The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

by Samuel R. Delany

  30.1. The doorbell rang late one afternoon, just before Christmas. I opened it to see another ex-B & N book clerk, tall, bespectacled, black-haired.

  “Hi,” she said. “Do you remember me?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Sue. Come on in! Come in.”

  Sue was the clerk who had led the futile drive to replace Muzak with Mozart.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve got a problem. Let me tell you right away. I don’t have a place to stay. I just lost my room up at Columbia. There’s not a reason on God’s earth you should say yes—you haven’t seen me for more than a year—but I was wondering if there was any chance I could stay with you guys for a couple of weeks. I have to get a job. I’ll try not to be in the way if you can swing it.”

  I looked at Marilyn, who was frowning.

  “Well, let’s sit down and talk about it,” I said.

  “I guess it would be okay,” Marilyn said, after a while.

  “We could put the cot in the little room there for you,” I said.

  “So that’s the end of my office for good,” Marilyn said.

  In the red chair, Sue looked up; but she didn’t know the comment’s history.

  “That’s all right,” Marilyn said. “I never go in it anyway.”

  “It would only be for a couple of weeks,” I said.

  “That’s nice of you guys,” Sue said. “I really appreciate it.”

  30.2. The “two weeks” turned out, finally, to be more like three months. “Literature survives by fertile ambiguity …” Sue told me one day, handing over her copy of Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man.

  By then I was having my first bout with some severe and painful gastrointestinal problems, but I tried to be appreciative.

  Some years before I had read D. B. Wyndham Lewis’s study, François Villon. Now I discovered that this Lewis was not the same person at all: the pointed and polemical critiques of Joyce, Woolf, and Proust, interlarded with near-impenetrable bouts of metaphysics, were the very opposite of the arch, learned, gossipy, and finally somewhat suspect recreations of twelfth-century life and thought.

  But through stomach agony, through our semipermanent house-guest (through Time and Western Man), I worked away on that recalcitrant second volume.

  30.3. We brought Sue over to Dirty Dick’s at the dockside end of Christopher Street once or twice; but she never took to it—so that, when the apartment was just too small for its three highly talkative inhabitants, the waterfront bar became a place for Marilyn and me to escape to.

  30.4. With its title changed by editorial mandate from Out of the Dead City to the more commercial Captives of the Flame (in another double), copies of my second novel, the first volume of my SF trilogy, became available at the end of March 1963. (Its official publication date was May 1.) And I went on struggling with that recalcitrant second volume.

  30.5. One nagging problem with the book was simply that when the civilian chapters of The Fall’s Book Two had finally developed a plan, I realized that if I wanted to end it in anything other than chaos, changes would have to be made as far back as Chapter 1 of Book One—which was now in wire paperback book racks across the country.

  Marilyn was always very generous with her criticism. During the thirteen years we lived together, she read everything I wrote carefully and criticized it meticulously—which involved everything from correcting my spelling to juggling sentences and pointing out plot and character weaknesses. (“You don’t need this,” was her most frequent criticism. That one was always right.) Practical, hardheaded manuscript criticism was a level on which we could almost always communicate—often when there was very little else we could speak of that did not lead one or both of us to sullenness, sulking, and hurt.

  30.6. Sue was an intensely literary young woman. Yet her personality was as different from Marilyn’s as a personality could be. She read as constantly as Marilyn. Novels by Henry James and William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald passed under her hands in a constant flow. Her conversation about them was always sharp, and I was curious what her reaction to the first volume of my trilogy would be. Perhaps, I seriously hoped, she might have some insight into the first book that might clarify some of the problems I was having with the second. She’d read some of Marilyn’s poems and been duly impressed. But she hadn’t shown any interest in looking at anything of mine. (Myself, I couldn’t conceive of being a houseguest of any writer and not, out of sheer curiosity, reading at least one thing by him or her.) But when I finally asked Sue if she’d take a look at the first volume, she appeared quite distressed and said, “Oh … oh, well … yes. But I don’t know very much about science fiction …”

  A week later, as far as I could tell, the copy I’d given her had not been opened—or even been moved from the living room phone table where I’d left it for her and taken into her room. I can think of three reasons why Sue never got around to reading anything I wrote.

  One was simply the graduate student problem. The titles she picked up from our living room bookshelves to read, or purchased from the shelves of the Village bookstores farther west, came from an ideal list of Great Literary Works. These were the works you were supposed to read. Finishing all the books on that list was a lifetime chore. And the general perception was, I think, that there just wasn’t time to read anything that had not, somehow, gotten into that strangely and mysteriously maintained canon.

  The second problem was probably an outgrowth of the first. The possibility that she might actually find one of these noncanonical works as entertaining, if not as intelligent, as she clearly found her confrontations with classical writers (and Sue, Marilyn, and I talked about writing and novels constantly and entertainingly) would itself threaten all the unexpressed and unanalyzed notions that made the idea of a canon valid.

  (Of course, I wondered if she’d already picked the book up at some point when I wasn’t looking, read a page or two, and found it all so idiotic that she could not bring herself to read further—and simply didn’t know what to say. But the apartment was small, and there was probably very little time when she might have.)

  Finally there was the psychological discomfort that had to do with reading anything of any length by a friend. If they think of criticism as communication over real problems of real concern to writer and reader, then people tend to plunge into it. If criticism is, however, a student performance in wait for professorial judgment, then—especially before the writer—people shy from it.

  Once, when Sue had been despairing over a succession of Jamesian heroines for a couple of days, she got up to go to the bathroom. Inadvertently, I’d left a copy of Captives open on the hamper, where I’d been checking it myself some hours before for some detail I needed in the new book.

  Suddenly, from behind the closed john door, came a hoot, and Sue now read out, loudly: “‘She made a note on her pad, put down her slide-rule, and picked up a pearl snap with which she fastened together the shoulder panels of her white …’ I like that! Sliderules! Now that’s what I want to see more of. … Oh, this is yours, Chip? Well, maybe I’ll have to read this one after all!”

  As far as I know, however, she never read further.

  Marilyn’s comments and ideas had long since been exhausted.

  And so I struggled through my middle volume problems alone.

  30.7. Sometimes if I went off wandering for a night (the phrase we used was “calculated drifting”), Marilyn and Sue would get high and stay up reading Henry James out loud to each other till all hours.

  Marilyn was now a full-time student at the Art Students League, and the major income for the three of us that winter was her unemployment insurance—not much, everything considered. So the two of them made occasional shoplifting forays to the Second Street supermarket and, more frequently, went off to lurk together just before dawn while the bread truck (Marilyn’s province) or the milk truck (Sue’s) made its deliveries to this or that small grocery. When the paunchy delivery man carried his tray to the store door, Marilyn
would climb into the truck’s open back, secrete loaves under her coat—then run! (Once a delivery man grabbed her arm and hit her over the head with a loaf of Italian bread.) Sue would pass quickly by a cardboard carton filled with milk quarts, and two would go under her soiled gray trench coat. They would return to the apartment, often in hysterics over the morning’s adventures and, while they rehearsed the daring deed, together cooked immense breakfasts for themselves—or for themselves and me, if I was there.

  “Now, this is survival—!” Sue would say, poking her fork at the tiny amber islands the curls in the bacon made in the bubbling pan.

  By an open orange juice carton, Marilyn would break another egg into the glass casserole that seemed to be our major cooking implement, the yolk settling among the others, like yellow mice drowsing under the albumin, each touched with its white tissue bit. “Survival?” she’d declare. “My God, you looked silly when you came around the corner!”

  “I looked silly—?”

  There was a dark scent of coffee; there was a rich warmth of toast.

  Both women would start to laugh again.

  30.8. While the weather was still cold, Sue got a dress (which I gave her the twenty dollars for from the five-hundred-dollar check Out of the Dead City/Captives of the Flame brought into the house). She had a job a week later. Indeed, when she was on the verge of moving into a new place with another friend, Marilyn and I came up short a month’s rent—and the choice became whether to have Sue stay a month more and (finally) contribute a month’s rent or to move out and leave us foundering on our own.

  She stayed.

  Marilyn wasn’t particularly happy about it. I don’t think Sue was either. But there were still things we all could laugh about together when the first warm weather broke.

  31. Through connections that had begun at Breadloaf, an assistant editor, named Lorn, at Bobbs-Merrill had read Those Spared by Fire and had been impressed enough with it to write me a note, to talk with me on the phone—and to pass the manuscript on to a senior editor who’d liked it enough to take the two of us to lunch. Through total happenstance, her name was Bobs (less one b) Pinkerton. She was well-dressed, white-haired, and could easily have been Rosemary’s sister. “What I’ve decided to do,” she explained, “is give the manuscript to an old friend of mine whom I worked with for many years. Name’s Bill Rainey. He’s a literary editor, of the best sort, and I think he’d have some real sympathy for the kind of thing you’re doing.” (I didn’t mention that the work had actually been written four years before. But I was very pleased that, while I had been at Breadloaf, Rainey’s name had been mentioned to me on several occasions. I’d seen a novel he’d published himself only a year or so ago. Now, apparently, he would finally see my work.) “I think that’s really the wisest course.”

  31.1. Three weeks after Rainey was sent my manuscript, he killed himself.

  31.2. “I’m so sorry,” Bobs said to me. She’d invited me up to her Stuyvesant Town apartment for drinks, rather than to the office. “It’s just devastating—first, because I was so fond of him and had so much respect for him; and because I’ve put you in this dreadful position. You understand, he never got to it. I gather his whole life had rather fallen apart and he did very little in the last three months.”

  I tried to reassure her that I had nothing less now than I’d had before. Besides, I was finishing another novel, Voyage, Orestes!, far more ambitious and—I hoped—far more skillfully written. Was there anyone who might be interested in it? “Well,” she said, “I can’t think of any reason not to submit it to Bobbs-Merrill. But I must warn you beforehand: they’re interested only in very commercial properties right through here. What you’re doing—and what I’ve seen of yours so far—is far more literary; that’s why I’d wanted Bill to take a look at it.”

  31.3. Days later, Marilyn and I invited Lorn over for dinner. Bobs seemed too grand a personage to invite to our slum flat; and since she was the senior editor involved, it would have looked too much as if we were currying favor. At the same time, I can still recall with how much awe we looked at Lorn. After all, he was twenty-five—four and five years older than Marilyn and I. He was an assistant editor at a real, hardcover publishing company. Also, his name had been on the masthead of an international literary review.

  Sue, as she often did when we had guests, absented herself for the evening.

  The night he came over, I prepared the identical shrimp curry I’d fixed for Auden and Kallman. We knew enough, at that point, to supply white wine instead of red—and Lorn, in his blue suit and conservative maroon tie, with a dashing gesture of adult sophistication, brought a bottle of his own as a house present.

  “I thought you might like to see Bobs’s report on what you’ve shown her so far of your new book,” he told us. “I really shouldn’t have brought it, of course. But since there was nothing she wouldn’t want you to see …” He handed me a carbon of the typed memo. Marilyn moved to my side to read it over my shoulder. After a remarkably faithful and professionally economical outline of the plot of the first seven hundred pages of Voyage, Orestes!, she went on to say, “… The writing is energetic and often polished. The sensibility is full of unusual urban insights. Delany is still a few weeks shy of his twenty-first birthday and has already published two remarkably literate science fiction novels with a paperback house, Ace Books. He’s completing another. Obviously, he’s a real writer. Clearly we ought to snap him up before someone beats us to him.”

  The uninvited guest that evening was Ana, who, joining us for dessert and coffee, actually shocked me by asking Lorn, after half an hour’s desultory conversation. “Are you queer?”

  And Lorn shocked me even more by, first, clearly not taking offense and, second, answering. “Yes. You could say so. Are you?”

  “More or less,” said Ana. “But tell me, what do you want to do with your life, then?”

  “I suppose,” Lorn said, “I’m trying to learn how to be the perfect lover.”

  But these were ideas, phrases, bits of rhetoric (Sue, just about now, came in, nodded a quick and smiling hello to all of us sitting in the living room, then disappeared into the small cubicle on the side that was hers) from a discourse so foreign to me that I listened to it as I might to strangers speaking another language.

  32. During some low-key, lingering argument between Marilyn and me, when there was a truce, Sue said she was out of Camels. “I’ll go out and get ’em for you,” I said. (Marilyn had taken to smoking with Sue, though I never picked up the habit.) “I’ve got to get something myself.”

  I went out, passed the grocery store, kept on over to the Village—and stayed away three days.

  When I got home, Marilyn was out. But Sue was sitting in the living room reading. “You know—,” she looked up from her book, “going out for cigarettes and not coming back for three days just isn’t acceptable behavior, Chip. I don’t care what kind of argument you two were having. And I suppose you forgot the cigarettes, too?”

  It seemed reasonable; so I never did it again.

  Indeed, I wish I could say that that was the only time I’d done it.

  33. “Those dried peyote buttons you have up in that paper bag in the corner of the kitchen cabinet …?” Sue said, one day.

  “Yeah?” I said. “What about them?”

  “Take them,” she said. “It breaks my heart to see them just sitting there, day after day.”

  “What’ll happen if I do?” I asked. Sue had introduced pot into the house and was our resident expert on all matters concerning drugs, though much of her information came, I suspect, from a small volume that served a number of sixties types as a bible, Drugs and the Mind.

  “It’s similar to mescaline,” she explained. (I’d read Henri Michaux’s Miserable Miracle, the French poet’s account of his hallucinogenic experiments, some years ago.) “It tastes awful. I’ve had some very nice trips on it myself. You’ll have to take it real fast and wash it down with beer or something, and you mig
ht get an upset stomach anyway. But you’ll probably have some real hallucinations.”

  “After all this time,” I asked, “you think they’re still good?”

  “Very,” she said.

  “What kind of hallucinations?”

  “Well,” she explained, “you can be walking down the street and you might see an old tennis sneaker lying there—only, suddenly, it becomes a wholly cosmic tennis sneaker, vibrating and pulsing with truly universal significance. …”

  “Tennis sneaker?” I said. “World in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour—that sort of stuff?”

  “You try it. Just get a bottle of beer, like I say. The beer will relax you, too, so that the peyote proper comes on easier.”

  That evening, toward sunset, I cut the hard brown buttons with their bitter, inner tufts into small pieces; for a moment I wondered if Rick’s “wedding present” might have been laced with cyanide. Then I swallowed them down with most of a quart bottle of beer. I told Marilyn not to get worried if I were gone for the night. She might catch me over at the bar later.

  Then I went out for a walk.

  There were no cosmic tennis sneakers, but the sun, lying late on the city, had a liquid solidity in its slant beams across the tenements’ crenellations that was different and pleasant. A little after blue smudged away the day’s terminal salmon and gold, I watched a glimmering scarlet fire engine, highlighted with the streetlights’ change from red to green and screeching north on Hudson Street, become a galumphing dragon—though what was far more significant than the banal metamorphosis was that it was the saddest dragon in the world; and when she had passed, her wailing done, and the siren had reasserted itself on the autumn night, my lips were open, my breath was a quiet roar in my mouth’s cave, and the tears rolled down my cheeks.