Читать книгу Letters from Amherst - Samuel R. Delany - Страница 11

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TO ROBERT BRAVARD

February 21, 1989

• • •

Dept. of Comp. Lit.

South College Building

U. of Mass., Amherst

Amherst MA 01003

February 21, 1989

Dear Bob,

Well, here I am—at last with a little time to write.

Spent the morning at home, making out checks for $316.89 worth of bills. At the cafe on the corner, ran into our department’s junior-faculty-genius, Peter Fenves. At 28, he’s a respected and widely published Kantian and deep into a book on Kierkegaard. One of my graduate students, a 31-year-old Lesbian named Mel, with peach-colored hair, a couple of years his senior, said of him recently: “It’s really nice to have someone on the faculty who actually lives in ancient Greece.” Peter’s dark, skinny, bespectacled, tiny-fingered, distracted, curly-haired, delicately opinionated, and very good-hearted. Mel’s description is pretty accurate—though Peter’s Greece probably grants Walter Benjamin and Hölderlin honorary citizenship. He came here the same time I did, from Johns Hopkins. I’m in the midst of reading an article he published last year on George Eliot’s first book, Scenes of Clerical Life. Writing a bit clunky, but content fine.

Eliot’s monster, Dempster, is Peter’s antihero—because Dempster tells perfectly absurd and baseless stories and insistently sticks to them in the face of truth, the French encyclopedia, common sense, and everything!

A couple of nights ago, I took him and Don Levine (another professor) to dinner, and we’d yakked about Proust and Madame Bovary and modernism and drank Irish coffees till two in the morning in the lounge of a place whose name I can’t remember. Apparently a comment I dropped that evening sent him home to reread Hiawatha (I found out this morning). So we discussed boredom in poetry, in a most unboring fashion, in the crowded restaurant, while I drank decaf and he had coffee.

Then I bundled into my winter coat, while Peter went off to collect his laundry down the road.

Now I’m sitting in my university office on some mid-February holiday—I’m not even sure which one it is. The squirrels are running over the roof. Creatures whose identity I don’t want to speculate on rattle around in the walls. And the hallway outside my office is more or less deserted.

My classes are notably better this than last term. I guess people are beginning to hear I’m here—maybe some of last term’s students actually talked. At any rate, this time classes were preceded by half-a-dozen calls from particularly interested students who wanted to study with me. In general, the ambition and intelligence—and energy level!—of the classes is so much higher. Last term, though opened to graduate students, my modernist novel class (513) attracted only juniors and seniors. This term, I’ve got half a dozen graduate students. And the undergraduates who’ve enrolled seem a lot more there.

It’s strange to think that I’m here, already sunk in the second term of the rest of my life; the first was, if I’m honest, grim; though—as I look back—not grim in any surprising ways. Half of it was (as I knew it would be) just that the landscape was so new.

By “landscape” I mean something more complex than the physical layout of the town, with its central graveyard [around which my end of Amherst is built], or of the U. Mass. campus, ten minutes down the road from my house. But the bureaucratic landscape, coupled with the psychological landscape [and the social landscape on top of that—the place, as best I can figure out, doesn’t have a sexual landscape (at least not so’s you’d notice)]—has just been annoying, irritating, maddening to learn my way around in. But how could it be otherwise for someone who’s spent thirty years basically self-employed in NYC?

My 2nd floor apartment on Cowles Lane is still bare enough to make (my very rare) visitors, when they come in, look about a bit askance. There’s a bed in the main room. A large study table and a couple of benches are almost lost in the front room.

No rugs. No wall decorations. No other objects to speak of—oh, yes: three mismatching kitchen chairs¹ move desultorily through the four low-ceilinged rooms. But that’s it. Books are worming their way along the baseboards, having overflowed the two built-in bookshelves.

Still, when I got back after intersession in New York, I actually had a surge of good feeling over the town; coming in my front door, I felt I was coming home. (Thank the Lord, since, for better or worse, it’s going to be home awhile.)

My office is only a little more homey than the apartment; but because the office has the word-processor in it, I spend most of my days here. One particular “landscape” absurdity is that, though I’m constantly being assigned jobs in which I have to contact other scholars out of state, my phone is not set up to make long-distance calls!

Why you’d give a 70-thousand-dollar-a-year distinguished professor a phone that can only make local calls inside the Amherst city limits is beyond me! I volunteered to have my own put in that I would pay for completely on my own.

No, said the university.

They like it this way.

Oh, well.

Bob, of late I haven’t been the correspondent I’d have liked to be. That goes for a couple of years, now. Looking back over things, I despair of how much has never made it into my letters. You probably noticed “Charles Solomon Coup” on the dedication page of The Motion of Light in Water. I met him back in ’87; he was a six-three, 26-year-old street kid, somewhat retarded, with a couple of stints in jail for not much of anything, who hailed from Western Pennsylvania’s hills, and with whom I had a pleasant summer-long affair that year, which straggled on and off over a year more. Once Iva came home from summer camp and the main part of Mike’s and my relation subsided (by mutual consent) into occasional visits (with friendly sex, if Iva was at her mother’s), a few months later he more or less settled in with another lover, a pleasant, hyper-talkative Puerto Rican artist in his thirties named Paul. Though the last time Mike and I ended up in bed together (Mike is Charles’s street name. In fact it’s “Mike Smith,” yes, after the Heinlein hero in Stranger in a Stranger Land: Mike can’t read, but someone out on the street gave it to him when he first got to the city; so he kept it) was the first time I came down to the city, after I started up here. And of course he’s twenty-eight or nine, now. I’ve had Mike and Paul over for dinner a couple of times, and—when the two of them were kicked out of Paul’s Brooklyn flat—I put them up for a few days.

I met Charles/Mike while he was sitting on the rim of a trash can, in front of the Burger King out on Broadway, about a week after my mother’s 2nd of July stroke. After drinking a couple of cans of beer together, on the bench in the island in the middle of Broadway, over a few nights, when I’d run into him in the street after I’d come from St. Vincent’s, and buying him a couple of Chinese take-out meals, one Sunday I found him in Riverside Park, during the sweltering New York summer heat. (He was standing by the large stone newel, just inside the 79th Street entrance, and looking a little confused about where to amble on to next.) Finally I asked him how he’d take to bedding down with me. He (a nail-biter to rival John Mueller) grinned and said: “That’d be okay. It don’t bother me none. I done that before.” Later, when we got to know each other better, he told me that the reason he’d first gone along with it was because I’d mentioned I had an air conditioner. At any rate, by the next day, this six-foot-three, size-thirteen-sneakered, easygoing hillbilly who really likes to get his tits sucked (“It’s funny, but nobody ever does that enough. Men or women. I like gettin’ my tits sucked almost more’n my dick. You suck on them for me, and I’ll do anything for you, man—anything!”) had basically moved in.

At fifteen, Mike was tested at school (in which, after staying back for two years, he still couldn’t read) and diagnosed as a “slow learner” and “borderline retarded.” It precipitated a kind of a family crisis: an older sister threw a tantrum and declared she “… didn’t want no retard for a brother!” Mike went out into the woods and, rather ineffectually, tried to commit suicide. But it didn’t work—or he couldn’t do it. He slunk back home. His parents (who had five other kids) were just bewildered and not too sure what to do. But Mike’s growing estrangement from the family started about then—though once a week, he still calls his mother.

I don’t know if either one of us really found the other’s company too stimulating. When he talks, Mike’s conversation is pretty limited to the guns he would like to have owned but couldn’t afford, the crimes he would like to have committed but never had the guts to do. Once I took him to an SF party given by some fans (Computer engineer and executive secretary wife) over on West End Avenue. Mike had a perfectly fine time. Shyness is not his problem. But when it was time to go home and I went to collect him, he’d got some bespectacled law student in the kitchen corner by the icebox and, with a beer in one hand, was affably and unwittingly terrorizing the young man with his easy and endless recitation of these only just-never-quite-accomplished deeds of violence. (Mike is very large, with a kind of scraggly beard—and, because his hair is thinning, almost never takes his baseball cap off.) As I took Mike’s arm and, with a tug, told him, “Hey there, big guy! It’s time for us to go home and let these people go to sleep!” the young man blinked at me above the brown knot of his tie between the forest green tabs of his collar and said, “You have a … very interesting friend, Mr. Delany.”

But I certainly found the friendship comforting, especially while I was going through the first months with my mother. And, even after he’d officially “moved out” on the last weekend of August, from the way he’d occasionally drop by and crawl into bed with me, probably he did too—since I’m always willing to listen to him. And not a lot of people are.

Over a very rough period, he was one of the major people who got me through that very hard time. He really deserves his dedication.

You probably got a couple of stories from me about Danny McLaughlin. (Another dedicatee of the book.) But there are many, many more—Danny is currently in jail up in Ontario.

And John Mueller, who got out of jail last February, after finally getting fired for the last time from his machine shop job in New Rochelle, went on a drunken toot about three months ago that ended him up in Florida—where he was shortly picked up. Because he’d broken parole, he’s back in jail, this time in Sing-Sing. Got a letter from him only three days ago.

Nor do you know anything about Maison Bailey, a tree-service worker, with a surgically corrected harelip, who lives in Brewster, New York, and whom I’ve been seeing on and off since last April. Maison is (incidentally) the single person I’ve been most in love with in my life. Bar none. Ever. Alas, the relation is down to twice a week phone calls, now that I’m up here.

My good friend John (Del Gaizo, whom I jokingly call “Big Del Gaizo Fellow”) has been going with SF writer (my fellow Little Magazine editor and former student from the Clarion SF Writers’ Workshop) Susan Palwick, for six months now. I hope it lasts. Because the two of them are about my all-time favorite people. John, the most patient of heterosexual men, has had to hold my hand and listen for what must be days’ worth of hours now, to the intricacies of the Maison affair: John is the only one of my New York friends actually to meet Maison!

At some point, I really will have to tell you about him. But because it’s the relation that’s meant most to me since I was a kid, it’ll have to wait for a letter all its own.

Through all the last couple of years, Barbara Wise has been a wonderfully fine friend. I spent a couple of weeks with her and Howard up on the Cape last summer. (Howard is failing fast. I don’t expect him to last out the year.) But this past spring, Barbara, Big Del Gaizo Fellow, and I all acted in a production of Ionesco’s Jack, or the Submission, directed by Cynthia Belgrave, out at her basement CBA Theater on Bergen Street in Brooklyn. I played Father Jack. Barbara was Mother Jack. And John was Father Robert. (The leads—Jack and Roberta—were taken by a totally impossible and wonderfully handsome black Jamaican actor, Donald Lee Taylor, and a wonderfully talented actress, Bette Carlson.) There’s a videotape of the entire production on store at the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston. And one or two of the SF crowd (Debbie Notkin and Ellen Kushner) actually got out to see it.

Barbara’s come up to Amherst a couple of times to visit. Her stepson, Jeremy, lives in town. Barbara and I had an absurd adventure here one night, back in early December, when she and I had gone dancing at a local Amherst nightspot, the Pink Cadillac. It ended up with Barbara running a red light in town, getting arrested, and spending a night in jail in Belchertown—while I and another friend, Mackie, ran all over Amherst, trying to keep all this from Jeremy and the rest of the family, who consider Barbara just a bit wild anyway.

Chip Delany and Barbara Wise as Father Jack and Mother Jack in Eugène Ionesco’s Jack, or The Submission, upstairs in the changing area of Cynthia Belgrave’s CBA Theater, April 1988.

I spent the six weeks from Christmas till the start of classes (Feb. 1st) down in New York with Iva. We had great fun.

She’s happily ensconced at the Bronx High School of Science and doing well. All Christmas Eve I found myself wondering about and thinking of you. It seems on so many other Christmas Eves I’ve somehow been able to find the time to sit down and write you. And three weeks later, on Iva’s birthday, I found myself getting all ready to write you yet again, as I’ve done so many years now. But this year, for the first time, Iva decided she didn’t want to have a party. So, instead of the burst of cleaning in the morning, with the rest of the day free while the kids entertained each other, she and I spent the whole day together. And another letter didn’t get written—though she and I had a wonderful time.

Toward the end of January, down from Canada and on her way to Montego Bay, Judith Merril stopped off to stay with Iva and me for three very nice days. It was quite wonderful to have a house guest. For one thing, if just for those three days, it got me into regular cooking—we had beef stew the night of Judy’s arrival, and I made real breakfasts in the morning. Indeed, on the evening of the second night, Judy said, “Chip, what is the fanciest thing you can do with breakfast eggs?”

Working at the dining room table on the manuscript for the English edition of Motion of Light in Water, I looked up and frowned. “I don’t know. You can sheer them, I suppose. Then there’s eggs Florentine, poached over fresh spinach—that’s nice. And of course you can always fall back on Benedict. Why do you ask?”

“Because tomorrow’s my birthday,” Judy said. “And I’m only going to be here for breakfast. And I’d like some birthday eggs.”

“You shouldn’t have told him that!” Ending a telephone conversation in the corner, Iva laughed. She stood up from the maroon chair. “Now he’ll be off to Zabar’s for all sorts of stuff—and knowing how he cooks, he would have started this morning if you let him, so that there’d be things fresh baked for tomorrow!”

“I know how he cooks, too,” Judy said. “That’s why I waited till ten o’clock at night to tell him. So he couldn’t take too much trouble. Really, eggs will do.”

But of course I dashed out (without letting Judy know) and managed to sneak some champagne back into the house. And since Judy tends to sleep late (and Zabar’s opens at 8:00 in the morning), I was over getting smoked salmon and sable and watercress (and fresh hot bagels from H&H—Judy had been going on about how she so missed good New York deli food), with scarf wound round my nose, against the January chill.

The eggs themselves were simply scrambled in a double boiler with butter, fresh chives, and a dash of Worcestershire. But the fish and bagel and champagne accoutrements were something.

We sat down to the table at nine-thirty and “breakfasted” till noon.

Iva was at her most mature and charming—finally to go off to a Saturday morning baby-sitting job towards eleven.

Judy left from breakfast, an hour after Iva, to go meet Tom Disch for lunch.

It was all quite fun.

Now one of Judy’s reasons for coming down through New York was that her grandson, Kevin, at twenty-four, was expecting his first child. The last time I’d seen Kevin was well over a dozen years ago, when I’d visited his mother, Merril, in Milford PA, back when Kevin was a rambunctious moppet of eight. Judy had timed her trip through the city on the off chance it would take in the new baby’s birth and she might drop down to Philadelphia to see them. (“But it’s their first kid, and first children are always two weeks late. So I don’t really have much hope.”) Sure enough, however, twenty minutes after she’d left to meet Tom, there was a phone call from a very tired and precise sounding young man: “Is Judith Merril there …?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “She just left for lunch. You missed her by about twenty minutes.”

“Well,” he said. “This is her grandson, Kevin. Could you please give her a message for me. Now be sure she gets it exactly: ‘Happy Birthday, Great Grandma!’”

Well, of course I exploded with congratulations and good wishes (and the obligatory, “I know you don’t remember me, Kevin, but the last time I saw you was …”), then had a chat with Merril, his mom, who was there. And whom I hadn’t talked to for a decade. (The last time I actually saw her was when she came to New York and picked me up at the Heavenly Breakfast, to drive me down to Milford, and we had an interesting encounter with some high school drop-out toughs in a diner where we’d stopped for coffee. One came up to me in what was clearly an attempt to start trouble and asked: “Hey, fella. Who does your hair?”—as it was all over my head in a very long proto-Afro [also I wore an earring at the time, back then when everybody else didn’t], the part that wasn’t in a very bushy ponytail.

(In perfect innocence I answered, ‘Oh, I do it myself,’ and went back to my coffee, while Merril—who was rather heavy and more familiar than I with the mores of the area—held her breath on the counter stool beside me, waiting for the first punch … which never flew. Because it never occurred to me that the guy with the denim jacket, pimply chin, open sweatshirt, and the tattoos showing over his t-shirt collar wasn’t perfectly serious. Back in the car Merril and I laughed about it for the rest of the trip down.) At any rate, Judy’s new (and first), great-grandchild was a girl, five-and-a-half pounds, named Kelly Nichole. Mother and daughter were both fine. (It’s quite astonishing to think of Merril, who’s only a couple of years older than I am, as a grandmother!) And when I got off the phone, I called Tom, who hadn’t left to meet Judy yet, and conveyed the message. “Now be sure to get it right,” I said. “‘Happy Birthday, Great Grandma!’”

As pleased as I was, Tom assured me he would.

That evening when she came in, Judy filled me in on the rest of the story. Tom had waited till she was seated at the restaurant table before he’d reached across, taken her hand, and given her the message. The waitress had just come up to take their order, and overheard it.

So when desert time came, she brought two, both with candles, and the whole restaurant sang Happy Birthday. Twice. Telling me all this, Judy sat back on the couch, laughing. “It was really the most wonderful 67th birthday present anyone could possibly have!”

Over a couple of gossip sessions Judy told me things about her life—and the SF world—that were just fascinating. In this tiny circle in which I’ve made my living for so many years, much of the gossip about Judy has the quality of legend already. And the first evening she was there, David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer came over—and David tried, not very subtly, to prompt her into writing an autobiography; an idea she likes, I think. If she does it, it will be quite wonderful for any of us sunk in the field’s mythology.

She told us about her early affair with the legendary John Michel, a Futurean who never really wrote any SF but who was the acknowledged genius of the bunch, the mentor of Pohl and Kornbluth and Asimov as well as of Judy. (“My first half-dozen sales—mysteries and westerns, all—were just a case of writing down what John told us to write. Then revising them the way he told us to revise them. It was pretty much the same with Fred and Ike too, I guess.”) She told us the perfectly hysterical story of how Donald Wollheim finally told Michel that he could no longer see Judy because she had been a Trotskyite (Wollheim was a Stalinist; none of them were over twenty-one) and tried to expel her from the group; and how she and Virginia Kidd had gotten the rest of them together and expelled them from the Futureans in return.

“Where was Sam Moskowitz in all this?” I asked.

Judy laughed. “Off in New Jersey, I suppose, writing The Immortal Storm.”

She told us about her first meeting with Ted Sturgeon, who was rooming down the street from her with Jay Stanton at the time in the late ’40s when her Fuller Brush Man informed her that there was an SF writer living in the neighborhood—and Judy, already a Sturgeon fan, sent Ted a fan letter and was invited to come over.

She also spoke of her equally legendary affair with Walter O. (“Darfsteller,” Canticle for Leibowitz) Miller, from half a dozen years later. And how, with their combined five children, they fled about the country, now to Texas, now to Chicago, now to Florida, to escape hounding X-es. (“For better or for worse, it really was the passion of my life. I remember once, in some hotel, we were in bed together. And in the dark, after we’d just finished making love, Walt said to me: ‘We’re both wonderful performers. And we’ve both found the perfect audience. I wonder if we’ll ever perform for anyone else?’ But really, that was the level the whole thing happened on—” she chuckled, sitting back on the green couch Big Del Gaizo Fellow had given me the month before, raising the general designer standard of the living room by a good three-hundred percent—“or almost all of it, anyway.”) In the course of the story, she recounted a harrowing scene, when, in some shack in Florida, long, lanky Fred Pohl showed up to physically wrest back his and Judy’s mutual daughter, Ann, at which point Walt came in with a gun. (“Fred, with impressive bravery—he really didn’t know it wasn’t loaded—grabbed the thing by the barrel and yanked it out of Walt’s hands!”) The two men ended up rolling all over the kitchen floor (“… while I stood there like a ninny, crying, ‘You can’t do that in here! If you’re going to do that, take it outside! Go on, don’t fight in here! Fight outside’”). Fred’s glasses got broken. (“That was really the end of it, because without them he was perfectly blind—only Walt didn’t know that!”) Three-year-old Merril came running up to her 26-year-old ex-stepfather with all the fragments—Fred was still searching around for them on the floor—and said: ‘Here they are, daddy!’”

The story went on, tense with out-of-state phone calls and advice from Milt Amgott (up until half a dozen years ago my own aging lawyer, but back in the late-’40s the entire science fiction community’s legal eagle), and climaxed in the custody trial at which Judy lost Ann to Fred and at which, quite to Judy’s astonishment, Walt’s refined, southern Gentle Woman mother testified on Judy’s behalf. (“Ah can think of no home in which Ah would prefer to see my grandchildren raised.”) I was impressed, Judy told me. The judge was impressed. But then, Mrs. Miller was a very impressive woman!

Still, the verdict went against Judy—since it was nineteen fifty and she and Walt were unquestionably “living in sin”; also Fred had now married Carol, and thus had an unstained home for the kids to come to.

That custody trial polarized the whole SF community. It is actually the explanation—I’ve known this for years—for the perfectly mindless selection of SF writers cited in Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell. (Only the Pohl-side writers are represented in the book.) And although Fred and Judy have more or less healed their breach and appear on panels with each other and are probably, today, a bit more friendly than M. and I (I have even seen them dance together at an SF convention party!), you can still see the traces of the alignments in the attitudes of the older writers, even today.

The day Judy left for the Caribbean, Barbara Wise’s 25-year-old daughter, Julie, got married in a truly sumptuous home wedding. For the affair, I actually bought my first pair of dress shoes in about ten years. Then, a trip to the thrift store on 98th Street netted me a Pierre Cardin suit that almost fits, for a mere thirty dollars. It’s really quite handsome. Iva picked up her best party clothes from her mother’s, then she and I went down to attend on Sunday evening. I wept through the whole service, while Iva giggled at me.

The one real sadness there was that Barbara’s close friend Michael had been supposed to help out tending bar. I think I mentioned to you that he had AIDS, when we all had Christmas dinner together at Barbara’s in ’87. Well, the day of the wedding, he had to go into the hospital; he’s been falling a lot, sleeping even more; and a cat scan shows it’s gone to the brain—which is how it took Ralph, the year before. This may well be it. But the ceremony was lovely.

The bride looked beautiful. A harpist and flautist played throughout. All of Howard’s electronic art was a-glitter, a-flash, and a-blink about their sepulchrally large living room—including the great, John Ray wall light-sculpture (which had been on the fritz for the last half dozen years, but which Barbara had gotten Ray in to fix for the occasion—he lives here in Amherst, too! Barbara and I spent a lovely evening with him in December). The food Barbara managed to get together (down in the well that drops through the midst of the living room floor stood an immense ice sculpture of a dragon, set about with spring tropic flowers—because the newlyweds were to be honeymooning in the tropics) was beyond belief:

Shrimp. Ham. Vegetarian crepes. New potatoes stuffed with caviar (Sevruga!), salads and wonderfully fresh vegetables, and three kinds of champagne for the various courses—Deutch with the canapés, Taittinger with the entree—and (a daring move that worked, just taking people’s heads off!) peach champagne with the sumptuous wedding cake.

I had a long talk with one of the groom’s 17-year-old sons, and decided that—though going through a rough adolescence—he is a profoundly good kid.

There were about a hundred guests.

This Christmas my sister had given us tickets to Andrew Lloyd (Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, Starlight Express) Webber’s and Charles Hart’s The Phantom of the Opera.

The Monday after the wedding, on January 23rd, wearing much what we’d worn the night before, Iva and I went to see it.

It’s customary to say that the show is dreadful—but it’s just musically rather complicated. The production is lavish (and the season’s hugest Broadway success) on an order that the Broadway term “lavish” doesn’t usually cover. As spectacle, it makes it almost impossible to pay attention to the music—which is a decent modern-middlebrow leitmotif opera. But the spectacle is, I’m sure, why it’s successful.

The opening twin scenes are breathtaking. You enter a theater in ruins, with scenery fallen over the stage and gray hangings covering the proscenium, dust cloths on all the scenic statuary, some of which shows, broken and tarnished, from beneath it.

The lights go down, and, on stage, an auction starts. Objects from the old theater are being sold off. An old man in a wheelchair buys a little music box, on which a figure of a monkey plays cymbals. Lying askew on the stage, a huge, old theatrical chandelier is uncovered. The auctioneer explains that this is, indeed, the chandelier that figured in the disaster involved with “the strange affair of the Phantom of the Opera, never fully explained.” An attempt to illuminate the old object produces a sudden shower of sparks and short circuits, but suddenly the cables begin to haul the clinking, glittering object up from the boards, out over the audience, and toward the actual theater ceiling—at which point the entire house (not just the stage), over some twenty-eight bars of thunderous triple-fff organ, mostly in darkness, but with shafts of light darting now here, now there, to spotlight some instant of the transformation, returns to its 1890’s gilt and gaslit splendor!

It all settles down on a moment when a sort of clunky but colorful Meyerbeer-style opera (Hannibal?) is in progress on the stage.

It’s so impressive visually (as is, indeed, the rest of the show, with its underground lakes of dry ice, its disappearing mirror walls, its tilting subterranean stairways), you can’t possibly concentrate on the fairly intricate—and modestly intelligent—musical development.

I’ve been listening to the tapes, though, and I’ve ascertained that there really is something (if not that much) going on.

I read Gaston Leroux’s novel a couple of months back, before I saw the show. John Del Gaizo was a loader and workman at the Beacon Theater, which they revamped for the opening-night cast party. John’s stories from that evening are a tale in themselves! The novel is a hopelessly clunky mess. Leroux probably wrote it for three-part serialization in some French monthly pulp—likely without reading the earlier installments when working on the latter ones.

In the book, there’re really three phantoms (one of which, the mysterious rat-catcher in the theater cellar, was clearly going to get some sort of story to himself, before he got abandoned as Leroux came closer to the end), and heaven alone knows what Leroux thought the ending was going to be when he began—clearly he didn’t want to close off any possibilities! I’m sure when he started out, the mysterious Turk who is always wandering around back stage (and who turns out, quite unexpectedly, to be a detective, who takes the callow young hero, Raoul, under his wing and proceeds to solve the mystery) was going to turn into the first Phantom. But G.L. probably decided that was too obvious. Eric (the Phantom we all know and love) must have more professions (engineer, architect, composer, singing teacher, magician, sideshow manager, assassin, oriental torturer, horse trainer …) than any other character ever to make it through a penny-dreadful. All of which professions he’s superb at—of course.

What is fascinating however: the book symbolizes beautifully the uncomfortable psychological underside of the transformation of the early 19th century, perpetually lit-up romantic theater of light into the late romantic, Wagnerian theater of darkness. The whole creaky melodrama is a black and reactionary allegory of the transformation that accompanies it, not only in the performing arts, but in all the rest as well, between early “performer-as-craftsman,” socially only a little higher than a prostitute, and “performer-as-artist” (truly concerned about the work, obsessive over study and the spiritual center of the music, possessed by the artist and his mission) that accompanied the theatrical transformation Bayreuth brought about in the general art world between 1876 and the death of Edward VII in 1910 (the year of The Phantom’s first book publication). For most of the original story, the Phantom is not real. He is only in Christine’s mind. But at the same time he is her singing teacher and the composer of the new and supremely difficult opera that all the traditional singers find nearly impossible to learn their parts in …

It really is a straight portrayal of the Wagner mythos.

The chandelier the Phantom brings crashing down mid-story on the audience, murdering one unfortunate woman in the stalls, is doubtless an old-fashioned gas or candle-lit affair, which burned under the ceiling of the theater throughout the performance. The new one that goes up to replace it (and which the new theater managers are so proud of) is certainly an electric one, which is extinguished during performances—rendering the theater dark (and modern!), à la Bayreuth, but which—problematically and allegorically—allows the Phantom an even easier time in wreaking his murderous mischief on all and sundry.

Note that more than half the Phantom’s actual energy is directed toward the two new Paris Opera managers on “how his theater is to be run” and securing his 20-thousand-francs-per-quarter salary! I mean, how Wagnerian could you get? The Webber show, incidentally, takes it out of the Paris Opera and replaces it in an imaginary theater called The Opéra Populaire.

And—with its “music of the night” theme running through—the B’way show (at any rate) makes a nice, but probably unconscious, nod to Novalis, who supplied both Wagner (Tristan, Act II) and all after him with the dark metaphors in which such tales of shadowy obsession traditionally are couched. (Hymnen an die Nacht.)

It occurs to me that the original mythologic/historic basis for The Phantom of the Opera is quite probably the death of Von Carolsfeld, Wagner’s first, twenty-five-year-old Tristan. The Munich Opera had already made Tristan und Isolde a thing of gossip, well before its first performance, by abandoning it after an untoward fifty-odd rehearsals, even after the music had already been published and various children, such as Nietzsche [fifteen at the time] and King Ludwig [Prince back then], were playing it on their pianos and waiting on pins and needles for an actual performance.

Six weeks after the actual, first, 1866, royal command performance of the legendarily “unperformable” opera, Von Carolsfeld, devoted to Wagner, died, presumably of typhus, the fever exacerbated during the opera’s brief, royal run (that young King Ludwig had finally commanded in the notoriously cold and draughty wings, where, dripping with sweat after the exertions of Act II, Von Carolsfeld had to lie in the cold (though it was June), waiting for the even more taxing demands of Act III. Von Carolsfeld (Ludwig Schnorr) died raving, believing he was Tristan and calling for Wagner to heal him. (The rather horrid symptoms of his very unpleasant death make it sound more like a case of galloping syphilis. And Wagner and Cosima were both distraught.) But theater gossip was that there’d been some sexual relationship between the rather heavy, hard-working young tenor (probably not true, since Von Carolsfeld’s wife, Malvina, who played Isolde in the same production, was equally devoted to Wagner. But that just made it stranger). One of the reasons for the sexual rumor, however, was that before general rehearsals had begun, the difficulty of the part had obliged Wagner to spend some weeks closeted alone with the young man (whose voice was wonderful and whose enthusiasm was boundless—but whose sight-reading left something to be desired), working with him on the difficult chromaticisms of the Herculeanly taxing part—a most unusual practice that only added to the mythos when, a month and a half later, he died so unexpectedly and unpleasantly.

But, displaced onto a woman, this is probably the Ur-version behind both The Phantom and its Ur-version, George du Maurier’s melodrama Trilby (1894).

But little or none of that makes it into the Broadway show.

At any rate, when the music of the night finally got over with, and the lovers were safely off together, and the Phantom had done his last and poignant disappearing act, and we were squeezing up the crowded theater aisle, over the red carpet and between the maroon seats, my daughter (from the height of her new, week-old fifteen years of maturity) told me: “You know, I think Raoul was … well, just a pain. She should have gone off with the Phantom.”

I laughed. “Well, that’s what they wanted you to feel. So I guess the show was a success …?”

“It was okay,” she allowed, as the first cool air from outside finally reached us over the crowd ahead, squeezing before us, around us, into the lobby. “It was sort of silly, though. The story, I mean … I mean, every time stupid, dumb Raoul came on, I just wanted to scream!”

Then there was only squeezing; and no more talking for a while. But as we hurried up 44th Street toward Eighth Avenue, looking for a midnight cab, I wondered how to explain to Iva that, in historical/allegorical terms, Christine really had gone off with the dangerous, obsessive Phantom, and not with shallow, reactionary Raoul after all. If you take the Phantom as a demonized symbol for the Wagnerian concept of the artist, fighting for possession of Christine’s soul, then, really, in terms of modernist history, things had worked out exactly as Iva’d wished. And the single line of show music, which, that night, was all I’d managed to retain once the curtain had come down, kept playing through my mind, with all its Oedipal edge a-glitter, as Iva and I moved past the theater posters in their glass frames along the wall of the Milford Plaza; “He’s here, the Phantom of the Opera … I am the Phantom of the Opera …!”

A couple of days later I recreated Judy’s birthday breakfast for John Del Gaizo. (Iva: “How come we’re doing everything so fancy, these days?” Me: “Oh, I don’t know. I just feel like it.” Iva: “Me too! Me too—don’t stop. Could I have some more smoked salmon?” Which tickled Big Del Gaizo Fellow, who had another glass of champagne.) Then, a few days later, while in the nest of my office I worked maniacally at finishing up the last section of the Camera Obscura interview for Constance Penley and Sharon Willis (which interview I’m quite proud of!), John came up and packed stuff for me—a twenty-five pound box of journals and manuscripts to be Federal Expressed up to Boston and a hundred-twenty-five pound box of books/clothes/cooking utensils/general-stuff for me in Amherst.

Then Iva and Bumper (the cat) went back to Iva’s mother’s, and the next morning I went down to the bus below Grand Central, rode out to La Guardia, then flew to Erie, Pennsylvania, to deliver a cut-down version of my “Introduction to Deconstruction” lecture² for the Mercyhurst College “academic celebration.” It went over pretty well—and I kind of fell in love with the blue-collar town.

What else? Just the lectures I guess, first off in Lowell, then again, last weekend, in Philadelphia at the meeting of the Associated Writing Programs of America—I sent you the booklet. But its dry account of panels and programs masks some interesting happenings. First off, the overall theme was a celebration of Allen Ginsberg. Though I’ve been in the same room with him a couple of times, and though we have many mutual friends (and once a mutual landlord named Chuck Bergman whom both of us, I believe, were occasionally going to bed with), we’ve never been introduced.

At the upstairs reception after the Gay/Lesbian Panel, then, I was a bit surprised with the scraggly bearded Professor Ginsberg (he’s taken John Ashbery’s place as Professor of Poetry in the City University System), in his modest brown suit and tie, came up to me and simply said: “Hello, Delany. How’ve you been?” then launched into a chat about the Cherry Valley Farm, the Naropa Institute (that he runs with our mutual friend, Anne Waldman), etc.³ Finally he reached into his canvas shoulder bag and handed me a flyer for a series of readings he was putting on, mostly of black poets.

I give him points.

It looks like quite a program he and Gwendolyn Brooks have put together there.

One of the most pleasant people at the AWP was Honor (Memoir) Moore. The first night we were there, after most of the panelists went out to dinner at a very good—but crashingly expensive—Japanese place called, incongruously, “Ziggy’s,” Honor and I snuck off together to the Hershey Hotel’s cabaret, and heard a couple of her old friends from Yale perform some standard show tunes quite brilliantly.

Then we went to a reception for them, where the food the hotel supplied was far better than the hors d’oeuvres it had gotten together for the school teachers. A lot of old Yale people had shown up for the evening. And in the course of sitting around chatting, I realized I was talking to Rhoda Levine, director of Anthony Davis’s X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which I wrote you about a couple of years back, when I was at Cornell. (I sent you a copy of the interview I did with the composer one Sunday morning at the home of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.).⁴

Mayhaps you remember, while I very much appreciated the music, I hated the production. In the course of prodding Ms. Levine, who is a very gutsy, New York/Academic theater person, I got some hair-raising stories about the production that certainly put a different light on some of it.

One of the reasons the thing ever got to Lincoln Center at all was because it came with an assembled cast of pretty professional singers. But the New York State Theater’s stage is huge, and the whole thing had to be revamped for a playing area almost three times the size of any they’d performed on before. And it was assumed that they were also not going to need any rehearsal time to speak of—when what Rhoda actually wanted (she explained to me, as she leaned forward in her purple slacks and purple woolly top) was at least a hundred hours—i.e., two weeks—of rehearsal time in the new theater.

Well, when the new opera was booked in, there simply wasn’t a 100 hours of rehearsal time available.

The compromise they struck was arrived at rather dramatically. When they’d used up the 30 hours that was all Lincoln Center would give them, they hadn’t even started on the third act. So Rhoda went to a pay phone and called Beverly Sills and began to explain: “We’ve finally decided the way we’re going to do it.

“At the end of Act II, we’re going to stop the whole opera. Dead in its tracks, Beverly! The cast is going to gather on the stage, and we’re going to perform the third act as a cantata—no movement, no actions, just characters stepping out of the chorus and singing. Suddenly the whole performance will simply paralyze into total and complete stasis! It’s going to be breathtaking!

“You know as well as I do, Beverly—people have been complaining about the rehearsal time available here for years; the lack of funding, the lack of facilities. Well, besides being about the economic oppression of the American Black, this is also of course a meta-opera … about that! And what better way to dramatize it? Certainly for the cast, this is really an opera about the oppression of the American opera as a theatrical form. They’re singers, and that’s what they’re really concerned about. It’s about performance standards. It’s about what can and can’t be done in the theater today with a serious work because there’s no money, no time, and no margins for doing it properly. And you’re going to have it, right on your stage—the audience will be devastated, I promise you! People will be talking about it for years!

“There was,” Ms. Levine went on with her story, “absolute silence on the other end of the phone. Finally, Beverly said to me: ‘Rhoda, how much time do you need?’

“So I said: ‘Oh, I thought about eighty-three hours.’ And Beverly said: ‘You’ve got it!’” And Rhoda sat back at the crowded round little hotel table, slapping her knees while we laughed.

I still think it was a thoughtless production. While she certainly delivers a good anecdote, I think she’s a director who has no notion (or possibly experience) of what images will carry in a space that size and what images won’t. Dramatic stage arrangements that are perfectly acceptable on a 25 foot proscenium for a three-hundred seat house can be simply invisible in a thousand-plus seat hall the size of the three major theater spaces at Lincoln Center.

But I enjoyed her story.

The next day, I had a very pleasant lunch with Richard Howard, Honor Moore, and Peter (The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty) Klappert, at which Richard told us all about a course he’d taught the previous year, called American Ecstatics: It covered a whole range of people, such as Whitman, Isadora Duncan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Sounded just fascinating.

At the actual panel, I met an interesting young man, an historian and writer on economics named Walter (Mortal Splendor) Mead. My piece—the one I sent you last week—opened the panel.⁵ But the real winner among the formal presentations was Allan Gurganus’s piece, which, when it’s printed, I’ll send along. It would be unfair to try and reproduce it informally, since it was so carefully done. Later, while the informal part was going on, and after I made my point about [Guy] Davenport, Richard threw in that a few months ago he’d been talking to Hugh Kenner on the phone.

Kenner has always been one of Davenport’s biggest supporters. But Kenner had been complaining to Richard that he just found the sexual content of Davenport’s more recent material “absolutely embarrassing” and simply didn’t know how he was supposed to deal with it. Richard pointed out that the whole area of pedophilia really puts people off. And I pointed out that Davenport’s characters never cross any real, legal line. Nevertheless they stray so close that it becomes that much more bothersome—because the line is so clearly in the reader’s mind.

Both Allan Gurganus and Marianne Hauser had stressed in their pieces the responsibility of the writer to cross boundaries and write about people other than themselves. Men must try to write from the position of women. Women must try to write from the position of men; rich, poor, and all other boundaries must be breached by the writer of fiction.

I made the point toward the end that, however these boundaries were crossed, we had to remember that these same boundaries represented differences in power relationships. Thus, a man writing from the position of a woman was crossing one power boundary and a woman writing from the point of view of a man was crossing another. Hauser had cited some of the criticism she had received in the forties when she’d written a first person novel as a man. I pointed out that what this criticism had actually meant was: “How dare you, a woman, usurp this particular male field of power.” And that a man writing as a woman seldom gets such criticism because the male writer assuming a firstperson female persona is moving down the power scale, not up.

On the aisle, toward the back of the ballroom in which all this was going on, a little brown woman in a red tam and bundled up in a lot of orange down coat was nodding intently at just about everything I said.

When the panel was over, a great young bear in glasses and a woolly sweater, with a mass of curly hair caught back in a small ponytail, came running up to the table, put his chin over the edge of the pale blue cloth (spotted now with water between the several microphones and Styrofoam cups), and said: “Mr. Delany, I just wanted to tell you: I’ve probably read everything you’ve published. And for years I’ve always thought you were one of the finest writers in America—and certainly the most underrated one. I’m so glad to get a chance to meet you. May I give you this?” and he handed me a copy of Mortal Splendor.

“Thank you,” I said. “Eh, what is it …?”

“It’s my book,” he said.

“Oh!” I said. “Well, thank you very much …”

Then said young bear turned around and dashed back off into the crowd.

That afternoon in my room I started reading the nicely printed trade paperback with the rather impressive encomiums on the back.

Fifty pages on, and I’d realized that (one) it was quite well written and (two) it was even better in its thinking. It’s an analysis of the “American Empire” with an extremely cogent set of suggestions on what the country might do to get it together.

The last program of the day was a reading with novelist Toby Olson and poet Sonia Sanchez. Olson is a six-foot-ten bearded, white-blond woodsman of a fellow (I exaggerate, but not by much). He was always at the center of an entourage—and seemed very much into himself. A couple of times I addressed friendly remarks to him, but he never answered. Perhaps because his head is so far above mine, he just didn’t hear me.

Alas, I don’t much like his work. It’s not awful. But it’s as sexist and as homophobic as one can get away with these days and still be taken seriously (by those who don’t think sexism and homophobia are all that serious after all …) and I listened to him with a mental blue pencil striking out excess verbal baggage in his prose on a pretty regular basis.

When Sanchez got up to read, I realized she was the brown woman in the orange coat who’d been nodding so enthusiastically in the back of the room during my panel.

Marilyn has mentioned her to me on several occasions—and has apparently arranged readings for her a few times. The mentions were always somewhat mysterious: “Have you ever heard Sonia Sanchez read?”

I’d say no.

And Marilyn would say: “You really should,” then go on to talk about something else.

I don’t have too much to say about the poems. I suspect they’re probably pretty good. Certainly I didn’t find myself editing them down the way I had done with Olson’s prose. But Sanchez’s performance was stunning.

First off, I use “performance” not in the sense of drama, but rather in the sense of the way poetry—not theater—should be performed. And I don’t mean that she was at all restrained. The energy level was jaw-dropping and electric. And, between the poems, she became a kind of political David Antin. She chanted the intra-poetic material at such a level that it almost came out stronger than the poems. Her message is straight Dickens:

Love one another, and we’ll all make the world a better place.

But it’s a nice one. And I think everyone left the ballroom feeling even taller than Toby Olson!

Outside in the hall, Toi Derricotte grabbed me by the shoulder and gave me a hug, just bubbling: “Isn’t it wonderful that she exists, Chip?”

And I had to allow that it was.

But everyone was simply babbling on about how moving she had been.

As I said to Peter Klappert when we found ourselves lingering together outside: “Talk about American Ecstatics …! Richard’s got a real live one, right here!”

Really, if she ever passes within a hundred miles of you, you must catch her. For someone under twenty-five years old, I wouldn’t be surprised if a single reading by Sanchez might change their lives forever.

That evening, when we were all gathered downstairs again, drinking and making friendly, I hunted out the burly Walter, still in jeans and his sweater, and, between buying each other far too many drinks, we got into a very interesting conversation about his work, about mine. The conversation continued through a banquet dinner (which ended in a sing-a-long with Allen Ginsberg and the Fugs [“And all the hills echoèd …” I sang into Ed Sanders’ mike as he roamed the hundred in the hall], who’d been reconvened by the AWP Program Director to entertain: it was nice to see Ed Sanders again, who’s on the Governing Board with me at New York Foundation for the Arts) in a homage to Blake, and on into the party afterwards.

Mr. Mead (Walter) is a very smart 35.

At one point when some of the other panelists had joined us, he explained that, as a political writer, people are just starting to call on him to testify in political hearings. He’s gay—and he’s wondering whether he should come out publicly or not. The general opinion was that he should probably not rush that, but that we couldn’t really advise him till we knew better what exactly his situation was.

Eventually the conversation thinned down again to the two of us. And then I did something that I have never done before at any SF con or academic convention of any sort. I asked him if he’d like to go to bed. He smiled and said: “Oh, I’d like that very much.” Then he asked me: “Is it my hands?” (He’d already mentioned that he’d read everything I’d ever published.)

I laughed. “No. It’s just you. But it’s a little odd to meet 50 perfect strangers who are quite so privy to all your sexual particularities.”

“I would probably have said something to you, first,” he said. “But because I don’t bite my nails, I figured you probably wouldn’t be interested.”

“Come on,” I said.

And we had a very pleasant night of it.

The next morning, after he showered, I took him to breakfast in the hotel’s overpriced mezzanine restaurant, then sent him off to his train back to whatever university he hails from. He’s not Maison Bailey, but it was still very nice.

A couple of hours later, when I was in the waiting room at the 30th Street Station, I struck up a conversation with a black poet also down at the AWP program, named Walter Mosley, who’d gone to U. Mass., and who recommended several restaurants to me in my own neighborhood I’d never heard of before.

The next three issues of the New York Review of Science Fiction will see the “Intro to Deconstruction” (my Lowell/Erie lecture) serialized in three parts. It’s kind of fun. I’ll send on copies, when I get some.

A couple of nights back, I stayed up till all hours reading René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, its completion interrupted by Daumal’s death in 1944. Then I started on his earlier, completed book, A Night of Serious Drinking. (My journal says: “Finally—after how many years [finding it first on the shelf in San Francisco’s City Lights in ’69]—read Mount Analogue.”) What an eccentric and interesting little book. A mystical tract almost wholly without God. Only one of the editorially appended notes gives in to a “Being that holds each thing accomplished,” residing at the mountain’s peak.⁶ But even that’s only a mountaineer’s song, which Daumal finally decided not to include in the book. In its incomplete and fragmentary form, it seems largely of the Novalis / Heinrich von Ofterdingen or Oberman tradition. Can’t think of another book that comes apart less into its respective sentences. A good book to read on a day when you’ve got a hangover [I’d overindulged at dinner the night before.] … The novel proper ends, mid-sentence, in the midst of an ecological parable that is eminently completable on the ideational level; and mentally completing it is one of the most seductive pleasures of the text.

I’d recently recommended it to our department professor who specializes in mystical literature, Lucian Miller (who’d never heard of it! Which gives you an idea of the quality of some of these guys); but I thought I’d really better read it myself before I handed it over. It quite lives up to its reputation.

Then, day before yesterday I got a call from Frank—down in New York. He’d gone over to the apartment, checking for mail in the mailbox. (Can you imagine. Three years after our break-up, he’s still getting mail there!) Because it was kind of stuffed, he took everything out and called me up to find out if I wanted him to read any of it to me over the phone. Among the stuff there was a new copy of the Australian SF Review; they just devoted an entire issue to me. He says he’s going to get the mail back to the house, but, though I know he has the best intentions, I suspect I’ll never actually see any of it again. But that’s just Frank.

Still, I’d rather like to find out what Russell Blackwell had to say about me. He’s really the best critic yet (present company excepted!) who’s written about me. Too bad he’s down under.

But that more or less brings you up to date.

I wish there was that much to tell you about the work. But I’m not even going to try.

Well, this is about half the letter I should write you! And I have not even started to respond to your letters. But I want to get this off, just so you’ll know I haven’t forgotten you.

Someone is supposed to show up here at ten to start giving me lessons in American Sign Language⁷ (which I know a little bit of already), and there is an Undergraduate Studies Committee Meeting at noon. And someone just printed up and distributed a poster for a guest speaker (Henry Sussman), that apparently has the wrong date on it, about which various people are running around and being mildly hysterical.

My love to you and yours.

Really, I still owe you a letter in which I actually answer yours! (I ought at least to mention that the awful situation with Michael P. is one I’ve encountered a couple of times in the last year. Larry McCaffery just went through his own version of the same thing, when a young graduate student brought charges of sexual harassment against him [from what I know of both the man and of such situations, it’s equally as unlikely as it was in Michael’s case] that flowered into something truly unpleasant. I wonder what this is indicative of?) But that will have to wait till the next moment I get some time.

All good thoughts

for more good things,

Samuel R. Delany

1. Lent to SRD by SF writer and translator for the deaf Geary Gravel.

2. “Neither the First Word nor the Last on Deconstruction, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, and Semiotics for SF Readers,” in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, by Samuel R. Delany (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1999).

3. A dozen years after Ginsberg’s death, SRD would teach at Naropa for fifteen summers in their Summer Writing Program.

4. “Anthony Davis—a Conversation,” in Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics, by Samuel R. Delany (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 289.

5. “Gay Writers / Gay Writing.”

6. This, of course, is discourse; though it is not a being, it is a process entailing brains and a world—the ones that are the cases (Wittgenstein).

7. Geary Gravel—see note 1 above.