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

by Samuel R. Delany

  That day after lunch, Marilyn—who was correcting galleys—had simply decided she wasn’t going to answer the phone anymore. The next time it rang, she let it ring—till Ed looked up and asked, “Are you going to get that?”

  “Nope.” And Marilyn went on with her galleys.

  There was no blowup. Ed had answered the phone—which was for him. Later, though, he’d asked Marilyn if she would at least answer the phone when there were writers or other editors in or around the office. He went on to explain that he didn’t mind answering the phone, since most of the calls were for him. But it would make him uncomfortable if anyone saw him answering the phone and it turned out to be for her. In short, Marilyn had realized he wanted her to pretend to be his secretary. But he was discommoded by the notion of anyone’s mistaking him for hers.

  This bothered her enough for us to talk about it through an evening.

  Still, Marilyn was popular at her job. The surly elevator man, who took the editors up to the dingy offices in the old slab-doored elevator (both the elevator and office lobby floors were covered with maroon battleship linoleum), was famous for not speaking to anyone save in grunts. Marilyn’s pleasant “Good morning,” had elicited the first “Mornin’, ma’am,” from him anyone remembered.

  When, a few times, I went to pick her up after work at the dismal, ancient office complex, it was all anyone of the staff seemed able to talk about.

  9.31. On Wednesday morning, at Ace, there were editorial meetings, to which assistant editors were not invited. Marilyn had already realized that the only way to survive the work situation was to move up as quickly as possible. She had been a prodigy.

  Over several evenings, she put together a six-month publishing program for educational reprints of public-domain classics in demand in school programs, as Ace had already been dabbling in the educational market. She showed the program to editor-in-chief Wollheim, who showed it to the publisher, A. A. Wyn—who decided that Marilyn must be a “pretty bright girl.” The next week, Marilyn and Ed were invited to the Wednesday editorial conference.

  No, Ed had had nothing to do with the program, with its drafting, or with its presentation. But it was customary (the office manager told Marilyn) to invite male editorial assistants to the editorial meeting after they had been with the company six months as a matter of course.

  No, women editorial assistants were not invited to editorial conferences at all.

  But since an exception had been made in Marilyn’s case, it had been decided to move up Ed’s invitation by four months so as not to make him feel bad that Marilyn had been invited before he had.

  At the same time, I was having my own problems at work back at Barnes & Noble. The store was hooked into a kind of Muzak where vast 16-rpm records played the dullest semi-popular sop imaginable over the store loudspeakers all day long. Led by a young woman clerk named Sue, who was also a graduate student up at Columbia University, a bunch of us got together and got hold of some 16-rpm Mozart divertimenti (the original Muzak—but oh-so-much-better done!). The store manager, someone had told us, actually had a degree in music from a western university. A deputation of us went to her and asked her if we wouldn’t all be happier if she swapped the Mozart for the Muzak.

  Her response?

  “I can’t abide Mozart.”

  So that was that.

  Not long afterward I quit.

  10. Without him many of us would have never happened.

  —Karl Shapiro, “Auden”10

  My old elementary school friend, Johnny, had come to our rent party cum housewarming. Johnny’s father, Louis, had collaborated with W. H. Auden on The Oxford Book of Aphorisms. Along with accounts of Chester Kallman’s imitations of Diana Trilling at Johnny’s parents’ last Christmas fête, Johnny had given us Auden’s address and assured us the poet was a genial and accessible man with a sincere interest in young writers. I’d first gone to 77 St. Marks Place, where the two poets lived, at the tail end of August 1961 (the basement bar on one side of the steps up to the entrance, the printer’s shop on the other), days after our return from Detroit, to introduce myself to Auden and mention that my wife of a week was a poet who’d already won a number of writing awards and scholarships—but I learned from the slim, golden college youths subletting the place, who, when I pressed the bell button, came down to answer the door, that Auden and Kallman would not be back from Austria till September. Sometime later, toward October’s end, Marilyn took some poems over to their house, where she was received by Kallman, who, at the head of the first-floor landing, in a blue kimono, asked her what she wanted and somewhat grumpily took her poems in to Auden. One day in November Marilyn ran up the stairs, excited, with an envelope in which was a white postcard with a handwritten invitation from Auden to come to tea. A day or two later, the phone rang in our apartment. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Hello,” a vaguely English voice returned, the accent somewhat cut away by mechanical transmission. “May I speak with Marilyn Hacker?” I seem to remember Marilyn with an expression that suggested right then she didn’t want to be bothered with anyone.

  “Who shall I say is calling?”

  “This is Wystan Auden.”

  As I covered the mouthpiece, there was that swelling excitement and surprise, perhaps a little akin to fear, that comes at such a time. “It’s Auden …!” I told her.

  She opened her eyes to look quite as surprised as I felt, then took the phone.

  “Yes. … Yes. … Yes. … Certainly. … Thank you. … Yes. Goodbye.” She put down the phone and turned beside the small, polished wooden phone table (that had come, with the easy chair, from her mother’s). “He wants me to come to tea in two weeks …!”

  10.1. Here’s Marilyn’s account of her tea (not a full week after her birthday), from an interview twenty-five years and a National Book Award for poetry later:

  “I’d been moving furniture that day and looked like a nineteen-year-old girl who’d been moving furniture in paint-stained khaki work-pants and three plaid flannel shirts. [At tea, Auden] said a sestina I’d sent him wasn’t really a sestina because the six repeated words weren’t repeated in the proper order. But he was otherwise encouraging.”

  10.2. One of the poems she had given him was “The Song of Liadan,” whose source in Graves’s White Goddess (which, along with Pound’s ABC of Reading, was simply required fare for literary-minded adolescents in those years) Auden recognized at their November meeting. After they’d spoken about some of the other poems, he asked her if she thought Marianne Moore had a tin ear—a few years before, he’d dropped the

  “… week/ … physique” quatrain from the famous Yeats elegy, because he found his own rhyme tinny. As they talked, Auden reminisced about his boyhood interest in engineering—which, though she didn’t mention it, Marilyn remembered having read about in some textbook blurb on Auden in one of our old high school poetry anthologies.

  10.21. When she came home from her critique session, she wrote a nine-line fragment and a sonnet about the visit. The first recounted waiting for Auden to come out of the back room and join her:

  In the chill outer rooms of strangers’ houses,

  women’s rearrangements or men’s disorders,

  with nothing that remains to do but wait,

  chafing the cold palms between the knees,

  sometimes watching a corner of the ceiling,

  sometimes watching a small obtrusive spider

  skeletize a silken polyhedron

  from a remoter corner of the ceiling,

  [another order imposed upon the chaos;

  another chaos supersedes the order.]

  Someone is waiting in the other room …11

  If the “women’s rearrangements” were Marilyn’s own generalization placed, for whatever reason, on the Auden/Kallman domicile, the spider was there—in the upper corner of the room. (The lines I’ve placed in brackets were, a year later, cut.) And it was, yes, cold.

  10.22. Auden cam
e into the front room to talk to her. And the result was the following, written right after:

  We sit in a cold room. A. pours the tea.

  A gaudy twilight helps us hide ourselves.

  I try to read the titles on the shelves

  and juggle cup and saucer on my knee.

  A. tells me anecdotes that I have read.

  I poise a studied ambiguity.

  A. wonders will I turn my head and see

  the crumpled blue kimono on the bed.

  I pick a crystal ashtray up to watch

  its slow rotation slap a waterfall

  of iridescent limbs across a wall,

  fumble with cigarettes. A. strikes a match

  as the enormity of darkness swells

  upward in a cacophony of bells.12

  … ringing from the tower of St. Marks Church a few blocks north—or from one of the closer Ukrainian churches.

  10.23. If this was her serious response, her lighter one was some bits of doggerel, composed possibly even a few weeks before her visit:

  Critic, do not beat your breast.

  Though Chester Kallman is a pest,

  he must have done strange things to broaden

  the attitudes of Wystan Auden.13

  This was her private revenge on Kallman for being so brusque on her first visit to bring Auden the poems in the first place. Completely unconnected with the visit, but within the same day or two, Marilyn also wrote, on the blue flaking wall of the hall outside our apartment in heavy ballpoint:

  A tree can grow from any clod,

  but only Jews could make a God.14

  10.24. I am not a poet. Nor have I ever thought of myself as one. (A love for reading poetry, which I have, is not the same as a talent for writing it, which I lack.) But, like all young writers, from time to time I would try my hand at it—none of it, despite how hard I worked on it, very good. Marilyn’s response to one of my early attempts about this time (and it set me chuckling in our four dark rooms for an hour) was:

  There was a young man named Delany

  whose verse wasn’t overly brainy.

  When you start to get with him,

  he completely drops the concept of rhythm

  and after a while doesn’t even bother to rhyme.15

  I have never considered myself any sort of poet since. The difficulties of prose are quite enough.

  10.3. The furniture we’d been moving that November day—and the reason Marilyn was in paint-stained khakis (a pair of mine, I believe)—was to allow us, finally, to finish painting our apartment: I’d hauled paint cans from a store out on Avenue B; Marilyn had carried a ladder up from the basement; we’d bought trays and rollers and started in that morning, covering the dead lead white with an innocuous beige.

  The whole project had begun with an argument. Did we have to paint the house this very weekend, right then and there? I was writing a novel, and I wanted to work on it.

  Yes, we did. Marilyn was miserable. We’d been living in the place, unpainted, getting on more than two months, saying we’d get to it every week. And a new coat of paint alone, she explained, would cheer her up.

  And Marilyn miserable could be pretty daunting.

  So we’d painted—Marilyn taking a few hours off that afternoon to go over to Auden’s.

  When she came back, she threw herself into the work as well as into her account of the afternoon.

  I don’t think there was a great deal of argument that evening as, into the night, we slathered beige over the ceiling and walls.

  The only moment of dissension I remember was, when I was up on a ladder finishing a corner of the living room and Marilyn was on her knees trimming molding at the baseboard, at one point I said something that she took exception to. She returned, angrily, “Oh, for God’s sake, Mother—!”

  It came out with no irony. But a moment later, as she heard what she’d said, we both began laughing.

  10.31. Marilyn was a very logical and analytical young woman. Though her miseries could be intense, she had a wonderful sense of humor and a wide, raucous silly streak. I’ve mentioned she’d been a Quiz Kid. She was also an avid SF reader—as was I—by the time we met at the Bronx High School of Science. Having been a certified child prodigy, she was somewhat wary about exposing herself to new areas of information. Since she’d always been able to turn in a pretty spectacular intellectual performance in just about any area she tried, the prospect of being a beginner again was not one she cherished. But new life experiences, on the contrary, she sought out with astonishing gusto, given that she was physically so frail. And for Marilyn poetry—and everything connected with it, from criticism to material for poems—was, well before it was an area of knowledge, an area of life.

  In the years just before and just after our marriage, watching this thin young woman in thick glasses write her early poems, being around her while the detritus of daily life was transmuted into lines of dizzying musicality, not to mention being the poems’ first reader, was unspeakably exciting.

  It made my whole adolescence and early manhood an adventure—an adventure I was thrilled and pleased to be sitting at the edge of.

  A social situation had followed us through adolescence, however, that, till now, has escaped these pages. By temperament I was both more outgoing and easygoing than Marilyn. Prose is easier for most people to talk about at length than poetry. And there are simply more social models available both for being and for dealing with male artists than there are for being and dealing with women artists. Several times Marilyn had found new groups of friends who had become terribly excited by her work, her wit, and her intelligence. Marilyn would introduce me to them. And over a period of days, weeks, months, there would be a clear shift of interest, away from her and toward me. At first I basked in it; and Marilyn worried about it.

  Then we both worried.

  Marilyn’s worries tended to be in terms of what it meant. Did it mean there was something wrong with her work? Did it mean there was something wrong with her?

  I worried because I hated the effect it had on Marilyn. However pleasant it might be for me, it was a situation that, with repetition after repetition, caused her hurt and insecurity. That I believed completely in the power and art of her writing meant that, for support, she had to turn again and again to the source of the pain. It was not a situation to make any artist happy and relaxed. Rightly or wrongly, my perception was that all our lasting friends sensed this social situation and—the good friends—in the deployment of their attention between us and between our work, tried to compensate for it. And I was terribly grateful that they did. But if that were true, Marilyn wondered, didn’t it mean that when they talked about her work they weren’t really all that interested in it? Did it mean they would rather have been talking to me about mine? For me these were non-problems: for a youngster from my multiple worlds, such compensation was what good manners said you did for everyone. Why should someone you like, love, and respect be an exception? For Marilyn, however, a young woman from a culture where “good manners” and sincerity were always seen to be somehow at odds, my even speaking of it in such terms only opened up possibilities for her of silent deceptions, unspoken contempt (was there something wrong with her manners …?), secret judgments: it just went round and round, the grooves becoming raw and painful.

  Marriage itself had been a way to escape some of these social and artistic anxieties—though, as we brought the mortar and brick out of which they were built along with us pretty much wherever we went (while society laid out the blueprints for their construction), they did not dissipate. We knew Auden and Kallman were homosexual. Wouldn’t they likely become more interested in a bright and attractive young man than in maintaining an interest in a young woman poet, however talented …?

  10.32. Besides both poetry and doggerel, Marilyn also wrote, at my urging, a note to Auden thanking him for his time and asking whether he and Kallman might come to dinner.

  Auden returned a friendly note saying they wo
uld indeed come, but that they were busy all through the Christmas season and, really through January as well. They would not be free till after the first week in February. Marilyn responded with a note giving them their choice of Monday, February the eighth, or Friday, February the twelfth.

  Auden phoned to accept for the eighth.

  10.4. At the time what I knew of Auden’s work was largely his half dozen overanthologized warhorses. A few years before, I’d seen him read on the Sunday morning television show “Camera Three” (and had become an admirer, through that reading, of his poem “The Shield of Achilles”). And I’d watched the NBC Opera production, on Channel 4, of The Magic Flute, with the young Leontyne Price as the Queen of the Night, more or less unaware that Auden and Kallman had translated (and rearranged) the Schikaneder libretto. Years before that, while working at a summer job as a page at the St. Agnes Branch of the New York Public Library when I was fifteen, I’d spent an hour or so in the basement with the score of The Rake’s Progress, where I’d traced out, between Stravinsky’s staves of neoclassic melody, Auden’s and Kallman’s verbal inventions for Tom, Shadow, Ann, and the bearded Baba-the-Turk. And only months ago, in the Barnes & Noble basement, where I’d gotten that first postmarital job, I’d stolen several hours over several days and, back in the basement stacks, perched on the top of a ladder, my head among the asbestos-covered pipes with purple rounds of light falling on the page from the dirty glass tiles in the sidewalk above, now and again blocked by overhead pedestrian feet, I’d read Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (as well as The Sea and the Mirror, with which it had been published). I felt, as I suspect many of its forties and fifties readers did, that it was a more ambitious, focused, and finally better poem than The Waste Land, some of whose themes it shared. The fact that Auden’s poems had been written twenty years after Eliot’s had not really registered. After all, the two names had always appeared in the same sentences in the introductions to the various high school poetry anthologies where I’d first met them. To me, at nineteen, both Auden’s and Eliot’s efforts were simply “modernist works.”