The Engines of the Night

by Barry N. Malzberg

  The novels were curiously cold for all of their effects and mercilessly driven, but the characters, particularly the female characters, who were the protagonists of many of them, were rendered with great sensitivity and were always in enormous pain. That was one of the mysteries of Woolrich’s work for the editors and writers who knew him: how could a man who could not relate to women at all, who had had a brief and terrible marriage annulled when he was twenty-five, who had lived only alone or with his mother since . . . how could such a man have had such insight into women, write of them with such compassion, make these creatures of death and love dance and crumple on the page? Some theorized that the writer could identify with these women because that was the terrible and essential part of him which could never be otherwise acknowledged. Others simply called it a miracle: a miracle that a lonely man in a hotel room could somehow create, populate, and justify the world.

  “I tried to move out. In 1942 I lived alone in a hotel room for three weeks and then one night she called me and said, ‘I can’t live without you, I must live with you, I need you,’ and I put down the phone and I packed and I went back to that place and for the rest of her life I never spent a night away from her, not one. I know what they thought of me, what they said about me, but I just didn’t care. I don’t regret it and I’ll never regret it as long as I live.”

  He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work and stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to Black Mask and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibilities, but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich’s gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimaxes to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple Chandler had verged toward this more than a little; there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature, but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations. Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it, but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death, but the novels and short stories of Woolrich were death—in all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality.

  Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract Truffaut, whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre and the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. Nothing at all . . . but the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.

  “I wasn’t that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn’t write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried.”

  Inevitably, his vision verged toward the fantastic; he published a scattering of stories which appeared to conform to that genre at least to the degree that the fuller part of his vision could be seen as “mysteries.” For Woolrich it all was fantastic; the clock in the tower, hand in the glove, out-of-control vehicle, errant gunshot which destroyed; whether destructive coincidence was masked in the “naturalistic” or the “incredible” was all pretty much the same to him. Rendezvous in Black, The Bride Wore Black, Nightmare are all great swollen dreams, turgid constructions of the night, obsession, and grotesque outcome; to turn from these to the “fantastic” was not to turn at all. The work, as is usually the case with a major writer, was perfectly formed, perfectly consistent; the vision leached into every area and pulled the book together. “Jane Brown’s Body” is a suspense story. The Bride Wore Black is science fiction. Phantom Lady is a gothic. Rendezvous in Black was a bildungsroman. It does not matter.

  “I’m glad you liked Phantom Lady but I can’t help you, you see. I can’t accept your praise. The man who wrote that novel died a long, long time ago. He died a long, long time ago.”

  At the end, amidst the cases and the bottles and the empty glasses as the great black leg became turgid and began to stink, there was nothing at all. The television did not help, the whiskey left no stain, the bellhops could not bring distraction. They carried him out to St. Clare’s and cut off the leg in April and sent him back in June with a prosthesis; the doctors were cheerful. “He has a chance,” they said. “It all depends upon his will to live.” At the Sheraton-Russell they came to his doors with trays, food, bottles, advice. They took good care of him. They helped him on his crutches to the lobby and put him in the plush chair at the near door so that he could see lobby traffic. They were unfailingly kind. They brought him into the dining room and brought him out. They took him upstairs. They took him downstairs. They stayed with him. They created a network of concern: the Woolrich network in the Sheraton-Russell.

  In September, like Delmore Schwartz, he had a stroke in a hotel corridor; in September, like Schwartz in an earlier August, he died instantly. He lay in the Campbell funeral parlor in a business suit for three days surrounded by flowers from Chase Manhattan.

  His will left $850,000 to Columbia University (he had inherited money; the markets didn’t leave him much) to establish a graduate creative writing program in memory of Claire. He had been a writer of popular fiction, had never had a serious review in the United States, had struggled from cheap pulp magazines to genre hardcover and paperback. Sure he wanted respectability; a university cachet. Sure. Why not? Who wouldn’t?

  “Life is death. Death is in life. To hold your own true love in your arms and see the skeleton she will be; to know that your love leads to death, that death is all there is, that is what I know and what I do not want to know and what I cannot bear. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.

  “Don’t leave me now, Barry.”

  1980: New Jersey

  A Few Hard Truths for the Troops

  ONE: THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR PERSONAL editorial contact in this business, particularly at the outset of a career. It is easy enough to sell short stories by mail, but in order to sell them in any quantity the editors should be met; it is ten times easier to sell a first novel to an editor who knows you. Shortly after the initial sales, therefore, it is imperative for a new writer to come to New York (wherein work almost all the editors), or, better yet, to attend the science fiction conventions. The editors go to them. There are at least five conventions a year—the world convention, the West Coast convention on the July 4 weekend, the New York convention in the spring, the Philadelphia and Cincinnati conventions—at which half the editors or more are present. Although a new writer should not become obsessed with convention attendance, at least six should be attended in the year after the first sale (assuming any professional ambitions and spare funds at all), and at least three a year thereafter.

  It is possible to run a career from a post office box—James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) is the most notable recent example as Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) was of the past—but only a couple of such careers exist during any given writing generation (which according to van Vogt, and I agree, is just about ten years). The rest of you—the rest of us—are like it or not going to have to make the changes, work the scenery. Ten years ago or more a young writer would be best advised to come to New York to live for a while, but New York is now such an expensive and (for many) fundamentally untenable place that it is no longer necessary. With writers scattered throughout the countryside, editors have a good excuse to spend expense account money to go to conv
entions to see them and editors have no objection to this.

  TWO: Reviews have almost no effect upon the sale of a science fiction book. Prepublication reviews in the trade journals are meaningless; reviews in the professional and amateur magazines appear so long after publication that the fate of a book has long been decided by the time they appear. The only factor affecting the sale of a science fiction novel from the point of view of the publisher is print order; a book that prints more will sell more, assuming a certain rough fixed percentage of copies printed as sales, and therefore the destiny of a book has been resolved before it is even out of manuscript. Print order is in itself determined by the amount of the advance—the more a publisher has paid the more he must print in order to retrieve the advance—and the advance depends upon the reputation of the writer, editorial caprice, the editorial-book interface, the general state of the market and so on. (Merit except for a rare case or two has no effect upon the advance.) There have been cases in which books for which large advances have been paid have had small print orders and failed dismally; this is either because the editor has, in the interim, lost his job or because others in the hierarchy are out to sink him. There are even fewer cases in which books with small advances have had large print orders, but here venery and caprice are the only applicable factors and it is impossible to do anything about them.

  THREE: Although matters have changed somewhat in the last half decade, science fiction is still regarded by the nonspecialist publishers as a minor category and the science fiction editor is low in relative standing; this means for all intents and purposes that if a writer’s editor is fired or quits his job, the writer is finished with the publisher . . . the writer simply has no individual cachet for the publisher; he is an anonymous part of someone’s “science fiction list.” Accordingly one does not cultivate publishers but editors, and if one is fortunate, one’s editor will remain at a post for a long time acquiring autonomy and prestige, or will go onto other publishers at an increasing level of responsibility, finally achieving a position of full autonomy.

  FOUR: There is no point in trying to construct a saleable novel by studying and then reproducing material which (even if recently published) is already on the stands or in the bookstores; the reality of publishing, because of the nature of the production and editorial processes, is at least two years ahead of books being published today (and the books two years behind). Attempts to reproduce the mood, subject, or style of freshly successful writers is only to remind the editors of what naïfs they were a couple of years ago, and besides, they already have published stuff like that. You are far better off trying to reproduce the sense, subject, and style of much older work, the forties and fifties novels; that is where the field reposes and probably always will. (You are almost certainly doomed if you attempt at the beginning of your career to do truly innovative, original work. You will not sell it. You may scatter a few such short stories here and there but the novel market is blocked to you. The time to do innovative work if you are fool enough to want to is after you have sold a few novels, have some kind of cachet in the field, and have enabled the publishers to presume that you have an audience which is looking for your work and which you can take along with you. The publishers are wrong in this judgment, but they are wrong in most of their judgments, and simple, vulnerable, hapless creatures are not necessarily to be condemned for that.)

  FIVE: Never try to sell a novel to a publisher on the basis that although another publisher has rejected it, it has done so with a “good,” i.e., glowing, letter of rejection extolling the merits of the proposal and regretting only its inappropriateness for the particular list. Publishers tend to believe one another (otherwise why would they hire the same editors, publish the same writers, work from the same pool of freelance artists and copy editors), and a letter of rejection in any guise is nothing more than that. The only way to sell a novel in early (and usually in late) career is to represent it as new work, never offered to the marketplace before.

  SIX: On balance, and taking everything into account, including the residual rights, the small notoriety, the sexual prerogatives occasionally available at conventions, the shelf of collected works, and the feeling of accomplishment, not disregarding all of this but putting it in the balance, you would be better off going to law school . . . or if that is not your thing, becoming a temporary typist.

  1980: New Jersey

  Onward and Upward with the Arts, Part III

  WHEN I STARTED OFF IN THIS FIELD IN 1967, just a plucky lad with a sack over my shoulder, off to Ferman and Wollheim to seek my fortune, it all seemed very reasonable. The fact that no one had ever done it did not occur to me at the time or for several years thereafter: what I would do would be to write science fiction of such imposing quality and quantity that sooner or later it would seep into The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The Hudson Review, not the fiction you understand (later for the Hudson, but the recognition. “My,” I conceived of Phillip Rahv saying, breathing hard, brandishing Lancer Book X3418-B ISBN 0075, “this isn’t your ordinary science fiction full of monsters and stuff, this is quality lit. Let’s give this boy the push.” Soon thereafter there would be “At Home with Malzberg” sidebars accompanying the review of the new novel (surely from Farrar, Straus now), “Oh, I don’t know,” I would say with a fetching little laugh, tossing my head and inserting yet another cigarette into my elegant black holder, “I don’t know if I’m all that good; you have to understand that I’m just one of many. Many, many fine writers.

  “Why this field is filled with people who are doing literature, you might never be able to guess it from the magazine and paperback covers in which they’re forced to appear because of the economics of the paperback original market . . . but they’re quite as good as anybody writing in America today. Why, just for openers there’s A and B and then there’s C, terrific kindly old fellow who has quietly been doing wonderful work for the penny-a-word market for decades, and let’s not forget D, who has been underrated for so long and whose new serial in Worlds of If is really terrific, and then as long as I’m making a list, you ought to investigate E and F and G—”

  I had resolved to be generous, you understand. I knew of all the sullen, recriminative successes embittered by years of struggle and anonymity who held onto their recognition like spoiled children and would not share even a bite of it. I had been impressed by the stories of Robert Frost and Ezra Pound, determined to be unlike the former, who would not say a good word for any living poet, just like the latter, who told his Parisian publisher that if the choice was between doing The Wasteland or his own new volume, the Eliot work should be done. What must be understood about that twenty-eight-year-old version of myself is that although I was a fool, I was a fool of the kindliest nature. I really did not want to persevere or succeed at the cost of others, and if I did it was my intention to pass around at least a little bit of the success. (My first Ace paperback of short stories paid tribute in its introduction to several science fiction writers who I felt were superior to me.)

  I was a fool of course. An idiot stick has been described as pointing toward nowhere on one end, attached to an idiot on the other, and the stick was science fiction. In 1967 no science fiction writer who stayed within the confines of the genre had ever received critical recognition or significant commercial success. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. had published with some frequency in the field in the fifties of course (and knew as much about it as, say, Robert Sheckley), but he had begun in the middle of the decade to disassociate himself from science fiction as vocally and persistently as he could; his denials that he was a science fiction writer and his refusal to publish his books under category imprint or his stories in the genre magazines had, along with good acquaintanceship, put him in the position finally in 1968 with the publication of Slaughterhouse Five to find recognition and enormous audience as a “serious” writer. Richard McKenna’s first publications were all science fiction short stories (and several of them were ou
tstanding), but his first novel, The Sand Pebbles, was of course a near-date historical and was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post and picked up by the book clubs without even the knowledge that he had published in the field. Ray Bradbury had at least started off within the genre but soon enough his stories, all rejected (but one) by John W. Campbell, were appearing in the bottom-line pulp magazines and Weird Tales, and then in one postwar burst in the mass-circulation magazines; The Martian Chronicles was regarded as the work of a fantasist who had had only glancing acquaintance with science fiction, and Bradbury’s ascent came via the best-of-the-year short story collections, script work, and Playboy magazine. No other writer who had published in quantity in the genre had, as of 1967, had even a whiff of serious attention from the academic critics or the quarterlies.

  The question arises soon enough—it always has when I have discussed this issue in public or even in small, clamorous trysts in restaurants or bars—as to exactly why I wanted critical recognition and what that critical recognition, then or now, would have been worth in terms of audience, income, or general karmic peace. The answer is one I would prefer to table within this context; the question is not contemptible and the answer may have to do more with my own personal conflicts and difficulties than it does with market realities. For the moment it is sufficient to say that no serious writer can be taken seriously in his time (and usually for all time) unless the academic critics pay him some attention, and I felt then (I am not nearly so sure now) that I was a serious writer. With the general trade imprints, the O. Henry Awards collection or the college anthologies closed to my science fiction, there was no chance of achieving reputation for the work that I had elected to do . . . I could have, in somewhat Vonnegut-fashion, ceased to write science fiction and come at the academies from a different direction, but I did not think that was quite fair . . . I would have had to partly repudiate and totally abandon the work that I cared to do and was doing well. So simple equity and justice were one motivation, and the other was that if I had achieved critical attention, I might have had at least the option of finding a university teaching position, a cachet absolutely unavailable to a science fiction writer at that time. (Matters have changed since then but not too greatly.)