The House of Rumour

by Jake Arnott

  Three novels with Doubleday followed: Stupor Mundi (1960), Psychopomp (1961) and Laugh at This Hereafter (1962). Zagorski was adopted by the nascent hippie movement and he rapidly adopted their style. Despite having just turned forty, he moved into a shared house in Venice Beach and began what was to be an eight-year stint of communal living. He weaned himself off the uppers and downers; he began experimenting with mescaline, LSD, counter-cultural pursuits and radical politics.

  Soon after the terrifying jonbar moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, he attempted to set up the Non-Aligned Science Fiction Writers Association with his old friend Nemo Carvajal. The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem rejected an invitation to join because of his extremely low opinion of American SF. The proposed NASFWA did not last very long in any case. Zagorski quickly fell out with Carvajal who, in accordance with the principles of the Posadist Fourth International of which he was a member, believed that nuclear war could be a good thing in that it might ‘finish off capitalism for good’. Larry was horrified by Nemo’s insistence that the NASFWA should issue a statement, declaring that ‘Atomic War is inevitable, humanity will quickly pass through this necessary stage into a new society — socialism.’ He swiftly disbanded the association and responded with the story ‘Sycorax Island’, which appeared in Galaxy magazine in 1963.

  Set in a parallel world where the Missile Crisis has escalated into all-out nuclear war, a disparate bunch of survivors find themselves stranded on an idyllic island in the Caribbean. American embassy staff and their families, a detachment of Cuban women’s militia and a group of Russian technical advisors overcome their initial hostilities and attempt to build a new world together. They find traces of a long-dead culture on the island: the circular ruins of some kind of temple that becomes the focus of the emerging community. At the end, just after one of the militia women has given birth to a mutant baby of uncertain paternity, a unit of US Marines arrives and promptly kills all the Cubans and Soviets. ‘Hey!’ their captain calls out to reassure his now hysterical fellow Americans. ‘It’s all right! You’re safe! Didn’t you hear the news? We won! Yeah, we really clobbered the bastards!’

  In September 1964, Larry attended the Twenty-Second World Science Fiction Convention in Oakland and met Philip K. Dick for the first time. They indulged in a long and drug-addled conversation concerning Dick’s most recent book Man in a High Castle, a counter-factual novel where the Nazis and the Japanese have won the Second World War. Zagorski had assumed that this had been influenced (as his own first novel had been) by Swastika Night. Dick assured him that he had in fact been guided by the ancient Chinese book of divination, the I Ching.

  It seems clear that this is what inspired Larry to start work on what was to become The Quantum Arcana of Arnold Jakubowski (1966), a cycle of twenty-two interconnecting stories structured around the trump cards in the Tarot deck. Zagorski spent longer on this novel than any other and he was never happy with it.

  It started with such promise, I mean it just seemed to write itself until I got up to the sixteenth card, and then — wham! It was the Tower! I was back at my first story, back trying to find my lost father. I felt that I was being led into a hall of mirrors, stuck in some awful time warp. I’d been doing primal therapy, rebirthing, stuff like that, and, of course, ingesting huge quantities of LSD. I used Crowley’s Thoth pack, which is pretty psychedelic anyway — and there it was: the ego, the phallus, that vision of authority I could never overcome, plus I’d just learnt that I was infertile so I felt emasculated and cut off from fatherhood at both ends of the continuum. I found myself wandering up and down Venice Broadwalk, muttering, ‘The tower must fall, the tower must fall.’ I had an overpowering sense of doom — after all, the Tower represents ruin and catastrophe. I got through it but after that it was a hard book to finish.9

  Now the Tower had perhaps become a symbol of an existential despair in the midst of apparent success. As Blaise Pascal had written: ‘We burn with a desire to find a secure abode, an ultimate firm base on which to build a tower which might rise to infinity; but our very foundation crumbles completely, and the earth opens before us unto the very abyss.’

  The critical reception of The Quantum Arcana of Arnold Jakubowski was mixed. Village Voice declared it a ‘meta-fictional masterpiece’; The New York Times called it ‘a confused and self-indulgent mess’. It was joint winner of the Hugo Award for best novel awarded at the SF Worldcon in Cleveland, Ohio in 1966.

  Much of Zagorski’s work was now being hailed as part of the ‘New Wave’ of SF writing. Larry certainly liked to be seen as radical and he pushed the idea of an ‘alchemical reaction between pop culture and the avant-garde’. His stories found their way into Michael Moorcock’s militantly nouvelle vague journal New Worlds and he was asked to contribute to Harlan Ellison’s seminal anthology Dangerous Visions (1967). But already one can detect an uneasiness concerning the permissive age in Zagorski’s writing. His Dangerous Visions story, ‘The Crazy Years, Mass Psychosis in the Sixth Decade’ (named after Robert Heinlein’s uncanny prediction for the 1960s in his 1941 ‘Time-Line of Future History’), depicts an increasingly barbaric youth cult called the Subheads, whose idea of liberation is to progressively burn out their brains with highly potent hallucinogens. It was also a desperate reflection of his fears concerning his own drug addiction.

  In 1968, Larry married Wanda Ferris, a sculptor aged twenty-eight who had been a long-time resident of the commune in Venice. They moved into a beach house in Malibu together. Wanda recalls:

  We’d had this freewheeling kind of affair for years. Larry was great company, so full of ideas, funny and charming. To be honest I was happy with an open relationship. But he was never any good with the free-love ethic. Oh, he wanted to be but he just couldn’t do it. Basically he craved emotional security. He kept on at me about living as a couple, just the two of us. He made it sound like a wonderful dream and I knew that the idea of it would make him happy so in the end I agreed. But it was a big mistake.10

  As the sixties drew to a close Larry became more and more paranoid. He was convinced that he was being watched by the FBI and the Church of Scientology. He had a high-security fence rigged up around the beach house and began to amass a small arsenal of firearms. Wanda remembers asking him: ‘ “What’s all this really about, Larry?” and he replied: “Guilt”. “Guilt, what about?” “I don’t know, everything”.’ In 1969, during the Tate/LaBianca murder investigation, it was revealed that the Manson Family used names and rituals from Stranger in a Strange Land as part of their cult, and a heavily annotated copy of American Gnostic was also found in their Spahn Ranch headquarters.

  The Peregrinations of Percival Pluto (1970) was completed during a sustained LSD binge that was excessive even by Zagorski’s standards of the time. Despite the gruelling complexities of his last novel, Larry was determined to continue to stretch the boundaries of the SF form by attempting what he explained as ‘a science fiction version of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival’.

  I’d thought long and hard about the term ‘space-opera’ and how it’s a pejorative term, but I thought what if you wrote something truly operatic? So Peregrinations became this Wagnerian project. It was insane! It was this interplanetary quest and I really did want to explore spirituality and symbolism on some deep level but it ended up in a whole series of psychological dead ends. And yes, Childe Larry to a dark tower came once more. This time it was the Grail Castle with its castrated king. I didn’t have any answers. I’d forgotten what the question was.11

  Despite being scarcely readable, the novel sold steadily throughout the 1970s. It was thought to contain many hidden messages and references to self-awareness and spiritual growth. ‘It was a mess,’ was Larry’s later verdict on it, ‘but its success had a woeful effect upon me. For a while I was convinced that I had this visionary gift so the writing really suffered.’

  From Here to Alternity (1972) features a time-travel organisation called the Office of Counter-factual Affairs,
which intervenes at volatile moments in history such as the Battle of Hastings or the Third Crusade of 1198. The novel’s protagonist, Baxter Brahma, jumps from one unstable jonbar point to another, occasionally falling into an alternate universe that he has to escape from. Brahma holds the key to scientia media, or middle knowledge, a concept devised by the sixteenth-century Jesuit, Luis Molina, to reconcile divine providence and free will: that God has prevolitional knowledge of all conditional contingents and possible counter-factual worlds.

  ‘I spent most of the 1970s doing a lot of coke and developing a warped understanding of Renaissance philosophy and particle physics.’ Larry became convinced that alchemy and astrology had a deep connection with quantum mechanics and believed that occult and hidden traditions could provide some unifying theory. In 1973 he experienced a series of hallucinations that elemental forces were attempting to contact him with the information that God existed on a subatomic level. In The Hieroglyphic Monad (1974), Zagorski uses Elizabethan magician John Dee’s universal symbol of the cosmos, a unifying motif that attempts to connect a series of discursive stories set in a twenty-second-century Europe where the Enlightenment never happened.

  Wanda Ferris left Larry Zagorski in 1976. ‘He was a pharmaceutical mess, yes, that was for sure; he was slowly but surely killing himself. But the worst thing was that he’d lost all his charm. He’d become grandiose and insufferable.’ By the end of the decade he had descended into near madness and degradation. His old friend Mary-Lou Gunderson was shocked when they met in April 1978.

  I’d just got a new job as a television producer at one of the main studios and suddenly science fiction was on the rise again after the massive success of Star Wars — there was big money ready to finance TV franchises like Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. So I took a meeting with Larry, which I thought would be fun, imagining that we’d catch up on the past and talk about rehashing all the pulp and space-opera ideas from when we’d started out. But it was awful. Larry was this jibbering wreck, constantly wandering off to the restroom, obviously to take drugs. He kept muttering that this heretic monk had been in touch and had a message for me.12

  In June, Zagorski was admitted to Los Robles Hospital with diluted cardiomyopathy. He was told that if he did not change his lifestyle he would be dead within six months. ‘I’ve not much to live for,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘so I guess I should prepare myself for death.’

  Then in November came the appalling news of the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. Larry’s first wife Sharleen had been a resident of the Peoples Temple community and was one of the 918 victims. ‘Utopia turned into a death-camp,’ Larry later commented. ‘Jim Jones twisted idealism, calling mass-murder “revolutionary suicide”. But out of the darkness came one small spark of hope.’

  Martin Stirling Johnson, Sharleen’s son by Cato Johnson, was among the few survivors. Earlier in the year Larry had joined the Concerned Relatives group that had voiced fears about the welfare of family members in Jonestown and he now involved himself directly in the care of the twelve-year-old orphan.

  It took a lot of work convincing the social workers that I was up to it but, after an initial period of fostering under supervision, the California Department of Social Services authorised my legal guardianship of Martin. Of course I had to turn my life completely around and the irony is that it was my own life I was saving. At last I had a purpose. All those years of feeling sorry for myself and thinking that the universe was out to get me had been a complete waste of time.13

  Zagorski got a part-time job lecturing on science fiction at UCLA as part of their creative writing programme and devoted the rest of his time to the challenging task of raising a deeply traumatised adolescent. Beyond the obvious psychological problems Martin had to contend with, Larry noted that the young man had ‘lost a normal capacity for imagination; in warding off nightmares he cannot permit himself dreams’. In trying out many types of play and art therapy, Larry noticed that his own faculties had somewhat diminished. ‘I realised that since the mid-sixties my work had become increasingly pompous. I’d lost so much of the capricious energy that had drawn me to SF in the first place. Luckily I wasn’t too old to learn from the young.’

  And it was not only watching Martin grow up that gave him inspiration. He was picking up new ideas from his students at UCLA and other young Turks on the SF scene. He appeared on the now notorious Cyberpunk Panel at the 1985 North American Science Fiction Convention in Austin, Texas, sporting a shaved head and mirror shades, declaring: ‘I’m a punk. I’m an old punk but a punk nonetheless.’ It’s fair to say that his two subsequent attempts at the form, The Cut-Throat Laser (1987) and Zap-Gun Boogie-Woogie (1990), rather fall short of cyberpunk. They do, however, conjure a sharp and highly entertaining pastiche of mid-twentieth-century futurism.

  In 1996, Zagorski provided an introduction to Beach 16 by Nemo Carvajal, a SF novel set in Cuba during the ‘Special Period’ of post-Soviet austerity. In his preface to Carvajal’s book, Zagorski uses the term ‘post-utopian’ (first coined by art critic Gerardo Mosquera) as a way of describing the theme of the novel and also as a possible new point of departure for SF: ‘What then is the future of the future? If, as Fukuyama insists, we are at the end of history, how can we think about tomorrow? What is the point of any fiction, let alone speculative fiction, unless we can find new ways of dreaming, new ways of imagining the universe?’14 In 1998, Zagorski co-edited with Carvajal an anthology of new short stories by writers from North and South America, titled Post-Utopian SF. A second collection was planned but abandoned after Carvajal’s death in 1999.

  In 2000, Fugitive Alien was remade by Multiversal Studios with British singer Danny Osiris in the role of Zoltar the extraterrestrial.

  The House of God was published in September 2001 and caused a certain amount of controversy at the time. Its cover depicted an image of a falling tower from the Tarot, and a central event in the book is the destruction of a skyscraper by a fanatical religious sect. It was inevitable that people would draw parallels with the events of September 11. But, as Larry would later explain, that wasn’t what got him into trouble.

  I was very clear in interviews that it certainly wasn’t meant as any kind of prediction. The House of God is an alternative name for the Tower in the Tarot but the cover image was unfortunate. I’d actually intended that an image from the Minchiate deck be used, which depicts Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, as the book had a strong post-utopian theme. But instead we had the falling tower and, yes, there is a nod in the novel to the Tower of Babel story where a monolithic culture collapses into chaos. But there it was, that ill-omened card turning up once more. I pointed out that in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow the Tower becomes the rocket, the V2, the avenging missile. It represents catastrophe, and I’ve had my share of that. Susan Sontag said that science fiction stories are ‘not about science. They are about disaster which is one of the oldest subjects of art.’15 Interestingly the word disaster comes from the Italian disastro, meaning the unfavourable aspect of a star or planet. And I would have been fine continuing to intellectualise about the ‘aesthetics of destruction’ like this but instead I went on to make an unintentionally provocative comment. All I’d meant to say was that the attack on the World Trade Center was a ‘science fiction moment’ but then I added that ‘some disaffected people would see it as Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star’. And a great many took offence at that, mostly Star Wars fans.16

  A volume of autobiography, Leaving the Twentieth Century, was published in 2002. Zagorski has sometimes insisted that The House of God is to be his last work of fiction, though he has also given enigmatic hints of a novel in progress. ‘A great unfinished work,’ he told a journalist in 2006, ‘that will remain unfinished.’ Pressed as to whether this was a comment on his life, he said: ‘Oh no, I’m still writing, still speculating. But I’m just a contributor, you know, just one of the voices.’

  The span of his career
has seen SF go from being about the probable, the possible, the impossible, the metaphysical to the ordinary, the everyday. It seems the one form that can truly grasp the essential strangeness of modern living, the cognitive dissonance that seems all-pervasive. ‘Perhaps one can use the narrative projections of SF to reverse-engineer a sense of reality into contemporary culture,’ says Zagorski. ‘I think it was William Gibson who said that SF is set now to become an essential component of naturalism in fiction.’ Now more than ever, Zagorski’s writing deserves to be rediscovered and re-evaluated, though he remains phlegmatic about his position in American literature. ‘Almost all my work is now out of print. I’m unlikely ever to be taught in schools or studied in universities. But I’m out there where I belong. In thrift stores and yard sales, in battered paperback editions with lurid covers and yellowing pages. Part of that story told by the lost and forgotten, the cheap pulps, the junk masterpieces.’

  NOTES

  1. Larry Zagorski, Leaving the Twentieth Century (2002), p. 4.

  2. Ibid., p. 9.

  3. The end of the ‘Golden Age’ of SF is usually seen as the mid to late 1950s when there was a rapid contraction of the inflated pulp market. Various critics have commented that the ‘Golden Age of SF is twelve’ in the harsh judgement that the genre forever belongs to early adolescence.

  4. Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions 1937–1952 (1964), p. 86.

  5. Brian Aldiss, ‘Judgement at Jonbar’, SF Horizons magazine (1964).

  6. Nemo Carvajal, introduction to Post-Utopian SF (1998).

  7. Mary-Lou Gunderson, Small Screen Memories (2000), p. 34.

  8. In the film, an air force officer of unspecified rank mentions ‘the Magenta Memorandum’, explaining it as a ‘top-secret document on these flying saucers’. This is thought by some to be a reference to a highly confidential briefing in 1948 by CIA director Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter to President Harry S. Truman, concerning ‘Operation Magenta’ — a top-level investigation into UFO activity that is said to have uncovered evidence of actual human contact with extraterrestrials. An FBI investigation of copies of this alleged document concluded that they were forgeries, pointing out formatting errors and false chronologies.