The Avram Davidson Treasury (2 page)

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.

—R
OBERT
S
ILVERBERG
September, 1995

STARSHIP AVRAM: A WRITERS’
MEMORIAL PARTY
G
RANIA
D
AVIS

A
VRAM
D
AVIDSON
: A
PRIL
23, 1923–M
AY
8, 1993

A
VRAM
D
AVIDSON
’
S REMARKABLE WRITING
career spanned nearly half a century. He lived and wrote enough for many lifetimes—he was writing letters to beloved friends on the day he passed away in May 1993. He discovered “magical realism” before the term was invented, and his later works of imaginative fiction are as strong and inventive as the powerful stories of his youth.

He wrote intensely, and published over two hundred works of short fiction. Many stories are award winners or award nominees, or were included in “Best of …” anthologies. The score stands at:

Five World Fantasy Award nominations, and three awards (Best Short Fiction, Best Collection, and Life Achievement).

Seven Nebula nominations, covering
all
categories. (The Nebula is awarded by one’s colleagues in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.)

Two Edgar nominations and one award, for Best Short Mystery Story, from his fellow Mystery Writers of America.

The Ellery Queen Award for Best Short Mystery Story.

Appearances in nearly fifty (count ’em!) “Best Of …” anthologies.

(And a partridge in a pear tree…)

Yet many of these acclaimed stories have never appeared in an Avram Davidson collection, or have fallen out of print and are rare and hard to find.

Avram once wrote, “A labor which might have made Hercules pause is persuading a publisher to issue a collection of short stories. At the first suggestion of it they whine, whimper, climb trees, and go seek their homes in the rocks like the aunts.” (Preface to
Strange Seas and Shores
, Doubleday, 1971.)

But here they are—or at least some of them, gathered into a wonderful, whiz-bang volume. Ask your bookseller for more.

Avram Davidson has always been a writers’ writer—the author that other authors choose when they want a warm, witty, literate read. This became strikingly clear when we sent invitations to his friends and colleagues, requesting introductions to their favorite Avram Davidson stories—a sort of Writers’ Memorial Party. The response was exciting, as you will see. Many stories in this book were award winners or nominees; most of them appeared in one or more “Best of …” anthologies; and all of them were picked by a respected author of imaginative fiction as a beloved favorite.

I want to thank all the authors who wrote introductions, and pass along Avram’s advice to you:

A million schoolmams, male and female, have taught us as if teaching geometry or other holy writ, that a story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And, of course, a story has. The beginning of a story is where it begins, the middle of a story is where it middens, and the end of a story is where it ends. This is exemplified by the one book found even in homes where the mom and the dad have provided no Bible, namely the telephone book. It begins at A and it ends at Z and it middens at or about L. It is the story or song of the Tenth Sister, Elemenope, the Muse of the Alphabet. Characters?
Look
at all those characters! Plots? Plots? As many as you like. From Abbott Plott to Zygmunt Plotz. (Afterword to
The Best of Avram Davidson
, Doubleday, 1979.)

This book has been the cooperative effort of Avram Davidson’s friends, and mine. I owe thanks and gratitude to every one—you are
each
a treasure. To Robert Silverberg, my esteemed co-editor, and to Teresa Nielsen Hayden, our Tor editor, who was with us from the start. To every friend who wrote an introduction—and especially to every friend who
offered
to write an introduction, even after the book was filled. To my dear husband, Dr. Stephen L. Davis, and my fine sons Ethan Davidson and Seth Davis (Avram Davidson’s son and godson), who made countless field-trips to the dreaded copy-shop. To Darrell Schweitzer and George Scithers at Owlswick Literary Agency, who persevered, and to Peter Crowther and Stewart Wieck, who got our ball rolling. Many thanks to author Sr. Richard Gibbons, who kept it together, and to Davidson bibliographers extraordinaire, Richard Grant, who saved so much, and
vajra
Henry Wessells. To those who listened patiently, tracked down information, offered help and ideas, encouragement, kindness and love in so many ways—you know who you are.

Thanks most of all to the readers, who are about to embark on an adventure. You are in for some laughs and verbal thrills, and your mind will be bent in many directions. Please remember that some of the stories were written decades ago, when language customs were different—like those wonderful old black-and-white
noir
films, where all the women are called “babe.” Fasten your seat belts, hold onto your hats, and don’t forget to send postcards home.

S
TARSHIP
A
VRAM TAKING OFF
—B
ON
V
OYAGE
.

Y
OURSLY
Y
OURS
(
AS
A
VRAM OFTEN SAID
),

G
RANIA
D
AVIS
(
THE
“I
RON
K
REPLACH
”),
1998, S
AN
R
AFAEL
, C
ALIFORNIA
,
AND
K
AHUKU
, H
AWAII

I
NTRODUCTION BY
R
OBERT
S
ILVERBERG

This little story was the science-fiction world’s introduction to the art of Avram Davidson. It occupied just four pages of the July, 1954 issue of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
which then was an elegant and fastidious publication edited by the elegant and fastidious Anthony Boucher, a connoisseur of fine wines and opera and mystery stories and fantasy, and his colleague J. Francis McComas. Boucher’s brief introduction to the story went like this:

Avram Davidson, scholar and critic, has the most beautiful beard that has ever visited our office, and one of the most attractively wide-ranging minds, full of fascinating lore on arcane and unlikely subjects. For his first fiction outside of specialized Jewish publications, he takes his theme from an offtrail branch of folklore, the baffling rime-games sung by little girls, with distinctive and delightful results.

Thus the new author was placed perfectly for us as he actually was: the bearded scholar with the wide-ranging off-beat mind. And Avram did the rest, with the dazzling opening paragraph that (while seeming to be bewilderingly diffuse) actually communicates a dozen different significant things about the narrator and his predicament, and then, deftly leading us onward through one circumlocution after another, depositing us less than two thousand words later at the sharply ironic final moment.

It was all there, right at the outset: the cunning narrative strategy, the mannered prose, the flourish of esoteric erudition, the sly wit, all done up in a four-page marvel of a story. Surely we all saw, right away, that a stream of further masterpieces would follow this introductory tidbit. Surely we did: surely. Oh, Avram, Avram, what a wonder you were!

MY BOY FRIEND’S NAME IS JELLO

F
ASHION
,
NOTHING BUT FASHION
. Virus X having in the medical zodiac its course half i-run, the physician (I refuse to say “doctor” and, indeed, am tempted to use the more correct “apothecary”)—the physician, I say, tells me I have Virus Y. No doubt in the Navy it would still be called Catarrhal Fever. They say that hardly anyone had appendicitis until Edward VII came down with it a few weeks before his coronation, and thus made it fashionable. He (the medical man) is dosing me with injections of some stuff that comes in vials. A few centuries ago he would have used herbal clysters… Where did I read that old remedy for the quinsy (“putrescent sore throat,” says my dictionary)?
Take seven weeds from seven meads and seven nails from seven steeds
. Oh dear, how my mind runs on. I must be feverish. An ague, no doubt.

Well, rather an ague than a pox. A pox is something one wishes on editors…strange breed, editors. The females all have names like Lulu Ammabelle Smith or Minnie Lundquist Bloom, and the males have little horns growing out of their brows. They must all be Quakers, I suppose, for their letters invariably begin, “Dear Richard Roe” or “Dear John Doe,” as if the word
mister
were a Vanity…when they write at all, that is; and meanwhile Goodwife Moos calls weekly for the rent. If I ever have a son (than which nothing is more unlikely) who shows the slightest inclination of becoming a writer, I shall instantly prentice him to a fishmonger or a Master Chimney Sweep. Don’t write about Sex, the editors say, and don’t write about Religion, or about History. If, however, you
do
write about History, be sure to add Religion and Sex. If one sends in a story about a celibate atheist, however, do you think they’ll buy it?