Wielding a Red Sword

by Piers Anthony

  In FeBlueberry it slacked off, with only thirty-nine letters, but the books-to-be-blurbed took up what slack there might have been. Still, by the end of the month I was two days from completing the editing of the novel. The editing consists of reading it through on the screen, printing out my bracket-notes relating to other projects, deleting both bracket notes and marginal symbols (I have special macros to facilitate that, such as one that locates and highlights all the material between the next set of brackets, so I can check it before deleting it), correcting my own typos and spelling errors (yes, we have a spelling-checker program, but it's easier to do it myself), revising awkward sentences, and adding new material where required. This editing replaces the second and submission-draft typings I used to do and takes about a quarter the time. So I knew I would wrap it up just a couple of days into Marsh.

  And on Marsh oneth (1th) came a package from Del Rey Books containing eighty-six fan letters dating back to Jamboree and Dismember. I should have known that if I used Ogre Months I'd get ogrish mail! There was nothing to do but read them (which alone took about six hours) and answer them (six days). So by the end of the Seventh I had answered eighty-seven of those eighty-six letters. (Apparently they were starting to reproduce in the package.) Then I got on the letters that had come in separately. As I type this paragraph, which is being inserted in the middle of this text, I have done 102 letters, as of the Ninth. This novel has been delayed that week. I think the pace is about to slack off, maybe, I hope. But this feels very like a war!

  Again, I hear someone muttering: why do I bother? Why not call it quits and stick to my paying work? Or perhaps answer only the most serious ones and let the others go. Ah, yes, I hear the siren song of expediency. I understand that only two writers in the genre answer large volumes of mail personally; the other is Isaac Asimov. But again, I know of only two who never suffer Writer's Block, and the other is Isaac Asimov. My Antiblock Theory gains credence.

  But let's consider some of these letters individually. Perhaps some are dispensable. Two from this last bunch were from people who are confined long-term by accident or illness and use my books to ease their solitude and pain. It seems that mine have better effect in this respect than those of most other writers. In the past I had letters from a young man who used my books to divert his mind from the unpleasantness of chemotherapy for cancer. Another in the present group is from an oncology (cancer) nurse who thanks me for taking death seriously in On a Pale Horse. Ignore these letters? I just can not; they must be answered.

  Well, some of the others, then. Yet they evoke startling bits of individual personality. There is the lady who announces that I have stolen her heart. The righteously indignant teenager who isn't sending me any PUNS. (You see, most of these are in response to Crewel Lye, just published, whose brief Note explains that Xanth is no longer in the market for puns. That didn't stop a number of fans from sending me full pages of them.) The mother who thanks Xanth for doing what nothing else did—hooking her learning-disabled son on reading. (I raised an LD daughter; I understand about this sort of thing.) The coed who was hooked on Xanth by her boyfriend; she gave up the boyfriend but remained addicted to Anthony and, when my novels ran out, she had to get into Donaldson, Eddings, Moorcock, and McCaffrey. (Those other writers may not realize how much of their success is thus owed to me...) The man who brings up seeming inconsistencies in my novels, then proffers intelligent explanations for these that I can use to fend off other critics. The one who wishes to convert me to Jesus. (I am apt to refer these well-meaning people to my three-part novel Tarot, which is perhaps cruel. The point is, I am not agnostic from ignorance, but from preference; I suspect I have done more research on religion than most.) The young woman who begins: "I'm 19 yrs. old + I don't want to be a writer. I want to be an editor." (That one popped my eyes open! But why not? Editing is a dirty job, but someone has to do it.) The man who met a college professor of mine and relays that professor's regards to me—along with the news that the professor is dead. (I hadn't realized, so this was a jolt. That prof had been my counselor; I remember him with preternatural clarity.) The woman who relates somewhat graphically her experience in being assaulted by a masked male who put a gun to her head, and her thoughts on death and On a Pale Horse. And from the interim mail: a "fan" letter in the form of a fan, that opens out to reveal the writing. And an invitation to a convention, that I turned down, as usual. Which of these do I file without answering?

  Well, why not cut off the repeats? Answer each fan once, and not again? Two considerations, there. First, I have found that a kind of universal inverse ratio applies, so that only about half of the first-timers respond again, and only half of the second-timers, and so on, so that the correspondence tends to damp out. That enables me to keep it down without actually having to cut people off, and I prefer that method. Second, some of those fans have excellent continuing input, and an arbitrary limit would be unfortunate. Third, (my difficulty in keeping count has been noted before) there are special cases.

  I wrote about sixteen letters to one girl in Jamboree, ranging from cards to a six page missive. Yes, this is a very special case, and illustrates as well as any the levels on which wars are fought, the conflict between good and evil, and the difficulty of telling the two apart. This was a suicidal teenager who said she loved me. Now I was at this writing fifty years old, with two daughters older than this girl, so the matter had points of awkwardness.

  You see, though I was never a 'battered child' I was a disturbed child, with compulsive mannerisms and comprehensive fear. Another impression I have is that a person does not have to be totally fouled up to be a successful writer, but that it helps. Today I have a life that is about as comfortable as any life gets, with supportive wife and daughters, an income in the top percentile, and success in the one type of work I always wanted to succeed at. I don't crave the adulation of the masses, but I know I could experience it any time I choose to attend a fan convention. I should be deliriously happy. But I am not. I suffer from chronic depression and I think about death on a daily basis, perhaps an hourly basis. (Yesterday I buried our last hen; we had had twelve, and as time progressed they died off individually; the last survivor had been with us a year and a half after the death of the next-to-last. Call me foolish if you will; I grieve for her, as I do for any pet who dies. Death is much larger in my life than in that of most other people.) I am not suicidal and never have been, but every morning I ask myself whether life is really worth it, and I am uncertain. As the day progresses I become more positive, and by evening I am pretty satisfied with life. Since no economic or social reason exists for this depression, and it is cyclical by the day, and steadfast by the year, I conjecture that it is a fringe benefit of my mild diabetes; my cells are generally slightly hungry for energy, and that chronic discomfort translates into mild depression.

  The point is, I do have a basis to understand the situation of a fouled-up child, because of my memory of my own childhood; and I understand also how depression can be. My depression relates to this girl's depression about the way my adult-onset diabetes relates to the savage juvenile-onset form of it. What I have is token; what she has is serious. So while I only wonder whether life is worthwhile, she thinks seriously of suicide. I, being what I am, cannot simply tell her to quit bothering me.

  Oh, objectively the situation is clear enough. This girl—I will not identify her here, of course, but let's give her an obvious pseudonym. I shall name her after a suicide I have in this novel, Ligeia, though there is no other parallel that I know of between the two. "Ligeia" was not aware of having experienced love in her home and she longed to be a part of a family where love exists. That is to say, my family. She wanted to love and be loved, which is perhaps the deepest human need. She could not simply invoke that love from others, but she could contribute her part of it. Thus she loved me, because she knew me from my novels and Notes, and because I answered her letters seriously, as I do with all letters. I had been treating her in the way I w
ould a daughter and a child, partly because I was conscious that she was not exactly either. My teenage readers may find this confusing, but I trust that my adult readers will understand. This is not a "childish" matter; Ligeia wanted from me a good deal more than I could afford to give on either the fatherly or the manwoman level. I of course explained that, and she of course refused to accept it. Thus I found myself in a kind of ethical war, and it was difficult indeed to distinguish the nuances of right from wrong.

  Why didn't I simply tell her that her interest was misplaced, and reject her letters? Two reasons. First, because I try to follow the Golden Rule, treating others as I would have them treat me, with fairness and compassion. Second, because it was possible that she would have died if I cut her off that way. In that sense this was a kind of emotional blackmail. It happens to be a kind I am vulnerable to. If this be a failing, it is hardly my only one. I have to say that I really would not care to know a person well who was not similarly vulnerable. This does not mean being mush-minded; it just means that the consequence of one's actions should be a concern of every person, on the social as well as the legal level.

  Our correspondence began when she wrote a fan letter. It grew more serious with time. Her letters came in envelopes decorated with cute little butterflies, unicorns, rainbows, balloons and hearts, signifying a sweet and happy little girl, but inside they were desperate. She told of slashing her wrists in an attempt to commit suicide, of turning on her heater and closing the windows tight, of similar things. She spoke of feeling lonely and tired, of the foreboding of evil. She felt trapped, like being in a box with the sides closing in, and was afraid that after she died she would be similarly trapped, as if in a shell. All that enabled her to survive was love. The love I could not return. She believed she was going mad, but that there was no need to worry: her death would stop only her body, for she felt she was already dead in the ways that mattered. She said that suicide might be considered a copout, but that for her it would only hasten the inevitable. She expressed difficulty relating to an emotion that sprang from her heart instead of her mind. She saw love as a lifeline, while hate was worse than anything.

  Another letter was smeared, as by tears. She had had a good day that then became bad. A discussion with a friend about love and sex and politics and religion and feeling—the things this bright girl really liked to explore—had lifted her. Then there had been a singulariy bad episode at home that threw her back into the depths. She said she needed love so much, yet it eluded her; she couldn't wait to die wholly. She concluded with the words "I'm so cold," trailing off with a jerky line as if abruptly interrupted, the letter unsigned.

  I think it is evident that my objective, sensible statements were largely wasted here. I had a deep sympathy for Ligeia's plight, but I could not call this love. I tried to help her in various ways, putting her in touch with supportive correspondents and even checking with the authorities, but to no sufficient avail. Ligeia could not escape her situation that way. I saw her swirling down and down in the maelstrom, and I could not rescue her from that without going well beyond permissible bounds. So I wrote to her, with the unhappy suspicion that this was a war that was being lost.

  Hence the letters of Jamboree. I tried an experiment: in addition to the fewer, longer letters, I sent her a series of light post cards, saying nothing thereon that other eyes could not see. The heart of them was the Ogre Tail, transcribed chapter by chapter, fourteen chapters on separate cards. The first Tail was "The Ugly Unicorn," and I think it is worth reprinting here:

  Chapter One: Once upon a time, there was a little unicorn. She lived in a shell.

  Chapter Two: There was a funny thing about this shell. No one else could see it.

  Chapter Three: But to her, it was very heavy, as if an elephant were on it.

  Chapter Four: Sometimes that shell just seemed to crush all the happiness right out of her.

  Chapter Five: Of course, she wasn't really a unicorn, because little unicorns don't live in shells.

  Chapter Six: She was really an alicorn, which is a flying unicorn. Her mane was brown.

  Chapter Seven: Alicorns live in shells, because they like privacy. When anyone comes near, they close.

  Chapter Eight: Of course that means that hardly anyone ever sees an alicorn, which is unfortunate.

  Chapter Nine: Because alicorns are really very special creatures, when they come out of their shells.

  Chapter Ten: But the little unicorn didn't know she was an alicorn. She wanted to die.

  Chapter Eleven: This is because a magical creature who stifles her magic is in deep trouble.

  Chapter Twelve: No one else understood about this, because no one else could see the shell.

  Chapter Thirteen: Except for maybe one old centaur—but he was too far away to help.

  Chapter Fourteen: He hoped the little unicorn would learn to fly, before she learned to die.

  Ligeia loved the chapters, and they buoyed her momentarily, but then her depression resumed its hold. She wrote me a letter signed with her blood.

  In one of her letters, she described a dream she had had, involving a cemetery where instead of people there were thoughts. She had not intended it as a suggestion, but I liked the notion and put it into this novel; this is the notice of credit.

  Of such stuff was my life made, as I wrote this novel and this Note. My humor is obvious, but privately war and death and injustice were much on my mind.

  You may wonder why I have used the past tense. That is because the enchantment that links these novels to my life remains; the theme is War, and so war came to the publication of the novel. The publisher took exception to this inordinately long Author's Note, stating that it was in the business of fiction, not nonfiction, and requested the Note's deletion. I refused. This was no minor matter; fundamental rights were at issue. The publisher is not required to publish material it deems to be unsuitable for its imprint—but the author must give permission for any significant changes. I feel that these notes are important to a sizeable segment of my readership and I do care about that readership. Neither side backed off, while the novel remained in limbo, unable to be published.

  My agent, caught in the middle, spent many hours trying to negotiate a cease-fire, but for months the war continued. At last we came to a compromise. Part of the publisher's concern was about Ligeia: I had presented poignant excerpts from two of her letters. I had cleared this with her directly, showing her the material and making corrections she asked for. But she was a minor; therefore she lacked the legal capacity to give permission for my use of this material. That had to come from her parents. But she had made plain throughout that her parents did not know the things she told me, and she did not want them to know. It would be a violation of her confidence even to ask them for such permission, as her secret love and death wish would be exposed. Thus I could not obtain permission, and risked a lawsuit for the violation of a living person's privacy if I ran the letters. So, with deep regret, I revised that portion of the Note. I can not even tell you what happened to Ligeia in the intervening year, because that might serve to identify her. Thus do I lose the battle for part of my text, but win the battle for the rest of it by the somewhat heroic measure discussed here, and the war for Ligeia's life grinds on.

  As I write this revision, I am midway through the next novel in the series, the one concerning Nature. Yes, the enchantment continues; Nature is making herself felt emphatically. I will cover that in the next Note.