The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

by Samuel R. Delany

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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF SAMUEL R. DELANY

  “I consider Delany not only one of the most important SF writers of the present generation, but a fascinating writer in general who has invented a new style.” —Umberto Eco

  “Samuel R. Delany is the most interesting author of science fiction writing in English today.” —The New York Times Book Review

  Dhalgren

  “Dhalgren’s the secret masterpiece, the city-book-labyrinth that has swallowed astonished readers alive for almost thirty years. Its beauty and force still seem to be growing.” —Jonathan Lethem

  “A brilliant tour de force.” —The News & Observer (Raleigh)

  “A Joyceian tour de force of a novel, Dhalgren … stake[s] a better claim than anything else published in this country in the last quarter-century (excepting only Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck and Nabokov’s Pale Fire) to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of our national literature.” —Libertarian Review

  The Nevèrÿon Series

  “Cultural criticism at its most imaginative and entertaining best.” —Quarterly Black Review of Books on Neveryóna

  “The tales of Nevèrÿon are postmodern sword-and-sorcery … Delany subverts the formulaic elements of sword-and-sorcery and around their empty husks constructs self-conscious metafictions about social and sexual behavior, the play of language and power, and—above all—the possibilities and limitations of narrative. Immensely sophisticated as literature … eminently readable and gorgeously entertaining.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “This is fantasy that challenges the intellect … semiotic sword and sorcery, a very high level of literary gamesmanship. It’s as if Umberto Eco had written about Conan the Barbarian.” —USA Today

  “The Nevèrÿon series is a major and unclassifiable achievement in contemporary American literature.” —Fredric R. Jameson

  “Instead of dishing out the usual, tired mix of improbable magic and bloody mayhem, Delany weaves an intricate meditation on the nature of freedom and slavery, on the beguiling differences between love and lust … the prose has been so polished by wit and intellect that it fairly gleams.” —San Francisco Chronicle on Return to Nevèrÿon

  “One of the most sustained meditations we have on the complex intersections of sexuality, race, and subjectivity in contemporary cultures.” —Constance Penley

  Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  “Delany’s first true masterpiece.” —The Washington Post

  “What makes Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand especially challenging—and satisfying—is that the complex society in which the characters move is one … which contains more than 6,000 inhabited worlds and a marvelously rich blend of cultures. The inhabitants of these worlds—both human and alien—relate to one another in ways that, however bizarre they may seem at first, are eventually seen to turn on such recognizable emotional fulcrums as love, loss and longing.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Delany’s forte has always been the creation of complex, bizarre, yet highly believable future societies; this book may top anything he’s done in that line.” —Newsday

  Nova

  “As of this book, [Samuel R. Delany] is the best science-fiction writer in the world.” —Galaxy Science Fiction

  “A fast-action far-flung interstellar adventure; [an] archetypal mystical/mythical allegory … [a] modern myth told in the SF idiom … and lots more.” —The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “[Nova] reads like Moby-Dick at a strobe-light show!” —Time

  The Motion of Light in Water

  “A very moving, intensely fascinating literary biography from an extraordinary writer. Thoroughly admirable candor and luminous stylistic precision; the artist as a young man and a memorable picture of an age.” —William Gibson

  “Absolutely central to any consideration of black manhood … Delany’s vision of the necessity for total social and political transformation is revolutionary.” —Hazel Carby

  “The prose of The Motion of Light in Water often has the shimmering beauty of the title itself … This book is invaluable gay history.” —Inches

  The Motion of Light in Water

  Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

  Samuel R. Delany

  Contents

  Sentences: An Introduction

  The Peripheries of Love

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  58

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  61

  Acknowledgments

  A Biography of Samuel R. Delany

  If, then, the following narrative does not appear sufficiently interesting to engage general attention, let my motive be some excuse for its publication. I am not so foolishly vain as to expect from it either immortality or literary reputation. If it affords any satisfaction to my numerous friends, at whose request it has been written, or in the smallest degree promotes the interests of humanity, the ends for which it was undertaken will be fully attained, and every wish of my heart gratified. Let it therefore be remembered that, in wishing to avoid censure, I do not aspire to praise.

  —The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself

  SENTENCES: AN INTRODUCTION

  MY FATHER HAD BEEN sick almost a year. Already he’d had one lung removed. But after a time home—which he spent mostly in bed, listening to programs of eclectic classical music (Penderecki, Kodaly’s Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello) on WBAI-FM, all of which were new to him and pleased him greatly, or sitting up in his robe and pajamas working on a few ordered and geometric paintings of cityscapes in which there were no people (he’d always wanted to paint)—he began to grow weaker. Soon he was in pain. Toward the end of September an ambulance was sent for to take him to the hospital. But the attendants who arrived to strap him into their stretcher, there in the apartment hall in his dark robe and pale pajamas, were too rough, yanking down the straps and buckles over his thin legs that, by now, could not fully straighten. After asking them twice to loosen them, he began to shout: “Stop it! You’re hurting me! Stop—!” Lips tight, my mother stood, flustered, embarrassed, and worried at once, perfectly still.

  My father bellowed at the two white-jacketed young men,
one black, one white, “Get out—!”

  An hour later, my grown cousin (called Brother) and I helped him down the hall, into the elevator, out to the car, and drove him over to the hospital. Each bump in the rutted Harlem streets made him gasp or moan. The day was shot through with his fear and exhaustion. The pain made him cry when, in his awkward white smock, he had to stretch out on the black, cold X-ray table. I held his hand. (“I’m going to fall. I’m falling …! Hold me. I’m falling.” “No you’re not, Dad. I’ve got you. You’re okay.” “I’m falling …!” Tears rolled down his bony cheeks. “It’s too cold.”) He had difficulty urinating into the enameled bedpan as I sat with him in his hospital room, and he made little whisperings to imitate the fall of water to induce his own to fall.

  For most of my life, if it came up, I would tell you: “My father died of lung cancer in 1958 when I was seventeen.”

  Behind that sentence is my memory of a conversation with my older cousin Barbara, who was staying with us. She was a doctor. I said: “I guess it’s going to take an awful long time for him to get well.”

  Carefully, Barbara put her teacup down on the glass-topped table with the woven wicker beneath. “He’s not going to get well,” she said. Then, very carefully, she said: “He’s going to die.”

  It was, of course, the truth; and, of course, I knew it.

  It was also the kindest thing she could have said.

  “How long will it be?” I asked.

  “You can’t say for sure,” she said. “Two or three weeks. Two or three months.”

  Later I went downstairs to see Mr. Jackson.

  “Is Jesse in?” I asked his wife.

  “Sure.” Ann was a little woman with glasses and meticulous hair. “He’s in the back.” She stepped from the door. “Just go on in.”

  Sitting in the room that served him for an office, with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the framed illustrations from the young people’s novels he’d written about black children growing up in the Midwest looking down at us from the walls, I told him what Barbara had said. Jesse was a teak-colored man, with short gray hair. Somehow he’d managed to be equally close to both my father and me, an extraordinary accomplishment as Dad and I had been so often at loggerheads.

  “Yes.” Jesse put his pipe carefully on the desk, recalling Barbara with her cup. “That’s probably true.”

  He let me sit there without saying anything else, while he puttered around in his office, a full twenty minutes before I went back to our apartment upstairs.

  An early October afternoon a heavy handful of days later, we were called in the morning to go over, and, in the darkened hospital room, I smiled and said, “How’re you feeling …?” while my younger sister reached through the oxygen tent’s plastic, scored with light from the floor lamp, to squeeze my father’s long hand with its slightly clubbed fingers. His face was lax and unshaven. “Yes,” he said hoarsely, “I’m feeling a little better …” After I followed her into the hall, her own face broke slowly apart before she covered it with her hands to cry, while some of my aunts stood in the corridor, speaking quietly of the kindnesses of one particular white nurse from Texas.

  My sister and I rode home on the bus together, alone.

  Sometime near five, I had just stepped from the living room as my sister came out of her room in the back, when the lock on the hall door between us ratcheted. The door swung in. Then my mother and aunts erupted through, all at once:

  “It’s all over! It’s all over—the poor boy—he’s gone! Oh, the poor boy!”

  (That was one of my father’s older sisters, Bessie. As the announcement broke through the women’s sobs, why, I wondered, feeling distant, do we turn in stress to such banalities?)

  “No more suffering! It’s all over!” My Aunt Virginia’s voice might have been that of a traffic policeman clearing the road, as she led in my mother, an arm around her shoulders. “He’s out of his pain.”

  The four of my father’s sisters, Bessie, Sadie, Laura, and Julia, as well as my mother, were in tears. (Only Virginia, my mother’s sister, was not crying.) All six women—I realized—already wore black.

  That evening, over Mom’s protests, I went walking by Riverside Park. Dead leaves mortared the pavement around Grant’s Tomb. For some reason, sitting on one of the benches beside the public mausoleum, I took my shoes and socks off to amble barefoot on the chill concrete, beneath the mercury vapor lights, notebook under my arm. I’d been trying to write an elegy. It began, “They told me you were not in any pain …” because, for some reason, that’s what people had been saying to me about him a week now, even though every movement had made him gasp, grunt, or grate his teeth.

  Days later, in suit and tie, I sat beside my mother in the front row of folding chairs in the funeral chapel, watching Brother (the same cousin who had driven us to the hospital, and who had been running my father’s funeral business a year now, since Dad had been too ill to work) go up at the end of the service to the casket banked left and right by flowers, take the corpse’s hand in his, and, with a sharp tug, remove my father’s ring. Then he reached up to lower dark, gleaming wood. Moments afterward, outside the funeral home on Seventh Avenue among milling relatives and friends, he handed the ring to me and I slipped it into the inside pocket of my suit jacket, before I got into the gray, nestlike softness of the funeral car for the ride to the cemetery.

  Ten years ago, in 1978, while I was at the typewriter table in my office one afternoon, with Amsterdam Avenue’s commercial traffic growling by five stories down, I opened an envelope giving its return address as the English department of a Pennsylvania state college. Two scholars were undertaking a book-length bibliography of my then-sixteen years of published writing, to be introduced with a biographical essay of some fifty or sixty pages.1

  Honesty? Accuracy? Tact? These are the problems of all biographers, auto- or otherwise. But the very broadness of the questions obscures the specific ways each can manifest itself. Few of us are ever biographized—especially during our lifetimes. No one is born a biographical subject, save the odd and antiquated royal heir. I have never seen a book on how to be a good one. But, like anything else, having your life researched and written about is an experience, with particular moments that characterize it, mark it, and make it what it is.

  “My father died of lung cancer in 1958 when I was seventeen.” This is just not a sentence that, when an adult says it in a conversation seven or a dozen or twenty years after the fact, people are likely to challenge.

  And when, to facilitate my Pennsylvania scholars, I put together a chronology of my life, starting with my birth (April Fools’ Day, 1942), that sentence, among many, is what I wrote.

  I don’t remember the specific letter in which one of them pointed out gently that, if I was born in 1942, in 1958 I could not possibly have been seventeen. In 1958 I was fifteen up until April 1 and sixteen for the year’s remaining nine months. (Certainly my father didn’t die when I was fifteen or sixteen …?) WBAI-FM did not begin to broadcast till 1960. There were no Penderecki recordings available in 1958. Various researches followed, along with more questions; a sheaf of condolence letters to my mother turned up—one from a man I’d never heard of, now living somewhere in Europe, who recalled teaching my father to drive in North Carolina, when my father was seventeen or eighteen—the first time it ever occurred to me that, at some point, he must have learned. Finally, in an old Harlem newspaper, a small article was unearthed that confirmed it: my father died in the early days of October 1960.

  I was eighteen.

  Here’s a pretty accurate chronology based on one we prepared for the year and a half that straddled my nineteenth birthday, starting from the summer before, covering my father’s death, and ending a year later.

  In June 1960 when I was eighteen, because of disagreements over school policy with the administration, I cut my graduation so as not to be present to receive the school creative writing award. My father was ill. My parents did not understand.
I probably made little effort to explain it to them. But a few days later, at the beginning of July, with the son of a downstairs neighbor, Peter, a talented banjo player a year older than I and with whom I had gone to summer camp some years before, I drove up to the Newport Folk Festival, where we attended concerts in the evening and slept on the beaches at night with thousands of other young people. The notebook I filled over the four days there was typed over the next weeks to become an eighty-page memoir of the trip, whose title, The Journals of Orpheus, I rolled around on my tongue for weeks, for months.

  A few days later, I left New York City by Greyhound for the Bread-loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, where I’d received a work scholarship at the recommendation of an editor from Harcourt Brace, on the strength of one of my several adolescent novel manuscripts. (One was called Those Spared by Fire; another, Cycle for Toby.) Along with a half a dozen or more young people who’d received similar scholarships, I supplemented the partial tuition by working at the conference as a waiter. My roommate was a young black poet, Herbert Woodward Martin. The late afternoon in which I got back to New York City, my father came out to the living room, in his blue pajamas and robe, to sit listening, with my mother, to my accounts of my summer with Robert Frost, John Frederick Nims, Allen Drury, and X. J. Kennedy, smiling at my anecdotes, now and then hawking into the galvanized zinc pail Mom had set by his slippered feet, with a little water and detergent in it—till, in the midst of something I was saying, he rose and walked back into the bedroom; and I realized just how sick he’d grown.

  In September, I began classes at the College of the City of New York: Greek, Latin, and English, along with Chemistry, Speech (a required freshman course), and Art History. I joined the staff of the college literary journal, The Promethean. At the end of that month, my father went into the hospital—as I’ve told. I also resumed weekly therapy sessions with a psychologist, Dr. Harold Esterson, which were to continue, somewhat intermittently, through the early months of 1961.

  In the last days of October, after Dad’s death, I moved in with Bob Aarenberg, a nineteen-year-old friend who lived, as my family and I had since I was fifteen, in Morningside Gardens. He had taken a small student apartment on the third floor of a grimy building on West 113th Street, the St.-Marks Arms. Bob was an amateur shortwave radio operator, and the place was jammed with ham equipment. Upstairs in the same building lived science fiction writer Randall Garrett, whom I met, with whom I became friends, and to whom I showed some of my early (non-SF) novels. That Halloween, dressed as Medusa and Perseus, Marilyn Hacker and I, with a friend named Gail (Medea), hiked through a chill Washington Square evening to a costume party at New York University’s Maison Française, where a number of our friends, among them Judy (dressed as Comedy/Tragedy), were celebrating. Our regalia was inspired by a verse play of Marilyn’s, called Perseus, whose sections she had read to me over the phone, some weeks before, day by day as she’d written them.