Some notes, occasionally extended on (to steal Mailer's phrase) the talent in the room. Excluded are Convention program book encomia for friends ("X wields the heaviest glass and the heaviest pen in the business; what a great guy I thought as we shot geese together in the Antarctic"), blurbs for book covers or jackets ("Packed with color and excitement: a moving, terrifying experience, filled with all that wonder that Y has given us over and again starting with the Sunburst Trilogy) or reviews ("The Sunburst Trilogy, unoccupied by wonder, falls and falls like geese shot in the Antarctic"). The essay on Ballard—one of those noted earlier as showing the author clearly writing over his head—was commissioned for an anthology of critical essays on this writer's work. An anonymous reviewer for the University press to whom it was delivered targeted this essay as the worst in a bad collection "and of itself it indicates precisely why we should not publish this book." Which they did not. I am kind of proud of this but I do not know why.
The Asimov-Leonard Bernstein confluence struck me at the time and seems even spookier over the years. Both irreplaceable; I have through the madness of our millennial national adventures felt the absence of those voices as keenly as I would have responded to their presence.
Flowers for Daniel
(Daniel Keyes)
Most of us, sooner or later, come to understand the nature of the human condition . . . that slow stalk from darkness to light, from ignorance to at least a tentative understanding, from helplessness to accommodation . . . and then the slow or accelerating slide into extinction, incapacity, the darkness from which we struggled that was always our condition. For some, disaster or genetics speeds or suddenly truncates that journey, for others the slow procession toward understanding is impossible. But the traversal is generic; the greater number understand. Ecclesiastes, and so on.
That knowledge being so close to general, why does Flowers for Algernon, that encompassing story, that narrative of grief beyond metaphor, move us so? Why are the last pages of the novelette and the novel which is its expansion so shattering? "It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell," Oscar Wilde said of Dickens, but no such judgment has yet been made of the extinguishing of Charlie Gordon. Unbearable and yet—as art will permit—cathartic.
Why so moving? The narrative premise, perhaps—never before evoked, I am fairly sure. The story is framed as Charlie's diary, he speaks to us directly and his voice shifts through the situation. His voice is the situation. No mute, inglorious Milton here seen externally but the living, breathing, suffering thing itself, and, somewhere around the two-thirds point of the narrative, the stunned, then poised awareness of doom; the incalculable price of that acceptance. Nothing like this, really. The novel is successful, the details of Charlie's childhood, of filial shame and rapprochement, are touching . . . but the novelette is incomparable. It needs no further detail. It is stark, yet lush in its traversal of that disaster which the philosophers instruct us is the "human condition."
Flowers for Algernon was only the fifth or sixth story published by Daniel Keyes, who gives autobiography and the link between autobiography and this story in his memoir, Algernon, Charlie, and I very well. There was only one Keyes story in the science fiction magazines after the appearance of the novelette. In 1968, three years after publication of the novel, his only other novel published in his country, The Touch, appeared, and in the early 19705 a nonfiction biography of ESP and telekinesis, The Minds of Billy Milligan. The Touch, a curiously prescient novel of breakdown in a nuclear installation and the disastrous effect fear of contamination has upon its employees, was undervalued; published a little more than a decade before Three Mile Island and the movie The China Syndrome (and a decade and a half before the film Silkwood), it is a brilliant adumbration of issues which had not until that time entered the general consciousness. Alas, for all its great merit, the novel failed to find any support from its publisher, failed then to reach its intended audience.
This is not true of Flowers for Algernon. It found its intended audience, that audience being everyone. The novelette became a novel, television adaptation, feature film, musical, other adaptations, television series in Japan, most recently a new film for television. Keyes, as he writes in Algernon, Charlie, and I, became the man who hit the lottery, made the jackpot, scored the Ultimate Tip and thus brought home the big winner, but he did so not through the exercise of chance but, one might theorize, through the avoidance of chance; there were a hundred ways in which Flowers for Algernon could have gone wrong, could have collapsed into sentiment or fakery, but craft took Keyes the right way, every time.
And the power, the beauty, the absolute effectiveness of this work also say something about science fiction, our dear old field which we often painfully, but always earnestly celebrate in these volumes.
Note this: of the five most famous and influential stories in the corpus of what we call modern science fiction* (SF published subsequent to the first issue of Amazing Stories dated April 1926), two of them are by writers who are known to the general public and largely within the field itself only by those stories, writers whose careers without those stories would, however honorable, be modest. What does this mean?
Here is what I think it means: that voice, the great voice of science fiction, the power of our medium, its resonance, vision, possibility, has created a body of literature which at its best could have been told in no other way. This great task, great burden, alchemy of spirit and machine, manages to somehow have subsumed all of its creators, has opened the way to the final mystery and its power to us all. We are made one with Algernon and Charlie Gordon before and after, yes certainly after, that great fall itself.
Falling from the Air
(Alice Sheldon)
I want to write about Alice Sheldon whose brightness fell from the air and fell and fell on May 2, 1987, and I will probably do not much better a job than John Clute, dearly science fiction's best critic and essayist, was able to manage in his introduction to the Arkham House collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1974) (Clute is appalled by the power and the darkness of the work but perhaps does not see it as the clear paradigm of autobiography which it seems to be; this may be the one insight in which I have the better of Clute but otherwise there is something about Sheldon which silences everyone, she incited adoration or revulsion but probably less useful comment than any major science fiction writer of our time).
Alice Sheldon—who wrote of course as "James Tiptree, Jr." for the first years of her career, 1968-1976, and a little bit as "Racoona Sheldon" in the later years of that period and then under her own name after the revelation of her identity (essentially she exposed herself, she permitted her true persona to be known because it was time to end a deception which perhaps she felt had shaded toward mockery and then self-mockery and then, possibly, dangerously toward a real self-contempt—was perhaps the best short story writer who ever worked within this field. Her two novels, Up the Walls of the World (1978) and Brightness Falls From the Air (1985) do not come anywhere near her achievement at the short-story length and it is possible that there may be reserved for her that particular and painful obscurity found by writers who were indisputably better in that form or who did not write novels at all. There are exceptions—Poe, of course, and John Collier and John Cheever who did some fairly strong novels—but writers like Stanley Ellin, Borden Deal, Henry Slesar, Henry Kuttner, Cyril Kornbluth are already in that kind of trouble or drifting in that direction. (Slesar is very much alive and made a fortune writing The Edge of Night, he also won a first novel Edgar way back in 1958, he most likely does not give a damn about this judgment.) Sheldon's achievement in the short story is so significant and so exceeds recognition of her novels that she may turn out to be the central example of this kind of critical and market judgment: the short story is not particularly valued in this country and our publishing process has never been geared toward lending it permanence. Or a wide audience.
It is fairly easy to understand why Alice Sheldon was so much better in the short story. The territory which she was working, the absolute equation if not interchangeability of sex and death was one part of the answer although of course there are a fair number of novelists who have managed quite well in extending that mutuality to book length. (Almost none in science fiction, however; Silverberg's Born with the Dead may take the issue as far as it has gone in any episodic sense and it is a 30,000 word novella.) What characterizes Sheldon, however, would be the question of her structures; they are intricate, tightly interwoven and calculated to pay off within a narrow and intense compass. Early stories like "The Man Who Walked Home" (1972) show a ruptured chronology which only makes sense in retrospect and only when the last piece has been placed; later stories like "Morality Meat" (1985) and "Backward Turn Backward" (posthumously published in Crown of Stars, 1988) are even more intricate. One can find out what is happening in these works only by pursuing them to the very end and it is only in retrospect at this point that the work assembles.
Sheldon herself understood this, knew how deliberate and deliberately off-putting her narrative attack was. "Start fifty feet underground and at the end of everything," she said in a letter, "and then, don't tell them," an approach reminiscent of Beater's insistence that one tried to find the point of a story at which matters were about to reach their highest point and explode, then you went beyond that to the point at which the explosion had occurred "and then you start the story . . . attack, attack, always attack." In both cases, it is the voice of the short-story writer we hear, the writer focused upon the peripety and its awful consequences, looking for that one frozen moment of utter consequence and obtained oblivion. Bester was able to slide around this particular curse probably because he had Horace Gold watching out for him in the two great novels, probably because it was Gold who insisted that Ben Reich and Gully Foyle's obsessions were enacted repeatedly in chapter after chapter and never solved until, penultimately, these men were destroyed; Tiptree and later Sheldon had little editing at all in a different era and tended to work toward her epiphanies and then quit.
Chiaroscuro technique, then, an anatomization of narrative to assemble only in retrospect. The technique needs close analysis and sometimes tends to be self-defeating. ("Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (1970) is a novella which simply fails to make sense for so long that when the rather banal and brutal denouement at last appears, it tends to flatten the story, make it trite rather than intricate) but the equation of sex and death which was the thematic obsession of this writer needs little close analysis or analysis at all, it was simply there from nearly the beginning and it reaches such a point of explicitness in The Screwfly Solution" (1977) that, as good as that story is, it seems to be close to self-parody.
In "The Screwfly Solution" that line which (barely) keeps the aggression-driven sex drive in the human male from being actively dangerous to the female is obliterated by malevolent aliens interested in depopulating the planet; the story is told in the telegraphic series of dispatches, letters, communiques and stream-of-consciousness reminiscent of Sherred's "E for Effort" (1947) and shows the males, in a kind of frozen self-awareness, killing their women again and again; the story may have begun as a feminist metaphor but passes into a concrete, graphic horror. The same theme underlies "The Milk of Paradise" (1972) showing intercourse with aliens as transcendence in death, it is what drives "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" (1971) in which the biological imperative within the human male to copulate ever further from the basic affinity group leads to obsessive intercourse with aliens and death. Sex is death in these stories then, usually the kind of sex practiced by the male but these are not feminist tracts (Sheldon, after her emergence in 1976 in her true identity was more or less taken up by those in the sf community identifying as feminist) as they are dreadful visions, more painful than accusatory, of biological imperative carried toward personal obliteration. The paradigmatic Sheldon story, of course, "The Women Men Don't See" (1973) to its wry title, Sheldon's conscious message and self-mockery to the community, is a dazzling, multi-leveled uninflected piece of social commentary; the levels here are so dazzling—a woman writing under a man's name in the first-person of a male protagonist who is neither the center of the story nor comprehending of anything going on here—as to be flabbergasting and the premise and conclusion of this story, like those of "Vintage Season" (1940) or "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To" (1963) or "E for Effort" have been appropriated by so many writers for so many works that only a diminishing percentage of contemporary readers can trace those stories back to their source. The stark ending—the two women begging the aliens to take them away because it cannot possibly be worse for them out there than it is here—now seems inevitable and predictable but I do believe that Sheldon introduced it into science fiction and then proceeded to do it so well and with such finality that all of those other works can only be imitations, they are not extensions.
The external details of Sheldon's odyssey are probably as well known as those of any writer—those World War II years "spent in a Pentagon basement," the midlife doctorate in experimental psychology, the entrance into science fiction under the James Tiptree, Jr. persona in the late sixties when she wrote some stories as a respite from the doctoral orals, the burgeoning reputation,, the mysterious persona, the post office box in CIA territory, the rumors that this was a CIA employee, the interviews-by-mail and strange postcards cascading upon so many of us, the 1975 Ballantine collection with the Silverberg introduction insisting that despite some rumors to the contrary, "the Tiptree stories could have been written only by a man," the self-revelation in 1976, the cautious revelation of her identity and background, what is regarded by many (Clute most notably) as the slow weakening of the work after the pseudonym and anonymity have been sacrificed and the spectacular murder-and-suicide, front page of the Washington Post on 5/2/87, a suicide directly refracted and foreshadowed explicitly in several of the last stories ("Backward Turn Backward" (1988) and, horrifyingly, the posthumous "In Midst of Life" (1987)). But I suspect that these are indeed only details, only facts and scantily assembled facts at that; "facts are the enemy of truth" as the Man of La Mancha reminded his companion and the truth is something hard, terrible and rigorous. These stories were from the start, barring an occasional predilection for low comedy and pratfalls as in "Birth of a Salesman" (1968), rigorous, self-enclosed and adumbrating a vision of the human and alien condition so bleak and imposing as to defy emotional embrace and make necessary the occasion and profusion of pseudo-technological, pseudo-extrapolative jargon simply as a means of making this material bearable. Well, it is very hard to find the summation here. There is no summation, not really, every major career is ongoing, even when it is not. I knew her a little (but only by mail) and read her a lot and was floored by the posthumous collection, CROWN OF STARS (Tor, 1988) which I reached only recently (I had read "Yanqui Doodle" on publication in 7/87) and which seems to me utterly devastating. I hope this work lasts. I am not sure that it will but Kuttner's stories seem to stay around and so do Bester's in the occasional anthology and there are worse fates. Her real point may be too bleak, frightening for a general audience and she did not shield that vision in the lollipop-and-Halloween paraphernalia which characterizes Lovecraft but I don't think that her work is going to date and she provides certain satisfactions which Lovecraft, Dunsany and Bram Stoker did not. (Mary Shelley, maybe.) As Jimmy Cannon wrote in a eulogy of Hemingway in 1962, and in terms of the short story at least, she was our best writer, I think.
Dark of the Knight
An Introduction And Epilogue
(Damon Knight)
Damon Knight grew up in Hood River, Oregon, made himself first known in the science-fiction field via a classic demolition in a fan magazine (despite the fact that the magazine had a circulation of no more than two hundred, the review had significant consequences upon two careers), and, like most bright people of his generation, fled to Manhattan. He worked briefly in a literary agency (the same one I worked in almost twenty years later), collaborated with James Blish on "Tiger Ride" for Astounding—this was his first major sale—wrote a few pulp stories under various pseudonyms, became a freelance illustrator and editor, and began to publish s-f widely. His "Not with a Bang," which leads off this collection, created some talk in the fall of 1949; by the mid-1950s he had established himself at the top of his field by steadily putting out sardonic and elegantly crafted pieces for the magazines. He wrote a few novels, too, one of which—A for Anything—is probably a masterpiece.
In the mid-fifties Knight's career as a creative writer began to slow up; he became a reviewer, then a critic, and wrote for a number of publications the first body of literate criticism in the history of science fiction. (His criticism was later collected in an important book, In Search of Wonder.) Around 1960 he got tired of criticism and turned to editing the Orbit series while he got back to fiction on a modest scale. "Down There," the last story in this volume and Knight's most recent, strikes me as being the best he's written, so one can hardly say that Knight has deteriorated in his middle age; in fact, he's a better writer than ever. He lives placidly and happily now with his wife, the distinguished writer Kate Wilhelm, in a big house in Florida, and he talks of never coming to New York again.
This is a bare enough outline of a working life, yet in the interstices you can see suggestions of the dimensions of the accomplishment. I submit that a good case could be made for Damon Knight's being the most important literary figure to come out of science fiction to date. He has, in the first place, excelled in everything he's done—editing, criticism, novels, short stories, and some extraordinary dirty limericks, too. In the second place, his reputation as critic and editor has obscured to younger writers and readers the fact that the body of fiction he produced in the 1950s was superb. Of all the writers H. L. Gold developed for Galaxy, Knight was probably the most characteristic and often the best at social satire and criticism. That he was not merely a satirist but a writer of great passion and stylistic range can be seen in stories like "The Handler" and "Masks," which are included here.
Always underrated (even by himself) as a novelist, he has produced several ignored works of quality—of which the aforementioned A for Anything, temporarily and unfortunately out of print, stands to last as long as any novel of its decade. (It was published in the late fifties.) A stunning portrait of a feudal society built upon the deliberate repression of abundance, A for Anything has the veracity of a political handbook and the conciseness and inevitability of a good scatological joke. It also has a conclusion that strikes me as being the single most depressing in science-fiction novels. I recommend it to you highly, and I also think you ought to take a look at Mind Switch (1964), an extension of his novella "The Visitor in the Zoo"; it strikes me as being the only novel in the manner of Garnett's Lady into Fox that has anything new to say.
And of course I recommend In Search of Wonder. Knight's original modest proposal was simply that science fiction is a branch of literature to which one can—and has to—apply the same critical standards one would apply to any other branch of literature. Out of reasonable scholarship, a good command of the history of the modern novel, and a shattering wit, Knight produced a critical work that stands by itself and is essentially responsible for any informed criticism of science fiction coming out today.
In short, Knight is a man of stature and quality, a writer of importance, and a writer whose works will be a new and perhaps jarring experience for many people who were not around when this oeuvre was being built block by block.
At some basic level I owe almost all the critical apparatus with which I now deal with science fiction to Damon Knight, and I owe practically to him alone my first astonished realization in the early fifties that, by God, science fiction not only was a lot of fun . . . it could be written by its best practitioners so as to correspond to (though never duplicate) the best of work done anywhere.
—Teaneck, N.J.
September, 1975
Epilogue: After 27 Years
Pocket Books brought out eight of these science fiction "Best" collections in 1976. Adele Leone Hull (later Adele Leone the agent; she died a few years ago) commissioned me to write all of the Introductions and that to The Best of Damon Knight was the last to appear within that short compass. Oh, how your Damon and mine must have shuddered, reading this. The small illiteracies ("career as a creative writer began to slow up"), the tortured phraseology ("critical apparatus with which I now deal with science fiction"), tortured relationship with grammar ("the same one I worked in almost twenty years later") bring me to quivering and shamed alertness now. If they do this to me, what would they have done to the fearsome apostrophe detective, the merciless hunter and trapper of false tropes?
But Damon was in fact nice about it all. In a letter of response to the essay which had been sent in manuscript, his only objection was to the first sentence with its evocation of a "classic demolition." Damon wanted to let it go; all of that had happened a long time ago. I pointed out that his "critical demolition" in the mid-forties had been of pivotal importance to the history of science fiction: it was, perhaps, the first rigorous criticism any science fiction writer had received on the proper terms. Rigorous because it took the premise of the work as honorable and examined the degree to which the premise had been betrayed. That was quite a distance from Asimov's portrait of the pre-atomic bomb literary critics "Who thought that science fiction was just a bunch of crazy stories for kids."
Science fiction was anything but such by 1945, of course . . . but it took Damon and James Blish as the first serious critics with primary background in the field, to prove that this was so and that our potential was limitless. That criticism moved in a swift arc over a decade and a half and was collected by Advent in 1964 as In Search of Wonder. Damon by that time had moved on to the Orbit series and an editorial career which to some degree eclipsed the critical writings.
Also somewhat shrouded was the fiction, as the Introduction noted. The fiction is beyond remarkable. My considered judgment—long after his hot 1950s and more than a quarter of a century after the paperback collection which at 100,000 words was a microcosm—is that Knight produced the finest body of short fiction to emerge from the confines of the genre. There was competition from his contemporaries and predecessors—Kuttner/Moore, Pohl, Sturgeon of course, Phil Klass—and there was competition from those who came after: Silverberg, Tiptree, Avram Davidson . . . but the quality of Knight's work at the top is astonishing and almost all of the stories are at that top. It is impossible to locate a single "best" story or even ten best. There are at least forty at the highest level and through the whole body of work there are no weak stories. (Well, maybe "A Likely Story," a kind of jumped-up fan fiction which ran in Swank Magazine in 1956. To prove that Homer nodded.) "Anachron," "Country of the Kind," "What Rough Beast," "Ask Me Anything," "Ticket to Anywhere," "Four-In-One," "Man in the Jar," and on and on . . . there are maybe four or five stories in the entire run of the O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories anthologies from the 1950s and 1960s which are at this level of craft. Damon was a better short story writer through the range of his work than Bernard Malamud or J.D. Salinger. I have done the research. I can defend this.
The novels are, as they say, uneven but A for Anything (also published as The People Maker) is, as I noted 27 years ago, remarkably accomplished. Unlike almost anyone, Damon's novelistic skills improved as he aged: Why Do Birds and Humpty-Dumpty: An Oval represent a new level of accomplishment. That latter novel, in fact, is comparable to the Ninth Symphony in E Minor of Ralph Vaughan-Williams which was written when the composer was 85; it is a visionary work coming from and pointing toward the undiscovered countries. No way of knowing what the Tenth Symphony or Damon Knight's next novel might have been but the clues are fascinating. These men, never old, soldiered on and on through the far lands.
Remarkable too that the short stories (of which no improvement could have been asked) held to their stunning level throughout Damon's entire working life. "Fortyday," published in Asimov's in 1994 (it appears in Nebula Awards 30 to mark Damon's Grand Master year and is the best story in that very good anthology) is flabbergasting. It appeared 45 years after "Not With a Bang," more than four decades after "The Analogues" and "Four-In-One." This is as pure an accomplishment, as miraculous a commission as Jack Williamson's Nebula and Hugo for a novella written in his 90s.
