Meet Me at Infinity (27 page)

In some ways it is easier to live with a Devil who is clearly different, black or white or yellow, old, young, female or male, or such.
Them,
the baddies;
Me
(wholly a different animal), the good guy. Easier; but maybe not so instructive.

At any event, by the time I had finished the decade’s worth of instruction in How Things Are provided by this event—you know, joining organizations, getting in the Army, milling around in the early forms of American left-wing sentiment, worrying about Is It Going to Happen Here (an occupation I haven’t given up), getting out of the Army, doing a little stint in government, trying a dab of business, etc. etc.—I realized that my whole life, my skills and career, such as they were, my friends, everything had been shaped by this event, and rather derailed from what I’d intended to be in a vague way. So ensued a period of more milling (I’m a slow type) including some dabblings in academe. And now the story grows even vaguer for the time being, Jeff, since I’m against lying on principle. (Life’s too short, it takes all one’s time to get a finger on some truth.)

But y’know, the other day It came to me, all I write is one story. There’s this backward little type, and he’s doing some gray little task and believing like they tell him, and one day he starts to vomit and rushes straight up a mountain, usually to his doom. Human or alien, mountain or rocket, it’s all the same. Next year I’m trying a real departure: There’s this
girl,
see, and she rushes
down
a salt mine. But they always vomit. The amount of sheer puke in my stories is staggering… What more do you need to know?

Does a writer ever stop telling you who he is?

Smith:
But it’s dangerous to try and guess at an author’s feelings from just his writings. He may use five thousand words to see how a new lifestyle feels, decide he doesn’t like said lifestyle, but still have a publishable short story with his name on it. Or: Try an experiment. Here is an unwritten short story of mine. (Part of it is written and is excruciatingly bad, I’m afraid.) Can you interpret my feelings about marriage from the outline of the story “The Marriage”?

For a couple hundred years there has been no marriage. Everyone sleeps around with whomever he/she pleases. Either coincidently or not so coincidently, the society is decadent, stagnant. The people have not yet reached the level of Wells’s Eloi, but they’re on the way. There has been no progress in any art or science. Everyone sits around doing a lot of nothing. Now this couple decides to get married. They have a big ceremony, and everyone wonders if marriage will be the New Thing. They don’t wonder if marriage will be the savior of society, but the reader does. But after a year or so of monogamy the husband takes on a lover, and another olde praktise—divorce—is reinstituted.

Well, you know how simpleminded plot summaries are. Assume that the whole story is there; do I feel marriage is good or evil? Is my writing (quote unquote) telling you who I am?

Tiptree:
First, I fling the query back at you. Whether you feel marriage is good or evil is not
who you are.
It is a superficial Nixon-debate type formalism of no psychic weight or penetration. No-no-no! If you think your scanning-process occupies itself with such flak, listen deeper to it.

Listening:
Who is this guy? Is he for real? Does he live in the same world I do? What scares him? What does he love? Is he threatening me? Can he endure the messiness of being Human or is he building some neat unreal escape scheme? I hear his verbal argument, pro or con, but what’re his reasons? What
kinds
of points is he making to support it?

For samples, you could have a Jeff Smith who showed his marriage position entirely in terms of society’s good. Or a sad-case Jeff Smith appealing to some conventional mystique. Or a happy Jeff Smith playing around with some Trobriander analogy. Or a hard-nose Jeff Smith who would thump it out in terms of Ordnung or the patriarchal power structure or, godhelpus, economic efficiency. Or a psychological-cynical Jeff Smith who lays it on us in the name of alleged primate instincts. Or a psychological-weepy Jeff Smith wringing our hearts about children’s need for nuclear family role models. Or a hotnuts Jeff Smith breathing hard over unlimited-sex-access fantasies. Or a revengeful-brat Jeff Smith producing bloody gobbets of his parents’ marriage… had enough?

So—when you hear this rather quiet account of a social state in which a pair of individuals follow their own bent, producing an “innovation,” which is followed by another “innovation,” you get an immediate impression of a curious, probably orderly mind testing a social generality by showing what real people might do… and the cycle form (history returning on itself) gives unmistakable evidence of a mild ironic trend. The author notices and enjoys history’s little ways of presenting the same old meatballs as Hash du Jour. The fact that he asks the question he does hints that he is
not
a black-white crusader. More subtly, the reference to self suggests that he is one who uses self as an experience laboratory, no sacred wall around the sealed black box of Me (such as you meet often in, say,
Analog).
The way the story goes, A leads to B which leads to etc., suggests a process-type thinker, interested in social causality (spends extra words on relation of marriage to “decadence”). Wells ref. suggests author reads around on the subject, probably still in the shallows (uses terms like “decadence”) but will go deeper (tone of thoughtful curiosity about that “coincidentally or not”)… and a gentle guy, forgive it.

Now there’s my try at describing what comes over in a flash as I read the bare summary.
Don’t tell me you don’t do it too.

And that was all at the surface or content level (Do pay attention, children) without any digging into the effects of choice of words, cadences, that eel-bucket known as
style.

(Of course the fact that the author omitted a whole encyclopedia of stereotype words tells us something right off. For example, imagine a summary with the words “purity of bodily fluids” or “joy of life” or “so-called liberals” in it.)

And it occurs without reference—correction, with
almost
no reference—to whether the story seems “good” or “bad.”

In other words, what an author leaks at every sentence is not his formal argument alone but what he sees as real, how deeply he’s into life… and himself. What kind of companion he’d be to run out of gas with in the Mojave Desert, maybe. (And some fine writers you’d rather not, right?)

The same holds in the case you cite where a guy publishes a temporary essay into some lifestyle. If he’s a fast-developing, changing person you could be put off for a while on a specific piece, but even then I bet his very mercurial-serious quality would give itself away. You’d hold off judgment. This is a useless argument without a concrete example.

But it does bring up the other variable. No generalizations hold, not even this one—and I claimed above that your radar brings in this sort of stuff too. Well, I think that holds for
you,
Jeff Smith, and for most of you—whew!—sensitive, intuitive, creepy-quirky-feely learning-type minds out there… But:

Readers differ. Some people’s radar is tuned down to basics like
Can I beat this bugger or do I have to listen to him?
(And don’t we all do this jest a leetle?) The type I mean is the fellow who takes unfamiliar words as a threat, an attempted intimidation. Whereas the learning-type reader takes them as lures or exciting displays. (Unless they are an obvious threat-pose or squid-cloud.)

Now look, Jeff, you lured me into an embryo essay on the nonverbal level of verbal communication.

Which has doubtless been done better by the experts, so let’s abort this mission and get on with it.

Smith:
Why don’t you want your friends to know about your “second career”? Don’t you think that perhaps someday someone will stumble across one of your stories? Will you then deny being the same James Tip-tree, Jr., or what?

Tiptree:
I can answer that easily: I haven’t a clue.

Let me tell you how all this got started.

Couple of years back under a long siege of work and people pressure, I set down four stories and sent ‘em off literally at random. Then I forgot the whole thing. I mean, I wasn’t rational; the pressure had been such that I was using speed
(very
mildly), and any sane person would have grabbed sleep instead. Obviously, one more activity was sheerly surreal. So some time later I was living, as often happens, out of cartons and suitcases, and this letter from Conde Nast (Who the hell was Conde Nast?) turns up in a carton. Being a compulsive, I opened it. Check. John W. Campbell.

About three days later I came to in time to open one from Harry Harrison.

Now, you understand, this overturned my reality-scene. I mean, we know how writers start. Years, five, ten years, they paper a room with rejection slips. It never occurred to me anyone would buy my stuff. Never. I figured I had the five years to get my head together. I had a list of the places I was going to rotate the things through. (Methodical, even when stoned, see above.)

Three years later I still haven’t got it together. The thing has gone on and on, twenty-one as of now, and I still don’t believe it. I don’t deny I love it, but I deny being happy. It’s too weird. As I told David Gerrold, if these guys only knew it, I’d have paid them for their autographs. I mean, years, years and years, I’ve been the kind of silent bug-eyed Rikki-Tikki-Mongoose type fan who thinks those guys who wrote them walk around six inches off the ground with private MT channels in their closets, step in and Flick!—Gal Central.

Moreover,
Jeff. When someone like Barry Malzberg, who can write rings around me (I unknowingly wrote a fan letter to “K. M. O’Donnell”
through
Malzberg when he was editing
Amazing/Fantastic)
—When such guys claim they have drawers full of unsold manuscripts it proves to me something is wrong. What’s the matter with me, they don’t reject mine? Can only be ‘cause I’m not really really
original?
See?

You better believe it, people mention how they get rejected, I flinch… Of course I occasionally do get reject letters, and then I not only flinch, I roll up in the rug, bawling. Maybe it all goes to show that writers are unfillable hungry voids of ego, like black star gravity-warps. Or maybe it’s me, I dunno.

At this point I note I’ve been ducking your question “Why?” Ah indeed, why? Somewhere Freud is said to have observed that every action is overdetermined, that is, that there is usually more than one sufficient cause, that acts occur at convergence points where many causes meet. (I wish I could locate this quote, I may be overinterpreting; it’s a very useful concept.)

At any event, I could give you a set of plausible reasons, like the people I have to do with include many specimens of prehistoric man, to whom the news that I write
ugh, science fiction
would shatter any credibility that I have left. (Sometimes I think SF is the last really dirty word.)

Or that I’m unwilling to tarnish my enjoyment of this long-established secret escape route by having to defend it to hostile ears. (Coward!)

Or, conversely, that my mundane life is so uninteresting that it would discredit my stories. Etc., etc.…

Probably the real reason is partly inertia, it started like this, I don’t yet really believe it, let it be till it ripens. That too.

But basically maybe I believe something about the relation of writers to their stories, that the story is the realest part of the storyteller. Who cares about the color of Coleridge’s socks? (Answer, Mrs. C.) Of course, I enjoy reading a writer’s autobiography—or rather,
some
writers! A few. By far the most of them make me nervous, like watching a stoned friend driving a crowded expressway. For Chrissakes,
stop!

I told this to Harlan Ellison, but I don’t think he understood, because he is one of the few who can reveal all he wants without spoiling his stories. But there’s the catch. When you’re reading Harlan’s wonderfully natural, candid, Human-all-too-Human accounts of Harlan Living,
are you really looking behind the scenes?
You are not. You are looking at more of Harlan’s writing, not because Harlan is being deceptive, or being less than candid, but because Harlan belongs to that Human type, Homo Logensis, the Talking Man, like Mailer, like Thomas Wolfe, whose life forms into narrative as it is being lived, so that at every act of unveiling, at putting the naked squirm of the inmost flesh into words, another level of reality forms behind and beneath, in which the living Harlan exists just one jump ahead of the audience.

Those of us who are not so blessed are very rightly dubious about the value of straight autobiographical writing. For example, the poet Auden offers as his autobiography, a collection of cherished quotations and notations, his commonplace book. (I’m reading it now, it’s great.) And he’s right; if you want a terrible instance of suicide by autobiography, Cordwainer Smith. One of the greats. If only I’d never read that perishing introduction in which he blathers on about his household, and how his cook or somebody is really almost Human. Jeesus.

Does this convey?

Just to wind this up, you’ll notice I left a “partly” dangling on the last page. Well, the last remaining part of my secretiveness is probably nothing more than childish glee. At last I have what every child wants, a real secret life. Not an official secret, not a Q-clearance polygraph-enforced bite-the-capsule-when-they-get-you secret, nobody else’s damn secret but
mine.
Something
they
don’t know. Screw Big Brother. A beautiful secret
real
world, with real people, fine friends, doers of great deeds and speakers of the magic word, Frodo’s people if you wish, and they write to me and know me and accept my offerings, and I’m damned if I feel like opening the door between that magic reality and the universal shitstorm known as the real (sob) world. When all the more cogent reasons are done, it’s probably that simple.

So, how to reconcile that with honesty? Well, who is honest? You? Or You? Don’t tell me, man. You know as well as I do we all go around in disguise. The halo stuffed in the pocket, the cloven hoof awkward in the shoe, the X-ray eye blinking behind thick lenses, the two midgets dressed as one tall man, the giant stooping in a pinstripe, the pirate in a housewife’s smock, the wings shoved into sleeveholes, the wild racing, wandering, raping, burning, bleeding, loving pulses of reality decorously disguised as a roomful of Human beings. I know goddam well what’s out there, under all those masks. Beauty and Power and Terror and Love.