A, B, C: Three Short Novels

  III.

  When The Jewels of Aptor came back from copyediting, Don Wollheim asked me to cut 720 lines—about 10 percent of the book.

  Standing at the far side of his desk, I must have looked surprised.

  “Huh?” I asked. “Yeah, sure. But why? Was there some particular place you thought it was too…loose?”

  “Oh, no,” Don said. “But it has to fit into a hundred forty-six pages. It casts off at seven hundred twenty lines too long.” He would do it for me, if I wanted—

  “Oh, no!” I said. “No….That’s all right. I’ll do it!” I reached across the desk for the manuscript in its red rubber band.

  Completed when I was nineteen, contracted for not quite a month after my twentieth birthday (since the copyright laws changed in 1976, the phrase has become “in contract”), and cut down by fifteen pages a few weeks later, the first edition of The Jewels of Aptor was published that winter—where I pick up the story:

  In 1966, an editor a few years older than I, Terry Carr, joined the staff at Ace Books, the U.S. publisher of all the books I had written up till then except Nova. I have written before, as have many before me, that the history of post–World War I science fiction is the history of its editors: Hugo Gernsback, F. Olin Tremaine, Raymond Palmer, J. Francis McComas and Anthony Boucher, Howard Browne, Ian and Betty Ballantine, John W. Campbell, H. L. Gold, on through Avram Davidson, Cele Goldsmith, Don Wollheim, Harlan Ellison, Frederik Pohl, Damon Knight, Michael Moorcock, Larry Ashmead, David Hartwell, Judy Lynn and Lester Del Ray, Betsey Wollheim, Beth Meacham, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, Betsy Mitchell, L. Timmel Duchamp, Steve Berman, Kelly Link, and Warren Lapine. (In this incomplete list, many were writers as well—Campbell, Davidson, Pohl, Knight, Moorcock, Ellison, Duchamp, and Link are significant writers, whose fiction remains influential for any real understanding of our genre’s development—though their editorial force and direction is central to their careers.) Carr is among those editors. He edited the first novels of William Gibson, Joanna Russ, and Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and a dozen other memorable titles for his Ace Science Fiction Specials series.

  In 1967 Carr did for me one of the most generous things an editor can do. “Chip, I was just rereading your first novel, The Jewels of Aptor. I enjoyed it. Don told me we cut it for length, though. I was thinking of doing a new edition. Do you have an uncut copy? I’d like to take a look.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I do…”

  In the top drawer of a file cabinet in the kitchen of the fourth-floor apartment where we had lived for a couple of years on Seventh Street, I’d left an uncut carbon copy. The apartment had been more or less inherited by a woman I’d known in Athens during my first, six-month European jaunt. Later I’d brought it up to my mother’s Morningside Heights (aka Harlem Heights) apartment, where it stayed in an orange crate full of manuscripts and journals in a back closet—and left all the other papers, manuscripts, contracts, and correspondence in the Seventh Street kitchen filing cabinet.

  I came up to get it.

  As Mom and I walked down the hall to what had been my bedroom when I’d lived there, and was now my grandmother’s room, my mother asked: “When are you going to take the whole thing?” Over the years I’d transferred the most important papers and my growing stack of journal notebooks to my mother’s bedroom closet.

  “Soon,” I told her. “I’ll take it soon.”

  “Well, please do.”

  And I carried the uncut Jewels of Aptor back on the subway down to where I now lived, farther along Sixth Street. At home I read it through: I crossed out the odd word or phrase and moved a few more subjects up against their verbs. (Full disclosure: and I have done similar reading once more, here, for the same end.) My personal sense is that this was no sort of rewrite. There was no revising of incident, characters, setting, or structure. Pages went by without an emendation. I wouldn’t call it “editing,” so much as “copyediting.” As I remember, no more than six pages were corrected so heavily (more than five corrections on a sheet) that I put them through the typewriter once more. (This was before there were copy centers or home computers or word processors; even Xerox machines were rare.) The rest were done by hand on that “onionskin” copy, typed with carbon paper. I finished the final work two days later and took it in to Terry Carr that afternoon.

  Some time on, I was able to oblige Mom: a letter came from the Curator of Special Collections at Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library, Dr. Howard Gotlieb. He asked if I would let his library house my papers. “Thank you,” I told him when I phoned back. “I’d be happy to.” Dr. Gotlieb and his staff sent a station wagon from Boston to get them from the places around Harlem and Alphabet City where they’d been stored (such as my mother’s bedroom closet).

  Mom and I stood back while two graduate students in slacks and sports jackets carried the very full crate—yes, made of wooden slats in which oranges had been shipped from Florida, with a dark blue, white, and orange paper label pasted onto each end—to the apartment door and out into the echoing co-op hallway with its florescent lights, to take it down to the car parked on Amsterdam Avenue.

  While getting ready for sending things up to Boston, I’d learned that the conscientious super’s wife had had the wooden file cabinet, with its four drawers still stuffed with papers, manuscripts, and letters, moved to the building’s cellar only days after I’d removed The Jewels of Aptor carbon. A few months later, the building had been demolished. Everything in the basement had been buried beneath brick, glass, shattered beams, and plaster, to be steam-shoveled into dumpsters and hauled to a landfill, while a new building went up in its place on the north side of Seventh Street. The paper trail of my life till then—contracts, correspondence, completed manuscripts of both novels and stories, along with countless false starts on countless stories and other projects—today is ripped, scattered, soaked, and soiled beneath the mud of the Jersey flats.

  Certainly I felt Aptor read better with the text intact. But I had been prepared for Terry to say he thought the cut version more commercial and that he’d stick with it. When he called me into the office, and I asked him what his verdict was, however, he told me, “It certainly makes more sense, now. And it doesn’t lurch quite the way the cut version did a few times. Yes, we’re going to do it.”

  That is the version Ace republished in 1968, which has generally been in print since. Regardless of what it says on the back of whatever paper or hardcover edition, it has not been “expanded,” except to restore the missing pages and paragraphs, nor has it been “completely revised” or “updated,” other than to return to the initial version, along with one more read-through to make sure it was as close as I could get it to what I’d first wanted. Those mass-market claims on the paperback are Ace’s concession to what, at the time, Wollheim felt fans would like to hear, however misleading. But even the actual changes I inserted are no more than any conscientious copy editor might have suggested, the majority of which—the vast majority—were spelling and typing corrections that had slipped through because of my dyslexia.

  It’s what appears here.

  Over the years, Dr. Gotlieb and I exchanged notes between the Mugar and New York, between the Mugar and San Francisco, between the Mugar and New York again. Regularly Boston University’s Special Collections Archive sent me birthday cards, Christmas cards, update announcements on its other holdings from other writers—and every year or two I would FedEx cartons of my journals and manuscripts and hand-corrected galleys to Boston. Since Elizabethan days publishers have called these “foul papers” or “foul matter” and were happy to be shut of them. In any publishers’ storage spaces it accumulates faster than clothes-hangers breed in clothes closets.

  I didn’t meet Dr. Gotlieb or see the collection in person, however, until a 1982 visit. Elderly, genial, and eccentric, he was a white-haired library science scholar, at home in his office and among the extraordinary things he had gathered about
him over the years for Special Collections (today the Howard Gotlieb Memorial Archive) at Boston University. While I was there, I broke down and asked him why, fourteen years before, he had decided to collect me. He said, “I used to pick your books up from the newsstands, read them, and I liked them—as well, I had a dream of making the collection here a portrait of the twentieth century for future scholars: you were part of the second half of the twentieth century. So why not?” That’s how my papers joined the papers of Samuel Beckett, L. Sprague de Camp, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dan Rather, Philip Roth (Roth’s mailbox from one country house or another sat on a side shelf in Dr. Gotlieb’s office), Isaac Asimov, and Bette Davis—whom Dr. Gotlieb also liked.

  Talk about luck.

  IV.

  During 1999 and 2000, I taught at the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. Henry Morrison had been my agent since I was twenty-three, and by then was also a film producer. At a New York lunch he told me: “As far as I can see, Chip, this is the worst time to be a writer—a regularly selling writer with a market—in the history of the United States. And I mean back to Charles Brockden Brown. I don’t see how you guys do it anymore.”

  To which the answer is, most of us don’t. That’s why, today, so many of us teach. I would like to be able to say to the young, “You think you have it rough? Well, when I was your age…” But I can’t. Today’s young folks, especially in the arts, have a much harder time than those of us—who now have some sort of track record and, possibly, tenure—did fifty years ago when we started. I wish it were otherwise. It would be healthier for the entire country.

  V.

  From January 1969 through ’70 and again in 1972 and part of ’73, I lived in San Francisco. By late ’70 I was staying on Oak Street, in something of a commune. The building was a medium-sized Victorian, painted gray on the outside. To the right of the building was an alley less than three feet wide, halfway down which sat a baby stroller missing a wheel. You had to climb over it or really squeeze by to get to the back. From the broad kitchen windows, out over a green board fence, you could see behind us the yard and rear balconies of the San Francisco Buddhist Center. A counterculture artist who’d owned the place ten years earlier had painted the inside walls and ceilings along the halls and in the major bedrooms with pastoral murals.

  But not in mine.

  Mine was just over the size of the small downstairs bathroom and at the very front of the house. Probably at one time it had been used for storage or as a maid’s quarters.

  In that year’s foggy West Coast winter, the Modern Language Association was holding its sprawling annual academic meeting in the Bay Area. One Professor Thomas Clareson had invited me to address the Continuing Symposium on Science Fiction that year—the second oldest of the two continuing symposia in the organization. (Once I’d asked Professor Clareson what the oldest continuing symposium in the MLA was. He’d said, “Oh, it’s something like Shifts in the Umlaut through Two Hundred Fifty Years of Upper High German…or some such.” I assumed he was joking.) The night before I had been out drinking with a handful of science-fiction scholars, including Clareson, who was to moderate the next day’s panel on which I was to give my talk. It was my second MLA appearance in three years, though at the time I was neither a teacher nor a member. (You could do that then, but you haven’t been able to for the last decade or so.) Apparently he had been keeping track of what I was drinking—I hadn’t—and he had driven me home afterwards. He’d figured, correctly, that I might need some…support getting to my event by one o’clock the next day.

  At ten I had opened an eye, squinted at the sun coming through the curtain, and thought, “Oh, Christ…no, I’m going to blow this off. Can’t do, can’t do, can’t do…” and I’d rolled over and gone back to sleep. Stuck in my notebook, on the desk wedged beside the head of my army-style cot, was the typescript of my talk.*3

  In about an hour, though, the doorbell rasped. Loud knocks, now. The bell rasped again. Someone else in the house answered and, soon, called through my closed door: “Chip! Someone’s here to see you…!”

  I had no idea who it might be. But in that haze where you are too wiped not to respond, I sat up, pulled on some jeans, stepped to my room door and opened it.

  Looking fresh in a gray suit, a pale blue tie, and a paler blue shirt, Professor Clareson—far more experienced in such matters than I—said, “Morning, Chip. Into the shower with you. Come on, get your clothes on. We’ll pour some coffee into you. You’ll feel a whole lot better!”

  I said, “Unnnnnnn…” and then, “Tom, hey…thanks. But I don’t think I can do this, today—”

  “Yes, you can,” he said from behind silver-rimmed granny glasses. “It’s eleven. You don’t have to talk till one. Hot shower, then cold, then warm again…” White hair receded from the front of his skull. (I thought of Death…) “Come on,” he repeated.

  I took a breath, looked around, and grasped a fistful of clothing. Tom walked with me along the hall’s gray runner while, on the walls, oversized shepherdesses loped among blue and pink sheep and, with halos neon bright around their naked bodies, male angels did not look down at me. Clouds and eagles—and one angel who was also a skeleton, refugee from some Dia de Los Muertos celebration—drifted over the ceiling. Tom pulled a wicker-backed chair in front of some large shepherd’s knee and settled on it, slowly, glancing down at both sides. I think he was wondering if it would hold. “I’ll wait….” It did. “If you really feel sick, give a yell. I’ll help, if you need me.” He smiled up at me. “You’ll be okay.”

  “Okay…?” I repeated, queasy, between questioning, confirmation, and the entire conceptual impossibility. I went inside—white tile to the waist, a few pieces cracked or missing, dark blue walls for the rest—and pulled the door closed. A cat box sat under the sink. Kitty litter scattered the linoleum, and a blue plastic toy lay on the shower’s zinc floor.

  There five weeks, it belonged to the kid who belonged to the stroller in the alley. But the people whose kid it was weren’t there that month.

  I dropped my jeans, tried to kick them off—one pants leg wouldn’t come away from my foot till I sat on the loose commode ring (it had no cover), leaned forward and pulled my cuff down over my heel. Standing again, I stepped into the stall, moved the plastic curtain forward along its rod (it had torn free from two of the odd-shaped metal wires), and—stepping toward the back—reached forward and turned the knobs that looked more as if they were for two outside garden hoses than for an inside shower stall. Between my forearms, water fell.

  When it reached reasonable warmth, I moved forward and, for a minute or so, turned one way and another, under the heated flush. A soap bar lay in a metal dish edged with rust and bolted to the blue. I slid the bar free—soft at one side—and soaped chest, underarms, groin, and butt, while warm water beat away the foam. Then, a knob in each hand, with a quick twist I made the water cold—

  “Oh, Christ…!” shouted a committed atheist. (In foxholes and in cold showers…)

  Outside, Tom chuckled.

  Taking a breath, I held it and made myself stand there for a count of three, four, five—then sharply turned up the hot and turned down the cold. It took three long seconds for the warm water to creep up the pipe and spew from the showerhead.