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THE GOLDEN AGE OF PULP FICTION
1. George Allan England
THE GOLDEN AGE OF MYSTERY AND CRIME
1. Fletcher Flora
2. Ruth Chessman
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Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR
Originally published in 1985 by Necronomicon Press.
INTRODUCTION
It is often taken for granted—I’ve always felt quite unjustifiably—that a fiction writer’s characters are thinly disguised aspects of himself wearing multiple-personality type costumes.
If that were true the writing of an autobiographical memoir would be the height of folly, because whatever he may have been somewhat reticent about in his stories would be more fully revealed to the least friendly of his critics. With all his defenses demolished he would become a stripped-to-the-bone kind of figure, haunting cemetery shadows until he could find an ope grave to his liking (ope is an archaic but “just right” term for a certain kind of grave, since it conjures up, for me at least, a vision of a yawning pit surrounded by heaped-up mounds of freshly turned earth, and containing no trace of its previous occupants).
There are risks, however, that must be taken when circumstances of an unusual nature make the avoidance of a risk factor seem—well, at the very least, unworthy. Besides—and I must stress this again—I’ve always refused to believe that imaginative fiction writers have to project some aspect of themselves into every character they create. Even naturalistic fiction, at its most candid, seems at times to be peopled by at least a few characters so alien to the writer that they could hardly have been based on more than careful, extremely objective observation. How much more true (“true” can hardly be a comparative adjective, but let it stand) would that be of science fiction and fantasy writers, particularly of supernatural horror story writers, when at every “turn of the screw” in some dark, high house in the mist in the small hours, or while standing with a quickly assembling crowd at the site of you-know-what kind of landing, they encounter something or someone so unlike themselves that the character trait identification factor would become a mockery.
The unusual circumstances that made the writing of this memoir almost mandatory can be set forth quite simply, in no more than a paragraph or two, and without the intrusion of anything controversial. The closely related genres of science fiction and fantasy writing have far more than simply “come of age”. A decade ago that statement, which quite often appeared on book jackets and in review columns in the 1950s, had become “outdated” and clearly needed to be rephrased. Today it would be ridiculous to refer to the growth and present standing of both genres as a surprise development of comparatively recent origin, when for a full generation now the maturity, scholarship, and depth and brilliance of characterization that has been achieved in both realms on their highest levels has not been surpassed by the great majority of mainstream novelists. An exaggeration, a wish-fulfillment fantasy? I think not. My point is strengthened here by the simple fact that no less than five widely acclaimed mainstream authors have written novels in either the science fiction or dark fantasy categories in the past few years, in an apparent effort to stand shoulder to shoulder with a round dozen battle-scarred veterans on that no longer side street platform as the bands go by. How well they have succeeded can be safely left to the future to decide.
When a new century draws near there is no laborer in the vineyards of the old whose personal recollections may not be of some value in years to come, even if only stumbled on by accident in, let us say, 2025. And that imposes an obligation which I cannot in good conscience evade, and is the chief raison d’être for the pages which follow. One further word—in Chapter One I have dwelt at considerable length on my childhood. Although it may seem to strain credulity, the ancient but never really trite assumption that the child is father to the man was largely absent from my thoughts when I was writing it. I was thinking instead—and I stressed this in a recent interview—that there are imaginative worlds of strangeness and wonder which can never be re-entered in adult years, or that the memories of adults can never hope to recapture in more than a transitory, infinitely incomplete way. It is in those worlds that the wisdom of children seems often to transcend every sophisticated insight acquired by adults through their vastly greater experience and orientation to what is commonly thought of as reality in the course of the years.
CHAPTER 1
The imagery to which very young children are most sensitive creates for many of them a world so different from the rule-obeying, outwardly sane and ordered world of adults that it can be said that it bears a collision-course potential that is more remote from immediate, everyday reality than most people suspect. More often than not, however, an actual shattering does not occur and that secret world becomes a refuge that changes very little as the years pass. All it actually does is drift away to regions apart, where it still remains accessible, along mountain pathways, and across shining valleys, to the imaginatively defiant and the bold.
Though city-born—incredible as it may seem to some—that world has always contained dark and mysterious woodland vistas for me, perilous crags, haunted marshes, goblin-infested caves and crows on the wing. Great beauty as well, shapes of light and loveliness, and one image that has always symbolized for me exactly the opposite, horror in an extreme form—a great, white-maned horse, trapped in quicksand and sinking slowly down until its struggles cease and only its rump remains visible.
It was not from books that such images came, for my parents never read to me by gaslight in a house where the scampering of mice was never absent, despite the setting of many traps. (If you were not born before the early years of the century you will find it hard to imagine how it would be possible to live in a spacious but wholly non-electrified house!)
But I’m distorting the facts just a little here, because my particular world of early childhood was far from entirely urban, and I spent two and a half months of every year in a summer wonderland with some backwoods aspects. As not a few professional men did at the time, my father spent July, August and sometimes most of September as a vacationist; fishing and hunting were very important to him, and enabled him to feel that the practice of dentistry could be mixed with such outdoor interests with no detriment to either.
His location of choice was the Thousand Islands on the Canadian shore, about seven miles from the then small village of Cananoque. Through one of his patients he had heard of a successful but not too prosperous Canadian farmer who owned a large tract of land which was only partly cultivated—a youngish married man who took in summer boarders to supplement the family income.
I have no recollection at all of the first summer I spent there, since I was exactly six months old. But my mother informed me—much later, of course—that I was placed in a bureau drawer in an upstairs bedroom, because there was no cot available. (The farmer’s two sons were six and eight, and their cots had long since been used for firewood.) Some slight deception may have been practiced by a false assurance, by letter perhaps, that a cot would be available. I never asked my mother about this, because the entire matter distressed me and I had no desire to talk about it. A future supernatural horror story writer could well have developed an infantile coffin complex through such an episode!
Another distressing event occurred during my third year at the farm, and I may as well dispose of it here. I developed pneumonia (I had recklessly fallen into the river at the end of a long pier the day previously). My father leapt into a motorboat in the middle of the night and went to Cananoque for a doctor. He returned with a Chinese physician who later became quite renowned as one of Canada’s most distinguished research physicians, and at that time was the only physician for miles around.
My entire chest was plastered with almost boiling hot compresses, and my mother was left with instructions to complete the emergency measure every two hours. Or perhaps it was every half-hour. All I can remember is the almost unbearable horror and pain that accompanied the descent of those plasters, again and again and again, from throat to navel.
In fact—and I’m quite serious about
this, as I was not, of course, about my totally unremembered, hastily-improvised crib experience earlier, trying as it must have been to my mother—it was the only memory from that period that I can recall today as truly frightening. My actual fall from the pier I do not remember at all, and it was told to me for the first time several years later.
That memories of infancy sometimes go back to the birth trauma itself I have never doubted, for it bears a striking resemblance to the accounts of what happens when people who have been pronounced dead by an attending physician are later restored to consciousness, and may well be a repetition of that experience and far from proof of after-death survival.
Like almost everyone else I would much prefer to believe otherwise, for there is nothing quite so appalling as the thought of total, after-death extinction. HPL, of course, preferred to believe it was the opposite of appalling, and said to me, more than once, “What difference does it really make, Belknapius, if we become again what we once were—a totally at peace aspect of nothingness?”
We remained on the farm during the summer months until I was eight or nine years old, and my father found new lodgings where the fishing and hunting was even better at another point on the Canadian shore—it was truly a wilderness in those early years—where the St. Lawrence widened out a little, and there were more of its many islands. It was an inn that at one time had been a boys’ school and the library was still overflowing with instructional volumes, including a huge one dealing with beetle and butterfly collecting, which could hardly have failed to stimulate my already growing interest in natural history.
We moved to still another location several years later and I remained a summer vacationist in the Thousand Islands until I was seventeen. If I attempted to dwell at length on those long, unforgettable summers there would be little space left in this memoir for my New York childhood, which, of course, was of just as great a formative importance, although it did not always seem so. But here are a scattered few of the highlights, as I remember them:
Visiting Cananoque perhaps fifty times in the family launch, which my father had named The Rover and ascending from the wharf at the base of the village over a road that was darkened a little by belching smokestacks to its long main street and adjacent dwellings. In the earliest days it had been little more than a small village, but it soon became a medium-sized town of growing industrial importance.
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 2
