But the idea that the author of The Jewels of Aptor and Captives of the Flame once, as a singer, had his name in substantially larger letters above Bob Dylan’s—even for five minutes—has always made me smile.
36. By now the sheer bulk of the trilogy was beginning to tell. At least once I officially decided to abandon the project—and took out the old Ballad of Beta-2 manuscript up to the office on the nineteenth floor of 220 West Forty-second Street, where my old friend Bernie Kay worked in Mrs. Cavanaugh’s translation bureau. “You 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.” Back home I looked at the abandoned Towers of Toron again, then turned to work on Voyage, Orestes!
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. Sometime that winter when I was three-quarters of the way through The Towers of Toron, an old friend since I was seventeen, a young and gentle artist, yet another Al—he had a sprawling purple birthmark over his eye and cheek, very like my character Rara—invited Marilyn and me over to his Upper West Side studio at 104th Street for dinner. But at the last minute Marilyn decided she didn’t want to go. After eating, as Al and I got to talking, I found myself near tears the night long and went on till after sunup, explaining and explaining and explaining again, as the sky lightened behind the bars of the fire escape outside the windows in his gray loftlike walls, that I had no idea what was happening anymore 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.
36.1. Rose Marion, the Barnes & Noble stock clerk who had steered us to Professor Lewis’s Shakespeare class, had come by in March. She was going to be moving out of her apartment at 739 East Sixth Street, 4-D, a block northeast, in the middle of April. It was a slightly smaller one than ours, but certainly the building—and the apartments in it—were in far better condition.
“I think it’s the apartment here that keeps you miserable,” she said to Marilyn. “And Chip’s got ulcers, you say.” (Actually it was just a spastic duodenum.) “I’d be depressed if I lived here, too. And you’ve had Sue here all the time. You’re perfectly welcome to mine, once I move. You guys come over to dinner next Thursday, and I’ll introduce you to the supers. They’re awfully nice people.”
And so next Thursday we went to Rose’s for dinner and met Mr. and Mrs. Joreba, the elderly Polish couple who looked after the building.
36.2. Birthdays have always pushed me to work harder. My twenty-first was on me. Also there was the prospect of the move, slated for the second week in April. I’d progressed several hundred pages in Voyage, Orestes! and had told Lorn and Bobs I had perhaps another six months of work to do till completion. Suddenly, however, I put it aside—and by sheer will forced myself through the handwritten draft of the concluding three chapters of The Towers of Town. It was finished within days of April first, one way or another.
Following my superstition, immediately (within minutes? hours?) I started writing the opening chapter of City of a Thousand Suns. Before I even turned to typing up the conclusion of The Towers of Toron, I had drafted out the whole first chapter of volume three in my notebook (and a few paragraphs of chapter two—more of that superstition).
There seemed something exciting in it, too, so—still without going back to type up the end of The Towers of Toron—I decided to transcribe City of a Thousand Suns’ opening chapter. I wanted to show it to Marilyn. It was a weekend morning. She sat down to read it on the couch.
Bill and Terry dropped by minutes after she’d started it. (Health inspectors had finally closed the Elysée. Terry was weeks away from another baby. The previous night she and Billy had gone up to Forty-second Street and seen the first James Bond picture, Dr. No, and today were full of enthusiasm over it.) Terry took the carbon now, sat down in the easy chair and read it, while Billy in the kitchen went on to me about the film, as Marilyn was finishing the top copy. …
36.3. As far as I can tell, at the start of City of a Thousand Suns something happens to the writing. Every time I’ve read over the galleys for the near-dozen-odd editions of the trilogy that have been reprinted in the past twenty years, the change has struck me. As much as I can see from my all-too-subjective position, the energy increases.
A writer’s evaluation of his or her own work is probably the least trustworthy judgment in the range of human judgments. Still, book one felt relatively easy in its composition. Book two had seemed a nightmare stretched out to where it had almost made me stop the project. Rereading them today, however, I find little difference between them: the second only gets further ensnared in the flaws inherent in the first.
Book three, however, from beginning to end reads … differently.
What intrigues me about this change—if it’s actually there—is that I can point to nothing in my life that might have caused it. Despite the denouement, the writing at the end of book two is still its old, ordinary self, while the writing that began just a few minutes later seems so … other.
Do I fool myself in remembering how both Terry and Marilyn, as they sat in the living room, carried on for some time about how this was far more vivid and colorful than what they’d read of the trio till now …?
37. In the middle of April, Sonny came by (knocking, ringing) to help us move and, with great goodwill and a more willing back, carted beds and crates and mattresses through the street and up the steps to the new apartment. (Days before we left, Sue got another place to stay. I don’t believe we ever really knew where it was.) With four-fifths or more of the moving done, we three sat down to kill a six-pack. Then Sonny had to go off somewhere.
Later, just about dark, Marilyn and I got the wooden filing cabinet down to the Fifth Street stoop on the dolly that the Jorebas, from the new building, had loaned us.
It was the last large piece to go.
An odd kid about nineteen or twenty had been in and out of the shooting gallery across the hall on a daily basis. As we were standing on the stoop in the cold spring evening, he came hurrying up the street, and, with his hands deep in his corduroy jacket, cantered up the steps—and stopped. “You guys movin’?”
“Yeah.” I nodded.
“Where you movin’ to?”
“A little ways up and over.”
Marilyn glanced at me.
Neither one of us felt particularly good about letting him know too much of our business. But he must have read our minds.
“Oh,” he said. “You don’t want me to know ’cause I’m a junkie.” He said it brightly, matter-of-factly. “Only that’s not the sort of junkie I am,” he began to explain, unasked, there on the chilly stoop. “Though I don’t blame you for not wanting to tell me, anyway. But you see, my family lives right there, three buildings down.” He took his hands out of his pockets, leaned forward, and, with one, pointed around at another doorway. “I work right over across the street in the window-frame factory, there. You probably seen me goin’ in with the guys in the morning. And I get my dope—most of the time—right up on the second floor. I don’t hurt nobody. And I don’t rip people off. And I keep a steady job. Some people think just ’cause a guy’s a dope fiend, he’s gotta be a criminal. I don’t blame ’em—there’re enough of ’em who are. But I can’t let myself get in no trouble around here. This is my neighborhood. Everybody in it’s known me since I was a kid. They all know I’m a dope fiend, too. And they don’t like it. But they know I ain’t gonna hurt nobody, neither. I don’t wanna scare you, but I know where you’re movin’ to, anyway. I seen you earlier—with Sonny—goin’ up to Sixth Street. Now I like to help people out—that’s the kind of guy I am. A neighborhood sort of guy. Here, I’m gonna take this a
round to your other place for you. Then I’ll come on back here and get my dope. And all you gotta do, you see me in the street, is say, ‘Hi,’ or nod, or don’t even say nothin’ if you don’t want to, ’cause I’m a goddamn junkie. That’s all. But that’s the kind of guy I am, see.”
I broke out laughing. “All right.”
And the next thing we knew, he had the dolly down the steps and was wheeling the filing cabinet, racketing and rumbling, toward the corner, with Marilyn and me hurrying behind.
What I’ve asked myself about this encounter, which had no fallout to speak of (a dozen years later, I recognized him in the elevator of the Hotel Albert on East Tenth Street, face a little gaunter, body a bit thinner, hair now salted with white, and clearly on his way to make a score. We said hello. “Yeah, I remember you. You kids were moving this damned big old wooden file cabinet. Sure”), was if the reason I gave in so quickly, or simply if the reason I’ve remembered it as long and as clearly as I have, is that when he took his hands out of his pockets to point to where he lived, I saw that his nails were more severely bitten than anyone else’s—up till that point—I’d ever seen in my life!
37.1. Once more we were painting—this time covering the intestinal red bedroom with a more acceptable beige.
37.2. I launched into the final typing of The Towers of Toron at the new apartment, in the midst of which I was suddenly struck with a way to make the vowel shifts in the successive mentions of the “flip-flop” creature appear as random as possible: actually a simple formula, it took me a day and a half of work to carry out. But the effect of uniform variety, which is the way art conveys the random, always requires organization—if only to avoid the aesthetically distracting clumps of repetition the truly random always produces and around which meaning forms.
37.21. “Did anyone ever tell you—” Marilyn asked me (I interrupt this account of the writing of the trilogy with her revelation, because that’s where my memory places it)—“that you have dyslexia?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I was reading an article about it at work this afternoon,” she told me. “It explains why your spelling is so atrocious. The article said it had something to do with imperfect cerebral dominance. You’re left-handed, like me—”
I nodded.
“But you do everything except write with your right hand.”
“That’s because they tried to change me when I was a kid. At this point my right hand is stronger than my left.”
“Well—” she leaned back from the drawing pad on the round table Dick and Alice had given us as a housewarming present, where she’d started another picture of the pot plant, spiraling from the terracotta planter on the kitchen’s back window sill—“that goes along with it. It’s really very prevalent. As many as one out of ten males have it—like colorblindness, it’s sex-linked. And much more common in men than in women …”
Other articles, other investigations, and some informally administered tests followed. Soon it was clear from my history and from the current state of my first-draft manuscripts that I had a marked form of that learning disability only recently brought to the attention of educators, dyslexia.
It gave me some satisfaction over the next years to learn that it was surprisingly common among writers: Yeats and Flaubert were certainly dyslexics. Keats, Virginia Woolf, and F. Scott Fitzgerald most probably were.
37.3. The retyping on the second volume was finally finished. I submitted The Towers of Town to Wollheim. Three weeks after I submitted it, Don invited me to lunch. When we met at the office, he gave me the single fan letter Captives of the Flame had managed to elicit: the writer explained that he had figured out that “Samuel R. Delany” had to be a pseudonym of A. E. van Vogt. If you took the first and last letters from Samuel and followed them by the fourth and fifth letters in “Delany,” it spelled Slan, the title of van Vogt’s most famous SF novel. And, besides, the writer went on, he’d never heard of an SF writer named “Samuel R. Delany” before and he knew all the SF writers there were.
At The Blue Ribbon Restaurant on Forty-eighth Street, beefy middle-aged Germanic waiters, with black tailcoats and white aprons tied about their bellies wandered the darkly paneled rooms, or brought us soup and sole, while Don explained, “Oh, we’ll publish it. Readers like series books. But it’s not quite as strong as your last one.”
I wasn’t really surprised.
From the first two volumes, it was clear that I was not producing a better work than McCullers’s or Capote’s. Capote’s and McCullers’s books were astutely observed psychological novels; and just as the social chronicle novel 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 desire 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 lesson if I’d been able to say my mistake was that I’d done too much planning. But it was clear that the only thing that made the first two books of the trilogy minimally publishable was, indeed, the planning there’d 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 ballpoint 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.
37.4. Possibly depressed by Wollheim’s justifiably (I felt) lukewarm reaction to my third book, and possibly because, once more, I wanted to throw myself seriously into Voyage, Orestes! with all the excitement I felt over the opening of City of a Thousand Suns, I put that chapter aside and once more began to work in earnest on the non-SF novel.
But the change I’ve mentioned above had already occurred.
37.5. 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 go from planning to writing was images, ideas, a kind of ill-seen “movie in the mind” (what contemporary narratologists call the diegesis) that, in order to clarify, I would sit down and describe in my notebook—front or back at this point, it really didn’t matter. Occasional words and phrases were involved in that initial inner imaging—but not many. Those that were there usually went into the text pretty much unchanged. (The Fall’s “beetles’ wings/carbuncle/silver fire” motif is an example.) From City of a Thousand Suns’ first pages, however, once the expository opening was finished and the first scene in the capital begun, the third book came to me with just as many ideas and images, but now what pressed me to put words on paper—what made me open my notebook and pick up my ballpoint—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.
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 prewritten story, I would also envision equally vague sentences or paragraphs, sometimes as much as a page or a page and a half long, which was when I knew it was time to write.
There might 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. Actual writing, of course, would revise all this greatly. If anything, the rhythm gave the most clichéd, and the least energetic, way
to say what I wanted, so that its loose, lazy, and lax periods became a base meter against which to re-meter a crisp line: but that soft and lilting under-rhythm would let me know what the line must be heard in relation to. Till then, simply because I had never consciously or conscientiously heard it—or listened for it—before, it had been the rhythm that, too often, my writing followed rather than fought.
The vaguer material between would shrink or expand as words gave it edges and interstices, never finally fixed, never wholly stable, but always denser and more textured than the loose and malleable diegesis alone with only the rhythms of the language in the ear, with neither breath nor body—neither speech nor writing—to incise its pale stabilities.
As always, images would clarify and complete themselves in the writing.
But the purely verbal 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 come upon about the same time), very little else is teachable about writing. Getting rid of extra adjectives, extra words, the advantage of the active voice, the breaking of overcomplex sentences into smaller ones—these were all things I’d learned back in my “literary” novels. Had I not known them, no doubt The Jewels would never have placed. But what I’m talking of now is a certain psycholinguistic 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 to a kind of romantic self-indulgence that, certainly, no romantic we still read today could have indulged—so much pollutes contemporary paraliterary art. I wasn’t, now.