Possibly this is also why, ten or fifteen years after a book of mine has appeared, when I pick it up and again start reading, I find sentences that strike me as pleasant, scenes that seem well-orchestrated, passages that appear to project their ideas with clarity, or an observation on the world that registers as true for its time and that goes some way toward delineating, if not re-creating, my feelings, or other passages whose grammar and logic convince me they are the utterances of a single mind rather than the dozen deeply flawed selves I had to be shattered into by the world to live in it, much less to write about it. (Is it the layers of correction or the illusion of unity that does the pleasing? I can hope. But I can never know. They are the same thing seen from different sides: an effect and what creates it.) If they please, they please to the extent I have forgotten how the disjunctive cataclysm that I am wrote them — though also I know that so much rereading can, as easily as it might produce excellence, fix the mistakes in a text in our mind so deeply that when we come back to it years on, we skim errors in expression and thought without seeing them because unconsciously they are so familiar.
Neither the writer’s pleasure nor pain justifies returning a work to print, however; nor is either a reason for letting a text languish. (Sometimes a work is about something no longer of current or compelling interest, but that’s another tale.) All language is habit, as I remind my writing students regularly, speaking or writing. You learn to write badly, to overwrite, or to write dull, banal stories much the way you learn to write well — as well as a given epoch sees it. (Lacking a National Academy, of the sort France, Italy, and Spain have had for centuries, America finds the surface criteria changing radically every twenty or thirty years.{5}) I do believe, however, that the amount and quality of mentation that go into the fictions I find interesting are different from the amount and quality that go into the ones I find thin. Only hard-won habits can fix the difference within us — if we’re lucky. And no one can be sure it has — ever. As well, I believe the writer must look at the minute places where her or his relationship to the world is different from most, for me personally to find that relationship of interest. (Often I’ve wished I had broader tastes.) To find what deeply engages us, within a field of our apparent differences we must interrogate, our similarities for the sake of potential and possibilities, either good or bad. That can mean, for the same ends, the writer is trying to dramatize a feeling of difference within that field of similarities, so that often the writer has a sense of having undertaken a more difficult analytical dance than anticipated. The writer signals both differences and similarities by additions to the text, by organization of the textual elements, or by absences in the text, vis-à-vis the average productions of that day or era — and, as much as they are frowned on today, by direct statements of emotions, most effective when they are used indirectly. How to distinguish between which texts are better and which texts are worse is, ultimately and finally, anyone’s guess, and the shifts in criteria, decade after decade, century after century, even place to place in what we always assume is a more unified culture than it ever is or could possibly be, and the general attitudes toward following the various paths of least resistance that mark out the cliché, the cluttered, or the thin, don’t make it easier. Those shifts in criteria, however, all indicate traces of a struggle with those problems, though not necessarily in a manner that either you or I might feel was successful. That’s why it’s worth it for us to accustom ourselves to the way things were written a generation or two, a century or two, a millennium or two before us, in India or Italy, in China or Czechoslovakia, in Timbuktu or Teheran, Portugal or Japan, Leningrad or Moscow, Brazil, New Orleans, Mexico City, Argentina, or Chicago — which is to say, the ways of reading that the texts were written for, in various places at various times — for the pleasure of the game, if only because of what, here and there, we can learn about how they made the game pleasurable and use it for our own profit, if it still works today. It’s the concert of all these that justify republication, a decision from which, for the reasons outlined here (mostly in dependent qualifying clauses, or even parentheses) the author, if still living, is always excluded. Only someone else who has managed to educate him- or herself to read the texts of the past, even from only forty or fifty years ago, and is sensitive to the problems and concerns of the present, can make the call — and finally for pretty personal reasons — as to whether or not a text merits republishing. We all hope — readers and writers both — we will be lucky enough to have such editors.
When The Jewels of Aptor came back from copyediting, Don Wollheim asked me to cut 720 lines — about 10 percent of the book.
Standing at the far side of his desk, I must have looked surprised.
“Huh?” I asked. “Yeah, sure. But why? Was there some particular place you thought it was too…loose?”
“Oh, no,” Don said. “But it has to fit into a hundred forty-six pages. It casts off at seven hundred twenty lines too long.” He would do it for me, if I wanted —
“Oh, no!” I said. “No….That’s all right. I’ll do it!” I reached across the desk for the manuscript in its red rubber band.
Completed when I was nineteen, contracted for not quite a month after my twentieth birthday (since the copyright laws changed in 1976, the phrase has become “in contract”), and cut down by fifteen pages a few weeks later, the first edition of The Jewels of Aptor was published that winter — where I pick up the story:
In 1966, an editor a few years older than I, Terry Carr, joined the staff at Ace Books, the U.S. publisher of all the books I had written up till then except Nova. I have written before, as have many before me, that the history of post — World War I science fiction is the history of its editors: Hugo Gernsback, F. Olin Tremaine, Raymond Palmer, J. Francis McComas and Anthony Boucher, Howard Browne, Ian and Betty Ballantine, John W. Campbell, H. L. Gold, on through Avram Davidson, Cele Goldsmith, Don Wollheim, Harlan Ellison, Frederik Pohl, Damon Knight, Michael Moorcock, Larry Ashmead, David Hartwell, Judy Lynn and Lester Del Ray, Betsey Wollheim, Beth Meacham, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, Betsy Mitchell, L. Timmel Duchamp, Steve Berman, Kelly Link, and Warren Lapine. (In this incomplete list, many were writers as well — Campbell, Davidson, Pohl, Knight, Moorcock, Ellison, Duchamp, and Link are significant writers, whose fiction remains influential for any real understanding of our genre’s development — though their editorial force and direction is central to their careers.) Carr is among those editors. He edited the first novels of William Gibson, Joanna Russ, and Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and a dozen other memorable titles for his Ace Science Fiction Specials series.
In 1967 Carr did for me one of the most generous things an editor can do. “Chip, I was just rereading your first novel, The Jewels of Aptor. I enjoyed it. Don told me we cut it for length, though. I was thinking of doing a new edition. Do you have an uncut copy? I’d like to take a look.”
“Actually,” I said, “I do…”
In the top drawer of a file cabinet in the kitchen of the fourth-floor apartment where we had lived for a couple of years on Seventh Street, I’d left an uncut carbon copy. The apartment had been more or less inherited by a woman I’d known in Athens during my first, six-month European jaunt. Later I’d brought it up to my mother’s Morningside Heights (aka Harlem Heights) apartment, where it stayed in an orange crate full of manuscripts and journals in a back closet — and left all the other papers, manuscripts, contracts, and correspondence in the Seventh Street kitchen filing cabinet.