by Gene Wolfe
And yet there is a great deal of interest. We learn, for example, that both Gilbert and his kid brother Cecil were spoiled rotten. (The result was that Gilbert became a genius and Cecil a nuisance of such stature as to prompt speculation on the number of geniuses the human race can afford.) We learn that the British lads who, like Chesterton, attended St. Paul’s School, lived comfortably at home. And that though boys of twelve studied Greek there—a prospect before which the average American Ph.D. candidate would fly screaming—any actual love of books was as despised as it is in our own schools; so that it almost seems young George Orwell’s joys at boarding school may have been preferable after all. We learn that when Chesterton, who was sometimes accused of anti-Semitism, ended a series of articles for the London Daily Telegraph with one supporting Zionism, the paper refused to print it.
But even as the author tells us all this—and much, much more, much of it equally interesting—she saps our confidence by egregious blunders. How are we to trust her laborous research when she writes about the idea of “Chesterton as nothing more than … the drinking companion of G. B. Shaw”? For a single, miraculous moment we picture Shaw and Chesterton staggering homeward in the aureate light of dawn, their arms twined about each other’s shoulders, bellowing the poem the author of this book calls “Gungadin.” But that light is not of sea or land; it is the light of Faerie, and it fades. It fades, and the bitter memory of Shaw’s carrot juice returns.
Most are not so entertaining. The author writes, “In contrast to Gilbert, Cecil Chesterton was short and stout.” But Gilbert himself—our G. K. Chesterton—was tall and stout, so the contrast is something less than perfect. She refers to Dr. Johnson’s being a part of “the mythical ‘Grub Street’”; but Grub Street was a real London street, and its name was changed to Milton Street only in 1830, fifty years before the beginning of “modern times,” but nearly fifty years too after Doctor Johnson’s death in 1784.
She even contrives to misunderstand Cecil, who called his brother’s wife, Frances, a “lady of a type which a generation of advanced culture is producing a plentiful crop—the conservative rebel against the conventions of the unconventional. Living amidst the aesthetic anarchism of Bedford Park, she was in a state of seething revolt against it.” The author then writes: “Cecil’s opinion needs some correction … . The evidence suggests that Cecil was probably more ‘unconventional,’ or bohemian, than Frances.” But of course that is what Cecil himself said. He was calling Frances a counterrevolutionary, and the reader, pierced by her stare from the fading snapshots in Dale’s book, can well believe it.
Nor does American history escape. Writing of the London Daily News, the author tells us, “During the latter half of Victoria’s reign it … supported the anti-slave trade cause, the North in the U.S. Civil War, Italian unification, and the campaign against privilege and monopoly in land.” The midpoint of Victoria’s reign was 1868, after which opposition to slavery should have been safe enough.
For its documentation and its revelations, this new Outline of Sanity is recommended. But for Chesterton himself, it is better to go to his Autobiography. Then the living man will come rolling out, his eyes gleaming with merriment above his pince-nez, his black inverness cape flapping behind him, his sword cane flourishing, and his Victorian revolver bulging from his hip pocket. He bought the gun when he won Frances; and though he is famous for having raised common sense to the transcendental level, he never showed his common sense more than by buying it, unless it was by saying he had bought it to defend her. He hardly needs it to defend himself from the author of this biography. She loves him, and she has done him little harm, and a great deal of good. But what wild knight will defend her from herself?
From a Letter to Nancy Kress
DATED SEPTEMBER 21, 1987
We went on the Queen Elizabeth 2. All my life I’ve read about people going to Europe on ocean liners—and coming back to America on ocean liners—and I finally got to do it. When we came into New York Harbor with the Fuji blimp and the Goodyear blimp overhead, and the social director with the waistlength red hair lecturing us over the PA about New York history and soft-pedaling the Revolutionary War, and we saw the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, and the captain blew the big whistle at the Statue of Liberty—well. Nan, I felt that Roosevelt and the NRA might save this derned old country after all.
That, of course, was the voyage back. After the one over, we landed at Southampton (and it wasn’t until this very moment that I remembered that the section of Houston I grew up in used to be called that) and got our rental Ford. I had never driven in England before, and the Ford had a five-speed stick that went into reverse or third when I had very plainly told it to go into first. (It also went into first from time to time when I wanted reverse.) England has two kinds of roads—no three, but I won’t tell you about the third. It is too horrible. “M” roads are like freeways, except that they are never more than ten miles long (and often shorter) and that everyone drives them at ninety (no, that’s not an exaggeration) on the left. The “A” roads are the ones that have been laid out by hobbits with an ugly sense of humor. Just when you think that if an “A” road gets half an inch narrower you’ll jump out and walk, there’s a sign to tell you that the road is about to become narrower still. And that sign is not lying.
There’s no sign, however, to let you know that just after the nasty bit over the hill and down the steep with a wibble-wobble there’s going to be a quaint little village inhabited at the moment by a great bloody lorry going 80. The drive from Southampton to Bath is one I shall never forget, Nan. Never.
BULLETIN: Cheap Street has sent me the Publisher’s Edition of Empires of Foliage and Flower. It is so beautiful that it sort of hurts to look at it. I’ve put it on the shelves next to the laundry room, where my griffin lives. If you’re good maybe I’ll let you see it.
I’ve always wanted to take a tour of Bath. A lot of the houses go back to the early part of the nineteenth century, and some people from my mother’s family lived there then. The name was either Noble or Jones, I think. My mother’s mother’s maiden name was Noble, and I think her mother’s maiden name had been Jones. Well, Nan, I got my wish. We drove around town for three hours trying to locate our hotel. We had a little sketch map that the hotel put out, but it didn’t do us much good since Rosemary could never seem to locate anything that showed on it and I couldn’t look at it and drive on the left at the same time. Once or twice we got outside of Bath, out in the country again, and on one of those times I got my first experience of the third kind of British road. I won’t say I’ve never been so scared in my life, because I’ve been awfully scared once or twice. But I felt that we were about to be involved in a fatal accident in which those who died would be the lucky onces, if you know what I mean. Every so often we would stop and ask directions and try to follow them, and every so often we would stop and try to use a public phone that didn’t work to call the hotel and ask for somebody to come get us. That out-of-order British phone was shadowing us, and whenever it could see that we were about ready to phone again, it would run on ahead and stand innocently on some street corner.
Finally we got close and got directions from an English girl of about nineteen who seemed to have a pretty good head on her shoulders, and the directions were so simple you couldn’t have gone wrong if you tried: “Go to the bottom of the hill and turn right.” We did and found ourselves back on George Street. We had been on George Street a dozen times and had always turned off because the hotel was on Bathwick Street; but this time we figured that the girl had seemed uncommonly sensible and her directions uncommonly simple, and we ought to have faith.
You’ve probably guessed the answer already. George Street was about three blocks long, at which point it headed uphill and changed its name to Bathwick and never looked back.
It was around eight-thirty when we arrived at Somerset House, which turned out to be a sort of bed-and-breakfasty kind of place, an old Georgian mansion
converted into a little family hotel. The landlady there had saved some food for us, and we ate everything in sight (which to give her credit was a lot) and went up to bed. Ours was the Charlotte Room, which was full of pink pigs. There were pink pig hooks to hang up clothes, a pink pig light switch, and pictures and little statues of pink pigs here and there. My first thought, naturally enough, was that all this was a comment on our dinner; but a little reflection convinced me that our landlady could hardly have gotten all this stuff assembled while we were eating. My second was that the landlady was a big fan of Charlotte’s Web, and the pink pigs were Wilber. I went to sleep well satisfied with that and resolved to have a little literary conversation in the morning. But when we woke up, I discovered a plaque sandwiched in between a couple of pink pigs that explained that the room was dedicated to Princess Charlotte (daughter of George IV, the builder of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton) and told enough about her life to make me feel it had been less exciting than mine. If you happen to know why this princess’s room should be full of pink pigs, Nan, I’d appreciate a bit of enlightenment.
Explaining Nancy Kress
(1985)
“Explanations, Inc.,” which you will find in this book, concerns a research shop whose operators will explain anything for a price. The price is not your soul or even the life of your firstborn, just plain old money; and that is one of the reasons you should read Nancy Kress.
There are really only three schools of writing. In the Pooh Bear school you make up a world that is different from the actual world, and in certain respects better. A. A. Milne obviously belongs to this school, and it would be nice, and fun, and interesting if little Christopher Robin’s stuffed toys could walk and talk, and if they lived in hollow trees in the woods instead of in his toy chest. Less obviously, so do Shakespeare and Dickens; real madmen do not rave so well as Lear, real princes do not possess Hamlet’s nobility, real scapegraces are never really so graceful as Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Micawber, and Sir John Falstaff, though we may wish to God they were. As I hope my examples have shown, most of the writers worth reading are Pooh Bears; and Nancy Kress has demonstrated that she can lift the Banner of the Bear as high as any living writer, though you will not find her doing much of that here.
In the Bare Poop school, you make up a world that is different from this one and in certain respects worse. Most creative writing teachers and most of the writers appearing in “little” magazines belong to this school; and it would be nasty, foul, and intolerable if the bear cage at the zoo really stank as much as they say it does, and if the bear were half so flyblown and disgusting. We may thank God it isn’t so. The actual cages in actual zoos may stink, but they never stink quite so vilely as those stories; and what is perhaps more important, there is a sense in which the caged bears are not actual bears at all, are less real even than Winnie the Pooh. For Winnie is an ideal toy bear—a toy bear as a toy bear would wish to be if a toy bear could wish. While the caged bear is an exhibit, a bear unbearably parted from the ursine ideal, just as the writers of the Bare Poop school are writers unbearably parted from the writerly ideals of Homer and Hemingway, pseudowriters who could be made worse only by appearing in their own vignettes. Nancy Kress does not write like that; if she did, I would not be introducing you to Trinity and Other Stories, because she would be incapable of writing it.
In the Kress school you make up a single event that is different (and in some respects better) from the things we usually see in our actual world; then you put it there. Suppose, for example, that reincarnation could be shown to be fact—and an actress is to play Joan of Arc. That is “With the Original Cast,” and you will not find a single flaw in the casting; these are real, contemporary New York theatrical people, thinking and acting as such people do.
Or suppose that a woman could recall all her past lives—and that woman was the only parent and the only adult that an adolescent had ever known. That is “The Talp Hunt,” and “The Talp Hunt” is one of the few castaway stories worth reading since “A Martian Odyssey.”
I could go on like this for story after story. But if I did, you would get the idea that Nancy Kress is fundamentally an idea writer, a gimmick writer and perhaps even a gadget writer. Nothing could be further from the truth. She has idea after idea, true. And it is also true that they are ideas most writers would give their firstborn for—were it not that most of us writers are too invincibly smug to see how badly we need new ones. But Nancy would not give her firstborn for them, or so much as her oldest cat; she knows ideas are nothing without people. In “Night Win” you will meet an ugly couple fighting on the side of life in a hospital and in the only fantasy land that really exists; and you will see in both—because Nancy will make you see—that heroism has no more to do with good looks and steel thews than happiness does.
I could go on about the characters too; about Laura, who is Brorovsky’s hollow woman, and about the central figure of “Trinity,” who is not Seena the entomologist (though Seena is beautifully drawn) but that ineffable thing Francis Thompson called the Hound of Heaven, the being whom all of us hunt and flee.
Thus far I, who work or at least try to work for Explanations, Inc., have not yet explained Nancy Kress to the satisfaction of you, my client; and you’re beginning to think I can’t do it and you’re going to get your money back. Well, you’re wrong.
I said a moment ago that there were three schools of writing. There are also two kinds of writers, both kinds being found in all three schools. The first type of writer (usually male) possesses no deep insight into the human soul, and thus writes largely about those things that are outside it: robots and ray guns, murders and wars. Lewis Carroll and Robert E. Howard are writers of this type; so is Agatha Christie. And of course there is nothing wrong with this kind of writer or this kind of writing, which has given us Gulliver’s Travels, Titus Groan, and a thousand other treasures.
The second type (usually female) makes the soul her chief concern. Unfortunately quite often there is something wrong with this kind of writer and the writing she does. It has been called natural modesty, womanly humility, a decent reticence and a dozen other names, all of them complimentary and some of them noble; but it is not a good thing for writing. Stripped of its lovely names, it amounts to an unwillingness to show too much, because the writer knows that in showing the souls of her characters she reveals her own. And she wouldn’t, she really wouldn’t, want us to see that.
But occasionally we may find a writer—as occasionally we may find a diamond—who does not care. Or rather, who cares so much for her creation that her creation is all that matters to her, not because she counts herself as nothing but because she does not count herself at all. Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust are writers of this kind. So is Nancy Kress. They don’t care what we think of them, which is why we think the world of them.
Introduction for Episodes of the Argo
(1990)
No true reader who has read as much as a single story by Raphael Aloysius Lafferty needs to be told that he is our most original writer. In fact, he may be not just ours, but the most original in the history of literature.
Not least in this: that while the rest of us strive (often unsuccessfully) for originality, Lafferty struggles to suppress it. To a commercial publisher, a desirable—which is to say, a highly profitable—writer is one who sees exactly what the mass of book-buyers see, and not a whit more clearly than they, but is able to enunciate his vision (if it may be called that) in a way that they cannot. Thus we have hundreds, if not thousands, of turgid novels about wealthy families who are not in the least like actual wealthy families but are instead what people lacking both experience and insight imagine such families to be. These books, and many other kinds by writers of the same sort, may be said in both senses to constitute the base of popular literature for adults.
Over them are the books of writers who see the same things that others do, but see them more clearly; these are the books for which true readers search, for the most part. For insta
nce, I (for I count myself a true reader as well as you) had never, even after Proust and dozens of lesser authors, understood what it was like to be a genuine aristocrat, with a title the passing centuries had left meaningless, and arms dating to 1351, and a ruined castle crowning some inaccessible crag. I did not truly understand, that is, until I read “Isak Dinesen,” who was born Karen Dinesen and was entitled, thanks to an unhappy marriage, to call herself the Baroness Blixen. I had seen people of that kind, most clearly perhaps in the seven novels of Proust; but I had seen them from without. Dinesen had not only seen them but had seen them through their own eyes, and was able to make me see them too.
Lafferty is not like that.
Lafferty sees what we do not see, and because we do not see it, we frequently think that it does not exist. The words every writer dreads most are “I didn’t understand.” And every writer of any merit at all must hear them often. It is impossible to write intelligently about anything even marginally worth writing about, without writing too obscurely for a great many readers, and particularly for those who refuse as a matter of principle to read with care and to consider what they have read. I have had them tell me (for example) that they were completely baffled when a scene they had read was discribed differently, later in the story, by one of the characters who took part in it; because I had not told them, “This man’s lying,” it had never occurred to them that he might be. I have had them complain to me that they thought nothing of it when they were told that morning glories could be glimpsed through the open back door of Ben Free’s house when there was ice on the front steps. That did not strike them as odd—nor did half a dozen other abnormalities.