Summer 2007

by Subterranean Press

  Man. What a killer. There was a taste of Burroughs here, and a big ole dollop of Jack London, and some other influences as well, but there was a whole lot of a guy named Robert E. Howard. Already the things that made him unique were slipping through. Sure, the prose was often rushed and purple, some of these faults having to do with the style of the time, and some because Howard wrote for magazines that paid by the word and times were tough and he needed money.

  His work was raw and savage and original and he was a lover of the primitive, or at least the primitive as he viewed it. But Howard was not a primitive talent. He was well read. This is proved by his correspondence with others, and by the discussions Ms. Novalyne Price, perhaps his one true love, reported in her book about Howard, One Who Walks Alone.

  Howard was not just hammering at it. Sure, the storytelling was natural, but there was intent behind his work, even if it wasn’t of a great literary ambition, and his main concern was that of entertaining the reader. No easy thing to do, I might add.

  Take for instance this section from Almuric, as his hero Esau Cairn considers the life he has fallen into on his new world.

  “I was living the life of the most primitive savage; I had neither companionship, books, clothing, or any of the things that go to make up civilization. According to the cultured viewpoint, I should have been most miserable. I was not. I reveled in my existence. My being grew and expanded. I tell you, the natural life of mankind is a grim battle for existence against the forces of nature, and any other form of life is artificial and without meaning.

  “My life was not empty; it was crowded with adventures calling on every ounce of intelligence and physical power.”

  There is something of the little boy’s yearning for adventure in all of this. The view that the primitive life is a good one, the whole noble savage bit. Spend a week in the woods in your skivvies trying to survive on ants and grubs, drinking creek water and hunting your food with a pointed stick, crapping behind trees with leaves as your toilet paper, and the primitive experience would most likely cause the bulk of us to long for our bathrooms and hot showers and bedrooms and soft beds, our books and our TV remote. But the idea of being free, of being eternally youthful and capable, is just the sort of thing to grab boys and young men by the throat and engage them on some level that has little to do with truth or literary criticism. Howard, like Burroughs, is reaching into that part of us that is forever Huck Finn; the wild boy free of all restraints and inhibitions, out for a ride on the world, spurs dug in, riding the bucks and the jumps like a rodeo rider.

  And Howard is studied enough, purposeful enough, to do just that, give us that bucking, wild ride. In these kinds of fantasies, when well done, and Almuric is well done, you can project yourself into the main character, and fill him up, give him bits of yourself that are not in the narrative, become Esau Cairn, constantly capable, youthful, smart, and in the end, guess what?

  Yep. You get the girl.

  And we’re not talking the local poke or the library spinster.

  You usually end up with a hot little virgin who can’t live without you. And even Howard backs off a bit, gives Altha the “gentler instincts of an Earthwoman”. He couldn’t quite go the whole hog. Womanhood in most of his stories was still that of the 1930’s Texas woman who could cook your dinner, tend you in bed, and cut your throat with a razor if you done her wrong. There is something in the ending of Almuric that makes one consider that soon, Esau Cairn may not be quite so wild, since now there is peace between warring cities, and shortly he could be carrying out the trash, walking the Almuric equivalent of old Rover, wondering why he can’t just put his feet up.

  But thank goodness Howard doesn’t go that far. He leaves us in our bubble, in this false but seemingly perfect world, or at least perfect to that aforementioned eleven-year-old boy, or the eleven-year-old boy inside of most men.

  ###

  Again, Howard was very much aware of what he was doing. Even the name of his hero, Esau Cairn, brings up certain images. In the bible, Esau was the hairy one, not thought capable of carrying on the civilization he was, as the elder son, supposed to inherit and push forward. He was the outcast, the rough one, the savage. Howard saw this not as a loss, but as a positive, so it strikes me that the name is a purposeful connection. And Esau Cairn is not only savage, he is dangerous. Doesn’t the name Cairn strike close to Cain, the man who killed his brother, Abel? When God asked him where his brother was, Cain replied: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

  One gets the impression that Howard wanted to be free of all responsibilities, even the keeping of one’s brother, or in his case, his ailing mother. It was all a double-edged sword for Howard. Sure, he loved his mother and was attached to her, but on some level he just wanted to be free. And in 1936, shortly after he knew she would never regain consciousness, had fallen into a death watch coma, he, not so much out of depression, but out of sense of no more responsibility, a lust for dark freedom, lit a blue steel candle that threw him out of this world and unchained him. Perhaps that snap of gunfire tossed him across the black void of space to one of his created worlds like Almuric.

  My guess is he hoped so, or wished to be reincarnated in some other time, more savage, more in need of a man of brawn and quick wit.

  And if you throw out this idea of his character’s name being a connection to the biblical Cain, the name of the ultimate outcast, just leave the last name as it is, Cairn, and you still have an interesting and dark connection. A cairn is a pile of stones erected by someone to mark something of significance, often to mark a burial site or to stand as a memorial to the dead. Death was never far from Howard’s mind, and it is interesting that his hero’s name bears both the mark of the outcast, Esau, and a tribute to the dead, and if you want to carry the idea of Cain into it, which I admit might be stretching it a bit, but I believe it, you also have yet another reference to the outsider, an outcast, someone who has shirked the responsibilities and the actions of polite society and is living from moment to moment.

  I bring this up, and perhaps belabor the point, to show that Howard was fully aware of what he was doing, had literary technique, even if it is with a small “l”, and that he was tapping into our knowledge of words and images and archetypes. He was not a primitive creator of tales, a savage genius, but was a clever man of letters with a little boy’s heart.

  ###

  Burroughs was perhaps more able to suspend my belief quickly, but only slightly, for Howard was just gaining his chops with this one. A few pages in, and I was as hooked as a bass on a handmade fly, right through the gills. Soon I was with Esau Cairn, and in an even shorter time, I was him; a civilized man that didn’t fit in and who all his life had held back his energies and physical powers for fear of hurting someone; I was him, loose now on a world that was designed for me, a world where mortal combat was the order of the day, a world where strange monsters slipped, slid, walked, and flew over the landscape; a land where I was forever vigilant, forever in top physical shape and something for the ladies, who I might add, were also primitives, always good looking and secretly lustful minus the pesky problems of real primitives, ticks, fleas and body odor; beautiful maidens who have saved themselves for me to ravish, with, of course, the aforementioned “gentler instincts of the Earthwoman”, therefore not carrying the male reader too far from mama.

  ###

  Howard, like Burroughs, had that ability to make you believe anything, even when the writing went off a little. I think Almuric has some of Howard’s most convincing and natural writing, but there are moments when he strays, when the night oil has burned too long and the fingers have flexed too much on the typewriter keys; little moments any commercial writer will have, but they were blips, nothing more, and sometimes they were interesting blips. But the true measure of Howard was when he strayed we could forgive, because his internal storytelling compass constantly pointed true north.

  This also has to do with the method he used to tell this specific tale. It was
not a method Howard used as much as Burroughs, but I must admit up front that for me the first person method of telling a story is the best, the truest and the purest, and in the end the most convincing. It is in one way the easiest way to tell a story, and the hardest to do well.

  Like Burroughs with his tales of John Carter of Mars, as well as others, Howard uses a foreword to set up the story, and by the time Esau Cairn starts talking, the narrative becomes smooth and swift, and because of the first person narration, believable, at least for the time it takes you to read the book. That’s an achievement, friends.

  But, it’s not all about storytelling, or first person narrative, it’s also about the prose, and Howard could turn a phrase, or several of them. He could engage you, excite you, and still stay on target with his theme–shallow perhaps, but constant.

  Take this example:

  “On his rude throne above us, old Khossuth lifted a spear and cast it earthward. Our eyes followed its flight, and as it sheathed its shining blade in the turf outside the ring, we hurled ourselves at each other, iron masses of bone and thew, vibrant with life and the lust to destroy.”

  This scene is the theme of the novel, and Howard never loses this thematic intent in his adventure. It is front and foremost, the idea that being close to nature and our basic impulses is the way men and women are meant to live, though there’s no doubt that Howard’s world is mostly a masculine one, a manly wet dream where one can constantly prove himself through combat.

  When I was a kid, I ate that up. It allowed me, the youthful reader, to feel powerful. More powerful than I really felt, and that is the secret to this kind of fiction’s success. Again, I belabor, but I am caught up in the spirit, so back off brothers and sisters, stand down and listen to me testify.

  Howard gave me happiness.

  He gave me adventure that went beyond my own part time Huck Finn experiences.

  He gave me lust; what could be better than those savage dolls he portrayed in his fiction. Women who could be feminine one moment, and run with the wolves the next.

  Yes, brothers and sisters, I say it once again unto you: Howard speaks to youth, speaks to the youth inside all of us, the frisky part of us that is tired of electric bills and water bills and phones that ring and children that need braces.

  It takes a storyteller to truly take us away, to lose us inside the pages of his tale, and what makes a great storyteller is the ability to tell you a bald faced lie and make you believe it, make you part of it, make you the character.

  Sure, his characters weren’t Ahab or Nick Adams or Augie March, but they were in some ways better, for they were archetypes, and Howard could make us become them. When you get right down to it, some of our finest writers fail to do that. What Howard had was something that is often overlooked. He had the ability to make the narrative the character; it was the totality of the book that was the character, all else was there to serve the story, and to finally create this wonderful, bumpy faced novel with blood in its teeth.

  Ray Bradbury, a more literary writer for sure, is still a writer of this ilk. His characters are not to me true characters, no more than his dialogue is real dialogue. What he does is sculpt out a story where a little of this, a little of that, bits of business we don’t understand in pieces, but only as a whole, come together to create the story as character.

  Burroughs did that. And Howard did that.

  This, as well as the ability to convince, is more of an inborn talent than a skill, and it serves a writer well if he or she has it, not to mention it’s helpful to politicians as well. Because it is not only necessary to lie convincingly to make your stories work, but on some deeper level, the good storyteller, or politician, must somehow believe his or her own lies to the extent that they become, well, characters of a sort, a thing you can embrace that somehow goes beyond mere words.

  When Howard was writing Almuric, or the bulk of his tales, I don’t doubt that he entered into a kind of trance that put him right where he was writing about. Made those worlds so real to him that they became real to us.

  Maybe Almuric fails to be quite as convincing as John Carter’s journey, but there was a similarity in approach, in conviction, and had Howard continued to write in this vein, which is just slightly to the left of his Sword and Sorcery, he would have been very successful. In fact, a series of short books continuing in this style might actually have solidified his career better, at least earlier on. But Howard was all over the map. Sword and Sorcery, Westerns, crime stories, horror stories, you name it, he wrote it. Unlike his peer, H. P. Lovecraft, he thought being a writer meant you wrote, meant you could write when you needed to, not just when you wanted to. He was all about making a living, being able to look any sonofabitch in the eye and tell them to go to hell, because he didn’t need them. It was, in a strange way, as close as Howard, the good ole boy writer from Texas, could come to the freedom of the savage.

  Column: The Life and Work of Godfrey Winton: A Panel Discussion on One of Science Fiction’s Lost Masters

  Panelists: Sarah Monette, Nick Sagan, John Scalzi Panel at Penguicon 5.0, Troy Michigan, April 21, 2007

  –PANEL TRANSCRIPT BEGINS –

  John Scalzi: All right, we’re going to go ahead and start this panel. I’d like to thank all of you for coming. I realize those of you in the back are feeling like you’re a little cramped and crowded, but just kind of squeeze in. One of the nice things about the room is that it does have oxygen monitors, so if things begin to get a little too heated, or the oxygen level drops, thing will come down from the ceiling, and then just attach them to your mouth. You know how that works. We’re here to discuss Godfrey Winton, who is sometimes celebrated, sometimes neglected… Sarah Monette: Sometimes vilified… JS: : Sometimes vilified. Actually more than sometimes. Nick Sagan: Often. JS: : Often vilified. Unfairly, some say, though others do disagree. Now, one of the great things is that in discussing Godfrey Winton, when I first met with the Penguicon people about this, I said I really want to have this panel, and Matthew, who is the programming guy, said, well, we’re in luck, because we have three of the greatest Godfrey Winton scholars attending. One of them of course is me, I’m John Scalzi, but we also have Nick Sagan, who knows a little bit about his time in Hollywood and doing movies, and we also have Sarah Monette, who knows quite a bit about him on a textual level, and we’re really looking forward to getting into that. The fourth major Winton scholar is of course Chip Delaney; he’s not here because he owes me money. One day, he and I are going to have an accounting about that, but today is not that day. Anyway, let’s begin. Let’s begin by talking, to start, about the fact that there are so many misconceptions about who he is, what he did, or even what he looked like. Now, Nick, I know you actually have a little bit of personal history with Godfrey Winton. NS: Well, I really don’t claim to be an expert or scholar on Godfrey, but I am probably the only person on this panel to have sat on his lap. JS: : Okay. NS: Because my parents used to throw dinner parties back in the 70s, and I had this very kind of “Jonny Quest” upbringing, with scientists and science fiction writers. Godfrey was a frequent guest, along with Isaac Asimov, Francis Ford Coppola and other people, sort of an odd mix, and he was my “Uncle Godfrey.” And so my memories of him are as this sort of towering figure, with a moustache. This is all from the memory of a three-year-old. I mean, if I sat in his lap when I was eighteen, this would be a very different story. JS: : It would definitely be a very different story, and probably a more salable one. NS: Probably. It would also probably scar me. JS: : Right. Exactly. Some things are better left unsaid; unfortunately, this panel is not about those things. NS: This is very true. JS: : So, we should move on. The first thing I actually want to address is that in the description of the panel, one of the things that is noted, and this is in the first line, so let’s talk about the misperceptions, it mentions that he had eleven Nebulas, and twenty-six Hugos. This is a common misperception, which of course he actively promoted while he was still alive. SM: Well, yes. JS: :
Exactly. Sarah, can you talk a little about this? For example, the Nebulas, which weren’t actually Nebulas at all. SM: Well, no. There were a number of science fiction associations in the United States, many which had their own awards, which they give out every year, like you do. One them happened to be called the “Nebular.” JS: : The Nebular. SM: The Nebular. JS: : With an “R.” SM: With an “R.” There was an unfortunate glitch in a convention program and the “r” was left off, and of course Winton, being Winton… JS: : He never bothered to correct. SM: Actively resisted correcting. Oh yes. NS: He might as well take advantage of it if he can. JS: : I suppose, I suppose. NS: He was always an opportunist. JS: : So the eleven Nebulas are, in fact, Nebular awards. Do we even know what science fiction association this was? SM: Not one that is currently active. One of the many great schisms of Midwestern fandom in the 1960s. JS: : Oh, yes, that’s right. Was it Des Moines? Or was it Iowa City? SM: It may have been Cedar Rapids. JS: : And that’s just a perfect example. Obviously, he’s proud of these awards, he wants to promote them but at the same time, Nebula, Nebular… NS: Funiculì, Funiculà… JS: : Right, exactly. Tomato, Tomatoe. NS: Let’s call the whole thing off. JS: : No, we can’t. We still have forty minutes. The other thing is that I want to clarify about the Hugos. Now, it is true he won quite a few Hugos, perhaps more than quite possibly he deserved. But the thing that is really interesting to note about the Hugos – well, there are a couple things. As we all know, the Hugo lineup has not been fixed over the 50, 60 years that they’ve existed; I mean, we all know that Robert Silverberg once won the Hugo for Best New Writer. There is no longer any Hugo for Best New Writer, which is of course a crying shame, and now we have the Campbell Award. But there have been other awards that have come and gone. At the same time there’s also the thing where each Worldcon gets to create its own category. What is not often know is that Godfrey Winton had quite a lot of friends who were Worldcon attendees, and he did quite a lot of planning so that he could create categories for which he was, indeed, almost uniquely suited. And so, for example, in the stretch of time in which he was active, in the 50 and the 60s, he won some idiosyncratic Hugos. SM: That’s a good word, John. That’s a nice word. JS: : For example, he has the Hugo for the Best Punctuated Novel. He has the one for Most Enthusiastic Writer. Best Enjoyment of Dairy Products – I believe that was a Worldcon that was held in St. Louis, so there was an agricultural theme there. Here is an interesting one, and I think you can speak a little to this one, Nick: He won the Hugo for Most Likely to Get Into a Bitter Argument with Isaac Asimov. NS: Oh, yes. Yes. Well. There was a very longstanding feud with Isaac, where they did not get along at all, and actually it was a source of a lot of bad blood at the dinner parties they went to. One illustration of this I remember: My dad, my mom got Godfrey and his second wife, I think it was Cathy… JS: : Cathy? Cathy’s the third wife. His third wife. NS: Okay. I can’t keep the chronologies straight. JS: : Jessica is the second wife. Cathy’s the third wife. NS: Right. JS: : She’s also the sixth wife. NS: Yeah. JS: : Also the ninth. NS: It gets messy. But as I remember, they all went to go see 2001 for the first time, and they came out of the theater, and I remember my dad talking about how Godfrey came out with a big, giddy smile on his face, this almost manic look. And the only thing he said was “So much for the First Law of Robotics!” So he did not like Isaac one bit. JS: : Well, Sarah, you were the one, I believe you mentioned something about that at the librarian level, there was some sort of bitter contest between the two to see who could get… SM: …The most books published in a year. Yes. Because, of course, Winton is known for his competitive streak. I mean, we can see that with the Hugos. The constant scheming. And with the persistent refusal to clarify the difference between the Nebulas and the Nebulars. So, very competitive. And of course Isaac Asimov is tremendously prolific, astoundingly prolific… JS: : Suspiciously prolific. SM: Even. And truly it seems to have driven Winton almost mad that he could never catch up. He could never write as fast as Asimov. He could never write as much as Asimov. JS: : I do think a part of that was the fact he would do only one type of writing a day. And when we’re talking about doing only one type of writing a day, we’re not talking about just writing only science fiction, for example. He would specifically only write nouns on one day, and the next day he would go in and fill in the verbs, and then the adjectives and so on and so forth. SM: An unfortunate experimental period. JS: : Right. And this has problems. For one thing, he was most prolific in the time of the typewriter. What this meant was that he would have to plan ahead where all the nouns would be on the page. He would come back, put in all the verbs, and then go on, go back and put in all the adjectives. And if you don’t get it right… you spend so much time rewriting. And of course that’s where Isaac went ahead. NS: Was that not, as I understand it, one of the inspirations for Mad Libs? SM: So Winton has always claimed. NS: That’s what I remember. JS: : This has been an argument between Winton and PSS Publishing, which are the people who publish the Mad Libs, and had been for years. He spent tons of money – I mean, long before Harlan Ellison was out there suing AOL. Winton was extraordinarily litigious. SM: And with a competitive streak. JS: : Right. So this really was a problem. Now, one of the things that I think was interesting about the Most Likely to Get Into a Bitter Argument with Isaac Asimov Hugo is that in fact it was a contested Hugo, because Isaac Asimov actually won that Hugo. Which really drove Winton insane. We went and complained; he said the fix is in, you can’t possibly get into an argument with yourself. NS: But Isaac, if you know Isaac, he certainly could. SM: Au contraire, Godfrey. JS: : Right, Right. So this went round and round and round, and I believe it went all the way to the very top of World Science Fiction Society, to the clandestine meetings of which we have only sketchy details of, because they were not supposed to take notes, and it turns out that he did manage to get that overturned. And indeed that was the final straw between Asimov and Winton for many many years, until, of course, their death bed reconciliation, when Winton was right at the end. But let’s not get into that. I do want to point out one more Hugo, which he was nominated for an won, which was for Loudest Clothes Hugo. SM: Clearly only because he did not have to compete with David Hartwell. JS: : It’s funny you mention that, because he did, in fact, compete with a young David Hartwell. SM: Oh! Not in his prime. JS: : Not in his prime. He hadn’t reached his stride yet. This was the first of many Hugo nominations – and sadly, failures – for David Hartwell, up until last year. Indeed, I think if you ask David Hartwell, he would tell you Winton was an inspiration in so many ways – one, if you’re only doing verbs one days and nouns the next, you do actually learn something about editing. I do believe Hartwell did go back and study those texts. And also the clothes. NS: I would like to point out that although we are painting a picture of Godfrey as a bitter, deranged individual, he did have a sense of humor about himself. JS: : Oh, sure. He’s the sort of person who you wouldn’t mind putting your child in his lap. NS: Yes, well. That’s another story. All I know, and you can correct me if this is untrue, is that before he started winning Hugos, he was so obsessed with it that he made a joke out of it – he wouldn’t drive himself, because he was very frightened of cars. But he had a driver named Hugo, and he would bring him around and say, have you seen my Hugo? Which was kind of a nice way to poke fun at the fact that he hadn’t won the big one. JS: : The funny thing is that after he won the Hugo, he fired Hugo. And then his next driver was Oscar. NS: That’s right. But nothing ever came of that. JS: : No. You can’t go to the well more than once. I want to talk a little bit about his novels. One of the things that was very interesting about Winton was that as with many science fiction authors, he didn’t make a lot of money writing science fiction. SM: Because you can’t. JS: : Because you can’t. Even today it’s very difficult. And of course he had the various day jobs; I remember you, Nick, saying that he spent some time at JPL. NS: Yes. JS: : And we’ll get to that in a minute. SM: He was very proud of his stint well-digging in Maine. He claimed it
gave him more material for his books than any ten years of college. JS: : It’s true. One of the interesting things about Maine is that its water table is so random because the rock shelf, it makes it actually very hard to farm there, and makes it hard to dig wells, so you do end up building some character. I would assume. SM: Yes, although unfortunately not an ability to dowse. JS: : No, and that did become a problem. He was run out of El Paso, I think, because of that. Is that right? In ’56? ’57? SM: Was it El Paso? JS: : Was it El Paso? SM: Yes. Yes, it was El Paso. In ’55. JS: : The Great Drought of ’55. That’s right. He claimed to be a dowser. SM: To be fair to Winton, he was at that point extremely hard up. JS: : Yes. The things that you will do. And I believe he was exchanging his dowsing skills for, what was it? Two goats, and… SM: Piano lessons. JS: : …A piano lesson, that’s right. And he actually took delivery of the piano lesson. Although not of the goats. Which was good, because he was ridden out on a rail, and it’s hard to take goats with you. SM: It would be very hard on the goats. JS: : Yes. It’s just as well the goats weren’t involved. But because was, as so many science fiction authors were, so hard up for cash, what he ended up doing – well, we all heard how Robert Silverberg used to write erotica of some sort or another during his hard-up days. SM: Porn always sells. JS: : Porn always sells. What Godfrey Winton ended up doing was “answer novels.” Now, if you know anything about music, a song will come out and will be very popular, and then parodies and responses called “answer songs” will come up and some of them will be popular too. NS: “Sweet Home Alabama” after “Southern Man,” for example. JS: : Right, exactly. Well, there was a small paperback press called Lactic Press – it was supposed to be “Galactic Press,” I think. SM: Again with the typos that haunted Winton throughout his career. Thus, the irony of the Best Punctuated Hugo. JS: : And also the Best Enjoyment of Diary Products Hugo. SM: Yes. JS: : But he wrote answer novels, in which in the case of a very popular science fiction novel, he would write a novel that was more or less a response to that. So for example, Stranger in a Strange Land came out in 1961; immediately after, three or four months after , Winton wrote Stranger Who Couldn’t Ask for Directions. Later on, 1963, The Man in the High Castle, Hugo winner, and Winton came up with The Man in a Smelly Tenement; for AE van Vogt’s Slan, we had Slude, and then Something Wicked This Way Comes and Wants Lunch, which I believe is a favorite of yours, Nick. NS: Yes. Yes it is. It’s actually one of his best. JS: : I think so too. And of course let’s not forget his short story collection, I Have No Toes and Must Plié. Which I think personally is one of the most underrated science fiction short story collections in the world. NS: How did Harlan react to that? Wasn’t there some bitterness? JS: : I believe… well. Famously litigious – both of them famously litigious – SM: And competitive – JS: : And competitive. And of course it wasn’t until the death bed reconciliation where I think everything got settled, or at least got settled in a financial sense. SM: Winton’s great DeathCon. JS: : Yes, DeathCon. Up against, I think, IgunanaCon, which was very difficult, because Harlan was Guest of Honor at IguanaCon, so he actually had to catch a shuttle to attend both of those. It was good for Winton to know that he had that lingering disease. So he had planned it out, well in advance. And it was coincidental that he did die as soon as the last guest left. NS: It’s like that line in MacBeth: “Nothing became him so much in his life as the leaving of it.” He did a very good job on the way out. JS: : Yes. I do think that one of the great unfortunates is that we don’t actually have his last words. I believe it was actually Harlan Ellison who shut the door – actually slammed the door – so the last word were sort of lost. There was some discussion what they were. As you know, he was a big fan of Millard Fillmore. SM: Yes. JS: : And so one of his great hopes, and wrote about this, I think it was in 1951, was that on his death bed, he’d be able to recite Fillmore’s last words, which were, as you know, “The nourishment is palatable.” Because he had been fed a thin gruel just before passing. NS: No, I didn’t hear this at all. JS: : No, this is actually true. Unfortunately, what happens is Harlan Ellison slams the door. He could have said it, maybe he said it; the people on the other side of the door, we have conflicting reports. NS: See, I’d heard something, but now that I think about it, I think it wasn’t actually Godfrey Winton, but I’d heard that his last words were “Quick! Get me money!” But that didn’t happen. JS: : No. And of course he didn’t get the money. Which was an endemic problem. NS: Well, he didn’t have to spend it at that point. JS: : Well, he did have the TV on, so there were opportunities to call in now. NS: Like a Ron Popiel kind of thing. JS: : Right. But he wouldn’t have gone for the installment plan. Now, Sarah, I know that you’d done some of your doctoral work on some of these answer novels. And I want you to talk a little about that. SM: Well, I have to admit that my favorite of the answer novels is Night of the Truffles. Which is, of course, what do you do with a dead triffid. Which is an excellent question, and I find Winton’s answer compelling. And one thing I have to say about Godfrey Winton, although goodness knows he had his flaws both as a writer and as a human being, he was ahead of this time in his interest in and sympathy for gender issues. JS: : Sure. SM: And thus, taking this great work of science fiction horror, and turning it to the topics of women’s work and women’s concerns, and how do you bake a triffid? In some ways I think it’s the gentlest of his parodies, and also a moving examination of how life goes on after a great disaster, and the role that women play in the 50s and 60s nuclear family paradigm, which his later works would begin to contest. But still, within that paradigm, he was saying that this work was valuable, that this work was necessary. So that’s my favorite of the answer novels. NS: Is it fair to say that the more often he got divorced, the less the focus on women’s issues? SM: Actually it depends. After the third divorce, there was a retrenchment into the Heinleinian model of women as sexually available nymphettes. It’s a male fantasy common among middle-aged science fiction writers. JS: : And Winton was getting up there around that time. SM: But the interesting thing is that after the sixth divorce – JS: : The sixth divorce? NS: To Cathy. JS: : Second divorce to Cathy. Does that actually count as a second divorce, an actual divorce? SM: It was a second divorce, once removed. JS: : Right. Exactly. SM: Well, the fourth time he had to go through the legal proceeding of a divorce, since that second divorce to Cathy was in the early 70s, and was in fact part of Cathy’s sexual awakening, and since he did remain on excellent terms with Cathy and Cathy’s life partner Jo Elle, through the remainder of his life – JS: : Thus occasioning, actually, the third marriage to Cathy, and, subsequently, the first marriage to Jo Elle. SM: Yes. Although we don’t know for sure because the relevant correspondence was destroyed, it seems to have been a very flexible and open arrangement. Mercifully not on the Heinleinian level. NS: This might be a good point to point out that he fancied himself a ladies’ man, of course. SM: Yes. You don’t get divorced that many times – JS: : Twelve times? Twelve? Nine? NS: I don’t know, honestly. I know it was a lot. JS: : I think he just rolled a 20-sided and let that be the number. SM: And remember he was prone to exaggeration. JS: : About everything. SM: And especially this. Because he did fancy himself as science fiction’s Casanova. NS: Especially when he drank, and very few people could drink like Godfrey could drink. I remember these was a specific dinner party, my mother had taken classes in Chinese cooking and gotten a lot of people together for this, and Godfrey was famous of wrecking it by running around to every woman at the table, “Are those Jewish breasts?” It was just one of those mortifying things. He was obsessed with breasts. JS: : And he was obsessed with Jewish women. Strange, because he was Lutheran. NS: Yes. It was a forbidden fruit thing. JS: : Right. And this was one of the problems, which was that science fiction in that era was enabling for, well, let’s face it, completely undersocialized men running around, grabbing breasts and asking questions about their religious background. NS: And yet, with the marriages, especially to Cathy and Jo Elle, there was a kind of loving quality to that
. I remember that he was able to treat really serious issues with humor. I remember that when Jo Elle had her mastectomy, he famous for going around and saying he was married to a swinging single. JS: : I believe that was the occasion of the divorce, though. NS: Well, no one took his humor in the way that he meant it. JS: : What’s interesting is that what correspondence we do have – Godfrey Winton’s surviving archives, stored at Edison Community College in Piqua, Ohio – is that many poems were written to his various wives, and written, to get back around to this, in the form of Mad Libs, where in fact the rhymes were there, but many of the relevant nouns and verbs were missing. And I believe the intent was whatever wife it was that we was with at the time could fill in what it was that she thought he was feeling at the time. Unfortunately, when he got some of these back, some of the verbs and nouns weren’t ones that you would want. Now, we’ve talked a little bit about the bitter rivalry with Isaac Asimov, a little bit about Harlan Ellison. But in fact, pretty much at any one time he was having six or seven bitter rivalries going on with other science fiction authors. We know that Alfred Bester and he once got into it over a pool table — NS: Right — JS: : Not actually about a pool table, but they were actually standing on the pool table themselves. In a bar, and I believe it was in Nag’s Head, North Carolina. SM: Yes, and that was at the end of Winton’s experimental phase. JS: : Yes. SM: Emphatically so. JS: : Well, talk about that a little bit. What about that poolside gathering, so to speak, ended that phase? SM: Bester’s right hook. JS: : One of the great clarifying things about Bester, as I’ve heard many times, is that he actually does knock grammar into people. SM: Yes. JS: : One doesn’t want to believe that this is true, but anecdotally it happened to Winton, I believe at some point AE van Vogt and he went around, and there were others. SM: Bester had the sense, unlike many of Winton’s endemic foes, to realize what was going on was about Winton’s competitiveness, not any real desire, any enduring desire, to experiment with typography and – JS: : — Drugs. SM: Those too. But that is the bitter rivalry with Philip K. Dick. Which may be a contributing cause to Winton’s death. JS: : That’s true. Although they did reconcile. NS: At the death bed. But before you get there, I want to touch on this, I had heard rumors and I wanted to see if they were true – JS: : Throw it out – NS: That pool table brawl. Was that not in fact the inspiration for an Isaac Asimov mystery, in which a cue ball is used as a weapon, based on the force and the velocity? And then he titled it something, and then Godfrey, to try to top him, said, no, you should have called it “Dirty Pool”? And in the acknowledgements, Isaac says – SM: “To Godfrey, you were right.” NS: Right. Is that true? JS: : The rumor is, not only is that true – SM: Well, certainly that dedication exists – JS: : Yes. It’s there. Not only is that true, but I will counter with another rumor that I believe is also true, which was that Isaac Asimov bought the pool table that was in the bar. It was a three-quarter sized pool table, so it could actually fit into his apartment in New York City. NS: Huh. JS: : Not only did he buy the pool table, he actually had the pool table bronzed. NS: Wow. JS: : Yeah. SM: And engraved. JS: : And engraved. SM: Not where it could be seen. On the bottom. “In memoriam, Alfred Bester’s right hook.” JS: : Exactly. It was actually underneath, and rumor has it that whenever Isaac Asimov was feeling low, he’d crawl under that pool table, and would come out with a smile on his face. Unfortunately, the pool table has been lost. SM: Sadly. As with so much of what would be an extensive collection of Winton memorabilia, given his propensity for signing other people’s books with his name. There should be an entire library of them, and yet, only three exempli remain. JS: : It’s a real shame. In fact, a lot of what it came down to, there is the belief that going back to DeathCon, Ellison slammed the door. As you know, Winton had a phobia of incandescent bulbs, which meant that every light in his house was actually a gas wick. So: Door slams, lamp falls over. Flames. They manage to get his body out in time. Which was good. SM: Not realizing that he had already died. JS: : Right. SM: It was truly a courageous effort on the part of the assembled science fiction writers. And a great honor, really, for Winton. JS: : Yes. They didn’t let him burn. SM: That’s right. JS: : Ironically, he was later cremated. SM: Completely different thing. JS: : But because of this unfortunate fire, which took up the whole house, so much memorabilia is lost. The shame is, of course, that the existing material at the Edison Community College in Piqua, Ohio, is just a shoebox with a few notes, a figurine of Mickey Mouse from Disneyland and some old candy. Now, Nick, you know a little about his sweet tooth, because of the parties. NS: Yes. He would always offer me candy. JS: : Right. Right. SM: Did you take the candy from him? NS: I would, and then at a certain point my mother gave me a look, like maybe I shouldn’t do that. But I don’t think there was anything untoward about it. JS: : No, no. I mean, everybody loves candy. You and I have gone around on a particular topic I want to discuss, and feel free to pitch in, Sarah, but Nick, as you know, at a certain point our friend Winton basically said “To hell with America, to hell with everything,” and he went to Europe, where he spent time writing screenplays for Italian science fiction movies. Now, I’ve been a movie critic for fifteen years. I’ve written a book on science fiction movies. And I am here to tell you, unreservedly, that Italian science fiction movies are the worse science fiction movies that have ever existed. In addition to being the genre of film that spawned the career of David Hasselhoff – SM: Which is a sin for which it can never be forgiven. JS: : No, no. Generations future will curse – SM: Curse! JS: : — indeed. NS: Hasselhoff aside. JM: Hasselhoff aside, you actually think the screenplays that he wrote were sort of a creative highlight for him. NS: I just think it was very different. It’s not the thing you usually see – spaghetti space opera has a place, and you just don’t see it very often. They dispensed with a lot of the scientific aspects of it – JS: : And dialogue. NS: And dialogue, and they didn’t use very good actors, and it was kind of a mess. SM: But! Nick says. There are redeeming qualities! NS: There are redeeming qualities. There’s a Fellini-esque quality to it. We would actually put clowns in space. I thought that was very… JS: : Well, it’s because the movie studio was timesharing the building with the Rome Clown College. NS: Yeah. JS: : So they were readily available. NS: You have to make use of what you have. JS: : But are you giving him too much credit? Fellini used clowns because he was making a point about clowns. Winton’s using clowns because they were there. Doesn’t that make a difference? NS: Yes, it makes a difference, to certain extent. But Winton is no Fellini. You have to build with what you’ve got. SM: And it true that by the end of his screenwriting career, the last film, I think it is heads and shoulder above any of his previous efforts. And I think it is because, you know, like you’re saying, you have to dance with them what brung you. But if they want to square dance and you want to waltz… I think that was the problem Winton was having for much of his Italian screenwriting career, was that he was working in a medium without wanting to give in to what he had. JS: : Well, in fact, he absolutely maintained that he should be writing the screenplays in Italian, a language he did not speak. NS: Yes. He refused to learn it on principle. JS: : Right. Exactly. Because he felt that would detract from the quality. SM: Yes. But the last film, with the extended spacewalk sequence. In which there is no sound, because there is no sound in space. He broke through the terrible limitations of his form… JS: : Aaaah. Oh. Okay. You know what, this is another common misperception, and I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you. The reason that there is no sound is because Winton pawned the microphones. SM: Yes. But still. NS: It’s like guerilla filmmaking. JS: : And he did actually use gorillas, because in addition to the clown college there was also the gorilla training facility. NS: That’s right. And when the gorillas killed a clown, at that moment they had to stop. And that was the end of his career. Once you kill a clown in space… SM: There’s nothing you can do. It’s all over. JS: : you can’t go back. SM: You can’t go forward, either. JS: : You have to float there helplessly. NS: Yes. With y
our greasepaint and your nose. SM: However it came about, it remains iconic. JS: : Okay. Now, Winton did come back to the United States after doing the Italian space stuff, and he actually started writing the original novels. Some of those titles: That’s My Toe, which I think you like the best, Nick. Sarah, I remember you saying you actually liked The Star Accountants. SM: Yes. Yes. JS: : And let me put a shout-out to what is my favorite, Contractually Obligated Androids, which despite the title was actually written on spec. SM: Well, the interesting thing about Winton’s late career, which is when it became financially almost feasible to make that career. Almost feasible – JS: : Almost. SM: I mean, better than ’55. JS: : Well, this was the same time and space where people were actually getting paid very well – SM: Yes. Yes. JS: : — and everybody was trying to compete, trying to get the best authors, and to the laggards go Winton. So Winton benefitted. SM: Yes. And it’s true that Winton comes back from his European jaunt with a much better understanding of, and finer sensibility about not only about sexual politics, because this is the era of Cathy and Jo Elle, but he also learned a certain amount about Marxism and Communism. JS: : Right. Because he was in Italy. Red as the day is long. SM: But you can see this in the later works, both in The Star Accountants and in Contractually Obligated Robots. You can see that he’s exploring, really in a way that we’re only now beginning to see again in the work of China Mieville. JS: : And of course this is also after this fight with Bester, so he did write sentences in sequence now. SM: Which actually worked much better. JS: : It’s strange that it would be that way, but for him it was a style that did better for him. NS: See, I may need to re-read that book again, because I read it purely as response to Asimov, that robots, instead of having laws, would be given actual contracts that they would have to fill out. Like, “Will you rebel against humanity? Check box one. “ JS: : and indeed there was some discussion about this – is this in fact just another answer novel? And there were two things going on. One, of course, Lactic Press had gone under, and the principals of that had gone to San Quentin. As you do. Accounting matters. And indeed, that’s the theme of Star Accountants. SM: This is the period of Winton’s life where is personal life and his philosophical concerns came together in his fiction in a way that he had never achieved before. Which makes his work much more interesting, and much more powerful. The contractual obligation instead of a law – there’s a strong Hobbsean element to that, and a much more honest and realistic assessment of the responsibilities of creating sentient creatures like a robot. Like Asimov’s robots. JS: : And to lend credence to the theory that it might have been a response, the scene where the robots actually stab the lead scientist, named “Basimov.” NS: Yeah. SM: Well, that was a little transparent. JS: : It was, and it was one of those things where, up until the death bed reconciliation, Winton maintained it was completely coincidental. Along with the scene in which the robots beat, on a jai alai court, the guy named “Lester.” NS: But wasn’t there that first draft where after he wrote these names, he’d write “ha, ha,” exclamation point, close parenthesis? JS: : Went up in the fire, if it did exist at all. SM: There’s still a great debate in academic circles whether “Lester” is Bester or Lester Del Rey. JS: : That is true as well, because as we know, Lester Del Rey and Winton did have problems, specifically over money, and a small dog. NS: Yes. JS: : What breed? NS: Wasn’t it a Pomeranian? JS: : I think it was a Pomeranian. I remember it being some sort of fluffy dog. And I remember hearing from some of the old timers that it really wasn’t even so much about the money, just that Winton really loved that dog. It was an unfortunate thing. And of course people want to make something of it. Like it was unseemly. But it really wasn’t. It was a pure, clean love between a man and his dog. And then of course he sued Harlan Ellison, because he thought “A Boy and His Dog” was transparently about him and his affection for the Pomeranian. NS: Well, and he did think that he and the Pomeranian had a telepathic understanding. SM: Here again we see the influence of his need to compete with Philip K. Dick. It’s sad, really, that at the height of his career, with Star Accountants and Contractually Obligated Androids, this is the pinnacle of his artistic powers and to talk about the things that matter to him, and to be funny about them, and to tell a good story. He’s finally got all his ducks in a row… and they tell him about Dick, and his writing a novel in a weekend. It was like a red flag to a bull. JS: : He did write, to his credit, an entire novel, 60,000 words, he timed it as 18 hours and 17 minutes. Now, unfortunately, the problem was, due to his writing so fast he didn’t enter spaces between his words. It was very hard to read. They couldn’t hire an editor to insert the spaces. It’s a lost novel. We will never know. SM: Winton was very bitter about the reception of that novel. Because, of course: Finnegan’s Wake. JS: : Right. Exactly. And of course he was not able to have a death bed reconciliation with Joyce. SM: No. No. Joyce was already dead. JS: : Right. Now, we’re coming close to the end, so what I want to do now is to throw out the rumors that we do hear with Winton, and tell us what you know about them. Sarah, to begin: World War II. There is a great discussion about Winton’s involvement with the OSS. Was he a spy, or was he a janitor? SM: Janitor. The persistent motif of Winton’s autobiographical discourse is self-inflation. I think this is absolutely a case in point. JS: : All right. Nick: The rumor is that he dated the Gabor sisters, in chronological sequence. NS: I never met them. I dimly remember that there was not an attractive woman out there who he did not claim he had dated, was dating, or was going to date. And this was often with his wives present. Just get a couple of Jack Daniels in him and he was ready to go. SM: This was the cause of how many of the divorces? JS: : Seven. I think seven. One of the divorces wasn’t so much of a divorce as a settlement because of something along the line of her driving her car into his abdomen. And everyone decided, let’s just walk away from that. NS: There was an annulment. JS: : There was an annulment. But we don’t count that because it was an annulment, not a divorce. Now: Food fight instigator at Worldcon 12. SM: Yes. That is true. JS: : It’s true. Muffins everywhere. SM: And whipped cream. JS: : Yes. We don’t want to talk about that. NS: I thought it was catsup. JS: : No. I have to side with her, it was definitely whipped cream. There were no stains. NS: I had totally heard that he had sprayed Catsup on everyone, and that this was the start of the whole Star Trek “Red Shirt” thing. JS: : Wow, because that was what I was going to ask you next. You are indeed a former Star Trek story editor, is Winton himself he inspiration for the Red Shirt? NS: That’s what I’d heard. But you never know what’s real and what’s not. SM: I think though that that wasn’t Worldcon 12. JS: : Wasn’t Worldcon 12? SM: No. It was the second food fight. JS: : Oh! So whipped cream one, catsup the other, it’s entirely possible. SM: Food fights were a favorite pastime. JS: : Sure. As they were with many science fiction authors. SM: He claims to have been the inspiration for great pie fight in The Great Race. Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, the biggest food fight ever filmed. JS: : Yes, and he was very bitter about that with both Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. SM: Yes, and again, because of the failure of a death bed reconciliation. JS: : Right. SM: They did not attend DeathCon. JS: : Right. And with that, I think that also accentuates again: So many legends, so many things we hear about Winton, which may be true, which may not. We may never know the entire story because of the fire, possibly started by Harlan Ellison – NS: Possibly – JS: : I’m not saying intentionally – NS: Unproven – JS: : Unproven. But I can say that what we’ve done here is gotten a better understanding of him. Now unfortunately we’ve gone through this very quickly and we’ve run out of time, so we can’t discuss his years as the story editor for the Sid and Marty Kroft Super Show, where the rumor was he was dating Witchypoo. We’re not going to be able to get into that. We’re not going to talk about him, at the very end, writing exclusively on ARPANET, where the rumor was he started the first flame war. NS: It would not surprise me. JS: : These things we’re not going to be able to tell you. We’re not going to be able to tell you about his collabor
ations with religious tract maker Jack Chick, “Jesus’ Robot” and “Heathens on the Moon.” But I am going to say this: He’s having a resurgence now. Subterranean Press, a well-regarded small press, is soon to release Ten Toes and Others, which is a single-volume book of his work over the years. SM: Sadly we also don’t have time to discuss the rumors of a toe fetish. JS: : Yeah, well… NS: It was all breasts and feet with him. JS: : One thing we can say about Ten Toes and Others is that apparently the Post Office has filed a suit to stop its publication on the grounds that it’s just too damn heavy to deliver. But again, we’re out of time. NS: Do have time enough just for a quick toast? JS: : A toast! Yes! NS: To my Uncle Godfrey. JS: : To Uncle Godfrey: May his lap be forever free for small children. NS & SM: Hear, hear. JS: : Thank you everyone, thank you for coming.