Twenty or more years ago ... how did it feel, the haunting, at first?
I noticed nothing — except that while sitting in a Greyhound bus heading east from Wisconsin I felt a growing fascination with the intelligence and humor put into play in the short stories before my eyes — for I felt dazzled, truly, by several; delighted, by others. They amused and surprised that ambitious, impetuous, blindly self-assured, and often overly critical person which I was, and to some degree still am. I knew the writer's name well enough — for while I read books generally, I gravitated toward writings about science fiction of the so-called Golden and Silver ages that were before my time, and of the New Wave that was perpetually ebbing; and from these sources I knew that this writer struck a nerve: for if others saw opportunity to invoke his name then they did so.
I knew and admired his writing before this — or thought I did. I stood where Van Wyck Brooks's Oliver Allston did, who "had known 'all about' writers before he knew the writings of the writers themselves." I think all of us, before older and more willing to admit our limitations, believe we encompass more within our personal spheres than we do within our hemispheres. I think moreover that among those who grew up liking science fiction in the late 1960s to early '70s, as I did, such an attitude arose in an utterly natural way — or a seemingly natural way, just as aquarium fish given their color-enhancing flakes display their "natural" brilliance. I believed in my own natural colors, as other youths do of themselves; and I think I was, indeed, brilliant — not due to my literary diet but due to my diet's additives. I had taken in my flakes and grown attractively reflective. As to my knowing and admiring this writer? These were more scales.
Fifteen years before this, The Best of C.M. Kornbluth had entered my life at age 17, just I before boarded a Greyhound leaving Kansas City for college. In my bag I packed the Science Fiction Book Club edition whose official publication date was September, 1976 — the month I left home and also left the fantasy small-press scene within which I had been finding my early identity as a writer. How much and how carefully I read that Best of I have small idea. That I had the book club edition stood in the book's way — for I would learn through the years how cheapness of presentation affects how eagerly I dip into text. That it was a collection, moreover, meant I could take it in portions and perhaps never take it in whole. That it had story introductions, too, offered a minor obstacle: for I had been maturing as a reader exposed to a publishing scene upon which Harlan Ellison cast a long shadow. I had the habit already of reading through a volume's introductions; and, feeling the satisfaction of that accomplishment, only later or sometimes never would read the works introduced. The introduction-and-story model, I think, had acquired its power from television. Printed-matter editors envied the impact of the Host before the Show: for the cumulative effect of the host's recurring appearances versus the one-time-only appearance of the particular show gave the host a fixed place in memory — no matter if greater care, effort, and artistry had gone into the individual shows themselves. With collections and anthologies of the 1970s and later, if I did read a story in a collection, it almost always meant I had just finished re-reading the introduction.
It remains strangely vivid to me that during my first term at Beloit my college friend Brian Klein borrowed this book and, when returning it, quoted humorously from "The Advent on Channel Twelve." What, I asked, about the famous "The Marching Morons"? He liked that and others — and unlike me had seen a televised version of "The Little Black Bag" — but at the moment he felt taken by "Advent." I re-read that story then — and ended up re-reading that adroit, seemingly lightweight miniature more times than I did any other in the collection. Poetry and Asian philosophy interested me. I had started studying Confucius and Lao Tzu already at Ottawa University in Kansas, and appreciated small forms and expressive compression. I had no idea, since not so informed by the introduction, that "Advent" came from among the writer's last crop of stories. Nor would I learn until decades had passed that his late stories included other such miniatures. His then-agent Harry Altshuler used the word "beautiful" in reference to at least one.
Similarly, over a decade later, on that eastbound Greyhound away from Wisconsin, I had no clue that the collection in my hand, A Mile Beyond the Moon, was another product of the writer's last year. I found no information on its cover beyond general evaluations. "Here is science fiction at its peak" — generic book-cover nonsense that, to my surprise, met with my agreement. "These stories have helped to set the highest standards of modern science fiction" — these words, too, appeared there, attributed to the New York Herald Tribune.
I find it sadly amusing, now, to re-read these words. They helped decide me on buying the Manor Books paperback at a Milwaukee used-book store before setting out on the next leg of my bus trip. Anthony Boucher wrote them. The Tribune fell within his territory. I know now that Boucher's help and influence were immeasurably important in that ending period of Cyril Kornbluth's life. Boucher, in fact, had helped Cyril devise small changes in "Advent" to answer an editor's quibbles. He helped Cyril through revisions of the strange and wonderful "Ms. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie" — and must have influenced likewise the story that first made me sit up and take serious, fascinated notice, there on the Greyhound: "The Events Leading Down to the Tragedy." Boucher must have been the force behind the act that should have saved Cyril's life — the act of giving Cyril compatible work to do at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. How eerily strange I find it now that, in that used bookstore in Milwaukee, Tony Boucher was there to reach out and open my soul just wide enough to let in a ghost.
This occurred in the late 1980s or early '90s. The delight I experienced in my Greyhound encounter turned easily into an abiding respect for the fiction.
I thought I should find an open door into the past, allowing me now to see, and to begin understanding, the man behind the words. I found only a few doors leading back, however — partially ajar, but not as if from opening. Shutting, rather.
That Cyril Kornbluth, not just his works, struck a nerve among readers became evident to me. Why, then, this sense of the closing door? For that matter, why this sense of a wall that required a door? The more I pursued my multiplying questions the more I discovered puzzles and contradictions swirling around his memory, still in motion despite his absence from our world for four decades and more. Some questions became what seemed my personal burden, by the time the '90s ended. As the next decade passed they lost none of their compelling nature and in some cases seemed more urgently pressing than ever. I committed myself, then, at last, to an effort to unravel what mysteries I could and to share my findings with readers.
End, Part One.
