A, B, C

Foreword

The Jewels of Aptor…

The Ballad of Beta-2…

They Fly at Çiron…

Aptor, Beta-2, Çiron…A, B, C, and there’s my title.

The subtitle tells what follows: Three Short Novels.

This book contains my first published novel, a science fantasy, The Jewels of Aptor, much as I wrote it in the winter of 1961–62. Officially it was released December 1, 1962. I saw copies late that November.

As I’d conceived and written the book, its audience was my brilliant, talented wife of those years, the poet Marilyn Hacker — nine months younger than I but always at least a year ahead of me in school. Walking up and over the school roof to get to classes, as all the entering students had been instructed to do, so as not to bother the elementary school students with whom we shared the building, we’d met on our first day of high school. Two years later Marilyn went on to NYU as an early admissions student at fifteen and finished her classes in three years. When we married on August 24, 1961, she was eighteen and I was nineteen.

Those interested in the invaluable part she played in discussing the ideas in Aptor and getting it published — she wrote some of the poetic spells in the book — can read about it in my autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (1988; exp., 1992). Without her, it wouldn’t — it couldn’t have happened. After our marriage, Marilyn’s first job was with the publisher, Ace Books. She took my manuscript in under a pen name. That’s how it was submitted. That’s how it was read. That’s how it was accepted.

Only when contracts were drawn up, did she admit that the writer was her husband — and the name on the contracts was hastily changed to mine.

Eventually it got a few (generous) reviews; but the thousand-dollar advance I received — $500 on contract signing in April and $500 in December on publication — back then would have covered fifteen months of our $52-a-month rent on our second-floor, four-room tenement apartment — rent for more than a year! (Would that it did so today.) And I could think, “Hey, I’m making my living as a writer!”

And I had a publisher. If I handed in anything that more or less met my editor’s genre expectations, I assumed, I could sell it.

For my second book (what today is They Fly at Çiron), I took two old fantasy stories and quickly wrote three more. Each section had as a protagonist someone who was a minor character in one of the others. One involved only a name change for a character in one of the already completed tales.^{1} Nor were the landscapes the tales took place in much related to one another. Rapidly reading over passages, I decided on a few more things that might connect them and wrote out bridges from one to the next. But I put into Çiron neither the time nor the intensity of thought and imagination I had put into Aptor.

A few weeks after I handed it in to Ace Books, Don Wollheim rejected it.

Today, I feel that rejection was the most important thing that happened to me in my first years of publishing. I’ll try to explain how and why it was so useful, so instructive, so important — though I don’t know if, finally, it’s possible to describe it in a definitive way.

Understand, I’d had novels rejected before. I’d been writing them since I was thirteen, and from seventeen on I had been submitting them to New York publishers — who’d been declining them. But also I’d been getting a fair amount of attention for them. Two years before, Marie Ponsot, a poet who had been very supportive of both Marilyn and me, spoke to her friend Margaret Marshall, an editor at Harcourt Brace. At Marie’s request and on the strength of one of those early manuscripts, Marshall had secured me a work-study scholarship for the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College, Vermont. While attending the novel-writing workshops and lectures on the grassy and sunny Middlebury campus, where, even before the inception of the already legendary conference, novelists as varied as Anthony Hope and Willa Cather had written some of their most critically acclaimed pieces, I’d worked those two July weeks as a waiter in a white-painted dining room with square glass panes in the window doors along one wall. I’d attended the lectures, readings, and novel-writing workshops; I’d talked with writers and editors, new and established, and I’d found two or three who were willing to read my work and were even enthusiastic about it. Both before and since Bread Loaf, I’d submitted my novels. They’d been rejected too. What remains from those rejections, however, are the hours or even days of encouragement preceding them.

Wollheim’s rejection, brief and final, I recall, however, with documentary clarity.

Wollheim phoned me at our apartment on East Fifth Street. The phone sat on an end table, discarded by my mother-in-law in the Bronx, and I sat on the armchair’s arm. He said, “Hi, Chip. This is Don — Don Wollheim. I read your second manuscript this weekend.” Somewhere in an office on Forty-eighth Street in Midtown, he paused. “I don’t think they quite make a book, Chip. So I’ll pass on them. But I’m certainly interested in seeing the next one you do. Okay?”

I said, “Oh…um, yeah. Okay. Yes, I see! Um…thanks.”

Don said, “You’re welcome. So long.”

I said, “Good-bye…Um, Good-bye,” and hung up, surprised and disappointed.

I was twenty. It was still painful when I wrote about it in my autobiography twenty-five years later, so I told it there as quickly as I could. Here’s a little more of the tale:

I wanted to talk to Marilyn — badly — but she was out looking for work; so after I hung up I went downstairs and outside for a walk, to think over what had happened. It seemed clear, though.

One reason why I felt it so deeply was because with this particular rejection, the rejection of what would become Çiron, I had been turned down by an editor (and publisher) who had accepted something already.

Walking through the chill spring slums, I thought about the differences between the kind of work I’d done for the book that had been accepted (so enthusiastically, too), and the kind for the book that had been turned down (so summarily). With Aptor, before each scene, each writing session at the writing table, or with my notebook, cross-legged on the daybed, I’d worked to picture as many details of that scene and its physicality as I could. Many of those scenes had begun as disturbingly vivid dreams, so that for a number of them — the waterfront, the jungle, the beach, the temple, and the morning light or the evening light that suffused them — already I had complete images in mind, in some cases unsettlingly so.

Others, though, I’d had to visualize from scratch.

Aptor had commanded high imaginative involvement throughout. I had not used all the results or even most of them. But having them when I needed them seemed to loan the work (for me) coherence and authority.

For Çiron, however, I’d taken some odd texts, hastily forced them into what I thought might do for a linear narrative, which I’d realized in the hour since the rejection was nowhere near linear enough. I had read over passages quickly and decided what might connect them to the next and wrote it out; but I’d put into it neither the time nor the intensity of thought and imagination I had put into the earlier book.

For a scene here or there I’d done a bit of the mental work. But the things that I’d felt (that I’d hoped…) had made Aptor lively, vivid, and given it momentum, were the things I’d failed to do in Çiron. Don had read it, felt how thin it was. Now, so did I — and I realized as well what the world’s reaction would be, as exemplified by Don and Ace Books.

I’m glad I saw this — with only a sentence from Wollheim to prompt me over the phone, a kindness granted my second book doubtless because he’d published my first, and probably because I was twenty. In those days, young writers starting to sell, when and if they found themselves in that position, often didn’t understand this.

It didn’t need to be another kind of written piece. It needed to be a better quality piece. The book didn’t need more sex. It didn’t need more violence. It didn’t need more action. It needed to be better organized from start to finish. It needed to be more richly imagined, first part to final. That meant I had to do the work, start to finish, I hadn’t done. Had I done it, that work would have suggested better organization because I would have seen the material more vividly along with its many incoherent lax spots. The missing or extraneous material would have stood out more clearly and provided me with a clearer view of how to fix it — delete, insert, rewrite, expand, replace, connect to something earlier or farther on, several of them or one, the choice hinging on the clarity and intensity of my apprehension of the whole book.

As I’d read and reread Aptor, during its composition, that’s how the details had come to me: in further specifics of landscape, characterization, psychology, dialogue, and incidents for the story.

This was the work I hadn’t done on Çiron.

I thought this, however, not because any of it had been mentioned in the workshops at Bread Loaf or in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel or in Lajos Egris’s The Art of Dramatic Writing or in Orwell’s essays or even in Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or Lectures in America — books I’d read on writing that already had been, up till then, so helpful. Today I suspect five different writers, each going through some version of this, might go through it in five different ways and arrive at five different conclusions, all of which would accomplish much the same. What seemed most important, however, as I walked through the smells and confusion of our crowded neighborhood was: think about this seriously. Your life hangs on it. (That’s another year’s rent you don’t have now…!) You can’t fuck around….

It’s surprising how far that can take you — about anything.

Returning from my walk, past the East Side tenements, the fish store on Avenue C, turning into the dead end of East Fifth Street where we lived, walking over the broken pavement before the parking garage’s gaping door, by the plate-glass window edged in the flaking paint of the bodega next to it, set back, and up three steps, I thought: if I’m a writer and I want my pieces to place, I have to do that work.

This was not a case of writing the kind of pieces that would place. I could decide that pretty easily. I needed to write the quality of pieces that would place. It was neither the acceptance nor the rejection that had been so instructive, but the differences between them and what I knew now I might expect from each, and the information about my future in the world those differences comprised.

I knew what the two kinds of work felt like, behind my face, in my belly, along my arms, in my feet against the floor, my hands moving over the typewriter keys or across the notebook pages as I gripped my ballpoint, now that I could associate each with their different results.

If each had a shape, a shape I could grasp at in the world, even if those shapes were not entirely pensive, spatial, mental, or muscular, descriptions of their form or the content that could arrive to fill them out would always be incomplete — including this one. But now I had a nonverbal sense of what each was.

When Marilyn came home, we talked about what I might do. In my journal I’d already made notes on possible projects. One was the barest sketch for a trilogy of SF novels that would show what war was like in its effects on the country attacking, rather than the country invaded.

After several conversations with Marilyn, a few days later we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to visit some friends in Brooklyn Heights for brunch. Walking back, we talked about it more. When we got home, I sat down in front of the typewriter, typed out a title page for the entire project, and began the first of the three-volume series I had planned out with her, and began the work I needed to generate the material necessary to construct its first volume, in order to write the best book that, at that very immature age, I could manage.

Basically I’d decided that if I was going to write something of the highest quality I could achieve, it had best be about something I felt was important. And we were a country at war.

It was a lot of work — I’ve written about it several times. The middle volume was more work than I’d ever imagined it might be. Often, I was afraid the work would defeat me. There are places where I believe it did. But I also knew, by now, that if I didn’t do it, not only couldn’t I sell it, but I couldn’t live with myself either. By now I was afraid to avoid the work or to try for shortcuts.

The three books of The Fall of the Towers are not here. But they are still in print.

It’s worth repeating: the rejection of Çiron gave me the chance to compare two things I had written, not in terms of the differences between the surfaces of the texts, but rather the differences between the mental work I had done writing the accepted text and the mental work I had shirked writing the rejected one.

The writing of The Ballad of Beta-2 came along to interrupt the trilogy, during the time I’d thought, for a while, the second volume would stop me. I began it in the middle of that stalled second book. I wanted to write a short novel unconnected to the War of Toromon, so that I could give myself the feeling of starting and completing something. Soon I realized I had to stop (or more accurately realized I had already stopped) thinking about selling in order to attain and sustain the level I was reaching for — and always missing and going back in hope of pulling myself closer. Today I suspect even that conflict muddled the causes of the problems I was having.

The Ballad of Beta-2 itself was interrupted when I managed to get back my wind on the trilogy’s recalcitrant book two. After the third volume appeared, I finished Beta-2. (Yes, I managed to complete the trio; after volume two, work on the third was as surprisingly easy as, for the second book, it had been unexpectedly hard. That meant — to me — it was time to go on to projects which would be harder.) Beta-2 appeared as the shorter half of another Ace Double at the start of 1965 and then in an Ace volume containing The Ballad of Beta-2 and another of my short science-fiction novels, Empire Star. In 1982 Beta-2 was again released by Ace, this time in a stand-alone paperback that remained in print till 1987. Altogether the book had a run of twenty-two years in print, as did The Jewels of Aptor.

Although They Fly at Çiron was, in fact, the third of the three here to be published (which is how it earns its “C”), while I think of it as my second novel, actually it was my nineteenth published. The reason I published it at all is because in 1991, in Amherst, Massachusetts, I took it out and reworked it end to end.

In 1993 They Fly at Çiron had two separate hardcover printings, a trade hardcover and a special edition, both from Ron Drummond’s incomparable small press, Incunabula. Two years later, a hardcover and a mass-market paperback followed from Tor Books.

The above is all to say, whether the effort was wasted, invisible, or has somehow left its signs either in pleasing or in awkward ways, by the time these three were actual books, I’d worked on them as hard as I could — as did the publishers to see that they were successful in the marketplace — and I hope it says it in a way that conveys three further facts (the second of which I’ll return to in my “Afterword”):

First, with each book, moments arrived in the creation process when the text felt as if it required more work than I could possibly do. I gave up. I despaired. Then I came back and tried to do it anyway. In short, it was a process like any other human task. What made it different, however, was that it was primarily internal: the “shape” of its internality made it wholly of itself and only indirectly and incompletely communicable in any rigorous way.

Second, over a very, very long time — tens of thousands to multiple millions and even billions of years, rather than over decades or centuries — a congruence arises between creatures and the conditions that are the landscapes in which they and we dwell.^{2} Along with that congruence arises the illusion of a guiding intelligence. (There may be a truth behind the illusion. There may not be. But that is metaphysics, however, and not our concern here. The similarly structured illusion of direct animal and human communication through the senses, by the same process imposes the effect/illusion of a metaphysics we arrogantly presume must exist behind our necessarily mediated perceptions to form a reality resonant with our aesthetic wonders and distress, our appetitive pleasures and pain, our political urgencies, disasters, and satisfactions, and their largely unseen structuring forces: another illusion, another effect. The same indirect process that feels so direct to us (and probably to all the animals who utilize it) is what allows wolves to bay out to warn their pack of danger or approaching prey — and humans to tell stories, gossip, and write novels, as well as create cultures: the cultures we form are the only realities we have, however, or can have any access to, and our ignorance of which, when we are aware of it, all too infrequently we take as a mandate for both honesty and humility (the engine of ethics at its best), even as these realities of which we are a part create the curiosities, the yearnings, the passions to know so often perceived to be that arrogance itself. That these multiple realities are parsimoniously plural, however (without having been directly caused by evolution; only the ability to construct them and respond to them is evolutionary, not what is constructed), is the first, but by no means the strongest, evidence for their complex relations,^{3} however functional or problematic their multiplicity.

Third, the work of art — a sculpture we carve or a novel we write — can be and can exhibit a complex structure that appears to mimic some of the world (some of one reality or another; or even some of one that does not exist) because it evolves from the world; it mimics it in much the way certain insects camouflage themselves as the bark or the leaves of the trees they sometimes rest on, in the same way that intelligence can sometimes mimic something greater than itself, both spatially and temporally, even while simpler in its details and less protracted in operation; thus we can camouflage what we have to say as a series of happenings from life. And sometimes something that is not mind but that here and there entails one or millions of minds, at different levels and at different tasks — mind that is as likely to be on the way out (like gigantism in dinosaurs) as it is to be developing into something more useful, the results of which we will not live to see because it (they) will not manifest in any way we might notice or even it itself might notice or comprehend — if ever — for another handful of millions of years or more, is only another wrinkle in the bark or the leaf — another fold in the monad, as Leibniz would have it.

The possibility that from time to time such aesthetic work as I have so inadequately described can create anything of interest is another effect: direct causality between work and result is as much an effect here as is any other sort of communication. But because that interest is communicated and therefore indirect, incomplete, constituted of its own inaccuracy and slippage, already there in whatever education from which we can construct our experience of utterances (including what can be spoken about), or of texts (including what can be written about; and they are not necessarily the same). From time to time, locally or briefly, however, something of interest occurs. We suspect it does mostly because, however briefly and locally, we are interested.