July 2, 2023: On the Upcoming Essay, "Writing Kornbluth"

I am about to begin posting here a long essay, in eight sections. Written eleven years ago, it helped in a healing process.

Healing from what? Call it a writing injury, from overstrain.

A slowly composed, slowly revised piece, "The Events Leading Down to Biography: On Writing Kornbluth," will appear here much as it did in manuscript in late 2012, when I considered it finished. At present I prefer not to attempt re-tuning its voice to accord better with the voice, mood, or style that new writing from this pencil might reflect.

Yet at its conclusion I will add a separate, new note — not an additional section, since, those many years ago, I felt satisfied with the essay's closure. I still do.

Why publish it now, after all this time?

Though I have planned to do this for years, I have hesitated time and again: for to be my own editor would mean revisiting issues that remain emotional ones for me. Besides the fact that time does smooth over rough areas in our lives, however, two occasions prompt me to act on this at last.

One is that on the 14th of this month I will drive to Minneapolis to be Special Guest at Diversicon, a small, congenial science-fiction convention. The invitation came about because a pre-announced guest had to back out; and since a convention "ghost of honor" was Cyril Kornbluth, the convention committee, which had already contacted me about possibly attending, invited me to be that guest's replacement. I am ending my decade's absence from public events, in other words.

The second reason has to do with today's date. The Diversicon planners chose Cyril Kornbluth because he would have been a hundred years old this year. They also chose Gordon R. Dickson for the same reason. I requested that they consider adding Judith Merril, again for the same reason. This they did.

Today, as it happens — July 2, 2023 — Cyril would have reached one hundred. In common with his character Edward Royland in "Two Dooms," he was born July 2, 1923. (Judy, half-a-year older, was born January 21, 1923.)

In honor of the day's ghost, I give him this essay. Happy birthday, Cyril Kornbluth! Unless that ghost already has, only one person outside this house, here in Cashton, has read this essay. I will tell you about the circumstances in my after-note.

Cheers ...

P.S. — In checking my records after finishing the above, I was surprised to find that in 2014 I did send the essay to Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. Plainly I forgot having ever sent it out post-2012. Since I never heard back, I assume the manuscript was lost.

Farewell to Jack Vance

I never knew him —— although after our one or two phone conversations I began to feel as though I did, at least a little: and at this moment I can hear his voice in my ear, genial and gentle and unassuming. As has happened for me with other souls who identify themselves as political conservatives we made our links to one another via the arts —— plural —— one being science fiction, another being music. Or maybe I should say we made a link to one another through memory: his memory, personal and direct; mine, impersonal and research-based and indirect. We cared enough about the same things that our exchanges came easily.

On January 6, 2009, Jack told me, "I'm blind. My eyes went out fifteen years ago. I've acclimated myself to the situation. It seems almost normal." His contact with literary culture continued —— for he had a "reader" —— I assume an automatic device: "I've got a reader that reads cassettes to me from the Library of Congress." At the time, poetry occupied a fair share of his time, for in his queue he had the Oxford Book of English Verse and Oxford Book of Children's Verse. Should my eyes dim while my ears remain a-quiver, I could ask for no better companions for quiet afternoon or evening hours.

I doubt he could have done in prose what he did, without the influence of traditional poetry.

At the time of our conversation I jotted down those titles without too much thought.

Where does Vance stand in science fiction? I wish I knew better. He was doing a great deal of writing and publishing in years when I read relatively little in the genre. His earlier books, insofar as I know them, include distinctive, idiosyncratic and complex works that I have enjoyed and respected and look forward to revisiting. What emerges most powerfully from them, in memory, is the Vanceian color —- the strangeness, the posed artificiality that inhabits and infects his characters and situations, tingeing them with an impalpable edginess that threatens to blur into discomfort but often leaves an aftertaste of pleasure.

Cheers ...

An SFRA Review of Kornbluth

I have only now stumbled upon a review of C.M. Kornbluth that appeared in the Summer 2012 SFRA Review, No. 301, written by Patrick Casey. This and another academic review by Joe Sanders both spend quite a bit of space objecting to my depiction of Frederik Pohl——perhaps understandably, since Pohl and academia have what seems a friendly relationship. These objections seem more important for these reviewers to discuss, in their brief comments, than the many other aspects and narrative strands that make up my book, to the point that I do find myself wondering how carefully they read what I wrote——a thirty-four chapter, 240,000-word study, with 439 pages to the end of the index.

As my first major effort at writing cultural criticism, my book does have flaws, inevitably. The book is, however, so unlike other works focusing upon science fiction that I imagine some reviewers might find that it lies too far outside their own academic specialties to fully appreciate: for cultural criticism is the blending, as Barzun noted, of history, biography and criticism.

Is Casey being a bit condescending in his opening? "Picture if you can the caricature of the science fiction fan. Not the science fiction reader browsing the science fiction aisle, but the “fan”: the person as passionate about the writers’ lives as he or she is about the works themselves. If you can picture that caricature’s tone in a debate about his favorite author, you’ll have a good idea of what makes Mark Rich’s biography of Cyril Kornbluth ... so frustrating. ... Rich writes as a true fan." If Bob Madle said these words of me, I would regard it as a compliment: for Madle was, indeed, a fan, and remains one; and he possesses a memory for names and facts, and a desire for precision, that any of us might envy. Casey, it strikes me, means something less than complimentary, however. So be it. If he means to demean someone like Madle, then I feel honored to be likewise looked down upon. I hope never to be regarded as a science-fiction academic myself if it means I must then condescend to the fan.

A few notes about minor points——such as this line: "Rich's apparent dislike of Pohl constantly threatens to undermine what could have been a wonderful biography of one of the Golden Age's greatest talents." Either it "threatens to undermine a wonderful biography" or it "undermines what could have been a wonderful biography"——one or the other. Interestingly, the review misspells Pohl's first name two different ways.

Casey did like a few pages of the book: the ones about Mars Child. (Thank you, Judy!) His last paragraph begins, "In the end, too much of the story remains untold and Rich, despite his enthusiasm and years of research, doesn't reveal enough to satisfy those looking for an understanding of the man and his works." Casey apparently missed my note on the third page of text, about C.M. Kornbluth opening up new avenues for research. As I have said before, the book establishes a documented basis for additional work, presumably by others. I was, in fact, astonished that I ended up being able to tell as much of the story as I did. When I began writing it, as far as I knew, and as far as anyone would tell me, the documentation I needed simply did not exist.

Casey seems unastonished by this accomplishment, in addition to being unsatisfied. I will indulge myself, though, by remaining astonished at how the book did finally come together.

And I do think the literary biographer should be as passionately engaged with the life as with the works themselves. Do we place months and years of our lives on alters that means nothing to us?

I pity the unpassionate.

Cheers ...

A Random Surfacing of Twain

A day ago, Saturday, we were at a rain-drenched auction here in the west of Wisconsin where we bought a little of this, a little of that. Near the end, when our small Saturn wagon was about full, I bought a large, cubical box of books, mostly children's.

This afternoon when looking through them I found one of those charming collections of sayings and quotations that Peter Pauper press used to do so well. This particular one appeared beneath the Hallmark imprint.

A Treasury of Mark Twain ... not a collection of stories; just short observations and asides.

In opening the small book this evening one quotation caught my eye:

"Few slanders can stand the wear of silence."

When I published C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary I did find myself attacked by one of Kornbluth's several erstwhile collaborators ... the only surviving one, naturally. This erstwhile collaborator of Kornbluth claimed not to know me, although he and I had kept in contact, on and off, since the middle 1990s.

Anyway ... I have been reading Twain short works for my bedtime reading, recently. So I opened this little gift book with pleasure. When I came across this saying, provenance unlisted, I smiled ... for I was thinking back upon my strategy in the face of public attack.

For when my name was spoken with derision in public, in a famous author's blog ...

I deemed my best option, for the time being, to be silence.

Cheers ...

A Little Note

Soon after being delightfully referred to as the "little Mark Rich creep" I happened to be doing some reading in a book by Daniel Lang. Lang, a writer for The New Yorker in the 1940s, shared a penchant with other New Yorker writers. Then and now, they have seemed eager to show off the latest in word-nuances and word-meanings, as found along the writing beat.

In writing about the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the Manhattan District, in 1945, Lang spoke repeatedly of "creeps" — who were, in fact, the Corps' counter-spies. On page fourteen of his book From Hiroshima to the Moon (New York: Dell/Laurel, 1961), for instance, this appears: "The creeps would put the spy under surveillance twenty-four hours of the day, make friends with him, even 'help' him with his mission." The C.I.C. head, Colonel William Budd Parsons, was "known as the creep."

Although writing and publishing in 1945, Lang was using a sense of the word not to be found in the 1947 American College Dictionary (New York: Harper Brothers, 1948 Text Edition). It did, of course, list the verb meaning of "to move slowly, imperceptibly, or stealthily."

In the Webster's Third New International Dictionary that has been my weighty companion since I entered Beloit College in 1976, the "creep" noun-definitions end with a pair of entries marked "slang." First: "a sneak thief that works in connivance with a cheap hotel or flophouse," or "a stealthy snooper." Second: "an unpleasant, unattractive, obnoxious, or insignificant person."

I find it fascinating that the counter-spy meaning went unnoticed by the would-be-all-inclusive Third New.

The word came up in reference to my having written the book C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary. I was not particularly stealthy, I am afraid, in pursuing my research. In the first issue of my fanzine Kornblume: Kornbluthiana, in August, 1994, I posed this to my readers: "The question arises: are there any holdings that include CMK correspondence?"

One would gather that no one among my readers knew the answer, since no one provided one. Most of the readers of that first issue were fellow professional writers who had known or might have known Kornbluth.

Much later — in early 2009 — I learned that David Ketterer's study of John Wyndham had led him to Syracuse University. I looked into it, found that many materials of special interest to me were archived there, effusively expressed my amazement and thanks to David, announced my visit to the university in advance, and did my research under bright lights in the company of other researchers in other subject-areas. The papers I used had been archived there expressly for the use of researchers.

Similarly, to track down the smaller number of papers that ended up at Northern Illinois University, I followed a lead provided by James Gunn.

Cheers ...

A Mile Beyond the Moon

[written on and intended for July 1, 2010]

Martha ordered a copy of the June Locus when it was announced, and received it this past week, in the last days of the month. While I have been intended to renew my subscription -- for I do have a job now -- I had not yet done so when June's review of C.M.K. appeared.

Gary K. Wolfe writes the review. It is a positive one -- and in a positive note he mentions a mistake that evaded my eye and, more surprisingly, the eagle eye of Bob Silverberg, who went through the text with a fine-toothed comb this last January.

It probably evaded both our attentions because it appears on page one ... in the "Preface," where I was writing relaxedly and Bob was likely not yet into fine-toothed-comb mode. Interestingly, though, Gary Wolfe is mistaken in the sentence in which he mentions the error: "There are a few minor errors and omissions -- Rich only once mentions Kornbluth's important 1958 collection A Mile Beyond the Moon, for example, and he gets the title wrong (as Miles Beyond the Moon)."

Kornbluth's posthumous collection does come in for discussion several times, at appropriate places in K's story -- just not under the name of the collection, which, as far as I could tell, was not determined while Cyril was alive.

As an example of the collection appearing in the narrative of Cyril's life, his re-reading of novelette "Reap the Dark Tide," and his personal reaction to his own writing, came about because he was assembling the book for Doubleday.

In any case, I should have addressed factual matters concerning the book's publication and impact. By the time I was at the point when I might have been developing the subject of the collection's impact, and writing such matters down, however, I was exhausted physically and emotionally (having long before been exhausted financially) by the writing of the book; and that issue, among others, remained unaddressed. The manuscript had grown already to mammoth proportions, moreover.

I certainly should have noted the collection's title chronologically. That I did not is, indeed, an oversight.

Thanks to G.K.W. for a thoughtful review.

Cheers ...

The New F&SF

I mentioned the James Sallis review, the other day. The review appears on pages 33-38 of the July-August double issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction -- an issue apparently not yet on the stands, since Rick Bowes reported on Facebook this week that he had yet to receive either contributor or subscriber copies as of yet ... while I had received a copy in the mail at midweek, not too long after having received an electronic copy of the review.

The published copy arrived here in Cashton thanks to special attention from Gordon Van Gelder. He sent the copy first class from New Jersey, bless his heart, in a manila envelope spotted with The Simpsons stamps.

An amusing aspect of the review that escaped me, on first reading, was that Sallis calls the biography "imminently readable" -- which means the book will become readable, any day now.

No doubt most readers will wait for that to happen, before investing in copies of their own.

... but in any case I remain impressed with the heartfelt response that Sallis has, to the biography. I feel a bit humbled.

For those who have too little or no exposure to the fiction of Bowes, by the way, "Pining To Be Human" displays many of its characteristic strengths and beauties. The first paragraph is magically effective:

"So many years later I can still see the Witch Girls gliding over the grass amid the fireflies of a summer evening. I first saw them the July when I was four. That season in 1948 is the first piece of time I can remember as a coherent whole and not just a series of disconnected images. That evening I saw magic and told no one."

Do those lines not transport you elsewhere than here?

The phrase suddenly occurs to me: "shattered continuity." Are Rick's words so convincing because of the shattered aspect -- or the sense of over-arching continuity ... the latter which gives many pieces of his fiction their mythic feeling?

Cheers ...

Speaking with Madle

On Monday I had a nice telephone conversation with Bob Madle, one of the few souls around who was present during those heady days of late-1930s science fiction.

I believe I have yet to note the correction here, for those who have the C.M. Kornbluth biography, concerning page 70. Even if I noted it before, it bears repeating. In the photograph, Bob is standing in the middle, holding some posters or a portfolio of some sort, with Robert Thompson to his left (as in stage left). The figure (stage right) who is mostly turned away from the camera, and whom the caption makes out to be Bob, Bob tells me is almost certainly Sam Moskowitz.

This photo was correctly captioned, in the proofs of the book. At a late moment an editorial question arose, since the caption was seen to be ambiguous. I apparently misunderstood what the editorial question was -- or else the editors misunderstood my clarification -- since the incorrect attribution then appeared in the published book.

This was quite embarrassing, since Bob not only helped me with numerous matters relating to the text of the book, but was also the source of that photo.

In any case, Bob is impressed with the biography -- which impresses me. His mind is so full of factual detail, concerning so many events that I describe in the book, that to have the text gain his approval is to set my mind at east about it, to one degree more than it already was.

"It's a remarkable book," he said, Monday afternoon. "I read every word, every footnote -- every ibid., ever op. cit..

Cheers ...

Sallis Reviews the Kornbluth Biography

An electronic file has just arrived from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Upon the file's digital pages are the six pages of the F&SF review, by James Sallis, of C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary.

My first reaction on seeing this was to think that Sallis was an excellent choice for reviewer. He does, indeed, home in on many of the major themes and arguments of the biography, with great accuracy -- and does so with a stylistic approach entirely his own.

It seems to be a deeply felt, deeply sympathetic consideration of the book.

I am, in response, deeply grateful.

Cheers ...

On Missing Wiscon

Our normal activity for Memorial Day weekend has been, for many years, attending the feminist science fiction convention named Wiscon. It is held, these days, in the Madison Concourse. This year I made the decision to attend Wiscon countless times. despite lack of means.

I made the decision not to attend countless times plus one.

I had particularly wanted to go this year to see old friend and collaborator Richard Bowes, a fine novelist -- one of the finest, in truth, in my reading experience -- and to see again Carol Emshwiller, who came to my assistance during the writing of the Cyril Kornbluth biography.

But ...

The financial situation is in the process of changing, here in our household, because of my having taken on a job -- one that seems to be the kind of job best for me: one that saps less than the full energies that I should be putting into creative activities ... yet while the financial picture is changing, it has yet to actually change. I could not quite contemplate going two thousand dollars in debt to buy my author copies of the biography, and then adding atop that the hundreds required to spend time at the Madison Concourse. Moreover I have yet to prepare the promotional materials I need to have at hand, in any convention appearances ... so had I, this year, opted for Wiscon, I would have been making the drive down and spending the days and dollars without books to show and sell, and without materials to hand out. However much the value -- it is immense -- of seeing friends whom I dearly want to see, it seems far better to wait until I can attend conventions better equipped.

Staying home allowed us the pleasure of frittering away time, doing some Memorial-weekend rummaging. At one point in our wanderings we went into an antique shop in Centerville which usually we have seen closed and so never had investigated. A great many wonders awaited us inside. What I walked out with, though, for $2.50, was a copy of the January, 1960, issue of The Original Science Fiction Stories -- a magazine with which I had no familiarity. Its editor was Robert A.W. Lowndes, though -- the figure who, as Robert W. Lowndes, Bob Lowndes, or "Doc" Lowndes, has such prominence in the Cyril Kornbluth biography. What prompted my purchase, though, was the prominent notice on the cover:

"Puritan Planet," by Carol Emshwiller.

A perhaps stranger reminder of the Wiscon we were missing came for Martha at the Agricenter in Viroqua, where we stopped on Sunday to look at some plants. She was writing a check, so picked up the pen lying on the plant-nursery counter ... a pen from the Madison Concourse. The clerk said she had never seen the pen before.

Cheers ...

Bottling Bitter, Part III

The funny thing, or else the unfunny thing, about this train of thought is that it began not with the actual bottling of British Bitter but with the arrival of two checks (one of them was from the ever-admirable RedJack Books, for some illustration work I did at the request of the ever-admirable Heidi Lampietti). Both checks arrived in a single day, suddenly rescuing my bank account from its constant hovering near the perilous zeroes -- the dragging-down Charybdis which has threatened it for something like two years. Martha has been gainfully employed during this period, fortunately, which enabled us to keep going as a household: but these two years were times that would have been far more psychically trying for me had I not lived through far worse periods -- and had I not learned to cope, mentally in addition to physically, with those far-worse conditions.

One of the causes of this long financial drought is that I embraced the writing of the Kornbluth biography as a way out of the drought's looming imminence, two years ago. After I embraced it, and once I was working on the book, I managed to do almost nothing else -- which means I was taking almost no side-jobs of the sort that would bring in short-term writing income. I was at the C.M. Kornbluth task for seven days of the week -- with a day rarely being as short as eight hours long. During a goodly period it was not unusual at all for me to find myself awake at 2:30 a.m., my mind alive with the project ... at which point I would give up trying to sleep, rise, and start in again at the task. Fourteen-hour workdays were not unusual.

Barry N. Malzberg, by the way, found himself losing sleep, himself, after having read my Kornbluth biography. There was a great deal of personal angst and bitterness running as an undercurrent in my writing of that book; yet I hardly believe it was that which was keeping Barry awake. What kept him awake this past winter was the same thing that had kept me owl-eyed the winter before: the incredible and sometimes terrible nature of that life about which I was writing.

If ever there was a reader to pick up on and fully internalize a bitterness that has been cellared and at long last uncorked to freshen in the air, by the way, it is Barry. I regard him as almost ideal reader of this book. That he could read it with understanding, and hear within it notes that resonated deeply with his own experience, helped me feel that what I had undertaken was worthwhile.

Cheers ...

Culture of Collaboration

In Steven Silver's review, I like that he uses the phrase "culture of collaboration" in relation to the Futurians. Cyril's personality seems to have included a considerable appreciation for working in a cooperative manner. This stood him in good stead with the other Futurians, in learning the ropes of his craft while spending weekends in their company. It also put him in the position of having his talents being used to others' advantage, unfortunately. He was a writer of such conscious ability that I believe he knew what he was providing to his elders, including Wollheim, in terms of writing quality. At the same time, however, I believe he little realized how much he was giving away in terms of writing value.

In the biography, I begin the work of establishing to what degree the young Cyril Kornbluth wrote works which later would be attributed to other, senior writers.

The "collaborative culture" mainly involved Dirk Wylie/Harry Dockweiler, Richard Wilson, and Kornbluth, with Wollheim and others also participating. Perhaps because of his personal power in the group, the "collaborative" work involving Wollheim tended to be on a contractual basis -- which is why at least some of Kornbluth's writings disappeared from sight. Kornbluth's most important writing partnership during Futurian days was probably, indeed, with the Futurian chief -- although until Wollheim's papers become available it will likely remain unknown how many stories Kornbluth wrote that would end up attributed to the older Futurian.

Cheers ...

Author Copies

Although I've received scant personal comment on C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary since January and early February, that was a fairly heady period of time. I had only a few extra copies at hand from McFarland -- and I still have yet to buy more, since the investment is so costly, at the level necessary to obtain a reasonable author's discount ... so I had to pick and choose to whom to send them. My parents had to receive a copy, of course: without their support we would never have managed the move a few years ago, here to Cashton; and we would have been much harder pressed to survive the downturn of the past two years, after the magazines for which I wrote a number of monthly columns shriveled up and blew away in a chill December breeze.

The other extras went to a few good souls who had helped me out -- not to all of them, since I had only that handful of copies. From one of those people I heard nothing; and I have yet to learn, actually, if he saw it and appreciated what it represented, before his death. Phil Klass was quite ill and hospitalized, around the time those early copies arrived. I can only hope Fruma showed him the book, and perhaps pointed out the ways in which I put to use his memories -- especially in the final chapter, hidden at the end of the short "analysis" subsection of the book. There, I drew upon Phil's experiences as a way of suggesting an important aspect of Cyril's character. The option of writing that chapter would have been closed to me without knowledge of the particular way in which Phil faced the trial of his involvement in World War II, and the way in which he dealt with the implications of that trial's ending.

Cheers ...