The Engines of the Night (13 page)
Read The Engines of the Night Online
Authors: Barry N. Malzberg
Tags: #Education & Reference, #Literature & Fiction, #History & Criticism, #Movements & Periods, #Criticism & Theory
SIX: Science fiction which questions science fiction; work which questions the assumptions of the category and speculates on the effect it might have upon its readership. Silverberg’s two short stories and my own
Galaxies
(all cited elsewhere) are the last examples of work of this form; the most recent was published more than half a decade ago.
SEVEN: Genuinely feminist science fiction; that is, science fiction in which women are perceived to react to events and internalize in a way which is neither a culturally received stereotype (the bulk of science fiction before 1970) nor a merely male stereotype projected onto female characters. (Most of the female-protagonist work of the post-1970 period.) The women of contemporary “feminist” science fiction are not women but male characters with female names, genitalia, and secondary sexual characteristics; most of the advance into the era of liberation has only been in terms of new labels for an old constituency. I have absolutely no conception of what a true feminist science fiction would be, and I am more than half-convinced that I could not write it (although ideally male writers could do it as well as female), but it would be like nothing we have seen before and would bear little relation to the gender-changed 1940s pulp envisionings which are passed off as feminist science fiction today. (The only truly feminist science fiction story I can bring to mind—which is not to say that there might not be others—is James Tiptree’s [Alice Sheldon’s] 1973 “The Women Men Don’t See,” which shows a degree of submission, subtlety, and converted rage in its two female characters absolutely not glimpsed elsewhere in science fiction.)
* * *
This dismal listing—and there is no way to characterize it other than as dismal; give it to an aspirant science fiction writer and show the aspirant how to sink a career—in no way is meant to imply my own endorsement of the tabooed viewpoints. (Some are close to my gnarled little heart and others are my own anathema. Some I could write and more than a couple do not, to me, seem worth writing at all.) What I am merely suggesting is that a science fiction novel (and almost any science fiction short story other than by an important writer) flouting one or more of the taboos listed would be very unlikely to find a publisher. (It goes without saying that more than one taboo could be assaulted in a work. Bester’s
The Demolished Man
, which would probably be unpublishable today, took on at least three of them; Sturgeon’s long-promised novel of which the novella “When You Care/When You Love” published in 1962 is the supposed opening section might well cut through all seven.) It is what they call in Las Vegas or Atlantic City an out bet to suggest that no more than a hundred thousand words of science fiction published throughout the ensuing decade will take on any of these strictures.
And so the decade is launched. It is in fact well launched; the patterns of the eighties are well set: the conglomerates will dominate, fewer titles will receive more publicity, the magazines will drift away, the ambitious new writers will have a tough time. (When except for the brief glimmering between 1952 and 1955 did they not?) It would be easy to conclude with the clarion call for the ending of such taboos: liberation, ladies and gents, to the barricades, take on the stereotypes, muscle away the poltroons and the elitists, throw a flying fuck in the case of the Queen. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! as Lear pointed out (hopelessly) on the heath. If not such fervid cries, at least an ironic suggestion with a moue of the features that it might have been the very taboo-laden atmosphere of the late fifties which contributed to the near collapse of the field. A similar atmosphere prevailing today might replicate the disaster unless editors become adventurous, writers daring, readers insistent and so on. Onward! Onward with liberated science fiction!
It would be nice to round it off that way but I am distinctly middle-aged and have been a professional science fiction writer for a long time. I have been reading in the field for three decades. I do not believe that I could sustain the call to barricades without collapsing into self-loathing chuckles and ironic gasps, the kind of laughter with which attendants in mental institutions and bartenders in writers’ heavens all over the country are so familiar. I cannot sustain that voice because I do not believe that science fiction will ever become liberated
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(what is liberation?) or that if the ragged old form did that it would be to its advantage.
To the contrary. A true science fiction might destroy the field commercially, sending the majority of its readership away in confusion or horror. They do not read science fiction, most of them, to be disturbed but to be pacified. Science fiction indeed may be flourishing now precisely to the degree that it is saying less and saying it worse than ever before. The period of greatest economic and readership growth in the history of the field has coincided with the post-1975 shutdown of experimentation or ideological quibble. Science fiction has become big business; it intersects with the media which are feeding it and which it has fed so well, and the field is being run with negligible exceptions amongst the minor book publishers and the magazines by the very same people. Gulf & Western and Rocket Industries. The Music Corporation of Speculation. International Telephone & Terrestials.
And brave, brave new decade to the inheritors of the mantle of Kornbluth and Kuttner and Campbell. Could the twenty-seven-year-old John W. Campbell get a job today anywhere in the industry? Would they let Horace stay in his apartment while the galleys were slipped underneath the door?
1979/1980: New Jersey
The Richard Nixon-John B. Mitchell-Spiro Agnew Blues
S
CIENCE FICTION IS NOT NECESSARILY
a cultural microcosm (and then again perhaps it is; the boys in the back room of the fifties indeed felt they were building a better world), but confluence in the political life of the Republic and the market news was striking in the mid-seventies. The collapse of the market for “experimental,” “literary,” “avant-garde,” “downbeat,” “technophobic,” or “depressing” science fiction can be placed within virtually a month of Nixon’s speedy and insufficiently dramatic eviction from high office; by the end of 1974 the editorial doors had closed. Writers and work embodying the cutting edge of the field through the seventies were not having their calls returned, editors who had become identified with those writers and work were either losing their jobs or frantically changing policy. Gerald Ford and the era of Lucas seemed to descend upon the Republic simultaneously; we know that this was not true (Ford was gone when
Star Wars
opened in the spring of 1977), but it
feels
true. Post-Watergate was when Lucas was raising the money, anyway.
This, to be sure, is a perilous statement . . . retrospection seeks order that the ongoing reality had no time to set . . . but this matter of perceiving science fiction as a microcosm of the nation’s tumultuous, self-deluded, and ultimately disastrous politics must be briefly pursued. I have felt for a while that the eviction of Nixon was the last gasp of the contemporary left; after fifteen years of assassinations, demonstrations, murmurings, rumbles, and license, a President had actually been thrown out of office legally and the left wing recoiled as if in horror: they had, like the child in tantrum who burns down the place, never really expected that they could get away with it. Simultaneously, the right wing and great center regarded the detenancy as the last concession that the left wing would exact. “We gave you the son of a bitch,” seemed to be the implicit statement, “you made such an all-fired nuisance of yourselves that we let him go but I’m telling you for your own good: this is the last time. You kids have pulled your last prank; now it’s time to go out and get a job.”
All the kids seemed to get the message. By 1976 Eugene McCarthy was a ghost candidate, the left wing of the Democratic party (as “represented” by the pusillanimous and disgraced Humphrey) could not even go through the motions of a primary fight, and the “liberal” Republicans had assented to the removal of Nelson Rockefeller from the vice presidency without protest. The antiwar movement had long since fragmented and collapsed and the war itself if not over was over for us. The sixties radicals were dead, in hiding, on the underside or taking up permanent rights via squatting in the middle class.
And in science fiction,
simil
.
In science fiction, the speed and force of the counterrevolution was so abrupt that many of the younger writers for years thereafter were still writing short stories and novels for a market which no longer existed. The bottom of the original anthology market fell out. Ballantine Science Fiction became Del Rey Books and proceeded in both theory and reissued fact to reconstruct the childhood of Lester del Rey. Random House quit science fiction and Pyramid quit everything and those publishers which continued were letting the word out explicitly that traditional themes and handling would be appreciated. Aldiss and Ballard fell out of the American market; Ellison, Silverberg, and the undersigned announced within a fortnight of one another in late 1975
29
that we would write science fiction no more, and new writers began to have more trouble finding publishers than at any time since the early sixties. Certain kinds of writing were almost unsaleable.
It is easy—almost seductively easy one might say—by pursuing this line of confluence to say that science fiction was merely reacting to or reenacting on its own level the political climate of its time. I am not quite sure that this is so; science fiction has been a fairly self-contained circumstance since its inception whose development often moved at odds with the larger culture. (The first half of the forties, that decade of unspeakable horror, will always be known in science fiction as the “Golden Age.”) Rather, serendipity seems to be the issue; for different reasons both America and science fiction found itself in retreat from the shocks and terrors of the sixties, which as they brought the very existence of institutions into question, opened the windows on a future which was unacceptable.
The assassinations, the war, the corruption of all political life, the decline of religion, the rise of divorce, and sexual libertarianism had opened up the same trap doors that the post-technological visions of Ballard and Aldiss, the psychological horrors of Tiptree, and the demented idealism of Lafferty had opened in science fiction, and both America (its corporate structure and institutions) and science fiction (through editors and publishers) were in fear of falling. In both cases, the forces of counterrevolution had the same desperate, unspoken assent; no one really wanted to see the country or this great escape fiction fall apart. That the President of the United States could be revealed as a simple crook, that the literature of technological transcendence should become imbued with images of how the machines were killing us was simply too much for the audience to handle. Blame them not. Their confusion became hostility and finally outrage: Nixon might be thrown out and the visions of Ballard scribbled like graffiti all over the holy gates, but now things were going to get back to normal, as quickly as possible. And they were going to stay normal for a hell of a long time. There were big plans to put everything on hold once the temple was resecured.
It may turn around again. It may not. Years ago, the theory of cycles would apply in politics and science fiction alike and one could make reference to the metaphor of the pendulum. A society and economy controlled by conglomerates, however, a literature which is a minor subdivision of a subdivision of these conglomerates, can be manipulated to stay frozen in position (until or unless the whole thing falls apart), and in this totalitarian possibility science fiction and American life can be seen at last to become indistinguishable, to become facets of one another in the last fifth of the last century of the last millennium in which the theory of causality can be seen (or may be needed) at all to apply.
1980: New Jersey
Cornell George Hopley Woolrich: December 1903 to September 1968
A
T THE END, IN THE LAST YEAR, HE LOOKED
three decades older. The booze had wrecked him, the markets had wrecked him,
he
had wrecked him; by the time that friends dragged him out in April to St. Clare’s Hospital where they took off the gangrenous leg, he had the stunned aspect of the very old. Where there had been edges there was now only the gelatinous material that when probed would not rebound.
Nonetheless, if the booze had stripped all but bone it had left his eyes moist and open, childlike and vulnerable. That September in the open coffin, surrounded by flowers sent by the Chase Manhattan Bank, he looked young; he looked like the man who in his late twenties had loafed around the ballrooms and written of the debutantes.
There were five names in the guest book, Leo and Cylvia Margulies of
Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine
leading off. Leo died in December 1975 and Cylvia divested herself of the publication about two years later.
He died in print. The April 1968
Escapade
had a story, and
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
had taken his stunning “New York Blues” to publish it two years later; that novelette had been written in late 1967. Ace Books had embarked upon an ambitious program of reissue which brought
The Bride Wore Black
,
Rendezvous in Black
,
Phantom Lady
, and others back into the mass market. Truffaut’s
The Bride Wore Black
was in production. The
Ellery Queen
hardcover mystery annual had a story. Now, more than a decade later, he is out of print; an item for the specialty and university presses, an occasional republication in an Ellery Queen annual. Ace let the books go a long time past: poor sales. There are no other paperbacks. The hardcovers—what few copies remain—are for the collectors.
“It isn’t dying I’m afraid of, it isn’t that at all; I know what it is to die, I’ve died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That’s what I can’t stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don’t you? . . . I really loved to write.”
His mother Claire died in 1956. Shortly thereafter his own work virtually ceased. A novel—never published—found with his effects; it had been rejected all over New York in the early sixties. A few short stories for
Ellery Queen
and
The Saint Mystery Magazine
. His relationship with his mother had been the central—it is theorized that it was the only—relationship of his life; they had lived together continuously for her last fourteen years. When she died, he lived alone in one room on the second floor of the Sheraton-Russell Hotel in Manhattan surrounded by cases and cases of beer cans and bottles of whiskey, and invited the staff to come up and drink with him and watch television. Sometimes he would sit in the lobby; more occasionally he would take a cab to McSorley’s Tavern in the village. The gangrene which came from an ill-fitting shoe and which untreated turned his left leg to charcoal, slowly, from early 1967 to April 1968, ended all that; he would stay in his room and drink almost all the time and stare at the television looking for a film from one of his novels or short stories which came on often enough and usually after 2
A.M.
; between the movies and the alcohol he was finally able to find sleep. For a few hours. Until ten or eleven in the morning, when it would all start again. At the end he had almost none of his books left in the room: he had given them all away to casual visitors. Bellboys. Maids. The night manager. An employee of his literary agent. He could not bear to have his work around him anymore.
“I got six hundred dollars from Alfred Hitchcock for the movie rights to ‘Rear Window.’ That’s all that I got; it was one story in a collection of eight that was sold in the forties by the agent H. N. Swanson for five thousand dollars; he sold
everything
for five thousand dollars; that’s why we all called him five grand Swannie. But that didn’t bother me really; what bothered me was that Hitchcock wouldn’t even send me a ticket to the premiere in New York. He knew where I lived. He wouldn’t even send me a ticket.”
The novels were curiously cold for all of their effects and mercilessly driven, but the characters, particularly the female characters, who were the protagonists of many of them, were rendered with great sensitivity and were always in enormous pain. That was one of the mysteries of Woolrich’s work for the editors and writers who knew him: how could a man who could not relate to women at all, who had had a brief and terrible marriage annulled when he was twenty-five, who had lived only alone or with his mother since . . . how could such a man have had such insight into women, write of them with such compassion, make these creatures of death and love dance and crumple on the page? Some theorized that the writer could identify with these women because that was the terrible and essential part of him which could never be otherwise acknowledged. Others simply called it a miracle: a miracle that a lonely man in a hotel room could somehow create, populate, and justify the world.
“I tried to move out. In 1942 I lived alone in a hotel room for three weeks and then one night she called me and said, ‘I can’t live without you, I must live with you, I need you,’ and I put down the phone and I packed and I went back to that place and for the rest of her life I never spent a night away from her, not one. I know what they thought of me, what they said about me, but I just didn’t care. I don’t regret it and I’ll never regret it as long as I live.”
He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work and stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to
Black Mask
and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibilities, but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich’s gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimaxes to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple Chandler had verged toward this more than a little; there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature, but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations. Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it, but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death, but the novels and short stories of Woolrich
were
death—in all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality.
Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract Truffaut, whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre and the French
nouvelle vague
, the central conception that nothing really mattered. Nothing at all . . . but the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.
“I wasn’t that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn’t write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried.”
Inevitably, his vision verged toward the fantastic; he published a scattering of stories which appeared to conform to that genre at least to the degree that the fuller part of his vision could be seen as “mysteries.” For Woolrich it
all
was fantastic; the clock in the tower, hand in the glove, out-of-control vehicle, errant gunshot which destroyed; whether destructive coincidence was masked in the “naturalistic” or the “incredible” was all pretty much the same to him.
Rendezvous in Black
,
The Bride Wore Black
,
Nightmare
are all great swollen dreams, turgid constructions of the night, obsession, and grotesque outcome; to turn from these to the “fantastic” was not to turn at all. The work, as is usually the case with a major writer, was perfectly formed, perfectly consistent; the vision leached into every area and pulled the book together. “Jane Brown’s Body” is a suspense story.
The Bride Wore Black
is science fiction.
Phantom Lady
is a gothic.
Rendezvous in Black
was a
bildungsroman
. It does not matter.
“I’m glad you liked
Phantom Lady
but I can’t help you, you see. I can’t accept your praise. The man who wrote that novel died a long, long time ago. He died a long, long time ago.”
At the end, amidst the cases and the bottles and the empty glasses as the great black leg became turgid and began to stink, there was nothing at all. The television did not help, the whiskey left no stain, the bellhops could not bring distraction. They carried him out to St. Clare’s and cut off the leg in April and sent him back in June with a prosthesis; the doctors were cheerful. “He has a chance,” they said. “It all depends upon his will to live.” At the Sheraton-Russell they came to his doors with trays, food, bottles, advice. They took good care of him. They helped him on his crutches to the lobby and put him in the plush chair at the near door so that he could see lobby traffic. They were unfailingly kind. They brought him into the dining room and brought him out. They took him upstairs. They took him downstairs. They stayed with him. They created a network of concern: the Woolrich network in the Sheraton-Russell.
In September, like Delmore Schwartz, he had a stroke in a hotel corridor; in September, like Schwartz in an earlier August, he died instantly. He lay in the Campbell funeral parlor in a business suit for three days surrounded by flowers from Chase Manhattan.
His will left $850,000 to Columbia University (he had inherited money; the markets didn’t leave him much) to establish a graduate creative writing program in memory of Claire. He had been a writer of popular fiction, had never had a serious review in the United States, had struggled from cheap pulp magazines to genre hardcover and paperback. Sure he wanted respectability; a university cachet. Sure. Why not? Who wouldn’t?
“Life is death. Death is in life. To hold your own true love in your arms and see the skeleton she will be; to know that your love leads to death, that death is all there is, that is what I know and what I do not want to know and what I cannot bear. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.
“Don’t leave me now, Barry.”
1980: New Jersey
