Fantastic Lives : Autobiographical Essays by Notable Science Fiction Writers 0809309874

Citation preview

KD^HJERNNII/ES is a new series under the general editorship of Eric S.

Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander which has been established to serve the growing critical audience of science fiction, fantastic fiction, and speculative fiction.

Fantastic Lives AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS

BY NOTABLE SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS

Edited by Martin H. Greenberg

Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville

Copyright© 1981 by Southern Illinois University Press

"Memoir: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison. Copyright © 1980 by Harlan Ellison. Reprinted by arrangement with and permission of the Author and the Author's agent, Robert P. Mills, Ltd., New York. All rights reserved. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Designed by Quentin Fiore Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Main entry under title: Fantastic lives. (Alternatives) CONTENTS: Ellison, H. Memoir.—Farmer. P. J. Maps and spasms.—Lafferty, R. A. The case of the moth-eaten magician.—MacLean, K. The expanding mind. ¡etc.] 1. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 2. Science fiction, American—Biography. I. Greenberg, Martin H. PS129.F3 8i3’.o876’o9 |B] 80-17592 ISBN 0-8093-0987-4

Contents Preface

vii

1. Memoir: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream Harlan Ellison i 2. Maps and Spasms Philip José Farmer

20

3. The Case of the Moth-eaten Magician R. A. Lafferty 57 4. The Expanding Mind Katherine MacLean 79 5. . . . And a Chaser Barry N. Malzberg

102

6. Science Fiction and Socioeconomics Mack Reynolds 118 7. Wight in Space: An Autobiographical Sketch Margaret St. Clair M4 8. A Prince from Another Land Norman Spinrad 157

9. My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story A. E. van Vogt 175

Preface In the more than fifty years that science fiction has existed as an identifiable publishing category, its practitioners have produced precious little autobiography. There were occasional reflective pieces in fanzines and (more rarely) in the science fiction magazines, but these pieces usually contained too little and held back too much. This situation began to change in the mid-1970s. By then the writers of science fiction’s so-called Golden Age were in their mid­ fifties and older, science fiction had become academically and otherwise respectable, and some of the individuals who were in at or near the beginning began to talk about their lives in the genre. Actu­ ally, this process had begun earlier in the headnotes, prefaces, and introductions of single-author collections, and these remain one of the most important underutilized sources for science fiction scholarship. A leader in this regard was Isaac Asimov, who, through his story collections and his massive anthology Before the Golden Age (1974) had begun the work that would lead to his huge twovolume autobiography, In Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Yet Felt (1980). Meanwhile, Doubleday contributed to this process with the publication of a series of story collections of the earliest work of a group of notable writers called The Early . . . , including Lester del Rey, Frank Belknap Long, Jack Williamson, and Frederik Pohl, who later wrote a fascinating autobiography, The Way The Future Was (1978). The demise of this series is particularly regrettable. Arthur C. Clarke and Samuel R. Delany also wrote autobiographical books, but these contained little information on their careers in sci­ ence fiction. Especially noteworthy were the efforts of Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison in convincing six of the leading authors of mod­ ern science fiction—Robert Silverberg, Alfred Bester, Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl, and themselves—to write autobiographical

viii

Preface

essays that ultimately emerged as Hell's Cartographers (1975). That book is unashamedly the model for this book and the others that will hopefully follow in its wake. And like Aldiss and Harrison I tried to choose contributors who were innovative and who have made major contributions to the field of science fiction. The authors range in age from this side of forty (Norman Spinrad and, when he wrote this material, Barry N. Malzberg) to their sixties (Mack Reynolds, A. E. van Vogt, R. A. Lafferty, and Margaret St. Clair), and in between. They are a most remarkable group. Harlan Ellison, born in 1934, is a legend in his own time. Among the most honored writers of his generation—seven Hugo Awards (one shared), three Nebula Awards from the Science Fiction Writers of America, at least two Writers Guild of America Awards for scriptwriting, and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award. He is one of only a handful of writers who have established an international reputation on the basis of collections of his short fic­ tion. His powerful, emotion-filled stories have touched the hearts and minds of millions of readers, both inside and outside of the science fiction audience. In addition, his trilogy of original anthologies—Dangerous Visions (1967), Again, Dangerous Visions, and the forthcoming Last Dangerous Visions—are landmark works in the field of speculative literature. In his ''Memoir: 1 Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” he discusses his most famous and possibly most controversial story, and presents his views on literary criticism and its dangers for the writer. Philip José Farmer, born in 1918, is one of relatively few writers who became famous upon the publication of their first sci­ ence fiction story, in his case the taboo-breaking "The Lovers” in the August, 1952, issue of Startling Stories, a story that was audaci­ ous (for its time) in its sexual theme and in its vivid depiction of an alien life form. Always a prolific writer, he has maintained an amaz­ ingly high standard of quality through the years, winning a Hugo Award in 1968 for "Riders of the Purple Wage" and in 1972 for To Your Scattered Bodies (Jo, the first of his famous Riverworld series. Among his most interesting writing activities is his literary expres­ sion of his lifelong interest in and fascination with American popular culture, which can be seen in such books as Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life and Tarzan Alive. In "Maps and Spasms” he discusses his life from his child­

Preface

ix

hood in Illinois to the year 1952 and the publication of “The Lov­ ers.“ Further installments of his autobiography will appear in future publications.

Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, born 1914, is unusual in a number of respects. Science fiction is a field that has been charac­ terized by youth—young readers, young writers, even young editors and publishers—but Lafferty was forty-six when he published his first science fiction story. A truly unique voice and an author impos­ sible to classify, he is one of the least-studied important writers in the field (or in any field, for that matter). Although he won a Hugo Award for his story “Eurema's Dam” in 1972, and despite the fact that his work is widely admired by his fellow writers, he has not had the commercial success that his talent deserves. Here, in “The Case of the Moth-eaten Magician," he provides his own unique version of the history and meaning of modern science fiction, one that is both important and controversial. He also provides a too-brief glimpse of his own life and work. Katherine MacLean, born in 1925, is one of the most shamefully neglected writers in science fiction. Never prolific, her carefully crafted stories maintain an exceptionally high standard and combine stylistic brilliance with careful sociological and technologi­ cal extrapolation. One explanation for her relative obscurity and lack of a mass audience is her preference for the short story. It is difficult for any writer to achieve recognition on the basis of two novels, one of which is co-authored. She won a Nebula Award from her peers in the Science Fiction Writers of America for “The Miss­ ing Man” in 1971. In “The Expanding Mind” Miss MacLean takes us on a won­ drous tour of her early life, an unforgettable journey of discovery and of the impact of science fiction on the mind of a young girl. Barry N. Malzberg, born in 1939. is also unique. His mostly successful efforts to use the conventions and trappings of science fiction to discuss what it means to live in the second half of the twentieth century, his views on the nature of popular culture and the limitations and opportunities of the science fiction genre, and his public battle (unsuccessful, in his view) to achieve recognition as a writer of stature have brought him controversy, some despair, and more success than he realizes. Fantastically prolific from 1967 to 1976, he produced some seventy novels of all types, hundreds of short stories, and an esti-

x

Preface

mated 5,000,000 words of published work. His Beyond Apollo won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the finest science fiction novel published in 1972. "... And a Chaser” combines previously published writings and original material in a frequently bitter discus­ sion of his career. Mack Reynolds, born in 1917, has been an important figure in American science fiction for thirty years. During the 1960s he was one of the most popular authors in the science fiction magazines, where many of his more than thirty-five novels were serialized. But he is important not because of his popularity, but because for most of those thirty years he stood almost alone among American science fiction writers in his use of science fictional modalities to explore political philosophy, including socialism and Marxism. He was also one of the very few American writers to use Third World settings for his science fiction, most notably in his Homer Crawford books— Blaekman's Burden; Border, Breed nor Birth (both 1972); and The Best Ye Breed (1978). In "Science Fiction and Socioeconomics” he discusses his work, his social and political philosophy, and growing up as the son of radical parents.

Margaret St. Clair, born in 1911, added her name to the then-small roster of women science fiction writers in 1946. She has operated in two personas over the years, as Margaret St. Clair and as Idris Seabright, the latter for her excellent stories in The Maga­ zine of Fantasy & Seienee Fietion. Like several other writers in this book, she deserves more attention from academic and other critics, for much of her work, like the amazing story "Short In the Chest,” is both excellent and different. In "Wight in Space: An Autobiographical Sketch,” she re­ lates her career in science fiction and her mixed feelings about sci­ ence fiction and its place in American society. At first glance, Norman Spinrad, born in 1940, would ap­ pear to be too young to be concerned about autobiography, but he has jammed a tremendous amount of activity into his forty years. The author of (among others) two of the most controversial science fiction novels of the last ten years, Bug Jaek Barron 1969) and The Iron Dream (1972), he won a Jupiter Award for his novella Biding the Toreh, and. has been extremely active on behalf of authors’ rights. In addition, he has edited two anthologies—Modern Seienee Fietion, one of the very best books designed for classroom use, and

Preface

xi

The New Tomorrows (1971), in whose introduction one can find an excellent, reasoned discussion of the New Wave of the late 1960s. He has always been concerned with the commercial forces that de­ termine as much about the kinds of science fiction that ultimately get published, and in "A Prince from Another Land,” he discusses (among other things) his experiences in the marketplace. A. E. van Vogt, born in 1912, was one of the people who made the Golden Age of magazine science fiction golden. From the publication of his first story, “Black Destroyer,” in the July, 1939, issue of Astounding Science Fiction until his departure from writing in 1950 to follow the path of dianetics, he produced a remarkable corpus of work, including such landmark novels as Sinn, The Weapon Shops oj'lsher, and The World of Null-A. Few have equal­ led his ability at eliciting that sense of wonder that is central to much of science fiction and even fewer could equal the denseness of his plots. “Van Vogtian Space Opera” has become a term in the lexicon of science fiction, a term that is usually a compliment. In “My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story” he gives us an extended glimpse into the ideas that have fascinated him, ob­ sessed him, and for many years prevented him from writing science fiction. Joy. Sadness. Despair. Achievement. Nine fantastic lives.

Martin H. Greenberg Green Bay, Wisconsin April 3, 1980

Fantastic Lives

1

Alciiiuir: I Have Ha Alwitli, and I AVisi Scream By Harlan Ellison The story behind the writing of “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” and its subsequent success is, for me, a classic case of self-fulfilling prophecy. I’ve never set down in totality my feelings about this story, though it has become one of the three or four pieces most closely associated with the “reputation” I've managed to accrue, as my most “famous” story. (You’ll have to excuse all those quotation marks; 1 take such words as are enclosed by “ and ” with more than a grain of salt. The “ marks are intended to indicate that “others” use those words in a context of |if not Authority] at least “common knowledge.”) I have probably made more money per word from the 6500 assorted ones that comprise this story than anything else I’ve ever written, with the possible exception of “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” which was also, not so coincidentally, written for Fred Pohl. (I say not coincidentally, because this story was written as a direct result of Fred’s having bought and published the Harlequin/Ticktockman piece in 1965. More of that later.) “I Have No Mouth” has been translated into Polish, Ger­ man, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto, French, Norwegian, Dutch, Hebrew and Portuguese. . .and a few more I can’t recall offhand. It has been adapted as a theatrical production half a dozen times, once by Robert Silverberg for a tripartite off-Broadway setting. A film producer named Milton Subotsky once tried to rip it off as the title of a horror flick he was contemplating and a court of law stopped him 1

2

Harlan Ellison

by handing down a judgment that said while it's impossible to copyright a title, if one can prove ongoing substantial claim to finan­ cial stake in such a title, it can be protected; so Mr. Subotsky wound up calling his film something else. I think it was “Bucket of Blood,” but I could be wrong. It has been reprinted in magazines as diverse as Knave and Datamation. When it appeared in the latter, the leading trade journal of the automatic information handling equipment industry, it brought down a firestorm of outraged letters from programmers and systems analysts who felt that my equating God with the Malevolent Machine was heretical beyond support. They weren’t isolated in their feelings that there’s something subversive in the story: a high school teacher in a small Wyoming town lost her job because she included it in the reading program for her classes; the story was condemned by the then-extant National Office for Decent Literature funded by the Catholic church; the American Nazi Party (or what­ ever those clowns call themselves) sent me a shredded copy of the paperback edition with a note that assured me I was a godless kike heathen who would be high on their hit list for spreading such god­ less kike heathen propaganda. Nonetheless, the story has been reprinted a couple of hundred times, has appeared in numerous college-level textanthologies of “great literature” (those quotes again), and was selected as one of four classic American short stories celebrated in a series of special art posters published by the Advertising Typog­ raphers Association of America. It has been the subject of a number of learned treatises, presented by academicians at prestigious liter­ ary seminars. In the Spring 1976 edition of The Journal of General Education a gentleman named Brady dissected it in a monograph titled “The Computer as a Symbol of God: Ellison's Macabre Exodus.” I didn’t understand much of it, I’m afraid. Ah, but in Diogenes (no. 85, 1974) a gentleman named Ower peeled away the subcutaneous layers of deep philosophical perception in the story in a long essay titled “Manacle-Forged Minds: Two Images of the Computer in Science-Fiction.” Ah! Now that was a bit of work. I didn’t understand that one even worse than I didn’t understand the other one. It, or at least its title, reaps parody the way a Twinkiegourmand reaps zits. "I Have No Talent, and I Must Write,” “I Have No Bird, and I Must Die,” and a real gem titled “I Have No Nose, and I Must Sneeze” by a Mr. Orr in 1969 are but a paucive

Memoir

3

sampling of the aberrated clone-children that have pursued those original 6500 words down the ivy festooned halls of literary excel­ lence. The story has been optioned for theatrical feature or televi­ sion film production on seven separate occasions. No one, thus far, however, seems to have figured out a way to shoot it. If I find a likely john, maybe I’ll do it myself. References to the story appear in crossword puzzles in loca­ tions as likely as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, as unlikely as TV Guide. The London Times once referred to it as "a scathing repudiation of multinational corporations that rule our lives like deranged gods.” Go figure that one. And I once attended a Modern Language Association con­ clave at which a brilliant Jesuit teacher presented a weighty disquisi­ tion on this little fable during which exposition he made reference to catharsis, marivaudage, metaphysical conceits, intentional fallacy, incremental repetition, chanson de geste, gongorism, the New Humanism, Jungian archetypes, crucifixion and resurrection sym­ bolism and that all-time fave of us all, the basic ApollonianDionysian conflict. When the savant had completed his presentation, I was asked to comment. Had Mary Shelley or Henry James been present I suppose they, too, would have been asked to respond to analyses of their work. Unfortunately, they had prior commitments. I got up, knowing full well that I was about to make some trouble. I pause in the retelling of this anecdote to limn the motives of the Author. Serious critical attention from Academia has its benefits and its drawbacks. Others have commented at greater length and deeper perceptivity about this situation. And while I find the attention most salutary on an ego-boosting level, I find it as troublesome and mis­ chievous in its negative aspects as, say, Lester del Rey’s outmoded, hincty belief that erudition, attention to style and a college education cripple a writer from ever producing anything containing “the sense of wonder.” As wrongheaded and tunnel-visioned as is Lester’s belief—expressed at the top of his voice for the past forty years and a position adopted by many another ex-pulp writer—it is no less berserk than the worshipful nitpicking of junior professors deter­ mined to publish-or-perish through manipulation of the writings of contemporary fantasists. The ground has been rather well picked-

4

Harlan Ellison

over in the terrain of Fitzgerald, Woolf, Ford Madox Ford and Faulkner. But a name can still be made if one can imbue with suffi­ cient import the writings of Disch, Malzberg, Le Guin and Heinlein. The curse that accompanies such attention, however, is one that strikes the subject rather than the herald. The critic frequently doubles as Typhoid Mary, and the sickness s/he passes on to the writer is the crippling, sometimes killing, malady known as “taking oneself seriously." I will not here subscribe to the disingenuous conceit that what I write is for “beer money.” I take my work too seriously (though I find it difficult to take myself too seriously); I work too hard at it. No, what I do I do with the clean hands and composure of which Balzac spoke. But it seems to me the sensibility that informs my work is fired, in large part, by a kind of innocence: a determination to ignore any voices echoing down the corridors of Posterity. By this attitude, 1 feel sure, I can escape the fate of those writers who have come to believe themselves so significant that they become co­ opted, become part of the literary apparat, lose their willingness to get in trouble, to anger their readers, to shock even themselves, to go into dangerous territory. Robert Coover has said, “. . . it’s the role of the author, the fiction maker, the mythologizer, to be the creative spark in this process of renewal: he’s the one who tears apart the old story, speaks the unspeakable, makes the ground shake, then shuffles the bits back together into a new story.” Or, more briefly, in the words of Arthur Miller: “Society and man are mutually dependant enemies and the writer’s job [is] to go on forever defining and defending the paradox—lest, God forbid, it be resolved.” The loss of innocence prevents the writer, once dangerous, from pursuing those endeavors of which Coover and Miller speak. And cathexian freighting laid upon a writer's work, if s/he pays attention to the comments, inevitably has a deleterious effect on the innocence of a writer, stunts his/her ability to kick ass. And so, not merely out of self-defense but from a well-honed sense of survival, I resist the attempts of literary philosophers to imbue my motives with scholarly nobility. Which is why I rose to respond to that decent, kind and flattering Jesuit scholar with chaos in my heart. I said: “I’ve listened to all this rodomontade, all this investi­ ture of a straightforward moral fable with an unwarranted load of

Memoir

5

silly symbolism and portentous obscurantism and frankly, Father, I think you’re stuffed right full of wild blueberry muffins.” Those who know me, know that I tend in moments of great emotional stress, to speak in a manner not unlike that of the late W.C. Fields. The words poltroon, jongleur and mountebank were held at the ready. The good Father huffed and puffed. Affronted. So I went chapter&verse refuting all his assumptions and insinutations (all of which had tended to make me appear a “serious writer”). Virtually everything he had attributed as subtext to the story, all the convoluted and arcane interpretations, were identified as constructs of his vast erudition (and prolix woolgathering) and nowhichway intended by the Humble Author. A bit of a brouhaha ensued. Umbrage taken. Dudgeon ele­ vated to new heights. Slurs bandied. And finally, falling back to the usually unassailable position taken as final barricade by academic glossolaliastes, the good Father put me in my place with this rebuke: “The unconscious is deep and mysterious. Not even the writer can understand the meanings hidden in what he has written.” A less survival-prone, possibly kinder person might have swallowed that one and backed off; I am neither, and did not. “Father, if you’re so bloody hip to all the subtle nuances of this story, if you’re on to undercurrents not even / know are there. . .how come you didn’t notice the woman in the story is black?” The good Father huffed and puffed. Buffaloed. “Black? Black? Where's that?” “Right there. Right in the words. ‘Her ebony features stark against the snow.' Nothing hidden, nothing symbolic, just plain black against the snow. In two places.” He paused a moment. “Well, yes, of course, I saw that! But / thought you meant. . .” I spread my hands with finality. I rested my case. I have not been invited back to a MLA conference. In large part because of “I Have No Mouth . . . ,” my work has been termed “violent.” Bloody. Hateful. Negative. When I tell a lecture audience that “I Have No Mouth . . .” is a positive, humanistic, upbeat story, invariably I get looks of confusion and disbelief. For hordes of readers through the years this story has been an exercise in futility and morbid debasement of the human spirit.

6

Harlan Ellison

The impact of the setting and the somewhat romanticised horror of the ending tend to obscure the essential message of the story, which 1 intended as positive and uplifting. That most readers fail to per­ ceive this aspect of the work has me torn between self-flagellation at my ineptitude in explicating my message. . .and loathing of my au­ dience for reading too fast and too sloppily. (The latter, a condition of all too many of the declining species called “readers,” is symptomatic of the lowered assimilative capabilities attendant on a diet of those Love’s Tender Fury things, years of Taylor Caldwell, the expanded short stories called novels by such as Ken Follett and Sidney Sheldon and the slovenly slap-dash adventure paperbacks of semiliterate sf/horrow writers. It occurs, to be evenhanded, that I am elevating myself in my own eyes by blaming the readers; but even when I pillory myself for persistent imprecision of this sort on the part of my audience by an assumed guilt on the part of the less-than-adept Author, I find I’m castigating myself for trying to be subtle. And that does not seem to me to be a felony. One can only write so many beheadings and car crashes before one longs to make a point by indirect means. It is a conundrum.) In an attempt to explain all the foregoing—preceding the par­ enthetical remarks—please consider two elements of "I Have No Mouth. . .” that, bewilderingly to me, escape most readers: First, consider the character of Ellen. From time to time I’ve been taken to task with the accusation that my stories reflect a hatred of women. I wish my hands were absolutely clean in the matter of sexism manifesting itself in my work but, sadly, I was born in 1934, I was raised in America during the Forties, and though 1 do not hate women, a number of my earlier writings do contain chauvinistic views commonly held by American males born and raised in those times, in that place. I cannot flense those elements from my early stories. Nor would I. They repre­ sented the way I thought at those times. I don't think they reflect animus toward women, they reflect my propensity for writing about seriously flawed characters—both male and female. It was Mencken who said, "When people are at their worst, they are the most interesting.” I have always been drawn to charac­ ters that were interesting. Sometimes that caused me to write about unpleasant females, even as it did unpleasant males. 1 still prefer and find compelling the kind of characters who stumble through Scott Fitzgerald's “dark night of the soul,” and I guess 1 always will. And so I have come to live with the understanding that casual readers—

Memoir

7

those being fashionably liberal or those whose assumption of ex­ treme positions precludes their understanding of how dangerously they hobble the creative intellect by insistence on a slavish evenhandedness for all minorities even though one is writing about an individual, not a demographic group*—including those readers who are nouveau-liberated, with consciousnesses raised fifteen minutes earlier, who may choose to interpret my stories in the dim light of their own personal tunnel vision. But in going back over the stories I’ve written since, say, 1967,1 find that the Author learned better. It merely took someone to point out the muddy thinking. (For historians, the name of the teacher was Mary Reinholz.) The women in my stories have tended to be better-drawn, more various and, I like to think, as reflective of real­ ity as the men. There is one serious drawback to my selfcongratulation in this area, however. And it is this: whether I could ever convince a dispassionate jury that 1 feel to my core I am not a misogynist, there is no way I can escape the label of misanthrope. There is in me, damn it, a love-hate relationship with the human race. I read a phrase that pinned it neatly for me; it’s from Vance Bourjaily's new novel, A Game Men Play, and in speaking of his protagonist he said ". . .he was. . .full of rage and love, and of a malarial loathing for mankind which came and went chronically. . .” Like Bourjaily’s "Chink” Peters, 1 must confess to that dichotomous feeling about humanity. Capable of warmth, courage, friendship, decency and creativity, the species too often opts for amorality, cowardice, aversion, self-indulgence and vile mediocrity. How can one who writes about the human condition not fall prey to such misanthropy? Nonetheless, in going back through my work for nearly the last decade and a half, 1 find that the women come off equally as well as the men. An example, which I’ve asked you to consider, is the lone woman in "I Have No Mouth. . .”—Ellen. If one goes at a story in the Evelyn Wood SpeedReading manner, one can easily get the impression that Ellen is a selfish, flirtatious, extremely cruel bitch. Why not, doesn’t the narrator say she is? Yes, he does. And so I’ve had to explain what I’m about to explain here—and it’s all in the text of the story. I’m not interpreting or even reinterpreting to assuage my conscience—to women who *A quote from David Denby seems appropriate here. "An artist trying to create a powerful atmosphere can t be expected to embrace the banal method of TV documentaries, which always illustrate both sides of a situation and leave you nowhere."

8

Harlan Ellison

take Ellen as a classic representation of my "hatred of females." But, as 1 said earlier, precisely the opposite is the case. Consider: the story is told in the first person by Ted, one of the group of people the computer AM has brought into the center of the Earth to torment. But as Eve clearly stated in the story, also from the mouth of Ted, AM has altered each of them in one way or another. The machine has bent them, altered them, corrupted their minds or bodies. Ted, by his own words, has been turned into a paranoid. He was a humanitarian, a lover of people, and AM has twisted his mind so he views everything and everyone negatively. It is Ted, not the Author, who reviles Ellen and who casts doubt on her actions and motivations. But if you look at what she actually does, it becomes obvious that the only person in the story with any kindness toward the others is Ellen. She weeps for them, tries to comfort and solace them, brings to them the only warmth and alleviation of pain in the world of anguish to which they’ve been consigned. (Echoing my remarks to the Jesuit Father in the earlier anecdote, let me point out that few readers realize Ellen is a black woman, though it is precisely stated "her face black against the snow." In moments of introspection I see the plus&minus of my having made Ellen black. It was knee-jerk Liberalism to do it—remember I wrote the story in 1965 during a period of acute awakening of my, and the nation’s, social conscience—but at least I was enough of a writer not to make a big deal of it. In fact, though 1 have imbued this member of a much-sinned-against race with a nobility her Caucasian companions in the story do not possess, I understated it so much. . .it has, in the main, gone unnoticed.) Further, it is Ellen who joins Ted in providing the releasethrough-death that is their only possible escape from AM’s torture. And when it becomes the moment for her to die, she again demon­ strates not only her heroic nature, but an awareness that it is the kindest act a person can commit for another to free the other from guilt at causing a death. As I wrote it: Ellen looked at me, her ebony features stark against the snow that surrounded us. There was fear and pleading in her man­ ner, the way she held herself ready. I knew we had only a heartbeat before AM would stop us.

It struck her and she folded toward me, bleeding from the mouth. I could not read meaning into her expression; the pain had been too great, had contorted her face; but it might have been thank you. It's possible. Please.

Memoir 9 Her courage is only slightly less than Ted’s at this point. She knows AM will wreak vengeance more horrible than all that has gone before on anyone left alive of those who have stolen its play­ things away from it; even so. she frees Nimdok, at risk of her own soul. Thus, it can be seen that all the negative things said about Ellen—attributed so often to the Author’s "hatred of women”—are verbal manifestations of Ted's AM-induced paranoia. Finally, when it comes down to the last of them, Ted demon­ strates his uncommon courage and transcendentally human sense of self-sacrifice, overcoming the core derangement in him, by perform­ ing a final act of love and self-denial. He kills Ellen. And she forgives him with a look. Even at the final instant, filled with pain, she is such a superior person that she absolves him of the responsibility for the act of murder. Which brings me to the second element most readers mis­ construe; the aspect of this work that I intended as the important sub-text message; the moral, if you will. It is an upbeat ending. Infinitely hopeful and positive. How can 1 make such a contention when the story ends with mass murder and unspeakable horror? I can, and do, because ”1 Have No Mouth. . .” says that even when all hope is lost, when nothing but torment and physical pain will be the reward, there is an unquenchable spark of decency, self-sacrifice and Olympian cour­ age in the basic material of even the most debased human being that will send each of us to heights of nobility at the final extreme. Of all the qualities imputed to humanity as admittedly ethnocentric raison d’etre for our contention that we possess, snmmatus, the right to transcend in the Universe. . .this, in my estimation, is the one valid argument. Not that we possess a sense of humor, or the ability to dream, or the opposable thumb, or the little gray cells that permit us to make laws to govern ourselves. It is the spark of potential trans­ cendency, that which allows us to behave in a manner usually attrib­ uted to the most benevolent of gods. . .that remarkable aspect of the human character validates our contention that we deserve a high place in the cosmic pantheon. Even fully aware that he is condemning himself to an eternity of torture at AM’s invention, nonetheless Ted removes the one thing that can provide him with the tiniest measure of companionship and love and amelioration of his fate. . .the only other human being alive on the planet. He frees Ellen. . .and condemns himself not only to eternal torment, but to loneliness, never-ending loneliness. Who is

10

Harlan Ellison

to say which is most terrible: loneliness on a scale not even the most wretched of us will ever know, or the ghastly revenge AM will visit on him for having denied the mad computer its human toys? It is, in my intention, an act of transcendent heroism and a demonstration of the most glorious quality possessed by humanity. Yes, the fate that AM has in store for Ted is monstrous, and depres­ sing, and downbeat. But the sub-text clearly shows that Ted has outwitted the computer; he has defeated the amoral and inhuman aspects of the human race that were programmed into the machine and which brought the world to its end. As a paradigm for all of humanity, Ted has transcended the evil in our nature that cast AM in an insane image to begin with. The upbeat message contained in the ending of the story says frankly: we are frequently flawed and meretricious. . .but we are perfect in our courage, and transcendent in our nobility: both aspects exist in each of us. and we have free will to choose which we want to dominate our actions, and thus our destinies. At the base of all this is the persistent theme, evident in all my work, that we can be godlike if only we struggle toward such a goal. AM represents not God—as scholarly interpretation of this story has so often contended—but the dichotomous nature of the human race, created in the image of God; and that includes the demon in us. Ted, and his act of selfless heroism at the final burning moment of deci­ sion represent God as well; or at least it is an idealized representa­ tion of that which is most potentially godlike in us. (As a footnote, while I am hardly the theological authority 1 would have to be to have knowingly inserted all the mystical minutiae for which I’m credited by academicians, I find salutary parallels to my philosophy in the Nag Hammadi, or gnostic texts, the fifty-two gospels unearthed in 1945 and recently released to the public. These fourth-century Coptic copies of first-century Greek originals maintained that God was but an image—the Platonic demiurge—of the True God; that gnostics believed there were two traditions, one open and one secret. This is a radical departure from the basic monotheistic doctrine of God, the Father Almighty. And while they were denounced by orthodox Christians in the middle of the second century, they seem somehow much more relevant to the complex world of today than the concretized monotheism dealt with by almost all theologians ¡save Paul Tillich| in this century.) So when—as one critic observed—it seems that Ted and characters like him in my other stories “forego the right or honor-

Memoir 11 able action in order to survive" and that “all his humanity has been stripped from him,” I submit that these pickers of nits have spent too much time peeling the bark off the trees to perceive the message of nature contained in the totality of the forest. They have seen only violence, and I suggest that's their problem, and not one inherent in the story. They're the sort who also think Sergio Leone westerns are about violence. Wrong. When questions are hurled up at me from the college audi­ ences I frequently burden with my presence, one of the most fre­ quently asked is, “How did you get the idea for ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream'?” And when I respond, with absolute candor, that I had no idea what the story was about when 1 began writing it, I'm always treated to expressions ranging from disbelief to disbelief. Disbelief that such a “masterpiece” could emerge without the Author knowing what the hell he was doing. Disbelief that I’m telling the truth. But that is exactly and precisely the truth. There were two starting points. The first came from my friend Bill Rotsler, world-famous cartoonist, film maker, serious artist, world traveler, novelist, lover of women, bon vivant and ex­ sculptor. Those who have been blessed with any space of time spent in William’s company can verify that he is not only some of the very best hailfellow wellmet associate with whom one can fritter away golden time, but that he cannot go very long without doodling out some marvelous cartoons. Not just the pudding-shaped little men and women engaged in sexual and pseudo-sexual shenanigans for which he is justly famous within a tiny circle of deranged devotees. . .but quicksketch of a philosophical and frequently heart-tugging seriousness. One of those little doodles, of a doll-like human being sitting and staring, with one of its facial features missing, slug-lined "I have no mouth and I must scream,” came into my possession some time during 1965. I saved it, and asked Bill if he minded if I used it as the title of a story that I might one day write. He said okay. I put it aside. Then after a while I had it mounted on a small square of black art-board and pinned it up near my typewriter. This was when I was living in the treehouse on Bushrod Lane in Los Angeles. A little later in the year 1 was visited by a then-San Diego-

12

Harlan Ellison

Memoir 13 based artist named Dennis Smith. I had written several stories around Dennis’s drawings—“Bright Eyes” and "Delusion for a Dragon-Slayer” are two that come immediately to mind. Periodi­ cally, Dennis would come up from San Diego to visit, and he’d bring along his folio. 1 would riffle through it fairly rapidly and select a few pieces I thought might spur the creation of a story. (I’ve enjoyed writing that way, around an already existent illustration, since my early pulp days when I had to write stories to fit atrocious covers on sf magazines.) And I guess on Dennis’s part it was partially flattery that a writer would use his work as impetus for new stories—Dennis was still an aspiring amateur in those days—and partially a hope that if I managed to sell the story, that I’d bludgeon the magazine into buying his art to accompany it. (I’d done it every time before, so he had every logical reason to assume it would always be the case. He was right; it was.) From the folio that day in the summer of 1965, 1 pulled the Finlayesque pen-and-ink drawing I include here. That was the sec­ ond starting point for “I Have No Mouth. . .” (Apparently, from a note written in the first paperback publication of the story, there was a second Smith drawing, similar to this, that I held onto. But it’s long since gone.) When 1 saw the drawing I made the instant connection be­ tween Rotsler’s quote and the mouthless creature. But that was all there was of the story. No plot, no theme, no idea of who or what or why. But that’s the way I like to write stories. If I must perforce know the ending of a story I'm creating, quite often I get bored with the writing. . .because I know how it’s going to come out. And since I write to please and surprise myself, the thrill of writing a story that doesn’t telegraph its punch—even to me—is one of the finer plea­ sures involved in the grueling act of fictioneering. Not to mention that if I'm taken by surprise, the chances are good so will the reader. (Parenthetically, I think this is as true a way of writing a story as heavily plotting one from the git-go. If one is creating characters that have verisimilitude, they will take the plot where they want it to go; and since human nature is as unpredictable as a topping fire, that direction will likely be a surprising, fresh way to go.) So I sat down, rolled the paper into the Olympia standard office machine I use, and began with the title “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.’’

14

Harlan Ellison

The first line wrote itself: “Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette. . .” I had no idea who Gorrister was, nor why his body was hang­ ing head-down, attached to that improbable pink palette by the sole of the right foot. But the first six pages went quickly. I stopped writing at the bottom of page six of the manuscript with the sentence “The pain shivered through my flesh.” (Years later, going over the story, as 1 have many times to correct galleys for reprints of the work, I extended the sentence: “. . .shivered through my flesh like tinfoil on a tooth.”) Looking back at my original manuscript, I see that the idea of creating time-breaks in the story by use of computer tape was an integral element from the very outset. On my yellow second-sheet copy of the original (that was in the days before I could afford a Xerox machine, when I used carbon and scuzzy $i.oo-a-ream sec­ ond sheets for the files) 1 see that on page 2, after I had typed.

It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer. He was speaking for all of us. I typed an entire line of symbols stretching from margin to margin in sequence from the keyboard: Q WERT Y U1OPAS DFGH J KLZXC V BN MQ W ERT Y U 1 OP Sometime later, presumably right after I finished the story, I went back and, using cutouts from some kind of computer magazine 1 must have had lying around the treehouse, I Scotch Taped colored overlays on those typed lines. (When the story was finally submitted to If: Worlds of Sci­ ence Fiction for publication, the use of computer tape for the breaks was ignored. So were some of the breaks themselves, which altered the reading cadence, as far as I was concerned.) The use of computer tape as an element in the story was more than a gimmick. During the middle sixties I was going through an extended period of annoyance at the physical limitations of the printed page. While I cannot deny that a writer should be able to create all the mood and superimposed pre-continuum he needs for a story simply by his/her skill with the English language, I think any writer who attempts to stretch the parameters of the fictive equation

Memoir 15 inevitably comes to a place where s/he rails at the conformity of simple symbols in neat parallel lines. I would feel presumptuous and foolish saying such a thing, were it not for those who have gone before me, who obviously felt the same: Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, e. e. cummings, Alfred Bester, Gertrude Stein, Kenneth Patchen, Guillaume Apollinaire—to name the most prominent lurking in memory. My intent was to indicate that the story takes place actually and physically in the mind of the computer: that the characters are surrounded and dominated by the figment that AM has created as their world. One way to do this was to insinuate AM's running discourse with itself throughout the typographical makeup of the work. Years later I was lucky enough to have several computer programmers offer to set the breaks with specific dialogue. They asked me what I would like AM to be saying in those breaks. I always knew what it was, but I’d never been able to get a publisher to lay out the money to have the tapes cut exactly. I took the programmer/readers up on their offer. The computer tape time-breaks in the story now read: “I think, therefore I AM" and "Cogito ergo sum." Through the years, and through the many reprints of the story, I have had the most trouble with the other type-design ele­ ment, the "pillar of stainless steel bearing bright neon lettering." It was constructed to appear alj on one page, as a physical representa­ tion of the pillar in the story, yet the ineptitude of copyeditors and typesetters prevented it from appearing that way until almost eight years after the story’s first publication. (Yes, it was set in a column in//', but I had specified that the lines should fill, flush left and right, without a partial last line, what is called a "widow” in the indus­ try. . .and if you check back to the March 1967 issue of //'you'll see there’s a pronounced "widow.”) These days I send along a separate design sheet with the preferred text for all reprints. (Another aside. A friend named Burt Libe, who works with electronic gadgetry, has built for me a wonderful 16-byte binary counter with the words from AM’s stainless steel pillar on the face. I have it plugged in near my desk. When it’s flickering away, and I’m working, and strangers wander into the office and see that crazed screed about hating Humanity, they naturally draw the conclusion

16

Harlan Ellison

that I’m writing something ultimately detrimental to the well-being of the species. Oh well. Go explain your toys.)

I put the story aside after six pages. Other matters were press­ ing me hard at the time. Now the sequence of events returns to Frederik Pohl's purview. In 1965 I was still a relatively “uncelebrated” writer. And my attendance at the Milford (Pennsylvania) SF Writers Conference sponsored by Damon Knight, James Blish and Judith Merril was not a matter of very great concern for anyone but me. I have written elsewhere about my feelings of being a ratty poor relation, of having been "put in my place” years before by the legendary writers, and of having stayed away from Milford get-togethers for a long time while nurturing thoughts of revenge. I’ve written about that return visit elsewhere and, of course, Damon has written elsewhere that I was making the whole thing up, that they’d taken me to their bosom immediately. Anyone who has ever met me knows the unlikely pos­ sibility of taking me to bosom at once. I rest my case as far as Damon’s refutations go. Anyhow. At the 1965 Milford do, I wanted to write a story for submission to the Giants in attendance at the workshop sessions that would blow them away. I wrote and put into the session a story called “ Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” Reception was mixed. I didn’t really score a clean, clear victory of vengeance. Some of them liked it a lot, others thought it sucked. But Fred Pohl came up on the weekend, from New York. The final day of every Milford soiree was a big party; and many East Coast editors sashayed up for the blowout. When Fred appeared, I gave him the story to read. He bought it for Galaxy. It appeared in the December 1965 issue. Without fanfare. (My name wasn’t even on the cover. The names of C.C. MacApp, Norman Kagan, Algis Budrys, Willy Ley and Robert Silverberg were there, but not the kid.) I’d had a couple of big fights with Fred about the title. He wanted to shorten it to “Repent, Harlequin!” I begged and pleaded and threatened, and he finally let it stand. It won the very first Nebula award of the Science Fiction Writers of America in the short story category. It also won the Hugo presented by the 24th World Science Fiction Convention in Cleve­ land, September 1966. They were my first two awards in the field.

Memoir

17

Soon thereafter, Fred Pohl came through Los Angeles. He came to visit at the treehouse. I showed him the first six pages of "I Have No Mouth. . .” He liked the pages and said he’d insure the writing of the story with an advance payment. I needed the money. But it wasn’t until a month or so later when Fred called from New York to say that, seeing as how //'had won the Hugo as the best sf magazine of the year, he had decided to put out a SPECIAL HUGO WINNERS ISSUE of// in March of 1967, that I was goosed into going back to the story. (It occurs to me I’ve hopelessly bollixed up my dates on this. Memory stirs like an old snake on a warm rock. How it must have happened was that Fred came to visit before the Cleveland WorldCon and I took the uncompleted manuscript—which had been in work for a year and a half—back East with me. I realize that had to've been the progression because I worked on the story in hotel rooms at the Sheraton Cleveland during the convention and the Roger Smith Hotel in New York after Labor Day, and finished it at the Tom Quick Inn in Milford during the conference held after Labor Day. So Fred must have approached me for the Hugo Winners Issue at Cleveland, after the Hugos were awarded. There now, I think that’s correct.) But the story was my second attempt at validating my exis­ tence to the cadre of Milford superstars who had—either actually or in my fantasies—treated me so offhandedly. I returned to the 1966 Milford Conference with credentials. I was the first person ever to win a Hugo and a Nebula for the same story in the same year; and had won them for a story that had received a lukewarm reception the year before. So I submitted T Have No Mouth. . .” to the workshop sessions with a certain arrogance. I knew I had a hot item, and I was ready to eat up the slavish praise of those who, till that moment, had been my betters. This was my final bid to become one of their equals. I should have known better. John Brunner and Virginia Kidd heaped praise on it; Jim Blish commended me, bless him; and the younger writers thought it was fine. But there were many of the old hands who put it down, found fault with it, excoriated me for excess, and blissfully I’ve forgotten who among them was the most vocifer­ ous. But it didn’t really matter. The story appeared in that March 1967 Hugo winners issue of If, alongside Asimov, Zelazny, Niven, Budrys and Sprague de Camp.

18

Harlan Ellison

And it won me my second Hugo. The prophecy, a story written for a Hugo winners issue, itself won the award, fulfilling itself. As though it had all been planned, synchronism occurred, and the unbroken line of Milford conferences, Fred Pohl, “ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’,” the Hugo and Nebula, Galaxy and if. . .all of it fell into place and ‘T Have No Mouth. . .” pub­ lished in magazine form in March, published as the title story of my collection in April, copped the silver rocket in September at the 26th WorldCon. And though I railed at Fred for having published it sans the computer “talk-fields,” though 1 screamed bloody murder at the Bowdlerizing of what Fred termed “the difficult sections" of the story (which he contended might offend the mothers of the young readers of //), nonetheless 1 am forced to give the Devil his due: Fred Pohl, for all the aggravation he’s caused me through the years—we won’t mention all the aggravation I've caused him through the years—was one of the few editors who gave me my head and let me write what I wanted to write in those days before the phrase “New Wave” started emerging from people’s mouths. True, he still tells people 1 wanted him to publish “I Have No Mouth. . .” in four-colors, an error of memory he refuses to correct based on the manuscript coming to him with those colored cutouts pasted to the pages; but for all his cantankerous, albeit friendly, canards he re­ mains one of the truest judges of writing ability the field of imagina­ tive literature has ever produced. I cannot say that without his support “1 Have No Mouth. . .” would not have been written; but it’s certain that had Fred not championed those 6500 words I would not today be sitting here writing 30 to this memoir.

Bibliography NOVELS

The Sound of a Scythe (tg6o) Doomsman ( 1967) Phoenix Without Ashes (tg75. with Edward Bryant) Blood's a Rover (/giïo) STORY COLLECTIONS

A Touch of Infinity (ig6o) Ellison Wonderland (tgÔ2) Paingod and Other Delusions (igôj)

Memoir 19 I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream (1967) From the Land oj Fear (1967) The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World 1/969) Over the Edge (1970) Partners in Wonder (/970) Alone against Tomorrow (1971) Approaching Oblivion (1974) Deathbird Stories (1975) Strange Wine ht. In this the protagonist, Danny Alliger, was aware of the conflict between his conditioning in racial terms and his enlightenment by reason. I suppose that most readers are aware of the too-obvious resemblance between the names of the hero and Dante Alighieri. Which also explains why the name of the black couple in the novel was Virgil. What the reader may not know is that Dante’s family name was German in origin and was Alliger.

40

Philip José Farmer

At this time I was drifting, though I had vague plans to go back to college when my father’s debts were paid. I'd also deter­ mined that 1 didn’t want to be a newspaper reporter. 1 lacked the aggressiveness required, and it seemed to me that a reporter’s writ­ ings were too ephemeral. Vague also were my plans to be a fiction writer. But I thought that if I did become a fictionist. I’d write mainstream. The reason that I’d only written science fiction or fan­ tasy (and not much of that then) was that these seemed to come easier. I was very ignorant then; I had no knowledge of the ex­ tremely low rates paid to science fiction or fantasy writers or what a dog’s life it would be to support myself even minimally in this field. I didn’t even know there was such a phenomenon as the fan world. Now of course I’m thoroughly aware of the fans, though the rates paid in the science fiction magazines are still extremely low. In 1938 I discovered Dostoyevsky, and I was stunned. This man, I thought, is the greatest. Do I have the potential to be a Dostoyevsky? An American Dostoyevsky or Melville? Or combina­ tion thereof? A few years later I told myself that I might have the potential, but it would never be actualized unless I lived as fully as Dostoyevsky or traveled as extensively as Melville. What I ask my­ self now is whether or not I can realize the potential of Philip José Farmer. When I was at Missouri, I had several sessions with a faculty psychologist and freshman advisor. He told me after forty-five min­ utes that I had a drive for self-defeat, an unconscious desire to fail. A psychoanalyst in 1966 was to tell me the same thing, though it took the Beverly Hills doctor ten hours to see this. What both didn’t see or didn’t tell me was that I also had a drive to succeed. And that this conflict set up one more of the many tensions operating within me. I wish I could say with certainty what set up these wrangling drives. I wish I could say it with only some uncertainty. Or even with much uncertainty. But I don’t have the slightest idea of the causes. I only know that these opposing compulsions are within me and that I must be on my guard against them. During this drifting period, I quit reading all pulp magazines except Astounding. Aside from this, only modern fiction and classical mainstream or fantasy in hardbound books interested me. Nonfiction, history, biography, anthropology, and psychology were my chief interests. And, like most midwesterners of my age group. I was only vaguely aware of the rising Hitler menace. I didn’t get out of Peoria much except for some trips to the Wisconsin Dells, Hanni-

Maps and Spasms 41

bal, Missouri, the Mammoth Cave, and the New York World’s Fair. I did think seriously for a while of going to Africa when 1 got enough money to do so (Africa had always fascinated me) instead of return­ ing to college. But that would have bitterly disappointed my father. Besides, it was easier just to fantasize the trip. In late 1938 a friend introduced me to a woman whom 1 shall call Felicia. She was three years older than I and had an M.A. in psychology from a large state university in the East. She was very attractive, superbly built, pixy-faced, and husky-voiced. She intro­ duced me to Freud, Jung, Adler, and the depths of contemporary psychology. She also knew more than I did about literature, in fact, she knew more than I did about most things. However, she was interested in the stuff I'd written and read it with what I now see was great perception. She said that I showed some promise and had a vivid imagination but that I had a long way to go before 1 became a good writer. She also said that she wondered if I would become a writer. Here I was. almost twenty-one, and yet I'd produced very little. Did I have the drive and self-discipline needed to succeed? We had long talks and went for long walks in the country. After some time, she admitted that she was engaged to a man she’d met in the university and who lived in an eastern city. But since they didn’t see each other much they dated others. Despite this, my relationship with Felicia wasn’t Platonic. Within a month we were doing what was called then, quaint phrase, light petting. That progressed to heavy petting, an even quainter phrase. And then to copulation in the missionary position. After a few times of this, she told me that she was also screwing her fiancé (I’d guessed that), but that he was rather prejudiced against uncon­ ventional sexual practices. In fact, the idea of them disgusted him; he thought people who practiced them were perverts. She didn’t think so, but she was convinced that her fiancé would never get over his revulsion. Though she'd never been in to such tabu acts herself, she was curious about them. I confessed that I’d always had middle-class ideas about such things myself. She said that there were more middle-class people than I thought who secretly did such things. So I said that I’d try to overcome any inhibitions I might have. This conversation took place after we’d been discussing Nietzsche. I’m not sure how Zarathustra could have had such a liberating influence, but I’m sure that the woman-hating German philosopher who created Zarathustra would not have approved the

42

Philip José Farmer

events following. In any event, I found out that Felicia was polymorphous perverse (a marvellous phrase!) and that 1 shed my supposed inhibitions as easily as a snake sheds its skin. Felicia claimed that she’d had no experience in such acts. She’d only read about them. If this were true she was a hell of a good student. I didn’t care, though I did wonder sometimes if she was just using me. Not that 1 was bothered about this. She seemed to be as fond of me as 1 was of her. Neither was in love with the other, but 1 did have a bad time when she told me, ten months later, that we couldn't see each other any more. She would be getting married very soon; her fiancé would be in Peoria for the marriage within a week; her parents wouldn't like it if she kept dating me. I’ve often wondered if she ever converted her husband to her ways or if she was lying to me about him or if she now and then took a lover. Whatever the situation, she was a wonderful woman, and I've always been grateful to her. (She died a few years ago of cancer.) 1 suppose many of my youthful readers will wonder why I even bring up this story. What they don’t realize, can’t ‘'feel.” is that 1938 was a far different world from 1978. It was only five years before I met Felicia that Prohibition had been repealed and James Joyce's Ulysses could be legally printed in the United States. We could have been sent to jail for many years if caught, and we would have been regarded as rotten perverts. The main point of the Felicia story, though, is that, despite an intense conditioning against such sexual activity, I resisted it. My inborn temperament did not allow the conditioning to get a hold on me. In the summer of 1939 1 was able to return to school. But since I still didn't have much money, 1 decided to go to Bradley. This was a small college which had only a few years before been a polytechnic institute and still had an associated horological school, one of the best in the nation. Many I had known in high school were seniors there. I enrolled as an English literature major with a minor in philosophy. One of my teachers was a Harvard graduate; the other, a Wellesley graduate. When I became a candidate for a cre­ ative writing scholarship, these two decided that I should win it. A third member of the committee, a Dr. Bell, didn’t think I deserved it. But while the decision was pending. Bell went on a trip to Arkansas and was killed in an automobile accident. That effectively removed his objection, and I got the much-needed scholarship. However, it turned out that my being on the football and

Maps and Spasms 43

track team also had something to do with being awarded the scholarship. This so disgusted me that I quit football as soon as I had the scholarship in my hands. Besides, practice was taking too much time, and I’d lost all my enthusiasm for the sport. The coach never forgave me.

Dr. Kinsey came to Bradley to interview male students about their sexual habits, and I was one of those who got to be questioned by this great man. His pioneering work didn’t come out until years later, however. In 1940, I helped establish a Lambda Chi Alpha chapter on the campus. A local fraternity had decided to become a chapter of the national organization. Since I was the only one with any Lambda Chi Alpha experience, I did much of the groundwork. My best friend there, whom I’ll call Autolycus, became the president and I was the vice-president. The second semester we had a crisis which matched closely one I’d witnessed when 1 was a pledge at Missouri. A youth whom I’ll call Applebury wanted to pledge the frat. But when he was voted on, all but two blackballed him because he was too Jewishlooking. Autolycus and I said that we’d resign and make the reasons for it public if Applebury wasn’t pledged. After some acrimonious dispute, the others gave in. Nobody, of course, ever told Applebury about this, and he became quite popular in the house. When I was a pledge at Mizzou, two of the actives were of Syrian descent. One of them was my best friend; his brother was an asshole. Their cousin wanted to become a pledge, and this caused a secret meeting of the actives, excluding the two brothers, of course. Some actives said that Lambda Chi Alpha already had two Jewishlooking members. That was enough. A third would break the camel’s back. I had no vote in this meeting since I was only a pledge, but an active told me about it later on. The dilemma was solved, however, whenever the cousin decided to go to another school than Missouri. The brothers never had to face the problem of a Negro want­ ing to pledge. At that time American blacks weren’t admitted to Missouri. Blacks were admitted to Bradley, but there were very few because of the tuition. Most Peoria blacks went to state universities. At that time, however, there were very few who went to institutions of higher learning unless they were outstanding athletes. My friend Autolycus was a native Peorian whose uncle had been a governor of Arkansas and whose father was a policeman. We

44

Philip José Farmer

ran around a lot, stuffed the ballot box in the campus elections, and vomited cheap whiskey behind the trees on the campus. Though we double-dated a lot, he would never go out with me on Saturday or Sunday. 1 finally found out why. He was earning the money to put himself through college by running the Peoria syndicate's gambling money to the St. Louis syndicate on weekends. He’d leave at mid­ night with the illicit cargo under the back seat and hope that no cop stopped him and search the car. He’d gotten the job through his father, the cop. Despite his criminal career, Autolycus became a very re­ spectable member of the community. He was a civilian air instructor for the Army during the war, then became a pilot for American Airlines. At the same time, he studied law and eventually had two law practices going, one at Los Angeles and one at Chicago. The last I heard of him he’d retired from American and was in full-time practice as a well-known lawyer in Los Angeles. I never asked him whom he represented there. I met Bette Virginia Andre soon after she entered Bradley College in 1940. She had a musical scholarship and played the lead in a college musical stage play. We got rather serious, but in the winter semester of 1941 1 decided to transfer back to Missouri. Bradley had no courses in classical Greek, but Missouri did. If 1 was ever going to be able to read Homer in the original, I’d have to go where Greek was taught. Also, 1 was afraid of being too near to proposing mar­ riage to Bette. I wasn’t ready for that. Marriage was a tremendous responsibility, and my prospects for being able to support a wife and children were dismal. Arriving at M.U., 1 found I’d have to wait until the fall semes­ ter to take Greek. Never mind. I’d take other courses. 1 moved into the Lambda Chi Alpha house, a larger one than that I’d tenanted in 1936-37. Looking back now, 1 can see that there was a subtle differ­ ence in the students of 1941 and those I'd known when I was a freshman. The Zeitgeist was slightly different. The frat brothers seemed to be a little more grim and serious, as if the clouds of the coming war were casting dark shadows. These students were any­ thing but unaware of Hitler and the warlords of Japan. I took another creative writing course and entered a long story in a contest. If I’d won, I’d have had some money to apply toward my room and board. I lost, though my teacher thought I should have won. Perhaps, it was the theme of the story which kept it from winning in that state. It was about a Peoria Negro, a superb

Maps and Spasms 45

athlete with a high intelligence and high ambitions, who was con­ stantly frustrated and denigrated by whites. Finally, he explodes into verbal and then into physical violence. This story would be the germ of Fire and the Night, though 1 used very little of it in the novel. Though my writing teacher, a fine old gentleman from the Deep South, thought that the story should have won because of its vivid characterization and descriptive details, he also said that he had never met a black like my protagonist. He didn’t think that blacks were harboring the deep resentment and sullen rage of the hero. Of course, he didn’t know any like Elkanah Lee. No black with any regard for his life would have expressed such feelings to any southern white. I didn’t know any one like my hero, either. But all I had to do was put myself into the shoes of Elkanah and imagine how he felt. There was an election for the student governing body in the spring, and Lambda Chi Alpha was voting as a body for one of the three parties campaigning for these posts. The chief opposing party always hung up a big standard before a tavern and guarded it with big athletes armed with the heavy wooden paddles used to thwack the rear ends of pledges. The tradition was that the party to which my frat belonged would try to steal the standard or take it by force. I watched one such effort, a sudden raid which failed when the raiders were beaten back with the paddles. They were actually hitting each other with them! I thereupon determined to try to steal the standard all by myself, though 1 wasn’t sure I’d have the guts to do it. I hung around with the guards, who didn’t know me because I was a transfer and thought I was one of them. About half an hour before dusk, the guards took the standard down, rolled it up around the pole, and started to carry it toward the Sigma Chi house for safekeeping overnight. I grabbed the middle of the pole and helped them carry it. When we were a block away from the tavern and at a corner street, I suddenly gave an Indian yell and tore the standard from the hands of the men holding each end. They yelled and cursed at me, and as 1 sped down the street, I saw whirling paddles fly by me, some very close. Knowing that I'd probably be beaten or at least roughly manhandled by the angry pursuers, I really put on the steam. I was in good shape and fear pumped adrenalin into me. By the time 1 got to the Lambda Chi Alpha house, I was half a block ahead of the closest pursuer. I was also breathing very hard, and my

46

Philip José Farmer

sides hurt. I couldn’t have gone much farther, and a block ahead were other furious men who’d cut up the other block to head me off. I staggered into the house where I could expect safety in numbers. But the only ones there were the very old housemother and a big football player. 1 told him what had happened. He told me to help him lock the doors and windows. Then 1 went up to the attic and put the standard there. Meanwhile, a mob had collected in front of the house. It yelled and screamed and hollered and demanded that the standard be returned—or else. The football player made a lot of phone calls to summon help. It did arrive, but by then the mob had left. Not, however, before some went to a local warehouse and purchased dozens of eggs. When they returned, they pelted the front of the house with the eggs and a few rocks. Some windows were broken, causing the eighty-year-old housemother to go into hys­ terics. More eggs were brought up and hurled. The porch and front of the house and the windows became a gooey mess. Finally, seeing that they weren’t going to get the standard back unless they broke into house, and afraid to do that because the police might be called in, the mob dispersed. Just in time, since here came the rescuers, a big angry mob armed with paddles. There was a lull for a while during which I explained what had happened. Then a convertible crammed with the opposition raced by, and eggs flew from it. The mob, our guys, wiped the shells and yolks off and went down to the warehouse to buy hundreds of the ovarian ammunition themselves. For an hour or more there was a great egg-fight, and raiders pelted the Sigma Chi and several other frat houses. A lot of innocent bystanders got smeared, too. Indepen­ dent party students caught crossing the campus or emerging from the tavern. Even a couple of professors were bombarded. Then the chief candidate for the opposition phoned our leader and challenged him to a fist fight. They hated each other’s guts, and one had stolen the other’s girl friend the semester before. So we piled into cars and drove to the Sigma Chi house. Here there were many actives and pledges of both parties, all spoiling for a fight, though I think most of them hoped it would just be between the two big shots. These were in the center of the crowd when I got there, each cursing and accusing the other. But after a while it became evident that neither was going to throw the first punch, and people began drifting away. Finally, our leader, still hurling threats, got into a car and drove away.

Maps and Spasms 47

This was one of the big highlights of my life, and I was a hero for a day. In 1953 1 wrote a twelve-thousand-word novelet based on this incident. But the hero was a freshman who nerved himself to steal the standard becaure he wanted to impress a beautiful senior girl. The title was "The Face That Launched a Thousand Eggs.” It was too long for Playboy and the two mainstream magazines I sent it to, so I put it in the trunk. However, I plan to use it in a projected novel. Pearl Diving in Old Peoria. The locale will be shifted from the Missouri campus to Peoria University, Old P.U., based on Bradley College. The Shakespeare professor I’d had at Bradley was very good, but the one at Missouri was a fireball, a genius scholar and lecturer with his own original interpretation of King Lear. He convinced me then, and I still believe, that this is the Bard’s greatest play. Another professor who could set his students on fire was the Milton teacher, a witty Oscar Wilde-like character. Meanwhile, I missed Bette so much that I began hitchhiking weekends, leaving Friday after class and usually getting to Peoria late that night. I'd spend Saturday with her and start thumbing rides on Sunday morning to travel the three hundred miles to Columbia. In June we decided to get secretly married, and when she came down on the bus for the big fraternity dance, we did get hitched. Summer came, and since my parents had moved out to a farmhouse, I lived in the Lambda Chi Alpha house while working for the streetcar company. Then the draft threatened, and I became an aviation cadet in the Army Air Force. I’d had a semester of pilot instruction in the student CAA course at Bradley. On my final checkout flight I’d put the Piper Cub into a spin and came out as required, but the motor conked out. Unable to get it going again, I had to glide in and make a deadstick landing. I didn’t hit the tele­ phone wires bordering the field, but I did miss the runway. The instructor got mad at me because we had difficulty getting the plane out of the mud. He said that he was doubtful about giving me my pilot’s license, but, if I meant to take the next advanced course, he’d do so. I didn’t think I’d be around so I said I wouldn’t be taking the intermediate course. After this experience I had no business becoming a cadet, but I wanted to fly. While at the preflight school at Kelly Field, Texas, I heard the news over the radio of the attack on Pearl Harbor. I was by no means the only one there who had a sinking feeling. After preflight, I was transferred to a primary field near a small town north

48

Philip José Farmer

of Abilene. It was fun flying Stearman biplanes with their open cockpits. Twice, a friend of mine and I flew out of sight of the officers at the field and had simulated dogfights. We also buzzed the cattle and horses until complaints from the ranchers stopped that. Then I was sent from primary to basic at Randolph Field, the “West Point of the Air."' I went down with five others in a car and spent two days in San Antonio. When we left in the morning to report to the field, we passed a tavern. Knowing that we’d be re­ stricted to the base for a month, we decided we'd have one last drink. Three days later, we showed up at Randolph, hung over, red-eyed, our uniforms stained with beer, whiskey, and gravy. We were properly chewed out and in a few days were court-martialed. Our punishment was to walk fifty hours (not all at once) in full dress under the watchful eye of Major Taber. In addition, some of us accumulated some demerits which caused more hours to be tacked on. Since the barracks were very crowded and I deserved to be punished even more, I didn’t get to share a room with anybody. I had to sleep on a cot out in the hall. That didn't bother me. I was spared the many sudden inspections of the room for cleanliness and neatness. All I had to do was to arrange my bed and footlocker while the other cadets were working their asses off cleaning their quarters. At the same time that the officers were on our necks, the up­ perclassmen were hazing us. There was no justice in this, and there wasn't supposed to be. The good thing about this was that when you became an upperclassman, you could haze the lower class. I never did. Though I'd had no trouble flying at primary, I did in basic. I could understand only half of what my instructor said through the earphones, and that drove him crazy. He was a maniac, anyway, a very nervous man with the biggest feet I've ever seen and a tooclose physical resemblance to the detestable Dr. Bell of Bradley. I went to the Army doctor for a hearing examination. He told me my auditory apparatus was fine, and he intimated that perhaps I didn’t want to hear my instructor. I didn't tell the doctor that the instructor had accused me of laughing at him behind his back. This was untrue, though I may have grinned at him. Finally, I decided to apply for another instructor. Too late. I was washed out, and since I didn’t want to stay in the Air Force if I couldn’t be a pilot, the controller of the plane, I asked to be dis­ charged. At that time those who’d entered the air force before the

Maps and Spasms 49

war began were allowed to leave it. I was given an honorable dis­ charge, but it noted that I had an anxiety neurosis. I already knew that. I went home and waited for the draft to take me. I was thinking about joining the cavalry, and then I found out that this branch of the army had replaced horses with tanks. I moved in with Bette’s folks, and I got a job at the Keystone Steel & Wire Company, depicted under the name of Helsgets' in Fire and the Night. It was to be just a temporary job. So, eleven and a half years later, I quit the steel mill. I was never drafted. My son, the future Buddhist of the Nichiren sect, was born, followed three years later by my daughter, the future Roman Catholic. Their father, the village atheist and working stiff, slaved at the very hot, heavy, and sometimes dangerous labor in the blooming mill of Keystone. But he was reading voraciously in many fields and spasmodically writing stories or fragments thereof. The Bellman’s map had very few lines on it, and the Bellman himself was still getting the rudder mixed up with the bowspirit. I wrote several stories which I sent off to the Saturday Eve­ ning Post and a few other slicks. These were, of course, bounced. Why did I ever think that the Post would take a story about a young man who sneaked down at nights to bed his mother-in-law? Or a story about a woman in a small town, a very respectable and prudish wife and mother, who liked to expose herself in a window when the nearby trains went by? I was reading the Gold Medal softcovers then, too, most of which were private eye stories or violent adventures. I especially admired John D. MacDonald. I started a novel with Gold Medal in mind but never finished it. I also wrote about one hundred pages of what was to be a long novel about a freshman at the University of Missouri (called Shomi). I was under the influence of Thomas Wolfe then, and the novel shows it. It was titled The Green Knight, which I later changed to The Unruly Lanee. I was reading Whit Burnett’s quarterly, Story, then. This paid nothing but prestige, as 1 remember it, but editors and critics read it and noted the works of its con­ tributors. Its literary quality was usually high, and the fiction often consisted of stories which wouldn’t be acceptable in the national magazines because of their too-specific erotic or violent content or their social views. I wrote a short story titled "The Doll Game” and sent it to Burnett. It took place in Suburbia and was about two very young neighboring children who had witnessed the adulterous encounter of

50

Philip José Farmer

their parents and simulated this in a game with their dolls. Whit liked it very much, but his wife said it was “too rough.” 1 never did find out if she meant that the prose or the theme was too rough. I put it in the old trunk, and years later 1 sent it to Judy Merril when she was editing a mainstream anthology. She accepted it, but her publisher withdrew his support, and she lost the manuscript. I also wrote a fifty-word story for Esquire, which now and then published such midgets. The editor was all for it, but his publisher turned it down on the grounds that he wasn’t printing puzzles for his readers. The punch line was obvious to me and the editor, but that didn’t mean a thing to the man in power. Meanwhile, conditions in Bette’s parents’ house were miser­ able. Her father was a salesman for local grocers, though at one time he’d been a big-shot lawyer in Burlington, Iowa, a member of the legislature, and had been groomed to be the Republican candidate for governor. Then he became involved in some scandal and was a fugitive from justice for a while, though it turned out that he needn’t have run. Bette’s mother came from a wealthy Dutch family in the very small village of Hartsburg, Illinois, but was now reduced to being a saleslady for Montgomery Ward. She was always the chief provider of the two. He was given to long periods of abysmal melan­ choly which usually ended when Bette, always defending her mother, forced him to reveal what he was so sad about. There would be an explosion of verbal violence, and then her father would be okay for a while. The big traumatic event in Bette’s life had occurred when she was eight, when her father took off without a word and was hiding for four years. This made her “protect” her mother, though in recent years she’s seen that the fault wasn't entirely her father’s. Bette was suffering from grand mal seizures; our son got rheumatic fever. And then 1 came down with both typhoid fever and malaria. What? Malaria in mid-Illinois? Yes, 1 was one of three cases in Illinois that year. Later I’d find out that malaria was still a danger in the state, though not, statistically, a great one. I’d also discover that malaria killed far more pioneers in the Midwest than the Indians ever did. In 1945 1 wrote a twelve-thousand-word story, “O’Brien and Obrenov,” about the meeting in central Germany of the Russian and American forces and their simultaneous capture of a Nazi war crim­ inal, Scheissmiller. 1 sent it to Saturday Evening Post, which re­ turned it with a note that the editors liked it very much but couldn’t

Maps and Spasms 51

print it unless I deleted a big drunken banquet scene. 1 refused to do this since it would water the effect of the story too much. I sent it to Argosy, and the editor liked it but said it was too long for his maga­ zine. However, he’d sent it on to the editor of Adventure, and Ken­ neth White bought it. Its appearance in a 1946 Adventure was euphoric for me. Just maybe I could sell many more and quit the sweating drudgery and deadening swing shifts of Keystone. And get out of the house I'd been a prisoner in for a long time. But my next two stories, one about the historical little Jack Horner, were re­ jected. They were said to be too "frenetic." Most of the money I was making seemed to go for doctor bills. Then Bette's sister and her husband, with their two children, moved into the house. The situation was already bad enough, espe­ cially with my claustrophobic tendencies. It got worse, and one day I exploded under intense provocation and started to choke my sister-in-law. I never lost enough self-control, however, that I really meant to kill her. The result of this was that Bette’s parents decided to loan us the money to put a down payment on our own house. (Her father had come into some money with the death of his mother.) We moved into a house on Barker Street, four blocks away. But it seemed light-years distant. Bette, always the prime mover in our physical or metaphysi­ cal moves, thought that it would be a good idea if we joined a church. I went along with it, and then after a while I became charmed and overwhelmed by the brilliant intellect of the chief preacher. (Who later became a big shot in the World Council of Churches.) I joined and was baptized into the Disciples of Christ. (Which I found out last year was also the church of my eighteenthand nineteenth-century Dooley ancestors. Is there a psychic hered­ ity?) However (there always is a however or but in my life), I even­ tually became aware of the rationalizations in this liberal church just as I’d become aware of the rationalizations in Fundamentalism. So I backslid. Fell from grace, whoever she is. But whereas I’d been an atheist before this conversion, I became an agnostic after it. In the meantime, Bette said that I was wasting my talent and brains by working at Keystone. There was no future in it. So why didn’t we go back to Bradley and finish our education? If I got an M.A., I could be a teacher. Then I’d have the time to write and be in an academic atmosphere, one conducive to writing. This premise was false, but we didn’t know it then. To do this, I had to arrange with the bosses and fellow workers at Keystone a schedule which

52

Philip José Farmer

would permit me to work nights from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. The only way it would work out for me was to put in forty-eight hours a week. This meant that I’d have to put in an extra night. On the other hand, I’d be making more money. I enrolled for seventeen hours of classes per week at Bradley, which by then had become a university. The campus was crowded, the formerly large open areas of lawn now being covered with Quon­ set huts to house the extra faculty and some of the students there on the GI Bill. The Zeitgeist at Bradley had changed enormously in nine years. Where B.C. had been almost a semirural college, B.U. was now truly a university, though its cosmopolitanism was perhaps rawer than that at the University of Illinois or of Chicago. Also, because master’s and doctor’s degrees were now available there, there were many older students, mostly ex-Gl’s. Mornings, Bette and I would leave the house, walking the six long blocks to Bradley while our two children set off in the opposite direction for their grade school. Bette was taking courses which would, after hospital training, give her a license as a medical labora­ tory technician. I had a year and a half to complete toward a B.A. and then would get an M.A. and a job teaching English. After I was through with my morning and some early afternoon classes. I’d come home and sleep until suppertime. Then I’d study until it was time to go to work at the steel mill. Despite this rigorous and hard schedule, we had an extensive and sometimes rigorous social schedule. We fell in with a group of the older students whose Bohemian pre-Beatnik ways earned us the title of "The Bearded Ones,” though only two had beards. Since we were the only ones who had a house, the group made it their headquarters for parties. These lasted through Saturday evening and Sunday morning. One of the distinguishing features about this group was the eagerness of its members to learn. It may have been the last such at Bradley, since a professor there tells me that most of its students are distinguished now by their apathy. In any case, we took courses in such subjects as semeiotics and advanced anthropology and spent much time between or after classes sitting in the student union and discussing philosophy, psy­ chology, and, of course, sex. Copies of Henry Miller and Frank Harris, smuggled into the United States, were passed through the group. When L. Ron Hubbard’s book on dianetics came out, some of us took turns being auditors and auditees. During one session I smashed lamps and tore up the furniture. I also experienced the

Maps and Spasms 53

sensation of sliding beyond my moment of conception in my mother’s womb to an earlier life. It was the commonness of this phenomenon which led Hubbard to formulate the stage beyond dianetics, Scientology. A few nonstudents came into the group. For instance, our new next-door neighbor was a minister who’d been kicked out of his church because he preached that flying saucers were vehicles for angels. He later became a Scientologist auditor. Another member was a Bradley professor, a brilliant but drunken and adulterous radi­ cal left-winger whose wife was an oral nymphomaniac. After one year he was asked to leave, not because of his alcoholism or his lechery but because of his politics. One man later got his Ph.D. in psychology at Florida U. and then returned to Bradley to teach a fanatical brand of behaviorism. Another taught school in San Fran­ cisco, but the last I heard of him he was in prison for selling drugs. My best friend, depicted as Rohrig in The Dark Design, did blow his first oral examination for his M.A. as described in this novel. After graduation he got a job teaching English at a rural high school in Iowa but lost it, partly because he insisted on teaching his students Greek drama instead of English. Then he was a construc­ tion worker and architect of graveyards and then became the first mate on a Mexican ship carrying shrimp from Vera Cruz to Brownsville. As of now he’s a sculptor in Florida and doing quite well. He also had great ability as a poet and painter. Two of the group were the first persons I’d ever met who admitted to being homosexuals. (The Zeitgeist was really changing.) One was an excellent painter, but he ended up in Chicago's skidrow area, a hopeless wino. The other was a massively built lesbian, a lady barber who eventually became a lifelong tenant of psychiatrists’ couches. Part of the group, after graduation, purchased an old yacht, repaired it, and voyaged down the Illinois, the Mississippi, and through the Gulf of Mexico to Florida. They never came back. Bette and I and the children were invited to come along, but we didn't want to be on a boat where every member of the crew was a Captain Ahab. I graduated in 1950 after so many start-stop-starts, but my father wasn't able to attend the ceremony and see his ambition for me fulfilled. He died of pneumonia after being paralyzed for several weeks from a stroke. A series of smaller strokes previously had mentally befuddled him and changed his personality. Instead of being happy and proud of me, as I'd expected, he became sarcastic

54

Philip José Farmer

and bitter and obviously jealous. I was bewildered and hurt by this because I didn't know about the small strokes. Not until he had the major one did my mother tell me about them. She was a Christian Scientist and hence loath to admit that my father was sick. After graduation I came down with a case of nervous exhaus­ tion (that’s what the doctor called it) for a few weeks. When I re­ turned to work, 1 was forced to give up nights and to return to the regular swing shift. It was impossible for me to attend the day classes at Bradley on a regular basis. After taking two courses, I gave up my ambitions of getting an M.A. By then I’d decided that I didn't want to be an English teacher, anyway. In the meantime I'd added the new Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Galaxy to my reading list. I sent two short stories to John Campbell of Astounding, but he rejected them. Then, in mid-1950, while I was reading a book on entomology, I had the basic inspiration for the story that would be called “The Lovers.’’ I wrote this evenings and weekends, and when it was done sent it in to my hero, Campbell. It came back with a note to the effect that it nauseated him. Though he didn’t say so, he must have also thought that his readers would be equally repulsed by this story about inter­ phylum sexual intercourse and the use of the word “orgasm,” among a number of other things. I was crushed, though not for long. I sent the story to Horace Gold, and he had a similar reaction. “The Lovers” seemed to me to be too long for the Magazine of Fantasy A- Science Fiction, though 1 may have been wrong about that. In any event, instead of putting the manuscript away after several rejections, as I’d done with my manu­ scripts in the past, I meant to send it until all possible markets were exhausted. I believed that I had something that was really revolu­ tionary or at least really novel. I purchased copies of Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder, neither of which I’d ever read before, and perused the contents. The letter and fan columns were illuminating. For the first time, I became aware that there was a well-organized and vigorous fan world. It even had conventions. But though the stories didn't encourage me to think that “The Lovers” would be any better received by Sam Mines than by Campbell or Gold, I sent it in anyway. I’ve been told that it was Jerome Bixby, the assistant editor, who picked it out of the slush pile. He gave it to Sam Mines, the senior editor, to read with his enthusiastic recommendation. Then, knowing that I must have sent the story to better-paying and more

Maps and Spasms

55

prestigious markets first, he phoned Gold, editor of Galaxy. He said something like, “Hey, Horace, you silly son of a bitch, did you really reject ‘The Lovers’ by Philip José Farmer?” Horace stam­ mered for a while, then began the first of a number of revisionist explanations for his rejection, none of which matched the one he’d given me. Bixby didn’t phone Campbell because, 1 suppose, nobody talked to the colossus of science fiction as he’d talked to Horace. Finally, after what seemed a long time but wasn’t, I got a letter of acceptance from Mines. And then in the issue of Startling preceding the September issue, in which “The Lovers” was to ap­ pear, was a glowing comment by Mines about the forthcoming work by a new author. Sam really hyped it. He sounded almost like John the Baptist announcing the coming of the Messiah. I was near delirious with joy, though I tried to appear very cool. At last, at long last, I might be able to quit working at Keys­ tone, which had slowly been driving me nuts, and if I sold a few more stories, 1 could justify going into full-time writing. I thought I had the world by the tail. But, as it turned out, there was a tiger at the other end. Part 2, dealing with the years 1952-80, will appear in a later book in this series. Or, if not there, somewhere.

Bibliography NOVELS

Green Odyssey (1956) Flesh (i960) A Woman a Day (i960) The Lovers (1961) Fire and the Night (1962) Cache from Outer Space (1962) Inside Outside (1964) Tongues of the Moon (1964) Dare (1965) The Maker of Universes t and with the proceeds migrated to Los Angeles. Shortly after.we arrived in war­ time California, we struck it lucky and were presently occupying a two-bedroom lower duplex at 476 Hartford Avenue, downtown. Since soon therafter my sister Edna—whose husband, a wartime pilot, had been killed—and their little girl Pamela came to live with us, and since Mayne was involved as a partner in a small pottery business, and since my sister worked in an employment agency, and the little girl was in a private day-kintergarten, 1 sat in the living room, and wrote, and typed, completing at this time The World of Nidl-A, which was published in Astounding Science Fiction in four installments. We remained on Hartford Avenue until dianetics began. At which time we moved to an apartment on Rossmore Avenue just south of Hollywood—an elegant place costing $200 a month. At the end of '51 we opened that dianetic center and operated it, first, at 7175 Sunset Boulevard and then at 7089 Hawthorn Avenue. During the dianetic time I did a few fix-up novels—meaning I combined previously written short stories and novelettes into as much of a novel as the material permitted. Examples: The Voyage of the Space Beagle and The War against the Rail, both published in hardcover by Simon and Schuster. 1 also wrote one new novel— because 1 had signed a contract years before—The Mind Cage, pub­ lished as a hardcover by Simon and Schuster in 1958. However, the sitting and writing routine did not resume full-time until we bought a house in the Hollywood Hills in 1966. It turned out to be Mayne's last home. I'm still there—September, 1979. But Em busy fixing it for resale. So this may not be the place where 1 speak my last words. There are probably two best ways of writing fiction. The best best method 1 can’t do: simply sit down at the typewriter, and be so brilliant, have such a good story sense, and have your idea worked out in your head, that every day by lunch time you turn out five thousand words or more of publishable material. Fortunately, though thousands use this best best method, only a few of these actually write publishable stories. Some science fiction writers who do so: Robert Silverberg, John Brunner, and, when he was writing fiction, L. Ron Hubbard. These people have my admiration, but I don’t know how they do it. The following is an excerpt from an early letter from John W. Campbell, Jr., then editor of Astounding Science Fiction—the mag­ azine to which over a period of ten years I sold most of my science fiction: “ ‘Weapon Shop’ was, like much of your material, good

My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story

191

without any detectable reason for being interesting. Technically it doesn’t have plot, it starts nowhere in particular, wanders about, and comes out in another completely indeterminate place. But, like a park path, it's a nice little walk. I liked it, as you may have gathered from the 25% extra.” That letter was written Friday, June 12, 1942. And I have quoted from it because about 30 years later my fellow SPWAs (Science Fiction Writers of America) voted "The Weapon Shop” to be my best story; and, in fact, voted it to be one of the dozen or so best novelettes in science fiction. In an earlier letter, dated September 10, 1941, Campbell wrote me, "Bob Heinlein has decided he’d like to retire, and is going to practically stop writing. Since you . . . have shown an ability to do work on the same high level Heinlein maintained ... we can |now| absorb $200. to $300. worth a month from you in the two magazines. This being a year-round average.” (The other magazine was Unknown Worlds.) The measure of that offer requires the reali­ zation that this was a time when words rates were one cent, and a 25 percent bonus meant one and one-quarter cents a word. In effect, he was saying that he would be willing to buy 25,000 words a month from me. Heinlein did not retire; in fact he subsequently wrote some of his best stories, although he was engaged in war work and could only be an author in his spare time. Nonetheless, reading that offer from a New York editor, the question should arise: How come someone in remote Winnipeg, Manitoba, could get a hearing in a center of the universe that swarmed with starving writers and their hungry wives and children? My answer: I learned to write by a system propounded in a book titled The Only Two Wrry.v to Write a Story, by John W. Gallishaw (meaning by flashback or in consecutive sequence). Gallishaw had made an in-depth study of successful stories by great authors. He observed that the best of them wrote in what he called “presentation units” of about eight hundred words. Each of these units contained five steps. And every sentence in it was a "fictional sentence.” Which means that it was written either with imagery, or emotion, or suspense, depending on the type of story. The five steps can be described as follows: 1) Where, and to whom, is it happening? 2) Make clear the scene purpose (What is the immediate problem which confronts the protagonist, and what does to require him to accomplish in this scene?) 3) The interaction with the opposition, as he tries to achieve the scene purpose. 4) Make the reader aware that he either did accomplish the scene purpose, or did not accomplish it. 5) In all the early scenes whether protagonist did

192

A. E. van Vogt

or did not succeed in the scene purpose, establish that things are going to get worse. Now, the next presentation unit-scene begins with: Where is all this taking place. Describe the surroundings, and to whom it is happening. And so forth. When I was writing first-person viewpoint stories for publica­ tions like True Story Magazine, I never wrote a sentence that said simply, ‘‘I lived at 323 Brand Street.” Such a meaning in a confession-type story would be written, “Tears came to my eyes as I thought of my little room at 323 Brand Street.” (This is an example only.) A thousand sentences like that added up to a seven- to ninethousand-word story, all emotion. In science fiction 1 try as much as possible to put a hang-up in every sentence. What that requires is that the reader has to complete the meaning of the sentence in his mind. An example: “The human­ like being reached into what looked like a fold of skin, and drew out a tiny silver-bright object. It pointed this shining thing at Hagin.” Is it a weapon? Does the alien really have folds in its skin, or are we looking at unusual clothing material? That’s explained later, but by that time we have new hang-up sentences to keep the reader project­ ing meaning into the story. It’s not easy to dash off sentence after sentence like that. So that the 200,000 housewives who are reported to be currently—at any given time in history—scribing the next Great American Novel, are actually no threat to working authors. They should probably do what my wife, Mayne, did. She discovered a system of her own by which she could use my system. When I met Mayne she belonged to the Winnipeg Writers Club, and she had sold a number of little short-short stories to church publications in Canada—almost the only fiction markets in the country, except for some farm magazines which occasionally printed one short story in an issue. Also, Mayne had published articles in the Saturday magazine section of the Winnipeg Free Press—in Canada there were at that time no Sunday papers. Cana­ dians read their weekend color comics a day early. In addition she had had a short story rejected by Liberty Magazine; and the rejec­ tion was a letter praising the story but stating that it was not suitable for them. Mayne. when 1 met her, wrote by Method Number One. That is, she wrote intuitively, straight onto the typewriter. So that, when we were in Ottawa, and she got her first science fiction idea—after seeing the motion picture Captains of the Clouds—I encouraged her to write it in scenes. What was my sadness to discover that she had

My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story 193 done her usual of just sitting at the typewriter and letting the story flow onto the pages. What I did to the so-so (not bad) result was, I marked off where I thought the scenes began and ended. It took a while, but presently she had the story fairly well organized. How­ ever, the end result was too sparingly written—it was a slick-paper style. For me, it didn't have in it what I called the great pulp music. So 1 sat down one evening, and marked up her manuscript by insert­ ing adjectives and phrases like that “bright glowing moon.” She retyped it once more, and sent it to Campbell under the title “The Flight That Failed.” It was published under the by-line “by E. M. Hull.” As writers well know there’s always some reader who takes note of an oddity. So someone duly wrote in and asked, “Is this the same E. M. Hull who wrote The Sheik?" (Rudolph Valentino starred in the movie version of this old novel.) Because of that question the name E. Mayne Hull came into the science fiction writing field. After a while Mayne had another science fiction story idea. She propounded it to me. I okayed it as basically sound plot mate­ rial. When it was done I read the finished story. And was shocked. No sign of the eight-hundred-word scene. When I pointed this out to her, she said, "Oh, damn!" To make a long account brief, what she eventually did, she cut up her first version of a story and pinned together the sheets and half sheets into what seemed to be a scene. These yard-long pinned-up sheets lay on her desk for incredible periods of time, and she worked on each yard of manuscript separately. It was system within system. And essentially it worked. Out of that, with some technical help from me, grew the wonderful Artur Blord stories, and the Wish stories for Unknown. Would these stories of hers have ever come into existence if she had not been married to me? Looking back, my feeling is no. Yet when 1 first publicly, in a little book titled Of Worlds Beyond, a collection of articles on how to write, described my method, I did so with considerable trepidation. Now. the deluge—I thought. Surely, io percent of those would-be writers out there can grab the idea, and run with it to the nearest editor. And soon publishers will be buying stories only from their relatives and friends. Why didn’t that hap­ pen? Well, first of all, my description was misunderstood. The New Wave writers acted as if they didn’t notice the name of John Gallishaw. They thought I made up the whole lousy idea. It seems they wouldn't write like me if it was the last thing they ever did. When that attitude became clear, I thought, “Thank God.”

194

A. E. van Vogt

Then there were the "artists” who do not care to write a story by what they considered a plot formula. Somebody used the term—I'll be kind and not name him—and the art crowd grabbed it, and were scathing in their contempt. Thank God. A British professor sneered (on paper) in Foundation, a formidable science fiction re­ view published quarterly by a technical college in London. He wrote, "Van Vogt admits that he changes the direction of his plot every 800 words." I read that with total delight. Apparently, I can­ not give away my system. However, in 1969, at the world science fiction convention in Los Angeles, Thomas Scortia told me that he wrote more than a score of science fiction stories before he finally sold one. The one he sold was written as follows: He used one of my short stories as a model. He had his own story idea, of course, but where I had action he had action. Where 1 had dialogue, so did he. Where I described something, he described the parallel scene in his story. After listening to this, when 1 learned that he and Frank Robinson had sold a Hotel-type mainstream novel for a vast advance and a subsequent movie sale, I pictured him with one of the earlier best seller Hotel novels spread out before him. And where that author had dialogue, or description, or action, so would the Scortia part of the novel he and Frank were writing. I’m sure it takes a special type of craftsmanship, and may even be harder to do than my eight-hundred-word scene and my thousand sentences of emotion for True Story Magazine. The method has apparently worked well. Someone told me recently that Scortia has purchased a Beverly Hills mansion for $481,000 cash. (What that tells me is that he has even worked out a system whereby he didn’t have to pay as much income tax on his earnings as Uncle Sam would normally extract from such a gross income.) But also it tells you what a hardworking writer with a successful system can do if he is patient, and determined, and persistent. The picture I have presented throughout this account of me—during my writing years—either sitting on a couch with a clip­ board and pen, or at my typewriter transcribing what 1 had written in longhand, needs clarification. There were interruptions. Mayne would come and stand in front of me. And, after a while. I’d become aware of her: and she would say. "I need something from the store for dinner.” "Okay.” Up 1 got. Off I drove, with the dog in the back seat. Back I came with the required items. Or, the phone would ring, "Hey, Van, can I take you to lunch? 1 want to talk to you about something.” Since I prepared my own midday meal at home, and

My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story

195

usually read while eating (Mayne seldom ate lunch) it actually took just about as long to eat at a restaurant as at home. So off I went to lunch. Or, again, the phone would ring with an invitation for Satur­ day evening for both of us. Fine with me. 1 called it, doing what I had to do. It was fitting the world into my continuing schedule. It was recognizing obligations. Realizing that writers need some contact with other human beings. But throughout I remained the second worst correspondent in the world. Mayne was the worst. After I had heard her comment for a couple of months that she ought, really, to write her mother or sister, I would finally ask her what she wanted to say in her letter. Then I would type the letter, and lay it down where she could read it. After two or three days I would find that it had been signed. And I would mail it. Being a poor correspondent myself, I was always amazed when I heard reports of how many letters John W. Campbell, Jr., wrote to all his authors. Campbell wrote me perhaps a hundred long chatty letters during our author-editor relationship. But I only met him twice, personally—once, briefly, at a convention; the other I shall now describe. 1 went to New York City in November, 1953, and was in the area for nearly two weeks. I visited editors, principally those at Simon and Schuster. And I took a side trip to Philadelphia to attend one day of a dianetic convention. And then one bright morning I got on the ferry to New Jersey, got on a bus and, when it came to a stop, there was Campbell waiting for me with his car. The time was about 10:00 a.m. He thereupon drove me to his home, where I was intro­ duced to his second wife. (Never did meet the lady whose maiden name in modified form was used by Campbell as a pseudonym to write, among others, “Who Goes There?” the story that inspired me to write my first science fiction. Dona Stuart—Don A. Stuart—after her divorce from Campbell, married George O. Smith, and, accord­ ing to reports, passed away not long ago.) Campbell had started talking a blue streak as we got into his car. And later, after introducing me to his wife, he and I went to a world below—a basement study, where he continued his virtually ceaseless monologue. I don’t say I didn’t occasionally get in a word edgewise. But only words, never sentences. At noon Mrs. C. called us for lunch. And now I witnessed two high-speed, highly intellec­ tual individuals carry on a conversation that never stopped—or so it seemed. They must have eaten, as I was doing. But it was quickly obvious that Mrs. C. was a verbal match for her husband.

196

A. E. van Vogt

As many people are aware, Campbell introduced dianetics to the world by way of an article by Hubbard published in the May, 1950, issue of Astounding. The M.D. who wrote the foreword to the book, Dianetics, also published in May, was Dr. J. A. Winters, the brother of the woman who was now Mrs. C. All three, brother and sister Winter and Campbell subsequently departed from their asso­ ciation with Hubbard. At the luncheon table I gathered from the dialogue that they had gone far beyond Hubbard in their thinking about psychotherapy and the mind. But the details flew by too fast for me to snag. After lunch Campbell and I went down into the basement to a monologue that should have been recorded. Highlevel ideas flowed by my ears. I can remember being impressed. But I was later unable to recall what had been said. At dinner time who should show up but Dr. J. A. Winter, himself, and wife. At this point the conversation slowed. And I was able to discover from Dr. W. that in his own practice he was using a system of general semantics differentiation, which he considered to be very successful. Evidently, no one was using it on him. For, as I recall, he died a few years later from causes unknown to me. And, as far as I know, he did not write a book on his methods. Such a work would, I am sure, have been published after the critical success of his critical A Doctor Reports on Dianetics. Campbell was evidently a heart case. For one night, when he was watching TV his wife observed his head slump as if he had suddenly dozed. But what she actually witnessed was the moment of his death from heart failure. No last words from earlier in the eve­ ning have been quoted. So this incredibly vocal man left us without making a final statement. Campbell has been criticized for being too open to new ideas. So it was interesting to me to write Mrs. C. and to ask her what type vitamin E her husband had been taking as part of his medical treatment. Mrs. C. reported that the label showed the words d-l-alpha tocopheral acetate. This information will be in­ stantly significant only to diet buffs. So let me explain: when I began a major exercise experiment in 1968 1 reported this fact to the C ADA membership. Almost at once 1 began to receive urgent calls from concerned friends. One man rented an oxygen tank for me to use for four minutes after each forty-minute jog. Several advised me on vitamin E. I must take only the one recommended by the Canadian medical research laboratory (the company name of which I have forgotten). Apparently, their research established that there are at least eight types of vitamin E. So most of the vitamin E bottles have on their

My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story 197 labels the words “mixed tocopherals.” This means that they contain some of the eight, or all eight. Of the eight, the one that is recom­ mended as the best by the Canadian research group is d-alpha tocopheral—with nothing mixed in. Accordingly, this one is obtain­ able from health food stores and from chiropractors. The only vita­ min E the Canadian team found to be totally without merit is dl-alpha tocopheral acetate. The American Medical Association rec­ ommends, and prescribes, only this “worthless” E. I have to believe that Campbell knew of the entire con­ troversy. Yet in this generally regarded vital heart aide, he accepted the AMA-authorized Vitamin E and not the one favored by diet faddists. We may deduce that, given the opportunity, Freud might have had some thoughts for us about a man—Campbell—being so open to new, even farfetched ideas except in the one area where it was vital. On the other hand, I favor a more mundane explanation: that Campbell knew that he was being criticized for being far-out in his ideas. As a consequence, I deduce that he accepted authorized systems where they dealt with everyday matters like health. It is also possible that it did not seriously occur to him that his heart problem might kill him. I deduce all of the foregoing because I have had a somewhat parallel situation. So that when in 1948 an airline pilot called me from San Diego to say that he had seen a flying saucer on his flight that day, and he couldn’t think of anyone whom he should tell ex­ cept finally it occurred to him it should be a science fiction writer; to repeat, when this call came, the caller found me totally resistant. In fact, I promptly gave him the name and phone number of Forrest Ackerman as the person who should be the recipient of his story. My reason for not getting involved: I was already in too many kookie ideas. To begin with; I was a science fiction writer. Second, at the time 1 was writing a book on hypnotism for a psychologist. And the whole of the general semantics thing had produced some scathing reactions from individuals whose degrees and skill derived from courses they had taken in traditional uses of the English lan­ guage. I’m serious. You can only appear to be so crazy—so it seemed to me. One more madness (like flying saucers) was too much. I'm guessing that Campbell had a similar limitation in his head. From my own experience, as 1 have just described it, we may observe that all these people—the criticized and the critics—were busy balancing reality and fantasy inside their heads. Naturally, they did so without understanding, then, the more recent discoveries

198

A. E. van Vogt

about the two sides of the brain. Of how the reality left stimulates fantasy in the right, and of how, by deliberate fantasizing, reality is strengthened in the right side of the brain. Having done a lot of fantasizing in order to write science fiction. 1 am a proper recipient of the question: Okay, what level of success have you achieved in terms of real things? The answer: Essentially I have devised professional-level mental systems. But: Until age eighteen I was very much a physical person. 1 worked happily on my Uncle Peter’s farm during vacation. I drove his trac­ tor with plow or harrow attached all day long day after day. 1 went hunting. I rode horseback. I drove a truck for a combine (a mobile threshing machine). I was planning to go on a Far North trapping expedition with friends—but when that fell through for reasons be­ yond my control, suddenly all that physical activity ceased. Almost overnight I became the mental-oriented person that I have been ever since. (It would take a book to detail the reason for the switchover, as it unfolded in the psychotherapy I was given many years later. Apparently, there was a reason for the change.) So, again, we come to the reality that a writer’s life is an inward one. This continued to be so year after year, despite that in the late 1940s I was a regular attendee of the weekly meetings of LASFS (Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society). And then, when 1 got into dianetics and dealt with about two thousand people—most of them high-level individuals—for me those numerous associations consti­ tuted a study. In all the locations that I lived there were capable friends and acquaintances. It’s really amazing how bright and strong people have been everywhere. Each individual is worthy of a special report, but it would require a dozen books merely to outline my association with these numerous persons. Currently, among my best friends are a producer and his actress-wife, an oil company executive and his writer-wife, my agent, Forrest Ackerman, and his linguist-translator—retired pro­ fessor wife, Wendayne. I know a host of good writers. I am ac­ quainted with several millionaires. My attorney of twenty-nine years, now retired, and I go to dinner at least once a week. I have at least two hundred names I could list of people who are more than acquaintances. It’s amazing. How do I find time for them all? Well, we talk on the phone, and we meet at gatherings. But here now are my principal real world achievements. It was in Toronto, Canada, in 1943, that I discovered the method by which I was accidentally getting my creative ability. Until that time 1 attributed my success entirely to my eight-

My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story

199

hundred-word scene, each with its five steps, and to my method of writing in what John Gallishaw, the originator of the eighthundred-word scene, called fictional sentences. But, unknowingly, I had been tapping my subconscious mind, where human creativity is actually located, is my belief. Here is what 1 was doing. When you're writing, as I was, for one cent a word, and are a slow writer, and the story keeps stopping for hours or days, and your rent is due, you get anxious. Since “think" people don’t notice emotions, I would wake up spontaneously at night, anxious. But I wasn’t aware of the anxiety. 1 thought about story problems—that was all I noticed then. And so back to sleep 1 went. In the morning, often, there would be an unusual solution. All my best plot twists came in this way. Because, as I’ve mentioned it takes me a long time before I notice a pattern, it was not until July, 1943, that I suddenly realized what I was doing. That night I got out our alarm clock, and moved into the spare bedroom. I set the alarm to ring in one and one-half hours. When it awakened me, I reset the alarm for another one and one-half hours, thought about the problems in the story I was work­ ing on—and fell asleep. I did that altogether four times during the night. And in the morning, there was the unusual solution, the strange plot twist. Exactly as when I had awakened from anxiety. So I had my system for getting to my subconscious mind. During the next seven years 1 awakened myself about three hundred nights a year four times a night. It was in 1947 when I started to write the book on hypnotism for my psychologist friend. It was eventually published under the title The Hypnotism Handbook, and is still in print. In order to write that book, I went with the psychologist to lectures and demonstra­ tions he gave. I attended his classes for medical doctors who, at that time, were thinking of using hypnotism in childbirth. I was eventu­ ally an early-stage subject at these classes. At that time 1 still believed that writing a book fitted with my theory of doing things professionally. So I was involved in research for such a book. It was a first step in the direction of studying human behavior other than through reading books about it. I had read more than a hundred books on psychology. And I was confused, because there were so many schools promoting contradictory ideas. I have been asked many times if 1 considered dianetics a better system than these earlier schools. The truth is it really doesn’t matter. When an intelligent person, with no ulterior motives in rela­ tion to the persons involved, operates by a system that has as its goal

200

A. E. van Vogt

self-improvement for the subject, simply doing it is a brand-new experience for most people; something they should do at least once in their lifetime. Dianetics reached thousands of persons for every dozen individuals in analysis. As for me, during my prolonged dianetic look at human be­ havior in two thousand persons, I noticed among other things, and for the first time in human history, the characteristics of the type of person I call a violent male. And as a result from 1958 to 1961 in my spare moments I wrote a non-science fiction novel about Red China, which was published in 1962 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux as a hardcover, titled The Violent Man. Colin Wilson, the British Existentialist writer believes my study of the man who feels so right that he is entitled to hit and hurt, will get me a niche eventually in the psychological hall of fame. The book didn’t do well as a hardcover but it has had many paperback printings, and was reissued in 1978 by Pocketbooks, one of the leading United States paperback publishers. Another outcome was my systematic thought about women. In writing The Violent Man I described the behavior of the two women in it. I simply described what I had seen two women do, without understanding why they did it. So during the next few years I asked about three hundred men and women how they would ex­ plain what those two women did. I have written two stories so far incorporating a small part of the resulting systematic thought about women: part in a novelette, “The Sound of Wild Laughter” (pub­ lished as part of a collection by DAW Books, originally titled The Book of van Vopt and recently [ 1980] reissued as Lost, Fifty Sans), and another part in its sequel, a novel, The Secret Galaetics. It took one book. The Violent Man, to describe men—who are after all simple creatures emotionally—but I estimate it will take four more novels to dramatize my complete system on women. Nineteen fifty-eight seems to have been quite a seminal year. Because that year I learned that three men I had gone to school with had all become wealthy. So I started to try to remember what they were like in their teens. Finally, in the 1970s I published a nonfiction book, The Money Personality. It described, and lists, the twelve qualities you have to have to make and keep money. You can see the pattern is largely one of research in order to write books: The Hyp­ notism Handbook, The Violent Man, and The Money Personality. But the human behavior study was a twelve-year professional ap­ proach. At its peak the dianetic center earned $21,000 a year. Two other systems came out of my dianetic study. Number

My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story 201 three is a method of dream therapy, whereby I began to use the technique of awakening myself every one and one-half hours for the purpose of eliminating emotional problems. For this I didn’t use an alarm clock. I had an industrial timer, and it turned on a cassette recorder, on which 1 had recorded a few sentences to awaken me and to remind me what problem I was trying to get rid of. During this time, beginning about 1972, 1 began a fabulous new study, which I turned into a professional system in 1974. I had completed my exercise experiment. 1 noticed I was bringing my dog home in shorter and shorter periods of time. It didn’t take long to get down from forty minutes to ten minutes. Because, the fact is, exer­ cise by itself is boring. One day, the great thought: Why don’t I while striding with the dog learn foreign languages? So I bought some language records, and transcribed them onto regular tape, and from there onto casset­ tes, so 1 could carry the language with me. I quickly discovered that none of those commercial systems was suitable for teaching lan­ guages while walking rapidly. So 1 spent a lot of time with two tape recorders working out a system that was suitable. But it took many hours of my time organizing the material so that 1 could learn a language while striding. So finally in February, 1974, I placed an advertisement in the largest Los Angeles newspaper. The ad stated: “Writer wants for non-commercial taping people who speak Frisian, Flemish, Low German, Yiddish, Basque, Raeto-Romanic, Walloon. Will pay $10 an hour.” If you wonder why 1 asked for dialects and languages that were normally of regional interest only, well, my dog and I didn’t care what languages we learned. And, second, 1 had often wondered what such languages were like. A Frisian woman, a Flemish profes­ sor, a Low German speaking architect, and a young man who spoke Raeto-Romanic came and recorded material for me on my equip­ ment. 1 was still not thinking professionally. As I’ve mentioned I’m slow. However, suddenly, a few months later, came the profes­ sional thought. I decided that there are probably 200 languages available in the Los Angeles area, so 1 set up what I called the 200 Language Club, began to advertise in a national literary magazine, and continue by various methods to locate people who could speak foreign languages. And when they showed up I took them to a pro­ fessional recording studio, and I signed contracts with them which would provide a royalty if anything ever came of it. 1 can’t give too much time to it. But with the help of a part-

202

A. E. van Vogt

time secretary I now have a going business in language teaching by my copyrighted method. Recently, a New York publisher signed a contract with me, and they are currently promoting my High Ger­ man, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Japanese tapes to col­ leges all over the country. As soon as I have more time I plan to go on radio or television, and really search for unusual dialects and languages, which I believe are available in the Los Angeles. Now, how come that I, who have no formal scientific train­ ing, could come up with systems of that order? I attribute it to i) automatic consciousness expansion from reading and writing sci­ ence fiction, and 2) to persistence. I stay with an idea. The months go by, and I am still revising it, and watching it. The person who has his advance outline doesn’t do that. While working out my story I gradually work out the ideas in it, also. It is well to point out again that these various systems were, at base, just automatic reactions to the writing of science fiction. The left side of the brain got an over­ load of fantasizing flow from the right side, and literally had to do something real. There was motivation. All those years while I was observing human nature in the therapy situation, I finally had the thought: “Really, psychotherapy takes too long. Even this high-speed sys­ tem, dianetics, requires too much time and involvement.” There were people who came into my dianetic projects after five to ten years of Freudian analysis. Even in those days (the 1950s) the cost of analysis was $35 to $50 an hour, three sessions a week the first year, two sessions a week the second year, and thereafter once a week. So, noticing that, I had the additional consideration that, “Psychotherapy costs too much.” (For the record, the price of project auditing at Mayne’s and my center was study level. Partici­ pants paid $75 for thirty hours, given in one and one-half-hour ses­ sions two evenings a week and all day Sunday.) A further observation: The entire ritual of sitting, or lying, down for therapy, has the weakness in it that, while in this relaxed condition, and awake, the subject is least likely to contact engrams (traunatic experiences.) But put him suddenly on stage to give a talk or recite a poem, and a percentage of him is at once in a condition which has been described for centuries by the nonoperational term stage fright. Similarly, put him behind the steering wheel of a car, and at once he is in a state of stimulation, screaming at other drivers and snarling at pedestrians. The dianetic observation: His case is showing. It was the maturation of these thoughts that produced, first.

My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story 203 the conversion of my dream-story creative method into dream therapy. And then, the following remarkable experiment in exercise, originally titled "Exercise and Memory," here modified: Beginning in 1968, the author experimented on himself with a combination of exercise and psychotherapy. The results seem significant and may point to a new approach to psychotherapy which will simultaneously be systematic and yet permissive. At this stage, the appearance is that any associative type therapy can be combined with exercise. There is also reason to believe that at least one aspect of the method can be of help in the cure of major illness. My basic thought: Tiredness was probably an aberration. More precisely, 1 proposed to myself that past exhaustion, past illness, past unconsciousness, and other physical trauma of earlier years were automatically brought into associative recall by the stress of exercise or exertion. It was for this reason, I postulated, that most people tired quickly. 1 reasoned that only a few persons, percentagewise, were free of such aberration. These, and only these, were our great athletes, or possessed normal physical endur­ ance. The rest of us, I analyzed, could not ordinarily exercise except with difficulty. My hypothesis predicted that when, under the stress of exer­ cise, the person became exhausted, the exhaustion was a past trauma, as already described, and was, in fact, a trauma related to that particular exhaustion. 1 further predicted that if I freely as­ sociated on the details of the past trauma—that is, tried to remember it in detail—I would presently deal with it sufficiently, so that it would no longer interfere with the use of those muscles. Whereupon the musculature, thus freed from the restraint of past trauma, would become capable of tireless performance. About half of the foregoing hypothesis seemed to be proved by my experience. The rest of the hypothesis had to be modified. Until September, 1968, my own exercise history was sad. Not even an attempt since age twenty. I figuratively didn’t stir a finger, exercisewise, for most of my adult life. And I was born in 1912. On a morning in late September, 1968—my hypothesis, as I have de­ scribed it, as complete as I could make it in advance—I got up at 8:00 a.m. (which, though I didn’t mention it before, was an hour earlier than my normal get-up time), took my dog, and went for a run in the Hollywood Hills, where I live. I ran for forty minutes—with many gasping stops—and during that forty minutes I was not bored, and at the end of it 1 was not exhausted. I should note that I did not run uphill. In fact, I had to stop six times on a hill three-tenths of a

204

A. E. van Vogt

mile long while walking up it, but 1 ran all level and down hill stretches. For three months, I was up every morning at eight and out for a forty-minute run. During that ninety-day period, what I did differ­ ently from all my past exercising was I paid no attention to the jogging—that is, to the exercise. Instead, I concentrated my atten­ tion on associative thinking. Exactly as I had anticipated, the memories which came into view were of past illness, past times of exhaustion, and so forth. The shift from one recollection to another was more rapid than I had expected. One minute I would find myself recalling my measles (before age six), the next a time, about age eleven, when on an outing I became so exhausted that I had to lie down by the roadside. Since the day when that happened was hot, I realized after all those years that I may have had heat prostration. As the minutes and the days went by, the same incidents repeated at random. Each time, I examined them, I tried to obtain an affect recall of the original experiences, and kept on running. This went on to such an effect that, at the end of the three months, I could run up the hill on which at the beginning I had had to stop six times, walking. I did not exercise between Christmas, 1968, and New Year’s 1969. But I had some tests made. My blood pres­ sure was 120/80, my temperature 97.4, and my pulse 64. Alas, it had not occurred to me to take these tests in advance. However, since I give blood from time to time, and had occasion to take my own temperature, the past picture is as follows: Blood pressure: 150/90 or 85, temperature 98.6, and pulse 80. The fast pulse always bothered me, after I learned that geriatricians favored the slower pulse. It was my belief that high pulse speed reflected a basic fear. During the week of no exercise, my pulse moved up to 68, and it stayed there during my next group of exercises. By this time, the heavy ’69 rains had started, and jogging was out of the question for all except ducks. So one Monday morning in January, I began to do push-ups from the waist. That is, I kept my legs all the way to the hips on the floor, and only pushed up the top of my body. My very first effort produced a mere n push-ups with­ out stopping. But altogether during the forty minutes that 1 per­ sisted, I did 263 push-ups that first morning. Naturally, as with the jogging, my attention was not on the exercise but on the memory associations that were stimulated by the continuing stress of the unaccustomed exercise. On the tenth day, after starting the push­ ups, I reached my goal of 100 without stopping. Altogether, during that day’s forty minutes, 1 did 430 push-ups—from the waist.

My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story 205 The following day, I moved my hinge location down to my knees. Immediately, I could only do 34 push-ups without stopping. But I did over 300 in that forty-minute period. In ten days, I was up to 100 (from the knees) without stopping. During this period, I twice had a significant experience. In two different sessions, I improved markedly during the forty-minute exercise period. In one I started with 45 push-ups without stopping. Suddenly, instead of the usual small increase, I did 72. The second time, a few days later, was from the 70s to the 90s during the session. After I started pushing-up from the toes, I realized that this is what separates the men from the boys. In spite of my now consider­ able background in exercise, it took over two weeks to reach 100 without stopping. But I never did less than 300 during the forty minutes I exercised each day. To give you some idea of the difficulty of my doing push-ups from the toes, I’m six feet two inches long, and at that time weighed 198 pounds. Having attained my intermediate goals with the push-ups, the next day I lay on my back and began leg exercises. It would be too tedious to go into the details of what happened there. My goal was 100 without stopping, first from legs straight up lowered about twelve inches from the vertical, then from twelve inches from the vertical to twelve inches from the floor, and finally twelve inches from the floor to two inches from the floor; and in leanbacks the same pattern. I had almost but not quite completed this program when business required that I go down to Rio de Janeiro for two weeks. It was necessary for me to take a smallpox shot. I suspended my exercise program when I began to react to the shot. It seemed to me that it would be unwise to associate exercise with smallpox. That was the end of my forty-minutes-a-day intensive exer­ cise project. When I returned from Rio, I began a regimen of jogging twenty minutes a day without psychotherapy. My purpose was to see if I could retain my great condition for two years, at which time I planned to do an after program to see if my hypothesis about main­ taining permanent strength without exercise, was correct. During the five months that followed, I was mentally more alert than ever before in my life. I was wide awake from the time I came to at 8:00 a.m. in the morning until 12:30 at night when I went to bed. My work schedule was awesome. Except for necessary out­ ings, I worked until 11:00 p.m. Seven days a week. Having been a lifetime experimenter in what I call my search for certainty, I per­ sisted with my twenty-minute-a-day jogging program throughout the balance of 1969 and all of 1970. It was still intended as a maintenance

206

A. E. van Vogt

only, though it was progressively obvious that it was not maintain­ ing. Deterioration was steady. I had decided that late February, 1971, I would begin the two-year after test. I tentatively established that my ability at push­ ups, leg-ups and lean-backs was about half of what it had been two years before. For example, 1 did si pushups, first try, and thereafter in the 40s only. I only tried for a few days. What does this prove? Either the basic exhaustion in my body was not dealt with suffi­ ciently by my method of associating and recalling, or else the whole idea that strength could be maintained in a normal person without exercise was not true. The exceptions, those persons who definitely do retain their strength, would have to be explained by another theory. I believe 1 have that explanation. My conclusion: It is not normal for a person to be able to maintain performance without exercise. My analysis: 1 suggest that Pavlov's fatigue experiments, as he neared the end of his life, pro­ vide the explanation for retained endurance and strength without exercise. Pavlov found that there were three stages of fatigue. In the first stage the person could not be aware of small signals from the environment, only of very large signals. In the second stage, an apparent inversion occurred. The victim was now ultrasensitive to small signals, but insensitive to large ones. In the third stage, the dog turned against those whom he had formerly loved, and associated with those he had disliked or hated. The human being, subjected by Stalin’s police to fatigue, in this third stage admitted his guilt and could not do enough for his interrogator. In China, these three stages of fatigue were the method of what has been called brainwashing. I believe that the second stage of Pavlov’s fatigue observations is the one where the person apparently retains his strength. It would appear that a person who is terminally ill is, in addi­ tion to any infection, also in a state of aberration. My observation: A spontaneous age regression is involved. The stress of exercise plus free association memory is used to force him out of the illness re­ gression. Depending on his strength, the therapist should start with a minimum of exercise, and work up to a forty-minute session. An example: have the invalid lie on his back and raise his arms straight up until he cannot lift them anymore. Then ask him to associate the consequent exhaustion with one or more past memories. If there are any, let him tell about the past experience in detail. For people unoriented to free association, it may take a little while. Such per­ sons often have a tendency to dismiss the memories they do have as

My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story 207 not being relevant, or else they are secretive. Finally the therapist should say, "As soon as you can, do the exercise again.” However, if the lifting of the arms in any way aggravates the condition associated with the terminal illness, stop that exercise at once. Try the twelve-inch lean-back, or leg-up, or something that does not worsen the illness feelings. Reason: We are trying to shift the invalid away from the death association. My observation: It is unlikely that an ill person can deal with a severe trauma. Since illness is probably a complex, and is probably related to feelings of failure, there will probably be several relapses. Each time, the exer­ cise, should be done only until the invalid is forced by exhaustion to shift to another condition, which can be dealt with. Ignore the termi­ nal case’s state of depression or his desire to die. Consider it a part of his aberration, which he will abandon when he has been shifted away from the death trauma regression. I speculate that most of the people who do not exercise are in Pavlov’s stage one state of fatigue: result of an early fever or trauma. It takes a large stimulus to stir them. My guess is that people who do exercise can, themselves, be divided into two groups—those who are genuinely capable of exercise on an unaberrated basis, and those who are in Pavlov's stage two fatigue condition. I speculate that it is these latter who, when they are athletes, die suddenly of a heart attack at age forty, or are stricken by some other ailment. The fifty-minute hour of the analyst would seem to be an ideal frame for forty minutes of exercise therapy. The wonderful thing about it is that the subject normally feels a sense of accomplishment from the exercise, so much so that I once tentatively named the method Automatic Gain Therapy. My observation is that the great majority of non-exercisers (who are in the majority) would like to have someone motivate them to exercise. It would seem that the professional psychotherapist can move into exercise therapy with the confidence that comes from being an expert in his own system and at the same time accomplish­ ing for the subject the additional benefits that come from exercise. After reading that I think you’ll agree that those "complete” books on jogging are early, primitive, simplistic accounts that have no place in the future of exercise. Their authors, in describing their experiences, seem to feel that if they warn the prospective joggerreader of how painful it’s going to be (but that eventually the pains go away) they are providing up-to-the-minute professional encour­ agement. I never had a single muscle ache or screaming nerve end.

208

A. E. van Vogt

never a moment of joint or muscle stiffness, not one pain, nor a sleepless night. It is my belief that future psychiatrists will jog with half a dozen patients, teaching them to do self-therapy, and at night guiding them through my dream therapy system. These two basic systems will be supplemented occasionally by recourse to an office appointment. And that, after a decade or more of experience by many jogger-doctors, then it will finally be possible to write a worthwhile book about all of the aspects of exercise. But that, basically, these two systems—the dream therapy for dealing with emotional trauma and the exercise therapy for major illnesses, accidents, past opera­ tions, and other times of unconsciousness—will be the psychiatry of the twenty-ninth, thirty-ninth, and perhaps even the eighty-ninth centuries. By that time, of course, we shall have chemical aids and even biological manipulation. But here and now is when we are alive. If you do any experiment in life-prolonging activities, my two approaches are—I sincerely believe—the wave of the immediate future. Despite my critical attitude toward standard jogging texts, there is one man out there—one M.D.—doing an exercise thing that fills me with awe. I learned about him as a result of writing early in 1978 the following as a portion of a letter which I sent to all the members of the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America.) My heading for this portion of my letter was "The Search for New Sciences in Science Fiction.” Under that heading I wrote: What I probably really mean is sub-sciences. A few years ago a famous scientist told me that an idea of mine in my novel Mission to the Stars had started him thinking. Could that be done?—he had asked himself. Naturally, my version was vague, and lacked technical detail. But it turned out that he could supply that. If you have ever had to create a new sci­ ence in one of your stories, however far-fetched, give me title and page number; and everybody who answers will get a Xerox copy and credit in the talk that I want this material for— The talk I was going to give on that was canceled. But a number of answers arrived, one of them from Dr. T. J. Bassler, M.D., who writes occasional science fiction under the pseudonym of T. J. Bass. Dr. Bassler is a gerontologist. Every day he runs thirty miles with his over-seventy patients. (Naturally, when they first start out they can barely stagger a hundred yards—some of them—but they

My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story 209 are progressively guided, and assisted, until they also can jog thirty miles every day.) In his letter to me. Dr. Bassler said that when these oldsters can go the thirty-mile route their internal organs re­ semble those of teenagers; and that it is accordingly his belief that he has in his marathon running system the beginning of the science of immortality. So by this roundabout narrative account, we have fi­ nally arrived at the point where, with just a little bit more prelimi­ nary, I can state what my last words will most likely be. The other portion of my letter to the SFWA members began with three headings, as follows: "The Meaning of Life,” “The Meaning of the Universe,” and “Has Science Fiction Given Any Clues?” What I wrote for that was:

From a fairly early time in my career as an author, toward the end of my stories—1 would launch my subconscious into free associations, and within the frame of what I was writing— roughly—would just let it rattle on. The underlying premise was: in every rock, in every grain of sand, in every cell, there is a “memory” of ancient origins, and of the history of that bit of matter going back to the beginning of things. If we could but read the signals, we would have the answer to the riddle of life— Again, I asked for titles and page numbers of items which they, as authors of far-out stories, might consider relevant. In all those years, when I was letting my subconscious bounce around within the frame of this or that story, I often thought: Will I ever come up with anything about what preceded the Big Bang? One answer finally came: What arrived with the universe out of the Big Bang was a Thought Configuration. As you may observe that’s a pretty abstract concept. But it’s the first idea I ever had. I immediately began telling this thought to other people. And among my hearers was a friend, whom 1 see only occasionally—a professor of surgical medicine at the University of South Carolina. It was during a lunch when he came to town. And he immediately suggested an additional aspect. He said, “Why not a Goal Seeking Thought Configuration?” At once, I knew that at very least I had a marvellous ending for a science fiction story. When that goal seeking aspect comes to the moment when the goal takes form—fantastic has to be the word. I have included this idea in my screenplay for New World Pictures, Computerworld. I hope that the film industry is capable of doing the special effects I have written into that finale. But my real purpose in my letter was to locate a few more

210

A. E. van Vogt

possible clues in a search which began somewhere while 1 was doing my dianetic study. At that time, watching all those people, came the thought: could it be that a person who really eliminates the effect on his system of past shock, past illness, and other conditioning, could thus free his body of many aging influences, and live out his natural life span, whatever that might turn out to be. My exercise experi­ ment was aimed at aiding that goal. My dream therapy had the same goal. My journey to those childhood scenes in 1973 was designed to stimulate, or provide pictures that would stimulate, memories, which might then be disposed of by the dream or exercise tech­ niques. However, at this time 1 should clarify that the reason for taking the journey in that year had to do with Mayne. And my ostensible motivation was merely a cover-up to delude her. To explain that 1 need to go into her medical history. As 1 have said, we were married May 9, 1939- A couple of months later she had physical problems, and she went to see a doctor recom­ mended by a friend. As a consequence of this examination he per­ formed an operation which, among other things, removed her ap­ pendix. But new pains quickly developed. In late 194°’ when I was working for the Department of National Defense, she had another siege in the hospital and another operation—the purpose of which I cannot now recall. In 1944 we migrated to Los Angeles, and in 1945 Mayne had to have a tumor removed from one of her breasts. In 1947, we finally discovered a great doctor, who performed an opera­ tion to rectify the mistakes of that 1939 operation. "She was sewn back together in the wrong places,” he said. "No wonder she hurt all over.” He told me privately that in doing the correcting operation he had also removed a cyst from some interior organ. He considered it a bad sign, and he also felt negative when, in 1949, a second cyst had to be removed. In 1950 dianetics came along. Mayne abandoned writing and became a dianetic auditor (therapist). Her entire attitude changed. During the next twenty years she had two medical checkups, was pronounced in good health each time, and then in 1970 a dear friend—an attorney, James Struckmeyer of Phoenix, Arizona—died of cancer. Although it was August, Mayne and I drove through the desert heat to attend the funeral. On the way back Mayne suddenly burst into tears. And, after I had pulled over to the side of the road, she sobbed, “It’s the end of an era.” It was nearly ten years since I had essentially ended my dianetic career of always noticing everything that people said; and besides I was myself in a state of shock and disturbance; so I was not

My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story 211 alert to her sudden breakdown. Jim Struckmeyer had been our rea­ son for an annual Christmas visit to Phoenix, and our contact with some unusually interesting people in Arizona—super-ranchers and outstanding business people. Her outburst in the days when 1 was alert would have been the signal for me to probe immediately into underlying causes, with an intent of breaking the association right there. But 1 didn’t. And three weeks later there was blood in her urine. The subsequent operation on her bladder showed a cancerous condition, which was reported only to me, and I did not tell her. There were four more such operations. At which time, for various reasons—which I think I know but are not relevant to this account—the cancer went into a temporary remission. That’s when we took the trip. I actually did have the theory that I have described; and that u a.s the reason I gave to Mayne for taking the trip. But my actual purpose was based on my acceptance of the statement of the two attending doctors, to the effect that she was a terminal case. Accordingly, I wanted her to visit her sisters and brothers one last time. Toward the end of our journey, as we were coming down the coast to Los Angeles from Vancouver, Mayne, who had been in excellent spirits, began to have an all-over sick feeling. Her descrip­ tion of it chilled me. It sounded as if something much more basic was involved. And so, instead of making a couple of planned stopovers to visit friends, we came straight through in two days of driving. Her final operation did not take place until the doctors had tried a number of chemical aids. But when the surgeon finally opened her in May, 1974, he discovered the cancer had spread be­ yond the bladder. The rest, though it required another eight grueling months, was all downhill. And so it was on the night January 18, 1975. when a friend was visiting her, that Mayne sat up suddenly, uttered a piercing cry, and her last words, “1 want to speak to Eva!” she said to me when 1 rushed in. Eva was her older sister, who had died about six months earlier. The sister’s death, reported to me one midnight by Mayne’s brother in Winnipeg, was another piece of bad news that I had withheld. So now, she sat there, bolt upright, eyes staring wildly, saying nothing more as 1 patiently pointed out that it was midnight in Winnipeg, and that the nurses at the rest home would not allow Eva to come to the phone in her state of ill-health at that hour. With that explanation Mayne allowed herself to be lowered to a lying-down position. Whereupon, she seemed to fall asleep, which turned out to

212

A. E. van Vogt

be a coma from which never awakened. Thirty hours later, about 4:00 a.m. January 20, 1975, Mayne slipped from that coma into the death condition, whatever that may be. About eight months after Mayne’s death I began to have dizzy spells. And I actually staggered and fell a few times. Dis­ turbed, I hied myself off to a doctor. My blood pressure was still 120/80 and my pulse 70. But I had a low blood sugar condition and high fat content in my blood. Somehow all that emotion—grief dur­ ing Mayne’s illness and death, and severe guilt as I began to realize things I could have done for her—had eroded the virtually perfect physical condition which existed up to about the end of 1973. Natu­ rally, I cut out fats at once. And I read a book on low blood sugar, and followed the diet advice in it. About this time 1 learned for the first time that a large per­ centage of spouses normally died within the year after the passing of a husband or wife. That aroused my system interest. Another study began. What I found, then, was that what you actually are dealing with are vivid memories. Such memories can move in on you all through each day. The emotion of grief or guilt occurs only when the vivid memory has suddenly taken over the mind. No emotion occurs without the mental picture. Having discovered the association, I was curious. Years ago, 1 had read that there are in this country multi-millions of alcoholic widows. Obviously, these women had not died during the first year; so what was there about liquor? I started to take a swig whenever one of the mental images floated into my conscious awareness. It worked. The memories dimmed as long as I kept drinking. Interest­ ing, eh? Once again, I am forced to deduce that no one has ever before made such a precise observation of a condition. Many people have said: “Oh, I just can’t stand the feeling of grief. It’s just as if he died yesterday.” Notice that in such reactions the real culprit is overlooked. The mental picture has not been noticed by the victim or by any of the therapists they have gone to. Naturally, I didn’t intend alcoholism to be my solution. But if all else failed that was—I observed—one way to stop the erosion caused by the heavy continuous emotion that accompanied the vivid mental images. I talked to a woman who had remarried six months after her husband passed. “All our married life,” she told me, “he didn’t treat me right.” So she had no memories that produced grief or guilt. Another woman said: “When my husband died, I sold our furniture

My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story

213

and house, and moved from New York to Los Angeles, and I’ve made a new life for myself away from all associations that might remind me of him. And I never think of him. With those solutions of other persons in mind, and the real problem—the vivid memories—discovered, I began a system of my own that did not involve forgetting Mayne. Whenever a vivid mem­ ory came into my conscious awareness—and it happened many, many times—I looked at it, and said to it, in effect, ‘‘Not now— Sunday!” Meaning, all you images came through once a week only. After a while I made it once a month. And then once every six months. Which is where I have left it. Long ago, Hubbard said, you had to learn to get control of your automatic picture making ma­ chinery. And that turned out to be the method of dealing with an after-death situation. During the past four and three-quarter years I have been slowly finishing off science fiction book contracts ill-advisedly undertaken immediately after Mayne's death. My belief, in doing this, was that I should keep myself occupied. All the books so far completed were horribly overdue when finally delivered. I still have one to go—also long overdue. When that is done 1 shall resume my dream therapy and my exercise experiment in earnest—without my beautiful dog, alas; she also passed away—and we shall see if after so much travail, it is possible for a human being to live out a “natu­ ral” life-span in the meaning that I described earlier. But if all too soon, I find that the damage can no longer be rectified, picture me ruefully staring up at the ceiling of my hospital room, with the great mystery of death just ahead of me, saying, “I really don't think that anybody tried harder to reason his way out of man’s inevitable destiny”—meaning the death part of death and taxes. Because of these numerous unusual experiments and ideas, it could be that my life was my best science fiction story. Starting nowhere in particular—a little village in Saskatchewan, Canada— and arriving at an equally meaningless location (a hillside home over­ looking Hollywood). But as Campbell said of “Weapon Shop,” “It was a nice walk.” I have to add that I was really too busy and too inward look­ ing to notice the meandering journey through the park as the bright, wonderful thing it probably was. Maybe if I survive that should be my purpose: start noticing. (On October 6, 1979, A. E. van Vogt married Mrs. Lydia Brayman.

214 A. E. van Vogt The new Mrs. van Vogt is a former model, and has two grown-up children by a previous marriage. She has for some years now been a Superior Court interpreter for five languages, principally Russian.)

Bibliography NOVELS

Sian (1946) The Weapon Makers (1946) The Book of Ptath (1947) The World ofNull-A (1948) The Changeling (1950) The House That Stood Still (1950) Masters of Time (1950) The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1(750) The Weapon Shops of Isher (1(751) The Mixed Men (1952, also called Mission to the Stars) The Universe Maker (/95J) Planets for Sale (1954, with E. Mayne Hull) The Pawns of Null-A (195(1) Empire of the Atom (1957) The Mind Cage (1957) Siege of the Unseen (1959, also called The Three Eyes of Evil and The Chronicler) The War against the Rull (¡959) The Wizard of Linn (1962) The Violent Men (1962) The Beast (1963) Rogue Ship (1965) The Winged Man (1966, with E. Mayne Hull) The Silkie (1969) Children of Tomorrow (1970) Quest for the Future (1970) The Battle of Forever (1971) The Darkness on Diamondia (1972) Future Glitter (1973) The Man with a Thousand Names (1974) The Secret Galactics (1974, also called Eurth Factor X) The Anarchistic Colossus (1977) Supermind (1977) Renaissance (¡979) Cosmic Encounter (1980)

My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story 215 STORY COLLECTIONS

Out of the Unknown U948, with E. Mayne Hull) Away and Beyond (tg§2) Destination: Universe (tgs2) The Twisted Men U964) Monsters (1965) The Far Out Worlds of A. E. van Vogt (tg68) More than Superhuman (1971) M-33 in Andromeda (197/) The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders 0970 The Book of van Vogt (¡972; reissued as Lost: Fifty Suns) The Best of A. E. van Vogt U976) The Gryh U976) Pendulum 11^78)