There was general silence, general attention: there was much concentration on what was occurring in our own sequestered “part”; and there was much palpable and uneasy curiosity about what was happening in the other spaces, walled off by the translucent sheets, with only a bit of sound, a bit of light or shadow, coming through to speak of the work’s unseen totality.
At one point another assistant brought another child’s toy—this one a blue tin noisemaker with two little balls, which, when twisted back and forth, make a childish racket—silently into our room; but two steps in, she realized she had the wrong space and ducked out.
After a while, a leotarded young woman with a big smile came in and said, “That’s it.” For a moment, we were unsure if that were part of the work or the signal that it was over. But then Kaprow walked by the door and said, “Okay, it’s over now,” and Boyd and I got up and stepped out of our plastic-walled cubicle.
“Did you understand that?” Boyd asked softly as we waited our turn among the crowd at the doorway to go downstairs. “I mean, could you explain to me what that was supposed to be about?”
“I don’t think it’s about anything in the way you’re asking,” I said in my best tone of aesthetic neutrality. “You’re just supposed to experience it.”
A woman was standing next to us, wearing some voluminous caftan in a green print.
“That was kind of fun,” I said to her, to get out from under what I took to be the embarrassment—or the superiority—prompting my cousin’s question.
“Oh,” she said, “did you think so? How did you come here?”
“I saw it advertised on a poster taped up on the side of a mailbox. It sounded interesting. So we just came by.”
“You did?” she asked, a bit incredulously. I’d already noted that Boyd and I were probably the only two black people in the audience. Today I also suspect we were two of the very few there that evening unknown to the others, at least by sight. “You liked it?” And she smiled. “How unusual.”
This was, remember, 1960.
Then we were going down the stairs.
Boyd continued to question me as to the “meaning” of what we had just seen, all the way uptown. And I continued to resist explaining. But he had obviously been tickled by it all. And clearly it had meant something, though I was only willing to clarify it for myself once Boyd’s somewhat amused attentions were diverted from me and he could tell the rest of the family about the strange artistic gathering I had taken him to in the Village.
Figuring it out for myself, I began by reviewing my expectations from the title: Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts.
I’d assumed that the work, regardless of its content, would be rich, Dionysian, and colorful; I’d thought that the happenings themselves would be far more complex, denser, and probably verbally boundable: someone might come in and put on or take off a costume; someone might come in and destroy a baby carriage. Someone else might come in blowing bubbles under colored lights. I’d also thought the eighteen happenings, despite their partition, would crowd in on one another, would tumble into my perception one after another, that they would form a rich, interconnected tapestry of occurrences and associations. In short, while I had not assumed they would have the singular, synopsizable meaning Boyd was asking for, I’d nevertheless thought they would be rich in meanings and meaning fragments, full of resonances and overlapping associations, that they would be thick with ready-made suggestions, playful, sentimental, and reassuring—like a super e.e. cummings poem; indeed, I’d assumed from the title that they would be much like what many “happenings,” as other artists took over the term, were actually to be in the next decades (beginning the banalization that led to the Diana Ross hit).
The work I’d experienced had been, however, spare, difficult, minimal, constituted largely by absence, isolation, even distraction. For all its immense framing in wood and polyethylene, the actual work was even difficult to locate as to its start, content, style, or end. (Other than the chattering toy, Boyd and I were very unsure which were “our” actual happenings and which were things that merely facilitated them.) An hour later at home, however, I was already reflecting to myself that a little arithmetic might have disabused me of some of my expectations of meaningful richness: eighteen happenings in six parts generally suggests about three happenings per part, which, in turn, suggests Apollonian concentration, sparsity, and analysis—not Dionysian plenitude.
But what exactly had been our three happenings? Or had there been only one happening in our room, while four or five took place in one of the others? Or perhaps the title had simply lied about the work: either by accident or design, there could have been a few, or many, more than (or less than) eighteen happenings deployed among the chambers. In our isolated groups there was no way to know for sure.
Had there, indeed, been six chambers?
I, of course, had expected the “six parts” to be chronologically successive, like acts in a play or parts in a novel—not spatially deployed, separate, and simultaneous, like rooms in a hotel or galleries in a museum. I’d expected a unified theatrical audience before some temporally bounded theatrical whole. But it was precisely in this subversion of expectations about the “proper” aesthetic employment of time, space, presence, absence, wholeness, and fragmentation, as well as the general locatability of “what happens,” that made Kaprow’s work signify: his happenings—clicking toys, burning candles, pounded drums, or whatever—were organized in that initial work very much like historical events.
No two groups had seen the same ones. No group was even sure what the other groups were seeing. No one in the audience—nor, possibly, the artist or any of his assistants—could have more than an inkling (at best a theory) of the relation of a textured and specific experiential fragment to any totalized whole. Nor could the audience be sure any authoritative statement about it, from the artist’s title to the announcement of the work’s conclusion, was the truth.
Beginning with the separate chambers, the unity of the audience had been shattered as much as any other aspect of the work.
And of course there still remained the question for me over the next few days: how, in our heightened state of attention, could we distinguish what a single happening was? What constituted the singularity that allowed the eighteen to be enumerable? Had the performance of our windup toy been one happening? Or was the winding up one happening, its walking about a second, and its running down still a third? And how were we to distinguish facilitation from content—that is, how were we to distinguish “information” from “noise”? Certainly noise could figure in the interpretation of the meaning of a particular performance. (Earlier that spring I’d played and played a record of George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique to a frazzle.) But that presupposes noise can be identified as such.
Still, was that mistaken assistant’s momentary ingress with her silent noisemaker one of the eighteen happenings or not?
The impressive three-dimensional frame, which not only contained the work but the audience as well, and that divided the work and the audience as well as contained them, truly shattered the space of attention and, therefore, threw as many, or more, such distinctions into question as, or than, I was ready to deal with. And in a work whose title, organization, and accidents seemed set up to question precisely such distinctions, how was one to fit their sudden problematization into an interpretation?
It would be disingenuous to say that the interested eighteen-year-old, just back from, or just about to go off to, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference that summer went through this entire analysis in the hours and days after Kaprow’s piece. Exactly how much of it I went through then, I can’t, at this distance, say. “Subject,” “problematization,” and “interpretation” were not then part of my critical vocabulary; but “man,” “question,” and “meaning” were. And they were adequate to much of it. Certainly I had no particular difficulty accepting it as art or believing that, along the lines I’ve just sketched out, the piece was de
cipherable. Nor was I caught up in the search for narrative singularity—at whatever level of allegory—that, I suspect, Boyd wanted.
Still, I confess now (in a way I was unwilling to admit to Boyd at the time), I’d been disappointed in it: Boyd wanted his singular narrative meaning. And I still wanted my meaningful plentitude. But I can also say, at this distance, that mine was the disappointment of that late romantic sensibility we call modernism presented with the postmodern condition. And the work I saw was far more interesting, strenuous, and aesthetically energetic than the riot of sound, color, and light centered about actorly subjects in control of an endless profusion of fragmentary meanings that I’d been looking forward to. Also it was far more important: as a representation and analysis of the situation of the subject in history, I don’t think Kaprow’s work could have been improved on. And, in that sense, Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts was about as characteristic a work as one might choose in which to experience the clash that begins our reading of the hugely arbitrary postmodern.
The larger point is that this notion of history is almost absent from The Fall of the Towers—from the SF trilogy I planned on the bridge two years later—although I had been exposed to that notion in its most intense artistic representation and had even understood a bit of it. If it emerges in certain of the books’ images (the multichambered computer, the macrosocial structure, the fragmentary social portraiture), it is accidental, cursory—not psychological, not aesthetic, but … historical.
17.5. And two writers, a poet and an SF novelist, walked down the stanchion steps to the wooden walkway, continuing their amble along the concrete ramp into Brooklyn.
Today, watching them, the only thing I can look back on with complete sympathy from that evening (and even that sympathy makes me smile) is the seriousness with which we leaped from “Gulf” to War and Peace to Starship Troopers to The Grapes of Wrath to The Cosmic Rape to Père Goriot to The Stars My Destination to Nightwood to … well, to whatever had struck me as effective, to whatever had seemed instructive.
Provençal poetry has its tradition of the dompna soisebuda, or “borrowed lady”—that ideal woman with the eyes of Judith, the complexion of Susan, the voice of Linda, the breasts of Roxanne. … Whatever its ambition, The Fall of the Towers was the most “borrowed” of SF works. Perhaps all that can be said for it is that, given the age and experience of the writer, it couldn’t have been much else.
Not thinking any of this, but caught up in it like blind moths in its flicker and heat, we continued through the June warmth into Brooklyn Heights, to join Dick and Alice for dinner, where they now lived in a small brownstone.
I don’t believe I’ve said: Dick was a playwright. Sometime later Alice was to become a psychotherapist.
The talk that evening was mostly over the play Dick was writing, The Tyrant, an intensely concentrated and intricately worked piece about a revolution in an imaginary Central American country. Mostly we argued over the presentation of its single woman character, although from time to time the conversation drifted to Stendhal, Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, Auden, or Provencal poetry. …
The next day, back on East Fifth Street, I sat down at my typewriter, ran a piece of paper around the narrow black platen, and typed:
THE
FALL
OF
THE
TOWERS
Then I rolled the paper down, moved it to the left and typed:
a trilogy of novels:
1) Out of the Dead City
2) The Towers of Toron
3) City of a Thousand Suns
I rolled the paper down farther and moved it right:
by
Samuel R. Delany
629 East Fifth Street
New York 9, New York
(Yes, this was before Zip Codes.) I took the page from the typewriter, slipped it into my notebook where I’d already begun to make notes on the organization of Book One’s first chapter and the last chapter of Book Three, and went on with what I’d begun in longhand of Chapter 1.
18. Hilda was understandably anxious for her daughter to return to school and get her degree. Anything that hinted of it, she encouraged: and that included the classes at the Art Students League. Mexico City College had a fine art school.
Marilyn had thought about going away to Mexico to study art, where a friend had gone some years before. At one point Hilda offered to supply money for the trip.
When Marilyn had been sixteen, she’d gone with her mother to Mexico City for a week or so. The time had been pleasant, and Marilyn had come back from that first trip to attend a performance of mine at the New York Repertory Theater on St. Marks Place, and, afterwards, in some coffee shop, had shown me, among the poems she had written on that early trip, an arch monologue entitled “Jeremy Bentham in Guanajuato,” where, at the inspiration of the famous Ray Bradbury short story, she and her mother had gone to visit. Coupled with an anecdote about the post-funeral instructions of the English pragmatist, it had produced the memento mori.
But this was a much longer trip: six weeks of art classes, two weeks of travel, a living allowance, new people in another country. Surely Marilyn would decide to give up this Lower East Side squalor and do something … sensible.
It was as naked and as clumsy an attempt as any of her mother’s to pull Marilyn away from me. Hilda was not subtle about her intentions; and Marilyn’s immediate response, when she told me about it after coming from seeing her mother, was anger and understandable resentment. But our own situation day to day was developing all the strains so similar in every relationship that does not work—open, as ours was, or closed—and which only bear chronicling when overall patterns can be teased from them.
One evening, as we lay in bed, I said, “I don’t know whether either one of us wants this relationship to go on. But I do know this: if we don’t get some time apart, it’s not going to last more than a couple of months longer.”
“Why are you always threatening me with leaving?”
“I’m not threatening you with anything,” I said. “But you know what we’ve been going through. How does it look to you?”
A couple of days later, Marilyn told Hilda she would spend the summer in Mexico.
I don’t think I ever threatened Marilyn with leaving, actually. Very early I’d decided that to talk about it when I wasn’t sure I was going to do it would be simply torturous. But for most of our first year, I lived daily with the thought: Maybe I can stand this for another three days—then it’s got to be over with! Maybe I can survive this another two weeks. Surely then I’ll have to tell her I’m getting out of this—it’s not her fault or mine, it’s just who we both are. Well, maybe till the end of the week. …
Unspoken, such thoughts must have made the atmosphere far more threatening than it would have been had they been stated, discussed, resolved.
18.1. “You’re not very happy about going,” plump Terry from upstairs said. “I can tell.”
“Of course she’s happy!” Billy declared. “Who wouldn’t be happy about spending a summer in Mexico City? I’d sure be happy!”
“She’s not happy,” Terry said. “Look at her—oh …!”
Because, in her chair, Marilyn had begun to cry.
“Billy, you always have to say something like that! You see what you’ve gone and done?” In her housedress, Terry pushed back her black hair, gone damp with the first summer’s heat. “He does that with me all the time!”
“I’m sorry,” Marilyn said. “Really.” What she could not say was that she had no idea if, in eight weeks, she would be coming back to any sort of relationship at all. She knuckled at one eye.
Terry laughed.
“You’re leaving Chip; you’re leaving New York. I’m sure you’re just worried to death about everything. If I were leaving him,” Terry thumbed toward her older, brown-skinned husband, “I’d be scared to death he’d get into some kind of horrible trouble! Well, I’ll tell you—you don’t have to worry about Chip.
He can come up and eat with us.” Terry turned to me. “You give me ten dollars a week—unless that seems too much—and I’ll just include you in the shopping. You can come and eat dinner with us while Marilyn’s gone.” Terry nodded to Marilyn. “That way I can keep an eye on him, for you.”
“Oh, Jesus, Terry,” I said, “I can cook!”
“I know,” Terry said. “But I have to cook, so I might as well include you in. Besides, we can talk about science fiction. Billy never reads any. And if you feel guilty, you can always babysit for us every once in a while.”
So for ten dollars a week, Terry laid a place for me at dinner; and at six-thirty I would climb up to the top floor, knock on the door of the apartment diagonally across the hall from where ours was down on two, and come into the small, busy kitchen, where clothes were washing in the washer, or little Billy, a devilishly handsome child with a perfect median complexion between his Italian mother’s and black father’s, just over one, crawled around underfoot.
“Besides, I figured,” Terry said, our first dinner together, little Billy in the high chair beside her, while Big Bill opened another bottle of beer, this one for me (laundry made a kind of white-and-blue maze under the ropes across the ceiling), “you were working on your book. It would have to be easier if you didn’t have to worry about getting your food—even if you cooked like God Himself! I want to read it. This way, I figured, you might finish it faster.” Then Terry sighed and said, “I hope Marilyn writes lots and lots of poems in Mexico. She’s so good. Maybe she will, once she gets away from you! The way you’re just working all the time, I wouldn’t be able to do a thing around you myself!” Terry had read Marilyn’s poems—and had had her compliments rebuffed. But though it hadn’t stopped her friendship in any way (it was the last week in June; Marilyn had left that afternoon), she was sensitive enough to realize that it was best not to mention writing in front of Marilyn—Marilyn’s or mine.
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Page 22
