The Road to Amber (3 page)

When I thanked him for all of his help, Roger said, “All you need now is a notebook to put down your expenses and a Tax Pac to file your receipts, the rest will take care of itself.”

Another time he gave me some future advice—“From one family man to another, write one book for each of your children.”

“Why?” I asked.

“For the sake of legacy, for what you leave behind, write one book for each child. So, for me, a book each for Devin, Trent, Shannon. That should cover their needs…afterwards.”

I thought it was an odd thing to think about at a time when I was just getting started, but then I didn’t know that our time was growing short. Roger had the keen eyes of a hawk—he could see things that were not yet, things forthcoming. Much later, I realized that Roger meant more than “just a book”—he meant, in effect, write a “big” book for each of your children.

Once Roger had a dream, and he told me it was a plot outline for a book that he wasn’t going to write.

“Why not?”

“Well,” he answered, “I saw you as the author. This is your book, I’m giving you the outline.” I guess he wanted me to move along in the bestseller business. I was writing books, one after another, but they were more poetry books, children’s titles, and academic texts.

Roger’s dream novel seemed a bit hazy to me, as it involved James Bond, Dr. No, a bizarre murder, various timescapes and reality warps, and all of it set on the island ofJamaica in the late 1960s. He was quite specific about these things as he dictated the summary, and I wrote it down over the phone.

“So who’s the main character?” I queried when he was done.

Chuckling, he said—“You. But in the novel you’re an old man, a bookish old stickfighter from the hills of the North Coast.”

That summer, while working in Jamaica, I discovered that there were still a few ancient cudgelists—stickfighters—on the island. This nearly unknown martial art goes back to the days of Robin Hood. I sketched the outline Roger dictated and put it in my desk drawer where it still resides more than fifteen years later, untouched.

Am I waiting for a sign from Roger? Or just afraid that without him the novel won’t be what he wanted me to write? Roger taught me so many things, but perhaps the greatest gift of all was his ability to give someone a book that cut to the very core of their thinking.

There are three books that come to my mind, books that changed my life. These, more than any others, inspired me to write specific books of my own that, miraculously, many years after publication are still in print. All part of Roger’s great and generous plan.

Roger’s kindness really had no boundary. Once, when I was struggling to make ends meet, he gave me his unused, early model Apple computer that was still in the box it came in and with it a month’s rent, and he told me, “Help another writer when you’re able to. Pass it along.” He was the original believer of forwarding goodness. You could say he invented “the writer’s guild of guided saints.” And, if, in fact, writers have such providers, Roger is still moving manuscripts along, lifting them out from under the piles on editors’ desks, and letting them see the light of day.

Curiously, he once said he had actually done this; metaphysically, of course.

“How?” I asked him.

“With intention,” he replied.

I have talked to more than a dozen writers whose careers were boosted or even charmed by Roger, and each one of these people speaks in the same manner in which I’m writing, with a measure of awe, love, and wonder.

I don’t want to forget the three arcane books that Roger gave me, for they are a pivotal part of this friendship story.

Black Gods, Green Islands
by Geoffrey Holder with Tom Harshman.

Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works
by Carl Van Vechten.

Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence
by Nick Bantock.

Indeed, these are as special to me as they were to Roger. The first two nearly forgotten as literary art, the third, a classic in its genre—and who knows what that genre is, exactly. Roger liked all three and gifted them to me.
Black Gods, Green Islands
, if you don’t know it, is a return to the Garden of Eden, the garden of evil. I had an awakening when I read it—so this is how you merge mythology an fantastic fiction. The book was just what I was looking for. And it taught me how to utilize my Caribbean experiences and shape them into a book of my own. The book was almost a how-to on the art of doing this. Thus I did
Duppy Talk: West Indian Tales of Mystery and Magic
, which was used by the History Channel in their series Haunted Caribbean.

The Life and Times of Peter Whiffle
amused me, fascinated me. I remember Roger saying that he read it aloud to his family. “We’ve had a lot of fun with this story,” he said. I drank in the Whiffle tale and saw that it was full of Rogerisms.

Roger loved the Whiffly picaresque voice of Van Vechten. I did, too, and especially when I saw that some of Van Vechten’s wisps of historical narrative resurfaced in one or two of the Amber novels.

In
Griffin & Sabine
, Roger’s fascination with telepathy, letters, islands (of the mind as well as geography) is abundantly and pleasurably clear. This was the book he inscribed to my wife Lorry, for whom he also brought a scone each morning when he brought his children to Santa Fe Prep School. Lorry worked in the front office of Prep, and she would look up and see Roger, gift scone in hand, smiling. So
Griffin & Sabine
was for both of us, Lorry and me. Not surprisingly, this book would inspire a number of collaborative story collections that Lorry and I wrote and compiled during the 1990s. Somehow, I think, Roger effected a kind of alchemy, and it all started with the gift of this book
Griffin & Sabine
. Roger wrote in Lorry’s copy—“They don’t write them like this very often.” By which he meant not at all.

I once asked him how he did it, how he made so much invention so down-to-earth real. He tapped his forehead, “Right here,” he said in his deceptively simple way. I was reminded of that the other day when I saw this Bob Marley quote: “I live in my head.”

Roger was “miracle cat” as one of his books intimates. I saw him practice his martial art skills at our dinner table one time—pinning my hand like a butterfly with his two fingers. And this when he was sick from cancer but still strong as a bull. That one move of his sent me to a master with whom I studied for years, never achieving Roger’s catlike grace, but learning how to stand, how to sit, and curiously, how to hold a pen.

In addition to all his other gifts, Roger was a voracious reader, devouring some seven or eight books each week. I joined him in that rapacious pursuit for a while. But I couldn’t keep up. It doesn’t matter; he taught me to read fast and well and to zero in on the thing or things I was looking for. Book done, you move on. William Saroyan also read like this, calling it reading around. Roger’s pursuit was more fox and hound. Harrying not hurrying. Before I met Roger, it took me months to read a single book. Roger suggested I throwaway my reading glasses—but that is another story.

In writing this, I am suddenly reminded that I have left out the last and most eccentric of Roger’s gift books. How did I miss
The Pink Motel
by Carol Ryrie Brink? Roger presented this skinny little novella to me one day. The novel’s not that good, as Roger himself confessed, but he knew I would find a message within the hard boards of the book and left it at that.

The Pink Hotel
had a further effect on my psyche, and it went beyond the borderland of writing. Sometime after I read it, we moved to Florida. This little tale that Roger put in my hand was a roadmap to the sandspur back woods of Southwest Florida where an old saltwater collection of oddly painted cabins loomed in my future.

Dreams of conch shell pink.

I’m still here, writing amidst the herons and eagles.

And as I think of Roger’s legacy and the books of his that have altered my life, I wonder if he—if anyone—can be summed up in this casual, reminiscent way.

If so—Roger loved books, exotica, ideas, food. (reverse the order)

Above all, Roger loved people. (reverse the order again)

—Gerald Hausman
Bokeelia, Florida

I
t was difficult to follow the science fiction genre in the late ’60s without becoming aware of Roger Zelazny. Unlike his great contemporary Samuel R. Delany, whose early novels (published with maximum obscuriry as bottom-of-the-line pulp paperbacks) I had been following for several years before he even published his first short story, Zelazny was at the beginning of his career almost entirely known for his short fiction. I still associate him with the colorful covers of magazines such as
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
,
Worlds of If
, and
Fantastic
—magazines which, if you look at old copies today, give off when handled that unique pulp-magazine smell that for an old-time fan can instantly evoke sense-impressions of exactly where you were and what you were doing when you bought them. I dimly remember (this was forty-seven years ago, after all, while I was still in high school, so give me a break!) that I had run across a few stories by Zelazny in 1962 in
Fantastic
or
Amazing
(I was a loyal reader of Cele Goldsmith’s
Fantastic
in particular, mostly for Fritz Leiber’s “Gray Mouser” stories, so it’s quite likely), perhaps “Horseman!” or “Passion Play.” To tell the truth, they hadn’t impressed me much.

All that was to change, for me and for everyone else, with the publication of Zelazny’s ”A Rose for Ecclesiastes” in the November 1963
F&SF
. I remember standing in front of the newsstand shelf in Eaton’s Drugstore in Salem, Massachusetts, listening to the metallic clanking and whirring of the milk-shake machine (except that we called them frappes in New England in those days) and staring at the lovely wrap-around cover by Hannes Bok, which I believe was the only wrap-around cover I’d ever seen. It was the exotic evocativeness of the Bok cover that hooked me and drew me in (although, truth be told, I’d have bought the magazine anyway, no matter what the cover was), but back in my room I soon found that the story inside the covers was equally exotic and evocative, with a lyricism, fluidity, and playfulness of language that was rare in the SF of the day and which was to become one of Zelazny’s trademarks.

Here, in the words of the hoary old cliché, was a writer to watch—and even as a grotty high-school kid, I knew it as soon as I put the magazine down.

By the time I began trying to sell my own early stories, it had become nearly impossible not to have heard of Roger Zelazny, who seemed to be everywhere with amazing stories, and whose name was on everyone’s lips—although in those days almost nobody knew how to pronounce it.

By the time I actually met Roger Zelazny, I had progressed to being a very small-time neo-pro with three or four sales under my belt. I think it was in 1970, probably at a Disclave in Washington, D.C., possibly at a Balticon in Baltimore, Maryland. I was in a crowded room party when I became aware of a tall, thin man sitting quietly by himself in one corner of the room. “That’s Roger Zelazny,” somebody whispered in a hushed voice. I was too shy to actually approach him, but I watched him for a while. Although he spoke very little, his hands were constantly busy making intricate cat’s-cradles with string. When he finished a particularly complex one, he would raise it up to show it to someone, and his solemn face would break suddenly into a delighted smile, a smile of childlike pleasure that transformed his entire countenance. After you watched him for a while, you realized that, although he was very quiet, he was not isolated or detached from the party taking place around him, was in fact intently aware of everything. His eyes missed nothing.

At some point that weekend, I did actually meet Roger. I was relieved to find that he was warm and friendly in his quiet way with a surprising and mischievous sense of humor bubbling just below the surface, ready to lance out at lightning speed when he saw the opportunity to make a humorous remark. In fact, as I came to know him, the main impression I got of Roger, belying his somber appearance, was of a sweet and rather pixilated
silliness
. He was silly in the same way that Monty Python was silly, with a cockeyed surrealism that was rarely mean-spirited but which demonstrated an amused and benignly screwball way of looking at the world. I suspect that to a certain extent Roger saw the world as a game to be played with high spirits and great good cheer or perhaps a puzzle to be solved with quiet competency and calm enjoyment. Those qualities pervaded his fiction as well.

Like a number of other writers, Roger Zelazny began publishing in 1962 in the pages of Cele Goldsmith’s
Amazing
. This was the so-called “Class of ‘62,” whose membership also included Thomas M. Disch, Keith Laumer, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Everyone in that “class” would eventually achieve prominence, some faster than others. Zelazny’s career would be one of the most meteoric in SF history. The first Zelazny story to attract wide notice was ”A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” later selected by vote of the SFWA membership to have been one of the best SF stories of all time. By the end of that decade, he had won two Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards (Nebulas for “He Who Shapes” and “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” Hugos for the magazine serial
…And Call Me Conrad
[later published unabridged as
This Immortal
] and
Lord of Light
). He was widely regarded as one of the two most important American SF writers of the ’60s (the other was Samuel R. Delany).

Zelazny’s early novels were, on the whole, well-received (the first half of
This Immortal
, before the giant armadillos and giant bats and giant dogs come out, is excellent), but it was the strong and stylish short work he published in magazines like
F&SF
and
Amazing
and
Worlds of If
in the decade’s middle years that electrified the genre. These early stories—stories like “This Moment of the Storm,” “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” “The Graveyard Heart,” “He Who Shapes,” “The Keys to December,” “For a Breath I Tarry,” and “This Mortal Mountain”—established Zelazny as a giant of the field, and many still consider them his best work. These stories are still amazing for their invention, elegance and verve, for their good-natured effrontery and easy ostentation, for the risks Zelazny took in pursuit of eloquence without ruffling a hair, for the grace and nerve he displayed as he switched from high-flown pseudo-Spenserian to wisecracking Chandlerian slang to vivid prose-poetry to Hemingwayesque starkness in the course of only a few lines—and for the way he made it all look easy and effortless, the same kind of illusion Fred Astaire generated when he danced.