Part VIII:The Events Leading Down to Biography: On Writing Kornbluth

At McFarland, editors had been expressing fears that I would fail to find material sufficient to fill a book for their line. The day arrived, however, when they discovered what they described as a cement brick on their doorstep: my manuscript, all 240,000 words of it, in a large cardboard box.

I gave my book a somewhat morbid title: Kornbluth and the Death of Science Fiction. In my preliminary efforts, before conducting interviews or becoming aware of archival caches, I was attempting to place Kornbluth's works within the larger history of the earlier wonder stories and the later science fiction. Since I was accepting Northrop Frye's suggestion that a distinctly Modern age extended from around 1860 to around 1960, it seemed striking to me that the "science fiction" pulp-magazine field in the United States, within which Kornbluth worked, arose quite late as an expression of Modern culture. The fact also struck me that, by the early 1950s, older observers had begun bemoaning a falling-off of quality within the field — and that, by decade's end, they were speaking of the death of science fiction. The closely spaced deaths of Henry Kuttner and Kornbluth helped set the latter tone. The science fiction field, as long-time readers knew it, was reaching its end, to be supplanted by a different field, in which such figures as Harlan Ellison and Roger Zelazny could flourish and rise to prominence. The stories "The Mindworm," the magazine version of "With These Hands," and "The Last Man Left in the Bar," all by Kornbluth, offer direct antecedents to the stylistic audacity of the New Wave writings in science fiction that were to appear after his death.

Even as my book slowly blossomed in the biographical direction, this narrative strand about the waning of the traditional science fiction wonder story remained an important one. All the same, McFarland editors felt that the "death of science fiction" title did injustice to the book's scope. I accepted their title: C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary.

I failed to give my all to the book: for, after all, I survived — penniless, but alive. And yet I did give all I could, driven by haunting questions, including one unanswerable one. If I failed to place possession of Cyril's story where it belonged, who else could? For his story belonged not in my hands; it belonged in the reading public's hands. I believed and believe this. Kornbluth is mine; Cyril Kornbluth, not. His works have an importance that makes him, the author, belong to all of us. I wrote the book motivated by that idea.

This claim to achievement anyone may feel free to dispute. For with C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary I believe I succeeded.

I placed his life in the right hands.

The End

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Notes

Quotation from Frederik Pohl: "When we came to Bahai Hall," p. 77, The Way the Future Was, Ballantine Books: New York, 1978. From Cyril Judd: "Put him in with Fledwick," p. 57, Gunner Cade, Simon and Schuster: New York, 1952; or p. 45, Dell Publishing Co.: New York, 1969.

I dedicated my biography of Cyril to his brother Lewis, for several excellent reasons. This essay, though, I dedicate to Martha and our late, lamented Lorna.

Toys in the Age of Wonder

My new book has been published.

I am here announcing it . . . about a month late. Am I laggard in my affections? (Where in the world does that line come from?) Actually, I rather like this book. I have lived with it for ten years, and have struggled over its myriad subjects, facts, and ideas for many more. It has its flaws, but sits all the same among my most important efforts, in the arts.

Toys in the Age of Wonder: Science Fiction, Society, and the Symbolism of Play brings together many things. My personally favored title, Wonder Tales, Toys, and the World that Swallowed Itself, I believe does convey some of the book's breadth. In it, I am talking much less about science fiction than the wonder tale; I am thinking about toys whether they were dimestore baubles or Emerson's "toys that infatuate men and which they play for;" and I am exploring the West's efforts to technically envelope the human sphere — a "consolidated civilization scheme," as I recall a character saying, in one story I discuss. I speak about toy history, history of science, novels, poetry, comic strips, lexical changes, and cultural changes. I draw in works by Poe and Verne, in particular, and by many other authors along the way — with "the way" moving mainly along a time-line from 1859 to 1957-8. My method is cultural criticism, on model of Lewis Mumford, with further guidance taken from the writings of Northrup Frye and Van Wyck Brooks — among, again, many others.

The book's illustrations, all in black and white, make it other than the glossy and colorful affairs which some among my earlier ones were. The items pictured, however, show what sorts of things fascinate me: illustrations from both children's and older-reader books; photographs of children with toys; catalog pages; postcards; World's Fair images and memorabilia; and the toys themselves, children's and adult — anything, in other words, that conveys the symbolic reality that prevails, to my point of view, over the concrete, in culture.

I should note that my announcement's delay comes from concern and circumstance. I did and do wonder: should I, indeed, make a quiet noise about this, and act as though the book's publication might rank in any way against the troubles of our time — the pandemic, the criminal political "leadership," the bought-and-sold legislatures, the bestial police actions, the wildfires, the extinctions, the dying of the only economy that truly matters, which is the economy of life on Earth?

The book does rank, in a way, and not only because it happened to become a fact in this particular time. It ranks, in its small way, because, for the patient few who read it, it will help elucidate how it is that we placed ourselves into these times which encompass our lives. Moreover, it discusses the process by which our present conditions came into being.

A circumstance working into this announcement's delay came about from my having an "outdated" computer system which my blog's host decided to stop recognizing or allowing, a few months ago. Having limited means, limited technical savvy, and a will-to-succeed that often ends up absorbed in soup-makings, dishwater, and garden dirt, it took me quite a while to reach that point in which I could not only pencil these words but also publish them electronically here.

My sympathy for those poorer than I am has grown quite keen. So much activity has shifted on-line during the pandemic that ever more individuals are, literally, being virtually excluded from society. While a part of society is reflected off and conducted by the shell of satellites circling Earth, another part goes unreflected.

Now myself enabled, until that point when I am granted obsolescence once again by our technological shell, I propose to make some quiet noise in relation to my book — with the hope that people will understand that if I make myself a nuisance — oh, if only! — I do so not to advance my fortunes, which will grow by little more than nothing from this effort, but to advance my society's, in however microscopic a manner.

Cheers . . .

P.S. The book has a higher price-tag than I might wish. When your nearest library reopens, please make a request for it.

Notes on Genetic and Poetic Languages

I read the recent news from University of Washington about the discovery that genetic structures use two languages. The previously known language involved "codons." The new one involves "duons," which are dual-use codons.

My first thought? That the corporate drones who have committed genetic manipulation will not bat an eyelash. So they fiddled like children with their building blocks, and never realized those blocks had an alphabet printed on them? What does it matter? They made money and will make yet more. Having done their bit for the dehumanization of agriculture they will sleep like babies.

Ortega y Gasset may have been correct that our scientists are "barbarians"——specialists who know a great deal about one thing. The scientists I have known have tended to be actual scientists in the older sense of being natural philosophers. If not directly engaged in a process of discovery, they at least felt innately drawn to that process, as part of their participation in a tradition of humanism; and they stood apart from the funnel-eyed engineers and technicians required by corporate industry.

Yet funnel-eyed uni-directionalist drones must be in good supply; and our education system seems set on producing even more, to judge from statements I read earlier this year, somewhere, about the end result of the "No Child Left Behind" directive ... disastrous results, to my mind: for this system teaches students that to succeed they must make points, rather than make sense.

Schools now are turning children into the equivalents of those websites that have keywords but no content, except advertisements.

I possess no deep understanding of codons and duons——nor even a shallow understanding, from the point of view of the biologist. Yet the literary ordering of words we call poetry offers me a way of thinking about these notions. For a gene is a thing as well as a type of a thing——and also an expression: for surely even a corporate drone cannot sever a gene from its expression ... not even with that Orwellian-sounding technique that I came across in during random reading recently: that of "silencing" genes. (Next they will be "disappearing" genes.)

Similarly poetry is a thing, and a type of thing——and an expression.

Northrop Frye aptly observes that poetry has two languages: so you might think in terms of two languages being spoken simultaneously by a poem that is "viable"——if you will allow me the botanical word. Frye noted that one reads, hears or understands not only the language of the poet's writing but also the language of poetry itself. You might say the poem gives voice to the poet's creative individuality while also giving voice to poetic tradition. We might take away a particular sense from the first expression, and a universal sense from the second——even though the poet is as much a participant in universal creative process as s/he is a separate individual——and even though our poetic tradition is not at all universal but rather a particular playing ground of interactions between writers and readers ... simply the current moment of ongoing process.

A Second Second, and Product vs. Process

The thought occurs to me that this second "language" of the duons may well itself prove to be a composite of two languages. I think of the language within ourselves that we use in setting our actions or behavior: for I do think we are all like William Dean Howells's character who discovered "that two strains of blood were striving in (him) for mastery ... paternal and maternal." (Brooks has a similar point to make about American character, in terms of conflicting maternal and paternal influences.) Blake knew as well as did Hegel that without conflict there is no growth; and this language of our actions and behaviors seems inextricably tied to our growth.

How can I help but think that this newly identified second genetic language is inextricably tied not to stasis and unchanging form but to action and behavior——and growth?

Of course, that this second duality would be literally maternal and paternal seems reasonably possible.

Yet another way to think of the situation comes also from Frye. He draws a distinction between attitudes: the Aristotelian, which regards literature as product, versus the Longinian, which views literature as process. A product has static and fixed qualities among its attributes. We might think, metaphorically, of codons being related to product. A process, in contrast, must have unstable, changing aspects among its attributes. So we might think of the dual-language codons now called duons as being related to process.

The genetic modifiers (I mean those who modify genes ... although I can think of endless modifiers for these corporate drones——such as "rash," "dangerous," "unthinking," "human-culture-threatening," etc.) would fix the world into a particular set of regulated patterns, so that agriculture could be reduced even further from being a process and toward being production line.

Wilder Thoughts ...

In the absence of those "two strains of blood," expression would seem a one-way street; and in nature how many one-way streets are there?

Think about this carefully. (I insert here a small tribute to late professor of philosophy Scott Crom, who urged on me caution when nearing the specter of determinism.) For what is "expression"? The production of oils from seeds, I suppose is one answer——useful, but not part of the ongoing give-and-take dialog of a conscious being with its universe.

A microcosmic theory will arise eventually that will ascribe consciousness to the gene——and why not? At its scale the gene must exhibit something akin to the complexities of piscine, reptilian, avian or mammalian nervous centers.

And if such a theory should arise then the purveyors of genetically modified organisms, and their hired guns and ill-inspired drones, may well find themselves suddenly ranking alongside slave-dealers of a previous century.

A thought to consider...

Gene expression should be free. If gene expression cannot remain free then human expression cannot remain free.

I pose this without too many hesitations, except for my use of "expression." You may know why: that sense of the non-communicativeness of "expression." So how about this.

Gene communication must remain free. If gene communication cannot remain free, then human communication cannot remain free.

Cheers ...