For me at twenty, fiction itself was the series of overwhelming effects from works I’d read in adolescence: the torture scene in Heinlein’s “Gulf”; the scene in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath where, after endless and exhausting trails, the Joad family comes upon the peace, cleanliness, and community of the government migrant labor camp; Dr. O’Connor’s “Watchman, What of the Night?” monologue in Barnes’s Nightwood. That evening on the bridge I decided, about as coldbloodedly as any twenty-year-old could who’d suddenly realized that, through a largely preposterous fluke, part of his meager livelihood might now come from making novels, that, in my SF, I would try for science-fictional effects comparable to those that, in my other reading, had so struck me.
The Queen Mother’s interrogation of Alter in Book One was my essay in reproducing the Heinlein.
Jon’s and Alter’s arrival at the City of a Thousand Suns in Book Three was my attempt to duplicate the Steinbeck.
And Vol Nonek’s terminal monologue was my try at recreating the Barnes.
What else had I been reading? Besides Gutter in the Sky, I’d also been very much enjoying Beckett’s trilogy, as each volume appeared in the early Grove Press trade paperbacks. For four or five years now, I had been following each new work by Camus to come out in Vintage paperback. Three years before, Judy had taken me to see the revival of James Waring’s Dances Before the Wall at the Henry Street Playhouse, where she led me backstage afterwards and introduced me to dancers Fred Herko and Vincent Warren. I had followed John Rechy’s stories, eventually brought together in City of Night, through their initial publication in The Evergreen Review, reading the “Winnie” section and “The Wedding of Miss Destiny” aloud to Chuck on his last trip up to the city, at all hours. In the second issue of Evergreen, I’d first read Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer. Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book was my personal nomination for the most successful novel of 1960. But it wasn’t till some years later that I began to recall these in a search for new aesthetic models. For now, the gut effects of Heinlein and Steinbeck seemed more trustworthy. Gut effects then, I thought, was what I’d best try for — compassionate analysis notwithstanding.
The fragmentary and episodic method Sturgeon had used in The Cosmic Rape to depict the carrying out of complex plots and schemes had always struck me as an effective, suggestive, and economical way to put over general plot hugger-mugger, of which I was sure my books would have a fair amount. Very well, then, I would appropriate Sturgeon’s method for myself.
What else had gone into preparation?
Shortly after my seventeenth birthday, I’d first read Moby Dick. From the “Afterword” to the gilt-covered Signet Classics paperback, I’d gleaned the notion — or at any rate first seen it articulated — that greatness in a novel was a matter of form: the richness to the pattern of emotional contrasts between the various sections, the pacing and placing of those lines or metaphors that recall for the reader whole scenes or sections located earlier in the text — in short, the entire range of intratextual mechanics by which a novel sets up resonances and echoes within itself. Struggling even then with juvenile attempts at novels of my own, I’d logged Moby Dick’s thirty-five “nonfiction” chapters and noted where they came in the narrative proper, as well as where Melville had chosen to place his rhapsodic “silent monologues” or the several playlets that punctuated his book.
One of the Pequod’s crew had been a Gay Header.
During my seventeenth summer, my family had spent a few weeks on Martha’s Vineyard in the black section of Oak Bluffs. While there, we took a trip to the multichrome clay cliffs at Gay Head. During our car ride across the island, it rained; by evening the air was thick with yellow fog. When I got out of the car and went to look down the rocks, all I could see in the sunset was a single spot of ocean burning orange-white down at the sand’s edge, like a splatter of glass and silver in the mist, fifty yards below.
It might as well have been a lake as the sea. …
It might as well have been a foggy dawn as evening. …
17.35. The summer I’d spent waiting on tables at Breadloaf, along with my memory of the spot of water below the Gay Head cliffs, and an even older memory of an afternoon patrolling a firebreak during a forest fire that had devastated the nearby mountains when I’d been at Camp Woodland, had produced a novella I’d called The Flames of the Warthog, after a line from a poem by John Ciardi (at that time Breadloafs director). The story was about a young waiter in a summer resort who suddenly stops speaking, leaves his job, and goes to live in the woods, where he is taken in by a kindly, woods-wise hermit. With the hermit’s help, the young man returns to language.
The central section of Warthog, with about a third of its pages rewritten, would become Prince Let’s sojourn in the forest with the forest guard Quorl — Chapter 8 of Out of the Dead City. And in the first practice session for my high school’s short-lived freshman gymnastics team, I’d learned my first three stunts at the hands of our gym coach just the way Tel learns his at the hands of Alter in Chapter 5.
17.36. Back in my high school years, the acknowledged star of our school’s creative writing program (which included the future journalists Todd Gitlin, Sheldon Novick, Stewart Byron, and Michael Goodwin; poets Lewis Warsh and, of course, Marilyn; and SF/fantasy writers Peter Beagle and Norman Spinrad) was a bright, gaunt youngster named Cary.
(Yes, you’ve seen him, in his black leather jacket, at the end of the Auden/Kallman dinner.)
Cary was a Marxist and had been two years ahead of me at Science. His dark hair was very thin. He usually spoke softly, intensely, and he could be very funny when he wanted to. For half a dozen years, starting in my first year at high school, his moody lyric prose, now in letters, now in short stories or personal essays, often passed around in more and more dog-eared manuscript among the awed students, was the exemplum of art — at least as far as I was concerned.
Cary also drew.
In his junior or senior year he’d done a set of perhaps seven drawings he’d called The Fall of the Towers. They were multiple portrait studies, three to five heads on a sheet: a variety of children and old people, men and women, boys and girls, some clearly middle class, some explicitly working class, reacted to a catastrophic incident, outside the frame and never shown — this one with a look of curiosity, that one with an expression of distrust, another with an excited gaze, but most with a stupefied fascination hardly distinguishable from indifference. He’d first shown them to me on a Bronx street corner one breezy November afternoon. To me they’d had all the forceful commitment of Kathe Kollwitz (an artist we all admired hugely) combined with the delicacy of Virgil Finlay (whom only those of us familiar with science fiction magazines knew of). And like everything else Cary wrote or drew or even said, to me they were Art!
Today I suspect that, as figurative drawings go, they were pretty good. But I was overwhelmed by them — at least by what I took to be the concept behind them.
But we are again speaking of the fifties, a decade in which our parents, reacting to the Great Depression’s hardships and the war years’ disorientation — first World War II, with the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, then the Korean War — along with the McCarthy period’s blow to leftist and liberal thought, made “security” our nation’s watchword. People who lived in Greenwich Village or people, like Cary, who spent time there sitting in coffee shops, talking or reading, people who were members of YPSL (the Young Peoples’ Socialist League) or YSA (the Young Socialists’ Alliance), as almost all my teenage friends were, people who moved away from home early to live on their own (and during one of my teenaged attempts to get away, I’d slept on the floor of Cary’s roach-infested East Fourteenth Street furnished room for a week, and gone to meetings and parties with him at the St. Marks Place offices of The Militant, New York’s Communist Party newspaper, where I’d folded circulars and stuffed envelopes for mailings and where I was bought a fair number of meals by the sympathetic older volunteer workers, and had gone to Herbert Apthecker’s lectures at the Jefferson School — a building darker and more dilapidated than the old building at Science), people who played go and chess at Liz’s coffee shop above the Gaslight on MacDougal Street, waiting to score a nickel bag of pot from a black dealer named Ronny Mau-Mau: such people were still “bohemians.” And even those odd folks who were actually “beatniks” did not yet have long hair.