Until I met Harold it would have been hard for me to believe that so young a writer could have possessed so brilliant and spontaneous a tale-spinning ability. Elaborate and intricate plots—not just ideas for stories—seemed to leap fully developed into his mind, and in the course of a long subway ride or even a thirty-or forty-block walk he could make you feel that the narrative he was reciting with hardly a pause was something he must have memorized from a book.
There were times when just the spell cast by the narrative itself obsessed him to the exclusion of almost everything else. It had never been quite that way with me. Until I actually sat down to write a story there were a hundred other matters that concerned me more—life’s uncertainties, its tragedies and moments of joy, the strangeness of something I’d just seen, how promising had been the look of the girl I’d dined with the previous night and what would happen if I were a little more audacious the next time, and how I could get out of working long hours over some task that bored me to death and gave me no pleasure at any point.
I don’t mean to imply by that that writing wasn’t as important to me as it was to Harold. It was always one of the two or three things at the very center of my life. But the simple telling of some marvelous tale and then another and another, like some medieval balladeer or village-roaming Homeric-age bard, too absorbed in a continuous procession of wonders to give heed to anything else, is the mark of a storyteller apart. I had to wait for inspiration to strike, and just the right circumstance to arise, or series of circumstances. I had to have seclusion, as a rule, a chance to shut myself away from the distractions of the moment for a reasonable period of time.
To Harold, in those far-off days at least, what happened to Alerac the Dragon Slayer in the Misty Isles or some member of the Werewolf Clan became, when the tale-spinning demon took possession of him, the sole source of his concern.
Life can be strange indeed in the way some early friendships go into eclipse for no reason that can be rationally explained. Harold returned to New England and did not visit New York again for a long period of time, and so many events took place in my life that even keeping in touch with him by letter—well, it simply didn’t happen. (Much the same thing happened after my quite voluminous early correspondence with Clark Ashton Smith.)
I had no idea that he had married and was the father of grown children, or even that he had just recently lost his wife and was a West Coast resident, still actively engaged in writing, until I met him again in Providence at the First World Fantasy Convention in 1975!
CHAPTER 3
A complaint that is often voiced today by writers of science fiction, supernatural horror, and heroic fantasy has as its target the so-called literary establishment and is of so confused and contradictory a nature that it is greatly in need of clarification. It seeks persuasiveness by resting its claims on the assumption that there is no more than one literary establishment, if one must use that term, and that the three genres in question are separated, not only from one another—and there is a little truth in that—but from the far more important and enduring “main stream.”
What I shall try to do here, in a humble way, may provoke so much disagreement that it will please no one. But when one’s concern is deep and genuine there are risks that must be taken, even if it means watching one’s head being served up on a platter (an occurrence by no means impossible to imagine in some fourth-dimensional milieu!). The best way of tackling it is to break it down into categories, which I’ve numbered accordingly.
1. The literary establishment. There are, in America alone, at least six such establishments. What one thinks of first, perhaps, is the somewhat elitish, highly sophisticated one that brings to mind, almost immediately, the New York Review of Books. A total failure to be even so much as mentioned in that one can cause a few writers, even in our three genres, to lie awake nights. Actually, however, it is considerably less of a literary establishment than the slightly academic one (in recent years, at least, in its roping in of distinguished literary figures who are full professors) best represented by the New York Times Book Review. There follows in rapid sequence the Midwestern establishment and the West Coast establishment, almost as prestigious—perhaps even more so in a few respects—which is often at complete variance with Eastern seaboard criteria concerning books of enduring literary worth. Oh, yes—the Southern one as well, and to downgrade its literary standards in recent years would be a major critical mistake.
Last of all—but probably far from the least—there is the college-university establishment, with its hundreds of classrooms, presided over by brilliant young Ph.D.s or “stodgy” elderly professors too secure in their tenures to worry much about anything except reaching the enforced retirement age and preserving their health. (It is interesting to note in passing here that our three genres are still sometimes judged in this particular milieu, incredible as it may seem, by literary standards at least a century old—standards which even quite a few eminent Victorian and American writers of the same period would have regarded as a trifle old-fashioned.)
A résumé as brief as this must, of necessity, be somewhat simplistic, and I have failed to include establishment factors of considerable importance apart from the ones I’ve mentioned, such as many of the small literary reviews, and magazines such as Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, et cetera. But, as the walrus said when gobbling up the most appetizing parts of a spiny sea urchin, “One can’t include everything.”
2. The supernatural horror story. I’ve decided to let the other two genres go for a moment and concentrate on this one, if only because its popular aspects and the serious literary recognition it has been accorded by the literary establishments are in sharper contrast.
That supernatural horror—in folk tales, and in fiction—has exercised a very great influence on the American imagination over the past four centuries seems to me beyond dispute, with Cotton Mather’s Magnalia setting the original pace. In popular fiction its role has never been a minor one and that is just as true of so-called elitist or high-culture fiction.
To what extent then—and that is our central problem here—have the literary establishments I’ve listed failed to accord it the due its importance deserves? That all of them, except perhaps the first, have accorded it some due also seems to me beyond dispute.
But not anything like enough? The answer, I think, would have to be in the affirmative. Not nearly enough and it is very difficult to understand why. About all I can do is advance a few suggestions, in highly idiosyncratic, pinwheeling fashion, as a possible explanation of this cultural lag.
Establishments have a tendency to draw a distinction between genres that ignores the way they often merge and blend. The horror story, standing alone, is just one ripple, albeit an impressive one, on an infinitely broader fictional stream which embraces every kind of writing. There are numerous examples of so-called mainstream writing, for instance, that contain as much, or almost as much, of the horror or occult element as individual works by, let us say, Poe or Hawthorne (and even The House of the Seven Gables is far from completely dominated by that element alone) or HPL or, to cite a current example, Stephen King in The Shining. In sober fact there is a very strong horror or terror tale element—while not of a supernatural nature—in Faulkner. In the Dashiell Hammett anthology Creeps by Night there is a horror story, “A Rose for Emily,” far more chilling than mine in the same volume, or one by John Collier which has also become a classic of its kind. And in Faulkner’s novels, particularly the early ones, the horror element is very strong.
No question can arise at all as to the ghostly story’s popular recognition, in a general readership sense, both today and in the past. In America, from the days of Washington Irving onward—and even earlier—written and oral accounts, very frequently in fictional form, of haunted mansions, vanishing stage coaches, night-riding demons, flesh-eating ghouls and a wide variety of o
ther ghostly presences have gripped and held the American imagination. And no sooner had the English eighteenth-century Gothic novel made its influence felt on this side of the Atlantic than a host of new story tellers arose, minor figures for the most part and almost totally forgotten today. But they were widely read and popular enough in their time. Far from forgotten today is Charles Brockden Brown, the first major American novelist in the genre.
Then came Poe, and Hawthorne, who were certainly the opposite of minor in that particular realm and spread out across the rest of the century. Fitz-James O’Brien, Ambrose Bierce, F. Marion Crawford, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman of “Yellow Wall Paper” fame, Lafcadio Hearn (his Japanese ghost stories were close to major literary contributions to the genre, even though he wrote them after he arrived in Japan) and two or three other writers, often one-or two-story figures, which space limitations prevent me from dwelling on here.
Then the twentieth century dawned, and the supernatural horror story really began to gather momentum, in both a popular and a literary sense. I would have to write a thousand-page essay to go into all of that here. The best I can do is place on the turntable names, associations, publications et cetera known to all, as the phrase goes. I have set the record to revolving more or less at random here, with jerks, stops and a backward shifting of the needle here and there. What we get—and it must be remembered I am covering only American contributions—would sound something like this. Algernon Blackwood and The Wave, “The Willows,” “The Wendigo”—raise no eyebrows, please: read Episodes before Thirty and you’ll realize how much he identified with American writers in the genre during his stay here, and how extensively his books bore American publisher imprints later on—Irvin S. Cobb, a magnificent horror writer as well as a famed humorist whose contributions in the horror realm were unique of their kind—HPL—Weird Tales, the most legendary of horror genre pulps, with at least five early contributors who were later to establish major reputations in the field including Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury—the early movies, the Boris Karloff sort of thing, some going back to silent film days, with vampires, werewolves and Frankenstein-created monsters competing for the allegiance of the young on the widest possible graveyard scale. (And not just one age group, for the general popularity of such films contributed, to some extent at least, to the importance of the genre on a far more serious and indisputably literary plane, just as even so space-opera-ish a film as Star Wars has done the opposite of harm in paving the way for a more mature and sophisticated understanding of science fiction on an Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke or Frank Herbert plane.)
Then—the tremendous upsurgence—it could almost be thought of as an explosion—which has taken place in the supernatural horror story genre in the past six or seven years. I am spared the necessity of going into that here by the simple fact that Stephen King has covered it from all angles—recent, historical, hardcover, paperback and films—in a splendidly comprehensive way in Danse Macabre.
What establishment critics in general perhaps most wish to avoid is being thought of as genre critics, and the horror story, standing alone, presents an unusual pitfall in that respect. Its roots go so deep and it involves so much that is universal in its strangeness and hold on the human imagination that to accord it a very high place as an important branch of literature could make such a critic conspicuous as an “odd man out” amongst his peers, an esoteric defender of writing that should be approached with a greater degree of caution and balance.
What further complicates all this is the simple fact that in no other genre is it so hard to place an evaluation on writing that covers so wide a range in both its popular and serious literary appeal—from very badly, even atrociously written novels like Dracula (and a stylist on any level Bram Stoker was not) to such pocket masterpieces of great literary distinction as the ghost stories of M. R. James, or Henry James’ Turn of the Screw.
I am far from a pessimist, however, concerning the eventual acceptance of the supernatural horror story by all the literary establishments in America—and overseas as well, of course—as an important branch of literature, and, at its best, very much a part of the main stream. Like almost everything else in our “future shock” era, literary evaluations seem at times to be changing almost overnight.
3. Science fiction and fantasy in general. This appraisal would run to an inordinate length indeed if I attempted to cover more than two rather vital points. In so far as the three genres overlap in many ways, the feelings I’ve always had about supernatural horror in literature would be equally applicable here, with a few qualifications; in several areas of discussion I shall have to put these feelings aside until I start my dark-side-of-the-moon Ph.D thesis on 2020.
What seems most important to me, with such limitations in mind, is the extent to which science fiction today—the best of SF in a literary sense—is still thought to be ghettoized. I refuse to believe that it is. A few years ago perhaps, but not in 1985. In this I find myself in disagreement with three or four of the foremost practitioners, Robert Silverberg for one and particularly Harlan Ellison. For my chips they are both magnificent writers indeed, and have achieved so great a measure of professional success that their opinions have to be accorded weight. But so much can be placed on the other side of the scales to refute such a belief that I can’t see how it can be any longer maintained.
A few examples should suffice. At least a dozen establishment critics of major stature—as such criteria go—have ceased to draw any distinction between the best of science fiction in a literary sense and novels in other categories. A few of them have gone so far as to hail it as quite possibly the most important literature of tomorrow. I shall mention no names here. There is no need for me to do so. Just open the New York Times Book Review on any rainy Sunday—if it is not raining it might be wiser to follow Walt Whitman’s suggestion: “I listened to the learned astronomer and then went out and looked up at the stars.”
But at any rate, with the New York Times Book Review opened, glance at some of the recent full-page ads. The ads themselves mean very little in a purely literary sense. If a publisher feels like purchasing one, that is entirely—or almost entirely—irrelevant. But just glance at the quoted “rave notices” and some of the names attached to them.
How many of those names would it have been possible to assemble even a decade ago—academic, literary, prestigious or otherwise? Write off all log-rolling, all friendship ties, and you’d still have something to marvel at on the “establishment-accepted” side of the scales.
The second point of rather vital importance which I feel should be mentioned here is a quite simple one—nothing I have said regarding the entire fantasy field should be accorded more importance than any other portion of this “fireside chat” memoir. I may well be mistaken in as many ways as a hedgehog who meets himself coming back out of a cavern which he had gnawed in space-time and can’t quite decide whether he is one hedgehog or two or some creature of a different breed entirely.
CHAPTER 4
I’ve sometimes wondered what I might achieve in the realm of self-discovery if I could see and talk again to everyone I’ve ever known from the ages of two until the present time. To carry it back to the day of my birth might well involve a whole new ballgame of vast, mysterious forces too consciously ill-defined to be important to me in quite the same way, although it is interesting to note in this connection that Ray Bradbury has stated he can remember with considerable clarity the day of his birth.
Just suppose that, by some miracle of astral communication, with an instrument outwardly resembling nothing more complex than the easily attachable desk telephones one can now buy at bargain prices in department store sales, I could dial any one of the aforementioned individuals and find them at home and they could, in turn, dial me. Suppose, further, that few would refuse an invitation to visit me in person, if only because an invitation so unusual, in c
ircumstances so extraordinary, would be difficult to brush aside.
Almost immediately, unfortunately, other problems would arise. With so many individuals to talk to—multitudes, in fact—I could allot no more than a few seconds for a visit from each, even in so narrowed down a list that it would make the New York telephone directory seem, by comparison, a volume no more than a few millimeters thick. I could, of course, make a few exceptions, and allow an occasional visit to last for a minute or two. But even then—
All at once, a solution occurred to me.
Aside from my childhood, with its family ties, and my marriage, and the writing of books, nothing has played a more important role in my life than friendships I could only hope to renew through the kind of astral plane communication I’ve been dwelling on here. Not only were the majority of such friends fellow writers, the three or four I remained in communication with the most, over the longest periods of time, were writers in the closely related genres of science fiction and fantasy (with the latter’s several subdivisions). My other friends of a great many years, who outnumber them still, I have dwelt on elsewhere. But they hardly provide a solution to the problem I’ve just been discussing. Only this one does. If I confine the visits from each to no one else, the time available for a quite long visit ceases to present a problem. So—
I step to my desk, and pick up the astral phone communicator. I dial a number I’ve memorized by ESP perceptivity, the one that comes instantly to mind as the most important of several. You’ve guessed it—it is that of HPL. Where is he residing now? What will he have to tell me?
Bear in mind that the instrument is new to me. Its availability has dome as a revelation. Imagine my startlement then when my “hello” is answered in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, and before I can even ask “May I speak to—?”, by several quick reproaches: “Did you have to call me at so early an hour, Belknapius? I’ve been sleeping for not more than two hours. A terrible revision job. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to think about it again until noon, after I’ve had breakfast, and at least two cups of coffee.”
The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 20 Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 4
