The fragmentary and episodic method Sturgeon had used in The Cosmic Rape to depict the carrying out of complex plots and schemes had always struck me as an effective, suggestive, and economical way to put over general plot hugger-mugger, of which I was sure my books would have a fair amount. Very well, then, I would appropriate Sturgeon’s method for myself.
What else had gone into preparation?
Shortly after my seventeenth birthday, I’d first read Moby Dick. From the “Afterword” to the gilt-covered Signet Classics paperback, I’d gleaned the notion—or at any rate first seen it articulated—that greatness in a novel was a matter of form: the richness to the pattern of emotional contrasts between the various sections, the pacing and placing of those lines or metaphors that recall for the reader whole scenes or sections located earlier in the text—in short, the entire range of intratextual mechanics by which a novel sets up resonances and echoes within itself. Struggling even then with juvenile attempts at novels of my own, I’d logged Moby Dick’s thirty-five “nonfiction” chapters and noted where they came in the narrative proper, as well as where Melville had chosen to place his rhapsodic “silent monologues” or the several playlets that punctuated his book.
One of the Pequod’s crew had been a Gay Header.
During my seventeenth summer, my family had spent a few weeks on Martha’s Vineyard in the black section of Oak Bluffs. While there, we took a trip to the multichrome clay cliffs at Gay Head. During our car ride across the island, it rained; by evening the air was thick with yellow fog. When I got out of the car and went to look down the rocks, all I could see in the sunset was a single spot of ocean burning orange-white down at the sand’s edge, like a splatter of glass and silver in the mist, fifty yards below.
It might as well have been a lake as the sea. …
It might as well have been a foggy dawn as evening. …
17.35. The summer I’d spent waiting on tables at Breadloaf, along with my memory of the spot of water below the Gay Head cliffs, and an even older memory of an afternoon patrolling a firebreak during a forest fire that had devastated the nearby mountains when I’d been at Camp Woodland, had produced a novella I’d called The Flames of the Warthog, after a line from a poem by John Ciardi (at that time Breadloafs director). The story was about a young waiter in a summer resort who suddenly stops speaking, leaves his job, and goes to live in the woods, where he is taken in by a kindly, woods-wise hermit. With the hermit’s help, the young man returns to language.
The central section of Warthog, with about a third of its pages rewritten, would become Prince Let’s sojourn in the forest with the forest guard Quorl—Chapter 8 of Out of the Dead City. And in the first practice session for my high school’s short-lived freshman gymnastics team, I’d learned my first three stunts at the hands of our gym coach just the way Tel learns his at the hands of Alter in Chapter 5.
17.36. Back in my high school years, the acknowledged star of our school’s creative writing program (which included the future journalists Todd Gitlin, Sheldon Novick, Stewart Byron, and Michael Goodwin; poets Lewis Warsh and, of course, Marilyn; and SF/fantasy writers Peter Beagle and Norman Spinrad) was a bright, gaunt youngster named Cary.
(Yes, you’ve seen him, in his black leather jacket, at the end of the Auden/Kallman dinner.)
Cary was a Marxist and had been two years ahead of me at Science. His dark hair was very thin. He usually spoke softly, intensely, and he could be very funny when he wanted to. For half a dozen years, starting in my first year at high school, his moody lyric prose, now in letters, now in short stories or personal essays, often passed around in more and more dog-eared manuscript among the awed students, was the exemplum of art—at least as far as I was concerned.
Cary also drew.
In his junior or senior year he’d done a set of perhaps seven drawings he’d called The Fall of the Towers. They were multiple portrait studies, three to five heads on a sheet: a variety of children and old people, men and women, boys and girls, some clearly middle class, some explicitly working class, reacted to a catastrophic incident, outside the frame and never shown—this one with a look of curiosity, that one with an expression of distrust, another with an excited gaze, but most with a stupefied fascination hardly distinguishable from indifference. He’d first shown them to me on a Bronx street corner one breezy November afternoon. To me they’d had all the forceful commitment of Kathe Kollwitz (an artist we all admired hugely) combined with the delicacy of Virgil Finlay (whom only those of us familiar with science fiction magazines knew of). And like everything else Cary wrote or drew or even said, to me they were Art!
Today I suspect that, as figurative drawings go, they were pretty good. But I was overwhelmed by them—at least by what I took to be the concept behind them.
But we are again speaking of the fifties, a decade in which our parents, reacting to the Great Depression’s hardships and the war years’ disorientation—first World War II, with the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, then the Korean War—along with the McCarthy period’s blow to leftist and liberal thought, made “security” our nation’s watchword. People who lived in Greenwich Village or people, like Cary, who spent time there sitting in coffee shops, talking or reading, people who were members of YPSL (the Young Peoples’ Socialist League) or YSA (the Young Socialists’ Alliance), as almost all my teenage friends were, people who moved away from home early to live on their own (and during one of my teenaged attempts to get away, I’d slept on the floor of Cary’s roach-infested East Fourteenth Street furnished room for a week, and gone to meetings and parties with him at the St. Marks Place offices of The Militant, New York’s Communist Party newspaper, where I’d folded circulars and stuffed envelopes for mailings and where I was bought a fair number of meals by the sympathetic older volunteer workers, and had gone to Herbert Apthecker’s lectures at the Jefferson School—a building darker and more dilapidated than the old building at Science), people who played go and chess at Liz’s coffee shop above the Gaslight on MacDougal Street, waiting to score a nickel bag of pot from a black dealer named Ronny Mau-Mau: such people were still “bohemians.” And even those odd folks who were actually “beatniks” did not yet have long hair.
A few weeks after our Detroit marriage in late August ’61, Cary had dropped over to our East Fifth Street apartment in his black jeans and black sweater. What had happened to The Fall of the Towers, I’d asked. Myself, I’d been convinced that the fullness of time would bring them to some museum wall between the Modigliani portraits and the smaller nude studies of Gericault.
Cary explained that, in one of her periodic attempts to shake this “art” nonsense out of his head and make sure he did something with some “security” to it, his mother had destroyed as much of his writing as she could find, along with as many of his notebooks and letters and drawings as she could manage to cram down the incinerator. The Fall of the Towers had gone up in smoke in a basement furnace somewhere in the Bronx.
Had I visited the Museum of Modern Art and found that Picasso’s Guernica or Tchelitchew’s Hide and Seek had been destroyed, I couldn’t have been more devastated.
There had to be a way to make some gesture to the fact that the drawings had existed, had delighted, had awed. And while I wondered how, wandering with Marilyn through the cable shadows slanting the plank walk, looking back at Manhattan, looking ahead at Brooklyn, I decided that must be my trilogy’s overall title.
17.361. As I strolled through the start of summer with Marilyn, between two island shores, trying not to look down at the green glitter between the wooden walkway slats, a hundred thirty-three feet below (I am a hopeless acrophobe), the sky went yellow, then blue behind the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Watchtower offices. We paused to speculate, as usual, on whether any of the windows we could see might be the one through which Hart Crane and his lover, the nameless ship’s printer, had gazed out on the bridge in winter, listening to “… the long, tired sounds—fog-insulated noises: / Gongs in white surplice
s, beshrouded wails, / far strum of fog horns … signals dispersed in veils. // And then a truck will lumber past the wharves / As winch engines begin throbbing on some deck; / Or a drunken stevedore’s howl and thud below / comes echoing alley upward. …”
17.37. But not all things I felt on that bridge walk were so admirable. Among the other things I wanted that June evening—simply and baldly and with absolute envy—was to write a novel at twenty that would be more ambitious and better wrought than Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, which I’d read a few years before and knew he’d written by the same age. I wanted to write a novel better than The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which Carson McCullers had finished at twenty-three.
The five hundred dollars I’d received after I signed the contract for my first SF novel (with the promise of another five hundred on publication, three whole hopeless and uncountable months away) along with the equally real warning from the rejection of my second, had convinced me that fiction—and, yes, science fiction—was serious business.
By the time we walked down the metal steps at the bridge’s second stanchion, we’d made it from Tolstoy to Balzac: the novel, modern or classic, always seemed at its most lively when a character was learning to negotiate a social position somewhere up or down the scale from the one that he (or she) was used to. Take a lesson, then, we decided: make sure the plot pushed the various characters out of the social strata in which they began. Did that work for the science fiction novel too? It certainly seemed to provide the frame for all the energy in Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man and, even more so, The Stars My Destination. If it worked for Balzac and Bester, then it could work for me.
17.4. Let’s pause a moment, on an image of two young writers at the second stanchion of the bridge, ambling into Brooklyn, for another marginal tale that takes its significance from a contrast with all these moments of positivity.
Leave them, suspended, hand in hand, above the light-shot waters, and go back in time a bit.
As long as we preserve the split between what we’ve told and what’s to come (or had been, or now runs along beside), we can return.
For a number of historians the year Marilyn and I entered high school, 1956, marks the transition from America’s “Industrial Period” to its “Postindustrial Period”: it was the year the country’s white-collar workers finally exceeded in number its combined blue-collar and agricultural workers. As a transition point, it’s somewhat arbitrary. Whatever effects might be ascribed to this work deployment shift, they’d long since occurred in the country’s major cities, where that redeployment had been the case for decades: three years before, in 1953, the city subway fare, which had remained a nickel since well before World War I, had doubled—to the outrage, consternation, and bewilderment of the whole multiethnic urban populace. And the price of milk, which for many years had been more or less stable, between 21 and 24 cents a quart, had recently moved up to a quarter, to 27 cents, and, in very little time, to 35 cents a quart, introducing us to the constant and inexorable inflation that has since become the national condition—a condition very different in feel, cause, and form from the irregular upward jerks in pricing the US had lived with since the Depression.
Four years later, in the late summer of 1960, only years after this postindustrial point (only a few weeks before or after I returned from Breadloaf to regale my mother and dying father with the summer’s literary anecdotes), Allan Kaprow first presented a new work, Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts. It was repeated on several evenings in a Second Avenue studio apartment. It was the first time the word “happening” had been used in such a performance context; and, though the particular work never achieved overwhelming popularity, over the next dozen years, through Kaprow’s later “happening” works and from the word’s appropriation by many other artists, the term passed into the general American vocabulary (not without a progressive banalization, which reached its peak in the seventies, when Diana Ross recorded a million-copy pop music hit, “The Happening,” at which point the notion of art had been wholly replaced with the notion of desire). Many times now Kaprow’s piece (today we would call it “performance art”) has been cited by art historians as the (equally arbitrary) transition between the modern and the postmodern in cultural developments. But I don’t believe I’ve yet read a firsthand account of it by any of its original audience. I jot here, for my own reasons, then, what I remember, twenty-five years after the fact of that first performance:
When walking somewhere along Eighth Street, on the side of an army-green mail collection box I’d noticed a black-and-white mimeographed poster, stuck up with masking tape, announcing: “Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, by Allan Kaprow,” giving the weekend dates (“Friday, Saturday and Sunday”), time (“7:30 P.M.”), and price (“Contributions, $3.00”), and location.
Such posters were fairly common in the Village, advertising the newly burgeoning galleries on Ninth and Tenth Streets, or telling of a poetry reading at one or another coffee shop on the periphery of the tourist area. (Another such poster put me in touch with a group called Chamber Theater, run by an energetic and visionary woman named Risa, an undertaking which occupied me for most of a summer. Another introduced me to the New York Repertory Company, who rented the St. Marks Theater for a summer season, and where I performed for several months at the site of what is now a vintage clothing store, between the Valencia Hotel and the closed-up shell of the St. Marks Baths.) In this case, it was the word “happening” that intrigued me. An idea was abroad—and it had saturated the times so that even a bright eighteen-year-old might respond to its modernist scrip, if not the Wagnerian bullion behind it—that art must somehow get up off the printed page, must come down from the gallery wall. Lumias and theremins were the cutting edge of visual and auditory art—as yet there were not quite lightshows and synthesizers. And the word “happening”—with its lack of fanfare on the poster—spoke of just such a moment in which art might step from its current frame into a larger and more theatrical concept and context.
I wrote down the dates, time, and place in my notebook.
And I spent a lot of time mulling over what Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts might, indeed, be—quite sure, however, that I would find them exciting, whatever they were.
The weekend of the Eighteen Happenings, my cousin Boyd, five years older than I, was in from medical school. Why didn’t he come along with me?
Boyd was a lover of Fielding’s Tom Jones and a figurative artist of some talent, as well as a medical student. I think he was intrigued—if not by the artistic prospects, then by the notion of “the Village” with its romantic glimmer. As well, he had some curiosity as to what his younger cousin, who’d already established a family reputation for intellectual eccentricity, might be up to. And so we got on the subway (with the small, new copper tokens, brighter than clean pennies, just down from the size of dimes), and rode to the Village, to wander across town by Cooper Union, in plenty of time for the performance.
Below the bell in the apartment building’s narrow, white vestibule, the same poster I’d seen on the mail holder was taped to the wall.
Upstairs, when we walked in, most of the space was taken up by temporarily erected polyethylene walls on unpainted wooden frames. These walls divided the performance area into what I assumed, at this distance, was six square chambers, each about eight feet by eight feet, each accessible from a door-wide space on the outside, but separated from one another, and through whose translucent wavering walls, you could make out only the ghost of what was going on in the chambers beside or across from yours.
Possibly because Boyd and I were early, no one seemed set up to take our contributions.
Two or three young women were walking around in black leotards, apparently part of the proceedings—one of them on the plump side. There was at least one male assistant in jeans and T-shirt, all shoulders and cheekbones and deep-set eyes, who had something to do with the small, harsh, overhead lights. A gangling man in his late twenties or ear
ly thirties, in khaki slacks and a shortsleeved shirt, with a short haircut that nevertheless peaked in front—the fifties prototype for any number of today’s more conservative punk coiffures—was apparently Kaprow. The rest of the audience (somewhere between twenty and thirty-five of us) wandered in over the next half hour. Someone eventually took our money, looking rather surprised that we were actually paying.
Clearly most of the audience had been invited.
In each of the polyethylene-walled chambers, there were half a dozen or so blondwood folding chairs. It became clear that we were to be deployed between the six temporary rooms—I don’t remember whether or not there was some lottery arrangement to divide us up. But at one point I suggested to Boyd: “Why don’t you sit in another room so we can see as much of it as possible and compare notes afterwards?”
“That’s all right,” Boyd whispered to me. “I’ll stay in here with you.”
Were there six people in our particular room?
Were there six rooms?
The only truly clear memory I have of the performance proper was that I wasn’t very sure when, exactly, it began. One of the assistants came in and set a small mechanical windup toy to chatter and click around the floor—which ran down faster than was expected, and so had to be wound up and set going again, several times, through the twenty minutes or so of the work’s duration. I also recall a dish of water sitting on the floor, and a ball of string on a small table—but they may have been in other rooms than ours, whose entrances Boyd and I had glanced into while we’d walked around, waiting for the piece to start. During the brief performance, while we sat in our room, now and again from one of the other chambers we could hear the sound of a single drum or tambourine beat—or, at one point, laughter from one of the isolated groups when something in another room went (presumably) not quite according to plan. And just above floor level, through the grayish plastic to our right, a wobbling buttery glow came through from a candle that had been set up as, or as part of, a happening in an adjacent space.
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Page 21
