Samuel R Delany - Of Solids and Surds: Notes for Noël Sturgeon, Marilyn Hacker, Josh Lukin, Mia Wolff, Bill Stribling, and Bob White

OF SOLIDS AND SURDS

OF SOLIDS AND SURDS

Notes for Nol Sturgeon, Marilyn Hacker, Josh Lukin, Mia Wolff, Bill Stribling, and Bob White

SAMUEL R. DELANY

THE 2020 WINDHAM-CAMPBELL LECTURE

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

[CopyEd:] I had the pleasure of editing two of Marilyns translations for the Press: the poems of Hdi Kaddour and the poems of Jean-Paul de Dadelsen. I believe that a comment about its being a small world might be in order!

[SRD:] By all means, if you will allow me to include some of our exchanges. I believe a lot of people who read books like this dont realize how small the combined world of writers and editors at various levels can be. Both Lukin and Stribling are here in memoriam.

The Why I Write series is published with assistance from the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes, which are administered by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Copyright 2021 by Samuel R. Delany.

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Number: 2021931613

ISBN 978-0-300-25040-4

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OF SOLIDS AND SURDS

Notes for Nol Sturgeon, Marilyn Hacker, Josh Lukin, Mia Wolff, Bill Stribling, and Bob White

1. Im not a writer.... The only reason I want to write is because its the only way I can justify all the other things I didnt do.Theodore Sturgeon, quoted in Judith Merril, Theodore Sturgeon, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Sept. 1962)

2. I think you write sometimes because some people dont have the patience to listen to an older person speak.Dennis Rickett

3. I want to write a novel Id like to read.... I write the novel[s] I cant find in my own library or on bookstore shelves.Samuel R. Delany, Gizmodo

4. I first said that to myself when I was twenty or twenty-one and had already published five books and was in the midst of yet another; shortly I rewrote it in an early essay. What I remember myself saying was: I write the books or stories I want to read but cant find on bookstore shelf or paperback book rack. I would have thought something like that had even made it into some early essay or interview, but half an hour online turns up only the Gizmodo versionand an interview I did last year. In the midst of writing my first published book, however, The Jewels of Aptor (1962), I realized, one evening when I was trying to be overly modest during an eagerly awaited dinner visit by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman (it was February 1962), that the book I was in the midst of writing was the most important thing I felt I had undertaken. A little later, when I was still nineteen, I sat in the wood-framed red easy chair my mother-in-law had sent down with a lot of broken china as a house gift for my young wife and me: Marilyn was out at work that day, and I was home. I remember thinking of the various people who, only a few years before, were constantly coming around to my parents apartment in Morningside Gardens and saying they would be willing to get me a position at a really good-paying job: all I had to do was knock on their office door or give them a phone call and set up an appointment... Many had been fairly successful black businessmen who felt it was their responsibility to help out the new generation of young marrieds. Id also realized it was likely that if I did take them up on any of those offers, Id have been on my way to a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year job in a decade or so, and ten thousand a year at that time was the equivalent of more than a hundred thousand today. I mumbled to myself loud enough so that somebody might have been able to hear me if they had been in the room with me: I am never going to make that kind of money. I will be lucky if I make enough to survive.

My first novel was sold a few months later to Ace Books for $1,000; that was also the time when our rent on a four-room apartment in the East Village on the dead-end of East 5th Street was $52 a month, which had been brought down from $58 when the city inspectors had come around and discovered that the landlord was charging $6 over the maximum for a building with that level of plumbing. In short, our rent was $624 a year. Marilyn had a job in which she was making approximately $80 a week as an assistant editor at the paperback publishing company that had accepted my first novel as an anonymous submission. That was a livable wage.

I managed to lose most of the first half of that thousand dollars in a way that I am still too embarrassed to talk about, but within a year, I sold another novelthe first of a trilogy that was completed and contracted for before my twenty-first birthdayand I had learned my lesson about the money I was bringing in.

5. We lived in that building for four years before we moved to another building, 739 East 6th Street, apartment 4F. One of the objects we had bought first was a wooden four-drawer filing cabinet; it came from a secondhand furniture store two or three blocks away from where we lived, a little to the west and south, and we rolled it back on a convenient dolly that the store loaned us.

When we moved to the new apartment, a block north and east in Alphabet City, it was the first object transported by a helpful neighborhood heroin addict (on another borrowed dolly), who was not more than two years older than I was. A white kid, twenty or twenty-one, he was very proud that he had a good reputation in the neighborhood. Hed been born there and said that too many people knew him for him to be a thief or to break the law in any way other than his heroin habit. Fairly presentable as such people go, he did have the most badly bitten fingernails I think I have ever seen on another human being. I wish I remembered his name. He was a neighborhood character whom we saw on the street many places and whom one regularly said hello to. Once we moved, however, in another year or two, he disappeared from my landscape for ten or eleven years, then turned up again one afternoon in the lobby of the Albert Hotel, where I was staying during one of the periods when Marilyn and I were no longer living together and the number of published science fiction novels had gone up to nine.

6. It still astonishes me that all nine of those novels and a number of others are still in print and available on my website. Much of that is because, by that time, Id gotten an extremely good agent, Henry Morrison, whose job (as Henry had explained to me) was not so much to get me big advances but rather to vet my contracts so that my books would continue to make me money once my advance had earned out, which, in most cases, happened pretty rapidly. By 1975, the books were no longer at their initial publisher, Ace Books, but had been taken over by Bantam Books, which was then among the largest and most successful paperback companies in the country. Though today the offspring of Ace still exists, Bantam has been gone for years.