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.

Phil Klass, or William Tenn; and Science Fiction

Science fiction went away from what mattered about science fiction.

This, I believe, is what Phil Klass came to understand. He saw the change as it was coming; and he stepped away. Where he went was academia -- the place where forms whose times have passed are put upon the examining table beneath the unforgiving glare of all-night library lamps. That it was science fiction that he was teaching, much of the time, suited him: what had mattered about the form had grown so attenuated that it was no longer a form that could hold him. It could not hold him, so he held it, instead; and he taught it. He taught writing, too. Writing was a living matter -- and it was a way of living that mattered.

Importantly he wrestled with memories, with self, with the nature of science fiction, with history.

He was wrestling with internal matters still in his last year: to speak with him was to know this of him.

Although we were present to one another only through that uncomfortable yet strangely intimate medium of the telephone, Phil and I had marked effect on one another, last year. Aside from giving him chance to voice thoughts and memories, I was able to offer him some documentary confirmation of rumors that had put him on edge for decades. He did considerably more for me: for he was speaking to me across a distance, from his Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to my Cashton, Wisconsin -- but more importantly from his 1945 and 1951 to my 2009. Some of the doubts that had put me on edge -- for a mere dozen or fifteen years -- he erased by speaking to me from his store of thoughts and memories. Yet he did more: for he had engaged in a dialog within the field of science fiction, a dialog that started as early as 1946, of pivotal importance. His arguments helped me understand what it was that happened to science fiction in 1956-58 and the years afterward.

This understanding came clearer as I was trying to lift the larger-than-expected project of my Cyril Kornbluth biography into the light of day. In a way, my understanding grew even greater three quarters of a year later, while Phil was in his final illness and we were having no communication -- not by telephone, at least. Yet for weeks -- months, maybe -- I was still communing with Phil, in my wrestling with certain perspectives and ideas he brought to the table; and I was adding my returning words to the conversation, while writing a study of Judy Merril's earlier years in science fiction.

It gave me great pleasure to bring to the story of Cyril Kornbluth some of the story of Phil Klass. The final chapter I hope makes clear the debt I owe Phil for his helping me identify certain strand's in Cyril's life.

I may have paid some of that debt simply by incurring it. So it now occurs to me. Phil had attempted to raise a monument to Cyril, after Cyril's death -- a fact that had been lost, due to the erasures of time ... and perhaps thanks to the erasures of an interested party. That he helped me, with such strength, raise my own monument to Cyril made my task considerably less a solitary one. I see now it may have given him some sense of redress, when placing his shoulder beside mine at certain important moments -- redress for the lasting hurt of having had his own monument to Cyril taken from his hands.

Rest in peace, Phil. I hope the world does a better job than it did during your life of giving your wounded, beautiful soul, in death, its due.