A, B, C: Three Short Novels

by Samuel R. Delany

  They swarmed over me!

  One pulled loose my waist cinch, another the fastenings on my jerkin. They mewed into my ears such things as: “We play the game of desire, along the chain of desire, serving the Winged Ones’ Queen! We serve the beloved of the Queen, who is the Handsman. We serve the beloved of the Handsman, who is the brave groundling. We serve the beloved of the brave groundling, who is the groundling’s black-clad friend….We tangle the chain in our play!” One piece and another, my clothes came away, till all that was under my naked back was the harsh uncured skin—and folded over it, the wondrously soft fur—of the puma.

  The three of them at me, there, shook me and pleasured me, bit at me—yes, in several places, my shoulder, my inner thigh, they sipped blood—while I rebounded in the web.

  Do you understand? Moments before, I had been by a dying man, with whom I’d constantly felt I was not present to his words—a man who had urged me to exchange promises with him, as if we’d been a pair of lovers, yet to whose urgings, my own perceptions had been so blighted I could not tell if he knew or not I was unable to respond, for he might as well have been addressing the lion skull, already dead, by mine.

  But now, with these three lovers upon me, my bodily perceptions were cajoled, caressed, excited to a pitch, an altitude, where language could not follow, so that promises themselves were impossible. As I floated and flowed and soared above words, listening to their mewings and scrittings, I let a sound that was wholly animal, as inhuman as if the beast’s skull beside me had for a moment returned to life.

  I finally slid down the web. On the burned earth, when at last I could stand, I looked about for my clothes, pulled on my leggings, my boots, my gloves.

  The three Winged Ones all perched on the branch, as indifferent to my fumblings below with belt hooks, bootlaces, and button fastenings as lords of the air might be.

  I threw the puma skin over my back and, fastening it, stumbled off into the trees—unable to look back, bereft of all my initial desire: to survey the damages among my troops.

  I remembered it only when I was again walking between the shacks in some narrow alley. Reaching the end, I saw I was back at the common—with no progress at all in my project.

  But perhaps you can understand why this is not an event I often tell. Really, I can’t think how it concerns your own researches. It might, if you have any sense of delicacy, be better left unmentioned. As I said, put yourself in my place….

  —

  In evening light, the Calvicon historian listened to the little stones the waves raked away, then, returning, flung up the shingle. He sipped from his drink and nodded (for the historian was tired, and as they’d sat in the small yard, his host had refilled both their glasses several times), not certain just what he’d been asked.

  Amherst

  September 1991

  Afterword

  I.

  Something happens when a writer’s readership grows substantially larger than the dozen odd members of a university workshop or even a full auditorium of listeners at a college or a library reading. Approximately every seven or eight years, with each book of fiction and nonfiction I’ve written (though not every essay collection), I’ve cycled through the experiences I’m about to discuss.

  I will meet a new person, sometimes a young woman who has just published her first book and with whom I’m giving a reading, or an editor who has recently joined a publishing house to whom my own editor is introducing me in an office hallway, or a stranger who has recognized me a moment after I have stepped from the door of Barnes & Noble onto Union Square North. Over fifty years these people have been male, female, black, white, Asian, Native American, Dominican, Inuit, African, southern or northern European, Haitian, Jamaican, Martinican, half a dozen sorts of Latino and Latina; they have been gay; they have been straight; they have been transgendered or cis-gendered; they come from New York or San Francisco, Boston or L.A., from Peoria or Salt Lake City, and many places between; they have been Jewish, Baptist, Episcopalian, Catholic, Mormon, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, disabled, or temporarily abled. Sometimes it’s a teacher at a university or a high school where I’m giving a talk, sometimes it’s a student—though once, as I was walking down Eighty-second Street, leaning on my cane, a city sanitation worker in a green T-shirt, who, recognizing me from a picture in a recent Entertainment Weekly article, leaped from the back of his groaning truck, ran up and gripped my shoulder with an oily orange rubber glove, to tell me what I will tell in its time, and, six months ago, when I was returning to New York from a guest professorship at the University of Chicago, it was the uniformed fellow at the curbside baggage stand outside the United Airlines terminal at O’Hare, who, after I’d gone inside to wait for a wheelchair (arthritis makes getting around airports on my own all but impossible these days), ran in after me, stood in front of me, and declared: “Samuel R. Delany…? The writer guy? I’m right, aren’t I? Hey, my absolutely favorite book of yours is…”

  That’s what so many of them want to tell me.

  This one or that one will name Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, my most recent novel, or my very first, which you have in this book, or my tenth, or my fifth, or my fifteenth, or my book of science fiction and fantasy stories, Aye, and Gomorrah, or my book of naturalistic novellas, Atlantis, Three Tales, or one of my contemporary novels, Dark Reflections, or The Mad Man, or a science-fiction novel like Nova or Trouble on Triton. It can be a nonfiction work. The book named can be an award winner or a one-time bestseller or something published by an independent publisher that not two thousand people have read. It can be my twentieth, from a press out of Normal, Illinois, and Tallahassee, Florida, specializing in avant-garde fiction. It can be my 1,200-plus-page fantasy series in four volumes, Return to Nevèrÿon, or a ninety-page novella once sold as a stand-alone paperback, such as Empire Star.

  —

  And it can be—and has been, repeatedly, over fifty years as well as at least once over the last seven or eight—each of the novels here.

  It pleases me to think there might be a connection between that experience and the way I write. Do I know there is? No, I can’t know. No writer can. (So we decide—or hope—it’s because we’re quite smart…as we take a wrong turn, lose a laptop, drop and step on our reading glasses, or inadvertently call a business acquaintance the name of someone she or he despises, who, the moment we met, came to mind—or something else stupid.) Because such indications of popularity, however poorly they correlate with quality, hinge on reception rather than creation, they suggest—even if it’s never a sure thing—a reason to gamble on reprinting.

  The forty-five-odd experiences over the more than fifty years from which I’ve culled these instances might seem a lot, because I’ve crammed more than half of them into not a page and a half, with a number doing double, even triple, duty—the woman outside of Barnes & Noble, the most recent one to mention The Jewels of Aptor, was a Mormon here in the city with her brother (who’d never heard of me); the last young man who liked The Ballad of Beta-2 was a student and an African Muslim (in a motorized wheelchair). Sometimes three or four such encounters have happened in a year. Some years have gone by, though, with no such encounters at all. Were you waiting for the next one, you’d be more frustrated than not.

  —

  Here’s something that better suggests how little public attention that is: only three times in fifty years have I seen someone reading a book of mine in public. Once, while I was sitting on an IRT subway car in 1964 or ’65, I saw a woman across from me reading the second volume of my Fall of the Towers trilogy. Once, when Marilyn and I were returning from London a week before Christmas in 1974, coming through Kennedy Airport we saw a book rack full of just-released Dhalgrens and, minutes later, a sailor in unseasonal whites relaxing at his flight gate reading a copy. (With his knees wide in a tubular chair that they used in airports back then—he must have been flying back to somewhere in the Caribbean or Central or South America—as we walked by wit
h our daughter in a stroller.) Finally, on a Philadelphia bus, three years ago, I saw someone, certainly a student at Temple where I teach, reading a trade paperback of Atlantis, Three Tales, a week after the publishers had released a new printing.

  Three times in fifty years.

  It doesn’t seem so many now, does it?

  II.

  Not just Aptor and Beta-2, but all three books here had a run of almost two decades in bookstores—and that was in a book environment where the average life of a new volume on the store shelf was under three weeks. That interests editors and marketing folk, trying to anticipate how this book will do. I’m interested in that peripherally, of course—but not centrally. “No man but a blockhead,” said Dr. Samuel Johnson, the poet, scholar, and writer who put together the first comprehensive English language dictionary, “ever wrote, except for money.” A surprising number of writers since Dr. Johnson who have pursued the life of writing, however, have been blockheads—many of them good writers too. You have to think about too many other things while you’re writing that drive such considerations from the mind, so that dwelling on money is distracting, intimidating, and generally counterproductive. Also, the number of people who, if they were not calling me, personally, a blockhead for wanting to write at all, thought I was nuts, strange, or patently out of my mind for doing it (and it was never a munificent living) seemed at the time innumerable—starting with my dad. When I won a prize in high school or a scholarship, he was proud. And when his best friend, our downstairs neighbor, who wrote and published children’s books for black kids like myself but made his living editing immense economics textbooks he called “doorstoppers,” read some of the work I’d written at sixteen or seventeen and told my father I would probably be in print before I was voting age (back when that was twenty-one and the drinking age was eighteen; since then, they’ve reversed). Dad even paid the sixty-seven dollars to have my third novel—the one that got me the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship I mentioned in my foreword—retyped by a professional typist in Queens.

  It never appeared.

  Mom had a more liberal attitude. She wanted me to do whatever would make me happy, and from childhood on she encouraged me in all my enthusiasms. Clearly, though, she shared Dad’s misgivings. Except for intermittent lapses in which he tolerated my career choices—which were most appreciated and probably the only reason Dad and I had any positive relationship at all—generally my father argued and raged about those enthusiasms. My mother mulled over them and looked glum. They had lived through the Great Depression. Like many parents in the 1950s, they were concerned about security and their children’s livelihood. They had seen many disasters themselves. We, who were too young to remember those disasters firsthand, however, felt the manifestations of their fears were the harshest parental oppression. I wish I could say eventually I learned they were right, as they kept telling me I would. (“Just wait. You’ll see…”) In truth, however, they weren’t. Some things were much worse. Some things were far better. Many were different. The world had changed—including the speed of its changing.

  Novel writers, short-story writers, science-fiction writers, and many writers from the “unmarked” category, which bears the genre mark “literary,” have told me they cannot read their past or early work. When they try, many say, they feel something akin to pain.

  That’s not me, however.

  Possibly it has to do with how I write—though I can’t be sure.

  I’m dyslexic—severely so. Therefore, to put together a manuscript that’s readable, much less printable (by my own standards), I must read it and correct it and reread it and correct it again and reread it again; not three or four times, but twenty-five, thirty-five…some sections I must read forty-five times or more. (Now you know one reason so many people—not just my parents, but teachers and friends—thought I was nuts for wanting to write at all. Clearly I was so bad at the basics and everyone around me was better.) It’s the first five or so readings, however, I find painful. Between them, someone who is not dyslexic has to read it too and mark those places, usually with underlining, where the words are out of order and often incomprehensible or even missing, where I’ve spelled words so badly you can’t tell what they are, or where I’ve dropped other words and phrases that must be there for the sentences to make sense.

  I’m a grammar fanatic. I have been since I was in the sixth grade—probably to compensate for the other things I did and still do so poorly. Mistakes slip through even now; now and again other readers catch them, for which I am always grateful. (You may find some among these pages.) I couldn’t—and I still can’t—spell some simple words correctly three times in a row. But I was the best in my fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-grade English classes at diagramming sentences on the blackboard (in those days when blackboards were black, not green) or on tests. (“If you can do that, I don’t understand why you can never remember how to spell ‘orange.’ It doesn’t make sense,” my seventh-grade English teacher would say. It didn’t make sense to me, either. But her sincerity, concern, and honesty made me love her at the same time that it made me feel I was profoundly and irrevocably flawed.) Still, it’s why today I’m comfortable using both formal grammar and informal grammar at all colloquial levels. Point out the errors you find, and I can usually tell you why they’re errors and often the formal names these errors have or once had and how to correct or improve them. But these are what my dyslexia initially prevents me from seeing. (Today we know it’s neurological. Back then we didn’t.) In the course of my rereadings, however, phrases, words, or sections that to me are painful—for stylistic and content reasons that become one as the hand falls from the keyboard, from the page, and the ear and the eye take over to judge or to approve or, more frequently, to find fault with what I’ve put down—I excise or clarify so that, over time, the manuscript moves closer and closer to something I can enjoy. That’s how I wrote my earliest books, the ones here; that’s how I write them today. That’s how I build a text I’d like to read: by way of retardations, excisions, expansions, compressions, simplifications, and rewordings, along with numberless additions and plain corrections. Each layer is the trace of a different “self” as much mine as the self who tries to impose the effect of a controlled voice by suppressing one or enhancing another—to form a text I hope will fall within sight of my notion of the way a “good writer” writes, even though I am not one “naturally.”

  The only way I can get a text to feel (to me) that it is one my true thoughts might inhabit is through layers of revision.*1 If I try to express anything directly that I believe deeply and intensely without a fair amount of thought beforehand and during a many-layered process afterwards, what comes out is banal, overwrought, and riddled with errors in which clichés and imprecisions mock anything one might call intention.

  Another way of saying the same thing is that the unexamined “I” in an unexamined “world” is boring.

  I’m much too much like everyone else—because, presumably, the world has made me so: more venal than I would like to appear or admit, shy, deluded by clichés and commonplaces, eager to be liked, and for accomplishments, intellectual or social, that most of the time I feel I do not possess.

  Possibly this is also why, ten or fifteen years after a book of mine has appeared, when I pick it up and again start reading, I find sentences that strike me as pleasant, scenes that seem well-orchestrated, passages that appear to project their ideas with clarity, or an observation on the world that registers as true for its time and that goes some way toward delineating, if not re-creating, my feelings, or other passages whose grammar and logic convince me they are the utterances of a single mind rather than the dozen deeply flawed selves I had to be shattered into by the world to live in it, much less to write about it. (Is it the layers of correction or the illusion of unity that does the pleasing? I can hope. But I can never know. They are the same thing seen from different sides: an effect and what creates it.) If they please, they please to the extent
I have forgotten how the disjunctive cataclysm that I am wrote them—though also I know that so much rereading can, as easily as it might produce excellence, fix the mistakes in a text in our mind so deeply that when we come back to it years on, we skim errors in expression and thought without seeing them because unconsciously they are so familiar.

  Neither the writer’s pleasure nor pain justifies returning a work to print, however; nor is either a reason for letting a text languish. (Sometimes a work is about something no longer of current or compelling interest, but that’s another tale.) All language is habit, as I remind my writing students regularly, speaking or writing. You learn to write badly, to overwrite, or to write dull, banal stories much the way you learn to write well—as well as a given epoch sees it. (Lacking a National Academy, of the sort France, Italy, and Spain have had for centuries, America finds the surface criteria changing radically every twenty or thirty years.*2) I do believe, however, that the amount and quality of mentation that go into the fictions I find interesting are different from the amount and quality that go into the ones I find thin. Only hard-won habits can fix the difference within us—if we’re lucky. And no one can be sure it has—ever. As well, I believe the writer must look at the minute places where her or his relationship to the world is different from most, for me personally to find that relationship of interest. (Often I’ve wished I had broader tastes.) To find what deeply engages us, within a field of our apparent differences we must interrogate, our similarities for the sake of potential and possibilities, either good or bad. That can mean, for the same ends, the writer is trying to dramatize a feeling of difference within that field of similarities, so that often the writer has a sense of having undertaken a more difficult analytical dance than anticipated. The writer signals both differences and similarities by additions to the text, by organization of the textual elements, or by absences in the text, vis-à-vis the average productions of that day or era—and, as much as they are frowned on today, by direct statements of emotions, most effective when they are used indirectly. How to distinguish between which texts are better and which texts are worse is, ultimately and finally, anyone’s guess, and the shifts in criteria, decade after decade, century after century, even place to place in what we always assume is a more unified culture than it ever is or could possibly be, and the general attitudes toward following the various paths of least resistance that mark out the cliché, the cluttered, or the thin, don’t make it easier. Those shifts in criteria, however, all indicate traces of a struggle with those problems, though not necessarily in a manner that either you or I might feel was successful. That’s why it’s worth it for us to accustom ourselves to the way things were written a generation or two, a century or two, a millennium or two before us, in India or Italy, in China or Czechoslovakia, in Timbuktu or Teheran, Portugal or Japan, Leningrad or Moscow, Brazil, New Orleans, Mexico City, Argentina, or Chicago—which is to say, the ways of reading that the texts were written for, in various places at various times—for the pleasure of the game, if only because of what, here and there, we can learn about how they made the game pleasurable and use it for our own profit, if it still works today. It’s the concert of all these that justify republication, a decision from which, for the reasons outlined here (mostly in dependent qualifying clauses, or even parentheses) the author, if still living, is always excluded. Only someone else who has managed to educate him- or herself to read the texts of the past, even from only forty or fifty years ago, and is sensitive to the problems and concerns of the present, can make the call—and finally for pretty personal reasons—as to whether or not a text merits republishing. We all hope—readers and writers both—we will be lucky enough to have such editors.