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

by Samuel R. Delany

  Over this same period (September, October, November), during which I started school and my father died, I produced translations of Brecht’s “Vom ertrunkenen Mädchen,” Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre” (also a pastiche of his sonnet, “Voyelles”), and Catullus’s “Vivamus mea Lesbia,” as well as an original English version of “The Song of Songs Which is Solomon’s,” and some of Chatterton’s “Middle English” Rowley forgeries—using various English texts as cribs, such as Stanley Burnshaw’s international anthology The Poem Itself (purchased while at Breadloaf) or a recent paperback translation of “The Song of Songs”: no, my French, German, or Latin (not to mention Hebrew) was not up to the job unassisted.

  On the day before Christmas Eve, a City College companion, who shared both my Speech and my Art classes and whom I’d nicknamed “Little Brother” when we became friends in the first days of school, came over to spend the night with me at my mother’s apartment. At about three o’clock in the morning, an hour after we’d stopped talking and were, presumably, asleep, he suddenly sat up in his underwear at the edge of his bed and said, “I have to go home. …”

  “Hm?” I said, sleepily, from mine. “Why …?”

  “Because if I don’t,” he said, “I’m going to try and get in bed with you.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Come on.”

  “I don’t think you understand,” he said, softly. “I want to go to bed with you.”

  “Sure I do.” I held back the covers for him. “I want to go to bed with you, too. Come on. Get in.”

  And, a moment later, he slid down beside me.

  The next afternoon, when he left, I wrote some dozen rather jejune sonnets about it all—though I did not see him again for some three or four years. When the Christmas break was over, he did not return to school.

  Christmas passed, and on that snowy New Year’s Eve, I went to a party of a young musician and composer, Josh Rifkin, where the two of us went upstairs and, secreted in Josh’s room, listened to carefully and analyzed for hours the Robert Craft recording, just released, of the complete works of Anton Webern, while people celebrated downstairs.

  Midnight passed.

  In January 1961, I began my second term at City, continuing with Latin and Greek, dropping English, Speech, and Art, and adding History, Calculus Two (I’d received advanced placement in math, allowing me to skip Calculus One), and an obligatory Physical Education course. I became The Promethean’s poetry editor.

  In February I directed some friends, Eric and Esther, and myself in Marilyn’s Perseus: An Exercise for Three Voices. Marilyn was then a student at NYU: she had been my close friend since our first year together at the Bronx High School of Science. Shortly, David Litwin replaced Eric. Perseus was performed in the Grand Ballroom of the Student Center of City College on a Wednesday, once in the afternoon and again in the evening. It ran just under fifteen minutes.

  In March I was spending little time at my schoolwork; rather I would devote desultory bursts of energy to my own writing. I all but ceased attending classes. Here and there at various places in the Village, I played with the folksinging group I’d pulled together around me, the Harbor Singers (who rehearsed through the whole period at Dave’s mother’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen regularly on Tuesday evenings) and sometimes with downstairs neighbor Pete. I was an indifferent singer, but a passable guitarist. Probably in that month, rotund Randall Garrett took me to a party in Greenwich Village, possibly at John and Ann Hamilton’s, at which I met SF writer and critic Judith Merril, whose work I was familiar with through her anthologies and stories.

  From a September letter to Merril six years later, here’s my attempt to recall that night for us both:

  … Randy, a terribly sentimental guy, decided to take me to a party in the Village. I hadn’t thought about writing SF at the time, and was not even a proper fan. I was told before we left that you would be there, though. You I had heard of. You I had read and much liked, both reviews and your too-few stories. (Randy was wearing his opera cape that year and, en route to the party, dived head first into a snow bank and shed blue velvet in swirls across the snow as the neon lights of the bar went coral and azure over our heads.) You sat in the back room most of the party, we talked—you were sleepy? And went to sleep. The party left, came back at about five in the morning, whereupon you wakened. I volunteered to come up [town] … with you.

  I rode up with Merril on the subway to Port Authority, where she caught the bus back to Milford, Pennsylvania (famous to SF readers as the home of numerous SF writers, back then):

  We talked very seriously about SF on the subway from Eighth Street. You told me about your daughter … you were very nice and the Hope-we-meet-agains (you shook my hand with both of yours) had a nice warmth. …

  After putting Merril on the bus (according to the letter), I walked home through the snow-mounded city in the aluminum colored morning, from Port Authority to 113th Street—and burrowed into the daybed across from Bob’s ham equipment for a few hours sleep.

  Toward the end of April, at the Coffee Gallery, a small, second floor art gallery and coffee shop, then on Tenth Street, between Second and Third Avenues, I restaged Perseus—this time with Daniel Landau in the role of Voice Three. The program was expanded with a recitation by Marilyn of a poem called “Helen,” a ten-minute monologue presumably spoken by Helen of Troy:

  … The lute-player loves me. I can see his eyes

  perched like wing-clipped pigeons on my hand. …

  … Once did I pray for any power that can

  to pluck my womb and make of me a man.

  Thus, did I choose my sex? What choice had I,

  but to cause death or I myself to die.

  And when the captains call you, sighing youth,

  to change your notes for arrows as is dutiful,

  and when a note sounds life to dying truth,

  I swear you will not think me beautiful! …

  … the sea is the only lover.

  In her long dress (black), with her waistlength hair held back by a black band (and made up by Daniel in the tiny room in which we changed), the velvety-voiced eighteen-year-old poet brought if off stunningly. Added to this, I read a story of mine, “Silent Monologue for Lefty.” Now the program ran slightly over half an hour.

  The Coffee Gallery was upstairs from the printshop where Diane Di Prima and LeRoi Jones were producing The Floating Bear. At least once Diane and some of her friends stopped in to see the performance. The program ran on weekends, Friday and Saturday night, for five weeks, with audiences ranging from three to fifteen.

  In May I cut all my final exams. Unofficially, I had dropped out of school. (I managed, however, to fulfill my duties on the college magazine.) Over the previous six months I had written a number of short novels, with titles like The Flames of the Warthog, The Lovers, and The Assassination. Along with some earlier novels, I regularly submitted these to a number of New York publishers—by whom they were regularly rejected.

  In mid-June Marilyn became pregnant with our second sexual experiment.

  About then, a three-thousand-word article an editor at Seventeen magazine had suggested I write on Folk Music in Greenwich Village was rejected as “too informative.” A friend of the Harcourt Brace editor who’d helped me get my Breadloaf scholarship, she now suggested I try writing on something about which I knew less, striving for impressions rather than fact: jazz was something about which I knew nothing. So, early that July, I took off by bus to the Newport Jazz Festival, held on the same site as the Folk Festival. The three afternoons and evenings of open-air concerts included performances by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, and a whole afternoon Judy Garland extravaganza. At night, again in a sleeping bag on seaweed-strewn sand, I made notes by firelight before drifting off to sleep, while beer drinkers—an older and more rambunctious crowd than the Folk Festival had drawn—lurched about. On Monday I bussed back to the city to plunge into my article, completing it d
ays later.

  Back in New York, after the festival, I went with Marilyn to rent a four-room apartment on the Lower East Side.

  In August, with a loan from another old high school friend, Sharon Ruskin (nee Rohm), Marilyn and I took a three-day trip to Detroit, Michigan, where we were married.

  At the beginning of September I got a job as a stock clerk at Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street, in time for the September textbook rush.

  In October, almost exactly a year after my father’s death, Marilyn miscarried. She recuperated in my sister’s old room at my mother’s apartment. Two or three weeks later, she got a job as a salesgirl at B. Airman’s department store. Let go even before New Year’s, almost immediately she got a job as an editorial assistant at Ace Books.

  Probably within a week (certainly no more than ten days), after a set of obsessively vivid dreams, I began what, not quite a year later, would be my first published novel, The Jewels of Aptor.

  Looking over this bare and untextured chronology, it’s easy to read a fairly clear emotional story. My father’s death, my subsequent dropping out of school, and my hasty marriage speak of a young man interested in writing and music, but still under fair emotional strain. With the facts that I was black and Marilyn was white, that I was gay and both of us knew it, the implication of strain—for both of us—only strengthens. The story is so clear, I wouldn’t even think, at this date, to deny it.

  Still, it is not the story I remember from that time. While all the incidents listed are, in my own mind, associated with vivid moments, rich details, complexes of sensation, deep feelings, and the texture of the real (so indistinguishable from that of dream), their places on the list are wholly a product of research. And my inaccurate statement, “My father died when I was seventeen in 1958 …” is an emblem of the displacements and elisions committed upon that more objective narrative, if not a result of that strain.

  I have clear memories of my father’s death.

  I have clear memories of my first weeks of classes at City College, of my new teachers, of the new friends I made there, of surprises and disappointments and great excitement, of lunches with new and old acquaintances in the cafeteria, of trips between classes through crowded halls, of extracurricular activities, including a small choral group I sang with during the afternoons, under the direction of Allan Sklar (a former music counselor of mine at Camp Rising Sun), where we prepared for a recording of an a cappella version of the Orlande de Lassus’s Two-Part Motets.

  But there’s no connection between those memories and those of my father’s death in my mind. I retain no sense that one came along to interrupt the other. My entrance into college and my father’s death, instead of incidents separated by weeks, seem rather years apart. To the extent I retain any context around my father’s dying at all, it is some vague and uncertain time during my last two years of high school—possibly because I saw a friend or two I connected with that period right before or right after he died. Or because that was when he first became ill. Or because. …

  But I don’t know why memory separates it so completely from the time in which, objectively, it occurred.

  From the October a year later, I have clear—and painful—memories of Marilyn’s miscarriage.

  I also have clear memories of the afternoon back at East Fifth Street, when, waking from a nap, I became aware of the recurrent dreams that, a day or so later, impelled me into the writing of my first science fantasy novel. In the same months when I was writing through the winter, Marilyn, thinking of her miscarriage a little before, wrote:

  … The waxing body swells with seeds of death.

  The mind demands a measure to its breath. …

  Change is neither merciful nor just.

  They say Leonard of Vinci put his trust

  in faulty paints: Christ’s Supper turned to dust… 2

  Some of these lines I quoted in the novel. Still, I have no sense that the book began within a month or so of the miscarriage: only the chronology tells me that. In memory, the two seem months, many months, from one another; several times, when I’ve recounted the happenings to other people, I’ve spoken of them as if they actually were.

  In both cases, the disjunction in memory was strong enough to make me, now and again, even argue the facts, till their proximities were fixed by document and deduction:

  A careful and accurate biographer can, here and there, know more about the biographical subject than the subject him- or herself.

  My favorite autobiographical memoirs are Osip Mandelstam’s The Noise of Time, Louise Bogan’s Journey Around My Room, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Goethe’s Italian Journey, Paul Goodman’s Fire Years: Thoughts During a Useless Time, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of an African Slave, Michael McClure’s and Frank Reynold’s Freewheelin’ Frank, sections of Walter Benjamin’s One Way Street, and parts of Barthes by Barthes.

  With those brief and intense models shamelessly in mind (with the exception of the Goethe, the longest is just over 250 pages), I am not about to try here for the last word on event and evidential certainty. I hope it’s clear: despite the separate factual failing each is likely to fall into, the autobiographer (much less the memoirist) cannot replace the formal biographer. Nor am I even going to try. I hope instead to sketch, as honestly and as effectively as I can, something I can recognize as my own, aware as I do so that even as I work after honesty and accuracy, memory will make this only one possible fiction among the myriad—many in open conflict—anyone might write of any of us, as convinced as any other that what he or she wrote was the truth.

  But bear in mind two sentences:

  “My father died of lung cancer in 1958 when I was seventeen.”

  “My father died of lung cancer in 1960 when I was eighteen.”

  The first is incorrect, the second correct.

  I am as concerned with truth as anyone—otherwise I would not be going so far to split such hairs. In no way do I feel the incorrect sentence is privileged over the correct one. Yet, even with what I know now, a decade after the letter from Pennsylvania, the wrong sentence still feels to me righter than the right one.

  Now a biography or a memoir that contained only the first sentence would be incorrect. But one that omitted it, or did not at least suggest its relation to the second on several informal levels, would be incomplete.

  1. Michael W. Peplow and Robert S. Bravard, Samuel R. Delany: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1962-1919 (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1980).

  2. Marilyn Hacker, “Catherine Pregnant,” in Separations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), p. 23. Originally written in late October or early November of 1962 as an untitled sonnet in triplets, this poem was later incorporated in the Catherine series, the rest of which, based largely on incidents from the life of Claudie, first wife of painter and sculptor David Logan, were written a year or more later.

  THE PERIPHERIES OF LOVE

  THE DELICATE PURGATION OF a tongue

  turned back upon purgation: paradox

  within a more intriguing paradox

  of involuted mouth. The large eyes’ long

  panes reflect ritual violence

  hung in a room apart, the separate

  bright strands conglomerating intricate

  woven patternings of death and silence,

  the geometric flights of music, each

  intoning a formality in speech:

  If you are angle, I am complement.

  If you are circle, I am circumscribed.

  If my hands mold, yours is the form described.

  Your voice is my familiar instrument.

  I sound a note, and you complete the chord.

  Your eyes are an inscription in my hand

  that reads my face and tells me what I am.

  My singing resonates beneath your words.

  A more completes a move; as games are played,

  if I betray, you are the one betrayed.


  —Marilyn Hacker, from “The Terrible Children” (1960)

  1. Demolition for the Village View Apartments hadn’t quite finished: July dawns you could still wander the small streets (shortly to be replaced by concrete paths between scrubby lawns and red-brick buildings) and, among the devastated acres, catch sight, in the muggy morning, of fires here and there beside one or another still-standing tenement wall. Off beyond the Jacob Riis Houses with their green sliver of park, the East River’s sluggish oils nudged the city’s granite embankments or bumped the pilings beneath the Williamsburg Bridge: girder, cable, and concrete rose from among the delis and cuchifrito stands, the furniture and fabric stores, the movie marquees on Delancey Street to span the night waters—where cars and subways and after-dark cruisers took their delicate amble above the blue-black current banked with lights—before, above the Navy Yard, striking into Brooklyn’s glittering flank.

  In the summer of 1961 no one had yet named it the East Village: it was still the Lower East Side. It was the cheapest neighborhood in Manhattan. Rumors of three- and four-room apartments to be had for thirty-five dollars a month ran through the bohemian population of the city—as it was still called back then: the young people who came down to Washington Square Park on Sunday to play their guitars and sing, which included me and any number of my friends, or the slightly older ones who hung out in Village coffee shops.