Alas for Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe, one of the greatest of science-fiction writers, has passed away. His work was subtle and superb. Wolfe wrote paragraphs you could lose yourself in, like a labyrinth, and come out a changed person on the other side. He thought profoundly about what story-telling means as few other writers have. He was honored inside the genre and sometimes outside it, but deserved far more honor in both places. Any account of 20th-century American literature that omits Gene Wolfe is incomplete.

There are many places to start reading Wolfe: his novella "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," and his epic masterpiece The Book of the New Sun. But I would put in a word for the short story "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories," a meditative story which, depending on how you look at it, depicts neglected boy losing himself in a book of pulp science fiction or a book of pulp science fiction entering a boy's abusive environment to salvage him. It's the title story of the hilariously-named collection The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. (Wolfe also wrote "The Death of Doctor Island," which won the Nebula, "The Doctor of Death Island," and, somewhat later, "The Death of the Island Doctor.")

"The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" was part of a famous and ghastly faux pas. The Nebula Awards MC, Isaac Asimov, actually announced at the awards banquet that "Island" had won that year's Nebula for Best Short Story, and Wolfe stood up to accept the award before Asimov realized that Wolfe was the runner-up. "No Award" had won for Best Short Story that year. If that sounds to you a bit like the story about Pynchon, the Pulitzers, and Gravity's Rainbow, both stories are from the same era and feature profound, boundary-pushing work. As I said, Wolfe was never honored enough, in his parish or out of it.

Here are just the first two paragraphs of "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories":

Winter comes to water as to land, though there are no leaves to fall. The waves that were a bright, hard blue yesterday under a fading sky today are green, opaque, and cold. If you are a boy not wanted in the house you walk the beach for hours, feeling the winter that has come in the night; sand blowing across your shoes, spray wetting the legs of your corduroys. You turn your back to the sea, and with the sharp end of a stick found half buried write in the wet sand Tackman Babcock.

Then you go home, knowing that behind you the Atlantic is destroying our work.

Godspeed, Mr. Wolfe. You wrote in something far more durable than sand.

cross-posted from Dagblog. All comments welcome there, not here.

For Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin was my hero. Urusla K. Le Guin is my hero still. She is gone from this world, and only her words are left to us. Those words are marvels.

I remember driving to a college interview with a copy of The Dispossessed on the passenger seat beside me, in case I arrived too early. My first computer password, at the beginning of college, was an anagram of her name. I remember reading The Dispossessed again when I moved to California, to console myself to the strangeness of the new planet where I found myself. And The Dispossessed is on my bedside table again, tonight.

For the last two falls I have been teaching my graduate students The Left Hand of Darkness. Last fall, I realized their edition had a typo, a crucial, meaning-changing typo, on the novel's last page. I went through my house looking for other editions to compare. It turns out I had five.

I have blogged in the past about the debts I owe to Le Guin as a writer, and those debts have only matured as I have:

I no longer know how many times I have read The Language of the Night.  [I]t was my first example of how to write an essay about a piece of fiction. More importantly, it was my first model of an essayist's prose, and I could not have had a better. Le Guin's prose, lucid and evocative, as clear and as complex as running water, still gives me my sense of what a paragraph or a sentence ought to be.

[snip]

I was all too slow to be aware of it, but this is the truth: I am trying to write like Ursula K. Le Guin. I am always trying to write like Ursula K. Le Guin. This is no less so because I do it without thinking of it; it is only more so. .... She is the essayist I wanted to be when I grew up, and she is the stylist whom I, having grown up, would like to be. ... In the middle of my life, better late than never, I am obliged and honored to acknowledge her as my master.

She was a late bloomer, who published her first novel the year she turned 37, and her first undeniable masterpiece, The Left Hand, the year she turned forty. That has always been a lesson to me.

She was an American Taoist, a real one, in a country where many who profess Taoism are deceiving themselves. She had no space for self-deception; the Tao, after all, is about dispensing with illusions. Her perspective was unblinking and undeceived, looking straight at truths most shy from. Many would call such a perspective cold but, precisely because she was so free of illusions, her viewpoint was astonishing warm. She wrote fantasy, but never trafficked in or tolerated the everyday lies and fantasies that our society breathes. Her novels took you to another planet, where you found yourself facing the truths of human nature that you shied away from every day.

She was fearless. She could not be intimidated. And her craft was profound.

I am thinking of her husband tonight, Charles, to whom she was married for decades, and who clearly served as helpmeet to her in a way that men of his generation expected of their wives and not themselves. Le Guin wrote, again and again, of deep monogamous bonds, the pairing for life, in a way that has to be, in part, a profound tribute to her own partner.

I would take, gladly, another year or two or five of her words, of whatever she was able and willing to share. But she had already written her last novel, and knew it. When she no longer had the physical stamina to write a novel, she faced that truth. Her accomplishment is complete tonight. She has already achieved more than anyone could ask.

Ursula Le Guin did not believe in heaven. She found the idea of an afterlife suspect. So all that remains of her tonight are her words. They will always be there if you want them. Let me say what a comfort they can be.

cross-posted from Dagblog, where all comments are welcome

Weekend Reading, August 10: Occupy Mars!

I'm going to start a semi-regular series of "recommended weekend reading" posts. My recommendations will inevitably be all over the place, and I don't expect to focus on anything except things I happen to like. Ideally, each installment would have both a book recommendation and a link to a short story or poem available (with the author's permission) on the web.

So, in honor of the recent landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars, let me start by recommending Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, starting with Red Mars.

Robinson wrote his epic about the colonization of Mars, and its gradual transformation to a world with a viable ecosystem for humans,  in the early nineties, just before the first Mars rover missions, so the book's science is no longer quite up-to-date. But Robinson does put the science in science fiction here, drawing extensively on the many sciences (physical and social) that would come into play in colonizing a new planet: geology and climatology and material science, medicine and engineering, psychology and architecture, sociology and ecology and politics. And while you'll learn as much about the Martian regolith as you ever wanted to know, or more, you're also reading a novel of genuine epic sweep: the three books together make a kind of interstellar War and Peace.

It's also, nearly twenty years on, remarkably prescient in its lefty politics and its grim predictions about the direction international capitalism was likely to take after the Cold War.  Every novel about Mars is really a novel about Earth; Robinson's Mars novels, which take the physical reality of Mars more seriously than any of the hundreds of Mars novels before them, could have been written from the heart of the Occupy movement except that they were written two decades earlier. They are books about occupying Mars, in every sense of the phrase.

In a perfect world, this post would end with a link to one of Ray Bradbury's beautiful stories from The Martian Chronicles. He's only recently left us, and it was Ray who first demonstrated the truth that fictions about Mars are fictions about Earth, with his indelible sense of poetry, at the close of that book. But the Bradbury stories available on-line are all pirated, one way or another, and I don't want to begin this little series by picking a dead man's pocket, even for a dime.

So, if we can't have Bradbury, I'd like the recommend the next best thing: Kelly Link. She, like Bradbury, is the great short-story fantasist of her generation, and like Bradbury, one of her generation's handful of genuinely great short-story writers. If Bradbury was Poe in a cheerful mood, Link is Poe with most of the tricks hidden in her sleeve, doing her magic with sly misdirection and deadpan comedy. She is what Bradbury might have been if he had been able to grow up reading Ray Bradbury: funny, allusive, evocative, and sexy.

Link also (generously, shrewdly) puts a few of her stories on-line for free. So, courtesy of the author, here is a link to one of her first published stories, and one of my favorites, "Flying Lessons" from the collection Stranger Things Happen. It begins like this:

I. Going to hell. Instructions and advice.

Enjoy.

John Updike Is Dead, Alas

The mighty, mighty Johnny Up has passed away, and it's a shame. I admired him even when I didn't feel like reading him, and he was one of my heroes even though I've never wanted to be like him. If that sounds like faint praise it shouldn't. If my affection for his work had nothing to do with emulation, it also had nothing to do with ambition, and if my admiration wasn't founded on imaginative identification neither was it tainted by my self-regard. I've loved other writers more, but none less selfishly; Updike's appeal was stronger even than my egotism.

I respected Updike for his sheer chops, and for the pellucid artistic honesty with which he used them. Even when I felt alienated from the conventional middle-class "realism" practiced by Updike's inferiors, and hostile to its conventions, I could never begrudge Updike, who was clearly following his own artistic angels and demons where they led him and whose unrelenting eye made his work realistic in the strictest and rarest sense of that word. Updike was an original on an endless rack of knockoffs, a blessed soul in a massive congregation of hypocrites. That his artistic obsessions led him to a comfortable middle ground, wearing a sensible, inconspicuous suit, was hardly his fault. You couldn't tell him to change; he was doing what came naturally, and anything else would have been faking.

Perhaps more important was the reflexive and self-effacing generosity with which Updike used his fame. He had the best claim, for decades, to the title of Greatest Living American Writer, but refused to occupy the throne. There's no doubt that, had he chosen, Updike could have thrown his weight around, extorting homage and punishing rivals, but he doesn't seem to have been tempted. Best of all, perhaps, is that Updike's refusal to play king meant no one else could. Pretenders like Norman Mailer might brawl for the position of Top Writer, but it was hard to play the part convincingly with Updike off in the country somewhere. (Mailer, naturally, came to hate Updike, which is only one of the reasons to love him.) Updike kept American letters a democracy through his own constitutional shyness. And he used his bully pulpit in the New Yorker, his power to review essentially any book he liked, to build audiences for writers whose work was profoundly unlike his own. (If you doubt that Updike had more weight to throw around than he used, imagine what some other writers might do with the freedom to publish anything they chose, as often as they chose, in The New Yorker.) Updike's reviews introduced Nabokov and Garcia Marques, among others, to a mainstream American readership. Updike was never partisan when it came to art, and never insecure enough to insist upon this orthodoxy or that one. Every time I passed over Updike in the bookstores for some Latin American magical realist, I had Updike himself to thank; those writers would never have found their ways into American paperback without him. Updike the critic didn't grind an ax for his own selfish interests, or even for his own literary idiom, but generously led readers to books that Updike himself could never have written, but was wise and confident enough to love.

Traveling Cities

I'm flying across the country today, to the annual MLA conference. It's in San Francisco this year, one of my favorite cities, but the MLA itself, an overwhelming and enormous meeting of literary scholars from across the country, is a roving metropolis in its own right.

Like any great city it's a place to go to pursue ambitions, to meet people you've heard of but never seen, and to make friends who share the obsessions that everyone in your home town found odd. People dress up and ride elevators. The hours are brutally long. There are fabulous booksellers. It's exhilarating and Dickensian and anxious, like any great city, and even the people who prefer the suburbs couldn't do entirely without it.

As a tribute to the Metropolis of Literary Arguments, and to the pleasures of San Francisco in December, here is an excerpt from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities:

Cities and Desire 2

At the end of three days, moving southward, you come upon Anastasia, a city with concentric canals watering it and kites flying over it. I should now list the wares that can be profitably bought here: agate, onyx, chrysoprase, and other varieties of chalecedony; I should praise the flesh of the golden pheasant cooked here over fires of seasoned cherry wood and sprinkled with much sweet marjoram; and tell of the women I have seen bathing in the pool of a garden and who sometimes - it is said - invite the stranger to disrobe with them and chase them in the water. But with all this, I would not be telling you the city's true essence; for while the description of Anastasia awakens desires one at a time only to force you to stifle them, when you are in the heart of Anastasia one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you. The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content. Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave.

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Le Citta Invisibili), 1972
English translation by William Weaver, 1974

The Consolations of Literature (Holiday Travel Edition)

There's nothing quite as good, on a long winter's night featuring multiple flight delays and eerily quiet airline terminals, as having a truly wonderful novel to read.

Fortunately, tonight I have Junot Diaz'sThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is as good a travel companion as any becalmed traveler could ask. Original, engaging, and utterly fascinating. Even winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, an ominous portent many years, cannot diminish its charms.

The consolations of getting your rental car between two and three in the morning and of driving through the bleak cold night are, by necessity, less about literature than about kickass rock and roll. WBCN, te amo. No one will be listening anyway, so just play me a little Iggy and get me through my miles. That's what three AM is for.