The House of Rumour

by Jake Arnott

  And that’s when I get to sleep.

  I wake up and see the sun burning green and yellow through the bush. I make my way back, not really believing what has happened the night before. Somehow thinking that it was just another White Night and everybody will be back to life in the morning. Then I see all the bodies in the daylight. And I know that it’s true even though I still don’t believe it. Mom was right. God must have gone mad for this to happen. Everybody is gone. Passed. There’s an awful stink in the air and the low buzz of flies. Like Death is a crazy child humming to himself.

  Then I see a lone woman walking with a cane. A black senior limping and trying to make her way through all of the dead bodies. I hid under the bed, she tells me. I never, I never thought, she starts to say then stops. Looking all around then back to me. Mercy. Are we all there is?

  16

  the tower

  The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy.

  Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

  Larry Zagorski is a prolific author who has enjoyed intermittent commercial success and some critical acclaim (mostly in Europe and Japan) but owing to his chosen field remains largely unrecognised by the American literary establishment. ‘I always looked for the obscure, for something hidden from view,’ he said in 1989. ‘It’s little wonder that I was claimed by what I sought.’1

  Born in Los Angeles in 1922 to estranged parents of Polish descent (Zagorski is a topographic name meaning ‘one who lives on the other side of the hill’), he found refuge in fantasy and speculative writing from early childhood. When at the age of seven he was isolated and bedridden for three weeks with a severe case of mumps, his constant companion was a copy of Joseph Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales with full plate illustrations. Later influences were the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the pulp magazines Weird Tales and Wonder Stories.

  By his own account he was a sickly child who lived mostly in his own imagination. The young Zagorski’s search for the unknown was also a quest for an absent father. Zagorski senior left the family home when Larry was barely three years old with a chaotic trail of rumour and hearsay in his wake. ‘I was told variously by my mother that he was a private detective, a gold prospector, a circus horseman, and God knows what else. I eventually learnt that he was none of these things, merely a cheap conman, but as a child to me he was some kind of totem, a mysterious monolith. I looked for him in comic books and adventure stories.’2

  His first published story, ‘The Tower’ (printed in Amazing Stories in 1939 when he was seventeen), is a reworking of ‘Childe Rowland’ from the Jacobs stories of his childhood. A fatherless group of children find themselves trapped in a dark tower, the enchanted domain of the elfish ones. The interior is described (as in the original) as a wondrous fretwork of precious stones, magical lamps and illuminated crystals. It becomes clear (in Zagorski’s version) that this is the control panel of a spacecraft and the elfish inhabitants are visiting aliens, physically weak but able to bewitch with drugs and hypnotism. The children overcome the elfish extraterrestrials and escape as the tower blasts off into the firmament.

  ‘Childe Larry to a dark tower came,’ Zagorski writes in a later author’s note on this story, linking it to his fruitless attempts at understanding his relationship with a lost parent. It was a process that transformed Larry’s attitude so that from then on, rather than identifying his missing father as the hero of pulp stories, he instead becomes the strange creature, the alien. This liberated his creative sense, launching it into outer space. He joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society and began to sell stories regularly to Amazing Stories and Fabulous Tales, replete with ray guns and bug-eyed monsters. But science fiction was itself undergoing a transformation, and was about to enter what some were to call its ‘Golden Age’.

  Generally agreed to have commenced when MIT physics major John W. Campbell Jnr assumed editorship of Astounding magazine in the late 1930s, the Golden Age3 brought about what came to be known as the ‘hard science’ school of speculative fiction. While recognising the need for some background logic in SF, Zagorski was never entirely at ease with the tendency towards pseudo-rationality and technology fetishism, or a new orthodoxy with strict rules for robots and regulations on how to solve faster-than-light travel. To focus on scientific feasibility rather than the potential of the imagination went against his instincts as a writer. As Jorge Luis Borges observes, the fiction of Jules Verne speculates only on future probability (the submarine, the trip to the moon, the talking picture), while the work of H.G. Wells surpasses it by conceiving ‘mere possibility, if not impossibility (the invisible man, a crystal egg that reflects the events on Mars, a man who returns from the future with a flower from the future, a man who returns from the other life with his heart on the right side, because he has been completely inverted, as in a mirror)’.4

  Zagorski, however, was intrigued by the opportunities that quantum mechanics offered SF at this time. The first of two great inspirations for him in this period was Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time, serialised in Astounding in 1938. Though heavily freighted with all the clichés of the pulp era, The Legion of Time breaks new ground in SF in its treatment of the Uncertainty Principle, alternate futures and parallel worlds. Other authors have cited its importance (Brian Aldiss declared that ‘its influence of later time stories has been strong’5) and it created a new term in the SF world, the ‘jonbar point’ — a point of divergence where history can go either way, in this case towards utopia or dystopia.

  The possibility of a dystopic future was, of course, a very real danger at this time and Zagorski’s second big influence in the late 1930s was the novel Swastika Night, first published in 1937 under the pseudonym Murray Constantine. Reclaimed as a lost feminist classic in 1985 when it was revealed that it had been written by Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night is probably the first and certainly the most frightening of the many novels based on the premise of a Nazi victory. Zagorski acknowledges that it inspired him to write his first successful full-length work, Lords of the Black Sun (serialised in Fabulous Tales in 1940, first reprinted as a novel in 1948). ‘It might seem a fairly crass attempt at this now familiar conceit,’ he wrote in the introduction to the 1978 reissue, ‘but bear in mind that at the time of writing this was neither an alternate history nor a counter-factual exercise; this was the possible future.’

  It was probably the recognition he received for Lords of the Black Sun that gained him entry to Robert Heinlein’s celebrated SF salon in Los Angeles — the Mañana Literary Society. In Anthony Boucher’s roman-à-clef Rocket to the Morgue (1943), based on the Mañana group, Zagorski is clearly identifiable as Matt Duncan, the ‘up-and-coming young science-fictioneer’, alongside fictional versions of Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, Williamson and the rocket scientist Jack Parsons. There was much interest in alternate realities among this circle, as well as in the exploration of propagations of influence and even complex quantum notions like backward causation. In Boucher’s novel, Austin Carter, Heinlein’s alter ego, writes a story that proposes a world where far-left democrat Upton Sinclair wins in California while Roosevelt loses in 1936, causing a schism in the nation, civil war and the eventual ‘establishment on the West Coast of the first English-speaking socialist republic’. It was to be called ‘EPIC’ (with a nod to the End Poverty in California campaign that Heinlein had been part of).

  ‘Heinlein was something of a radical back then,’ Zagorski was to recollect in the 1960s. ‘I don’t know what happened to him later.’ It was at Heinlein’s salon that he first met friend and erstwhile collaborator, the Cuban SF writer Nemo Carvajal. ‘Interesting times for American science fiction,’ notes Carvajal. ‘The future was bound up in ideology, so even the space-opera writers could scarcely avoid a political critique in their work.’6 Indeed, the genre itself was ideal for geopolitical speculation and the
re emerged a collective and progressive approach to a world-view made possible by projections in time and space.

  Larry was in love with Mary-Lou Gunderson, a fellow writer (later director, producer and television executive), but it remained unrequited. The year 1941 saw the emergence of jonbar points, in Zagorski’s life as well as that of the planet. ‘He was a shy and sensitive kid,’ remarked Gunderson, ‘the last person you would imagine going to war.’7 Yet the day after Pearl Harbor, that great point of divergence in American history, he signed up with the USAAF for combat duty.

  Zagorski served as a radio operator in a B-24, flying bombing missions over Germany and occupied Europe. It was a harrowing experience as the conditions under which the air war was fought were extremely harsh. The long-range sorties were exhausting, some lasting over eight hours and in sub-zero temperatures with the crews wearing electrically heated suits and oxygen masks. Larry was to describe the experience as a ‘lethal parody of all my childhood dreams of flight and space travel’. Any simple technical malfunction could prove fatal and frozen oxygen lines could cause death from hypoxia. Then there were the swarms of enemy fighters and the flak from 88mm anti-aircraft batteries or the 108mm radar-controlled guns. The chances of surviving the thirty-mission requirement were very slim indeed.

  ‘Along the azimuth arc, from zenith to horizon flew death, and down below we saw planetary destruction, cities turned to moonscape, and we smiled.’ So begins ‘Fee, Fi, Foo, Fum’, one of the few stories he wrote that directly recall his experience of the war. The crew of a B-24 witness strange craft in the stratosphere:

  ‘Foo! Foo!’ went the call on the intercom. That nonsense word from some alien dialect. But the radioman knew what it meant. He had tuned himself in to them, ignoring all the arguments about whether such things were hallucinations, Nazi prototypes, or from another world. He knew what foo meant: it meant the future. Something had broken through the space–time continuum; that’s what they were seeing. A vision of what was to come, of the even greater terrors that awaited them in the heavens.

  Returning home, Larry took his share of a collective post-war trauma. For a year or so he lived with his mother, supporting them both on his GI Bill allowance. And for some time he turned away from SF. All its predictive powers seemed used up, its dread fantasies of power made real. The future seemed a bleak choice between unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.

  Between 1946 and 1947 he attempted a mainstream novel. The Attendant is set in an unspecified institution where the protagonist Tommy Buhl works, having been invalided out of the military following a nervous breakdown. He tries to make sense of what has happened to him as he plods through a dreary daily schedule. In a series of recollections, he is constantly in search of the point in his life where it all went wrong. The Attendant meanders aimlessly in its surviving 436-page draft, though it features several strong supporting characters, most notably the Mexican fortune-teller Angel Fernandez and the army air force chaplain Ignatius Creed. Zagorski failed to find a publisher for it.

  It was during a trip to Mexico in 1948 that Nemo Carvajal and Larry came up with the story that was to become the script idea for the film Fugitive Alien. Directed by Mary-Lou Gunderson, starring Trey Anderson and Sharleen Stirling, Fugitive Alien (1950) is one of the many B-movies that cashed in on the flying saucer craze. It was cheaply made and rich in the Cold War atmospherics of paranoia and suspicion. Unlikely stories about its production persist to this day, most notably the rumour that there are references in the dialogue to an actual secret air force memorandum on UFOs.8

  What is certain is that Nemo and Larry argued quite vehemently over proposed script changes during the shooting. Larry fell in love with the leading lady. He married Sharleen Stirling on 4 October 1951. Nemo Carvajal went back to Cuba that same year.

  The 1950s were an extremely productive time for Larry, though not all of his work saw the light of day. In a decade he wrote nineteen novels (five of which were published), fifty-seven stories (twenty-eight of which he managed to sell), and eleven scripts for the Dimension X radio programme (two of which were made).

  Larry found something of a champion for his work in Anthony Boucher, whom he had known from the Mañana days and who had begun editing The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF) in 1949. Urbane and generous of spirit, Boucher was to nurture many of the more left-field SF writers, most notably the young Philip K. Dick. Boucher favoured intelligent fantasy over the ‘hard-science’ school and was keen to promote a more literary style within the genre. He had, after all, produced the first English translation of Borges and sold it to what was more or less a pulp magazine (his rendering of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1948).

  F&SF was an ideal home for Larry’s work at this time. His stories had become increasingly fractured and recursive. Zagorski insisted to Boucher that he was no longer interested in prophecy, but rather ‘prodrome, that is, the early symptoms of an oncoming disease, an aura of disquiet’. He never liked to distinguish between what was ‘fantasy’ and what was ‘science fiction’. He confided to F&SF’s editor that the stories he placed with them were ‘inner projections of character, memoirs of the imagination’. In ‘Dummy’ (1954), a prisoner convicted of an unnamed crime and convinced of his innocence digs a tunnel via the ventilation grille in his cell. He makes a dummy to leave as a decoy for when he escapes. The construction of the mannequin starts to obsess him, particularly the sculpting of the face, which takes on a ‘lurid grimace that seemed to mock his protestations of guiltlessness’. One morning the guards search his cell. The tunnel is revealed but the dummy is missing. It has escaped, and in the months that follow the prisoner begins to hear of ghastly misdeeds committed by his puppet doppelgänger.

  The other main market for Larry’s work in the 1950s was Ace Books, where they were a good deal less sensitive with his material. One of the editors there, Donald A. Woolheim, a science fiction fan and veteran of the pulp years, would publish SF in ‘Ace Doubles’, a cheap format that bound two novels together, head to toe, with lurid covers on both sides. Titles were regularly changed to match the glib and sensationalist cover art, so that Zagorski’s Parker Klebb’s Purgatorio became A King of Infinite Space (1955) and his With Splendour of His Precious Eye was transformed into The Prophet from Proxima 6 (1956). One of Woolheim’s fellow editors at Ace, Terry Carr, is reported to have remarked: ‘If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double, it would be cut down to two twenty-thousand-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as “Master of Chaos” and the New Testament as “The Thing with Three Souls”.’ By the end of the decade, professionally at least, things were looking up. In 1957, Larry secured a two-book deal with the prestigious hardcover publisher Doubleday, the second of which was to prove his breakthrough novel. But in the meantime his private life was falling apart.

  All through the 1950s his prolific output was fuelled by a considerable intake of amphetamines. This was augmented by a heavy barbiturate habit that Larry relied on to bring him down from all the uppers he was taking, and a steady recreational use of marijuana and alcohol. Consistently existing in an altered mental state often inspired astonishing bursts of creativity, but it proved profoundly destructive in his emotional relationships.

  He had married Sharleen Stirling in haste, after a brief but intense infatuation. ‘She had an unearthly, ethereal beauty,’ he recalled. ‘If I’m honest she reminded me of those beautiful alien girls I’d gawped at as a teenager on the cover of Wonder or Planet Stories. I loved her but I was still emotionally immature and weighed down with psychological problems I hadn’t dealt with.’ Sharleen herself had long-term mental health issues and her once promising acting career was falling apart. ‘She believed what I wrote was real and I fed off her psychosis as inspiration for my characters. It was parasitical.’

  The Translucent Man (1957), the first of his books for Doubleday, was indifferently received but American Gnostic (1958) achieved consid
erable critical acclaim and went on to become a paperback best-seller. This success, however, coincided with Sharleen’s mental breakdown and their subsequent divorce in 1960.

  A harsh satire on the nation’s perverse relationship with both materialism and spirituality combined with a dystopian vision of the near-future, American Gnostic is an exemplar of what Kingsley Amis described, in his 1962 critique of SF, New Maps of Hell, as a ‘comic inferno’. Set in a twenty-first century where religion and culture are based on a ‘pulp mythology’ (fictional entities like Doc Savage and Batman are accepted as historical figures, while real people such as John Wayne and Greta Garbo have been transformed into deities), the established church is the Cult of Futurology founded by SF writer Lucas D. Hinkel. The economy is centred on sacramental consumerism and an overambitious space programme that is not only draining industrial and natural resources but is in stasis due to technological shortcomings (spacecraft landings on other planets are faked in ‘holovision’ studios). There is a growing faith in the coming of a being from outer space to save a polluted and overpopulated world, and fraudulent appearances are reported every week. John Six, a real extraterrestrial, finally does appear and, after a brief spell as the ‘Space Messiah’, elects to become the host of the holovision game-show All-American Alien.

  The success of the novel crossed over into mass consciousness, particularly among younger readers, and it became a cult book of the 1960s. Overnight Larry Zagorski was hip, and American Gnostic, like Stranger in a Strange Land and Naked Lunch, became one of the iconic SF titles talked about in coffee bars and passed around college campuses.