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

by Samuel R. Delany

  10.41. At the prospect of the dinner visit, Marilyn and I had taken out of the Tompkins Square Library (named after Vice President Tompkins, buried over in the churchyard at St. Marks in the Bowery), Nones, Homage to Clio, and The Shield of Achilles (and looked in vain for Kallman’s Storm at Castle-franco), read them over quickly (dwelling on “Primes,” on “In Praise of Limestone,” on “Shorts”), and returned them a few days before the poets arrived—so as not to have them ostentatiously lying about.

  Yet if you’d asked me just before that evening, I’d have said I was far more familiar with any number of other poets—Eliot, Pound, Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane, e.e. cummings, George Starbuck (“Oscar Williams fills a need, but a Monkey Ward Catalogue is softer, and gives you something to read. …”—Starbuck’s scathing acrostic was the intellectual secret of every bright fifteen-year-old with poetic leanings in the latter half of the fifties), X. J. Kennedy, Allen Ginsberg, John Crowe Ransom, or Gregory Corso.

  10.5. The morning of the eighth, I worked for a few hours on my SF novel, now called The Jewels of Aptor, stopping when the landlord’s carpenters arrived to start work on our bathroom, built into the kitchen’s corner, to go out to the open-front fish store around on Avenue C. Tramping about in the sawdust among the larger, cigar-smoking, rough-languaged men working there, Johnny, the redheaded near-midget fishmonger, measured me out a pound and a half of shrimp. A young man probably no older than I, in a bloody white apron, orange work shoes, thick gray sweater out at the elbows with a rolled-down shawl collar, his small, heavily veined hands sported frantically bitten nails, his fingers translucent from fillets and ice.

  Back home, with rice, canned tomatoes, some wine, onions, and curry powder, I got started on dinner as the winter windows darkened to blue, then black. Just before six, Marilyn came home from work. I slipped out of my jeans and flannel shirt to dress.

  10.6. Outside, the night was freezing. The apartment was swelteringly overheated. Steam from the saffron rice I was preparing licked up under the blue kitchen cabinets, with their painted-over broken panes.

  In my dark brown suit and bright red tie, I was, by my own choice, to be merely the cook and the maker of conversational filler. Though I was certainly as excited as she, it was, of course, Marilyn’s evening. Her two and a half feet of bronze hair were up in a bun; she wore a green wool winter dress, a bronze deco pin on her shoulder from which hung a brazen fringe. Charging in and out of our tiny bathroom off the kitchen, we were about as flustered as a nineteen-year-old couple could be, anticipating such guests, and kept making anxious quips to each other to the effect that we hoped they would be fashionably late, to give us time to get organized. In rather a frenzy, we passed from arguments on how to do this or that to hysterical laughter, then back, minute by minute.

  From time to time I glanced at the eye-level hole in the kitchen’s blue, blistered wall, within which sweated the copper pipes.

  10.61. About ten minutes before the eight o’clock dinner hour, someone twisted the key outside on our ancient doorbell. I turned to answer it. Unbuttoning overcoats over gray herringbone suits and somber ties, first Kallman, then Auden, stepped in. After I greeted them in our cramped kitchen, with Marilyn somewhat nonplussed behind me (I don’t think she really believed they were coming), I told them, “If we had a schedule, which we don’t, we’d be about twenty minutes behind it.”

  “Then perhaps,” Kallman said (as Marilyn finally got out her “Hello,” her smile, her hand …), taking a paper bag from under his arm, “we should all have some of this—” and broke out a small bottle of gin (not vodka, that night)—“unless you’re serving something else …?”

  There was also a small bottle of Noilly Prat in the bag.

  10.611. When I shook Auden’s hand, I noticed he was a serious nail-biter and, I think, fell in love with him a little bit.

  10.62. I took their coats and put them in the back bedroom. Left over from the housewarming (and we only had two real glasses), paper cups did for the martinis.

  Auden and Kallman were both big men, and our apartment was suddenly very small. Beneath the somewhat long, graying hair, Auden’s face had already begun to split into those astonishing crevices from the Touraine-Solente-Golé syndrome he suffered with—though they were not yet so deep as later photographs show them, nor was his increasing fleshiness yet so pronounced. For now, indeed, he was a handsome fifty-four—days away from his fifty-fifth birthday, though we didn’t know it.

  Through the opening conversation both men were as complimentary as possible about our apartment. They wanted to know how much we paid for it and told us they paid, I believe, $148 a month for their own St. Marks Place flat—which whispered to us of the luxurious life truly successful writers might lead.

  10.63. From Gail, I believe Marilyn and I had borrowed a copy of the 1949 translation, put out in Paris by Editions Morihen, of Genet’s Notre Dame des fleurs, called, rather rakishly, in English, Gutter in the Sky. The black hardcover had an oddly illustrated double-spread title page, which included a drawing of a seventeenth-century French wig in a little circle on the upper right of the recto. In the actual text, each new male character was introduced with a parenthetical aside, e.g., “(Perruque, nine-and-a-quarter inches.)” or “(Perruque, seven-and-a-half inches.)”: perruque means “wig” in French and is also argot for “cock.” (Apparently Genet omitted these bits from the 1952 Gallimard edition from which Bernard Frechtman did the current translation that appeared in 1963—unless they were extra-auctorial interpolations to begin with, inserted to spice up a text that, while lurid as to its depicted social milieu, was, in texture, all but nonerotic.) In the living room the book was lying on the bridge table my mother had given us, and on which we were to eat. Either Auden or Kallman picked it up; one of the other of them hadn’t actually seen the translation before, but I don’t remember which. The perruques were duly chuckled over. As I recall, Genet didn’t linger in the conversation.

  10.64. They approved of and cuddled our black kitten, Tamuz.

  “He’s a marvelous cat,” Marilyn told them, “except at four o’clock in the morning, when he decides to do his imitation of six dray horses pulling a beer wagon over the living room floor.”

  “Dray horses!” Auden declared, laughing. And to Chester, “This cat can imitate a dray horse!”

  Auden told a story about a cat of theirs in Ischia, who walked over his typewriter and sat on his papers, and whom I was sure I recognized, from his poems, as “Lucina,/Blue-eyed Queen of white cats …” Her initials, “L. K.-A.”, Marilyn and I had identified only a few days before as “Lucina Kallman-Auden.” After a bit Kallman suggested we three men remove our jackets in the overheated living room. We did—and opened some windows as well.

  10.65. Dinner was a very mild shrimp curry—and I note that the Noilly Prat martinis were probably a good idea, as Marilyn and I, still teenaged hosts, had only thought to provide (for four!) a single fifth of red wine.

  The conversation ranged from the preparation of escargots with Chester (“Really, the best thing to do in this country is to get them canned; the shells come separately, and you can always reuse them …”) to the fact that Auden had also at one time taught Shakespeare at the New School—as well as at Swarthmore.

  We outlined the nature of the controversy with Professor Lewis.

  Auden explained that “of course” my reading was right and that Lewis’s was “ridiculous.”

  10.66. Some years before, out of Pound’s ABC of Reading, I’d memorized two poemlets, by, respectively, Walter Savage Landor and Arthur Hugh Clough.

  One was:

  Dirce

  Stand close around, ye Stygian set,

  While Dirce on one barque conveyed,

  or Charon, seeing, may forget

  That he is old and she a shade.

  The other was:

  On Seeing a Lock of

  Lucrezia Borgia’s Hair

  Borgia, all that remains to thee these plates enfold:
/>
  Calm hair meandering in pellucid gold.

  Today, without looking them up, I couldn’t tell you which poem was by which poet. But I recall that evening, I recited one and asked Auden: “How do you pronounce ‘Clough’—‘Arthur Hugh Clough’? I mean, is it ‘Clow’ or ‘Cluff’?” Myself, I’d opted for “Cluff.”

  With the surprise of an adult realizing, faced with children, that history is running out, Auden answered: “It’s ‘Clow.’ Oh, it’s very definitely ‘Clow.’ Not ‘Cluff.’ Arthur Hugh Clough.”16

  10.661. Auden’s biographers tell of an Auden who, by the sixties, pontificated rather than conversed. Had he been inclined to pontificate that evening, he would have had a willing audience in Marilyn and myself. That night, however, both he and Kallman were convivial. Auden sat forward on our daybed, which doubled as a couch, alert and asking questions about everything. Kallman sat most of the time, more relaxed, back against the beige wall. Where had we gone to school? they wanted to know. They asked about Bronx Science. (In those days almost everybody did.) Most of the talk was, of course, directed to Marilyn, Auden conversing with her, while Kallman talked—about cooking, largely—to me. At one point, however, when Kallman returned from the bathroom and sat down on the daybed beside Marilyn, leaving Auden between us, Auden turned to me and asked: “And what do you do?”

  “Oh,” I said, “I scribble science fiction to survive.” Immediately I grew embarrassed.

  The science fantasy novel I had been contemplating back in October had grown, by now, to a handful of chapters. After a couple of weeks’ hesitation, I’d shown what I’d done to Marilyn, who’d suggested, as I’d hoped she might, that I submit it to Ace when it was finished. But as yet no one besides her at Ace Books had even heard of it, much less seen it; survival—i.e., money—was not even a question.

  At this point Kallman looked over. “What was that?”

  “He scribbles science fiction,” Auden said, “to survive.”

  “Oh,” said Kallman, not unkindly at all.

  But hearing my words come back at me like that, they sounded awful! What I’d intended, of course, was to maintain an appropriate modesty about an enterprise I took as seriously as anything I’d ever done. But what I’d actually managed to blurt was an untrue boast, laced—I could hear it when Auden repeated the words to Kallman—with the most ingenuous self-contempt. The conversation went on, while, red to the cheeks, I swore to be more circumspect about what I said in the future concerning my SF writing.

  10.662. It’s only small consolation, though I didn’t discover it until years later, but Auden himself had already noted, somewhere in The Age of Anxiety, that human beings are creatures who can never become anything without pretending to be it first—such as a publishing science fiction writer. I had managed to get in my moment of pretense; then I sweated for it the rest of the night.

  10.67. Before the evening was through, there was a fire in the paper garbage bag in the kitchen from one of Auden’s several times emptied and refilled cigarette dishes (we had no proper ashtray). We learned of it through our elderly upstairs Filipino neighbors, who smelled smoke before we did: it had trickled from the garbage bag, to be sucked into that hole in the wall, where it was drawn by the draft beside the new copper piping and into their rooms above.

  When I opened the kitchen door to their insistent ringing, they blurted: “You have fire! You have fire!”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Kallman said, stepping up behind me. “There’s no fire here.”

  “Oh, yes! Yes! You have fire,” the wizened husband persisted, while his wife tugged at his arm and Auden and Marilyn joined us, all of us looking from one to another.

  Then Marilyn or Auden noticed the smoke threading up from the rolled-down rim of the paper garbage sack against the wall by the sink. …

  When it was out, and the couple had gone, and we’d been sitting and talking again for perhaps twenty minutes, the doorbell key was twisted once more. Once more I went to open it, and found myself staring at an old high school friend in a black leather jacket, who, as soon as he was brought awkwardly in and introduced (“Cary, this is Chester Kallman and Wystan Auden. …”), said hello, wide-eyed, and, recognizing the visitors on whom he had intruded, stripped off his jacket fast enough to make it seem as if it had vanished, to reveal a tie and button-down blue shirt—the only time Marilyn or I had ever seen him wearing one. He stayed long enough to smoke half of a very thin Cuban cigar. (Would Auden or Kallman like one …? No; they’d pass.) Finally nervousness got the better of him, and he fled—as did our auspicious guests a polite ten minutes later.

  Marilyn and I were left wondering whether, despite the night’s adventures, the dinner had been a success or not. But we were pretty pleased with ourselves.

  10.671. There’s a process politicians know well: a hand shaken is a vote secured. The reason is simply that once the hand has been touched, all subsequent information about the politician’s policies takes on the character of gossip about a person briefly known; and to the extent there’s any intelligence behind those policies at all, the attention we pay to gossip is more likely to ferret it out than the attention most of us (Americans, at least) pay to politics per se. There is an analogous process in the arts, by which the great writer, once met, however fleetingly, ceases to be a passing, passive interest and becomes an active object of study. Shortly after our dinner, a copy of the old Random House Collected Poems of W. H. Auden found its way into our apartment, to be digested practically poem by poem. Then the Faber editions of the Auden/Isherwood plays began to arrive on our shelves. At one point I even had a photocopy of Auden’s bit of rhymed pornography, “The Platonic Blow,” about a gay tryst between the narrator and a mechanic. In later years I always tended to be at the edge of a social circle that knew Auden, though I never spoke to him after that night. A librarian friend in San Francisco claimed to have been picked up by him in Washington Square during the fifties. And in the spring of 1966 in Athens, in a moment of sun-shot beer-soaked Gemütlichkeit, outside a Plaka cafeneon, Gregory Corso invited me to lunch at Alan Ansen’s elegant Kolonaki home, with its warm gray walls and original Cocteau drawings. That afternoon Gregory cooked a casserole with many too many hot peppers, which Ansen and I sweated over but ate anyway. (Gregory said we didn’t have to, and didn’t eat any himself beyond the first bite.) But from that afternoon’s conversation about the book I was working on, A Fabulous, Formless Darkness, Gregory, still irritated over his culinary failure, made a comment that I took for an epigraph to one of my chapters.

  Nine years later, while visiting Ansen in that same house, some fifteen months after Auden’s death, Chester Kallman died.

  And in 1982 I found myself in the center of the confusion over the location of some forty pages of Auden’s letters to Kallman, found at 77 St. Marks Place by a friend of a friend, when, after Auden’s and Kallman’s deaths, the apartment was left open almost a year.

  10.672. Today Auden is certainly the modernist poet whose work I know best. Time tends to shift our allegiances to encountered gods. I suppose this all brings up the obvious, if pompous, question: What influence has Auden had on my own writing? Well, a few pages in one of my SF novels began as a pastiche of “Caliban to the Audience,” and another SF short story began as a commentary on Auden’s own poetic commentary, The Sea and the Mirror; but these are more in the nature of allusion than influence. Auden has certainly given me great pleasure as a reader on many fronts. But, as to writing, I don’t think influence per se is there. The reason is that, very soon, I knew his work too well. Writers who influence us, at least when we’re young (pace Harold Bloom), are not usually the ones we read thoroughly and confront with our complete attention, but rather the ill- and partially-read writers we start on, often in troubled awe, only to close the book after pages or chapters, when our own imagination works up beyond the point where we can continue to submit our fancies to theirs.

  10.673. I think it’s reasonable to suppose that, as
poets, Kallman and Auden were broadly and generously interested in what younger writers might be doing.

  That’s why they accepted Marilyn’s invitation.

  But parental transference working as it does, the visit was more important for us than for them, however it might have assuaged their curiosity: under the older writer’s gaze the youngsters’ self-critical faculties turn up another anxious notch. No matter how dispassionate or nonjudgmental the elder actually is, the younger can only read it as the awful gaze of History.

  This is not a bad thing.

  10.7. Next day, at work on The Jewels of Aptor, I went back and memorialized what I’d taken to thinking of as the Lewis/Auden New School debate over the interpretation of the Lear line in anagram.

  10. Karl Shapiro, “Auden,” The Harvard Advocate, 108, no. 2 and 3 (1976): p. 25.

  11. Hacker, “Prism and Lens,” in Separations, p. 70.

  12. Ibid., p. 71.

  13. Uncollected, untitled, and unpublished doggerel by Marilyn Hacker.

  14. Uncollected, untitled, and unpublished couplet by Marilyn Hacker.

  15. Uncollected, untitled, and unpublished limerick by Marilyn Hacker.

  16. A few years later, Auden changed his mind about the pronunciation; in a subsequently published “Academic Short,” he was to rhyme “Arthur Hugh Clough” with “enough.” But that night was “Clow.”

  11. My clearest memory of Billy comes from no more than a day or two after Auden’s and Kallman’s visit. At work, Billy told me his parents had given him and Bobbi two tickets to a new musical opening that night on Broadway, called Oliver! An article in the theater section of the Sunday Times had explained how the show, a smash in England, was now coming to New York. Throughout my adolescence, I had lived on Finian’s Rainbow, West Side Story, The Most Happy Fella. But this was based on Dickens; it was English; and, I suspected as we talked, though Billy felt musicals in general were not very interesting, this one might have some worth.