It was an apartment in a housing project, somewhere. My new agent, Henry, was there, and we talked a while. Willy Ley was also there — I asked Hans to point him out to me. But I must have missed the nod or the gesture, because the person I thought Hans indicated was a barrel-chested fellow moving animatedly around the apartment on two forearm crutches to make up for his withered legs. I even spoke to him once or twice that night, under my mistaken impression. For the next twenty-five years I thought that had been Ley — until the first version of this account was published and someone pointed out that I’d apparently missed the formidable, strapping German who was the actual Ley and confused him with a friend of Hans’s, also at the party that night, named Yonah.
All through the fifties and into the sixties, though he himself wrote no science fiction to speak of, Ley was one of the most important names associated with SF. His regular science column in Galaxy was the prototype for Asimov’s in Fantasy and Science Fiction; along with his numerous nonfiction titles and association with people like Wernher von Braun, it had made him as much a household name as any popular science writer to date. (At his death in ’69, a crater was named after him on the far side of the moon.) Hans came in, took me into the crowded kitchen, and introduced me to Gunn.
Suited, tied, and “imperially slim,” as E. A. Robinson has written of someone else, Gunn was leaning against the icebox after having had perhaps a drink or so more than he might have. “And what does this young man do?” he asked.
“Well, he writes SF,” Hans explained.
“Have you published anything?” Gunn asked.
“Oh,” I said, “three or four SF novels.” I thought that was a modest way to say five.
“And what’s your name — again?”
“Chip Delany,” I said. “Eh … Samuel R. Delany.”
“That’s amazing. I’ve never seen any of them. I really thought I kept up with the field.” Then he turned and announced over his glass, “Now, you see, these are the people whom we should be paying attention to. This is where the future of the field lies. Right here, in people like this.”
I was impressed — indeed, I couldn’t help thinking he had a point. That no one was really listening wasn’t important; even Hans was now speaking to a heavy woman in blue with metallic blond hair. (Our hostess …?) Feeling that the evening couldn’t offer me too much more than that, I made my round of goodnights and walked home.
Bill was gone when I got in, but Marilyn was still up. I told her somewhere between seriousness and joking about Gunn’s comment. I don’t think she was very interested.
60.2. The next day I left the house with a small bag (full of that suit my mother had bought me at Bloomingdale’s, a change of jeans, some shirts and undershirts), and my Martin double-oh-eighteen guitar in its bulky case (clean socks stuffed all around the neck) and my notebook: inside the front cover were folded copies of the poems Marilyn had so far written in the Navigators sequence, sketching the dissolution of the affair with Bob, and which I would take out to read, silently and thoughtfully, two or three times in every European city I visited. Two poems in the sequence remained to be written; but what is the closing today was the closing then:
On a bench at the West Side Airlines Terminal (it no longer exists), I finished rereading them, folded them up inside my gray passport book (passports were gray then) along with the yellow vaccination folder (vaccination folders are no longer required in Europe). Soon a crease in the page made the twelfth line almost unreadable (and months later a vertical one nearly split the pages into separate columns). But “The Navigators” went with me off on the Carey Bus out to Kennedy Airport, where I met Ron, and, by prop-jet (Icelandic used the last of them and they were discontinued, when …?), flew away with me via Iceland to Luxembourg.
61
61. Thus again conflicting memory and memory give me several notes, several images, from which I might choose an ending to these most arbitrary fragments.
I’ll choose from words already written:
… I looked out the window at walls of moonlit cloud rising beside us as though we were at the bottom of some, gray and ivory canyon, hung above the moon-smashed sea …
Ron was beside me. We’d been joined by a Canadian named Bill, met on the plane, who would travel with us for several months. (In life nothing ever ends neatly, cleanly.) But, with whatever hindsight, I suppose the reason that I want to close on a consideration of these words is that the moon-solid progress through high, drifting cumulus is — read them again — at the very opposite of what we perceive on a liquid’s tilting and untilting top, and so becomes the other privileged pole among the images of this study, this essay, this memoir.
Or perhaps, as it is only a clause whose syntactic place has been questioned by my own unscholarly researches, I merely want to fix it before it vanishes like water, like light, like the play between them we only suggest, but never master, with the word motion.
Acknowledgments
This book would never have been begun without
Robert S. Bravard and David G. Hartwell;
it’s written for my ideal readers,
John Del Gaizo, Kathleen L. Spencer, Anthony C. Lilly, and Marilyn Hacker;
nor would it ever have been finished without
Robert Morales, Ricky and Janet Kagan, Shelley Frier, Mia Wolff, Linda Alexander, Daniel Sundance McLaughlin, Susan Palwick, and Charles Solomon Coup.