The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

Sentences: An Introduction

MY FATHER HAD BEEN sick almost a year. Already he’d had one lung removed. But after a time home — which he spent mostly in bed, listening to programs of eclectic classical music (Penderecki, Kodaly’s Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello) on WBAI-FM, all of which were new to him and pleased him greatly, or sitting up in his robe and pajamas working on a few ordered and geometric paintings of cityscapes in which there were no people (he’d always wanted to paint) — he began to grow weaker. Soon he was in pain. Toward the end of September an ambulance was sent for to take him to the hospital. But the attendants who arrived to strap him into their stretcher, there in the apartment hall in his dark robe and pale pajamas, were too rough, yanking down the straps and buckles over his thin legs that, by now, could not fully straighten. After asking them twice to loosen them, he began to shout: “Stop it! You’re hurting me! Stop —!” Lips tight, my mother stood, flustered, embarrassed, and worried at once, perfectly still.

My father bellowed at the two white-jacketed young men, one black, one white, “Get out —!”

An hour later, my grown cousin (called Brother) and I helped him down the hall, into the elevator, out to the car, and drove him over to the hospital. Each bump in the rutted Harlem streets made him gasp or moan. The day was shot through with his fear and exhaustion. The pain made him cry when, in his awkward white smock, he had to stretch out on the black, cold X-ray table. I held his hand. (“I’m going to fall. I’m falling …! Hold me. I’m falling.” “No you’re not, Dad. I’ve got you. You’re okay.” “I’m falling …!” Tears rolled down his bony cheeks. “It’s too cold.”) He had difficulty urinating into the enameled bedpan as I sat with him in his hospital room, and he made little whisperings to imitate the fall of water to induce his own to fall.

For most of my life, if it came up, I would tell you: “My father died of lung cancer in 1958 when I was seventeen.”

Behind that sentence is my memory of a conversation with my older cousin Barbara, who was staying with us. She was a doctor. I said: “I guess it’s going to take an awful long time for him to get well.”

Carefully, Barbara put her teacup down on the glass-topped table with the woven wicker beneath. “He’s not going to get well,” she said. Then, very carefully, she said: “He’s going to die.”

It was, of course, the truth; and, of course, I knew it.

It was also the kindest thing she could have said.

“How long will it be?” I asked.

“You can’t say for sure,” she said. “Two or three weeks. Two or three months.”

Later I went downstairs to see Mr. Jackson.

“Is Jesse in?” I asked his wife.

“Sure.” Ann was a little woman with glasses and meticulous hair. “He’s in the back.” She stepped from the door. “Just go on in.”

Sitting in the room that served him for an office, with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the framed illustrations from the young people’s novels he’d written about black children growing up in the Midwest looking down at us from the walls, I told him what Barbara had said. Jesse was a teak-colored man, with short gray hair. Somehow he’d managed to be equally close to both my father and me, an extraordinary accomplishment as Dad and I had been so often at loggerheads.

“Yes.” Jesse put his pipe carefully on the desk, recalling Barbara with her cup. “That’s probably true.”

He let me sit there without saying anything else, while he puttered around in his office, a full twenty minutes before I went back to our apartment upstairs.

An early October afternoon a heavy handful of days later, we were called in the morning to go over, and, in the darkened hospital room, I smiled and said, “How’re you feeling …?” while my younger sister reached through the oxygen tent’s plastic, scored with light from the floor lamp, to squeeze my father’s long hand with its slightly clubbed fingers. His face was lax and unshaven. “Yes,” he said hoarsely, “I’m feeling a little better …” After I followed her into the hall, her own face broke slowly apart before she covered it with her hands to cry, while some of my aunts stood in the corridor, speaking quietly of the kindnesses of one particular white nurse from Texas.

My sister and I rode home on the bus together, alone.

Sometime near five, I had just stepped from the living room as my sister came out of her room in the back, when the lock on the hall door between us ratcheted. The door swung in. Then my mother and aunts erupted through, all at once:

“It’s all over! It’s all over — the poor boy — he’s gone! Oh, the poor boy!”

(That was one of my father’s older sisters, Bessie. As the announcement broke through the women’s sobs, why, I wondered, feeling distant, do we turn in stress to such banalities?)

“No more suffering! It’s all over!” My Aunt Virginia’s voice might have been that of a traffic policeman clearing the road, as she led in my mother, an arm around her shoulders. “He’s out of his pain.”

The four of my father’s sisters, Bessie, Sadie, Laura, and Julia, as well as my mother, were in tears. (Only Virginia, my mother’s sister, was not crying.) All six women — I realized — already wore black.

That evening, over Mom’s protests, I went walking by Riverside Park. Dead leaves mortared the pavement around Grant’s Tomb. For some reason, sitting on one of the benches beside the public mausoleum, I took my shoes and socks off to amble barefoot on the chill concrete, beneath the mercury vapor lights, notebook under my arm. I’d been trying to write an elegy. It began, “They told me you were not in any pain …” because, for some reason, that’s what people had been saying to me about him a week now, even though every movement had made him gasp, grunt, or grate his teeth.

Days later, in suit and tie, I sat beside my mother in the front row of folding chairs in the funeral chapel, watching Brother (the same cousin who had driven us to the hospital, and who had been running my father’s funeral business a year now, since Dad had been too ill to work) go up at the end of the service to the casket banked left and right by flowers, take the corpse’s hand in his, and, with a sharp tug, remove my father’s ring. Then he reached up to lower dark, gleaming wood. Moments afterward, outside the funeral home on Seventh Avenue among milling relatives and friends, he handed the ring to me and I slipped it into the inside pocket of my suit jacket, before I got into the gray, nestlike softness of the funeral car for the ride to the cemetery.

Ten years ago, in 1978, while I was at the typewriter table in my office one afternoon, with Amsterdam Avenue’s commercial traffic growling by five stories down, I opened an envelope giving its return address as the English department of a Pennsylvania state college. Two scholars were undertaking a book-length bibliography of my then-sixteen years of published writing, to be introduced with a biographical essay of some fifty or sixty pages.[1]

Honesty? Accuracy? Tact? These are the problems of all biographers, auto- or otherwise. But the very broadness of the questions obscures the specific ways each can manifest itself. Few of us are ever biographized — especially during our lifetimes. No one is born a biographical subject, save the odd and antiquated royal heir. I have never seen a book on how to be a good one. But, like anything else, having your life researched and written about is an experience, with particular moments that characterize it, mark it, and make it what it is.

“My father died of lung cancer in 1958 when I was seventeen.” This is just not a sentence that, when an adult says it in a conversation seven or a dozen or twenty years after the fact, people are likely to challenge.

And when, to facilitate my Pennsylvania scholars, I put together a chronology of my life, starting with my birth (April Fools’ Day, 1942), that sentence, among many, is what I wrote.

I don’t remember the specific letter in which one of them pointed out gently that, if I was born in 1942, in 1958 I could not possibly have been seventeen. In 1958 I was fifteen up until April 1 and sixteen for the year’s remaining nine months. (Certainly my father didn’t die when I was fifteen or sixteen …?) WBAI-FM did not begin to broadcast till 1960. There were no Penderecki recordings available in 1958. Various researches followed, along with more questions; a sheaf of condolence letters to my mother turned up — one from a man I’d never heard of, now living somewhere in Europe, who recalled teaching my father to drive in North Carolina, when my father was seventeen or eighteen — the first time it ever occurred to me that, at some point, he must have learned. Finally, in an old Harlem newspaper, a small article was unearthed that confirmed it: my father died in the early days of October 1960.

I was eighteen.

Here’s a pretty accurate chronology based on one we prepared for the year and a half that straddled my nineteenth birthday, starting from the summer before, covering my father’s death, and ending a year later.

In June 1960 when I was eighteen, because of disagreements over school policy with the administration, I cut my graduation so as not to be present to receive the school creative writing award. My father was ill. My parents did not understand. I probably made little effort to explain it to them. But a few days later, at the beginning of July, with the son of a downstairs neighbor, Peter, a talented banjo player a year older than I and with whom I had gone to summer camp some years before, I drove up to the Newport Folk Festival, where we attended concerts in the evening and slept on the beaches at night with thousands of other young people. The notebook I filled over the four days there was typed over the next weeks to become an eighty-page memoir of the trip, whose title, The Journals of Orpheus, I rolled around on my tongue for weeks, for months.

A few days later, I left New York City by Greyhound for the Bread-loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, where I’d received a work scholarship at the recommendation of an editor from Harcourt Brace, on the strength of one of my several adolescent novel manuscripts. (One was called Those Spared by Fire; another, Cycle for Toby.) Along with a half a dozen or more young people who’d received similar scholarships, I supplemented the partial tuition by working at the conference as a waiter. My roommate was a young black poet, Herbert Woodward Martin. The late afternoon in which I got back to New York City, my father came out to the living room, in his blue pajamas and robe, to sit listening, with my mother, to my accounts of my summer with Robert Frost, John Frederick Nims, Allen Drury, and X. J. Kennedy, smiling at my anecdotes, now and then hawking into the galvanized zinc pail Mom had set by his slippered feet, with a little water and detergent in it — till, in the midst of something I was saying, he rose and walked back into the bedroom; and I realized just how sick he’d grown.

In September, I began classes at the College of the City of New York: Greek, Latin, and English, along with Chemistry, Speech (a required freshman course), and Art History. I joined the staff of the college literary journal, The Promethean. At the end of that month, my father went into the hospital — as I’ve told. I also resumed weekly therapy sessions with a psychologist, Dr. Harold Esterson, which were to continue, somewhat intermittently, through the early months of 1961.

In the last days of October, after Dad’s death, I moved in with Bob Aarenberg, a nineteen-year-old friend who lived, as my family and I had since I was fifteen, in Morningside Gardens. He had taken a small student apartment on the third floor of a grimy building on West 113th Street, the St.-Marks Arms. Bob was an amateur shortwave radio operator, and the place was jammed with ham equipment. Upstairs in the same building lived science fiction writer Randall Garrett, whom I met, with whom I became friends, and to whom I showed some of my early (non-SF) novels. That Halloween, dressed as Medusa and Perseus, Marilyn Hacker and I, with a friend named Gail (Medea), hiked through a chill Washington Square evening to a costume party at New York University’s Maison Française, where a number of our friends, among them Judy (dressed as Comedy/Tragedy), were celebrating. Our regalia was inspired by a verse play of Marilyn’s, called Perseus, whose sections she had read to me over the phone, some weeks before, day by day as she’d written them.

Over this same period (September, October, November), during which I started school and my father died, I produced translations of Brecht’s “Vom ertrunkenen Mädchen,” Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre” (also a pastiche of his sonnet, “Voyelles”), and Catullus’s “Vivamus mea Lesbia,” as well as an original English version of “The Song of Songs Which is Solomon’s,” and some of Chatterton’s “Middle English” Rowley forgeries — using various English texts as cribs, such as Stanley Burnshaw’s international anthology The Poem Itself (purchased while at Breadloaf) or a recent paperback translation of “The Song of Songs”: no, my French, German, or Latin (not to mention Hebrew) was not up to the job unassisted.

On the day before Christmas Eve, a City College companion, who shared both my Speech and my Art classes and whom I’d nicknamed “Little Brother” when we became friends in the first days of school, came over to spend the night with me at my mother’s apartment. At about three o’clock in the morning, an hour after we’d stopped talking and were, presumably, asleep, he suddenly sat up in his underwear at the edge of his bed and said, “I have to go home. …”

“Hm?” I said, sleepily, from mine. “Why …?”

“Because if I don’t,” he said, “I’m going to try and get in bed with you.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Come on.”

“I don’t think you understand,” he said, softly. “I want to go to bed with you.”

“Sure I do.” I held back the covers for him. “I want to go to bed with you, too. Come on. Get in.”

And, a moment later, he slid down beside me.

The next afternoon, when he left, I wrote some dozen rather jejune sonnets about it all — though I did not see him again for some three or four years. When the Christmas break was over, he did not return to school.

Christmas passed, and on that snowy New Year’s Eve, I went to a party of a young musician and composer, Josh Rifkin, where the two of us went upstairs and, secreted in Josh’s room, listened to carefully and analyzed for hours the Robert Craft recording, just released, of the complete works of Anton Webern, while people celebrated downstairs.

Midnight passed.

In January 1961, I began my second term at City, continuing with Latin and Greek, dropping English, Speech, and Art, and adding History, Calculus Two (I’d received advanced placement in math, allowing me to skip Calculus One), and an obligatory Physical Education course. I became The Promethean’s poetry editor.

In February I directed some friends, Eric and Esther, and myself in Marilyn’s Perseus: An Exercise for Three Voices. Marilyn was then a student at NYU: she had been my close friend since our first year together at the Bronx High School of Science. Shortly, David Litwin replaced Eric. Perseus was performed in the Grand Ballroom of the Student Center of City College on a Wednesday, once in the afternoon and again in the evening. It ran just under fifteen minutes.

In March I was spending little time at my schoolwork; rather I would devote desultory bursts of energy to my own writing. I all but ceased attending classes. Here and there at various places in the Village, I played with the folksinging group I’d pulled together around me, the Harbor Singers (who rehearsed through the whole period at Dave’s mother’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen regularly on Tuesday evenings) and sometimes with downstairs neighbor Pete. I was an indifferent singer, but a passable guitarist. Probably in that month, rotund Randall Garrett took me to a party in Greenwich Village, possibly at John and Ann Hamilton’s, at which I met SF writer and critic Judith Merril, whose work I was familiar with through her anthologies and stories.

From a September letter to Merril six years later, here’s my attempt to recall that night for us both:

… Randy, a terribly sentimental guy, decided to take me to a party in the Village. I hadn’t thought about writing SF at the time, and was not even a proper fan. I was told before we left that you would be there, though. You I had heard of. You I had read and much liked, both reviews and your too-few stories. (Randy was wearing his opera cape that year and, en route to the party, dived head first into a snow bank and shed blue velvet in swirls across the snow as the neon lights of the bar went coral and azure over our heads.) You sat in the back room most of the party, we talked — you were sleepy? And went to sleep. The party left, came back at about five in the morning, whereupon you wakened. I volunteered to come up [town] … with you.

I rode up with Merril on the subway to Port Authority, where she caught the bus back to Milford, Pennsylvania (famous to SF readers as the home of numerous SF writers, back then):

We talked very seriously about SF on the subway from Eighth Street. You told me about your daughter … you were very nice and the Hope-we-meet-agains (you shook my hand with both of yours) had a nice warmth. …

After putting Merril on the bus (according to the letter), I walked home through the snow-mounded city in the aluminum colored morning, from Port Authority to 113th Street — and burrowed into the daybed across from Bob’s ham equipment for a few hours sleep.

Toward the end of April, at the Coffee Gallery, a small, second floor art gallery and coffee shop, then on Tenth Street, between Second and Third Avenues, I restaged Perseus — this time with Daniel Landau in the role of Voice Three. The program was expanded with a recitation by Marilyn of a poem called “Helen,” a ten-minute monologue presumably spoken by Helen of Troy:

In her long dress (black), with her waistlength hair held back by a black band (and made up by Daniel in the tiny room in which we changed), the velvety-voiced eighteen-year-old poet brought if off stunningly. Added to this, I read a story of mine, “Silent Monologue for Lefty.” Now the program ran slightly over half an hour.

The Coffee Gallery was upstairs from the printshop where Diane Di Prima and LeRoi Jones were producing The Floating Bear. At least once Diane and some of her friends stopped in to see the performance. The program ran on weekends, Friday and Saturday night, for five weeks, with audiences ranging from three to fifteen.

In May I cut all my final exams. Unofficially, I had dropped out of school. (I managed, however, to fulfill my duties on the college magazine.) Over the previous six months I had written a number of short novels, with titles like The Flames of the Warthog, The Lovers, and The Assassination. Along with some earlier novels, I regularly submitted these to a number of New York publishers — by whom they were regularly rejected.

In mid-June Marilyn became pregnant with our second sexual experiment.

About then, a three-thousand-word article an editor at Seventeen magazine had suggested I write on Folk Music in Greenwich Village was rejected as “too informative.” A friend of the Harcourt Brace editor who’d helped me get my Breadloaf scholarship, she now suggested I try writing on something about which I knew less, striving for impressions rather than fact: jazz was something about which I knew nothing. So, early that July, I took off by bus to the Newport Jazz Festival, held on the same site as the Folk Festival. The three afternoons and evenings of open-air concerts included performances by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, and a whole afternoon Judy Garland extravaganza. At night, again in a sleeping bag on seaweed-strewn sand, I made notes by firelight before drifting off to sleep, while beer drinkers — an older and more rambunctious crowd than the Folk Festival had drawn — lurched about. On Monday I bussed back to the city to plunge into my article, completing it days later.

Back in New York, after the festival, I went with Marilyn to rent a four-room apartment on the Lower East Side.

In August, with a loan from another old high school friend, Sharon Ruskin (nee Rohm), Marilyn and I took a three-day trip to Detroit, Michigan, where we were married.

At the beginning of September I got a job as a stock clerk at Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street, in time for the September textbook rush.

In October, almost exactly a year after my father’s death, Marilyn miscarried. She recuperated in my sister’s old room at my mother’s apartment. Two or three weeks later, she got a job as a salesgirl at B. Airman’s department store. Let go even before New Year’s, almost immediately she got a job as an editorial assistant at Ace Books.

Probably within a week (certainly no more than ten days), after a set of obsessively vivid dreams, I began what, not quite a year later, would be my first published novel, The Jewels of Aptor.

Looking over this bare and untextured chronology, it’s easy to read a fairly clear emotional story. My father’s death, my subsequent dropping out of school, and my hasty marriage speak of a young man interested in writing and music, but still under fair emotional strain. With the facts that I was black and Marilyn was white, that I was gay and both of us knew it, the implication of strain — for both of us — only strengthens. The story is so clear, I wouldn’t even think, at this date, to deny it.

Still, it is not the story I remember from that time. While all the incidents listed are, in my own mind, associated with vivid moments, rich details, complexes of sensation, deep feelings, and the texture of the real (so indistinguishable from that of dream), their places on the list are wholly a product of research. And my inaccurate statement, “My father died when I was seventeen in 1958 …” is an emblem of the displacements and elisions committed upon that more objective narrative, if not a result of that strain.

I have clear memories of my father’s death.

I have clear memories of my first weeks of classes at City College, of my new teachers, of the new friends I made there, of surprises and disappointments and great excitement, of lunches with new and old acquaintances in the cafeteria, of trips between classes through crowded halls, of extracurricular activities, including a small choral group I sang with during the afternoons, under the direction of Allan Sklar (a former music counselor of mine at Camp Rising Sun), where we prepared for a recording of an a cappella version of the Orlande de Lassus’s Two-Part Motets.

But there’s no connection between those memories and those of my father’s death in my mind. I retain no sense that one came along to interrupt the other. My entrance into college and my father’s death, instead of incidents separated by weeks, seem rather years apart. To the extent I retain any context around my father’s dying at all, it is some vague and uncertain time during my last two years of high school — possibly because I saw a friend or two I connected with that period right before or right after he died. Or because that was when he first became ill. Or because. …

But I don’t know why memory separates it so completely from the time in which, objectively, it occurred.

From the October a year later, I have clear — and painful — memories of Marilyn’s miscarriage.

I also have clear memories of the afternoon back at East Fifth Street, when, waking from a nap, I became aware of the recurrent dreams that, a day or so later, impelled me into the writing of my first science fantasy novel. In the same months when I was writing through the winter, Marilyn, thinking of her miscarriage a little before, wrote:

Some of these lines I quoted in the novel. Still, I have no sense that the book began within a month or so of the miscarriage: only the chronology tells me that. In memory, the two seem months, many months, from one another; several times, when I’ve recounted the happenings to other people, I’ve spoken of them as if they actually were.

In both cases, the disjunction in memory was strong enough to make me, now and again, even argue the facts, till their proximities were fixed by document and deduction:

A careful and accurate biographer can, here and there, know more about the biographical subject than the subject him- or herself.

My favorite autobiographical memoirs are Osip Mandelstam’s The Noise of Time, Louise Bogan’s Journey Around My Room, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Goethe’s Italian Journey, Paul Goodman’s Fire Years: Thoughts During a Useless Time, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of an African Slave, Michael McClure’s and Frank Reynold’s Freewheelin’ Frank, sections of Walter Benjamin’s One Way Street, and parts of Barthes by Barthes.

With those brief and intense models shamelessly in mind (with the exception of the Goethe, the longest is just over 250 pages), I am not about to try here for the last word on event and evidential certainty. I hope it’s clear: despite the separate factual failing each is likely to fall into, the autobiographer (much less the memoirist) cannot replace the formal biographer. Nor am I even going to try. I hope instead to sketch, as honestly and as effectively as I can, something I can recognize as my own, aware as I do so that even as I work after honesty and accuracy, memory will make this only one possible fiction among the myriad — many in open conflict — anyone might write of any of us, as convinced as any other that what he or she wrote was the truth.

But bear in mind two sentences:

“My father died of lung cancer in 1958 when I was seventeen.”

“My father died of lung cancer in 1960 when I was eighteen.”

The first is incorrect, the second correct.

I am as concerned with truth as anyone — otherwise I would not be going so far to split such hairs. In no way do I feel the incorrect sentence is privileged over the correct one. Yet, even with what I know now, a decade after the letter from Pennsylvania, the wrong sentence still feels to me righter than the right one.

Now a biography or a memoir that contained only the first sentence would be incorrect. But one that omitted it, or did not at least suggest its relation to the second on several informal levels, would be incomplete.