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

by Samuel R. Delany

  Still, I was surprised when, toward the end of the month, Don rejected them. (“I don’t think they quite make a book, Chip. So I’ll pass on them.”) But it brought home a lesson every young writer must learn: just because one book or one story or one poem has placed, this doesn’t mean that one is “in”—indeed, the condition of “in-ness” itself is only an illusion of people who are out.

  Back in February, hadn’t Auden himself mentioned in passing some poem of his that had recently been rejected?

  Coming down from the new Ace offices—for, shortly after Marilyn left off working there, they had moved into a bright, modern building on Sixth Avenue and Forty-third Street—I considered the cutting and the rejection.

  The result was that I decided to come up with an SF project of density and seriousness.

  17.1. What changes occurred between the first autumn of our marriage and the first spring?

  After a brief bout of full-time in the Barnes & Noble children’s department, working under an energetic blond character with a handsome, hawklike face gone red and riotous from adult acne, I’d quit sometime after Valentine’s day.

  The largest change, however, is that we got a double bed (at about the same time I left B & N: it was a gift, but from whom I don’t remember), which meant we now slept in the front bedroom.

  One reason the bed remains so firmly in mind is because its springs were loose. On one of Marilyn’s last days at Ace, I remember, foggily, her rising and dressing for work, while I dozed on and off. I woke up as Marilyn came to the bed and leaned over. “Okay,” she said, “bye-bye,” and leaned down to give me a kiss.

  “Bye …” I said.

  As she stood up, I felt a blinding pain. It was complete and total and pure as the white light of death. It left me unable to move or blink or make a sound. Through it, as through a veil of magnesium fire, I saw Marilyn hurry from the room, heard her go through the living room and into the kitchen, and a moment later, close the door behind her.

  Somewhere in it I managed to gasp out one breath, gasp in another, trying some movement that—at this point—made me clamp my jaws and eyes.

  What had happened (and how I figured it out or how I got loose from it remains at this point a blur) was that one of the springs in the bed had suddenly come loose; the awl-sharp coil had thrust up through the thin mattress pad, the sheet, and jabbed an inch and a half into my left buttock!

  By the time Marilyn came home that evening, I was patched up; and the spring had been wired down.

  In the living room, the daybed continued to serve as a couch, till it was finally returned (carried on our heads, up Avenue B) to Randy and Donya, who’d now moved down to the East Side too.

  17.2. One evening I was to meet Marilyn up at her mother’s apartment for our ritual Friday night dinner. On my way up to the Bronx, when I got off at the 175th Street station, I decided to stop in and see what sort of sexual activity was going on in the subway john there. I’d never gone into that one before, perhaps because I usually came there with Marilyn.

  I pushed into the yellow-tiled space, with its dim, caged light-bulbs. There was only one guy at the urinal, a tall workman in greens and scuffed orange construction boots—which had, only in the last year or so, become standard wear for the nation’s laborers. I stood a stall away from him, and we glanced at each other. When I smiled, he turned toward me.

  I reached for his penis.

  Holding it, I realized something was wrong with it, but, for the moment, couldn’t quite figure what. For its thickness and hardness it was too short. It ended in a kind of flat stump, like a sawed-off dowel, without the collar or taper of glans, making me think he was uncircumcised. Only there was no cuff of skin.

  That’s when he said, a little hoarsely, “That’s what there is. If you want it, it’s yours. But that’s it.” And I realized that, either from medical procedure or some other, the first inch or so had been amputated.

  He came very fast.

  I wanted to talk with him afterward, but he zipped up once we were finished and hurried away. I never saw him again, though I looked for him. But the image stayed, unsettlingly, awhile.

  17.3. This happened late June:

  Various fragments had been gathering in my head for a few days now. I’d made a few notes in the spiral notebook I always carried with me.

  A surge of warmth followed an unseasonable spring coolness. As we neared the end of our first year of marriage, the tensions of the opening months had given way to a kind of calm. Ambling down the Bowery to the narrow stone steps that lead up to the Brooklyn Bridge’s central wooden walkway, Marilyn and I had been discussing the limits of the American “buddy novel” as a template for adventure fiction since we’d left the house. (Writing was something we could always talk about; often we took refuge in it when our more emotional problems threatened to swamp us. In the midst of high ire or deep depression, “Tell me about literature” from either of us was always a sign for truce; and the other would usually try to take up the topic.) As the late afternoon’s first violet understated the clouds over the sounds beyond the intersections of slant and vertical cables, we started across the bridge, talking about the problems of making the “social chronicle novel” as exciting as the “adventure novel” and worrying whether or not this could be done in science fiction.

  Among the conclusions we reached that evening, as we strolled or paused at the rail with the cars sweeping by below us, or walked once more, fingers interlocked, cables wheeling above, was that for a novel, SF or otherwise, to show any aesthetic originality in the range of extant American fiction, it must portray, among many other sorts of relationships, at least one strong friendship between two women characters. Also, the major heterosexual relationship would have to involve a woman as active as the man. (Leslie Fiedler was shortly to announce that the proper subject for the novel was “mature heterosexual relations”; and we were too young to realize the phrase itself might just be—in our culture—a contradiction in terms.) Both characters must be developed as human beings, we decided, before they hooked up.

  Do you remember the incident with the pockets?

  The women friends who dropped by our Lower East Side apartment that year seemed to have only one topic of conversation. Most of them were Marilyn’s university friends, and they were all moving from the world of the university and home to the world of work and self-sufficiency. The most frequent topic of conversation was:

  What do you do about jobs that advertised positions as “editors,” “travel agents,” or “stockbrokers” in the women’s classified section of the Times and that closed with the phrase: “Some typing required.” The inclusion of this phrase, all these young women had found out, meant that, regardless of the title of the job, you were going to be somebody’s secretary.

  They didn’t want to be secretaries.

  They had just completed university.

  They wanted to be editors, travel agents, stockbrokers.

  I must have sat and listened to hundreds of hours of conversation in which these young women tried to figure out strategies for how to deal with this. Some simply had refused to learn to type. Some refused to admit that they already knew. One strategy that, to me anyway, looked good at first was to respond to such an ad with: “I can type enough for my own correspondence,” which seemed to be putting it on the line: you lie to me, I’ll lie to you, and we both know what we’re talking about. The only problem with that tactic was that the people doing the hiring were not interested in hiring people who could—or who even wanted to—get around their strategies.

  They wanted college-trained secretaries whom they could pay two-thirds or less of the salary they would have to pay someone coming out of secretarial school with no college diploma. And mostly they got them.

  Yet this was women’s talk—and as such was as outside the official parameters of language as was the sex I indulged in.

  What was within language was what appeared in the Times: want ads for women editors, w
omen stockbrokers.

  But I no more considered writing about what the women who came to my house were talking about than I would have considered discussing with my mother-in-law, over Friday night’s overdone roast beef, the mutilated cock in the men’s room.

  17.31. For weeks before that afternoon, we had discussed what was necessary in fiction to portray characters of both sexes accurately: both male and female characters needed to be presented by purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous actions. With both men and women, the character’s economic anchors to the world of the tale had to be clearly shown. And I had already found out in one novel how hard, starting with these principles, it was to apply them egalitarianly.

  It was tepid stuff in the face of the analysis that, some six years later, the women’s movement was to provide in a clearly articulated critique. But by 1962 it occupied a good deal of our thought and talk—about eighty percent of it, if I recall.

  The experience of cutting The Jewels of Aptor to fit Ace Books’ sixty-thousand-word-146-page paperback-original format still smarted. I knew that SF series were often popular. We were talking about a sizable work. The idea of making this a trilogy of SF novels came up before we reached the first stanchion. ‘“Anyone can write a three volume novel …’” I said.

  “‘… All it takes is a complete ignorance of Art and Life,’” Marilyn finished. “Don’t forget what Oscar Wilde said.”

  I laughed. “Maybe I’ll just let on that I don’t remember.”

  But most likely what was in my mind at the moment, as we climbed the metal steps that led to the higher platform where the bridge’s concrete tower gathered up the cables all across the afternoon, was a memory of those nights, years before, when Chuck in his apartment and I in mine would listen to Jean Shepherd at one, two, three o’clock in the morning and he would discuss I, Libertine, by “Frederick R. Ewing” (a passing pseudonym for my favorite science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon), the first volume in a projected trilogy—how often had I walked along, rolling the words “projected trilogy” about on my tongue. (Yes, I had read Asimov’s Foundation trilogy when I was thirteen.) And here I was, daring to contemplate writing one.

  My high school senior English teacher had been a marvelous woman, Dr. Isobel Gorden, and a great fan of Conrad Richter’s The Trees, The Fields, and The Town. (Thirty years later, when I ran into her, with her husband, on the Broadway bus, she said with characteristic candor: “Oh, yes, I remember you very well, Chip. You could never sit still. You were always running around and involved in everything.” At least one bit of running I’d done at her assignment found me in the New York Public Library Reading Room poring over the Latin exercises of the fifteen-year-old Mary Queen of Scots on the scarred dark-wood tables under the green glass lamps, searching for some clue to the adult Queen’s conception of honor.) One incident from Dr. Gorden’s description of Richter’s novels always stayed with me, however: the kidnapping of the heroine’s younger sister by Indians in the first volume. “But then,” she had explained enthusiastically to our advanced-level English class, “she returns as an adult, who’s been raised by Indians, in a later volume …!” When Richter’s trilogy appeared in paperback, I bought all three volumes and plunged into the first. But after forty pages, I’m afraid I found it unreadably mucky. I’d even tried a brief parody, where the heroine, Seyward Luckett, became Swayback Lunkhead. But still, someone ought to have written a trilogy with such an exciting effect—thus the abduction of Prince Let to the forest in my own Book One and his return to the throne in Book Two.

  “That could work,” Marilyn said.

  Beside us, thick as an old oak and smooth as a winter sky, the bridge’s main suspension cable swooped below the walkway’s edge for a few yards, before rising toward the far stanchion, pulling with it its web of wound steel. North of us the walls of Manhattan and the walls of Queens drew together over green water.

  But the question remained, how to make it art?

  Formally, parallels and contrasts among the three volumes would provide the major aesthetic resonances. The first chapter of Book One would cut across all the social classes that the remainder of the story would deal with. The final chapter of Book Three would survey the same locations but in reverse order. (The notion of having each volume turn on a different slogan didn’t come until I began writing the second book.) The theme would be freedom. The story would begin with the main character’s escape from prison—no, better, just after his escape. The escape itself would be recounted in each volume, but each time from a different point of view. The prison escape in the first book would be an “objective” narrative; the second book would retell the escape from the point of view of a prison guard, which would deepen its meaning. The full meaning would not come clear, however, until in the final book it was recounted by one of the prisoners remaining behind.

  Myself, I’ve always felt that the stories we tell ourselves about the books which we only know slightly and fleetingly, by rumor or inflationary report, end up being even more “influential” than the works we encounter full on, absorb, judge, and come to occupy some balanced relation with. From well-read books we absorb the unquestioned laws of genre, the readerly familiarity with rhetorical figures, narrational tropes, conventional attitudes and expectations. From the others, however, we manufacture the dreams of possibility, of variation, of what might be done outside and beyond the genre that the others have already made a part of our readerly language.

  17.32. As we walked the bridge that evening, before a city skyline not yet dominated by the World Trade Center, the United States was already in the first years of the immoral and grueling Vietnam War. Glorifying war as a viable field for personal growth, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers had recently won a Hugo Award for best SF novel of its year. At the insistence of Ana, who frequently nudged SF books my way, I had read it, a little over a year before, while at my parents’ home, and my response had been complex.

  Much in the book had fascinated me.

  But much in it had appalled.

  I wanted to make my work an answer to what I felt (and still feel) was specious in Heinlein’s argument.

  We talked about War and Peace that evening on the bridge (I’d read it in the same month that I’d read the Foundation series), in terms of the proportions of the story to be devoted to war and civilian life.

  I very much wanted to write a tale that would deal with the real effects of war on what, some years later in his fine SF novel Camp Concentration, Thomas Disch would call “the fabric of the everyday.” If direct portraiture of military action took up more than a certain percentage of the whole, then by definition that portrait would be distorted—at least if its aim were social completeness. I would use the alternate chapters of the middle volume alone, I decided, to tell a “military tale” that would critique the soldiers’ relation to what was happening in the greater society.

  17.33. A night or two before that evening’s stroll across to Brooklyn Heights, I’d had another intensely vivid dream that was to become the assassination of Prime Minister Chargil at the dawn ball, which begins Book Two, The Towers of Toron. And there had been still another dream, of soldiers in a foggy landscape cupping hallucinatory seashells and flaming women in their dirty palms—an image I’ve since traced to an illustration by Don P. Crane in a child’s life of Goethe I’d read as a boy. That image would appear in the military novella that weaves the second volume. That particular evening on the bridge, however, while I knew both dreams would eventually provide scenes for the books, I had no idea where or how.

  17.34. I’ve already mentioned reading Auden, both before and after his and Kallman’s winter visit. As we mounted the steps of the stanchion to walk under the arched and cabled stone, I knew that I wanted my books to convey the same air of abstract topicality and compassionate analysis as Auden’s longer poems. I even considered calling the project And at the Present Time for a few minutes—a homage to Auden’s oratorio.

  For me at twenty, fiction
itself was the series of overwhelming effects from works I’d read in adolescence: the torture scene in Heinlein’s “Gulf”; the scene in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath where, after endless and exhausting trails, the Joad family comes upon the peace, cleanliness, and community of the government migrant labor camp; Dr. O’Connor’s “Watchman, What of the Night?” monologue in Barnes’s Nightwood. That evening on the bridge I decided, about as coldbloodedly as any twenty-year-old could who’d suddenly realized that, through a largely preposterous fluke, part of his meager livelihood might now come from making novels, that, in my SF, I would try for science-fictional effects comparable to those that, in my other reading, had so struck me.

  The Queen Mother’s interrogation of Alter in Book One was my essay in reproducing the Heinlein.

  Jon’s and Alter’s arrival at the City of a Thousand Suns in Book Three was my attempt to duplicate the Steinbeck.

  And Vol Nonek’s terminal monologue was my try at recreating the Barnes.

  What else had I been reading? Besides Gutter in the Sky, I’d also been very much enjoying Beckett’s trilogy, as each volume appeared in the early Grove Press trade paperbacks. For four or five years now, I had been following each new work by Camus to come out in Vintage paperback. Three years before, Judy had taken me to see the revival of James Waring’s Dances Before the Wall at the Henry Street Playhouse, where she led me backstage afterwards and introduced me to dancers Fred Herko and Vincent Warren. I had followed John Rechy’s stories, eventually brought together in City of Night, through their initial publication in The Evergreen Review, reading the “Winnie” section and “The Wedding of Miss Destiny” aloud to Chuck on his last trip up to the city, at all hours. In the second issue of Evergreen, I’d first read Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer. Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book was my personal nomination for the most successful novel of 1960. But it wasn’t till some years later that I began to recall these in a search for new aesthetic models. For now, the gut effects of Heinlein and Steinbeck seemed more trustworthy. Gut effects then, I thought, was what I’d best try for—compassionate analysis notwithstanding.