by Rucker, Rudy
Marianne von Bitter Rucker, around 1970.
Marianne von Bitter was from Berlin, a slender aristocratic woman resembling Marlene Dietrich with brown hair. Everyone called her Nonny. She and my father met when she came to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. This was in 1937. My mother’s father, Rudolf von Bitter, could sense the gathering storm, and he was happy to get his only daughter out of harm’s way. Somewhere higher up in the branches of Rudolf von Bitter’s family tree were a few Jews, and there was a sense that if the Nazis stayed in power long enough, they’d get around to him and his family. At least Nonny, his youngest child, would be safe in America.
Also to be found among my German grandfather’s ancestors was the famous philosopher Georg Hegel. I remember the relationship under the rubric, “three greats,” that is, I’m Hegel’s great-great-great-grandson. When my mother left Berlin, she brought with her Hegel’s schoolboy diary—a treasured family memento. Written mostly in Latin, the little book covers the period 1785 to 1787, when Hegel was fifteen to seventeen years old. Eventually my mother lent it to some scholars who translated it into German. In my favorite passage, Hegel is excited about a rumor among the local peasants that an army of dead souls had ridden by the night before. Shades of a UFO sighting! As it turns out, the peasants had been deceived by the lights of passing carriages from a late party.
My mother was opinionated, outspoken within the family, and quick to label things “amazing” or “disgusting”—two of her favorite words. But she was always patient and loving with me, always approving. One of her most characteristic gestures towards me was to smile and then nod encouragingly.
When I was in the first few grades of school, I’d come home and it would be just the two of us there for lunch together. She’d eat square pumpernickel bread and blue cheese, while I preferred Campbell’s soup and perhaps a bologna sandwich. After lunch I’d sit on Mom’s lap and she’d hug me. “Yes,” Mom would say. “Good Rudy.” Our dog Muffin would whine, wanting to get some hugs too.
My father, Embry Cobb Rucker, Sr., was descended from Peter Rucker, a Flemish Huguenot who landed near the mouth of Virginia’s James River in 1790. The Ruckers and Cobbs were active in the South; one was a senator, another the first Governor of Georgia, and many of them owned plantations. Of course after the Civil War, all this was gone with the wind. My father’s father was a well-off insurance man.
When Pop went to college it was the Great Depression, and having the tuition in hand, his father could have sent him to any school at all, but Pop happened to choose the Virginia Military Institute, for no better reason than that another neighborhood boy had gone there.
Pop liked to regale Embry Jr. and me with horror stories of his first year at VMI. The freshmen were called rats. One rat was paddled so hard that blood could be seen seeping through the seat of this white dress pants. Another was wrapped in a mattress and thrown out of a second-story window; I believe it broke his back. Pop himself had to squat for an hour above the point of a propped-up bayonet. He seemed happy to have survived the hazing, but still a little angry about it. As a senior, he himself was so merciful to the freshmen that he was known as “Rat Daddy.” At graduation, all the rats cheered for Pop, and his father turned to the man next him and said, “That’s my boy.”
At VMI, Pop learned to shoot a pistol from a horse, lost a front tooth playing center on the football team, and lost the denture during a wild night at a notorious bordello called Lucille’s, in Lynchburg, Virginia. Once Pop was suspended for hopping onto the dining-table in the mess hall and hollering something obscene at an upperclassman who’d just finished intoning the grace in a manner that Pop found gallingly pompous. He also got a degree in Civil Engineering, despite having enormous difficulties with the obligatory class in Calculus. “I never figured out what they were talking about,” he’d always say, amazed that I’d ended up teaching the subject.
He was a great story-teller; sometimes after our Sunday dinner or evening meal, Pop would spin tales for my brother and me. The stories were always different, but they usually involved dwarves. One event would flow into the next in a logical yet unpredictable fashion. Pop prided himself on making up the stories as he went along. I learned a lesson: keep narrating and the ideas will come.
Embry Cobb Rucker, around 1970.
When Pop was forty he took it into his head to become an Episcopal minister. He covered the required course work by independent study, passed the required academic, theological and psychological exams, and was ordained, first as a deacon and then as a priest. When he was interviewed on a Louisville TV show called Pastor’s Round Table, and was asked why he became a minister so late in life, Pop claimed to have answered, “Well, I couldn’t make a go of anything else, so I thought I’d give this a whirl.” Although, really, his latest wood business was still bringing in a modest amount of money.
I never did understand exactly why he became a priest. He didn’t talk a lot about religion to us. But he was always committed to being kind to people, to doing good, to helping the less fortunate. One reason might be that he had a need for approval, and that he took pleasure in evoking positive feedback. But his priesthood was about more than his own needs. When he was standing at the altar, holding up the wine and the host, he’d acquire a truly numinous glow.
For her part, my mother wasn’t thrilled by this turn of events. “I never planned to marry a minister,” she once remarked. She was fairly shy, and felt uncomfortable when thrown together with new people. It was no joy for her to entertain parishioners whom she might find dull or tacky. But she was so charming and smart that, in the end, people always liked her. She stayed the course and did the necessary; she took good care of her husband and her two sons.
Not that her life was all about being a home-maker. She was an artist for her whole life, producing scores of paintings—mostly landscapes. In her later years, she took up pottery, turning out cartons and cartons of lovely cups, bowls and plates.
One ongoing problem was that Mom developed diabetes around 1962, and had trouble controlling the disease. She was punctilious about her insulin injections and her diet—too punctilious. Periodically her blood sugar would drop so low that she’d have frightening insulin reactions. The effect was if she’d suddenly be very drunk; we’d try and force orange juice on her, but sometimes she’d refuse it. Occasionally my father or I had to give her a glucagon injection to bring her back.
When my father turned sixty he had a heart attack and a coronary bypass operation. The technology of procedure was still crude, and it had a devastating effect on him. Overnight his personality changed. He grew distant and depressed. He’d point to the vertical scar on his chest and wince. “They opened me right up.”
Later I would model the character Cobb Anderson in my novel Software on Pop during this period of his life. My character Cobb is a man with a bad heart whose body is replaced by a robot copy of his flesh body, with his memories being transferred from his discarded brain to the computer mind of the robot. At first my character doesn’t even realize the transfer has taken place, but then he notices a little maintenance door in his chest.
My parents’ marriage became increasingly strained. Pop was drinking heavily. And nearly every holiday meal was preceded by one of Mom’s dramatic insulin reactions. At age 62, my father retired from the ministry and left my mother for another woman. My parents divorced and they never spoke to each other again. Mom was quite unhappy.
I held a grudge against my father for his having left my mother, and our relationship was never again as close as it once had been. Over the years my parents’ health declined, and eventually they both died of strokes. The very last time I saw Pop, we quarreled.
“It just ends in tears,” my mother used to say when we boys would do something reckless. Life ends in tears.
I spent my elementary school years at an all-male private school called Louisville Country Day School. I had a terrible time there; for some reason I was one
of the pariahs of the class. The boys were rich and clannish. Bullies picked on me. The teachers were unjust, unpleasant and incompetent. My grades were only fair.
My mother was big on doctors, and as one of them had diagnosed me as having hay fever and possibly asthma, she gave me a Benadryl capsule with my orange juice every morning. This had the effect, I believe, of making me somewhat dull and sluggish during this period. Or maybe it wasn’t the Benadryl. Maybe I was just a late bloomer. My biggest interest was playing with my dog.
When I reached the eighth grade, my mother and grandmother came up with the idea of sending me for a year to a boarding school in the Black Forest of Germany. I enjoyed this experience very much. The German language came easily to me. My classmates were friendly for a change. I liked the little intrigues with the girls in my co-ed classes. The other students and I went for lovely hikes in the mossy, brook-filled woods.
Age 13, playing with a Diablo top in Bonn, Germany.
Back in Louisville, I switched to an all-male Roman Catholic school called St. X, for St. Francis Xavier. St. X was believed to be have the best science classes in Louisville, and my parents were bent on seeing me become a scientist. Socially I fared better at the largely blue-collar St. X than at snobby Country Day. But, being a Protestant, I was still a bit of an outsider. The other boys would sometimes threaten to “baptize” me.
I had good teachers at St. X, especially in English, mathematics, and physics. My best friend at St. X was a boy named Mike Dorris—who later turned out to be a writer of such well-received novels as A Yellow Raft In Blue Water. Dorris and I spent endless hours on the phone together, gossiping like girls, talking about our schoolmates, about dreams of sex, about literature. He was a good pal.
Thanks to my cool big brother, I was admitted into a city-wide high-school fraternity called the Chevalier Literary Society. We had weekly meetings where we’d share information about parties and plan ways to raise funds. I’d often take the occasion to ask one of the older boys to buy liquor for me—it was quite hard to purchase alcohol if you were under twenty-one.
To legitimize their existence, each of the Louisville high-school fraternities put out a literary magazine once a year. One year I contributed a rudimentary science-fiction story to the Chevalier Pegasus, another year I wrote a Beat stream-of-consciousness piece that I later pasted into my “transreal” or autobiographical science fiction novel The Secret of Life—which depicts this period of my life in detail.
On Derby Day when I was sixteen, I got drunk and rammed my mother’s Volkswagen into a tree. I was unconscious for a minute, and awoke tangled in a fence. I’d flown out of the car and narrowly escaped hitting my head against the tree. The same observation I’d made after the removal of my spleen returned to me. “Someday I’ll be dead.”
I worried about the problem of death quite a bit during the coming years, trying to come to terms with it. I sometimes think of the problem as a koan, a tricky puzzle meant to open one’s mind: “You’re alive, this is wonderful, but it’s all going to end. What are you going to do about it?”
Although, being a minister’s son, I was regularly ushered to church, I didn’t feel satisfied by what I heard there. Perhaps as a result of my unhappy grade-school experience, whenever I’m in a group of people who all believe the same thing, my first reaction is to say they’re wrong. And, being a rebellious youth, I certainly didn’t want to believe the same things as my father. This said, to this day I do occasionally attend Episcopal church services.
But as a teenager, I found solace in a cobbled-together mysticism of my own devising. I came to believe in a cosmic life force, with a droplet of it inside each of us. Years later I saw a poster with a slogan “The dewdrop slides into the endless sea,” and this pretty well summarizes the view of death that I arrived at.
Although my heart was with the mystics, the beatniks and the French existentialists, I got top grades in high-school, and I won a National Merit Scholarship. Which college to attend? This was a sticky wicket. Each college application required the student to write a brief essay, and I committed the error of writing what I considered to be the truth: that life is essentially meaningless because we’re all going die, that whatever career I picked made no real difference so even being a truck-driver might be okay, and that I planned to spend my years living as authentically and ecstatically as possible. I was too pigheaded to change my essays even when my parents suggested that I should. Surely the wise academic administrators would share my disdain for the status quo!
My first-choice school was Harvard. I remember going downtown to the office of a local Harvard alum, a stockbroker. He could hardly believe what he was hearing from me. “These existentialists you’re going on about, that Sartre fellow, how old is he? Has he ever held a job?” My second-choice college, Swarthmore, was on the point of rejecting me as well, but my father phoned up the admissions office with something like tears in his voice. “My son has a National Merit Scholarship. I thought—I thought that meant he could go to pretty much any school he liked.” I was furious and embarrassed at the old man’s meddling. But it worked. The same month I went off to college, my father took a job as the rector of a church in Alexandria, Virginia, making my break with Louisville permanent.
Age 22, with wife Sylvia Bogsch Rucker in Boothbay Harbor, Maine.
I loved my four years at Swarthmore, and made some of the best friends of my life—most importantly, I met my future wife Sylvia Bogsch. I encountered Sylvia on March 21, 1964, on a charter bus taking students from Swarthmore to the Washington, DC, area. She was beautiful, sophisticated and intelligent. I liked her smile and her laugh. She seemed to understand and appreciate me more than anyone I’d ever met in my life. We talked about Pop Art, electric eels, and the game of pretending your finger is a scythe reaching out the bus window to mow the landscape. We dated through the rest of my time at Swarthmore, and the week after I graduated, we were married in her parents’ then home town of Geneva, Switzerland, at the American Episcopal Church, with none other than my father officiating. “The best day’s work I ever did,” Pop would say in later years, beaming at us. Mom loved Sylvia; indeed, if Sylvia and I ever disagreed, Mom would tend to take Sylvia’s side against me.
Getting back to my college days, it was great to be around so many smart, quirky people at Swarthmore: people like myself. I didn’t work very hard at my studies, and with the stiff competition I got mediocre grades—I think my overall college average was an exact C. Instead of studying, I was walking around the grassy campus, talking to my friends, reading popular books, and enjoying the chance to be with girls—remember that both my elementary and secondary schools were all-male.
Although I longed to major in philosophy or literature, my father urged me to study something more technical. “You can read all those books on your own,” he insisted. “Be a Renaissance man!” I decided to major in physics and invent an antigravity machine, but due to not taking the right course sequence, I ended up having to major in mathematics. This was agreeable, as mathematics comes easily for me. I always liked the fact that, in mathematics, there are so few brute facts to memorize. Everything follows logically.
Age 19, with friend Gregory Gibson at Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.
One of my closest Swarthmore friends was a boy named Gregory Gibson. He shared my interest in writing and in the beats. We liked to quote passages from William Burroughs’s Junky and The Yage Letters to each other, and we spoke of Burroughs as Der Meister, affecting ourselves to be apprentices in some celestial academy of beatdom. Part of the appeal of Burroughs was that his work was often so close to science fiction—cool science fiction. Two problems I saw with Burroughs’s writing were that his surreal routines never extended more than a few pages, and that he had a tendency to open up a parenthetical statement with a “(“ and fail to deliver the closing “)”.
Greg and I shared other literary interests as well: Hemingway’s In Our Time, Catch-22, and Thomas Pynchon’s V. One wonderful ra
iny morning, Greg read the whole of The Miller’s Tale to me in Old English, doing voices and adding glosses comparing the characters to our friends. We were also devotees of the now all but forgotten “black humor” writers Terry Southern and Bruce Jay Friedman.
Greg and I sometimes wrote things together, taking turns on my portable Olivetti. I recall a scabrous black humor pastiche, “Confessions of a Stag,” which we composed on a Ditto master so that I could mimeo off copies for our friends. In our small circle, this work was a solid success d’estime. But publishing it in the campus literary magazine The Roc was out of the question. The Roc did however print a literary vignette I wrote about my experiences working as a construction worker in Alexandria during the summer months.
Greg and I also shared a love of drinking beer, and when our junior year rolled around, we began experimenting with pot. I liked it a lot. I hadn’t looked at any genre science fiction for quite a few years, but now I came across a novel by Philip K. Dick: Time Out of Joint. For the first time I began to see the outlines of a beatnik science fiction, of a literature that was ecstatic and countercultural, but with logic and rigor to its weirdness.
Greg summed up my budding notion in a letter he wrote me a few years later while we were trying to write a science-fiction novel together. “The cool thing to do would be to write a science fiction book that’s about your real life.”
After college, Sylvia and I were married, and we both attended Rutgers University, where I would get a Ph. D. in mathematics, and she an M. A. in French literature. Above and beyond any mere academic tasks, Sylvia bore us two children there: Georgia and then Rudy, Jr.
Age 24, studying P. J. Cohen's book on set theory with William Burroughs in the background.