Samuel R. Delany
A, B, C: Three Short Novels
For Dennis Rickett and Junot Díaz
Also by Samuel R. Delany
FICTION
The Fall of the Towers
Babel-17
Empire Star
The Einstein Intersection
Nova
Dhalgren
Equinox
Trouble on Triton
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Return to Nevèrÿon:
Tales of Nevèrÿon
Neveryóna
Flight from Nevèrÿon
Return to Nevèrÿon
Empire (graphic novel)
The Mad Man
Hogg
Atlantis: Three Tales
Aye, and Gomorrah (collected stories)
Dark Reflections
Phallos
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
NONFICTION
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
Starboard Wine
The American Shore
Heavenly Breakfast
The Motion of Light in Water
Wagner/Artaud
The Straits of Messina
Silent Interviews
Longer Views
Bread & Wine (graphic novel)
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
1984: Selected Letters
Shorter Views
Foreword
The Jewels of Aptor…
The Ballad of Beta-2…
They Fly at Çiron…
Aptor, Beta-2, Çiron…A, B, C, and there’s my title.
The subtitle tells what follows: Three Short Novels.
This book contains my first published novel, a science fantasy, The Jewels of Aptor, much as I wrote it in the winter of 1961–62. Officially it was released December 1, 1962. I saw copies late that November.
As I’d conceived and written the book, its audience was my brilliant, talented wife of those years, the poet Marilyn Hacker — nine months younger than I but always at least a year ahead of me in school. Walking up and over the school roof to get to classes, as all the entering students had been instructed to do, so as not to bother the elementary school students with whom we shared the building, we’d met on our first day of high school. Two years later Marilyn went on to NYU as an early admissions student at fifteen and finished her classes in three years. When we married on August 24, 1961, she was eighteen and I was nineteen.
Those interested in the invaluable part she played in discussing the ideas in Aptor and getting it published — she wrote some of the poetic spells in the book — can read about it in my autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (1988; exp., 1992). Without her, it wouldn’t — it couldn’t have happened. After our marriage, Marilyn’s first job was with the publisher, Ace Books. She took my manuscript in under a pen name. That’s how it was submitted. That’s how it was read. That’s how it was accepted.
Only when contracts were drawn up, did she admit that the writer was her husband — and the name on the contracts was hastily changed to mine.
Eventually it got a few (generous) reviews; but the thousand-dollar advance I received — $500 on contract signing in April and $500 in December on publication — back then would have covered fifteen months of our $52-a-month rent on our second-floor, four-room tenement apartment — rent for more than a year! (Would that it did so today.) And I could think, “Hey, I’m making my living as a writer!”
And I had a publisher. If I handed in anything that more or less met my editor’s genre expectations, I assumed, I could sell it.
For my second book (what today is They Fly at Çiron), I took two old fantasy stories and quickly wrote three more. Each section had as a protagonist someone who was a minor character in one of the others. One involved only a name change for a character in one of the already completed tales.{1} Nor were the landscapes the tales took place in much related to one another. Rapidly reading over passages, I decided on a few more things that might connect them and wrote out bridges from one to the next. But I put into Çiron neither the time nor the intensity of thought and imagination I had put into Aptor.
A few weeks after I handed it in to Ace Books, Don Wollheim rejected it.
Today, I feel that rejection was the most important thing that happened to me in my first years of publishing. I’ll try to explain how and why it was so useful, so instructive, so important — though I don’t know if, finally, it’s possible to describe it in a definitive way.
Understand, I’d had novels rejected before. I’d been writing them since I was thirteen, and from seventeen on I had been submitting them to New York publishers — who’d been declining them. But also I’d been getting a fair amount of attention for them. Two years before, Marie Ponsot, a poet who had been very supportive of both Marilyn and me, spoke to her friend Margaret Marshall, an editor at Harcourt Brace. At Marie’s request and on the strength of one of those early manuscripts, Marshall had secured me a work-study scholarship for the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College, Vermont. While attending the novel-writing workshops and lectures on the grassy and sunny Middlebury campus, where, even before the inception of the already legendary conference, novelists as varied as Anthony Hope and Willa Cather had written some of their most critically acclaimed pieces, I’d worked those two July weeks as a waiter in a white-painted dining room with square glass panes in the window doors along one wall. I’d attended the lectures, readings, and novel-writing workshops; I’d talked with writers and editors, new and established, and I’d found two or three who were willing to read my work and were even enthusiastic about it. Both before and since Bread Loaf, I’d submitted my novels. They’d been rejected too. What remains from those rejections, however, are the hours or even days of encouragement preceding them.
Wollheim’s rejection, brief and final, I recall, however, with documentary clarity.
Wollheim phoned me at our apartment on East Fifth Street. The phone sat on an end table, discarded by my mother-in-law in the Bronx, and I sat on the armchair’s arm. He said, “Hi, Chip. This is Don — Don Wollheim. I read your second manuscript this weekend.” Somewhere in an office on Forty-eighth Street in Midtown, he paused. “I don’t think they quite make a book, Chip. So I’ll pass on them. But I’m certainly interested in seeing the next one you do. Okay?”
I said, “Oh…um, yeah. Okay. Yes, I see! Um…thanks.”
Don said, “You’re welcome. So long.”
I said, “Good-bye…Um, Good-bye,” and hung up, surprised and disappointed.
I was twenty. It was still painful when I wrote about it in my autobiography twenty-five years later, so I told it there as quickly as I could. Here’s a little more of the tale:
I wanted to talk to Marilyn — badly — but she was out looking for work; so after I hung up I went downstairs and outside for a walk, to think over what had happened. It seemed clear, though.