And when he read Beta-2, he said, “It’s a nice little story. It’ll make a good short side on a double. Of course, you know, we only pay seven fifty for those. …”
39.5. When it began to grow warmer, I gave Phil another call. Yeah, why don’t you drop by. So I did. At his apartment he played me some wonderful old Folkways records. Friends were staying with him that week, Jim and Jamey—a gay couple, heavily into S& M, who’d been together ten years and were, respectively, a nuclear physicist and a sometime journalist. They’d left New York to live in Washington when Jim (the elder and physicist) had gotten a government advisory job. There was another funny story about Hal, of course.
Jim, Jamey, and Phil had met in an S& M encounter, several years back, where they’d become good friends. Now, whenever Jim and Jamey came to New York, they stayed with Phil. In memory of whatever scene had brought them together, when they came to visit Jim would piss in a couple of empty beer bottles and leave them in the refrigerator for Phil. Nobody considered possible problems, but one day Hal had gone to the icebox, seen an open bottle, and thought, well, it wasn’t there this morning, why open a new one? I’ll just finish this one up, unless it’s completely flat—
“Jesus Christ, Phil! What the hell have you got in here …?” This had occasioned an apartment-wide discussion, involving not only Hal and Phil, Jim and Jamey, but also Hal’s girlfriend, a twenty-five-year-old lawyer named Lilly. Magnanimously, Jim proposed that, from now on, he would leave the piss on the left side of the refrigerator and the beer would be clearly separated from it on the right side. …
Hal’s response? Fuck that! For the duration of Jim’s and Jamey’s stay, he’d do his beer drinking outside the house in bars, thank you!
Telling me this, Phil laughed. “For a straight guy, Hal’s pretty tolerant—some of the things that go on here … well, how we stay friends, sometimes I really don’t know.” Minutes later, Hal—with lawyer Lilly—came in from work. Jim and Jamey came in only minutes on. At the time, Jim was about forty-five years old and regal in black leather: pants, vest, boots, jacket, and cap. Phil had cooked something for dinner and there was enough for everyone: so we all sat in the living room and ate it. And I found myself for the first time in a conversation I’ve had many times since when straight people and gay men talk about sex together—which, somehow, we began to do.
“Given the comparatively huge amount of sex available to homosexual men,” I asked Hal and Lilly, “I still don’t understand how heterosexuals survive within the institutionalized scarcity system imposed on them by society.”
Their answers were not very clear or sure. What exactly did I mean?
Well, did Hal and Lilly realize, Phil asked, taking the topic up, that any of the four queers in the room could walk out of the apartment and, within fifteen minutes, find someone to have sex with, to orgasm, without even having to pay bus fare?
“Well,” leather-clad Jim said, over his beer, “say forty-five minutes—for those of us a little older.”
I was by then within weeks, one way or the other, of twenty-two. And though Jim was more than twenty years my senior, I was (back then) sure he was exaggerating.
It was a long and interesting discussion, with Lilly—in her smart orange number from Bonwit’s—saying lots of very sharp things. Hal did a lot of listening and, now and then, asked a pertinent question. I probably did a lot of talking. And when, around ten-thirty, I got ready to go home, Phil walked with me into the hall.
As I started down the steps, he took my shoulder. “I’m really glad you said those things you did tonight—and that we all talked about what we did. They needed to hear that. That was very good. Thank you.”
I was a little surprised. Since Phil and Jim and Jamey had all seemed so open about being queer around Hal and Lilly, I just assumed they’d always been equally open about talking of the realities of their homosexual behavior—which, apparently, was not the case. But there you have at least one scene from gay life—I have no idea how common such discussions were—in pre-Stonewall New York.
39.51. The sexual was—sadly for me, as far as I was concerned—out of my relationship with Phil. But Marilyn had articulated the rules for this kind of situation: I forced myself to function, refused to let myself go to pieces over it. And I suppose if you act a certain way long enough, it kind of seeps in. Now Phil came down to dinner with Marilyn and me; he and Marilyn took to each other right off. A couple of times Phil had both of us up to his house for dinner. Along in there somewhere Phil was out of work for a while. Marilyn introduced him to our friend Bernie; and for some six months, when Bernie was running International Authors’ Representatives from Mrs. Cavanaugh’s cubicle on the nineteenth floor of the ancient office building between the movie houses, at 220 West Forty-second Street, Phil became Bernie’s secretary.
39.6. My best friend that year was a guy named Dave—sometimes, especially later, we called him Big Dave. (Don’t confuse him with my composer friend Dave from high school.) I’d first met him as a boyfriend of Ana’s, when Marilyn and I still lived on Fifth Street. But that affair had fallen off. Now his two passions were handball and playing the guitar. He’d been born on the Lower East Side and lived in a fourth-floor apartment around on Avenue B. With a group of neighborhood boys (Bobby, Billy, Dapper …), he’d grown up there and only left home a couple of years before. He’d shown me photographs of himself from a few years back, at the end of a pear-shaped, pimply adolescence. But with all the handball, his hips had slimmed, his shoulders had broadened, and a final, late, two inches of growth had brought him up to six feet, to make a well-above averagely attractive twenty- or twenty-one-year-old. Over the same time, his halting guitar technique had improved till it rivaled mine; and, through concerted practice, he’d strengthened his voice from a faltering baritone to a firm, pleasing tenor. (Anyone hearing the two of us would pronounce him the far better singer.) Exploring his own heterosexual map, Dave was trying to adjust to the fact that fat, smart women were far more sexually attractive to him than women who met more ordinary beauty standards—an adjustment that took some real self-examination and maturing for a young man whose looks I’d heard more than three people describe, when he was not there, with the cliché “like those of a Greek god.” For a while Dave worked at a place called Bob’s Bargain Books on the north side of Forty-second Street, just west of Sixth Avenue—a walk-in vastness of secondhand men’s magazines and soft-core porn.
Once he’d got me a job there, and for six weeks I’d worked behind the cash register for balding, cynical, cigar smoking Bob. Dave and I did a lot of talking over that time—I have no memory of first telling him I was homosexual. But I know when I did, he already knew it.
One of the reasons it didn’t bother him, he explained, was because two of his best friends, Joe and Paul, were a gay couple who lived in the rear apartment on the first floor of his own building. They were both from Philadelphia. They’d gotten together when Paul was seventeen and Joe was twenty-three. Now Paul was twenty-three and Joe was twenty-eight. They’d lived here in New York for several years now. Paul kind of stayed home and kept the house together. Joe was a truck driver, with his own minuscule trucking company in partnership with another New Jersey driver. Joe was away a lot. But whether Joe was in town or off hauling something, their apartment had become the social center of the building. Dave volunteered to introduce me. I said, sure, I’d like to meet them, but it didn’t happen for a while. If anything, I think I was scared.
Once, going to visit Dave, I saw that the door to the first floor back apartment (where I knew Joe and Paul lived) was open. The sound of hammering came from inside. By angling my step a little on my way to the stairs, I got a glimpse through. A white guy in his late twenties wore workman’s greens, his short sleeves rolled up over muscular arms. With very thick fingers, he gripped a hammer’s handle, pounding at a nail on some up-ended table. He was bent over it so that you could see his brown hair was pulling away from his temples and thinning over a
coming bald spot.
A slenderer guy in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt was just bringing him a cup of coffee.
Though I figured the one hammering was Joe and the one bringing the coffee was Paul, I didn’t recognize who Joe was right away. Still, instead of going on up the stairs to Dave’s place, I moved to the door’s edge, out of the line of sight, and stood listening for ten minutes to the quiet conversation of two men who were clearly fond of one another, who hadn’t seen each other for a week, the returning one of whom, at the request of the other, was fixing something that had lain long broken in the house. But when, invisible to me now, Joe said playfully, “You really want me to finish this up? I’m too tired. You work on it for a while,” I realized I knew the voice.
39.7. On Central Park West one spring night, a lanky, nail-biting Englishman picked me up. Seems he was a painter named Peter. At his West Side apartment, the conversation ranged from his dog, a friendly Irish setter who kept bounding into bed with us, to Andy Warhol, an acquaintance of Peter’s who’d just left advertising about a year back to go into “serious art.”
We two became friends. As had happened with so many others, sex left the relationship early. Soon Peter was coming down to dinner, and a little later showed Marilyn and me a novel he’d written.
The text seemed totally confused—how could we tell him it needed rewriting? When we finally did, though, he explained he’d rewritten it already—five times! On a hunch, I asked to see one of the earlier drafts. I chose draft three:
It was a perfectly acceptable novel, with one or two simple structural faults.
It was a major lesson in the dangers of overworking a text.
Since then I’ve rewritten novels of my own many more than five times. But there’s particular work (orchestrational, organizational) appropriate to the first two or three drafts. And there’s another kind of work (stylistic, small expansions and small cuts) appropriate to later ones. To undertake the wrong task at the wrong time in the compositional process is not the way to craft the best book.
39.71. I write of “voice,” “dictation,” and the “energy” that resulted from it. But whether you characterize the phenomenon with metaphors from speech or writing or production, it came at quite a price.
39.8. The acrophobia I mentioned parenthetically in the June walk we’d taken across the bridge in ’62 had grown more and more intense in the first months of the year, so that by the time I finished Voyage, Orestes!, and a few months later The Fall of the Towers trilogy, I could not have taken that walk again. Even to be in a room with windows more than three or four stories above ground level was disturbing, physically painful. The muscles behind my knees would clamp in pain. My breath would grow shallow. My head would become dizzy. At the same time, another fear, metamorphosed distressingly and magically from the first, had grown up that I would, first, fall under a subway train and, shortly after that, that something inside me was compelling me to throw myself under an on-rushing subway car. But general anxiety was rising all through my life.
Two or three times that spring I woke at three or four in the morning to leap from the bed and stand, shaking, naked, in the middle of the room, unable to breathe, my heart pounding, a red film over everything that, as my breath came back, would swirl clear in patches. Shivering, I would lie back down, unable to explain what had occurred to Marilyn who now tried harder and harder to ignore my stranger and stranger behavior.
39.9. A winter’s night on Central Park West:
I walked uptown on the small hexagonal pavings. The trees flickered bare branches before the street lights. There wasn’t anybody sitting on the benches beside the park wall—it was too cold. Hands in my pockets, I trudged from the kiosk at Fifty-ninth Street, up by the great named apartment buildings on the far side of the street, the San Remo, the Dakota, past the semicircular plaza with Humboldt’s bust, and the great, gloomy facade of the Museum of Natural History, all the way to Ninety-sixth, where the cruising was always pretty slim. Then I walked back. Then I walked up again. And back down once more. “Within fifteen minutes … ,” I thought. Sure. But there was nobody out. So I went home.
40. Sometimes I sat now at the round kitchen table, looking at my three published books and the manuscripts of the two that were to come out next year. Though I had a certain fondness for the Ed Emshwiller cover on The Towers of Toron, it had nothing to do with the cover of Captives of the Flame. The books were cheap and ugly objects. Since I’d started writing SF in the autumn of ’61, the five books Ace had bought had so far paid me three thousand eight hundred and seventy-five dollars (there were two more “on publication” payments to go, one of five hundred, one of three seventy-five) and a fan letter that claimed I didn’t exist. The whole situation seemed odd, awkward, incongruous. Certainly the sum of what I pulled in from tourists in the coffee shops over the warmer months of those same years probably—no, certainly—came to more than that. I looked at them, lifted them, paged through them, played with them for what seemed like hours, hours that spread over days, hoping that somehow they might seem more familiar. And from still another publisher Voyage, Orestes! had been rejected yet again as too long, too literary, too unwieldy. …
40.1. At least two editors who have read over these recollections and one friend to whom I’ve shown an early draft, have, all three and independently, shared one response among them: “Chip, you’ve got to tell your readers what Voyage, Orestes! was about! At least give us a synopsis—if only for a paragraph or so. Not knowing what was going on in it … well, the more you talk about working on it, the more our not knowing what it deals with becomes a kind of ache, like a hole in the gut you just want, somehow, to fill! Come on …!”
But if such an ache is there, to whatever extent, among some of you, let me, rather than assuage it, do something else to it with an alternate synopsis of what was actually two letters and a phone call I received a dozen years later in 1977:
“Hello? Mr. Delany …?”
“Speaking.”
“About ten years ago, in 1967, I got my first job in publishing. While I was there, your agent submitted a huge novel of yours to us. It was called Voyage, Orestes! I happened to get hold of it, and it simply blew me away. I kept the manuscript three weeks and read it through two-and-a-half times. I even called up friends to read sections from it to them on the phone. It was very powerful. And, I thought, very important. But I was twenty-five and an editorial assistant who’d been at the company less than a month. We rejected it, of course. It was completely outside the purview of what we were doing back then: your central character was bisexual, your narrator, telling all about him, was black; and there was just nothing in it for the middle American audience we thought back then every piece of fiction we published had to appeal to. But as you can see, I remember it pretty well. Indeed, I’ve been expecting to see it published by someone any month now—for going on ten years.”
“It’s very nice of you to take the time to tell me,” I said. “But what’s the purpose of this call?”
For the last six months, he explained, he’d been a senior editor at another publishing house. If Voyage, Orestes! hadn’t been published yet, he wanted to consider it for publication now. Indeed, when a large novel of mine called Dhalgren had appeared a few years ago, he’d assumed it was some version of the earlier book. But, as he’d finally gotten to reading the new novel, he’d realized there was no relation between the two. But that’s why he’d taken so long to call me.
I thanked him for his interest but told him I couldn’t show him the earlier novel.
Had somebody else bought it? He wanted to know. Now that Dhalgren was doing so well, had he managed to make his call a week or six months too late?
“No,” I said. “It’s not that. Voyage, Orestes! doesn’t exist any more.”
“Pardon me …?”
“It doesn’t exist,” I repeated. “There’s no way to see it.”
“I hope,” he said, after a moment, “you didn’t get discourag
ed because it wasn’t being taken and … destroyed it, or something. Mr. Delany, it was a very wonderful—”
“It’s probably presumptuous of me,” I said, “but I think so, too. No, I didn’t destroy it, though. It was lost.”
“Lost …?” There was another pause. “Mr. Delany, how in the world do you lose a thousand-page novel?”
“My agent,” I said, “was moving from one office to another back in ’68. There was a large carton in which he apparently packed a whole hodgepodge of manuscripts that had proved to be slow-moving—most of it general fiction, outside the genre categories, that he’d been submitting to various publishers for a while but that wasn’t getting much positive interest. The carton never reached the new offices. Everything in it was lost.”
“You’re kidding me. There must have been a photocopy, a carbon—?”
“When the book was written,” I explained, “in ’63, there weren’t photocopies—or, at least, there weren’t copy machines around the way they are now. There was one other full carbon, without all the final corrections. It was in an old wooden filing cabinet with a lot of other manuscripts—mostly carbons of my published SF novels, things like that, stored in the basement of a building I used to live in toward Avenue D on Sixth Street. When I left, a few months after I got back from a trip to Europe, the supers, a nice old Polish couple, Mr. and Mrs. Joreba, said I could leave the stuff in their basement indefinitely. It was there at least two years. When I learned that the first copy had been lost for good—for several months my agent assured me that the fugitive carton would have to turn up somewhere, but finally the moving company told him it was really gone—I was in San Francisco. When I got back to New York, I immediately went to see if I could retrieve the copy from the filing cabinet in the basement … the building had been torn down maybe six months before and was nothing but a lot full of broken brick. I even located Mrs. Joreba again. She said as far as she knew, the papers—just the wooden drawers had been put down there, actually, with all the stuff still in them, under an old tarpaulin for protection as the frame had already split—were still in the basement when demolition began. She hadn’t known where I was, and so couldn’t have let me know. And I’d told them the stuff in them wasn’t that important, anyway—until the manuscript was lost, it wasn’t.”
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Page 33