What has kept it out of these pages, however, was a value that still lingers with me from my adolescence, a value I was taking to eagerly at Science: a value that said that dances, that dating (and dating the right children of the right parents), indeed, that the whole conservative social machinery through which the Jack and Jill both existed and managed to wield its considerable social power, were, in themselves, beneath contempt for intellectuals. Yet despite any contempt I felt for it, Jack and Jill functions had still filled up my childhood, and continued to, up through the first high school years. It was at one of their spring dances, in the crepe paper-festooned basement of a midtown social center, the room hot as only a summer’s dance could be before the days of universal air conditioning, the red and amber gels turning over the ceiling spotlights, two or three mothers with arms folded and smiling from beside the punch bowl, and the rhythm-and-blues records moaning over the slow couples for a higher order of love, that I sat down on the banquette to talk to Mary.
Mary was my age and had been in my class at Dalton. Her father was my parents’ lawyer. And she’d been my date at the eighth-grade prom. We hadn’t seen each other for a while. “What have you been doing?” she asked.
“Actually,” I said, “I’ve written a novel.”
I was not referring to Lost Stars, though — at least in my own mind.
“Really?” she asked. “What’s it called?”
“The title’s Scavengers.”
“That’s interesting,” she said. “What’s it about?”
“Well,” I said, crossing my legs in my dark blue suit — and began to outline-cum-invent the plot of a book that, mistily, had been in the back of my mind to write. The justification for what I took to be a simple social lie was that, after all, I had written one novel (even if it really didn’t have an ending) — so it didn’t seem too much of an exaggeration to say I’d written another that, really, I was considering. The surprise came, however, when, at the end of my synopsis, Mary said, with what I immediately recognized as more than polite interest, “That sounds fascinating! I’d like to read it. Why don’t you let me see it?”
“Well,” I said, “actually, I’ve got a couple of weeks’ more work to do on the end. But I’ll give it to you soon. …” Then, while the record ended and Jack-and-Jillers drifted by us to the refreshment table, I added, “I’ll be sure to get it to you as soon as it’s done!”
Next day at home, in a paroxysm of guilt, I sat down at my typewriter, put in a page, and typed:
SCAVENGERS
by Samuel R. Delany
Beginning in June of ’57,1 worked on the book three weeks, six weeks, two months, three months. I outlined it. I re-outlined it. The first part (it was divided into five sections) bore an unsettling resemblance to Lost Stars — that is, the hero (nameless this time) spent the first forty pages wandering around and observing the city: perhaps it was my theme.
(And a novel was always conceived to occupy the center of my notebook, to fill it up unto both covers; and, in the writing, always slipped now to the front, now to the back, the intricacies of compositional order destroying, as notes accrued in an order all their own, all organizing schemas.)
But when he decided to run away to the country, plot took over, and he joined with a number of other disaffected youngsters, who now tried to live by themselves in the woods near a small country town. What plot there was, was simply Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, stripped of its science-fictional trappings and with the cast of characters expanded. A lot of the kids in it were portraits of my several new Puerto Rican friends who lived across LaSalle Street in the General Grant Houses. Some of its intense climaxes were over purely metaphysical conflicts so rarefied even I, a month after writing them, could not be sure what they were about. I never did show it to Mary. (At one point I saw her walking hand in hand through Morningside Gardens with Wally, a rambunctious white boy with whom, back at Dalton, I’d had a yearlong, after-swim-session, locker-room affair, and decided — on what justification I couldn’t tell you now — that she was probably no longer interested. But I was now writing other stories, too, with titles like “Payday at Coal Creek Don’t Come No More,” “Passacaglia with Death in the Higher Voices,” “Animal in the City,” and “The Pigeons.” In this second novel, though, nobody dreamed.) I did, however, show it to Marilyn.
In the Horn and Hardart Automat at the southeast corner of Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, we drank cup after cup of watery coffee while Marilyn criticized my manuscript.
Some of her comments were withering — especially toward my handling of the female lead, who, when she was by herself, was a rather overweight, plain, fifteen-year-old girl (based on one of my school friends), but who, whenever the plot demanded she do something romantic, like kiss the hero, would conveniently disappear for a couple of weeks, lose forty pounds, and return to the scene of the action ravishing and svelte, whereupon she would “slip beneath him,” for some sort of sex.
But whatever her criticism, I think she was impressed, as, in fact, was I, that I’d managed to type more than two hundred consecutive pages about more or less the same characters who stayed more or less in the same place and more or less took part in the same story.
Together that year, again and again after school, we would ride from her subway stop at 175th Street to mine at 125th Street and back, till as late as ten o’clock at night; then, at home, we’d continue the conversation another hour on the phone.
6.562. Once — in ’57? ’58?—I told Marilyn about a memory connected with our old house on Seventh Avenue, of lying in bed at night there, in my third-floor room, watching the traffic lights from Seventh Avenue sweep across my ceiling. And Marilyn wrote:
6.563. Also Marilyn wrote:
6
Hacker, “Chanson de l’enfant prodigue,” in
7
Hacker, “Mathematical appeared in