Читать книгу Decimated - Jack Dann - Страница 7

INTRODUCTION(S)

“In the Far-off Days of Beryllium and Greycats”

George:

Starting out, sometimes together, mostly alone, to learn “the blood and bones of writing,” as Jack once so aptly (eptly?) put it, was full of humorous disrespect and fear. After all, who knew?

But respect was won—for me with Jack’s great novel, The Memory Cathedral, and even earlier with Junction, along with some chaotic wrangling over short fictions; for Jack—well, let him sound my praises.

When Jack showed me draftings of Junction, he did so with an enthusiasm that could only be genuine and a mark of merit. I also enthused. All previous work had been crap, of course, but necessary, needy crap. I pushed the novel to editors, some of whom seemed baffled―but not Philip K. Dick or Roger Zelazny, and others. I know where “Junction” is in upstate New York, where flows the river into hell, where the bar waits on the corner, and what the black hole said and to whom.

“Traps” and “Dark, Dark, the Dead Star” were written at about the same time. The second contained what Jack declared to be his first good sentence, which he quoted out loud for some time until I put it into “Dead Star,” so it wouldn’t get lost. It was a sentence, and not the kind of fragment which beginners love to write. I finished both stories when Jack was away at law school in Brooklyn and needed the encouragement to quit. Both stories, we judged, “were good enough.”

With “Traps” good enough was maybe better than that. This little van Vogtian exercise surprised us after its publication, with an amusing triple incongruity of diversity, in Worlds of If magazine (the companion to the more prestigious Galaxy), then in a school textbook for young readers, and then in a German men’s magazine; and after that in the French Galaxie (where Jack’s byline was inextricably lost).

“Thirty-Three and One Third” went through a curious history of early acceptance (the earliest) by Anubis, a fan magazine, which failed to publish so we withdrew it, despite an offer of money. The story became something of a teaching tool; we tried it on beginning writers by giving them the structure and plot and having them write their own take, with the advantage of writing with much of the hard work already done. It always turned out different yet the same. Later our original appeared in a hardcover collection, and in a German anthology, by mistake, it seemed, when they put the wrong text into production. The editor apologized but said he liked this story also.

We sometimes collaborated on an old electric typewriter that ran like a steam engine. We approached it like bullfighters, each taking shots at one sentence after another, with major revisions by one of us later, sometimes much later. We stumbled through them, had fun in one draft, or a partial, then lived to appreciate the inspired bits, and rewrote. All nine except the last. “The Standard Crisis Scenario” appears here for the first time, unrevised; it is more poetry than story.

Early on, these stories wanted to escape certain constraints: the difference between efforts provoked by a market opportunity, when an editor says he needs a story on such and such a theme, and a story grown from the authors’ tendencies and interests. Jack and I sometimes looked to see what we “had available” and imagined how it might “seem” to a needy editor. Rationalization was a large part of it, on both sides of the cobra/mongoose editor-author relationship, as described by George Alec Effinger, who pointed out that the cobra’s efforts to swallow the author mostly fail in the long run. The author’s character prevails, since he cannot help but write “in character,” however imitative or adaptive he tries to be to alien demands. You can’t help but be yourself, since that is what you “be,” as Irving Thalberg found out about the Marx Brothers when they came to make movies for him at MGM.

This also applies to collaborations, in which we tried to swallow each other’s inspirations.

We became more sophisticated. “Faces Forward” “Od” and “Yellowhead” went upmarket, as they say, to hardcover collections, with paperback reprints. For more about each story, see the individual notes.

Hard work went into these stories, because back then we knew how to work hard better than how to be good, clever, or brilliant; but we were talented. A little voice always whispered to us that whatever the result of any jam session we would learn something, aside from the sheer fun we had along the way.

The pleasure of writing these notes recalls that fun, but more importantly it opens a door on a little history that might otherwise be lost. So when Robert Reginald gave us the go-ahead, I started scribbling notes by hand and was startled by what came up from an old well of fun.

First we had fun, learning the blood and bones of writing.

Then we got good. Well, much better.

But time to have fun again. Here in this collection, never before collected as one, with a chance to get some of the real praise on the record. As Woody Allen has said, “Success is mostly just showing up.”

On to the stories, where we have a few more things to say.

* * * *

Jack:

Yes, I think at that time of our lives—those distant, blurred salad days of exuberant youth—it was enough just to show up. After all, we were certain that everything was ahead of us; all we had to do was sit down in front of George’s (really Pam’s) old rat-tat-tat Smith Corona manual (and in those days manual meant manual!) typewriter and smash the hell out of those keys. Something rare and wonderful, something unmatched in genius and inspiration would magically and inevitably have to appear on the mint-white corrasable bond paper. Of that we were certain.

Well, perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that I was certain. George was further ahead in terms of craft. I was still at the stage where I believed that inspiration would somehow magically transform the electric-shocked thoughts in my head into coherent sentences, comprehensible plots, and characters that didn’t behave as if they’d just discovered that the strange digital appendages at the end of their arms were called fingers.

So I’d sit down in front of that old Smith Corona in George’s high-ceilinged, book-cluttered apartment in Binghamton, New York (Rod Serling’s home town) and clatter away until there was a small stack of typed pages beside me. I’d then show the brilliant outpouring to George, who would shake his great blond head as if he was in pain and proceed to turn ravings into story. Slowly, arduously, I started to learn the rudiments of craft...something I’ve learned one never stops learning. After having written or edited over seventy-five books, I still feel like I’m a raw beginner every time I stare into the grey-white flickerings of my laptop.

But, as George said earlier, those faraway, sunlit days were filled with joy. The very idea of being writers was enough: it was as rich and intriguing and glamorous as becoming ace fighter pilots, James Bond spies, or Kerouac(ian) Dharma-bums. We were writers because writers wrote. Nothing could be as noble, exciting, or as important. We were going to change the world by dint of the sheer power of thought.

And so we wrote and talked through the nights until dawn. George “knew stuff”, and I had the great talent of being an enormous sponge, greedily soaking up everything. Then I’d write some more, sure that every day’s acquired knowledge of craft, life, philosophy, literature, and science would transmute my awkward, leaden efforts into golden prose.

That didn’t even begin to happen, but what did happen was a complete story, and then another, and another...and George—that driven optimist who would have been groomed to be a shaman in another culture—took our stories to a science fiction convention and actually sold two of them then and there. He did exactly what I tell young writers never to do: buttonhole an editor at a convention. But, then, again, other writers aren’t George.

So now I was a published writer, a real writer, whatever the hell that meant. For me, it meant total immersion in craft, something that has never changed. The idea of being a writer? Well, that doesn’t mean much to me now. Writing is something I do, not who I am. But forty-three years ago it was definition itself.

George mentioned the time I wrote what I then considered a legitimate piece of prose, one sentence that is in “Dark, Dark, the Dead Star,” a sentence that now amuses the slightly embarrassed author of The Memory Cathedral, The Silent, and The Man Who Melted. But thirty-nine years later, as I stare into the laptop screen, I can still remember the line: “A fused mass of beryllium fled from Deneb.” George was very kind; he celebrated my creation of a sentence written in the active voice. (Another win for Strunk and White’s irreplaceable little guide The Elements of Style.)

Ah, those were the days. My pretension reached heights I hope I never climb again. I remember starting a story (which sold to a publisher, alas) with the line “Postulate one monad.” Ach! But George had made the mistake of introducing me to Leibniz’s Monadology, and...off I went.

George once said to me that if you weren’t born a genius, you could just push your way through to being one. George is a true polymath: the proverbial dog with a bone, or rather many bones. He just kept gnawing away at every subject that took his interest—philosophy, science, history, literature, film, genre fiction—until he gained the kind of understanding that would allow him to make real contributions to the great conversation of ideas. And I’ll be damned, but he did turn himself into a polymath genius: a genre Nabokov, a Sartre of reasoned optimism, a Polish Stanislaw Lem cum Isaac Bashevis Singer who publishes his work in Nature as easily as in Analog.

By the way, George is Polish. Born at the end of the war, he speaks the language fluently and in collaboration with his partner, award-winning author Pamela Sargent, makes the best bigos I’ve ever tasted! When he read my original note, which mistakenly noted that he was born in a concentration camp, he wrote:

My parents were taken as slave labor and worked on Austrian farms before being liberated. They were not reprehensible enough to be taken to the death camps, to be worked to death after the war was won by Hitler.

My bio-father was earlier taken with his high school buddies to shovel out the death trains as they came out of the facilities, but when his stomach was ruined by the disinfectant chemicals he was also sent to Austrian farm work.

He met my mother after the liberation; he joined the allied armies as a guard, and so my mother and I got to go to England as “allies.”

I was not born in a concentration camp, but as a privileged character in a Villach, Austria hospital, the son of “DPs”—displaced persons (liberated slave labor), who narrowly avoided forced repatriation to Poland, as Stalin had demanded, saved by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, passed just in time and written by Eleanor Roosevelt and H. G. Wells. I met Mrs. Roosevelt at the Hospital for Special Surgery in NYC in the early 1950s, where I was also operated on in 1959. Also met Hopalong Cassidy there.

God almighty!

So now to those early stories of ours. I haven’t read them in years, and it is with joy, nostalgia, and, yes, a little trepidation that I approach them again. I’ll add my notes to George’s after I read (well, re-read!) each story. I suppose, in a sense, this is a trip back to the future...what the late, great Isaac Asimov (may he rest in peace) called “antique futures.”

We’ll see....