A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop

  Even among this glut of invigorating stuff, The Left Hand of Darkness stood out. I realized that Le Guin’s novel demonstrated, unequivocally, that SF provided a legitimate vehicle for adroit speculation about both technology and the human condition. Therefore, and because Le Guin writes like a seraph, I admired her novel hugely . . . but I still wasn’t ready to start one of my own. In fact, I was several months away from placing my first story, “Piñon Fall,” with Ejler Jakobsson at Galaxy. I had some heavy lifting to do, a writerly apprenticeship to fulfill.

  I subscribed to Fantasy & Science Fiction and Galaxy. I bought new paperbacks off the racks of the Hallmark gift shop near the May D&F department store in Colorado Springs, notably the Ace Science Fiction Specials edited by Terry Carr. (At this Hallmark shop, I found The Left Hand of Darkness, Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage, Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead, Keith Roberts’s Pavane, Joanna Russ’s And Chaos Died, Michael Moorcock’s The Black Corridor, R. A. Lafferty’s Fourth Mansions, Bob Shaw’s The Palace of Eternity, and many other fascinating titles.)

  From the dusty bins of second-hand emporia in Colorado Springs or Denver, I salvaged used or out-of-print sf classics. I began to write “imaginative” tales of my own. Along with Klaus Krause, my English-department officemate at the Air Force Academy Prep School, I attended meetings of the Denver Area Science Fiction Association, all held in the basement of a branch bank several blocks from downtown.

  One noteworthy evening, Harlan Ellison himself showed up—late, of course—in the company of a club officer. He read from a copy of his story “One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty,” soon to appear in Orbit 8. He held up the cover proof of his Avon story collection The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (1969). He signed autographs for those of us who had brought copies of his books. (The young Ed Bryant, whom I met that night, was a DASFA member on hand for Ellison’s visit, and Bryant, the dog, had already sold some stories of his own.)

  In asking for a signature for my well-fingered copy of Paingod, I got Ellison’s back up by inquiring if he had ever written a novel. With audible annoyance, he let me know that he’d done several—four, if memory serves. I was delighted as well as abashed to have yanked his chain, for although I still haven’t read a full-length novel by Ellison (who later told my wife, Jeri, that my “marmoset eyes” made me an untrustworthy companion), I left that unforgettable meeting, knowing that even a short-story writer, including a natural one like the Harlequin, may have the ability to go long as well as short. Although that lesson did not sink in on our drive back to Colorado Springs, or even in the following three years, it registered on some level, and one day I would surely have need of it.

  A love of arresting, multiword titles.

  Ursula Le Guin’s novel about a planet called Winter and its population of alien but human androgynes.

  A self-directed crash course in contemporary science fiction.

  And a meeting at which an energetic short-story writer told me that, yeah, he’d written a novel, several, and why didn’t I wake up and smell the java?

  These are the foundations of my first novel, A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire . . . or, at least, some of them.

  As noted earlier, my first sale was to Galaxy. That occurred in the spring of 1970, and “Piñon Fall” appeared in the Oct.-Nov. issue. I then placed several pieces with Edward L. Ferman, editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction: “Darktree, Darktide,” “A Tapestry of Little Murders,” “Spacemen and Gypsies.” I sold a novelette in my Urban Nucleus series, “If a Flower Could Eclipse,” to Jakobsson at Worlds of Fantasy, and a second UrNu story, “The Windows in Dante’s Hell” to Damon Knight at Orbit. These stories were SF, horror, fantasy, or hybrid mongrels of these forms.

  My sixth or seventh sale proved my most important, although I did not understand that until later. Best known for his Star Trek script “The Trouble With Tribbles,” David Gerrold was editing original paperback anthologies for Ballantine (Protostars) and Dell (Generation). In the spring of 1972, he was assembling a second Ballantine anthology, presumably the beginning of a series, Science Fiction Emphasis.

  To David, I sent my first novella, a work pushing seventy pages, a projection of myself as a character into a future Spain in which the dying Franco has had his brain transplanted into the body of a healthy Nordic; meanwhile, the artist Picasso, reconciled to the old generalissimo and kept alive by mechanical means, returns to Spain to take part in its first free elections in decades. This story was “On the Street of the Serpents.” After I mailed it off, David replied with a letter noting that it was exactly the sort for which he’d inaugurated SF Emphasis. He wanted—hallelujah!—to buy it.

  Eventually, Betty Ballantine of Ballantine Books read “On the Street of the Serpents.” The cofounder of that trail-blazing paperback house liked it, too—enough, at least, to ask David to ask me if I had a novel in the works or if I could at least show her a proposal for one. She would look with favor on almost anything I sent her. This news flattered me, but I was a lieutenant in the Air Force, a rank beginner with only a few sales to my credit, and I had pushed my limits to write one coherent story of seventy pages. How could I do a hundred, much less three hundred, without my prose degenerating into jargon and my story into surreal argle-bargle?

  Actually, I was afraid to write a novel. But an image began to haunt me, a striking mental picture of a humanoid alien with gemstones for eyes, a vestigial scar for a mouth, and a skin structure permitting it to absorb nutrients through the palms of its hands. But I had no story, only this outré concept. I fiddled with it. I scratched out notes on the blotter of my desk at the Prep School. Either before drifting to sleep at night or while driving to work in the morning, I tried to figure out some of the likely metabolic consequences of my alien’s unlikely anatomy.

  During all this futzing about, I wrote a novelette deploying representatives of my imaginary species. In it, I called them Doukhobors after a sect of Russian Christians who advocated loyalty to one’s own spiritual light and the rejection of all external authority. My models were the modern Canadian Doukhobors, immigrants from Russia, who, as recently as the 1950s, had stripped naked and marched in groups to protest what they saw as official, and godless, discrimination against their faith. I set my story on another planet, in an island chain virtually identical in topography and ecology to the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, and I called this novelette—forgive me—“A Far Galapagos, an Inward Heart.” I then afforded every editor in the field a chance to reject my earnest mishmash. All of them did, but Ted White at Sol Cohen’s Amazing and Fantastic did offer me the consolation of encouragement.

  So I filed the abortion away, shoving its inchoate conceits into mental limbo, fearing them too pulpish and grotesque for credible fulfillment and doubting my ability to devise a story that would redeem them. I also doubted my ability to expand “A Far Galapagos, an Inward Heart” to a strong end 85,000 words from its opening sentence. I had a deep-seated novel-writing phobia. Meanwhile, I wrote two other stories; each grew to approximately the length of my SF Emphasis sale: “The White Otters of Childhood” and “Death and Designation among the Asadi.” These novellas landed on the final Nebula ballot for 1973. Also, I secured a position as an instructor of freshman English at the University of Georgia, left the service, and returned to Athens with Jeri and our infant son, Jamie. There, I finished the last sections of “Death and Designation” and the stories “Allegiances,” “Cathadonian Odyssey,” “Rogue Tomato,” “Blooded on Arachne,” “The Samurai and the Willows,” “In Rubble, Pleading,” my first draft of “The House of Compassionate Sharers,” and a Vietnam War story, “The Tigers of Hysteria Feed Only on Themselves.” I began to believe, sort of, that I could write a novel.

  Here, my memory gets fuzzy. As Joseph Brodsky puts it in his memoir Less Than One, “As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one’s palms kee
p sliding off.” I pulled out my old notes about the aliens with gems for eyes and my scruffy copy of “A Far Galapagos,” etc., and, at David Gerrold’s urging, wrote the first three or four chapters of the book that mutated into A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire. I sent these chapters, again at David’s urging, to Ballantine Books (which, at that point, still had not published the anthology for which he had acquired “On the Street of the Serpents”), and Betty Ballantine liked them well enough to ask for more.

  In June of 1973, then, I signed my first contract for a novel; my delivery date was September 15, 1973, but I probably overshot it: Jeri delivered our daughter, Stephanie, before I delivered my novel. When I did get the book in to Betty and her assistant, Judy-Lynn del Rey (née Benjamin), they agreed that reading it was like watching a colorful alien pageant “through a waterfall.” Revisions seemed called for.

  In either late 1973 or early 1974, Betty Ballantine flew down to Athens from New York to talk with me about the novel. Jeri and I put her up in our drafty rented house on Virginia Avenue. For one long weekend, with a welcome break for a catfish or barbecue dinner at an outlying eatery known as the Swamp Guinea, we pored over the manuscript. Betty explained why Gunnar Balduin could not—should not—be the cynical backstabber that I’d made him and how to remove the verbal waterfall veiling the novel’s events.

  After reviewing my book chapter by chapter in New York, Betty wrote one or more typed pages detailing the problems with each one. I kept these pages with me when she left Athens and did my damnedest to comply with her instructions to turn Funeral into an interplanetary thriller with a strong anthropological dimension and a pervasive aura of neo-Shakespearean tragedy. In fact, almost from the first, I had seen my novel as an Elizabethan drama in tie-dyed pulp clothing.

  About a year after Betty’s visit, after we Bishops had moved to a Victorian house in Pine Mountain, Georgia, the novel appeared. Square on its paperback’s cover stood a gem-eyed alien, nude but visible from only the waist up. The faceted green jewels of its eyes gave it the look of a humanoid BEM, or bug-eyed monster, and the “vestigial scar” replacing its evolutionarily obsolete mouth curved upward in a dismaying grin-cum-smirk. Also, Gene Szafran, the artist, had depicted this alien as pink-skinned as any card-carrying Caucasian. The sky above this naked humanoid creature was a somewhat darker pink. Behind the smirking creature, a V of plant-lined terraces balanced on its shoulders like out-of-focus wings.

  I didn’t hate the cover, but I knew that in this gaudy guise—a package altogether suited to the product—A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire would never bump Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Sons and Lovers from any university’s course syllabi or recommended reading lists. To me, the paperback looked like the sort that a teenage boy would thumb through under his bedcovers with a flashlight.

  I was at once proud and chagrined.

  Where did I get my title? The Ballantine edition of Funeral contained four epigrams, the first from The Making of a Counter Culture by Theodore Roszak: “The Shaman, then, is one who knows that there is more to be seen of reality than the waking eye sees. Besides our eyes of flesh, there are eyes of fire that burn through the ordinariness of the world and perceive the wonders and terrors beyond.” The quotation is from Chapter VIII, “Eyes of Flesh, Eyes of Fire.” In an Author’s Note to my reworked novel, published by Pocket Books as Eyes of Fire early in 1980, I termed Roszak’s chapter “a trenchant essay on the conflict between the world views of the shaman and the technocrat.”

  The other three epigrams in the 1975 Ballantine edition come from On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz, Vittorio Lanternari’s The Religions of the Oppressed, and African Genesis by Robert Ardrey. All throw light on my novel’s major themes, but I booted them out of the front matter of Eyes of Fire because they, like my chapter titles, now struck me as overexplicit or pretentious. Even so, the one from Lanternari may warrant repeating, for my reading of The Religions of the Oppressed, along with that of Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, prompted the line of thought underlying the moral dilemma in both versions of the book:

  “In the final analysis, all the endogenous messianic movements, regardless of their cultural level, are impelled by their nature to escape from society and from the world in order to establish a society beyond history, beyond reality, and beyond the necessity of fighting to bring about change and improvement.”

  In the Ballantine edition of Funeral, this messianic movement comprised the intuitive Ouemartsee, resistors of the technocratic Tropemen who rule the planet at large. In Eyes of Fire, these sectarians are the Sh’gaidu, a group of introspective, feminine, and mystical beings in contrast to the extrovert, masculine, and literal-minded rationalists who rule the continent Trope from Ardaja Huru, their capital. In short, although Eyes of Fire was a wholesale reimagining of my first novel, with new names, settings, characters, and complexity, it retained the thematic thrusts suggested by the discarded epigrams. But did the presence of these epigrams in the Ballantine original prove helpful to anyone? Did anyone care?

  A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire sold poorly. It received six recommendations over the Nebula year, but did not make the final ballot. Attention in both the general press and the review columns of SF specialty magazines was at best spotty; notices that did see print were, generally, either mixed or noncommittally descriptive. Or so I remember the bulk of them today.

  One review did make made a lasting impact. It appeared in the Books column of the August 1975 issue of F&SF. In this column, Alexei and Cory Panshin called Funeral “the most impressive first novel so far seen in the Seventies” and its author “one of the new and still rare breed of [sf] writer attempting to produce art without rejecting the pulp vigor that is science fiction’s continuing strength. If the cover blurbs of his book are to be believed, A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire is just so much pulp trash. But the blurbs are a lie. Bishop is attempting to use undiluted science fiction to present a tragic action of Shakespearean dimension, a disintegrating situation comparable in its mindless destructiveness and pain to our conduct of the Vietnamese war.”

  The Panshins followed this praise with a plot summary and then a rigorous catalogue of the novel’s failures and their likely causes: 1) The book’s basic situation was a “set-up”—because, wishing to write tragedy, I had designed this situation to facilitate my goal. 2) The first-person narrator existed “without knowledge, sincerity, history, or personal characteristics.” He was a “cypher whose eloquence and special vision are not his own, but Bishop’s,” for I had chosen the “safety and ease of first-person narrative” when I could have elected to view my protagonist “from the outside.”

  The Panshins’ second point struck a telling chord. I did find first-person narration more natural and easier than third, and I feared the work I had done at Betty Ballantine’s request to make my protagonist seem less a villain than a dupe had turned him into, yes, a cypher. I began hoping that I could revise the book. After all, Arthur C. Clarke had turned Against the Fall of Night into The City and the Stars, hadn’t he? At least one precedent existed.

  Precedent be damned. As an upstart SF writer struggling with Jeri’s help to stay out of debt and raise our two children, I could not afford the luxury of revising old work. The only royalty checks I had seen thus far had stemmed from the reprinting of my short fiction in best-of-the-year anthologies, and if I wanted to make a living, I had to do new work at novel length. And so I produced And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees (1976), Stolen Faces (1977), A Little Knowledge (1977), and a series of stories—the Urban Nucleus sequence—that I had planned, almost from the beginning, to yoke together in a noveloid “fix-up,” as Bradbury had assembled The Martian Chronicles, James Blish The Seedling Stars, and Clifford D. Simak City. The resultant book was Catacomb Years (1979), followed that same year by Transfigurations, and suddenly I had come to the end of a fairly sustained run and had no clear idea of what to do next.

  My editor at Berkley/Putnam had been David Hartwell. When Buz Wyeth a
t Harper & Row declined A Little Knowledge, David had accepted it; he later stood behind me on the projects that became Catacomb Years and Transfigurations. But, in 1978, David left Berkley/Putnam to edit the SF program at Pocket Books, and I had to complete Transfigurations without his input or help. Finished, I was at an impasse. Hartwell—as he had done before and as he did many times later—came to my rescue. Although Funeral still had not recouped its $2,500 advance from Ballantine, David offered me twice that sum to pull an Arthur C. Clarke. Rewrite A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire just as you’ve wanted to, he said. Go on, he urged: Get to it.

  I responded with incredulity, gratitude, and hard work.

  I’d learned a lot over the past four years, and Pocket Books, at Hartwell’s behest, would pay me to put that savvy to work doing something I would have jumped to do for free—if, that is, paying utility bills and keeping milk in the fridge had not loomed as major priorities.

  During the late winter and the spring of 1979, I thoroughly revised Funeral and turned in the result before the first of June. Gunnar Balduin became Seth Latimer. The planet Glaparcus was now Gla Taus. The Ouemartsee were now the Sh’gaidu. My first-person narration had metamorphosed into third-person. And when my revision hit the bookstores, its Pocket Books paperback boasted two maps, a list of characters, and a division into books meant to reflect the five-act structure of an Elizabethan play. But its cover bore the same painting that had marked the Ballantine edition . . . except that Pocket Books had reversed it, getting it right for the first time. Also, the emerald eyes of the Ballantine alien had become yellow chrysoberyls. Again, only a slim chance that Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, or Susan Sontag would expatiate about my novel in the New York Review of Books.