The Avram Davidson Treasury : a tribute collection

Foreword OH, AVRAM, AVRAM, WHAT A WONDER YOU WERE! by Robert Silverberg

HE WAS A SMALLISH, rumpled, bearded man who had the look of a rabbi for some down-at-the-heels inner-city Orthodox congregation. He had a rabbi’s arcane erudition, a rabbi’s insight into human foibles, a rabbi’s twinkling avuncular charm, a rabbi’s amiable self-mocking modesty; and, of course, a rabbi’s profound faith in Judaism, at least until, to my amazement if not his own, he gave up all his obsessive observance of the myriad Jewish rules and regulations and converted late in life to an exotic Japanese cult called Tenrikyo. He was also one of the finest short-story writers ever to use the English language, as the fortunate readers of this book are about to discover, or to rediscover, whichever is the case.

I can’t remember when or precisely where I met him, though it had to have been in New York City somewhere between 1956 and 1961. During those years I lived in a spacious and pleasant apartment on the fourth floor of a building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and I distinctly recall Avram’s coming to visit me on a Friday night — the eve of the Jewish Sabbath — when, as I had forgotten at the time, it is forbidden for Orthodox Jews to perform any sort of mechanical labor. The prohibition extends even unto pressing a button to summon an elevator; and so Avram diligently walked up the four flights of stairs to my apartment that evening, and walked down again when he left, which struck me — Jewish also, but not particularly observant — as a charming but bizarre adherence to Talmudic dogma.

But I think we must have met even before that, for why would I have invited an utter stranger to my apartment? I can’t tell you where that first Davidson-Silverberg encounter took place, though my memory for such things normally is extraordinarily precise. And, oddly, considering the rare precision of Avram’s own memory, he came to forget the details of our first meeting also, as I know from the evidence of a letter from him dated July 17, 1971, in which Avram wrote, apropos of nothing in particular, “We — you and I — first met in an apt in Mannahattoe; but whose? Fit would help you to recall, you had been talking about a story you’d just then written, ‘…and on this planet the people have no sexual parts, they’re all built like dolls…’ Hey! a great title! ‘All Built Like Dolls.’ But you can have it if you like.”

I quote this not only to illustrate that Avram was capable of forgetting things occasionally too, but also to demonstrate certain notable idiosyncracies of the man and of his style. Consider his use of the archaic term “Mannahattoe” for “Manhattan”—the original uncorrupted Native American name for that island in New York Harbor, which the Dutch twisted into the form used today, and which Avram of course knew, paying me the compliment of expecting that I would know it too. (I did.) Note also his genial colloquialism “Fit” for “If it,” and the borrowing from his friend and colleague Philip K. Dick in his use of “apt” for “apartment,” and the generosity implicit in his offering me, without strings, the story title he had plucked from my account of my own recent story. (A story of which, by the way, I have no recollection whatever; but all this was close to forty years ago, and there are a lot of stories I wrote then that I no longer remember, nor do I want to.)

Anyway, I definitely did meet Avram in New York City somewhere in the 1950s, and thereafter we maintained a pleasant acquaintanceship for decades. We were not precisely close friends, with all the intimate sharing of woes and triumphs and confessions that that term implies in my mind, but certainly we were friends of some sort, and beyond doubt we maintained a warm collegial relationship, fellow toilers in the vineyard of letters, always ready to exchange tidbits of professional information with each other or to query each other on some point of esoteric knowledge. (I quote from a typical letter from him, under date of Dec 8 1984: “As I know that you have a complete collection of EVERYTHING, and that there is nothing you like better than LOOKING THINGS UP to please a friend, so I am asking you, please, to find out: Who wrote the Galaxy ‘Bookshelf’ review column in #6 vol. 39…”

In the days when we both lived in New York, we saw each other most frequently at the monthly gatherings of the local science-fiction-writer’s organization, a pleasant casual group called the Hydra Club, or at parties held at various writers’ homes, such as at the one in (I believe) 1961, given by Daniel Keyes of “Flowers for Algernon” fame, at which Avram proudly introduced us to his (literally) blushing teenage bride Grania, with whom I would sustain a friendship extending decades beyond her marriage to Avram, and who is now my esteemed co-editor on this project. And often we would meet and break booze together at some science-fiction convention, where Avram was always a welcome sight to see, since he was in the habit of carrying a bag of excellent New York bagels around with him to distribute to his friends. (One time, also, he had a pocketful of coproliths — fossilized dinosaur turds — which he distributed similarly to those he knew would appreciate them. I cherish mine to this day.)

Avram entered New York s-f social circles with an instantly lofty literary reputation. Since 1946 his work had been appearing in places like Orthodox Jewish Life Magazine, but we knew nothing of that. However, his first professionally published story, “My Boy Friend’s Name Is Jello” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1954), though only a few pages long, announced immediately that a quirky, utterly original writer, as distinctive in his way as Ray Bradbury was in his, had arrived in our field. The following year the same magazine offered the similarly brief and similarly impressive “The Golem,” and then, in 1956 and 1957 and 1958, came a whole flurry of concise and brilliant little Davidson tales in nearly all the science-fiction magazines at once.

The New York s-f community, which at that time included (if you count its suburban branch in Milford, Pennsylvania) virtually all the movers and shakers of the field, was awed and captivated by the prolific performance of the kindly, charming, formidably learned, and rather peculiar little man who had taken up residence in its midst. He was, at the same time, contributing dazzling mystery stories to the premier mystery magazine of the day, Ellery Queen’s. Plainly there was a prodigious writer here. The author of “Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper” (Galaxy, July 1957) — that’s the one about the Jewish dentist who sends messages back from an alien planet, where he is being held captive, via dental fixtures — could be nothing other than a genius. The author of “Or All the Seas With Oysters” (Galaxy, May 1958), the story of alien residents of Earth who disguise themselves as safety pins in their pupal form and become coat-hangers when they reach the larval stage, must surely be a man of distinctly original mind. (So original, indeed, that he could conceive of pupas hatching into larvae, a stunning reversal of the usual order of things.) Not that the only thing he wrote was high whimsy; for there was the dark and brooding “Now Let Us Sleep” (Venture, September 1957) and the sinister Dunsanyesque fantasy “Dagon” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1959) and the quietly passionate “Or the Grasses Grow” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1958) and ever so much more.

So we clustered around this curious little man at our parties and got to know him, and when his stories appeared we bought the magazines that contained them and read them; and our appreciation, and even love, for his work and for him knew no bounds. He was courtly and droll. He was witty. He was lovable. He could be, to be sure, a little odd and cranky at times (though not nearly as much as he would come to be, decades later, in his eccentric and cantankerous old age), but we understood that geniuses were entitled to be odd and cranky. And that he was a genius we had no doubt. Ray Bradbury, in an introduction to a collection of Davidson short stories that was published in 1971, spoke of his work in the same breath as that of Rudyard Kipling, Saki, John Collier, and G. K. Chesterton, and no one who knows Avram’s work well would call Bradbury guilty of hyperbole in that.

Even though Avram had seemed to materialize among us like a stranger from another world, there in the mid-1950s, it turned out that he was in fact a New Yorker like the rest of us. (Well, not strictly like the rest of us, because Avram wasn’t really like anyone else at all, and the fact that he came from the suburban city of Yonkers rather than from one of the five boroughs of New York City disqualified him as a true New Yorker for a city boy like me.) Indeed he had been active in New York science-fiction fandom in his teens — cofounder, no less, of the Yonkers Science Fiction League. (I find the concept of a teenage Avram Davidson as difficult to comprehend as the concept of the Yonkers Science Fiction League, but so be it.) Exactly where he had been living immediately before his debut in the science fiction magazines, I was never sure, though he did once admit to having served in the Israeli Army at the time of Israel’s independence in 1948; certainly he gave the impression of one who was returning to New York after prolonged absence in exotic parts. In one of his infrequent autobiographical pieces he revealed this much:

Well, I was born in Yonkers, New York in 1923, and I attended the public school system there and some short time at New York University. Then I went into the Navy at the end of 1942 and stayed there until the beginning of 1946. Most of that time was spent at various air stations in Florida; I was attached to the 5th Marine regiment, was in the South Pacific, and then in China. Came back, went back to school a little bit, but never took any degrees; and in fact never was on campus again until I was a visiting instructor or writer many decades later.

Born in 1923—that means he was only thirty-five or so when I first met him at that unspecified party at an indeterminable time in the late 1950s. Which is hard to believe now, because I think of thirty-five-year-olds these days as barely postgraduate, and Avram, circa 1958, bearded and rotund and professorial, seemed to be at least sixty years old. (Beards were uncommon things then.) Of course, I was only twenty-something myself, then, and everybody in science fiction except Harlan Ellison seemed sixty years old or thereabouts to me. But Avram always looked older than his years; he went on looking a perpetual sixty for the next quarter of a century, and then, I guess, as his health gave way in his not very happy later years, he began finally to look older than that.

He led a complicated life. For a couple of years, from 1962 to 1964, he was the dazzlingly idiosyncratic editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and many a wondrously oddball story did he purchase and usher into print during that time. Then he went off with Grania to Mexico, and lived in a place called Amecameca, the name of which fascinated me for its repetitive rhythm, and in Belize, formerly British Honduras, for a time after that, before settling for a prolonged period in California. Somewhere along the way he and Grania split up, though in an extremely amicable way; she remarried, Avram never did, and for years thereafter Avram functioned as a kind of auxiliary uncle in the California household of Grania and her second husband, Dr. Stephen Davis. In 1980 or thereabouts he gravitated northward to the Seattle region, where he spent the last years of his life, the years of the diminishing career and the increasing financial problems and the series of strokes and the ever more querulous, embittered letters to old friends. (Which, nevertheless, were inevitably marked with flashes of the old Avram wit and charm.)

His career as a writer was, I think, more checkered than it needed to be. He had, as I hope I’ve made clear, the respect and admiration and downright awe of most of his colleagues; and he was not without acclaim among readers, either. “Or All the Seas with Oysters” won the Hugo award in 1958 for the best short s-f story of the previous year; “The Necessity of His Condition” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April, 1957) won the 1957 Ellery Queen Award; “The Affair at Lahore Cantonment” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1961) took the Edgar Award of the Mystery Writers of America; the World Fantasy Convention gave him its Howard trophy in 1976 for his short story collection The Enquiries of Dr. Esterhazy, and again in 1979 for his short story “Naples,” and once more in 1986 for Lifetime Achievement, an award that has also been given to the likes of Italo Calvino, Ray Bradbury, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roald Dahl.

But there is more to a professional writing career than winning awards and the respect of your peers. Avram remained close to the poverty line for most of his adult life. This was due, in part, to the resolutely individual nature of his work: His recondite and often abstruse fictions, bedded as they often were in quaint and curious lore known to few other than he, were not the stuff of bestsellers, nor did the increasingly hermetic style of his later writings endear him to vast audiences in search of casual entertainment. Beyond that, though, lay an utter indifference to commercial publishing values that encouraged him to follow his artistic star wherever it led, even if that meant abandoning a promising trilogy of novels one or two thirds of the way along, leaving hopeful readers forever frustrated. Nor was he as congenial in his business dealings as he was in his conversations with his colleagues. There was a subtext of toughness in Avram not always apparent at superficial glance — remember, this mild and bookish and rabbinical little man served with the Marines in the Pacific during World War II, and then saw action in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948—and, as the economic hardships of his adult life turned him increasingly testy, he became exceedingly difficult and troublesome to deal with, thereby making the problems of his professional life even worse.

Be that as it may. Avram is dead, now — he died near Seattle, weary and poor, just after his seventieth birthday — but his work lives on, free at last of the shroud of rancor that he wove around it in his final years. The stories are magical and wondrous. It will be your great privilege to read them; or, if that is the case, to read them once again. You will want to seek out the best of his novels afterward—The Phoenix and the Mirror and The Island Under the Earth and Peregrine: Primus. They will be hard to find; they will be worth the search. We are all of us one-of-a-kind writers, really, but Avram was more one-of-a-kind than most. How lucky for us that he passed this way; how good it is to have the best of his stories available once more.