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Across the Gates

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

Another of my abandoned projects: a series of alternate histories in which science fiction writers have their careers instead in the mainstream or mainstream writers become science fiction writers instead. Or both. Judith Merril hanging out in the Village with Djuna Barnes, exchanging gossip on Anthony Boucher. John Updike, that ambitious lad, writing a Smeerp Quatrology set on Mars and satirizing the mores of his time. Smeerp Run. The Academy of Arts and Letters overtaken by members of the Hydra Club. I thought it an amusing conceit but only produced one story (“Another Goddamned Showboat”) about a bitter fortyish Hemingway trapped in occupied France, collecting rejection slips from John W. Campbell, before I lost interest. Science fiction and its alternate histories in the 1980's was already too much of an insiders' practice, I thought, so I gave it up. Sometimes I think about trying again but I lie down until the urge passes. Paul di Filippo's collection, Lost Pages, tried something like this years ago and probably did the conceit sufficient justice.

Every writer of some prolificacy has abandoned projects and most were put in that category for good reason. Long ago Esquire had access to James Agee's notebooks; Agee (1909-1954) was the King of Abandonment, the sheer volume and emotional force of his notes for a series of realistic novels on the Depression project work which would have gone far beyond A Death In The Family . . . but of course notes for grandiose, unfulfilled projects are a category of their own. Mailer envisioned “The Man Who Studied Yoga” and “The Time Of Her Time” as a prologue and small chapter in an enormous work which would “Take the farthest shot in the history of letters at encompassing all of American life,” but those 15,000 words in the 1959 Advertisements For Myself were as far as he ever got.

Much closer to home, there is Gordon R. Dickson's “Dorsai Cycle,” which as conceived in 1959 (at Milford shortly after the novel Dorsai! had been published in Astounding as a three-part serial) would consist of three historical novels, three contemporary novels and three novels set in the future which would encompass the secret history of humanity. He did publish the very long The Final Encyclopedia thirty years later, a couple of magazine-length stories (“Soldier Ask Not” and “The Lost Dorsai!”) won the Hugo and Nebula, but the project in its entirety came to dust. Its very scope may have defeated Dickson just as it did Mailer.

I think it was the scope of the project atop its arcane nature which defeated me, but every now and then, even twenty years after I put it to rest, the project occasionally haunts me. It tends to do so when I read something by an acclaimed non-science-fiction writer which makes me wonder what this writer could have brought to our field. The most recent such encounter was a rereading of John Cheever's short story “The Jewels of the Cabots” (Playboy, May 1972/Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards 1973). Here is a wandering, looping first-person narrative in which Leander (this is obviously the Leander of Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle but we are never given a last name) takes us through forty years of St. Botolph's history, beginning and ending with the mysterious Cabots and Leander's shaky relationship with two of the daughters, centering on the jewels of the Cabots, diamonds left on the washline by Mrs. Cabot to dry . . . which were stolen by the older daughter to finance her flight from her crazed, randy family. Leander had briefly dated the younger daughter. Many years later he meets the older daughter, the thief Minerva, who has become a 300-pound expatriate.

The narrative sweeps here and lands there; it smashes time, pulverizes time, heads in one direction and then goes another, connects some of its strands, leaves others forever flying in the breeze like those chains of diamonds. One critic described this story having a narrator who is deliberately repressing what is really on his mind and indeed, “The Jewels of the Cabots” is, like Bester's “Fondly Farenheit” (a first-person story published a decade and a half earlier, which shares the restlessness and inexorable digressiveness). But there is something beyond Leander's aversion here. Cheever does something remarkably science-fictional which no science fiction writer, even Alfred Bester, seems to have done, at least to that point . . . he shatters time, destroys time, abandons linear narrative for a Heisenbergian cascade which mimics some of the characteristics of modern physics. Time in this story is a function of the observer effect and in its flexibility and elusiveness becomes the story's central character.

Without a rocket, robot, android, time machine or reference to the Antares Cluster, “The Jewels of the Cabots” is a science fiction story; it embodies a certain tormenting and fragmented means of confronting “reality” which would have been familiar to Phil Dick. It is clearly more science fiction than the Kelly Link novelette, “Magic for Beginners” and Karen Fowler's “What I Didn't See” (both Nebula winners) which I discussed in an earlier column, and it makes me wonder what kind of science fiction writer John Cheever might have been if he had attempted to work within the form. (Probably, in the mid-fifties, a very unhappy science fiction writer. Campbell wouldn't have understood him, Gold would have asked him for resolution beyond cheap mysticism, Boucher would have appreciated his style while feeling that Clingerman, Bester and Matheson with their ability to extrapolate or cartoon came closer to the expectations of his magazine's audience. Lowndes and Shaw might have liked him but only on occasion. Fred Pohl would have preferred Kornbluth for Star Science Fiction.)

We'll never know. I do know that George P. Elliott (1918-1980) wanted to be a science fiction writer; he told me so. It was only when stories like “The NRACP,” “Sandra” and “Faq” were being rejected consistently by the sf markets that he took them to The Hudson Review and slowly accumulated a reputation in quality lit. Inferring from his interest in science fiction and his occasional mature attempts to write it, I think that John Updike might have a similar history.

Other examples: Reynolds Price’s 1971 novelette, “Waiting For Dachau” (Esquire and the O. Henry Prize Stories) incorporates in its narrator an emotional understanding of the prison camp (to which he has come on tour. His girlfriend will not join in a tour of the prison camp, she insists on waiting outside and her refusal to enter ignites in the narrator an emotional desolation his girlfriend refuses to enter, which forces him to an emotional desolation and helpless sense of loss which in a tiny way replicate the response of later generations to the Holocaust. Phillip Roth in a late passage of I Married A Communist (1998) turns his cast of characters into stars and constellations; pasted on the canvas of sky, icy and remote as the galaxies. The frisson of that passage and of the Price story is for me that of the most moving science fiction.

I wrote Price years ago about this story: “You don't know this, but you're a science fiction writer.” He replied pleasantly and distantly. I thought of trying the same line on Roth but he is a recluse, notably unpleasant to strangers and I don't need the humiliation.

So I thought I'd try it on you.

—March, 2009, New Jersey