Portrait of the Artist as a Befuddled Old Man

Dark Reflections by Samuel R. Delany.  Carroll & Graf.  295 pp.  $15.95. *****

There’s nobody quite like Samuel R. Delany, and every now and then I have to read one of his books, often one I’ve read before (this is either my third or fourth time with Dark Reflections).  He had an early career as a brilliant young science fiction writer, moved on to memoirs and other kinds of fiction; he has also, in recent years, written a fair amount of erotica, though it’s pretty strange stuff.[1]  What I’ve enjoyed most—aside from the brilliant early novel Dhalgren—is the writing that stays close to his life, his memoir The Motion of Light in Water, the fascinating long essay Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, and the novellas in Atlantis.  Also 1984: Selected Letters, about the year he was audited by the IRS (it was infuriating to read about the way our government treated one of its great living artists).

Dark Reflections is fascinating because it does and does not seem to reflect his life.  Arnold Hawley is a poet, and as we meet him is at what seems to be the pinnacle of his career, at age 54.  He has just won the Alfred Proctor Prize[2] for poetry; he’s working with a mainstream press and has an editor who loves his work; he’s given up a full-time job as a government functionary for a teaching job that gives him more time to write, and though he’s right on the edge of poverty—for a while he is alternating oatmeal and scrambled eggs for dinner—the prize gives him a bit of a cushion.  He is, like Delany, an overweight African American man who has pursued a writing career all his life and hasn’t gotten the acclaim that he should.[3]  And he’s beginning to feel the effects of age.

One thing that is different about him—in contrast to his creator, who has had a wild sex life with hundreds of sex partners—is that he is a repressed homosexual.  He’s known most of his life that he was gay, but he’s been too timid, or afraid, to act on his desires.  He’s had exactly three sexual encounters in his life, and none of them led to orgasm, for anybody.

So it seems to be a strange alter-ego that Delany is writing about, the man he might have been if he’d allowed a repressive society to stifle him.  How Delany escaped all that is hard to say, but he’s led a bohemian artistic life since he was a teenager (as The Motion of Light in Water lets us know).  He seems to be looking at the man he might have been.  Except that he never even came close.

Dark Reflections is a dreadfully sad and touching story.  From the pinnacle that his career has reached, it declines rather precipitously; the editor that loves him is fired, another man comes along who likes his work but is a novice at the job; his publisher turns down his next book altogether, and things get more and more difficult for him.  At one point, contemplating a poverty-stricken old age, he has a nervous breakdown—going to the roof of his apartment building and stripping naked, staying up there for several days—something Delany experienced as a much younger man.  And then he recovers, writes one last book, and experiences a humiliation as a writer that is almost unspeakable.  It is simultaneously horrifying and rather funny.  It is also somehow characteristic of what happens to an older artist when he begins to lose touch with the culture.

But I have never, in my three or four readings, found this a depressing book.  I find it oddly inspiring, even exhilarating.

One factor in that is the sheer brilliance of the narrative.  That whole drama of the older Arnold Hawley is Part One of the novel; the second part concerns a disastrous brief marriage in his mid-twenties, and the third concerns a moment in his college career when his whole sex life might have gone in another direction.  Each of those moments greatly illuminates the story we heard in the first section.  The third section, in fact, moves forward in time, all the way to the aging poet the man has become.  I don’t know where Delany got the idea for this reverse chronology, but it’s brilliant.

The other thing is that, whatever his fate, this book is the portrait of a dedicated artist, and a kind cultivated man.  The limiting factor in his sex life may be his Aunt Bea, a somewhat moralistic woman who was nevertheless a huge influence in his life, and was major in encouraging his work: the portrait of the two of them attending concerts, going to exhibits, and the whole portrait of the reading Hawley managed to do, despite all the limitations of his life, is remarkable.  And at the moment of his worst humiliation, when anyone else would have been full of rage, and Hawley actually was full of rage, he was nevertheless extremely gracious to a younger poet.  He seems simultaneously to belong to an earlier age and to no age that ever was.  This is not a portrait of a great artist but of a dedicated artist who is a great man.  I’d rather read about a great man than a great artist.

I suspect that Delany himself is both.[4]

[1] I’m referring to books like Hogg, The Mad Man, and the 625 pages of Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders.  What Delany likes, at least in terms of pornography, is descriptions of sex that is literally dirty, including scat, snot, piss.  I admire the man enormously, but I’ve never been able to make my way through any of these books.

[2] Don’t bother to apply.  It was invented by S.R. Delany.

[3] Delany was famous early on as a boy wonder of science fiction, and Dhalgren sold a million copies, but he was a genre writer who wasn’t spoke of when people were mentioning the American canon.  For writing talent, intelligence, the size and variety of his output, Delany should be classed with the best American writers.  He should be in the Library of America.

[4] Years ago, I had an encounter with the man; after seeing him give a lecture in Cambridge, I sent him one of my novels, and encountered him back in North Carolina at a reading he gave.  I was an utterly unknown writer and he was a famous one.  But he spoke to me as if we’d known each other for years, recommended my book to other people we encountered, and in a few days sent my copies of five or six of his books, including one in manuscript.  A few years later he gave me a blurb for my next book.  But only after insisting that I make a few corrections in the early pages.