The Atheist in the Attic
Page 10
Interesting to me? Or interesting to readers? Presumably it was interesting enough for me to make whatever effort I needed to write it. The interest of readers—which is the one that finally counts—lies with readers. So they’re the ones you have to ask.
I believe the éminence grise who excoriated you (and Zelazny) at the ’68 Nebula Awards banquet has long since been identified. Can you name names?
Yes, it was Frederik Pohl. And, as I said, shortly he actually read the work in question that had inspired him to such ire, and decided—to his surprise, I gather—that he rather liked it in spite of Lester Del Ray’s fulminating against it, which is what had convinced him to bad-mouth it sight unseen. (This is supposition on my part. We never discussed it directly.) He started assigning me cover stories—which was a mixed blessing. But they made me a few hundred dollars when it was money I needed. Both “Cage of Brass” and “High Weir” were Pohl cover stories for If, the most experimental of what were then known as the Galaxy Combine. A cover story, which is something that almost never happens in the magazines these days, is where the editor has brought one or a number of covers before the story is written, and then shows the cover to the writer and says, okay, write a story to go with this.
A few years after that, Pohl was the editor who bought and published Dhalgren. Which is to say, he managed to do a 180-degree turn when it came to judging my work. But the whole SF community was smaller, younger, and things like that could happen.
You are one of the few literary academics in the U.S. without a doctorate. Has that been an impediment or an asset?
To the extent it represents a lot of experiences with the university system I never had, it was an impediment. (I not only don’t have a PhD, I never finished more than a term of college. I made two stabs at completing my second term—and couldn’t hack it. I wasn’t organized enough. That’s the ADD that encompassed my dyslexia.) Perhaps to some, it made me look a little more interesting; but then—as I said—you’ll have to ask them, not me.
One sentence on each, please: Alan Ansen, George Eliot, Junot Díaz.
Impossible question! But here goes, though I might try for a small paragraph.
Alan Ansen was nice, civilized, and in his capacity as Auden’s secretary, an interesting writer; after we met at a table outside a Plaka Kafeneion, he allowed Gregory Corso to invite me on the spur of the moment to his house in Kolonaki for lunch the next day, back during my first trip to Greece, in 1966 I think it was—the only time I ever saw him. (How would we get through these one-sentence restrictions without the semicolon?) In his kitchen I ate Gregory’s very hot rice, peppers, and sausage concoction (“Aw, man—you guys don’t have to eat this shit,” was his own verdict on what he’d made, but Ansen and I both did; I had come in a tie, slacks, and sports jacket: Greg was in jeans and some kind of short-sleeved shirt); and there were original Cocteau drawings framed and hung on the walls, I remember. I only saw him on two consecutive afternoons, both times with Corso, whom I only ran into about five times—four times in Greece, and once a few years later in the Lower East Side.
Later, I remember learning that his home was where Chester Kallman was staying when, years later, he drank himself to death once his older partner, Auden, had passed away.
George Eliot was a great English novelist whom C.L.R. James ranked with Melville, when James was writing Mariners, Renegades & Castaways. Moby-Dick and Middlemarch were his two nominees for the great mid-nineteenth-century English-language masterpieces. I can’t argue.
Junot Díaz: an extremely hardworking writer, who puts immense amounts of effort into the Pulitzer work he does on the prize committee every year, and his own political work, as well as his own writing, of which there is far too little, though what there is is beautiful and exquisitely crafted: Drown is an amazing book, and the concluding novella, “Negocios,” took my head off when I first read it; it still holds up well. And I’ll say the same for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He is also a wondrously patient and loyal friend to an often confused older fellow.
You often speak of writing as “discourse.” With yourself? With the reader? Is it the same for fiction and nonfiction?
I’m using “discourse” in an older sense: discourse as response, understanding, discourse as structure both conscious and unconscious: not dialogue, but what impels and structures dialogue: not the “discourse between …” but the “discourse of …”
My son (formerly of Tenth and A) tells me that hipsters are moving back to the Lower East Side because it’s more affordable than Brooklyn. Is this a good thing?
My understanding of the mysteries of gentrification or of what happens inside or around it is just not that great. I don’t know the neighborhood anymore, nor have I been there for years. We’ll let that one sit.
You had a long relationship with the late, lamented David Hartwell, SF’s Maxwell Perkins. How did that come about?
It began as the friendship between two young men who both liked Science Fiction, both liked poetry, both liked music. David was a year my senior, and in the first years I knew him, he did get his PhD and worked very hard on a poetry magazine called The Little Magazine, of whose voluntary staff I was a member. How we actually met I don’t recall, but I believe it revolved around Paul Williams, creator of an extremely successful music fanzine that became the first serious rock ’n’ roll magazine, which I got to write for, named Crawdaddy. At the time, Paul was going with Trina Robbins, who was about five or six years older than he was, and was then a dress designer. She made Marilyn’s dress that she wore to the Nebula Awards (which I attended not only with an unhappy Marilyn—she’d only agreed to come because I assured her I hadn’t won—but with my mother and sister and an albino friend named Whit Whitman, who came in a black denim suit, and with whom I had been to bed a couple of times and was a friend of Marilyn’s from the Old Reliable, while I wore a black tuxedo and a silver lamé turtleneck), the night Fred delivered his jeremiad—and I won my second and third Nebula Awards (a total surprise to me) in one evening.
Even after Nova was written, I was still not sure if I was going to be a musician or a writer. David was often my best friend and on more than one occasion saved my ass. But the absurdity of trying to capture a long friendship in a paragraph … What can I say? I’m glad it happened and I miss that I’ll never get to go out to lunch with him again, down near where he worked at Tor Books, in the Fuller Building (better known as the Flatiron) on Twenty-Third and Fifth. The history of science fiction tends to be the history of its editors, and David was the most important of those editors since the crop in the 1950s, Campbell, Gold, Boucher, Cele Goldsmith, and the Furmans, Joe and Ed.
I was lucky to be as close to him as I was. At his death, we had physically drifted apart, even as we’d come to appreciate and respect each other—at least on my side—more and more. His sudden and unexpected death startled us all. There were a lot of young editors, both at Tor and at other places, whom he’d trained. We’ll see what kind of job they do.
After all, he was the editor who pretty much discovered you, wasn’t he?
Yes, he was—and I’m glad I got (and took) the chance to thank him for my career that time we were all at Williams College together. The last time I saw him. But enough about me. What’s next for Samuel R. Delany?
Probably I need to get some lunch, which is about as far ahead as I can see right now. I hope some of this was of interest. But we all live our lives from the inside of our bodies out, not from the outside in. Which is why fiction has the texture that it does.
Thanks for the questions, Terry.
Bibliography
FICTION
The Jewels of Aptor (1962)
The Fall of the Towers trilogy:
Out of the Dead City (1963)
The Towers of Toron (1964)
City of a Thousand Suns (1965)
The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)
Babel-17 (1966)
Empire Star (1966)
&nb
sp; The Einstein Intersection (1967)
Nova (1968)
Driftglass (1969)
Equinox (1973)
Dhalgren (1975)
Trouble on Triton (1976)
Return to Nevèrÿon series:
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
Neveryóna (1982)
Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)
Return to Nevèrÿon (1987)
Distant Stars (1981)
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984)
Driftglass/Starshards (collected stories, 1993)
They Fly at Çiron (1993)
The Mad Man (1994)
Hogg (1995)
Atlantis: Three Tales (1995)
Aye, and Gomorrah (2004)
Phallos (2004)
Dark Reflections (2007)
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012)
A, B, C: Three Short Novels (2015)
GRAPHIC NOVELS
Empire (artist, Howard Chaynkin, 1980)
Bread & Wine (artist, Mia Wolff, 1999)
NONFICTION
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977; revised, 2008)
The American Shore (1978)
Heavenly Breakfast (1979)
Starboard Wine (1984; revised, 2008)
The Motion of Light in Water (1988)
Wagner/Artaud (1988)
The Straits of Messina (1990)
Silent Interviews (1994)
Longer Views (1996)
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)
Shorter Views (1999)
1984: Selected Letters (2000)
About Writing (2005)
In Search of Silence: The Journals of Samuel R. Delany: Volume 1, 1957–1968, ed. Kenneth R. James (2017)
About the Author
SAMUEL R. DELANY’S SCIENCE fiction and fantasy tales are available in Aye and Gomorrah and Other Stories. His collection Atlantis: Three Tales and Phallos are experimental fiction. His novels include science fiction such as the Nebula Award–winning Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, as well as Nova and Dhalgren. His four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon is sword-and-sorcery. Most recently, he has written the SF novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. Other novels include Equinox, Hogg, and The Mad Man. Delany was the subject of a 2007 documentary, The Polymath, by Fred Barney Taylor, and he has written a popular creative writing textbook, About Writing. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red / Times Square Blue and has written a Hugo Award–winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water. All are available as both e-books and in paperback.
Delany is the author of several collections of critical essays.
His interview in the Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” series appeared in spring 2012. In 2013 he was made the 31st Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master of Science Fiction. In 2015 he was the recipient of the Nicolas Guillén Award for philosophical fiction. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner, Dennis Rickett.
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