Damon Knight was one of those learned men who didn’t need the confirmation of a college education, like Frederik Pohl or John Brunner (who said that he dropped out of college because it was interfering with his education). I met Damon for the first time at the World Science Fiction Convention of 1955, held in Cleveland. We were kindred souls in our fascination by the critical side of science fiction and the conviction that science fiction could, and should, be written with literary skill. Where we disagreed was the form that skill should take: Damon, I think, was willing to see it become indistinguishable from the mainstream; I wanted to preserve its genre identity and vitality.
We met at the bar, the place where much of the business and almost all of the fun of a convention takes place. I recognized Damon by his pictures, or had him pointed out, and introduced myself. We chatted amiably. He was a medium-sized man with the thoughtful face of a professor—glasses, a narrow chin, a prominent forehead made more prominent by a receding hairline, and, most noticeably, observant eyes. I already knew who Damon was. Though my senior by less than a year, he was my senior by almost a decade in science fiction experience.
He had gone to New York from his native Oregon in 1941, attracted as a youthful fan by the reputation of the Futurians, and became a member of that fabled group. He worked as a freelance writer and an editor for various magazines, including his own Worlds Beyond that lasted for only three promising issues from 1950 to 1951. He had come into his own as a writer about the same time I began publishing stories. His first story to attract much attention, “Not with a Bang,” was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1950. My first story (which attracted no attention) was published in Startling Stories in 1949. His first Galaxy story, “To Serve Man,” was published in 1950, as well, and Damon continued to publish, mostly in F&SF and Galaxy throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, and became one of the great science fiction short-story writers of his generation.
But Damon’s stories and novels could not compete with his accomplishments in other aspects of the field. He made a reputation as a reviewer and a critic, mostly in the fanzines, beginning with a famous deconstruction in 1945 of A. E. Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A, under the title of “Cosmic Jerrybuilder.” It led to Damon’s later career as a reviewer for Infinity and F&SF and, perhaps, to the creation of his own influential anthology, Orbit, which he launched in 1966 and published through twenty-one issues, nurturing a number of major science fiction talents.
And he (with the help of the late Lloyd Biggle, Jr.) created the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1965. I had occasional contacts with Damon over the years after our first meeting. He had invited me to contribute some reviews to a journal he and James Blish (the other major name in bringing critical standards to the science fiction field) were starting, but it died before I could supply anything. Then came SFWA. The idea of an organization of science fiction writers had been discussed in the pages of Ted Cogswell’s irreverent fanzine PITFCS, some writers saying that they would never join an organization of any kind, others saying that it would only work if it had the power to strike and discipline its members. Damon thought otherwise, and the history of SFWA has proven him correct—it is one of the most influential writers’ organizations in the nation (and also, perhaps, the most disputatious). I was one of the charter members. Damon was its first president. I was its fourth.
Damon also created the Nebula Awards and the volume of its winners that supported the awards. He created the Milford Writers Conference for published writers, which he ran from his home in Milford, Pennsylvania, (and from his subsequent homes) for twenty years, and for twenty-seven years he and his wife Kate Wilhelm taught the final two weeks of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshops, founded by Robin Scott Wilson, which was inspired by the Milford Conferences. I was invited to the Milford Conferences from time to time but never had the opportunity to attend. (I would have liked to have been there the year Kurt Vonnegut participated.)
Damon was an anthologist. It was as an anthologist of historical surveys of science fiction that I invited him to participate in the science fiction lecture film series I was putting together in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I asked him to lecture on the early history of science fiction. In his typical organized fashion, he wanted his written text transcribed onto cue cards, and in 1971 we filmed him in front of the United Nations building (We wanted to do it on the grounds themselves but were refused permission). You won’t find that film in the series (or the DVDs that have been made from them). Traffic noise drowned out the sound track, but Damon was gracious enough to come to Lawrence, Kansas, where we filmed it all again in the living room of the series producer, Alex Lazzarino.
On that same visit I asked Damon to speak to my science fiction class, and we had a classic disagreement about whether one could differentiate between science fiction and fantasy. Damon took the side that no distinction was possible or desirable. I wish I had recorded our debate for posterity.
Damon was quick to express his opinions, and his opinions, right or wrong, were one of the forces that drove science fiction toward maturity of vision and integrity of craft. His reviews, collected in In Search of Wonder, along with James Blish’s in The Issue at Hand, were major influences on the writers of their time. Damon wasn’t always right, but he was always forceful and his force was toward higher aspirations and greater achievements. For instance, he never understood Van Vogt’s strengths (or if he did he never acknowledged them). But when I was planning a series of academic editions for the Perennial Library, I had the inspiration of asking Damon to do an introduction to The World of Null-A, as a kind of reappraisal, and Damon agreed. But Perennial canceled the series before anything was written.
Our last meeting was by e-mail. He had come across my contention that science fiction had its own reading protocols (something Samuel R. Delany first identified for me in a presentation to the Modern Language Association), and we exchanged some comments on an sff.net listserv—Damon insisting that science fiction had no special protocols and my explaining what I thought they were.
During our first meeting I asked Damon if he had reviewed my first novel, This Fortress World, which had been published that year along with Star Bridge, my collaboration with Jack Williamson. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I panned it.” And so he had. You can read it still in In Search of Wonder (pp.258–59). I learned two important lessons from that: never ask reviewers if they have reviewed your work, and to place my stories and novels in the near future rather than the distant future. I’ve followed both ever since.
DAMON KNIGHT
THE TEACHER
Robin Wilson
Robin Wilson, an anthology editor, novelist, and short story writer, is a retired university president living in coastal California. Robin’s bibliography can be found on the Web at http://isfdb.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Robin%20Scott%20Wilson.
Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm are very different as artists, but during the thirty-five years I knew them as a couple, they seemed intellectually and physically inseparable, a complex partnership of two people of great wit and intelligence. It follows that any account of Damon’s role in the Clarion workshop has equal relevance to Kate’s.
I began to learn about this duo in 1967. The year before, I had returned from five years in Berlin as a CIA Case Officer and was looking for another job. The one I landed was a professorship in English at Clarion State College, and a condition of my employment was that I organize a writers workshop. I did not know how to do this. I did not know anybody who knew how to do this, but I knew of Damon’s Milford Writers Conference, an annual gathering of professionals that had then been running for more than a decade. When I told him my plans, he invited me to participate in the 1967 conference. There, I discovered Kate and went about employing my old skills of surreptitious observation and assessment to recruit three more writers who seemed to have the critical sense to examine others’ work, the warmth to encourage without condescension those less talented
or experienced, and the idiocy to agree to live a week amid their students in an ancient dormitory in a town Damon later termed “the sphincter of the universe” for $500 and all found.
I had five one-week Visiting Lecturer slots to fill and only enough money to hire four, but the Knights came to the rescue. They agreed to serve together for a week and then to stay on for another. For the price of one I got four teacher-weeks, a case of faculty exploitation revealing my readiness for a subsequent career as a university administrator. Today, I look back across the Clarion Workshop’s thirty-seven-year history and see no greater boon than getting the Knights for that first session, better even than the felicity of the workshop’s name. It could have been Slippery Rock.
With the first-year faculty hired, I puzzled as to how we were to operate. The tough, competitive atmosphere of a conference for professionals such as Milford is not suited to aspiring tyros. Neither is the placid read-and-discuss model of college Creative Writing classes. More important, I knew no one who had learned to be a good fiction writer in a classroom; we had all learned by repeatedly trying and failing and listening to whatever criticism we could find and trying again. My notion was to reproduce that process—trying, failure, criticism, eventual success—in six intense weeks. I was convinced that total immersion in fiction writing for as many hours in the day as mind and body could bear was the key, if there was one, to its mastery.
In short, I did not expect the workshop to teach people to write but to provide a sweaty arena in which we could coach the motivated and talented to wrestle their muses into either unmistakable rejection or fluttery-eyed acquiescence. As Damon later noted, the Clarion atmosphere was like that at Milford, “. . . but that was eight days and this was six weeks.”
In that first session in 1968 we learned some new ways of doing things. It turned out that Damon and Kate were extraordinarily good at teaching, a skill which—like writing—is more to be discovered in oneself than learned. They accepted each story as a work in progress (we critiqued only freshly written material) to be evaluated within the context of the storyteller’s emotions and values. And they rapidly supplemented the Milford-style round-robin group criticism with tireless one-on-one conferences.
This process was energized by Kate’s perceptive empathy with fumbling neophytes, my growing skills for gaming the bureaucratic system, and Damon’s incredibly sharp insights, tersely delivered, with a humor that belied his claim to be “one of the most sarcastic, intolerant, opinionated sons of bitches in science fiction.”
Another lucky break: Milford’s schedule made the Knights unavailable before the last two weeks of the workshop, after an opening week in which I tried to provide a common critical vocabulary, followed by a week each of Judith Merril, Fritz Leiber, and Harlan Ellison. I instilled, Judith mothered imaginations, Fritz plotted and dueled, Harlan awed into adulation, and Damon and Kate showed up to pick up the pieces, put them back together again, and reseat the resulting ovoid structures onto their walls.
We all learned from the students and from each other. Early on, Damon grew convinced that stories were more often than not weak because they began at an inappropriate place in the plot line or were told from the wrong point of view. Kate insisted that good stories must stem from some matter of direct emotional concern to the writer, that other story ideas produced only mechanical exercises in technique, a criticism particularly relevant to science fiction, with its accent on setting and circumstance, on the vast, the mysterious, the alien. “Who Hurts and Who Cares?” became the mantra for workshop criticism.
And we also learned something about ourselves. Damon had been a little skeptical about teaching at the workshop, “this mad thing.” After the second Clarion, in 1969, he was a convert. “Impressed over again by Clarion,” he wrote. “Still can’t quite believe it. We were afraid last year was a fluke which couldn’t be repeated, but this year was better. Beautiful kids.”
Well, the next year (when Vonda McIntyre was a workshopper) was better still. By then fourteen of the first twenty previously unpublished full-time students had made it into print. And so it went every year thereafter, at Tulane in 1971 and then, from 1972 to the present, at Michigan State University. The roster of writers who have taught at Clarion is substantial, a Who’s Who in the field, and most of them turned out to be good teachers. But for twenty-seven years, until they retired in 1994, Kate and Damon put it all together in the final two weeks, ensuring the harvest to come.
In 1996, Michigan State University recognized Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm for the remarkable artists, critics, and teachers they are and awarded them honorary doctorates.
OH YOU KID! A PERSONAL
VIEW OF DAMON KNIGHT
Edward Bryant
Edward Bryant made a name for himself early in his career with dazzling short stories. He achieved back-to-back Nebula awards for “Stone” in 1978 and “giANTS” in 1979. Multitalented, he writes fiction in all lengths, screenplays, poetry, and edits the occasional anthology. Including 2076: The American Tricentennial, which, somewhat perversely, appeared in 1977. He is known, at least to this author, for his sharp wit, devastatingly dry humor, and equally devastating smile. Ed’s next book is the story collection Flirting with Death from CD Publications. His bibliography can be found online at http://isfdb.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Edward%20Bryant.
I knew damon knight long before I knew Damon Knight.
What I mean is that I read the man and read about the man long before I ever met the gentleman in person. First there was the legend; then the human being.
Having grown up in the Fifties, and being largely defined as a science fiction geek by my favored reading matter, I depended heavily upon my small-town Carnegie public library. But beyond that, I discovered prozines, professional science fiction magazines, and first twenty-five-cent, then thirty-five-cent paperbacks. Of course I discovered Damon Knight the writer.
But I had access to other resources as well. I was certainly the only kid on my school bus who pored over both the latest issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland and Dick Eney’s Fancyclopedia II. Bear in mind that I possessed no first-hand experience with science fiction fandom. I’d bought the mimeographed Eney reference book through the mail after seeing it reviewed in some prozine. So I started learning about the Futurians and slanshacks and fan feuds and all manner of other microcultural phenomena.
That’s when I found out that the writer and critic Damon Knight had had a checkered past in science fiction fandom. I learned that he had once been billed as damon knight, presumably after a profound intellectual brush with e. e. cummings. And I was told he’d first made his bones as a credible critic in a literary field not previously known for rigorous intellectual literary discourse by beating the crap out of poor A. E. van Vogt’s presumed classic The World of Null-A. Since then, Damon, along with a small but growing cadre of critics such as James Blish, had kept raising the bar in terms of critical commentary.
So all of that made him, of course, Somebody. Or as cummings might have said, somebody. But I still didn’t know the man on any kind of human level. That didn’t come until 1968 when I found myself bored and frustrated with my graduate level program in English and bolted for the summer to Clarion, Pennsylvania, where Robin Scott Wilson had put together the first Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, an enterprise based, as it turned out, on the workshopping principles of the Milford conference, the legendary week-long annual gathering of professional writers, mainly science fiction, created a few years earlier by Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm. As it turned out, Damon and Kate were slated to be the climactic writers-in-residence the final two weeks of the premiere Clarion.
So that’s how I met them. Both of them. The calm, perceptive, and serenely beautiful Kate Wilhelm. The intense, acerbic, and occasionally crazed Damon Knight, the man who by this time in his life, had adopted the striking visage of a bearded and bushy-haired Old Testament prophet. From the standpoint of a callow writing student, it was difficult not to be
impressed by a sensibility that appeared to have fanned more than a few burning bushes before striding down from the summit of Sinai.
I didn’t get the impression that Damon was the world’s greatest fan of my science fiction writing, but he did give me a fair shake, inviting me both to submit to his original anthology series Orbit and to attend the Milford Conference next time around. Making it into Orbit became one of my own personal high bars to clear, an ambition I eventually realized with a clear sense of pride and accomplishment. Of course I never sold Damon as many stories as did, say, Ray Lafferty, Gene Wolfe, or Kate, but I placed enough fiction with him, I knew it was no fluke.
Attending Milford was the killer experience, though. And I mean that in the best sense. Eventually Kate and Damon moved from Pennsylvania to Florida, and then to Oregon, taking the writing conference with them. It was in Eugene, Oregon, that I saw Damon do one of his great teaching things. After a long and contentious group discussion about the tired old clichés of pulp science fiction, Damon challenged all of us to write some real science fiction that turned inside out the old tropes. Pick some tired and hoary science fiction image, drag it gasping and wheezing from the junkyard of bygone standards, examine it from a brand new angle of approach. Make it fresh. I recall that only two of us expressed much enthusiasm for taking up the flung gauntlet. I don’t know whether Joe Haldeman ever carried through with his planned effort. Me, I wanted to take the old Ray Cummings Girl in the Golden Atom gimmick of worlds within worlds within subatomic worlds and turn it into something appropriate for the modern age. What resulted was a story called “Particle Theory.” Analog published it and the piece did well for me.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2004 Page 12
