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

When he and Judy Merril first collaborated, Cyril still lived in Chicago, not yet having cut ties to the wire service Transradio. Cyril was publishing mystery stories and had made a return to science fiction with an impressive 1950 trio: "The Little Black Bag," "The Silly Season," and "The Mindworm." Despite this, Judy's credentials made her the senior writer: for she had made her Astounding short-story debut two years before, with the impressive "That Only a Mother," and in 1950 made the leap to hardcover novelist.

For years, Fred Pohl had been trying to interest Cyril in reviving the Futurian model of collaboration: Cyril would do the actual writing, while Pohl provided outlines. In correspondence Fred struck this note repeatedly, from the war years onward. On a visit East from Chicago, Cyril did look at something Fred had started, but then asked Judy, by then married to Fred, if he could work on a fragment of hers — with the result that his "visit" consisted of holing up with a typewriter. The novel Mars Child, which the two later finished in Chicago, resulted.

When Cyril later left Chicago he was leaving journalism behind him, as well. His plans included more work with Merril: for they worked well together, being equal partners throughout the writing process. Cyril focused initially on that collaboration and on his first solo novel, although he also bowed to pressure to develop a novel taking off from "The Marching Morons." All three projects Cyril seems to have begun while still in Chicago.

At this pivotal time in Cyril's life, Fred's handling of the Dirk Wylie agency had made him a controversial figure in New York science fiction circles; and by the time Cyril and Mary Kornbluth arrived from Chicago, collapse seemed imminent for the still-new Merril-Pohl marriage. The Kornbluths moved into the Pohls' large house in Red Bank, New Jersey, where other transients and occasional visitors, including Katherine MacLean, were also staying. The household's attitudes toward Pohl must have been mixed, but undoubtedly found some reflection in the character who appeared in an early story synopsis for the second "Cyril Judd" collaboration. This character, "Fledwick the Thief," survived the outlining, writing, editing, and then publishing processes. Although the character dies in the story, Fledwick gained minor immortality through magazine and book publication of Gunner Cade.

I relate these facts to help make clear why one question so urgently pressed upon me — not just for months, but for years. This question above all needed answering were my book to move beyond being merely a book about Kornbluth, and to rise to being his biography. Until far too near the point of completion Kornbluth remained a "book about."

The question was this:

Given his plans, the success of "Cyril Judd," and the prestige of collaborating with Merril, why did Cyril turn to partnership with her husband, whose main renown in publishing, in 1951-52, derived from a faltering literary agency?

When I asked Judy this question in the 1990s, she said the reason was simple: Cyril and Fred were old friends. Judy's reply struck me as a true memory to some degree, yet also as one that may have seen unconscious modification, over the decades — decades during which Pohl published multiple tributes to partnership and friendship with Cyril. That others of her memories had altered through time would become evident to me: for Judy recalled "Fledwick" as having arisen by accident during the novel-writing process. In memory, in other words, she was dismissing any premeditated significance this fictional character might have had. In fact, the character was present, and named, in the novel's working outline. Would not an "old friend" hesitate before depicting another "old friend" in this way?

Another part of the answer to my question, I felt, related to a long argument in Red Bank, with Cyril on one side, and Merril and MacLean on the other. When Judy spoke of it to me, she said the argument centered around sexuality, with Cyril being not a prude but a staunchly traditional moralist who disbelieved in free love — unlike Merril and MacLean. Judy also told me that her divorce from Fred ended her and Cyril's collaborations. Judy's perspective on this did seem to contain some truth, since the later, drawn-out Merril-Pohl custody battle for their daughter did split the New York science fiction community in two — and did, indeed, place the Kornbluths on Pohl's side of the courtroom.

Even with these several perspectives, I felt I was missing much of the true picture. Three sources, however, finally came to my aid. Judy once told me that in writing her memoirs she was leaving the writing about Cyril to me. To our great fortune she acted otherwise, and left an account in her memoir that reveals another component of that long, heated argument in Red Bank.

In speaking with Phil Klass, and also reading his interviews with Eric Solstein, I began to comprehend the emotional impact Cyril's war experiences had on him. In studying his stories, it newly struck me how he seemed to come to grips with these memories only gradually: he gave his literally wounded heart expression indirectly, in fits and starts, through his art, through the years. So it rang true when Judy at last revealed, in her memoir, a related aspect of the around-the-house argument in Red Bank: for she and Kate had argued against the necessity of World War II, and found incomprehensible Cyril's implacable attitude toward Germany and all things German. Since Cyril would require years of ceaseless labors at his writing before finding ways to speak even indirectly about some war experiences, the two women were provoking and arguing with a man incapable of fully baring his heart — perhaps even to himself. He had served as a soldier in the war, and so was an actor in events; yet he served, too, as a witness to those events, and to the aftermath of atrocities. In this household argument, memories of a personal hell must have cast a fiery light from within upon fine points of personal, social, and political philosophy. Having unhealed wounds freshly irritated must have provoked Cyril's final, full retreat from a professional partnership that had proven to be both congenial and successful.

To me this picture, too, seemed to offer a glimpse of truth. Yet I finally learned that Cyril's step away from Judy may have had little or nothing to do with his decision to work with Pohl — for this latter decision arose not out of discord but concord with Merril and MacLean.

According to Phil Klass, Pohl came to the Red Bank house one day and literally went to his knees before Kornbluth, saying that, if anything remained of their friendship, then he needed Cyril's aid. Fred had the beginning piece of a novel that Horace Gold would serialize quite soon — if somehow it could be fleshed out to novel length. Klass, who was not present, had the scene described to him by Merril. Kate MacLean's memories fall into place with this account. According to her, the Red Bank trio agreed that they should help Pohl out of his financial predicament, which had become so dire that he faced jail. The novel for Horace Gold would bring in enough money to rescue him. Judy and Kate thought Cyril could do it. Cyril agreed with them. Since he had been dwelling already upon the fictional world controlled by advertising that he had created for "The Marching Morons" — and could draw other elements for the novel from his recent stories "The Goodly Creatures" and "The Luckiest Man in Denv" — Cyril did, indeed, do it.

A curious perspective now emerges in my mind, which failed to appear to me when struggling to understand Cyril's life. The apparent protagonist of Judy and Cyril's second novel, Gunner Cade, was Cyril himself, to some degree. As Ortega y Gasset lucidly observes, the "avoidance of certain realities" engenders metaphor. Cade — who simultaneously represents an avoidance and a full embrace of reality — a hiding and a revealing, rolled into one — impresses the reader not through character but through metaphorical force: for he is the soldier operating under social-military conditioning who is gradually awakening to his situation.

I find it striking, now, that the novel offers a symbolic premonition about the coming change in Cyril's professional life. In the novel, not through personal choice does Cade find his life enmeshed with the thief Fledwick's. In the novel it happens this way, instead:

A man strikes Cade with a truncheon and says, "All right. Put him in with Fledwick." Cade and Fledwick first meet — as jailmates. Once thrown together, Cade and Fledwick's fortunes remain intertwined, until Fledwick's death.

End, Part Six.

On Richard Bowes, Poem-Writing, and "Jacket Jackson"

I have been thinking lately of words Rick Bowes penned about a collaboration of ours entitled "Jacket Jackson."

That oddball novelet has reappeared thanks to Fairwood Press——in Rick's collection If Angels Fight.

I read the book in its entirety earlier this month. Since I had been away from his fiction for several years, due mainly to being preoccupied with a reading programme that kept me mostly clear of the contemporary, in returning to Bowes's stories I was returning to a too-long set-aside pleasure.

I find it interesting how well several of these stories still stand on their own: for these became parts of novels, and lost their separate identities within greater wholes. I had not revisited them since enjoying and admiring his novels Minions of the Moon and From the Files of the Time Rangers. Yet qualities that made the short works attractive, in those times before the novels existed, remain unchanged. In particular the allusive texture of his sentences retains its power to take the reader in several directions at once: forward in story-time; and backwards or, it often feels, inwards into now-fading personal-historical memory. It does one or both of these while conveying hints concerning a larger understanding of the contemporary-fantasy worlds in which Bowes's characters and readers find themselves.

The peculiar flavor of Bowes stories arises in part from the aspect that makes me want to call them nonfiction fantasies: for they open the way photo albums do (or did, in days when people kept photo albums), in presenting discrete moments, one after another, from a fixed and absolute past.

The turning of album pages, the succession of tableaus, the procession of frozen moments: it goes on, utterly believable because, whatever limits or distortions might have arisen in the pointing of lens or eye, a focus upon a truth centers each record or memory.

Photographs make past moments part of our contemporary moments——and so they offer means for achieving an immediacy that is layered with public or private history. The note in a Bowes story that gives it its contemporary feeling arises because the story usually involves factually recent events and perspectives, and because a common, Bowesian narrator, who lives within the stories' lead characters, is there turning photograph album pages before or behind their eyes, and before and behind the reader's.

For those various narrators, moreover, the contemporary moment being witnessed, remembered, or forgotten may be found in 1950, 1980, or 2010——one at a time, or all at once.

(For these or similar reasons, the use that Classical gods make of photographs works effectively upon the reader, in the wonderful novelet "The Mask of the Rex"——just as it works effectively upon the other characters in the story.)

Nestled among stories built upon this layered contemporaneity, "Jacket Jackson" may seem out of place. Clearly Rick thought otherwise, though, in including it. As fiction the story works for the same reason it fails: it is a mixed-up extemporaneous extravaganza pasted together by two congenial but quite different writers. (This wonderfully disastrous approach I recommend to anyone). It contains some layered contemporaneity but features above all one location, or quasi-location, that is utterly non-contemporary, utterly unrooted, utterly ridiculous——and utterly central to the tale ... if we dare call it a tale. Whatever regrets I might have about this extravaganza meet their answer in the fact that, as this collection makes clear, the mercurial humor that is so strongly a part of Rick Bowes the human being seems only weakly a part of Richard Bowes the writer. Yet the fact that I wrote some absurd passages in "Jacket Jackson" allows me to state that I wrote only some.

How clearly I remember dwelling upon Rick's contributions, when the steadily enlarging manuscript would make its return trip to me. I would do so with great pleasure: for he was playing offbeat melodies so well that they were irritatingly funny.

Rick in his introduction to this story mentions the poems that are a part of it: "Like magic Mark produced them whenever we decided one was necessary (and even once or twice when I just wanted to see another one)." Rick did contribute in this area, as in all others: for I sent him masses of lines, often barely poetical——and he neatly edited them with the sense of compression that is his and that gives much of his writing such pithy character; and he worked at them with a certain musical sense. Bowes would have nowhere near the stature he does had he failed at developing his voice. Voice arises from one's sense of phrasing, duration, rhythm and miscellaneous other concerns that may rate more attention from the average musician than from the average writer but receive it in equal measure from an accomplished writer.

Those words of Rick's that I have dwelled on in recent weeks I quoted above: "Like magic." In my past half-year of consciously returning to basics, where I could, and trying to rebuild my craft on a more secure basis, in a sense I have returned to a practice I developed in the 1980s, with regards to poems——a practice of revisiting my lines again and again. These days I find I must keep doing so until I can determine if I actually have even the seeds of a poem. Yet in those trickle-downer years my ability to separate valid lines from invalid often fell short. What Rick says is, in a real sense, true: for I can conjure words at a moment's notice, let them flow, and then be done with it. For probably the major part of my writing life, however, I have not known exactly what to do with the resulting abundance.

The advantage (or dis-) that occurs in collaboration is that one can send random verbal efflorescences to one's collaborator without taking the time to taste, to savor——to see what of it might be broth and what, gray water (harmless, and not odious, but not what we would call an addition to a soup).

These days I find myself spending at least days, often weeks and sometimes months working at a poem. Not constantly; more off and on. When I was first thinking of writing on this subject, two weeks ago, I jotted a line that came to mind, depicting the aim of the process: "Going past the obvious and discovering the empty spots you are always littering into your words." The feeling has grown on me that I have written countless poems that I have left unwritten. The "written" form that appears on the page, no matter how often revised, only appears to be what it might have been. The poem itself lies somewhere within or behind the page——unseen.

"Jacket Jackson" features for a foreground character a young poet, Christopher, who ends as a loser after a chaotic series of colorful complications. I had started aiming at something different, for his fate——as did Christopher himself, as a character. (He did enjoy an odd, unpredictable life, somewhere in that unknown place in-between our two Richian and Bowesian writing realms.)

Had I not been within a lost period myself, when I was surrounding myself yet again with nebulous, hastily swirling words, might I have given Christopher actual poems? And had I done so, might his creative power as the maker, the creator, of an utterly non-contemporary and nonsensically underpopulated city——the City of Castoff Futures——have stood unshakably, to have triumphed in the end?

I suppose nothing would have saved Christopher. He was an improvisor——reflecting the fact that Rick and I were improvisors.

Christopher created a city of nursery-rhyme idealism ...

And we two created an oddly amusing, picturesque ruin of a story.

Ruins do draw the curious, as you know ...

And look: here I am drawn back to gaze upon this one, yet again ...

Cheers ...

New Essay in Cascadia Subduction Zone

In October an essay of mine appeared that I have been meaning to call to readers' attentions. For me, the topic has importance.

It had disappointed me that after its publication C.M. Kornbluth failed to spur some feminist critic to begin the process of rescuing Cyril Kornbluth from the ill usage he has at times suffered from feminists. In the book I present ample evidence showing that Cyril exhibited a sexually egalitarian attitude; and I show how his writing suffered alterations that reflected poorly on him.

I also presented evidence showing where to place blame for these alterations. Frederik Pohl admitted to them, by and large. To my eyes the changes reflected so chauvinistic an attitude that as a critic I saw no alternative: my observations belonged in my book. I was writing cultural criticism, which combines biography, history and criticism; and to leave out my literary evaluations would have amounted to undermining my own structure.

Thanks to encouragement from Hal Davis to break my silence, and the agreeability of the Wiscon programming committee, I gave a talk in Madison in the spring offering my perspective. (And thanks to Mary Rickert, among others, for taking it in.) I had labored——even at the convention itself, banging away at an old manual typewriter——at shaping my talk to work as an oral presentation: so when Timmi Duchamp expressed interest in publishing it in Cascadia Subduction Zone, she presented me with many questions and suggestions. I ended up re-envisioning it, not just rewriting it, for publication, and truthfully made some important adjustments, and introduced as well one new discovery. As a consequence this published version overshadows the spoken one.

This essay discusses, among other matters, "visibly invisible collaboration," Judith Merril, Mary Byers-Kornbluth, George Barr McCutcheon, and structural feminism in Graustarkian novels. It describes some among Pohl's changes to Kornbluth texts, although without repeating analyses made in CMK, such as the examination of "Trouble in Time." It also discusses a situation that I had somewhat suspected before and confirmed after publication of my book——that the reputation of a novel I consider second-rate, The Space Merchants, rose as high as it did because readers thought it was the same book as the longer and quite Kornbluthian Gravy Planet. (As you might imagine, I deeply rue the fact that the Library of America republished, and in a sense canonized, The Space Merchants.) The new discovery I mention above, by the way, related to Joanna Russ and that worse-than-lackluster Pohl and Kornbluth production, Search the Sky.

My title: "Seeing C.M. Kornbluth as Gender-Egalitarian (For Those Who Have Seen Him as Anything But)." The magazine: The Cascadia Subduction Zone (www.thecsz.com), October 2013, 3:4. My thanks to Hal, Susan Groppi, Mary, Timmi, and Lew Gilchrist.

Cheers ...