale of Gorgik,” appeared in
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Adventure Magazine for Spring of 1979.
That story was nominated for a Nebula Award; and the collection of the
first five tales (with Kermi’s intriguing appendix) in a paperback volume
that same year became an American Book Award nominee. And, lo, the
opening tale is now longer.

Taken all together, Delany’s mega-fantasy is a fascinating fiction of

ideas, a narrative hall of mirrors, an intricate argument about power,
sexuality, and narration itself. In the second piece, “The Tale of Old
Venn,” we can watch sophisticated intellection and primitive passion play
off one another. By the third, “The Tale of Small Sarg,” sadomasochism
has reared its endlessly fascinating head; while the ninth, “The Tale of
Plagues and Carnivals,” explores the impact of AIDS on a major American
city.

Where did the fantasy go ...?

But that is precisely the fascination of the series.

Some critics have found within the stories, as well as the individual
tales’ arguments with one another, critiques, parodies, and dialogues
with and of writings as diverse as Freud’s Three Contributions to the
Theory of Sex, G. Spencer Brown’s The Laws of Form, Marx’s Critique of
Political Economy, Popper’s two-volume study, The Open Society and Its
Enemies, Derrida’s essay “Plato’s Pharmacy”—and even The Wizard ofOz. To
others, however, it was all ponderous and pointless beyond bearing. For
certain critics, the ten years Delany devoted to this most massive yet
marginal project in an already marginal sub-genre seemed manic
willfulness.

But we do not have to be alert to every nuance of the fantasy’s sometimes

dauntingly allusive play to enjoy this epic of the rise to political
power of an ex-mine slave in a world of dragons, barbarians, Amazons,
prehistoric splendor, perverse passions, and primitive precocity. If we
did, the series never would have gained the audience it has—which, thanks
to its initial three-volume paperback appearance (with a fourth in
hardcover), already numbers in the hundreds of thousands. And it is
equally a fact: few of us are such provincial readers that we won’t catch
some.
This heroic saga has been characterized many ways. Delany himself

has written of it as “a child’s garden of semiotics.” Once, at a

department party, I overheard someone who asked what to expect of
Delany’s fantasy sequence receive the suggestion that he would find it
closer to Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften than Die Frau ohne Schatten. My
favorite description was given, however, by SF writer Elizabeth Lynn.
Within my hearing, out on some screened-in Westchester porch, Lizzy was
speaking to someone who’d asked her about the first volume, just
published. (At this remove I don’t remember if they realized I was
listening.) She said:

“Imagine going into a wonderful gallery exhibit with an intelligent,

well-spoken, and deeply cultured friend, an expert in the period, richly
informed on the customs and economics of the times, familiar with the
lives of the artists and of their models, as well as the subsequent
critical reception of each of the paintings over each ensuing artistic
period, a friend who you only wished, as the two of you walked from
painting to painting, would shut up ...”

What a recommendation for a heroic fantasy!

But consider. That benevolent, oppressive, insistent voice, droning on

before those glimmering, luminous images—the voice of the master—always
and forever conveys two messages. One is true: “History,” it tells us,
“is intellectually negotiable. It can be untangled, understood, and the
miseries of our entrapment in it can be explained. And because history is
never finished, those miseries can be interrogated, alleviated, and the
situations that comprise and promote them can be changed. All men and
women have the right to essay such mastery over their own lives.” The
second message, inextricably bound up with the first, is as much a lie:
“History,” it tells us, “has already been negotiated, so that beyond a
certain point any attempt to know more is at best error and at worst
sedition. That we have any of the tools of historical analysis means
that, on some level, history is finished. Things as they are are as they
ought to be and must not be questioned or changed. Our agonies and our
pleasures, whether physical or intellectual, are fixed by a Greater
Power, call it God or history itself: thus no woman nor any man may
challenge the institutions through which you endure yours or I indulge
mine.”

Because it always bears this double message, that voice has only value in
a dialectical, if not dialogic, process. (Statements tolerable at the
beginnings of arguments are not acceptable as ends.) But if we cannot
silence the lie completely—for it is too intimately bound up with
experience, language, and desire—at least the writer can worry over how
to articulate the truth of that voice; and can try to write up the lie
for what it is.

The recourse here is always to form.

There is a traditional Marxist argument that when Daniel Defoe takes

on the voice of the prostitute Moll Flanders, or Paul T. Rogers the voice
of the hustler Sinbad, we still have the voice of the master, only now
involved in an extended quotation, still all for the profit of his own
class; and it is by untangling the recomplications of narrative form that
the Marxist reveals the voice’s true class origins, despite its
appropriations from whatever ostensibly proletarian subject.

But consider the problems our traditional Marxist might have, say,
reading the intricately framed monologue, the eighth part of Delany’s
series, “The Mummer’s Tale” (along with its chilling postscript, section
9.6 of “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals”), in which the master takes on
the voice of an actor informing the voice of a hustler, to tease apart
just those problems of appropriation, while, at the margin of the tale
itself, almost wholly congruent with the position of the reader, sits the
Master, silent through the recitation, in a growing indignation and
outrage that, we learn in the postscript, at last takes on, however
unconsciously, by means of a similar appropriation, murderous
proportions.

Who is quoting whom? What has been written and what has been spoken? And
how does the truth slide between them?

And though to learn that “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” §9.6, takes
resonances from Popper’s readings of Plato (with a passing gander at
Ryle’s) may please those who need reassurance that a writer knows a
little of what he or she is about, that is not knowledge we need to
follow the development of Delany’s argument for free political dialogue
and against political closure. That argument is there, however clear,
however cloudy, for anyone to read, concerned Marxist or committed
capitalist, or even those of us unsure of our position in this worldwide
debate.

Return to Neveryon1 is Delany’s overall name for his fantasy series—

though the publisher, without forbidding me to mention it, has urged me
not to stress it, as foreign-sounding words and diacritical marks are
thought to be off-putting to that most embarrassing of statistical
fictions, the commercial reader (not you, of course; not me), who
presumably consumes texts only for story, is assumed to stand deaf to
style, and is thought to applaud only the endlessly repeated
pornographies of action and passion that, for all their violences, still
manage to pander to an astonishingly untroubled acceptance of the
personal and political status quo.

(Where, one wonders, and in what form, does narrative elimination take
place?)

The ancient land called Neveryon is pronounced (I’ve been told by the
editor, who presumably at least once lunched with Delany himself) Ne-VER-
y-on: four syllables with the accent on the antepenult. The phrase
“Flight from Neveryon” more or less rhymes with the word “octogenarian.”

And Neveryona, the old aristocratic neighborhood of the capital port,

Kolhari, which briefly lent its name to the entire town, is pronounced
Ne-ver-y-O-na: five syllables with the primary accent on the penult, and
a secondary one on the second syllable: the word rhymes—roughly—with
“Defer Pomona.”

There. Now doesn’t that allay just a little of the anxiety?

Oh, and “The Tale of Rumor and Desire,” the editor told me (at our own
lunch), was one Delany wrote when a two-volume collection of all the
shorter Neveryon stories and novellas had been planned. That most
recently written story was crafted to make a transition between “The Tale
of Dragons and Dreamers” and “The Tale of Fog and Granite” for readers
who would not be able to make the journey through the full-length novel,
Neveryona, or the Tale of Signs and Cities, which, while it naturally
falls out as tale number six, was simply too long to include in that
bipartite omnibus—alas, since scuttled. That terminal tale’s major events
occur just after the end of Neveryona. Read it there if you must. But I
can assure you that—there—it will make no thematic sense whatsoever. And
its particular play of discontinuities will—there—only disorient you the
more as you broach the considerable mists of volume three.

But surely Delany intends his “return” not only for readers who are
actual re-readers of his sword-and-sorcery series. Recalling the passage
from German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s three-volume Principle of Hope I’ve
set at the head of this preface, Delany writes at the beginning of
Chapter Three of his SF novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
(written concurrently with the first Neveryon stories):

Home?

It’s the place you can never visit for the first time, because by the
time it’s become “home,” you’ve already been there. You can only return.
(You can never go home, only go home again.)2

There is a suggestion of Nietzsche’s “eternal return” in these tales

Delany asks us to return to. In the strict sense that one can never
initially “go” home, Neveryon is not a place one initially visits; it can
only be revisited—in much the way Delany revisits (and revalues) a
certain romantic stance connected with the Thomas Wolfe title he lightly
mocks in the parenthesis above. And in his essay on Joanna Russ’s
beautiful and meticulous science fiction cum sword-and-sorcery sequence,
The Adventures ofAlyx3, in a section dealing with the puzzling but
persistent relation between sword-and-sorcery and science fiction, we
find:

As one can speak of the simple calculus ... implicit behind the set of
algebras called Boolean, the comparatively limited landscape of sword-
and-sorcery may be the simple fantasy behind the extremely varied set of
future landscapes we call science fiction .... More precisely, I suspect,
sword-and-sorcery represents what can, most safely, still be imagined
about the transition from a barter economy to a money economy .... By the
same light, science fiction represents what can most safely be imagined
about the transition from a money economy to a credit economy.4

The suggestion is that in such fictions the place we are returning to is

deeply and historically implicated in the place we are returning from.
The nostalgic fictive recreation of a primitive past is always
constructed from the contemporary cultural materials around us—precisely
to the extent that the primitive is seen to be one with the mystical, the
unknown, and the unknowable. Even as they speculate on the workings of
history, such creations are insistently ahistorical—or are, at any rate,
historical only as they are products of our own historical moment.

The panorama of material life Delany evokes in his fantasy epic has
little or nothing to do with any specific society or culture of some
long-ago epochal period, some distant geographical site. These stories do
not move toward research into lost time. And it takes only the smallest
critical leap—which we are encouraged toward with the epigraph of each
new story—to realize all we are really learning about is our own age’s
conception of historical possibility. For the gesture with which we reach
yearningly after the exotic turns out to be only a digging down into our
own pockets for whatever is caught in the seams. As Delany writes in “The
Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” the penultimate (or antepenultimate)
Neveryon tale (depending on where you place “Rumor and Desire”), for
anyone managing to miss the point till then:

... The Neveryon series is, from first tale to last, a document of our
times, thank you very much. And a carefully prepared one, too.5

The series is a document of its times—our times, today. It is a lush and

colorful fantasy adventure. With all its sections taken together, it
forms a dark unheimlich comedy about the intricate relations of sex,
narrative, and power. What it is not, in any way, is a portrait of some
imagined historical culture.

I should know. The original historical research—if one can speak of such—
was mine.

Some of Delany’s readers will be renegotiating (once again) this

interplay of image and idea, of intellectual grit and imaginative
grandeur, of moonshot fog and mica-flecked granite, of controversy and
convention.

Others will be encountering it for the first time. “Fantasy,” I have

called the series. Delany marks it with Fritz Leiber ‘s term “ s word-
and—sorcery” and calls it “paraliterature.” Still, re-reading it strongly
invokes the often quoted comment by the German novelist Hermann Broch:
“Literature is always an impatience on the part of knowledge.” So I am
tempted to call it literature, as it inscribes itself where historical
knowledge is at its most incomplete and we are likely to become our most
impatient with it. (“Speculative fiction,” we could have labeled it, had
it been written in the Sixties when that term was used to refer to an
amalgam of the literarily experimental and the science fictional or
fantastic.) But, for all its historical thrust, there is something about
it rigorously of its own decades, the twentieth century’s terminal
quarter.

Our return begins (and ends) by plundering present-day culture for all
its source material, even when that means present-day cultural images of
the past. What it presents us, even as it seems to lure us away to
another age and clime, is our own home reviewed through the distorting
(or, better, organizing) lens of a set of paraliterary conventions. We
begin by preparing for a spin out in the extremes; but we are only going
home ... again—another way of saying one never goes home at all. So if
the saga seems luminous and familiar, remember: even before we open the
first page of the first tale, we know the material from which it has been
elaborated wondrously well.

Orphans that we are, it is ours.

Such deciphering work as mine (to return to our initial topic) is, of
course, highly speculative. And the part that inspired Delany’s series
was done over a decade back. The interpretive successes of those of us
who work today with the most enduring, if not eternal, of human
productions often seem, in our own eyes, spectacularly ephemeral. And
though, on occasion, some of them that ignite the general imagination
receive a modicum of acclaim, most developments—not to say triumphs—in
the decipherment of unknown scripts don’t, today, garner much fanfare.
Still, I would hope that, even among those readers “returning” here for
the first time, a few might remember a bit about them.

These tales are a marvelous reminder.

Thus, on Delany’s behalf, I’m delighted to introduce to you the stories

my labors engendered.

Return, then, to Neveryon ....

—Ann Arbor Summer 1986