You’ve Just Paid the Artist a Wonderful Compliment

Now Go to Hell

I wrote recently about Samuel R. Delany’s Dark Reflections, a novel in which Delany seems completely present, but has given himself another life.  Instead of being a science fiction writer, Arnold Hawley is a poet.  Instead of living in New York and teaching at Temple, he lives in New York and teaches on Staten Island.  Instead of living on a tight budget, and needing to continue teaching at an age when others have retired, he is close to the poverty line.  Instead of being a wildly promiscuous gay man, he is a completely repressed one.  He has never brought another man to orgasm, or had an orgasm himself in a man’s presence.

It’s as if Delany is saying, What if?  What if?  What if?

And then at one point, he moves beyond Arnold Hawley or himself, and speaks for artists in general.  Hawley has just, as a sixty-eight-year-old man, gone to dinner with a couple of editors and a much younger writer.  He got there quite late, because of all the indignities and difficulties of old age, and of traveling in New York.  He held up his end of the conversation, about the validity of various new art forms.  And then at the end of the dinner, the young writer—a proponent of the new forms, and a practitioner—lingered to pay him a compliment.

“Mr. Hawley . . . uh, Arnold—your . . . uh, prose poem Their Gunwales All Submerged is one of my favorite books of the last . . . well, thirty years!  In any genre!  Really!  It’s just an . . . an amazing performance!”

Delany has—before this scene—shown Hawley looking back on his entire oeuvre, and the book in question—the actual title was High-Toned Homilies with Their Gunwales All Submerged—was his most obscure and difficult, and the worst-selling of all his books.  The fact that he’d met someone who had read it, much less someone who resonated with it, was incredible.

His reaction was just as surprising.

“Why did such compliments always make him so fucking angry?”  He was so upset that he didn’t walk toward his subway, but walked away from it, so he could get away from the whole dinner crowd.

He thought back eventually to a conversation he’d had with a therapist after—just several years before—he’d suffered a nervous breakdown, going up to the roof of his apartment building and stripping himself of his clothes, staying there for several days.  In one way, he’d been worried about his very existence, worried that, if his finances got any worse, he’d wind up homeless on the street.  In another way, his problem was just the same old one he’d had all his life.

“The fact is, there is no praise as great as the praise I want.”  He’d said it with tears welling.  “That sort of praise doesn’t exist—I know that,” Arnold had told Dr. Engles, on is side of the chipped table in the small blue room at Mount Sinai.  “It doesn’t stop me from wanting it, though—wanting it so much!”

Even at age 68, he still felt that way.

This is one of the most honest moments I’ve ever encountered in a work of art.

I’m not widely read in the world of science fiction.  I have only a few favorites (Delany, Ursula LeGuin, Philip K. Dick).  Every one of them was wildly successful in the world of science fiction, but took forever to become known to a large public, though LeGuin and Dick are now in the Library of America, and Delany should be.  Dick spent years cranking out masterpieces (also pure crap) and getting paid almost nothing (the same for the masterpieces as for the crap).  LeGuin eventually found her way into the world of mainstream publishing, and published stories in the New Yorker, but her best work was in science fiction and fantasy, and had been done years earlier.

There is nothing more short-lived than a genre writer.  I thought that Ross Thomas, for instance, was a mystery/thriller writer of greatness; I read a number of his books multiple times, but at this point it’s as if he’s dropped off the face of the earth (if you have no idea who I’m talking about, read Chinaman’s Chance.  If you can find it).  Rex Stout wasn’t a great writer, but he was certainly a wonderful mystery writer, but when I wanted to read one of his books recently I couldn’t find one anywhere, even at used bookstores.

And I vividly remember that after my first introduction to Delany, at a two-hour lecture at MIT when I was living in Cambridge (a friend just a year before had cornered me at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham and said, “This is the one science fiction writer who is the equal of any of the post-modernist novelists.  You have to buy and read this book”) I went after the lecture to a science fiction specialty bookstore, and asked if they had any books by Delany, and they said no.  They shrugged and looked away, as if to say, who’s this dumb asshole?  I wanted to say, where the hell is your backlist?

There basically is no backlist on genres.  There is only what has come out lately.

I briefly corresponded with LeGuin after I sent her an article I’d written about her.  She was extremely gracious, like Delany, sent me free copies of several of her books, received and read a couple of mine (and had the guts to tell me she didn’t like one of them).  But she confessed that, even at that age, she was still rather grouchy that she hadn’t gotten greater recognition in the larger literary world.  As mature a human being as she was, it still bothered her.

Delany got at the heart of this situation by making Arnold Hawley a poet.  Of all the writers I’ve ever met, poets are the most underpraised, and the most resentful.

But I think the real problem is that any writer, in creating a work of art, even a far inferior writer, has been in touch with something infinite.  All works of art come out of the vast space that we get to in meditation, or in any creative endeavor, the vast space of dreams (if anyone could write a book as good as his best dreams, he’d be a genius).  The vision of what we have seen is infinite.  We’ve done our best to render it into a work of art.  No response could be adequate to it.  Even a young poet’s honest stuttering words.

Arnold Hawley is not just a minor poet whom Samuel R. Delany invented out of fragments of his life.  He is a stand-in for all artists.  The beauty of his life is in the dedication that produces the poems.  The reaction he gets when he tries to share them with the world is heartbreaking.