Microcosmic God (4 page)

But like many parents of the time who forbade their children to read “such trash,” Argyll no doubt thought he was protecting his stepson from the pernicious influence of an evil antiart. But the larger point (in terms of writers like Sturgeon, who, through such first-hand encounters, knew this aesthetic to function at a strength that, say, someone like myself—whose childhood fell on the other side of the Second World War, in a time of greater affluence and general relaxation of moral rigidities—never had to deal with. When my parents walked in on me as an eight-year-old and found me reading a Batman comic, sometime in 1946, my father was, indeed, appalled. But my mother’s response was: “But at least he’s reading
something …
!” And so comics—and later science fiction—were allowed in the house with only comparatively minimal policing) is the effect of this aesthetic on the self-presentation of commercial SF writers at the time:

If I am doing something good for you that you must work hard to benefit from (the Good Physician Aesthetic speaking), then it is reasonable for me—or someone else, if I am too modest—to stress the work I have had to do, if only to urge you to do your part.

If, however, I am doing something bad for you—and, what’s more, you have already worked hard to get hold of it (and in the early pulp years this meant not only the clandestinely purchased magazines, the parental disapproval, and—on my side of the War—the flashlight under the covers, the secret stash in the crawl space, but also
reading
all those texts, learning one’s way around in a confusing and ill-set jargon, and learning to respond to a procession of conventions that were just forming and often in flux; so that whenever one of them was called up by no matter what distant or however fragmented metonymy, you knew what that convention meant, the way you know a word’s meaning [rather than the way you know how to exegete a law or define a word—or explain a literary convention], in short, it meant work, a kind of work not so different in its basic form from that required of a scholar to become comfortable with the work of another century) then I have none of the privileges of the Good Physician. If I can get a consensus that, while what I am doing is bad for you, it’s not all
that
bad (and, besides, I just tossed it off without much thought), then there is a possibility I may be judged a more or less forgivable scamp. If, however, not only is what I am doing bad for you, but it also becomes known that I worked on it, calculated its every effect, indulged dreams of glory over its possible success and sweated in agony over its possible failure, planned it endlessly and revised it incessantly, and, finally exhausted, let it go from me, sick over where it falls short of perfection and grimly smug over where it approaches it, then I am no longer a scamp.

I am a criminal.

This is the historical reason SF writers must play down the work that goes into their texts. Along with the synchronic reasons outlined above it, this is the historical background—far stronger in the thirties than it was in 1947 (and all but vanished today—though there is always the possibility for a resurgence), the date of “Maturity”—against which Sturgeon actually
revised
a story, revised it because of his own dissatisfaction with some Lukacsian ethical/aesthetic interface. This was the virtuoso stance suddenly cast aside. This was Faust admitting that the formula for his potion was really
more complicated than the artificial sweeteners and fruit colorings listed in small print at the bottom of the label. This was not a commercial writer’s acquiescence to some editorial exhortation to tone this down for propriety’s sake or beef that up for excitement’s. It was the acrobat, after the trick had been performed for all practical purposes successfully, as much a virtuoso as ever (it had been published, had it not?), suddenly shaking his head, going back into the ring, and doing it again—not for some effect of the performance, but out of commitment to what was being performed.

The effect—on a good deal of the audience—was stunning.

The temptation was, no doubt, to see this as simply an importation of “mainstream” behavior into science fiction. That some of Sturgeon’s contemporaries saw it as such and thought it inappropriate no doubt added energy to the dialogue—which is why we can recall it today. Nevertheless, meanings are matters of context and metonymy: Faust, no matter the caduceus he wave aloft nor the bedside manner he assume, is
not
the Good Physician. And the whole occurrence was not caduceus-waving—it was real (that is, it was something the field
had
to deal with); it was perceived as authentic. What it did was to clear an area in that conceptual space that is science fiction (the texture of particular moments in that space expressed in—and as—particular SF texts) in which such commitment could now be recognized to exist and could continue to exist, if not with a terribly sophisticated critical vocabulary for talking about it then at least with a vocabulary of actions, situations, and responses through which it could be thought about dramatically. Such a clearing and defining reorganized the structure of a conceptual space in such a way that the structure recomplicates and expands through that space until the mental space of construction for the actual text (and thus the texture of the text) is changed.

A personal example, if it will help: My basic working method has been (at least up until the time of word processors) not extraordinary for an SF author making a living by writing. I instituted it with my first SF novel and, with minor variations, it remains my working method today: I write a longhand draft; from this I make a rough typescript, specifying, expanding, toothbrushing out redundancies,
excising unnecessary adjectives and phrases, clarifying parallels as I go. From this I make a polished typescript, in which I can catch any missed details as well as do any doctoring necessary on those details thrown out of sync between the first and second layers. In my personal vocabulary this tri-layered process
is
my “first draft.” Anything beyond this is “revision.” And should that revision run over a sentence or two, it goes through the same tri-layered process. It is a highly utilitarian method: it makes for prose that stays in print. (Word processors have simply expanded the tri-layered process into a ten-or-more layered one.) Also, it acknowledges that the cleverest of us is extremely fallible, that a story is a very complex engine, and that in the best of them far too much is going on for even the author to keep all parts spinning in the air at any one time. Why not allow a minimum of three?

This relates to Sturgeon in two ways. First, I probably would not have wanted to write science fiction if Sturgeon’s work had not affected me the way it did. Second, I probably would not have hit on my working method—and certainly not hit on it for my first book—if the “Maturity” episode had not been part of our field’s history, so that as a 19-year-old, twelve years after the fact, I could still be aware of its excitement, its energy, its message: science fiction
can
be revised,
can
command commitment,
can
strive for a stylistic clarity, concision, and invention beyond that of mere journalism. For science fiction to mature, this awareness had to grow out of science fiction’s own space. It couldn’t be imported—for the conceptual space of science fiction is finally far closer in organization to the performance space of the circus (with its extraordinary vertical as well as horizontal organization recalling science fiction’s spaceships and alien worlds; with its audience surround and its oddly fuzzy distinction between backstage and performance area recalling SF writers’ relation to their vociferous and ever-present fans; and the circus was the first art to insist openly that more must go on in the performance space than can possibly be seen at once) than it is to the staid divisions of the theater (backstage, stage, and audience), which, since Shakespeare, has constrained our view of “Literature.” For it is precisely in the circus space that the virtuoso gesture is held out
to tempt novices to trip over themselves in the rush to achieve it; whereupon they become victims of a derision far sharper and crueler than that which greets the clowns, who first lured them from their seats and into the ring with their parodic versions of all the splendor passing and twirling, roaring and soaring.

Looking back on the “Maturity” episode, two other general points might be made. First, this clearing of the conceptual space for this commitment could only have happened with a writer of the reputation Sturgeon had already garnered within the field by 1947. Second, given this late ’40s setting, it could probably only have occurred around a story as profoundly safe as “Maturity”: Any signs of daring or protest in the text itself would have immediately slanted the general interpretation of the supposed motivation for that subsequent revision away from one of pure ethical/aesthetic commitment. For we are talking of mythology now—not an actual writer with actual paper in an actual typewriter. But these myths, frustrating as they are for the man or woman at their core, have their formal importance. And “Maturity” is about as well-mannered a tale, by the conventions of ordinary ’50s fiction, as someone is likely to find in the Sturgeon
oeuvre;
and the later version is slightly more well-mannered than the former. Anyone acquainted with the context, if not the text itself, should have been able to predict this. Certainly they should not have been, as Lem was, surprised by it. For that matter, all great writers have been concerned with good manners as their times define them. But to seek Sturgeon’s greatness in a tale achieving notice in such circumstances and then to declare oneself put out at not finding it, as, in effect, Lem does, seems almost willfully obtuse. The careful analysis of a public success, however small that public, is always instructive. But by the same token—accepting public opinion as an essential given of someone’s analytic insight, because public opinions are myths, and myths, as Cassirer and others have noted, are invariably conservative “if only through the committee nature of their composition”—the worst one can say of Lem is that, coming from a country with no pulp tradition of its own, he had no feel for the context and simply ignored or misread the contextual signs. The best one can say is that, well, giants will wrangle.

But it is often the Sturgeon stories that gained notice, if not notoriety, in their day that seem now on the thin side. “The World Well Lost,” for example, which despite its powerful picture of homophobia brushes rather pastel fingers over the subject of male homosexuality itself, was for a while frequently mentioned as an example of science fiction’s growing “liberality” in matters sexual, along with Philip José Farmer’s “The Lovers.” Today the Farmer tale seems, at best, intriguingly troglodytic, and the Sturgeon only a step from rank conservatism—although it certainly made my eyes water when I first read it at fifteen. Another Sturgeon story much discussed in the few years after its publication was “Affair with a Green Monkey”: however artful its opening, today we have to admit that its whole thrust is toward a rather trivial one-liner. A contemporary reader, finding the excited references to it that litter the fanzines and magazine letter columns of its day, is likely to ask: What was all the fuss? The only way to understand the fuss is, again, to reconstruct the surrounding situation, i.e., a social moment in which not only were the actions involved in these stories considered a sin, a sickness, and a crime by law, but the words themselves were forbidden to print. We can take an example from Sturgeon’s science fiction novella, “To Marry Medusa” (1958—which Sturgeon later expanded into his briefest science fiction novel,
The Cosmic Rape
[1958]): “ ‘… an’ him runnin’ out an stickin’ his head back in an’ callin’ me a—’ Sanctimoniously, Al would not sully his lips with the word. And the rye-and-ginger by the door would be nodding wisely and saying, ‘Man shouldn’t mention a feller’s mother, whatever,’ ” or, later on, from the novel’s Chapter 12, “ ‘… Pop. Hey, Pop! Carol’s sayin’ summon a bish.’ And Tony would say, ‘Don’t say that, Carol,’ whereupon the lights of the oncoming vehicle would be upon him and in dedicated attention he would slit his eyes, set his jaw, and say precisely what Carol was trying to repeat.” In light of today’s realistic novel and film dialogue, readers tend to see these now as coy gestures toward a vanished piety. But what such passages actually are is ironic commentary on their epoch’s very real and absolutely enforced (by law
and threat of imprisonment) printing conventions—conventions that would not begin to relax till nearly a decade after the tales carrying such lines had been first published. Here we are again left with two points to make: first, verbal tropes such as the one-liner of “Affair with a Green Monkey” or the pastel touch in “The World Well Lost” are what that decade substituted for sex (of whatever persuasion) in print, while piously insisting that the clear discomfort these substitutions caused was precisely what was being avoided by eliding the sex itself.

We cannot be surprised if Sturgeon, the writer most sensitive to those years, was also, in the work of this period, very much of those years himself. But we should also note that when, for example in his Western story “Scars,” Sturgeon dealt with some of the same material both “Affair With a Green Monkey” and “The World Well Lost” had focused on (i.e., men’s dubiousness about masculine sexual expectations), he did so with much less heavy hands, to produce one of his strongest and most compassionate stories by today’s standards.

But it is not in Sturgeon’s well-mannered stories (be they conservatively or shockingly well-mannered) that today’s reader is likely to find what is most interesting, most stimulating, most impressive, most obsessive, and most simply and awesomely beautiful in Sturgeon. The ten-year delay in finding a publisher for one of Sturgeon’s earliest written stories (then the thousand-dollar first prize from
Argosy
magazine—a story by Graham Greene took second place—the vindication, the reputation: the story is “Bianca’s Hands” [in
The Ultimate Egoist
, Volume I of The Complete Stories]) does not speak of well-mannered fiction as the times defined—although the story is beautifully wrought, and any nineteen-year-old (Sturgeon was nineteen when he wrote it) could be justly proud of it. “Die, Maestro, Die!,” with its guitarist’s amputated fingers (a passing obsession for Sturgeon? Compare this with the extraordinary self-mutilation scene involving the guitar-playing protagonist from
The Dreaming Jewels
[1950]) is not a polite tale at all. And while this second volume of stories contains a goodly number of Sturgeon stories that were particularly popular in their day (“Microcosmic God,” “Shottle Bop,” and “Poker Face” are all tales that came in for special praise when
they first appeared—as did “Killdozer!”, the story that will open the subsequent Volume III), the delight of this volume is that it contains so many stories that today’s reader is bound to find even richer and
more
rewarding. Nor are “The Sex Opposite,” “It Wasn’t Syzygy,” “The Other Celia,” “Bright Segment,” “A Way of Thinking,” or “Mr. Costello, Hero” well-mannered stories by anybody’s standards. And
these
are the tales in which a modern reader begins to encounter the unsurpassed, the incomparable, the magnificent Sturgeon.